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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40947 ***
+
+Note: Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries. See
+      http://archive.org/details/romanceofhislife00choluoft
+
+
+      +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+      |                                                              |
+      |  Transcriber's note:                                         |
+      |                                                              |
+      |  Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).     |
+      |                                                              |
+      |  Small capitals in the original work are represented here    |
+      |  as all capitals.                                            |
+      |                                                              |
+      |  Footnotes have been renumbered and moved to directly below  |
+      |  the paragraph to which they belong.                         |
+      |                                                              |
+      |  More Transcriber's Notes will be found at the end of this   |
+      |  text.                                                       |
+      +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ROMANCE OF HIS LIFE
+
+And Other Romances
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    _By MARY CHOLMONDELEY_
+
+      NOTWITHSTANDING: A Novel.
+      MOTH AND RUST: together with GEOFFREY'S WIFE and THE PITFALL.
+      THE LOWEST RUNG: together with THE HAND ON THE LATCH, ST. LUKE'S
+            SUMMER AND THE UNDERSTUDY.
+      UNDER ONE ROOF: A Family Record.
+
+    LONDON: JOHN MURRAY.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+THE ROMANCE OF HIS LIFE
+
+And Other Romances
+
+by
+
+MARY CHOLMONDELEY
+
+Author of "Red Pottage."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+London
+John Murray, Albemarle Street W.
+1921
+
+
+
+
+    TO
+    PERCY LUBBOCK
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+                                  PAGE
+
+    INTRODUCTION                    11
+
+    THE ROMANCE OF HIS LIFE         25
+
+    THE DARK COTTAGE                55
+
+    THE GHOST OF A CHANCE           83
+
+    THE GOLDFISH                   109
+
+    THE STARS IN THEIR COURSES     146
+
+    HER MURDERER                   173
+
+    VOTES FOR MEN                  200
+
+    THE END OF THE DREAM           216
+
+
+
+
+Introduction
+
+IN PRAISE OF A SUFFOLK COTTAGE
+
+
+Most of these stories were written in a cottage in Suffolk.
+
+For aught I know to the contrary there may be other habitable dwellings
+in that beloved country of grey skies and tidal rivers, and cool sea
+breezes. There certainly are other houses in our own village, some
+larger, some smaller than mine, where pleasant neighbours manage to eat
+and sleep, and to eke out their existence. But, of course, though they
+try to hide it, they must all be consumed with envy of me, for a cottage
+to equal mine I have never yet come across, nor do I believe in its
+existence.
+
+Everyone has a so-called cottage nowadays. But fourteen years ago when I
+fell desperately in love with mine they were not yet the rage. The
+fashion was only beginning.
+
+Now we all know that it is a parlous affair to fall in love in middle
+age. Christina Rossetti goes out of her way to warn us against these
+dangerous grey haired attachments.
+
+She says:
+
+    "Keep love for youth, and violets for the spring."
+
+I had often read those beautiful lines and thought how true they were,
+but I paid no more attention to their prudent advice the moment my
+emotions were stirred than a tourist does to the word "Private" on a
+gate.
+
+It amazes me to recall that the bewitching object of my affections had
+actually stood, forlorn, dishevelled, and untenanted, for more than a
+year before I set my heart upon it, and the owner good naturedly gave me
+a long lease of it.
+
+Millionaires would tumble over each other to secure it now. This paper
+is written partly in order to make millionaires uneasy, for I have a
+theory, no, more than a theory, a conviction that they seldom obtain the
+pick of the things that make life delightful.
+
+Do you remember how the ex-Kaiser, even in his palmy days, never could
+get hot buttered toast unless his daughter's English governess made it
+for him, and later on chronicled the fact for the British public.
+
+There are indications that a few millionaires and crowned heads have
+dimly felt for some time past the need of cottages, but Royalty has not
+yet got any nearer to one than that distressful eyesore at Kew with tall
+windows, which I believe Queen Caroline built, and which Queen Victoria
+bequeathed to the nation as "a thing of beauty."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One of the many advantages of a cottage is that the front door always
+stands open unless it is wet, and as the Home Ruler and I sit at
+breakfast in the tiny raftered hall we see the children running to
+school, and the cows coming up the lane, and Mrs. _A's_ washing wending
+its way towards her in a wheelbarrow, and Mrs. _M's_ pony and cart _en
+route_ for Woodbridge. That admirable pony brings us up from the
+station, and returns there for our heavy luggage, it fetches groceries,
+it snatches "prime joints" from haughty butchers. It is, as someone has
+truly said, "our only link with the outer world."
+
+The village life flows like a little stream in front of us as we sip our
+coffee at our small round mahogany table with a mug of flaming Siberian
+wallflower on it, the exact shade of the orange curtains. Of course if
+you have orange curtains you are bound to grow flowers of the same
+colour.
+
+The passers by also see us, but that is a sight to which they are as
+well accustomed as to the village pump, the stocks at the Church gate,
+or any other samples of "still life." They take no more heed of us than
+the five young robins, who fly down from the nest in the honeysuckle
+over the porch, and bicker on the foot scraper.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The black beam that stretches low over our heads across the little room
+has a carved angel at each end, brought by the Home Ruler in pre-war
+days from Belgium; and, in the middle of the beam, is a hook from which
+at night a lantern is suspended, found in a curiosity shop in Kent. My
+nephew, aged seven, watched me as I cautiously bought it, and whispered
+to his mother:
+
+"Why does Aunt Mary buy the lantern when, for thirty shillings, she
+could get a model engine?"
+
+"Well, you see she does not want a model engine, and she does want a
+lantern, and it is not wrong of her to buy it as she has earned the
+money."
+
+Shrill amazement of nephew.
+
+"_What!_ Aunt Mary earned thirty shillings! How she must have _sweated_
+to make as much as that!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I must tell you that our cottage was once two cottages. That is why it
+looks so long and pretty from the lane, pushing back the roses from its
+eyes as it peers at you over its wooden fence. Consequently we have two
+green front doors exactly alike, and each approached by a short brick
+path edged with clipped box. Each path has its own little green wooden
+gate. One of these doors has had a panel taken out by the Home Ruler,
+and a wire grating stretched over the opening, as she has converted the
+passage within into a larder.
+
+Now, would you believe it? Chauffeurs, after drawing up magnificent
+motors in front of the house, actually go and beat upon the _larder_
+door, when, if they would only look through the iron grating, they
+would see a leg of mutton hanging up within an inch of their noses--that
+is in pre-war days: of course now only sixpenny worth of bones, and a
+morsel of liver.
+
+And all the time we are waiting to admit our guests at the _other_ door,
+the _open_ door, the _hall_ door, the _front_ door, with an old brass
+knocker on it, and an electric bell, and a glimpse within of a table
+laid for luncheon, with an orange table cloth--to match the curtains!
+
+I have no patience with chauffeurs. They observe nothing.
+
+That reminds me that a friend of ours, with that same chauffeur, was
+driving swiftly in her car the other day, and ran into a butcher's boy
+on his bicycle. As I have already remarked, chauffeurs never recognize
+meat when they see it unless it is on a plate. The boy was knocked over.
+My friend saw the overturned bicycle in the ditch; and a string of
+sausages festooned on the hedge, together with a piece of ribs of beef,
+and a pound of liver caught on a sweet-briar, and imagined that they
+were the scattered internal fittings of the butcher's boy, until he
+crawled out from under the car uninjured. She did not recover from the
+shock for several days.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To return to the cottage. I am not going to pretend that it had no
+drawbacks. There were painful surprises, especially in the honeymoon
+period of my affections. Most young couples, if they were honest, which
+they never are, would admit that they emerged stunned, if not partially
+paralysed, from the strain of the first weeks of wedded life. I was
+stunned, but I remembered it was the common lot and took courage. Yes,
+there were painful surprises. Ants marched up in their cohorts between
+the bricks in the pantry floor. When we enquired into this phenomenon,
+behold! there _was_ no floor. For a moment I was as "dumbfounded" as the
+bridegroom who discovers a plait of hair on his bride's dressing table.
+The bricks were laid in noble simplicity on Mother Earth, no doubt as in
+the huts of our forefathers, in the days when they painted themselves
+with wode, and skirmished with bows and arrows. I had to steel my heart
+against further discoveries. Rats raced in battalions in the walls at
+night. Plaster and enormous spiders dropped (not, of course in
+collusion) from the ceilings in the dark. Upper floors gave signs of
+collapse. Two rooms which had real floors, when thrown into one, broke
+our hearts by unexpectedly revealing different levels. That really was
+not playing fair.
+
+Frogs, large, active, shiny Suffolk frogs had a passion for leaping in
+at the drawing room windows in wet weather. The frogs are my department,
+for the Home Ruler, who fears neither God nor man, hides her face in her
+hands and groans when the frogs bound in across the matting; and I, _moi
+qui vous parle_, I pursue them with the duster, which, in every well
+organised cottage, is in the left hand drawer of the writing table.
+
+The great great grandchildren of the original jumpers, jump in to this
+day, in spite of the severity with which they and their ancestors from
+one generation to another have been gathered up in dusters, and cast
+forth straddling and gasping on to the lawn. Frogs seem as unteachable
+as chauffeurs!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Very early in the day we realised that in the principal bedroom a rich
+penetrating aroma of roast hare made its presence felt the moment the
+window was shut. Why this was so I do not know. The room was not over
+the kitchen. We have never had a hare roasted on the premises during all
+the years we have lived in that delectable place. We have never even
+partaken of jugged hare within its walls. But the fact remains: when the
+window is shut the hare steals back into the room. Perhaps it is a
+ghost!!!
+
+I never thought of that till this moment. I feel as if I had read
+somewhere about a ghost which always heralds its approach by a smell of
+musk. And then I remember also hearing about an old woman who after her
+death wanted dreadfully to tell her descendants that she had hidden the
+lost family jewels in the chimney. But though she tried with all her
+might to warn them she never got any nearer to it than by appearing as
+a bloodhound at intervals. Everyone who saw her was terrified, and the
+jewels remained in the chimney.
+
+Is it possible that I have not taken this aroma of roast hare
+sufficiently seriously! Perhaps it is a portent. Perhaps it is an
+imperfect manifestation--like the bloodhound--of someone on the other
+side who is trying to confide in me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yes, we sustained shocks not a few, but there was in store for us at any
+rate one beautiful surprise which made up for them all.
+
+One bedroom (the one with the hare in it, worse luck) possessed an oak
+floor, fastened with the original oak pins. It had likewise a Tudor
+door, but the rest of the chamber was commonplace with oddly bulging
+walls, covered with a garish flowery wallpaper.
+
+We stripped it off. There was another underneath it. There always is. We
+stripped that off, then another, and another, and yet another. (The
+reader will begin to think the roast hare is not so mysterious after
+all.)
+
+We got down at last to that incredibly ugly paper which in my childhood
+adorned every cottage bedroom I visited in my native Shropshire. Do you
+know it, reader, a realistic imitation of brickwork? It seems to have
+spread itself over Suffolk as well as the Midlands.
+
+After stripping off seven papers the beautiful upright beams revealed
+themselves, and the central arch, all in black oak like the floor.
+
+We whitewashed the plaster between the beams, scratched the beams
+themselves till they were restored to their natural colour, and rejoiced
+exceedingly. We rejoice to this day.
+
+    But the hare is still there.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our cottage is on the edge of a little wood. Great forest trees stand
+like sentinels within a stone's throw of the house. In front of the
+drawing room windows is a tiny oasis of mown lawn, bounded by a low wall
+clambered over by humps of jasmine and montana, and that loveliest of
+single roses scinica anemone. The low wall divides the mown grass from
+the rough broken ground which slopes upwards behind it till it loses
+itself among the tree trunks. Here tall families of pink and white
+foxgloves and great yellow lupins jostle each other, and it is all the
+Home Ruler can do to keep the peace between them, and to persuade them
+to abide in their respective places between stretches of shining ground
+ivy and blue periwinkle; all dappled and checkered by the shadows of the
+over-arching trees.
+
+If you walk down that narrow path between the leaning twisted hollies
+you come suddenly upon an opening in the thicket, and a paved path leads
+you into another little garden.
+
+This also has its bodyguard of oaks and poplars on the one side, and on
+the other the high hedge dividing it from the lane, over which tilt the
+red roofs of the cottages.
+
+Within the enclosure a family of giant docks spread themselves in the
+long grass, and ancient fruit trees sprawl on their hands and knees,
+each with a rose tree climbing over its ungainliness, making a low inner
+barrier between the tall trees, and the little low-lying burnished
+garden in the midst. Here ranged and grouped colonies of rejoicing
+plants follow each other into flower in an ordered sequence, all
+understood and cherished by the earth-ingrained hands of the Home Ruler.
+
+Some few disappointments there are, but many successes. Wire worm may
+get in. Cuttings may "damp off." Brompton stocks may not always "go
+through the winter." But the flowers respond in that blessed little
+place. They do their best, for the best has been done for them. If it is
+essential to their well being that their feet should be shaded from the
+sun, their feet _are_ shaded, by some well-bred low growing plant in
+front of them, which does not interfere with them. If they need the
+morning sun they are placed where its rays can pour upon them.
+
+It is a garden of vivid noonday sunshine, when we sit and bask among the
+rock pinks on the central bit of brickwork; and of long velvet afternoon
+shadows: a garden of quiet conversation, and peaceful intercourse, and
+of endless, endless loving labour in sun and rain.
+
+I contribute the quiet conversation, and the Home Ruler contributes the
+loving labour; and, while we thus each do our share, the manifold
+voices of the village reach us through the tall hedge: the cries of the
+children playing by the bridge, the thin complaint of the goats, the
+jingle of harness, and the thud of ponderous slow stepping hoofs, the
+whistle of the lad sitting sideways on the leading horse; all the
+_paisible rumeur_ of the pleasant communal life of which we are a part.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our village is not really called Riff. It has a beautiful and ancient
+name, which I shall not disclose, but I don't mind telling you that it
+is close to Mouse Hold,[1] a hamlet in the boggy meadows beyond the
+Deben; and not so very far from Gobblecock Hall. Of course if you are
+not Suffolk born and bred you will think I am trying to be humourous and
+that I have invented this interesting old English name. I can only say.
+Look in any good map of Suffolk. You will find Gobblecock Hall on it
+near the coast. Riff is only a few miles from Kesgrave Church, where you
+can still see the tombstone of the gipsy queen in the churchyard. The
+father of one of the oldest inhabitants of Riff witnessed the immense
+concourse of gipsies who attended the funeral.
+
+    [1] Probably originally Morass Hold.
+
+Riff is within an easy walk of Boulge, where Fitzgerald lies under his
+little Persian rose tree, covered in summer with tiny yellow roses. You
+see how central Riff is. And, if you cross the Deben, and walk steadily
+up the low hill to that broomy, gorsy, breezy upland, Bromswell Heath,
+then you stand on the very spot where, a little over a hundred years
+ago, British troops were encamped to await Napoleon. And a few years ago
+our soldiers assembled there once more to resist the invasion which
+Kitchener at any rate expected, and which it now seems evident Germany
+intended.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We in Riff learned the meaning of war early in the day. Which of us will
+forget the first Zeppelin raid, and later on the sight of torn,
+desolated Woodbridge the day after it was bombed: the terrified blanched
+faces peeping out from the burst doorways, the broken smoking buildings,
+the high piles of shredded matchwood that had been houses yesterday, the
+blank incredulous faces of friends and neighbours. No doubt our faces
+were as incredulous as those we saw around us. It seemed as if it could
+not, could not be! We had seen photographs of similar havoc in Belgium
+and France, but Woodbridge! our own Woodbridge, that pleasant shopping
+town on its tidal river with the wild swans on it. _It could not be!_
+But so it was.
+
+Yes, the war reached us early, and it left us late. Riff suffered as
+every other village in Great Britain suffered. Our ruddy cheerful lads
+went out one after another. Twenty-two came back no more.
+
+As the years passed we became inured to raids. Nevertheless, just as we
+remember the first, so all of us at Riff remember the last in the small
+hours of Sunday morning, June 17th, 1917.
+
+I was awakened as often before, by what seemed at first a distant
+thunderstorm, at about 3 o'clock in the morning.
+
+I got up and went downstairs in the dark. By this time the bombs were
+falling nearer and nearer. As I felt my way down the narrow staircase it
+seemed as if the trembling walls were no stronger than paper. The
+cottage shook and shook as in a palsy, and C. and E. and I took refuge
+in the garden. M. kept watch in the lane. It was, as far as I could see,
+pitch dark, but their younger eyes descried, though mine did not, the
+wounded Zeppelin lumber heavily over us inland, throwing out its bombs.
+Our ears were deafened by the sharp rat-tat-tat of the machine guns, and
+by our own frantic anti-aircraft fire. In that pandemonium we stood, how
+long I know not, unaware that a neighbour's garden was being liberally
+plastered by our own shrapnel. Then, for the second time, the stricken
+airship blundered over us, this time in the direction of the sea.
+
+When it had passed overhead we groped our way through the cottage, and
+came out on its eastern side. A mild light met our eyes. The dawn was at
+hand. It trembled, flushed and stainless as the heart of a wild rose,
+behind the black clustered roofs of the village, and the low church
+tower.
+
+And above the roofs, some miles away, outlined against the sky, hung the
+crippled Zeppelin, motionless, tilted. We watched it fascinated. Slowly
+we saw it right itself, and begin to move. It headed towards the coast,
+but it could only flee into its worst enemy--the dawn. It travelled, it
+dwindled. The sea haze began to enfold it. The clamour of our gun fire
+suddenly ceased. It toiled like a wounded sea bird towards its only
+hope--the sea.
+
+As we watched it fierce wings whirred unseen overhead. Our aeroplanes
+had taken up the chase.
+
+The Zeppelin travelled, travelled.
+
+_What was that?_
+
+A spark of light appeared upon it. It stretched, it leaped into a great
+flame. The long body of the Zeppelin was seen to be alight from end to
+end.
+
+Then rose simultaneously from every throat in Riff a shout of triumph,
+the shrill cries of the children joining with the voices of the elders.
+
+And, after that one cry, silence fell upon us, as we watched that
+towering furnace of flame, freighted with agony, sink slowly to the
+earth. At last it sank out of sight, leaving a pillar of smoke to mark
+its passing.
+
+So windless was the air that the smoke remained like some solemn
+upraised finger pointing from earth to heaven.
+
+No one stirred. No one spoke. The light grew. And, in the silence of our
+awed hearts, a cuckoo near at hand began calling gently to the new day,
+coming up in peace out of the shining east.
+
+
+
+
+The Romance of His Life
+
+
+I have always believed that the exact moment when the devil entered into
+Barrett was four forty-five p.m. on a certain June afternoon, when he
+and I were standing at Parker's door in the court at ----s. He says
+himself that he was as pure as snow till that instant, and that if the
+_entente cordiale_ between himself and that very interesting and
+stimulating personality had not been established he is convinced he
+would either have died young of excessive virtue, or have become a
+missionary. I don't know about that. I only know the consequences of the
+_entente_ aged me. But then Barrett says I was born middle-aged like
+Maitland himself, the hero of this romance, if so it can be called.
+Barrett calls it a romance. I call it--I don't know what to call it, but
+it covers me with shame whenever I think of it.
+
+Barrett says that shame is a very wholesome discipline, a great
+eye-opener and brain stretcher, and one he has unfortunately never had
+the benefit of, so he feels it a duty to act so as to make the
+experience probable in the near future.
+
+On this particular afternoon we had both just bicycled back together
+from lunching with Parker's aunt at Ely, and she had given me a great
+bunch of yellow roses for Parker and a melon, and we were to drop them
+at Parker's. And here we were at Parker's, and apparently he was out or
+asleep, and not to be waked by Barrett's best cat-call. And as we stood
+at his door, Barrett clutching the melon, I found the roses were not in
+my hand. Where on earth had I put them down? At Maitland's door,
+perhaps, where we had run up expecting to find him, or at Bradley's,
+where we had stopped a moment. Neither of us could remember.
+
+I was just going back for them when whom should we see coming sailing
+across the court in cap and gown but old Maitland in his best attitude,
+chin up, book in hand, signet ring showing.
+
+Parker's aunt used to chaff us for calling him old, and said we thought
+everyone of forty-five was tottering on the brink of the tomb. And so
+they mostly are, I think, if they are Dons. I have heard other men who
+have gone down say that you leave them tottering, and you come back ten
+years later and there they are, still tottering.
+
+Barrett said Maitland did everything as if his portrait was being taken
+doing it, and that his effect on others was never absent from his mind.
+I don't know about that, but certainly in his talk he was always trying
+to impress on us his own aspect of himself.
+
+If it was a fine morning and he wished to be thought to be enjoying it,
+he would rub his hands and say there was not a happier creature on God's
+earth than himself. He pined to be thought unconventional, and after
+drawing our attention to some microscopic delinquency, he would regret
+that there had been no fairy godmother at hand at his christening to
+endow him with a proper deference for social conventions. If he gave a
+small donation to any college scheme the success of which was not
+absolutely assured, he would shake his head and say: "I know very well
+that all you youngsters laugh in your sleeve at the way I lead forlorn
+hopes, but it is a matter of temperament. I can't help it."
+
+The personal reminiscences with which his conversation was liberally
+strewed were ingeniously calculated to place him in a picturesque light.
+Parker's aunt says that stout men are more in need of a picturesque
+light than thin ones. Maitland certainly was stout and short, with a
+thick face and no neck, and a perfectly round head, set on his shoulders
+like an ill-balanced orange, or William Tell's apple. We should never
+have noticed what he looked like if it had not been for his illusion
+that he was irresistible to the opposite sex; at least, he was always
+adroitly letting drop things which showed, if you put two and two
+together, and he never made the sum very difficult--what ravages he
+inadvertently made in feminine bosoms, how careful he was, how careful
+he had _learnt_ to be not to raise expectations. He was always
+pathetically anxious to impress on us that he had given a good deal of
+pain. But whether it was really an hallucination on his part that he was
+hopelessly adored by women, or whether the hallucination consisted in
+the belief that he had succeeded in convincing his little college world
+of his powers of fascination, I cannot tell you. I don't pretend to know
+everything like Barrett.
+
+Parker's aunt told Parker in confidence, who told Barrett and me in
+confidence, that she had once, on his own suggestion, asked Maitland to
+tea, but had never repeated the invitation, though he told her
+repeatedly that he frequently passed her door on the way to the
+cathedral, because he had hinted to mutual friends that a devoted
+friendship was, alas! all he felt able to give in that quarter, but was
+not what was desired by that charming lady.
+
+And now here was Maitland advancing towards us with one of Parker's
+aunt's yellow roses in his buttonhole.
+
+We both instantly realised what had happened. I had left the roses at
+his door by mistake. How gratified she would be when she heard of it!
+
+I giggled.
+
+"Don't say a word about them," hissed Barrett, her fervent admirer, as
+Maitland came up to us.
+
+"Won't you both come in to tea," he said genially. "Parker's out."
+
+We left Parker's melon on his doorstep to chaperon itself, and turned
+back with him. And sure enough, on his table was the bunch of roses.
+
+"Glorious, aren't they?" said Maitland, waving his signet ring toward
+them.
+
+I do believe he had asked us in because of them. He loved cheap effects.
+
+We both looked at them in silence.
+
+"The odd thing is that they were left here without a line or a card or
+anything while I was out."
+
+"Then you don't know who sent them," said Barrett, casting a warning
+glance at me.
+
+"Well, yes and no. I don't actually know for certain, but I think I can
+guess. I fancy I know my own faults as well as most men, and I flatter
+myself I am not a coxcomb, but still--"
+
+I giggled again. I should be disappointed in Parker, who was on very
+easy terms with his aunt if he did not score off her before she was much
+older.
+
+"You are not, I hope, expecting me or even poor Jones (Jones is me) to
+be so credulous as to believe a man sent them," said Barrett severely.
+When Maitland was in what Barrett called his "conquering hero mood" he
+did not resent these impertinences, at least not from Barrett. "If you
+are, I must remind you that there are limits as to what even little
+things like us can swallow."
+
+"Barrett, you are incorrigible. _Cherchez la femme_," said Maitland with
+evident gratification, counting spoonfuls of tea into the teapot. He
+often said he liked keeping in touch with the young life of the
+University. "One, two, three, and one for the pot. Just so! I don't set
+up to be a lady-killer, but--"
+
+"Oh! oh!" from Barrett.
+
+"I'm a confirmed old bachelor, a grumpy, surly recluse wedded to my
+pipe, but for all that I have eyes in my head. I know a pretty woman
+from a plain one, I hope, even though I don't personally want to
+"domesticate the recording angel."[2]
+
+    [2] I thought the recording angel funny at the time until Barrett
+        told me afterwards that it was cribbed from Rhoda Broughton.
+
+"She'll land you yet unless you look out," said Barrett with decision.
+"I foresee that I shall be supporting your faltering footsteps to the
+altar in a month's time. She'll want a month to get her clothes. Is the
+day fixed yet?"
+
+"What nonsense you talk. I never met such a sentimentalist as you,
+Barrett. I assure you I don't even know her name. But it has not been
+possible for me to help observing that a lady, a very exquisite young
+lady, has done me the honour to attend all my lectures, and to listen
+with the most rapt attention to my poor words. And last time, only
+yesterday, I noted the fact, ahem! that she wore a rose, a yellow rose,
+presumably plucked from the same tree as these."
+
+There were, I suppose, in our near vicinity, about a hundred and fifty
+yellow rose trees in bloom at that moment. Barrett must have known that.
+Nevertheless, he nodded his head and said gravely:
+
+"That proves it."
+
+On looking over these pages he affirms that this and not earlier was the
+precise moment when the devil entered into him, supplying, as he says, a
+long felt though unrealised want.
+
+"I seldom look at my audience when I am lecturing," continued Maitland.
+"I am too much engrossed with my subject. But I could not help noticing
+her absorbed attention, so different from that of most women. Why they
+come to lectures I don't know."
+
+"I think I have seen the person you mean," said Barrett, in a perfectly
+level voice. "I don't know who she is, but I saw her waiting under an
+archway after chapel last Sunday evening. I noticed her because of her
+extreme good looks. She was evidently watching for someone. When the
+congregation had all passed out she turned away."
+
+"I should have liked to thank her," said Maitland regretfully. "It
+seems so churlish, so boorish, not to say a word. You have no idea who
+she was?"
+
+"None," said Barrett.
+
+Shortly afterwards we took our leave, but not until Maitland had been
+reminded by the lady's appearance of a certain charming woman of whom he
+had seen a good deal at one time in years gone by, who, womanlike, had
+been unable to understand the claims which the intellectual life make on
+a man, and who had, in consequence, believed him cold and quarrelled
+with him to his great regret, because it was impossible for him to dance
+attendance on her as she expected, and as he would gladly have done had
+he been a man of leisure. Having warned us young tyros against the
+danger of frankness in all dealings with women, and how often it had got
+him into hot water with the sex, he bade us good evening.
+
+As we came out we saw across the court that the melon had been taken in,
+so judged that Parker had returned. He had. We were so tickled by the
+way Maitland had accounted for the roses that we quite forgot to score
+off Parker about them, and actually told him what Maitland supposed.
+
+Barrett then suggested that we should at once form a committee to
+deliberate on the situation. Parker and I did not quite see why a
+committee was necessary to laugh at old Maitland, but we agreed.
+
+"Did you really see the woman he means, or were you only pulling
+Maitland's leg?" I asked.
+
+"I saw her all right," retorted Barrett. "Don't you remember, Parker,
+how I nudged you when she passed."
+
+Parker nodded.
+
+"She was such a picture that I asked who she was, and found she was a
+high school mistress, the niece of old Cooper, the vet. She is going to
+be married to a schoolmaster, and go out to Canada with him. I don't
+mind owning I was rather smitten myself, or I should not have taken the
+trouble."
+
+"She has left Cambridge," said Parker slowly. "When I got out of the
+train half-an-hour ago she was getting in. Cooper was seeing her off."
+
+"Oh, don't--don't tell poor old Maitland," I broke in. "Let him go on
+holding out his chest and thinking she sent him the roses. It won't
+matter to her, if she is off to Canada, and never coming back any more.
+And it will do him such a lot of good."
+
+"I don't mean to tell him--immediately," said Barrett ominously. "I
+think with you he ought to have his romance. Now I know she is safely
+gone forever, though I don't mind owning it gives me a twinge to think
+she is throwing herself away on a schoolmaster: but as she really can't
+come back and raise a dust, gentlemen, I lay a proposal before the
+committee, that the lady who sent the roses should follow them up with
+a little note."
+
+The committee agreed unanimously, and we decided, at least Barrett
+decided, that he should compose the letter, and Parker, who was rather
+good at a feigned handwriting, should copy it out.
+
+Parker and I wanted Barrett to make the letter rather warm, and saying
+something complimentary about Maitland's appearance, but Barrett would
+not hear of it. I did not see where the fun came in if it was just an
+ordinary note, but Barrett was adamant. He said he had an eye on the
+future.
+
+He put his head in his hands, and thought a lot and then scribbled no
+end, and then tore it up, and finally produced the stupidest little
+commonplace letter you ever saw with simply nothing in it, saying how
+much she had profited by his lectures and rot of that kind. I was
+dreadfully disappointed, for I had always thought Barrett as clever as
+he could stick. He said it was an awful grind for him to be commonplace
+even for a moment, and that by rights I ought to have composed the
+letter, but that it was no more use expecting anything subtle from me
+than a Limerick from an archbishop.
+
+He proceeded to read it aloud.
+
+"But how is he to know it is the person who sent him the roses?" said
+Parker, "and how is he to answer if she does not give him an address?
+Hang it all. He ought to be able to answer. Give the poor devil a
+chance."
+
+"He shall be given every chance," said Barrett. "But don't you two prize
+idiots see that we can't give a real name and address because he would
+certainly go there?"
+
+"Not a bit of it. He's as lazy as a pig. He never goes anywhere. He says
+he hasn't time. He's been seccotined into his armchair for the last ten
+years."
+
+"I tell you he would go on all fours from here to Ely if he thought
+there was the chance of a woman looking at him when he got there."
+
+"Then how is he to answer?" said Parker, who always had to have
+everything explained to him.
+
+"I am just coming to that. I don't say anything in the note about the
+roses, you observe. I am far too maidenly. But I just add one tiny
+postscript:
+
+    'If you do not regard this little note as an unwarrantable
+    intrusion, please wear one of my roses on Sunday morning at chapel,
+    even if it is faded, as a sign that you have forgiven my presumption
+    in writing these few lines.'"
+
+"That's not bad," said Parker suddenly.
+
+"Now," said Barrett, tossing the sheet over to him, "you copy that out
+in a fist that you can stick to, because it will be the first of a long
+correspondence."
+
+"We've not settled her name yet," I suggested.
+
+"Maud," said Barrett with decision. "What else could it be?"
+
+The letter was written on an unstamped sheet of paper, was carefully
+directed--not quite correctly. Barrett insisted on that, and posted it
+himself.
+
+The following Sunday we were all in our places early, and sure enough,
+Maitland, who came in more like a conquering hero than ever, was wearing
+a faded yellow rose in his buttonhole. He touched it in an absent manner
+once or twice during the service, and sat with his profile sedulously
+turned toward the congregation. He was not quite so bad profile because
+it did not show the bulging of his cheeks. As he came out he looked
+about him furtively, almost shyly. He evidently feared she was not
+there. Barrett and I joined him, and engaged him in conversation (though
+we had some difficulty in dragging him from the chapel), in the course
+of which he mentioned that he had intended to go to his sister at
+Newmarket for Sunday, but a press of work had obliged him to give up his
+visit at the last moment.
+
+Poor Maitland! When he left us that morning, and Barrett and I looked at
+each other, I felt a qualm of pity for him. I knew how ruthless Barrett
+was, and that he was doomed.
+
+But if I realised Barrett's ruthlessness, I had not realised his
+cunning. His next move was masterly, though I did not think so at the
+time. He was as cautious and calculating as if his life depended on it.
+He got some note-paper with a little silver M. on a blue lozenge on it
+and wrote another note. He was going to Farnham for a few days to stay
+with his eldest brother, who was quartered there. And in this note
+Maud--Maitland's Maud as we now called her--diffidently ventured to ask
+for elucidation on one or two points of the lectures which had proved
+too abstruse for her feminine intellect. She showed considerable
+intelligence for a woman, and real knowledge of the lectures--I did that
+part--and suggested that as her letters, if addressed to her, were apt
+to go to her maiden aunt of the same name with whom she was staying, and
+who was a very old-fashioned person, totally opposed to the higher
+education of women--that if he was so good as to find time to answer her
+questions it would be best to direct to her at the Post Office, Farnham,
+under her initials M.M., where she could easily send for them.
+
+I betted a pound to a penny that Maitland would not rise to this bait,
+and Barrett took it. I told him you could see the hook through the worm.
+Parker was uneasy, even when Barrett had explained to him that it was
+impossible for us to get into trouble in the matter.
+
+"You always say that," said Parker, with harrowing experiences in the
+back-ground of his mind.
+
+"Well, I say it again. I know your powers of obtruding yourself on the
+notice of the authorities, but how do even you propose to wedge yourself
+into a scrape on this occasion? With all your gifts in that line you
+simply can't do it."
+
+Parker ruminated.
+
+"Ought we to--"
+
+"Ought we to what?"
+
+"To pull his leg to such an extent? Isn't it taking rather a--rather
+a--er responsibility?"
+
+"Responsibility sits as lightly on me as dew upon the rose," said
+Barrett. "You copy out that."
+
+Parker copied it out and Barrett went off to Farnham. A few days later
+he re-appeared. I was smoking in Parker's room when he came in.
+
+He sat down under the lamp, drew a fat letter from his waistcoat pocket,
+and read it aloud to us. It was Maitland's answer.
+
+It really was a ghastly letter, the kind of literary preachy rot which
+you read in a book, which I never thought people really wrote, not even
+people like Maitland, who seem to live in a world of shams. It was
+improving and patronising and treacly, and full of information, partly
+about the lectures, but mostly about himself. He came out in a very
+majestic light you may be sure of that. And at the end he begged her not
+to hesitate to write to him again if he could be of the least use to
+her, that busy as he undoubtedly was, his college work never seemed in
+his eyes as important as real human needs.
+
+"He's cribbed that out of a book," interrupted Parker. "Newby the tutor
+in 'Belchamber,' who is a most awful prig, says those very words."
