"I believe so."
"Oh—why did I ever go there?"
"He didn't want you to. That was why."
"Where is she now?"
"Nobody knows. She might be anywhere."
"Not here?"
"No, not here. My dear, you mustn't get her on your nerves."
"I'm afraid of meeting her."
"It isn't likely that you ever will. She isn't the sort one does meet—now, poor thing."
"Who was she?"
"The wife of Sir Andrew Cayley, a tallow-chandler."
"Oh, how did Walter ever—"
"My dear, one meets all sorts of funny people in Scale. He was a very wealthy tallow-chandler. Besides, it wasn't he that Walter did meet, naturally."
"How can you joke about it? It makes me sick to think of it."
"It made me sick enough once, dear. But I don't think of it."
"I can't help thinking of it."
"Well, whenever you do, when it does come over you—it will, sometimes—think of what Walter's life was before he knew you. Everything was spoiled for him because of me. He was sent to a place he detested because of me; put into an office which he loathed, shut up here in this hateful house, because of me. And he was good to me, good and dear. Even at the worst he hardly ever left me if he thought I wanted him—not even to go toher. But he was young, and it was an awful life for him; you don't know how awful. It would have been bad enough for a woman. It was intolerable for a man. I was worse then than I am now. I was horribly fretful, and I worried him. I think I drove him to her—I know I did. He had to get away from it sometimes. Won't you think of that?"
"I'll try to think of it."
"And it won't make you not like him?"
"My dear, I liked him first for your sake, then I liked you for his, now I suppose I must like him for yours again."
"No—for his own sake."
"Does it matter which?"
"Not much—so long as you like him. He really is angelic, though you mayn't think it."
"I think you are."
Edith was not only angelic, but womanly and full of guile, and she knew with whom she had to do. She had humbled Anne with shrewd shafts that hit her in all her weak places; now she exalted her. Anne had not her likeness in a thousand. She was a woman magnificently planned, of stature not to be diminished by the highest pedestal. A figure fit for a throne, a niche, a shrine. Edith could see the dear little downy feathers sprouting on Anne's shoulder-blades, and the infant aureole playing in her hair.
"You're a saint," said Edith.
"I am not," said Anne, while her pale cheek glowed with the flattery.
"Of course you are," said Edith, "or you could never have put up with me."
Whereupon Anne kissed her.
"And I may tell Walter what you've said?"
It was thus that she spared Anne's mortal pride. She knew how it would shrink from telling him.
Anne went down to Majendie in the garden and sent him to his sister. They returned to the house by the open window of his study. A bright fire was burning in the room. He looked at her shyly and half in doubt, drew up an arm-chair to the hearth, and left her there.
His manner brought back to her the days of their engagement when that room had been their refuge. Not that they had often been alone together. She could count the times on the fingers of one hand, the times when Edith was too ill to be wheeled into her room. It had been nearly always in Edith's room that she had seen him, surrounded by all the feminine devices, the tender trivialities that were part of the moving pathos of the scene. She had so associated him with his sister that it had been hard for her to realise that he had any separate life of his own. She felt that his love for her had simply grown out of his love for Edith, it was the flame, the flower of his tenderness. It was one with his goodness, and she had been glad to have it so. There was no jealousy in Anne.
It came over her now with a fresh shock, how very little, after all, she had known of him. It was through Edith that she really knew him. And yet it was impossible that Edith could have absorbed him utterly. Anne had not counted his business; for it had not interested her, and to say that Walter was a ship-owner did not define him in the very least. What remained over of Walter was a secret that this room, his study, must partially reveal.
She remembered how she had first come there, and had looked shyly about her for intimations of his inner nature, and how it was his pipe-rack and his boots that had first suggested that he had a life apart and dealings with the outer world. Now she rose and went round the room, searching for its secret, and finding no new impressions, only fresh lights on the old. If the room told her anything it told her how little Majendie had used it, how little he had been able to call anything his own. The things in it had no comfortable look of service. He could not have smoked there much, the curtains were too innocent. He could not have sat in that arm-chair much, the surface was too smooth. He could not have come there much at any time, for, though the carpet was faded, there was no well-worn passage from the threshold to the hearth. As far as she could make out he came there for no earthly purpose but to change his boots before going upstairs to Edith.
The bookcase told the same story. It held histories and standard works inherited from Majendie's father; the works of Dickens, and Thackeray, and Hardy, read over and over again in the days when he had time for reading; several poets whom, by his own confession, he could not have read in any circumstances. One Meredith, partly uncut, testified to an honest effort and a baulked accomplishment. On a shelf apart stood the books that he had loved when he was a boy, the Annuals, the tales of travel and adventure, and one or two school prizes gorgeously bound.
As she looked at them his boyhood rose before her; its dead innocence appealed to her comprehension and compassion.
She knew that he had been disappointed in his ambition. Instead of being sent to Oxford he had been sent into business, that he might early support himself. He had supported himself. And he had stuck to the business that he might the better support Edith.
She could not deny him the virtue of unselfishness.
She remembered one Sunday, three weeks before their wedding-day, when she had stood alone with him in this room, at the closing of their happy day. It was then that he had asked her why she cared for him, and she had answered: "Because you are good. You always have been good."
And he had said (how it came back to her!), "And if I hadn't always? Wouldn't you have cared then?"
She had answered, "I would have cared, but I couldn't marry you."
And he had turned away from her, and looked out of the window, keeping his back to her, and had stood so without speaking for a moment. She had wondered what had come over him.
Now she knew. He had not been good. And she had married him.
At the recollection the thoughts she had quieted stirred again and stung her, and again she trampled them down.
She faced the question how she was going to build up the wedded life that her knowledge of him had laid low. She told herself that, after all, much remained. She had loved Walter for his unhappiness as well as for his goodness. He had needed her, and she had felt that there was no other woman who could have borne his burden half so well. Edith was too sweet to be thought of as a burden, but it could not be denied she weighed. In marrying Walter she would lift half the weight. Anne was strong, and she glorified in her strength. That was what she was there for.
How much more was she prepared to do? Keeping his house was nothing; Nanna had always kept it well. Caring for Edith was nothing; she could not help but care for her. She had promised Walter that she would be a good wife to him, and she had vowed to herself that she would live her spiritual life apart.
Was that being a good wife to him? To divorce her soul, her best self, from him? If she confined her duty to the preservation of the mere material tie, what would she make of herself? Of him?
It came to her that his need of her was deeper and more spiritual than that. She argued that there must be something fine in him, or he never would have appreciatedher. That other woman didn't count; she had thrust herself on him. When it came to choosing, he had chosen a spiritual woman! (Anne had no doubt that she was what she aspired to be.) And since all things were divinely ordered, Walter's choice was really God's will. God's hand had led him to her.
