To Edith's mind there was something heart-rending in the expression of
that intent, innocent back, so surrendered to their gaze, so unconscious
of its own pathetic curve. She wondered if it appealed to Anne in that
way. She judged from the expression of her sister-in-law's face that it
did not appeal to her in any way at all.

"Poor dear," said she, "he's still worrying about those blessed bulbs of
mine--of yours, I mean."

"Don't, Edie. As if I wanted to take your bulbs away from you. I'm not
jealous."

"No more am I," said Edie. "Let's say both our bulbs. I wish he wouldn't
garden quite so much, though. It always makes his head ache."

"Why does he do it, then?" asked Anne calmly.

Her calmness irritated Edith.

"Oh, why does Walter do anything? Because he's an angel!"

Anne's silence gave her the opening she was looking for.

"You know, you used to think so, too."

"Of course I did," said Anne evasively.

"And equally of course, you don't, now you've married him?"

"I _have_ married him. What more could I do to prove my appreciation?"

"Oh, heaps more. Mere marrying's nothing. Any woman can do that."

"Do you think so? It seems to me that marrying--mere marrying--may be a
great deal--about as much as many men have a right to ask."

"Hasn't every man a right to ask for--what shall I say--a little
understanding--from the woman he cares for?"

"Edith, what has he told you?"

"Nothing, my dear, that I hadn't seen for myself."

"Did he tell you that I 'misunderstood' him?"

"Did he pose as _l'homme incompris_? No, he didn't."

"Still--he told you," Anne insisted.

"Of course he did." She brushed the self-evident aside and returned to
her point. "He does care for you. That, at least, you can understand."

"No, that's just what I don't understand. I can't understand his caring.
I can't understand him. I can't understand anything." Her voice shook.

"Poor darling, I know it's hard, sometimes. Still, you do know what he
is."

"I know what he was--what I thought him. It's hard to reconcile it with
what he is."

"With what you think him? You can't, of course. I suppose you think him
something too bad for words?"

Anne broke down weakly.

"Oh, Edith, why didn't you tell me?"

"What? That Wallie was bad?"

"Yes, yes. It would have been better if you'd told me everything."

"Well, dear, whatever I told you, I couldn't have told you that. It
wouldn't have been true."

"He says himself that everything was true."

"Everything probably is true. But then, the point is that you don't know
the whole truth, or even half of it. That's just what he couldn't tell
you. I should have told you. That's where I bungled it. You know he left
it to me; he said I was to tell you."

"Yes, he told me that. He didn't mean to deceive me."

"No more did I. If my brother had been a bad man, dear, do you suppose
for a moment I'd have let him marry my dearest friend?"

"You didn't know. We don't know these things, Edith. That's the terrible
part of it."

"Yes, it's the terrible part of it. But _I_ knew all right. He never kept
anything from me, not for long."

"But, Edith--how _could_ he? How _could_ he? When the woman--Lady
Cayley--She was _bad_, wasn't she?"

"Of course she was bad. Bad as they make them--worse. You know she was
divorced?"

"Yes," said Anne, "that's what I do know."

"Well, she wasn't divorced on Walter's account, my dear. There were
several others--four, five, goodness knows how many. Poor Walter was a
mere drop in her ocean."

Anne stared a moment at the expanse presented to her.

"But," said she, "he was in it."

"Oh yes, he was in it. The ocean swallowed him as it swallowed the
others. But it couldn't keep him. He couldn't live in it, like them."

"But how did she get hold of him?"

"She got hold of him by appealing to his chivalry."

(His chivalry--she knew it.)

"It's what happens, over and over again. He thought her a vilely injured
woman. He may have thought her good. He certainly thought her pathetic.
It was the pathos that did it."

"That--did--it?"

"Yes. Did it. She hurled herself at his head--at his knees--at his
feet---till he _had_ to lift her. And that's how it happened."

Anne's spirit writhed as she contemplated the happening.

"I know it oughtn't to have happened. I know Walter wasn't the holy saint
he ought to have been. But oh, he was a martyr!" She paused. "And--he was
very young."

"Edith--when was it?"

"Seven years ago."

Anne pondered. The seven years helped to purify him. Every day helped
that threw the horror further back in time--separated it from her. If--if
he had not been steeped too long in it. She wanted to know _how_ long,
but she was afraid to ask; afraid lest it should be brought nearer to her
than she could bear. Edith saw her fear.

"It lasted two years. It was all my fault."

"Your fault?"

"Yes, my fault. Because of my horrid spine. You see, it kept him from
marrying."

"Well, but--"

"Well, but it couldn't have happened if he had married. How _could_ it?
How could it have happened if you had been there? You would have saved
him."

She paused on that note, a long, illuminating pause. The note itself was
a divine inspiration. It rang all golden. It thrilled to the verge of the
dominant chord in Anne. It touched her soul, the mother of brooding,
mystic harmonies.

"You would have saved him."

Anne saw herself for one moment as his guardian angel, her mission
frustrated through a flaw of time. That vision was dashed by another,
herself as the ideal, the star he should have looked to before its dawn,
herself dishonoured by his young haste, his passion, his failure to
foresee.

"He should have waited for me."

"Did you wait for him?"

A quick flush pulsed through the whiteness of Anne's face. She looked
back seven years to her girlhood in the southern Deanery, her home. She
had another vision, a vision of a Minor Canon, whom she had loved with
the pure worship of her youth, a love of which somehow she was now
ashamed. Ashamed, though it had then seemed to her so spiritual. Her dead
parents had desired the marriage, but neither she nor they had the power
to bring it about.

