I have mentioned that Miss Bell had looked considerations
of sentiment very full in the face at an age when she
might have been expected to be blushing and quivering
before them, with downcast countenance. She had arrived
at conclusions about them--conclusions of philosophic
contumely, indifference, and some contempt. She had since
frequently talked about them to Janet Cardiff with curious
disregard of time, and circumstance, mentioning her
opinion in a Strand omnibus, for instance, that the only
dignity attaching to love as between a man and a woman
was that of an artistic idea. Janet had found Elfrida
possessed of so savage a literalism in this regard that
it was only in the most hardily adventurous of the moods
of investigation her friend inspired that she cared to
combat her here. It was not, Janet told herself, that
she was afraid to face the truth in any degree of nakedness;
but she rose in hot inward rebellion against Elfrida's
borrowed psychological cynicisms--they were not the truth,
Tolstoi had not all the facts, perhaps from pure Muscovite
inability to comprehend them all The spirituality of love
might be a western product--she was half inclined to
think it was; but at all events it existed, and it was
wanton to leave out of consideration a thing that made
all the difference. Moreover, if these things ought to
be probed--and Janet was not of serious opinion that they
ought to be--for her part she preferred to obtain advices
thereon from between admissible and respectable book-covers.
It hurt her to hear them drop from Elfrida's lips--lips
so plainly meant for all tenderness. Janet had an instinct
of helpless anger when she heard them; the woman in her
rose in protest, less on behalf of her sex than on behalf
of Elfrida herself, who seemed so blind, so willing to
revile, so anxious to reject. "Do you really hope you
will marry?" Elfrida had asked her once; and Janet had
answered candidly, "Of course I do, and I want to die a
grandmother too." "_Vraiment!_" exclaimed Miss Bell
ironically, with a little shudder of disgust, "I hope
you may!"
That was in the very beginning of their friendship,
however, and so vital a subject could not remain, outside
the relations which established themselves more and more
intimately between them as the days went on. Janet began
to find herself constantly in the presence of a temptation
to bring the matter home to Elfrida personally in one
way or another, as young women commonly do with other
young women who are obstinately unorthodox in these
things--to say to her in effect, "Your turn will come
when _he_ comes! These pseudo-philosophies will vanish
when _he_ looks at them, like snow in spring. You will
succumb--you will succumb!" But she never did. Something
in Elfrida's attitude forbade it. Her opinions were not
vagaries, and she held them, so far as they had a personal
application, haughtily. Janet felt and disliked the tacit
limitation, and preferred to avoid the clash of their
opinions when she could. Besides, her own ideas upon the
subject had latterly retired irretrievably from the light
of discussion. She had one day found it necessary to lock
the door of her soul upon them; in the new knowledge that
had taken sweet possession of her she recognized that
they were no longer theoretical, that they must be put
away. She challenged herself to sit in a jury upon Love,
and found herself disqualified.
The discovery had no remarkable effect upon Janet. She
sometimes wasted an hour, pen in hand, in inconsequent
reverie, and worked till midnight to make up; and she
took a great liking for impersonal conversations with
Miss Halifax about Kendal's pictures, methods and meanings.
She found dining in Royal Geographical circles less of
a bore than usual, and deliberately laid herself out to
talk well. She looked in the glass sometimes at a little
vertical line that seemed to be coming at the corners of
her mouth, and wondered whether at twenty-four one might
expect the first indication of approaching old-maidenhood.
When she was paler than usual she reflected that the
season was taking a good deal out of her. She was bravely
and rigidly commonplace with Kendal, who told her that
she ought to drop it and go out of town--she was not
looking well. She drew closer to her father, and at the
same time armed her secret against him at all points.
Janet would have had any one know rather than he. She
felt that it implied almost a breach of faith, of
comradeship, to say nothing of the complication of her
dignity, which she wanted upheld in his eyes before all
others. In reality she made him more the sovereign of
her affections and the censor of her relations than nature
designed Lawrence Cardiff to be in the parental connection.