It had been a blow to Anne's pride to realise that she had married—spiritually—beneath her. Her pride now recovered wonderfully, seeing in this very inequality its opportunity. She beheld herself superbly seated on an eminence, her spiritual opulence supplying Walter's poverty. Spiritually, she said, it might also be more blessed to give than to receive.
Their marriage, in this its new, its immaterial consummation, would not be unequal. She would raise Walter. That, of course, was what God had meant her to do all the time. Never again could she look at her husband with eyes of mortal passion. But her love, which had died, was risen again; it could still turn to him a glorified and spiritual face; it could still know passion, a passion immortal and supreme.
But it was an emotion of which by its very nature she could not bring herself to speak. It could mean nothing to Walter in his yet unspiritual state. She felt that when he came to her he would insist on some satisfaction, and there was no satisfaction that she could give to the sort of claim he would make. Therefore she awaited his coming with nervous trepidation.
He came in as if nothing had happened. He sank with every symptom of comfortable assurance into the opposite arm-chair. And he asked no more formidable question than, "How's your headache?"
"Better, thank you."
"That's all right."
He did not look at her, but his eyes were smiling as if at some agreeable thought or reminiscence. He had apparently assumed that Anne had recovered, not only from her headache, but from its cause. To Anne, tingling with the tension of a nervous crisis, this attitude was disconcerting. It seemed to reduce her and her crisis to insignificance. She had expected him to be tingling too. He had more cause to.
"Do you mind my smoking? Say if you really do."
She really did, but she forbore to say so. Forbearance henceforth was to be part of her discipline.
He smoked contentedly, with half-closed eyes; and when he talked, he talked of the garden and of bulbs.
Of bulbs, after what he had discussed with Edith upstairs. She would rather that he had asked his question, forced her to the issue. That at least would have shown some comprehension of her state. But he had taken the issue for granted, refused to face the immensity of it all. She had had her first taste of sacrificial flames, and her spirit was prepared to go through fire to reach him. And he presented himself as already folded and protected; satisfied with some inferior and independent secret of his own.
She felt that a little perturbation would have become him more than that impenetrable peace.
It would make it so difficult to raise him.
The bell of St. Saviour's had ceased. Over the open market-place the air throbbed with a thousand pulses from the dying heart of sound. The great grey body of the Church was still; tower and couchant nave watched in their monstrous, motionless dominion, till the music stirred in them like a triumphant soul.
As they hurried over the open market-place, Anne realised with some annoyance that she was late again for the Wednesday evening service. She dearly loved punctuality and order, and disliked to be either checked or hastened in her superb movements. She disliked to be late for anything. Above all she disliked standing on a mat outside a closed church door, in the middle of a General Confession, trying to surrender her spirit to the spirit of prayer, while Walter lingered, murmuring profane urbanities that claimed her as his own.
He had perceived what he called her innocent design, her transparent effort to lead him to her heavenly heights. He had lent himself to it, tenderly, gravely, as he would have lent himself to a child's heart-rending play. He could not profess to follow the workings of his wife's mind, but he did understand her point of view. She had been "let in" for something she had not expected, and he was bound to make it up to her.
There had been a week of concessions, crowned by his appearance at St. Saviour's.
But that was on a Sunday. This was Wednesday, and he drew the line at Wednesdays.
Oh yes, he saw her drift. He knew that what she expected of him was incessant penitence. But, after all, it was difficult to feel much abasement for a fault committed quite a number of years ago and sufficiently repented of at the time. He had settled his account, and it was hard that he should be made to pay twice over. To-night his mood was strangely out of harmony with Lent.
Anne slackened her pace to intimate as much to him. Whereupon he lapsed into strange and disturbing legends of his childhood. He told her he had early weaned himself from the love of Lenten Services, observing their effect upon the unfortunate lady, his aunt, who had brought him up. Punctually at twelve o'clock on Palm Sunday, he said, the poor soul, exhausted with her endeavours after the Christian life, would fly into a passion, and punctually would rise from it at the same hour on Easter Day. For quite a long time he had believed that that was why they called it Passion Week.
She moaned "Oh, Walter—don't!" as if he had hurt her, while she repressed the play of a little, creeping, curling, mundane smile.
If he would only leave her! But, as they crossed to the curbstone, he changed over, preserving his proper place. He leaned to her with the indestructible attention of a lover. His whole manner was inimitably chivalrous, protective, and polite.
Anne hardened her heart against him. At the church gate she turned and faced him coldly.
"If you're not going in," said she, "you needn't come any further."
He glanced at the belated group of worshippers gathered before the church door, and became more than ever polite and chivalrous and protective.
"I must see you safely in," he said, and took up his stand beside her on the mat.
Her eyes rested on him for a second in reproach, then dropped behind the veil of their lids. In another moment he would have to go. He had already surrendered her prayer-book, tucking it gently under her arm.
"You'll be all right when you get in, won't you?" he said encouragingly.
"Please go," she whispered.
"Do I jar, dear?" he asked sweetly.
"You do, very much."
"I'm so sorry. I won't do it again."
But his whispered vows and promises belied him, battling with her consecrated mood. She felt that his innermost spirit remained in its profanity, unillumined by her rebuke.
Once more she set her face, and hardened her heart against him, and removed herself in the silence and isolation of her prayer.
Through the closed door there came the rich, confused murmur of the Confession. He saw her lips curl, flower-like, with emotion, as her breath rose and fell in unison with the heaving chant. He watched her with a certain reverence, incomprehensibly chastened, till the door opened, and she went from him, moving down the lighted aisle with her remote, renunciating air.
The door was shut in Majendie's face, and he turned away, intending to kill, to murder the next hour at his club.
Anne was self-trained in the habit of detachment. She had only to kneel, to close her eyes and cover her face, and her soul slid of its own accord into the place of peace. Her very breathing and the beating of her heart were stayed. Her mind, emptied in a moment, was in a moment filled, brimming over with the thought of God. To her veiled vision that thought was like a sheet of blank light let down behind her drooped eyelids, and centring in a luminous whorl. It fascinated her. Her prayer shot straight to the heart of it, a communion too swift to trouble or divide the blessed light.
In that instant her husband, the image and the thought of him, were cast into the secular darkness.
She remembered how difficult it had once been thus to renounce him. Her trouble, in the days of her engagement, had been that, thrust him from her as she would, the idea of his goodness—the goodness that justified her through its own appeal—would call up his presence, emerging radiant from the outermost abyss. Inferior emotions then mingled indistinguishably with her holiest ardours. Spiritually ambitious, she had had her young eye on a hard-won crown of glory, and she had found that happiness made the spiritual life almost contemptibly easy. It was no effort in those days to realise divine mysteries, when the miracle of the Incarnation was, as it were, worked for her in her own soul; when she heard in her own heart the beating of the heart of God; when his hand touched her with a tenderness that warmed her place of peace. She had hardly known this flamed and lyric creature for herself. It was as if her soul, resting after long flight, had contemplated for the first time the silver and fine gold of her wings.