+
+"Prigs all say the same things," said Barrett airily. "If Maitland read
+'Belchamber,' he would think Newby was a caricature of him. He'd _never_
+believe that he was plagiarising Newby. The cream of the letter is still
+to come," and he went on reading.
+
+Maitland patted the higher education of women on the head, and half
+hinted at a meeting, and then withdrew it again, saying that some of the
+difficulties in her mind, which he recognised to be one of a high order,
+might be more easily eliminated verbally, and that he should be at
+Farnham during the vacation, but that he feared his stay would be brief,
+and his time was hopelessly bespoken beforehand, etc., etc.
+
+"He might be an Adonis," said Parker. "He'll be coy and virginal next."
+
+"He'll be a lot of things before long," said Barrett grimly. "Get out
+your inkpot, Parker. I'm going to have another shy at him."
+
+"You're _not_ going to suggest a meeting! For goodness sake, Barrett, be
+careful. You will be saying Jones must dress up as a woman next."
+
+"Well, if he does, I won't," I said. "I simply won't."
+
+I had taken a good many parts in University plays.
+
+"The sight of Jones as a female would make any man's gorge rise," said
+Barrett contemptuously. "I know I had to shut my eyes when I made love
+to him at 'The Footlights' last year. I never knew two such victims of
+hysteria as you and Jones. Suggest a meeting! Maud suggest a meeting!
+What do you know of women! I tell you two moral lepers, unfit to tie the
+shoestring of a pure woman like Maud, that it takes a Galahad like me to
+deal with a situation of this kind. What you've got to remember is that
+I'm not trying to entangle him."
+
+Cries of "Oh! Oh!" from the Committee.
+
+"I mean Maud isn't. I am, but that's another thing. You two wretched,
+whited sepulchres haven't got hold of the true inwardness of Maud's
+character. Your gross, assignating minds don't apprehend her. Maud is
+just one of those golden-haired, white-handed angels who go through life
+girthing up a man's ideals; who exist only in the imagination of elderly
+men like Maitland, who has never seen a woman in his life, and who does
+not know that unless they are imbeciles they draw the line at drivel
+like that letter. Bless her! _She's_ not going to suggest a meeting.
+He'll do that and enjoy doing it. Can't you see Maitland in his new role
+of ruthless pursuer--the relentless male? No more easy conquests for
+him, sitting in his college chair, mowing them all down like a Maxim as
+far as--Ely. He's got to _work_ this time. I tell you two miserable
+poltroons that this is going to make a man of Maitland. He's been an old
+woman long enough."
+
+"All I can say is," said Parker, ignoring the allusion to Ely, "that if
+the Almighty hasn't a sense of humour you will find yourself in a tight
+place some day, Barrett."
+
+My pen fails me to record the diabolical manner in which Barrett played
+with his victim. It would have been like a cat and mouse if you can
+imagine the mouse throwing his chest out and fancying himself all the
+time. Barrett inveigled Maitland into going to Farnham, and accounted
+somehow for Maud's non-appearance at the interview coyly deprecated by
+Maud, and consequently hotly demanded by Maitland. He actually made him
+shave off his moustache. Parker and I lost heavily on that. We each bet
+a fiver that Barrett would never get it off. It was a beastly moustache
+which would have made any decent woman ill to look at. It did not turn
+up at the ends like Barrett's elder brother's, but grew over his mouth
+like hart's tongue hanging over a well. You could see his teeth through
+it. Horrible it was. But you can't help how your hair grows, so I'm not
+blaming Maitland, and it was better gone. But we never thought Barrett
+would have done it. I must own my opinion of him rose.
+
+And he kept it up all through the long vacation with a pertinacity I
+should never have given him credit for. He took an artistic pride in it,
+and the letters were first rate. I did not think so at first; I thought
+them rather washy until I saw how they took. Barrett said what Maitland
+needed was a milk and water diet. He seemed to know exactly the kind of
+letter that would fetch a timid old bachelor. But it was not all "beer
+and skittles" for Barrett. He sorely wanted to make Maud stand up to him
+once or twice, and put her foot through his mild platitudes. He wrote
+one or two capital letters in a kind of rage, but he always groaned and
+tore them up afterward.
+
+"If Maud has any character whatever," he sometimes said, "if she shows
+the least sign of seeing him except as he shows himself to her, if she
+has any interest in life beyond his lectures, he will feel she is not
+suited to him, and he will give his bridle-reins--I mean his waterproof
+spats--a shake, and adieu for evermore."
+
+Barrett eventually lured Maitland into deep water, long past the bathing
+machine of adieu forevermore, as he called it. When he was too
+cock-o-hoop, we reminded him that, after all, he was only one of a
+committee, and that he had been immensely helped by the young woman
+herself. She really looked such a saint, and as innocent as a pigeon's
+egg.
+
+But Barrett stuck to it that her appearance ought, on the contrary, to
+have warned Maitland off, and that he was an infernal ass to think such
+an exquisite creature as that would give a second thought to a stout old
+bachelor of forty-five, looking exactly like a cod that had lain too
+long on the slab. I could not see that Maitland was so very like a cod,
+but there was a vindictiveness about Barrett's description of him that I
+really think must have been caused by his romantic admiration of
+Parker's aunt, and his disgust at the slight that he felt had been put
+upon her. She married again the following year Barrett's elder brother's
+Colonel.
+
+Barrett hustled Maitland about till he got almost thin. He snap-shotted
+him waiting for his Maud at Charing Cross station. And he did not make
+her write half as often as you would think. But he somehow egged
+Maitland on until, by the middle of the vacation, he had worked him up
+into such a state that Barrett had to send Maud into a rest cure for her
+health, so as to get a little rest himself.
+
+When we met at Cambridge in October he had collected such a lot of
+material, such priceless letters, and several good photographs of
+Maitland's back, that he said he thought we were almost in a position
+to discover to him exactly how he stood.
+
+He threw down his last letter, and as Parker and I read them, any
+lurking pity we felt for him as having fallen into Barrett's clutches,
+evaporated.
+
+They showed Maitland at his worst. It was obvious that he was tepidly in
+love with Maud, or rather that he was anxious she should be in love with
+him. He said voluntarily all the things that torture ought not to have
+been able to wring out of him. He told her the story of the woman who
+had quarrelled with him because he did not dance attendance on her, and
+several other incidents which meant, if they meant anything, that there
+was something in his personality, hidden from his own searching
+self-examination, which was deadly to the peace of mind of the opposite
+sex. He was very humble about it. He did not understand it, but there it
+was. He said that he had from boyhood lived an austere, intellectual
+life, which he humbly hoped had not been without effect on the tone of
+the college, that he had never met so far any one whom he could love.
+
+"That's colossal," said Parker, suddenly, striking the letter. "Never
+met any one he could love. He'll never better that."
+
+But Maitland went one better. He said he still hoped that some day,
+etc., etc., that he now saw with great self-condemnation that if his
+life had been altruistic in some ways, it had been egotistic in others,
+as in preferring his own independence to the mutual services of
+affection; that he must confess to his shame that he had received more
+than his share of love, and that he had not given out enough.
+
+"He's determined she shall know how irresistible he is," said Barrett.
+"I had no idea these early Victorian methods of self-advertisement were
+still in vogue even among the most elderly Dons."
+
+"Hang it all!" blurted out Parker, reddening. "The matter has gone
+beyond a joke. We haven't any right to see his mind without its clothes
+on. You always say the nude is beautiful. But really--Maitland
+undraped--viewed through a key-hole, sets my teeth on edge."
+
+"Undraped? you prude," said Barrett. "What are you talking about?
+Maitland is clothed up to his eyes in his own illusions. He's padded out
+all round with them back and front to such an extent that you can't see
+the least vestige of the human form divine. Personally, I don't think he
+has one. I don't believe he is a man at all, but just a globular mass of
+conceit and unpublished matter, swathed in a college gown. The thing
+that revolts me is the way he postures before her. Malvolio and his
+garters isn't in it with Maitland. Good Lord! Supposing she were a real
+live woman! What a mercy for him that it's only us, that it's all
+strictly _en famille_. I always have said that it's better to keep women
+out of love affairs."
+
+"How did you answer this?" said Parker, pushing the last letter from him
+in disgust.
+
+"I let him see at last--a little."
+
+"That it was all a joke?"
+
+"No. That I--that Maud, I mean--cared. She did not say much. She never
+does. She mostly sticks to flowers and sunsets, but she gave a little
+hint of it, and threw in at the same time that she was very much out of
+health and going abroad."
+
+"That'll put him off. He'll back out. He would hate to have a delicate
+wife. He might have to look after her, instead of her waiting hand and
+foot on him."
+
+"We shall see," said Barrett. "Her last letter was posted at Dover."
+
+"Well, mind! It's got to be the last," said Parker decisively. "I had
+not realised you had been playing the devil to such an extent as this. I
+had a sort of idea that you were only one of a committee. And what a
+frightful lot of trouble you must have taken. I suppose Maud was always
+moving about so that he could never nail her."
+
+"Always, just where I was going, too, by a curious coincidence. And her
+old aunt is a regular tartar; I don't suppose there ever was such a
+typical female guardian outside a penny novelette. But she is turning
+out a trump now about taking Maud abroad, I will say that for her. They
+remain at Dover a week. I've arranged for it. I knew you two would wish
+me to feel myself quite untrammelled, and, indeed, I wish it myself.
+Then we'll hand him the whole series, and see how he takes it; and tell
+him we've shown it to a few of his most intimate friends first, and your
+aunt, Parker--she'll nearly die of it--and that they are all of opinion
+that it's the best thing he has done since his paper on Bacchylides."
+
+Neither of us answered. In spite of myself I was sorry for Maitland.
+
+A few days later Barrett came to my rooms. We knocked on the floor for
+Parker, and he came up.
+
+Then he put down a letter on the table and we read it in silence.
+
+It was just what we expected, an enigmatic, self-protecting effusion.
+Maitland was hedging. He had evidently been put off by Maud's illness,
+and talked a great deal about friendship being the crown of life, and
+how she must think of nothing but the care of her health, etc., etc.;
+and he on his side must not be selfish and trouble her with too many
+letters, etc.
+
+"Brute," said Parker.
+
+"There's another," said Barrett.
+
+"You don't mean to say you wrote again. There's not been time."
+
+"No. _He_ wrote again. He doesn't seem to have been perfectly satisfied
+with the chivalry of the letter you've just read. He's always great on
+chivalry, you know. And it certainly would be hard to make that last
+letter dovetail in with his previous utterances on a man's instinct to
+guard and protect the opposite sex."
+
+Barrett threw down a bulky letter and--may God forgive us--Parker and I
+read it together under the lamp.
+
+"I can't go on," said Parker after a few minutes.
+
+"You must," said Barrett savagely.
+
+We read it through from the first word to the last, and as we read
+Parker's face became as grave as Barrett's.
+
+It is an awful thing when a poseur ceases to pose, when an egoist
+becomes a human being. But this is what had befallen Maitland. The thing
+had happened which one would have thought could not possibly happen. He
+had fallen in love.
+
+I can't put in the whole of his letter here. Indeed, I don't remember it
+very clearly. But I shall not forget the gist of it while I live.
+
+After he had despatched his other letter he told her the scales of
+egotism had suddenly dropped from his eyes, and he had realised that he
+loved for the first time, and that he could not face life without her,
+and that the thought that he might lose her, had possibly already lost
+her by his own fault, was unendurable to him. For in the new light in
+which now all was bathed he realised the meanness of his previous
+letter, of his whole intercourse with her: that he had never for a
+moment been truthful with her: that he had attitudinised before her in
+order to impress her: that he had always taken the ground that he was
+difficult to please, and that many women had paid court to him, but that
+it was all chimerical. No woman had ever cared for him except his
+mother, and a little nursery governess when he was a lad. During the
+last twenty years he had made faint, half-hearted attempts to ingratiate
+himself with attractive women: and when the attempts failed, as they
+always had failed, he had had the meanness to revenge himself by
+implying that his withdrawal had been caused by their wish to give him
+more than the friendship he craved. He had said over and over again that
+he valued his independence too much to marry, but it was not true. He
+did not value it a bit. He had been pining to get married for years and
+years. He saw now that to say that kind of thing was only to say in
+other words that he had never lived. He had not. He had only talked
+about living. He abased himself before her with a kind of passion. He
+told her that he did not see how any woman, and she least of all, could
+bring herself to care for a man of his age and appearance, even if he
+had been simple and humble and sincere, much less one who had taken
+trouble to show himself so ignoble, so petty, so self-engrossed, so
+arrogant. But the fact remained that he loved her; she had unconsciously
+taught him to abhor himself, and he only loved her the more, he
+worshipped her, well or ill, kind or unkind, whether she could return it
+or not.
+
+We stared at each other in a ghastly silence. I expected some ribald
+remark from Barrett, but he made none.
+
+"What's to be done?" said Parker at last.
+
+"There's one thing that can't be done," said Barrett, and I was
+astonished to see him so changed, "and that is to show the thing up.
+It's not to be thought of."
+
+We both nodded.
+
+"I said it would make a man of him, but I never in my wildest moments
+thought it really would," continued Barrett. "It's my fault. You two
+fellows said I should go too far."
+
+We assured him that we were all three equally guilty.
+
+"The point is, what's to be done?" repeated Parker.
+
+"I've thought it over," said Barrett, putting the letter carefully in
+his pocket, "and I've come to the conclusion it _must_ go on. I have not
+the heart to undeceive him. And I don't suppose you two will want to be
+more down on him than I am."
+
+"If it goes on he'll find out," I groaned.
+
+"He mustn't be allowed to find out," said Barrett. "He simply mustn't.
+I've got to insure that. I dragged the poor devil in, and I've got to
+get him out."
+
+"How will you do it?"
+
+"Kill her. There's nothing for it but that. Fortunately she was ill in
+the vacation. He's uneasy about her health now. I put her in a rest
+cure, if you remember, when he became too pertinacious, and I was
+yachting."
+
+"He'll feel her death," said Parker. "It's hard luck on him."
+
+"Suggest something better then," snapped Barrett.
+
+But though we thought over the matter until late into the night we could
+think of nothing better. Barrett, who seemed to have mislaid all his
+impudent self-confidence, departed at last saying he would see to it.
+
+"Who would have thought it," said Parker to me as I followed him to lock
+him out. "And so Maitland is a live man, after all." We stood and looked
+across the court to Maitland's windows, who was still burning the
+midnight oil.
+
+"You don't think he'll ever get wind of this," I said.
+
+"You may trust Barrett," Parker replied. "Good-night."
+
+Barrett proved trustworthy. He and Parker laid their heads together, and
+it was finally decided that Maud's aunt should write Maitland a letter
+from Paris describing her sudden death, and how she had enjoined on her
+aunt to break it to Maitland, and to send him the little ring she always
+wore. After much cogitation they decided that Maud should send him a
+death-bed message, in which she was to own that she loved him. Barrett
+thought it would comfort him immensely if she had loved him at first
+sight, so he put it in. And though he was frightfully short of money he
+went up to London and got a very nice little ring with a forget-me-not
+in turquoises on it, for the same amount he had won off us about
+Maitland's moustache. I think he was glad as it was blood money in a way
+(if you can call a moustache blood) that it should go back to Maitland.
+
+The old aunt's letter was a masterpiece. At any other time Barrett's
+artistic sense would have revelled in it, but he was out of spirits, and
+only carried the matter through by a kind of doggedness. The letter was
+prim and stilted, but humane, and the writer was obviously a little hurt
+by the late discovery that her dear niece had concealed anything from
+her. She returned all the letters which she said her niece had
+evidently treasured, and said that she was returning heartbroken to her
+house in Pimlico the same day, and would, of course, see him if he
+wished it, but she supposed that one so busy as Maitland would hardly be
+able to spare the time. The letter was obviously written under the
+supposition that the address in Pimlico was familiar to him. It was
+signed in full. _Yours faithfully, Maud Markham._
+
+Barrett got a friend whom he could rely on to post the packet on his way
+through Paris.
+
+I don't know how Maitland took the news. I don't know what he can have
+thought of his grisly letters when he saw them again. But I do know that
+he knocked up and had to go away.
+
+There is one thing I admire about Barrett. He did not pretend he did not
+feel Maitland's illness, though I believe it was only gout. He did not
+pretend he was not ashamed of himself. He never would allow that we were
+equally guilty. And when Maitland came back rather thinner and graver,
+we all noticed that he treated him with respect. And he never jeered at
+him again. Maitland regained his old self-complacency in time and was
+dreadfully mysterious and Maitlandish about the whole affair. I have
+seen Barrett wince when he made vague allusions to the responsibility of
+being the object of a great passion, and the discipline of suffering.
+But he _had_ suffered in a way. He really had. And when the Bursar's
+wife died Maitland was genuinely kind. He shot off lots of platitudes of
+course; but on previous occasions when he had said he had been stirred
+to the depths he only meant to the depth of a comfortable arm-chair. Now
+it was platitudes and actions mixed. He actually heaved himself out of
+his armchair, and exerted himself on behalf of the poor, dreary little
+bounder, took him walks, and sat with him in an evening--his sacred
+evenings. To think of Maitland putting himself out for anyone! It seemed
+a miracle.
+
+After a time it was obvious that the incident had added a new dignity
+and happiness to his life. He settled down so to speak, into being an
+old bachelor, and grew a beard, and did not worry about women any more.
+He felt he had had his romance.
+
+I don't know how it was, but we all three felt a kind of lurking respect
+for him after what had happened. You would have thought that what we
+knew must have killed such a feeling, especially as it wasn't there
+before. But it didn't. On the contrary. And Maitland felt the change,
+and simply froze on to us three. He liked us all, but Barrett best.
+
+
+
+
+The Dark Cottage
+
+    The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed
+    Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.
+
+    _Edmund Waller._
+
+
+PART I
+
+1915
+
+John Damer was troubled for his country and his wife and his child.
+
+At first he had been all patriotism and good cheer. "It will be a short
+war and a bloody one. The Russians will be in Berlin by Christmas. We
+shall sweep the German flag from the seas. We are bound to win."
+
+He had stood up in his place in the House and had said something of that
+kind, and had been cheered.
+
+But that was a year ago.
+
+Now the iron had entered into England's soul, and into his soul. He had
+long since volunteered, and he was going to France to-morrow after an
+arduous training. He had come home to say good-bye.
+
+He might never come back. He might never see his Catherine, his
+beautiful young wife, again, or his son Michael, that minute, bald,
+amazing new comer with the waving clenched fists, and the pink soles as
+soft as Catherine's cheek.
+
+And as John Damer, that extremely able successful wealthy man of thirty,
+sat on the wooden bench in the clearing he suddenly realised that, for
+the first time in his life, he was profoundly unhappy.
+
+How often he had come up here by the steep path through the wood, as a
+child, as a lad, as a man, and had cast himself down on the heather, and
+had looked out across that wonderful panorama of upland and lowland,
+with its scattered villages and old churches, and the wide band of the
+river taking its slow curving course among the level pastures and broad
+water meadows.
+
+That river had given him the power to instal electric light in his home,
+the dignified Elizabethan house, standing in its level gardens, below
+the hill. He could look down on its twisted chimneys and ivied walls as
+he sat. How determined his father had been against such an innovation as
+electric light, but he had put it in after the old man's death. There
+was enough water power to have lit forty houses as large as his.
+
+Far away in the haze lay the city where his factories were. Their great
+chimneys were visible even at this distance belching forth smoke,
+which, etherealised by distance, hung like a blue cloud over the city.
+He liked to look at it. That low lying cloud reminded him of his great
+prosperity. And all the coal he used for the furnaces came from his own
+coal fields.
+
+But who would take care of all the business he had built up if he fell
+in this accursed war? Who would comfort Catherine, and who would bring
+up his son when he grew beyond his mother's control?
+
+Yet this was England, spread out before his eyes, England in peril
+calling to him her son who dumbly loved her, to come to her aid.
+
+His eyes filled with tears, and he did not see his wife till she was
+close beside him, standing in a thin white gown, holding her hat by a
+long black ribbon, the sunshine on her amber hair.
+
+She was pale, and her very beauty seemed veiled by grief.
+
+She sat down by him, and smiled valiantly at him. Presently she said
+gently:
+
+"Perhaps in years to come, John, you and I shall sit together on this
+bench as old people, and Michael will be very kind, but rather critical
+of us, as quite behind the times."
+
+And then had come the parting, the crossing, the first sound as of
+distant thunder; and then interminable days of monotony; and mud, and
+lack of sleep, and noise unceasing; and a certain gun which blew out the
+candle in his dug-out every time it fired--and _then_! a rending of the
+whole world, and himself standing in the midst of entire chaos and
+overthrow, with blood running down his face.
+
+"I'm done for," he said, as he fell forward into an abyss of darkness
+and silence, beyond the roar of the guns.
+
+
+PART II
+
+1965
+
+It was fifty years later.
+
+Michael's wife, Serena, was waiting for her husband. The gallery in
+which she sat was full of memorials of the past. The walls were covered
+with portraits of Damers. Michael's grandfather in a blue frock coat and
+light grey trousers. Michael's father, John Damer, ruddy and determined
+in tweeds, with a favourite dog. Michael himself, not so ruddy, nor so
+determined, in white smock and blue stockings. Michael's mother,
+beautiful and austere in her robe of office.
+
+Presently an aeroplane droned overhead, which she knew meant the
+departure of the great Indian doctor, and a moment later Michael came
+slowly down the landing steps in the garden, and entered the gallery.
+
+"The operation has been entirely successful," he said.
+
+They looked gravely at each other.
+
+"It seems incredible," she said.
+
+"He said it was a simple case, that all through those years while Father
+was unconscious the skull had been slowly drawing together and mending
+itself, that he only released a slight lesion in the brain. He has gone
+back to Lucknow for an urgent case, but he says he will look in again in
+a couple of days time if I let him know there is an adverse symptom. He
+said he felt sure all would go well, but that we must guard him from
+sudden shocks, and break to him very gradually that it is fifty years
+since he was hit at Ypres."
+
+"He'll wake up in his own room where he has lain so long," said Serena.
+
+"Has the nurse changed yet?"
+
+"Yes. We made up the uniform from the old illustrated papers. Blue gown,
+white cap and a red cross on the arm."
+
+"We had better get into our things, too," said Michael nervously.
+
+"The blue serge suit is on your bed, and a collar and a tie. I found
+them in the oak chest. They must have been forgotten."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"I will wear your Mother's gown which she wore at your christening. She
+kept it all her life."
+
+A few minutes later Michael, uneasy in a serge suit which was too tight
+for him, and his wife in a short grey gown entered the sick room and sat
+down one on each side of the bed. The nurse, excited and self-conscious
+in her unfamiliar attire, withdrew to the window.
+
+The old, old man on the bed stirred uneasily, and his white beard
+quivered. His wide eyes looked vacantly at his son, as they had looked
+at him all Michael's life. Serena, with a hand that trembled a little,
+poured a few drops into a spoon, and put them into the half-open lips.
+
+Then they held their breath and watched.
+
+John Damer frowned. A bewildered look came into his vacant eyes, and he
+closed them. And he, who had spoken no word for fifty years, said in a
+thin quavering voice:
+
+"The guns have ceased."
+
+He opened his eyes suddenly. They wandered to the light, and fell upon
+the nurse near the window.
+
+"I am in hospital," he said.
+
+"No. You are in your own home," said Michael, laying his hand on the
+ancient wrinkled hand.
+
+The dim sunken eyes turned slowly in the direction of the voice.
+
+"Father," said the old man looking full at Michael. "Father! well, you
+do look blooming."
+
+The colour rushed to Michael's face. He had expected complications, and
+had prepared numberless phrases in his mind to meet imaginary dilemmas.
+But he had never thought of this.
+
+"Not Father," said Serena intervening. "You are forgetting. Father died
+before you married, and you put up that beautiful monument to him in the
+Church."
+
+"So I did," said the old man, testily. "So I did, but he is exactly like
+him all the same, only Father never wore his clothes too tight for him
+and a made up tie--never."
+
+Michael, the best dressed man of his day, was bereft of speech.
+
+"You're a little confused still," said Serena. "You were wounded in the
+head at Ypres. You have been ill a long time."
+
+There was a silence.
+
+"I remember," said John Damer at last. "Have they taken the Ridge?"
+
+"Yes, long ago."
+
+"Long ago? Oh! can it be--is it possible? Have we?"--the old man reared
+himself suddenly in bed, and raised two thin gnarled arms. "Have we--won
+the war?"
+
+"Yes," said Michael, as Serena put her arms round his father, and laid
+him back on his pillow. "We have won the war."
+
+John Damer lay back panting, trembling from head to foot.
+
+"Thank God," he said, and in his sunken lashless eyes two tears
+gathered, and ran down the grey furrows of his cheeks, and lost
+themselves in his long white beard.
+
+They gave him the sedative which the doctor had left ready for him, and
+when he had sunk back into unconsciousness, they stole out of the room.
+
+They went back to the picture gallery looking on the gardens, and
+Michael gazed long at the portrait of his grandfather in the blue frock
+coat.
+
+"Am I so like him?" he said with a sort of sob.
+
+"Very like."
+
+He sat down and hid his face in his hands.
+
+"Poor soul," he said. "Poor soul. He's up against it. Do you know I had
+almost forgotten we had 'won the war' as he called it. There have been
+so many worse conflicts since that act of supreme German folly and
+wickedness."
+
+"Not what he would call wars," said Serena. "He only means battles with
+soldiers in uniforms, and trenches and guns."
+
+"How on earth are we to break to him that his wife is dead, and that I
+am his son, and that he is eighty years of age, and that Jack is his
+grandson."
+
+"It must come to him gradually."
+
+"In the meanwhile I shall take off these vile clothes and get back into
+my own. Serena, what can a made-up tie be, and why is it wrong?"
+
+Michael tore off his tie and looked resentfully at it at arm's length.
+"It is just like the pictures, it seems correct, and it fastens all
+right with a hook and eye."
+
+"It is the first time your taste in dress has been questioned, and
+naturally it pricks," said Serena smiling at her husband. "It is lucky
+Jack did not hear it."
+
+"I don't know who Jack inherits his slovenliness and his clumsiness
+from," said Michael. "Why on earth can't he sit on his smock without
+crumpling it. I can. He may be a great intellect, I think he is; he
+takes after my mother, there is no doubt, but he can't fold his cloak on
+his shoulder, he can't help a woman into her aeroplane, and he is so
+careless that he can't alight in London on a roof without coming down
+either on the sky doorway, or the sky-light. He has broken so many
+sky-lights and jammed so many roof doors that nowadays he actually goes
+to ground and sneaks up in the lift."
+
+Serena was accustomed to these outbursts of irritation. They meant that
+her nervous, highly strung Michael was perturbed about something else.
+In this case the something else was not far to seek. He recurred to it
+at once.
+
+"Will Father ever understand about Jack and Catherine? Will he ever in
+his extreme old age understand about anything?"
+
+"His mind is still thirty," said Serena. "The Iceland brain specialist
+said that as well as Ali Khan, and all the other doctors. That is where
+they say the danger lies, and where the tragedy lies."
+
+"But how are we to meet it," said Michael walking up and down. Presently
+he stopped in front of his wife and said as one who has solved a
+problem!
+
+"I think on the whole I had better leave the matter of breaking things
+to Father entirely in your hands. It will come better from you than from
+me."
+
+And the pictures of the various wives of the various ancestors heard
+once more the familiar phrase, to which their wifely ears had been so
+well accustomed in their day from the lips of their lords, when anything
+uncomfortable had to be done.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So Michael left it to Serena, and in the weeks which followed she guided
+her father-in-law, with the endless tenderness of a mother teaching a
+child to walk, round some very sharp corners, which nearly cost him his
+life, which, so deeply was her heart wrung for him, she almost hoped
+would cost him his life.
+
+With a courage that never failed him, and which awed her, he learned
+slowly that he was eighty years of age, that his wife had died ten years
+ago, at sixty, that Michael was his son, and that he had a very clever
+grandson called John after him, one of the ablest delegates of the
+National Congress, and a grand-daughter called Catherine. She tried to
+tell him how they had lost a few months earlier their eldest son,
+Jasper, one of the pioneers of a new movement which was costing as many
+lives as flight had cost England fifty years earlier.
+
+"He failed to materialise at the appointed spot," said Serena, "I
+sometimes wonder whether his Indian instructor kept back something
+essential. The Indians have known for generations how to disintegrate
+and materialise again in another place, but it does not come easy to our
+Western blood. Jasper went away, but he never came back."
+
+John Damer looked incredulously at Serena, and she saw that he had not
+understood. She never spoke of it again.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As the days passed John, fearful always of some new pang, nevertheless
+asked many questions of Serena when he was alone with her.
+
+"Tell me about my wife. She was just twenty when I left her."
+
+"She grieved for you with her whole heart."
+
+"Did she--marry again? I would rather know if she did. She would have
+been right to do so in order to have someone to help her to bring up
+Michael."
+
+"She never married again. How could she when you were alive, and in the
+house."
+
+"I forgot."
+
+"She hoped to the last you would be completely restored. All the
+greatest doctors in the world were called in, and they assured her it
+was only a question of time. Wonderful discoveries had been made in the
+Great War as to wounds in the head. But they only gradually learnt to
+apply them. And the years passed and passed."
+
+"It would have been kinder to let me die."
+
+"Did doctors let people die when you were young?"
+
+John shook his head.
+
+"They are the same now," she said.
+
+"And I suppose Catherine spent her life here, caring for her child, and
+me, and the poor. She loved the poor."
+
+"She cared for you and Michael, and she worked ceaselessly for the cause
+of the oppressed. She battled for it. She went into Parliament as it was
+called in those days, as soon as the age for women members was lowered
+from thirty to twenty-one. She strove for the restriction of the White
+Slave Traffic, and for safeguarding children from the great disease.
+Some terrible evils were abated by her determined advocacy. But she
+always said she did not meet the same opposition the first women doctors
+did a hundred years ago, or as Florence Nightingale had to conquer when
+she set out to improve the condition of the soldier in hospital and in
+barracks, and to reduce the barbarities of the workhouses."
+
+"I should have thought she would have been better employed in her own
+home, that she would have been wiser to leave these difficult subjects,
+especially the White Slave Traffic--to men."
+
+"They had been left to men for a long time," said Serena.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The day came when he was wheeled out into the garden in the old mahogany
+wheel chair which his father had used in the last years of his life.
+
+Serena was sitting beside him. When was she not beside him! Michael, at
+a little distance, was talking to two of the gardeners.
+
+"Why do Michael and the gardeners wear smock frocks and blue stockings?"
+
+"It is so comfortable for one thing, and for another it is the old
+national peasant dress. We naturally all wish to be dressed alike
+nowadays, at any rate when we are in the country, just as the Scotch
+have always done."
+
+"I remember," said John, "when I was a small child a splendid old man
+of ninety, Richard Hallmark, who used to come to church in a smock frock
+and blue worsted stockings and a tall black hat. His grown-up grandsons
+in bowler hats and ill-made coats and trousers looked contemptible
+beside him, but I believe they were ashamed of him."
+
+His dim eyes scanned the familiar lawns and terraces of the gardens that
+had once been his, and the wide pasture lands beyond.
+
+It was all as it had been in his day. Nevertheless he seemed to miss
+something.
+
+"The rooks," he said at last. "I don't hear them. What has become of the
+rookery in the elms?"
+
+"They've gone," she said. "Ten years ago. Michael felt it dreadfully.
+Even now he can hardly speak of it. I hope, Father, you will never
+reproach him about it."
+
+"Did he shoot them?" asked the old man in a hollow voice.
+
+"No, no. He loved them, just as you did, but when he installed the Power
+Station he put it behind the elm wood to screen it from the house, and
+he did not remember, no one remembered, the rookery. You see rooks build
+higher than any other birds, and that was not taken into account in the
+radiation. At first everything seemed all right. The old birds did not
+appear to notice it. Even the smallest birds could pass through the
+current it was so slight. But when the spring came it proved too much
+for the fledgelings. They died as they were hatched out in the nest.
+Then the old birds made the most fearful outcry, and left the place."
+
+"There has always been a rookery at Marcham," said John, his voice
+shaking with anger. "I suppose I shall hear of Michael shooting the
+foxes next."
+
+Serena did not answer. She looked blankly at him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Presently John asked that his chair might be wheeled up the steep path
+through the wood to the little clearing at the top. Michael eagerly
+offered to draw the chair himself, but John refused. He had been distant
+towards his son since he had heard about the rookery.
+
+Serena, with the help of a gardener, conveyed him gently to the heathery
+knoll, just breaking into purple.
+
+John looked out once more with deep emotion at the familiar spot in the
+golden stillness of the September afternoon.
+
+"I sat here with my wife the last afternoon before I went to the front,"
+he said in his reedy old man's voice. "The heather was out as it is
+now."
+
+His eyes turned to the peaceful landscape, the wooded uplands, the
+river, the clustered villages, and far away the city and the tall
+chimneys of his factories. As he looked he gave a gasp, and his jaw
+fell.
+
+"The factories aren't working," he said.
+
+"Yes, dear, indeed they are."
+
+"They're _not_. Not a sign of smoke. It used to hang like a curtain over
+the city."
+
+"Or like a shroud," said Serena looking fixedly at him. "It hung over
+the grimy overworked mothers, and the poor grimy fledglings of children
+in the little huddled houses. The factories consume their own smoke
+now."
+
+"There was a law to that effect in my time," said John, "but nobody
+obeyed it."
+
+"No one," she agreed. "No one."
+
+As he looked it seemed as if a cloud of dust rose from the factories,
+and eddied in the air. As it drew near it resembled a swarm of bees.
+
+"What on earth is that?" he asked.
+
+"It is the work people going home to the garden city behind the hill. It
+would not do for them to live near the factories, would it? The ground
+is marshy. There are five or six streams there. And the gas from the
+factories has killed all the trees. What was not good for trees could
+not be good for children."
+
+"They all lived there in my time. It was handy for work. There was
+always a great demand for houses. I know I had to build more."
+
+Serena's eyes fell.
+
+The flight of aeroplanes passed almost overhead followed by two enormous
+airships waddling along like monstrous sausages.
+
+"Are those Zeppelins?"
+
+"They are aero busses built on the German models. They superseded the
+ground electrics a few years ago. Those two are to carry back the
+workers who are more or less deficient, and can't be trusted to fly an
+aeroplane; the kind of people who used to be shut up in asylums.
