II

He had now passed through the woods and crossed the road and entered the

footpath that ran down to Woodlands, the small house encircled by birch

and fir woods where, for now some four or five years, the Dallases had

pitched their errant tent. One could reach it, also, by the road; but

Rupert always took this short cut that brought him out at a little gate

opening on the upper lawn. There was an upper and a lower lawn at

Woodlands; on the upper Colonel Dallas had a putting-green; the lower

was a tiny square surrounded by Mrs. Dallas’s beds of carnations.

Rupert, when he emerged upon the putting-green, could look down past the

red-tiled roofs and the white rough-cast walls of the house at the

carnations, massed in their appointed colours--from deep to palest rose,

from fawn and citron to snowy white--among flagged paths.

Mrs. Dallas had told him, in one of her infrequent moments of

communicativeness, that during years of wandering as a soldier’s

wife--her first husband, also, had been a soldier--she had come to be

known as the woman who could make things grow anywhere. She had grown

flowers in sands and marshes. She had snatched it might be but the one

season of fulfilment from the most temporary of sojournings--in China,

in India, in Africa. Sometimes only bulbs would grow; sometimes only

roses; but what she tried for, always, and had never attained in more

perfection than at Woodlands, was carnations. They were her favourite

flower and they atoned to her here, she said, for living in a house that

made her always think of an ornamental bottle of some popular

dentifrice, so red and white, so fresh and spick and span, and with such

a well-advertised air, was Woodlands. Her carnations were the only

things of which he had ever heard her speak with feeling. Rupert, as he

looked down at them from the upper lawn and descended the stone steps,

felt his heart beating violently.

A veranda ran along the front of Woodlands, and Mrs. Dallas was sitting

on it, just outside her drawing-room windows. The shaded depths of the

room behind her glimmered here and there with the half-drowned

brightness of crystal, porcelain, lacquer,--the things, none very good

but all rather charming, that she had picked up for a song in the course

of her wanderings; and she sat there, rather like a siren indeed, at the

mouth of her cavern, its treasures seeming to shine in the translucent

darkness behind her as if through water. Rupert, remembering and

accepting the simile, saw her as a siren, a creature of poetry and

romance, though he recognized that her poetry, like her romance, was

hidden from the ordinary observer. Even to his eyes she always appeared

first and foremost as a woman of extreme fashion, and his other

perceptions of her were tinged with the half-tormenting, half-delicious

pungency of this one, for Rupert had known till now no women of

fashion. He had passed his youth, until going to Oxford, in a

provincial town, where his father, an admirable and sagacious man, was a

hard-worked doctor; and his only glimpses of society had been in his

encounters, always displeasing to him, with Marian’s tiresome and

conventional kinsfolk and the few haphazard contacts in London that came

in the way of a young writer. Mrs. Dallas might embody poetry and

romance, but she also embodied luxury and the exercised and competent

economy that made it possible. She might have to live in small, gimcrack

Woodlands and do without a motor; but she had her maid. The slices of

bacon at breakfast were carefully computed; but the coffee was of the

best and blackest.

To-day, as always when he had seen her, she seemed ready for any

possible social emergency. She could have stepped from her veranda, with

those wonderfully cut little white shoes, into the smartest of

garden-parties, or have received in her shimmering cavern the unexpected

visit of a royal personage; and her soft white linen with its heavy

Italian embroideries clotted, like thick cream, about the hem and wrists

and breast, would have been as exquisitely appropriate as it was to this

empty afternoon of reverie.

She was a small, very shapely woman, soft and curved and compact. Her

coiffure would have looked old-fashioned in its artifice and elegance,

and with its “royal fringe,” were it not for its air of a rightness as

unquestionable as that of some foreign princess’s, who kept and did not

follow fashions. Mrs. Dallas’s face, too, was small and colourless and

slightly faded; her hair was of a lighter brown than her arched eyebrows

and her melancholy and dissatisfied eyes; her eyelids, tinged with a

dusky mauve, drooped heavily and made her always look a little sleepy;

the smiling line of her full-lipped yet minute mouth was ironic rather

than mirthful. To have called it a bewitching or an alluring face would

have been to imply a mobility it did not possess; but it was potent

through its very passivity; it was provocative through its profound and

slumbrous indifference.