It was the facility of the revelation that had first caused her to suspect it. And she had thrown ashes on the flame, and set a watch upon her soul, lest she should mistake an earthly for a heavenly content. She could not bear to think that she was cheated, that her pulses counted in her sense of exaltation and beatitude. She desired, purely, the utmost purity in that divine communion, so as to be sure that it was divine.
Now, having suffered, she was completely sure. Her wound was the seal God set upon her soul. It was easy enough now for her to achieve detachment, oblivion of Walter Majendie, to pour out her whole soul in the prayer for light: "Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night."
Her hands, as she prayed, were folded close over her eyes. Having annihilated her husband, she was disagreeably astonished to find that he was there, that he had been there for some time, in the seat beside her.
He was sitting in what he took to be an attitude of extreme reverence, his head bowed and resting on his left arm, which was supported by the back of the seat in front of him. His right arm embraced, unconsciously, Anne's muff. Anne was vividly, painfully aware of him. Over the crook of his elbow one eye looked up at her, bright, smiling with inextinguishable affection. His lips gave out a sound that was not a prayer, but something between a murmur and a moan, distinctly audible. She felt his gaze as a gross, tangible thing, as a violent hand, parting the veils of prayer. She bowed her head lower and pressed her hands to her face till the blood tingled.
The sermon obliged her to sit upright and exposed. It gave him iniquitous opportunity. He turned in his seat; his eyes watched her under half-closed lids, two slits shining through the thick, dark curtain of their lashes. He kept on pulling at his moustache, as if to hide the dumb but expressive adoration of his mouth. Anne, who felt that her soul had been overtaken, trapped, and bared to the outrage, removed herself by a yard's length till the hymn brought them together, linked by the book she could not withhold. The music penetrated her soul and healed its hurt.
"Christian, doth thou see them,On the holy ground,How the troops of MidianProwl and prowl around?"
"Christian, doth thou see them,On the holy ground,How the troops of MidianProwl and prowl around?"
sang Anne in a dulcet pianissimo, obedient to the choir.
Profound abstraction veiled him, a treacherous unspiritual calm. Majendie was a man with a baritone voice, which at times possessed him like a furious devil. It was sleeping in him now, biding its time, ready, she knew, to be roused by the first touch of acrescendo. Thecrescendocame.
"Christian! Up and fight them!"
"Christian! Up and fight them!"
The voice waked; it leaped from him; and to Anne's terrified nerves it seemed to be scattering the voices of the choir before it. It dropped on the Amen and died; but in dying it remained triumphant, like the trump of an archangel retreating to the uttermost ends of heaven.
Anne's heart pained her with a profane tenderness, and a poignant repudiation. Her soul being once more adjusted to the divine, it was intolerable to think that this preposterous human voice should have power to shake it so.
She sank to her knees and bowed her head to the Benediction.
"Did you like it?" he asked as they emerged together into the open air.
He spoke as if to the child she seemed to him now to be. They had been playing together, pretending they were two pilgrims bound for the Heavenly City, and he wanted to know if she had had a nice game. He nursed the exquisite illusion that this time he had pleased her by playing too.
"Of course I liked it."
"So did I," he answered joyously, "I quite enjoyed it. We'll do it again some other night."
"What made you come, like that?" said she, appeased by his innocence.
"I couldn't help it. You looked so pretty, dear, and so forlorn. It seemed brutal, somehow, to abandon you on the weary road to heaven."
She sighed. That was his chivalry again. He would escort her politely to the door of heaven, but would he ever go in with her, would he ever stay there?
Still, it was something that he should have gone with her so far. It gave her confidence and an idea of what her power might come to be. Not that she relied upon herself alone. Her plan for Majendie's salvation was liberal and large, it admitted of other methods, other influences. There was no narrowness, any more than there was jealousy, in Anne.
"Walter," said she, "I want you to know Mrs. Eliott."
"But I do know her, don't I?"
He called up a vision of the lady whose house had been Anne's home in Scale. He was grateful to Mrs. Eliott. But for her slender acquaintance with his sister, he would never have known Anne. This made him feel that he knew Mrs. Eliott.
"But I want you to know her as I know her."
He laughed. "Is that possible? Does a man ever know a woman as another woman knows her?"
Anne felt that she was not only being diverted from her purpose, but led by a side tract to an unexplored profundity. On the further side of it she discerned, dimly, the undesirable. It was a murky region, haunted by still murkier presences, by Lady Cayley and her kind. She persisted with a magnificent irrelevance.
"You must know her. You would like her."
He didn't in the least want to know Mrs. Eliott, he didn't think that he would like her. But he was soothed, flattered, insanely pleased with Anne's assumption that he would. It was as if in her thoughts she were drawing him towards her. He felt that she was softening, yielding. His approaches were a delicious wooing of an unfamiliar, unwedded Anne.
"I would like her, because you like her, is that it?"
"It wouldn't follow."
"Oh, how you spoil it!"
"Spoil what?"
"My inference. It pleased me. But, as you say, the logic wasn't sound."
Silence being the only dignified course under mystification, Anne was silent. Some men had that irritating way with women; Walter's smile suggested that he might have it. She was not going to minister to his male delight. Unfortunately her silence seemed to please him too.
"Never mind, dear, I do like her; because she likes you."
"You will like her for herself when you know her."
"Will she like me for myself when she knows me? It's extremely doubtful. You see, hitherto she has made no ardent sign."
"My dear, she says you've never been near her. You've never come to one of her Thursdays."
"Oh, her Thursdays—no, I haven't."
"Well, how can you expect—but you'll go sometimes, now, to please me?"
"Won't Wednesdays do?"
"Wednesdays?"
"Yes. It wasn't half bad to-night. I'll go to every blessed Wednesday, as long as they last, if you'll only let me off Thursdays."
"Please don't talk about being 'let off.' I thought you might like to know my friends, that's all."
"So I would. I'd like it awfully. By the way, that reminds me. I met Hannay at the club to-night, and he asked if his wife might call on you. Would you mind very much?"
"Why should I mind, if she's a friend of yours and Edith's?"
"Oh well, you see, she isn't exactly—"
"Isn't exactly what?"
"A friend of Edith's."
There is a polite and ancient rivalry between Prior Street and Thurston Square, a rivalry that dates from the middle of the eighteenth century, when Prior Street and Thurston Square were young. Each claims to be the aristocratic centre of the town. Each acknowledges the other as its solitary peer. If Prior Street were not Prior Street it would be Thurston Square. There are a few old families left in Scale. They inhabit either Thurston Square or Prior Street. There is nowhere else that they could live with any dignity or comfort. In either place they are secure from the contamination of low persons engaged in business, and from the wide invading foot of the newly rich. These build themselves mansions after their kind in the Park, or in the broad flat highways leading into the suburbs. They have no sense for the dim undecorated charm of Prior Street and Thurston Square.
