As it happened, sooner than anybody expected Miss Quincey did get well.
Mrs. Moon was the first to notice that. She hailed Juliana's recovery as
a sign of grace, of returning allegiance to the memory of Tollington
Moon.

"Now," said the Old Lady, "I hope we've seen the last of Dr. Cautley."

"Of course we have," said Miss Quincey. She said it irritably, but
everybody knows that a little temper is the surest symptom of returning
health. "What should he come for?"

"To run up his little bill, my dear. You don't imagine he comes for the
pleasure of seeing _you_?"

"I never imagine anything," said the little arithmetic teacher with some
truth.

But they had by no means seen the last of him. If the Old Lady's theory
was correct, Cautley must have been the most grossly avaricious of young
men. The length of his visits was infamous, their frequency appalling. He
kept on coming long after Miss Quincey was officially and obviously well;
and on the most trivial, the most ridiculous pretexts. It was "just to
see how she was getting on," or "because he happened to be passing," or
"to bring that book he told her about." He had prescribed a course of
light literature for Miss Quincey and seemed to think it necessary to
supply his own drugs. To be sure he brought a great many medicines that
you cannot get made up at the chemist's, insight, understanding,
sympathy, the tonic of his own virile youth; and Heaven only knows if
these things were not the most expensive.

All the time Miss Quincey was trying to keep up with the new standard
imposed on the staff. Hitherto she had laboured under obvious
disadvantages; now, in her leisurely convalescence, sated as she was with
time, she wallowed openly and wantonly in General Culture. And it seemed
that the doctor had gone in for General Culture too. He could talk to her
for ever about Shakespeare, Tennyson and Browning. Miss Quincey was
always dipping into those poets now, always drawing water from the wells
of literature. By the way, she was head over heels in debt to _Sordello_,
and was working double time to pay him off. She reported her progress
with glee. It was "only a hundred and thirty-eight more pages, Dr.
Cautley. In forty-six days I shall have finished _Sordello_."

"Then you will have done what I never did in my whole life."

It amused Cautley to talk to Miss Quincey. She wore such an air of
adventure; she was so fresh and innocent in her excursions into the
realms of gold; and when she sat handling her little bits of Tennyson
and Browning as if they had been rare nuggets recently dug up there, what
could he do but feign astonishment and interest? He had travelled
extensively in the realms of gold. He was acquainted with all the poets
and intimate with most; he knew some of them so well as to be able to
make jokes at their expense. He was at home in their society. Beside his
light-hearted intimacy Miss Cursiter's academic manner showed like the
punctilious advances of an outsider. But he was terribly modern this
young man. He served strange gods, healers and regenerators whose names
had never penetrated to St. Sidwell's. Some days he was really dreadful;
he shook his head over the _Idylls of the King_, made no secret of his
unbelief in _The Princess_, and shamelessly declared that a great deal of
_In Memoriam_ would go where Mendelssohn and the old crinolines have
gone.

Then something very much worse than that happened; Miss Quincey gave him
a copy of the "Address to the Students and Teachers of St. Sidwell's,"
and it made him laugh. She pointed out the bit about the healers and
regenerators, and refreshing yourself at the wells of literature. "That
is a beautiful passage," said Miss Quincey.

He laughed more than ever.

"Oh yes, beautiful, beautiful. They're to do it in their evenings, are
they? And when they're faint and weary with their day's work?" And he
laughed again quite loud, laughed till Mrs. Moon woke out of a doze and
started as if this world had come to an end and another one had begun. He
was very sorry, and he begged a thousand pardons; but, really, that
passage was unspeakably funny. He didn't know that Miss Cursiter had such
a rich vein of humour in her. For the life of her Miss Quincey could not
see what there was to laugh at, nor why she should be teased about
Tennyson and bantered on the subject of Browning; but she enjoyed it all
the same. He was so young; he was like a big schoolboy throwing stones
into the living wells of literature and watching for the splash; it did
her good to look at him. So she looked, smiling her starved smile and
snatching a fearful joy from his profane conversation.

There were moments when she asked herself how he came to be there at all;
he was so out-of-place somehow. The Moons and Quinceys denounced him as a
stranger and intruder; the very chairs and tables had memories,
associations that rejected him; everything in the room suggested the same
mystic antagonism; it was as if Mrs. Moon and all her household gods were
in league against him. Oddly enough this attitude of theirs heightened
her sense of intimacy with him, made him hers and no one else's for the
time. The pleasure she took in his society had some of the peculiar
private ecstasy of sin.

And Mrs. Moon wondered what the young man was going to charge for that
little visit; and what the total of his account would be. She said that
if Juliana didn't give him a hint, she would be obliged to speak to him
herself; and at that Juliana looked frightened and begged that Mrs. Moon
would do nothing of the kind. "There will be no charge for friendly
visits," said she; and she made a rapid calculation in the top of her
head. Nineteen visits at, say, seven-and-six a visit, would come to
exactly nine pounds nine and sixpence. And she smiled; possibly she
thought it was worth it.

And really those friendly visits had sometimes an ambiguous character; he
dragged his profession into them by the head and shoulders. He had left
off scribbling prescriptions, but he would tell her what to take in a
light and literary way, as if it was just part of their very interesting
conversation. Browning was bitter and bracing, he was like iron and
quinine, and by the way she had better take a little of both. Then when
he met her again he would ask, "Have you been taking any more Browning,
Miss Quincey?" and while Miss Quincey owned with a blush that she had, he
would look at her and say she wanted a change--a little Tennyson and a
lighter tonic; strychnine and arsenic was the thing.

