Sir Richmond was stirred very deeply by Miss Grammont’s confidences. His
dispute with Dr. Martineau was present in his mind, so that he did not
want to make love to her. But he was extremely anxious to express his
vivid sense of the value of her friendship. And while he hesitated over
this difficult and unfamiliar task she began to talk again of herself,
and in such a way as to give a new turn to Sir Richmond’s thoughts.
“Perhaps I ought to tell you a little more about myself,” she said; “now
that I have told you so much. I did a thing that still puzzles me. I was
filled with a sense of hopeless disaster in France and I suppose I had
some sort of desperate idea of saving something out of the situation....
I renewed my correspondence with Gunter Lake. He made the suggestion I
knew he would make, and I renewed our engagement.”
“To go back to wealth and dignity in New York?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t love him?”
“That’s always been plain to me. But what I didn’t realize, until I had
given my promise over again, was that I dislike him acutely.”
“You hadn’t realized that before?”
“I hadn’t thought about him sufficiently. But now I had to think about
him a lot. The other affair had given me an idea perhaps of what it
means to be married to a man. And here I am drifting back to him. The
horrible thing about him is the steady ENVELOPING way in which he has
always come at me. Without fellowship. Without any community of ideas.
Ready to make the most extraordinary bargains. So long as he can in any
way fix me and get me. What does it mean? What is there behind those
watching, soliciting eyes of his? I don’t in the least love him, and
this desire and service and all the rest of it he offers me--it’s not
love. It’s not even such love as Caston gave me. It’s a game he plays
with his imagination.”
She had released a flood of new ideas in Sir Richmond’s mind. “This
is illuminating,” he said. “You dislike Lake acutely. You always have
disliked him.”
“I suppose I have. But it’s only now I admit it to myself.”
“Yes. And you might, for example, have married him in New York before
the war.”
“It came very near to that.”
“And then probably you wouldn’t have discovered you disliked him. You
wouldn’t have admitted it to yourself.”
“I suppose I shouldn’t. I suppose I should have tried to believe I loved
him.”
“Women do this sort of thing. Odd! I never realized it before. And there
are endless wives suppressing an acute dislike. My wife does. I see now
quite clearly that she detests me. Reasonably enough. From her angle I’m
entirely detestable. But she won’t admit it, won’t know of it. She never
will. To the end of my life, always, she will keep that detestation
unconfessed. She puts a face on the matter. We both do. And this affair
of yours.... Have you thought how unjust it is to Lake?”
“Not nearly so much as I might have done.”
“It is unfair to him. Atrociously unfair. He’s not my sort of man,
perhaps, but it will hurt him cruelly according to the peculiar laws
of his being. He seems to me a crawling sort of lover with an immense
self-conceit at the back of his crawlingness.”
“He has,” she endorsed.
“He backs himself to crawl--until he crawls triumphantly right over
you.... I don’t like to think of the dream he has.... I take it he will
lose. Is it fair to go into this game with him?”
“In the interests of Lake,” she said, smiling softly at Sir Richmond in
the moonlight. “But you are perfectly right.”
“And suppose he doesn’t lose!”
Sir Richmond found himself uttering sentiments.
“There is only one decent way in which a civilized man and a civilized
woman may approach one another. Passionate desire is not enough. What is
called love is not enough. Pledges, rational considerations, all these
things are worthless. All these things are compatible with hate.
The primary essential is friendship, clear understanding, absolute
confidence. Then within that condition, in that elect relationship, love
is permissible, mating, marriage or no marriage, as you will--all things
are permissible....”
Came a long pause between them.
“Dear old cathedral,” said Miss Grammont, a little irrelevantly. She
had an air of having concluded something that to Sir Richmond seemed
scarcely to have begun. She stood looking at the great dark facade edged
with moonlight for some moments, and then turned towards the hotel,
which showed a pink-lit window.
“I wonder,” she said, “if Belinda is still up, And what she will think
when I tell her of the final extinction of Mr. Lake. I think she rather
looked forward to being the intimate friend, secrets and everything, of
Mrs. Gunter Lake.”