Nothing could be more distinguished than Prior Street, with its sombre symmetry, its air of delicate early Georgian reticence. But its atmosphere is a shade too professional; it opens too precipitately on the unlovely and unsacred street.
Thurston Square is approached only by unfrequented ancient ways paved with cobble stones. It is a place of garden greenness, of seclusion and of leisure. It breathes a provincial quietness, a measured, hallowed breath as of a cathedral close. Its inhabitants pride themselves on this immemorial calm. The older families rely on it for the sustenance of their patrician state. They sit by their firesides in dignified attitudes, impressively, luxuriously inert. Their whole being is a religious protest against the spirit of business.
But the restlessness of the times has seized upon the other families, the Pooleys, the Gardners, the Eliotts, younger by a century at least. They utilise the perfect peace for the cultivation of their intellects.
Every Thursday, towards half-past three, a wave of agreeable expectation, punctual, periodic, mounts on the stillness and stirs it. Thursday is Mrs. Eliott's day.
The Eliotts belong to the old high merchant-families, the aristocracy of trade, whose wealth is mellowed and beautified by time. Three centuries met in Mrs. Eliott's drawing-room, harmonised by the gentle spirit of the place. Her frail modern figure moved (with elegance a little dishevelled by abstraction) on an early Georgian background, among mid-Victorian furniture, surrounded by a multitude of decorative objects. There were great jars and idols from China and Japan; inlaid tables; screens and cabinets and chairs in Bombay black wood, curiously carved; a splendid profusion of painted and embroidered cloths; the spoils of seventy years of Eastern trade. And on the top of it all, twenty years or so of recent culture. The culture was represented by a well-filled bookcase, a few diminished copies of antique sculpture, some modern sketches made in Rome and Venice (for the Eliotts had travelled), and an illuminated triptych with its saints in glory.
Here, Thursday after Thursday, the same people met each other; they met, Thursday after Thursday, the same fervid little company of ideas, of aspirations and enthusiasms.
It was five o'clock on one of her Thursdays, and Mrs. Eliott had been conversing with great sweetness and fluency ever since half-past three. That was the way she and Mrs. Pooley kept it up, and they could have kept it up much longer but for the arrival of Miss Proctor.
There was nothing, in Miss Proctor's opinion (if dear Fanny only knew it), so provincial as an enthusiasm. As for aspirations (and Mrs. Pooley was full of them) what could be more provincial than these efforts to be what you were not? Miss Proctor disapproved of Thurston Square's preoccupation with its intellect, a thing no well-bred person is ever conscious of. She announced that she had come to take dear Fanny down from her clouds and humanise her by a little gossip. She ignored Mrs. Pooley, since Mrs. Pooley apparently wished to be ignored.
"I want," said she, "the latest news of Anne."
"If you wait, you may get it from herself."
"My dear, do you suppose she'd give it me?"
"It depends," said Mrs. Eliott, "on what you want to know."
"I want to know whether she's happy. I want to know whether, by this time, sheknows."
"You can't ask her."
"Of course I can't. That's why I'm asking you."
"I know nothing. I've hardly seen her."
Miss Proctor looked as if she were seeing her that moment without Fanny Eliott's help.
"Poor dear Anne."
Anne Fletcher had been simply dear Anne, Mrs. Walter Majendie was poor dear Anne.
Her friends were all sorry for her. They were inclined to be indignant with Edith Majendie, who, they declared, had been at the bottom of her marriage all along. She was the cause of Anne's original callings in Prior Street. If it had not been for Edith, Anne could never have penetrated that secret bachelor abode. The engagement had been an awkward, unsatisfactory, sinister affair. It was a pity that Mr. Majendie's domestic circumstances were such that poor dear Anne appeared as having made all the necessary approaches and advances. If Mr. Majendie had had a family that family would have had to call on Anne. But Mr. Majendie hadn't a family, he had only Edith, which was worse than having nobody at all. And then, besides, there was his history.
Mrs. Eliott looked distressed. Mr. Majendie's history could not be explained away as too ancient to be interesting. In Scale a seven-year-old event is still startlingly, unforgetably modern. Anne's marriage had saddled her friends with a difficult responsibility, the justification of Anne for that astounding step.
Acquaintances had been made to understand that Mrs. Eliott had had nothing to do with it. They went away baffled, but confirmed in their impression that she knew; which was, after all, what they wanted to know.
It was not so easy to satisfy the licensed curiosity of Anne's friends. They came to-day in quantities, attracted by the news of the Majendies' premature return from their honeymoon. Mrs. Eliott felt that Miss Proctor and the Gardners were sitting on in the hope of meeting them.
Mrs. Eliott had been obliged to accept Anne's husband, that she might retain Anne's affection. In this she did violence to her feelings, which were sore on the subject of the marriage. It was not only on account of the inglorious clouds he trailed. In any case she would have felt it as a slight that her friend should have married without her assistance, and so far outside the charmed circle of Thurston Square. She herself was for the moment disappointed with Anne. Anne had once taken them all so seriously. It was her solemn joy in Mrs. Eliott and her circle that had enabled her young superiority to put up so long with the provincial hospitalities of Scale on Humber. They, the slender aristocracy of Thurston Square, were the best that Scale had to offer her, and they had given her of their best. Socially, the step from Thurston Square to Prior Street could not be defined as a going down; but, intellectually, it was a decline, and morally (to those who knew Fanny Eliott and to Fanny Eliott whoknew) it was, by comparison, a plunge into the abyss. Fanny Eliott was the fine flower of Thurston Square. She had satisfied even the fastidiousness of Anne.
She owned that Mr. Majendie had satisfied it too. It was not that quality in Anne that made her choice so—well, so incomprehensible.
It was Dr. Gardner's word. Dr. Gardner was the President of the Scale Literary and Philosophic Society, and in any discussion of the incomprehensible his word had weight. Vagueness was his foible, the relaxation of an intellect uncomfortably keen. The spirit that looked at you through his short-sighted eyes (magnified by enormous glasses) seemed to have just returned from a solitary excursion in a dream. In that mood the incomprehensible had for him a certain charm.
Mrs. Eliott had too much good taste to criticise Anne Majendie's. They had simply got to recognise that Prior Street had more to offer her than Thurston Square. That was the way she preferred to put it, effacing herself a little ostentatiously.
Miss Proctor maintained that Prior Street had nothing to offer a creature of Anne Fletcher's kind. It had everything to take, and it seemed bent on taking everything. It was bad enough in the beginning, when she had given herself up, body and soul, to the spinal lady; but to go and marry the brother, without first disposing of the spinal lady in a comfortable home for spines, why, what must the man be like who could let her do it?
"My dear," said Mrs. Eliott, "he's a saint, if you're to believe Anne."
Even Dr. Gardner smiled. "I can't say that's exactly what I should call him."