And Mrs. Moon still wondered. "I never saw anything like the indelicacy
of that young man," said she. "You're running up a pretty long bill, I
can tell you."

Oh, yes, a long, long bill; for we pay heavily for our pleasures in this
sad world, Juliana!




CHAPTER VI

Spring Fashions


Winter had come and gone, and spring found Miss Quincey back again at St.
Sidwell's, the place of illumination; a place that knew rather less of
her than it had known before. After five-and-twenty years of constant
attendance she had only to be away three months to be forgotten. The new
staff was not greatly concerned with Miss Quincey; it was always busy. As
for the girls, they were wholly given over to the new worship of Rhoda
Vivian; impossible to rouse them to the faintest interest in Miss
Quincey.

Her place had been kept for her by Rhoda. Rhoda had put out the strong
young arm that she was so proud of, and held back for a little while Miss
Quincey's fate; and now at all costs she was determined to stand between
her and the truth. So Miss Quincey never knew that it was Rhoda who was
responsible for the delicate attentions she had received during her
illness; Rhoda who had bought and sent off the presents from St.
Sidwell's; Rhoda who had conceived that pretty little idea of flowers
"with love"; and Rhoda who had inspired the affectionate messages of the
staff. (The Classical Mistress had to draw most extravagantly on her
popularity in order to work that fraud.) Rhoda had taken her place, and
it was not in Rhoda's power to give it back to her. But Miss Quincey
never saw it; for a subtler web than that of Rhoda's spinning was woven
about her eyes.

Possibly in some impressive and inapparent way her unhappy little
favourite Laura Lazarus may have been glad to see her back again, though
the two queer creatures exchanged no greeting more intimate than an
embarrassed smile. In this rapidly-advancing world the Mad Hatter alone
remained where Miss Quincey had left her. She explained at some length
how the figures twisted themselves round in her head and would never stay
the same for a minute together. Miss Quincey listened patiently to this
explanation; she was more indulgent, less persistent than before.

Under that veil of illusion she herself had become communicative. She
went up and down between the classes and poured out her soul as to an
audience all interest, all sympathy. There was a certain monotony about
her conversation since the epoch of her illness. It was, "Oh yes, I am
quite well now, thank you. Dr. Cautley is so very clever. Dr. Cautley has
taken splendid care of me. Dr. Cautley has been so very kind and
attentive, I think it would be ungrateful of me if I had not got well.
Dr. Cautley--" Perhaps it was just as well for Miss Quincey that the
staff were too busy to attend to her. The most they noticed was that in
the matter of obstruction Miss Quincey was not quite so precipitate as
she had been. She offended less by violent contact and rebound than by
drifting absently into the processions and getting mixed up with them.

Rhoda saw a change in her; Rhoda was never too busy to spare a thought
for Miss Quincey. "Yes," she said, "you _are_ better. Your eyes are
brighter."

"That," said Miss Quincey, with simple pride "is the arsenic. Dr. Cautley
is giving me arsenic."

Now arsenic (like happiness) has some curious properties. It looks most
innocently like sugar, which it is not. A little of it goes a long way
and undoubtedly acts as a tonic; a little more may undermine the stoutest
constitution, and a little too much of it is a deadly poison and kills
you. As yet Miss Quincey had only taken it in microscopic doses.
Something had changed her; it may have been happiness, it may have been
illusion; whatever it was Miss Quincey thought it was the arsenic--if it
was not the weather, the very remarkable weather. For that year Spring
came with a burst.

Indeed there is seldom anything shy and tentative, anything obscure and
gradual about the approaches of the London Spring. Spring is always in a
hurry there, for she knows that she has but a short time before her; she
has to make an impression and make it at once; so she works careless of
delicacies and shades, relying on broad telling strokes, on strong
outlines and stinging contrasts. She is like a clever artist handicapped
with her materials. Only a patch of grass, a few trees and the sky; but
you wake one morning and the boughs are drawn black and bold against the
blue; and leaves are sharp as emeralds against the black; and the grass
in the squares and the shrubs in the gardens repeat the same brilliant
extravaganza; and it is all very eccentric and beautiful and daring. That
is the way of a Cockney Spring, and when you are used to it the charm is
undeniable.

One day Miss Quincey walked in Camden Town and noted the singular
caprices of the Spring. Strange longings, freaks of the blood and brain,
stirred within her at this bursting of the leaf. They led her into Camden
Road, into the High Street, to the great shops where the virginal young
fashions and the artificial flowers are. At this season Hunter's window
blooms out in blouses of every imaginable colour and texture and form.
There was one, a silk one, of so discreet and modest a mauve that you
could have called it lavender. To say that it caught Miss Quincey's eye
would be to wrong that maidenly garment. There was nothing blatant,
nothing importunate in its behaviour. Gently, imperceptibly, it stole
into the field of vision and stood there, delicately alluring. It could
afford to wait. It had not even any pattern to speak of, only an
indefinable white something, a dice, a diaper, a sprig. It was the sprig
that touched her, tempted her.