There was certainly no hint of allurement in the glance she turned on

Rupert Wilson as he came round the corner of the veranda; it was,

indeed, even to his rapt preoccupation, a little harder in its quiet

attentiveness than usual; yet she smiled at him, and her smile was

always sweet, holding out a languid hand in silence and leaving it to

him to say, “You expected me.”

It was hardly a question, and Mrs. Dallas gave it no answer. He had,

indeed, come to see her every day for many weeks now. But yesterday had

finished the novel, and to-day was almost the first they had had without

some definite programme of reading.

Rupert sat down on the steps of the veranda at her feet and took off his

hat and looked out across the carnations; and since she said nothing,

he, too, was silent, and to his trembling young heart the silence was

full of new avowals.

Colonel Dallas’s smoking-room also opened on the veranda, and as they

sat there he came out. He was a tall, heavy man, with large pale cheeks

drooping on either side of a white moustache, and a gloomy eye that

could become fretful. He cast now a glance that was only gloomy at his

wife and her companion.

“Beastly hot day,” he said, to her rather than to Rupert. “It’s worse in

the house than out, I think.”

“Are you going over to the Trotters' for tea and croquet?” his wife

inquired.

“To the Trotters'? Why should I go to the Trotters'?”

“They asked you, and you accepted.”

“Well, I certainly don’t feel inclined to endure that broiling walk for

the sake of _les beaux yeux_ of Madame Trotter _et filles_. It’s a dull

neighbourhood, this, but the Trotters are, perhaps, when all’s done and

told, the dullest people in it.”

“You’ve always seemed to get on particularly well with them, I’ve

thought,” said Mrs. Dallas, in the voice that when it seemed considerate

could contrive to be most disparaging. “It’s a pity not to go. You need

a walk. You can’t afford Carlsbad this year, you know.”

“I need hardly be reminded of that,” said Colonel Dallas, and now it was

fretfully. “To run the risk of apoplexy on the road and to drink the

Trotters' foul Indian tea is hardly an equivalent. No; I shall practise

some putting shots, and perhaps, if it gets cooler towards evening, I’ll

go over to the links. The Trotters can manage without me.--What time do

the Varleys arrive?”

“At seven-thirty. There’s no other train they could arrive by, as far as

I’m aware.”

The colonel looked at his watch, drew his hat down over his eyes, and

went slowly away round the corner of the house.

His wife’s eyes did not follow him, nor, it was evident, her thoughts.

“It has been rather oppressive, hasn’t it?” said Rupert, glancing up at

her. “You haven’t been feeling it too much, I hope.”

“Not at all. I like it. I think it’s only people who don’t know how to

be quiet who mind the heat,” said Mrs. Dallas. “This is the one time of

the year that one can sit out of doors in a thin dress, and I am very

grateful for it.” Even about small things Mrs. Dallas always seemed to

have her mind quite made up. Her likes and dislikes, for all the

inertness of her demeanour, were clear and unshifting. She sometimes

made Rupert feel himself amorphous, vague, uncertain; and this feeling,

though blissful, had yet its sting of sadness and anxiety.

“Well, some people aren’t able to be quiet, are they?” he observed. “On

a day like this I always think of people in factories,--great, roaring,

clanking places with the sun gnawing at their iron roofs,--and the pale,

moist faces, the monotonously rapid hands.”

“Do you?” said Mrs. Dallas. She often said that, in that tone, when he

gave expression to some enthusiasm or sympathy. She did not make him

feel snubbed, but always, when she said, “Do you?” she made him feel

young again, a little bewildered and a little sad. He imagined, to

explain it in her, that people’s thoughts did not interest her, her

woman’s intuition probing below their thoughts to their personalities.

It was he, himself, with his heart full of devotion, that interested

Mrs. Dallas. Yet it was not of him that she next spoke. “How is Marian?”

she asked. “Is she painting to-day?”

He was aware that his face altered and that his colour rose. He had to

steady something, in his glance and in his voice, the pressure of his

new consciousness was so great, as he answered, “Yes, she’s been

painting all the morning.”

“I haven’t seen her for some days now,” Mrs. Dallas remarked.

“No.” The longing in him to confide in her, to pour out his grief and

his devotion, was so strong that for the moment he could find only the

simple negative.

“I quite miss Marian,” Mrs. Dallas added.

He looked down at the little foot placed on a cushion beside him, and he

said, “You’ve always been so kind, so charming to Marian.” He remembered

Marian’s words with a deepened wrath and tenderness.