+They can do sufficient work under supervision to pay for their own
+maintenance. We group with them the hysterical and the melancholy, and
+people who can't take the initiative, and those who suffer from inertia
+and tend to become blood suckers and to live on the energies of others.
+Their numbers grow fewer every year."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Serena and Michael talked long about his father that night.
+
+"But surely he must have seen it was a crime to house his factory hands
+like that."
+
+"He didn't seem to. You see he compared well with many employers. He
+doesn't know--how could he, that his generation let us in. We paid their
+bill. All the wickedness and the suffering of the great black winter had
+their root in the blindness and self-seeking of his generation and the
+one before him."
+
+"He's never been the same to me since he found I killed the rookery.
+What's a rookery to a thousand children reared in a smoky swamp. What
+will he think of me when he hears that I stalked and shot the last fox
+in the county?"
+
+"He must not hear it. We must guard him," said Serena, "and I pray that
+his life may not be long. It can't be, I think, and we have been warned
+that any sudden shock will kill him. I wish he could have a joyful shock
+and die of it, but there aren't any joyful shocks left for him in this
+world I am afraid."
+
+"Have you explained to him that his grandchildren are coming home
+to-morrow from the Rocky Mountains?"
+
+"I have told him that they are coming, but not that they have been in
+the Rockies. He might think it rather far to go for a fortnight's
+fishing."
+
+"Serena, what on earth will Father make of Jack. Jack is so dreadfully
+well-informed. I hardly dare open my mouth in his presence. Jack says he
+is looking forward to meeting his grandfather, and realising what he
+calls his feudal point of view."
+
+"Jack only means by that expounding to his grandfather his own point of
+view. I don't think your Father will take to him, but he will love
+Catherine; she is so like your Mother, and _she_ never wants to realise
+any point of view."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jack arrived first with his servant and a large hamper of fish. The air
+lorry followed with the tents and the fishing tackle and the mastiffs.
+
+"But where is Catherine," asked Michael, as Jack came in pulling off his
+leather helmet and goggles.
+
+Jack grinned and said with a spice of malice:
+
+"Catherine fell into the sea."
+
+"She didn't!" said Serena. "That's the second time. How tiresome. She
+always has a cold on her chest if she gets wet."
+
+"Where did you leave her?" asked Michael.
+
+"In mid-Atlantic. We kept to the highway. It was her own fault. I warned
+her not to loop the loop with that old barge of hers, but she would try
+and do it. She was fastened in all right. I saw to that, but her stuff
+was loose, and you should have seen all her fish and kettles and the
+electric cooker shooting out one after another into the deep. It was in
+trying to grab something that she lost control, and fell, barge and all
+after her crockery into the sea. I circled round--that is why I am a
+quarter-of-an-hour late--till I sighted one of the patrol toddling up,
+old Granny Queen Elizabeth it was. Catherine wirelessed to me that she
+was all right, and would start again as soon as she was dry and had had
+a cigarette, so I came on."
+
+Catherine arrived an hour later, full of apologies about the lost
+crockery, and the electric cooker, and was at once put into a hot bath
+by her mother and sent to bed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After the arrival of his grandchildren John spent more and more of his
+time in the clearing in the wood. He shrank instinctively from the
+sense of movement and life in the house, and his sole prop, Serena,
+seemed unable to be so constantly with him as before.
+
+He was never tired of gazing at the gracious lines of the landscape.
+Perhaps he loved that particular place because he had sat there with his
+wife on their last afternoon together, perhaps also because, in a world
+where all seemed changed, that alone, save for the cloud on the horizon,
+was unchanged. He was at home there.
+
+Jack took a deep and inquisitive interest in his grandfather which made
+him often stroll up the hill to smoke a pipe on the bench near him.
+Sometimes John pretended to be asleep when he heard his grandson's
+whistle on the path below him. He was bewildered by this handsome,
+quick-witted, cocksure, bearded young man who it seemed was already at
+twenty-three a promising Fatigue Eliminator, and might presently become
+a Simplyfier. His grand-daughter, Catherine, he had not yet seen, as she
+was in quarantine owing to a cold, and the Catarrh Inspector had only
+to-day pronounced her free from infection.
+
+"You sleep a great deal, Grandfather," said Jack, coming so suddenly
+into view that John had not time to close his eyes. "Don't you find so
+much sleep tends to retard cerebral activity?"
+
+"I don't happen to possess cerebral, or any other form of activity,"
+said John, coldly.
+
+"Do you mean you wish er--to resume the reins? Father and I were talking
+of it last night. Everything he has is yours, you know, by law."
+
+John shook his head, and looked at his powerless hands.
+
+"Reins are not for me," he said.
+
+"Well, in my opinion, grandfather," said Jack, with approval, not wholly
+devoid of patronage, "you're right. A great deal of water has passed
+under the bridge since your day."
+
+"This clearing in the wood is the same," John said. "That is why I like
+it, and my old home looks just the same--from here."
+
+There was a moment's silence while Jack lit his pipe.
+
+John suddenly said, "I put in the electric light. My father never would
+hear of it, but I did it."
+
+He thought it was just as well that his magnificent grandson should know
+that he had done something when he held the reins.
+
+"That is one of the many things I have been wishing to discuss with you,
+grandfather. You installed electric light in the house and stables and
+garage, but there was power enough to light a town. While you were doing
+it, why didn't you light the church and the village as well?"
+
+"I never thought of it."
+
+"But it must have made you very uncomfortable to feel you had not shared
+the benefit of it with the community. The village lies at your very
+gates. You must have hated the feeling that you had lit yourself up, and
+left them in the dark. It was essential, absolutely essential for your
+workers' well-being that they should have light. Even in your day the
+more intelligent among the agricultural labourers were beginning to
+migrate to the towns. We only got them back by better conditions in
+lighting and housing, and facilities for movement and amusement."
+
+"Electric light in cottages was unheard of in my time," said John. "It
+never entered my head."
+
+"Just so," said Jack. "That seems so odd, so incomprehensible to us
+unless we can seize the feudal point of view. You confirm the classics
+on the subject. I have questioned numbers of very old men who were in
+their prime before the war like you, grandfather, but I have not found
+their opinions as definite as yours, because they have insensibly got
+all their edges worn off so to speak by lifelong contact with the two
+younger generations. Your unique experience is most interesting. Never
+entered your head. There you have the feudal system in a nutshell. No
+sense of communal life at all. I'll make a note of it--I'm compiling a
+treatise on the subject. You were against female suffrage, too, I
+remember. I've been reading up your record. You voted several times
+against it."
+
+"I did. I consider woman's sphere is in the home."
+
+"Just so. That was the point of view, and there is a lot to say for it
+considering the hash women made of power when first they got it, though
+not so enormous a hash as the Labour Party. You know, I suppose, we've
+had three Labour Governments since the great war?"
+
+"I always prophesied a Labour Government would come, and I feared it. I
+knew they had not sufficient education to rule. No conception of foreign
+policy."
+
+"Not an atom. I agree with you. Not a scrap. Thirty years ago most of
+our rulers hadn't an idea where India was, or why we must complete the
+trans-African railway in case we lost control of the Suez Canal. They
+actually opposed it. They nearly piloted the Ship of State on to the
+rocks."
+
+John frowned.
+
+"Now what I want to know is," said Jack, extending two long blue
+stockinged legs, and enjoying himself immensely, "why instead of
+opposing female suffrage you did not combine to place the franchise on
+an educational basis, irrespective of sex; the grant of the vote to be
+dependant on passing certain examinations, mainly in history and
+geography. Or, if you were resolved to delay as much as possible the
+entrance of women into politics, why didn't you give better national
+education. You did neither. You let loose a horde of entirely ignorant
+and irresponsible men and women out of your national schools. You say
+you foresaw that a Labour Government was inevitable, but you don't seem
+to have made any preparation, or taken any precaution to insure its
+efficiency when it did come."
+
+John was silent.
+
+"They were also hostile men and women," continued the young man. "That
+was the worst of it. Were you at Lille when you were fighting in
+France?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, the East Lancashires were. They were all miners, and the thing
+that interested them most was the devastated mines, ruined by the
+Germans in their retreat. And they saw the remains of the bath houses at
+the pit heads. Those baths had been there before the war. Every miner
+could go back clean to his own home, instead of having to wash in his
+own kitchen. Grandfather, you owned coal-mines. Why didn't you and the
+other coal-owners put up baths at the pit heads? You would have liked it
+if _you_ had been a miner. And just think what it would have saved your
+wife. The English miners got them by threats after they had seen the
+wrecks of them in France. But why didn't the English coal-owners copy
+French methods, if they hadn't the imagination to think them out for
+themselves? Why did they only concede when they could not help it?
+Reforms were wrung out of the governing class in your day by threats and
+strikes. That is what, for nearly thirty years, ruined our class with
+Labour when it came into power. Why didn't your generation foresee
+that?"
+
+"We didn't see the danger," said John, "as you see it. Everyone can be
+wise after the event."
+
+"Just so. But if you couldn't foresee the danger, why didn't you see at
+the time the _justice_ of their claims, men like you, grandfather, who
+fought for justice for the smaller nations? It seems to me, the national
+characteristic of the upper classes fifty years ago must have been
+opposition to all change, a tendency to ignore symptoms which really
+were danger signals, and an undeveloped sense of justice ..., which only
+acted in certain grooves. The result was the uneducated came into power,
+embittered, without a shred of confidence in the disinterestedness of
+the educated. The Commonwealth--"
+
+"The what?"
+
+"The Commonwealth--you used to call it the Empire--nearly went upon the
+rocks."
+
+Jack's young face became awed and stern and aged, as John had seen
+men's faces become when they charged through the mud in the dawn.
+
+"I was in Liverpool," Jack said, "all through the Black Winter. It
+needn't have been. It never, never need have been if there had been
+justice and sympathy in England for Labour forty years before. But there
+was not. So they paid us back in our own coin. We had no justice from
+them. My God! I can't blame them."
+
+Serena, coming quietly up the path, saw the two men looking fixedly at
+each other, both pallid in the soft sunshine. The same shadow of
+suffering seemed to have fallen on the beautiful young face, and on the
+old one.
+
+"You must not talk any more," she said to John, casting a reproachful
+glance at her son. "You are over-tired."
+
+Jack took the hint, kissed his mother's hand, and walked slowly away. He
+was deeply moved.
+
+John shivered. A deathlike coldness was creeping over him, was laying an
+icy hand upon his heart. He turned to his sole comforter, Serena,
+watching him with limpid grieved eyes.
+
+"Your grand-daughter, Catherine, is coming up to see you in a few
+minutes," she said, trying as always to guard him against surprise. "How
+cold your hands are, Father. I could not let her see you till she had
+been disinfected after her chill for fear she might give it to you."
+
+He was not listening.
+
+"Serena," he said feebly. "The world is not my world any longer. I am a
+stranger and a sojourner in it. All my landmarks are swept away. I wish
+I could be swept away, too."
+
+Serena took his cold hands in hers, and held them to her breast.
+
+"Father," she said, "unless you and countless others, all the best men
+of your time had given your lives for your country, we should have no
+country to-day. You bled for us, you kept it for us, for your son, and
+your son's son: and we all honour and thank you for what you have done
+for us."
+
+John Damer's eyes looked full at her in a great humility.
+
+"I see now," he said, in his thin quavering voice, "that I only died for
+my country. I did not live for her. I took things more or less as I
+found them. I was blind, blind, blind."
+
+She would fain have lied to him, but her voice failed her.
+
+He looked piercingly at her.
+
+"Did the others--all those who never fought--there were so many who did
+not fight--and those who fought and came back--did they live for her,
+did they try to make a different England, to make her free and
+happy--after the war?"
+
+"Some did," said Serena, "but only a minority."
+
+She saw his eyes fix suddenly. His face became transfigured.
+
+"She's coming up the path," he said, in an awed whisper. "Catherine is
+coming."
+
+Serena followed his rapt gaze and saw her daughter coming towards them
+in a white gown, her hat hanging by a ribbon in her hand, the sunshine
+upon her amber hair.
+
+"Catherine," said the old man, "Catherine, you have come to me at last.
+You said we should sit here together when I was old. You've come at
+last."
+
+And he, who for fifty years had not walked a step, without help, raised
+himself to his full height, and went to meet her with outstretched arms.
+
+They caught him before he fell, and one on each side of him supported
+him back to the bench.
+
+He sank down upon it, blue to the lips. Serena laid the trembling white
+head upon her daughter's breast. The bewildered young girl put her arms
+gently round him in silence.
+
+John Damer sighed once in supreme content, and then--breathed no more.
+
+
+
+
+The Ghost of a Chance
+
+    "Yes, but the years run circling fleeter,
+      Ever they pass me--I watch, I wait--
+    Ever I dream, and awake to meet her;
+      She cometh never, or comes too late."
+
+    _Sir Alfred Lyall._
+
+
+"The thing I don't understand about you," I said, "is why you have never
+married. Your love affairs seem to consist in ruining other people's. I
+was on the verge of getting married myself years ago when you lounged in
+and spoilt my chance. But when you had done for me you did not come
+forward yourself, you backed out. I believe, if the truth were known,
+you have backed out over and over again."
+
+Sinclair did not answer. He frowned and looked sulkily at me with
+lustreless eyes. He was out of health, and out of spirits, and ill at
+ease.
+
+The large, luxurious room, with its dim oriental carpets and its shaded
+lights, and its wonderful array of Indian pictures and its two exquisite
+rose-red lacquer cabinets, had a great charm for me who lived in small
+lodgings in the city near my work. But it seemed to hold little pleasure
+for him. I sometimes doubted whether anything held much pleasure for
+him. He had just returned from China. The great packing cases piled one
+above another in the hall were no doubt full of marvellous acquisitions,
+china, embroideries, rugs. But he did not seem to care to unpack them.
+
+"Did I really spoil your marriage?" he said listlessly. He looked old
+and haggard and leaden-coloured, and it was difficult to believe he was
+the magnificent personage who had diverted Mildred's eyes from me ten
+years before.
+
+"Don't pretend you didn't know it at the time," I retorted.
+
+His behaviour had been outrageous, and I, with my snub nose and
+crab-like gait, had been cast aside. I could not blame her. He was like
+a prince in a fairy tale. I never blamed her. She knows that now; in
+short, she knows everything.
+
+"No, my pepper pot, I won't pretend I didn't know it. But I thought--I
+had a strong impression--I was mistaken, of course, but I thought
+that--"
+
+"That what?"
+
+His face altered.
+
+"That it was _she_," he said below his breath.
+
+I stared at him uncomprehending.
+
+"She looked like it," he went on more to himself than to me. "She had a
+sweet face. I thought it _might_ be she. But it was not."
+
+Silence fell on us.
+
+At last I said:
+
+"Perhaps you will be interested to hear that she and I have made it up."
+
+"I am," he said, and his dull eyes lightened, "if you are sure she is
+the right woman; really sure, I mean."
+
+"I've known that for eleven years," I said, "but the difficulty has been
+to get the same idea firmly into her head. At any rate, it's in now.
+I've tattooed it on every square inch of her mind, so to speak. If I had
+been let alone she would have been my downtrodden, ill-used wife, and I
+should have been squandering her money for the last ten years. I shall
+have to hammer her twice a day and get heavily into debt to make up for
+lost time. Why don't you marry yourself, Sinclair? That is what you
+want, though you don't know it; what I want, what we all want, someone
+to bully, something weaker than ourselves to trample on."
+
+"Don't I know it!" he said. "I know it well enough. But how am I to find
+her?"
+
+"Marry Lady Valenes. I'm sure you've made trouble and scandal enough in
+that quarter. Now old Valenes is dead you ought to marry her; and she's
+more beautiful than ever. I saw her at the opera last night."
+
+Sinclair stared straight in front of him with his long hands on his
+knees. His face, thickened and coarsened, fell easily into lines of
+fatigue and ill temper.
+
+"What is the use of Lady Valenes to me?" he said savagely. "What is the
+use of any woman in the world, except the right one?"
+
+"Well, you acted as if she was the right one when her poor jealous old
+husband was alive. It's just like you to think she won't do now he is
+dead and she is free."
+
+He was silent again.
+
+I was somewhat mollified by the remembrance that I had got Mildred, the
+most elusive and difficult of women, firmly under my thumb at last, and
+I said:
+
+"The truth is, you don't know what love is, you haven't got it in you to
+care a pin about anyone except yourself, or you would have married years
+ago. Who do you think you're in love with now?"
+
+"The same woman," he said wearily, "always the same."
+
+"Then marry her and have done with it, and turn this wretched museum
+into a home."
+
+"I can't find her."
+
+"What is her name?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Just seen her once, I suppose," I retorted. "A perfect profile sailing
+past in a carriage under a lace parasol. And you think that's love.
+Little you know."
+
+I expanded my chest. Since I had come to terms with Mildred, some thirty
+hours before--and I had had a very uphill fight of it before she gave
+in--I felt that I was an expert in these matters.
+
+"Chipps," said Sinclair. (Chipps is not my name, but it has stuck to me
+ever since I was at school.) "Chipps, the truth is, we are in the same
+boat."
+
+My old wound gave a sudden twinge.
+
+"No," I said. "No. We aren't. I'm not taking any water exercise with
+you, so you needn't think it. Mildred and I are walking on the
+towing-path arm in arm, and I don't approve of boating for her because I
+don't like it myself. So she remains on dry land with me. In the same
+boat, indeed!"
+
+"I meant, we were both in love," he said with the ghost of a smile, "if
+your corkscrew advances towards matrimony can be called love. I did not
+mean that we were in love with the same woman."
+
+"I don't care if you are _now_. I did care damnably once, but I don't
+mind a bit now. Do your worst."
+
+"The conquering hero, and no mistake," Sinclair said, looking at me with
+something almost like affection, and he put out his hand. "Good luck to
+you, old turkey cock."
+
+I shook his hand harder than I intended, quite warmly, in fact.
+
+"Why don't you marry too?" I said. "It would make all the difference to
+you, as it has to me."
+
+We seemed suddenly very near to each other, as we had been in the old
+days; nearer than we had ever been since he had made trouble between
+Mildred and me.
+
+He looked at me with a kind of forlorn envy.
+
+"I cannot find her," he said again.
+
+The words fell into the silence of the large, dimly lighted room.
+
+And perhaps because we had been at school together, perhaps because I
+had no longer a grudge against him, perhaps because I was not quite so
+repellent to confidences as heretofore, and he was conscious of some
+undefinable change in me, Sinclair said his say.
+
+"I fell in and out of love fairly often when I was young," he said.
+"You've seen me do it. But at the back of my mind there was always a
+deep-rooted conviction that I was only playing at it, and the real thing
+was to come, that there was the one woman waiting somewhere for me. I
+wasn't in any hurry for her. I supposed she would turn up at the right
+moment. But the years passed. I reached thirty. As I got older I began
+to have sudden horrible fits of depression that she wasn't coming after
+all. They did not last, but they became more severe as I gradually
+realised that I could not really live without her, that I was only
+marking time till she came.
+
+"And one summer night, or rather morning, ten years ago, something
+happened. You need not believe it unless you like, Chipps. It's all one
+to me whether you do or you don't. I came home from a ball, and I found
+among my letters one dictated by my young sister saying she was very ill
+and wishing to see me. She was always ill, poor little thing, and always
+wanting to see me. She was consumptive, and she lived in the summer
+months with her nurse in a shooting-box high up on the Yorkshire moors,
+the most inaccessible place, but she liked it, and the doctor approved
+of it. I used to go and see her there when I had time. But that was not
+often. I had made provision for her comfort, but I seldom saw her.
+
+"I laid the letter down, and wondered whether I ought to go. I did not
+want to leave London at that moment. I had been dancing all night with
+Mildred, and was very much _épris_ with her. Then I saw there was a
+postscript in the same handwriting, no doubt that of the nurse. "Miss
+Sinclair is more ill than she is aware."
+
+"That settled it. I must go. Once before I had been warned her condition
+was serious, and had hurried up to Yorkshire to find her almost as
+usual. But, nevertheless, I supposed I ought to go. I felt irritated
+with the poor little thing. But as my other sister Anna was married and
+out in India, I was the only relation she had left in England. I decided
+to go.
+
+"In that case it was not worth while to go to bed. I sat down by the
+open window, and watched the dawn come up behind Westminster. And as I
+sat with the letter in my hand a disgust of my life took hold of me. It
+looked suddenly empty and vain and self-seeking, and cumbered with
+worldly squalid interests and joyless amusements. And where was the one
+woman of whom I had had obscure hints from time to time? Other women
+came and went. But she who was essential to me, who became more
+essential to my well-being with every year--she never came. I felt an
+intense need of her, a passionate desire to find her, to seek her out.
+But where?
+
+"And as I sat there I felt in my inmost soul a faint thrill, a vibration
+that gradually flooded my whole being, and then slowly ebbed away. And
+something within me, something passionate surrendered myself to it, and
+was borne away upon it as by an outgoing tide. It ebbed farther and
+farther. And I floated farther and farther away with it in a golden
+mist. And in a wonderful place of peace I saw a young girl sitting alone
+in the dawn. I could not see her face, but I recognised her. She was the
+one woman in the world for me, my mate found at last. And I was consumed
+in an agony of longing. And I ran to her, and fell on my knees at her
+feet, and hid my face in her gown. And she bent over me, and raised me
+in her arms and held my head against her breast. And she said, 'Do not
+be distressed, I love you, and all is well.'
+
+"And we spoke together in whispers, and my agitation died away. I did
+not see her face, but I did not need to. I knew her as I had never known
+anyone before. I had found her at last.
+
+"I had never guessed, I had never dreamed, I had never read in any book
+that anything could be so beautiful. It was beyond all words. It was
+more wonderful than dawn at sea. I leaned my head against her and cried
+for joy. And she soothed me as a mother soothes her child. But she was
+crying too, crying for sheer joy. I felt her tears on my face. She
+needed me as I needed her. That was the most wonderful of all, her need
+of me. We had been drawn to each other from the ends of the earth, and
+we were safe in each other's arms at last.
+
+"And then gradually, imperceptibly, a change came. The same tide which
+had brought me to her feet began to draw me away again, and sudden
+terror seized me that I was going to lose her. I clung convulsively to
+her, but my arms were no longer round her. We were apart, stretching out
+our hands to each other. Her figure was growing dimmer and dimmer in a
+golden mist. In an agony I cried to her. 'Where shall I find you? Tell
+me how to reach you?' And she laughed, and her voice came serene and
+reassuring. 'We shall meet. You are on your way to me. You will find me
+on the high road.'
+
+"And we were parted from each other, and I came slowly back over immense
+distances and moving waveless tides of space; back to this room, and the
+dawn coming up behind the tower of Westminster."
+
+"You awoke in fact," I said.
+
+"No. I had not been asleep. I returned. And an immense peace enveloped
+me. But gradually that too, ebbed away as I began to realise that I had
+not seen her face. She was in the world, she was waiting for me. Thank
+God that was no delusion. But which of all the thousands of women in the
+crowd was she? How was I to know her? 'You are on your way to me, you
+will find me on the high road.' That was what she had said, and it
+flashed through my mind that she might be Mildred. 'You are on your way
+to me.' I was to motor Mildred to Burnham Beeches that very afternoon. I
+had arranged to take her there before I had received the letter about my
+sister. Chipps, I dare say you will think me heartless, perhaps you
+often have, but I simply dared not start off to Yorkshire that morning,
+even if my sister was dangerously ill. I had a feeling that my whole
+future was at stake, that I must see Mildred again, that nothing must
+come between her and me. I went with her to Burnham Beeches. We spent
+the afternoon together."
+
+"I have not forgotten that fact," I said.
+
+"And I found I was mistaken," he said. "She knew nothing. The same
+evening I went to Yorkshire, but I did not find my sister. She had died
+suddenly that afternoon."
+
+"You would have been in time to see her if you had let Mildred alone," I
+said brutally.
+
+He did not answer for a long time.
+
+"For ten years I looked for her, now in one person now in another, but I
+could not find her. I tried to go to her again in that waking dream, but
+I could not find the way. I could not discover any clue to her. For ten
+years she made no sign. At last I supposed she was dead, and I gave her
+up.
+
+"That was last autumn. Gout had been increasing on me, and I had been up
+to Strathpeffer to take the waters there. And my other sister Anna, now
+a widow, pressed me to stay a few days with her at the little house on
+the moors where my younger sister had lived, and which I allowed Anna to
+use as her home as she was extremely poor. The air was bracing and I
+needed bracing, so I went, dropping down from Strathpeffer by easy
+stages in my motor. I was glad I went. The heat was great, but on those
+uplands there was always a fresh air stirring. Anna, who had hardly seen
+me for years, made much of me, and though she had no doubt become
+rather eccentric since her husband's death, that did not matter much on
+a Yorkshire moor. I spent some happy days with her, and it turned out to
+be fortunate that I had come, for on the third afternoon of my visit,
+she had found out--she found out everything--that an old servant of
+mine, the son of my foster mother, had got into difficulties, and was
+being sold up next day at a distant farm. She urged me to motor over
+very early in the morning and stop the sale and put him on his legs
+again. I rather liked the idea of a thirty mile drive across the moors
+before the sun was up, and I agreed to go. I had no objection to acting
+Providence and pleasing Anna at the same time.
+
+"I shall never forget that afternoon. We had tea together in the
+verandah, overlooking the great expanse of the heathered, purple moors.
+And the thunder which had hung round us all day rolled nearer and
+nearer. The moors looked bruised and dark under the heavy sky. The long
+white road grew whiter and whiter. My sister left me to shut all the
+windows, and I lay in my long deck chair and looked at the road.
+
+"And as I looked the words came back to my mind. 'You will find me on
+the high road.' Lies! Lies! Ten years I had been seeking her. I should
+never find her. And far, far away on the empty highway I saw a woman
+coming. My heart beat suddenly, but I remembered that I had been
+deceived a hundred times, and this was no doubt but one more deception.
+I watched her draw nearer and nearer. She came lightly along towards the
+house under the livid sky with the heather on each side of her. She had
+a little knapsack on her shoulder. And as she drew near the breathless
+stillness before the storm was broken by a sheet of lightning and a clap
+of thunder. My sister rushed up and dragged the chairs farther back.
+Then her eye caught sight of the tall grey figure now close below us on
+the road. A few great drops fell.
+
+"Anna ran down to the gate and called to the woman to take shelter. She
+walked swiftly towards us, and then ran with my sister up the steps,
+just as the storm broke.
+
+"'Magnificent,' she said, easing her shoulder of the strap of her
+knapsack while her eyes followed the driving rain cloud. 'How kind of
+you to call me in. There is not another house within miles.'
+
+"She was a very beautiful woman of about thirty, with a small head and a
+clear-cut grave face. Her dark, parted hair had a little grey in it on
+the temples. She smoothed it with slender, capable, tanned hands. She
+had tea with us, my sister welcoming her as if she were her dearest
+friend. That was Anna all over.
+
+"The thunderstorm passed, but not the rain. It descended in sheets.
+
+"The stranger looked at it now and then, and at last rose and put out
+her hand for her knapsack.
+
+"'I must be going,' she said.
+
+"But Anna would not hear of it. There was not another house within
+miles. She insisted on her stopping the night. A room was got ready, and
+presently we all three sat down to a nondescript meal which poor Anna
+believed to be dinner.
+
+"I was attracted by our guest, but not more than I had often been before
+by other women. She had great beauty, but I had seen many beautiful
+women during the last twenty years. She was gay, and I like gaiety. And
+she had the look of alertness and perfect health which often accompanies
+a happy temperament. She and Anna talked incessantly, at least, Anna
+did. I did not join in much. My cure had left me languid. When we had
+finished our meal we found the rain had ceased, and the moon shone high
+in heaven over a world of mist. The moors were gone. The billows of mist
+drifted slowly past us like noiseless waves upon a great sea. The house
+and terraced garden rose above it like a solitary island. The night was
+hot and airless, and we sat out on the verandah, and talked of many
+things.
+
+"Of course, Anna is eccentric. There is no doubt about it. But the
+worst of her is that her form of eccentricity is infectious. She is
+extremely impulsive and confidential, and others follow suit if they are
+with her. I have known her once (at a luncheon party of eight people
+whom she had never met before) say, as a matter of course, that she
+remembered a previous existence, and sleeping seven in a bed in an
+underground cellar. I was horrified, but no one else was. And a grave
+man beside her, a minister, told her that when first he went to Madeira
+he remembered living there in a little Portuguese cottage with a row of
+sugar canes in front of it. He said he recognised the cottage the moment
+he saw it, and said to himself, 'At any rate, I am happier now than I
+was then.' A sort of barrier seemed always to go down in Anna's
+presence. People momentarily lost their fear of each other, and said
+things which I have no doubt they regretted afterwards.
+
+"I need hardly say that as Anna looked at the moonlight and the mist she
+became recklessly indiscreet. I could not stop her. I did not try. I
+shut my eyes, and pretended to be asleep. And she actually told this
+entire stranger all about her first meeting with her late husband, which
+it seemed had taken place on an expedition to Nepal. Anna was always
+wandering over the globe with Lamas, or sailing on inflated pigskins
+with wild Indians, or things of that kind. I had only known the bare
+fact of her marriage with a distinguished but impecunious soldier who
+had died some years later, and I was amazed what a dramatic story she
+made of her first encounter with him on the mountains of Nepal, and how
+his coolies had all run away, and she let him join on to her party. And
+how they walked together for three days through a land of rose-coloured
+rhododendrons; without even knowing each other's name, and how she
+cooked their meals at the doors of the little mud rest-houses. There was
+something very lovable after all in the way Anna told it. I realised for
+the first time that she, too, had lived, that she had been touched by
+the sacred flame, and that it was natural to her to speak of her great
+happiness, the memory of which dwelt continually with her.
+
+"I saw through my half-closed eyes the strange woman's hand laid for a
+moment on Anna's hand.
+
+"'You were very fortunate,' she said gently.
+
+"'Was I?' said Anna. 'I suppose everyone else is the same. We all see
+that light once in our lives, don't we? I am sure you have too.'
+
+"'I am unmarried,' said the stranger, 'and thirty years of age, and
+nothing of that kind has ever happened to me. I was once engaged to be
+married for a short time. But I had to break it off. It was no good. I
+suppose,' she said, with a low laugh, 'that the reason we are both
+talking so frankly is because we are entire strangers to each other.'
+
+"'I do believe the world would go all right, and that we should all be
+happy if only we did not know each other,' said Anna earnestly.
+
+"I felt sure the stranger would think her mad, but she answered
+tranquilly:
+
+"'There are two ways of living absolutely happily with our fellow
+creatures, I think. When you know nothing about them and have no tie to
+them, and when you know them through and through. But on the long road
+between where all the half-way houses are, there seems to be a lot of
+trouble and misunderstanding and disappointment.'
+
+"'We can never know anyone through and through until we love them,' said
+Anna.
+
+"'No,' said the stranger, 'Love alone can teach that. Even I know that,
+I who have never seen love except once--in a dream.'
+
+"'Tell me about it,' said Anna.
+
+"'I have never spoken of it,' she said with the same tranquillity; her
+face as I took one glance at it serene and happy in the moonlight,
+'except to my sister. And it is curious that I should speak of it here;
+for it was in this house it happened to me.'
+
+"'You have been here before?' said Anna.
+
+"'Yes. Ten years ago. That was why I went out of my way on my walking
+tour to-day just to look at the little place again. I stayed a month
+here, and I helped a friend of mine who is now dead, a trained nurse, to
+nurse a Miss Sinclair who was dying here.'
+
+"'We are her brother and sister,' said Anna.
+
+"'I thought it possible when I saw you on the verandah. You are both
+like her in a way. My friend, who was in charge, was over-taxed, and I
+came down to help her. Two nurses were necessary, but she did not like
+to complain, and the family seemed rather inaccessible. Miss Sinclair
+liked me, and I did the night work till she died. I left directly she
+was gone.'
+
+"'My brother was too late,' said Anna.
+
+"'Yes,' she said. 'I was grieved for him. I added a postscript unknown
+to her, to her last letter to him which I wrote at her dictation. My
+postscript would have alarmed him and brought him at once. But the
+letter must have been delayed in the post. The last night before the end
+I was sitting here on the verandah. I had just been relieved, and I
+ought to have gone to bed, but I came and sat here instead and watched
+the dawn come up, 'like thunder,' behind the moors. And as I sat I
+became very still, as if I were waiting in a great peace. And gradually
+I became conscious as at an immense distance of someone in trouble. I
+was not asleep, and I was not fully awake. And from a long, long way off
+a man came swiftly to me, and threw himself on his knees at my feet,
+and hid his face in my gown. He was greatly agitated, but I was not. And
+I wasn't surprised either. I raised him in my arms, and held him to my
+breast, and said, "Do not be distressed, for I love you, and all is
+well." It was quite true. I did love him absolutely, boundlessly, as I
+love him still. And gradually his agitation died away, and he rested in
+my arms, and ecstasy such as I had never thought possible enfolded us
+both. We both cried for sheer joy, and for having found each other. It
+was beyond anything I had ever dreamed. It was as beautiful as the
+dawn.'
+
+"'It _was_ the dawn,' said Anna.
+
+"'If it was the dawn, the day it spoke of never came,' said the stranger
+quietly, 'and presently we were parted from each other, and he began to
+be frightened again. And he called to me, 'Tell me how to find you,' and
+I laughed, for I saw he could not miss me. I saw the way open between
+him and me. Such a short little way, and so clear. I said, 'You are on
+your way to me now. You will find me on the high road.' It was such a
+plain road, that even a blind man could not miss it. And we were parted
+from each other and I came back to the other dawn, the outer dawn. For
+days and weeks I walked like one in a dream. I felt so sure of him, I
+would have staked my life upon his coming--that is ten years ago--but he
+never came.'
+
+"Chipps, I thought the two women must have heard the mad hammering of my
+heart. She was there before me in the moonlight, found at last--my
+beautiful, inaccessible mate. And she was free, and we loved each other
+as no one had loved since the world began. I could neither speak nor
+move. Though it was joy, it was the sharpest pain I had ever known. I
+did not know how to bear it.
+
+"'My dear, he will come still,' said Anna.
+
+"'Will he?' said the stranger, and she shook her head. She rose and
+stood in the moonlight, a tall, noble figure. And for the first time
+there was a shade of sadness on her serene, happy face.
