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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Legend, by Clemence Dane
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: Legend
+
+
+Author: Clemence Dane
+
+
+
+Release Date: November 15, 2020  [eBook #63775]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEGEND***
+
+
+E-text prepared by ellinora, Barry Abrahamsen, and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made
+available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustration and
+      a music recording.
+      See 28711-h.htm or 28711-h.zip:
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28711/28711-h/28711-h.htm)
+      or
+      (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28711/28711-h.zip)
+
+
+      Images of the original pages are available through
+      Internet Archive. See
+      https://archive.org/details/legenddane00daneiala
+
+
+Transcriber’s note:
+
+      Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).
+
+
+
+
+
+LEGEND
+
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+          THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+   NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
+         ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
+
+         MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
+        LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
+                MELBOURNE
+
+    THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
+                 TORONTO
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+LEGEND
+
+by
+
+CLEMENCE DANE
+
+Author of “Regiment of Women” and “First the Blade”
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+The Macmillan Company
+1920
+All rights reserved
+
+Copyright, 1920
+by the Macmillan Company
+
+Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1920.
+
+
+
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+[Music: BEETHOVEN, Op. 57.]
+
+
+
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+                                 LEGEND
+
+
+_Messrs. Mitchell and Bent will shortly issue ‘The Life of Madala Grey’
+by Anita Serle: a critical biography based largely on private
+correspondence and intimate personal knowledge._
+
+That was in _The Times_ a fortnight ago. And now the reviews are
+beginning—
+
+_The Cult of Madala Grey_....
+
+_The Problem of Madala Grey_....
+
+_The Secret of Madala Grey_....
+
+I wish they wouldn’t. Oh, I _wish_ they wouldn’t.
+
+_No admirer of the late Madala Grey’s arresting art can fail to be
+absorbed by these intimate and unexpected revelations_....
+
+_Delicately, unerringly, Miss Serle traces to its source the inspiration
+of that remarkable writer.... And—this will please Anita most of all_—
+
+_We ourselves have never joined in the chorus of praise that, a decade
+ago, greeted the appearance of ‘Eden Walls’ and its successors, and in
+our opinion Miss Serle, in her biographical enthusiasm, uses the word
+genius a little too often and too easily. Madala Grey has yet to be
+tried by that subtlest of literary critics, the Man with the Scythe. But
+whether or not we agree with Miss Serle’s estimate of her heroine, there
+can be no_ _two questions as to the literary value of the ‘Life’ itself.
+It definitely places Miss Serle among the Boswells, and as we close its
+fascinating pages we find ourselves wondering whether our grandchildren
+will remember Miss Serle as the biographer of Madala Grey, or Madala
+Grey as the subject matter merely, of a chronicle that has become a
+classic._
+
+That is to say—_La reine est morte. Vive la reine!_ Anita will certainly
+be pleased. Well, I suppose she’s got what she wants, what she’s always
+wanted. She isn’t a woman to change. The new portrait in the _Bookman_
+might have been taken when I knew her: the mouth’s a trifle harder, the
+hair a trifle greyer; but no real change. But it amuses me that there
+should be her portrait in all the papers, and none of Madala Grey; not
+even in the _Life_ itself. I can hear Anita’s regretful explanations in
+her soft, convincing voice. She will make a useful little paragraph out
+of it—
+
+_Miss Serle, whose ‘Life of Madala Grey’ is causing no small stir in
+literary circles, tells us that the brilliant novelist had so great a
+dislike of being photographed that there is no record of her features in
+existence. An odd foible in one who, in our own recollection, was not
+only a popular writer but a strikingly beautiful woman._
+
+And yet, from her heavy, solitary frame (we have no other pictures in
+our den) that ‘beautiful woman,’ with her flowered scarf and her handful
+of cowslips, is looking down at this moment at me—at me, and the press
+cuttings, and _The Times_, and Anita’s hateful book. And she says,
+unmistakably—‘Does it matter? What does it matter?’ laughing a little as
+she says it.
+
+Then I laugh too, because Anita knows all about the portrait.
+
+After all, does it matter? Does it matter what Anita says and does and
+writes? And why should I of all people grudge Anita her success?
+Honestly, I don’t. And I don’t doubt that the book is well written: not
+that I shall read it. There’s no need: I know exactly what she will have
+written: I know how convincing it will be. But it won’t be true. It
+won’t be Madala Grey.
+
+Of course Anita would say—‘My dear Jenny, what do you know about it? You
+never even met her. You heard us, her friends, her intimates, talking
+about her for—how long? An hour? Two hours? And on the strength of
+that—that eaves-dropping five years ago’ (I can hear the nip in her
+voice still) ‘you are so amusing as to challenge my personal knowledge
+of my dearest friend. Possibly you contemplate writing the story of
+Madala Grey yourself? If so, pray send me a copy.’ And then the swish of
+her skirt. She always wore trains in those days, and she always glided
+away before one could answer.
+
+But I could answer. I remember that evening so well. I don’t believe
+I’ve forgotten a word or a movement, and if I could only write it down,
+those two hours would tell, as Anita’s book never will, the story of
+Madala Grey.
+
+I ought to be able to write; because Anita is my mother’s cousin; though
+I never saw her till I was eighteen.
+
+Mother died when I was eighteen.
+
+If she had not been ill so long it would have been harder. As it was—but
+there’s no use in writing down that black time. Afterwards I didn’t know
+what to do. The pension had stopped, of course. I’d managed to teach
+myself typing, though Mother couldn’t be left much; but I didn’t know
+shorthand, and I couldn’t get work, and my money was dwindling, and I
+was getting scared. I was ready to worship Anita when her letter came.
+She was sorry about Mother and she wanted a secretary. If I could type I
+could come.
+
+I remember how excited I was. I’d always lived in such a tiny place and
+we couldn’t afford Mudie’s. To go to London, and meet interesting
+people, and live with a real writer, seemed too good to be true. And it
+helped that Anita and her mother were relations. Mother used to stay
+with Great-aunt Serle when she was little. Somehow that made things
+easier to me when I was missing Mother more than usual.
+
+In the end, after all those expectations, I was only three weeks with
+Anita. They were a queer three weeks. I was afraid of her. She was one
+of those people who make you feel guilty. But she was kind to me. I
+typed most of the day, for she was a fluent worker and never spared
+either of us; but she took me to the theatre once, and I used to pour
+out when interesting people came to tea. In the first fortnight I met
+nine novelists and a poet; but I never found out who they were, because
+they all called each other by their Christian names and you couldn’t ask
+Anita questions. She had such a way of asking you why you asked. She
+used to glide about the room in a cloud of chiffon and cigarette
+smoke—she had half-shut pale eyes just the colour of the smoke—and pour
+out a stream of beautiful English in a pure cool voice; but if they
+interrupted her she used to stiffen and stop dead and in a minute she
+had glided away and begun to talk to someone else. Old Mrs. Serle used
+to sit in a corner and knit. She never dropped a stitch; but she always
+had her eyes on Anita. She was different from the rest of my people. She
+had an accent, not cockney exactly, but odd. She had had a hard life, I
+believe. Mother said of her once that her courage made up for
+everything. But she never told me what the everything was. Great-aunt’s
+memory was shaky. One day she would scarcely know you, and another day
+she would be sensible and kind, very kind. She liked parties. People
+used to come and talk to her because she made them laugh; but every now
+and then, when Anita was being brilliant about something, she would put
+up her long gnarled finger and say—‘Hush! Listen to my daughter!’ and
+her eyes would twinkle. But I never knew if she were proud of her or
+not.
+
+Everybody said that Anita was brilliant. She could take a book to pieces
+so that you saw every good bit and every bad bit separated away into
+little compartments. But she spoiled things for you, books and people,
+at least she did for me. She sneered. She said of the Baxter girl once,
+for instance—‘She’s really too tactful. If you go to tea with her you
+are sure to be introduced to your oldest friend.’ And again—‘She always
+likes the right people for the wrong reasons.’
+
+Of course one knows what she meant, but I liked the Baxter girl all the
+same. Beryl Baxter—but everyone called her the Baxter girl. She was kind
+to me because I was Anita’s cousin, and she used to talk to me when
+Anita wasn’t in the mood for her. She asked me to call her ‘Beryl’
+almost at once. Anita used to be awfully rude to her sometimes, and then
+again she would have her to supper and spend an evening going through
+her MSS. and I could tell that she was giving her valuable help. The
+Baxter girl used to listen and agree so eagerly and take it away to
+re-write. I thought she was dreadfully grateful. I hated to hear her.
+And when she was gone Anita would lean back in her chair with a dead
+look on her face and say—
+
+“God help her readers! Jenny, open the window. That girl reeks of
+patchouli.” And then—“Why do I waste my time?”
+
+And Great-aunt Serle in her corner would chuckle and poke and mutter,
+but not loud—
+
+“Why does she waste her time? Listen to my daughter!”
+
+The next time the Baxter girl came Anita would hardly speak to her.
+
+The Baxter girl seemed to take it as a matter of course. But once she
+said to me, with a look on her face as if she were defending herself—
+
+“Ah—but you don’t write. You’re not keen. You don’t know what it means
+to be in the set.”
+
+“But such heaps of people come to see Anita,” I said, “people she hardly
+knows.”
+
+“They’re only the fringes,” said the Baxter girl complacently. “They’re
+not in the Grey set. They don’t come to the Nights. At least, only a
+few. Jasper Flood, of course—You’ve met him, haven’t you?—and Lila
+Howe—_Masquerade_, you know, and _Sir Fortinbras_.” The Baxter girl
+always ticketed everyone she mentioned. “And the Whitneys. She used to
+stay with the Whitneys. And Roy Huth. And of course Kent Rehan.”
+
+“Kent Rehan?”
+
+“_The_ Kent Rehan,” said the Baxter girl.
+
+Then I remembered. The vicar’s wife always sent Mother the Academy
+catalogue after she had been up to town. I used to cut out the pictures
+I liked, and I liked Kent Rehan’s. They had wind blowing through them,
+and sunshine, and jolly blobs that I knew must be raw colour, and always
+the same woman. But you could never see her face, only a cheek curve or
+a shoulder line. They were in the catalogue every year, and so I told
+the Baxter girl. She laughed.
+
+“Yes, he’s always on the line. Anita says that’s the worst she knows of
+him. And of course the veiled lady——” she laughed again, knowingly, “But
+there is one full face, I believe. _The Spring Song_ he calls it. But
+it’s never been shown. Anita’s seen it. She told me. He keeps it locked
+away in his studio. They say he’s in love with her.”
+
+“With whom?”
+
+“Madala Grey, of course.”
+
+I said—
+
+“Who is Madala Grey?”
+
+The Baxter girl had sunk into the cushions until she was prone. I had
+been wondering with the bit of mind that wasn’t listening what the
+people at home would have said to her, with her cobweb stockings (it was
+November) and her coloured combs and her sprawl. It was a relief to see
+her sit up suddenly.
+
+“‘Who’s Madala Grey!’” Her mouth stayed open after she’d finished the
+sentence.
+
+“Yes,” I said. “Who is she?”
+
+“You mean to say you’ve never heard of Madala Grey? You’ve never read
+_Eden Walls_? Is there anyone in England who hasn’t read _Eden Walls_?”
+
+“Heaps,” I said. She annoyed me. She—they—they all thought me a fool at
+Anita’s.
+
+The Baxter girl sighed luxuriously.
+
+“My word, I envy you! I wish I was reading _Eden Walls_ for the first
+time—or _Ploughed Fields_. I don’t care so much about _The
+Resting-place_.” She laughed. “At least—one’s not supposed to care about
+_The Resting-place_, you know. It’s as much as one’s life’s worth—one’s
+literary life.”
+
+“What’s wrong with it?”
+
+“Sentimental. Anita says so. She says she doesn’t know what happened to
+her over _The Resting-place_.”
+
+“I like the title,” I said.
+
+“Yes, so do I. And I love the opening where——Oh, but you haven’t read
+it. And you’re Anita’s cousin! What a comedy! Just like Anita, though,
+not to speak of her.”
+
+“Why? Doesn’t Anita like her?”
+
+The Baxter girl was flat on the cushions again. She looked at me with
+those furtive eyes that always so strangely qualified her garrulity.
+
+“Are you shrewd? Or was that chance?”
+
+“What?”
+
+“‘Doesn’t Anita like her?’”
+
+“Doesn’t she then?”
+
+“Ah, now you’re asking! Officially, very much. Too much, _I_ should say.
+And too much is just the same as the other thing, I think. Would you
+like Anita for your bosom friend?”
+
+Naturally I said—
+
+“Anita’s been very kind to me.” Anita’s my cousin, after all. I didn’t
+like the Baxter girl’s tone.
+
+“Oh, she’s been kind to me.” The Baxter girl caught me up quickly. She
+was like a sensitive plant for all her crudity. “Oh, I admire Anita.
+She’s the finest judge of style in England. Jasper Flood says so. You
+mustn’t think I say a word against Anita. Very kind to me she’s been.”
+Then, innocently, but her eyes were flickering again—“She was kind to
+Madala too, till——”
+
+“Well?” I demanded.
+
+“Till Madala was kind to her. Madala’s one of those big people. She’ll
+never forget what she owes Anita—what Anita told her she owed her. After
+she made her own name she made Anita’s. Anita, being Anita, doesn’t
+forget that.”
+
+“How d’you mean—made Anita’s name?”
+
+“Well, look at the people who come here—the people who count. What do
+you think the draw was? Anita? Oh yes, _now_. But they came first for
+Madala. Oh, those early days when _Eden Walls_ was just out! Of course
+Anita had sense for ten. She ran Madala for all she was worth.”
+
+“Then you do like Madala Grey?”
+
+“I?” The Baxter girl looked at me oddly. “She read my book. She wrote to
+me. That’s why Anita took me up. She let me come to the Nights. She
+started them, you know. Somebody reads a story or a poem, and then it’s
+talk till the milkman comes. Good times! But now Madala’s married she
+doesn’t come often. Anita carries on like grim death, of course. But
+it’s not the same. Last month it was dreary.”
+
+“Is it every month?”
+
+“Yes. It’s tomorrow again. Tomorrow’s Sunday, isn’t it? It’ll amuse you.
+You’ll come, of course, as you’re in the house.”
+
+“Will she? Herself?” I found myself reproducing the Baxter girl’s
+eagerness.
+
+“Not now.” The common voice had deepened queerly. “She’s very ill.” She
+hesitated. “That’s why I came today. I thought Anita might have heard.
+Not my business, of course, but——” She made an awkward, violent gesture
+with her hands. “Oh, a genius oughtn’t to marry. It’s wicked waste.
+Well, so long! See you tomorrow night!”
+
+She left me abruptly.
+
+I found myself marking time, as it were, all through that morrow, as if
+the evening were of great importance. The Baxter girl was always
+unsettling, or it may have been Anita’s restlessness that affected me.
+Anita was on edge. She was writing, writing, all the morning. She was at
+her desk when I came down. There was a mass of packets and papers in
+front of her and an empty coffee cup. I believe she had been writing all
+night. She had that white look round her eyes. But she didn’t need any
+typing done. Early in the afternoon she went out and at once Great-aunt,
+in her corner, put down her knitting with a little catch of her breath.
+But she didn’t talk: she sat watching the door. I had been half the day
+at the window, fascinated by the fog. I’d never seen a London fog
+before. I found myself writing a letter in my head to Mother about it,
+about the way it would change from black to yellow and then clear off to
+let in daylight and sparrow-talk and the tramp-tramp of feet, and then
+back again to silence, and the sun like a ball that you could reach up
+to with your hand and hold. I was deep in my description—and then, of a
+sudden, I remembered that she wasn’t there to write to any more. It was
+so hard to remember always that she was dead. I got up quickly and went
+to Anita’s shelves for a book. Great-aunt hadn’t noticed anything. She
+was still watching the door.
+
+The little back room that opened on to the staircase was lined to the
+ceiling with books, all so tidy and alphabetical. Anita lived for books,
+but I used to wonder why. She didn’t love them. Her books never opened
+friendlily at special places, and they hadn’t the proper smell. I ran my
+finger along the ‘G’s’ and pulled out _Eden Walls_.
+
+I began in the middle of course. One always falls into the middle of a
+real person’s life, and a book is a person. There’s always time to find
+out their beginning afterwards when you’ve decided to be friends. It
+isn’t always worth while. But it was with _Eden Walls_. I liked the
+voice in which the story was being told. Soon I began to feel happier.
+Then I began to feel excited. It said things I’d always thought, you
+know. It was extraordinary that it knew how I felt about things. There’s
+a bit where the heroine comes to town and the streets scare her, because
+they go on, and on, and on, always in straight lines, like a corridor in
+a dream. Now how did she know of that dream? I turned back to the first
+page and began to read steadily.
+
+When Anita’s voice jerked me back to real life it was nearly dark. She
+was speaking to Great-aunt as she took off her wraps—
+
+“The fog’s confusing. I had to take a taxi to the tube. A trunk call is
+an endless business.”
+
+“Well?” said Great-aunt.
+
+“Nothing fresh.”
+
+“Did _he_ answer?”
+
+Anita nodded.
+
+“Was he——? Is she——? Did you ask——? What did he tell you, Anita?”
+
+Anita stabbed at her hat with her long pins. She was flushing.
+
+“The usual details. He spares you nothing. Have you had tea, Mother?”
+She rang the bell.
+
+Great-aunt beat her hand on the arm of her chair in a feeble, restless
+way. When I brought her tea she said to me in her confidential whisper—
+
+“Give it to my daughter. She’s tired. She’ll tell us when she’s not so
+tired.”
+
+She settled herself again to watch; but she watched Anita, not the door.
+
+And in a few minutes Anita did say, as the Baxter girl had said—
+
+“She’s very ill.” And then—“I always told you we ought to have a
+telephone. I can’t be running out all the evening.”
+
+“Do they come tonight?” said Great-aunt Serle.
+
+Anita answered her coldly—
+
+“They do. Why not?”
+
+Great-aunt tittered.
+
+“Why not? Why not? Listen, little Jenny!”
+
+Anita, as usual, was quite patient.
+
+“Mother, you mustn’t excite yourself. Jenny, give Mother some more tea.
+What good would it do Madala to upset my arrangements? Besides, Kent
+will have the latest news. I think you may trust him.” She gave that
+little laugh that was Great-aunt’s titter grown musical. Then she turned
+to me.
+
+“By the way, Jenny, I expect friends tonight. You needn’t change, as
+you’re in mourning. You’ll see to the coffee, please. We’ll have the
+door open and the coffee in the little room. You might do it now while I
+dress.”
+
+The big drawing-room was divided from the little outer room by a
+curtained door. It was closed in the day-time for cosiness’ sake, but
+when it was flung back the room was a splendid one. The small room held
+the books and a chair or two, and a chesterfield facing the door that
+opened on to the passage and the narrow twisting stairs. They were so
+dark that Anita kept a candle and matches in the hall; but one seldom
+troubled to light it. It was quicker to fumble one’s way. Anita used to
+long for electric light; but she would not install it. Anita had good
+taste. The house was old, and old-fashioned it should stay.
+
+I fastened back the door and re-arranged the furniture, and was sitting
+down to _Eden Walls_ again when Great-aunt beckoned me.
+
+“Go and dress, my dear!”
+
+“But Anita said——” I began.
+
+She held me by the wrist, all nods and smiles and hoarse whispers.
+
+“The pretty dress—to show a pretty throat—isn’t there a pretty dress
+somewhere? I know! Put it on. Put it on. What a white throat! I’ve a
+necklace somewhere—but then Anita would know. Mustn’t tell Anita!”
+
+She pulled me down to her with fumbling, shaky hands.
+
+“Tell me, Jenny, where’s my daughter?”
+
+“Upstairs, Auntie.”
+
+“Tell me, Jenny—any news? Any news, Jenny?”
+
+I didn’t know what to say to her. I was afraid of hurting her. She was
+so shaking and pitiful.
+
+“Is it about Miss Grey, Auntie?”
+
+“Carey, Jenny—Carey. Mrs. John Carey. Good name. Good man. But Anita
+don’t like him. Anita won’t tell me. You tell me, Jenny!”
+
+“Auntie, it’s all right. It’s all right. She’ll tell you, of course,
+when she hears again.” And I soothed her as well as I could, till she
+let me loosen her hand from my wrist, and kiss her, and start her at her
+knitting again, so that I could finish making ready the room. But as I
+went to wash my hands she called to me once more.
+
+“Yes, Auntie?”
+
+“Put it on, Jenny. Don’t ask my daughter. Put it on.”
+
+She was a queer old woman. She made me want to cry sometimes. She was so
+frightened always, and yet so game.
+
+But I went upstairs after supper and put on the frock she liked. Black,
+of course, but with Mother’s lace fichu I liked myself in it too. I did
+my hair high. I don’t know why I took so much trouble except that I
+wanted to cheer myself up. It had been a depressing day in spite of
+_Eden Walls_. I looked forward to the stir of visitors. And then I was
+curious to see Kent Rehan.
+
+When I came down the Baxter girl was already there, standing all by
+herself at the fire. She was strikingly dressed; but she looked
+stranded. I wondered if Anita had been snubbing her.
+
+Anita was shaking hands with Mr. Flood and with a lady whom I had not
+seen before. She was blonde, with greenish-golden hair and round eyes,
+very black eyes that had no lights in them, not even when she smiled.
+She often smiled. She had a drawling voice and hardly spoke at all,
+except to Mr. Flood. If he talked to anyone else or walked away from
+her, she would watch him for a minute, and then say—‘Jasper’ with a sort
+of purr, not troubling to raise her voice. But he always heard and came.
+She wore a wonderful Chinese shawl, white, with gold dragons worked on
+it, and whenever she moved it set the dragons crawling. She was powdered
+and red-lipped like a clown, and I didn’t really like her, but
+nevertheless there was something about her that was queerly attractive.
+When she smiled at me because I gave her coffee, I felt quite elated.
+But I didn’t like her. Mr. Flood called her ‘Blanche.’ I never heard her
+other name.
+
+Anita seemed very pleased to see them. I caught scraps.
+
+“Am so glad—one’s friends about one—such a strain waiting for news. I
+phoned this afternoon. No, the usual phrases. Anxious, of course, but I
+should certainly have heard if——Good of you to come! No chance of the
+Whitneys, I’m afraid—too much fog. And what are you reading to us?”
+
+The Baxter girl, as I greeted her, stripped and re-dressed me with one
+swift look.
+
+“My dear, it suits you! I wish I could look Victorian. But I’m vile in
+black. Have you seen Lila? I met her on the step. They’ve turned down
+_Sir Fortinbras_ in America. Isn’t it rotten luck? Anita said they
+would. Anita’s always right. Any more news of Madala?”
+
+Anita overheard her. She was suddenly gracious to the Baxter girl.
+
+“You may be sure I should always let you know at once. And what is this
+I hear about Lila? Poor Lila! It’s the last chapter, I’m afraid. I
+advised her from the beginning that the American public will not
+tolerate—but dear Lila is a law unto herself.” And then, as Miss Howe
+came in—“Lila, my dear! How good of you to venture! A night like this
+makes me wonder why I continue in London. Madala has urged me to move
+out ever since——No. No news. But Jasper’s been energetic——” She circled
+mazily about them while I brought the coffee.
+
+“Kent coming?” said Mr. Flood, fumbling with his papers.
+
+Anita shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“Who can account for Kent? It may dawn on him that he’s due here—and
+again, it may not. It depends as usual, I suppose, on the new picture.”
+
+“Oh yes, there’s a new one,” recollected the Baxter girl carefully.
+
+“There must be! He was literally flocculent yesterday.” Miss Howe
+chuckled. “That can only mean one of two things. Art or——”
+
+“—the lady! Who can doubt? Well, if Carey doesn’t object to his
+brotherly love continuing, I’m sure I don’t. But I wish it need not
+involve his missing his appointments.” Mr. Flood eyed his typescript
+impatiently.
+
+Anita was instantly all tact.
+
+“Oh, we won’t wait. Certainly not. Pull in to the fire. Now, Jasper!”
+
+But Miss Howe, as she swirled into Anita’s special chair, her skirts
+overflowing either arm, abolished Mr. Flood and his typescript with a
+movement of her soft dimply hands.
+
+“Oh, I’m not in the mood even for Jasper’s efforts. I want to let myself
+go. I want to damn publishers—and husbands! Damn them! Damn them! There!
+Am I shocking you, Miss Summer?”
+
+She smiled at me over their heads. She was always polite to me. I liked
+her. She was like a fat, pink pæony.
+
+“Well, if you take my advice——” began Anita.
+
+“My darling, I love you, but I don’t want your advice. I only want one
+person’s advice—ever—and she has got married and is doing her duty in
+that state of life——Hence I say—Damn husbands! I tell you I want Madala
+to soothe me, and storm at the injustice of publishers for me, and
+then—no, not give me a brilliant idea for the last chapter, but make me
+tell her one, and then applaud me for it. _You_ know, Anita!” She dug at
+her openly.
+
+I caught a movement in Great-aunt’s corner.
+
+“Coffee, Auntie?”
+
+She gave me a goblin glance.
+
+“My daughter!” She had an air of introducing her triumphantly. “Listen!
+She don’t like fat women.”
+
+We listened. Anita’s voice was mellow with cordiality.
+
+“Yes indeed. Madala has often said to me that she thought you well worth
+encouraging.”
+
+Miss Howe laughed jollily.
+
+“I admire your articles, Nita. I wilt when you review me. But you’ll
+never write novels, darling. You’ve not the ear. Madala may have said
+that, but she didn’t say it in that way.”
+
+“She certainly said it.”
+
+“Some day I’ll ask her.”
+
+“Some day! Oh, some day!” The Baxter girl was staring at the fire.
+“Shall we ever get her back?”
+
+“In a year! Let us give her a year!” Mr. Flood looked up at the lady
+beside him with a thin smile. I couldn’t bear him. He sat on the floor,
+and he called you ‘dear lady,’ and sometimes he would take hold of your
+watch-chain and finger it as he talked to you. But he was awfully
+clever, I believe. He wrote reviews and very difficult poetry that
+didn’t rhyme. Anita was generally mellifluous to him and she quoted him
+a good deal. She turned to him with just the same smile—
+
+“Ah, of course! You’ve met John Carey too.”
+
+“For my sins, dear lady—for my sins.”
+
+“Not the same sins, surely,” breathed the blonde lady.
+
+“As the virtuous Carey’s? Don’t be rude to me! It’s a fact—the man’s a
+churchwarden. He carries a little tin plate on Sundays! Didn’t you tell
+me so, Anita? No—we give her a year. Don’t we, Anita?”
+
+“But what did she marry him for?” wailed the Baxter girl.
+
+They all laughed.
+
+“Copy, dear lady, copy!” Mr. Flood was enjoying himself. “Why will you
+have ideals? Carey was a new type.”
+
+“But she needn’t have married him!” insisted the Baxter girl. The
+argument was evidently an old one.
+
+“She, if I read her aright, could have dispensed with the ceremony, but
+the churchwarden had his views. Obviously! Can’t you imagine him—all
+whiskers and wedding-ring?”
+
+“But I thought he was clean-shaven! I thought he was good-looking!” I
+sympathized with the Baxter girl’s dismay.
+
+“Ah—I speak in parables——”
+
+“You do hate him, don’t you?” said Miss Howe with her wide, benevolent
+smile. “Now, I wonder——”
+
+Mr. Flood flushed into disclaimers, while the woman beside him looked at
+Miss Howe with half-closed eyes.
+
+“I? How could I? Our orbits don’t touch. _I_ approved, I assure you. An
+invaluable experience for our Madala! A year of wedded love, another of
+wedded boredom, and then—a master-piece, dear people! Madala Grey back
+to us, a giantess refreshed. Gods! what a book it will be!”
+
+“I wonder,” said Miss Howe vaguely.
+
+Anita answered her with that queer movement of the head that always
+reminded me of a pouncing lizard.
+
+“No need! I’ve watched Madala Grey’s career from the beginning.”
+
+“For this I maintain—” Mr. Flood ignored her—“_Eden Walls_ and _Ploughed
+Fields_ may be amazing (_The Resting-place_ I cut out. It’s an
+indiscretion. Madala caught napping) but they’re preliminaries, dear
+people! mere preliminaries, believe me.”
+
+“I sometimes wonder——” Miss Howe made me think of Saladin’s cushion in
+_The Talisman_. She always went on so softly and imperviously with her
+own thoughts—“Suppose now, that she’s written herself out, and knows
+it?”
+
+The Baxter girl gave a little gasp of horrified appreciation.
+
+“So the marriage——”
+
+“An emergency exit.”
+
+But Anita pitied them aloud—
+
+“It shows how little you know Madala, either of you.”
+
+“Does anyone? Do you?”
+
+Anita smiled securely.
+
+“The type’s clear, at least.” Mr. Flood looked round the circle. His
+eyes shone. “_Une grande amoureuse_—that I’ve always maintained. Carey
+may be the first—but he won’t be the last.”
+
+“Is he the first? How did she come to write _The Resting-place_ then?
+Tell me that!” Anita thrust at him with her forefinger and behind her,
+in the corner, I saw the gesture duplicated.
+
+“So I will when I’ve read the new book, dear lady.”
+
+“If ever it writes itself,” Miss Howe underlined him.
+
+“As to that—I give her a year, as I say. Once this business is over—”
+his voice mellowed into kindliness—“and good luck to her, dear woman——”
+
+“Ah, good luck!” said Miss Howe and smiled at him.
+
+“Once it’s over, I say——”
+
+“But she _will_ be all right, won’t she?” said the Baxter girl.
+
+“I should certainly have been told——” began Anita.
+
+Miss Howe harangued them—
+
+“Have you ever known Madala Grey fail yet? She’ll be all right. She’ll
+pull it off—triumphantly. You see! But as for the book—if it comes——”
+
+“When it comes,” corrected Mr. Flood.
+
+“What’s that?” said Anita sharply.
+
+There was a sound in the passage, a heavy sound of feet. It caught at my
+heart. It was a sound that I knew. They had come tramping up the stairs
+like that when they fetched away Mother. Thud—stumble—thud! I shivered.
+But as the steps came nearer they belonged to but one man. The door
+opened and the fog and the man entered together. Everyone turned to him
+with a queer, long flash of faces.
+
+“Kent!” cried Anita, welcoming him. Then her voice changed. “Kent!
+What’s wrong? What is it?”
+
+He shut the door behind him and stood, his back against it, staring at
+us, like a man stupefied.
+
+The Baxter girl broke in shrilly—
+
+“He’s wired. He’s had a wire!” She pointed at his clenched hand.
+
+Then he, too, looked down at his own hand. His fingers relaxed slowly
+and a crush of red and grey paper slid to the floor.
+
+“A son,” he said dully.
+
+“Ah!” A cry from the corner by the fire eased the tension. Great-aunt
+Serle was clapping her hands together. Her face was wrinkled all over
+with delight. “The good girl! The pretty——And a son too! A little son!
+Oh, the good girl!”
+
+Anita turned on her, her voice like a scourge—
+
+“Be quiet, Mother!” Then—“Well, Kent? Well?”
+
+“Well?” he repeated after her.