“Have I? I’m glad you think so. It’s been very easy,” said Mrs. Dallas.

A silence fell.

“May I talk to you?” Rupert jerked out suddenly. “May I tell you things

I’ve been feeling? I have been feeling so much--about you--about

myself.--I long to tell you.”

“By all means tell me,” said Mrs. Dallas with great placidity; and one

could see that she had often made the same sort of reply to the same

sort of appeal.

“You know what you have been to me,” said Rupert, turning on the step so

that he could look up at her. “You know how it’s all grown--beautifully,

inevitably. No one has ever been to me what you are.”

Mrs. Dallas’s sleepy eyes rested on him, and her delicate nostrils,

slightly dilating, might have been, though without excitement, inhaling

a familiar incense.

“I do love you so much,” said Rupert in a trembling voice, gazing at

her; “I do love you. You understand what I mean. You know me now and you

couldn’t misunderstand. I want to serve you. I want to help you. I want

you to lean on me and trust me--to let me be everything to you that I

can.” And as he spoke he stretched out his hand and laid it on her hands

folded in her lap.

Mrs. Dallas let it lie there, and she looked back at him, not moved,

apparently, but a little grave. “No, I don’t think I misunderstand your

feeling,” she said after a moment. “Of course I’ve seen it plainly.”

“Yes, yes, I knew you did.--And that you accepted

it,--dearest--loveliest--best.” He had drawn her hand to him now and he

pressed his lips upon it. And as he kissed Mrs. Dallas’s hand, as that

imagined happiness was consummated, he felt his mind cloud suddenly, as

if in a cloud of fragrance, and, thought sinking away from him, he knew

only an aching sweetness, the white, warm hand against his lips, the

darkness of the glimmering room near by, and the scent of the

carnations, exhaling their spices in the hot sunshine. Closing his eyes,

he breathed quickly. And above him, a little paler, Mrs. Dallas, for a

moment, as if with the conscious acceptance of a familiar ritual, also

closed her eyes and breathed in, with the scent of her carnations, the

immortal fragrance of the youth and passion that, to her, could soon no

longer come. “Dear boy!” she murmured.

They heard the step of Colonel Dallas descending from the upper lawn.

Rupert drew back sharply; Mrs. Dallas softly replaced her hand upon the

other in her lap. Her husband appeared, and he looked very fretful.

“The sun is quite tropical. It’s impossible to play in it. We don’t get

a breath of air down in this hole.” He took out his watch--Colonel

Dallas was always taking out his watch. “What time is tea?” he asked.

“At five o’clock, as usual, I suppose,” said his wife.

“It’s only just past four,” said the colonel, with the bitterly resigned

air of one who loses a wager he had hardly hoped to win. “I shall go to

the Trotters'. It’s better than being baked in this oven. Their lawn is

shaded at all events.” He spoke as if there had been some attempt to

dissuade him from the alleviations of the Trotters' lawn.

“I don’t know why you didn’t go half an hour ago,” said his wife.

“You’ve so often discovered that the sun is tropical on the upper lawn

at this hour.” And as the colonel moved off she added, “Just tell them

that I’ll have lemon-squash instead of tea, will you?”

It was a rather absurd little interlude; yet it had its point, its

appropriateness; it fitted in with those thoughts of succour, and Rupert

tried, now, to recover them, saying, after the gate had closed upon the

colonel and keeping still at his little distance, “Are you very

unhappy?”

How he was to help Mrs. Dallas except by loving her and coming to see

her every day and being allowed to kiss her and hold her hand he did not

clearly know, but it seemed the moment for returning to those offers of

service. He did not attempt to regain her hand. Mingling with the

rapture, when the kiss and the scent of the carnations had blurred his

mind, there was also a sense of fear. He was different; and there was

more in his love than he had known.

“Very unhappy? Not more than most people, I suppose. Why?” Mrs. Dallas

asked. Her tone was changed. Her moment of diffusion, of languor and

acceptance, was gone by.

“Why?” Rupert felt the change and the question hurt him. “When that’s

your life?--This?”

“By that, do you mean my husband?” Mrs. Dallas inquired kindly. “He’s

not my life. As for this--if you mean my situation and occupation--having

love made to me by a pleasant young man while I smell carnations, I can

assure you that there’s nothing I enjoy much more.”

She did more than hurt him now; she astonished him. “Don’t!” he

breathed. It was as if something beautiful were being taken from him.