+
+"'I saw the road so clear,' she said, 'but I am afraid he has somehow
+missed it. I have an intuition that he will not come now, that he is
+lost.'
+
+"Sitting far back in the shadow, I looked long at her, at my wonderful
+dream came true; and I swore that I would never lose sight of her again
+once found. I would take no risks; I would bind her to me with hooks of
+steel.
+
+"And then, in a few minutes, it was bedtime, and Anna aroused me, and
+she and her guest went off together hand in hand. I dragged myself to my
+room, too. I was shaking from head to foot, and Brown, my valet, said
+'You aren't fit, sir, to start at six in the morning.'
+
+"I had clean forgotten that I had arranged to drive early across the
+moors to stop the sale of my foster brother's farm. It was impossible to
+go now. I might come back in the afternoon and find my lady flown. There
+was no telegraph office within miles; I must think of some other plan.
+It was too late to countermand the motor, which put up several miles
+away. So I told Brown to send it back when it arrived at six, and to
+tell the chauffeur to bring it round again at eleven. Then, perhaps, my
+lady would deign to drive with me, and I might have speech with her.
+
+"'On the high road'--that was where she had said we should meet. Yes,
+when we were on the high road alone together, I would prove to her that
+I was her lover. I would boldly claim her. She would never repulse me,
+for she needed me as I needed her.
+
+"I did not sleep that night. It seemed so impossible, so amazing, that
+we had met at last. I felt transformed, younger than I had ever been.
+Waves of joy passed over me, and yet I was frightened, too. There was a
+sort of warning voice at the back of my mind telling me that I should
+lose her yet. But that was nonsense. My nerves were shaken. I could not
+lose her again. I would see to that.
+
+"Very early, long before six, I heard Anna stirring. I remembered with
+compunction that she had only one servant, and that she had said she
+would get up and cook my breakfast for me herself before I started. Anna
+was an excellent cook. I heard her rattling the kitchen grate and
+singing as she laid the breakfast and presently there were two voices,
+Anna's and another. I knew it was the voice of my lady. I felt unable to
+lie still any longer, and when the motor came round at six I was already
+half dressed. There was a momentary turmoil, and an opening and shutting
+of doors, and then the motor went away again. I finished dressing and
+went into the garden into the soft September sunshine. There was no one
+about. I went back to the house and found the servant clearing away a
+meal and relaying the table for me. I asked her where her mistress was,
+and she said she had gone in the motor with the other lady and had left
+a note for me. Sure enough, there was a scrawl stuck up on the
+mantelpiece.
+
+    "'So sorry you are not well enough to start, but don't worry your
+    kind heart about it. I have gone in your place and will arrange
+    everything. Take care of yourself, and don't wait luncheon.'
+
+"I got through the morning as best I could. I was abominably tired after
+my sleepless night and getting up so early, and a horrible anxiety grew
+and grew in me as the hours passed and Anna did not return. I had
+luncheon alone, and still no Anna. Could there have been an accident? I
+thought of my careful chauffeur and my new Daimler. Nothing ever
+happened to Anna, but I could not tolerate the idea of any risk to my
+lady. At last I heard the motor, and Anna came rushing in.
+
+"'It's all right,' she cried joyfully. 'Brian's farm is saved, and he
+and his old mother can't thank you enough. I told them both it was all
+your doing, and you had sent me as you were not well enough to go
+yourself. Brown told me how poorly you were. And it was only a hundred
+and fifty pounds, after all. I gave my cheque for it, as I didn't like
+to wake you for a blank one. They were almost paralysed with surprise.
+They could hardly thank me--I mean you--at first. Old Nancy cried, poor
+old darling, and called down blessings on you.'
+
+"'Did your guest enjoy the drive?' I said at last.
+
+"'She did,' said Anna. 'And, oh! how I wished you had been well enough
+to be driving with her instead of me. The world was all sky. Such a
+pageant I had never seen--such vistas and fastnesses and citadels of
+light. She said she should remember it always.'
+
+"'She is not tired, I hope?' I said.
+
+"'Tired! She said she was never tired. She said she would have walked
+the whole way if there had been time; but of course she was delayed by
+last night's storm. So she was glad of the lift, and I dropped her at
+the cross roads above Riffle station. That was a splendid woman,
+Gerald.'
+
+"I turned cold.
+
+"'Do you mean to say she's gone?'
+
+"'Yes. She sails for South America on Tuesday. I forget why she said she
+was going.'
+
+"'And what was her name?'
+
+"'I haven't an idea.'
+
+"'Anna, you don't mean to say you let her go without finding out her
+name and address?'
+
+"'I never thought of such a thing. She never asked any questions about
+me, and I didn't ask any about her. Why should I? What does her name
+matter?'"
+
+Sinclair groaned.
+
+"I lost her absolutely just when I thought I was sure of her," he said.
+"She walked into my life and she walked out of it again, leaving no
+trace. I haven't had the ghost of a chance."
+
+"Perhaps you will meet her again," I said at last, somewhat lamely. "She
+may turn up suddenly, just when you least expect her."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"I shall never find her," he said. "She's gone for ever, I know it. She
+knew it. Lost! Lost! Lost!"
+
+And the shadowed room echoed the word "Lost!"
+
+I told the whole story to Mildred next day. I dare say I ought not to
+have done, but I did.
+
+"Poor Mr. Sinclair," she said softly when I had finished.
+
+"Do you think he's off his head?" I said. "It sounds perfectly
+ridiculous, a sort of cracked hallucination."
+
+"Oh, no. It's all true," said Mildred, in the same matter-of-fact tone
+as if she had said the fire was out. Women are curious creatures. The
+story evidently did not strike her as at all peculiar.
+
+"What a pity he did not stick to the high road," she said.
+
+"What high road, in Heaven's name?" I asked.
+
+"Why, his duty, of course. Don't you see, it was there she was sitting
+waiting for him. It led him straight to her. She saw that, and that he
+couldn't miss her. He had only got to take the train to his sister when
+she was dying and he would have found his lady there. That was what she
+meant when she said the road was open between them. But he went down a
+side track to flirt with me and lost his chance. And the second time, if
+he had only stuck to going to the rescue of his foster brother, he could
+have given her a lift in his motor as Anna did, and have made himself
+known to her."
+
+"What a preposterously goody-goody idea! I don't believe it for a
+moment. Here have I been doing my duty for the last ten years, toiling
+and moiling and snarling at everybody, and it never led me to you that I
+can see."
+
+"It might have done," said Mildred, "if you hadn't been entirely
+compacted of pride and uncharitableness. I made a mistake ten years ago,
+and was horribly sorry for it, but you never gave me a chance of setting
+it right till last Tuesday."
+
+"I never thought I had the ghost of a chance till last Tuesday," I said.
+"Upon my honour I didn't. The first moment I saw it I simply pounced on
+it."
+
+"Pounced on it, did you?" said Mildred scornfully "And poor me, with
+hardly a rag of self-respect left from laying it in your way over and
+over again for you to pounce on. Men are all alike; all as blind as
+bats. I'm sure I don't know why we trouble our heads about them with
+their silly ghosts and chances and pouncings."
+
+
+
+
+The Goldfish
+
+A Favourite has no Friends.
+
+
+It was my first professional visit to the Robinsons. I had been called
+in to prescribe for Arthur Robinson, a nervous, emaciated young man,
+whom I found extended on a black satin sofa, in a purple silk dressing
+gown embroidered with life-sized hydrangeas. The sofa and the dressing
+gown shrieked aloud his artistic temperament.
+
+He had a bronchial cold, and my visit was, as he said, purely
+precautionary. He kept me a long time recounting his symptoms, and
+assuring me that he was absolutely fearless, and then dragged himself to
+his feet and led me into the magnificent studio his mother had built for
+him, where his sketches were arranged on easels, and where we found his
+wife, a pale, dark-eyed young creature cleaning his brushes.
+
+He appeared--like most egotistic people--to be greatly in need of a
+listener, and he poured forth his views on art, and the form his own
+message to the world would probably take. I am unfortunately quite
+inartistic, but I gave him my attention. I was in no hurry, for at that
+time the one perpetual anxiety that dogged my waking hours was that I
+had not enough patients.
+
+At last I remembered that I ought not to appear to have time to spare,
+and his wife took me downstairs to the drawing-room, where his mother
+was awaiting us, a large, fair woman, with a kindly foolish face.
+
+I saw at once that I was in for another interview as long as the first.
+
+Mrs. Robinson did not wait for me to give an opinion on her son's
+condition. She pressed me to be perfectly frank, and, before I could
+open my mouth to reply, poured forth a stream of information on what was
+evidently her only theme--Arthur's health.
+
+"I said the day before yesterday--didn't I, Blanche. 'Arthur, you have
+got a cold.' And _he_ said, so like him--'No Mother, I haven't.' That is
+Arthur all over. Isn't it, Blanche?"
+
+Blanche made no response. She sat motionless, gazing at her
+mother-in-law with half absent eyes, as if she were trying--and
+failing--to give her whole attention to the matter in hand.
+
+"Then I said in my joking way, 'Arthur, I can't have you starting a
+cold, and giving it to me and Blanche.' We don't want any presents of
+that kind. Do we, Blanche?"
+
+Blanche made no reply. Perhaps experience had taught her that it was a
+waste of energy.
+
+"So I said, 'with your tendency to bronchitis I shall send for Doctor
+Giles, and it will be a good opportunity to make his acquaintance now
+that our dear Doctor Whittington has retired.'"
+
+It went on a long time, Mrs. Robinson beaming indiscriminately on me and
+her daughter-in-law.
+
+At last, when she was deeply involved in Arthur's teething, I murmured a
+few words and stood up to go.
+
+"You will promise faithfully, won't you, to look in again to-morrow."
+
+I said that a telephone message would summon me at any moment. As I held
+out my hand I heard a loud splash.
+
+"Now, Dr. Giles, you are wondering what _that_ is," said Mrs. Robinson
+gleefully.
+
+I looked round and saw at the further end of the immense be-mirrored
+double drawing-room a grove of begonias, and heard a faint trickle of
+water.
+
+"It's an aquarium," said Mrs. Robinson triumphantly, and she looked
+archly at me. "Shall we tell Dr. Giles about it, Blanche?"
+
+"It has a goldfish in it," said Blanche, opening her lips for the first
+time.
+
+"That was the splash you heard," continued Mrs. Robinson, as if she were
+imparting a secret. "That splash was made by the goldfish."
+
+I gave up any thought I may have had of paying other professional calls
+that morning, and allowed Mrs. Robinson to lead me to the aquarium.
+
+As aquariums in back drawing-rooms go it was a very superior aquarium,
+designed especially for the house, so Mrs. Robinson informed me, by a
+very superior young man at Maple's----quite a gentleman.
+
+The aquarium had gravel upon its shallow bottom, and large pointed
+shells strewed upon the gravel. The water trickled in through a narrow
+grating on one side, and trickled out through another on the other side.
+An array of flowering begonias arranged round the irregularly shaped
+basin, gave the whole what Maple's young man had pronounced to be "a
+natural aspect," and effectually hid the two gratings while affording an
+unimpeded view of the shells, and the inmate.
+
+In the shallow water, motionless, save for his opening and shutting
+gills, and a faint movement of his tail, was poised a large obese
+goldfish.
+
+I looked at him through the gilt wire-netting stretched across the basin
+a few inches above the surface of the water, and it seemed as if he
+looked at me.
+
+I wondered with vague repugnance how anyone could regard him as a pet.
+To me he was wholly repulsive, swollen, unhealthy looking.
+
+"He knows me," said Mrs. Robinson, with a vain attempt at modesty. "He
+has taken a fancy to me. Cupboard love I'm afraid, Dr. Giles. You see I
+feed him every day. He just swims about or stays still if I am near,
+like I am now, and he can see me. But if I am some way off and he can't
+see me he tries to jump out to get to me. He never tries to jump when I
+am near him. I call him Goldy, Dr. Giles, and I'm just as fond of him as
+he is of me. Isn't it touching that a dumb creature should have such
+affection? If it were a dog or a cat of course I could understand it,
+and I once heard of a wolf that was loving, but I have always supposed
+till now that fishes were cold by nature. I daresay, dear Dr.
+Whittington told you about him? No! Well I am surprised, for he took
+such an interest in Goldy. It was Dr. Whittington who made me put the
+wire-netting over the aquarium. He said 'Some day that poor fellow will
+jump out in your absence to try and get to you, and you will find him
+dead on the carpet.' So we put the wire-netting across."
+
+"He jumps," said the young girl gazing intently at the goldfish. "When
+we sit playing cards in the evening he jumps again and again. But the
+wire always throws him back."
+
+I looked for the first time at Mrs. Robinson's daughter-in-law; her
+colourless young face bent over the aquarium with an expression of
+horror. And as I looked the luncheon bell rang, and with it arose a
+clamour of invitation from Mrs. Robinson that I should stay for the
+meal. Pot luck! Quite informal! etc., etc., but I wrenched myself away.
+
+A few days later I called on my predecessor, Dr. Whittington, and
+found him sitting in his garden at East Sheen. He was, as always,
+communicative and genial, but it was evident that his interest in his
+late patients had migrated to his roses.
+
+"Mrs. Robinson is an egregious goose, my dear Giles, as you must have
+already perceived, but she is a goose that lays golden eggs. You simply
+can't go too often to please them. I went nearly every day, and they
+constantly asked me to dinner. They have an excellent cook."
+
+"They adored you," I said.
+
+"They did; and some great writer has said somewhere that we must pay the
+penalty for our deepest affections. I--ahem! exacted the penalty; you
+see part of the results in my Malmaisons, and I advise you to follow in
+my footsteps. They are made of money."
+
+"They look it."
+
+"And they are, if I may say so, a private preserve. They know nobody. I
+always thought that everybody knew somebody, at any rate every one who
+is wealthy, but they don't seem to know a soul. If you dine there you'll
+meet a High Church parson whom they sit under, or the family solicitor,
+or a servile female imbecile who was Arthur's governess, and laughs at
+everything he says--no one else."
+
+"Didn't he go to school?"
+
+"Never. His mother said it would break his spirit. I've attended him
+from his birth. A very costly affair _that_ was to Mrs. Robinson, for I
+had to live in the house for weeks, in order to help to usher in young
+Robinson, and at the same time usher out old Robinson, noisily dying of
+locomotor ataxia, and drink on the ground floor. I've since come to the
+conclusion that she never was legally his wife, and that is why they
+know no one, and don't seem to make any effort socially. She had all the
+money, there's no doubt of that, and she wasn't by any means in her
+first youth. I rather think he must have been a bigamist or something
+large hearted of that kind. Perhaps like Henry the Eighth he suffered
+from a want of concentration of the domestic affections."
+
+"And what is the son like, a malade imaginaire? I've never seen anything
+like his dressing gowns except in futurist pictures."
+
+"A malade imaginaire! Good Lord! no. Where are your professional eyes?
+Arthur is his father's son, that is what is the matter with him.
+Abnormal irritability and inertia, and a tendency to dessimated
+sclerosis. He may have talent, I'm no judge of that; but he'll never do
+anything. No sticking power. He's doomed. If ever any one was born under
+an unlucky star that poor lad was. He began to cause a good deal of
+anxiety when he was about twenty, made a determined attempt to go to
+the devil: women, drink, drugs. In short, it looked at one moment as if
+he would be his father over again without his father's vitality. His
+mother was in despair. I said to her, 'My good woman, find him a wife; a
+pretty young wife who will exert a good influence over him and keep him
+straight.'"
+
+"Apparently she followed your advice."
+
+"She did. It was the only chance for him, and not a chance worth betting
+on even then. I've often wondered how she found the girl. She makes no
+end of a pet of her. She's a warmhearted old thing. She ought to have
+had a dozen children, and a score of grandchildren. Introduce your wife
+and family to her, Giles. She'll take to them at once. She's fond of all
+young people. She's wrapped up in her son and daughter-in-law and--"
+
+"Her goldfish?" I suggested.
+
+"Her goldfish," assented Dr. Whittington, with a grin. "What an ass she
+is. She actually believes the brute tries to jump out of the aquarium to
+get to her."
+
+"You encouraged her in that belief."
+
+"My dear Giles," said my predecessor drily, "I have indicated to you the
+path your feet should assiduously tread as regards the Robinsons. Now
+come and look at my Blush Ramblers."
+
+Dr. Whittington was right. The Robinson family was a gold mine. It is
+not for me to say whether I resorted to a pick and shovel as he had
+done, or whether, resisting temptation, I held the balance even between
+my duty, and the natural cupidity of a man with an imperceptible income,
+and three small children. At any rate I saw a great deal of the
+Robinsons.
+
+Arthur was a most interesting case, to which I brought a deep
+professional interest. Perhaps also I was touched by his youth and good
+looks, and felt compassion for the heavy handicap which life had laid
+upon him. I strained every nerve to help him. Dr. Whittington had been
+an old-fashioned somewhat narrow-minded practitioner close on seventy. I
+was a young man, fresh from walking the hospitals. I used modern
+methods, and they were at first attended with marked success. Mrs.
+Robinson was at my feet. She regarded me, as did Arthur, as a
+heaven-born genius. She openly blessed the day that had seen the
+retirement of Dr. Whittington. She transferred her adoration from him to
+me as easily as a book is transferred from one table to another. She
+called on my wife; and instantly enfolded her and the children in her
+capacious affections, and showered on us cream-cheeses, perambulators,
+rocking-chairs, special brands of marmalade, "The Souls' Awakening" in a
+plush and gilt frame, chocolate horses and dogs, eiderdown quilts and
+her favourite selection from the works of Marie Corelli and Ella
+Wheeler-Wilcox.
+
+I began to think that Dr. Whittington had not put such an exorbitant
+price on the practise as I had at first surmised.
+
+I fought with all my strength for Arthur, and it was many months before
+I allowed myself to realise that I was waging a losing battle. I had
+unlimited funds at my disposal, the Robinson purse had apparently no
+bottom to it. My word was law. What I ordered Mrs. Robinson obsequiously
+carried out. Nevertheless, at last I had to own to myself that I was
+vanquished. Arthur was doomed, as Dr. Whittington had said, and certain
+sinister symptoms were making themselves more and more apparent. His
+temper always moody and irritable, was becoming morose, vindictive, with
+sudden outbursts of foolish mirth. The outposts were being driven in one
+after another. I saw with profound discouragement that in time--perhaps
+not for a long time if I could fend it off--his malady would reach the
+brain.
+
+I encouraged him to be much in the open air. I planned expeditions by
+motor to Epping Forest, to Virginia Water, on which his young wife
+accompanied him. She was constantly with him, walked with him, drove
+with him, played patience with him, painted with him, or rather watched
+him paint until the trembling of his hand obliged him to lay down his
+brush. I hardly exchanged a word with her from one week's end to
+another. She seemed a dutiful, docile, lifeless sort of person, without
+any of the spontaneity and gaiety of youth. Mrs. Robinson owned to me
+that fond as she was of her daughter-in-law, her companionship had not
+done all she hoped for her son.
+
+"So absent-minded, Dr. Giles, so silent, never keeps the ball rolling at
+meals; the very reverse of chatty, I do assure you. I don't know what's
+coming to young people now-a-days. In my youth," etc., etc.
+
+Gradually I conceived a slight dislike to Blanche. She seemed
+colourless, lethargic, one of those people who without vitality
+themselves, sap that of others, and expect to be dragged through life by
+the energy of those with whom they live. It was perfectly obvious that
+fat and foolish Mrs. Robinson was the only person in the house with any
+energy whatever.
+
+Presently the whole family had influenza. Then for the first time I saw
+Blanche alone. She was laid up with the malady at the same time as her
+husband and mother-in-law. I went to her room, to see how she did, and
+found her in bed.
+
+She looked very small and young and wan, in an immense gilt four poster
+with a magnificent satin quilt.
+
+I reassured her as to her husband's condition, and then asked her a few
+questions about herself, and told her that she would soon be well
+again.
+
+She gave polite answers, but again I had that first impression of her
+that she was making an effort to keep her attention from wandering, that
+she felt no interest in what I was saying.
+
+"Have you an amusing book to pass the time?" I asked.
+
+She looked at a pile on the table near her.
+
+"Perhaps your eyes are too tired to read?"
+
+"No," she said, "I had forgotten they were there. I don't care for
+reading."
+
+Her eyes left the books and travelled back to the other end of the large
+ornate room, overfilled with richly gilt Empire furniture.
+
+I turned and followed her rapt gaze.
+
+There were half-a-dozen yellow chrysanthemums in a dull green jar on a
+Buhl chiffonier. The slanting November sunshine fell on them, and threw
+against the white wall a shadow of them. It was a shadow transfigured,
+intricate yet vague, mysterious, beautiful exceedingly.
+
+I should never have noticed it if she had not looked at it with such
+intentness. For a moment I saw it with her eyes. I was touched; I hardly
+knew why. All the apathy was gone from her face. There was passion in
+it. She looked entirely exhausted, and yet it was the first time I had
+seen her really alive.
+
+The sunshine went out suddenly, and she sighed.
+
+"You may get up to-morrow, and go downstairs," I said. "It is dull for
+you alone up here."
+
+"I like being here," she said.
+
+Was she, like so many women, "contrary?" Always opposing the suggestions
+of others, never willing to fall in with family arrangements.
+
+"Don't you want to see the goldfish?" I hazarded, speaking as if to a
+child. "He must be lonely now Mrs. Robinson is laid up. And who will
+give him his crumbs?"
+
+"No, I don't want to see him," she said passionately. "I never look at
+him if I can help it. Oh Dr. Giles, everyone seems to shut their eyes
+who comes into this house--everyone--but don't you see how dreadful it
+is to be a prisoner?"
+
+She looked at me with timid despairing eyes, which yet had a flicker of
+hope in them. I patted her hand gently, and found she still had a little
+fever.
+
+"But he gets plenty of crumbs," I said soothingly, "and it is a nice
+aquarium with fresh water running through all the time. I think he is a
+very lucky goldfish."
+
+She looked fixedly at me, and the faint colour in her cheeks faded, the
+imploring look vanished from her eyes.
+
+She leaned back among her lace pillows.
+
+"That is what Mrs. Robinson says," she said with a quivering lip, and I
+perceived that I was relegated to the same category in her mind as her
+mother-in-law.
+
+She withdrew her thin hand and retreated once more behind the frail
+bastion of silence from which she had looked out at me for all these
+months; from which she had for one moment emerged, only to creep back to
+its forlorn shelter.
+
+A few days later Mrs. Robinson was convalescent, sitting up in bed in a
+garish cap festooned with cherry-coloured ribbons, and a silk wadded
+jacket to match. I questioned her about her daughter-in-law, in whom for
+the first time I felt interested. It needed no acumen on my part to draw
+forth the whole of Blanche's short history. One slight question was all
+that was necessary to turn on the cock of Mrs. Robinson's confidences.
+The stream gushed forth at once, it overflowed, it could hardly be
+turned off again. I was drenched.
+
+"How long has Blanche been married? Two years, Dr. Giles. She's just
+nineteen. That's her age--nineteen. Seventeen and three days when she
+married. Such a romance. _She_ was seventeen and Arthur was twenty-two.
+Five years difference. Just right, and you never saw two young people so
+much in love with each other. And such a beautiful couple. It was a love
+match. Made in heaven. Just like his father and me over again. That is
+what I said to them. I said on their wedding day: 'Well, I hope you
+will be as happy as your father and I were.'"
+
+There was not much information to be retrieved from Mrs. Robinson's
+gushings, but in the course of the next few days I hooked up out of a
+flood of extraneous matter a few facts which had apparently escaped her
+notice.
+
+Blanche it seemed was the niece of a former Senior Curate of St.
+Botolph's. "A splendid preacher, Dr. Giles, and a real churchman, high
+mass and confession, and incense, just the priest for St. Botolph's, a
+dedicated celibate and vegetarian--such a saintly example to us all."
+
+It appeared obvious to me, though not to Mrs. Robinson, that the
+vegetarian celebate had been embarrassed as to what to do with his
+niece, when at the age of seventeen she had been suddenly left on his
+hands owing to the inconvenient death of her widowed mother. Evidently
+Blanche had not had a farthing.
+
+"But he was such a wide-minded man. Of course he wanted dear Blanche to
+lead the highest life, and to dedicate herself as he had done, and to go
+into a sisterhood. But she cried all the time when he explained it to
+her, and said she could not paint in a sisterhood. And she didn't seem
+to fancy illuminating missals, or church embroidery, just what he had
+thought she would like. He was always thinking what would make her
+happy. And then it turned out there was some question of expense as well
+which he had not foreseen, so he gave up the idea. And just at that time
+I had a lot of trouble with Arthur--with drink--between you and me. It
+was such a hot summer. I am convinced it was the heat that started it;
+too much whiskey in the soda water--and other things as well. Arthur was
+got hold of and led away. And Dr. Whittington advised me to find a nice
+young wife for him. And I told Mr. Copton--that was the priest's name,
+all about it--I always told him everything, and he was _most_ kind, and
+interested, and so understanding, and he agreed a good wife was just
+what Arthur wanted, and marriage was an honourable estate, those were
+his very words. And Arthur was fond of painting, and Blanche was fond of
+painting too, simply devoted to it, and they had lessons together in a
+private studio and--"
+
+It went on and on for ever.
+
+"And her uncle gave her away. He was quite distressed that he could not
+afford a trousseau, for he was Rector Designate of Saint Oressa's at
+Liverpool, but I told him not to trouble about that. I gave her
+everything just as if she had been my own child. I spent hundreds on her
+trousseau, and she was married in my Brussels lace veil that I wore at
+my own wedding. I just took to her as my own child from the first. And
+would you believe it before he went away on his honeymoon, Arthur
+brought me the goldfish to keep me company. In a bowl it was. Such a
+quaint idea, wasn't it, so like Arthur. They are my two pets, Blanche
+and Goldy."
+
+I am not an artistic person, but even I was beginning to have doubts
+about Arthur's talent. It seemed somehow unnatural that he was always
+having his work enlarged by a third or a fifth, or both. Every picture
+he had painted, before his hands trembled too much to hold a brush, was
+faithfully copied and enlarged by his wife. She reproduced his dreary
+compositions with amazing exactitude, working for hours together in a
+corner of his studio, while he lay pallid, with half-closed eyes on the
+black satin sofa, watching her.
+
+I had always taken for granted they were a devoted couple. Mrs. Robinson
+was always saying so, and it was obvious that Arthur never willingly
+allowed his wife out of his sight.
+
+However, one morning I came into the studio when there was trouble
+between them. I saw at once it was one of his worst days.
+
+He was standing before an enlargement of one of his pictures livid with
+anger.
+
+"How often am I to to tell you that a copy must be exact," he stammered
+in his disjointed staccato speech. "If you quote a line of poetry do
+you alter one of the words? If I trust you to reproduce a picture surely
+you know you are not at liberty to change it."
+
+She was as pale as he was. She looked dully at him, and then at her own
+canvas on the easel.
+
+"I forgot," she said, in a suffocated voice.
+
+I looked at the original and the copy, and even my stolid heart beat a
+little quicker.
+
+The original represented a young girl--his wife had evidently sat for
+him--playing on a harp, while a man listened, leaning against a table,
+with a bowl of chrysanthemums upon it.
+
+The copy was much larger than the original, and its wooden smugness was
+faithfully reproduced. The faulty drawing of the two figures seemed to
+have been accentuated by doubling its size. It was an amazingly exact
+reproduction, except in one particular. In Blanche's copy she had made
+the shadow of the chrysanthemums fall upon the wall. It was a wonderful,
+a mysterious shadow, _I had seen it before_.
+
+"I hadn't indicated the slightest shadow," Arthur continued. "There is
+no sunshine in the room. You have deliberately falsified my
+composition."
+
+"I did it without thinking," said Blanche shivering. "It is a mistake."
+
+"A mistake," he said sullenly. "Your heart isn't in your work, that is
+the truth. You don't really care to help me to find my true
+expression."
+
+And he took the canvas from the easel and tore it in two.
+
+Did he half know, did some voice in the back of his twisted brain cry
+out to him that his part of the picture was hopelessly mediocre and out
+of drawing, that the only value it possessed was the shadow of the
+chrysanthemums? Was there jealousy in his rage? Who shall say!
+
+I butted in at this point, and made a pretext for sending Blanche out of
+the room.
+
+"Now, my dear fellow," I said confidentially, "don't in future try to
+associate your wife with your art. It is quite beyond her. Women, sir,
+have no artistic feeling. The home, dress, amusement that is their
+department. 'Occupy till I come,' might well have been said of feminine
+talent. It does occupy--till--ahem! _we_ arrive. When a woman is happily
+married like your wife she doesn't care a fig for anything else. Let her
+share your lighter moments, your walks and drives, allow her to solace
+your leisure. The bow, sir, must not be always at full stretch. But
+promise me you won't allow her to copy any more of your pictures."
+
+"Never again," said Arthur sepulchrally, stretched face downwards on the
+satin sofa.
+
+I picked up the two pieces of torn canvas. A sudden idea seized me.
+
+"And now," I said, "I shall say a few words of reprimand to Mrs.
+Robinson. You need not fear that I shall be too severe with her."
+
+Arthur made no movement, and I left him, and after taking the torn
+picture to my car I climbed to the top of the house where I suspected I
+should find Blanche.
+
+Her mother-in-law had reluctantly given her leave to use an attic lumber
+room, and, amid a litter of old trunks and derelict furniture and
+cardboard boxes, she had made a little clearing near the window, where
+she worked feverishly at her painting in her rare leisure.
+
+I had seen the room once when I had helped the nurse to carry down a
+screen put away there, and suddenly needed in one of Arthur's many
+illnesses. I had been touched by the evident attempt to make some sort
+of refuge in that large house, where there were several empty rooms on
+the lower floors, but--perhaps--no privacy.
+
+I quickly found that Mrs. Robinson tacitly disapproved of Blanche
+working in the attic. Her kind face became almost hard when she spoke of
+the hours her daughter-in-law spent there, when her sick husband wanted
+her downstairs.
+
+I tapped at the door, but there was no answer, and I went in. Blanche
+was sitting near the window on a leather trunk.
+
+I expected to find her distressed, but her eyes, as they were raised to
+meet mine, were untroubled. An uncomprehending calm dwelt in them. I
+saw that she had already forgotten her husband's anger in her complete
+absorption in something else.
+
+For the first time it struck me that her mental condition was not quite
+normal. Had she then no memory; or did she continually revert, as soon
+as she was left to herself to some world of her own imagination, where
+her harassed, bewildered soul was refreshed? I remembered the look I had
+often seen in her face, the piteous expression of one anxiously
+endeavouring and failing to fix her attention.
+
+She was giving the whole of it now to a picture on a low easel before
+her. I drew near and looked at it also.
+
+It was a portrait of the goldfish. It was really exactly like him with
+his eye turned up on the look out for crumbs. He was outlined against a
+charming assortment of foreign shells, strewn artistically on a zinc
+floor. The aquarium was encircled by a pretty little grove of cowslips
+and primroses, which gave the picture a cheerful and pleasing aspect.
+
+"It is lovely," I said.
+
+"He is a lucky goldfish, isn't he?" she said apathetically.
+
+I pondered long that night over Blanche. I reproached myself that I had
+not perceived earlier that she was overwrought. When I came to think of
+it her life was deeply overshadowed by her husband's illness. Was it
+possible that she was the more talented of the two, and that it was not
+congenial to her to spend so much of her time docilely copying Arthur's
+pictures? I had never thought of that before. I knew nothing about art
+myself, but I could find out. I was becoming much more occupied by this
+time, and one of my patients was the celebrated artist, M., whose slow
+death I was trying to make as painless as possible.
+
+A day or two later I laid before him the picture Arthur had torn in two.
+
+I can still see M. sitting in his arm-chair in the ragged dressing gown
+which he wore day and night, unshaved, wrinkled, sixty.
+
+He threw the larger half of the canvas on the floor, and held the piece
+containing the chrysanthemums and their shadow in his thin shaking talon
+of a hand, moving it now nearer now further away from his half blind
+blood-shot eyes.
+
+I began to explain that only the chrysanthemums were by the wife of the
+painter of the picture, but he brushed me aside.
+
+"She can see," he said at last. "And she's honest. I was honest once.
+She can't always say all she sees--who can--but she sees _everything_.
+Bring me something more of hers."
+
+Reader, after immense cogitation I decided to take him two of Arthur's
+compositions, the couple which after hours of agitated vacillation he
+considered to be his best. They were all spread out in his studio, and I
+had to assist in his decision. He had on several occasions--knowing I
+attended the great man--hinted to me that he should like M. to see his
+work and advise him upon it, but I had never taken the hint. Mrs.
+Robinson was only surprised that he had not pressed to see her son's
+pictures earlier. She and Arthur evidently thought I had kept them from
+the famous painter's notice until now, as, indeed, I had.
+
+"And I must take something of yours too," I said kindly to Blanche as
+she put the two selected works of art into a magnificent portfolio.
+
+"Yes, indeed," said Mrs. Robinson. "Blanche paints sweetly too, but
+mostly copies. She's a wonderful hand at copying."
+
+"I have nothing," said Blanche, "except the goldfish."
+
+"Then I must take him," I said. This was regarded as a great joke by
+Arthur and his mother, and they could hardly believe I was in earnest
+until I sent Blanche for it.
+
+"It's Goldy to the very life," said Mrs. Robinson fondly, "and the
+shells and everything exact. Such a beautiful home for him."
+
+Arthur looked gloomily at the little picture, and for a moment I thought
+he would forbid my taking it, but I wrapped it up with decision, put it
+in the portfolio with the others, and departed.
+
+I found M. as usual in his armchair in his studio, leaning back livid
+and breathless, endeavouring so he whispered "to get forward with his
+dying."
+
+I assured him he was getting forward at a great pace.
+
+"Not quick enough for me, Giles," he said, "and you won't help me out,
+d---- you."
+
+I put the goldfish on a chair in front of him. He looked at it for some
+moments without seeing it, and then reared himself slowly in his chair.
+
+He began to speak in his broken husky voice, and for an instant I
+thought he had gone mad.
+
+"Ha!" he said, leaning forward towards the picture. "You're portrayed,
+sir. Your unsympathetic personality, your unhealthy spots, your dorsal
+redness, and your abdominal pallor, your sullen eye turned upwards to
+your captors and their crumbs, all these are rendered with lynx-eyed
+fidelity. Privacy is not for you. Like Marie Antoinette, you are always
+in the full view of your gaolers."