Edith had never heard of the Minor Canon. She had drawn a bow at a
venture.

"My dear," she said, "why not? It's only the very elect lovers who can
say to each other, 'I never loved any one but you.'"

"At any rate," said Anne, "I never loved any one else well enough to
marry him."

For, in her fancy, the Minor Canon, being withdrawn in time, had ceased
to occupy space; he had become that which he was for her girlhood, a
disembodied dream. She could not have explained why she was so ashamed
of him. What ground of comparison was there between that blameless one
and Lady Cayley?

"Edith," she said suddenly, "did you ever see her?"

"Never," said Edith emphatically.

"You don't know what she was like?"

"I don't. I never wanted to. I dare say there are people in Scale who
could tell you all about her, only I wouldn't inquire if I were you."

"Did it happen at Scarby?" She was determined to know the worst.

"I believe so."

"Oh--why did I ever go there?"

"He didn't want you to. That was why."

"Where is she now?"

"Nobody knows. She might be anywhere."

"Not here?"

"No, not here. My dear, you mustn't get her on your nerves."

"I'm afraid of meeting her."

"It isn't likely that you ever will. She isn't the sort one does
meet--now, poor thing."

"Who was she?"

"The wife of Sir Andrew Cayley, a tallow-chandler."

"Oh, how did Walter ever--"

"My dear, one meets all sorts of funny people in Scale. He was a very
wealthy tallow-chandler. Besides, it wasn't he that Walter did meet,
naturally."

"How can you joke about it? It makes me sick to think of it."

"It made me sick enough once, dear. But I don't think of it."

"I can't help thinking of it."

"Well, whenever you do, when it does come over you--it will,
sometimes--think of what Walter's life was before he knew you. Everything
was spoiled for him because of me. He was sent to a place he detested
because of me; put into an office which he loathed, shut up here in this
hateful house, because of me. And he was good to me, good and dear. Even
at the worst he hardly ever left me if he thought I wanted him--not even
to go to _her_. But he was young, and it was an awful life for him; you
don't know how awful. It would have been bad enough for a woman. It was
intolerable for a man. I was worse then than I am now. I was horribly
fretful, and I worried him. I think I drove him to her--I know I did. He
had to get away from it sometimes. Won't you think of that?"

"I'll try to think of it."

"And it won't make you not like him?"

"My dear, I liked him first for your sake, then I liked you for his, now
I suppose I must like him for yours again."

"No--for his own sake."

"Does it matter which?"

"Not much--so long as you like him. He really is angelic, though you
mayn't think it."

"I think you are."

Edith was not only angelic, but womanly and full of guile, and she knew
with whom she had to do. She had humbled Anne with shrewd shafts that
hit her in all her weak places; now she exalted her. Anne had not her
likeness in a thousand. She was a woman magnificently planned, of stature
not to be diminished by the highest pedestal. A figure fit for a throne,
a niche, a shrine. Edith could see the dear little downy feathers
sprouting on Anne's shoulder-blades, and the infant aureole playing
in her hair.

"You're a saint," said Edith.

"I am not," said Anne, while her pale cheek glowed with the flattery.

"Of course you are," said Edith, "or you could never have put up with
me."

Whereupon Anne kissed her.

"And I may tell Walter what you've said?"

It was thus that she spared Anne's mortal pride. She knew how it would
shrink from telling him.

Anne went down to Majendie in the garden and sent him to his sister. They
returned to the house by the open window of his study. A bright fire was
burning in the room. He looked at her shyly and half in doubt, drew up an
arm-chair to the hearth, and left her there.

His manner brought back to her the days of their engagement when that
room had been their refuge. Not that they had often been alone together.
She could count the times on the fingers of one hand, the times when
Edith was too ill to be wheeled into her room. It had been nearly always
in Edith's room that she had seen him, surrounded by all the feminine
devices, the tender trivialities that were part of the moving pathos of
the scene. She had so associated him with his sister that it had been
hard for her to realise that he had any separate life of his own. She
felt that his love for her had simply grown out of his love for Edith,
it was the flame, the flower of his tenderness. It was one with his
goodness, and she had been glad to have it so. There was no jealousy in
Anne.

It came over her now with a fresh shock, how very little, after all, she
had known of him. It was through Edith that she really knew him. And yet
it was impossible that Edith could have absorbed him utterly. Anne had
not counted his business; for it had not interested her, and to say that
Walter was a ship-owner did not define him in the very least. What
remained over of Walter was a secret that this room, his study, must
partially reveal.

She remembered how she had first come there, and had looked shyly about
her for intimations of his inner nature, and how it was his pipe-rack and
his boots that had first suggested that he had a life apart and dealings
with the outer world. Now she rose and went round the room, searching for
its secret, and finding no new impressions, only fresh lights on the old.
If the room told her anything it told her how little Majendie had used
it, how little he had been able to call anything his own. The things in
it had no comfortable look of service. He could not have smoked there
much, the curtains were too innocent. He could not have sat in that
arm-chair much, the surface was too smooth. He could not have come there
much at any time, for, though the carpet was faded, there was no
well-worn passage from the threshold to the hearth. As far as she could
make out he came there for no earthly purpose but to change his boots
before going upstairs to Edith.

The bookcase told the same story. It held histories and standard works
inherited from Majendie's father; the works of Dickens, and Thackeray,
and Hardy, read over and over again in the days when he had time for
reading; several poets whom, by his own confession, he could not have
read in any circumstances. One Meredith, partly uncut, testified to an
honest effort and a baulked accomplishment. On a shelf apart stood the
books that he had loved when he was a boy, the Annuals, the tales of
travel and adventure, and one or two school prizes gorgeously bound.