Instinctively he stretched out his hand for hers and again she gave it;

but now she looked clearly at him, a touch of malice in her smile,

though her smile was always sweet.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t pretend to be hard--flippant. Don’t hide from me. Give yourself

to the real beauty that we have found.”

“I have just said that I enjoy it.”

“Enjoy is not the word,” said Rupert, in a low voice, looking down at

the hand in his. “It’s an initiation. A dedication.”

“A dedication? To what?” Mrs. Dallas asked, and even more kindly; yet

her kindness made her more removed.

Her words seemed to strike with soft yet bruising blows upon his heart.

“To life. To love,” he answered.

“And what about Marian?” Mrs. Dallas inquired. And now, still gently,

she withdrew her hand and leaned her cheek on it as, her elbow on the

cushions of her chair, she bent her indolent but attentive gaze upon

him. “I should have thought that dedication lay in that direction.”

His forehead was hot and his eyes, hurt, bewildered, indignant,

challenged hers yet supplicated, too. “Please don’t let me think that

I’m to hear mean conventionalities from you--as I have from Marian. You

know,” he said, and his voice slightly shook, “that dedication isn’t a

limiting, limited thing. You’ve read my books and cared for them, and

understood them,--better, you made me feel, that I did myself,--so that

you mustn’t pretend to forget. Love doesn’t shut out. It widens.”

“Does it?” said Mrs. Dallas. “And what,” she added, “were the mean

conventionalities you heard from Marian? I’ve been wondering about

Marian.”

“She is jealous,” said Rupert shortly, looking away. “I could hardly

believe it, but she made it too plain. It seemed to take the

foundation-stones of our life away to hear her. It made all our past,

all the things I believed we shared, seem illusory. It made me feel that

the Marian I’d loved and trusted was a stranger.”

Mrs. Dallas contemplated his averted face, and as she heard him her

glance altered. It withdrew itself; it veiled itself; it became at once

less kind and more indolent. “And you really don’t think Marian has

anything to complain of?” she inquired presently.

“No, I do not,” said Rupert. “Nothing is taken from her.”

“Isn’t it? And if I became your mistress, would you still think she had

nothing to complain of?” Mrs. Dallas asked the question in a tone of

detached and impartial inquiry.

How far apart in the young man’s experience were theory and practice was

manifested by the hot blush that sprang to his brow, the quick stare in

which an acute eye might have read an ingenuous and provincial dismay.

“My mistress?” he stammered. “You know that such a thought never entered

my head.”

“Hasn’t it? Why not?”

“You know I only asked to serve--to help--to care for you.”

“You would think it wrong, then, to be unfaithful, technically, to your

wife?”

“Wrong?” His brow showed the Saint-Bernard-puppy knot of perplexity.

“It’s not a question of wrong. Wrongness lies only in the sort of love.

Real love is sacred in all its expressions of itself; my ideal of love,

just because it includes that one, can do without it.”

“But, on your theory, why should it do without it?” Mrs. Dallas, all

mildness, inquired.

His mind was driven back to those questionings in the studio, when he

had thought of the incongruous yet allied themes of passion and

perambulators, and groped again, angrily, in the same obscurity.

“It’s--it’s--a matter of convenience,” he found, frowning; “it--it

wouldn’t work in with other beautiful things. It wouldn’t be

convenient.”

“I’m glad to hear you find such a reasonable objection,” said Mrs.

Dallas. “There could hardly be a better one. It wouldn’t be at all

convenient. Though, I gather, if it could be made convenient, you still

think that Marian would have nothing to complain of.”

“I don’t know why you are trying to pin me down like this.” Rupert,

stooping, gathered some flakes of stone from the path and scattered them

with a sharp gesture that expressed his exasperation. “You know what I

believe. Love is free, free as air and sunshine. How can one stop one’s

self from loving? Why should one? And if our love, yours and mine, could

mean that complete relation, then, yes, the ideal thing, the really

ideal thing, would be for Marian to feel it right and beautiful and to

be glad that there should be two perfected and complete relations

instead of one. As it is, that inclusive vision isn’t asked of her.”

“She’s not, in fact, to be asked to be a Mormon,” Mrs. Dallas remarked.

“All that she has to put up with is that her husband should be in love,

platonically, with another woman, and should have ceased to be in love

with her. It’s hard, you know, when some one has been in love with you,

to give it up.”