+
+He paused to take breath.
+
+"This is England, a free country where we lock into tiny prisons for our
+amusement the swiftest of God's creatures, birds, squirrels, rabbits,
+mice, fishes. You are silhouetted against a background of incongruous
+foreign shells strewn on a zinc floor: the nightmare of a mad
+conchologist. What tenderness, what beauty in the cowslips and
+primroses which encircle your prison and almost hide the iron
+grating--but not quite. The rapture of Spring is in them. They bloom,
+they bloom, every bud is opening. The contrast between their joyous
+immobility and your enforced immobility is complete. Nothing remains to
+you, to you once swift, once beautiful, once free, nothing remains to
+you in your corpulent despair except--the pleasures of the table."
+
+M. leaned back exhausted, trembling a little.
+
+"It is certainly a work of the imagination," I hazarded, "if you can
+read all that into it."
+
+"Giles, my good fellow, confine yourself to your own sphere, how to keep
+in life against my will and all laws of humanity my miserable worn out
+carcase. That is not a work of the imagination. It is the work of close
+and passionate observation, observation so close, and of such integrity
+that it fears nothing, evades nothing. It is tremendous."
+
+There was a moment's silence. I was a little hurt. I knew I was ignorant
+about art, but after all I had brought the picture to M.'s notice.
+
+"How old is she?"
+
+"Nineteen."
+
+"I've never had a pupil, but if I could live a few months longer I would
+take her. I suppose she's starving. I nearly starved at her age. I'll
+give her a hundred for it, and I'll see to its future. Send her round
+here to-morrow morning." He scrawled and flung me a cheque for a hundred
+guineas.
+
+"Now, understand," I said, "I will bring the girl to see you to-morrow
+on one condition only, that you buy her husband's 'Last Farewell,'
+and 'The dawn of love' for fifty pounds each. They are in this
+portfolio--and 'The Goldfish' by his wife for five. Is that a bargain?"
+
+"If you say so it is. You always get your own way. I suppose he's
+jealous of her."
+
+"He's just beginning to be, and he doesn't do things by halves."
+
+Perhaps the happiest moment of poor Arthur's tawdry inflamed existence
+was when I told him that the great M. had bought his pictures. The
+latent suspicion and smouldering animosity died out of his eyes. He
+became radiant, boyish, for the moment sane. Perhaps he had looked like
+that before the shadow fell. Blanche, too, was suffused with delight.
+Mrs. Robinson, hurrying in with an armful of lilac orchids, was
+overjoyed. She burst forth in loud jubilation, not unlike the screeches
+of the London "syrens" when they herald the coming in of the New Year.
+She it seemed had _always_ known, _always_ seen her boy's genius. He
+would get into the Academy now, from which jealousy had so long kept him
+out. He would be hung on the line. He would be recognised. He would be
+as great as M. himself, greater, for she and others among her friends
+had never fancied his pictures. They had not the lofty moral tone of
+Arthur's.
+
+I produced the cheque.
+
+"One hundred pounds for Arthur," I said, "and five pounds for the
+goldfish."
+
+Blanche started violently and looked incredulously at me.
+
+Arthur's jaw dropped. Then he said patronizingly, "Well done, Blanche,"
+and leaned back pallid and exhausted on the satin couch.
+
+"I must see him," he said over and over again as his mother laid a warm
+rug over his knees, and his wife put a cushion behind his head. "He
+could tell me things, tricks of the trade. Art is all a trick."
+
+"He found no fault with your work," I said, "but--don't be discouraged,
+Blanche--he did criticise yours. He said you could not put down all you
+saw."
+
+"What have I always told you, Blanche?" said Arthur solemnly. "You put
+down what you _don't_ see. Look at that shadow where I had not put one."
+
+"He is really too ill to see anyone, but he will speak to Blanche for a
+few minutes." I turned to her. "You must not mind if he is severe. He
+is a drastic critic. Would you like to put on your hat and come with me?
+I am going on to him now."
+
+I had some difficulty in getting her out of the house. Mrs. Robinson
+wanted to come too. Arthur was determined that she should wait till he
+was better, and they could go together. But I had long since established
+my authority in that household. I had my way.
+
+Blanche asked no questions as we drove along. She did not seem the least
+surprised that the greatest painter of his day had bought her husband's
+pictures. Was she lacking in intelligence? Was there some tiny screw
+loose in her mind?
+
+M. had not made a toilet as I half expected he would. When we came in he
+was standing with his back to us, leaning against the mantelpiece, his
+unshaved chin on his hands. His horrible old dressing gown, stained with
+paint, and showing numerous large patches of hostile colours, clung to
+him more tightly than ever. His decrepitness struck me afresh. He
+looked what, indeed, he was, an old and depraved man, repulsive,
+formidable--unwashed--a complex wreck, dying indomitably on his feet.
+
+"And so you can do things like that," he said, turning towards Blanche a
+face contracted with pain, and pointing a lean finger at the goldfish,
+and the chrysanthemum shadow, propped side by side on the mantel piece.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Where were you taught?"
+
+She mentioned the school where she had studied.
+
+"Why did you leave it?"
+
+"Because Mother died, and I had not any money to go on with my
+education."
+
+"And so you married for a home I suppose," he snarled, showing his black
+teeth, "for silken gowns and delicate fare and costly furs such as you
+are wearing now."
+
+She did not answer.
+
+"You had better have gone on the streets and stuck to your painting."
+
+Blanche's dark eyes met the painter's horrible leer without flinching.
+
+"I wish I had," she said.
+
+They had both forgotten me. They were intent upon each other.
+
+And she who never spoke about herself said to this stranger:
+
+"I married because I did not want to go into a sisterhood, and because
+Arthur said he understood what I felt about painting, and that he felt
+the same, and that when we were married we would both study under S.,
+and I was grateful to him, and I thought I loved him. But S. would not
+take him and wanted to take me. And Arthur was dreadfully angry, and
+would not let me go without him. And the years passed, hundreds and
+hundreds of years, and Arthur changed to me. And he has to be humoured.
+And now--I copy his pictures. I enlarge them. Sometimes I decrease them,
+but not often. He likes to watch me doing them. He does not care for me
+to be doing anything else."
+
+There was a long silence.
+
+They stood looking at each other, and it seemed as if the sword that had
+pierced her soul pierced his also.
+
+"Leave all and follow me," said the painter at last. "That is the voice
+of art, as well as of Jesus of Nazareth. That is the law. There is no
+middle course. You have not left all, you have not followed. You have
+dallied and faltered and betrayed your gift. You have denied your Lord.
+And your sin has found you out. You are miserable; you deserve to be
+miserable."
+
+She made no answer.
+
+"But you are at the end of your tether. I know what I know. You can't go
+on. You are nineteen and your life is unendurable to you. You are
+touching the fringe of despair. Break away from your life before it
+breaks you. Shake its dust from off your feet. Forsake all and find
+peace in following your art."
+
+"You might as well say to the goldfish, jump out," said Blanche, white
+to the lips, pointing to the picture.
+
+"I do say to him, 'Jump out.' Leap in the dark, and risk dying on a
+vulgar Axminster carpet, and being trodden into it, rather than pine in
+prison on sponge cake."
+
+"Yes," said Blanche fiercely, "but there is the wire netting. It's not
+in the picture, but _you know it's there_. He jumps and jumps. Haven't I
+said so in the picture! And it throws him back. You know that. I was
+like him once. I used to jump, but I always fell back. I don't jump any
+more now."
+
+And then, without any warning, she burst into a paroxysm of tears.
+
+For a moment I stared at her stupified, and then slipped out of the room
+to fetch a glass of water.
+
+When I came back M. was sunk down in his armchair, and she was crouching
+on the ground before him almost beside herself, holding him by the feet.
+
+"Let me live with you," she gasped half distraught. "Arthur hates me,
+and I'm frightened of him. He's mad, mad, mad, only Dr. Giles pretends
+he isn't, and Mrs. Robinson pretends; everything in that dreadful house
+is pretence, nothing real anywhere. Let me live with you. Then he'll
+divorce me, and you needn't marry me. I don't want to be married. I
+won't be any trouble to you. No pretty clothes, no amusements, no
+expense. I don't want anything except a little time to myself, to
+paint."
+
+"You poor soul," said the painter faintly, and in his harsh voice was an
+infinite compassion.
+
+"Help me to jump out," she shrieked, clinging to him.
+
+"My child," he said. "I cannot help you. I am dying. I could not live
+long enough even to blacken your name. I have failed others in the past
+whom I might have succoured. Now I fail you as I failed them. There is
+no help in me."
+
+He closed his eyes, but nevertheless two very small tears crept from
+beneath the wrinkled lids, and stood in the furrows of his cheeks.
+
+She trembled and then rose slowly to her feet, and obediently took the
+glass of water which I proffered to her. She drank a little, and then
+placed the glass carefully on the table and drew on her gloves. I saw
+that she had withdrawn once more after a terrible bid for freedom into
+her fortress of reserve. She was once more the impassive, colourless
+creature whom I had seen almost daily for a year without knowing in the
+least until to-day what she really was.
+
+"I ought to be going back now," she said to me.
+
+"I will take you home," I said.
+
+She went slowly up to M. and stood before him. I had never seen her look
+so beautiful.
+
+The old man looked at her fixedly.
+
+"I made up my mind," she said, "after I spoke to Dr. Giles that I would
+never try to jump out any more, but you see I did."
+
+"Forgive me," he said brokenly, holding out a shaking hand.
+
+"It's not your fault," she said, clasping his hand in both of hers. "You
+are good, and you understand. You are the only person I have ever met
+who would help me if you could. But no one can help me. No one."
+
+And very reverently, very tenderly, she kissed his leaden hand and laid
+it down upon his knee.
+
+As I took Blanche home I said to her:
+
+"And when did you appeal to me, and when did I repulse you?"
+
+"When I spoke to you about Goldy and you weren't sorry, you did not mind
+a bit. You only said he was a lucky goldfish."
+
+"And what in Heaven's name had that to do with you?"
+
+She looked scornfully at me as if she were not going to be entrapped
+into speaking again.
+
+I saw that she had--so to speak--ruled me out of her life. Perhaps when
+I first came to that unhappy house nearly a year ago she had looked to
+me as a possible helper, had weighed me in the balance, and had found me
+wanting.
+
+I was cut to the heart, for deep down, at the bottom of my mind I saw at
+last, that I _had_ failed her.
+
+She might be, she probably was, slightly deranged, but, nevertheless,
+she had timidly, obscurely sought my aid, and had found no help in me.
+
+M. died the following evening, after trying to die throughout the whole
+day. I never left him until, at last, late at night, he laid down his
+courage, having no further need of it, and reached the end of his
+ordeal.
+
+Next morning after breakfast I went as usual to the Robinson's house,
+and, according to custom, was shown into the drawing-room. Now that M.
+was out of his agony my mind reverted to Blanche. My wife and children
+were going to the seaside, and my wife had eagerly agreed to take
+Blanche with her, if she could be spared.
+
+"But they won't let her go," said the little woman.
+
+"They must if I say it's necessary," I said with professional dignity. I
+wondered as I waited in the immense Robinson drawing-room how best I
+could introduce the subject. Half involuntarily I approached the
+aquarium. As I drew near my foot caught on something slippery and stiff.
+I looked down, and saw it was the dead body of the goldfish on the
+carpet. I picked it up, and was staring at it when Mrs. Robinson came
+in. She gave a cry when she saw it, and wrung her hands.
+
+"Put him back in the water," she shrieked. "He may be still alive."
+
+I put him back into his cell, but it had no longer any power over that
+poor captive. "Goldy" floated grotesque and upside down on the surface
+of the water. His release had come.
+
+"He must have jumped out to get to me when I was not there," sobbed Mrs.
+Robinson, the easy tears coursing down her fat cheeks. "My poor faithful
+loving little pet. But someone has taken the wire off the aquarium. Who
+could have been so wicked? Downright cruel I call it."
+
+The wire, true enough, had been unhooked, and was laid among the
+hyacinths on the water's edge.
+
+"Where is Blanche?" I asked. "I want to talk to you about her. I do not
+think she is well, and I should advise--"
+
+"That was just what I was going to tell you when I came in and saw that
+poor little darling dead in your hand. I am dreadfully worried about
+Blanche. She has been out all night. She hasn't come in yet."
+
+"Out all night?" A vague trouble seized me.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Robinson, "all night. Would you have thought it
+possible? But between you and me it's not the first time. Once long ago,
+just before you came to us, she did just the same. She--actually--ran
+away: ran away from her husband and me, and her beautiful home, though
+we had done everything in the world to make her happy. She went to her
+uncle at Liverpool, who never liked her. He telegraphed to us at once,
+and he brought her back next day. He spoke to her most beautifully, and
+left her with us. She seemed quite dazed at first, but she got round it
+and became as usual, always very silent and dull. Not the companion for
+Arthur. No brightness or gaiety. Blanche has been a great disappointment
+to me, tho' I've never shown it, and I'm not one to bear malice, I've
+always made a pet of her. But between you and me, Dr. Giles, Arthur is
+convinced that she is not quite right in her head, and that she ought to
+be shut up."
+
+"But she is shut up now," I said involuntarily.
+
+She stared at me amazed.
+
+A servant brought in a telegram.
+
+"I telegraphed to her uncle first thing this morning," said Mrs.
+Robinson, "to ask if she was with him. Now we shall hear what he says."
+
+She opened the envelope and spread out the contents.
+
+"She's _not_ with him," she said. "Then Dr. Giles, where _is_ she? Where
+can she be?"
+
+Later in the day we knew that Blanche had taken refuge in the
+Serpentine.
+
+The two pets had fled together. She had made the way of escape easy for
+her weaker brother.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was early in May. There was the usual crush at the Academy. I elbowed
+my way through the crowd to look at Serjeant's majestic portrait of M.
+Near it on the line hung the picture of the goldfish.
+
+A long-haired student and a little boy were staring at it.
+
+"Mummy," said the child, running to a beautifully dressed slender woman
+looking at the Serjeant, "I want a goldfish, too."
+
+"Well, darling, you shall have one," she said, and, turning to the young
+man who accompanied her, she added, "You never saw a child so fond of
+animals as Cedric."
+
+
+
+
+The Stars in their Courses
+
+
+I was always somewhat amazed when I came to think of it, but I hardly
+ever did think of it, that my cousin, Jimmy Cross, should have married
+Gertrude Bingham. There seemed no reason for such a desperate step on
+his part. But if one is going to be taken aback by the alliances of
+one's friends and relations one would journey through life in a
+continual state of astonishment, and the marriage service especially
+exhorts the married "not to be afraid with any amazement," which shows
+that that is the natural emotion evoked by contemplation of the holy
+estate, and that it is our duty not to give way to it.
+
+I said there seemed no reason for the lethargic Jimmy to take this step,
+especially as he had been married before, and had enjoyed a serene
+widowhood for some years. But what I forgot was that he never did take
+any step at all in either marriage. He just sat still.
+
+The first time his Mother arranged everything, and the result, if dull,
+was not actually unpleasant.
+
+The second time Gertrude Bingham took all the necessary steps with
+precision and determination. Now and then it certainly seemed as if he
+would take alarm and run away, but he did not. He remained seated.
+
+It is as impossible for a man rooted in inertia to achieve a marriage
+which implies an effort, as it is for him to evade a marriage, the
+avoidance of which requires an effort. He remains recumbent both when he
+ought to pursue and when he ought to fly. He is the prey of energetic
+kidnappers.
+
+Gertrude was a great astrologer and conversed in astrological terms,
+which I repeat, but which I don't pretend to understand. She told me
+(after the wedding) that when she discovered that Jimmy's moon in the
+house of marriage was semi-sextile to her Venus she had known from the
+first that their union was inevitable. I think Jimmy felt it so too, and
+that it was no use struggling. To put it mildly, she placed no obstacles
+in the way of this inevitable union, and it took place amid a general
+chorus of rather sarcastic approval from both families.
+
+What a mother Gertrude would make to Joan, Jimmy's rather spoilt girl of
+twelve, what a wife to Jimmy himself, what an excellent influence in the
+parish, what an energetic addition to our sleepy neighbourhood. We were
+told we were going to be stirred up. I never met the second Mrs. Cross
+till Jimmy brought her down as a bride to call on me in my cottage near
+his park gates. She at once inspired me with all the terror which very
+well-dressed people with exactly the right hair and earrings always
+arouse in me. She was good-looking, upright, had perfect health and
+teeth and circulation, did breathing exercises, had always just finished
+the book of the moment, and was ready with an opinion on it, not a
+considered opinion--but an opinion. During her first call I discovered
+that she had, for many years, held strong views about the necessity of
+school life for only children, and was already on the look-out for a
+seminary for Joan.
+
+"It is in her horoscope," she said to me, as we walked in my orchard
+garden, too much engrossed with Joan's future to notice my wonderful
+yellow lupins. "Her Mercury and ruling planet are in Aquarius, and that
+means the companionship of her own age. I shall not delay a day in
+finding the best school that England can produce."
+
+I need hardly say that such an establishment protruded itself on to Mrs.
+Cross's notice, with the greatest celerity, and thither the long-legged
+nail-biting, pimply, round-shouldered Joan repaired, and became a
+reformed character, with a clear complexion and a back almost as flat as
+her step-mother's.
+
+"Wonderful woman," Jimmy used to say somewhat ruefully to me, sitting
+on the low stone wall which divides my little velvet lawn from my bit of
+woodland. "Gertrude has been the making of Joan."
+
+"And of you, too, my dear Jimmy," I remarked.
+
+He sighed.
+
+It was perfectly true. She had been the making of him, just as she had
+been the making of the Manor garden, of the boot and shoe club, the
+boys' carving class, the Confirmation candidates' reading class, the
+mothers' working parties, the coal club, the Church members' lending
+library. The only misgiving that remained in one's mind after she had
+been the making of all these things was that it seemed a pity that they
+were all so obviously machine-made, turned out to pattern.
+
+Personally, I should have preferred that they should have been treated
+less conventionally, or let alone. My own course and Jimmy's would, of
+course, have been to have left them alone. We left everything alone. But
+Gertrude always had a ready-made scheme for everything and everybody.
+She even had a scheme of salvation into which the Deity was believed to
+be compressed. I did not mind much the industrious efforts she expended
+on Jimmy, who was now an inattentive Magistrate and member of the County
+Council, and wobbly chairman of his own Parish Council, writing an
+entirely illegible hand, which perhaps did not matter much as he never
+answered letters. But I felt acutely distressed when she reconstructed
+the rambling old Manor garden entirely. All its former pleasant
+characteristics were wrenched out of it. It was drawn and quartered, and
+then put together anew in compartments. It contained everything; a
+Japanese garden, a rock garden, a herb garden, a sunk garden, a
+wilderness, a rose garden, a pergola, three pergolas, just as the
+village now contained, a boot club, a coal club, a--but I think I have
+said that before.
+
+In the course of time she presented Jimmy with two most remarkable
+children, at least she said they were remarkable: and from their
+horoscopes I gathered the boy would probably become a prime minister,
+and the girl a musical genius. We don't actually know yet what form
+their greatness will take, for as I write this they are still greedy,
+healthy children, who come out in plum-pudding rash regularly at
+Christmas.
+
+I knew her well by the time the garden had been given its _coup de
+grâce_, and I told her after I had been dragged all over it that she had
+a constructive mind. (I have never been a particularly truthful person,
+but my career as a liar dates from Jimmy's marriage with Gertrude.)
+
+My remark pleased her. She smiled graciously and said, "Ah, I had not
+got Mars rising in Capricorn for nothing when I was born."
+
+As we became more intimate she insisted on drawing out my horoscope, and
+after a week of intense mental activity produced a sort of cart wheel on
+paper at which I looked with respectful misgiving.
+
+"I hope it does not say anything about my living anywhere except here,"
+I said anxiously.
+
+I had long had a fear at the back of my mind that she might need my
+cottage for some benevolent scheme. Jimmy, who had always been fond of
+me, had let it to me at a nominal rent in his easygoing widower days,
+because the mild climate suited my rheumatism, and my society suited
+him. Round the cottage had gradually sprung up what many, though not
+Gertrude, considered a beautiful garden.
+
+"No travelling at all," she said, "no movement of any kind. And I am
+afraid, Anne, I can't hold out the slightest hope of a marriage for
+you."
+
+"Since I turned forty I had begun to fear I might remain unwedded," I
+remarked.
+
+"No sign of marriage," she said, exploring the cart wheel, "and there
+must have been considerable lethargy in the past when openings of this
+kind did occur. Your Venus seems for many years to have been in square
+to Neptune, and that would tend to make these chances slip away from
+you."
+
+"I endeavoured to pounce on them," I said humbly. "My dear mother's
+advice to me as to matrimony was 'clutch while you can'--I assure you I
+left no stone unturned."
+
+"In that case you probably turned the wrong ones," she said judicially.
+"And I am sorry to tell you that I don't see any good fortune coming to
+you either, and rather bad health. In short, you will have a severe
+illness next spring. March especially will be a bad month for you. Your
+Moon will be going through Virgo, the sign of sickness."
+
+It generally was. I don't mean my moon, but March. I rarely got through
+the winter without an attack of rheumatism at the end of it.
+
+All in a moment, as it seemed to me, after a few springs and autumns and
+attacks of rheumatism, Gertrude's two children were leaving the nursery,
+and Joan was returning home from school to be introduced into society.
+Gertrude began to look round for a governess who would also be a
+companion for Joan. I helped her to find one. It was a case of nepotism.
+I recommended my own niece, Dulcibella, who had just returned from the
+completion of her education at Dresden. Dulcibella's impecunious parents
+had, of course, both died and left her to battle with life--and me,
+alone, her only heritage being a wild rose prettiness and dark eyes like
+an Alderney calf's.
+
+She was well educated. I had been able to achieve that owing to the
+cheap rate at which I lived, thanks to Jimmy. But I had thoroughly made
+up my mind that I was not going to have her twirling her thumbs under my
+roof. She was close on eighteen, and must now earn her own living.
+
+She was staying with me on a visit when Gertrude told me of her
+requirements. Gertrude's two stout children were at that moment sitting
+on the lawn blowing soap bubbles with Dulcibella. Jimmy had been engaged
+in the same pursuit as his offspring five minutes earlier, but had
+departed. Gertrude looked at the group critically.
+
+"Your niece does not look strong," she said dubiously.
+
+"She isn't."
+
+"Or energetic."
+
+"She's not."
+
+"Is she really firm with children?"
+
+"I should not think so, but you are a better judge of character than I
+am."
+
+Conscience pricked as I said the words, but I had become inured to its
+prickings.
+
+"I have, of course, studied human nature," she said slowly, still
+looking at the pretty group on the lawn.
+
+I have not yet met a fellow creature who does not think he has studied
+human nature. Yet how few turn the pages of that open book. And out of
+that few the greatest number scan it upside down.
+
+"I could make a truer estimate," she continued, "if I drew out her
+horoscope. I go by that more than by my own fallible judgment. I may
+err, but I have never known astrology to fail."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Dulcie was duly engaged as governess on approval for three months, on
+the strength of her horoscope. Before she went to the Manor House I made
+a few remarks to her to which she listened decorously, her eyes
+reverently fixed on my face.
+
+"You will leave with me that remarkably pretty lilac muslin you appeared
+in yesterday--and the sun-bonnet. You will make yourself look as like a
+district visitor as possible, thick where you ought to be thin, and thin
+where you ought to be thick. Don't cry, Dulcie. I am endeavouring to
+help you. Be thankful you have an aunt like me. Who educated you?"
+
+"You did." Sob. Sob.
+
+"Well, now I am finishing your education. You want to earn your living,
+I suppose. You know that I only have a small annuity, that I have not a
+farthing to leave you."
+
+"Yes, yes, Aunt Anne."
+
+"Well, then, don't look prettier than that square Joan, and don't let
+the wave in your hair show."
+
+The Alderney calf eyes brimmed anew with tears. Dulcie drooped her pin
+of a head. Like that defunct noodle, her mother, she lived solely for
+clothes and poetry and the admiration of the uncorseted sex. She had
+come into the world a little late. She conformed to the best Victorian
+ideals, but there are men still lurking in secluded rural districts if
+one could but find them, to whom her cheap appeal might be irresistible.
+I had hopes she might secure a husband if she took a country engagement.
+I proceeded with my discourse. It spread over Jimmy as well. I did not
+bid her pure eyes look into depths of depravity but I did make her
+understand that Mrs. Cross was becoming rather stout and middle-aged,
+and that if Mr. Cross blew soap bubbles in the schoolroom too
+frequently, she, Dulcie, might find that her French accent was not good
+enough for her young charges.
+
+Dulcie has not the faintest gleam of humour, but she is docility itself.
+
+She appeared next day staid, flat-figured, almost unpretty, her
+wonderful hair smoothed closely over her small ears.
+
+I blessed her, and said as a parting word:
+
+"Take an interest in astrology."
+
+And then the gardener wheeled her luggage on the barrow to the Manor,
+and Dulcie crept timidly behind it to her first situation.
+
+In order that this tragic story, for it is a tragedy, should not expand
+into a novel, I will say at once that she was a complete success. That
+was because she did exactly as I told her. As a rule, very silly people
+never will do what they are told. But in that one point Dulcie was no
+fool.
+
+She was lamentably weak with the children. She had no art of teaching.
+She did not encourage Joan to preserve a burnished mind, but she took to
+astrology like a duck to water. From the first she was deeply interested
+in it, and believed in it with flawless credulity.
+
+"Dulcie," said Gertrude with approval, "has a very alert mind for one so
+young. Joan has never taken the faintest interest in astrology, but
+Dulcie shows an intelligent grasp of the subject. She studies it while
+the children are preparing their syntax. You, yourself, Anne, have never
+in all these years mastered even the elements of the science. I don't
+believe you know what _an aspect_ means."
+
+"I don't pretend to a powerful mind."
+
+"Your difficulty is the inertia that belongs to a low vitality," said
+Gertrude, "and I rather think that is what is the matter with Joan. She
+hardly opens a book. She has not an idea beyond her chickens. She spends
+hours among her coops."
+
+"Dulcie's horoscope," continued Gertrude after a pause, "shows a marked
+expansion in her immediate future. The wider life which she has entered
+upon under our roof is no doubt the beginning of it. I feel it my duty
+to help her in every way I can."
+
+"Dear Gertrude," I said. "_Thank you._ My poor motherless child, for
+whom I can do but little has found a powerful friend in you."
+
+Conscience jabbed me as with a knitting needle, but I paid no more
+attention to it than the Spartan boy to his fox.
+
+"There is certainly a love affair in her near future," continued
+Gertrude affably. "_She_ says that astrologically she can't see any such
+thing for several years to come, but I know better. I found him under
+Uranus, transiting her Venus. She is an extremely intelligent pupil, but
+she is certainly obstinate. She _won't_ see it. But she can see Joan's
+engagement and marriage quite clearly. We both see that. But I am
+convinced Dulcie has an opportunity of marrying as well as Joan. Her
+moon will shortly be going through the fifth house, the house of lovers
+which speaks for itself. I wondered whether it might possibly be Mr.
+Wilson. Most respectable--you know--Mr. Benson's pupil. He's always
+coming over on one pretext or another, to play tennis or see Joan's
+chickens. I saw him walking back through the park with Dulcie and the
+children the other day."
+
+I pretended to be horrified.
+
+"I will speak to her," I mumbled, "most reprehensible."
+
+"I beg you will do nothing of the kind," said Gertrude with asperity.
+"The world moves on, my dear Anne, while you sit dreaming in your
+cottage; and if you can't raise a finger to help your own niece then
+don't try to nullify the benevolent activities of those who can."
+
+"Of course, Gertrude, if you look at it in that way. But a governess!"
+
+"I do look at it in that way; and allow me to tell you, Anne, that you
+dress her abominably, and I have advised her to revolt. And her hair! I
+spoke to her about it yesterday, and she said you liked her to plaster
+it down like that. The child has beautiful hair, very like mine at her
+age. It needs releasing. It is not necessary that she should imitate
+your severe coiffure."
+
+"Oh! Gertrude, I always brush my own hair back, and surely it is not too
+much to ask of my brother's only child who owes everything to me to--" I
+became tearful.
+
+"It _is_ too much to ask. You are an egoist, Anne. The poor child looked
+quite frightened when I spoke to her yesterday. You mean well, but you
+have repressed her. I intend, on the contrary, to draw her out, to widen
+her narrowed, pinched existence." Gertrude had said the same of Jimmy
+when she married him. Everyone had a pinched existence till she dawned
+on them, though it would have been difficult to say who had dared to
+pinch Jimmy.
+
+Next day Dulcie came down half frightened, wholly delighted, to confer
+with me.
+
+"My dear," I said. "Do exactly what kind Mrs. Cross wishes about your
+hair and dress and general deportment. I can't explain, it would take
+too long, and when I had explained you would not understand. You may now
+take back with you the lilac gown and the sun-bonnet. And, by the way,
+what is this Mr. Wilson like who is always coming over?"
+
+"Very, _very_ nice"--with fervour.
+
+"And handsome?"
+
+"Very, _very_ handsome."
+
+"H'm! Now, Dulcie, no nonsense such as you ladled out to me about Herr
+Müller, the music master at Dresden. You needn't cry. That is all past
+and forgotten. But I want a plain answer. Does this very handsome man
+care about chickens?"
+
+"Yes, yes, Aunt Anne. He has taken several prizes."
+
+"Does he come to see you, or Joan?"
+
+Dulcie cogitated.
+
+"At first it was Joan," she said.
+
+Light broke in on me. _That serpent Gertrude!_ She did not think the
+poultry fancier good enough for the stolid Joan, but quite good enough
+for my exquisite Dulcibella.
+
+"I must go back now," said Dulcie. "I'm dining down because Mr. Cross
+likes a game of patience in the evening. It keeps him from falling
+asleep. Mr. Wilson is staying to dinner. I'm going to wear my amber
+muslin, and Mr. Vavasour is coming to stay. We've seen a good deal of
+him lately. Mrs. Cross says he has had a very overshadowed life with his
+old mother, and she wants to help him to a wider sphere."
+
+I pricked up my ears.
+
+"Is he Vavasour, of Harlington?"
+
+"Yes, that's his home, near Lee on the Solent."
+
+"But surely he is quite an infant."
+
+"I don't know what you mean by an infant, Aunt Anne. He is two years
+older than me, and he simply _loves_ poetry."
+
+"And is he as nice as Mr. Wilson?"
+
+"Very, _very_ nice."
+
+Further lights were bursting in. The illumination momentarily staggered
+me.
+
+"H'm. Dulcie, you will now attend to what I tell you."
+
+"Yes, yes, Aunt Anne. I always do."
+
+"Now, mind you don't make eyes at Mr. Wilson, who is Joan's friend. That
+is what horrid little cats of girls do, not what I expect of _you_.
+Chickens draw people together in a way, ahem! you don't understand,
+but--you will later on."
+
+"Like poetry does?" Dulcie hazarded.
+
+"Just like poetry. And one thing more. Don't speak to Mr. Vavasour
+unless he speaks to you."
+
+"No, no, Aunt Anne. I never do."
+
+Once again I must compress. As the summer advanced, Gertrude, nose down
+in full cry on the track, unfolded to me a project which only needed my
+co-operation.
+
+I reminded her that I never co-operated, but she paid no attention, and
+said she wished to send the children with Joan and Dulcie to the seaside
+for a month, while she watched over Jimmy during his annual visit to
+Harrogate. The children required a change.
+
+I agreed.
+
+She had thought of Lee on the Solent. (You will remember, reader, that
+Mr. Vavasour's place was near Lee.)
+
+"Why Lee?" I said, pretending surprise. "Expensive and only ten miles
+away. No real change of climate. Send them to Felixstowe or
+Scarborough."
+
+But Gertrude's mind was made up. She poured forth batches of adequate
+reasons. It must be Lee. Would I accompany the party as their guest?
+Joan and Dulcie were rather too young to go into lodgings alone.
+
+I saw at once that, under the circumstances, Lee was no place for me. I
+might get into hot water. I, so free now, might become entangled in the
+affairs of others, and might be blamed later on. I might find myself
+acting with duplicity or, to be more exact, I might be found out to be
+doing so.
+
+I declined with regretful gratitude. If it had been Felixstowe or
+Scarborough I would have taken charge with pleasure, but I always had
+rheumatism at Lee. Rheumatism was a very capricious ailment.
+
+"It is, indeed," said Gertrude coldly.
+
+"Send your old governess," I suggested, "the ancient Miss Jones who
+lives at Banff. You have her here every summer for a month. Kill two
+birds with one stone. Let her have her annual outing at Lee instead of
+here."
+
+Gertrude was undeniably struck by my suggestion, though she found fault
+with it. As she began to come round to it I then raised objections to
+it. I reminded her that Miss Jones was as blind as a bat: that when she
+accompanied them to Scotland the year before she had mistaken the
+footman bathing for a salmon leaping. But Gertrude was of the opinion
+that Miss Jones's shortsightedness was no real drawback.
+
+The expedition started, and I actually produced five pounds for Dulcie
+to spend on seaside attire. I considered it a good investment.
+
+Before Gertrude departed with Jimmy for Harrogate she volunteered with a
+meaning smile that she understood Mr. Wilson bicycled over frequently to
+Lee.
+
+"Ten miles is nothing," I said, "to a high principled poultry fancier."
+
+"Now you know," she said archly, "why I did not wish to remove Dulcie to
+a great distance at this critical moment in her young life. I hear from
+Miss Jones, who writes daily, that there are shrimping expeditions and
+picnics with the children, strolls by moonlight without them."
+
+Reader, I did not oblige that serpent to disgorge the fact that
+moonlight strolls are not taken by two women and one man. I knew as well
+as possible that Miss Jones had received a hint to give these two young
+men every opportunity. I thanked Providence that I had not got into that
+_galère_. I had been saved by the fixed principle of a life time to
+avoid action of any kind.
+
+I had hardly begun to enjoy the month of solitude when it was over, and
+Gertrude and Jimmy returned from Harrogate, he very limp and depressed,
+as always after his cure, and sure that it had done him more harm than
+good.
+
+The two girls came back from the Solent looking the picture of health;
+even Joan was almost pretty, beaming under her tan. Dulcibella, who did
+not tan, was ravishing. The children were a rich brown pink apparently
+all over, and the ancient Miss Jones was a jet-beaded mass of bridling
+gratitude and self-importance.