Amongst the poorer ranks of Miss Quincey's profession the sumptuary laws
are exceptionally severe. It is a crime, a treachery, to spend money on
mere personal adornment. You are clothed, not for beauty's sake, but
because the rigour of the climate and of custom equally require it. Miss
Quincey's conscience pricked her all the time that she stood looking in
at Hunter's window. Never before had she suffered so terrible a
solicitation of the senses. It was as if all those dim and germinal
desires had burst and blossomed in this sinful passion for a blouse. She
resisted, faltered, resisted; turned away and turned back again. The
blouse sat immovable on its wooden bust, absolute in its policy of
reticence. Miss Quincey had just decided that it had a thought too much
mauve in it, and was most successfully routing desire by depreciation of
its object when a shopman stepped on to the stage, treading airily among
the gauzes and the flowers. There was no artifice about the young man; it
was in the dreamiest abstraction that he clasped that fair form round the
collar and turned it to the light. It shuddered like a living thing; its
violent mauve vanished in silver grey. The effect was irresistible. Miss
Quincey was tempted beyond all endurance; and she fell. Once in
possession of the blouse, its price, a guinea, paid over the counter,
Miss Quincey was all discretion. She carried her treasure home in a
pasteboard box concealed under her cape; lest its shameless arrival in
Hunter's van should excite scandal and remark.

That night, behind a locked door, Miss Quincey sat up wrestling and
battling with her blouse. To Miss Quincey in the watches of the night it
seemed that a spirit of obstinate malevolence lurked in that deceitful
garment. Like all the things in Hunter's shop, it was designed for
conventional well-rounded womanhood. It repudiated the very idea of Miss
Quincey; in every fold it expressed its contempt for her person; its
collar was stiff with an invincible repugnance. Miss Quincey had to take
it in where it went out, and let it out where it went in, to pinch, pull,
humour and propitiate it before it would consent to cling to her
diminished figure. When all was done she wrapped it in tissue paper and
hid it away in a drawer out of sight, for the very thought of it
frightened her. But when next she went to look at it she hardly knew it
again. The malignity seemed all smoothed out of it; it lay there with its
meek sleeves folded, the very picture of injured innocence and reproach.
Miss Quincey thought she might get reconciled to it in time. A day might
even come when she would be brave enough to wear it.

Not many days after, Miss Quincey might have been seen coming out of St.
Sidwell's with a reserved and secret smile playing about her face; so
secret and so reserved, that nobody, not even Miss Quincey, could tell
what it was playing at.

Miss Quincey was meditating an audacity.

That night she took pen and paper up to her bedroom and sat down to write
a little note. Sat down to write it and got up again; wrote it and tore
it up, and sat down to write another. This she left open for such
emendations and improvements as should occur to her in the night. Perhaps
none did occur; perhaps she realized that a literary work loses its force
and spontaneity in conscious elaboration; anyhow the note was put up just
as it was and posted first thing in the morning at the pillar-box on her
way to St. Sidwell's.

Old Martha was cleaning the steps as Miss Quincey went out; but Miss
Quincey carefully avoided looking Martha's way. Like the ostrich she
supposed that if she did not see Martha, Martha could not see her. But
Martha had seen her. She saw everything. She had seen the note open on
Miss Juliana's table by the window in the bedroom when she was drawing up
the blind; she had seen the silk blouse lying in its tissue paper when
she was tidying Miss Juliana's drawer; and that very afternoon she
discovered a certain cake deposited by Miss Juliana in the dining-room
cupboard with every circumstance of secrecy and disguise.

And Martha shook her old head and put that and that together, the blouse,
the cake and the letter; though what connection there could possibly be
between the three was more than Miss Juliana could have told her. Even to
Martha the association was so singular that it pointed to some painful
aberration of intellect on Miss Juliana's part.

As in duty bound, Martha brought up her latest discovery and laid it
before Mrs. Moon. Beyond that she said nothing, indeed there was nothing
to be said. The cake (it was of the expensive pound variety, crowned with
a sugar turret and surrounded with almond fortifications) spoke for
itself, though in an unknown language.

"What does that mean, Martha?"

"Miss Juliana, m'm, I suppose."

Martha pursed up her lips, suppressing the impertinence of her own
private opinion and awaiting her mistress's with respect.

No doubt she would have heard it but that Miss Juliana happened to come
in at that moment, and Mrs. Moon's attention was distracted by the really
amazing spectacle presented by her niece. And Miss Juliana, who for
five-and-twenty years had never appeared in anything but frowsy drab or
dingy grey, Miss Juliana flaunting in silk at four o'clock in the
afternoon, Miss Juliana, all shining and shimmering like a silver and
mauve chameleon, was a sight to take anybody's breath away. Martha dearly
loved a scene, for to be admitted to a scene was to be admitted to her
mistress's confidence; but the excellent woman knew her place, and before
that flagrant apparition she withdrew as she would have withdrawn from a
family scandal.

Miss Quincey advanced timidly, for of course she knew that she had to
cross that room under fire of criticism; but on the whole she was less
abject than she might have been, for at the moment she was thinking of
Dr. Cautley. He had actually accepted her kind invitation, and that fact
explained and justified her; besides, she carried her Browning in her
hand, and it made her feel decidedly more natural.

Mrs. Moon restrained her feelings until her niece had moved about a bit,
and sat down by her enemy the cabinet, and presented herself in every
possible aspect. The Old Lady's eyes lost no movement of the curious
figure; when she had taken it in, grasped it in all its details, she
began.