+
+“Madala? How’s Madala? What about Madala Grey?”
+
+“Dead!” he said.
+
+_Dead._ The word fell amongst the group of us in the circle of
+lamp-light, like a plummet into a pool. _Dead._ For an instant one could
+hear the blank drop of it. Then we broke up into gestures and little
+cries, into a babel of dismay and concern and rather horrible
+excitement.
+
+Instinctively I separated myself from them. It was neither bad news nor
+good news to me, but it recalled to me certain hours, and they—it was as
+if they enjoyed the importance of bereavement. Anita talked. Miss Howe
+was gulping, and dabbing at her eyes. The Baxter girl kept on
+saying—‘Dead?’ ‘Dead?’ under her breath, and with that wide nervous
+smile that you sometimes see on people’s faces when they are far enough
+away from laughter. Great-aunt had shrunk into her corner. I could
+barely see her. The blonde lady had her hand on her heart and was
+panting a little, as if she had been running, and yet, as always, she
+watched Mr. Flood. He had pulled out a note-book and a fountain-pen and
+was shaking at it furiously, while his little eyes flickered from one to
+another—even to me. I felt his observance pursue me to the very edge of
+the ring of light, and drop again, baulked by the dazzle, as I slipped
+past him into the swinging shadows beyond. It’s odd how lamp-light cuts
+a room in two: I could see every corner of the light and shadow alike,
+and even the outer room was not too dim for me to move about it easily;
+but to those directly under the lamp I knew I had become all but
+invisible, a blur among the other blurs that were curtains and pictures
+and chairs. They remembered me as little as, absorbed and clamorous,
+they remembered the man who had brought them their news, and then had
+brushed his way through question and comment to the deep alcove of the
+window in the outer room and there stood, rigid and withdrawn, staring
+out through the uncurtained pane at the solid night beyond. I could not
+see his face, only the outline of a big and clumsy body, and a hand that
+twitched and fumbled at the tassel of the blind.
+
+And all the while Anita, white as paper, was talking, talking, talking,
+saying how great the shock was, and how much Miss Grey had been to her—a
+stream of sorrow and self-assertion. It was just as if she said—‘Don’t
+forget that this is far worse for me than for any of you. Don’t
+forget——’
+
+But the others went on with their own thoughts.
+
+“Dead? Gone? It’s not possible.” Miss Howe was all blubbered and
+deplorable. “What shall we do without her?”
+
+“Yes—that’s it!” The Baxter girl edged-in her chair to her like a young
+dog asking for comfort.
+
+“For that matter, from the point of view of literature,” Anita’s voice
+grated, “she died a year ago.”
+
+“It’s not possible! That’s what I say—it’s not possible!” It was strange
+how even the Baxter girl ignored Anita. “Dead! I can’t grasp it.
+It’s—it’s too awful. She was so vivid.”
+
+“Awful?” Mr. Flood was biting his fingers. “Awful? Nothing of the kind.
+You know that Holbein cut—no, it’s earlier stuff—‘Death and the Lady,’
+crude, preposterous. And _that’s_ what it is. Old Bones and Madala Grey?
+That’s not tragedy, that’s farce! Farce, dear people, farce!” Then his
+high tripping voice broke suddenly. “Dead? Why, she wasn’t thirty!”
+
+“She was twenty-six last June,” said Anita finally. “Midsummer Day. I
+know.”
+
+“June!” He caught it up. “Just so—June! Isn’t that characteristic? Isn’t
+that Madala all over? Of course she was born in June. She would be. She
+_was_ June. June——
+
+                   “Her lips and her roses yet maiden
+                    A summer of storm in her eyes——”
+
+Miss Howe winced.
+
+“For God’s sake don’t Swinburnize, Jasper! She’s not your meat. Oh, I
+want to cry—I want to cry! Dead—at twenty-six——”
+
+“In child-bed,” finished Anita bitterly, and her voice made it an
+unclean and shameful end.
+
+Mr. Flood’s glance felt its way over her, hatefully. It never lifted to
+her face.
+
+“Of course from your point of view, dear lady——” he began, and smiled as
+he made his little bow of attention.
+
+I thought him insolent, and so, I believe, did Miss Howe. She lifted her
+head sharply and I thought she would have spoken; but Anita gave her no
+time. There was always a sort of thick-skinned valiance about Anita.
+
+“Oh, but you all know my point of view. She knew it herself. I never
+concealed it. You know how I devoted myself——”
+
+“A bye-word, a bye-word!” said Miss Howe under her breath.
+
+“—but not so much to her as to her gift. I should never allow a personal
+sentiment to overpower me. I haven’t the time for it. But she had the
+call, she had the gift, and because she had it I say, as I have always
+said, that for Madala Grey, marriage——”
+
+“And all it implies——” Mr. Flood was still smiling.
+
+She accepted it.
+
+“Marriage and all that it implies was apostasy. I stand for Literature.”
+
+“And Literature,” with a glance at the others, “is honoured.”
+
+They wearied me. It seemed to me that they sparked and fizzled and
+whirred with the sham life of machinery: and like machinery they
+affected me. For at first I could not hear anything but them, and then
+they confused and tired me, and last of all they faded into a mere
+wall-paper of sound, and I forgot that they were there, save that I
+wondered now and then, as stray sentences shrilled out of the buzz, that
+they were not yet oppressed into silence.
+
+For there was grief abroad—a grief without shape, without sound, without
+expression—a quality, a pulsing essence, a distillation of pure pain.
+From some centre it rayed out, it spread, it settled upon the room,
+imperceptibly, like the fall of dust. It reached me. I felt it. It
+soaked into me. I ached with it. I could not sit quiet. I was not drawn,
+I was impelled. _Dead_—the dull, bewildered voice was still in my ears.
+_That_ I heard. But it was statement, not appeal. It was not his
+suffering that demanded relief, but some responding capacity for pain in
+me that awoke and cried out restlessly that such anguish was unlawful,
+beyond endurance, that still it I must, I must!
+
+I rose. I looked round me. Then I went very softly into the outer room.
+
+He was still standing at the window. The street lamp, level with the
+sill, was quenched to a yellow gloom. It lit up the wet striped branches
+and dead bobbins of the plane-tree beside it, and the sickly undersides
+of its shrivelled last leaves. I never thought a tree could look so
+ghastly. Against that unnatural glitter and the luminous thick air the
+man and the half-drawn curtain stood out in solid, unfamiliar bulk of
+black.
+
+I came and stood just behind him. He was so big that I only reached his
+shoulder. He may have heard me: I think he did; but he did not turn. I
+was not frightened of him. That was so queer, because as a rule I can’t
+talk to strangers. I get nervous and red, and foolish-tongued,
+especially with men. Of course I knew all the usual men, the doctor at
+home, and the church people, and husbands that came back by the
+five-thirty, and now all Anita’s friends, and Mr. Flood; but I never had
+anything to say to them or they to me. But with Kent Rehan, somehow, it
+was different. He was different. I never thought—‘This is a strange
+man.’ I never thought—‘He doesn’t know me: it’s impertinent to break in
+upon him: what will he think?’ I never thought of all that. I never
+thought about myself at all. I was just passionately desiring to help
+him and I didn’t know how to do it.
+
+I think I stood there for four or five minutes, trying to find words,
+opening my lips, and then catching back the phrase before a sound came,
+because it seemed so poor and meaningless. And all the while the Baxter
+girl’s words were running in my head—‘They say he was in love with her.’
+
+With her—with Madala Grey. She was the key. I had the strangest pang of
+interest in this unknown woman. Who was she? What was she? What had she
+been? What had she done so to centre herself in so many, in such alien
+lives? What had she in common for them all? Books, books, books—_I’d_
+never heard of her books! And she was married. Yet the loss of her,
+unpossessed, could bring such a look (as he turned restlessly from the
+window at last) such a look to Kent Rehan’s face. I was filled with a
+sort of anger against that dead woman, and I envied her. I never saw a
+man look so—as if his very soul had been bruised. It was not, it was
+never, a weak face, and it was not a young one; yet in that instant I
+saw in it, and clearly, its own forgotten childhood, bewildered by its
+first encounter with pain. It was that fleeting look that touched me so
+and gave me courage, so that I found myself saying to him, very low and
+quickly, and with a queer authority—
+
+“It won’t always hurt so much. It will get easier. I promise you it
+will. It does. Truly it does. In six months—I _do_ know.”
+
+He looked down at me strangely.
+
+I went on because I had to, but it was difficult. It was desperately
+difficult. I could hear myself blundering and stammering, and using
+hateful slangy phrases that I never used as a rule.
+
+“I had to tell you. It isn’t cheek. I know—it hurts like fun. It’ll be
+worst out of doors. You see them coming, you see them just ahead of you,
+and then it isn’t them. But it won’t always hurt so horribly. I promise
+you. One manages. One gets used to living with it. I know.”
+
+He looked at my black dress.
+
+“Your husband?”
+
+“No. Mother.”
+
+He said no more. But he did not go away from me. We stood side by side
+at the window.
+
+The voices in the other room insisted themselves into my mind again,
+against my will, like the ticking of a clock in the night. I was
+thinking about him, not them. But Anita called to me to put coal on the
+fire and, once among them, I did not like to go back to him again.
+
+They had re-grouped themselves at the hearth. Miss Howe was in the chair
+with the chintz cover that was as pink and white and blue-ribboned as
+she herself. The Baxter girl crouched on the pouf and the fire-light
+danced over her by fits and starts till, what with her violet dress and
+her black boy’s head with the green band in it and that orange glow upon
+her, she looked like one of the posters in the Tube. The blonde lady had
+pushed back her chair to the edge of the lamp-light, so that her face
+was a blur and her white dress yellow-grey. Her knees made a back for
+Mr. Flood sitting cross-legged at her feet, and watching the Baxter girl
+as if he admired her. Once the blonde lady put her hand on his shoulder,
+and he caught it and played with the rings on it while he listened to
+her, and yet still watched the Baxter girl. She went on whispering, her
+hand in his, till at last he put back his head and caught her eye and
+laughed. Then she leaned back again as if she were satisfied. But I
+thought—‘How I should hate to have that dank hair rubbing against my
+skirt.’ Beside Mr. Flood lay the MS. he had brought, but I think Anita
+had forgotten it. She, sitting at the table in her high-backed chair
+(she never lolled), was still talking, indeed they were all talking
+about this Madala Grey. Anita’s voice was as pinched as her face.
+
+“Oh, I knew from the first what it would be! She could never do anything
+by halves. She had no moderation. The writing, the work, all that made
+her what she was, tossed aside, for a whim, for a madness, for a man. I
+can’t help it—it makes me bitter.”
+
+“Do you grudge it her so?” The Baxter girl looked at her wonderingly. “I
+kicked at it too, of course. We all did, didn’t we? But now, I like to
+think how happy she looked the last time she came here. Do you remember?
+I liked that blue frock. And the scarf with the roses—I gave her that.
+Liberty. She was thin though. She always worked too hard. Poor Madala!
+Heigh-ho, the gods are jealous gods.”
+
+Anita stared in front of her.
+
+“Just gods. She served two masters. She was bound to pay.”
+
+“You are hard,” said the Baxter girl in a low voice.
+
+Miss Howe rocked herself.
+
+“But don’t you know how she feels? I do. It’s the helplessness——”
+
+Anita’s pale eye met and held her glance as if she resented that
+sympathy. Then, as if indeed she were suddenly grown weak, she
+acquiesced.
+
+“I suppose so. Yes, it’s the helplessness. ‘If this didn’t happen’—‘If
+that weren’t so’—Little things, little things—and they govern one. A
+broken doll—a cowslip ball—stronger than all my strength. And she
+needn’t have met Carey. It was just a chance. If I’d known—that day! I
+used to ask her questions, just to make her talk. I remember asking her
+about her old home—more to set her off than anything. I said I’d like to
+see it some day. It was true. I was interested. But it was only to make
+her talk. But she—oh, you know how she foamed up about a thing. ‘My old
+home! Would you, Anita? Would you like to come? Wouldn’t it bore you,
+Anita? It’s all spoiled, you know. But I go down now and then. Nobody
+remembers me. It’s like being a ghost. Oh, I _feel_ for ghosts. Would
+you really like to come? Shall we go soon? Shall we go today?’ And then,
+of course, down we go. And then we meet Carey. And then the play
+begins.”
+
+Miss Howe shook her head.
+
+“Ends.”
+
+Anita accepted it.
+
+“Ends. Then the play ends.” And then, frowning—“If I’d known that day—if
+I’d known! I was warned, too. That’s strange. I’ve never thought of it
+from that day to this. If I were an old wife now——” She shivered.
+
+“What happened?” said the Baxter girl curiously.
+
+“Oh, well, off we went! We had a carriage to ourselves. I was glad. I
+thought she might talk.”
+
+“And you always tried to make her talk,” said Miss Howe softly.
+
+Anita went on without answering her.
+
+“She grew quite excited as we travelled down, talking about her ‘youth.’
+She always spoke as if she were a hundred.”
+
+“She put something into that youth of hers, I shouldn’t wonder,” said
+Miss Howe.
+
+“She did. The things she told me that day. I knew she had been in
+America, but I never dreamed——She landed there, if you please, without a
+penny in her pocket, without a friend in the world.”
+
+“I never understood why she went to America,” said Miss Howe. “I asked
+her once.”
+
+“What did she say?” said Anita curiously.
+
+“To make her fortune. But I never got any details out of her.”
+
+“Didn’t you know?” said Anita. “Her people emigrated. The father failed.
+It happened when Madala was eighteen, and she and her mother persuaded
+him, expecting him, literally, to make their fortunes. The mother seems
+to have been an erratic person. Irish, I believe. Beautiful.
+Extravagant. I have always imagined that it was her extravagance—but
+Madala and the husband seem to have adored her. I remember Madala saying
+once that her father had been born unlucky, ‘except when he married
+Mother!’ I suspect, myself, that that was the beginning of his ill-luck.
+Anyhow, when the crash came, they gathered together what they had and
+started off on some romantic notion of the mother’s to make their
+fortune farming. America. Steerage. The _Sylvania_.”
+
+“_Sylvania?_ That’s familiar. What was it? A collision, wasn’t it?”
+
+“No, that was the _Empress of Peru_. The _Sylvania_ caught fire in
+mid-ocean—a ghastly business. There were only about fifty survivors.
+Both her people were drowned.”
+
+“Oh, that’s what she meant,” began Miss Howe, “that time at the Academy.
+We were looking at a storm-scape, and she said—‘People don’t know. It’s
+not like that. They wouldn’t try to paint it if they knew.’ She was
+quite white. Of course I never dreamed——Poor old Madala! Well, what
+happened?”
+
+“Oh, she reached America in what she stood up in. There was a survivors’
+fund, of course, but money melts in a city when you’re strange to it.”
+
+“Couldn’t she have come back to England?”
+
+“I believe she had relations over here, but her mother had quarrelled
+with them all in turn. They didn’t appreciate her mother and that was
+the unforgivable sin for Madala. She’d have starved sooner than ask them
+to help her. I shouldn’t wonder if she did, too!—half starve anyway. I
+shouldn’t wonder if those first bare months haven’t revenged themselves
+at last.”
+
+“Oh, if one had known!” began the Baxter girl. “How is it that no one
+ever knows—or cares?”
+
+“You? You were a schoolgirl. Who had heard of her in those days? But she
+made friends. There was a girl, a journalist, who had been sent to
+interview the survivors. She seems to have helped her in the beginning.
+She found her a lodging—oh, can’t you see how she uses that lodging in
+_Eden Walls_?—and gave her occasional hack jobs, typing, and now and
+then proof-reading. Then she got some work taken, advertisement work,
+little articles on soaps and scents and face-creams that she used to
+illustrate herself. She was comically proud of them. She kept them all.”
+
+“I suppose in her spare time she was already working at _Eden Walls_?”
+
+“No. I asked her. And she said—‘Oh, no, I was too miserable. Oh, Anita,
+I _was_ miserable.’ And then she began again telling funny stories about
+her experiences. No, she was back in England before she began _Eden
+Walls_. However, she seems to have made quite a little income at last,
+even to have saved. And then, just when she began to see her way before
+her to a sort of security, then she threw it all up and came home.”
+
+“Just like Madala! But why?”
+
+“Heaven knows! Homesick, she said.”
+
+“But she hadn’t got a home!”
+
+“It was England—the English country—the south country—the Westering Hill
+country. She used to talk about it like—like a lover.”
+
+“Isn’t that more probable?” said Mr. Flood.
+
+“What?”
+
+“A lover.”
+
+“Carey?”
+
+“Not necessarily Carey.”
+
+Anita looked at him with a certain approval.
+
+“Ah—so you’ve thought of that, too? Now what exactly do you base it on?”
+
+He shrugged and smiled.
+
+“Delightfullest—my thoughts are thistle-down.”
+
+“But you have your theory?” She pinned him down. “I see that you too
+have your theory.”
+
+“Our theory.” He bowed.
+
+“You’ve got wits, Jasper.”
+
+“What are you two driving at?” Miss Howe fidgeted.
+
+“We’re evolving a theory—a theory of Madala Grey. Who lived in the south
+country, Anita?”
+
+“Carey, for that matter.”
+
+“Matters not. She didn’t come home for Carey. You can’t make books
+without copy. Not her sort of book. Any more than you can make bricks
+without straw. But she didn’t make her bricks from his straw, that I’ll
+swear.”
+
+“No, she didn’t come home for Carey,” said Anita. “I tell you, that was
+the day she met him. It’s barely a year ago. She had made her name twice
+over by then. She was already casting about for her third plot. I think
+it was that that made her so restless. She’d grown very restless. But
+she certainly didn’t come home for Carey.”
+
+“Then why?”
+
+“Homesick.”
+
+“That’s absurd.”
+
+“I’m telling you what she said. She insisted on it. She used a queer
+phrase. She said—‘I longed for home till my lips ached.’”
+
+The lady with Mr. Flood stirred in her shadows.
+
+“She didn’t imagine that. That happens. That is how one longs——” She
+broke off.
+
+“For home?” he said, with that smile of his that ended at his mouth and
+left his eyes like chips of quartz.
+
+She answered him slowly, him only—
+
+“I suppose, with some women, it could be for home. If she says so——That
+is what confounds one in her. She knows—she proves that she knows, in a
+phrase like that, things that (when one thinks of her personality) she
+_can’t_ know—couldn’t know. It’s inexplicable. ‘Till one’s lips
+ache’——Oh, Lord!” She laughed harshly.
+
+Anita looked at them uncertainly.
+
+“Well, that’s what she said. And to judge from her description Westering
+was something to be homesick for. I expected a paradise.”
+
+“Westering? That’s quite a town.”
+
+“Yes, I know. There’s a summer colony. Madala mourned over it. She was
+absurd. She raced me out of the station and up the hill, and would
+scarcely let me look about me till we were at the top, because the lower
+end of the village had been built over. It might have been the sack of
+Rome to hear her—‘Asphalt paths! Disgraceful! The grocer used to have
+_blue_ blinds. They’ve spoiled the village green.’ And so it went on
+until we reached Upper Westering.”
+
+“Oh, where they live now?”
+
+“Yes. And then she turned to me and beamed—‘_This is_ my _country_.’
+It certainly is a pretty place. There’s a fine view over the downs;
+but too hilly for me. We climbed up and down lanes and picked
+ridiculous bits of twig and green stuff till I protested. Then she
+took me into the churchyard. We wandered about: very pleasant it was:
+such a hot spring day, and pretty pinkish flowers—what did she call
+the stuff?—cuckoo-pint, springing from the graves—and daffodils. Then
+we sat down in the shadow of the church to eat our lunch. We began to
+discuss architecture and I was growing interested, really beginning to
+enjoy myself—some of it was pre-Norman—when a man climbed over the
+stile from the field behind the church, and came down the path towards
+us. As he passed, Madala looked up and he looked down, and up she
+jumped in a moment. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘I do believe—I _do_ believe—’
+You know that little chuckly rise in her voice when she’s pleased—‘I
+do believe it’s you!’ ‘Oh, Madala,’ I said, ‘the sandwiches!’ They
+were in a paper on her lap, you know. She had scattered them right and
+left. But I might have talked to the wind. I must say he had perfectly
+respectable manners. He turned back at once, and smiled at her, and
+hesitated, and began to pick up the sandwiches, though he evidently
+didn’t know her. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘don’t you remember? Aren’t you Dr.
+Carey? You mended my camel when I was little. I’m Madala!’ She was
+literally brimming over with pleasure. But, you know, such a silly way
+to put it! If she had said ‘Madala Grey’ he would have known in a
+moment. There were a couple of _Eden Walls_ on the bookstall as we
+went through. I saw them. However, he remembered her then. He
+certainly seemed pleased to see her, in his awkward way. He stood
+looking down at her, amused and interested. People always got so
+interested in Madala. Haven’t you noticed it? Even people in trams.
+Though I thought to myself at the time—‘How absurd Madala is! What can
+they have in common?’ Yes, I thought it even then.”
+
+“Well, what had they in common?”
+
+“Heaven knew! She was ten and he was twenty-five when they last met. He
+knew her grand-people: he had mended her dolls for her: he lived in her
+old home: that, according to her, was all that mattered. She said to me
+afterwards, I remember, ‘Just imagine seeing him! I _was_ pleased to see
+him. He belongs in, you know.’ ‘No, Madala,’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Such
+a fuss about a man you haven’t seen since you were a child! I call it
+affectation. It’s a slight on your real friends.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘but
+he belongs in.’ She looked quite chastened. She said—‘Nita, it wasn’t
+affectation. I believe he was pleased too—honestly!’ He was. Who
+wouldn’t be? You know the effect she used to make.”
+
+“What did he say?” asked the Baxter girl.
+
+“Oh, he looked down at her as if he were shy. Then he said—‘You’ve a
+long memory, Madala!’ Yes, he called her Madala from the first. It
+annoyed me. She said—‘Oh, do you remember when Mother was so ill once?
+You were very kind to me then.’ Then she said something which amazed me.
+I’d known her for two years before she told me anything about that
+_Sylvania_ tragedy, but to him she spoke at once. ‘They’re dead,’ she
+said, ‘Mother and Father. They’re drowned. There isn’t anyone.’ But her
+voice! It made me quite nervous. I thought she was going to break down.
+He said, with a stiff sort of effort—‘Yes. I heard.’ That was all.
+Nothing sympathetic. He just stood and looked at her.”
+
+“Well?” said Miss Howe impatiently.
+
+“Oh—nothing else. I finished picking up the sandwiches. She introduced
+me, but I don’t think he realized who I was. It annoyed me very much
+that she insisted on his eating lunch with us. As I said to her
+afterwards, it wasn’t suitable. Buns in a bag! But there he sat on a
+damp stone (he gave Madala his overcoat to sit upon) perfectly
+contented. I confess I wasn’t cordial. But he noticed nothing. Obtuse!
+That was how I summed him up from the first—obtuse! And no conversation
+whatever. Madala did the talking. I believe she asked after every cat
+and dog for twenty miles round. And her lack of reticence to a
+comparative stranger was amazing. She told him more about herself in
+half an hour than she had told me in four years. But she was an
+unaccountable creature.”
+
+“Yes, that’s just it. One never knew what Madala would do next, and yet
+when she’d done it, one said—‘Of course! Just what Madala _would_ do!’
+But it wasn’t like her to neglect you, Nita!”
+
+“Oh, she noticed after a time. She began to be uncomfortable. I—withdrew
+myself, as it were. You know my way. She didn’t like that. She tried—I
+will say that for her—she did try to direct the conversation towards my
+subjects. Useless, of course. He was, not illiterate—no, you can’t say
+illiterate—but curiously unintellectual. Socialism now—somehow we got on
+to socialism. That roused him. I must say, though he expressed himself
+clumsily, that he had ideas. But so limited. He had never heard of Marx.
+Bernard Shaw was barely a name to him. Socialism—his socialism—when we
+disentangled it, was only another word for the proper feeding of the
+local infants—drains—measles—the village schools. Beyond that he was
+mute. But Madala chimed in with details of American slum life, and
+roused him at once. They grew quite eloquent. But not one word, if you
+please, of her own work. Anything and everything but her work. He did
+ask her what she was doing. ‘Oh,’ said she in an offhand way, ‘I
+scribble. Stories.’ And then—‘It earns money, and it kills time.’ Yes,
+that’s exactly how she put it. ‘Madala!’ I said, ‘that’s not the
+spirit—’ I’d never heard her use such a tone before. She had such high
+ideals of art. It jarred me. I thought that she ought to have known
+better. But she looked at me in such a curious way—defiant almost. She
+said—‘It’s my own spirit, Nita. Oh, let me have a holiday!’ And at that
+up she jumped and left us sitting there, and wandered off to the stile
+and was over it in a second. We sat still. The hedge hid her. Then we
+heard her call—‘Cowslips! Oh, cowslips!’ I thought he would go when she
+called, but he sat where he was, listening. It was one of those hot,
+still days, you know. There was a sort of spell on things. There were
+bees about. We heard a cart roll up the road. I wanted to get up and
+talk, make some kind of diversion, and yet I couldn’t. We heard her call
+again—‘Hundreds of cowslips! I’m going to make a cowslip ball.’ Her
+voice sounded far away, but very clear. And there was a scent of may in
+the air, and dust—an intoxicating smell. It made me quite sleepy. It was
+just as if time stood still. Three o’clock’s a drowsy time, I suppose.
+And he never stirred—just sat there stupidly. But I was too sleepy to be
+bored with him. Presently back she came. She had picked up her skirt and
+her petticoat showed—it was that lavender silk you gave her, Lila. So
+unsuitable, you know, on those dirty roads. And her skirt was full of
+cowslips. She was just a dark figure against the sky until she was close
+to us; but then, I thought that she looked pretty, extremely pretty.
+Bright cheeks, you know, and her eyes so blue——”
+
+“Grey—” said Mr. Flood, “the grey eyes of a goddess.”
+
+“They looked blue, and she didn’t look like a goddess. She looked like a
+little girl. Well, there she stood, with her grey skirt and her lavender
+silk, and her cowslips—you know they have a sweet smell, cowslips, a
+very sweet smell—and tumbled them all down on the tombstone. Then she
+wanted string. Carey seemed to wake up at that. He’d been looking at her
+as if he had dreamed her. He produced string. He was that sort of man.
+Then she made her cowslip ball. I held one end of the string and he held
+the other, and she nipped the stalks off the flowers and strung them
+athwart it. That is the way to make a cowslip ball.”
+
+“Nita, I love you!” cried Miss Howe for the second time, and the others
+laughed.
+
+She stopped. She stiffened.
+
+“I don’t know what you mean.”
+
+“Ne’ mind! Go on!”
+
+She said offendedly—
+
+“There’s nothing more to tell. We got up and came away.”
+
+But as we sat silently by, still waiting, the storyteller crept back
+into her face.
+
+“Oh, yes—” up went her forefinger. “It was then that it happened. We
+went stumbling over the graves, round to the east end, to see the
+lepers’ window, a particularly interesting one. Ruskin mentions it. Yes,
+Carey came with us. There’s a little bit of bare lawn under the window
+before the stones begin again, and as we crossed it Madala gave a kind
+of shuddering start. He said—‘Cold?’ smiling at her. She shivered again,
+in spite of herself as it were, for she’d been joking and laughing, and
+said—‘Someone must be walking over my grave.’ And at that he gave her
+such a look, and said loudly in a great rough voice—‘Rubbish! don’t talk
+such rubbish!’ Really, you know, the tone! And I thought to myself then
+as I’ve thought many times since—‘At heart the man’s a bully—that’s what
+the man is.’ But Madala laughed. We didn’t stay long after that. The
+window was a disappointment—restored. There was nothing further to see
+and Madala was quite right—it was chilly. The sky had clouded over and
+there was a wind. I thought it time to go. Madala made no objection. She
+had grown curiously quiet. She tired easily, you know. And he didn’t say
+another word. Quite time to go. I thought we might try for the earlier
+train, so we went off at last in a hurry. No, he didn’t come with us: we
+shook hands at the gate. And when I looked back a minute later he had
+turned away. We caught our train.”
+
+There was a little pause that Miss Howe ended.
+
+“Queer!” she said.
+
+Anita stared at them. Her hands twitched.
+
+“Oh, I’m a practical person, but—‘You’re walking on my grave,’ she said.
+And there or thereabouts, I suppose, she’ll lie.”
+
+“Coincidence,” said Mr. Flood quickly.
+
+“Of course. I never thought of it again. Nor did Madala for that matter,
+though she was quiet enough in the train. There she sat, looking out of
+the window and smiling to herself. But then she was always like that
+after any little excitement, very quiet for an hour, re-living
+it—literally. I think, you know,” she hesitated, “that that was the
+secret of her genius. Her genius was her memory. _She liked whate’er she
+looked on_——”
+
+“And her looks were certainly everywhere,” said the blonde lady in her
+drawling voice.
+
+“Just so. But it didn’t end there. She remembered. She remembered
+uncannily. She was like a child picking up pebbles from the beach every
+holiday, and spending all the rest of its year polishing. She turned
+them into jewels. The process used to fascinate me—professionally, you
+know. You could see her mind at work on some trifling incident,
+fidgeting with it, twisting it, dropping it, picking it up again, till
+one wearied. And then a year later, or two years, or three years, or ten
+years maybe, you’ll pick up a novel or a story, and there you’ll find
+it, cut, graved, polished, set in diamonds, but—the same pebble, if one
+has the wit to see.”
+
+“Well, what did she say?” Miss Howe cut through the theory impatiently.
+
+Anita frowned. She disliked being hurried.
+
+“Oh, that day? Very little. I was surprised. She usually enjoyed pouring
+herself out to me. But no, she just sat and smiled. It irritated me.
+‘What is it, Madala?’ I said at last. She stared at me as if she had
+never seen me before. ‘I don’t know,’ she said in her vague way. And
+then—‘Wasn’t it a lovely day?’ I waited. I knew she would go on sooner
+or later. Presently she said—‘That stone we sat on _was_ damp. He was
+quite right.’ Then she said, thinking aloud as it were—‘You know, if a
+man has a really pleasant voice, I like it better than women’s voices.
+It’s so steady.’ And then—‘What did you think of him, Anita?’”
+
+Miss Howe chuckled.
+
+“And you said?”
+
+“Oh, I said what I could. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. It was so
+obvious that the place and everyone in it was beglamoured for her. I
+said that he seemed a worthy, harmless person, or something to that
+effect. I forget exactly how I phrased it—I was tactful, of course. Oh,
+I remember, I said that she ought to put him into a book—that the old
+country doctors were disappearing, like the farmers and the parsons. I’m
+sure I appeared interested. But all she said was—‘Old? He’s not old.
+Would you call him old?’ ‘That was a figure of speech,’ I said. ‘I was
+thinking of the type. But all the same you can’t describe him as young,
+Madala.’ ‘Oh, he’s not a boy,’ she said. ‘No one ever said he was a
+_boy_.’ She didn’t say any more. But just as we were getting out at
+Victoria she cried—‘My cowslips! Anita, my cowslips! I’ve forgotten my
+cowslip ball.’ I told her that it wouldn’t have lasted anyway, with the
+stalks nipped off so short. But she looked as if she had lost a
+kingdom.”