+
+Then, of course, the storm burst.
+
+You and I, reader, know exactly what had happened. Dulcie had got
+engaged to Mr. Vavasour, and Joan to Mr. Wilson.
+
+Dulcie came skimming down in the dusk the first evening to announce the
+event to me, her soft cheek pressed to mine. She said she wanted me to
+be the first to know.
+
+_And Gertrude had said I could do nothing for her!_
+
+She told me that at that very moment the blissful Joan was announcing
+her own betrothal to her parents.
+
+Next morning Jimmy came down to see me. He generally gravitated to me if
+anything went wrong.
+
+"We are in a hat up at the house," he said. "Joan has actually engaged
+herself to that oaf, Wilson. Infernal cheek on his part, I call it."
+
+"You have had him hanging about for months," I said, "I expect he and
+Joan thought you approved."
+
+"They did. They do. But that doesn't make it any better. Of course I
+said I would not allow it, and Joan was amazed and cried all night, and
+Gertrude is in a state of such nervous tension you can't go near her,
+and poor old Jones, who came back preening herself, is bathed in
+tears--and Gertrude says I have got to speak to Wilson at once. She
+always says things have got to be done at once."
+
+He groaned, and sat down heavily on my low wall, crushing a branch of
+verbena.
+
+"It's not as if I hadn't warned Gertrude," he went on. "I said to her
+several times 'I'm always catching my foot against Wilson,' and yet she
+would have him about the place. She as good as told me she thought he
+and Dulcie might make a match of it. But it's my opinion Dulcie never so
+much as looked at him. I told Gertrude so, but she only smiled, and said
+I was to leave it to her, and that it was in those confounded stars that
+Dulcie would marry almost at once. This is what her beastly stars have
+brought us to."
+
+"She did tell me there was an early marriage for Joan, too, in her
+horoscope," I hazarded.
+
+"Well, we had had thoughts, I mean Gertrude had, that young Vavasour
+came over oftener than he need. He's rather a bent lily, but of course
+he's an uncommonly good match. I should not have thought there was
+anything in it, myself, but Gertrude kept rubbing it in. That is why
+they went to Lee."
+
+"You don't say so!"
+
+"Yes, I do say so. But look how it has turned out."
+
+"I think I ought to tell you--I'm so astonished that even now I don't
+know how to believe it--I only heard of it last night,--that Dulcie has
+accepted Mr. Vavasour."
+
+For a moment Jimmy stared at me, and then he burst into shouts of
+laughter.
+
+"Well done, Anne!" he said, rolling on my poor verbena. "Well done,
+Dulcie. That little slyboots. Thirty thousand a year. What a score. Who
+would have thought it, Anne! You look so remote and unworldly in your
+grey hair, stitching away at your woolwork picture. But you've outwitted
+Gertrude. Well, I don't care what she says. I'm glad of any luck
+happening to Dulcie. She is not fit to struggle for herself in this hard
+world. But Gertrude will never forgive _you_, Anne. You may make up your
+mind to that."
+
+"But what have I done?" I bleated. "Nothing. I'm as innocent as an
+unlaid egg."
+
+"You may be, but she will never forgive you all the same," said Jimmy
+slowly rising, and brushing traces of verbena from his person. "Stupid
+people never forgive, and they always avenge themselves by brute force."
+
+Old Miss Jones, bewildered and tearful, toddled down to see me, boring
+me to death with plans for leaving Banff and settling in Bournemouth
+with a married niece. Joan rushed down, boisterously happy, and
+confident that her father would give in; Jimmy, weakening daily, came
+down. Mr. Wilson called, modest and hopeful; Dulcie, and the children
+came down, Mr. Vavasour, a stooping youth, with starling eyes, and an
+intense manner, motored over.
+
+_But Gertrude never came._
+
+I consoled myself with Mr. Vavasour. There was no doubt he was in love
+with Dulcie, and I surmised that in the future, if she could not
+dominate him, his aunt by marriage might be able to do so. I can't say
+whether Dulcie cared much about him, but I told her firmly that she was
+very much in love, and she said, "Yes, yes, Aunt Anne."
+
+That was what was so endearing about Dulcie.
+
+She was so obliging; always ready to run upstairs for my spectacles, or
+to marry anybody.
+
+One evening, when she was dining with me, she proceeded to draw out her
+Ronald's horoscope.
+
+She was evidently extraordinarily well up in the subject.
+
+"I will ask, Mrs. Cross," she said at last, after much knitting of white
+brows, "but I should say Ronald was certainly not going to marry at all
+at this moment with Mercury and Jupiter in opposition. But then I said
+the same about myself, and about your going on a long journey. I should
+have thought some great change was inevitable with your sun now
+sesquiquadrate to Uranus in Cancer. But Mrs. Cross said I was absolutely
+mistaken about both. She was very emphatic."
+
+"You don't mean to say you believe a single word of it," I said, amazed.
+
+"Oh, yes, Aunt Anne, of course I do. Why, don't you remember you
+yourself advised me to study it. I'm _sure_ it's all true, only it's
+difficult to disentangle."
+
+Jimmy came down next day, and a more crestfallen man I have never seen.
+I was dividing my white pinks, and he collapsed on a bench, and looked
+at me.
+
+"You've given in about Mr. Wilson," I said drily.
+
+"I have. Gertrude came round to it quite suddenly last night."
+
+"Bear up," I said "They will probably be very happy."
+
+"I don't find I mind much now it's decided on. And between ourselves
+Gertrude and Joan did not hit it off too well. I used to get a bit
+rattled between the two of them. It will be more peaceful when Joan is
+married."
+
+"Then I don't see why you look so woe-begone."
+
+Jimmy shifted on his bench.
+
+"Anne," he said solemnly, "you made the great mistake of your life when
+you refused me."
+
+"You could not expect me to leave a brand new kitchen boiler for you. I
+told you that at the time."
+
+"We should have suited each other," went on Jimmy, drearily, ignoring
+manlike, my reasons for celibacy. "We are both," he paused and then
+added with dignity, "contemplatives by nature. We should have sat down
+in two armchairs for life. I should never have been a magistrate, and a
+chairman of a cursed Parish Council. I should just have been happy."
+
+"I _have_ been happy," I said, "I _am_ happy."
+
+"You have had a beautiful life: one long siesta. That is so like you.
+_You_ have fetched it off and I've missed it. Just as Gertrude has
+missed this match for Joan, and you have fetched it off for Dulcie. If I
+had married you you would never have wanted me to exert myself. That was
+why my higher nature turned to you like a sunflower to the sun. You
+ought to have taken me. After all, you are the only woman I have ever
+proposed to," said the twice married man.
+
+"I thought as much," I said, pulling my white pinks apart.
+
+"You might have known," he said darkly, and a glint of malice
+momentarily shone in his kindly eyes, "that trouble would some day
+overtake you for your wicked selfishness in refusing me."
+
+I did not notice what he was saying so much as that alien expression in
+my old friend's face. I stared at him.
+
+"I'm putty in Gertrude's hands," he continued solemnly, "as I should
+have been in yours. It's no kind of use saying I ought not to be putty.
+I know I ought not, but putty I am. You don't know what marriage is
+like. No peace unless you give in entirely--no terms--no half-way house,
+no nothing except unconditional surrender."
+
+I had never heard Jimmy speak like this before. I put in a layer of
+pinks, and then looked at him again.
+
+There were tears in his eyes.
+
+"My dear old soul," he burst out, "I can't help it, I _cannot_ help it.
+She insisted on my coming down and telling you myself. She said it must
+come from me, as my own idea, and I'm not to mention her at all. The
+truth is--she has decided--and nothing will move her--that it will be
+best if Joan and Bobby Wilson lived quite near us for a time as they are
+both so young--in fact--" his voice became hoarse--"in this cottage."
+
+"_My_ cottage!" I said. "_Here!_"
+
+He nodded.
+
+For a moment I could neither see nor hear. My brain reeled. I clutched
+at something which turned out to be Jimmy's hand.
+
+"My own little house," I gasped. "My garden, made with my own hands. The
+only place my rheumatism--" I choked.
+
+"Don't take on so, Anne," but it was Jimmy who was crying, not I, "I'll
+find something else for you. Miss Jones is leaving Banff. You shall have
+her house rent free. I hate it all just as much as you. It makes me
+sick to think of chicken hutches on your lawn; but, but--you _shouldn't_
+have outwitted Gertrude."
+
+"She told me there was no movement, no journey of any kind in my
+horoscope," I groaned.
+
+"She says she made a mistake, and that she sees now there is a long
+journey. Dulcie told her so some time ago, but she would not hear of it.
+But now she has worked it out again, and she says Dulcie was right after
+all. You are plum in the thick of Uranian upheavals."
+
+"And is Dulcie's marriage a mistake, too?"
+
+"She said nothing about that. But, between ourselves, Anne, though I'm
+not an astrologer, I should not count on it too much, for I've been
+making a few enquiries about Vavasour, and I find he has been engaged
+four times already. It's a sort of habit with him to get engaged, and
+his mother never opposes him, but she has a sort of habit of gently
+getting him out of it--every time."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All this took place several years ago. I live in the suburbs of Banff
+now in Miss Jones's old house. As there is no garden that kind Jimmy has
+built me a little conservatory sticking like a blister to the unattached
+wall of my semi-detached villa. He sends me a hamper of vegetables every
+week, and Joan presents me with a couple of chickens now and then,
+_reared on my lawn_.
+
+They come in handy when Dulcie and her Wilhelm are staying with me. Herr
+Müller has an appointment in Aberdeen now. They are dreadfully poor, and
+a little Müller arrives every year, but Dulcie is as happy as she is
+incompetent and impecunious. She adds to their small muddled away income
+by giving lessons in astrology. I have learned the rudiments of the
+science, in order when I stay with her to help her with her pupils. But
+I never stay long as I have rheumatism as severely in Aberdeen as in
+Banff.
+
+
+
+
+Her Murderer
+
+
+"The truth is, I shall have to murder her!" said Mark gloomily. "I see
+no way out of it."
+
+"I could not be really happy with a husband whose hands were red with
+gore," I remarked. "I'm super-sensitive, I know. I can't help it. I was
+made so. If you murder her, I warn you I shall throw you over. And where
+would you be then?"
+
+"Exactly where I am now, as far as marrying you is concerned. You may
+throw me over as much as you like. I shan't turn a hair."
+
+He had not many hairs left to turn, and perhaps he remembered that fact,
+and that I held nothing sacred, for he hurried on in an aggrieved tone:
+
+"You never give me credit for any imagination. I'm not going to spill
+her blood. I'm much too tidy. I've thought it all out. I shall take you
+and her on a picnic to the New Forest, and trot you both about till
+you're nearly famished. And then for luncheon I shall produce a tin of
+potted lobster. I shall choose it very carefully with a bulging tin.
+Potted lobster is deadly when the tin bulges. And as the luncheon will
+be at my expense, she will eat more than usual. She will 'partake
+heartily,' as the newspapers will say afterwards; at least, as I hope
+they will have occasion to say. And then directly the meal is over the
+lobster will begin to do its duty, and swell inside her, and she'll
+begin struggling among the picnic things. I shan't be there. I shall
+have gone for a little stroll. You will support her in her last moments.
+I don't mind helping with the funeral. I'd do that willingly."
+
+I laughed, but I was near to tears.
+
+"How long have we been engaged?" asked Mark.
+
+"Twelve years. You know that as well as I do."
+
+"Well, as far as I can see, we shall be still affianced in twenty years'
+time. Aunt Pussy will see us all out."
+
+"We may toddle to the altar yet," I said hysterically, "when you are
+about eighty and I am seventy. And I shall give you a bath-chair, and
+you will present the bridesmaids, who must not be a day younger than
+myself, with rubber hot-water bottles. Rubber will be cheap again by
+then."
+
+He came back, and sat down by me.
+
+"It's damnable!" he said.
+
+"It is," I replied.
+
+"And it isn't as if the little ass couldn't afford it!" he broke out,
+after a moment. "She can't have less than thirty thousand a year, and
+she lives on one. And it will all come to you when she dies. And it's
+rolling up, and rolling up, and the years pass and pass. Our case is
+desperate. Janet, can't you say something to her? Can't you make a great
+appeal to her? Can't you get hold of someone who has an influence over
+her, and appeal to them?"
+
+I did not think it necessary to answer. He knew I had tried everything
+years ago.
+
+It had been thought a wonderful thing for me when Aunt Pussy, my
+godmother, adopted me when I was fourteen. We were a large family, and I
+was the only delicate one, not fitted, so my parents thought, to "fend
+for myself" in this rough world. And I had always liked Aunt Pussy, and
+she me. And she promised my father, on his impecunious death-bed, that
+she would take charge of me and educate me. She further gratuitously and
+solemnly promised that she would leave me all her money. Her all was not
+much, a few hundreds a year. But that was a great deal to people like
+ourselves. She was our one rich relation, and it was felt that I was
+provided for, which eventually caused an estrangement between me and my
+brothers and sisters, who had to work for their living; while I always
+had pretty clothes and a little--a very little--pocket-money, and did
+nothing in the way of work except arrange flowers, and write a few
+notes, and comb out Aunt Pussy's Flossy, being careful to keep the
+parting even down the middle of his back.
+
+My sisters became workers, and they also became ardent Suffragists,
+which would have shocked my father dreadfully if he had been alive, for
+he was of opinion that woman's proper sphere is the home, though, of
+course, if you have not got a home or any money it seems rather
+difficult for women to remain in their sphere.
+
+I, being provided for, remained perfectly womanly, of the type that the
+Anti-Suffrage League, and the sterner sex especially, admire. I took
+care of my appearance, I dressed charmingly on the very small allowance
+which Aunt Pussy doled out to me, I was an adept at all the little
+details which make a home pleasant, I never wanted to do anything except
+to marry Mark.
+
+For across the even tenor of our lives, in a little villa in Kensington,
+as even as the parting down Flossie's back, presently came two great
+events. Aunt Pussy inherited an enormous fortune, and the following
+year, I being then twenty, fell in love with Mark and accepted him. I
+can't tell you whether he, poor dear, was quite disinterested at first.
+It was, of course, known that I should inherit all my aunt's money. He
+was rather above me in the social scale. I have sometimes thought that
+his old painted, gambling Jezebel of a mother prodded him in my
+direction.
+
+But if he was not disinterested at first, he became so. We were two
+perfectly ordinary young people. But we were meant for each other, and
+we both knew it.
+
+We never for a moment thought there would be any real difficulty in the
+way of our marriage. Aunt Pussy was, of course, exasperatingly
+niggardly, but she was now very wealthy, and she approved of Mark,
+partly because he was not without means. He was an only child with a
+little of his own, and with expectations from his mother. He had had a
+sunstroke in Uganda, which had forced him to give up his profession, but
+he was independent of it. Aunt Pussy, however, though she was most kind
+and sentimental about us, could not at first be induced to say anything
+definite about money.
+
+When, after a few months, I began to grow pale and thin, she went so far
+as to say that she would give me an allowance equal to his income. I
+fancy even that concession cost her nights of agony. If he could make up
+five hundred a year she would make up the same.
+
+Was this the moment, I ask you, for his wicked old mother to gamble
+herself into disgrace and bankruptcy? My poor Mark came, swearing
+horribly, to her assistance. But when he had done so, and had given her
+a pittance to live on, there was nothing left for himself.
+
+Even then neither of us thought it mattered much. Aunt Pussy would
+surely come round. But we had not reckoned on the effect that a large
+fortune can make on a miserly temperament. She clutched at the fact that
+Mark was penniless as a reason to withdraw her previous promise. She
+would not part with a penny. She did not want to part with me. She put
+us off with one pretext after another. After several years of irritation
+and anger and exasperation, we discovered what we ought to have known
+from the first, that nothing would induce her to give up anything in her
+life-time, though she was much too religious to break her promise to my
+father. She intended to leave me everything. But she was not going to
+part with sixpence as long as she could hold on to it.
+
+We tried to move her, but she was not to be moved. On looking back I see
+now that she was more eccentric than we realised at the time. In the
+course of twelve years Mark and I went through all the vicissitudes that
+two commonplace people deeply in love do go through if they can't marry.
+
+We became desperate. We decided to part. We urged each other to marry
+someone else. We conjured each other to feel perfectly free. We doubted
+each other. He swore. I wept. He tried to leave me and he couldn't. I
+did not try. I knew it was no use. We each had opportunities of marrying
+advantageously if we could only have disentangled ourselves from each
+other. I learned what jealousy can be of a woman, younger and better
+looking, and sweeter-tempered and with thicker hair than myself.
+
+He asseverated with fury that he was never jealous of me. If that was
+so, his outrageous behaviour to his own cousin, a rich and blameless
+widower in search of a wife, was inexplicable. And now, after twelve
+years, we had reached a point where we could only laugh. There was
+nothing else to be done. He was growing stout, and I was growing lean.
+If only middle-aged men could grow thin, and poor middle-aged women a
+little plump, life would be easier for them. But we reversed it. Aunt
+Pussy alone seemed untouched by time. Even Mark's optimistic eye could
+never detect any sign of "breaking up" about her.
+
+And throughout those dreary years we had one supreme consolation, and a
+very painful consolation it was. We loved each other.
+
+"It's damnable!" said Mark again. "Well, if I'm not to murder her, if
+you're going to thwart me in every little wish just as if we were
+married already, I don't see what there is to be done. I've inquired
+about a post obit."
+
+"Oh, Mark!"
+
+"It's no use saying 'Oh, Mark'! I tell you I've inquired about a post
+obit, and if you had a grain of affection for me you would have done the
+same yourself years ago. But it seems you can't raise money on a promise
+which may be broken. As I said before, there is no way out of it except
+by bloodshed. I shall have to murder her, and then you can marry me or
+not as you like. You will like, safe enough, if I am handy with the
+remains."
+
+The door opened, and Aunt Pussy hurried in. She was always in a hurry.
+We did not start away from each other, but remained stolidly seated side
+by side on the horsehair dining-room sofa with anger in our hearts
+against her. She had never given me a sitting-room. I always had to
+interview Mark in the dining-room with a plate of oranges on the
+sideboard, like a heroine in "The Quiver."
+
+Aunt Pussy was a small, dried-up woman of between fifty and sixty, with
+a furtive eye and a perpetually moving mouth, who looked as if she had
+been pinched out of shape by someone with a false sense of humour and no
+reverence. She was dressed in every shade of old black--rusty black,
+green black, brown black, spotted black, figured black, plain black.
+Mark got up slowly, and held out his hand.
+
+"How do you do, Mark?" she said nervously. "I will own I'm somewhat
+surprised to see you here," ignoring his hand, and taking some figs out
+of a string bag, and placing them on an empty plate (the one that ought
+to have had oranges in it) on the sideboard. "I have brought you some
+figs, Janet; you said you liked them. I thought it was agreed that until
+Mark had some reasonable prospect of being able to support a wife his
+visits here had better cease."
+
+"I never agreed," said Mark, "I was always for their continuing. I've
+been against a long engagement from the first."
+
+"Well, in any case, you must have a cup of tea now you are here,"
+continued Aunt Pussy, taking off her worn gloves, which I had mended for
+her till the fingers were mere stumps. "Ring the bell, Janet. We will
+have tea in here as there isn't a fire in the drawing-room."
+
+She put down more parcels on the table, and then her face changed.
+
+"My bag!" she gasped, and collapsed into a chair like one felled by
+emotion. "My bag!"
+
+We looked everywhere. Mark explored the hall and the umbrella-stand. No
+handbag was to be seen.
+
+"I knew something would happen if the month began with a Friday!" moaned
+Aunt Pussy.
+
+"Had it a great deal in it?" I asked.
+
+"Twenty pounds!" said Aunt Pussy, as if it were the savings of a
+lifetime. "I had drawn twenty pounds to pay the monthly books." And she
+became the colour of lead.
+
+I flew for her salts, and made tea quickly, and presently she recovered
+sufficiently to drink it. But her hand shook.
+
+"Twenty pounds!" she repeated, below her breath.
+
+We questioned her as to where she last remembered using the bag, and at
+length elicited the information that she had no recollection of its
+society after visiting Brown and Prodgers, the great shop in Baskaville
+Road, where she recalled eating a meat lozenge, drawn from its recesses.
+Mark offered to go round there at once, and see if it had been found.
+
+"I've never lost anything before," she said when he had gone, "but I
+felt this morning that some misfortune was going to happen. There was a
+black cat on the leads when I looked out. As sure as fate, if I see a
+black cat something goes wrong. Last time I saw one, two of my
+handkerchiefs were missing from the wash."
+
+As Aunt Pussy bought her handkerchiefs in the sales for less than
+sixpence each, I felt that the black cat made himself rather cheap.
+
+Mark returned with the cheering news that a bag had been found at Brown
+and Prodgers, and one of the principal shopwalkers had taken charge of
+it. And if Aunt Pussy would call in person to-morrow, and accurately
+describe its contents, it would be returned to her.
+
+Aunt Pussy was so much relieved that she actually smiled on him, and
+offered him a second cup of tea. But next morning at breakfast I saw at
+once that something was gravely amiss.
+
+Had she slept?
+
+Yes.
+
+Had she seen the black cat?
+
+No.
+
+"The truth is, Janet," she said, "I have had a most terrible dream. I
+feel sure it was a warning, and I really don't know whether I ought to
+call for it or not."
+
+"Call for what?"
+
+"The bag."
+
+"Was the dream about the bag?"
+
+"What else could it be about? I took one of my little bromides last
+night, for I knew I had not a chance of sleep after the agitation of the
+day. And I fell asleep at once. And I dreamed that it was morning, and I
+was in my outdoor things going to Brown and Prodgers for the bag. And
+the black cat walked all the way before me with its tail up. But it did
+not come in. And when I got there I told a shopwalker who was standing
+near the door what I had come about. He was a tall, dark man with a sort
+of down look. He bowed and said, 'Follow me, madam.' And I followed him.
+And we went through the--ahem! the gentlemen's underclothing, which I
+make a point of never going through, I always go round by the artificial
+flowers, until we came to a glass door near the lift. And he unlocked
+the door and I went in, and there on the table lay my bag. I was so
+delighted I ran to take it. But he stopped me, and I saw then what an
+evil-looking man he was. And he said, 'Look well at this bag, madam. Do
+you recognise it as yours?' And I looked and I said I did. There was the
+place where you had mended the handle.
+
+"Then he took it up, and put it in my hand, and said, 'Look well at the
+contents, madam, and verify that they are all there.'
+
+"So I looked at them, and they were all there, the tradesmen's books and
+everything. And I counted the money and it came right. The only thing I
+could not be sure about was the number of the meat lozenges. I thought
+one might have been stolen.
+
+"Then when I had finished he said, 'Look well at me, madam, for I am
+your murderer.' And I was so terrified that I dropped the bag and woke
+with a scream. Now, Janet, don't you think it would be flying in the
+face of Providence to go there this morning? Dreams like that are not
+sent for nothing."
+
+"Well, perhaps it would be better not," I said maliciously, for I knew
+very well that Aunt Pussy would risk any form of death rather than lose
+twenty pounds.
+
+"I thought perhaps you would not mind getting it for me. The danger
+would not be the same for you."
+
+"I should not mind in the least, but they will only give it up to you."
+
+Aunt Pussy's superstition struggled with her miserliness throughout her
+frugal breakfast. Need I say her miserliness won. Had it ever sustained
+one defeat in all her life! But she remained agitated and nervous to an
+extreme degree. I offered to go with her, but she felt that was not
+protection enough. So I telephoned to Mark, and presently he arrived and
+Aunt Pussy solemnly recapitulated her dream, and we all three set out
+together, she walking a little ahead, evidently on the look-out for the
+black cat.
+
+Mark whispered to me that the portent about the black cat was being
+verified for us, not her, and that the shopwalker was evidently a very
+decent fellow, and that if he did his duty by us he should certainly ask
+him to be best man at our wedding. He had not made up his mind how deep
+his mourning ought to be for a murdered aunt-in-law, and was, to use his
+own expression, still poised like a humming-bird between a grey silk tie
+and a black one with a white spot, when we reached the shop.
+
+It was early, and there were very few customers about. A tall dark man
+was walking up and down. Aunt Pussy instantly clutched my arm, and
+whispered, "It's him!"
+
+He saw us looking at him, and came up to us, a melancholy downcast,
+unprepossessing-looking man. As Aunt Pussy could only stare at him,
+Mark, who had spoken to him the day before, told him the lady had come
+to identify the bag lost on the previous afternoon. The man bowed to
+Aunt Pussy, and said, "Follow me, madam," and we followed him through
+several departments.
+
+"Gentlemen's outfitting!" hissed Aunt Pussy suddenly in my ear, pointing
+with a trembling finger at a line of striped and tasselled pyjamas which
+she had avoided for many years.
+
+Presently we came to a glass door, and the man took a key from his
+pocket, opened the door, and ushered us in. And there on a small table
+lay a bag--_the_ bag--Aunt Pussy's bag, with the mended handle. She
+groaned.
+
+The man fixed his eyes on her and said:
+
+"Look well at this bag, madam. Do you recognise it as yours?"
+
+"I do," said Aunt Pussy, as inaudibly as a bride at the altar.
+
+He then asked her what the contents were, and she described them
+categorically. He then took up the bag, put it into her hand, and said,
+"Look well at the contents, madam, and verify that they are all there."
+
+They were all there. As Aunt Pussy was too paralysed to utter another
+word I said so for her.
+
+There was a long pause. The man looked searchingly from one to the other
+of us, and sighed. If he expected a tip he was disappointed. After a
+moment he moved towards Aunt Pussy to open the door behind her. As he
+did so she gave a faint scream, and subsided on the floor in a swoon.
+
+When we had resuscitated and conveyed her home, and Mark had gone, she
+said in a hollow voice:
+
+"Wasn't it enough to make anybody faint?"
+
+I said cheerfully that I did not see any cause for alarm; that the man
+no doubt always used exactly the same formula whenever lost property had
+to be identified.
+
+"But why should he have said just at the last moment, 'Look well at me,
+madam, I am your murderer?'"
+
+"Dear Aunt Pussy, of course he never said any such thing!"
+
+"He did! I heard him! That was why I fainted."
+
+It was in vain I assured her that she was mistaken. She only became
+hysterical and said I was deceiving her; that she saw I had heard it,
+too. She had been eccentric before, but from this time onwards she
+became even more so. She would not deal at Brown and Prodgers any more.
+She would not even pass the shop. She became more penurious than ever.
+
+We could hardly persuade servants to stay with us so rigid was she about
+the dripping. It was all I could do to obtain the necessary money for
+our economical housekeeping. As the lease of our house was drawing to a
+close, she decided to move into a flat, thinking it might be cheaper.
+But when it was all arranged and the lease signed, she refused to go in,
+because the man who met us there with a selection of wallpapers was, she
+averred, the same man whom she always spoke of as her murderer.
+
+And I believe she was right. I thought I recognised him myself. I asked
+him if he had not formerly been at Brown and Prodgers, and he replied
+that he had; but was now employed by Whisk and Blake. After this
+encounter nothing would induce Aunt Pussy to enter her new home. She had
+to pay heavily for her changeableness, but she only wrung her hands and
+paid up. The poor little woman had a hunted look. She evidently thought
+she had had a great escape.
+
+Mark, who did not grow more rational with increasing years, said that
+this was obviously the psychological moment for us to marry, and drew a
+vivid picture of the group at the altar--the blushing bridegroom and
+determined bride, and how when Aunt Pussy saw her murderer step forward
+as the best man, with a gardenia in his buttonhole, she would die of
+shock on the spot. And after handsomely remunerating our benefactor, he
+and I should whisk away in a superb motor, with a gross of shilling
+cigars on an expensive honeymoon.
+
+Six months passed, and there was no talk of any honeymoons. And then the
+lease of our house came to an end, and Aunt Pussy, having refused to
+allow any other house or flat to be taken, she was forced to warehouse
+her furniture, and we had recourse to the miseries of hotel life.
+Needless to say, we did not go to a quiet residential hotel, but to one
+of those monster buildings glued on to a railway station, where the
+inmates come and go every day.
+
+Strangely enough, the galvanised activity of hotel existence pleased
+Aunt Pussy. She called it "seeing life." She even made timid advances to
+other old ladies, knitting and dozing in the airless seclusion of the
+ladies' drawing-room, for, of course, we had no sitting-room. I saw
+plainly enough that we should live in those two small adjoining bedrooms
+under the roof, looking into a tiled air-shaft, for the remainder of
+Aunt Pussy's life.
+
+Three months we lived there, and then at the cheapest time in the year,
+when the hotel was half empty and the heat of our rooms appalling, she
+consented to move for a short time into the two rooms exactly below
+ours, which looked on the comparatively balmy open of the August
+thoroughfare, and had a balcony.
+
+I had realised by this time that Aunt Pussy was no longer responsible
+for her long cruelty to Mark and me, and my old affection for her
+revived somewhat with her pathetic dependence on me. She could hardly
+bear me out of her sight.
+
+A certain Mrs. Curtis, a benevolent old Australian widow, living in
+rooms next ours on this lower floor, showed us great kindness. She
+grasped at once what Aunt Pussy was, and she would sit with her by the
+hour, enabling me to go out in the air. She took me for drives. She soon
+discovered there was a Mark in the background, and often asked us to
+dine at her table, and invited him too.
+
+She was said to be enormously wealthy, and she certainly wore a few
+wonderful jewels, but she was always shabbily dressed. Aunt Pussy became
+very fond of her, and must have been a great trial to her, running in
+and out of her rooms at all hours. She gave us tea in her sitting-room
+next door to us, and this gave Aunt Pussy special satisfaction, as we,
+having no sitting-room, could not possibly, as she constantly averred,
+return the civility.
+
+Towards the end of September the hotel began to fill again, and the
+prices of the lower rooms were raised. So we moved back to our old
+quarters, and Mrs. Curtis, who had a noisy bedroom, took for herself and
+her son the two we had vacated. Her son was expected, and I have never
+forgotten her face of joy when she received a telegram from him during
+dinner saying he had reached Calais, and should arrive next morning.
+
+We were dining early, for the kind old woman was taking Mark and me to
+the play. The play was delightful, and he and I, sitting together
+laughing at it, forgot our troubles, forgot that our youth was
+irretrievably gone, and that we were no nearer happiness than we had
+been thirteen years before. Our little friend in her weird black gown,
+with her thin fingers covered with large diamonds clutching an opera
+glass, looked at us with pained benevolence.
+
+Mark saw us back to the door of our hotel, and after he was gone Mrs.
+Curtis took my arm as we mounted the steps and said gently:
+
+"You and that nice absurd man must keep your courage up. I waited
+seventeen years for my husband, and when it was over it was only like a
+day."
+
+The night porter appeared at the lift door, and we got in. He stood with
+his back to me, and I did not look at him till he said: "What floor?"
+The servants knew us so well that I was surprised at the question,
+and glanced at him. It was Aunt Pussy's murderer. I recognised
+him instantly, and I will own my first thought was one of
+self-congratulation.
+
+"Now we shall leave this horrible place," I thought. "She will never
+stay another day if he is here."
+
+But my second thought was for her. She might go clean out of her mind if
+she were suddenly confronted with him. What would it be best to do?
+
+When he had put down Mrs. Curtis at Floor 7, and we were rumbling
+towards Floor 8, he volunteered, as we bumped with violence against the
+roof that he was new to the work. I asked him what hours he came on and
+went off at. He said, "Heleven p.hem. to hate hay-hem." He did not
+recognise me--as, indeed, why should he?--but he looked more downcast
+and villainous than ever. It was evident that life had not gone well
+with him since he had been foreman at Brown and Prodgers.
+
+"Lady's son from Horsetralia just arrived," he remarked
+conversationally, jerking his thumb towards the lower landing. "Took 'im
+up 'arf an hour ago."
+
+I was surprised that Mr. Curtis should have already arrived, but in
+another moment I forgot all about it, for the first object that met my
+eyes as I opened my door was Aunt Pussy in a state of great agitation,
+sitting fully dressed on my bed. It seemed that after we had started for
+the play she had stood a moment in the hall looking after us, and she
+had seen her murderer pass, and not only had he passed, but he had
+exchanged a few words with the hall porter airing himself on the hotel
+steps.
+
+"We must leave. We must leave to-morrow, Janet," she repeated, in an
+agony of terror. "I know he'll get in and kill me. That's why he spoke
+to the porter. Let's go and live at Margate. No, not Margate; it's too
+public. But I saw a little house at Southwold once; tumbling down it
+was, with no road up to it. Such a horrid place! We might go and live
+_there_. No one would ever think I should go there. Promise me you will
+take me away from London to-morrow, Janet."
+
+I promised, I realised that we must go at once, and I calculated that if
+Aunt Pussy, who always breakfasted in her room, only left it at ten
+o'clock to enter a cab to take her to the station it was impossible she
+should run across the new night porter, who went off duty several hours
+earlier. She must never know that he was actually in the house.
+
+I tried to calm her, but dawn was already in the sky, or rather
+reflected on the tiles of our air-shaft, before she fell asleep, and I
+could go to my room and try to do the same.
+
+I did it so effectually that it was nearly ten o'clock before I went
+down to breakfast, leaving Aunt Pussy still slumbering.
+
+While I drank my coffee I looked out the trains for Southwold, and noted
+down the name of a quiet hotel there, and then went to the manager's
+office to give up our rooms. When I got there a tired, angry young man,
+with a little bag, was interviewing the manager, who was eyeing him
+doubtfully, while a few paces away the hall porter, all gold braid and
+hair-oil and turned-out feet, was watching the scene.
+
+"Surely Mrs. Curtis told you she was expecting me, her son," he was
+saying as I came up.
+
+"Yes, sir," said the manager, civil but suspicious. "No doubt, sir. Mrs.
+Curtis said as you were expected this morning, but, begging your pardon,
+you arrived last night, sir. Mr. Gregory Curtis arrived last night just
+after I retired for the evening."
+
+"Impossible," said the young man, impatiently. "There is some mistake.
+Take me to Mrs. Curtis's room at once."
+
+The manager hesitated.
+
+"This certainly is Mr. Gregory Curtis," I said, coming forward. "He is
+exactly like the photograph of her son which stands on Mrs. Curtis's
+table, and which I have seen scores of times."
+
+The young man looked gratefully at me. And then, in a flash, as it were,
+we all took alarm.