“But I have not ceased to love Marian!” Rupert cried. “Why should you

suppose it? My love for you doesn’t shut out my love for her. It’s a

vulgar old remnant of sexual savagery to think it does. A mother doesn’t

love one child the less for loving another. Why can’t people purify and

widen their minds by looking at the truth?--That jeer about Mormons is

unworthy of you. Marriage is a prison unless husband and wife are both

free to go on giving and growing. What does love mean but growth?”

Mrs. Dallas’s eyes had drifted away to her beds of carnations and they

now rested on them for a little while. Rupert took up his hat and fanned

himself. He was hot, and very miserable.

“It always strikes me, when I hear talk like yours,” said Mrs. Dallas

presently, “that it is so much less generous and noble than it imagines

itself to be. It’s the man, only, who frames the new code and the man,

only, who is to enlarge himself and run two or three loves abreast.”

“Not at all. Marian is precisely as free as I am to love somebody else

as well as me.”

“As free? Oh no,” said Mrs. Dallas, laughing softly. “Theoretically,

perhaps, but not actually. Nature has seen to that. When women have

babies and lose their figures it’s most unlikely that they’ll ever be

given an opportunity to exercise their freedom. That fact in itself

should make you reconsider your ideas about love. Own frankly that they

apply only to men and don’t pretend to generosity. The only free women

are the _femmes galantes_; and you’ll observe that they are seldom

burdened with a nursery, and that they never grow fat.”

She touched, with an accuracy malignant in its clairvoyance, his

subconscious awareness of Marian’s physical alteration. Something in him

shrank away from her in fear and indignation. She was trying to make him

see things from a false and petty standpoint, the standpoint of a woman

of the world, a mere woman of the world--that world of shameful

tolerances and cruel stupidities. “I don’t know anything about _femmes

galantes_,” he said, “nor do I wish to. You misunderstand me if you

think that by love I mean sensuality.”

With slightly lifted brows she looked out at the carnations; and had she

been angry with him he could have felt less angry with her. He was,

indeed, very angry with her when she remarked, tranquilly, “I don’t

think you know what you mean by love.”

“I mean by love what Shelley meant by it,” Rupert declared.

"True love in this differs from gold and clay,

That to divide is not to take away.

Love is like understanding that grows bright

Gazing on many truths.

“I mean what all the true, great hearts of the world have meant by

it,--poetry, rapture, religion; and they can only be sustained, renewed,

created, by emotion, by passion, by sexual passion--if you like to call

it by a name you imagine to be derogatory.” He felt himself warmed and

sustained against the menace that emanated from her by the sound of his

own familiar eloquence.

But Mrs. Dallas still tranquilly contemplated the carnations.

“That’s the man’s point of view. The view of the artist, the creator.

Perhaps there’s truth in it. Perhaps he can’t write his poems and paint

his pictures without taking intoxicants. But it will never be the view

of the woman. Mary Shelley will never really like it when Shelley makes

love to Jane Clairmont; Marian will never like it when you make love to

me. They’ll try to believe it’s the ideal, to please him, when they are

the ones he is in love with; but when he is in love with other women

they won’t go on believing.”

“That is their fault, their littleness, then. The wide, glorious outlook

is theirs, too, if they choose to open their eyes. I don’t accept your

antithesis for women,--humdrum respectability, roast mutton, milk

pudding, or dissipation. I don’t believe that when a woman marries and

becomes a mother she must turn her back on love.”

Mrs. Dallas at this began to laugh, unkindly. “Turn her back on love? No

indeed. Why should she? Hasn’t she her husband and children, to say

nothing of her friends, her father and mother, her sisters and brothers?

You idealists seem always to forget these means of expansion. By love

you mean simply and solely the intoxicant. Call it poetry and religion,

if you like, but don’t expect other people, who merely see that you are

intoxicated, to call it that.”

He sat, trying to think. Idly, half absently, with languid fingers, she

seemed to be breaking his idols as though they had been silly little

earthenware figures, not good enough--here was the stab, the

bewilderment--for her drawing-room. And who was she to do it, this

remote, mysterious creature, steeped in the perfume of her passionate

past? He felt as he gazed at her that it was not only himself he must

defend against her.