"Need we," said Mr. Eliott, "call him anything? So long as she thinks him a saint—"
Mr. Eliott—Mr. Johnson Eliott—hovered on the borderland of culture, with a spirit purified from commerce by a Platonic passion for the exact sciences. He was, therefore, received in Thurston Square on his own as well as his wife's merits. He too had his little weaknesses. Almost savagely determined in matters of business, at home he liked to sit in a chair and fondle the illusion of indifference. There was no part of Mr. Eliott's mental furniture that was not a fixture, yet he scorned the imputation of conviction. A hunted thing in his wife's drawing-room, Mr. Eliott had developed in a quite remarkable degree the protective colouring of stupidity.
"How can she?" said Miss Proctor. "She's a saint herself, and she ought to know the difference."
"Perhaps," said Dr. Gardner, "that's why she doesn't."
"I'm sure," said Mrs. Eliott, "it was the original attraction. There could be no other for Anne."
"The attraction was the opportunity for self-sacrifice. Whatever she's makes of Mr. Majendie, she's bent on making a martyr of herself." Miss Proctor met the vague eyes of her circle with a glance that was defiance to all mystery. "It's quite simple. This marriage is a short cut to canonisation, that's all."
Then it was that little Mrs. Gardner spoke. She had been married for a year, and her face still wore its bridal look of possession that was peace, the look that it would wear when Mrs. Gardner was seventy. Her voice had a certain lucid and profound precision.
"Anne was always certain of herself. And since she cares for Mr. Majendie enough to accept him and to accept his sister, and the rathertristelife which is all he has to offer her, doesn't it look as if, probably, she knew her own business best?"
"I think," said Mr. Eliott firmly, "we may take it that she does."
Miss Proctor's departure was felt as a great liberation of the intellect.
Mrs. Pooley sat up in her corner and revived the conversation interrupted by Miss Proctor. Mrs. Pooley had felt that to talk about Mrs. Majendie was to waste Mrs. Eliott. Mrs. Majendie apart, Mrs. Pooley had many ideas in common with her friend; but, whereas Mrs. Eliott would spend superbly on one idea at a time, Mrs. Pooley's intellect entertained promiscuously and beyond its means. It was inclined to be hospitable to ideas that had never met outside it, whose encounter was a little distressing to everybody concerned. Whenever this happened Mrs. Pooley would appeal to Mr. Eliott, and Mr. Eliott would say, "Don't ask me. I'm a stupid fellow. Don't ask me to decide anything."
Thus did Mr. Eliott wilfully obscure himself.
To-day he was more impregnably concealed than ever. He hadn't any opinions of his own. They were too expensive. He borrowed other people's when he wanted them. "But," said Mr. Eliott, "it is very seldom that I do want an opinion. If you have any facts to give me—well and good." For he knew that, at the mention of facts, Mrs. Pooley's intellect would retreat behind a cloud and that his wife would pursue it there.
"I suppose," said Mrs. Eliott, "there's such a thing as realising your ideals."
Her eyes gleamed and wandered and rested upon Mrs. Gardner. Mrs. Gardner had a singularly beautiful intellect which she was known to be shy of displaying. People said that Dr. Gardner had fallen in love with it years ago, and had only waited for it to mature before he married it. Mrs. Gardner had a habit of sitting apart from the discussion and untroubled by it, tolerant in her own excess of bliss. It irritated Mrs. Eliott, on her Thursdays, to think of the distinguished ideas that Mrs. Gardner might have introduced and didn't. She felt Mrs. Gardner's silence as a challenge.
"I wonder" (Mrs. Eliott was always wondering) "what becomes of our ideals when we've realised them."
The doctor answered. "My dear lady, they cease to be ideals, and we have to get some more."
Mrs. Eliott, in her turn, was received into the cloud.
"Of course," said Mrs. Pooley, emerging from it joyously, "we must have them."
"Of course," said Mrs. Eliott vaguely, as her spirit struggled with the cloud.
"Of course," said Dr. Gardner. He was careful to array himself for tea-parties in all his innocent metaphysical vanities, to scatter profundities like epigrams, to flatter the pure intellects of ladies, while the solemn vagueness of his manner concealed from them the innermost frivolity of his thought. He didn't care whether they understood him or not. He knew his wife did. Her wedded spirit moved in secret and unsuspected harmony with his.
He had a certain liking for Mrs. Eliott. She seemed to him an apparition mainly pathetic. With her attenuated distinction, her hectic ardour, her brilliant and pursuing eye, she had the air of some doomed and dedicated votress of the pure intellect, haggard, disturbing and disturbed. His social self was amused with her enthusiasms, but the real Dr. Gardner accounted for them compassionately. It was no wonder, he considered, that poor Mrs. Eliott wondered. She had so little else to do. Her nursery upstairs was empty, it always had been, always would be empty. Did she wonder at that too, at the transcendental carelessness that had left her thus frustrated, thus incomplete? Mrs. Eliott would have been scandalised if she had known the real Dr. Gardner's opinion of her.
"I wonder," said she, "what will become of Anne's ideal."
"It's safe," said the doctor. "She hasn't realised it."
"I wonder, then, what will become of Anne."
Mrs. Pooley retreated altogether before this gross application of transcendent truth. She had not come to Mrs. Eliott's to talk about Mrs. Majendie.
Dr. Gardner smiled. "Oh, come," he said, "youarepersonal."
"I'm not," said Mrs. Eliott, conscious of her lapse and ashamed of it. "But, after all, Anne's my friend. I know people blamed me because I never told her. How could I tell her?"
"No," said Mrs. Gardner soothingly, "how could you?"
"Anne," continued Mrs. Eliott, "was so reticent. The thing was all settled before anybody could say a word."
"Well," said Dr. Gardner, "there's no good worrying about it now."
"Isn't it possible," said the little year-old bride, "that Mr. Majendie may have told her himself?"
For Dr. Gardner had told her everything the day before he married her, confessing to the light loves of his youth, the young lady in the Free Library and all. She looked round with eyes widened by their angelic candour. Even more beautiful than Mrs. Gardner's intellect were Mrs. Gardner's eyes, and the love of them that brought the doctor's home from their wanderings in philosophic dream. Nobody but Dr. Gardner knew that Mrs. Gardner's intellect had cause to be jealous of her eyes.
"There's one thing," said Mrs. Eliott, suddenly enlightened. "Our not having said anything at the time makes it easier for us to receive him now."
"Aren't we all talking," said Mrs. Gardner, "rather as if Anne had married a monster? After all, have we ever heard anything against him—except Lady Cayley?"
"Oh no, never a word, have we, Johnson dear?"
"Never. He's not half a bad fellow, Majendie."
Dr. Gardner rose to go.
"Oh, please—don't go before they come."
Mrs. Gardner hesitated, but the doctor, vague in his approaches, displayed a certain energy in his departure.
