Marion Keeley lay in an indolent attitude on the sofa by the window.
Her mother was addressing circulars at the writing-table, with the
anxious haste of the fashionable woman of business. Both of them
looked as though the London season, which a royal wedding had
prolonged this year, had been too much for them.
"He is coming again to-night," said Marion, throwing down a letter she
had been reading. Her tone was one of dissatisfaction.
"I know," replied her mother. "I asked him to come."
Marion made a gesture of impatience.
"Don't you think," she said, "that you might occasionally, for the
sake of variety, wait until his own inclination prompted him to come?"
"I don't understand you," said Mrs. Keeley, absently. "I asked him
because I wanted to make final arrangements with him about Lady
Suffolk's drawing-room meeting, at which he has promised to speak
to-morrow."
"It seems to me," observed Marion sarcastically, "that it would save a
lot of trouble if you were to marry him yourself."
"It is very surprising," complained her mother, "how you persist in
dragging the frivolous element into everything. If you were only like
your cousin, now,--so earnest and so sympathetic! How is it that you
are really my daughter?"
"I'm sure I don't know; in fact, I think it is the only subject on
which you have allowed me to remain ignorant," returned Marion,
calmly. "But you needn't bother about me; I am going out to dinner in
any case to-night, so you will be able to make your arrangements with
Paul without the distraction of the frivolous element. Meanwhile,
can't we have some tea?"
The Honourable Mrs. Keeley returned to her circulars with a sigh.
"One might almost think, to hear you talk, that you did not want to
marry him at all," she exclaimed.
"One almost might," assented Marion; and she tore her letter into
little pieces, and threw them deftly into the waste-paper basket. Her
mother looked at her a little apprehensively.
"How you can, even in fun, pretend to ignore the merits of a
character like Paul Wilton's is beyond my comprehension," she
grumbled. "What more can you want in a man, I should like to know?"
"More? I don't want any more; I want a good deal less. I'm not
ignoring his merits; I only wish I could. I would give anything to
find a few honest human imperfections in him. It is his eternal
excellence that is driving me to distraction. What a fool I was ever
to let him take me seriously! Of course I never should have done, if
he had not provoked me by being so difficult to fascinate. He is one
of those awful people who are going to make heaven unbearable!"
"Judging by your aggravating behaviour in this world, you won't be
there to help him," said her mother, who was losing her patience
rapidly after having wrongly addressed two wrappers.
"I hope I sha'n't. If all the people go to heaven who are popularly
supposed to be _en route_, I should think even the saints would be too
bored to stop there. As for Paul, I grant you that he is eminently
fitted for a son-in-law, but I don't see why I should be the victim of
his heaven-sent vocation."
"You are not married to him yet; and if you continue in this strain
much longer, I doubt if you ever will be."
"Oh," said Marion, with sudden animation, "do you really think there
_is_ a chance of his breaking it off?"
The opportune arrival of Katharine at this moment restored some of
Mrs. Keeley's good-humour. She approved very decidedly of Katharine,
not only because she was a working-woman, but also on account of her
patience as a listener. Katharine, she felt, would have made an ideal
daughter; Katharine understood the serious aspect of the political
situation, and she showed no signs of being bored when people gave her
their opinion of things. So she received her with genuine cordiality.
"I am so glad you have come," said Marion, offering her a perfunctory
embrace. "You have interrupted mamma, and made tea inevitable. It is
quite providential."
"I am glad to be the unwitting cause of so many blessings," said
Katharine drily. "I really came to say good-bye. I am going home
to-morrow."
"Holidays already?" exclaimed Mrs. Keeley, as though she grudged even
the working gentlewoman her moments of relaxation.
"They have not come too soon for me," observed Katharine, to whom the
last six weeks had seemed an endless period of waiting. "But I am
leaving town for good; so I suppose I shall not see you again for some
time. I mean to say, I have given up my teaching, and--"
"How charming of you!" exclaimed Marion, who felt that the last
barrier to a warm friendship with her cousin was now removed. "Are you
really going to be like everybody else, now?"
But the Honourable Mrs. Keeley was bitterly disappointed.