It gave him great pleasure that he could make his daughter
a friend, and accord her the independence of a friend;
it was a satisfaction to him that she was not obtrusively
filial. Her feeling for Kendal, under the circumstances,
would have hurt him if he bad known of it, but only
through his sympathy and his affection--he was unacquainted
with the jealousy of a father. But in Janet's eyes they
made their little world together, indispensable to each
other as its imaginary hemispheres. She had a quiet pain,
in the infrequent moments when she allowed herself the
full realization of her love for Kendal, in the knowledge
that she, of her own motion, had disturbed its unities
and its ascendancies.
Since that evening at Lady Halifax's, when Janet saw John
Kendal reddening so unaccountably, she had felt singularly
more tolerant of Elfrida's theories. She combated them
as vigorously as ever, but she lost her dislike to
discussing them. As it became more and more obvious that
Kendal found in Elfrida a reward for the considerable
amount of time he spent in her society, so Janet arrived
at the point of encouraging her heresies, especially with
their personal application. She took secret comfort in
them; she hoped they would not change, and she was too
honest to disguise to herself the reason. If Elfrida
cared for him, Janet assured herself, the case would be
entirely different--she would stamp out her own feeling
without mercy, to the tiniest spark. She would be glad,
in time, to have crushed it for Elfrida, though it did
seem that it would be more easily done for a stranger,
somebody she wouldn't have to know afterward. But if
Elfrida didn't care, as a matter of principle Janet was
unable to see the least harm in making her say so as
often as possible. They were talking together in Mr.
Cardiff's library late one June afternoon, when it seemed
to Janet that the crisis came, that she could never again
speak of such matters to Elfrida without betraying herself.
Things were growing dim about the room, the trees stood
in dusky groups in the square outside. There was the
white glimmer of the tea-things between them, and just
light enough to define the shadows round the other girl's
face, and write upon it the difference it bore, in Janet's
eyes, to every other face.
"Oh!" Elfrida was saying, "it does make life more
interesting, I admit--up to a certain point. And I
suppose it's to be condoned from the point of view of
the species. Whoever started us, and wants us to go on,
excuses marriage, I suppose. And of course the men are
not affected by it. But for women, it is degrading
--horrible. Especially for women like you and me, to whom
life may mean something else. Fancy being the author of
babies when one could be the author of books! _Don't_
tell me you'd rather!"
"I!" said Janet "Oh, I'm out of it. But I approve the
principle."
"Besides, the commonplaceness, the eternal routine, the
being tied together, the--the domestic virtues! It must
be death, absolute death, to any fineness of nature. No,"
Elfrida went on decisively, "people with anything in them
that is worth saving may love as much as they feel
disposed, but they ought to keep their freedom. And some
of them do nowadays."
"Do you mean," said Janet slowly, "that they dispense
with the ceremony?"
"They dispense with the condition. They--they don't go
so far."
"I thought you didn't believe in Platonics," Janet
answered, with wilful misunderstanding.
"You know I don't believe in them. Any more," Elfrida
added lightly, "than I believe in this exaltation you
impute to the race of a passion it shares with--with the
mollusks. It's pure self-flattery."
There was a moment's silence. Elfrida clasped her hands
behind her head and turned her face toward the window so
that all the light that came through softly gathered in
it. Janet felt the girl's beauty as if it were a burden,
pressing with literal physical weight upon her heart She
made a futile effort to lift it with words. "Frida," she
said, "you are beautiful to--to hurt to-night Why has
nobody ever painted a creature like you?"
It was as if she touched an inner spring of the girl's
nature, touched it electrically. Elfrida leaned forward
consciously with shining eyes. "Truly am I, Janetta?
Ah--to-night! Well, yes, perhaps to-night, I am. It is
an effect of chiaroscuro. But what about always--what
about generally, Janetta? I have such horrid doubts. If
it weren't for my nose I should be satisfied--yes, I
think I should be satisfied. But I _can't_ deceive myself
about my nose, Janetta; it's thick!"
"It isn't a particularly spiritually-minded nose," Janet
laughed. "But console yourself, it's thoughtful."
