And now these young people had to resume life in London in earnest. The
orchestral accompaniment of the world at large began to mingle with
their hitherto unsustained duet. It had been inaudible in Italy. In
Chelsea it had sounded, faintly perhaps but distinctly, from their very
first inspection of the little house. A drawing-room speaks of callers,
a dining-room of lunch-parties and dinners. It had swayed Marjorie from
the front door inward.
During their honeymoon they had been gloriously unconscious of comment.
Now Marjorie began to show herself keenly sensitive to the advent of a
score of personalities, and very anxious to show just how completely
successful in every sense her romantic disobedience had been. She knew
she had been approved of, admired, condemned, sneered at, thoroughly
discussed. She felt it her first duty to Trafford, to all who had
approved of her flight, to every one, herself included, to make this
marriage obviously, indisputably, a success, a success not only by her
own standards but by the standards of anyonesoever who chose to sit in
judgment on her.
There was Trafford. She felt she had to extort the admission from every
one that he was the handsomest, finest, ablest, most promising and most
delightful man a prominent humorist was ever jilted for. She wanted them
to understand clearly just all that Trafford was--and that involved, she
speedily found in practice, making them believe a very great deal that
as yet Trafford wasn't. She found it practically impossible not to
anticipate his election to the Royal Society and the probability of a
more important professorship. She felt that anyhow he was an F.R.S. in
the sight of God....
It was almost equally difficult not to indicate a larger income than
facts justified.
It was entirely in Marjorie's vein in those early days that she would
want to win on every score and by every standard of reckoning. If
Marjorie had been a general she would have counted no victory complete
if the struggle was not sustained and desperate, and if it left the
enemy with a single gun or flag, or herself with so much as a man killed
or wounded. The people she wanted to impress varied very widely. She
wanted to impress the Carmel girls, and the Carmel girls, she knew, with
their racial trick of acute appraisement, were only to be won by the
very highest quality all round. They had, she knew, two standards of
quality, cost and distinction. As far as possible, she would give them
distinction. But whenever she hesitated over something on the verge of
cheapness the thought of those impending judgments tipped the balance.
The Carmel girls were just two influential representatives of a host.
She wanted to impress quite a number of other school and college
friends. There were various shy, plastic-spirited, emotional creatures,
of course, for the most part with no confidence in their own appearance,
who would be impressed quite adequately enough by Trafford's good looks
and witty manner and easy temper. They might perhaps fall in love with
him and become slavish to her after the way of their kind, and anyhow
they would be provided for, but there were plenty of others of a harder
texture whose tests would be more difficult to satisfy. There were girls
who were the daughters of prominent men, who must be made to understand
that Trafford was prominent, girls who were well connected, who must be
made to realize the subtle excellence of Trafford's blood. As she
thought of Constance Graham, for example, or Ottiline Winchelsea, she
felt the strongest disposition to thicken the by no means well
authenticated strands that linked Trafford with the Traffords of
Trafford-over-Lea. She went about the house dreaming a little
apprehensively of these coming calls, and the pitiless light of
criticism they would bring to bear, not indeed upon her happiness--that
was assured--but upon her success.
The social side of the position would have to be strained to the
utmost, Marjorie felt, with Aunt Plessington. The thought of Aunt
Plessington made her peculiarly apprehensive. Aunt Plessington had to
the fullest extent that contempt for merely artistic or scientific
people which sits so gracefully upon the administrative English. You
see people of that sort do not get on in the sense that a young lawyer
or barrister gets on. They do not make steps; they boast and quarrel
and are jealous perhaps, but that steady patient shove upward seems
beyond their intelligence. The energies God manifestly gave them for
shoving, they dissipate in the creation of weak beautiful things and
unremunerative theories, or in the establishment of views sometimes
diametrically opposed to the ideas of influential people. And they are
"queer"--socially. They just moon about doing this so-called "work" of
theirs, and even when the judgment of eccentric people forces a kind
of reputation upon them--Heaven knows why?--they make no public or
social use of it. It seemed to Aunt Plessington that the artist and
the scientific man were dealt with very neatly and justly in the
Parable of the Buried Talent. Moreover their private lives were often
scandalous, they married for love instead of interest, often quite
disadvantageously, and their relationships had all the instability
that is natural upon such a foundation. And, after all, what good were
they? She had never met an artist or a prominent imaginative writer or
scientific man that she had not been able to subdue in a minute or so
by flat contradiction, and if necessary slightly raising her voice.
They had little or no influence even upon their own public
appointments....
The thought of the invasion of her agreeable little back street
establishment by this Britannic system of judgments filled Marjorie's
heart with secret terrors. She felt she had to grapple with and overcome
Aunt Plessington, or be for ever fallen--at least, so far as that
amiable lady's report went, and she knew it went pretty far. She
wandered about the house trying to imagine herself Aunt Plessington.
Immediately she felt the gravest doubts whether the whole thing wasn't
too graceful and pretty. A rich and rather massive ugliness, of course,
would have been the thing to fetch Aunt Plessington. Happily, it was
Aunt Plessington's habit to veil her eyes with her voice. She might not
see very much.
The subjugation of Aunt Plessington was difficult, but not altogether
hopeless, Marjorie felt, provided her rejection of Magnet had not been
taken as an act of personal ingratitude. There was a case on her side.
She was discovering, for example, that Trafford had a really very
considerable range of acquaintance among quite distinguished people; big
figures like Evesham and MacHaldo, for example, were intelligently
interested in the trend of his work. She felt this gave her a basis for
Plessingtonian justifications. She could produce those people--as one
shows one's loot. She could imply, "Oh, Love and all that nonsense!
Certainly not! _This_ is what I did it for." With skill and care and
good luck, and a word here and there in edgeways, she believed she might
be able to represent the whole adventure as the well-calculated opening
of a campaign on soundly Plessingtonian lines. Her marriage to Trafford,
she tried to persuade herself, might be presented as something almost
as brilliant and startling as her aunt's swoop upon her undistinguished
uncle.
She might pretend that all along she had seen her way to things, to
coveted dinner-tables and the familiarity of coveted guests, to bringing
people together and contriving arrangements, to influence and
prominence, to culminations and intrigues impossible in the
comparatively specialized world of a successful humorist and playwright,
and so at last to those high freedoms of authoritative and if necessary
offensive utterance in a strangulated contralto, and from a position of
secure eminence, which is the goal of all virtuously ambitious
Englishwomen of the governing classes--that is to say, of all virtuously
ambitious Englishwomen....