The disillusionment about marriage which had discovered Trafford a
thwarted, overworked, and worried man, had revealed Marjorie with time
on her hands, superabundant imaginative energy, and no clear intimation
of any occupation. With them, as with thousands of young couples in
London to-day, the breadwinner was overworked, and the spending
partner's duty was chiefly the negative one of not spending. You cannot
consume your energies merely in not spending money. Do what she could,
Marjorie could not contrive to make house and child fill the waking
hours. She was far too active and irritable a being to be beneficial
company all day for genial, bubble-blowing little Margharita; she could
play with that young lady and lead her into ecstasies of excitement and
delight, and she could see with an almost instinctive certainty when
anything was going wrong; but for the rest that little life reposed far
more beneficially upon the passive acquiescence of May, her pink and
wholesome nurse. And the household generally was in the hands of a
trustworthy cook-general, who maintained a tolerable routine. Marjorie
did not dare to have an idea about food or domestic arrangements; if she
touched that routine so much as with her little finger it sent up the
bills. She could knock off butcher and greengrocer and do every scrap of
household work that she could touch, in a couple of hours a day. She
tried to find some work to fill her leisure; she suggested to Trafford
that she might help him by writing up his Science Notes from rough
pencil memoranda, but when it became clear that the first step to her
doing this would be the purchase of a Remington typewriter and a special
low table to carry it, he became bluntly discouraging. She thought of
literary work, and sat down one day to write a short story and earn
guineas, and was surprised to find that she knew nothing of any sort of
human being about whom she could invent a story. She tried a cheap
subscription at Mudie's and novels, and they filled her with a thirst
for events; she tried needlework, and found her best efforts
aesthetically feeble and despicable, and that her mind prowled above the
silks and colours like a hungry wolf.
The early afternoons were the worst time, from two to four, before
calling began. The devil was given great power over Marjorie's early
afternoon. She could even envy her former home life then, and reflect
that there, at any rate, one had a chance of a game or a quarrel with
Daffy or Syd or Rom or Theodore. She would pull herself together and go
out for a walk, and whichever way she went there were shops and shops
and shops, a glittering array of tempting opportunities for spending
money. Sometimes she would give way to spending exactly as a struggling
drunkard decides to tipple. She would fix on some object, some object
trivial and a little rare and not too costly, as being needed--when she
knew perfectly well it wasn't needed--and choose the most remotest shops
and display the exactest insistence upon her requirements. Sometimes she
would get home from these raids without buying at all. After four the
worst of the day was over; one could call on people or people might
telephone and follow up with a call; and there was a chance of Trafford
coming home....
One day at the Carmels' she found herself engaged in a vigorous
flirtation with young Carmel. She hadn't noticed it coming on, but there
she was in a windowseat talking quite closely to him. He said he was
writing a play, a wonderful passionate play about St. Francis, and only
she could inspire and advise him. Wasn't there some afternoon in the
week when she sat and sewed, so that he might come and sit by her and
read to her and talk to her? He made his request with a certain
confidence, but it filled her with a righteous panic; she pulled him up
with an abruptness that was almost inartistic. On her way home she was
acutely ashamed of herself; this was the first time she had let any man
but Trafford think he might be interesting to her, but once or twice on
former occasions she had been on the verge of such provocative
intimations. This sort of thing anyhow mustn't happen.
But if she didn't dress with any distinction--because of the cost--and
didn't flirt and trail men in her wake, what was she to do at the
afternoon gatherings which were now her chief form of social contact?
What was going to bring people to her house? She knew that she was more
than ordinarily beautiful and that she could talk well, but that does
not count for much if you are rather dowdy, and quite uneventfully
virtuous.
It became the refrain of all her thoughts that she must find something
to do.