They passed Mrs. Walter Majendie on the stairs.
She had come alone. That, Mrs. Eliott felt, was a bad beginning. She could see that it struck even Johnson's obtuseness as unfavourable, for he presently effaced himself.
"Fanny," said Anne, holding her friend's evasive eye with the determination of her query, "tell me, who are the Ransomes?"
"The Ransomes? Have they called?"
"Yes, but I was out. I didn't see them."
"Oh, my dear," said Mrs. Eliott, in a tone which implied that when Annedidsee them——
"Are they very dreadful?"
"Well—they're not your sort."
Anne meditated. "Not—my—sort. And the Lawson Hannays, what sort are they?"
"Well, we don't know them. But there are a great many people in Scale one doesn't know."
"Are they socially impossible, or what?"
"Oh—socially, they would be considered—in Scale—all right. But he is, or was, mixed up with some very queer people."
Anne's cold face intimated that the adjective suggested nothing to her. Mrs. Eliott was compelled to be explicit. The word queer was applied in Scale to persons of dubious honesty in business; whereas it was not so much in business as in pleasure that Mr. Lawson Hannay had been queer.
"Mr. Hannay may be very steady now, but I believe he belonged to a very fast set before he married her."
"And she? Is she nice?"
"She may be very nice for all I know."
"I think," said Anne, "she wouldn't call if she wasn't nice, you know."
She meant that if Mrs. Lawson Hannay hadn't been nice Walter would never have sanctioned her calling.
"Oh, as for that," said her friend, "you know what Scale is. The less nice they are the more they keep on calling. But I should think"—she had suddenly perceived where Anne's argument was tending—"she is probably all right."
"Do you know anything of Mr. Charlie Gorst?"
"No. But Johnson does. At least I'm sure he's met him."
Mrs. Eliott saw it all. Poor Anne was being besieged, bombarded by her husband's set.
"Then he isn't impossible?"
"Oh no, the Gorsts are a very old Lincolnshire family. Quite grand. What a number of people you're going to know, my dear. But, your husband isn't to take you away fromallyour old friends."
"He isn't taking me anywhere. I shall stay," said Anne proudly, "exactly where I was before."
She was determined that her old friends should never know to what a sorrowful place she had been taken.
"You dear," said Mrs. Eliott, holding out a suddenly caressing hand.
Anne trembled a little under the caress. "Fanny," said she, "I want you to know him."
"I mean to," said Mrs. Eliott hurriedly.
"And I want him, even more, to know you."
"Then," Mrs. Elliot argued to herself, "she knows nothing; or she never could suppose we would be kindred spirits."
But she carried it off triumphantly. "Well," said she, "I hope you're free for the fifteenth?"
"The fifteenth?"
"Yes, or any other evening. We want to give a little dinner, dear, to you and to your husband—for him to meet all your friends."
Anne tried not to look too grateful.
The upward way, then, was being prepared for him. Beneficent intelligences were at work, influences were in the air, helping her to raise him.
In her gladness she had failed to see that, considering the very obvious nature of the civility, Fanny Eliott was making the least shade too much of it.
Anne presented herself that evening in her husband's study with a sheaf of visiting cards in her hand. She thought it possible that she might obtain further illumination by confronting him with them.
"Walter," said she "all these people have called on us. What do you think I'd better do?"
"I think you'll have to call on them some day."
"All of them?"
He took the cards from her and glanced through them.
"Let me see. Charlie Gorst—we must be nice to him."
"Ishenice?"
"I think so. Edie's very fond of him."
"And Mrs. Lawson Hannay?"
"Oh, you must call on her."
"Shall I like her."
"Possibly. You needn't see much of her if you don't."
"Is it easy to drop people?"
"Perfectly."
"And what about Mrs. Ransome?"
He frowned. "Hasshecalled?"
"Yes."
"I'll find out when she's not at home and let you know. You can call then."
A fourth card he tore up and threw into the fire.
"Some people have confounded impudence."
Anne went away confirmed in her impression that Walter had a large acquaintance to whom he was by no means anxious to introduce his wife. He might, she reflected, have incurred the connection through the misfortune of his business. The life of a ship-owner in Scale was fruitful in these embarrassments.
But if these disagreeable people indeed belonged to the period she mentally referred to as his "past," she was not going to tolerate them for an instant. He must give them up.
She judged that he was prepared for so much renunciation. She hoped that he would, in time, adopt her friends in place of them. He was inclined, after all, to respond amicably to Mrs. Eliott's overtures.
Anne wondered how he would comport himself at the dinner on the fifteenth. She owned to a little uneasiness at the prospect. Would he indeed yield to the sobering influence of Thurston Square? Or would he try to impose his alien, his startling personality on it? She had begun to realise how alien he was, how startling he could be. Would he sit silent, uninspiring and uninspired? Or would unholy and untimely inspirations seize him? Would he scatter to the winds all conversational conventions, and riot in his own unintelligible frivolity? What would he say to Mrs. Eliott, that priestess of the pure intellect? Was there anything in him that could be touched by her uncoloured, immaterial charm? Would he see that Mr. Eliott's density was only a mask? Would the Gardners bore him? And would he like Miss Proctor? And if he didn't, would he show it, and how? His mere manners would, she knew, be irreproachable, but she had no security for his spiritual behaviour. He impressed her as a creature uncaught, undriven; graceful, but immeasurably capricious.
The event surprised her.
For the first five minutes or so, it seemed that Mrs. Eliott and her dinner were doomed to failure; so terrible a cloud had fallen on her, and on her husband, and on every guest. Never had the poor priestess appeared so abstract an essence, so dream-driven and so forlorn. Never had Mr. Eliott worn his mask to so extinguishing a purpose. Never had Miss Proctor been so obtrusively superior, Mrs. Gardner so silent, Dr. Gardner so vague. They were all, she could see, possessed, crushed down by their consciousness of Majendie and his monstrous past.
Into this circle, thus stupefied by his presence, Majendie burst with the courage of unconsciousness.
Mr. Eliott had started a topic, the conduct of Sir Rigley Barker, the ex-member for Scale. A heavy ball of conversation began to roll slowly up and down the table, between Mr. Eliott and Dr. Gardner. Majendie snatched at it deftly as it passed him, caught it, turned it in his hands till it grew golden under his touch. Mr. Eliott thought there wasn't much in poor Sir Rigley.
"Not much in him?" said Majendie. "How about that immortal speech of his?"
"Immortal—" echoed Mr. Eliott dubiously.
"Indestructible! The poor fellow couldn't end it. It simply coiled and uncoiled itself and went off, in great loops, into eternity. It began in all innocence—naturally, as it was his maiden speech—when he rose, don't you know, to propose an amendment. I take it that speech was so maidenly that it shrank from anything in the nature of a proposal. It went on in a terrified manner, coyly considering and hesitating—till it cleared the House. And he was awfully pleased when we congratulated him on his 'maidenly reserve.'"