"Well, I declare, Juliana"--(five-and-twenty years ago she used to call
her "Jooley," keeping the full name to mark disapproval or displeasure.
Now it was always Juliana, so that Mrs. Moon seemed to be permanently
displeased)--"whatever possessed you to make such an exhibition of
yourself? (And will you draw your chair back--you're incommoding the
cabinet.) I never saw anything so unsuitable and unbecoming in _my_
life--at this hour of the day too. Why, you're just like a whirligig out
of a pantomime. If you think you can carry off that kind of thing you're
very much mistaken."

That did seem to be Miss Quincey's idea--to carry it off; to brazen it
out; to sit down and read Browning as if there was nothing at all
remarkable in her personal appearance.

"And to choose lilac of all things in the world! You never could stand
that shade at the best of times. Lilac! Why, I declare if it isn't
mauve-pink."

"Mauve-pink!" She had given voice to the fear that lay hidden in Miss
Quincey's heart. A sensitive culprit caught in humiliating guilt could
not look more cowed with self-consciousness than Miss Quincey at that
word. Criminal and crime, Miss Quincey and her blouse, seemed linked in
an awful bond of mutual abhorrence. The blouse shivered as Miss Quincey
trembled in nervous agitation; as she went red and yellow by turns it
paled and flushed its painful pink. They were blushing for each other.
For it _was_ mauve-pink; she could see that well enough now.

"Turn round!"

Miss Quincey turned round.

"Much too young for you! Why, bless me, if it doesn't throw up every bit
of yellow in your face! If you don't believe me, look in the glass."

Miss Quincey looked in the glass.

It _did_ throw up the yellow tints. It threw everything up to her. If she
had owned to a little fear of it before, it affected her now with
positive terror. The thing was young, much too young; and it was brutal
and violent in its youth. It was possessed by a perfect demon of
juvenility; it clashed and fought with every object in the room; it made
them all look old, ever so old, and shabby. And as Miss Quincey stood
with it before the looking glass, it flared up and told her to her face
that she was forty-five--forty-five, and looked fifty.

"Louisa," murmured the Old Lady, "was the only one of our family who
could stand pink."

"I will give it to Louisa," cried Miss Quincey with a touch of passion.

"Tchee--tchee!" At that idea the Old Lady chuckled in supreme derision.
"Capers and nonsense! Louisa indeed! Much good it'll do Louisa when
you've been and nipped all the shape out of it to suit yourself. However
you came to be so skimpy and flat-chested is a mystery to me. All the
Quinceys were tall, your uncle Tollington was tall, your father, he was
tall; and your sister, well; I will say this for Louisa, she's as tall as
any of 'em, and she has a _bust_."

"Yes, I daresay it would have been very becoming to Louisa," said Miss
Quincey humbly. "I--I thought it was lavender."

"Lavender or no lavender, I'm surprised at you--throwing money away on a
thing like that."

"I can afford it," said Miss Quincey with the pathetic dignity of the
turning worm.

Now it was not worm-like subtlety that suggested that reply. It was
positive inspiration. By those simple words Juliana had done something to
remove the slur she was always casting on a certain character. Tollington
Moon had not managed his nieces' affairs so badly after all if one of
them could afford herself extravagances of that sort. The blouse
therefore might be taken as a sign and symbol of his innermost integrity.
So Mrs. Moon was content with but one more parting shot.

"I don't say you can't afford the money, I say you can't afford the
colour--not at your time of life."

Two tears that had gathered in Miss Quincey's eyes now fell on the silk,
deepening the mauve-pink to a hideous magenta.

"I was deceived in the colour," she said as she turned from her
tormentor.

She toiled upstairs to the back bedroom and took it off. She could never
wear it. It was waste--sheer waste; for no other woman could wear it
either; certainly not Louisa; she had made it useless for Louisa by
paring it down to her own ridiculous dimensions. Louisa was and always
had been a head and shoulders taller than she was; and she had a bust.

So Miss Quincey came down meek and meagre in the old dress that she
served her for so many seasons, and she looked for peace. But that
terrible old lady had not done with her yet, and the worst was still to
come.

No longer having any grievance against the blouse, Mrs. Moon was
concentrating her attention on that more mysterious witness to Juliana's
foolishness--the Cake.

"And now," said she, pointing as she might have pointed to a monument,
"will you kindly tell me the meaning of this?"

"I expect--perhaps--it is very likely--that Dr. Cautley will come in to
tea this afternoon."

The Old Lady peered at Miss Quincey and her eyes were sharp as needles,
needles that carried the thread of her thought pretty plainly too, but it
was too fine a thread for Miss Quincey to see. Besides she was looking
at the cake and almost regretting that she had bought it, lest he should
think that it was eating too many of such things that had made her ill.

"And what put that notion into your head, I should like to know?"

"He has written to say so."

"Juliana--you don't mean to tell me that he invited himself?"

"Well, no. That is--it was an answer to my invitation."

"_Your_ invitation? You were not content to have that man poking his nose
in here at all hours of the day and night, but you must go out of your
way to send him invitations?"

"Dr. Cautley has been most kind and attentive, and--I thought--it was
time we paid him some little attention."

"Attention indeed! I should be very sorry to let any young man suppose
that I paid any attention to him. I should have thought you'd have had a
little more maidenly reserve. Besides, you know perfectly well that I
don't enjoy my tea unless we have it by ourselves."

Oh yes, she knew; they had been having it that way for five-and-twenty
years.

"As for that cake," continued the Old Lady, "it's ridiculous. Look at it.
Why, you might just as well have ordered wedding cake at once. I tell you
what it is, Juliana, you're getting quite flighty."