As she looked at them his boyhood rose before her; its dead innocence
appealed to her comprehension and compassion.

She knew that he had been disappointed in his ambition. Instead of being
sent to Oxford he had been sent into business, that he might early
support himself. He had supported himself. And he had stuck to the
business that he might the better support Edith.

She could not deny him the virtue of unselfishness.

She remembered one Sunday, three weeks before their wedding-day, when she
had stood alone with him in this room, at the closing of their happy day.
It was then that he had asked her why she cared for him, and she had
answered: "Because you are good. You always have been good."

And he had said (how it came back to her!), "And if I hadn't always?
Wouldn't you have cared then?"

She had answered, "I would have cared, but I couldn't marry you."

And he had turned away from her, and looked out of the window, keeping
his back to her, and had stood so without speaking for a moment. She had
wondered what had come over him.

Now she knew. He had not been good. And she had married him.

At the recollection the thoughts she had quieted stirred again and stung
her, and again she trampled them down.

She faced the question how she was going to build up the wedded life that
her knowledge of him had laid low. She told herself that, after all, much
remained. She had loved Walter for his unhappiness as well as for his
goodness. He had needed her, and she had felt that there was no other
woman who could have borne his burden half so well. Edith was too sweet
to be thought of as a burden, but it could not be denied she weighed. In
marrying Walter she would lift half the weight. Anne was strong, and she
glorified in her strength. That was what she was there for.

How much more was she prepared to do? Keeping his house was nothing;
Nanna had always kept it well. Caring for Edith was nothing; she could
not help but care for her. She had promised Walter that she would be a
good wife to him, and she had vowed to herself that she would live her
spiritual life apart.

Was that being a good wife to him? To divorce her soul, her best self,
from him? If she confined her duty to the preservation of the mere
material tie, what would she make of herself? Of him?

It came to her that his need of her was deeper and more spiritual than
that. She argued that there must be something fine in him, or he never
would have appreciated _her_. That other woman didn't count; she had
thrust herself on him. When it came to choosing, he had chosen a
spiritual woman! (Anne had no doubt that she was what she aspired to be.)
And since all things were divinely ordered, Walter's choice was really
God's will. God's hand had led him to her.

It had been a blow to Anne's pride to realise that she had
married--spiritually--beneath her. Her pride now recovered wonderfully,
seeing in this very inequality its opportunity. She beheld herself
superbly seated on an eminence, her spiritual opulence supplying Walter's
poverty. Spiritually, she said, it might also be more blessed to give
than to receive.

Their marriage, in this its new, its immaterial consummation, would not
be unequal. She would raise Walter. That, of course, was what God had
meant her to do all the time. Never again could she look at her husband
with eyes of mortal passion. But her love, which had died, was risen
again; it could still turn to him a glorified and spiritual face; it
could still know passion, a passion immortal and supreme.

But it was an emotion of which by its very nature she could not bring
herself to speak. It could mean nothing to Walter in his yet unspiritual
state. She felt that when he came to her he would insist on some
satisfaction, and there was no satisfaction that she could give to the
sort of claim he would make. Therefore she awaited his coming with
nervous trepidation.

He came in as if nothing had happened. He sank with every symptom of
comfortable assurance into the opposite arm-chair. And he asked no more
formidable question than, "How's your headache?"

"Better, thank you."

"That's all right."

He did not look at her, but his eyes were smiling as if at some agreeable
thought or reminiscence. He had apparently assumed that Anne had
recovered, not only from her headache, but from its cause. To Anne,
tingling with the tension of a nervous crisis, this attitude was
disconcerting. It seemed to reduce her and her crisis to insignificance.
She had expected him to be tingling too. He had more cause to.

"Do you mind my smoking? Say if you really do."

She really did, but she forbore to say so. Forbearance henceforth was to
be part of her discipline.

He smoked contentedly, with half-closed eyes; and when he talked, he
talked of the garden and of bulbs.

Of bulbs, after what he had discussed with Edith upstairs. She would
rather that he had asked his question, forced her to the issue. That at
least would have shown some comprehension of her state. But he had taken
the issue for granted, refused to face the immensity of it all. She had
had her first taste of sacrificial flames, and her spirit was prepared to
go through fire to reach him. And he presented himself as already folded
and protected; satisfied with some inferior and independent secret of his
own.

She felt that a little perturbation would have become him more than that
impenetrable peace.

It would make it so difficult to raise him.




CHAPTER V


The bell of St. Saviour's had ceased. Over the open market-place the air
throbbed with a thousand pulses from the dying heart of sound. The great
grey body of the Church was still; tower and couchant nave watched in
their monstrous, motionless dominion, till the music stirred in them like
a triumphant soul.

As they hurried over the open market-place, Anne realised with some
annoyance that she was late again for the Wednesday evening service. She
dearly loved punctuality and order, and disliked to be either checked or
hastened in her superb movements. She disliked to be late for anything.
Above all she disliked standing on a mat outside a closed church door, in
the middle of a General Confession, trying to surrender her spirit to the
spirit of prayer, while Walter lingered, murmuring profane urbanities
that claimed her as his own.

He had perceived what he called her innocent design, her transparent
effort to lead him to her heavenly heights. He had lent himself to
it, tenderly, gravely, as he would have lent himself to a child's
heart-rending play. He could not profess to follow the workings of his
wife's mind, but he did understand her point of view. She had been "let
in" for something she had not expected, and he was bound to make it up
to her.