"It is incredible," she said. "Do you mean to say that you are going
to throw up your life's work, just as you are on the point of being a
brilliant success?"
"I think, on the contrary, I have merely been a failure," said
Katharine, with a patient smile. "You see, there are hundreds of
people who can do just what I am doing. But I am wanted at home, and I
am going back to my father; I ought never to have left him."
"Oh, these girls!" sighed Mrs. Keeley. "What is the use of trying to
make them independent? And I thought you were so different; I held you
up as an example to my own daughter--"
"I am so sorry," murmured Katharine, in parenthesis. Marion only
laughed.
"I was proud to own you as my niece," pursued Mrs. Keeley, increasing
in fervour as she went on. "You were doing what so few women succeed
in doing, and I had the keenest admiration for your courage and your
talent. And to give it all up like this! Surely, you have some
excellent reason for such an extraordinary course of action?"
"It seems to me quite sufficient reason that I am more wanted at home
than here," replied Katharine, with the same air of gentle endurance.
She had gone through a similar explanation more than once lately, and
it was beginning to blunt the edge of her newly made resolutions. It
also took away most of the picturesqueness of being good.
"But, indeed, you are very much mistaken," her aunt continued to urge.
"Who has been putting this effete notion of _duty_ into your head? I
thought we working-women had buried it for ever! Consider what you are
doing in throwing up the position you have carved out for yourself;
consider the bad effect it will have upon others, the example,--everything!
Your place is the world, Kitty, the great world! There cannot be any
work for you to do in a home like yours."
"There is always plenty to do in the village, and nobody to do it,"
said Katharine. "I have considered the matter thoroughly, Aunt Alicia,
and my mind is quite made up. Anybody can do my work up here in
London; you know that is so."
"Indeed, you are mistaken," said her aunt, vehemently. It seemed
particularly hard that her favourite protégée should have deserted her
principles, just as she had been driven to the last limit of endurance
by her own daughter. "Every woman must do her own work, and no one
else can do it for her."
"Then why do you always say the labour market is so overcrowded?"
asked Marion, making a mischievous application of the knowledge she
had so unwillingly absorbed. But she was not heeded.
"It is the mass we have to consider, not the individual," continued
the Honourable Mrs. Keeley, as though she were addressing the room
from a platform. "It is for lesser women than ourselves to look after
the home and the parish; there is a far wider sphere reserved for such
as you and I. It would be a perfect scandal if you were to throw
yourself away on the narrowness of the domestic circle."
Katharine felt a hysterical desire to laugh, which she controlled with
difficulty. She spoke very humbly, instead.
"It must be my own fault, if I have allowed you to think all these
things about me," she said. "There is nothing great reserved for me; I
am just a complete failure, and that is the end of all my ambition and
all my conceit. I wish some one had told me I was conceited, before I
got so bad."
The Honourable Mrs. Keeley was silenced at last. None of her
experience of working gentlewomen helped her to meet the present
situation. A woman with a great future before her had obviously no
right to be humble. But Marion realised gleefully that she had gained
a new and unexpected ally.
"I always said you were much too jolly to belong to mamma's set," she
observed; at which the angered feelings of her mother compelled her to
seek comfort in solitude, and she made some excuse for retiring to her
boudoir, and left the two rebels together. They looked at one another
and broke into mutual merriment. But Marion laughed the loudest,--a
fact that she herself was the first to appreciate.
"Kitty," she said suddenly, growing grave, "I am so sorry, dear!
What's up, and who has been treating you badly?"
She strolled away immediately to pour out tea, and Katharine had time
to recover from surprise at her unusual penetration.
"How did you know?" she asked, slowly.
"I guessed, because--oh, you looked like it, or something! Don't ask
me to give a reason for anything I say, _please_. It isn't my
business, of course, and I don't want to know a thing about it if you
would rather not tell; only, I'm sorry if you're cut up, that's all.
Did you chuck him, or did it never get so far as that? There, I really
don't want you to tell me about it. Of course, he was much older than
you, and much wickeder, and he flirted atrociously with you and you
were taken in by him, you poor little innocent dear! I know all about
it, and the way they get hold of girls like you who are not up to
their wiles. He was married, too, of course? They always are, the
worst ones."