Flighty? No mind but a feminine one, grown up and trained under the
shadow of St. Sidwell's, could conceive the nature of Miss Quincey's
feelings on being told that she was flighty. She herself made no attempt
to express them. She sat down and gasped, clutching her Browning to give
herself a sense of moral support. All the rest was intelligible, she had
understood and accepted it; but to be told that she, a teacher in St.
Sidwell's, was flighty--the charge was simply confusing to the intellect,
and it left her dumb.

Flighty? When Martha came in with the tea-tray and she had to order a
knife for the cake and an extra cup for Dr. Cautley, she saw Mrs. Moon
looking at Martha, and Martha looking at Mrs. Moon, and they seemed to be
saying to each other, "How flighty Miss Juliana is getting."

Flighty? The idea afflicted her to such a degree that when Dr. Cautley
came she had not a word to say to him.

For a whole week she had looked forward to this tea-drinking with tremors
of joyous expectancy and palpitations of alarm. It was to have been one
of those rare and solitary occasions that can only come once in a blue
moon. The lump sum of pleasure that other people get spread for them more
or less thickly over the surface of the years, she meant to take once for
all, packed and pressed into one rapturous hour, one Saturday afternoon
from four-thirty to five-thirty, the memory of it to be stored up and
economised so as to last her life-time, thus justifying the original
expense. She knew that success was doubtful, because of the uncertainty
of things in general and of the Old Lady's temper in particular. And then
she had to stake everything on his coming; and the chances, allowing for
the inevitable claims on a doctor's time, were a thousand to one against
it. She had nothing to go upon but the delicate incalculable balance of
events. And now, when the blue moon had risen, the impossible thing
happened, and the man had come, he might just as well, in fact a great
deal better, have stayed away. The whole thing was a waste and failure
from beginning to end. The tea was a waste and a failure, for Martha
would bring it in a quarter of an hour too soon; the cake was a waste
and a failure, for nobody ate any of it; and she was a waste and a
failure--she hardly knew why. She cut her cake with trembling fingers and
offered it, blushing as the gash in its side revealed the thoroughly
unwholesome nature of its interior. She felt ashamed of its sugary
artifice, its treacherously festive air, and its embarrassing affinity to
bride's-cake. No wonder that he had no appetite for cake, and that Miss
Quincey had no appetite for conversation. He tried to tempt her with bits
of Browning, but she refused them all. She had lost her interest in
Browning.

He thought, "She is too tired to talk," and left half an hour sooner than
he had intended.

She thought, "He is offended. Or else--he thinks me flighty."

And that was all.




CHAPTER VII

Under a Blue Moon


It was early on another Saturday evening, a fortnight after that
disastrous one, and Miss Quincey was taking the air in Primrose Hill
Park. She was walking to keep herself warm, for the breeze was brisk and
cool. There was a little stir and flutter in the trees and a little stir
and flutter in her heart, for she had caught sight of Dr. Cautley in the
distance. He was coming round the corner of one of the intersecting
walks, coming at a frantic pace, with the tails of his frock-coat waving
in the wind.

He pulled himself up as he neared her and held out a friendly hand.

"That's right, Miss Quincey. I'm delighted to see you out. You really are
getting strong again, aren't you?"

"Yes, thank you--very well, very strong."

Was it her fancy, or did his manner imply that he wanted to sink that
humiliating episode of the tea-party and begin again where they had left
off? It might be so; his courtesy was so infinitely subtle. He had
actually turned and was walking her way now.

"And how is _Sordello?_" he asked, the tone of his inquiry suggesting
that there was something seriously the matter with _Sordello_.

"Getting on. Only fifty-six pages more."

"You _are_ advancing, Miss Quincey--gaining on him by leaps and bounds.
You're not overdoing it, I hope?"

"Oh no, I read a little in the evenings--I have to keep up to the
standard of the staff. Indeed," she added, turning with a sudden suicidal
panic, "I ought to be at home and working now."

"What? On a half-holiday? It _is_ a half-holiday?"

"For some people--not for me."

His eyes--she could not be mistaken--were taking her in as they had done
before.

"And why not for you? Do you know, you're looking horribly tired. Suppose
we sit down a bit."

Miss Quincey admitted that it would be very nice.

"Hadn't you better put your cape on--the wind's changing."

She obeyed him.

"That's hardly a thick enough wrap for this weather, is it?"

She assured him it was very warm, very comfortable.

"Do you know what I would like to do with you, Miss Quincey?"

"No."

"I should like to pack you off somewhere--anywhere--for another three
months' holiday."

"Another three months! What would my pupils do, and what would Miss
Cursiter say?"

It was part of the illusion that she conceived herself to be
indispensable to Miss Cursiter.

"Confound Miss Cursiter!"

Evidently he felt strongly on the subject of Miss Cursiter. He confounded
her with such energy that the seat provided for them by the London County
Council vibrated under it. He stared sulkily out over the park a moment;
he gave his cuffs a hitch as if he were going to fight somebody, and
then--he let himself go.

At a blind headlong pace, lashing himself up as he went, falling
furiously on civilization, the social order, women's education and
women's labour, the system that threw open all doors to them, and let
them be squeezed and trampled down together in the crush. He was ready to
take the nineteenth century by the throat and strangle it; he squared
himself against the universe.

"What," said Miss Quincey, "do you not believe in equal chances for men
and women?" She was eager to redeem herself from the charge of
flightiness.