“It’s curious to me to hear you talk in this way.” He armed himself, as

he spoke, with all that he could muster of wisdom and of weight. “You

are the last woman I’d have expected to hear it from. You’ve made me

your friend, so that I’d have a right to be frank, even if you hadn’t

let me love you. What right have you to turn your back on all the

beauty and romance of life--to smile at them and mock them? You haven’t

allowed yourself to be bandaged and crippled by convention, I’m sure of

it. You have followed your heart--bravely, truly--out into life. You

have loved--and loved--and loved--I know it. It breathes from you. It’s

all you’ve lived for.”

“And you think the result so satisfactory?” said Mrs. Dallas. She looked

at him now, and if it was with irony it was with sadness. She turned

from her question. “Well, if you like, I am one of the _femmes

galantes_; they are of many types, you know; I wasn’t thinking, when I

shocked you so, of the obvious, gross type. I was thinking of the woman

who corresponds to you--the idealist, the spiritual _femme galante_.

And, I’m convinced of it, for a woman, it doesn’t work. A man, if he is

a big man, or has a big life,--it isn’t always the same thing by the

way,--may have his succession of passions, or, as you’d claim,--and I

don’t believe it,--his contemporaneities; he has a context to frame them

in; they may fall into place. But a woman’s life can’t be calculated in

those terms of dimension. It is big enough for the emotion that leads to

marriage and to the loves that grow from that, the loves you think so

little of. It is an emotion that can’t be repeated over and over again,

simply because, in a normal life, it has grown into something else,

something even better, I should say: a form of poetry and rapture and

religion quite compatible with roast mutton and respectability. But the

women who miss the normal life and who try to live on the emotions,

they--well, I can only say that to my mind they always come to look

silly. Silly is the only word for them.”

He stared at her. “You don’t look silly.”

“Why should I?” Mrs. Dallas asked. “I’m not of the idealist type. I

don’t confuse intoxication with religion and think I have the one when

I’ve only the other. I may have missed the real thing, but I’ve not

repeated the emotion that ought to lead to it. You are quite mistaken in

imagining that I’ve loved and loved and loved. I haven’t. I have allowed

other people to love me. That, as you’ll own, is a very different

matter. I am hard and cold and disillusioned. I am not soft and yearning

and frustrated. Why should I look silly?”

He stared at her, and his heart was flooded with pain. What was she,

then? What was her feeling for him? What had she meant? As she spoke and

as he looked at her, the veil of romance dissolved from about her and he

saw her for the first time with her own eyes,--devoid of poetry, a hard,

cold, faded, worldly woman. Yet she was still a Sphinx, strange and

alluring, and still he struggled against her, for her, saying hotly,

though his heart was chilled, “If it’s true, you’ve hurt

yourself--you’ve hurt yourself horribly, through fear of looking silly.”

“No, I’ve not hurt myself,” said Mrs. Dallas. “I’ve been hurt, perhaps;

but I’ve not allowed my hurts to repeat themselves too often. Some

things in life should be unique and final. The people who don’t keep

them so become shoddy. Marian, for instance, is neither hard nor cold,

nor shoddy either. You have made one of the mistakes that idealists are

always making in imagining that she was humdrum respectability and that

I was poetry and rapture and religion.--Oh, it’s no good protesting. If

I had a double chin and thin hair you’d never have wanted to help my

soul, however unhappy I was. And if Marian had sat about in carefully

chosen clothes and looked mysterious and not let you feel sure that she

cared about you, you would probably have remained in love with her. So

please own that you have been mistaken and that on the one side is love,

the love that Marian feels for you, although she knows you; because she

knows you; and on the other is illusion, intoxication, sensuality; yes,

my dear Rupert, such as you felt when I let you kiss my hand a little

while ago.”

He sat, sullen, even sulky, half turned from her, and again he stooped

and gathered up the flakes of stone and tossed them away down the path.

The clink and chink of ice and glass was heard approaching through the

drawing-room, and the maid stepped out bearing the tray, which she set

down on a wicker table before her mistress. The tall crystal jug, veiled

in frosty rime, showed tones of jade and chalcedony, and fillets of

lemon peel threaded it like pale, bright enamel. This gem-like beaker,

the plate of golden cakes, with the scent of the carnations, with Mrs.

Dallas’s little foot on its cushion, with her rings of pearl and ruby,

had all been part of the magic she had meant to him. The very sound of

the ice, dully yet resonantly chinking, brought a suffocating sense of

nostalgia. It was over, all over. He was disenchanted. She was cruel to

him, to him who had loved her. She had cut into him and killed bright,

ingenuous, trustful things. And, in a placid voice, she asked him if he

would have some cake, and filled his glass.