It was too much trouble to correct her assumptions, and Katharine
allowed her to go on. After all, her sympathy was genuine, if it was a
little crudely expressed.
"I shouldn't think any more about him, if I were you," continued
Marion. "They're not worth it, any of them; go and get another, and
snap your fingers at the first. You're not tied to one, as I am."
"No," said Katharine, scalding herself with mouthfuls of boiling tea.
"I'm not."
"I know I would give anything to get rid of mine," said Marion
sorrowfully. "May you never know the awful monotony of being engaged!"
"I don't fancy I ever shall," observed Katharine.
"Always the same writing on the breakfast table," sighed Marion;
"always the same face on the back seat of the carriage; always the
same photograph all over the house,--oh, it's maddening! You wouldn't
be able to stand it for a day, Kitty!"
"Perhaps not," said Katharine. "Then your engagement is publicly
announced now?"
"I should rather think so! I am tired of being congratulated by a lot
of idiots, who don't even take the trouble to find out whether I want
to be married or not. And then, the boys! Bobby is going to shoot
himself, he says; but of course Bobby always says that. And Jack has
gone to South Africa; I don't exactly know why, except that every one
goes to South Africa when there isn't any particular reason for
staying in town. And Tommy--you remember Tommy, don't you? He was my
best boy for ever so long; I rather liked Tommy. Well, he has gone and
married that stupid Ethel Humphreys, and he always said she _pinched_.
I know why he did it, too. He was being objectionably serious, one
day, and said he would do anything on earth for me; so I asked him to
go and marry mamma, because then I should get eight hundred a year.
And he didn't like it a bit; Tommy always was ridiculously
hot-tempered. Oh, dear, I'm sick of it all! I believe you're the only
person I know, who hasn't congratulated me."
"Apparently, you do not consider yourself a subject for
congratulation," said Katharine, smiling faintly.
"Oh, you're not like all the others, and I should like to be
congratulated by you. You would mean what you said, anyhow."
"I certainly should," exclaimed Katharine.
"How earnestly you said that! It's frightfully nice of you to care so
much, though. I was telling Paul what a good sort you were, the other
day, and he quite agreed."
"Wasn't it rather dull for him?"
"Oh, no, I'm sure it wasn't; he takes a tremendous interest in you; he
says you are the cleverest woman he knows, and the pluckiest. He does,
really!"
"I have no doubt of it. He has always thought me clever and plucky,"
said Katharine.
"Well, it's more than he thinks about me, anyhow," said Marion
ruefully. "He doesn't think I am good for anything, except to play
with."
"And to fall in love with," added Katharine softly.
"Why didn't you come and meet him the other evening?" continued
Marion. "He seemed so disappointed. So was I; I wanted you to come,
for lots of reasons. I get so bored when I am left alone with him! I
like him ever so much better if there is some one else there; and you
are the only girl I know who would be safe not to flirt with him.
Bobby said, only the other day, that you were much too nice to flirt
with. And girls are so mean, sometimes,--aren't they? I was really
sorry when you refused."
"If you had told me the real reason for your invitation, instead of
the conventional one, I might have made more effort to come," said
Katharine.
"You old dear, don't be sarcastic; I never can endure sarcasm. But you
will come next time, won't you? Oh, dear, I am forgetting all about
your own trouble; what a selfish wretch I am! Are you sure there is
nothing I can do for you?"
"Nothing, thanks; at least, nothing I would let you do."
"Sure? Well, let me know if there is. Are you really very gone on him,
Kitty?"
"Please don't," said Katharine.
"All right, I won't. But I wish you would try a course of boys for a
time; it would make you feel so much happier. They're so fresh and
harmless."
"Even when they shoot themselves?" said Katharine.
"Oh, that's only Bobby. Must you really go? You old dear, you have
done me such a lot of good. What is it, Williams?"
Mr. Wilton was in the library, the man announced, and would be glad to
see either Mrs. Keeley or her daughter for a moment, and he would
rather not come upstairs, as he was in a hurry. Marion gave a petulant
little stamp.