"Equal chances? I daresay. But not unequal work. The work must be unequal
if the conditions are unequal. It's not the same machine. To turn a woman
on to a man's work is like trying to run an express train by clock-work,
with a pendulum for a piston, and a hairspring for steam."

Miss Quincey timidly hinted that the question was a large one, that there
was another side to it.

"Of course there is; there are fifty sides to it; but there are too many
people looking at the other forty-nine for my taste. I loathe a crowd."

Stirred by a faint _esprit de corps_ Miss Quincey asked him if he did not
believe in the open door for women?

He said, "It would be kinder to shut it in their faces."

She threw in a word about the women's labour market--the enormous demand.

He said that only meant that women's labour could be bought cheap and
sold dear.

She sighed.

"But women must do something--surely you see the necessity?"

He groaned.

"Oh yes. It's just the necessity that I do see--the damnable necessity. I
only protest against the preventable evil. If you must turn women into so
many machines, for Heaven's sake treat them like machines. You don't work
an engine when it's undergoing structural alterations--because, you know,
you can't. Your precious system recognises no differences. It sets up the
same absurd standard for every woman, the brilliant genius and the
average imbecile. Which is not only morally odious but physiologically
fatuous. There must be one of two results--either the average imbeciles
are sacrificed by thousands to a dozen or so of brilliant geniuses, or
it's the other way about."

"Whichever way it is," said Miss Quincey, with her back, so to speak, to
the wall, "it's all part of civilization, of our intellectual progress."

"They're not the same thing. And it isn't civilization, it's intellectual
savagery. It isn't progress either, it's a blind rush, an inhuman
scrimmage--the very worst form of the struggle for existence. It doesn't
even mean survival of the intellectually fittest. It develops
monstrosities. It defeats its own ends by brutalising the intellect
itself. And the worst enemies of women are women. I swear, if I were a
woman, I'd rather do without an education than get it at that price. Or
I'd educate myself. After all, that's the way of the fittest--the one in
a thousand."

"Do you not approve of educated women then?" Miss Quincey was quite
shaken by this cataclysmal outbreak, this overturning and shattering of
the old beacons and landmarks.

He stared into the distance.

"Oh yes, I approve of them when they are really educated--not when
they are like that. You won't get the flower of womanhood out of a
forcing-house like St. Sidwell's; though I daresay it produces pumpkins
to perfection."

What did he say to Miss Vivian then? Miss Quincey could not think badly
of a system that could produce women like Miss Vivian.

A cloud came over his angry eyes as they stared into the distance.

"That's it. It hasn't produced them. They have produced it."

Miss Quincey smiled. Evidently consistency was not to be expected of this
young man. He was so young, and so irresponsible and passionate. She
admired him for it; and not only for that; she admired him--she could not
say exactly why, but she thought it was because he had such a beautiful,
bumpy, intellectual forehead. And as she sat beside him and shook to that
vibrating passion of his, she felt as if the blue moon had risen again
and was shining through the trees of the park; and she was happy,
absolutely, indubitably happy and safe; for she felt that he was her
friend and her protector and the defender of her cause. It was for her
that he raged and maddened and behaved himself altogether so
unreasonably.

Now as it happened, Cautley did champion certain theories which Miss
Cursiter, when she met them, denounced as physiologist's fads. But it was
not they, nor yet Miss Quincey, that accounted for his display of
feeling. He was angry because he wanted to come to a certain
understanding with the Classical Mistress; to come to it at once; and the
system kept him waiting. It was robbing him of Rhoda, and Rhoda of her
youth. Meanwhile Rhoda was superbly happy at St. Sidwell's, playing at
being Pallas Athene; as for checking her midway in her brilliant career,
that was not to be thought of for an instant.

The flower of womanhood--it was the flower of life. He had never seen a
woman so invincibly and superlatively alive. Cautley deified life; and in
his creed, which was simplicity itself, life and health were one; health
the sole source of strength, intelligence and beauty, of all divine and
perfect possibilities. At least that was how he began. But three years'
practice in London had somewhat strained the faith of the young devotee.
He soon found himself in the painful position of a priest who no longer
believes in his deity; overheard himself asking whether health was not an
unattainable ideal; then declaring that life itself was all a matter of
compromise; finally coming to the conclusion that the soul of things was
Neurosis.

Beyond that he refused to commit himself to any theory of the universe.
He even made himself unpleasant. A clerical patient would approach him
with conciliatory breadth, and say: "I envy you, Cautley; I envy your
marvellous experience. Your opportunities are greater than mine. And
sometimes, do you know, I think you see deeper into the work of the
Maker." And Cautley would shrug his shoulders and smile in the good man's
face, and say, "The Maker! I can only tell you I'm tired of mending the
work of the Maker." Yet the more he doubted the harder he worked; though
his world spun round and round, shrieking like a clock running down, and
he had persuaded himself that all he could do was to wind up the crazy
wheels for another year or so. Which all meant that Cautley was working a
little too hard and running down himself. He had begun to specialize in
gynecology and it increased his scepticism.

Then suddenly, one evening, when he least looked for it, least wanted it,
he saw his divinity incarnate. Rhoda had appealed to him as the supreme
expression of Nature's will to live. That was the instantaneous and
visible effect of her. Rhoda was the red flower on the tree of life.