There had been a week of concessions, crowned by his appearance at St.
Saviour's.

But that was on a Sunday. This was Wednesday, and he drew the line at
Wednesdays.

Oh yes, he saw her drift. He knew that what she expected of him was
incessant penitence. But, after all, it was difficult to feel much
abasement for a fault committed quite a number of years ago and
sufficiently repented of at the time. He had settled his account, and
it was hard that he should be made to pay twice over. To-night his mood
was strangely out of harmony with Lent.

Anne slackened her pace to intimate as much to him. Whereupon he lapsed
into strange and disturbing legends of his childhood. He told her he had
early weaned himself from the love of Lenten Services, observing their
effect upon the unfortunate lady, his aunt, who had brought him up.
Punctually at twelve o'clock on Palm Sunday, he said, the poor soul,
exhausted with her endeavours after the Christian life, would fly into
a passion, and punctually would rise from it at the same hour on Easter
Day. For quite a long time he had believed that that was why they called
it Passion Week.

She moaned "Oh, Walter--don't!" as if he had hurt her, while she
repressed the play of a little, creeping, curling, mundane smile.

If he would only leave her! But, as they crossed to the curbstone, he
changed over, preserving his proper place. He leaned to her with the
indestructible attention of a lover. His whole manner was inimitably
chivalrous, protective, and polite.

Anne hardened her heart against him. At the church gate she turned and
faced him coldly.

"If you're not going in," said she, "you needn't come any further."

He glanced at the belated group of worshippers gathered before the church
door, and became more than ever polite and chivalrous and protective.

"I must see you safely in," he said, and took up his stand beside her on
the mat.

Her eyes rested on him for a second in reproach, then dropped behind the
veil of their lids. In another moment he would have to go. He had already
surrendered her prayer-book, tucking it gently under her arm.

"You'll be all right when you get in, won't you?" he said encouragingly.

"Please go," she whispered.

"Do I jar, dear?" he asked sweetly.

"You do, very much."

"I'm so sorry. I won't do it again."

But his whispered vows and promises belied him, battling with her
consecrated mood. She felt that his innermost spirit remained in its
profanity, unillumined by her rebuke.

Once more she set her face, and hardened her heart against him, and
removed herself in the silence and isolation of her prayer.

Through the closed door there came the rich, confused murmur of the
Confession. He saw her lips curl, flower-like, with emotion, as her
breath rose and fell in unison with the heaving chant. He watched her
with a certain reverence, incomprehensibly chastened, till the door
opened, and she went from him, moving down the lighted aisle with her
remote, renunciating air.

The door was shut in Majendie's face, and he turned away, intending to
kill, to murder the next hour at his club.

Anne was self-trained in the habit of detachment. She had only to kneel,
to close her eyes and cover her face, and her soul slid of its own accord
into the place of peace. Her very breathing and the beating of her heart
were stayed. Her mind, emptied in a moment, was in a moment filled,
brimming over with the thought of God. To her veiled vision that thought
was like a sheet of blank light let down behind her drooped eyelids, and
centring in a luminous whorl. It fascinated her. Her prayer shot straight
to the heart of it, a communion too swift to trouble or divide the
blessed light.

In that instant her husband, the image and the thought of him, were cast
into the secular darkness.

She remembered how difficult it had once been thus to renounce him.
Her trouble, in the days of her engagement, had been that, thrust him
from her as she would, the idea of his goodness--the goodness that
justified her through its own appeal--would call up his presence,
emerging radiant from the outermost abyss. Inferior emotions then mingled
indistinguishably with her holiest ardours. Spiritually ambitious, she
had had her young eye on a hard-won crown of glory, and she had found
that happiness made the spiritual life almost contemptibly easy. It was
no effort in those days to realise divine mysteries, when the miracle of
the Incarnation was, as it were, worked for her in her own soul; when she
heard in her own heart the beating of the heart of God; when his hand
touched her with a tenderness that warmed her place of peace. She had
hardly known this flamed and lyric creature for herself. It was as if her
soul, resting after long flight, had contemplated for the first time the
silver and fine gold of her wings.

It was the facility of the revelation that had first caused her to
suspect it. And she had thrown ashes on the flame, and set a watch upon
her soul, lest she should mistake an earthly for a heavenly content. She
could not bear to think that she was cheated, that her pulses counted in
her sense of exaltation and beatitude. She desired, purely, the utmost
purity in that divine communion, so as to be sure that it was divine.

Now, having suffered, she was completely sure. Her wound was the seal God
set upon her soul. It was easy enough now for her to achieve detachment,
oblivion of Walter Majendie, to pour out her whole soul in the prayer for
light: "Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great
mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night."

Her hands, as she prayed, were folded close over her eyes. Having
annihilated her husband, she was disagreeably astonished to find that he
was there, that he had been there for some time, in the seat beside her.

He was sitting in what he took to be an attitude of extreme reverence,
his head bowed and resting on his left arm, which was supported by the
back of the seat in front of him. His right arm embraced, unconsciously,
Anne's muff. Anne was vividly, painfully aware of him. Over the crook of
his elbow one eye looked up at her, bright, smiling with inextinguishable
affection. His lips gave out a sound that was not a prayer, but something
between a murmur and a moan, distinctly audible. She felt his gaze as a
gross, tangible thing, as a violent hand, parting the veils of prayer.
She bowed her head lower and pressed her hands to her face till the blood
tingled.