"How did he ever get elected?" said Miss Proctor.
"My dear lady, it was a glorious stroke of the Opposition. They withdrew their candidate when he contested the election. Of course, they felt that he'd only got to make a speech and there'd be a dissolution. You simply saw Parliament melting away before him. If he'd gone on he'd have worn out the British constitution."
Dr. Gardner looked at Mrs. Gardner and their eyes brightened, as Majendie continued to unfold the amazing resources of Sir Rigley. He breathed on the ex-member like a god, and played with him like a juggler; he tossed him into the air and kept him there, a radiant, unsubstantial thing. The ex-member disported himself before Mrs. Eliott's dinner-party as he had never disported himself in Parliament. Majendie had given him a career, endowed him with glorious attributes. The ex-member, as a topic, developed capacities unsuspected in him before. The others followed his flight breathless, afraid to touch him lest he should break and disappear under their hands.
By the time Majendie had done with him, the ex-member had entered on a joyous immortality in Scale.
And in the middle of it all Anne laughed.
Miss Proctor was the first to recover from the surprise of it. She leaned across the table with a liberal and vivid smile, opulent in appreciation.
"Well, Mr. Majendie, Sir Rigley ought to be grateful to you. If ever there was a dull subject dead and buried, it was he, poor man. And now the difficulty will be to forget him."
"I don't think," said Majendie gravely, "I shall forget him myself in a hurry."
Oh no, he never would forget Sir Rigley. He didn't want to forget him. He would be grateful to him as long as he lived. He had made Anne laugh. A girl's laugh, young and deliciously uncontrollable, springing from the immortal heart of joy.
It was the first time he had heard her laugh so. He didn't know she could do it. The hope of hearing her do it again would give him something to live for. He would win her yet if he could make her laugh.
Anne was more surprised than anybody, at him and at herself. It was a revelation to her, his cleverness, his brilliant social gift. She was only intimate with one kind of cleverness, the kind that feeds itself on lectures and on books. She had not thought of Walter as clever. She had only thought of him as good. That one quality of goodness had swallowed up the rest.
Miss Proctor took possession of her where she sat in the drawing-room, as it were amid the scattered fragments of the ex-member (he still, among the ladies, emitted a feeble radiance). Miss Proctor had always approved of Anne. If Anne had no metropolitan distinction to speak of, she was not in the least provincial. She was something by herself, superior and rare. A little inclined to take herself too seriously, perhaps; but her husband's admirable levity would, no doubt, improve her.
"My dear," said Miss Proctor, "I congratulate you. He's brilliant, he's charming, he's unique. Why didn't we know of him before? Where has he been hiding his talents all this time?"
(A talent that had not bloomed in Thurston Square was a talent pitiably wasted.)
Anne smiled a blanched, perfunctory smile. Ah, where had he been hiding himself, indeed?
Miss Proctor stood central, radiating the rich afterglow of her appreciation. Her gaze was a little critical of her friends' faces, as if she were measuring the effect, on a provincial audience, of Majendie's conversational technique. She swept down to a seat beside her hostess.
"My dear Fanny," she said, "why didn't you tell me?"
"Tell you—"
"That he was that sort. I didn't know there was such a delightful man in Scale. What have you all been dreaming of?"
Mrs. Eliott tried to look both amiable and intelligent. In the presence of Mr. Majendie's robust reality it was indeed as if they had all been dreaming. Her instinct told her that the spirit of pure comedy was destruction to the dreams she dreamed. She tried to be genial to her guest's accomplishment; but she felt that if Mr. Majendie's talents were let loose in her drawing-room, it would cease to be the place of intellectual culture. On the other hand she perceived that Miss Proctor's idea was to empty that drawing-room by securing Mr. Majendie for her own. Mrs. Eliott remained uncomfortably seated on her dilemma.
Sounds of laughter reached her from below. The men were unusually late in returning to the drawing-room. They appeared a little flushed by the hilarious festival, as if Majendie had had on them an effect of mild intoxication. She could see that even Dr. Gardner was demoralised. He wore, under his vagueness, the unmistakable air of surrender to an unfamiliar excess. Mr. Eliott too had the happy look of a man who has fed loftily after a long fast.
"Anne dear," said Majendie, as they walked back the few yards between Thurston Square and Prior Street, "we shan't have to do that very often, shall we?"
"Why not? You can't say we didn't have a delightful evening."
"Yes, but it was very exhausting, dear, for me."
"You? You didn't show much sign of exhaustion. I never heard you talk so well."
"Did I talk well?"
"Yes. Almost too well."
"Too much, you mean. Well, I had to talk, when nobody else did. Besides, I did it for a purpose."
But what his purpose was Majendie did not say.
Anne had been human enough to enjoy a performance so far beyond the range of her anticipations. She was glad, above all, that Walter had made himself acceptable in Thurston Square. But when she came to think of what was, what must be known of him in Scale, she was appalled by his incomprehensible ease of attitude. She reflected that this must have been the first time he had dined in Thurston Square since the scandal. Was it possible that he did not realise the insufferable nature of that incident, the efforts it must have cost to tolerate him, the points that had been stretched to take him in? She felt that it was impossible to exaggerate the essential solemnity of that evening. They had met together, as it were, to celebrate Walter's return to the sanctities and proprieties he had offended. He had been formally forgiven and received by the society which (however Fanny Eliott might explain away its action) had most unmistakably cast him out. She had not expected him to part with his indomitable self-possession under the ordeal, but she could have wished that he had borne himself with a little more modesty. He had failed to perceive the redemptive character of the feast, he had turned it into an occasion for profane personal display.
Mrs. Eliott's dinner-party had not saved him; on the contrary, he had saved the dinner-party.
Anne was right. Though Majendie was, as he expressed it, "up to her designs upon his unhappy soul," he remained unconscious of the part to be played by Mrs. Eliott and her circle in the scheme of his salvation. From his observation of the aristocracy of Thurston Square, it would never have occurred to him that they were people who could count, whichever way you looked at them.
Meanwhile he was a little disturbed by his own appearance as a heavenward pilgrim. He was not sure that he had not gone a little too far that way, and he felt that it was a shame to allow Anne to take him seriously.
He confided his scruples to Edith.
"Poor dear," he said, "it's quite pathetic. You know, she thinks she's saving me."
"And do you mind being saved?"
"Well, no, I don't mind a little of it. But the question is, how long I can keep it up."
"You mean, how long she'll keep it up?"
He laughed. "Oh, she'll keep it up for ever. No possible doubt about that. She'll never tire. I wonder if I ought to tell her."
"Tell her what?"
"That it won't work. That she can't do it that way. She's wasting my time and her own."
"Oh, what's a little time, dear, when you've all eternity in view?"
"But I haven't. I've nothing in view. My view, at present, is entirely obscured by Anne."