+
+“I believe I know that cowslip ball.” Miss Howe looked amused. “_A_
+cowslip ball, anyway. She had one sent to her once when I was there. I
+thought it was from her slum children.”
+
+“Yes, he sent it on.” My cousin went on quickly with her own story. “How
+he knew the address puzzled me. Her publishers wouldn’t have given it
+and I know she didn’t.”
+
+“Telephone book,” said the Baxter girl, as one experienced.
+
+“Ah, possibly. I went round to her that morning, and—yes, you were
+there, Lila,” she conceded, “for I remember I wondered how Madala could
+compose herself to work with anyone else in the room. I always left her
+to herself when she stayed with me.”
+
+“She didn’t mind me,” said Miss Howe firmly.
+
+“She always said that she didn’t, I know. And of course I know that it
+is possible to withdraw oneself as it were, but I confess I disapproved.
+Her room was a regular clearing-house in those days. Oh, not you
+particularly, Lila, but——”
+
+“You came in yourself that morning, didn’t you?” said Miss Howe very
+softly and sweetly.
+
+“I was telling you so. And what did I find? Her desk littered over with
+string and paper and moss and damp cardboard, and that story Hooper
+published (it had been freshly typed only the day before) watering into
+purple under my eyes, while she sat and gloated over those wretched
+flowers. ‘Madala!’ I said, ‘your manuscript! Really, Madala!’”
+
+“And Madala—” Miss Howe began to laugh—“Oh, I remember now.”
+
+“What did Madala say?” demanded the Baxter girl.
+
+“It wasn’t like her.” Anita fidgeted. “She knew how I disliked the
+modern manner.”
+
+“But she said,” Miss Howe caught it up—
+
+“I don’t know what possessed her,” said my cousin with a rush. “She
+actually stamped her foot at me. Yes, she did, and then held out her
+wretched posy and said—‘Oh, damn the manuscript, Nita! Smell!’”
+
+“What did Nita do?” enquired the blonde lady softly of Miss Howe.
+
+“Sniffed,” Mr. Flood struck in. “Obviously! Satisfied Madala and
+relieved her own feelings. That is called tact.”
+
+“And just then, you know,” Miss Howe glanced over her shoulder and
+lowered her voice, “_he_ came in.”
+
+“Kent?” The lady with Mr. Flood did not lower her voice. I believe she
+wanted him to hear. She was like a curious child poking at a hurt
+beastie. Her smile was infantine as she looked across at him. But the
+man at the window never stirred.
+
+“Sh!” Miss Howe frowned at her. And then, still whispering—“Yes, don’t
+you remember? he had his studio in the same block all that year. He
+always came across to Madala when he wanted a sardine tin opened, or
+change for his gas, or someone to sit to him.”
+
+“Someone was saying that he couldn’t keep a model.” Mr. Flood glanced at
+them in turn.
+
+Miss Howe flushed surprisingly.
+
+“It’s not that. You ought to know better, Jasper. It’s only that he’s
+exigeant—never knows how the time goes, and” (she lowered her voice
+still more), “and Madala spoilt him. She could sit by the hour looking
+like a Madonna, and getting all her own head-work done, and never
+stirring a hair. Of course he doesn’t like the shilling an hour type
+after her.”
+
+“I know, I know! The explanation is quite unnecessary.” He smiled and
+waved his hand.
+
+“Then why——?” She was still flushed and annoyed.
+
+“One gets at other people’s views. I merely wondered how
+the—er—partnership appeared to your—er—intelligence. Now I know.”
+
+“She did spoil him.” Anita disregarded them. “The time she wasted on
+him! In he came, you know, that day, and she went to meet him with the
+cowslips still in her hand, and shielding her eyes from the sun. That
+room of hers got all the morning sun.”
+
+“What did she wear—the blue dress?” The Baxter girl was like a child
+being told a story.
+
+“I forget. Anyway he stood looking her up and down till she reddened and
+began to laugh at him. And then he said—‘And cowslips too! What luck!
+Come along! Come _along_!’ ‘Oh, my good man!’ I said, ‘she’s in the
+middle of her writing!’ But it was useless to expostulate. He wanted her
+and so she went. I heard him as he dragged her off. ‘Madala, I’ve got
+such a notion!’ No, it was the great fault of her character, I consider,
+that she could never deny anyone, not even for her work’s sake. Still, I
+suppose one had to forgive it in that case, for that was the beginning,
+you know, of _The Spring Song_. She is painted just as she stood there
+that morning, literally gilded over with sunshine, and the flowers in
+her hands.”
+
+“It’s the best thing he’s ever done, isn’t it?” said the Baxter girl.
+
+“Best thing? It’s a master-piece. It’s Madala Grey.”
+
+“When is he going to show it?” asked Mr. Flood.
+
+Anita shrugged.
+
+“Heaven knows! He insists that it isn’t finished. I believe he sits and
+prays over it. He was annoyed that Madala took me there one day. You
+know how touchy he is.”
+
+“He won’t show it now,” said the blonde lady.
+
+“Why not? Why not?” Anita hovered, on the pounce, like a cat over a bowl
+of goldfish, and like a fish the blonde lady glided out of reach.
+
+“And _she_ asks!” she appealed to the others.
+
+Anita frowned.
+
+“You’re cryptic.”
+
+“Well, wasn’t there a certain—rivalry? You should have a
+fellow-feeling.”
+
+“Oh—” she resented quickly, “Kent always wanted to keep her to himself,
+if you mean that.”
+
+The blonde lady smiled.
+
+“And now he keeps her to himself. I mean just that. I go by your
+account, of course. _I_ haven’t glimpsed _The Spring Song_.”
+
+“So that started it.” The Baxter girl mused aloud. “I think that’s
+romantic now—to make a famous picture and to pick up one’s husband, all
+in twenty-four hours.”
+
+“‘Pick up!’”
+
+“You know what I mean—fall in love.”
+
+“‘Fall in love!’”
+
+“Nita, don’t trample.” Miss Howe threw the Baxter girl a cigarette.
+
+“I only mean—it was romantic, meeting like that so long ago and nobody
+knowing a word until just before they were married, except you, Miss
+Serle. And I don’t believe you guessed?” She questioned her with defiant
+eyebrows.
+
+“How could I guess what never happened? ‘In love!’ I suppose it deceived
+some good folks.”
+
+“It wasn’t so long ago,” Miss Howe soothered them. She had a funny
+little way of slipping people into another subject if she thought that
+they sounded quarrelsome. ‘Let’s be comfortable!’ was written all over
+her. And yet she could scratch. I think that a great many women are like
+Miss Howe.
+
+“Long ago? Of course not!” Anita picked it up at once. “How long is it?
+A year? Eighteen months? April, wasn’t it? She wrote _The Resting-place_
+in the next three months. Scamped. I shall always say so. She was three
+years over _Ploughed Fields_. Yes, April began it. _The Resting-place_
+was out for the Christmas sales. She married him at Easter. And now it’s
+November. The year’s not gone. But Madala Grey is gone.”
+
+“Where?” said the Baxter girl intensely.
+
+“Don’t!” said Miss Howe.
+
+But the Baxter girl looked as if she couldn’t stop herself.
+
+“We—we put her into the past tense—d’you notice how easily we’re doing
+it already?—but—is she less alive to you, less lovable, less Madala Grey
+to you, because of a telegram and a funeral service? is she?”
+
+“No,” said Miss Howe. “If you put it like that—no.”
+
+“Yes,” said Mr. Flood. “When you put it like that—yes.”
+
+“She must be somewhere,” argued the Baxter girl. “She can’t just stop.”
+
+“Why not?” said Mr. Flood, with his bored smile.
+
+“She can’t. I feel it,” she said with her hand at her heart and her
+large eyes on him.
+
+“I don’t,” he said to her, and he lost his smile. “‘Dust to dust——’”
+
+The woman behind him moved restlessly.
+
+“Jasper, _dear_! How trite!”
+
+“But the spirit?” said the Baxter girl, “the spirit?”
+
+Nobody answered. The little blue flames on the hearth capered and said
+‘Chik-chik!’ Anita shivered.
+
+“The room’s getting cold,” she said sharply. And then—“Jenny, is that
+door open? There’s such a draught.”
+
+I got up and went to see. But the door was shut. When I came back they
+were talking again. Anita was answering the Baxter girl.
+
+“Yes, I stayed there once. A pretty place. The sort of place she would
+choose. All roses. No conveniences. And what with the surgery and the
+socialism, the poor seemed to be always with us. Only one servant——”
+
+“She _ought_ to have made money,” said Miss Howe.
+
+“Oh, the first two books were a _succès d’estime_, I wept over her
+contract. She did make a considerable amount of money on _The
+Resting-place_. But it was all put by for the child. She told me so. He,
+you know, a poor man’s doctor! She told me that too—flung it at me. She
+had an extravagant way of talking, manner more than anything, of course,
+but to hear her you would almost think she was proud of the life they
+led. She was always unpractical.”
+
+“I’d like to have gone down there once,” said Miss Howe. “If I’d
+known—heigh-ho!”
+
+“I—I wished I hadn’t gone,” said Anita slowly. “It wasn’t a success.”
+
+“The husband, I suppose,” the Baxter girl hinted delicately.
+
+“No, I hardly saw him. It was Madala herself. Changed. Affectionate—she
+was always that to me but——I remember sitting with her once. We had been
+talking, about Aphra Behn I believe, and she had grown flushed and had
+begun to stammer a little. You know her way?”
+
+“I know.” The Baxter girl leaned forward eagerly.
+
+“And she was tracing a parallel between the development of the novel and
+the growth of the woman’s movement—her old vein. Brilliant, she was. And
+all at once she stopped and began staring in front of her. You know that
+trick she had of frowning out her thoughts. I was careful not to
+interrupt. I knew something big was coming. She could be—prophetic,
+sometimes. At last she said in a worried sort of way—‘I’ve a dreadful
+feeling that we’re out of coffee and it’s early closing.’ No, I’m not
+exaggerating—her very words. And then some long rigmarole about Carey’s
+appetite, and that if she made the coffee black strong she could
+persuade him to take more milk with it. Oh—pitiful! And in a moment
+she’d dashed off on a three mile walk to the next village where there
+was a grocer that did open on Wednesdays. Oh, it was most pathetic. It
+made me realize the effect that he was having on her—stultifying! I
+always did dislike him.”
+
+“Well, I don’t know,” said Miss Howe.
+
+“Just so—you don’t know. Naturally, you were not so intimate with
+Madala. Well, that very afternoon, I remember, he came in at tea-time.
+That was unusual: he was generally late for seven-thirty dinner, and
+then he didn’t change. I used to wonder how Madala allowed it. Well, as
+I was telling you, he came in, stamping through the hall, calling to
+her, and when he opened the drawing-room door and found that she was
+out, you should have seen his look! Sour! No other word! And off he went
+at once to meet her, on his bicycle, though I was prepared to give him
+tea. They didn’t come back for hours. In fact I had gone up to change. I
+saw them from the window, coming up the drive. And there was Madala
+Grey, perched on _his_ bicycle, with a great bunch of that white parsley
+that grows in the hedges, and a string bag dangling down, while he
+steadied her, and both of them _talking_! and as he helped her off, she
+kissed him—in front of the kitchen windows. And, if you please, not a
+word of apology to me. All she said was—why hadn’t I seen that he had
+some tea before he went after her? I think it’s the only time I’ve ever
+seen Madala annoyed. No, you can’t say the marriage improved her.” She
+paused. “It was so unlike her,” she meditated, “as if I could help it!
+You know, I’d always thought her so considerate. Carey’s influence, of
+course. Oh,” she cried out suddenly and angrily, “I’ve got nothing
+against Carey. I’m not prejudiced. But if he’d been the sort of man one
+could approve—someone——” Her eye wandered from Kent Rehan to Mr.
+Flood—“but he was dragging her down——”
+
+Miss Howe shook her head.
+
+“Anita, you’re wrong. I’ve only met him a couple of times but I liked
+what I saw of him. An honest, straightforward sort of person. Oh, not
+clever, of course. He’d have bored me in a week——”
+
+“Ah?” said the woman behind Mr. Flood.
+
+“Oh, yes, dull—distinctly. But I had the impression that if I’d been one
+of his patients I should have done everything he told me to do.”
+
+Anita shrugged.
+
+“Oh, I’ve no doubt he had every virtue, but it’s idle to pretend that he
+made any attempt to appreciate Madala Grey.”
+
+“You don’t suggest that the man didn’t love his wife, do you?” said Miss
+Howe in her downright way.
+
+“I suggest nothing. But the fact remains—I give it for what it is
+worth—but the fact does remain that John Carey has never read one of her
+books—not one!”
+
+“What?” The Baxter girl’s mouth opened and stayed so.
+
+“You don’t intend to say——” began Mr. Flood.
+
+“I don’t believe it,” said Miss Howe contemptuously.
+
+“Why not? I’ve known a man jealous of his wife before now. I suppose he
+knew enough to know that she had the brains.” The blonde lady was
+smiling.
+
+Anita shook her head reluctantly.
+
+“Jealousy? H’m—it might have been, of course. But I didn’t get that
+impression. I believe that it was a perfectly genuine lack of interest.”
+
+“Yes, but I don’t believe it. How d’you know he didn’t? It’s not a thing
+he’d own to. Who told you?”
+
+“Madala. Madala herself. She used to make a joke of it.”
+
+“She never showed when she was hurt,” said the Baxter girl emotionally.
+
+“Yes, but it almost seemed as if she were not hurt, as if her—her
+sensitiveness, her better feelings, had been blunted. I’ve known her use
+it as a _weapon_ almost,” said Anita conscientiously recollecting.
+“He—that annoyed me so—he was very peremptory with her sometimes, most
+rude in his manner. Of course, you know, she _was_ dreamy. Not that that
+excused him for a moment. I remember a regular scene——”
+
+“Before you?” Miss Howe cast instant doubt upon it.
+
+“My room was next to theirs. I could hear them through the wall. I can
+assure you that he stormed at her in a most ungentlemanly way——”
+
+“What about?” said the Baxter girl breathlessly.
+
+“Something about his razors. A parcel had come by the early post, and
+just because she had cut the string—but I couldn’t follow it all. He was
+a man who was easily irritated by trifles. Well, as I say, after he had
+raged at her for five minutes or more, till I could have gone in and
+spoken to him myself, all that that patient woman said, was—‘Darling,
+have you begun _Eden Walls_ yet?’ I tell you the man never said another
+word.”
+
+“He didn’t prevent her writing, did he?” said Miss Howe.
+
+“There’s no doubt that he discouraged her. He was selfish. It was his
+wretched doctoring all day long—and you know how sensitive Madala was. I
+did persuade her to do some work while I was staying with them, but I
+soon saw that it was labour thrown away. Her heart wasn’t in it. When it
+wasn’t Carey it was the baby clothes. For the sake of her reputation,”
+her voice hardened, “it’s as well that she has died when she has.”
+
+“Anita!”
+
+“I mean it.” She was quick and fierce. “Do you think it was a little
+thing for me to see that pearl of great price—oh, not Madala Grey! I
+grew to hate her almost, that new Madala Grey—but the gift within her,
+her great, blazing genius—flung away, trampled on——”
+
+Miss Howe turned her head in slow denial.
+
+“No, Anita! Not genius. Charm, if you like. Talent, as much as you
+please. But Madala Grey wasn’t a genius, and she knew it.”
+
+Anita flung up her head.
+
+“She will be when I’ve done with her. She will be when I’ve written the
+_Life_.”
+
+“Ah, the poor child!” said Great-aunt startlingly.
+
+Anita never heeded. She was wrapt away in some cold passion of her own,
+a passion that amazed me. I had always thought of her as what she
+looked, an ordered, steely woman, all brain and will; yet now of a
+sudden she revealed herself, a creature convulsed, writhing in flames.
+But they were cold flames. Cold fire, is there such a thing? Ice burns.
+There is phosphorus. There is the light of stars. I know what I mean if
+only I had the words. Star-fire—that’s it. She was like a dead star. She
+warmed no one, she only burned herself up.
+
+It was the impression of a moment. When I looked again it was as if I
+had been withdrawn from a telescope. She was herself once more. The
+volcano had shrunk to a diamond twinkle, to a tiny, gesticulating
+creature with a needle tongue. It was bewildering: while I listened to
+her I was still thinking—‘Yes, but which is Anita? Diamond or star? What
+makes the glitter? Frost or flame?’
+
+But that blonde woman in the shadows went off into noiseless laughter
+that woke the dragons and stirred Mr. Flood to an upward glance. Then he
+hunched himself closer against her knees, his chin low on his chest, so
+that his tiny beard and mouth and eyes were like triangles standing on
+their points. The pose gave him a glinting air of mockery and yet,
+somehow, you did not feel that he was amused. You only felt—‘Oh, he’s
+practised that at a looking-glass.’
+
+He drawled out—
+
+“The _Life_, dear lady? Enlighten our darkness.”
+
+“That,” came the murmur behind him, “is precisely what she is going to
+do. How dense you are, Jasper!”
+
+And at the same moment from Miss Howe—
+
+“Be quiet, you two! Tell us, Anita! A life of her? Is that it? Ah, well,
+I always suspected your note-book. Did she know you Boswellized?”
+
+“She?” There was the strangest mixture of scorn and admiration in the
+voice. “As if one could let her know! That was the difficulty with
+Madala Grey: she wouldn’t take herself seriously. She had—” a pause and
+a search for the correct word—“what I can only call a _perverted_ sense
+of humour. If she’d known that I—noted things, she’d have been quite
+capable of falsifying all her opinions, misrepresenting herself
+completely, just to—throw me out, as it were. Not maliciously, I don’t
+mean that. But she teases,” finished Anita petulantly. “She will do it.
+She laughs at the wrong things. Of course she’s young still.”
+
+“Yes, she’s young—now. She stays young now. She gains that at least,”
+said the woman in the shadows.
+
+Anita made a quick little sound, half titter and half gasp.
+
+“Oh!” she cried—and her voice was as grey as her face—“I forgot. Do you
+know—I forgot! It’s going to be ghastly. I believe I shall always be
+forgetting.”
+
+I glanced up at Kent Rehan. It made me realize that I had been listening
+with anxiety, that I was afraid of their expressive sentences. They had
+words, those writing people. They knew what they thought: they could say
+what they thought: and what they thought could hurt. I didn’t want him
+to be hurt. I said, under my breath—
+
+“Oh, why do you stay here? They aren’t your sort.”
+
+But he had heard nothing. He was poring over the long tassel of the
+blind, weaving it into a six-strand plait. I couldn’t help watching his
+fingers. He had the most beautiful hands that I’ve ever seen on a man.
+They looked like two alive and independent creatures. They looked as if
+they could do anything they chose, whether he were there to superintend
+or not. And he was miles away. I was glad. Anita’s voice was rising like
+a dreary wind.
+
+“Just that is so strange. All the time I’ve known her I’ve thought of
+her in the past tense. Her moods, her ways, her actions, were finished
+things to me—chapters of the _Life_. I _wrote_ her all the time. But
+now, when she _is_ mine, as it were, now that she exists only in my
+notes and papers and remembrance of her, now it comes that I’m shaken. I
+can’t think of her as a subject any more. I shall be wanting
+her—herself. I can’t think clearly. It’s frightening me, the work there
+is ahead of me. Because I’ve got to do it without her. She’s lying dead
+down there in Surrey—now—at this minute. And there’s that man—and a
+child. One’s overwhelmed. It’s so cruel. The only creature who ever
+cared for me. Think of Madala, quite still, not answering, not lighting
+up when you speak to her, staring at the ceiling, staring at her own
+coffin-lid. In two days she’ll be under the ground. Do you ever think
+what that means—burial—the corruption—the——”
+
+“Stop it, Nita!” Miss Howe’s movement blotted out my cousin’s face. “Do
+you hear? I can’t stand it. Here—drink some coffee. Jasper! Say
+something!” I heard the coffee-cup dance in its saucer.
+
+There came Aunt Serle’s anxious quaver—
+
+“Anita! Nita! What’s the matter, my dear? What’s the matter with my
+daughter?”
+
+Nobody answered. She was like a tortoise as she poked her head from the
+hood of her chair.
+
+“Jenny!” she called cautiously. “Jenny!”
+
+I slipped across the room to her.
+
+“What’s it about, Jenny? Eh? Speak up, my dear! Not crying, is she?
+Temper, that’s it. Don’t say I said so.”
+
+“It’s all right, Auntie. She—they—it’s the bad news. It’s upset them
+all.”
+
+“Bad news? Fiddlesticks! Temper, I call it. Why shouldn’t the girl get
+married? Not much money, but a pleasant fellow. Time for her to settle.
+I said to her—‘My dear, you follow your heart.’ But Nita tried to stop
+it. Nita couldn’t get over it. Cried. Temper. That’s it. Look at her
+now. ’Sh! Don’t let her see you.”
+
+But Anita wasn’t looking at me and she wasn’t crying. I suppose
+Great-aunt must have known what she was talking about; but it wasn’t
+easy to imagine my cousin soft and red-eyed like that great,
+good-natured Miss Howe. Her little sharp face looked as controlled as if
+it were carved. Yet, as she said herself, she was shaken. That showed in
+the jerkiness of her movements, the sharpening of her voice, in the
+break-up of her accustomed flow of words into staccato, like a river
+that has come to some rocks: and her hands had a clock-work, incessant
+movement, clutch-clutch, fingers on palm, that her eyes repeated. They
+were everywhere at once, resting, flitting, settling again, yet seeing
+nothing, I think, while she listened to Mr. Flood and grew more
+irritated with every word.
+
+“Why bad news?” said Great-aunt in my ear. “It’s a son, isn’t it?”
+
+I hesitated.
+
+“Oh, Auntie, didn’t you hear?” (She had heard, you know. I had seen her
+shrinking back when Anita screamed at her, with that dreadful shrinking
+that you see in an animal threatened by a head-blow. She had been
+leaning forward, and eager. She must have heard.)
+
+“Hear? They all talk,” she quavered. “‘Be quiet,’ says Anita. Ah, I’ve
+spoilt her. Now Madala——What’s the time, my dear? Why don’t she come?”
+
+“Auntie—Auntie——”
+
+“Eh?” she said. “Why don’t Madala come?”
+
+“Auntie—you’ve forgotten. She’s been ill.”
+
+“Ah—and she’ll be worse before she’s better,” said Great-aunt briskly.
+“’Sh! Listen to my daughter.”
+
+We listened: at least, I listened. Great-aunt cocked her head on one
+side, still as a bird, for a minute; then, like a bird, she was
+re-assured and fell to her knitting again.
+
+Anita and Mr. Flood were quarrelling.
+
+“Why shouldn’t I? Tell me that! Is anyone better fitted? Who knows as
+much about her as I do? Didn’t I discover her, hacking on two pounds a
+week? Didn’t I recognize what she was? Who sent her to Mitchell and
+Bent? Who introduced her everywhere? Who bullied her into writing
+_Ploughed Fields_? Who was the best friend she ever had—even if I didn’t
+make the parade of being fond of her that——Oh, I’ve no patience! What
+would the world know of Madala Grey if it weren’t for me?”
+
+“But—oh, of course we all know how good you were to her, Miss Serle,
+indeed I can guess by what you’ve done for me——” began the Baxter girl.
+
+Mr. Flood’s tongue tip showed between his red lips. I think he would
+have made some comment but for the hand pressing on his shoulder.
+
+“But——?” said the woman behind the hand.
+
+“I only mean—‘genius will out,’ won’t it?”
+
+“Genius? Big word!” said Miss Howe.
+
+“Not too big.” The Baxter girl reddened enthusiastically.
+
+“‘Genius will out?’ Not Madala Grey’s. She didn’t know she had any. I
+don’t believe she ever fully realized——Why, it was the merest chance
+that _Eden Walls_ didn’t go into the fire. If it hadn’t been for me—if
+it hadn’t been for me——”
+
+“Ah—_you_!” Miss Howe squared up to her. “Now just what (among friends)
+have you stood to gain? Fond of her? Oh yes, you were, Anita! Don’t tell
+me! But in spite of yourself, eh? But that wasn’t what you were after.
+You didn’t get the pleasure out of her that—I did, for instance. You
+used to exhaust Madala. I’ve seen you do it. You—you drained her.”
+
+“Yes, I did. I meant to,” said Anita with her laugh. “Pleasure!”
+
+“And she thought you were fond of her. She used to flare if anyone
+attacked you. Poor Madala!”
+
+“Poor? Why? I shall give it all back.” Anita gave her a long cool look.
+“I—I hate debts,” said Anita.
+
+Miss Howe flushed brightly.
+
+“If you were cursed with the artistic temperament——” She broke off and
+began again. “If I were a poor devil of a Bohemian in a hole, it’s not
+to you I’d go——”
+
+“—twice!” said Anita.
+
+Again they eyed each other. Miss Howe, still flushing, chose her words.
+
+“Madala never lent. That wasn’t in her. She gave. Time, money, love—she
+gave. You took, it was understood, rather than hurt her feelings by
+refusing. But it was always free gift.”
+
+“Not to me.” Anita held her head high. “I shall pay. And interest too.”
+
+“Oh, the _Life_! Are you really going to attempt a _Life_?” Miss Howe
+recovered herself with a laugh, while Mr. Flood repeated curiously—
+
+“Yes, but then what were you after, Anita? What do you stand to gain?”
+
+“Reflected glory,” came from behind him.
+
+She turned as if she had been stung.
+
+“Reflected? Let her keep it! Reflected? Am I never to have anything of
+my own? Oh, wait!”
+
+“You can’t get much of yourself into a life of Madala Grey though.
+You’ve too much sense of style for that,” Mr. Flood insisted. “We both
+hate a biographer who ‘I says, says I.’”
+
+“Oh, it shall be all Madala Grey. I promise you that,” she said with her
+thin smile.
+
+“Humph! It’s a notion.” Miss Howe was really interested, I could see—yet
+with a flush on her cheek still. “It’s your sort of work too, Anita!
+You’re—happier—in critical work.”
+
+“Oh, don’t hedge. Don’t be delicate with me. I can’t create, that’s what
+you mean. Do you think that’s news to me? Is there a critic who has
+failed to make it clear to me? I can record—but I can’t create. Good! I
+can’t create. I can’t do what she did—what you do, Jasper—what even
+Beryl here does. But——” she paused an instant, “you should be afraid of
+me for all that. I can pry. Little, nasty, mean word, isn’t it? It’s
+me!”
+
+The Baxter girl laughed uncertainly and then stopped because Anita’s
+eyes were on her.
+
+“I’ve eyes. I”—she opened and shut her tiny hands before them—“I’ve
+claws. I can pry you open, any of you—if I choose. I haven’t chosen.
+You’ve not been worth while. But—Madala!” and here she released the
+uneasy Baxter girl—“Madala’s my chance—my chance—my chance! Madala
+Grey—look at her—coming into her kingdom at twenty—that babe! And me!
+Look at me! Do you know what my life has been, any of you? Oh, you come
+to my house to meet my lionets, and we’re very good friends, and you’re
+afraid of my reviews, and so I have my position, I suppose. But what do
+you know about me? When I was fifteen—and it’s thirty years ago—I said
+to myself, ‘Now what shall I do with my life?’ Mother—” she shot her a
+glance: she didn’t even trouble to lower her voice, “she’d have drudged
+me and dressed me and married me, I suppose, to three hundred a year and
+the city—oh, with the best of motives. I fought. I fought. That’s why
+I’m an ungrateful daughter. I’m supposed to be, I think. My people were
+so sorry for my mother. My people thought me a fool. I saw through them.
+Yes, and I saw through myself. That’s the kind of a fool I was. Didn’t I
+reckon it out? I hadn’t a charm. I hadn’t a talent. I had my _will_.
+That’s all I had. I taught myself. Work? You don’t know what work means,
+you ten and five-talented. There’s not a book worth reading that I
+haven’t read. There’s not the style of a master that I haven’t studied,
+that I couldn’t reproduce at a pinch. There’s not a man or a woman in
+London today, worth knowing—from my point of view—that I haven’t
+contrived to know. The people who’ve arrived—how I’ve studied them, the
+ways of them, the methods of them. And what’s the end of it all? That”
+—she jerked her head to the row of her own books on the shelf behind
+her—“and my column in the _Matins_, and some comforting hundreds a year,
+and—my knowledge of myself. Oh, I’ve turned out good work. I know that.
+I have judgment. That’s why I judge myself. I’ve always been rigid with
+myself. And so I know when I look at my books—though I can say that they
+are sounder, better work, in better English, that they have more
+knowledge behind them, than the books of a dozen of you people who
+arrive—yet I know that they have failed. People don’t read me. People
+don’t want me. Why? I have my name. I’ve the name of a well-known
+critic, but—I’m only a name. I’m not alive. The public doesn’t touch
+hands with me. Now why? Oh, how I’ve tormented myself. Nearly thirty
+years I’ve given, of unremitting labour, to my art, to my career.
+There’s not a thought or a wish that I haven’t sacrificed to it. And
+then that child of twenty comes along, without knowledge, without
+training, without experience, and gets at one leap, mark you all, at one
+leap, more than I’ve achieved in thirty years. Some people, I suppose,
+would submit. Well, I won’t. I wouldn’t. Does my will go for nothing? I
+_will_ have my share. ‘Reflected glory,’ yes, I’ve stooped to that. I’ve
+exploited her, if you like to call it that. When I think of the day I
+discovered her——” She paused an instant, dragging her hand wearily over
+her eyes—“I was at my zero that day. The _Famous Women_ had been out a
+week. The reviews—oh, the reviews! Respectful, courteous, lukewarm. If
+they’d attacked me, if they’d slated, I’d have rejoiced. But they
+respect me and they’re bored. They know it’s sound work and they’re
+bored. I bore people. I bore you—all of you. Do you think I’m blind?
+That night I read the manuscript of _Eden Walls_. (Wasn’t it kind of
+me—it wasn’t even typed!) And then I saw my chance. I saw how far she’d
+got at twenty, and I thought—‘I’ll take my chance. I’ll take this
+genius. I’ll make her fond of me. I’ll help her. I’ll worm myself into
+her. I’ll abase myself. I’ll toady. I’ll do anything. But I will find
+out how she does it. I will find out the secret. I’ll find it and I’ll
+make it my own. I’ll serve for her as Jacob served for Rachel; but she
+shall serve me in the end.’ I have watched. I have studied. I have
+puzzled. I believe I’ve grasped it at last. I know myself and I know
+her. If genius is life—the power to give life—is it that?—then I’m
+barren. I can’t make life as Madala can. But—listen to me! Listen to me,
+all of you! I can take a living thing—I can cut it open alive. That’s
+what I shall do with this life-maker—this easy genius. I’ve taken her to
+pieces, flesh and blood, bone and ligament and muscle, every secret of
+her mind and her heart and her soul. The life, the _real_ life of Madala
+Grey, the rise and fall of a genius, that’s what I’m going to make
+plain. She’s been a puzzle to you all, with her gifts and her ways and
+her crazy marriage—she’s not a mystery to me. I tell you I’ve got her,
+naked, pinned down, and now I shall make her again. Isn’t it fair? She
+ought to thank me. ‘Dead,’ he says. Who’s to blame? She chose to kill
+herself. What right had she to take risks? I—I’ve refrained. She
+couldn’t. She threw away her lamp. But I—I take it. I light it again.