The sermon obliged her to sit upright and exposed. It gave him
iniquitous opportunity. He turned in his seat; his eyes watched her under
half-closed lids, two slits shining through the thick, dark curtain of
their lashes. He kept on pulling at his moustache, as if to hide the dumb
but expressive adoration of his mouth. Anne, who felt that her soul had
been overtaken, trapped, and bared to the outrage, removed herself by a
yard's length till the hymn brought them together, linked by the book she
could not withhold. The music penetrated her soul and healed its hurt.


  "Christian, doth thou see them,
     On the holy ground,
   How the troops of Midian
     Prowl and prowl around?"


sang Anne in a dulcet pianissimo, obedient to the choir.

Profound abstraction veiled him, a treacherous unspiritual calm. Majendie
was a man with a baritone voice, which at times possessed him like a
furious devil. It was sleeping in him now, biding its time, ready, she
knew, to be roused by the first touch of a _crescendo_. The _crescendo_
came.


  "Christian! Up and fight them!"


The voice waked; it leaped from him; and to Anne's terrified nerves it
seemed to be scattering the voices of the choir before it. It dropped on
the Amen and died; but in dying it remained triumphant, like the trump of
an archangel retreating to the uttermost ends of heaven.

Anne's heart pained her with a profane tenderness, and a poignant
repudiation. Her soul being once more adjusted to the divine, it was
intolerable to think that this preposterous human voice should have power
to shake it so.

She sank to her knees and bowed her head to the Benediction.

"Did you like it?" he asked as they emerged together into the open air.

He spoke as if to the child she seemed to him now to be. They had been
playing together, pretending they were two pilgrims bound for the
Heavenly City, and he wanted to know if she had had a nice game. He
nursed the exquisite illusion that this time he had pleased her by
playing too.

"Of course I liked it."

"So did I," he answered joyously, "I quite enjoyed it. We'll do it again
some other night."

"What made you come, like that?" said she, appeased by his innocence.

"I couldn't help it. You looked so pretty, dear, and so forlorn. It
seemed brutal, somehow, to abandon you on the weary road to heaven."

She sighed. That was his chivalry again. He would escort her politely to
the door of heaven, but would he ever go in with her, would he ever stay
there?

Still, it was something that he should have gone with her so far. It gave
her confidence and an idea of what her power might come to be. Not that
she relied upon herself alone. Her plan for Majendie's salvation was
liberal and large, it admitted of other methods, other influences. There
was no narrowness, any more than there was jealousy, in Anne.

"Walter," said she, "I want you to know Mrs. Eliott."

"But I do know her, don't I?"

He called up a vision of the lady whose house had been Anne's home in
Scale. He was grateful to Mrs. Eliott. But for her slender acquaintance
with his sister, he would never have known Anne. This made him feel that
he knew Mrs. Eliott.

"But I want you to know her as I know her."

He laughed. "Is that possible? Does a man ever know a woman as another
woman knows her?"

Anne felt that she was not only being diverted from her purpose, but led
by a side tract to an unexplored profundity. On the further side of it
she discerned, dimly, the undesirable. It was a murky region, haunted
by still murkier presences, by Lady Cayley and her kind. She persisted
with a magnificent irrelevance.

"You must know her. You would like her."

He didn't in the least want to know Mrs. Eliott, he didn't think that he
would like her. But he was soothed, flattered, insanely pleased with
Anne's assumption that he would. It was as if in her thoughts she were
drawing him towards her. He felt that she was softening, yielding. His
approaches were a delicious wooing of an unfamiliar, unwedded Anne.

"I would like her, because you like her, is that it?"

"It wouldn't follow."

"Oh, how you spoil it!"

"Spoil what?"

"My inference. It pleased me. But, as you say, the logic wasn't sound."

Silence being the only dignified course under mystification, Anne was
silent. Some men had that irritating way with women; Walter's smile
suggested that he might have it. She was not going to minister to his
male delight. Unfortunately her silence seemed to please him too.

"Never mind, dear, I do like her; because she likes you."

"You will like her for herself when you know her."

"Will she like me for myself when she knows me? It's extremely doubtful.
You see, hitherto she has made no ardent sign."

"My dear, she says you've never been near her. You've never come to one
of her Thursdays."

"Oh, her Thursdays--no, I haven't."

"Well, how can you expect--but you'll go sometimes, now, to please me?"

"Won't Wednesdays do?"

"Wednesdays?"

"Yes. It wasn't half bad to-night. I'll go to every blessed Wednesday, as
long as they last, if you'll only let me off Thursdays."

"Please don't talk about being 'let off.' I thought you might like to
know my friends, that's all."

"So I would. I'd like it awfully. By the way, that reminds me. I met
Hannay at the club to-night, and he asked if his wife might call on you.
Would you mind very much?"

"Why should I mind, if she's a friend of yours and Edith's?"

"Oh well, you see, she isn't exactly--"

"Isn't exactly what?"

"A friend of Edith's."




CHAPTER VI


There is a polite and ancient rivalry between Prior Street and Thurston
Square, a rivalry that dates from the middle of the eighteenth century,
when Prior Street and Thurston Square were young. Each claims to be the
aristocratic centre of the town. Each acknowledges the other as its
solitary peer. If Prior Street were not Prior Street it would be Thurston
Square. There are a few old families left in Scale. They inhabit either
Thurston Square or Prior Street. There is nowhere else that they could
live with any dignity or comfort. In either place they are secure from
the contamination of low persons engaged in business, and from the wide
invading foot of the newly rich. These build themselves mansions after
their kind in the Park, or in the broad flat highways leading into the
suburbs. They have no sense for the dim undecorated charm of Prior Street
and Thurston Square.

