"_My Dear Stephen,_
"_I was delighted with your letter, I believe you are feeling
better, for you sounded far more like your old self. Especially
the postscript, which I thought a most hopeful indication._
"_Yes, I remember old Jock Wetherby. Poor old thing! How perfectly
ghastly to approach the end of one's life as a mere elderly
libertine. For I feel there is very little else one could
truthfully carve on his tombstone. And what a commentary on free
will! He once had gifts and opportunities such as are given to few._
"_Last night I went with Judy and Noel to see that enchanting sprite
Karsavina. I shall never forget it. As a rule one watches people
dance, but last night I danced too. I swear that my spirit left its
rheumatic old body and sprang and whirled and darted in the midst
of all that color and movement with the music splashing and
rippling about it. For a few hours I bathed in the Fountain of
Youth--that fountain whose waters, I believe, are made up of music,
color, and some other ingredients that man with his slow mind has
not yet discovered. Certainly I was never less conscious of flesh
and bones._
"_And why is it, I ask myself, that only certain combinations of
sound and color can produce this effect, or give this measure of
delight? Suppose, one day, some one were to hit upon the utmost
perfection in arrangement of sound, color and form, would it open
up a straight path like a shaft of light for our spirits to glide
upon into some other world than this? For I feel we are very near
that other world when our senses are so stirred and lifted up by
beauty. I wonder! But perhaps there is already perfect beauty in
the world, and it is only that our spirits lack the necessary
freedom from earthly things--or why should we not drift into
Paradise itself upon the perfume of a rose?_
"_At the moment my mind is very full not of Paradise but of Eric and
Louise. She has decided to go and stay with her people in Norfolk
for a while, where, I fear, she will continue to be unhappy. Things
had come to a dangerous pass with them, and Eric is as sore and
puzzled as a man can be. Hers is a strange nature. I have tried hard
to find a chink in the armor of her bitterness. Poor Louise! And yet
I believe she would go to the stake vowing she had been a good wife
to him. There are a great many women, I find, who think that if they
neither leave nor deceive their husbands they are being good wives
to them. I pray that something--God knows what!--will happen, to
make a change of attitude easy for her. She would have been happy,
poor girl, with a dull fellow to whom she could have condescended._
"_I often say to myself, Stephen, that to realize the imperfection of
our relation to God, it is only necessary to realize the
imperfection of our relation to one another._
"_I have made a discovery of late. At least I think it is a
discovery. This is it. I believe that while the majority of men are
content to be merely themselves, the majority of women are busy
playing some rôle or other that takes their fancy or that
circumstances suggest. I think that most women are forever
conscious of an audience. I shall never forget a girl I once
knew--she would be a very old woman now--who pretended to have lost
her lover in the Crimean War. I knew--for she made me her
confidante--that it was a quite imaginary lover, and that she had
invented him to make people think her inconsolable, instead of
unsought, as was actually the case. So for years she played the rôle
of a bereaved woman, and if she is alive she is playing it yet.
Every word, every action was suited to the part, and eventually she
must of course have come to believe it herself. When she talked to a
girl about to be married or in love, there was always a trembling
smile upon her lips, and the brightness in her eye (as the novelists
say) of unshed tears._
"_'Ah, my dear, treasure your happiness. I pray you may be more
fortunate than I was.'_
"_And youth knew her for a woman with a sad, romantic story._
"_'A liar, pure and simple,' you may say. Not at all. Merely an
actress playing her part._
"_Take the case of Louise--a weak nature overshadowed by a stronger
one. What does she do? Creates a rôle for herself--the rôle of a
patient, slighted woman, married to a selfish and exacting man. Why?
Seen under the microscope we might discover it to be an attempt to
attract notice._
"_Take the case of my dear Judy. Most of her friends are married.
She, being very fastidious, and finding that falling in love is at
present quite beyond her, creates a little rôle for herself--the
rôle of a very modern, independent girl who finds that sort of
love unnecessary to her happiness._
"_Then there is Millicent. She too is playing a part, though she
would be horrified if I told her so. Hers is to be as much as
possible like her surroundings, and to imitate as closely as she can
the other women of her set. She has become as conventional and as
harmlessly snobbish as they. At heart she is a kindly creature, but
since marrying her John she has disguised herself so well as a
Pendleton that if I had not a good memory for faces I would find it
hard to distinguish her from all the other Pendletons._
"_And then there was Connie--poor Connie! Her rôle was that of a
woman of great emotions, of devastating loves--a sort of Camille.