+Finding’s keeping. It’s mine.”
+
+Her voice ripped on the high note like a rag on a nail, and she checked,
+panting. Her hand went up to her throat as the fumy air rasped it.
+
+“Mine!” she cried again, coughing. There was wild-fire in her eyes as
+she challenged them.
+
+The little space between her solitariness and their grouped attention
+was filled with fog and silence and lamp-light, woven as it were into a
+fifth element. It was like a pool to be crossed. And across it, in
+answer, a laugh rippled out.
+
+I don’t know who it was that laughed. I did not recognize the voice.
+Sometimes, looking back, I think it was the laugh of their collective
+soul.
+
+“Oh!” cried Anita, and stopped as if she had been awakened suddenly by a
+blow—as if the little wondering, wincing cry had been struck out of her
+by a blow on the face. She stood thus a moment, uncertain. Then she,
+too, laughed, nervously, apologetically.
+
+“One talks,” she said, “among friends.”
+
+Miss Howe made a wry face.
+
+“Lord, we’re a queer set of friends! How we love one another!”
+
+“You’ve all of you been awfully good to me,” said the Baxter girl. But
+her gratitude was too general to be acceptable. Even I could have told
+her that.
+
+“Oh, we do our best for you,” said Mr. Flood.
+
+She looked at him from under her lashes.
+
+“Yes, and she’s thinking this minute what a nice little scene this would
+make for her new book—touched up, of course,” said the woman behind him.
+
+“Art—selection—Jimmy Whistler——” Mr. Flood was one indistinct murmur.
+
+“With herself her own heroine again, eh?” Miss Howe baited her.
+
+“I didn’t. I wasn’t.”
+
+“Better folk than you do it, child! Anita says so. Don’t they, Anita?”
+
+“Oh,” said Anita heavily, “I wish Madala Grey were here. I wish she
+hadn’t died. If she were here she wouldn’t—you’d never—she wouldn’t let
+you laugh at me.”
+
+Miss Howe looked at her intently. There was a quick little run of
+expression across her large handsome face, like a hand playing a scale.
+It showed, that easily moved, easily read face, surprise, interest,
+concern, and, in the end, the sentimental impulse of your kind fur-clad
+woman to the beggar on the curb. ‘Why! I believe she’s cold! I don’t
+like it! Give her tuppence, quick!’ She was out of her chair,
+overwhelming Anita, in one impetuous heave of drapery.
+
+“You’re right, Nita! We’re pigs! Something’s wrong with us. ’Pologize.
+You know we don’t mean it.”
+
+Anita endured her right-and-left kisses.
+
+“You do mean it,” was all she said.
+
+She was shrunk to such a small grey creature again. I thought to
+myself—‘Fire? It’s not even diamond-sparkle. She’s as dull as stone.’
+
+Miss Howe was eagerly remorseful.
+
+“We don’t. I don’t know what’s got into us tonight. It’s the fog.
+There’s something evil about a fog. Distorting. It yellows over one’s
+soul.”
+
+“It isn’t only tonight,” said the Baxter girl, with her sidelong,
+‘can-I-risk-it?’ look at them. “The fog’s been coming on for months.”
+
+“And you mean——?” The blonde lady never snubbed the Baxter girl. It
+struck me suddenly, as their eyes met, that there was the beginning of a
+likeness between them. The Baxter girl at fifty—with dyed hair——? But it
+was only an idea of mine. I’m always seeing imaginary likenesses. I
+remember that those Academy pictures of Kent Rehan’s always set me to
+work wondering—‘That woman with the face turned away—I’ve seen her
+somewhere—of whom does she remind me?—where have I seen her?’ And yet,
+of course, in those days I knew nothing of Madala Grey.
+
+But the Baxter girl was answering—
+
+“It—it’s cheek, I know, but it’s true. When I first came—” then, with a
+swift propitiatory glance at Anita—“when you first let me come—the
+Nights weren’t like this. You weren’t like this, any of you——”
+
+“Upon—my—word!” said Miss Howe with her benevolent chuckle. “Nita!
+Listen to the infant!”
+
+“Like what?” Mr. Flood moved uneasily.
+
+The Baxter girl turned to him enthusiastically.
+
+“Oh, I used to think you such wonderful people——”
+
+“Did you now?” Miss Howe teased her.
+
+“Let be! let be!” said Mr. Flood impatiently. “Well, dear lady?”
+
+“Oh, I did! I’d read all your stuff. I believe I could write out _The
+Orchid House_ from memory still.”
+
+His eyes lit up as he challenged her—
+
+             “‘Sour!’ said the fox at her feet,
+              ‘How can she ripen windy-high?
+              Sour!’ said the fox with his nose to the sky—”
+
+He was as pleased as a child with a toy when she capped it—
+
+             “Then a grape dropped off. It was rotten sweet.
+
+There!” she flushed at him triumphantly. And then—“Now did you mean——?
+Who was in your mind? Were they anyone we know? I’ve always wanted to
+ask you.”
+
+But before he could answer her the blonde lady leaned forward and
+whispered in his ear. He turned to her with a glance of interest and
+amusement, but with his lips still moving and his mind still running on
+an answer to the Baxter girl. The blonde lady whispered again, and then
+he turned right round to answer her, shelving his arms on her knees. I
+couldn’t hear what they said, but it was just as if she had beckoned him
+into another room. He was withdrawn from the conversation and from the
+Baxter girl for as long as that blonde lady chose.
+
+Miss Howe looked at them with her broad smile.
+
+“Tell us, Beryl! We’re listening, anyhow!” she said invitingly.
+
+But the Baxter girl’s chin went up. The touch of annoyance in her voice
+made it twang, made her commonness suddenly noticeable. She was bearable
+when she was in awe of them, but now she was asserting herself, and that
+meant that she was inclined to be noisy.
+
+“Oh, my opinion doesn’t count, of course! But”—she swung like a
+pendulum between her two manners—“oh, I _did_ enjoy myself at first. It
+was the way you all talked. You knew everyone. You’d read everything.
+You frothed adventures. Like champagne it was, meeting all the people. I
+used to write my head off, the week after. And you were all kind to me
+from the first. I suppose it was Madala. She never let one feel out of
+it. But I thought it was all of you. I had the feeling—‘the gods
+_aren’t_ jealous gods.’ But now it’s” —she looked at them pertly—“it’s
+fog on Olympus.”
+
+“You needn’t—honour us, you know, Beryl,” said Anita sharply.
+
+She answered with her furtive look.
+
+“I know. And I don’t think—I don’t want to come as much as I did.”
+
+“In that case——” Anita ruffled up.
+
+“Fog! Fog!” cried Miss Howe clapping her hands. And then—“All the same,
+Nita, people are dropping off. The Whitneys haven’t been for weeks. When
+did Roy Huth come last? And the Golding crowd? I marvel that _he_ turns
+up still.” She nodded towards Kent Rehan. “Oh, you know, we’re like a
+row of beads when the string’s been pulled out. We lie in a line for a
+time, but a touch will send us rolling in all directions.”
+
+“Yes,” said the Baxter girl vehemently, “the heart’s out of it somehow.
+I’m not ungrateful. It’s just because I used to love coming so.”
+
+Miss Howe looked down at Anita, not unkindly.
+
+“Give it up, Nita! The Nights have served their turn. It sounds
+ungracious, but things have to end sometime or other. Hasn’t the time
+come? Hasn’t it come tonight?”
+
+“But you’ve been coming all this year just the same,” said Anita
+stubbornly.
+
+Miss Howe shrugged her shoulders. It was the Baxter girl who answered—
+
+“Ah, but there was always just a chance of seeing Madala.”
+
+At that Anita, who had been sitting as steely stiff as a needle in a
+pin-cushion, got up, shaking off Miss Howe’s persuasive, detaining hand
+and the overflow of her skirts. The cushions tumbled after her on to the
+floor.
+
+“As to that,” she said, “and don’t imagine that I haven’t known what you
+came for, all of you——”
+
+“Eh?”
+
+Her voice was sharp enough to have recalled anyone and it recalled Mr.
+Flood. He returned to the conversation with the air of dragging the
+blonde lady after him. She had the manner of one hanging back and
+protesting, and laughing still over some secret understanding. “Eh?”
+said he. “What’s that about Madala?”
+
+Anita looked from one to another.
+
+“I’m telling you,” she said. “I’ve told you already, I can give you
+Madala Grey. Come here and I’ll give you Madala Grey still. That’s what
+you want, isn’t it, to be amused? She amused you.”
+
+“She did, bless her!” said Miss Howe.
+
+“It was her brains,” said the Baxter girl.
+
+“A beautiful creature,” said Mr. Flood slowly.
+
+“Not she!” The lady behind him was smiling. “She made you think so. She
+made men think so. But how? That intrigued me. Oh, she was prettyish:
+but that was all. I used to watch her——”
+
+“Envy?” said he.
+
+“No, not envy,” said that woman slowly. “She was too—innocent—how could
+one envy? She didn’t know her own strength. She said—‘Don’t hurt me,’
+with a sword at her side.”
+
+“Excalibur.” It came from Mr. Flood. “Magic.”
+
+“No, Madala—just Madala.” Miss Howe sighed. “It’s no good, Anita, you
+can’t give us back Madala.”
+
+But my cousin, looking at them, laughed in her turn.
+
+“Madala? You fools! You’ve never had her. But you shall! Oh, wait! My
+books are dull, aren’t they? Yet you’ll be here, you know, every month,
+thick as bees, to listen to me. A chapter a month, that’s all I’ll give
+to you. _I_ don’t write three novels a year. But you’ll come, you’ll
+come. Proof? There’s plenty of proof. See here.”
+
+She went swiftly across to the outer room. There was a large carved desk
+standing on the little table by the window. She picked it up. It was too
+big for her. It filled her arms so that she staggered under the weight.
+
+“Oh, Kent!” she called.
+
+He came back to the foggy room with a visible wrench.
+
+“Here, that’s too heavy for you. Let me.” He took it from her.
+
+“The table—here. Thank you, oh, thank you, Kent.” She veiled her voice
+as she spoke to him. “It’s heavy—it’s so full—books—papers——”
+
+He put it down for her and nodded, and was straying away again when she
+stopped him.
+
+“Kent! Don’t sit by yourself. We”—her voice was for him alone—“we’re
+talking about—her. I was going to show them—Kent, stay here with us.”
+
+He waited while she talked to him. And she talked very sweetly and
+kindly. She was the quiet, chiffony little creature again with the
+pretty, pure voice. _I_ couldn’t make her out. She looked up at him and
+said something too low for me to catch, and then—
+
+“There’s your chair. Isn’t that always your chair?” And so left him and
+turned to the table and the box and the others.
+
+But he did not take the saddle-bag near Anita’s own seat. He looked
+irresolutely from one to another of the group that watched Anita
+fumbling with her keys. He looked, and his face softened, at Great-aunt,
+muttering over her needles. He looked at the empty chair beside me. He
+looked at me and found me watching him. Then, as I smiled at him just a
+little, he came to me and sat down. But he said nothing to me, and so I
+was quiet too.
+
+But Anita was busy, hands and eyes and tongue all busy.
+
+“When she married, you know, in that hole-and-corner fashion——” Then, as
+if in answer, though nobody had spoken—“Well, what else was it, when
+nobody knew?—when even I didn’t know——”
+
+There was a movement in the chair beside me, and turning, I caught the
+ending of a glance towards my cousin. A new look, I found it, on that
+passive face, a roused and wondering and scornful look that transformed
+it. But, even as I caught it, it faded again to that other look of bleak
+indifference, a look to know and dread on any creature’s face, a look
+that must not stay on any fellow-creature’s face. I knew that well
+enough. So I said the first words that came, in my lowest voice, lest
+they should hear.
+
+But they were talking. They did not hear.
+
+“I’m sure that Great-aunt knew.” Indeed I thought so. I think that
+Great-aunt would always be kind and guessing with a girl. Then I
+wondered at myself for daring it and thought nervously—‘He’ll snub me.
+He’ll be right to snub me——’
+
+But he looked across at Great-aunt kindly and said, in just such a
+withdrawn voice as mine—
+
+“Yes, of course, if ever there was a time when——” Then he half smiled.
+“Poor old lady! But she’s changed. She used to be so brisk and managing,
+more like fifty than seventy. But this year’s aged her. She wanted, you
+know, to give some pearls—her own pearls. But pearls spell sorrow. And
+Anita would have objected. She told me all about it.”
+
+“She was speaking of them tonight.” We both turned again and looked at
+her. She had dropped her knitting, or it had slipped from her knee, and
+she sat in her chair staring down at it with a terrible, comical air of
+helplessness. Then she caught his eye and forgot the knitting and nodded
+at him.
+
+“I think—” I said, “I don’t think she understands. She asked me—she
+forgets I’m a stranger. She asked me——” I broke off. I couldn’t say to
+him—‘She asked me about Miss Grey and she doesn’t realize that she’s
+dead.’ One’s afraid of the brutality of words. But he understood. There
+was a simplicity about him that re-assured one. And he never said—‘It’s
+Anita’s business. It’s not your business,’ as anyone else might have
+done. He just said, once again—
+
+“Poor old lady!” and hesitated a minute. Then he got up and went across
+to her and picked up her wools. I don’t think the others noticed him go.
+Anita didn’t. She was talking too fast.
+
+“—left a trunk-full of papers and so on. I’d often stored boxes for her.
+Somehow it never got sent down. I came across it only yesterday. I
+thought to myself that there was no harm in putting things straight. You
+know I’m literary executor? Oh yes. She said to me soon after her
+marriage, half in joke, that she supposed she had got to make a will—and
+what about her MSS.? ‘I can’t have _him_ worried.’ I offered at once.
+You see I know so exactly her attitude in literature. There’s a good
+deal of unpublished stuff—early stuff. But all in hopeless confusion.
+Tumbled up with bills and programmes and one or two drafts of letters—or
+so I imagine. She had that annoying habit—that ugly modern habit—of
+beginning without any invocation, and never a date. But there’s one
+letter—there’s the draft of a letter that’s important from my point of
+view.” She broke off with a half laugh. “It sounds a ridiculous
+statement to make about Madala Grey of all people, but do you know that
+she couldn’t express herself at all easily on paper?”
+
+Miss Howe nodded.
+
+“Do I know? I’ve known her re-write a letter half a dozen times before
+she got it to her liking—no, not business letters, letters to her
+intimates. A most comical trick. Scribble, scribble, scribble—slash! and
+then crunch goes the sheet into a ball, into the grate, or near it, till
+it looked as if she were playing snow-balls, and then Madala begins
+again—and again—and again. Yet she talked well. She talked easily.”
+
+“Isn’t that in keeping?” Mr. Flood struck in. “She didn’t express so
+much herself in her speech as the mood of the moment.”
+
+“As the mood of the companion of the moment more likely,” the blonde
+lady corrected.
+
+He nodded agreement.
+
+“But for herself—go to her books.”
+
+“Or her letters—her careful, conscientious letters. But she was careless
+about her drafts,” said Anita significantly.
+
+Mr. Flood looked at her curiously.
+
+“What’s up that sleeve of yours, Anita?”
+
+She was quick.
+
+“You shall read it, in its place. But the trouble is——” She hesitated.
+She gave the little nervous cough that always ushered in her public
+lectures. “We’ve all written books,” she said, “all except you,
+Blanche——”
+
+The blonde lady blinked her sleepy eyes.
+
+“You’re all so strenuous,” she purred. “I love to watch you being
+strenuous. So soothing.”
+
+“Well, I was going to say, it’s easy enough to end a book, but have you
+ever got to the beginning? I never have. One steps backward, and
+backward again——”
+
+“I know,” cried the Baxter girl. “Till you get tired of it at last and
+begin writing from where you are, but you never really get your foot on
+the starting-point, on the spring-board, as you might say.”
+
+“That’s it. Yes, Jasper, I’ve got material up my sleeve, but frankly, I
+don’t know how to place it. I don’t know where to begin. The facts of
+her life, her conversation, her literary work, her letters—I go on
+adding to my material till I am overwhelmed with all that I have got to
+say about her. But I don’t want to begin with facts. Facts are well
+enough, but think how one can twist them! I want the woman behind the
+facts. I want the answer to the question that is the cause of a
+biography such as mine is to be—the question—‘What was Madala Grey?’ Not
+who, mark you, but further back, deeper into herself—‘_What_ was Madala
+Grey?’”
+
+“Why, a genius,” said the Baxter girl glibly.
+
+Anita neither assented nor dissented.
+
+“Ah—” she said, frowning, “but that’s not the beginning either. At once
+we take our step backward again—‘What is genius?’”
+
+“Isn’t talent good enough?” said Mr. Flood acidly.
+
+“But does one mean talent?” She was still frowning. “Everyone’s got
+talent. I’m sick of talent. But she—she mayn’t be a great one—how she’d
+have laughed at being called a great one!—but she makes her dolls live.
+And isn’t that the blood-link between the greatest gods and the littlest
+gods? Life-givers? Life-makers? Oh, I only speak for myself; but she
+made her book-world real to me, therefore for me she had genius. Whether
+or not I convince you is the test of whether my life-work, my _Life_ of
+her—fails or succeeds.”
+
+“I suppose you wouldn’t trust it to Madala?” said Miss Howe softly.
+
+“Trust what?”
+
+“To convince us.”
+
+She answered, suspicious rather than comprehending, for indeed Miss
+Howe’s tone was very smooth—
+
+“What do you mean? _I_’m writing her life.”
+
+Miss Howe was inscrutable.
+
+“Of course you are. Fire ahead. Genius, wasn’t it?”
+
+Anita shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“What’s in a name? It’s the quality itself that fascinates me. I want to
+account for it. I want to trace it to its source. Worth doing, isn’t it?
+But do you realize the difficulties? Sometimes I feel hopeless. I’ve
+known her five years, and her books I know by heart, and I’m only just
+beginning to decide whether to call her a romantic or a realist.”
+
+“A realist. Look at _Eden Walls_,” said the Baxter girl.
+
+“A romantic. Look at _The Resting-place_,” said Miss Howe.
+
+Mr. Flood over-rode them.
+
+“Dear ladies, you confuse the terms. It amazes me how people always
+confuse the terms. Your so-called realist, your writer who depicts what
+we call reality, the outward life, that is, of flesh and dirt and
+misery—don’t you see that he is in truth a romantic—a man (or woman) who
+lives in a fair world of his own, a paradise of the imagination? Out of
+that secure world of his he peers curiously at ours, and writes of it as
+we dare not write, writes down every sordid, garish, tragic-comic
+detail. Your so-called realist can afford the humour of Rabelais, the
+horror of Dostoevsky, the cheerful flesh and blood of Fielding. Why
+shouldn’t he be truthful? It’s not his world. Don’t you see? But your
+so-called romantic, he lives in this real world. He knows it so well
+that he has to shut his eyes or he would die of its reality. So he
+escapes into the world of romance, the world of beauty within his own
+mind—nowhere but in his own mind. Who is our dreamer of dreams? Shelley,
+the realist! Blake jogged elbows with poverty and squalor all his life,
+and he was the prophet and the king of all spirits. Don’t you see? And
+Goethe—the biographers will tell you that Goethe began as a realist and
+ended as a romantic. I say it was the other way round. What did he know
+of reality in the twenties? Its discovery was the romantic adventure of
+his young genius. But when he was old and worldly and wise—then he wrote
+his romances, to escape from his own knowledge. Oh, I tell you, you
+should turn the words round. Now take Shakespeare——”
+
+“It’s not fair to take Shakespeare,” said Miss Howe. “It’s the Elephant
+and the Crawfishes over again. Let’s keep to the crawfishes! Let’s keep
+to our own generation!”
+
+“Well, if I were Anita I should begin by showing Madala as a romantic—as
+the young romantic producing the most startlingly realistic book we’ve
+had for a decade. Indeed to me, you know, her development is marked by
+her books in the sharpest way. It’s the young, the curious, the
+observant Madala in _Eden Walls_. The whole book is a shout of
+discovery, of young, horrified discovery, of the ugliness of life. It’s
+as if she said—‘Listen! Listen! These things actually happen to some
+people. Isn’t it awful?’ She dwells on it. She insists on every detail.
+She can’t get away from it. And yet she can hardly believe it, that
+young Madala. But in _Ploughed Fields_ already the tone’s changing. It’s
+a pleasanter book, a more sophisticated book. It interests profoundly,
+but it’s careful not to upset one—an advance, of course. Yet I, you
+know, hear our Madala’s voice in it still, an uneasy voice—‘Hush! Hush!
+These things happen to most people. Pretend not to notice.’ And in the
+last book, in the pretty, impossible romance, there you have your
+realist full-fledged—‘Shut your eyes! Come away quickly! These things
+are happening to _me_!’” He leant back again, folding his arms and
+dropping his chin. And then, because Miss Howe was looking at him as if
+she were amused—“I tell you I know. I recognize the symptoms. I’m a
+realist myself. That’s why I write romantic poetry. Have to. It’s that
+or drugs. How else shall one get through life?”
+
+“Jasper!” said the blonde lady. But for once he didn’t turn to her. He
+shrugged his shoulders.
+
+“Don’t worry. Who’ll believe me?”
+
+The Baxter girl was breathless.
+
+“Oh, but I do. It’s a new Madala, of course. But I believe it explains
+her.”
+
+“But the facts of her life don’t agree,” began Miss Howe.
+
+“Ah, Anita’s got to make ’em,” said Mr. Flood languidly. “Isn’t that the
+art of biography?”
+
+But Anita was deadly serious.
+
+“You don’t begin far enough back. My spring-board is not—what is Madala?
+but—what is genius? How does it happen? Is it immaculate birth? or is it
+begotten of accident upon environment? That is to say—is it inspiration
+or is it experience? I speak of the divine fire, you understand, not of
+the capacity for resolving it into words or paint or stone. That’s
+craft, a very different thing. You say that Madala was not a genius in
+the big sense—yes, I’ll admit that even, for the argument’s sake—but
+even you will concede her the beginnings of it. So my difficulty is just
+the same. I’ve never believed in instinctive genius. Yet how can she, at
+twenty, have had the experience (that she had the craft is amazing
+enough) to cope with _Eden Walls_? Romantic curiosity isn’t enough
+explanation, Jasper! Look at her certainty of touch. Look at her detail.
+Look how she gets inside that woman’s mind. That’s the fascination of
+it. It’s such a document. Now how does she know it? That’s what
+intrigues me. Madala and a street woman! Where’s the connection? How
+does she get inside her? Because she does get inside her.”
+
+“Oh, it’s real enough,” said the blonde lady.
+
+“It must be. You should have seen the letters she received! Amazing,
+some of them.”
+
+“Anita, they amazed _her_. I remember her getting one while she was
+staying with us. She looked thoroughly frightened. She said—‘But, Lila,
+I didn’t realize—it was just a story. But this poor thing, she says it’s
+true! She says it’s happened to her! What are we to do?’ You know, she
+was nearly crying. It was some hysterical woman who had read the book.
+But Madala always believed in people. I know she wrote to her. I believe
+she helped her. But she never told you much about her doings.”
+
+“Oh, her sentimental side doesn’t interest me. What I ask myself is—how
+does she know, as she obviously does know, all that her wretched drab of
+a heroine thought and felt and suffered?”
+
+“Instinct! Imagination!” said the Baxter girl. “It must be the
+explanation.”
+
+“It isn’t. It isn’t. Oh, I’ve puzzled it out. I’m convinced that from
+the beginning it’s experience. Don’t flare, Lila, I don’t mean literal
+experience. Not in _Eden Walls_, anyhow. Later, of course—but we’re
+discussing _Eden Walls_. Imagination, do you say, Beryl? But the
+imagination must have a fact for its root. I’ll grant you that
+imagination is so essentially a quality of youth that the merest rootlet
+of a reality is enough to set a young artist beanstalk climbing. But the
+older he grows, the wiser, the more versed in reality, the less he
+trusts his imagination, the more, in consequence, his imagination flags
+and withers; till he ends—one sees it happen again and again—as the
+recorder merely of his own actual experiences and emotions. It’s only
+the greatest who escape that decay of the imagination. Do you think that
+Madala did? Look at _Eden Walls_. Remember what we know about her. Can’t
+you see that the skeleton of _Eden Walls_ is Madala’s own life? Consider
+her history. She leaves what seems to have been a happy childhood behind
+her and sets out on adventure—very young. So does the woman in _Eden
+Walls_. The parallel’s exact. Madala’s Westering Hill and the
+_Breckonridge_ of the novel are the same place. The house, the lane, the
+country-side, she doesn’t trouble to disguise them. Again—Madala’s
+adventure is ushered in by calamity: and tragedy—(you can see the artist
+transmuting the mere physical calamity into tragedy) tragedy happens to
+the woman in _Eden Walls_. Remember how much more Madala dwelt on the
+sense of loneliness and lovelessness, on the anguish of the loss of
+something to love her, than on what one might call the—er—official
+emotions of a betrayed woman. Didn’t it strike you? Doesn’t that show
+that she was depending on her experience rather than on her imagination,
+fitting her own private grief to an imaginary case? Then, in America,
+she has the struggle for meat and drink, for mere existence. So does the
+woman in _Eden Walls_. Madala does not go under. The woman in _Eden
+Walls_ does. It’s the first real difference. But I maintain that in
+reality the parallel still continues, that, in imagination, Madala did
+go under over and over again: that she had ever in front of her the
+‘suppose, suppose,’ that, in drawing the woman in _Eden Walls_, she is
+saying to herself—‘Here, but for the grace of God, go I.’ And then, you
+know, when you think of her, hating that big city, saving up her
+pennies, and coming home at last in a passion of homesickness (if it was
+homesickness—sickness anyhow), can’t you see how it makes her write of
+that other woman? It’s the gift, the genius, stirring in her: born, not
+immaculately, but of her own literal experience. Jasper’s right—you can
+always make facts fit if you think them out: and because I possess that
+underlying shadow-work (I admit it’s no more) of fact to guide me in
+deciphering her method in the first book, therefore, in the second book
+and the third book, I find it safe to _deduce_ facts to cover the
+stories, even when I don’t possess them. I consider that I’m justified,
+that _Eden Walls_ justifies me. Don’t you?”
+
+“It’s plausible,” said Mr. Flood thoughtfully.
+
+“Oh, it’s convincing,” said the Baxter girl reverently. “I feel I’ve
+never known Madala Grey before. What it will be when you get it into
+shape, Miss Serle——”
+
+“In fact,” said Miss Howe, “there’s only one drawback——”
+
+“And that?” said Anita swiftly.
+
+“Only Madala’s own account.”
+
+“She never discussed her methods,” said Anita sharply.
+
+“Just so! You’re not the only person who’s—pumped. I remember seeing her
+once surrounded, in her lion days. I remember her ingenuous
+explanations. She did her best to oblige them—‘Honestly, I don’t know.
+One just sits down and imagines.’ And then—‘That’s quite easy. But it’s
+awfully difficult writing it down.’ That’s the explanation, Nita. A
+deliberate, even unconscious self-exploitation is all nonsense. Madala’s
+not clever enough.”
+
+“Not clever enough!”
+
+“No. You’re much cleverer than she was. You have twice her brains. You
+can’t think, Anita, what brains you’ve got. You’ve got far too many to
+understand a simple person. I don’t agree, you know, with ‘genius.’ I
+can’t throw a word like that about so lightly. But as far as it went
+with Madala, it was the same sort of genius that makes a crocus push in
+the spring. Your theory—oh, it’s plausible, as Jasper says, but don’t
+you see that it destroys all the charm of her work? It’s the innocence
+of her knowledge, the simplicity of her attitude to her own insight that
+to me is moving. She touches pitch, yet her fingers are clean. It’s her
+view of her story that arrests one, not her story, not her facts, not
+her mere plot.”
+
+“No, the plot is conventional, I’ll grant you that. She was always
+content with old bottles.”
+
+“Yes, and when the new wine burst them and made a mess on the carpet,
+Madala was always so surprised and indignant.”
+
+Mr. Flood giggled.
+
+“Pained is the word, dear lady—surprised and pained. Do you remember
+when _Eden Walls_ was banned?”
+
+“I don’t suppose she talked to you about it, Jasper,” said Miss Howe
+sharply.
+
+“I? I was never of her counsels. But I got my amusement out of the
+affair. Dear, delightful woman? She behaved like a schoolgirl sent to
+Coventry. I remember congratulating her on the advertisement, and she
+would hardly speak to me. But it suited her, the blush.”
+
+“_Wasn’t_ it an advertisement!” said the Baxter girl longingly.
+
+“If one could have got her to see it,” said Anita. “But no, she insisted
+on being ashamed of herself. She said to me once that the critics had
+‘read in’ things that she had never dreamed of—that it made her doubt
+her own motives—that she felt dirtied and miserable. And yet she
+wouldn’t alter one of those scenes. Obstinate! She could be very
+obstinate.”
+
+“Oh, which scenes?” The Baxter girl stuck her elbows on the table and
+her chin in her fists. Her eyes sparkled. “Oh, then, Miss Serle, did
+you—? did she come to you in the early days? Did you help her too?”
+
+“My daughter—very kind to young people!”
+
+It was a mere mutter, but I recognized the swing of the phrase. Anita
+didn’t. She was busy with the Baxter girl.
+
+“I don’t say that there would be no Madala Grey today if I——”
+
+“_But_——” said Mr. Flood.
+
+“_But_—” said Miss Howe, “she’s Anita’s discovery. We’re never to forget
+that, are we, darling?”
+
+“Oh, I knew that,” said the Baxter girl, trying to be tactful. “But
+_Eden Walls_ was written before you knew her, wasn’t it? I understood—I
+didn’t know, I mean,” she explained to them, “that Miss Serle
+had—blue-pencilled——”
+
+“I did and I didn’t.” Anita laughed, as if in spite of herself. “I
+confess I thought at the time that it needed revision. Mind you, I never
+questioned the quality, but I knew what the public would stand and what
+it wouldn’t. Of course, I didn’t want the essentials altered. But there
+were certain cuts——However, nothing would move her.”
+
+“That’s funny. She never gave me the impression that she believed in
+herself so strongly.”
+
+“Oh, her _pose_ was diffidence,” said the blonde lady.
+
+“But she didn’t believe in herself. It was obvious. When I went through
+her MS. and blue-pencilled, she was most grateful. She agreed to
+everything and took the MS. away to remodel.”
+
+“And then?”
+
+“I heard nothing more of her—for weeks. Finally I wrote and asked her to
+come and see me. She came. She was delightful. I had told her, you know,
+about the _Anthology_ the first time I met her. I remember that I was
+annoyed with myself afterwards. I’m not often indiscreet. But she had
+a—a knack—a way with her. I hardly know how to describe it.”
+
+“One told her things,” said the Baxter girl.