At St. Sidwell's, that great forcing-house, they might grow some
vegetables to perfection; whether it was orchids or pumpkins he neither
knew nor cared; but he defied them to produce anything like that. He was
sorry for the vegetables, the orchids and the pumpkins; and he was sorry
for Miss Quincey, who was neither a pumpkin nor an orchid, but only a
harmless little withered leaf. Not a pleasant leaf, the sort that goes
dancing along, all crisp and curly, in the arms of the rollicking wind;
but the sort that the same wind kicks into a corner, to lie there till it
rots and comes in handy as leaf mould for the forcing-house. Rhoda's
friend was not like Rhoda; yet because the leaf may distantly suggest the
rose, he liked to sit and talk to her and think about the most beautiful
woman in the world. To any other man conversation with Miss Quincey would
have been impossible; for Miss Quincey in normal health was uninteresting
when she was not absurd. But to Cautley at all times she was simply
heart-rending.

For this young man with the irritable nerves and blasphemous temper had
after all a divine patience at the service of women, even the foolish and
hysterical; because like their Maker he knew whereof they were made. This
very minute the queer meta-physical thought had come to him that somehow,
in the infinite entanglement of things, such women as Miss Quincey were
perpetually being sacrificed to such women as Rhoda Vivian. It struck him
that Nature had made up for any little extra outlay in one direction by
cruel pinching in another. It was part of her rigid economy. She was not
going to have any bills running up against her at the other end of the
universe. Nature had indulged in Rhoda Vivian and she was making Miss
Quincey pay.

He wondered if that notion had struck Rhoda Vivian too, and if she were
trying to make up for it. He had noticed that Miss Quincey had the power
(if you could predicate power of such a person), a power denied to him,
of drawing out the woman-hood of the most beautiful woman in the world;
some infinite tenderness in Rhoda answered to the infinite absurdity in
her. He was not sure that her attitude to Miss Quincey was not the most
beautiful thing about her. He had begun by thinking about the colour of
Rhoda's eyes. He could not for the life of him remember whether they were
blue or green, till something (Miss Quincey's eyes perhaps) reminded him
that they were grey, pure grey, without a taint of green or a shadow of
blue in them. That was what his mind was running on as he looked into the
distance and Miss Quincey imagined that his bumpy intellectual forehead
was bulging with great thoughts. And now Miss Quincey supplied a
convenient pivot for the wild gyrations of his wrath. He got up and with
his hands behind his back he seemed to be lashing himself into a fury
with his coat-tail.

"The whole thing is one-sided and artificial and absurd. Bad enough for
men, but fatal for women. Any system that unfits them for their proper
functions--"

"And do we know--have we decided--yet--what they are?" Miss Quincey was
anxious to sustain her part in the dialogue with credit.

He stared, not at the distance but at her.

"Why, surely," he said more gently, "to be women first--to be wives and
mothers."

She drew her cape a little closer round her and turned from him with
half-shut eyes. She seemed at once to be protecting herself against
his theory and blinding her sight to her own perishing and thwarted
woman-hood.

"All Nature is against it," he said.

"Nature?" she repeated feebly.

"Yes, Nature; and she'll go her own way in spite of all the systems that
ever were. Don't you know---you are a teacher, so you ought to know--that
overstrain of the higher faculties is sometimes followed by astonishing
demonstrations on the part of Nature?"

Miss Quincey replied that no cases of the kind had come under _her_
notice.

"Well--your profession ought to go hand-in-hand with mine. If you only
saw the half of what we see--But you only see the process; we get the
results. By the way I must go and look at some of them."

His words echoed madly in a feverish little brain, "Ought to
go--hand-in-hand--hand-in-hand with mine."

"Nature can be very cruel," said she.

Something in her tone recalled him from his flight. He stood looking down
at her, thoughtful and pitiful. "And Nature can be very kind; kinder than
we are. You are a case in point. Nature is trying to make you well
against your will. A little more rest--a little more exercise--a little
more air--"

She smiled. Yes, a little more of all the things she wanted and had never
had. That was what her smile said in its soft and deprecating bitterness.

He held out his hand, and she too rose, shivering a little in her thin
dress.

She was the first to hurry away.

He looked after her small figure, noted her nervous gait and the agitated
movement of her hand as the streamers on her poor cape flapped and
fluttered, the sport of the unfeeling wind.




CHAPTER VIII

A Painful Misunderstanding


And now, on early evenings and Saturday afternoons when the weather was
fine, Miss Quincey was to be found in Primrose Hill Park. Not that
anybody ever came to look for Miss Quincey. Nevertheless, whether she was
walking up and down the paths or sitting on a bench, Miss Quincey had a
certain expectant air, as if at any moment Dr. Cautley might come tearing
round the corner with his coat-tails flying, or as if she might look up
and find him sitting beside her and talking to her. But he did not come.
There are some histories that never repeat themselves.

And he had never called since that day--Miss Quincey remembered it well;
it was Saturday the thirteenth of March. April and May went by; she had
not seen him now for more than two months; and she began to think there
must be a reason for it.

At last she saw him; she saw him twice running. Once in the park where
they had sat together, and once in the forked road that leads past that
part of St. Sidwell's where Miss Cursiter and Miss Vivian lived in state.
Each time he was walking very fast as usual, and he looked at her, but he
never raised his hat; she spoke, but he passed her without a word. And
yet he had recognised her; there could be no possible doubt of it.