Nothing could be more distinguished than Prior Street, with its sombre
symmetry, its air of delicate early Georgian reticence. But its
atmosphere is a shade too professional; it opens too precipitately on
the unlovely and unsacred street.

Thurston Square is approached only by unfrequented ancient ways paved
with cobble stones. It is a place of garden greenness, of seclusion and
of leisure. It breathes a provincial quietness, a measured, hallowed
breath as of a cathedral close. Its inhabitants pride themselves on this
immemorial calm. The older families rely on it for the sustenance of
their patrician state. They sit by their firesides in dignified
attitudes, impressively, luxuriously inert. Their whole being is a
religious protest against the spirit of business.

But the restlessness of the times has seized upon the other families, the
Pooleys, the Gardners, the Eliotts, younger by a century at least. They
utilise the perfect peace for the cultivation of their intellects.

Every Thursday, towards half-past three, a wave of agreeable expectation,
punctual, periodic, mounts on the stillness and stirs it. Thursday is
Mrs. Eliott's day.

The Eliotts belong to the old high merchant-families, the aristocracy of
trade, whose wealth is mellowed and beautified by time. Three centuries
met in Mrs. Eliott's drawing-room, harmonised by the gentle spirit of the
place. Her frail modern figure moved (with elegance a little dishevelled
by abstraction) on an early Georgian background, among mid-Victorian
furniture, surrounded by a multitude of decorative objects. There were
great jars and idols from China and Japan; inlaid tables; screens and
cabinets and chairs in Bombay black wood, curiously carved; a splendid
profusion of painted and embroidered cloths; the spoils of seventy years
of Eastern trade. And on the top of it all, twenty years or so of recent
culture. The culture was represented by a well-filled bookcase, a few
diminished copies of antique sculpture, some modern sketches made in Rome
and Venice (for the Eliotts had travelled), and an illuminated triptych
with its saints in glory.

Here, Thursday after Thursday, the same people met each other; they met,
Thursday after Thursday, the same fervid little company of ideas, of
aspirations and enthusiasms.

It was five o'clock on one of her Thursdays, and Mrs. Eliott had been
conversing with great sweetness and fluency ever since half-past three.
That was the way she and Mrs. Pooley kept it up, and they could have kept
it up much longer but for the arrival of Miss Proctor.

There was nothing, in Miss Proctor's opinion (if dear Fanny only knew
it), so provincial as an enthusiasm. As for aspirations (and Mrs. Pooley
was full of them) what could be more provincial than these efforts to be
what you were not? Miss Proctor disapproved of Thurston Square's
preoccupation with its intellect, a thing no well-bred person is ever
conscious of. She announced that she had come to take dear Fanny down
from her clouds and humanise her by a little gossip. She ignored Mrs.
Pooley, since Mrs. Pooley apparently wished to be ignored.

"I want," said she, "the latest news of Anne."

"If you wait, you may get it from herself."

"My dear, do you suppose she'd give it me?"

"It depends," said Mrs. Eliott, "on what you want to know."

"I want to know whether she's happy. I want to know whether, by this
time, she _knows_."

"You can't ask her."

"Of course I can't. That's why I'm asking you."

"I know nothing. I've hardly seen her."

Miss Proctor looked as if she were seeing her that moment without Fanny
Eliott's help.

"Poor dear Anne."

Anne Fletcher had been simply dear Anne, Mrs. Walter Majendie was poor
dear Anne.

Her friends were all sorry for her. They were inclined to be indignant
with Edith Majendie, who, they declared, had been at the bottom of her
marriage all along. She was the cause of Anne's original callings in
Prior Street. If it had not been for Edith, Anne could never have
penetrated that secret bachelor abode. The engagement had been an
awkward, unsatisfactory, sinister affair. It was a pity that Mr.
Majendie's domestic circumstances were such that poor dear Anne appeared
as having made all the necessary approaches and advances. If Mr. Majendie
had had a family that family would have had to call on Anne. But Mr.
Majendie hadn't a family, he had only Edith, which was worse than having
nobody at all. And then, besides, there was his history.

Mrs. Eliott looked distressed. Mr. Majendie's history could not
be explained away as too ancient to be interesting. In Scale a
seven-year-old event is still startlingly, unforgetably modern. Anne's
marriage had saddled her friends with a difficult responsibility, the
justification of Anne for that astounding step.

Acquaintances had been made to understand that Mrs. Eliott had had
nothing to do with it. They went away baffled, but confirmed in their
impression that she knew; which was, after all, what they wanted to know.

It was not so easy to satisfy the licensed curiosity of Anne's friends.
They came to-day in quantities, attracted by the news of the Majendies'
premature return from their honeymoon. Mrs. Eliott felt that Miss Proctor
and the Gardners were sitting on in the hope of meeting them.

Mrs. Eliott had been obliged to accept Anne's husband, that she might
retain Anne's affection. In this she did violence to her feelings, which
were sore on the subject of the marriage. It was not only on account of
the inglorious clouds he trailed. In any case she would have felt it as a
slight that her friend should have married without her assistance, and so
far outside the charmed circle of Thurston Square. She herself was for
the moment disappointed with Anne. Anne had once taken them all so
seriously. It was her solemn joy in Mrs. Eliott and her circle that had
enabled her young superiority to put up so long with the provincial
hospitalities of Scale on Humber. They, the slender aristocracy of
Thurston Square, were the best that Scale had to offer her, and they had
given her of their best. Socially, the step from Thurston Square to Prior
Street could not be defined as a going down; but, intellectually, it was
a decline, and morally (to those who knew Fanny Eliott and to Fanny
Eliott who _knew_) it was, by comparison, a plunge into the abyss. Fanny
Eliott was the fine flower of Thurston Square. She had satisfied even the
fastidiousness of Anne.