+
+“Just so. One told her things. And she had brought me a mass of
+material—some charming American verse (you remember? in the last section
+but one) that I had never come across. She had been reading for me at
+the British Museum in her spare time. I confess I was touched. We
+talked, I remember——” She sighed reminiscently. “It was not until she
+made a move to go that I recollected myself. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘and how
+about _Eden Walls_?’ She fidgeted. She looked thoroughly guilty. At last
+it came out. She hadn’t altered a line. She had tried her utmost. She
+had drafted and re-drafted. She had finally given it up in despair and
+just got work in some obscure newspaper office—‘a most absorbing
+office!’ But there—you know Madala when she’s interested—was
+interested——”
+
+“Don’t,” said Miss Howe softly.
+
+But Anita went on—
+
+“‘Well but—’ I said to her—‘that’s all very well. But you’re not going
+to abandon _Eden Walls_, are you?’ Then it all came out. Yes, she was.
+She knew I was right. She wasn’t conceited. She quite saw that the book
+was useless. It just meant that she couldn’t write novels and that she
+mustn’t waste any more time. ‘But, my dear Miss Grey,’ I said, ‘you mean
+to say that you’d rather leave the book unpublished than alter a couple
+of chapters, remodel a couple of characters?’ ‘But I can’t,’ she said,
+‘I can’t. They happened that way.’ ‘Then make them happen differently,’
+I said. But no, she couldn’t. ‘Oh well,’ I said at last—‘if you’re so
+absolutely sure of yourself, if you’re prepared to set up your
+judgment——’ That distressed her. I can hear her now. ‘But I don’t set up
+my judgment. I’ll burn the wretched stuff tomorrow if you say it’s
+trash. I knew it would be, in my heart. But—I can’t alter it,
+because—because it happened that way.’ Then I had an idea. ‘To you?’ I
+said. She looked at me. She laughed. She said—‘Miss Serle, you’ve
+written ten books to my one. Don’t pretend you don’t know how a story
+happens.’” Anita nodded at us. “You see? Evasive. I think it was from
+that moment that I began to have my theory of her.”
+
+“Well—and what next?” demanded Miss Howe.
+
+“She would have said good-bye if I had let her. I stopped her.
+‘Reconsider it,’ I said. She beamed at me, chastened but quite cheerful.
+‘Oh, I’ll try another some day,’ she said. ‘I suppose I’m not old
+enough. I was a fool to think I could.’ At that, of course, I gave in. I
+wasn’t going to lose sight of _Eden Walls_. I told her to bring it as it
+was and I’d see what I could do. As you know, Mitchell and Bent jumped
+at it.”
+
+“But it was banned,” said the Baxter girl.
+
+“Yes, but everybody read it. You can get it anywhere now. And I can say
+now—‘Thank the gods she didn’t touch it.’”
+
+“Then she was right?”
+
+“Of course she was right. I knew it all the time.”
+
+“And she didn’t?”
+
+“Of course she didn’t. Mine was critical knowledge. Hers the mere
+instinct of—whatever you choose to call it. I was afraid of the critics.
+She didn’t know enough to be afraid.”
+
+“There’s something big about you, Anita!” said Miss Howe suddenly.
+
+Mr. Flood gave the oblique flicker of eyes and mouth that was his smile.
+
+“Yes,” he said slowly, “it fits her quite well.”
+
+“What?” said Anita sharply.
+
+“The mantle, dear lady.”
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“Ah—_Gentle dullness ever loves a joke_. What, Beryl?”
+
+“I don’t see,” the Baxter girl had harked back, “how you can call a book
+that has been banned conventional.”
+
+“Only the plot——”
+
+“Ah, that plot!” Nobody could snub Mr. Flood. “Think, dear lady! Village
+maiden—faithless lover—lights o’ London—unfortunate female—what more do
+you want?”
+
+“Of course.” Anita resumed the reins. “It’s as old as _The Vicar of
+Wakefield_.”
+
+“Oh, _that_!” The Baxter girl looked interested. “Do you know, I’ve
+never seen it. One of Irving’s shows, wasn’t it?”
+
+I laughed. I couldn’t help it. But they were all quite solemn, even
+Anita. But then she never did listen to the Baxter girl. She had talked
+straight through her sentences.
+
+“But it’s not the material. It’s the way it’s handled. It’s never been
+done quite so thoroughly, from the woman’s point of view—so unadornedly.
+People are afraid of their ‘_poor girls_.’ There’s a formula that even
+the Immortals follow. They are all young and beautiful, and they all
+die. They must. They wouldn’t be tragic in continuation. But Madala’s
+woman doesn’t. That’s the point. There’s no pretence at making her a
+heroine. She’s just the ordinary stupidish sheep of a creature, ‘gone
+wrong.’ There’s no romantic halo, no love-glamour, no pity and terror,
+just the chronicle of a sordid life. And yet you can’t put the book
+down. At least I couldn’t put it down.”
+
+“Do _you_ like it?” I said to Kent Rehan, as he paused beside me in his
+eternal pacing from room to room.
+
+He looked at me oddly.
+
+“I respect it,” he said. “I don’t like it. People misjudged——”
+
+“If it had been the recognized love story”—Mr. Flood’s high voice
+silenced him—“the regularized irregularity, so to speak, it wouldn’t
+have been banned. It was the absence of a love story that the British
+public couldn’t forgive. It was cheated. It was shocked.”
+
+“But there is a love story at the beginning, isn’t there?” I said. “I
+haven’t read far.”
+
+Instantly the Baxter girl exhibited me—
+
+“Yes, imagine! She hasn’t read it!”
+
+“I’ve read _The Vicar of Wakefield_,” I said. And then I was annoyed
+that I had shown I was annoyed. But at once Miss Howe helped me. Miss
+Howe was always nice to me.
+
+“How far have you got? Where the man tires of her? Ah, yes! Well, after
+that it’s just her struggle. She—she earns her living—in the inevitable
+way. She grows into a miser. She hoards.”
+
+Mr. Flood looked acute.
+
+“That’s what upset them. They don’t mind a Magdalen; but Magdalen
+unaware, unrepentant, Magdalen preserving her ill-gotten gains—no,
+that’s not quite nice.”
+
+“Well, I don’t know,” said Miss Howe. “If anyone can’t feel the spirit
+it’s written in, the passion of pity—I think it’s the most pitiful thing
+I’ve ever read. It made me shiver. That wretched creature, saving and
+sparing——” And then to me, for I suppose I showed I was interested—“She
+wants to get away, you know, to get back into the country. It’s her
+dream. The homesickness——”
+
+“I suppose such a woman could——?” said the Baxter girl.
+
+“I used to argue it with Madala. Madala always said that, with some
+people, that animal craving for some special place was like love—a
+passion that could waste you. She said that every woman must have some
+devouring passion, for a man, or a child, or a place—_every_ woman. And
+that for a beaten creature like that, it would be _place_—the homing
+instinct of a cat or a bird. And mixed up with it, religion—the vague
+shadowy ideal of peace and cleanly beauty—all that the wretched creature
+tries to express in her phrase—‘getting out and living quiet’—that
+Madala typifies in the word ‘Eden.’ It meant much to Madala. Don’t you
+remember that passage towards the end of the book where she meets the
+man, the first man, and brings him home with her—and he doesn’t even
+recognize her, and she doesn’t even care.” She picked up a bundle of
+tattered proofs and turned them over. “Where is it? What an appalling
+hand she had!” She stood a moment, reading a page and pursing her lips.
+“Oh, well, what’s the use of reading it? We all know it.” She flung it
+down.
+
+“Let me see,” I said to the Baxter girl. She drew it towards me. It was
+the first proof I’d ever seen. It was corrected till it was difficult to
+read. But I made it out at last.
+
+    With the closing of the door she dismissed him with one phrase
+    for ever from her mind—
+
+    “And that’s that!”
+
+    She had long been accustomed thus to summarize her clients,
+    dispassionately, as one classes beasts at a show; and she judged
+    them, not by their clothing or their speech, not by the dark
+    endured hours of their love or by the ticklish after-moment of
+    the reckoning, but rather, as she hovered at the door with her
+    provocative night smile dulled to a business friendliness, by
+    their manner of leaving her.
+
+    Always there was the fever to be gone; but some went furtively,
+    with cautious, tiptoe feet that set the stairs a-squeak with
+    mockery. Her smile did not change for the swaggerer who stayed
+    long and took his luck-kiss twice, but her eyes would harden.
+    Mean, cheating mean, to kiss again and never pay again! And some
+    she watched and smiled upon who left her in a brutal silence.
+    For them she had no resentment, rather the sullenness beneath
+    her smile reached out to the revulsion of their bearing as to
+    something welcomed and akin. And some gave back her smile with
+    kindly words—and those she hated.
+
+    But when, after his manner, the man had gone, she had, as
+    always, her ritual.
+
+    She locked her easy door and pulling out the key, put it before
+    her on the table at the bedside. Left and right of it she laid
+    her money down, adding to the night’s gains the meagre leavings
+    of her purse. Left and right the little piles grew, one heaped
+    high for the needs of her day and her night, for food and roof
+    and livery, and one a thin scatter of coppers and small silver
+    that took long weeks to change into the dear, the exquisite, the
+    Eden-opening gold. It was the bigger pile that she thrust so
+    carelessly back into her bag, and the scattered ha’pence that
+    she warmed in the cup of her two hands, holding them,
+    jingle-jingle, at her ears, dropping them to her lap again to
+    count anew, piling them before her to a little, narrowing tower,
+    before she opened the child’s jewel-case beside her, and,
+    lifting the sheaf of letters that she never read but kept still
+    and would always keep, for the savage pain they gave her when
+    her eyes saw them and her fingers touched them, she poured out
+    the new treasure upon the sacred hoard beneath.
+
+    Tenpence saved—and yesterday a shilling! Five shillings last
+    week. Fifty pounds! She would soon have fifty pounds!
+
+    She put away the box of money, and so, surrendering at last to
+    the awful bodily fatigue, lay down again upon the tousled bed,
+    not to sleep—her sleeping time was later in the day—but to shut
+    her eyes.
+
+    For, by the amazing pity of God, a secret that is not every
+    man’s, was hers—the secret of the refuge appointed, behind
+    shut eyes, of the return into eternity that is the shutting
+    down of lids upon the eyes. The window glare, the screaming
+    street below, the blank soiled ceiling with the flies, the
+    walls, the unending pattern of the hateful walls, the clock,
+    the finery, the beastly scents, the loathed familiars of stuff
+    and wood and brass that blinked and creaked at her like voices
+    crying—“Misery! misery! misery!”—these were her world. Yet
+    not her only world. She, who was so dim and blunted a
+    woman-thing, could pass, with the warm dark velvet touch of
+    dropping lids, not into the nullity of sleep, but into the
+    grey place, limitless, timeless, where consciousness knows
+    nothing of the flesh.
+
+    She shut her eyes with the sigh of a tired dog, and instantly
+    her soul lay back and floated, resting.
+
+    There was no time, no thought, no feeling. There was
+    peace—quiet—greyness. At unmeasured intervals realization washed
+    over her like waves, waves of peace—quiet—greyness. Greyness—she
+    worshipped the blessed greyness. She wanted to give it a beloved
+    name and knew none. ‘When I am dead!’—‘For ever and ever,
+    Amen!’—So she came nearest to ‘Eternity.’
+
+    Peace—quiet—greyness: greyness enduring for ever, that could yet
+    be rent asunder like a temple veil and let in misery—the window
+    glare, the reeking room, the clodding footsteps, the fingers
+    tapping at her door—a frail eternity whose walls were slips of
+    flesh.
+
+    She called harshly—
+
+    “Get out! Get away! Put it down outside then, can’t you?”
+
+    There was a mutter and the clank of a scuttle-lid, and a thud.
+    The footsteps shuffled out of hearing.
+
+    She shut her eyes again.
+
+    Peace—quiet—greyness. The waves were rocking her.
+
+    She did not dream. There are, by that same pity of God, no
+    dreams permitted in the place of refuge. But, as she lay in
+    peace, she watched her own memorial thoughts rising about her,
+    one by one, like bubbles in a glass, like cocks crowing in the
+    dark of the dawn.
+
+    A white road ... the hill-top wind panting down it like a runner
+    ... dust ... bright blue sky ... sky-blue succory in the gutter
+    ... succory is so difficult to pick ... tough ... it leaves a
+    green cut on one’s finger ... succory in a pink vase on the
+    mantel-piece ... the fire’s too hot for flowers ... hot buttered
+    toast ... the armchair wants mending ... the horsehair tickles
+    one’s ears as one lies back in it and warms one’s toes and
+    watches the rain drowning the fields outside ... empty winter
+    fields, all tousled and tussocky from cow dung ... grey skies
+    ... snow ... not a soul in sight ... and succory in a pink vase
+    on the mantel-piece ... because one’s back in Eden ... summer
+    and winter are all one in Eden ... picking buttercups in Eden as
+    one used to do ... all the fields grown full of buttercups ...
+    fifty buttercups make a bunch ... fifty golden buttercups with
+    the King’s head on them ... hurry up with the buttercups ... one
+    more bunch of buttercups will buy back Eden—Eden—ah!
+
+    So, with a long gasping sigh would come the end. “Eden—” and the
+    longing would be upon her, tearing like a wild beast at her eyes
+    and her throat and her heart—“I want to go home. Oh, God, let me
+    go home! Let me out! I want to go home——”
+
+The chapter ended.
+
+“And does she?” I looked up at the Baxter girl. “I’m always afraid of a
+bad ending. Does she get back in the end?”
+
+The Baxter girl fluttered through the pages.
+
+“The money’s stolen first—a man takes it—while she’s asleep——Oh, it’s
+beastly, that scene. She has to save it all up again. It takes her
+years. But—oh, yes, she does go back.”
+
+“The railway journey,” said Miss Howe. “Do you remember?”
+
+“If you want happy endings”—the Baxter girl flattened out the last page
+with a jerk—“there you are!”
+
+I read over her shoulder. The strong scent that hung about her seemed to
+float between me and the page.
+
+“Here we are—where she gets to the station. ‘Eden,’ Madala calls it, but
+the woman calls it ‘Breckonridge.’
+
+    At last and at last the station-board with the familiar name
+    flashed past her window. She thrilled. The station lamps
+    repeated it as the train slowed down. She thought—how long the
+    platform’s grown! ... a bookstall! ... a bookstall on each side!
+    ... there used not to be ... wasn’t the station smaller?...
+
+    She spoke to the ticket collector shyly, blushing, like a girl
+    going to an assignation and thinking that all the world must
+    know it.
+
+    He answered, already catching at the ticket of the traveller
+    behind her—
+
+    “How far to Breckonridge? A mile, maybe—but you get the tram at
+    the corner.”
+
+    She stared. She would have questioned him again, but the throng
+    of people pressed her forward.
+
+    A tram through the village? ... queer! ... not that it mattered
+    to her ... she would take the old short cut through the fields
+    outside the station yard.... There was a stile ... and a wild
+    cherry tree....
+
+    She left the yard, the unfamiliar yard with asphalt and motors
+    and a great iron bridge, crossed the road, and stopped
+    bewildered.
+
+    There were no fields.
+
+    ‘Station Road.’ The labelled yellow villas were like a row of
+    faces. Eyes, nose, mouth—windows, porch, steps—steps like teeth.
+    They grinned.
+
+    In a sort of panic she ran past them down the road, a lumbering,
+    clumsy woman. She trod on her skirt, and recovered herself with
+    difficulty. She heard a small boy laugh and call after her. She
+    clambered on to the tram.
+
+    “I want to go to the village—to Breckonridge——”
+
+    “It’s all Breckonridge. ’Ow far?”
+
+    She stared.
+
+    “I don’t remember. He said a mile.”
+
+    “Town ’All, I expect.” He took his toll and passed on.
+
+    She turned vaguely to a neighbour.
+
+    “Town Hall? I don’t remember. The road’s all different Where are
+    the fields?”
+
+    The neighbour nodded.
+
+    “Built over. When were you here last? Thirty years? My word,
+    you’ll find changes! I notice it, even in five. Very full it’s
+    getting. Good train service. My husband can get to his office
+    under the hour.”
+
+    She said dazedly—
+
+    “It was—it is—a little village.”
+
+    The woman laughed.
+
+    “I daresay. But how long ago?”
+
+    “There were fields,” she said under her breath. “There were
+    flowers——”
+
+    “Here’s the Town Hall. Didn’t you want the Town Hall?”
+
+    Unsteadily she rose and got out. The tram clanged forward.
+
+    She stood on an island where four roads met and looked about
+    her. The sun stared down at her, a brazen city sun. The asphalt
+    was hot and soft under her feet. Road-menders were at work in
+    the fair-way. They struck alternately at the chisel between them
+    and it was as if the rain of blows fell upon her. She felt
+    stupid and dizzy. She did not know where to turn. There was
+    nothing left of her village, and yet the place was familiar.
+    There were drab houses and rows of shops and a stream of
+    traffic, and the figures of women and men—menacing, impersonal
+    figures of men—that hurried towards her down the endless
+    streets.
+
+“Well?” said the Baxter girl.
+
+“But that’s not the _end_?” I said.
+
+The Baxter girl looked at me oddly.
+
+“Why not?” And then—“How else could it end? How would you make it end?”
+
+“Oh, I don’t mean——” I began. I hesitated. “I don’t think I quite
+understand,” I said.
+
+That was the truth. At the time I couldn’t follow it. It moved me. It
+swept me along. But whether it was good or bad I didn’t know. I hadn’t
+the faintest idea of what it was driving at. I felt in a vague way that
+the people at home wouldn’t have liked it.
+
+“What does it mean?” I said to the Baxter girl.
+
+“That you can’t eat your cake and have it, I suppose. You can get out of
+Eden, but you can’t get back.”
+
+Anita answered her contemptuously—
+
+“Is that all it means to you?”
+
+And yet we had spoken very softly. But Anita had eyes that ate up every
+movement in a room, and her small pretty ears never seemed to miss a
+significant word though ten people were talking. I had seen her glance
+uneasily at us and again at the two in the other room. I knew
+Great-aunt’s mutter was too low even for her, and Kent Rehan only nodded
+now and then, but even that annoyed her. She lifted her own voice to be
+sure that they should hear all that she said, as if afraid lest, even
+for a moment, she should be left out of their thoughts.
+
+“Oh!” she said loudly and contemptuously, “I tell you what _I_ see.”
+
+She succeeded, if that pleased her. Kent Rehan raised his head and
+stared across at her with that impersonal expression of attention that,
+I was beginning to realize, could always anger her on any face. She had
+said a little while ago that she only cared for Miss Grey as an artist,
+and I believe that she believed it. But I don’t think—I shall never
+think it true. I think Anita depended—depends, on other people more than
+she dreams. Poor Anita! I can see her now, her whole personality
+challenging those dark abstracted eyes. But she spoke to the Baxter
+girl—
+
+“When Madala Grey chose _Eden Walls_ for her title—when she flung it in
+the public face——”
+
+I saw him give a shrug of fatigue or distaste—I couldn’t tell which.
+Great-aunt, who had been sitting, her head on one side, with her sharp
+poll-parrot expression, crooked her finger at me. I went across to her
+and behind me I heard the Baxter girl—
+
+“You talk as if she were in a passion——”
+
+And Anita—
+
+“So she was. I’m telling you. It’s the wrongs, not of one woman, but of
+all women, of all ages of women, that burn behind it.”
+
+“Votes for Women!” It was Mr. Flood’s voice.
+
+There was a laugh and I lost an answer. I caught only a vehement blur of
+words, because Great-aunt had me by the wrist.
+
+“Chatter, chatter! I can’t hear ’em. What’s my daughter talking about?”
+
+I hesitated.
+
+“About books, Auntie.”
+
+“Whose books?” she pounced.
+
+“Some writer, Auntie.”
+
+“What’s she saying about her, eh?” She held me bent down to her. I
+glanced at Kent Rehan. He was listening to us. I felt harried.
+
+“About—oh—whether a genius—whether she was a genius——”
+
+“Madala, eh?”
+
+“Yes, Auntie.”
+
+I thought I heard him sigh. And at that—why, I don’t know—I turned on
+him. I was rude, I believe. I sounded silly and cruel, I know. Yet,
+heaven knows, that that was the last thing I wanted to be.
+
+I said angrily to him—
+
+“Oh, why do you stand there and listen? Don’t you see that I can’t help
+myself? Why don’t you go away? What good can it do you to stay here, to
+stay and listen to it all?”
+
+Then I stopped because he looked at me for a moment, and flushed, and
+then did turn away, back again to his old dreary post at the street
+window.
+
+Great-aunt chuckled.
+
+“That’s right, little Jenny. Take your own way with them, Jenny!”
+
+I said—
+
+“Let me go, Auntie dear,” and I loosed her hand from my wrist and went
+after him; for of course the instant the words were out of my mouth I
+was ashamed of myself. I couldn’t think what had possessed me. I was
+badly ashamed of myself.
+
+I came to him and said—
+
+“Mr. Rehan—I don’t mean to be rude. Great-aunt—she doesn’t understand.
+She made me talk. It wasn’t rudeness; but you stood there, and I knew—I
+thought I knew, what you must think, must be thinking—” (but ‘feeling’
+was the word I meant) “and I was sorry. I was angry because I was sorry.
+I didn’t mean to be rude.”
+
+He said—
+
+“It’s all right. I didn’t think you rude.”
+
+Then I said—
+
+“But I meant it. Why do you stay? What good can it do you? Why don’t you
+go away from it all?”
+
+And he—
+
+“Where is there to go? I’ve been tramping all day.”
+
+“Where?”
+
+“I don’t know. Up and down streets. It’s—it’s blinding, it’s stifling——”
+
+“The fog is,” I said quickly. But we didn’t mean the fog.
+
+He let himself down into the low wicker chair. I stood leaning against
+the sill, watching him.
+
+“You’re just dead tired,” I said.
+
+He nodded. Then, as if something in my words had stung him—
+
+“Where else? I’ve always come here. Every month. It was natural to
+come.”
+
+“But now” I said (and I was so urgent with him because of all their talk
+that drummed still in my mind like a wasps’ nest)—“I’d go away if I were
+you. What good does it do you? They talk. It’s—it’s rather hateful. I’ve
+been listening. I’d go.”
+
+“Where?” he said again. And I—
+
+“Haven’t you anyone—at home?”
+
+But as I asked I knew that he hadn’t. He had the look. Oh, he wore good
+clothes and I knew he wasn’t poor. But it was written all over him that
+he looked after himself and did it expensively and badly. He had, too,
+that other look that goes with it—of a man who has never found anyone
+more interesting to him than himself. And the queer part was that it
+didn’t seem selfish in him—and I’m sure it wasn’t. It was just like the
+way a child takes you for granted, and tells you about its own big
+affairs, and never guesses that you have your own little affairs too. I
+suppose it was a fault in him; but it made me like him. And he talked to
+me simply and almost as if he needed helping out; as if he’d been just
+anybody. I never had to help out anyone before: it had always been the
+other way round. I’d thought, too, that celebrated people were always
+superior and brilliant and overwhelming, like Anita and Mr. Flood. But
+he wasn’t. He was as simple as A, B, C. I liked him. I did like him. I
+felt happier, more at peace, standing there with him than I had felt
+since I had been in Anita’s house. I think he would have gone on talking
+to me too, if it hadn’t been for the Baxter girl. She spoilt it. She
+tilted back her chair, yawning, and so caught sight of us, and laughed,
+and leaning over to Miss Howe, whispered in her ear. She was a crazy
+girl. At once I got up and came across to them, panic-stricken, hating
+her. I had to. I didn’t want him worried, and you never knew what
+hateful thing the Baxter girl wouldn’t say, and think that she was
+pleasing you.
+
+But without knowing it, Anita helped me. Her voice, rising excitedly in
+answer to some word of Mr. Flood’s, recalled the Baxter girl.
+
+“Mystery? Of course there’s a mystery! She was at the height of her
+promise in _Ploughed Fields_. It’s as good as _Eden Walls_ in matter
+and, technically, better still. The third book ought to have settled her
+place in modern literature for good and all. It ought to have been her
+master-piece. But what does she do? We expect a chaplet of pearls, and
+she gives us a daisy-chain. Isn’t that a mystery worth solving? Won’t
+people read the _Life_ for that if for nothing else? Am I the only
+person who has asked what happened to her between her second and her
+third books?”
+
+“I tell you, but you won’t listen,” Mr. Flood insisted. “Your romantic
+has become a realist and is flying from it to the resting-place of
+romance.”
+
+“I do listen. Just so. You use your words and I use mine, but we mean
+the same thing. She’s been bruising herself against facts. She has been
+walled up by facts. Her vision is gone. Now what was, in her case, the
+all-obscuring fact?”
+
+“She was a woman,” said the blonde lady. “It could only be one thing.
+Don’t I know the signs? She even lost her sense of humour.”
+
+“Yes, she did, didn’t she?” cried the Baxter girl in a voice of relief.
+“Oh, I remember one day, just before the engagement was announced——”
+
+“As if that had anything to do with it,” said Anita scornfully.
+
+“—and she’d been so absent-minded I couldn’t get anything out of her. I
+thought I knew her well enough to tease her. I had told her all _my_
+affairs. So—‘I believe you’re in love,’ I said. ‘Oh, well, you’ll get
+over it. It’s a phase.’ Was there any harm in that? It was only
+repeating what you had said to me about her, you know,” she reminded the
+blonde lady. “But she froze instantly. She made no comment. She just
+changed the subject. But I felt as if I had been introduced to a new
+Madala. I wished I hadn’t said it.”
+
+“You are a little fool, Beryl,” said the blonde lady tolerantly.
+
+“But she _was_ altered,” insisted the Baxter girl. “The old Madala would
+have laughed.”
+
+“Yes, she was altered,” said Anita. “Her whole attitude to herself and
+her work changed that spring. How she horrified me one day. It was soon
+after _Ploughed Fields_ came out, and we were talking about her new
+book, at least I was, pumping a little, I confess, and suddenly she
+said—‘Anita, I don’t think I’ll write any more. This stuff—’ she had her
+hands on _Eden Walls_, ‘it’s harsh, it’s ugly; and so’s _Ploughed
+Fields_. Isn’t it?’ ‘It’s true to life,’ I said, ‘that’s the triumph of
+it.’ ‘Is it?’ she said. She looked at me in an uneasy sort of way. And
+then—‘I’d like to write a kind book, a beautiful book.’ I told her that
+she couldn’t, that she was a realist. ‘That’s why,’ she said, ‘I don’t
+think I’ll write any more.’ I laughed, of course. Anybody would have
+laughed. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I mean it. I haven’t an idea in my head. I’m
+tired and empty. I think I shall go away for a wander. There’s always
+the country, anyhow.’ ‘Well, Madala,’ I said, ‘I think you’re
+ungrateful. You’re a made woman. You’ve got your name: you’ve got your
+line: you’ve got your own gift——’ ‘Oh, that!’ she said, as if she were
+flicking off a fly. I was irritated. It was so arrogant. ‘What more do
+you want?’ I asked her. ‘What more _can_ you want?’ She said—‘I don’t
+know,’ looking at me, you know, as if she expected me to tell her. I
+disliked that mood of hers. One did expect, with a woman of her
+capacity, to be entertained as it were, to have ideas presented, not to
+be asked to provide them. Then she began, à propos of nothing at all—‘If
+I ever marry——’ That startled me. We’d never touched on the subject
+before. ‘Oh, my dear Madala,’ I said, ‘you must never think of anything
+so—so unnecessary. For you, of all people, it would be fatal. It would
+waste your time, it would distract your thoughts, it would narrow your
+outlook, it would end by spoiling your work altogether. I’ve seen it
+happen so often. It’s terrible to me even to think of a woman with a
+future like yours, throwing it away just for the——’ She interrupted me.
+‘I wouldn’t marry for the sake of getting married, if you mean that. Not
+even for children.’”
+
+“You didn’t mean that, did you, Anita?” said Miss Howe smiling a little.
+
+“Certainly not. But I had always been afraid that she might be tempted
+to marry for the adventure’s sake, for the mere experience, for the——”
+
+“Copy,” said Mr. Flood. “I always said so. Yes?”
+
+“‘Oh well, Madala,’ I said to her, ‘you know what I think. I’m not one
+to quote Kipling, but—_He travels fastest who travels alone_.’ She
+looked at me so strangely. ‘Alone?’ she said. ‘Alone. Its the cruellest
+word in the language. There’s drowning in it.’ ‘Well, without conceit,
+Madala,’ I said, ‘I can affirm that I have been alone, spiritually, all
+my life.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ she said, ‘but you’re different.’ And that,” Anita
+broke off, “was what I liked in Madala. She did recognize differences.
+She could appreciate. She wasn’t absorbed in herself. She said to me
+quite humbly—‘I’m not strong, I suppose; but I don’t suffice myself. I
+can’t bear myself sometimes. I can’t bear the burden of myself. Can’t
+you understand?’ ‘Frankly,’ I said, ‘I can’t. I’m a modern woman, and
+the modern woman is a pioneer. She’s the Columbus of her own
+individuality. She must be. It’s her career. It’s her destiny.’ She
+answered me pettishly, like a naughty child—‘I don’t want to be a
+pioneer.’ ‘You’re that,’ I said, ‘already, whether you want to be or
+not.’ Then she said to me, with that dancing, impish look that her eyes
+and her lips and her white teeth used to manage between them—‘All right!
+If I’ve got to be, I will. But I’ll be a pioneer in my own way. I swear
+I’ll shock the lot of you.’”
+
+“_Oho!_” said Mr. Flood with exaggerated unction.
+
+“Exactly!” Anita gave his agreement such eager welcome. “That put me on
+the qui-vive. Knowing her as I did, it was a very strong hint. I awaited
+developments. Frankly, I was prepared for a scandal, a romance, anything
+you please in the way of extravagance. That’s why the Carey marriage,
+that tameness, upset me so. It was not what I was expecting. Really, I
+don’t know which was more of a shock to me, _The Resting-place_ or the
+marriage. Hardly had I recovered from the one when——”
+
+“Oh, _The Resting-place_ was the shock of my life too.” He giggled. “I
+mourned, I assure you that I mourned over it. That opening, you
+know—‘There was once’—And the end again—‘So they were married and had
+children and lived happily ever after.’ Pastiche! And then to be invited
+to wade through a conscientious account of how they achieved it! Too bad
+of Madala! As if the poor but virtuous artist’s model weren’t a drug on
+the market already! And the impecunious artist himself—_stooping_, you
+know! Oh, I sat in ashes.”
+
+Miss Howe clapped her hands.
+
+“Jasper, I love you. I _do_ love you. Did she pull your leg too? Both
+legs? She did! She did! Oh, there’s only one Madala!”
+
+Mr. Flood’s vanity was in his cheeks while she rattled on.
+
+“Darling Jasper, I thought better of you! Can’t you see the whole
+thing’s a skit? Giving the jampot public what they wanted! Why, it’s
+been out a year and they’re sucking the spoon still. It’s the
+resting-place! Ask the libraries! Oh, can’t you see?”
+
+“If it is parody,” said Mr. Flood slowly, “then, I admit, it’s unique.”
+
+“What else? You’ll not deny humour to her?”
+
+“I do!” the blonde lady nodded her head. “Once a woman is in love she’s
+quite hopeless.”