"Poor Anne! To think she actually stands between you and your Maker."
"Yes, you know—in her very anxiety to introduce us."
They looked at each other. Her sainthood was so accomplished, her union with heaven so complete, that she could afford herself these profaner sympathies. She was secretly indignant with Anne's view of Walter as unpresentable in the circles of the spiritualélite.
"It never struck her that you mightn't need an introduction after all; that you were in it as much as she. That's the sort of mistake one might expect from—from a spiritual parvenu, but not from Anne."
"Oh, come, I don't consider myself her equal by a long chalk."
"Well, say she does belong to the peerage; you're a gentleman, and what more can she require?"
"She can't see that I am (If I am. You say so). She considers me—spiritually—a bounder of the worst sort."
"That's her mistake. Though I must say you sometimes lend yourself to it with your horrible profanity."
"I can't help it, Edie. She's so funny with it. Shemakesme profane."
"Dear Walter, if you can think Anne funny—"
"I do. I think she's furiously funny, and horribly pathetic. All the time, you know, she thinks she's leading me upward. Profanity's my only refuge from hypocrisy."
"Oh no, not your only refuge. You say she thinks she's leading you. Don'tlether think it. Make her think you're leading her."
"Do you think," said Majendie, "she'd enjoy that quite so much?"
"She'd enjoy it more. If you took her the right way. The way I mean."
"What's that?"
"You must find out," said she. "I'm not going to tell you everything."
Majendie became thoughtful. "My only fear was that I couldn't keep it up. But you really don't think, then, that I should score much if I did?"
"No, my dear, I don't. And as for keeping it up, you never could. And if you did she'd never understand what you were doing it for. That's not the way to show you're in love with her."
"But that's just what I don't want her to see. That's what she hates so much in me. I've always understood that in these matters it's discreeter not to show your hand too plainly. You see, it's just as if we'd never been married, for all she cares. That's the trouble."
"There's something in that. If she's not in love with you—"
"Look here, Edie, you're a woman, and you know all about them. Do you really, honestly think Anne ever was in love with me?"
"Oh, don't ask me. How should I know?"
"No, but," he persisted, "what do you think?"
"I think shewasin love."
"But not with me, though?"
"No, no, not with you."
"With whom, then?"
"Darling idiot, there wasn't any who. If there was, do you think I'd give her away like that? If you'd asked mewhatshe was in love with—"
"Well, what then?"
"Your goodness. She was head over ears in love with that."
"I see. With something that I wasn't."
"No, with something that you were, that you are, only she doesn't know it."
"Then," said Majendie, "you can't get out of it, she's in love withme."
"Oh no, no, you dear goose, not with you. To be in love with you she'd have to be in love with everything you'renot, as well as everything you are; with everything you have been, with everything you never were, with everything you will be, with everything you might be, could be, should be."
"That's a large order, Edie."
"There's a larger one than that. She might sweep all that overboard, see it go by whole pieces (the best pieces) at a time, and still be in love with the dear, incomprehensible, indescribableyou. That," said Edie, triumphant in her wisdom, "is what being in love is."
"And do you think she isn't in it?"
"No. Not anywhere near it. But—it's a big but—"
"I don't care how big it is. Don't bother me with it."
"Bother you? Why, it's a beautiful but. As I said, she isn't in love with you; but she may be any minute. It's just touch and go with her. It depends onyou."
"Heavens, what am I to do? I've done everything."
"Yes, you have, but she hasn't. She's done nothing. She doesn't know how to. You've got to show her."
He shook his head hopelessly. "You're beyond me. I don't understand. There isn't anything for me to do. How am I to show her?"
"I mean show her what there is in it. What it means. What it's going to be for her as well as you. Just go at it hard, harder than you did before you married her."
"Isee, I've got to make love to her all over again."
"Exactly. All over again from the very beginning."
"I say!" He took it in, her idea, in all the width and splendour of its simplicity. "And do it differently?"
"Oh, very differently."
"I don't quite see where the difference is to come in. What did I do before that was so wrong?"
"Nothing. That's just the worst of it. It was all too right. Ever so much too right. Don't you see? It's what we've been talking about. You made her in love with your goodness. And she was in love with it, not because it wasyourgoodness, but because it was her own. That's why she wanted to marry it. She couldn't be in love with it for any other reason, because she's an egoist."
"No. There you're quite wrong. That's what she isn't."
"Oh, youarein love with her. Of course she's an egoist. All the nicest women are. I'm an egoist myself. Do you love me less for it?"
"I don't love you less for anything."
"Well—unless you can make Anne jealous of me—and you can't—you've got to love me less, now, dear boy. That's where I come in—to be kept out of it."
She had led him breathless on her giddy round; she plunged him back into bewilderment. He hadn't a notion where she was taking him to, where they would come out; but there was a desperate delight in the impetuous journey, the wind of her sudden flight lifted him and carried him on. He had always trusted the marvellous inspirations of her heart. She had failed him once; but now he could not deny that she had given him lights, and he looked for a stupendous illumination at the end of the way.
"Out of it!" he exclaimed. "Why, where should I have been without you? You were the beginning of it."
"I was indeed. You've got to take care I'm not the end of it, that's all."
"What on earth do you mean?"
"I mean what I say. You don't want Anne to be in love with you formysake, do you?"
"N—no. I don't know that I do exactly. At least I should prefer that she was in love with me for my own."
"Well, you must make her, then. That's why you've got to leave me out of it. I've been too much in it all along. It was through me she conceived that unfortunate idea of your goodness. I'm its father and its mother and its nurse, I ministered to it every hour. I fed it, I brought it up, I brought itout, I provided all the opportunity for its display. Nothing else had a show beside your goodness, Wallie dear. It was something monstrous. It took Anne's affection from you and concentrated it all on itself. She worshipped it, she clung to it, she saw nothing else but it, and when it went everything went.Youwent first of all. Well, you must just see that that doesn't happen again."
"You mean that I must lead a life of iniquity?"
"You mustn't lead a life of anything."
"Do you mean I mustn't be good any more?"
Majendie's imagination played hilariously with this fantastic, this preposterous notion of his goodness.
"Oh yes, be good," said Edith, "but not too good. Above all, not too good to me. Concentrate on her, stupid."
"I have concentrated," he moaned, mystified beyond endurance. "Besides, you said I couldn't make her jealous."
"No, I wish you could. I mean, don't let her fall in love with your devotion to me again. Don't hold her by that one rope. Hold her by all your ropes; then, if one goes, it doesn't so much matter."
"I see. You don't trust my goodness."
"Oh,Itrust it, so will she again. But don'tyoutrust it. That precious goodness of yours is your rival. A bad, dangerous rival. You've got to beat it out of the field. Show that you're jealous of it. A little judicious jealousy won't hurt." Edith's eyes were still and profound with wisdom. "I don't believe you've ever yet made love to Anne properly. That's what it all comes to."