"Oh, send mamma to him! How like Paul, not to care which of us he
sees! Just fancy, if it were Tommy, now! Stop, though, show him up
here, Williams. You will be able to congratulate him, Kitty; it will
put him in a good humour. Oh, nonsense! you can wait just for that,
and I haven't anything to say to him that he hasn't heard hundreds of
times before."
So Katharine found herself shaking hands with him once more, and
congratulating him on being engaged to her cousin, Marion Keeley. She
had not seen him since the night of the thunderstorm, when he had
stood in the old doorway in Essex Court, with the lamplight on his
face.
"You are very good; it is kind of you to take so much interest," he
was saying with frigid politeness.
They were silent after that, and Marion said she was sure they must
have crowds to talk about, and she would go upstairs and ask her
mother about Lady Suffolk's drawing-room meeting; and they both made
perfectly futile efforts to keep her in the room, and were ashamed of
having made them when she had gone, and they were left to face the
situation alone.
"I suppose," said Paul, with an effort, "that your holidays will soon
be beginning?"
"They have begun to-day," said Katharine. "This is the first day--of
my last holidays."
"Your--last holidays?" She felt, without seeing, that he had looked up
sharply at her.
"I don't suppose it will interest you," she went on, rousing herself
to be more explicit; "but I am giving up my work in London, and going
home for good."
There was the slightest perceptible pause before he spoke.
"Would you care to tell me why?"
"Because," said Katharine slowly, "I happened to find out, through a
friend, that I was a prig; and I am going home to try and learn not to
be a prig any more." She was looking straight at him as she finished
speaking. His face was quite incomprehensible just then.
"Was that a true friend?" he asked.
"People who tell us unpleasant things about ourselves are always said
to be our true friends, are they not?" she said, evasively.
"That is not an answer to my question; I was not dealing in
generalities when I asked it. But of course, you have every right to
withhold the answer, if it pleases you--"
"I don't think I know the answer," said Katharine. "I have always
found your questions too difficult to answer; and as to this one,--I
wish I could be sure that it was a friend at all." He moved his chair,
involuntarily, a little nearer hers.
"Can I do anything to make you feel more sure?" he asked.
She shook her head, and he moved away again. "Of course, you are the
best judge in the matter," he resumed, more naturally; "but it is
rather a serious step to take at the outset of your career, is it
not?"
"Perhaps," she said, indifferently; "but then, I am not a man, you
see. There is no career possible for a woman, because her feelings are
always more important to her than all the ambition in the world. A man
only draws on his feelings for his recreation; but a woman makes them
the whole business of her life, and that is why she never gets on. I
don't suppose you can realise this, because it is so different for
you. Everybody expects a man to get on; it is made comparatively easy
for him, and nobody ever disputes his way of doing it. A man can have
as much fun as he likes, as long as he isn't found out,--and it's easy
for a man not to be found out," she added, with a sigh.
"Easier than for a woman?" He spoke in the bantering tone that was so
familiar to her.
"Oh, a woman is dogged by detectives from her cradle, mostly drawn
from the ranks of her own sex. It is a compliment we pay ourselves, in
one sense. We dare not inquire into the private life of a man, because
of the iniquities he is supposed to practise; but there is so little
scandal attached to a woman's name, that we are anxious not to miss
any of it." She laughed at her small attempt to be frivolous, and Paul
brightened considerably. He could understand her when she was in this
mood, and his peace of mind was undisturbed by it.
"I suppose the man is still unborn who will take the trouble to
champion his sex, and explain that men are not all profligates before
they are married," he observed. "I wonder why women always think of us
as cads, and then take us for husbands. I can't think why they want to
marry us at all, though."
"And we can't think what reason there is for you to offer _us_
marriage, unless you do it for position or something like that,"
retorted Katharine, and then bit her lip and stopped short, as she
realised what she had said. In the embarrassing pause that followed,
Marion came back into the room.
"Well, you two don't look as though you'd had much conversation," she
remarked.
"We haven't," said Katharine, getting up to leave. "Mr. Wilton's
conversation, you see, is all bespoken already."
"Miss Austen is a little hard on me," said Paul. "I have had so little
practice in conversation with brilliant and learned young lecturers,
that--"
"That I will leave you to a less dismal companion," interrupted
Katharine, a little abruptly.