+
+“I don’t see how parody could be in question,” Anita broke in. “Anybody
+reading the book carefully must see that she’s in earnest. That’s the
+tragedy of it.”
+
+“The literary tragedy?”
+
+“Not only literary. The psychological value is enormous. It’s not art,
+it’s record. It’s photography. That happened. That happened, tragically,
+to Madala. Oh, not the trimmings, of course, not the happy-ever-after.
+But to me it’s perfectly clear that that lapse into _Family Herald_
+romance has had its equivalent in Madala’s own life. I’ve always felt a
+certain weakness in her character, you know—a certain sentimentalism.”
+
+“In the author of _Eden Walls_?” said Miss Howe contemptuously.
+
+“No, dear lady! But in the author of _The Resting-place_.” Mr. Flood had
+recovered himself.
+
+“Skit, I tell you, skit!” she insisted. And they continued to bicker in
+undertones while Anita summed up the situation.
+
+“No, my theory is this—Madala Grey met some man——”
+
+“Carey?” asked Mr. Flood, dividing his allegiance.
+
+“No, Carey comes later. There was—an episode——”
+
+“Episodes?” he amended.
+
+“Possibly. But an episode anyhow, that I place myself at the end of the
+_Ploughed Fields_ period. It may have been later, it may have been the
+following summer while she was working at _The Resting-place_. I’m open
+to conviction there. But an episode there must have been. In _The
+Resting-place_ she wrote it down as it ought to have happened.”
+
+“Why ought?”
+
+“Well, obviously it didn’t happen or she wouldn’t have become Mrs.
+Carey.”
+
+“The gentleman loved and rode away, you mean?”
+
+“Something of the sort. Something went wrong.”
+
+“I see.” Miss Howe was interested. “It’s a theory, anyhow. And then in
+sheer savage irony at her own weakness——”
+
+“Not a bit. In sheer weak longing——”
+
+“I see. If your theory is correct—I don’t know what you base it on——”
+
+“Internal evidence,” said Anita airily.
+
+“Then I can imagine that _The Resting-place_ was a relief to write. Poor
+Madala!”
+
+“And then,” concluded Anita triumphantly, “then appears Carey, and she’s
+too worn out, too exhausted with her own frustrated emotions to care
+what happens. The book’s in her head still, and she her own heroine. He
+appears to her—I admit that it’s possible that even Carey might appear
+to her—as a refuge, a resting-place.”
+
+“Yes, but you don’t like Mr. Carey,” said the Baxter girl. “But if
+Madala did? Isn’t it possible that in Madala’s eyes——? Why shouldn’t the
+hero be Mr. Carey himself?”
+
+Anita’s eyes were bright with the cold anger that she always showed at
+the name.
+
+“My good girl, you know nothing about John Carey, or you’d rule that
+out. Have you ever seen him? I thought not. And yet you _have_ seen him.
+All day. Every day. When you talk of the man in the street, whom do you
+mean? What utterly common-place face is in your mind? Shall I tell you
+what is in mine? John Carey. Ordinary! Ordinary! The apotheosis of the
+uninspired! Oh, I haven’t any words. Look for yourself.” She rummaged
+furiously in the half-opened desk and flung out a fading snapshot on a
+mount. “There he is! That’s the thing she married!”
+
+“What’s he doing in your holy of holies?” Mr. Flood’s eyes seemed to
+bore into her desk.
+
+Anita, still thrusting down the overflowing papers, answered coldly—
+
+“Madala sent it to Mother. She said that it wasn’t good enough but that
+it would give her an idea.”
+
+“It certainly gives one an idea,” said the blonde lady languorously.
+
+“And then she put in a post-script that it didn’t do him justice because
+the sun was in his eyes. Defiantly, as it were. Isn’t that significant?
+She’d never own to a mistake. Pride! She had the devil’s own pride. Look
+at the way she took her reviews! And in this case she would be bound to
+defend him. She’d defend anything she’d once taken under her wing.”
+
+“Well, you know,” drawled the blonde lady, her eyes on the photograph,
+“according to this he topped her by two inches. I don’t somehow see him
+_under_ Madala’s wing.” And then—“After all, there’s something rather
+fascinating in bone and muscle.”
+
+“Yes, and I don’t see,” the Baxter girl hurried into defiance, “honestly
+I don’t see, Miss Serle, why she shouldn’t have been in love with him.
+Of course, it’s not a clever face, but it’s good-tempered, and it’s
+good-looking, and there’s a twinkle. Madala loved a twinkle. And I don’t
+see——”
+
+Anita crushed her.
+
+“We’re discussing the standards of Madala Grey.”
+
+“That’s not the point either, Anita.” Mr. Flood would sometimes rouse
+himself to defend the Baxter girl. “You know something. You own to it.
+What do you know?”
+
+“Simply that she was in love with someone else. I’ve papers that prove
+it. Now it was either some man whom none of us know, whom for some
+reason she wouldn’t let us know, or——” she hesitated. Then she began
+again—“Mind you, I don’t commit myself, but—has the likeness never
+struck you? _Hugh Barrington_ in _The Resting-place_ and——?” Her eyes
+flickered towards Kent Rehan.
+
+Mr. Flood whistled.
+
+“Be careful, Anita.”
+
+“He?” Miss Howe laughed, but kindly. “He’s lost to the world. He’ll be
+worse than ever now.”
+
+“There!” Anita dropped upon the sentence like a hawk upon a heather
+bird. “You see! You say that! And yet you tell me there was
+nothing—nothing—between them? Didn’t she rave about him? his talents?
+his personality? his charm? And then she goes and writes the story of an
+artist’s model!”
+
+Miss Howe laughed again.
+
+“When a thing’s as obvious as that, it probably isn’t so. Besides, the
+artist’s model marries the artist.”
+
+“Exactly. She leaves them, and us, cloyed with love in a cottage. I
+repeat, the artist’s model marries the artist because Madala Grey
+didn’t. It’s the merest shadow of a solution as yet, but—isn’t that a
+living portrait in _The Resting-place_? Oh, I know it by heart—
+
+    “Maybe it was his height that gave you the impression, less of
+    weakness than of vagueness, as if his high forehead touched
+    cloud-land, and were obscured by dreams; for his cold eyes
+    guarded his mind from you, and his dark beard hid his mouth.”
+
+“You _do_ know it by heart!” said Miss Howe.
+
+“Of course I know it by heart. It was the first clue. Can anybody read
+those lines without recognizing him?”
+
+The Baxter girl persisted—
+
+“But I don’t see it. Oh, of course it is like him—but because she
+borrowed his face, the story needn’t be about him. Why couldn’t she just
+imagine the story? If she was a genius?”
+
+“That remains the point,” said Mr. Flood.
+
+“She was,” insisted Anita stubbornly.
+
+Miss Howe smiled and said nothing.
+
+He continued—
+
+“The mere fact that she was a genius would prevent such a descent into
+milk and sugar, unless she were money-making or love-sick.”
+
+The blonde lady spoke—
+
+“Just so! Love-sick—sick of love—savage with love—savaging her holy of
+holies. A parody. Lila’s right.”
+
+But Miss Howe shook her head.
+
+“No, no. I didn’t mean that sort of parody. Madala may have had her
+emotions, but she’d always be good-tempered about them. She’s laughing
+at herself in _The Resting-place_ as well as at us.”
+
+“But why do you cavil at it so?” said the Baxter girl slowly.
+
+“Only at its plain meaning. Grant the parody and——”
+
+“But why can’t you just read it as it stands? Why do you say
+sentimental? I—I liked it.”
+
+Anita took the book from her hand.
+
+“But, my dear child, _any_body can write this sort of thing. Where’s the
+passage the ladies’ papers rave about, where they have a day on the
+river together?” She whipped over the pages while I said to the Baxter
+girl—
+
+“What is it? What’s it about? What’s the plot?”
+
+“Oh, there isn’t any. That’s what they complain of. It’s just a little
+artist’s model who sits to an elderly, broken-down dreamer, and thinks
+him a god. The duke and door-mat touch. It’s just how two people fall in
+love and find it out. It’s as simple as A, B, C. But people ate it when
+it came out.”
+
+“Treacle, I tell you,” insisted Mr. Flood.
+
+Anita overheard him.
+
+“Exactly! Listen to this—
+
+    ... and they landed at last in a meadow of brilliant, brook-fed
+    grass.
+
+    She had no words in which to say a thousand times ‘How
+    beautiful!’ Words? She had never known a country June. She had
+    never seen whole hedges clotted with bloom, she had never in all
+    her life breathed the perfume of the may or heard a lark’s
+    ecstasy. She had never—and to her simplicity there was no break
+    in the chain of thought—she had never before been alone with
+    him, unpaid, not his servant but his equal and companion. How
+    should she have words?
+
+    She sat in the grass with the tall ox-eyes nodding at her elbow
+    and looked at him from under her hat with a little eased sigh.
+    This, after the dust of the journey, of the day, of her life,
+    was bliss. She prepared herself for this bliss, deliberately, as
+    she did everything. She was too poor and too hungry to be
+    wasteful of her happiness: she must have every crumb. Therefore
+    she had looked first at herself, critically, with her trained
+    eye, fingering the frill of her blouse, flinging a scatter of
+    skirt across her dusty city feet, lest her poverty should jar
+    his thoughts of her.
+
+    Then she looked at him. She saw him for a moment with undazzled
+    eyes, the blue sky enriched with clouds behind him. She was
+    saying to herself—‘I’m not a fool. I can see straight. I know
+    what he is. He’s just an ordinary man in a hot, black suit. He
+    stoops, I suppose. He’s worn out with work. He’ll never be young
+    again. And there’s nothing particular about him. Then what makes
+    me like him? But I do. I do. He has only to turn and smile at
+    me——’
+
+    Then he turned and smiled at her, and it seemed to her that the
+    glamour of the gilded day passed over and into him as he smiled,
+    glorifying him so that she caught her breath at his beauty. She
+    knew her happiness. She knew herself and him. He was the sum of
+    the blue sky and green, green grass, and the shining waters and
+    the flowers with their sweet smell, and the singing birds and
+    the hum of the little things of the air. All beauty was summed
+    up in him: he was food to her and sunshine and music: he was her
+    absolute good: and she thought that someone ought to see that
+    his socks were mended properly, for there was a great ladder
+    down one ankle, darned with wrong-coloured wool.
+
+“Well?” She shut the book.
+
+“I like it,” said the Baxter girl stubbornly.
+
+Mr. Flood twisted uneasily in his seat.
+
+“Oh, pretty, of course. Of course it’s pleasant enough in a way. But
+Madala oughtn’t to be pretty. Think of the stuff she _can_ do.”
+
+“But can’t you see,” Miss Howe broke in, “how it parodies the slush and
+sugar school?”
+
+Anita shook her head.
+
+“She used another manner when she was ironical. I wish you were right.
+Oh, you may be—I must consider—but I’m afraid that she is in earnest.
+That phrase now—‘The green, green grass,’ (why double the adjective?)
+‘the shining waters, the singing birds’—pitiful! And that
+anti-climax—‘He was her absolute good: and she thought that someone
+ought to see that his socks were mended properly.’ I ask you—is it art?”
+
+“Not as serious work, of course,” said Miss Howe, “but——”
+
+“I wish I could think so,” said Anita.
+
+“Well, I wish I could do it,” said the Baxter girl. “What do you say,
+Jenny?”
+
+But it had brought back the country to me. It had brought back home. I
+hadn’t anything to say to them.
+
+“And she wouldn’t discuss it, you know. She came in after supper that
+night, just as I was reading the last chapter. It had only been out a
+day. There she sat, where you are now, Lila, smiling, with her hands in
+her lap and her eyes fixed on her hands, waiting for me to finish.”
+
+“Oh—” Miss Howe gave a little gushing scream, “that reminds me—d’you
+know, Anita, somebody actually told me that nobody had seen _The
+Resting-place_ before it was published, not even you. I was amused. I
+denied it, of course.”
+
+“Why?” said Anita coldly.
+
+Miss Howe screamed again.
+
+“Then you didn’t? Oh, my dear?”
+
+“Emancipation with a vengeance,” said Mr. Flood.
+
+“It had to come, Anita,” said Miss Howe with deadly sympathy.
+
+“It was not that. It was only—she was so extraordinarily sensitive about
+the _Resting-place_—unlike herself altogether. I think, I’ve always
+thought that she herself knew how unworthy it was of her. She—what’s the
+use of disguising it?—she, at least, had a value for my judgment,” her
+eyes, wandering past Miss Howe, brooded upon the Baxter girl, “and she
+knew what my judgment would be. She owned it. She anticipated it. I had
+shut the book, you know, quietly. She sat so still that I thought she
+was asleep. She had had one of those insane mornings——”
+
+“Of course. She used to take a crowd of children into the country,
+didn’t she?”
+
+“Once a week. Slum children.”
+
+“I know. ‘To eat buttercups,’ she told me,” said Miss Howe.
+
+“It was ridiculous, you know. She couldn’t afford it. Look at the way
+she lived! I always said to her, ‘If you can afford mad extravagances of
+that sort, you can afford a decent flat in a decent neighbourhood’——”
+
+“Oh, but I loved those rooms,” said the Baxter girl, “with the Spanish
+leather screen round the wash-hand-stand.”
+
+Anita glanced behind her.
+
+“Ah, you’ve noticed? I happened to admire it one day and—you know what
+she is—‘Would you like it? Why, of course, it would just suit the rest
+of your things. Oh, you must have it. I’d like you to. It’s far too big
+for this room.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘if you want it housed——’ So that’s how it
+comes to be here. One couldn’t hurt her feelings. And you know, it was
+quite unsuitable to lodging-house furniture.”
+
+Miss Howe laughed.
+
+“It disguised the wash-hand-stand. That was all Madala cared. Only then
+she always took you round to show you how beautifully it did disguise
+it.”
+
+“Typical,” said Mr. Flood. “Her reserves were topsy-turvy.”
+
+“But she had her reserves,” said Miss Howe quickly.
+
+“I doubt that,” he answered her.
+
+“Oh, but she had.” Anita recovered her place in the talk. “Curious
+reserves. You know how she came to me over _Eden Walls_ and _Ploughed
+Fields_. I saw every chapter. But as I was telling you, she wouldn’t
+hear a criticism of _The Resting-place_. That evening she pounced on me.
+She was as quick as light. She said—‘You don’t like it! I knew you
+wouldn’t! Never mind, Anita. Forget it! Put it in the fire! You like me.
+What do the books matter?’ She’d been watching me all the time.”
+
+“She had eyes in the back of her head,” said Miss Howe.
+
+“Kind eyes,” said the Baxter girl.
+
+“And I assure you she wouldn’t have said another word on the subject if
+I hadn’t insisted. I told her not to be ridiculous. How could I help
+being disappointed? How could I separate her from her work? I was
+disappointed, bitterly. I made it clear. I said to her—‘Well, Madala,
+all I can say is that if your future output is to be on a level with
+this—this pot-boiler——’”
+
+“It’s not a pot-boiler,” said the Baxter girl loudly and quite rudely.
+“I don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s not a pot-boiler.”
+
+Anita stared her down.
+
+“‘—pot-boiler,’ I said, ‘then—I wash my hands of you.’ I wanted to rouse
+her. I couldn’t understand her.”
+
+“Well?” said Miss Howe.
+
+They all laughed.
+
+“Oh, you can guess.” Anita was petulant, but she, too, laughed a little.
+“You know her way. She just sat smiling and twisting a ring that she
+wore and looking like a scolded child.”
+
+“But what did she say?” said the Baxter girl.
+
+“Nothing to the point. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘but, Anita, if I’d never written
+anything, wouldn’t you be just as fond of me?’ Such a silly thing to
+say! She was distressing at times. She embarrassed me. Fond of her! She
+knew my interests were intellectual. Fond of her! For a woman of her
+brains her standard of values was childish.”
+
+“But you were fond of her, you know,” said Miss Howe.
+
+“Oh, as for that—there was something about her—she had a certain
+way——After all, if it gave her pleasure to be demonstrative, it was
+easier to acquiesce. But she made a fetish of such things. I was only
+trying to explain to her, as I tell you, that it was quite impossible to
+separate creator and creatures, and that to me she was _Eden Walls_ and
+_Ploughed Fields_, and if you believe me, she was upon me like a
+whirlwind, shaking me by the shoulders, and crying out—‘No, no, stop!
+You’re to stop! It’s me you like, not the books. I hate them. I hate all
+that. I shall get away from all that one day.’ And I said—‘I don’t
+wonder you’re ashamed of _The Resting-place_. I advise you to get to
+work at once on your new book. You’ll find that if you pull yourself
+together——’ And all she said was—‘Nita! Nita! _Don’t!_ And she looked at
+me in such a curious way——”
+
+“How?” somebody said.
+
+“I don’t know—laughing—despairing. She’d no right to look at me like
+that. It was I who was in despair.”
+
+“I’d like to have seen you two,” said Miss Howe.
+
+“I didn’t know what had got into her. Of course I blame myself. I ought
+to have followed it out. I might have prevented things. But I was
+annoyed and she saw it, and she——”
+
+Miss Howe twinkled.
+
+“She wouldn’t let you be annoyed with her long. What did she do with
+you, Anita?”
+
+“She? I don’t know what you mean. We changed the subject. And as a
+matter of fact I was much occupied at the time with the _Anthology_.”
+She paused. “She had excellent taste,” said Anita regretfully.
+“Naturally I reserved to myself the final decision, but——”
+
+“Just so,” said Mr. Flood.
+
+“Be quiet, Jasper.” The blonde lady’s draperies dusted his shoulder
+intimately.
+
+“She’d brought me a delicious thing of Lady Nairn’s, I remember, that
+I’d overlooked. And from talking of the _Anthology_ we came, somehow, to
+talking about me. Yes—” Anita gave an embarrassed half laugh—“She began
+to talk to me, turning the tables as it were—about myself. She’s never,
+in all the years I’d known her, taken such a tone. Astonishing! As if—as
+if I were the younger.” She stared at them, as one combating an
+unuttered criticism. “I—liked it,” said Anita defiantly. “There was
+nothing impertinent. It was heartening. She made me feel that one person
+in the world, at least, knew me—knew my work. I realized, suddenly, that
+while I had been studying her, she must have been studying me, that she
+understood my capacities, my limitations, my possibilities, almost as
+well as I did myself. The relief of it—indescribable! She was
+extraordinarily plain-spoken. As a rule, you know, I thought her
+manner——”
+
+“Insincere?” said the Baxter girl. “Yes, I’ve heard people say that.”
+
+“It had that effect. It didn’t seem possible that she could like
+everyone as much as she made them think she did. But with me, at least,
+she was always frankness itself. She believes, you know,—she believed,
+that is, that all my work so far, even the _Anthology_ and the _Famous
+Women_ series, not to mention the lighter work, is still preliminary:
+that my——” she hesitated—“my master-piece, she called it, was still to
+come. She said that, though she appreciated all my work, I hadn’t ‘found
+myself.’ Yes! from that child to me it was amusing. But right, you know.
+She said that my line, whether I dealt with a period or a person, would
+always be critical, but that I’d never had a big success because so far
+I’d been merely critical: that I’d never become identified with my
+subject: that I’d always remained aloof—inhuman. Yes, she said that. A
+curious theory—but it interested me. But she said that it was only the
+real theme I needed, the engrossing subject. She said that my chance
+would come: that ‘she felt it in her bones.’ I can hear her voice
+now—‘Don’t you worry, Nita! It’ll come to you one day. A big thing.
+Biography, I shouldn’t wonder. And I shall sit and say—I told you so—I
+told you so!’ Yes, she talked like that. Oh, it’s nothing when I repeat
+it, but if you knew how it seemed to pour new life into me. It was the
+belief in her voice!”
+
+“She always believed in you,” said Miss Howe with a certain harshness.
+“Insincere! You should have heard her talk of your _Famous_ _Women_!”
+And then—“Yes. She believed in you right enough.”
+
+“More than I did in her that night. I couldn’t forget _The
+Resting-place_. It lay on the table, and every now and then, when I felt
+most comfort in her, my eyes would fall on it, and it would jar me. She
+felt it too. When I saw her off at last—it had grown very late—she
+stopped at the gate and turned and came running back. I thought that she
+had forgotten her handbag. She nearly always forgot her handbag. But no,
+it was _The Resting-place_ that was on her mind. It was—‘Nita! try it
+again. Maybe you’d like it better.’ And then—‘Nita! I enjoyed writing it
+so.’ ‘That’s something, at any rate,’ I said, not wanting, you know, to
+be unkind. Then she said—‘I wish you liked it. Because, you know, Nita—’
+and stopped as if she wanted to tell me something and couldn’t make up
+her mind. ‘Well, what?’ I said. It was cold on the steps. She hesitated.
+She looked at me. For an instant I had an absurd impression that she was
+going to cry. Then she kissed me. She’d kissed me goodnight once
+already, though, you know, we never did as a rule. And then, off she
+went without another word. I was quite bewildered by her. I nearly
+called her back; but it was one of those deep dark blue nights: it
+seemed to swallow her up at once. But I heard her footsteps for a long
+while after—dragging steps, as if she were tired. I wasn’t. It was as if
+she had put something into me. I went back into the house and I worked
+till daylight. And all the next day I worked—worked well. I felt, I
+remember, so hopeful, so full of power. By the evening I had quite a
+mass of material to show her, if she came. I half expected her to come.
+But instead—” she fumbled among her papers—“I got this.”
+
+It was a sheet of note-paper, a sheet that looked as if it had been
+crushed into a ball and then smoothed out again for careful folding.
+Anita’s fingers were still ironing out the crinkled edge while she read
+it aloud.
+
+    “I want to tell you something. I tried to tell you yesterday,
+    but somehow I couldn’t. It oughtn’t to be difficult, yet all
+    this afternoon I’ve been writing to you in an exercise book, and
+    crossing out, and re-phrasing, and putting in again as carefully
+    and dissatisfiedly as if it were Opus 4. I wish it were, because
+    then you’d be very much pleased with Madala Grey and forget the
+    dreadful shock of Opus 3! I was always afraid you wouldn’t like
+    it, and sorry, because I like it more than all my other work put
+    together. Have you never even begun to guess why? But how should
+    you, when I didn’t know myself until after it was finished?
+    Coming events, I suppose. It’s quite true—one isn’t overtaken by
+    fate: one prepares one’s own fate: one carries it about inside
+    one, like a child. I hear you say—‘Can’t you come to the point?’
+    No, I can’t. Partly because I’m afraid of what you’ll say,
+    because I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed, and partly,
+    selfishly, because there is a queer pleasure in beating about
+    the bush that bears my flower. It’s too beautiful to pick
+    straight away in one rough snatch of a sentence. Am I selfish?
+    You’ve been so kind to me. I know you will be sorry and that
+    troubles me. And yet—Anita, I am going to be married. You met
+    him once in the churchyard at home, do you remember? I’ve seen
+    him now and then when I took the children down there in the
+    summer. He——
+
+There’s something scratched out here,” said Anita.
+
+    “I think we shall be happy. When you get accustomed to the idea
+    I hope you will like him.”
+
+She paused.
+
+“Now what do you make of that?” said Anita.
+
+“It explains the expeditions with the children,” said Mr. Flood. “They
+were always too—philanthropic, to be quite—eh?”
+
+“Oh, but she began those outings ages ago,” said Miss Howe quickly.
+
+“Besides,” said Anita, “she didn’t go every week that summer. That’s the
+point. She told me herself that she was so busy that she had to get
+help—one of those mission women. Now why was she so busy?”
+
+“Diversions in the country _and_ attractions in town?” said Mr. Flood.
+“It all takes time.”
+
+Anita nodded.
+
+“You think that? So do I. _And_ attractions in town! Exactly! At any
+rate I shall make that the big chapter, the convincing chapter, of the
+_Life_. I think I shall be able to prove that that summer was the climax
+of her affairs. I grant you that she met Carey that summer, but as she
+says herself, a few times only. We must look nearer home than Carey.”
+
+“Oh, but there’s such a thing as love at first sight,” protested the
+Baxter girl, and Anita dealt with her in swift parenthesis—
+
+“I was there when they first met. Shouldn’t I have realized——?” And
+then, continuing—“Well, reckon up my points. To begin with—the
+difference in her that we all noticed, the restlessness, the—unhappiness
+one might almost say, the aloofness—oh, don’t you know what I mean? as
+if she didn’t belong to us any more.”
+
+“As if she didn’t belong to herself any more.”
+
+“Yes, yes, that’s even more what I mean. Then comes the fact that we saw
+so little of her. What did she do with her time? Writing _The
+Resting-place_, was her explanation, but—is that gospel? Do you really
+believe that she sat at home writing and dreaming all those long summer
+days and nights, except when she was—eating buttercups—with Carey and
+her chaperons? And then comes _The Resting-place_ with its appalling
+falling-off, and following on that, this letter, this sudden engagement.
+Now doesn’t it look—I ask you, doesn’t it look as if something had been
+going on behind all our backs and had at last come to a head?”
+
+“Oh, that she was in love is certain,” said Mr. Flood. “Was there ever a
+woman of genius who wasn’t?”
+
+“Exactly. It’s a moral certainty. And this letter to me proves that,
+whoever it was, it wasn’t Carey. ‘I think we shall be happy.’ ‘I hope
+you will like him.’ Is that the way a woman writes of her first love or
+her first lover?”
+
+“Oh, but that sentence just before——” the Baxter girl stretched out her
+hand for the letter—“‘The bush that bears my flower——’” She spoke
+sympathetically; but it jarred me. I wondered how I should feel if I
+thought that the Baxter girl would ever read my letters aloud.
+
+“Ah, that’s the literary touch. Madala could never resist embroideries.
+Besides—she wants to confuse me. That means nothing. But here, you,
+see——” she took the letter out of the Baxter girl’s hand—“as soon as she
+comes to the point, the real point, the confession, the apologia—then
+the baldest sentences. Try to remember that Madala Grey has written one
+of the strongest love scenes of the decade, and all she can say of the
+man she is to marry is—‘I hope you will like him.’”
+
+“H’m! It’s curious!” Miss Howe was frowning.
+
+“Isn’t it? And then you know, the whole manner of the engagement was so
+unlike her usual triumphant way. She always swept one along, didn’t she?
+But in the matter of the marriage she seems, as far as I can make out,
+to have been perfectly passive. She left everything to the
+man—arrangements—furniture—I imagine she even bought her clothes to
+please him. And the wedding itself—no reception, no presents, no notice
+to anyone, so sudden, so private. Not a word even to her oldest
+friends——”
+
+Great-aunt stirred in her corner.
+
+“—there was something so furtive about it all: as if she were running
+away from something.”
+
+Miss Howe sat up.
+
+“D’you mean?—what do you mean, Anita? Are you hinting——?”
+
+Anita looked at her in a puzzled way that relieved me, I hardly knew
+why.
+
+“Why, only that it carries out my theory—of Carey as a refuge.”
+
+“From what?”
+
+“Life—frustration—what did you think I meant?”
+
+“I don’t know. Nothing. It was my evil mind, I suppose.” She flushed.
+
+“How she harps on the child!” the Baxter girl carried it on.
+
+“That’s a mere simile——” said Miss Howe swiftly.
+
+“But a queer simile!”
+
+“The marriage _was_ sudden,” said Mr. Flood from the floor in his silky
+voice. “Anita’s theory has its points.”
+
+“A seven months’ child!” It was the first word that the blonde lady had
+said for some time. There was something sluggishly cold, slimily cold,
+in her abstracted voice.
+
+Anita started.
+
+“I never suggested that,” she said sharply. But there was a quiver in
+her voice that was more excitement than anger.
+
+“My dear lady, nobody suggests anything. We are only remarking that the
+union of our Madala and her ‘refuge’—the soubriquet is yours, by the
+way—was as surprising as it was—er—sudden. That was your idea?” He
+turned to the shadows and from them the blonde lady nodded, smiling.
+
+At the time, you know, I didn’t understand them. They were so quick and
+allusive. They said more in jerks and nods and pauses than in actual
+speech. But I saw the smile on that woman’s face, and heard the way he
+said ‘our Madala.’ I felt myself growing angry and panic-stricken, and I
+was quite helpless. I just went across the room to that big man sitting
+dully in his corner, in his dream, and I caught his arm and cried to him
+under my breath—
+
+“You must come. You must come and stop them. They’re talking about her.
+Come quickly. They—they’re saying beastly things.”
+
+He gave me one look. Then he got up and went swiftly from one room to
+the other. But swiftly as he moved and I followed, someone else was
+there before us to fight that battle.
+
+It was Great-aunt Serle.
+
+She was a heavy old woman and feeble. She never stirred as a rule
+without a helping arm; but somehow she had got herself out of her seat
+and across the floor to the table, and there she stood, her knitting
+gripped as if it were a weapon, the long thread of it stretched and taut
+from the ball that had rolled round the chair-leg, her free hand and her
+tremulous head jerking and snapping and poking at that amazed assembly
+as she rated them—
+
+“I won’t allow such talk. Anita, I won’t have it. If I let you bring
+home friends—ought to know better! And you——” the blonde lady was
+spitted, as it were, on that unerring finger, “you’re a wicked woman.
+That’s what you are—a wicked, scandalous woman. And you, Anita, ought to
+be ashamed of yourself, to let her talk so of my girl. Such a woman!
+Paint and powder! Envy, hatred, malice! And in my house too! Tell her to
+wash her face!” She glowered at them.
+
+There was a blank pause and then a sound somewhere, like the end of a
+spurting giggle. It must have been the Baxter girl. There was a most
+uncomfortable moment, before Anita cried out “Mother!” in a horrified
+voice, and Miss Howe said “Beryl!” in a voice not quite as horrified.
+
+But the blonde lady sat through it all quite calmly, smiling and
+moistening her lips. At last she drawled out—
+
+“Nita! Your dear mother’s quite upset. So sorry, Nita!” Then, a very
+little lower, but we could all hear it—“Poor dear Nita! Quite a trial
+for poor dear Nita!”
+
+But Anita had jumped up. She was very much flustered and annoyed. I
+think, too, that she was startled. I know that I was startled.
+Great-aunt didn’t look like herself. She was like a witch in a
+picture-book, and her voice had been quite strong and commanding.
+
+Anita tried to quiet her and get her away.
+
+“Mother! You must be quiet! D’you hear me, Mother? You don’t know what
+you’re saying. You’ve been up too long. You’re overdone. It’s time you
+went to bed.”
+
+She took her firmly by the arm. But Great-aunt struggled with her.
+
+“I won’t. Leave me alone. It’s your fault, Anita. You sat and listened.
+You let them talk that way about my girl.”
+
+“Now, Mother, what nonsense! Your girl! Madala’s not your daughter.” And
+then, in apology—“She’s always confusing us. She gets these ideas.”
+
+“Not mine? Ah! That’s all you know! ‘Anita upstairs?’ That’s how she’d
+come running in to me. ‘Are you busy, Mrs. Serle?’ Always looked in to
+my room first. Brought me violets. Talked. Told me all her troubles.
+_You_ never knew. Not mine, eh? Didn’t I see her married, my pretty
+girl? ‘Hole-and-corner business!’ That’s what you tell them? ‘Nobody
+knew.’ But I knew.”