Elfrida put her elbows on her knees and framed her face
with the palms of her hands. "If I am beautiful to-night
you ought to love me. Do you love me, Janetta? Really
_love_ me? Could you imagine," she went on, with a
whimsical spoiled shake of her head, "any one else doing
it?"
Janet's fingers closed tightly on the arm of her chair.
Was it coming already, then?
"Yes," she said slowly, "I could imagine it well."
"More than one?" Elfrida insisted prettily. "More than
two or three? A dozen, perhaps?"
"Quite a dozen," Janet smiled. "Is that to be the limit
of your heartless proceedings?"
"I don't know how soon one would grow tired of it. Maybe
in three or four years. But for now--it is very amusing."
"Playing with fire?"
"Bah!" Elfrida returned, going back to her other mood.
"I'm not inflammable. But-to that extent, if you like,
I value what you and the poets are pleased to call love.
It's part of the game; one might as well play it all.
It's splendid to win--anything. It's a kind of success."
"Oh, I know," she went on after an instant. "I have done
it before--I shall do it again, often! It is worth
doing--to sit within three feet of a human being who
would give all he possesses just to touch your hand--and
to tacitly dare him to do it."
"Stop, Elfrida!"
"Shan't stop, my dear. Not only to be able to check any
such demonstration yourself, with a movement, a glance,
a turn of your head, but without even a sign, to make
your would-be adorer check it himself! And to feel as
still and calm and superior to it all! Is that nothing
to you?"
"It's less than nothing. It's hideous!"
"I consider it a compensation vested in the few for the
wrongs of the many," Elfrida replied gaily. "And I mean
to store up all the compensation in my proper person that
I can."
"I believe you have had more than your share already,"
Janet cried.
"Oh no! a little, only a little. Hardly anything
here--people fall in love in England in such a mathematical
way. But there is a callow artist on the _Age_, and
Golightly Ticke has become quite mad lately, and Solomon
--I mean Mr. Rattray--will propose next week--he thinks
I won't dare to refuse the sub-editor. How I shall laugh
at him! Afterward, if he gives me any trouble, I shall
threaten to write up the interview for the _Pictorial
News_. On the whole though, I dare say I'd better not
suggest such a thing; he would want it for the _Age_.
He is equal to any personal sacrifice for the _Age_."
"Is, that all?" asked Janet, turning away her head.
"You are thinking of John Kendal! Ah, there it becomes
exciting. From what you see, Janetta _mia_, what should
you _think?_ Myself, I don't quite know. Don't you find
him rather--a good deal--interested?"
Janet had an impulse of thankfulness for the growing
darkness. "I--I see him so seldom!" she said. Oh, it was
the last time, the very last time that she would ever
let Elfrida talk like this.
"Well, I think so," Elfrida went on coolly. "He fancies
he finds me curious, original, a type--just now. I dare
say he thinks he takes an anthropological pleasure in my
society! But in the beginning it is all the same thing,
my dear, and in the end it will be all the same thing.
This delicious Loti," and she picked up "Aziade"--"what
an anthropologist he is--with a feminine bias!"
Janet was tongue-tied. She struggled with herself for an
instant, and then, "I _wish_ you'd stay and dine," she
said desperately.
"How thoughtless of me!" Elfrida replied, jumping up.
"You ought to be dressing, dear. No, I can't; I've got to
sup with some ladies of the Alhambra to-night--it will make
such lovely copy. But I'll go now, this very instant."
Half-way downstairs Janet, in a passion of helpless tears,
heard Elfrida's footsteps pause and turn. She stepped
swiftly into her own room and locked the door. The
footsteps came tripping back into, the library, and then
a tap sounded on Janet's door. Outside Elfrida's voice
said plaintively, "I had to come back. Do you love me--are
you quite sure you love me?"
"You humbug!" Janet called from within, steadying heir
voice with an effort, "I'm not at all sure. I'll tell
you to-morrow!"
"But you do!" cried Elfrida, departing. "I know you do."