He took it from her and drank it off in silence. The icy, aromatic

liquid seemed an antidote to that other intoxicant she had mocked. Irony

flowed through his veins; a bitter-sweet sense of vengeful maturity.

When he set down the glass, he looked up at her, and he felt himself

measuring his sword against the stiletto of an adversary.

“Well, I’ve had my lesson,” he said. “I’ve been a generous but deluded

idealist, it seems, in imagining that men and women are equals in their

claims on life. Since I’m an artist, I have a right to my raptures, I

take it. And poor Marian must be jealous with reason. Well, well; it’s

an odd morality to hear preached.”

Mrs. Dallas still sipped her lemonade and she quietly considered him.

She said nothing, and even after she had finished and set down her glass

she sat for still a little while in silence.

“I’m sorry I’ve seemed to preach,” she then remarked, “and I certainly

think that Marian has every reason to be jealous. What more did I say?

That a man isn’t as ridiculous and undignified as a woman when he falls

in and out of love-affairs on the condition that he has a big life? That

was it, wasn’t it?”

“That was it, and I’m glad to have your assurance that I am in no danger

of being ridiculous or undignified.”

“Do you mean,” said Mrs. Dallas, looking at him, “that you think yours

such a big life?”

It had been, before, his heart, its tenderness, its devotion and

dedication, that she had cut into; it was into something deeper now,

something more substantially and vitally at the centre of his life,

something of which his heart and all its ardours were but tributaries.

He was to learn that self-love could bleed with a fiercer, darker gush.

The blood, as if foretelling his ordeal, sprang to his forehead as he

looked back at her.

“I have my art,” he said, and he disdained any pretended humility; he

spoke with pride and even with solemnity. “I live for my art. I don’t

think that I am an insignificant man.”

“Don’t you?” said Mrs. Dallas. It was with an unaffected curiosity that

her eyes rested on him, and it sank into him, drop by drop, like poison.

“Not insignificant, perhaps,” she took up after a moment. “That’s not

quite the word, perhaps. You are very intelligent and appreciative and

good-hearted. I don’t suppose one can be quite insignificant if one is

that. But--do you call it art, your writing? I wonder. Oh, you are quite

right to live for it, of course, just as other men do for stock-broking

or fox-hunting or print-collecting, or anything else that employs their

energies or satisfies their tastes or brings in money; but, to count as

art, a man’s activities must mean more than just his own satisfaction in

them, mustn’t they? You write careful, intelligent, sentimental little

books; but I can’t feel that the world would be any the poorer if you

were to take to stock-broking or fox-hunting instead. No, it doesn’t

seem to me, my dear Rupert, that your life is nearly large enough for a

succession of love-affairs. It’s all right when one is young and looking

for a mate; experiments are in order then; but you’ve found your mate,

and you’ll soon be not so very young, and if on the strength of your art

you imagine yourself entitled to unseasonable intoxications, you’ll

become, in time, an emotional dram-drinker, one of those foolish old

inebriates we are all familiar with, and you’ll spoil yourself for what

you were meant to be and can be,--a devoted husband and an excellent

_père de famille_.”

Stretched on his rack, broken, bleeding, Rupert stared at her. Who was

this woman, this cruel, ambiguous woman who watched his agony with

deliberating, drowsy eyes? There came into his mind the memory of a

picture seen in childhood, some sentimental print that had strongly

impressed his boyish sensibilities. A corner of a Roman amphitheatre, a

rising tier of seats; sham architecture, sham Romans, no doubt, and a

poor piece of claptrap, looked back on from his maturity; but the face

of the Roman woman, leaning so quietly forward under its gold tiara, to

watch, unmoved, the tormented combatants below, was it not like this

face? Yes, she was of that stony-hearted breed, unaltered by the

centuries.

The torment of his humiliation snatched at anger for a veil. He said,

smiling, “You have been very successful till now in concealing your real

opinion of me.”

“Have I concealed it?”

“My work certainly seemed to be of absorbing interest to you.”

“I listened to it; yes.”

“I didn’t imagine you’d stoop to feign interest. I didn’t imagine you’d

take such pains to allure and flatter a commonplace young _père de

famille_.”