"Will you allow me to suggest," he went on, as he held her hand for a
moment, "that you should try and think more kindly of the particular
friend who was so unpleasantly frank to you?"
"If I thought that the friend in question were likely to be affected
by my opinion of him, perhaps I might," she said, as she turned away.
When she had gone, Marion asked him what he had meant.
"Merely a passing reflection on something she had been telling me,"
was his reply.
"Oh," said Marion, "did she tell you about her love affair?"
"My dear girl, Miss Austen is not likely to favour me with these
interesting disclosures, is she? I didn't know she had a love affair,
as you rather frankly express it."
"She isn't a bit the sort, is she? I only found it out this afternoon;
he's an awful beast, I should think,--led her on, and treated her
villainously, poor old Kitty! Isn't it a shame?"
"Did she tell you all that?"
"Don't look so surprised! Of course she did; at least, I guessed,
because she looked so miserable. I always know; I've had so much
experience, you see. But it's much worse for Kitty, don't you know,
because she takes things so seriously. It's a mistake, isn't it? I
would give a good lot to meet the man who has ill treated her,
though!"
"Yes? What would you do to him?"
"I would tell him he was a horrid little bounder, and that Kitty was
well rid of him."
"In which case there is no occasion to pity her, is there?"
"Oh, how unsympathetic you are! Of course it's just as bad, whatever
the man is like. It's always the saints like Kitty who break their
hearts for the most worthless men. I'm not made like that; I should
soon console myself with some one else, and make the first one mad.
But then, I'm not clever."
"Your cousin is a most interesting psychological study," said Paul
vaguely.
"What do you mean? She is a very nice girl indeed," cried Marion
indignantly; and Paul silently condemned the whole sex, without
reservation.
It was a particularly bright and sunny evening when Katharine returned
to her home,--a failure. She felt that, to be appropriate, it should
have been dull and dreary; but it was on the contrary quite at
variance with her feelings, and she grew unaccountably happier in
spite of herself, as the train sped past the familiar landmarks on the
way and brought her nearer every minute to the home of her childhood.
For there was a sneaking consideration for herself in her sudden
desire to serve others; she had felt out of tune with the world since
it had been the means of revealing her deficiencies to herself, and
she longed for the panacea of home sympathy, which was still connected
in her mind with the days when she had been supreme in a small circle,
a circle that believed in her if it did not precisely understand her.
She had found something wanting in the sympathies and interests which
had absorbed her for the last two years, and she turned instinctively
to those earlier ones which may have offered her no great allurements
at the time, but which at least contained no rude awakenings. She
forgot the petty discomforts and frequent annoyances of her life at
home, in her present desire for rest and peace; she was tired of
fighting hard for her happiness and gaining nothing but a moiety of
pleasure in return; and the weary condition of mind and body in which
she found herself at the end of it all, probably helped her to
exaggerate the advantages of that former existence of hers, and to
mistake its monotony for restfulness.
She had her first disillusionment as she hastened out of the station.
It was no one's fault that the Rector had been obliged to attend a
meeting of the archæological society, and that Miss Esther had been
detained in the village; but they had never omitted to meet her
before, and that they should have done so on this particular occasion
which was of so much import to her, appeared in the light of a bad
omen, and she set it down sadly as another penalty that she was to pay
for having neglected her real duty so long. But she had yet to learn
that her ardent desire to sacrifice herself for somebody did not bring
with it the necessary opportunity, and it was not encouraging to
discover that no one was particularly anxious to be the recipient of
her good works, and that her effort at well-doing was more resented by
those in authority than her previous and undisguised course of
self-indulgence. Even Miss Esther mistrusted her enthusiasm, and
evidently looked upon it as another freak on the part of her
capricious niece, which would probably prove as transient as the last;
and Katharine felt that she was touching the extreme limits of her
endurance in the first few days she spent at the Rectory.
"It is very hard," she complained to herself when she had been home
about a week, "that they should make it so much easier for me to be
bad than good. All the same," she added, with a touch of her old
defiant spirit, "I am going to be good, whether they like it or not!"