+
+Anita’s hand dropped from her mother’s arm. She stared at her.
+
+“You, Mother? You there?” And then, angrily, “Oh, I don’t believe it.”
+
+“Don’t believe it, eh? But it’s true, for all I’m lumber in my own
+house. I’m to go to bed before the company comes, before she comes.
+Don’t she want to see me then? Who pinned her veil for her and kissed
+her and blessed her, and took her to church, and gave her to him? Not
+you, my daughter. She didn’t come to you for that.” And then, with a
+slacking and a wail, “Eh, but we were never to tell!”
+
+“Mother, you’d better come to bed. I——” there was the faintest
+suggestion of menace in her voice—“I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
+
+The old woman shrank away.
+
+“I won’t come. I know. You want me out of the way. You don’t want me to
+see her. What are you going to say about me? You’ll say things to her
+about me. I’ve heard you.”
+
+Quite obviously Anita restrained herself.
+
+“Now, Mother, you know you don’t mean that.”
+
+“Hush!” Great-aunt pulled away her hand. “Quiet, child, quiet! Wasn’t
+that the cab? I’ve listened all the evening, all the long evening.” Her
+old voice thinned and sharpened to a chirp. “Soft, soft, the wheels go
+by. The wheels never stop. Wait till the wheels stop. It’s the fog
+that’s keeping her. There’s fog everywhere. Maybe she’s lost in the
+fog.” Then she chuckled to herself. “Naughty girl to be so late. But
+she’s always late. Why should I go to bed? I’ve got to finish my
+knitting, Nita. Only two rows, Nita. They’ll just last me till she
+comes.” And then, “Anita, she will come?”
+
+Anita turned to the others.
+
+“Don’t be alarmed. It’s nothing. I’m afraid she hasn’t realized——” She
+began again—“Now, Mother! It’s bed-time, Mother dear.”
+
+“‘Dear’—‘dear’—why do you speak kindly? Madala’s not here to listen.”
+And then—“Nita, Nita child, let me stay till she comes.”
+
+Anita was quite patient with her, and quite unyielding.
+
+“Now listen, Mother! It’s no use waiting. Come upstairs with me. She
+won’t——” her voice altered, “she can’t come tonight.”
+
+Beside me Kent Rehan spoke—
+
+“I can’t stand it,” he said. “I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it.” He
+didn’t seem to know that he was speaking.
+
+But Great-aunt heard his voice if she didn’t hear the words. She broke
+away from Anita and went shuffling over the floor towards him with blind
+movements. She would have fallen if he hadn’t been beside her in an
+instant, holding her.
+
+“Kent, d’you hear her? You know my daughter. You know Madala too. You
+speak to her! You tell her! Madala always comes, doesn’t she? Always
+comes. You tell her that! I want to see Madala. Very good to me, Madala.
+Brought me a bunch of violets.”
+
+Anita followed.
+
+“Kent, for goodness’ sake, try to help me. She’ll make herself ill. I
+shall have her in bed for days. Now, Mother——Now come, Mother!”
+
+Great-aunt clung to his arm.
+
+“She’s not kind. My daughter’s very hard on me.”
+
+For the first time Anita showed signs of agitation. She was almost
+appealing.
+
+“Kent! You mustn’t believe her. It’s not fair. You see my position. One
+has to be firm. And you don’t know how trying——What am I to do? Shall I
+tell her? She’s as obstinate—I’ll never get her to bed. Ought I to tell
+her? She’ll have to be told sooner or later. She’ll have to realize——”
+
+He said—
+
+“I’ll talk to her if you like.”
+
+Anita looked at him intently.
+
+“It’s good of you. She has always listened to you. Since you and I were
+children together. Do you remember, Kent? Yes, you talk to her.”
+
+“What’s she saying?” demanded Great-aunt. Her old eyes were bright with
+suspicion. “Talking you over, eh? Talk anyone over, my daughter will—my
+clever daughter. So clever. Madala thinks so too. ‘Dripping with
+brains.’ That’s what Madala said. Made me laugh. Quite true, though.
+Hasn’t Madala come yet?”
+
+“Now, look here, Mrs. Serle——” he put his arm round her bent shoulders,
+“it’s very foggy, you know, and it’s very late. Nobody could
+travel—nobody could come tonight. You’ll believe us, won’t you?”
+
+“Wait! What’s that?” She stood a moment, her finger raised, listening
+intently. Then she straightened her bowed body and looked up at him. One
+so seldom saw her face lifted, shone upon by any light, that that alone,
+I suppose, was enough to change her. For changed she was—her countenance
+so wise and beaming that I hardly knew her. “Now I know,” she said, “she
+will come. Wait for her, Kent. She will come. I—I hear her coming. She’s
+not so far from us. She’s not so far away.”
+
+They stared at each other for a moment, the man and the old woman. Then
+her face dropped forward again, downward into its accustomed shadow, as
+he said to her—
+
+“It’s too late, Mrs. Serle. She won’t come—now. Not now any more. And
+Anita thinks—truly you’re very tired, aren’t you? Now, aren’t you?”
+
+“Very tired,” she quavered.
+
+“I know you are. Won’t you let me help you upstairs?”
+
+“And stay a bit?” she said, clutching at him. “Stay and talk to me?”
+
+“Yes, yes,” he humoured her.
+
+“About Madala?”
+
+He was very white.
+
+“About Madala. Anita, take her other arm. That’s the way.”
+
+They helped her out of the room, and we heard their slow progress up the
+stairs.
+
+It was the blonde lady who broke the silence with her tinkling laugh—
+
+“Poor dear Nita!”
+
+“Kent’s a good sort,” said Miss Howe.
+
+“What’s Hecuba to him now?” Mr. Flood’s smile glinted from one to
+another.
+
+“A very old friend,” said the blonde lady. “You heard what dear Nita
+said to him.”
+
+“‘Children together!’ I didn’t know that.” He was still smiling.
+
+“And they always kept in touch,” put in Miss Howe.
+
+“Trust Nita for that,” said the blonde lady.
+
+Miss Howe nodded.
+
+“She told me once that from the first she realized that he would do big
+things.”
+
+“So Nita kept in touch!” Mr. Flood laughed outright.
+
+“But it’s only the last few years that she’s been able to produce him at
+will, like a conjuror’s rabbit.”
+
+“Since Madala’s advent, you mean,” said the blonde lady.
+
+“‘Will you walk into my parlour?’ said Anita to the fly. ‘It’s a
+literary parlour——’” murmured Mr. Flood. And then—“No. Kent’s not likely
+to have walked in without a honey-pot in the parlour. Madala must have
+been useful.”
+
+“That’s what Miss Serle will never forgive her, _I_ think,” said the
+Baxter girl.
+
+“What?”
+
+“That she was useful. Do _you_ believe in the other man?”
+
+“The unknown influence?” His eyes narrowed. “H’m!”
+
+“And yet of course there’s been someone.” The Baxter girl never quite
+deserted Anita, even in her absence.
+
+The blonde lady nodded.
+
+“Of course. Nita’s always nearly right. The influence—the adventures—the
+_mariage de convenance_—she’s got it all so pat—and the man too. She
+knows well enough; yet she fights against it. She won’t have it. I
+wonder why. ‘Very old friends’ I suppose.” She laughed again. “But of
+course it was Kent. Can’t you see that’s why Nita hates her? What a
+_Life_ it will be! I just long for it to come out. Nita’s a comedy.”
+
+“A tragedy.”
+
+“Nita? My dear Lila! What do you mean?”
+
+“I’m only quoting,” said Miss Howe. And then—“But when she isn’t
+actually annoying me I think I agree.”
+
+“Who said it?” said the Baxter girl inquisitively.
+
+“Madala. It’s the only thing I’ve ever heard her say of Anita. She never
+discussed Anita. Now of Kent she would talk by the hour. Which proves to
+me, you know, that the affair with him didn’t go very deep. Nita quoted
+that description of Kent just now, but only so far as it served her. She
+carefully forgot how it goes on. Here, where is it? Ah——
+
+    He brooded like a lover over his colour-box, and as she watched
+    him her thoughts flew to her own small brothers at home. Geoff
+    with his steam-engine, Jimmy sorting stamps—there, there was to
+    be found the same ruthlessness of absorption, achieving dignity
+    by its sheer intensity. She smiled over him and them.
+
+    “Keep your face still,” he ordered.
+
+    She obeyed instantly, flushing; and as she did so she thought to
+    herself—‘I could be afraid of that man,’ but a moment
+    afterwards—‘He _is_ like a small boy.’
+
+“Now that may be Kent—oh, it is Kent, of course—but it’s not Madala’s
+attitude to Kent. She was not in the least afraid of him.”
+
+“Ah, but that later passage, the country passage—that’s pure Madala.”
+
+“Yes. Just where it ceases to be Kent—‘He stoops, I suppose. He’s worn
+out with work. He’s quite ordinary.’ That’s not Kent.”
+
+“No, that’s true. One doesn’t know where to have her. She muddles her
+trail,” said Mr. Flood.
+
+“I call it weakness of touch not to let you know whom she drew from,”
+said the Baxter girl.
+
+“Ah, but she always insisted that she didn’t draw portraits.”
+
+“Of course. They always do. If one believed _them_ one would never get
+behind the scenes, and if one can’t get behind the scenes one might as
+well be mere public and read for the story,” said the Baxter girl
+indignantly.
+
+“Well, you know,” Miss Howe sat turning over the pages of _The
+Resting-place_ with careful, almost with caressing fingers, “I don’t
+believe she meant to draw portraits. She had queer, old-fashioned
+notions. I think she would have thought it—treacherous.”
+
+“The portraits are there though, if you look close enough,” insisted the
+Baxter girl.
+
+“Yes, but they happened in spite of her. Anyone she was fond of she took
+into her, in a sense: and when her gift descended upon her and demanded
+expression, then, all unconsciously, she expressed them too. But gilded!
+We find ourselves in her books, and we never knew before how lovable we
+are. You’re right, Blanche, _she liked whate’er she looked on_. And
+you’re right too, Jasper, _Grande amoureuse_, she was that. That
+capacity for loving made her what she was. The technical facility was
+her talent and her luck; but it was her own personality that turned it
+into genius.”
+
+“Then after all you admit the genius,” said the Baxter girl
+triumphantly.
+
+“No. No. No. My judgment says no. When I read her books in cold
+blood—no. But we’ve been talking about her. It’s as if she were with us,
+and when she’s with us my judgment goes! That’s the secret of Madala
+Grey. She does what she likes with us. But the next generation, the
+people who don’t know her, whether they’ll find in her books what we do,
+is doubtful. Who wants a dried rose?”
+
+“Yes, but Miss Serle—in the _Life_? Won’t she—preserve her?”
+
+“Preserve—exactly! But not revive. No, I’d sooner pin my faith to _The
+Spring Song_, although I haven’t seen it. It ought to be a revelation.
+She eluded Nita, impishly. I’ve seen her do it. But there’s no doubt
+that she gave Kent his chance.”
+
+“Every chance. She’d deny it, I suppose.”
+
+“Oh, she did.” Miss Howe laughed. “Have you ever seen her in a temper? I
+have. I was a fool. I told her one day (you know how things come up)
+just something of the gossip about Kent and her. I thought it only kind.
+But you should have heard her. She was as healthily furious as a
+schoolgirl. That was so comfortable about Madala. She hadn’t that
+terrible aloofness of really big people. She didn’t withdraw into
+dignity. She just stormed.” Miss Howe laughed again. “I can see her now,
+raging up and down the room—‘Do you mean to say that people——? I never
+heard of anything so monstrous! What has it got to do with them? Why
+can’t they leave me alone? I’ve never done them any harm. I wouldn’t
+have believed it, pretending they liked me, and letting me be friends
+with them, and then saying hateful things behind my back. I’ll never
+speak to them again—never! That they should go about twisting things—Why
+can’t they mind their own business? And dragging in Kent like that! Oh,
+it does make me so wild!’ ‘Oh, well, my dear,’ I said to her, ‘when two
+people see as much of each other as you and Kent do, there’s bound to be
+talk.’ At that she swung round on me. ‘But he’s my _friend_,’ she said.
+‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s just it.’ ‘But I’m not expected to marry everyone
+I’m fond of!’ ‘Are you fond of him, Madala?’ I asked her. ‘Yes,’ she
+said directly, ‘I am. I’m awfully fond of him. I’d do anything for him,
+bless his heart!’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you needn’t be so upset. That’s all
+that people mean. If you’re fond of him and he—he’s obviously in love
+with you——’ But at that she caught me up in her quick way—‘In love? Oh,
+you don’t understand him. Nobody understands Kent. He doesn’t understand
+himself. Dear old Kent!’ Then she began walking up and down the room
+again, but more quietly, and talking, half to herself, as if she had
+forgotten I was there, justifying herself, justifying him. ‘Dear old
+Kent! Poor old Kent! I’m awfully fond of Kent. So is he of me. But not
+in the right way. He’s got, when he happens to think of it, a great
+romantic idea of the woman he wants, of the wife he wants; but the truth
+is, you know, that he doesn’t want a wife. He wants a mother, and a
+sister, and a—a lover. A true lover. A patienter woman than I am. A
+woman who’ll delight in him for his own sake, not for what he gives her.
+A woman who’ll put him first and be content to come second with him.
+He’ll always put his work first. He can’t help it. He’s an artist. Oh,
+not _content_. I didn’t mean that. She must be too big for that—big
+enough to know what she misses. But a wise woman, such a loving, hungry
+woman. ‘Half a loaf,’ she’ll say to herself. But she’ll never have to
+let him hear. He’s chivalrous. He’d be horrified at giving her half a
+loaf. He’d say—“All or nothing!” But he couldn’t give her all. He
+couldn’t spare it. So he’d give her nothing out of sheer respect for
+her. That’s Kent. He’s got his dear queer theories of life—oh, they’re
+all right as theories—but he fits people to them, instead of them to
+people. Procrustes. He’d torture a woman from the kindest of motives.
+It’s lack of imagination. Haven’t you noticed?’ ‘Considering he’s one of
+the great imaginative artists of the day, Madala,’ I said to her,
+‘that’s rather sweeping.’ ‘But that’s why,’ she said. ‘It’s just because
+he’s a genius. He lives on himself, in himself. Kent’s an island.’ I
+said—‘No chance of a bridge, Madala?’ She shook her head. ‘Not my job.’
+I said I was sorry. I was, too. It would have been so ideal, that pair.
+I wanted to argue it with her; but she wouldn’t listen. She said—‘If I
+weren’t an artist too, then maybe—maybe. I’m very fond of Kent. But
+no—I’d want too much. But, you know, there’s a woman somewhere, rather
+like me—I hope he’ll marry her. I’d love her. She’d never be jealous of
+me. She’d understand. She’s me without the writing, without the outlet.
+She’ll pour it all into loving him. I hope she’s alive somewhere. He’d
+be awfully happy. And if he had children—that’s what he needs. I can
+just see him with children. But not my children. If I married——’ And
+then she flushed up to the eyes in that way she had, as if she were
+fifteen. ‘I—I’d like to be married for myself, for my faults, for the
+bits I don’t tell anyone. Kent would hate my faults. I’d have to hide my
+realest self.’ She stood staring out of the window. Then she said, still
+in that rueful, childish voice—‘I would like to be liked.’ ‘But, my dear
+girl,’ said I, ‘what nonsense you talk! If ever a woman had friends——’
+She flung round at me again—‘If I’d not written _Eden Walls_ would Anita
+have looked at me—or any of you?’ I said—‘That’s not a fair question.
+Your books _are_ you, the quintessence, the very best of you.’ ‘But the
+rest of me?’ she said, ‘but the _rest_ of me?’ I laughed at her. ‘Well,
+what about the rest of you?’ Then she said, in a small voice—‘It feels
+rather out of it sometimes, Lila.’”
+
+“I say,” Mr. Flood twinkled at her, “are you going to present all this
+to Anita? She’d be grateful.”
+
+“Not she,” said Miss Howe sharply. “Too much fact would spoil her
+theory. Let her spin her own web.”
+
+“Agreed. There’s room for more than one biography, eh?” They laughed
+together a little consciously.
+
+“You know,” the blonde lady recalled them, “she must have been quite a
+good actress. She always seemed perfectly contented.”
+
+“Imagine Madala Grey discontented,” said the Baxter girl. “How could she
+be?”
+
+“Oh, Kent was at the root of that,” said Miss Howe, “for all her talk.”
+
+Mr. Flood nodded.
+
+“Yes, the lady did protest too much, if your report’s correct.”
+
+“It’s the only explanation and, as you said, Blanche, in her heart Anita
+knows it. After all, he’s a somebody. Madala wouldn’t be the only one
+who’s found him attractive, eh?” She cocked an eyebrow.
+
+“Don’t be scandalous, Lila,” said the blonde lady virtuously, and Mr.
+Flood gave his little sniff of enjoyment.
+
+“Oh, give me five minutes,” said Miss Howe cosily. “She’ll be down in
+five minutes. I’ve been good all the evening. But I’m inclined to agree
+with her, you know, that Madala was attracted, just because Madala
+denied it so vehemently. Only Anita goes too far for me. She’s right, of
+course, when she says of Kent—‘Not a marrying man!’ but not in the way
+she means it. There are dark and awful things in the history of every
+unmarried man, to Anita. She scents intrigue everywhere. I’m a spinster
+myself, but I’m not such a spidery spinster. She may be partly right.
+Some other man, some question-mark of a man, may have treated Madala
+badly. But Kent didn’t. Kent isn’t that sort. Intrigue would bore him.
+Still, he wasn’t a marrying man in those days, and I think Madala was
+perfectly honest when she said—‘Just friends.’ But I think also, if you
+ask me, that they were far too good friends. It’s not wise to be friends
+with a man. You must be a woman first and let him know it. I don’t
+believe in these platonic friendships. So I think that in time Madala
+found out where they were making the mistake. And he didn’t, or
+wouldn’t. Oh well!” she paused expressively, “he’s finding it out now.
+He has been all the year. Didn’t you see his face when he came in
+tonight? Madala shouldn’t have hurried. Poor Madala! Though I don’t
+think it broke her heart, you know.”
+
+“No.” The blonde lady nodded. “She was too serene, too placid, for real
+passion. She could draw it well enough, but always from the outside.”
+
+“Oh, I don’t think so,” said the Baxter girl. “Think of the end of
+_Ploughed Fields_.”
+
+“Let’s give her some credit for imagination, even if we don’t say
+‘genius’! I agree with Blanche. Oh, perhaps her heart did crack just a
+little——”
+
+The blonde lady struck in—
+
+“But then Carey’s a doctor. So convenient!”
+
+“Yes,” said Mr. Flood. “I always said he caught her on the rebound.”
+
+“And then, to mix metaphors, the fat was in the fire. Then, Kent woke up
+to her. Isn’t it obvious? He was fond of Madala Grey, but it was Mrs.
+Carey that he fell in love with. Just like a man!”
+
+“Oh, I hate you,” said Mr. Flood. “You destroy my illusions. I’m like
+Anita. I demand the tragic Madala.”
+
+“You can have her, I should think,” said the Baxter girl thoughtfully.
+“Oh, of course your theory does seem probable as far as it goes, Miss
+Howe, but——”
+
+“But what?” said Miss Howe.
+
+“Well, she hardly ever came to town afterwards, did she?”
+
+“Ah, Madala was always wise,” said the blonde lady.
+
+Mr. Flood rubbed his hands.
+
+“Thank you, Beryl. We’re in sympathy. And it’s quite a satisfying,
+tragical picture, isn’t it? The two artists—he with his lay figure and
+she with her Hodge, and the long year between them. Can’t you see them,
+cheated, desirous, stretching out to each other their impotent hands?
+One could make something out of that.”
+
+“You could, Mr. Flood,” said the Baxter girl fervently.
+
+“Out of what?” Anita was always noiseless. I jumped to hear her voice so
+close behind me.
+
+Miss Howe looked up at her quizzingly.
+
+“Madala and——Where _is_ Kent?”
+
+“With Mother still. He’s managed her extraordinarily. She’s getting
+sleepy, thank goodness! He’ll be down in a minute.” Then, with a change
+of tone—“Madala and Kent? I think not, Lila dear.”
+
+“But you said yourself——” the Baxter girl interposed.
+
+“Oh no! I flung it out—a suggestion—a possibility. I haven’t committed
+myself—yet. I wish I could be sure of Kent. He’s upset my conception of
+him tonight. I should have said—selfish. Especially over Madala. But all
+men are selfish. Yet, tonight——” she hesitated, playing with the papers
+that lay half in, half out of the open desk. “But who was it, if it
+wasn’t Kent? Because there _was_ someone, you know——” And then, as if
+Miss Howe’s smile annoyed her beyond prudence—“Do you think I’m
+inventing? Do you think I’ve talked for amusement’s sake? I tell you,
+she was on the verge of an elopement. _Without_ benefit of clergy!”
+
+“Anita!” Miss Howe half rose from her chair.
+
+“We’re getting it at last.” Mr. Flood addressed the room. “I knew she
+had something up her sleeve.”
+
+“I don’t believe—I won’t believe it,” said Miss Howe.
+
+Then Anita smiled.
+
+“Didn’t I say she was careless about her drafts? I’ve a fragment
+here—no, I’ve left it in my writing-table——” and she rose as she
+spoke—“no name, but it’s proof enough. It’s an answer to some man’s
+letter.”
+
+“But does she definitely consent——?” began the Baxter girl.
+
+“Not in so many words. But it’s obvious there was some cause or
+impediment, and he, whoever he is, has evidently had qualms of
+conscience about letting her call the world well lost for his sweet
+sake.”
+
+“That would rule out Kent, of course,” said Miss Howe thoughtfully.
+“There was no reason why Kent shouldn’t marry.”
+
+“We know of none,” said Anita in her suggestive voice. “Isn’t that as
+much as one can say of any man?”
+
+“Ah!” said the Baxter girl, illuminated. I don’t know why—her round
+eyes, I suppose, and her pursed mouth—but she reminded me of the woodcut
+of Minerva’s owl in _Larousse_.
+
+“So you see my prime difficulty. I’ve passed under review every man of
+her acquaintance, till I narrowed down the possible——”
+
+“Affinities,” said the blonde lady.
+
+“—to Kent Rehan, John Carey, and this probable but unknown third. There
+I hang fire. Until I make up my mind on which of the three her love
+story hinges, I can’t do more than trifle with the _Life_. And how shall
+I make up my mind?”
+
+“Three?” said Mr. Flood. “Two. You can eliminate the husband. He’s fifth
+act, not third.”
+
+“Yes, of course. But I never jump a step. Which leaves me the unknown—or
+Kent.”
+
+The blonde lady leant forward rather eagerly—
+
+“Nita! Where’s that letter?”
+
+“I’ll get it.” She went across the room to her writing-table.
+
+The Baxter girl twisted her head.
+
+“I say! He’s coming down the stairs.”
+
+“If she read aloud that draft——” the blonde lady’s drawl had
+disappeared. She glittered like an excited schoolgirl—“he might
+recognize——”
+
+“You mean——?” Mr. Flood raised his eyebrows but Anita, fumbling with her
+keys, did not hear.
+
+“It would be nice to be sure,” said the blonde lady.
+
+“It’s rather cruel, isn’t it?” said Miss Howe uneasily.
+
+“Why? It’ll be printed in the _Life_. Besides, it may not have been
+written to him.”
+
+“That’s why,” said Miss Howe.
+
+“It would be nice to be _quite_ sure,” said the blonde lady again. And
+as she spoke Kent Rehan came into the room.
+
+At once I got up, with some blind, blundering idea, I believe, of
+stopping him, of frustrating them, but Anita was nearer to him than I.
+
+“Is she asleep? Very good of you, Kent. Sit here, Kent. Jenny, is the
+window open in the passage? Very cold. I never knew such a draught.”
+
+I went out to see. I had to do as I was told. Besides, how could I have
+stopped them or him? Yet I was shaking with anger and disgust at them,
+and at myself for my hateful tongue-tied youth and insignificance. An
+older woman would have known what to do. Shaking with cold too—Anita was
+right—it was bitter cold in the passage. I could hardly see my way to
+the window for the fog. It was open an inch at the bottom, and at my
+touch it rattled down with a bang that echoed oddly. For an instant I
+thought it was a knock at the hall door. I stood a minute, quite
+startled, peering down into the black well of the hall. But there was no
+second knock, only the fog-laden draught of the passage came rushing up
+at me again, and again Anita called to me to come in and shut the door.
+I did so: and because it rattled, wedged it with the screw of paper that
+lay near it on the floor, the crumpled telegram that Kent Rehan had
+dropped when he first came in. Then, still shivering a little, I sat
+down where I was. I didn’t want to go nearer. I knew my face was
+tell-tale. I didn’t want to have the Baxter girl looking at me, and
+maybe saying something. I could hear them in the other room well enough.
+Anita’s voice seemed to cut through the thick air. There was a letter in
+her hand. She was twisting it about as if she couldn’t find the first
+page.
+
+“—obviously a draft.” She held it away from her. Anita was long-sighted.
+
+    “Dear—dear——
+
+Then it breaks off and begins again. You see?” She displayed it to them.
+
+    “Dearest——”
+
+“Why, how clearly it’s written!” The Baxter girl peered at it. “That’s
+quite a beautiful hand. That’s not Madala’s scrawl.”
+
+The blonde lady looked at them through half-shut lids.
+
+“Ah! It’s been written slowly——”
+
+“As if she loved writing it!” The Baxter girl flushed. “Did _she_ know
+about that sort of thing—that sentimental sort of thing? I should have
+thought her too—oh, too splendid, removed—you know what I mean.”
+
+“I don’t suppose she talked about it,” said Anita coldly. “She was not
+of your generation.” And then, to the others—“I assure you, this letter
+shook me. Even I never dreamed of this side of her. Listen.” She read
+aloud in her measured voice—
+
+    “Dearest—
+
+    I wanted your letter so. I reckoned out the posts, and the
+    distances, and your busyness. I thought that in two days you
+    would probably write, and then I gave you another day’s grace
+    because you hate writing letters, and because I thought you
+    couldn’t dream how much I missed you—how much, how _soon_, I
+    wanted to hear. And then to get your letter the very next day,
+    before I could begin to look for it (but I did look!). Why, you
+    must have written as soon as the train was out of the station!
+    You missed me just as much then?
+
+    But it’s a mad letter, you know. It makes me laugh and cry. It’s
+    so sensible—and so silly. ‘Fame,’ ‘career,’ ‘reputation,’
+    ‘position’—why do you fling these words at me? _I_ am making a
+    sacrifice? Darling, haven’t you eyes? Don’t you understand that
+    you’re my world? All these other things, since I’ve known you,
+    they’re shadows, they’re toys, I don’t want them. The reviews of
+    my new book—I’ve never been so delighted at getting any—but why?
+    D’you know why? To show them to you—to watch you shake with
+    laughter as you read them. When a flattering letter turns up, I
+    save it to show you as if it were gold, because I think—‘Perhaps
+    it’ll make him think more of me.’ Isn’t it idiotic? But I do.
+    And all the while I glory in the knowledge that all these
+    things, all the fuss and fame, don’t mean a brass button to
+    you—or to me, my dear, or to me.
+
+    And yet you write me a solemn letter about ‘making a sacrifice,’
+    ‘abdicating a position.’
+
+    Don’t be—humble. And yet I like you in this mood. Because it
+    won’t last! I won’t _let_ it. It’s I who am not good enough. If
+    you knew how I tip-toe sometimes. You’re so much bigger than I
+    am. I lie in bed at nights, and all the things I’ve done wrong
+    in my life, all the twisty, tortuous, feminine things, all the
+    lies and cowardices and conceits, come and sting me. I’m so
+    bitterly ashamed of them. I feel I’ve got to tell you about them
+    all, and yet that if I do you’ll turn me out of your heart. If
+    you did that—if you were disappointed—if you got tired of me—it
+    turns me sick with fear.
+
+    I’m a fool to tear myself. I know you love me. And when you’re
+    with me I forget all that. I’m just happy. When you’re there
+    it’s like being in the blazing sunshine. Can ‘celebrity’ give me
+    that sunshine? Can ‘literature’ All my emptiness? Are the books
+    I write children to love me with your eyes? Oh, you fool!
+
+    Oh, of course, I know you don’t mean it. It’s just that you
+    think you ought to protest. But suppose I took you at your word?
+    Suppose I said that, on careful consideration, I felt that I
+    wanted to lead my own life instead of yours? that—how does the
+    list run?—my Work, my Circle of Friends, my Career, were too
+    much to give up for—you? What would you say—no, do? for even I,
+    (and the sun’s in my eyes) even I can’t call you eloquent! But
+    what would you do if I wouldn’t come to you?
+
+    Oh, my darling, my darling, you needn’t be afraid. I’d rather be
+    a door-keeper in the house of my God——
+
+    I’m changed. What have you done to me? Other people notice it.
+    My friends are grown critical of me. Only yesterday someone (no
+    one you know) sneered at me—‘In love? Oh well, you’ll get over
+    it. It’s a phase.’ You know, they don’t understand. I’m not ‘in
+    love,’ but I love you. There’s the difference. I love you. I
+    shall love you till I die. Till——? As if death could blot you
+    out for me! I used to believe in death. I used to believe it
+    ended everything. But now, since I’ve known you, I can never
+    die. You’ve poured into me an immortal spirit——”
+
+“Go on,” breathed the Baxter girl.
+
+“It breaks off there. It’s not signed. It was never sent.”
+
+“She had that much wisdom, then.” The blonde lady’s laughter came to us
+over Mr. Flood’s shoulder. “That’s not the letter to send to any man.
+Giving herself away?—giving us all away——”
+
+“To any man? To what man? There’s the point. You see the importance.
+It’s the heart of the secret. Who is it? For whom was she ready to give
+up, in her own words, name, friends, career——?”
+
+“Well, practically she did that, didn’t she, when she married Carey? She
+buried herself in the country. She didn’t write a line. You said
+yourself that she put her career behind her. Why shouldn’t it be written
+to Carey?”
+
+“Oh, don’t be absurd. It’s Carey that makes it impossible. How could
+Carey have written a letter needing such an answer? Little he cared.
+What was her genius to him? Isn’t it obvious, isn’t it plain as print,
+that Carey happened, Carey and all he stands for, _after_ the writing of
+this letter, because of some hitch? Why wasn’t the letter sent? What
+happened? What folly? What misunderstanding? What disillusionment? What
+realization of danger?—to send her, with that letter half written, into
+Carey’s arms? Carey, that stick, that ordinary man! And on the top of it
+_The Resting-place_ comes out, the _cri du cœur_—or, if you like, Lila,
+the satire—(for I’m beginning to believe you’re right) the satire of
+_The Resting-place_. I tell you, I smell tragedy.”
+
+“It’s supposition, it’s mere supposition,” said Miss Howe impatiently.
+
+“Isn’t all detective work supposition to begin with? Wait till I’ve made
+my book. Wait till I’ve sifted my evidence, till I’ve ranged it, stick
+and brick, step by step, up, up, up, to the letter.”