+
+"Then who _did_ you take up to my mother's rooms last night?" said her
+son. "And who took him up?"
+
+"Not me, sir," said the hall porter promptly. "I was off duty. Clarke,
+the new night porter, must have took him up."
+
+"Where _is_ Clarke?" asked the manager, seizing down a key from a peg on
+the wall.
+
+"Gone to bed, sir. Not been gone five minutes."
+
+"Bring him to me at once. And take this gentleman and me up in the lift
+first."
+
+"This lady also," said Gregory, indicating me.
+
+A horrible sense of guilt was stealing over me. Why hadn't I waited to
+see the fragile little old woman safely into her rooms?
+
+The manager and Gregory did not speak. I dared not look at them. The
+lift came to a standstill, and in a moment the manager was out of it,
+and fitting his master key into the lock of No. 10, almost knocking over
+a can of hot water on the mat. The door opened, and we all went in.
+
+The room was dark, and as the manager went hastily forward to draw the
+curtain his foot struck against something and he drew back with an
+exclamation. I, who was nearest the door, turned on the electric light.
+
+Mrs. Curtis was lying with outstretched arms on her face on the floor.
+Her widow's cap had fallen off, revealing on the crown of the head a
+dark stain. Her small hands, waxen white, were spread out as if in mild
+deprecation. There were no rings on them. The despatch box on the
+dressing table had been broken open, and the jewel cases lay scattered
+on the floor.
+
+After a moment of stupor, Gregory and I raised the little figure and
+laid it on the bed. It was obvious that there was nothing to be done.
+As we did so the door opened and the day porter dragged in the new lift
+man, holding him strongly by the arm.
+
+They both looked at the dead woman on the bed. And then the lift man
+began to shake as with an ague, and his face became as ashen as hers.
+
+"You saw her last alive," said the manager, "and you took up the party
+to her room last night."
+
+The lift man was speechless. The drops stood on his forehead. He looked
+the image of guilt.
+
+And as we stood staring at him Aunt Pussy ambled in in her
+dressing-gown, with her comb in her hand, having probably left something
+in the room she had only yesterday vacated.
+
+Her eyes fell first on the dead body, and then on the lift man.
+
+I expected her to scream or faint, but she did neither. She seemed
+frozen. Then she raised a steady comb and pointed it at the lift man.
+
+"He is her murderer," she said solemnly. "He meant to murder me. He told
+me so a year ago. He has followed me here to do it. But he did not know
+I had changed my rooms, and he has killed her instead."
+
+I don't know what happened after that, for I was entirely taken up with
+Aunt Pussy. I put my hand over her mouth, and hustled her back to her
+rooms.
+
+"He will be hanged now," she said over and over again throughout that
+awful day. "He is _certain_ to be hanged, and when he is really dead I
+shall feel safe. Then I shall take a house, and you shall have a motor,
+and anything you like, Janet. He's in prison now, isn't he?"
+
+"Yes, poor creature. He is under arrest. A policeman has taken him
+away."
+
+"Safe in prison now, and hanged very soon. I shan't be easy otherwise.
+And then I shall sleep peacefully in my bed."
+
+She was better than she had been for the last year. She ate and slept,
+and seemed to have taken a new lease of life. She was absolutely callous
+about Mrs. Curtis's death, and suggested that half-a-guinea was quite
+enough to give for a wreath.
+
+"If you're thinking of the number of times she gave us tea," she said,
+"it could not possibly, with tea as cheap as it is now--Harrod's own
+only one and seven--come to more than eight and six." And she opened her
+"Daily Mail" and pored over it. She had of late ceased to take in any
+paper, but now she took in the "Daily Mail" and the "Evening Standard,"
+and read the police news with avidity, looking for the trial of "her
+murderer."
+
+Mark and I went to the funeral, and he was very low all the way home. He
+was really distressed about Mrs. Curtis and Gregory, but of course he
+would not allow it, and accounted for his depression by saying that he
+had been attending the _wrong_ funeral. He said he did not actually
+blame Clarke (the lift man), for he had shown good intentions, but the
+man was evidently a procrastinator and a bungler, who had deceived the
+confidence he (Mark) had reposed in him, and on whom no one could place
+reliance. Such men, he averred, were better hanged and out of the way.
+
+When I got back to our rooms I found Aunt Pussy leaning back in her
+armchair near the window, with the "Evening Standard" spread out on her
+knee. A large heading caught my eye:
+
+  "SENSATIONAL ARREST OF THE
+  MURDERER OF MRS. CURTIS."
+
+    "RELEASE OF CLARKE."
+
+It had caught Aunt Pussy's eye too. And her sheer terror had been too
+much for her. She would never be frightened any more. She had had her
+last shock. She was dead.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A month later Mark came to see me in the evening. We did not seem to
+have much to say to each other, perhaps because we were to be married
+next day. But I presently discovered that he was suffering from a
+suppressed communication.
+
+"Out with it," I said. "You've got a wife and five small children at
+Peckham. There is still time to counter-order the motor and the wedding
+and the shilling cigars and--me."
+
+He took no notice.
+
+"I've seen Clarke," he said. "Poor devil! They won't have him back at
+the hotel, think he's unlucky, a sort of Jonah. His face certainly isn't
+his fortune, is it? And I hope you won't mind, Janet, I--"
+
+"You've asked him to be best man instead of Gregory?"
+
+"Well, no, I haven't. But I was sorry for him, and I gave him fifty
+pounds. Your money of course. I felt we owed him something for bringing
+us together. For you know, in a way, he really _has_, though he has been
+some time about it."
+
+
+
+
+Votes for Men[3]
+
+_Two hundred years hence, possibly less._
+
+    [3] First Published in 1909.
+
+
+  EUGENIA, _Prime Minister, is sitting at her writing table in her
+      library. She is a tall, fine looking woman of thirty, rather
+      untidy and worn in appearance._
+
+  EUGENIA [_to herself, taking up a paper_]. There is no doubt that we
+    must carry through this bill or the future of the country will be
+    jeopardized.
+
+  HENRY [_outside_]. May I come in?
+
+  EUGENIA. Do come in, dearest.
+
+  HENRY [_a tall, athletic man of thirty, faultlessly dressed, a
+    contrast to her dusty untidiness_]. I thought I could see the
+    procession best from here. [_Goes to windows and opens them._] It is
+    in sight now. They are coming down the wind at a great pace.
+
+  EUGENIA [_slightly bored_]. What procession?
+
+  HENRY. Why the Men's Reinfranchisement League, of course. You know,
+    Eugenia, you promised to interview a deputation of them at 5
+    o'clock, and they determined to have a mass meeting first.
+
+  EUGENIA. So they did. I had forgotten. I wish they would not pester me
+    so. Really, the government has other things to attend to than Male
+    Suffrage at times like this.
+
+  [_The procession sails past the windows in planes decked with the
+    orange and white colours of the league. The occupants preserve a
+    dead silence, saluting_ EUGENIA _gravely as they pass. From the
+    streets far below rises a confused hubbub of men's voices shouting
+    "Votes for men!"_
+
+  HENRY. How stately the clergy look, Eugenia! Why, there are the two
+    Archbishops in their robes heading the whole procession, and look at
+    the bevy of Bishops in their lawn sleeves in the great Pullman air
+    car behind. What splendid men. And here come the clergy in their
+    academic gowns by the hundred, in open trucks.
+
+  EUGENIA. I must say it is admirably organised, and no brawling.
+
+  HENRY. Why should they brawl? I believe you are disappointed that they
+    don't. They are all saluting you, Eugenia, as they pass. They won't
+    take any notice of me, of course, because it is known I am the
+    President of the Anti-Suffrage League. The doctors are passing now.
+    How magnificent they look in their robes! What numbers of them! It
+    makes me proud I am a man. And now come the lawyers in crowds in
+    their wigs and gowns.
+
+  EUGENIA. Every profession seems to be represented, but of course I am
+    well aware that it is not the real wish of the men of England to
+    obtain the vote. The suffragists must do something to convince me
+    that the bulk of England's thoughtful and intelligent men are not
+    opposed to it before I move in the matter.
+
+  HENRY. I often wonder what would convince you, Eugenia, or what they
+    could do that they have not done. These must be the authors and
+    artists and journalists, and quite a number of women with them. Do
+    you notice that? Look, that is Hobson the poet, and Bagg the
+    millionaire novelist, each in their own Swallow planes. How they
+    dart along. I should like to have a Swallow, Eugenia. And are all
+    those great lumbering tumbrils of men journalists?
+
+  EUGENIA. No doubt.
+
+  HENRY. It is very impressive. I wish they did not pass so fast, but
+    the wind is high. Here come all the trades with the Lord Mayor of
+    London in front! What hordes and hordes of them! The procession is
+    at least a mile long. And I suppose those are miners and
+    agricultural labourers, last of all, trying to keep up in those old
+    Wilbur Wrights and Zeppelins. I did not know there were any left
+    except in museums.
+
+  [_The procession passes out of sight._ EUGENIA _sighs_.
+
+  HENRY. Demonstrations like this make a man think, Eugenia. I really
+    can't see, though you often tell me I do, why men should not have
+    votes. They used to have them. You yourself say that there is no
+    real inequality between the sexes. The more I think of it the more I
+    feel I ought to retire from being President of the Anti-Suffrage
+    League. And all the men on it are old enough to be my father. The
+    young men are nearly all in the opposite camp. I sometimes wish I
+    was there too.
+
+  EUGENIA. Henry!
+
+  HENRY. Now don't, Eugenia, make any mistake. I abhor the "brawling
+    brotherhood" as much as you do. I was quite ashamed for my sex when
+    I saw that bellowing brute riveted to the balcony of your plane the
+    other day, shouting "Votes for men."
+
+  EUGENIA [_coldly_]. That sort of conduct puts back the cause of men's
+    reinfranchisement by fifty years. It shows how unsuited the sex is
+    to be trusted with the vote. Imagine that sort of hysterical
+    screaming in the House itself.
+
+  HENRY. But ought the cause to be judged by the folly of a few howling
+    dervishes? Sometimes it really seems, Eugenia, as if women were
+    determined to regard the brawling brotherhood as if it represented
+    the men who seek for the vote. And yet the sad part is that these
+    brawlers have done more in two years to advance the cause than their
+    more orderly brothers have achieved in twenty. For years past I
+    have heard quiet suffragists say that all their efforts have been
+    like knocking in a padded room. They can't make themselves heard.
+    Women smiled and said the moment was not opportune. The press gave
+    garbled accounts of their sayings and doings.
+
+  EUGENIA. Your simile is unfortunate. No one wants to emancipate the
+    only persons who are confined in padded rooms.
+
+  HENRY. Not if they are unjustly confined?
+
+  EUGENIA [_with immense patience_]. Dear Henry, must we really go over
+    this old ground again? Men used to have votes as we all know. In the
+    earliest days of all, of course, both men and women had them. The
+    ancient records prove that beyond question, and that women presented
+    themselves with men at the hustings. Then women were practically
+    disfranchised, and for hundreds of years men ruled alone, though it
+    was not until near the reign of Victoria the First that by the
+    interpolation of the word "male" before "persons" in the Reform Act
+    of 1832 women were legally disfranchised. Men were disfranchised
+    almost as suddenly in the reign of Man-hating Mary the Second of
+    blessed memory.
+
+  HENRY. I know, I know, but....
+
+  EUGENIA [_whose oratorical instincts are not exhausted by her public
+    life_]. You must remember I would have you all--I mean I would have
+    you, Henry, remember that men were only disfranchised after the
+    general election of 2009. It was the wish of the country. We must
+    bow to that.
+
+  HENRY. You mean it was the wish of the women of the country, who were
+    a million stronger numerically than men.
+
+  EUGENIA. It was the wish of the majority, including many thousands of
+    enlightened men, my grandfather among them, who saw the danger to
+    their country involved in continued male suffrage. After all, Henry,
+    it was men who were guilty of the disaster of adult suffrage. Women
+    never asked for it--they were deeply opposed to it. They only
+    demanded the suffrage on the same terms that men had it in Edward
+    the Seventh's time. Adult suffrage was the last important enactment
+    of men, and one which ought to prove to you, considering the
+    incalculable harm it did, that men, in spite of their admirable
+    qualities, are not sufficiently far-sighted to be trusted with a
+    vote. Adult suffrage lost us India. It all but lost us our Colonies,
+    for the corner-men and wastrels and unemployed who momentarily
+    became our rulers saw no use for them. The only good result of adult
+    suffrage was that women, by the happy chance of their numerical
+    majority, and with the help of Mary the Man-hater, were able to
+    combine, to outvote the men and so to seize the reins and abolish
+    it.
+
+  HENRY. And abolish us too.
+
+  EUGENIA. It was an extraordinary _coup d'état_, the one good result of
+    the disaster of adult suffrage. It was a bloodless revolution, but
+    the most amazing in the annals of history. And it saved the country.
+
+  HENRY. I do not deny it. But you can't get away from the fact that men
+    did give women the vote originally. And now men have lost it
+    themselves. Why should not women give it back to men--I mean, of
+    course, only to those who have the same qualifications as to
+    property as women voters have? After all it was by reason of our
+    physical force that we were entitled to rule, at least men always
+    said so. Over and over again they said so in the House, and that
+    women can't be soldiers and sailors and special constables as we
+    can. And our physical force remains the greater to this day.
+
+  EUGENIA. We do everything to encourage it.
+
+  HENRY. Without us, Eugenia, you would have no army, no navy, no
+    miners. We do the work of the world. We guard and police the nation,
+    and yet we are not entitled to a hearing.
+
+  EUGENIA. Your ignorance of the force that rules the world is assumed
+    for rhetorical purposes.
+
+  HENRY. I suppose you will say brain ought to rule. Well, some of us
+    are just as able as some of you. Look at our great electricians, our
+    shipbuilders, our inventors, our astronomers, our poets, nearly all
+    are men. Shakespeare was a man.
+
+  EUGENIA [_sententiously_]. There was a day, and a very short day it
+    was, when it was said that brain ought to rule. Brain did make the
+    attempt, but it could no more rule this planet than brute force
+    could continue to do so. You know, and I know, and every schoolgirl
+    knows, that what rules the birth-rate rules the world.
+
+  HENRY [_for whom this sentiment has evidently the horrid familiarity
+    of the senna of his childhood_]. It used not to be so.
+
+  EUGENIA. It is so now. It is no use arguing; it is merely hysteria to
+    combat the basic fact that the sex which controls the birth-rate
+    must by nature rule the nation which it creates. This is not a
+    question with which law can deal, for nature has decided it.
+
+  [HENRY _preserves a paralysed silence_.
+
+  EUGENIA [_with benignant dignity_]. I am all for the equality of the
+    sexes within certain limits, the limits imposed by nature. But the
+    long and the short of it is, to put it bluntly, no man, my dear
+    Henry, can give birth to a child, and until he can he will be
+    ineligible by the laws of nature, not by any woman-made edict, to
+    govern, and the less he talks about it the better. Sensible men and
+    older men know that and hold their tongues, and women respect their
+    silence. Man has his sphere, and a very important and useful sphere
+    in life it is. The defence of the nation is entrusted to him. Where
+    should we be without our trusty soldiers and sailors, and, as you
+    have just reminded me, our admirable police force? Where physical
+    strength comes in men are paramount. When I think of all the work
+    men are doing in the world I assure you, Henry, my respect and
+    admiration for them knows no bounds. But if they step outside their
+    own sphere of labour, then--
+
+  HENRY. But if only you would look into the old records, as I have been
+    doing, you would see that Lord Curzon and Lord James and Lord
+    Cromer, and many others employed these same arguments in order to
+    withhold the suffrage from women.
+
+  EUGENIA. I dare say.
+
+  HENRY. And there is another thing which does not seem to me to be
+    fair. Men are so ridiculed if they are suffragists. _Punchinella_
+    always draws them as obese disappointed old bachelors, and there are
+    many earnest young married men among the ranks of the suffragists.
+    Look at the procession which has just passed. Our best men were in
+    it. And to look at _Punchinella_ or to listen to the speeches in the
+    House you would think that the men who want the vote are mostly
+    repulsive old bachelors stung by the neglect of women. Why only last
+    week the member for Maidenhead, Mrs. Colthorpe it was got up and
+    said that if only this "brawling brotherhood" of single gentlemen,
+    who had missed domestic bliss, could find wives they would not
+    trouble their heads about reinfranchisement.
+
+  EUGENIA. There is no doubt there is an element of sex resentment in
+    the movement, dear Henry. That is why I have always congratulated
+    myself on the fact that, you, as my husband, were opposed to it.
+
+  HENRY. Personally I can't imagine now that women have the upper hand
+    why they don't keep up their number numerically. It is their only
+    safeguard against our one day regaining the vote. It was their
+    numerical majority plus adult suffrage which suddenly put them in
+    the position to disfranchise men. And yet women are allowing their
+    number to decline and decline until really for all practical
+    purposes there seems to be about two men to every woman.
+
+  EUGENIA. The laws of nature render our position infinitely stronger
+    than that of men ever was. We mounted by the ladder of adult
+    suffrage, but we kicked it down immediately afterwards. It will
+    never be revived. Men had no tremors about the large surplusage of
+    women as long as they were without votes. Why should we have any now
+    about the surplusage of men?
+
+  HENRY. Then there is another point. You talk so much about the
+    importance of the physique of the race, and I agree with all my
+    heart. But there are so few women to marry nowadays, and women show
+    such a marked disinclination towards marriage till their youth is
+    quite over, that half the men I know can't get wives at all. And
+    those who do, have almost no power of selection left to them, and
+    are forced to put up with ill-developed, sickly, peevish, or ugly
+    women past their first bloom rather than remain unmarried and
+    childless.
+
+  EUGENIA. The subject is under consideration at this moment, but when
+    the position was reversed in Edward the Seventh's time, and there
+    were not enough men to go round, women were in the same plight, and
+    men said nothing _then_ about the deterioration of the race. They
+    did not even make drunkards' marriages a penal offence. Drunkards
+    and drug-takers, and men dried up by nicotine constantly married and
+    had children in those days.
+
+  HENRY. I can't think the situation was as difficult for women as it is
+    now for men. I was at Oxford last week, and do you know that during
+    the last forty years only five per cent. of the male Dons and
+    Professors have been able to find mates. Women won't look at them.
+
+  EUGENIA. In the nineteenth century, when first women went to
+    Universities and became highly educated, only four per cent. of them
+    afterwards married, and then to schoolmasters.
+
+  HENRY. And I assure you the amount of hysteria and quarrelling among
+    the older Dons is lamentable.
+
+  EUGENIA. I appointed a committee which reported to me on the subject
+    last year, and I gathered that the present Dons are not more
+    hysterical than they were in Victorian days, when they forfeited
+    their fellowships on marriage. You must remember, Henry, that from
+    the earliest times men and women have always hated anything "blue"
+    in the opposite sex. Female blue stockings were seldom attractive to
+    men in bygone days. And nowadays women are naturally inclined to
+    marry young men, and healthy and athletic men, rather than sedentary
+    old male blue stockings. It is most fortunate for the race that is
+    is so.
+
+  HENRY [_with a sigh_]. Well, all the "blue" women can marry nowadays.
+
+  EUGENIA. Yes, thank heaven, _all_ women can marry nowadays. What women
+    must have endured in the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth
+    century makes me shudder. For if they did not marry they were never
+    spared the ridicule or the contemptuous compassion of men. It seems
+    incredible, looking back, to realise that large families of
+    daughters were kept idle and unhappy at home, after their youth was
+    over, not allowed to take up any profession, only to be turned
+    callously adrift in their middle age at their father's death, with a
+    pittance on which they could barely live. And yet these things were
+    done by educated and kindly men who professed to care for the
+    interests of women, and were personally fond of their daughters.
+    Over and over again in the biographies of notable women of the
+    Victorian and Edward the Seventh's time one comes across instances
+    of the way in which men of the country-squire type kept their
+    daughters at home uneducated till they were beyond the age when they
+    could take up a profession, and then left them to poverty. They did
+    not even insure their lives for each child as we do now. Surely,
+    Henry, it is obvious that women have done one thing admirably. The
+    large reduction which they have effected in their own numbers has
+    almost eliminated the superfluous, incompetent, unhappy women who
+    found it so difficult to obtain a livelihood a hundred years ago,
+    and has replaced them by an extra million competent, educated,
+    fairly contented men who are all necessary to the State, who are
+    encouraged, almost forced into various professions.
+
+  HENRY. Not contented, Eugenia.
+
+  EUGENIA. More contented, because actively employed, than if they were
+    wandering aimlessly in the country lanes of their fathers' estates
+    as thousands of intelligent uneducated women were doing a hundred
+    years ago, kept ferociously at home by the will of the parent who
+    held the purse-strings.
+
+  HENRY. I rather wish I had lived in those good old times, when the
+    lanes were full of pretty women.
+
+  EUGENIA. But you, at any rate, Henry, had a large choice. I was much
+    afraid at one time that you would never ask me.
+
+  HENRY. Ah! But then I was a great heir, and all heirs have a wide
+    choice. Not that I had any choice at all. I had the good luck to be
+    accepted by the only woman I ever cared a pin about, and the only
+    one I was sure was disinterested.
+
+  EUGENIA. Dearest!
+
+  HENRY [_tentatively_]. And yet our marriage falls short of an ideal
+    one, my Eugenia.
+
+  EUGENIA [_apologetically_]. Dear Henry, I know it does, but as soon as
+    I cease to be Prime Minister I will do my duty to the country, and,
+    what I think much more of, by you. What is a home without children?
+    Besides, I must set an example. When you came in I was framing a
+    bill to meet the alarming decline of the birth-rate. Unless
+    something is done the nation will become extinct. The results of
+    this tendency among women to marry later and later are disastrous.
+
+  HENRY. And what is your bill, Eugenia?
+
+  EUGENIA. That every healthy married woman or female celibate over
+    twenty-five and under forty, members of the government excepted,
+    must do her duty to the State by bringing into the world--
+
+  HENRY. Celibate! Bringing into the world! Eugenia! and I thought the
+    sanctity of marriage and home life were among your deepest
+    convictions. Just think how you have upheld them to--_men_.
+
+  EUGENIA. Patriotism must come first. By bringing into the world three
+    children, a girl and two boys. If her income is insufficient to rear
+    them, the State will take charge of them. One extra boy is needed to
+    supply the wastage of accidents in practical work, and in case of
+    war. I shall stand or fall by this bill, for unless the women of
+    England can be aroused to do their duty--unless there is general
+    conscription to motherhood, as in Germany, England will certainly
+    become a second-class power.
+
+  HENRY. Perhaps when there are two men to every woman we shall be
+    strong enough to force women to do justice to us.
+
+  EUGENIA. Men never did justice to us when they had the upper hand.
+
+  HENRY. They did not. And I think the truth lies there. Those who have
+    the upper hand cannot be just to those who are in their power. They
+    don't intend to be unfair, but they seem unable to give their
+    attention to the rights of those who cannot enforce them. Men were
+    unintentionally unjust to women for hundreds of years. They kept
+    them down. Now women are unjust to us. Yes, Eugenia, you are. You
+    keep us down. It seems to be an inevitable part of the _rôle_ of
+    "top dog," and perhaps it is no use discussing it. If you don't want
+    your plane, would you mind if I borrow it? I promised to meet
+    Carlyon at four above the Florence Nightingale column in Anne Hyde's
+    park, and it is nearly four now.
+
+  EUGENIA. Good-bye, Henry. Do take my plane. And I trust there will be
+    no more doubt in your dear head as to your Presidency of the
+    Anti-Suffrage League.
+
+  HENRY. None. I realise these wrigglings of the under dog are unseemly,
+    and only disturb the equanimity and good-will of the "top dog."
+    Good-bye, Eugenia.
+
+
+
+
+The End of the Dream
+
+
+The first time I saw Essie was a few weeks before her marriage with my
+brother Ted. I knew beforehand that she would certainly be very pretty
+for the simple reason that Ted would never have been attracted by a
+plain woman. For him plain women did not exist, except as cooks,
+governesses, caretakers and charwomen.
+
+Ted is the best fellow in the world, and when he brought her to see me I
+instantly realised why he had chosen her; but I found myself wondering
+why she had chosen him--she was charming, lovely, shy, very young and
+diffident, and with the serenest temperament I have ever seen. She was
+evidently fond of him, and grateful to him. Later on I learned--from
+her, never from him--the distress and anxiety from which he had released
+her and her mother. There was a disreputable brother, and other
+entanglements, and complicated money difficulties.
+
+Ted simply swooped down, and rescued her, and ordered her to marry him,
+which she did.
+
+"She is a cut above me, Essie is," he used to say rubbing his hands, and
+looking at her with joyful pride. It was true. Essie looked among us
+like a race horse among cart horses. She belonged, not by birth, but by
+breeding to a higher social plane than that on which we Hopkinses had
+our boisterous being. I was resentfully on the alert to detect the least
+sign of arrogance on her part. I expected it. But gradually the
+sleepless suspicion of the great middle class to which Ted and I
+belonged was lulled to rest. I had to own to myself that Essie was a
+simple, humble, and rather timid creature.
+
+I went to stay with them a few months after their marriage in their new
+home in Kensington. Ted was outrageously happy, and she seemed well
+content, amused by him, rather in the same way that a child is amused by
+a large dog.
+
+He had actually suggested before he met Essie that I should keep house
+for him, but I told him I preferred to call my soul my own. Essie
+apparently did not want to call anything her own. She let him have his
+way in everything, and it was a benevolent and sensible way, but it had
+evidently never struck him that she might have tastes and wishes even if
+she did not put them forward. He was absolutely autocratic, and without
+imagination.
+
+Before they had been married a month he had prevailed on her to wear
+woollen stockings instead of silk ones, because he always wore woollen
+socks himself.
+
+He chose the wallpapers of the house without any reference to her,
+though of course she accompanied him everywhere. He chose the chintzes
+for the drawing-room, and the curtains, and very good useful materials
+they were, not ugly, but of a garish cheerfulness. Indeed, he furnished
+the whole house without a qualm, and made it absolutely conventional. It
+is strange how very conventional people press towards the mark, how they
+struggle to be conventional, when it is only necessary to drift to
+become so.
+
+Ted exerted himself, and Essie laughed, and said she liked what he
+liked. If she had not been so very pretty her self-effacement would have
+seemed rather insipid, but somehow she was not insipid. She liked to see
+him happy in his own prosaic efficient inartistic way, and I don't think
+she had it in her power to oppose him if she had wanted to, or indeed
+anyone. She was by nature yielding, a quality which men like Ted always
+find adorable.
+
+I remember an American once watching Ted disporting himself on the
+balcony, pushing aside all Essie's tubs of flowering tulips to make room
+for a dreadful striped hammock.
+
+"The thing I can't understand about you English women," said the visitor
+to Essie, "is why you treat your men as if they were household pets."
+
+"What an excellent description of an English husband," said Essie.
+"That is just what he is."
+
+"What's that? What's that?" said Ted, rushing in from the balcony, but
+as he never waited for an answer Essie seldom troubled to give him one.
+
+Perhaps I should never have known Essie if I had not fallen ill in her
+house. Ted and she were kindness itself, but as I slowly climbed the
+hill of convalescence I saw less of him and more of her. He was
+constantly away, transacting business in various places, and I must own
+a blessed calm fell upon the house when the front door slammed, and he
+was creating a lucrative turmoil elsewhere. The weather was hot, and we
+sat out evening after evening in the square garden. Gradually, very
+gradually, a suspicion had arisen in my mind that there was another
+Essie whose existence Ted and I had so far never guessed. I saw that she
+did--perhaps by instinct--what wise women sometimes do of set purpose.
+She gave to others what they wanted from her, not necessarily the best
+she had to give. Ted had received from her exactly what he hoped and
+desired, and--he was happy.
+
+The evening came when I made a sudden demand on her sympathy. In the
+quiet darkness of the square garden I told her of a certain agonising
+experience of my own which in one year had pushed me from youth into
+middle age, and had turned me not to stone, but into a rolling stone.
+
+"I imagined it was something of that kind that was the matter with you,"
+she said in her gentle rather toneless voice.
+
+"You guessed it," I said amazed. I had thought I was a closed book to
+the whole world. "You never spoke of your idea to Ted?"
+
+"Never. Why should I?"
+
+There was a long silence.
+
+The noise of Kensington High Street reached us like the growl of some
+tired animal. An owl came across from Holland Park and alighted in a
+tree near us.
+
+"You should have married him," said Essie at last.
+
+"Married him!" I exclaimed, "but you don't understand." And I went over
+the whole dreadful story again--at full length. Love affairs are never
+condensed. If they are told at all they are recounted in full.
+
+"I don't see that any of those things matter," she said when I had
+finished, or rather when I paused.
+
+"Where is he now?"
+
+"In Turkistan, I believe."
+
+"Why not go to Turkistan?" She spoke as if it were just round the
+corner.
+
+"Turkistan!"
+
+"Well, it's somewhere on the map, I suppose. What does it matter where
+it is."
+
+"And perhaps when I got there I might find he had set up a harem of
+Turkistan women."
+
+"You might."
+
+"Or that he had long since left for America."
+
+"Just so."
+
+"Or that he did not want me."
+
+"All these things are possible."
+
+The owl began to call through the dusk, and, not far away, somewhere in
+the square a gentle lady owl's voice answered him.
+
+"There are things," said Essie, "which one can measure, and it is easy
+to know how to act about them, and whether it is worth while to act at
+all. Most things one can measure, but there are in life just a few
+things, a very few, which one cannot measure, or put a value on, or pay
+a certain price for, and no more, because they are on a plane where
+foot-rules and weighing machines and money do not exist. Love is one of
+these things. When we begin to weigh how much we will give to love, what
+we are willing to sacrifice for it, we are trying to drag it down to a
+mercantile basis and to lay it on the table of the money changers on
+which things are bought and sold, and bartered and equivalent value
+given."
+
+"You think I don't love him," I said, cut to the quick.
+
+"I am sure," said Essie, "that you don't love him yet, but I think you
+are on the road. Who was it who said
+
+    'The ways of love are harder
+    Than thoroughfares of stones.'
+
+Whoever it was, he knew what he was talking about. You have found the
+thoroughfare stony, and you rebel and are angry, very angry, and desert
+your fellow traveller. He, poor man, did not make the road. I expect he
+is just as angry and foot-sore as you are."
+
+"He was a year ago. I don't know what he is now. It is a year since he
+wrote."
+
+Essie knitted in silence.
+
+At last I said desperately:
+
+"I have told you everything. Do you think it's possible he still cares
+for me?"
+
+Essie waited a long minute before answering.
+
+"I don't know," she said, and then added, "but I think you will
+presently go to Turkistan and find out."
+
+Reader, I went to Turkistan, and was married there, and lived there and
+in Anatolia for many happy years. But that is another story. I did not
+start on that voyage of discovery till several months after that
+conversation. I had battered myself to pieces against the prison bars of
+my misery, and health ruthlessly driven away was slow to return.
+
+As I lived with Ted and Essie I became aware that he was becoming
+enormously successful in money matters. There were mysterious
+expeditions, buyings and sellings of properties, which necessitated
+sudden journeys. Immense transactions passed through his competent
+hands, and presently the possibility of a country house was spoken of.
+He talked mysteriously of a wonderful old manor house in Essex, which he
+had come upon entirely by chance, which would presently come into the
+market, and which might be acquired much below its value, so anxious was
+the owner--a foreign bigwig--to part with it at once.
+
+Ted prosed away about this house from teatime till bedtime. Essie
+listened dutifully, but it was I who asked all the questions.
+
+Ted hurried away next morning, not to return for several days, one of
+which he hoped to spend in Essex.
+
+"You don't seem much interested about the country house," I said at tea
+time. I was slightly irritated by the indifference which seemed to
+enwrap Essie's whole existence.
+
+"Don't you care about it? It must be beautiful from Ted's account."
+
+"If he likes it I shall like it."
+
+"What a model wife you are. Have you no wishes of your own, no tastes of
+your own, Essie?"
+
+She looked at me with tranquil eyes.
+
+"I think Ted is happy," she said, "and I am so glad the children are
+both exactly like him."
+
+"Yes, but--"
+
+"There is no _but_ in my case. Ted rescued me from an evil entanglement
+and eased my mother's life. And he set his kind heart on marrying me. I
+told him I could not give him much, but he did not mind. I don't think
+men like Ted understand that there is anything more that--that might be
+given; which makes a very wonderful happiness when it _is_ given. Our
+marriage was on the buying and selling plane. We each put out our wares.
+I saw very well that he would be impossible--for me at least--to live
+with unless I gave way to him entirely. Dear Ted is a benevolent tyrant.
+He would become a bully if he were opposed, and bullies are generally
+miserable. I don't oppose him. I think he is content with his bargain,
+and as fond of me as a man can be of a lay figure. My impression is that
+he regards me as a model wife."
+
+"He does, he does. He is absolutely, blissfully happy."
+
+"He would be just as happy with another woman," said Essie, "if she were
+almost inanimate. It was a comfort to me to remember that when I nearly
+died three years ago."
+
+"Yes, Ted is all right," I said, "but how about you? I used to think you
+were absolutely characterless, and humdrum, but I know better now. Don't
+you--miss anything?"
+
+"No," said Essie, "nothing. You see," she added tranquilly with the
+faintest spice of malice, "I lead a double life."
+
+I gasped, staring at her open-mouthed, horror-stricken. She ignored my
+crass imbecility, and went on quietly:
+
+"I don't know when it began, but I suppose when I was about five years
+old. I found my way to the enchanted forest, and I went there in my
+dreams every night."
+
+"In your dreams!" I stuttered, enormously reassured, and idiotically
+hoping that she had not noticed my hideous lapse.
+
+"In my dreams. I had an unhappy childhood, but I never was unhappy any
+more after I learned the way through the forest. Directly I fell asleep
+I saw the track among the tree trunks, and then after a few minutes I
+reached the wonderful glade and the lake, and the little islands. One of
+the islands had a temple on it. I fed the swans upon the lake. I twined
+garlands of flowers. I climbed the trees, and looked into the nests. I
+swung from tree to tree, and I swam from island to island. I made a
+little pipe out of a reed from the lake, and blew music out of it. And
+the rabbits peeped out of their holes to listen, and the squirrels came
+hand by hand along the boughs, and the great kites with their golden
+eyes came whirling down. Even the little moles came up out of the ground
+to listen."
+
+I gazed at her, astonished.
