“Coffee, Auntie?”
She gave me a goblin glance.
“My daughter!” She had an air of introducing her triumphantly. “Listen!
She don’t like fat women.”
We listened. Anita’s voice was mellow with cordiality.
“Yes indeed. Madala has often said to me that she thought you well worth
encouraging.”
Miss Howe laughed jollily.
“I admire your articles, Nita. I wilt when you review me. But you’ll
never write novels, darling. You’ve not the ear. Madala may have said
that, but she didn’t say it in that way.”
“She certainly said it.”
“Some day I’ll ask her.”
“Some day! Oh, some day!” The Baxter girl was staring at the fire.
“Shall we ever get her back?”
“In a year! Let us give her a year!” Mr. Flood looked up at the lady
beside him with a thin smile. I couldn’t bear him. He sat on the floor,
and he called you ‘dear lady,’ and sometimes he would take hold of your
watch-chain and finger it as he talked to you. But he was awfully
clever, I believe. He wrote reviews and very difficult poetry that
didn’t rhyme. Anita was generally mellifluous to him and she quoted him
a good deal. She turned to him with just the same smile—
“Ah, of course! You’ve met John Carey too.”
“For my sins, dear lady—for my sins.”
“Not the same sins, surely,” breathed the blonde lady.
“As the virtuous Carey’s? Don’t be rude to me! It’s a fact—the man’s a
churchwarden. He carries a little tin plate on Sundays! Didn’t you tell
me so, Anita? No—we give her a year. Don’t we, Anita?”
“But what did she marry him for?” wailed the Baxter girl.
They all laughed.
“Copy, dear lady, copy!” Mr. Flood was enjoying himself. “Why will you
have ideals? Carey was a new type.”
“But she needn’t have married him!” insisted the Baxter girl. The
argument was evidently an old one.
“She, if I read her aright, could have dispensed with the ceremony, but
the churchwarden had his views. Obviously! Can’t you imagine him—all
whiskers and wedding-ring?”
“But I thought he was clean-shaven! I thought he was good-looking!” I
sympathized with the Baxter girl’s dismay.
“Ah—I speak in parables——”
“You do hate him, don’t you?” said Miss Howe with her wide, benevolent
smile. “Now, I wonder——”
Mr. Flood flushed into disclaimers, while the woman beside him looked at
Miss Howe with half-closed eyes.
“I? How could I? Our orbits don’t touch. _I_ approved, I assure you. An
invaluable experience for our Madala! A year of wedded love, another of
wedded boredom, and then—a master-piece, dear people! Madala Grey back
to us, a giantess refreshed. Gods! what a book it will be!”
“I wonder,” said Miss Howe vaguely.
Anita answered her with that queer movement of the head that always
reminded me of a pouncing lizard.
“No need! I’ve watched Madala Grey’s career from the beginning.”
“For this I maintain—” Mr. Flood ignored her—“_Eden Walls_ and _Ploughed
Fields_ may be amazing (_The Resting-place_ I cut out. It’s an
indiscretion. Madala caught napping) but they’re preliminaries, dear
people! mere preliminaries, believe me.”
“I sometimes wonder——” Miss Howe made me think of Saladin’s cushion in
_The Talisman_. She always went on so softly and imperviously with her
own thoughts—“Suppose now, that she’s written herself out, and knows
it?”
The Baxter girl gave a little gasp of horrified appreciation.
“So the marriage——”
“An emergency exit.”