+
+Suddenly from where he sat, half way between me and them, Kent spoke—
+
+“Anita, you can’t publish that letter.”
+
+Her face, all their faces, turned towards us. She stared.
+
+“Why not?” And then—“Why do you sit out there? Come here. Come into the
+light.”
+
+He did not stir.
+
+She frowned, puckering her eyes.
+
+“Such a fog,” she said fretfully. “I can’t see you. Can’t you keep that
+door shut, Jenny?” Then—“Well, Kent—why not? Why not?”
+
+He said slowly—
+
+“It’s not decent.”
+
+She flared at once.
+
+“Decent! Not decent! What on earth do you mean?”
+
+He kept her waiting while he thought it out.
+
+“I mean—it’s not right, it’s not fair. To whomever it was written,
+that’s her business, not our business. And that letter——It’s vile,
+anyway, publishing her letters.”
+
+She stared at him in a sort of angry bewilderment.
+
+“But why? I shall write her life. One always does print letters.”
+
+“Not that sort of letter,” he said.
+
+“But don’t you see,” she cried, “that _that_ letter, just _that_
+letter——”
+
+He said—
+
+“That’s why. How dare you read that letter here—aloud—tonight? It—it’s
+ghoulish.”
+
+“Kent!” There was outrage in her voice.
+
+“But, Kent——” Miss Howe intervened—“we knew her—we care—it’s in all
+reverence——”
+
+And Mr. Flood—
+
+“My dear man, she’s not a private character. The lives that will be
+written! Anita’s may be the classic, but it won’t be the only one.
+Letters are bound to be printed—every scrap she ever wrote. Nobody can
+stop it. It’s only a question of time. The public has its rights.”
+
+“To what?” He turned savagely. “You’ve had her books. She’s given
+enough. Will you leave her nothing private, nothing sacred?”
+
+“But, Kent, can’t you see——” Anita had an air of pushing Miss Howe and
+Mr. Flood from her road—“aren’t you artist enough to see——? A writer, a
+woman like Madala, she has no private life. She lives to write. She
+lives what she writes. She _is_ what she writes. She gives her soul to
+the world. She leaves her riddle to be read. Don’t you see? to be read.
+That’s what I’m doing. That’s what I’m going to do—read her—for the rest
+of you, for the public. Because—because they care, because we all care.
+It’s done in all honour. It’s a tribute. And for what I am going to do,
+such a letter is the key.”
+
+She spoke softly, sweetly, persuasively. She wooed him to agree with
+her. She was extraordinarily eager for his approval. And the approval of
+the others she did win. They were all murmuring agreement.
+
+His eyes strayed over them, undecidedly, seeking—not help. I do not know
+what he sought, but his eyes found mine.
+
+“_You_——” he said to me—“would you want your letter——?”
+
+Anita’s voice thrust in sharply. In the instant the pleading, the
+beauty, the woman, was gone from it. It was cold and shrill.
+
+“Jenny’s views can hardly concern us.”
+
+But he did not listen to her. He had drawn some answer from me that
+satisfied him. He got up.
+
+“Oh,” I cried beneath my breath, and I think I touched his arm—“you
+won’t let her?”
+
+He shook his head. Then he went across to where Anita stood, her eyes on
+him, on me, while she listened to Miss Howe whispering at her shoulder.
+
+“Look here, Anita!” he began.
+
+“I’m looking,” she said.
+
+He checked a moment, puzzled. Then he went on—
+
+“That letter—you can’t print it. You’ve no right. It’s not your
+property.”
+
+She waved it aside.
+
+“I shall be literary executor. She promised. It’s mine if it’s anyone’s.
+It’s no good, Kent, it goes into the book. Nothing can alter that.
+Nothing——”
+
+Then she stopped dead. There was that same odd look in her eye as there
+had been when she watched us—that flicker of curiosity, and behind it
+the same gleam of inexplicable anger.
+
+“Look here——” she said very deliberately—“look _you_ here—what has it
+got to do with you?”
+
+It was not the words, it was the tone. It was shameless. It was as if
+she had cried aloud her hateful questions—‘Did you love her?’ ‘What was
+there between you?’ ‘I want to know it all. It tears me not to know.’
+But what she said to him, and before he could answer, was—
+
+“If, of course—anyone—had any right—could prove any right——” She broke
+off, watching him closely. But he said nothing. “If,” she said, and
+poked with her finger, “if that letter—if you recognized it—if that were
+the rough draft of a letter that had been sent——”
+
+He stared down at her. His face was bleak.
+
+“You’ll get no copy from me, Anita!”
+
+“Oh!” She caught her breath, fierce and wicked as a cat with a bird, yet
+shrinking as a cat does, supple, ears flat. “I only meant—I said
+_right_. If anyone—if you could satisfy me—if you have any right——”
+
+He said—
+
+“I have no right.”
+
+“Oh well, then!” She shrugged her shoulders.
+
+“But,” he held stubbornly to his purpose, “whoever has a right to it—you
+can’t print that letter.”
+
+She laughed at him.
+
+“You’ll see! You’ll see!”
+
+“Yes,” he said, “I’ll see.”
+
+They held each other’s eyes, angry, angry. I felt how Kent Rehan loathed
+her. And she—yes, she must have hated him. She was all bitterness and
+triumph and defiance. Yet all the time I was wanting to catch him by the
+arm and say—‘Be kind to her. Say something kind and she’ll give in.’ I
+knew it. He had only to say in that instant—‘Anita, I beg of you——’ and
+she would have given him the letter. I knew it. I know it. I don’t know
+how I knew it, but I was sure. But he was a man: of course he saw
+nothing. He was very angry. He looked big and fine. I wondered that she
+could stand outfacing him.
+
+But she, for answer, picked up the letter, and affected to search
+through it.
+
+“Had I finished? Where was I? Ah, yes—‘An immortal spirit——’”
+
+His hand came down heavily and swept the light table aside.
+
+“You can’t do it. You shan’t do it. By God you shan’t.”
+
+How it happened I couldn’t see. He was too quick. But at one moment she
+held the letter, and in the next he had it, and was kneeling at the
+grate, while she cried out—
+
+“Kent!” And then—“Lila! Jasper! Stop him!”
+
+Nobody could have stopped him. There was no flame, but the fire still
+burned, a caked red and black lump, smouldering on cinders. He picked it
+up—with his naked hands—thrust in the crumpled stiff paper, and smashed
+it down again, so that the lump split, and still held it pressed down,
+with naked hands, till the sheet had charred and shrivelled into
+nothing. I suppose it all happened in a few seconds, but it seemed like
+hours. I was in a train smash once: I wasn’t hurt; but I remember that I
+came out of it with just the same sense of being battered and aged. This
+scene I had only watched: I had not shared in it: I was still in the
+little outer room. Yet I was shaken. I heard Mr. Flood call out—“Kent,
+you crazy fool!” I heard Anita—“Let me _go_, Lila!” And then the women
+were between me and him, and I could only see their backs, and there was
+a babel of voices, and I found myself sitting like a fool, clutching at
+the arms of my chair, and saying over and over again—“Oh, his hands, his
+hands, his poor hands!” The tears were running down my cheeks.
+
+But nobody noticed me. They were all too busy. The group had shifted a
+little. The Baxter girl was edged out of it, and I watched her for a
+moment as she sat down again, her cheeks flaming, her eyes as bright as
+wet pebbles. She looked—it’s the only word—consumptive with excitement.
+Every now and then she tried not to cough. I heard her saying—“It’s the
+fog, it’s the awful fog!” defensively. But nobody listened. They were
+all watching Anita.
+
+Anita was dreadful. She was tremulous with anger. She was like a
+pendulum with the check taken away. Her whole body shook. She couldn’t
+finish her sentences. She talked to everyone at once.
+
+Miss Howe had her by the arm. Miss Howe was trying to quiet her—
+
+“My dear woman—steady now! You don’t want a row, you know! You’ve got
+the rest of the papers.” But she might have talked to the wind.
+
+“He comes into my house—my property—in my own house——It’s an outrage!
+Kent, it’s an outrage!”
+
+Kent Rehan rose to his feet. It was like a rock breaking through that
+froth of women. He stood a moment, nervously, brushing the black from
+his hands and wincing as he did so. Then he looked up. His eyes met her.
+He flushed.
+
+“Kent! Kent!” She flung off Miss Howe.
+
+The intensity of reproach in her voice startled me, and I think it
+startled him. I found myself thinking—‘All this anger for what? for a
+burnt paper? It’s impossible! But then—then what’s the matter with her?’
+
+He said awkwardly—
+
+“I’m sorry, Anita.”
+
+“_You!_” she cried, panting—“_You_, to interfere! D’you know what you’ve
+done, what you’ve tried to do? Will you take everything, you and he?
+Haven’t I my work too? Oh, what you’ve had from her, what you’ve had
+from her! And now you cheat me!”
+
+He was bewildered. He said again—
+
+“I’m sorry, Anita.”
+
+She came close to him. Her little hands were clenched. There was a wail
+in her voice—
+
+“You! Aren’t you friends with me? Didn’t I share her with you? Isn’t she
+my work too? What would you say if I came to your house and saw your
+work, your life work that she’d made possible, your pictures that are
+her, all her—and slashed them with a knife? What would you do if I’d
+done that, if I’d cut it to ribbons, your _Spring Song_?”
+
+That moved him. I saw a sort of comprehension lighting his stubborn
+face. The artist in her touched the artist in him. Of what lay behind
+the artist he had no knowledge. But he said, quite humbly—
+
+“Anita, I’m sorry!”
+
+Yet I knew that he was not sorry for what he had done.
+
+“Sorry! Sorry! Much good your sorrow does!” she shrilled, and I saw him
+stiffen again. She was strange. She valued him, that was so plain, and
+yet, it almost seemed in self-defence, she was always at her worst with
+him. “Sorry! It was the key of the book. You’ve spoilt my book.”
+
+“Nita! Nita! One letter!” Miss Howe was almost comical in her dislike of
+the scene. “As if you couldn’t pull it off without that.” She pulled her
+aside, lowering her voice—“Nita, what’s the use of a row? Pull yourself
+together. Put yourself in his place. Besides—you can’t afford——” She
+looked at Kent significantly. Anita’s pale glance followed her and so
+their eyes met again. She was angry and sullen and irresolute. Another
+woman would have been near tears.
+
+“Kent,” she began. And then—“Kent—if we quarrel——We’re too old to
+quarrel——If you had a shadow of excuse——”
+
+He waited.
+
+She took fire again because he did not meet her half way.
+
+“But if you think you’ve stopped me——” she cried. She broke off with a
+laugh and a new idea—“As if,” she said slowly and scornfully, “as if
+Madala would have cared!”
+
+He said distinctly—
+
+“You didn’t know her. You’d never understand——”
+
+“Ah,” she said, pressing forward to him, “why do you take that tone?
+What is it I don’t understand? If you’d help me with what you know, it
+could be big stuff. I’d forgive you for the letter if you’d work with
+me.” She hung on his answer.
+
+But he only said, not looking at her, in the same tone—
+
+“You’d never understand.” And then, with an effort—“I’ll go, Anita. I’m
+going. I’d better go.”
+
+Without waiting for her answer he went across the room to the little
+sofa near me where the hats and coats lay piled. I heard him fumbling
+for his things.
+
+But Anita went back to the others. The watching group seemed to open to
+receive, to enclose her. Her head had touched the lamp as she passed
+under it, and set it swaying wildly, so that I could scarcely see their
+faces in that shift of light and shadow through the thickened air. But I
+heard her angry laugh, and her voice overtopping the murmur—“Mad! He was
+always mad! If he weren’t such an old friend——” And then the Baxter
+girl’s voice—“Think of the sketches there must be!” And Miss Howe—“What
+I say is—you don’t want to quarrel!” And hers again—“Did you hear him?
+_I_ not understand Madala! Mad, I tell you! If I don’t know Madala——”
+
+It was at that moment that I looked up and saw a woman standing in the
+doorway.
+
+“Anita!” I murmured warningly. But my voice did not reach her, and
+indeed, she and the little gesticulating group in the further room
+seemed suddenly far away. The air had been thickening for the last hour,
+and now, with the opening of the door, the fog itself came billowing in
+on either side of the newcomer as water streams past a ship. It flooded
+the room, soundlessly, almost, I remember thinking, purposefully, as if
+it would have islanded us, Kent and me. It affected me curiously. I felt
+muffled. I knew I ought to get up and call again to Anita or attend to
+the visitor myself, but the quiet seemed to dull my wits. I found myself
+placidly wondering who she was and why she did not come in; but I made
+no movement to welcome her. I just sat still and stared.
+
+She was a tall girl—woman—for either word fitted her: she had brown
+hair. She was dressed in—I should have said, if you had asked me, that I
+could remember every detail, and I can in my own mind; but when I try to
+write it down, it blurs. But I know that there was blue in her dress,
+and bright colours. It must have been some flowered stuff. She
+looked—it’s a silly phrase—but she looked like a spring day. I wanted
+her to come into the room and drive away the fog that was making me
+blink and feel dizzy. There was a gold ring on her finger: yes, and her
+hands were beautiful—strong, white hands. In one she held the brass
+candle-stick that stood in the hall, and with the other she sheltered
+the weak flame from the draught. Yet not only with her hand. Her arm was
+crooked maternally, her shoulder thrust forward, her hip raised, in a
+gesture magnificently protecting, as though the new-lit tallow-end were
+fire from heaven. Her whole body seemed sacredly involved in an act of
+guardianship. But half the glory of her pose—and it was lovely enough to
+make me catch my breath—was its unconsciousness; for her attention was
+all ours. Her eyes, as she listened to the group by the hearth, were
+sparkling with amusement and that tolerant, deep affection that one
+keeps for certain dearest, foolish friends. It was evident that she knew
+them well.
+
+“Can’t you keep that door shut, Jenny? The draught——”
+
+Anita’s back was towards me. Her voice, as she spoke over her shoulder,
+rang high, muffled, imperious, and—I laughed. In a flash the stranger’s
+eyes were on me, and I found myself thrilling where I sat, absurdly
+startled for the moment, because—she knew me too! She knew me quite
+well. She was smiling at me, not vaguely as who should say—‘Oh, surely
+I’ve seen you somewhere?’ but with intimate, disturbing knowledge. It
+was the glance that a doctor gives you, the swift, acquainted glance
+that, without offence, deciphers you. I was not offended either, only
+curious and—attracted. She looked so friendly. I half began to say—‘But
+when? but where?’ but her bearing overruled me. Her mouth was pursed
+conspiratorially: if her hand had been free she would have put a finger
+to her lip. I smiled back at her, flattered to be partner in her
+uncomprehended secret. But I was curious—oh, I was curious! It was
+incredible to me that Anita and the rest should stand, subduing their
+voices to the soft, thick stillness that she and the fog between them
+had brought into the room, and yet remain unconscious of her vivid
+presence. I was longing to see their faces when they should at last turn
+and see her, and yet, if you understand, I was afraid lest they should
+turn too soon and break the pleasant numbness that was upon me. And upon
+them—the spell was upon them too. It was the look in her eyes, not
+glamorous, but kind. It healed. It passed like a drowse across the
+squabblers at the table: it stilled Anita’s feverish monologue. Indeed
+the room had grown very still. There was no sound left in it but the
+slurring of the lamp. It rested upon Kent as he stood in dumb misery,
+and I watched the strained lines of his body slacken and grow easier
+beneath it. At that—at that ease she gave him—suddenly I loved her.
+
+And as if I had spoken, as if I had touched her with my hand, her eyes,
+that had grown heavy with his trouble, turned, brightening, upon me, as
+if I were the answer to a problem, the lifting of a care. But what the
+problem was I could not then tell; for, staring as she made me—as she
+made me—into her divining eyes, I saw in them not her thought but my own
+at last made clear to me—my dream, my hope, my will and my desire,
+newborn and naked, and, I swear it, bodiless to me before that night and
+that hour. It was too soon. I was not ready. It shamed me and I
+flinched, my glance wandering helplessly away like a dog’s when you have
+forced it to look at you. And so noticed, idly, uncomprehending at
+first, and then with a stiffening of my whole body, that her hand did
+not show as other hands, blood-red against the light she screened, but
+coldly luminous, like the fingers of a cloud through which the moon is
+shining: and that her breast was motionless, unstirred by any breath.
+
+Then I was afraid.
+
+I felt my skin rising. I felt my bones grow cold. I could not move. I
+could not breathe. I could not think.
+
+A voice came out of the fog that had thickened to a wall between the
+rooms—a voice, thin, remote, like a trunk call—
+
+“_Can’t_ you keep that door shut, Jenny? The draught——” and was cut off
+again by the sudden crash of an overturned chair. There was a rush and a
+cry—a madman’s voice, shouting, screaming, groaning—
+
+“Madala Grey! My God, Madala Grey!” and Kent’s huge body, hurling
+against the door, pitched and fell heavily.
+
+For the door was shut.
+
+I ran to him. He was shaken and half stunned, but he struggled to his
+feet. It was dreadful to see him. He was like a frightened horse,
+shivering and sweating. His lips were loose and he muttered unevenly as
+if the words came without his will. I caught them as I helped him; the
+same words—always the same words.
+
+I got him to the sofa while the rest of them crowded and clamoured, and
+then I found myself taking command. I made them keep off. I sent Anita
+for water and a towel and I bathed his forehead where he had cut it on
+the moulding of the door. Mr. Flood wanted to send for a doctor, but I
+wouldn’t have it. I knew how he would hate it. Then someone—the Baxter
+girl, I think—giggled hysterically and said something about a black eye
+tomorrow, and then—“How did it happen?” “Did you see, Miss Summer?” And
+at that they all began to clamour again like an orchestra after a solo,
+repeating in all their voices—“Yes, what happened? What on earth was it?
+Did you see him? Some sort of a seizure? I told you twice to shut that
+door. The draught——Are you better now, old man? Kent—what happened?”
+
+They were crowding round him again. He pointed a shaking finger.
+
+“She saw,” he said. “She knows——”
+
+“Jenny?” Anita turned on me sharply, an employer addressing a servant at
+fault. “Oh, of course—you were in here too. What happened then?”
+
+I had a helpless moment.
+
+“Well?” she demanded.
+
+I stared at her. It was incredible, but there was actually jealousy in
+her voice. It said, pitifully plainly—‘Again I have missed the centre of
+a situation!’
+
+“Well?” she repeated. And then—“If you saw something——” She altered the
+phrase—“Tell us what you saw.”
+
+But I had not missed the quick fear that had shown, for a moment, in
+Kent’s eyes—fear of betrayal even while his tongue was betraying him.
+
+I laughed. I thought to myself as I answered, ‘Oh, I am doing this
+beautifully!’ And I was. My voice sounded perfectly natural, not a bit
+high. I had plenty of words. I said, most jauntily—
+
+“Oh, Cousin Nita, I could hardly see my own nose. The fog had been
+simply pouring in. My fault—I didn’t latch the door properly, I suppose.
+And then you called, and Mr. Rehan went to shut it for me, and he
+slithered on the mat, and——”
+
+“I see!”
+
+“Of course! Parquet——” The Baxter girl took a step or two and pirouetted
+back to us. “Perfect! You ought to give a dance, Miss Serle.”
+
+Anita made no answer, but taking the can and the towel she opened the
+door of dispute, and, stooping an instant on the threshold to lift some
+small object from the floor, went out of the room. We heard her set down
+her load on the landing, and the rattle of the sash as she threw up the
+window, paused, and shut it again. She came back. A fresh inflow of
+acrid vapour preceded her and set us coughing. It was the stooping, I
+suppose, that had reddened her cheeks, for she was flushed when she came
+back to us. It was the only time that I ever saw my cousin with a
+colour. She spoke to us, a little gaspingly, as if the fog had caught
+her too by the throat—
+
+“Jenny’s quite right. One can’t see an inch in front of one. No—not a
+cab in hearing. You’ll have to resign yourselves to staying on
+indefinitely. What? oh, what nonsense, Kent! As if I’d let you go in
+that state! Besides, there’s Jasper’s poem. Are you going away without
+hearing it?” The soft monologue continued as she shepherded them to the
+fire. “That’s always the way—one talks—one gets no work done. Get under
+the light, Jasper! Beryl, help me to move the table. Oh yes, Jasper, I
+forgot to tell you, I met Roy Huth the other day and he had just read——”
+
+I heard a movement behind me. I turned. Kent had half risen. He spoke—
+
+“Sit down. Sit down here.” He touched the cushion beside him.
+
+I shook my head.
+
+“Not yet. My cousin——”
+
+“Ah——”
+
+We were silent.
+
+I watched Anita. She stood a few moments in unsmiling superintendence,
+while the women settled themselves and Mr. Flood sorted his papers and
+cleared his throat. Then, as I had known she would do, she returned
+soft-footed to her purpose. At the same moment I left Kent Rehan’s side.
+When she reached the archway between the two rooms, I was there.
+
+“And now——” she confronted me—“what happened?”
+
+“I told you.”
+
+She smiled.
+
+“Did you? I have forgotten. Tell me again.”
+
+“Anita—he slipped. He fell. He was shutting the door.”
+
+“Did he replace this?” She opened her little hand. The wedge of paper
+that I had twisted lay on her palm. “It was shut in the door when I
+opened it just now.” She waited a moment. Then, with a certain
+triumph—“Well?”
+
+I said nothing. What was there to say?
+
+She tossed it from her.
+
+“Don’t be silly, Jenny! What was it? _Who_ was it?” Her eyes were
+horribly intelligent.
+
+“He slipped. He fell. He was shutting the door.” I felt I could go on
+saying that for ever and ever.
+
+The red patches in her cheeks deepened. She spoke past me, rudely,
+furiously—
+
+“I intend to know. I’ve a perfect right——Kent, I intend to know.”
+
+I put out my arms carelessly, though my heart was thudding, and rested
+them against the doorposts.
+
+“He’s shaken—a heavy man like that. Better leave him alone.”
+
+“I intend to know,” she insisted. And then—“Jenny! _Jenny!_ Let me
+pass.”
+
+“No!” I said.
+
+For a second we stood opposed, and in that second I realized literally
+for the first time (so dominating had her personality been) that she was
+shorter than I. She was dwindling before my eyes. I found myself looking
+down at her with almost brutal composure. That I had ever been afraid of
+her was the marvel! For I was young, and she was elderly. I was strong,
+and she was weak. Her bare arms were like sticks, but mine were round
+and supple, and I could feel the blood tingle in them as my grip
+tightened on the woodwork. She was only Anita Serle, the well-known
+writer; but I was Jenny Summer, and Kent was needing me.
+
+“Jenny—you will be sorry!” Her eyes and her voice were one threat. Such
+eyes! Eyes whose pupils had dilated till the irids were mere threads
+that encircled jealousy itself—jealousy black and bitter—jealousy that
+had stolen upon us as the fog had done, obscuring, soiling, stifling
+friend and enemy alike—jealousy of a gift and a great name, of a dead
+woman and a living man and their year of happiness—jealousy beyond
+reason, beyond pity—jealousy insatiable, already seeking out fresh food,
+turning deliberately, vengefully, upon Kent and upon me.
+
+I felt sick. I had never dreamed that there could be such feelings in
+the world. And now she was going to Kent, to probe and lacerate and
+poison—
+
+“No!” I said.
+
+Actually she believed that she could pass me!
+
+I still held fast by the door-posts, and she did not use her hands. We
+were silent and decorous, but for an instant our bodies fought. She was
+pressed against me, panting—
+
+“_No!_” I said.
+
+Then she fell away, and without another word turned and went back into
+the other room.
+
+I saw Miss Howe whisper some question. There was an instant’s silence.
+Then her answer came—
+
+“Much better leave him alone. Yes—rather shaken—a heavy man like that.”
+
+It was defeat. She was using my very words, because, for all her
+fluency, she had none with which to cover it.
+
+I was sorry. I felt a brute. But what else could I have done? I stood a
+moment watching her recover herself. Then I went back to Kent.
+
+He did not look up, but he moved a little to give me room. I sat down
+beside him. We were shut away between the wall and the window, in the
+shadow, out of sight of the others. It was very peaceful. Now and then I
+looked at Kent, but he was staring before him. He had forgotten all
+about me again, I knew. But I was content. It made me happy to be
+sitting by him. My thoughts hopped about like birds after crumbs. I
+remember wondering what I should do on the morrow—where I should go?
+That Anita would have me in the house another twenty-four hours was not
+likely. I had ten pounds. I did not care. I knew that I ought to be
+anxious, but I could not realize the need. I could not think of anything
+but him; yet I was afraid to speak to him. He sat so still. His face was
+set in schooled and heavy lines. There came a stir and a clash of voices
+from the other room, but he did not seem to hear it. It was only the end
+of a poem. In a little it had settled down again into the same
+monotonous hum, but for a moment I had thought that it was the break-up,
+and after that I had no peace. It had scared me. It made me realize that
+I had only a few minutes—half an hour at most—and that then he would be
+going away—and when should I see him again? Never—maybe never! He had
+his life all arranged. He didn’t even know my name. I felt desperate. I
+couldn’t let him go. I didn’t know what to do. I only knew that—that I
+couldn’t bear it if he went away from me.
+
+It was then that he moved and straightened himself in his chair with a
+sigh, that heavy, long-drawn sigh that men give when they make an end.
+‘Work or play, joy or grief, it’s done with. And now——?’ Such a sigh as
+you never hear from women. But then we are not wise at ending things.
+
+I thought that he was getting up, that he was going then and there, and
+instinctively I hurried into speech, daring anything—everything—his own
+thoughts of me—rather than let him go.
+
+“Yes—that’s over!” I translated softly.
+
+He turned with such a stare that I could have smiled.
+
+“I meant that. How did you know?”
+
+“Why shouldn’t I know?” I did smile then. It made him smile back at me,
+but doubtfully, unwillingly.
+
+“Can you read thoughts—too?” The last word seemed to come out in spite
+of himself.
+
+“Not always. Yours I can.” My face was burning. But I could have spared
+myself the shame that made it burn, for he did not understand. My voice
+said nothing to him. My face showed him nothing. He was thinking about
+himself. But he leant forward in that way he has—a dear way—of liking to
+talk to you.
+
+“Can you? I never can. Only when I paint. I can put them into paint, of
+course. But not words. _She_ said——” and all through the subsequent talk
+he avoided the name—“she said it was laziness, a lazy mind. But I always
+told her that that was her fault. I—we—her people—were just wool: she
+knitted us into our patterns. She was a wonder. You know, she—she was
+good for one. She was like bread—bread and wine——” His voice strained
+and flagged.
+
+I nodded.
+
+“Yes. I felt that too.”
+
+He glanced sideways at me.
+
+“Ah, then you knew her?” His voice (or I imagined it) had chilled. It
+began to say, that faint chill, that if I too were of ‘the set,’ he
+could not be at ease. But I would not give him time to think awry.
+
+“No, no! Only tonight. But I do know her.”
+
+“Tonight?”
+
+“Tonight,” I said and looked at him.
+
+“Then——” his hand tightened on the chair, “you saw? I was right? You
+_did_ see?”
+
+“I saw—something,” I admitted.
+
+“Some one?”
+
+I nodded.
+
+His face lighted up. He pulled in his chair to me.
+
+“Her hands—did you notice her hands? I have a drawing of them somewhere.
+I’ll show it to you——” He stopped short: Then—“What is your name?” he
+asked me.
+
+“Jenny. Jenny Summer.”
+
+He considered that fact for a moment and put it aside again.
+
+“I’d like you to see it. Anita will want it for that damned scrap-book
+of hers. She’ll be worrying at me—they all will.”
+
+“You won’t let it go?” I said quickly.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“No. But they can’t understand why. They can’t understand anything. They
+thought I was mad just now. So I was, for that matter. To see her again,
+you know—to see her again——”
+
+“I know,” I said.
+
+He laughed nervously.
+
+“Hallucination, of course. Thought transference. What you please. They’d
+say so. Do you think so? And I’d been thinking of my picture of her. Oh,
+I admit it. So we must look at the matter in the light of common-sense.”
+
+“But I saw her too.”
+
+His eyes softened, and his voice.
+
+“Yes. You were there. That’s comfort. You saw her too—standing there
+with her dear hands full of cowslips——”
+
+“A torch,” I said.
+
+“Cowslips——” he checked on the word. “_What?_”
+
+“She was carrying a candle,” I insisted. “It had just been lighted. She
+was holding it so carefully.”
+
+We stared at each other.
+
+“You’re sure?”
+
+“Sure.”
+
+He fell back wearily in his chair.
+
+“What’s the good of talking? She’s dead. That’s the end of it. I was
+dreaming. Of course. But when you said that you saw, for a moment I
+believed——What does it matter? What does it matter anyway? But her hands
+were full of cowslips.”
+
+I turned to him eagerly. I knew what to say. It was as if the words were
+being whispered to me.
+
+“That was your Madala Grey. But mine—how could she be the same? Oh,
+can’t you see? We’ve never seen the real Madala Grey. She gave—she
+became—to each of us—what we wanted most. She wrote down our dreams. She
+_was_ our dreams. Can’t you see what she meant to my cousin? Anita toils
+and slaves for her little bit of greatness. But _she_ was born royal.
+That’s why Anita hates her so—hates her and worships her. Why, she’s
+been a sort of star to you all—a symbol—a legend—
+
+“But the real Madala Grey—she wasn’t like that. She was just a girl. She
+was hungry all the time. She was wanting her human life. And he, the man
+they laugh at, ‘the thing she married,’ he did love that real Madala
+Grey. Why, he didn’t even know of the legend. Don’t you see that that
+was what she wanted? She could take from him as well as give. Life—the
+bread and wine—they shared it. Oh, and it’s him I pity now, not you. Not
+you,” I said again, while my heart ached over him. “You—can’t you see
+what she showed you? Not herself——”
+
+“What then?” he said harshly.
+
+I made the supreme effort.
+
+“But what—a woman—one day—would be to you.”
+
+I thought the silence would never break.
+
+The strange courage that had been in me was suddenly gone. I felt weak
+and friendless. I wanted to cry. I waited and waited till I could bear
+it no longer. Then I lifted my eyes desperately, with little hope, to
+read in his face what the end should be.
+
+I found him looking at me fixedly—_at_ me, you understand, not through
+me to a subject that absorbed him, but at me myself. It was as if he
+were seeing me for the first time. No—as if he recognized me at last.
+
+Then the doubts went, and the shame and the loneliness. It made me so
+utterly happy, that look on his face. I felt my heart beating fast.
+
+He said then, slowly—I can remember the words, the tone and pitch of his
+voice, the very shaping of his mouth as he said it—
+
+“Do you know—it’s strange—you remind me of her. You are very like her.
+You are very like Madala Grey.”
+
+The hunger in his voice hurt me. I wanted to put my arms round him and
+comfort him. I might have done it, for I knew I was still but half real
+to him. But I sat still—only, with such a sense in my heart of a trust
+laid upon me, of an inheritance, of a widening and golden future, I said
+to him—
+
+“Yes. I know.”
+
+
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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+------------------------------------------------------------------------
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+ ● Transcriber’s Notes:
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+    ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
+
+    ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
+      when a predominant form was found in this book.
+
+    ○ The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in
+      the public domain.
+
+
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