But underneath it I imagine and hope is still the simple, credulous
woman who looked for happiness where happiness was not._
"_'And,' perhaps you'll ask, 'don't men make rôles for themselves?'
Rarely; and when they do they are insufferable._
"_I am very tired and must stop. Tell me who else is at Cannes._
"_Accept my affectionate greetings,_
"CLAIRE."
"_P.S.--You tell me nothing of your life all these years._"
* * * * * *
Time never seemed to Madame Claire to pass slowly, but it had never
passed less slowly than now. Stephen de Lisle's letters undoubtedly
added a spice of excitement and anticipation to her days. She seldom
went out (for she disliked fog, and London seemed just then to have gone
to bed with a thick yellow blanket pulled over it) and she only asked
those people to come to see her who, she said, touched her at the most
points. She hated polite boredoms, and unless her visitors pleased or
amused her, she preferred to be left to her own thoughts.
Of late her mind had run much upon her youngest daughter Connie, the
beauty of the family--Connie who had "thrown her bonnet over the mill,"
as the saying was in those days, and run off with Petrovitch, who was at
that time first capturing London and Paris with his marvelous playing.
The blow had nearly broken her father, but Madame Claire was made of
sterner stuff, and had long observed tendencies in her lovely daughter
which promised to lead to this very dénouement. Connie Gregory had one
of those entirely beautiful faces which seem so at variance with the
tragedies they evoke. She had the prettiest and weakest mouth, and the
most irresistible blue eyes that ever gave delight to a painter of
pretty women. And she was "done" by all the fashionable artists of the
day in every imaginable style of dress and posture. She had a very small
share of wit, but with women like Connie, a little wit goes a long way.
Her lovely head was forever turning to look down dark paths, and no one
but her mother ever observed those sidelong glances. When she was
twenty-two, she married a perfectly suitable young man, and Madame
Claire hoped that the then serious duties of wifehood and motherhood
would fill her shallow little head to the exclusion of dark romancing.
But they had been married less than a year when Petrovitch with his
leonine head and his matchless playing became the rage of London, and
Connie, in company with a good many other women of her type, threw her
youth and beauty, like a bouquet of flowers, at his feet. He was able to
resist much, but the sheer loveliness of Connie made such an onslaught
upon his bored indifference--wherein was mingled the most astonishing
conceit--that when his contracts in London expired, he returned to Paris
with the emotional and hysterical young wife clinging to his arm.
It was just at the outbreak of the Boer War, and Leonard Humphries, her
husband, very naturally seized the opportunity of getting himself
honorably shot. When that event took place, as it did some months later,
people thought that Connie would at least legalize her irregular
attachment by marriage, but Petrovitch produced a sturdy German wife,
and scotched all such hopes. So London saw the lovely Connie no more.
Madame Claire bore her trouble with all the philosophy at her disposal.
She never tried to avoid the subject, and was quite as willing to talk
about Connie as about Eric or Millicent, in the wise belief that wounds
exposed to the air now and then have the best chance of healing. For
years after she sent letters and often money to Connie through her
banker, for she knew well enough where a lack of funds might lead those
uncertain steps. For a while her letters were answered, but it was not
long before the answers ceased to come. She had heard nothing from
Connie for many years now, and she no longer expected to hear. She
thought of her as a foolish and unhappy woman, whose punishment would
be, here or hereafter, self-inflicted, and understanding human nature
as she did, she refrained from bitterness.
As for Eric, he was of the opinion that the world suffers less on the
whole from women who love not wisely but too well, than from women who
love too little. Weighed in the perhaps faulty scales of a man's
judgment, therefore, Connie was a better woman than Louise. Connie gave
all and got nothing, while Louise took all without a thank you, and gave
nothing. But men are always more inclined to forgive the generous sins
than the ungenerous.