+
+"I did not wear any clothes," said Essie, "and I used to lie on the
+moss in the sun. It is delicious to lie on moss, warm moss in the sun.
+Once when I was a small child I asked my governess when those happy days
+would come back when we should wear no clothes, and she told me I was
+very naughty. I never spoke to her of the dream forest again. She did
+not understand any more than you did the first moment. I think the
+natural instinct of the British mind if it does not understand is to
+look about for a lurking impropriety. I saw other children sometimes,
+but never close at hand. They went to the temple singing, garlanded and
+gay, but when I tried to join them I passed through them. They never
+took any notice of me."
+
+"Were you a ghost?"
+
+"I think not. I imagine I am an old old soul who has often been in this
+world before, and by some strange accident I have torn a corner of the
+veil that hides our past lives from us, and in my dreams I became once
+more a child as I had really been once, hundreds and hundreds of years
+ago, perhaps in Greece or Italy."
+
+"And do you still have that dream every night?"
+
+"Not for many years past. I lost my way to the forest for several years,
+until I was again in great trouble. That was when--then one night when I
+had cried myself to sleep I saw the same track through the thicket, and
+I found the forest again. Oh! how I rejoiced! And in the middle of the
+forest was a garden and a wonderful old house, standing on a terrace.
+And there was no lake any more. It was a different place altogether, in
+England no doubt. And the house door was open. It was a low arched door
+with a coat of arms carved in stone over it. And I went in. And as I
+entered all care left me, and I was happy again, as I was among the
+islands in the lake. I can't tell you why I was so happy. I have
+sometimes asked myself, but it is a question I can't answer. It seemed
+my real home. I have gone back there every night since I was seventeen,
+and I know the house by heart. There is only one room I shrink from,
+though it is one of the most beautiful in the house. It is a small
+octagonal panelled room leading out of the banqueting hall where the
+minstrels gallery is. It looks on to the bowling green, and one large
+picture hangs in it, over the carved mantelpiece. A Vandyck I think it
+must be. It is a portrait of a cavalier with long curls holding his
+plumed hat in his hand."
+
+"Did you meet people in the house?"
+
+"No, not at first, not for several years, but I did not miss them. I did
+not want companionship; I felt that I was with friends, and that was
+enough. I wanted the repose, and the beauty and the peace which I always
+found there. I steeped myself in peace, and brought it back with me to
+help me through the day. The night was never long enough for me. And I
+always came back, rested, and refreshed, and content, oh! so deeply
+content. I am a very lucky person, Beatrice."
+
+"It explains you at last," I said. "You have always been to me an
+enigma, during the five years I have known you."
+
+"The explanation was too simple for you."
+
+"Do you call it simple? I don't. I should hardly be able to believe it
+if it were not you who had told me. And the house was always empty? You
+never saw anyone there?"
+
+"It was never empty, but I could not see the people who lived in it. I
+could see nothing clearly, and I had no desire to pry or search. I was
+often conscious of someone near me, who loved me and whom I loved. And I
+could hear music sometimes, and sweet voices singing, but I could never
+find the room where the music was. But then I did not try to find it.
+Sometimes when I looked out of the windows I could see a dim figure
+walking up and down the terrace, but not often."
+
+"Was it a man or a woman?"
+
+"A man."
+
+"And you never went out to the bowling green and spoke to him?"
+
+"I never thought of such a thing. I never even saw his face till--till
+that Christmas I was so ill with pneumonia. Then I fled to the house,
+and for the first time I could find no rest in it. And I went into the
+octagonal room, and sat down near the window and leaned my forehead
+against the glass. My head was burning hot, and the glass was hot too.
+Everything was hot. And there was a great dreadful noise of music. And
+suddenly it seemed as if I went deeper into the life of the house, where
+the light was clearer. It was as if a thin veil were withdrawn from
+everything. And the heat and the pain were withdrawn with the veil. And
+I was light and cool, and at ease once more. And the music was like a
+rippling brook. And _he_ came into the room. I saw him quite clearly at
+last. And oh! Beatrice, he was the cavalier of the picture, dressed in
+blue satin with a sword. And he stood before me with his plumed hat in
+his hand.
+
+"And as I looked at him a gentle current infinitely strong seemed to
+take me. I floated like a leaf upon it. I think, Beatrice, it was the
+current of death. I felt it was bearing me nearer and nearer to him and
+to my real life, and leaving further and further behind my absurd little
+huddled life here in Kensington, which always _has_ seemed rather like a
+station waitingroom.
+
+"We neither of us spoke, but we understood each other, and we loved each
+other. We had long loved each other. I saw that. And presently he knelt
+down at my feet and kissed my hands. Doesn't that sound commonplace,
+like a cheap novelette? but it wasn't. It wasn't ... and then as we
+looked at each other the gentle sustaining current seemed to fail
+beneath me. I struggled, but it was no use. It ebbed slowly away from
+me, leaving me stranded on an aching shore alone, in the dark, where I
+could not breathe or move. And I heard our doctor say, "she is going."
+But I wasn't going. I had nearly, nearly gone, and I was coming back.
+And then there was a great turmoil round me, and I came back in agony
+into my own room and my own bed, and found the doctor and nurse beside
+me giving me oxygen, and poor Ted as white as a sheet standing at the
+foot of the bed.... They forced me to--to stay. I had to take up life
+again."
+
+And for the first time in all the years I had known her Essie was shaken
+with sudden weeping.
+
+"That was three years ago," she said brokenly.
+
+For a time we sat in silence hand in hand.
+
+"And do you still go back there?"
+
+"Every night."
+
+"And you meet him?"
+
+"Yes and no. I am sometimes aware of his presence, but I never see him
+clearly as I did that once. I think at that moment I was able to see him
+because I was so near death that I was very close to those on the other
+side of death. My spirit had almost freed itself from the body, so I
+became visible to him and he to me. I have studied the pictures of
+Charles the First's time, and his dress was exactly of that date, almost
+the same as that well-known picture--I think it is Charles the First--of
+a man with his hand on his hip, standing beside a white horse. Do you
+think it is wrong of me to have a ghostly lover, who must have lived
+nearly three hundred years ago?"
+
+"Not wrong, but strange. It is a little like "The Brushwood Boy," and
+"Peter Ibbetson," and Stella Benson's "This is the end." I suppose we
+have all been on this earth before, but the cup of Lethe is well mixed
+for most of us, and we have no memory of previous lives. But you have
+not drunk the cup to the dregs, and somehow you have made a hole in the
+curtain of oblivion in two places. Through one of those holes you saw
+one of your many childhoods, probably in Greece, a couple of thousand
+years ago. Through the other hole you saw, in comparatively modern times
+your early womanhood. Perhaps you married your beautiful cavalier with
+the curls."
+
+"No," said Essie with decision, "I have never been married to him, or
+lived in his house. It is my home, but I have never lived there. I know
+nothing about him except that we love each other, and that some day we
+shall really meet, not in a dream."
+
+"In the Elysian fields?"
+
+"Yes, in the Elysian fields."
+
+At this moment the front door slammed, and Ted banged up the stairs, and
+rushed in. If I had not known him I should have said he was drunk.
+
+He was wildly excited, he was crimson. He careered round the room
+waving his arms, and then plumped on to the sofa, and stretched out his
+short legs in front of him.
+
+"I've bought it. I've got it," he shouted. "Do you hear? I've bought it
+dirt cheap. The young ass is in such a hurry, and he's apparently so
+wealthy he doesn't care. And two hundred acres of timber with it. Such
+timber. Such walnut, and chestnut and oak. The timber alone is worth the
+money, I've got it. It's mine."
+
+"The house in Essex?"
+
+"Kenstone Manor, in Essex. It's a nailer. It's a--a--an old world
+residence. It has no central heating, no bathrooms, no electric light,
+obsolete drainage and the floors are giving way. I shall have to put in
+everything, but I shall do it without spending a penny. I shall do it by
+the timber, and it's nine miles from a station, that's partly why no one
+wanted it. But the railroad is coming. No one knows that yet except a
+few of us, but it will be there in five years, with a station on the
+property. Then I shall sell all the land within easy reach of the
+station in small building lots for villas. I shall make a pile."
+
+Ted's round eyes became solemn. He was gazing into the future, leaning
+forward, a stout hand on each stout knee.
+
+"Teddy shall go to Eton," he said, "and I shall put him in the Guards."
+
+A week later Ted took us down by motor to see Kenstone. It was too far
+for us to return the same day, so he engaged rooms for us in the village
+inn. His "buyer" was to meet him, and advise him as to what part of the
+contents of the house he should offer to take over by private treaty
+before the sale.
+
+On a gleaming day in late September we sped along the lovely Essex
+lanes, between the pale harvested fields.
+
+"There's the forest," shouted Ted, leaning back from his seat in front,
+and pointing to a long ridge of trees which seemed to stretch to the low
+horizon beyond the open fields.
+
+"When we're over the bridge we're on the--the property," yelled Ted.
+
+We lurched over the bridge, and presently the forest came along the
+water's edge to meet us, and we turned sharply through an open gateway
+into a private road.
+
+Such trees I had never seen. They stood in stately groups of birch and
+oak and pine with broad glades of grass and yellowing bracken between
+them.
+
+"Ancient deer park once," shouted Ted. "Shall be again."
+
+Essie paid little attention to him. We had made a very early start, and
+she was tired. She leaned back in the car with half closed eyes.
+
+The trees retreated on each side of the road, and the wonderful old
+house came suddenly into sight, standing above its long terrace with its
+stone balustrade.
+
+Ted gave a sort of yelp.
+
+"Oh Essie!" I cried. "Look--look! It's perfect."
+
+She gazed languidly for a moment, and then she sat up suddenly, and her
+face changed. She stared wildly at the house, and put out her hands as
+if to ward it off.
+
+The car sped up to the arched doorway, with its coat of arms cut in grey
+stone, and Ted leaped out and rushed up the low steps to the bell.
+
+"Not here! Not here!" gasped Essie, clinging to the car. "I can't live
+here." She was trembling violently.
+
+"Dear Essie," I said amazed, "we can't remain in the car. Pull yourself
+together, and even if you don't like the place don't hurt Ted's feelings
+by showing it."
+
+She looked at me like one dazed, and inured to obedience got out, and we
+followed Ted into the house. We found ourselves in a large square hall.
+She groaned and leaned against the wall.
+
+"I can't bear it," she whispered to me. "It's no use, I can't bear it."
+
+"A glass of water, quick," I said to Ted, who turned beaming to us
+expecting a chorus of admiration. "Essie is overtired."
+
+"What is the matter?" I said to her as he hurried away. "What's wrong
+with this exquisite place?"
+
+"It's the house I come to at night," she said brokenly. "The dream
+house. I knew it directly I saw it. Look! There's the minstrels'
+gallery."
+
+I could only stare at her amazed.
+
+Kind Ted hurried back, splashing an overfull tumbler of water as he
+came, on the polished oak floor.
+
+She sipped a little, but her hands shook so much that I had to hold the
+glass for her.
+
+"Cheero, old girl," said Ted, patting her cheek, but Essie did not
+cheero.
+
+"The lady ought to lie down," said the old woman who had opened the door
+to us. "There's a sofy in the morning-room."
+
+I supported Essie into an octagonal room leading out of the great hall,
+and laid her on a spacious divan of dim red damask.
+
+"Leave her alone with me for a bit," I said to Ted. "She is overwrought.
+We made a very early start."
+
+"I seem to have gone blind," she whispered when Ted had departed.
+"Everything is black."
+
+"You turned faint. You will be all right in a few minutes."
+
+"Shall I? Would you mind telling me, Beatrice, is there--is there a
+picture over the fireplace?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What kind of picture?"
+
+"It is a life-size portrait of a young cavalier with curls, in blue
+satin, holding his hat in his hand."
+
+"I knew it," she groaned.
+
+There was a long silence.
+
+"I can't bear it," she said. "You may say that is silly, Beatrice, but
+all the same I can't. My life will break in two. If Ted lives here--I
+shall have nowhere to go."
+
+"I don't think it silly, dear, but I don't understand. This is your old
+home where you lived nearly three hundred years ago, and to which you
+have so often come back in your dreams. Now you are coming back to it as
+your home once more. It seems to me a beautiful and romantic thing to
+have happened, and after the first surprise surely it must seem the same
+to you. You have always been so happy here."
+
+"I can see a little now," she said. "Where is the glass of water?"
+
+She sat up and drank a little, and then dabbed some of the water on her
+forehead.
+
+"I'm all right now," she said, pushing back her wet hair.
+
+"Don't move. Rest a little; you have had a shock."
+
+She did not seem to hear me. She rose slowly to her feet, and stood in
+front of the picture.
+
+"Yes," she said to the cavalier. "It's you, only not quite you either.
+You are not really as handsome as that you know, and you have a firmer
+mouth and darker brows."
+
+The cavalier smiled at her from the wall: a somewhat insipid
+supercilious face I thought, but a wonderful portrait.
+
+The old caretaker came back.
+
+"The gentleman said you'd be the better for something to eat," she said,
+"and that you would take it in the hall."
+
+Through the open door I saw the chauffeur unstrapping the baskets from
+Fortnum and Mason.
+
+"Whose portrait is that?" said Essie.
+
+"Henry Vavasour Kenstone," said the old woman in a parrot voice.
+"Equerry to our martyred King, by Vandyck. You will observe the jewelled
+sword and the gloves sewed with pearls. The sword and the gloves are
+preserved in the banqueting 'all in a glass case."
+
+Essie turned away from the picture, and sat down feebly by the window.
+
+The clinking of plates, and Ted's cheerful voice reached us, and the
+drawing of a cork.
+
+"Our Mr. Rupert, the present owner, favours the picture," said the woman
+proudly in her natural voice, "and when he come of age three years ago
+last Christmas there was a grand fancy ball and 'e was dressed exackerly
+to match the picture, with a curled wig and all. And 'e wore the actual
+sword, and the very gloves, at least 'e 'eld 'em in 'is 'and. They was
+too stiff to put on. 'E did look a picture. And 'is mother being Spanish
+'ad a lace shawl on 'er 'ead, a duchess she was in 'er own right, and
+she might a been a queen to look at her. I watched the dancing from the
+gallery, me having been nurse in the family, and a beautiful sight it
+was."
+
+Essie's dark eyes were fixed intently on the garrulous old servant.
+
+"Three years ago last Christmas," she said sharply. "Are you sure of
+that?"
+
+"And wouldn't I be sure that took 'im from the month ma'am, but 'e don't
+look so like the picture when 'e ain't dressed to match, and without the
+yaller wig," and she wandered out of the room, evidently more interested
+in the luncheon preparations than in us.
+
+Ted hurried in. When was he not in a hurry?
+
+"Luncheon, luncheon," he said. "Don't wait for me, Essie. Rather too
+long a drive for my little woman. Give her a glass of port, Beatrice. I
+have to see Rodwell about the roof. Shan't be half a mo. He's got to
+catch his train. Mr. Kenstone, the Duke, I mean, will be here in ten
+minutes. If he turns up before I'm back give him a snack. They've sent
+enough for ten."
+
+We did not go in to luncheon.
+
+Essie sank down on the divan. I sat down by her, and put my arms round
+her. She leaned her head against my shoulder.
+
+"You heard what that woman said," she whispered. "You see he did not
+live hundreds of years ago as I thought. The dress deceived me. He's
+alive now. He's twenty-four."
+
+My heart ached for her, but I could find no word to comfort her in her
+mysterious trouble.
+
+As we looked out together through the narrow latticed windows the lines
+came into my mind:
+
+    "        casements opening on the foam
+    Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."
+
+It seemed to me that poor Essie was indeed a captive in some "faery land
+forlorn," and that invisible perilous seas were foaming round her
+casement windows.
+
+She gave a slight shudder, and started up.
+
+A man was walking slowly up and down the bowling green.
+
+"It is he," she said. "I've seen him walk there a hundred times."
+
+She watched the tall dignified figure pace up and down, and then turned
+her eyes from him to me. They were wide, and the pupils dilated.
+
+"Beatrice," she said solemnly, "I must not meet that man. He must not
+see me, for his sake, and for mine. All his life long he must go on
+thinking as he does now, that I am ... a dream."
+
+"The old woman says he starts for Spain to-day."
+
+Ted's roundabout figure was suddenly seen trundling out across the grass
+towards the distant pacing figure.
+
+"Who is that?" said Essie frowning.
+
+"Who is that? Why, it's Ted of course."
+
+"And who is Ted?"
+
+"Who is Ted?" I echoed staring at her. "What on earth do you mean?"
+
+She seemed to make a great mental effort.
+
+"Yes," she said. "Yes. It is Ted. _My husband._ I forgot. You see I've
+never seen him _here_ before."
+
+"You will soon grow accustomed to seeing him here," I said cheerfully.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+The two men met, and moved together towards the house.
+
+Essie looked round her in sudden panic.
+
+"I can't stay here," she said. "It's a trap. Where can I go?"
+
+Her eyes searched the room. There was no other door in it. She looked at
+the narrow latticed windows. Her eyes came back to me with sheer terror
+in them, such as I have seen in a snared wild animal.
+
+"You _must_ stay here," I said, "if you don't want to meet him. They
+will reach the open door into the garden long before you could cross
+the hall. Stay quietly where you are, and I will tell Ted you are
+unwell, and are resting."
+
+The two men were already in the hall. I went out to them, closing the
+door resolutely behind me.
+
+Rupert Maria Wenceslao di Soto, Duke of Urrutia, was a tall grave young
+man of few words, with close cropped hair and a lean clean shaven face.
+
+Ted introduced him to me, and then pressed him to have some luncheon.
+The long table down the banqueting hall shewed an array of which Fortnum
+and Mason might justly have been proud.
+
+The Duke was all courtesy and thanks, but had already lunched. His car
+would be here in ten minutes to take him to London. If agreeable to Mr.
+Hopkins he would say one word on business. He had called to modify his
+agent's letter about the mantelpieces. He was willing to sell them all
+as agreed at a valuation, except one.
+
+"Which one?" asked Ted, instantly changing from the exuberant host into
+the cautious business man.
+
+"The one in the south parlour," said the Duke, waving his hand towards
+the door of the room in which was Essie. "I desire to make it clear, as
+my agent has not done so, that everything in that room I intend to take
+with me, so that in my future home in the Pyrenees there may be one
+chamber exactly the same as my late mother's room in my old home here."
+
+The explanation quite bowled over Ted. The business man gave way to the
+man of sentiment.
+
+"Most creditable, I'm sure. Filial piety, most creditable. I don't
+recall the mantlepiece in question, but of course as your Grace wishes
+to keep it, I agree at once. Between gentlemen, no difficulties,
+everything open to arrangement, amicable settlement."
+
+The old woman, dissolved in tears, interrupted Ted's eloquence to tell
+"Mr. Rupert" that his car was at the door.
+
+The Duke led her gently out of the hall, his hand on her shoulder, and
+then came back.
+
+"I will detain you no longer from your luncheon," he said. "With your
+permission I will spend a few moments in my mother's chamber. It has
+many beautiful associations for me. I should like to see it once more
+before I leave for Spain."
+
+Ted hastened towards the door, but I barred the way.
+
+"Dear Ted," I said, "Essie is very ill. No one must go in."
+
+"No one go in!" said Ted flushing darkly. "I am astonished at you,
+Beatrice. The Duke wishes to see his mother's room once more, on bidding
+farewell to his ancestral home, and you take upon yourself to forbid
+it."
+
+"My sister-in-law is ill," I said, addressing the Duke, "it would
+distress her if a stranger were to go in suddenly."
+
+"I understand perfectly, Madam," he said coldly, and made as if to take
+his leave.
+
+"Stop," said Ted, purple in the face. "My wife _is_ unwell. She is
+overtired, but she is the kindest, most tender-hearted woman in the
+world. It would cut her to the heart if she found out afterwards she had
+prevented your Grace's seeing this room for the last time. Wait one
+moment, while I go in and explain it to her, and help her to walk a few
+steps to the settle here."
+
+And Ted, with a furious glance at me, pushed past me, and went into the
+room.
+
+"It would be a great kindness to my sister, who is very nervous," I said
+to the Duke, "if you would wait a moment in the garden."
+
+He instantly went towards the open door into the garden. Then I darted
+after Ted. Between us we would hurry Essie into one of the many other
+rooms that opened into the hall.
+
+She was standing by the window frantically endeavouring to break the
+lattice of the central casement, which was a little larger than the
+others.
+
+There was blood on her hand.
+
+Ted was speaking, but she cut him short.
+
+"Not in here," she said passionately. "I won't have it. He mustn't come
+in here."
+
+"He must come in if I say so," said Ted. The colour had left his face. I
+had seen him angry before now, but never so angry as this.
+
+"No," said Essie, "he must not."
+
+She came and stood before her husband.
+
+"Haven't I been a good wife to you these five years past," she said.
+"Haven't I done my best to make you happy? Haven't I obeyed you in
+everything, everything, everything--till now?"
+
+He stared at her open-mouthed. She had never opposed him before.
+
+She fell on her knees before him, and clasped his feet with her bleeding
+hands.
+
+"If you love me," she said, "send him away. I refuse to see him."
+
+"You are hysterical," said Ted, "or else you're stark staring mad. I've
+spoilt you and given way to you till you think you can make any kind of
+fool of me. Get up at once, and cease this play acting, and come into
+the hall."
+
+"He's in the garden," I broke in. "You can pass through the hall,
+Essie."
+
+She rose to her feet, and her vehemence dropped from her. Her eyes were
+rivetted on Ted. She paid no heed to what I said. She had no attention
+to give to anything but her husband.
+
+"I will not come out," she said, and she sat down again on the divan.
+
+"Then by--he shall come in," said Ted, and before I could stop him he
+strode to the door, calling loudly to the Duke to enter.
+
+There was a moment's pause, in which we heard a step cross the hall.
+Then the Duke came in, and Ted introduced him to Essie. She bowed
+slightly, but he did not. He stared at her, transfixed, overwhelmed.
+
+At that moment the discreet voice of Mr. Rodwell was heard in the
+doorway.
+
+"Can I have one last word, Mr. Hopkins? A matter of some importance."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Ted darting to the door, thankful to escape. As he left
+the room he said to me, "Take Essie at once into the hall. At once, do
+you hear?"
+
+He might as well have said, "Take her to the moon."
+
+The Duke and Essie gazed at each other with awed intentness. There was
+sheer amazement on his face, blank despair on hers. They were entirely
+absorbed in each other. As I stood in the background I felt as if I were
+a ghost, that no word of mine could reach their world.
+
+At last he spoke, stammering a little.
+
+"Madam, on the night of my coming of age I left the dancers, and came in
+here, and behold! you were sitting on that divan, all in white."
+
+"Yes," said Essie.
+
+"We saw each other for the first time," he said, trembling exceedingly.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And I knelt at your feet."
+
+"Yes."
+
+A suffocating compassion overcame me. It was unendurable to pry upon
+them, oblivious as they were of my presence. I left the room.
+
+"He will go out of her life in five minutes," I said to myself, "never
+to return. Poor souls. Poor souls. Let them have their say."
+
+I had never seen Romance before, much less such a fantastic romance as
+this, in a faery land as forlorn as this. My heart ached for them.
+
+Presently I heard Ted's voice in the distance shouting a last message to
+the departing Rodwell, and I went back to the octagonal room.
+
+He was kneeling at her feet, her pale hands held in his, and his face
+bowed down upon them.
+
+"You must go," she said faintly.
+
+He shuddered.
+
+"You must go," she repeated. "To me you can only be a picture. To you I
+am only a dream."
+
+"Yes, it is time to go," I said suddenly in a hoarse voice. I obliged
+them to look at me, to listen to me.
+
+Slowly he released her hands, and got upon his feet. He was like a man
+in a trance.
+
+"Go! Go!" I said sharply. Something urgent in my voice seemed to reach
+his shrouded faculties.
+
+He looked in bewildered despair at Essie.
+
+"Go!" she repeated with agonised entreaty, paler than I had ever seen a
+living creature.
+
+Still like a man in a trance he walked slowly from the room, passing Ted
+in the doorway without seeing him. In the silence that followed we heard
+his motor start and whirl away.
+
+"He's gone," said Essie, and she fainted.
+
+We had considerable difficulty in bringing her round, and, angry as I
+was with Ted, I could not help being sorry for him when for some long
+moments it seemed as if Essie had closed her eyes on this world for
+good.
+
+But Ted, who always knew what to do in an emergency, tore her back by
+sheer force from the refuge to which she had fled, and presently her
+mournful eyes opened and recognised us once more. We took her back in
+the motor to the village inn, and I put her to bed.
+
+Rest, warmth, silence, nourishment, these were all I could give her.
+Instinctively I felt that the presence of the remorseful distressed Ted
+was unendurable to her, and I would not allow him to come into her room,
+or to sit up with her as he was anxious to do.
+
+I took his place in an armchair at her bedside, having administered to
+her a sedative which I fortunately had with me, and was profoundly
+thankful when her even breathing shewed me that she was asleep.
+
+I have known--who has not?--interminable nights, and nights when I
+dreaded the morning, but I think the worst of them was easier to bear
+than the night I kept watch beside Essie.
+
+She was stricken. I could see no happiness for her in her future life,
+and I loved her. And I loved poor blundering Ted also. I grieved for
+them both. And I was sorry for the Duke too.
+
+When the dawn was creeping ghostlike into the room and the night-light
+was tottering in its saucer, Essie stirred and woke. She lay a long time
+looking at me, an unfathomable trouble in her eyes.
+
+"Beatrice," she said at last, "I could not find the way back."
+
+"Where, dearest?"
+
+"To the house. I tried and tried, but it was no use. It is lost, lost,
+lost. Everything is lost."
+
+I did not answer. I tried to put my trust in Time, and in the thought
+that she would presently see her children in its rooms and playing in
+its gardens, and would realise that Kenstone was in a new sense her
+home, though not in the old one.
+
+I brought her breakfast to her in her room, and then, in spite of my
+entreaties, she got up and dressed and came downstairs. But when a
+chastened and humble Ted timidly approached her to ask whether she would
+like to see the house once more before returning to London in a few
+hours time, she shook her head and averted her eyes. It was evident to
+me that she was determined never to set foot in it again.
+
+He did not insist, and she was obviously relieved when he left the room.
+He signed to me to follow him and then told me that he had just received
+a letter from the Duke asking him to accept the Vandyck in the octagonal
+room as a present, as on second thoughts he felt it belonged to the
+house and ought to remain there. The Duke had not started after all, as
+his ship had been delayed one day. He wrote from the house close at hand
+where he had been staying till his departure.
+
+"It's worth thousands," said Ted. "Thousands. These bigwigs are queer
+customers. What an awful fool he is to part with it just out of
+sentiment. But of course I shall never sell it. It shall be an heirloom.
+I've told him so," and Ted thrust the letter into his pocket and hurried
+away.
+
+Our rooms were airless, and Essie allowed me to establish her in a
+wicker armchair under a chestnut tree in the old-fashioned inn garden
+still brave with Michaelmas daisies and purple asters. The gleaming
+autumn morning had a touch of frost in it. I wrapped her fur motor cloak
+round her, and put her little hat on her head. She remained passive in
+my hands in a kind of stupor. Perhaps that might be the effect of the
+sedative I told myself. But I knew it was not so.
+
+Essie was drinking her cup of anguish to the dregs. She did not rebel
+against it. She accepted her fate with dumb docility. She was not
+bearing it. She was not capable of an effort of any kind. She underwent
+it in silence.
+
+I told her to try to sleep again, and she smiled wanly at me and
+obediently closed her eyes. As I went into the house to snatch an hour's
+rest and pack I turned and looked back at her motionless figure sunk
+down in her chair, her little grey face, pinched and thin like a
+squirrel's against the garish hotel cushion, her nerveless hands lying
+half open, palm upwards on her knee.
+
+A faint breeze stirred, and from the yellow tree a few large fronded
+leaves of amber and crimson eddied slowly down, and settled, one on her
+breast and the others in the grass at her feet. She saw them not. She
+heeded them not. She heeded nothing. Her two worlds had clashed
+together, and the impact had broken both. They lay in ruins round her.
+
+And so I looked for the last time on Essie.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Reader, I thought I could write this story to the end, but the pen
+shakes in my hand. The horror of it rushes back upon me. Ted's surprise
+at hearing that the Duke had gone to Essie in the garden, and that he
+had persuaded her to drive with him to London. Then his growing anxiety
+and continually reiterated conviction that we should find her in London,
+his uncomprehending fury when we reached London and--she was not there.
+And then at last his tardy realisation and desolation.
+
+I did what little I could to blunt the edge of his suffering when the
+first fever fit of rage was past.
+
+"Dear Ted, she did not like the house. She told me she could not live in
+it."
+
+"But she would have liked it when I had gutted it. I should have
+transformed it entirely. Electric light, bathrooms, central heating,
+radiators, dinner lift, luggage lift," Ted's voice broke down, and
+struggled on in a strangled whisper. "Inglenooks, cosy corners, speaking
+tubes, telephone, large French windows to the floor. She would not have
+known it again."
+
+He hid his face in his hands.
+
+I almost wished the paroxysms of anger back again.
+
+"Oh! Beatrice, to leave me for another man when we were so happy
+together, because of a house; and an entire stranger, whom she did not
+want even to speak to, whom she was positively rude to. It could not
+have been our little tiff, could it? She must have been mad."
+
+"You have hit on the truth," I said. "She was mad, quite mad. And mad
+people always turn against those whom they--love best."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is all a long time ago. I married a year later, and a year later
+still Ted married again, a sensible good-humoured woman, and was just
+as happy as he had been with Essie, happier even. In time he forgot her,
+but I did not. She had sailed away across "perilous seas." She had
+passed beyond my ken. I could only hold her memory dear. And at last she
+became to me, what for so many years she had been to her lover--a dream.
+
+
+W. HEFFER & SONS LTD., CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND.
+
+
+
+
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
+  |                                                                    |
+  |                        TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES                         |
+  |                                                                    |
+  | * This text has been preserved as in the original, including       |
+  |   archaic and inconsistent spelling, punctuation and grammar,      |
+  |   except as noted below.                                           |
+  |                                                                    |
+  | * Page numbers referenced herein are those in the original work    |
+  |   and are for information. Actual location of changes may be       |
+  |   found by searching for the relevant text.                        |
+  |                                                                    |
+  | * Spelling changes are shown below within single quotes. Changes   |
+  |   regarding punctuation are shown below in curly brackets, { },    |
+  |   for clarity.                                                     |
+  |                                                                    |
+  | * Changes made to the original text:                               |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 16: 'batallions' changed to 'battalions'.                 |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 21: 'steping' changed to 'stepping'.                      |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 29: 'call' changed to 'called'.                           |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 29: {'conquering hero} changed to {"conquering hero}.     |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 35: {"If you do not} changed to {'If you do not}.         |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 35: {these few lines."} changed to {these few lines.'"}.  |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 37: {when Barrett, had} changed to {when Barrett had}.    |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 44: 'obviously' changed to 'obvious'.                     |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 44: 'seaching' changed to 'searching'.                    |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 45: {his own illusions. "He's} changed to {his own        |
+  |     illusions. He's}.                                              |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 57: {said gently.} changed to {said gently:}.             |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 64: {solved a problem!} should perhaps read {solved a     |
+  |     problem:}.                                                     |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 65: {She grieved} changed to {"She grieved}.              |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 91: {"Do not be} changed to {'Do not be}.                 |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 91: {all is well."} changed to {all is well.'}.           |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 92: {high road.'"} changed to {high road.'}.              |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 92: {And we were} changed to {"And we were}.              |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 92: {tower of Westminster.} changed to {tower of          |
+  |     Westminster."}.                                                |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 95: {"How kind of you to call me in. There is not         |
+  |     another house within miles.} changed to {'How kind of you      |
+  |     to call me in. There is not another house within miles.'}.     |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 96: {The thunderstorm passed} changed to {"The            |
+  |     thunderstorm passed}.                                          |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 99: {and disappointment."} changed to {and                |
+  |     disappointment.'}.                                             |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 104: {Could there have been an accident} changed to       |
+  |     {Could there have been an accident?}.                          |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 106: {she was going.} changed to {she was going.'}.       |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 106: {"And what was} changed to {"'And what was}.         |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 110: {didn't I Blanche} changed to {didn't I, Blanche}.   |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 110: {Do we Blanche} changed to {Do we, Blanche}.         |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 114: {Mrs. Robinson is an egregious} changed to {"Mrs.    |
+  |     Robinson is an egregious}.                                     |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 116: {good woman find} changed to {good woman, find}      |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 121: 'contrairy' changed to 'contrary'.                   |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 121: {see the goldfish?} changed to {see the goldfish?"}. |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 121: {give him his crumbs.} changed to {give him his      |
+  |     crumbs?}.                                                      |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 121: {Dr. Giles, every one seems to} changed to {Dr.      |
+  |     Giles, everyone seems to}.                                     |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 121: {dreadful it is to be a prisoner.} changed to        |
+  |     {dreadful it is to be a prisoner?}.                            |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 136: 'decrepidness' changed to 'decrepitness'.            |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 145: 'portait' changed to 'portrait'.                     |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 152: {the sign of sickness.} changed to {the sign of      |
+  |     sickness."}.                                                   |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 156: {Joan has, never} changed to {Joan has never}.       |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 159: {He has taken several prizes?} changed to {He has    |
+  |     taken several prizes.}.                                        |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 179: 'ha' changed to 'had'.                               |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 203: {make any mistake I abhor} changed to {make any      |
+  |     mistake. I abhor}.                                             |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 209: 'out' changed to 'our'.                              |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 212: {father's estates} changed to {fathers' estates}.    |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 221: {"The ways of love} changed to {'The ways of love}.  |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 221: {thoroughfares of stones."} changed to               |
+  |     {thoroughfares of stones.'}.                                   |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 223: {marrying me I told him} changed to {marrying me.    |
+  |     I told him}.                                                   |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 225: {ground to listen.} changed to {ground to listen."}. |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 229: {And as I looked} changed to {"And as I looked}.     |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 229: {We neither of us spoke} changed to {"We neither of  |
+  |     us spoke}.                                                     |
+  |                                                                    |
+  |   * Page 240: {Who is Ted?" I echoed staring at her. 'What on}     |
+  |     changed to {"Who is Ted?" I echoed staring at her. "What on}.  |
+  |                                                                    |
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40947 ***