She owned that Mr. Majendie had satisfied it too. It was not that quality
in Anne that made her choice so--well, so incomprehensible.

It was Dr. Gardner's word. Dr. Gardner was the President of the Scale
Literary and Philosophic Society, and in any discussion of the
incomprehensible his word had weight. Vagueness was his foible, the
relaxation of an intellect uncomfortably keen. The spirit that looked
at you through his short-sighted eyes (magnified by enormous glasses)
seemed to have just returned from a solitary excursion in a dream. In
that mood the incomprehensible had for him a certain charm.

Mrs. Eliott had too much good taste to criticise Anne Majendie's. They
had simply got to recognise that Prior Street had more to offer her than
Thurston Square. That was the way she preferred to put it, effacing
herself a little ostentatiously.

Miss Proctor maintained that Prior Street had nothing to offer a creature
of Anne Fletcher's kind. It had everything to take, and it seemed bent on
taking everything. It was bad enough in the beginning, when she had given
herself up, body and soul, to the spinal lady; but to go and marry the
brother, without first disposing of the spinal lady in a comfortable home
for spines, why, what must the man be like who could let her do it?

"My dear," said Mrs. Eliott, "he's a saint, if you're to believe Anne."

Even Dr. Gardner smiled. "I can't say that's exactly what I should call
him."

"Need we," said Mr. Eliott, "call him anything? So long as she thinks him
a saint--"

Mr. Eliott--Mr. Johnson Eliott--hovered on the borderland of culture,
with a spirit purified from commerce by a Platonic passion for the exact
sciences. He was, therefore, received in Thurston Square on his own as
well as his wife's merits. He too had his little weaknesses. Almost
savagely determined in matters of business, at home he liked to sit in
a chair and fondle the illusion of indifference. There was no part of
Mr. Eliott's mental furniture that was not a fixture, yet he scorned the
imputation of conviction. A hunted thing in his wife's drawing-room, Mr.
Eliott had developed in a quite remarkable degree the protective
colouring of stupidity.

"How can she?" said Miss Proctor. "She's a saint herself, and she ought
to know the difference."

"Perhaps," said Dr. Gardner, "that's why she doesn't."

"I'm sure," said Mrs. Eliott, "it was the original attraction. There
could be no other for Anne."

"The attraction was the opportunity for self-sacrifice. Whatever she's
makes of Mr. Majendie, she's bent on making a martyr of herself." Miss
Proctor met the vague eyes of her circle with a glance that was defiance
to all mystery. "It's quite simple. This marriage is a short cut to
canonisation, that's all."

Then it was that little Mrs. Gardner spoke. She had been married for a
year, and her face still wore its bridal look of possession that was
peace, the look that it would wear when Mrs. Gardner was seventy. Her
voice had a certain lucid and profound precision.

"Anne was always certain of herself. And since she cares for Mr. Majendie
enough to accept him and to accept his sister, and the rather _triste_
life which is all he has to offer her, doesn't it look as if, probably,
she knew her own business best?"

"I think," said Mr. Eliott firmly, "we may take it that she does."

Miss Proctor's departure was felt as a great liberation of the intellect.

Mrs. Pooley sat up in her corner and revived the conversation interrupted
by Miss Proctor. Mrs. Pooley had felt that to talk about Mrs. Majendie
was to waste Mrs. Eliott. Mrs. Majendie apart, Mrs. Pooley had many ideas
in common with her friend; but, whereas Mrs. Eliott would spend superbly
on one idea at a time, Mrs. Pooley's intellect entertained promiscuously
and beyond its means. It was inclined to be hospitable to ideas that had
never met outside it, whose encounter was a little distressing to
everybody concerned. Whenever this happened Mrs. Pooley would appeal to
Mr. Eliott, and Mr. Eliott would say, "Don't ask me. I'm a stupid fellow.
Don't ask me to decide anything."

Thus did Mr. Eliott wilfully obscure himself.

To-day he was more impregnably concealed than ever. He hadn't any
opinions of his own. They were too expensive. He borrowed other people's
when he wanted them. "But," said Mr. Eliott, "it is very seldom that I
do want an opinion. If you have any facts to give me--well and good." For
he knew that, at the mention of facts, Mrs. Pooley's intellect would
retreat behind a cloud and that his wife would pursue it there.

"I suppose," said Mrs. Eliott, "there's such a thing as realising your
ideals."

Her eyes gleamed and wandered and rested upon Mrs. Gardner. Mrs. Gardner
had a singularly beautiful intellect which she was known to be shy of
displaying. People said that Dr. Gardner had fallen in love with it
years ago, and had only waited for it to mature before he married it.
Mrs. Gardner had a habit of sitting apart from the discussion and
untroubled by it, tolerant in her own excess of bliss. It irritated Mrs.
Eliott, on her Thursdays, to think of the distinguished ideas that Mrs.
Gardner might have introduced and didn't. She felt Mrs. Gardner's silence
as a challenge.

"I wonder" (Mrs. Eliott was always wondering) "what becomes of our ideals
when we've realised them."

The doctor answered. "My dear lady, they cease to be ideals, and we have
to get some more."