“Did I take pains to allure and flatter him?”

“From the first!--From the very first!--That day we met!--My God!” Even

now he could not help feeling himself, seeing himself, as one of his own

heroes; and, for a moment, he bent his head upon his hands--as they

would have done had a calamity as unimaginable as this befallen them.

“That first day!--The apple-blossoms framing you! You stood under your

white parasol in our orchard--and you smiled at me!”

“I generally do at agreeable-looking young men when I see that they

admire me,” Mrs. Dallas commented.

“Oh, don’t pretend!--Don’t hide and shift!” He lifted fierce eyes; “It

wasn’t only that. You seemed to care. You seemed to need me. You made it

easy--inevitable. You came--and came; and you asked me here again and

again.”

“Not 'me,'--'us,'” Mrs. Dallas amended suavely. She was looking at him,

all this time, with that thoughtful, poisonous curiosity; and as he now

sat, finding for the moment no words, his fury baffled by her quiet

checkmating, she went on, “And afterwards I let you come alone because I

saw that you admired me, and that is always pleasant to me. When, at

first, as you say, I showed myself so affable, it was because I liked

Marian. I do still like her; more than I ever liked you, my dear Rupert;

if you are good-hearted and intelligent, she is more so, and she has

more sense of humour than you have, and doesn’t take herself so

seriously. And, to be quite frank, since we are talking it all out like

this, I not only liked Marian, but saw that she could be of use to me.

I’ve had, in some ways, a tiresome, tangled life, and things haven’t

always gone as I wanted them to go, so that I don’t let opportunities

for strengthening and straightening here and there pass me by. Through

Marian I met several people I wanted to meet and make sure of. People

useful to me. I think Marian quite understood and quite wanted to help.

She would. She is of my world in a sense you aren’t, you know, my dear

Rupert. And, in my idle way, I did take a good deal of trouble to be

agreeable to her. It all turned out exceedingly well and I was very

grateful to Marian. That’s one reason, you see, why I felt to-day that

our little flirtation was going too far and must be put a stop to. I

don’t want Marian to be jealous of me; it would be distinctly

inconvenient. But there is more in it than that. I wouldn’t have put

myself to this bother and talked things out like this if it hadn’t been

because of my liking for Marian. It makes me angry to see that you don’t

know how lucky you are to have such a wife. I want you to see how very

lucky you are. I want you to see yourself as others see you,--a very

unimportant young man, without position and without money, married to a

quite unusually delightful girl who has both. This isn’t the young man’s

fault, of course; one wouldn’t like him the less for it; but one does

expect him to be aware of his own felicity. One does expect him to feel

that, at present, his wife is too good for him. I don’t mean in the

conventional sense; one wouldn’t ask him to recognize that; but in the

sense of worth and charm and distinction, for those are the things he

supposes himself to care for.”

She had, while she spoke of the “young man” thus impartially, turned her

eyes from him, and they rested again on the beds of carnations. The sun

had sunk behind the hill, and though the bright soft colours were

unshadowed, they all lay in a different light and seemed to glow coolly

in their own radiance, like jewels.

Rupert rose. His anger had passed from him. He no longer felt Mrs.

Dallas to be an antagonist; but he felt her to be a stranger; and he

felt himself to be a stranger. A sense of fear and loneliness and

disembodiment had fallen upon him while he listened to her. He held out

his hand to her. “Good-bye,” he said. “I think I must be going.”

She took his hand and looked up at him with the gaze so remote, so

irrevocable. “Good-bye,” she said; “I hope to see you and Marian some

day soon, perhaps.”

The words, with their quiet relapse on convention, made him feel himself

in a new world. He had been thinking of final, fatal things, things dark

and trenchant; she showed him compromise, continuity, commonplace good

sense; and, dispossessed, bereft as he was, something in him struggled

to place itself beside her in this alien atmosphere, to make itself a

denizen of the new since he had forever lost the old world.

“Oh yes, I’ll tell her,” he said. And as he released her hand he found,

“Thank you. I’m sure you meant it all most kindly.”

“It’s very nice of you to say so,” said Mrs. Dallas, smiling.

It was the world of convention; yet with all his bewildered groping for

clues and footholds, he felt, dimly, as a glimmer before his eyes or a

frail thread in his hands, that the smile was perhaps the most sincerely

sweet that he had ever had from Mrs. Dallas. It was as if she saw his

struggle and commended it.