Depend upon it there was a reason for _that_. Miss Quincey was one of
those innocent people who believe that every variety of human behaviour
must have a reason (as if only two months ago she had not been favoured
with the spectacle of an absolutely unreasonable young man). To be sure
it was not easy to find one for conduct so strange and unprecedented, and
in any case Miss Quincey's knowledge of masculine motives was but small.
Taken by itself it might have passed without any reason, as an oversight,
a momentary lapse; but coupled with his complete abandonment of Camden
Street North it looked ominous indeed. Not that her faith in Bastian
Cautley wavered for an instant. Because Bastian Cautley was what he was,
he could never be guilty of spontaneous discourtesy; on the other hand,
she had seen that he could be fierce enough on provocation; therefore,
she argued, he had some obscure ground of offence against her.

Miss Quincey passed a sleepless night reasoning about the reason, a
palpitating never-ending night, without a doze or a dream in it or so
much as the winking of an eyelid. She reasoned about it for a week
between the classes, and in her spare time (when she had any) in the
evening (thus running into debt to _Sordello_ again). At the end of the
week Miss Quincey's mind seemed to have become remarkably lucid; every
thought in it ground to excessive subtlety in the mill of her logic. She
saw it all clearly. There had been some misunderstanding, some terrible
mistake. She had forfeited his friendship through a blunder nameless but
irrevocable. Once or twice she wondered if Mrs. Moon could be at the
bottom of it--or Martha. Had her aunt carried out her dreadful threat of
giving him a hint to send in his account? And had the hint implied that
for the future all accounts with him were closed? Had he called on Mrs.
Moon and been received with crushing hostility? Or had Martha permitted
herself to say that she, Miss Quincey, was out when perhaps he knew for a
positive fact that she was in? But she soon dismissed these conjectures
as inadequate and fell back on her original hypothesis.

And all the time the Old Lady's eyes, and her voice too, were sharper
than ever; from the corner where she dreamed she watched Miss Quincey
incessantly between the dreams. At times the Old Lady was shaken with
terrible and mysterious mirth. Bastian Cautley began to figure
fantastically in her conversation. Her ideas travelled by slow trains of
association that started from nowhere but always arrived at Bastian
Cautley as a terminus. If Juliana had a headache Mrs. Moon supposed that
she wanted that young man to be dancing attendance on her again; if
Juliana sighed she declared that Dr. Cautley was a faithless swain who
had forsaken Juliana; if Martha brought in the tea-tray she wondered when
Dr. Cautley was coming back for another slice of Juliana's wedding-cake.
Mrs. Moon referred to a certain abominable piece of confectionery now
crumbling away on a shelf in the sideboard, where, with a breach in its
side and its sugar turret in ruins, it seemed to nod at Miss Quincey with
all sorts of satirical suggestions. And when Louisa sent her accounts of
Teenie who lisped in German, Alexander who wrote Latin letters to his
father, and Mildred who refused to read the New Testament in anything but
Greek, and Miss Quincey remarked that if she had children she wouldn't
bring them up so, the Old Lady laughed--"Tchee--Tchee! We all know about
old maids' children." Miss Quincey said nothing to that; but she hardened
her heart against Louisa's children, and against Louisa's husband and
Louisa. She couldn't think how Louisa could have married such a dreadful
little man as Andrew Mackinnon, with his unmistakable accent and
problematical linen. The gentle creature who had never said a harsh word
to anybody in her life became mysteriously cross and captious. She
hardened her heart even to little Laura Lazarus.

And one morning when she came upon the Mad Hatter in her corner of the
class-room, and found her adding two familiar columns of figures together
and adding them all wrong, Miss Quincey was very cross and very captious
indeed. The Mad Hatter explained at more length than ever that the
figures twisted themselves about; they wouldn't stay still a minute so
that she could hold them; they were always going on and on, turning over
and over, and growing, growing, till there were millions, billions,
trillions of them; oh, they were wonderful things those figures; you
could go on watching them for ever if you were sharp enough; you could
even--here Laura lowered her voice in awe of her own conception, for
Laura was a mystic, a seer, a metaphysician, what you will--you could
even think with them, if you knew how; in short you could do anything
with them but turn them into sums. And as all this was very confusing to
the intellect Miss Quincey became crosser than ever. And while Miss
Quincey quivered all over with irritability, the Mad Hatter paid no heed
whatever to her instructions, but thrust forward a small yellow face that
was all nose and eyes, and gazed at Miss Quincey like one possessed by a
spirit of divination.

"Have you got a headache, Miss Quincey?" she inquired on hearing herself
addressed for the third time as "Stupid child!"

Miss Quincey relied tartly that no, she had not got a headache. The Mad
Hatter appeared to be absorbed in tracing rude verses on her rough
notebook with a paralytic pencil.

"I'm sorry; because then you must be unhappy. When people are cross," she
continued, "it means one of two things. Either their heads ache or they
are unhappy. You must be very unhappy. I know all about it." The
paralytic pencil wavered and came to a full stop. "You like somebody, and
so somebody has made you unhappy."

But for the shame of it, Miss Quincey could have put her head down on the
desk and cried as she had seen the Mad Hatter cry over her sums, and for
the same reason; because she could not put two and two together.

And what Mrs. Moon saw, what Martha saw, what the Mad Hatter divined with
her feverish, precocious brain, Rhoda Vivian could not fail to see. It
was Dr. Cautley's business to look after Miss Quincey in her illness, and
it was Rhoda's to keep an eye on her in her recovery, and instantly
report the slightest threatening of a break-down. Miss Quincey's somewhat
eccentric behaviour filled her with misgivings; and in order to
investigate her case at leisure, she chose the first afternoon when Miss
Cursiter was not at home to ask the little arithmetic teacher to lunch.