Mrs. Eliott, in her turn, was received into the cloud.

"Of course," said Mrs. Pooley, emerging from it joyously, "we must have
them."

"Of course," said Mrs. Eliott vaguely, as her spirit struggled with the
cloud.

"Of course," said Dr. Gardner. He was careful to array himself for
tea-parties in all his innocent metaphysical vanities, to scatter
profundities like epigrams, to flatter the pure intellects of ladies,
while the solemn vagueness of his manner concealed from them the
innermost frivolity of his thought. He didn't care whether they
understood him or not. He knew his wife did. Her wedded spirit moved
in secret and unsuspected harmony with his.

He had a certain liking for Mrs. Eliott. She seemed to him an apparition
mainly pathetic. With her attenuated distinction, her hectic ardour, her
brilliant and pursuing eye, she had the air of some doomed and dedicated
votress of the pure intellect, haggard, disturbing and disturbed. His
social self was amused with her enthusiasms, but the real Dr. Gardner
accounted for them compassionately. It was no wonder, he considered, that
poor Mrs. Eliott wondered. She had so little else to do. Her nursery
upstairs was empty, it always had been, always would be empty. Did she
wonder at that too, at the transcendental carelessness that had left her
thus frustrated, thus incomplete? Mrs. Eliott would have been scandalised
if she had known the real Dr. Gardner's opinion of her.

"I wonder," said she, "what will become of Anne's ideal."

"It's safe," said the doctor. "She hasn't realised it."

"I wonder, then, what will become of Anne."

Mrs. Pooley retreated altogether before this gross application of
transcendent truth. She had not come to Mrs. Eliott's to talk about
Mrs. Majendie.

Dr. Gardner smiled. "Oh, come," he said, "you _are_ personal."

"I'm not," said Mrs. Eliott, conscious of her lapse and ashamed of it.
"But, after all, Anne's my friend. I know people blamed me because I
never told her. How could I tell her?"

"No," said Mrs. Gardner soothingly, "how could you?"

"Anne," continued Mrs. Eliott, "was so reticent. The thing was all
settled before anybody could say a word."

"Well," said Dr. Gardner, "there's no good worrying about it now."

"Isn't it possible," said the little year-old bride, "that Mr. Majendie
may have told her himself?"

For Dr. Gardner had told her everything the day before he married her,
confessing to the light loves of his youth, the young lady in the Free
Library and all. She looked round with eyes widened by their angelic
candour. Even more beautiful than Mrs. Gardner's intellect were Mrs.
Gardner's eyes, and the love of them that brought the doctor's home from
their wanderings in philosophic dream. Nobody but Dr. Gardner knew that
Mrs. Gardner's intellect had cause to be jealous of her eyes.

"There's one thing," said Mrs. Eliott, suddenly enlightened. "Our not
having said anything at the time makes it easier for us to receive him
now."

"Aren't we all talking," said Mrs. Gardner, "rather as if Anne had
married a monster? After all, have we ever heard anything against
him--except Lady Cayley?"

"Oh no, never a word, have we, Johnson dear?"

"Never. He's not half a bad fellow, Majendie."

Dr. Gardner rose to go.

"Oh, please--don't go before they come."

Mrs. Gardner hesitated, but the doctor, vague in his approaches,
displayed a certain energy in his departure.

They passed Mrs. Walter Majendie on the stairs.

She had come alone. That, Mrs. Eliott felt, was a bad beginning. She
could see that it struck even Johnson's obtuseness as unfavourable, for
he presently effaced himself.

"Fanny," said Anne, holding her friend's evasive eye with the
determination of her query, "tell me, who are the Ransomes?"

"The Ransomes? Have they called?"

"Yes, but I was out. I didn't see them."

"Oh, my dear," said Mrs. Eliott, in a tone which implied that when Anne
_did_ see them----

"Are they very dreadful?"

"Well--they're not your sort."

Anne meditated. "Not--my--sort. And the Lawson Hannays, what sort are
they?"

"Well, we don't know them. But there are a great many people in Scale one
doesn't know."

"Are they socially impossible, or what?"

"Oh--socially, they would be considered--in Scale--all right. But he is,
or was, mixed up with some very queer people."

Anne's cold face intimated that the adjective suggested nothing to her.
Mrs. Eliott was compelled to be explicit. The word queer was applied in
Scale to persons of dubious honesty in business; whereas it was not so
much in business as in pleasure that Mr. Lawson Hannay had been queer.

"Mr. Hannay may be very steady now, but I believe he belonged to a very
fast set before he married her."

"And she? Is she nice?"

"She may be very nice for all I know."

"I think," said Anne, "she wouldn't call if she wasn't nice, you know."

She meant that if Mrs. Lawson Hannay hadn't been nice Walter would never
have sanctioned her calling.

"Oh, as for that," said her friend, "you know what Scale is. The less
nice they are the more they keep on calling. But I should think"--she had
suddenly perceived where Anne's argument was tending--"she is probably
all right."

"Do you know anything of Mr. Charlie Gorst?"

"No. But Johnson does. At least I'm sure he's met him."

Mrs. Eliott saw it all. Poor Anne was being besieged, bombarded by her
husband's set.

"Then he isn't impossible?"

"Oh no, the Gorsts are a very old Lincolnshire family. Quite grand. What
a number of people you're going to know, my dear. But, your husband isn't
to take you away from _all_ your old friends."

"He isn't taking me anywhere. I shall stay," said Anne proudly, "exactly
where I was before."

She was determined that her old friends should never know to what a
sorrowful place she had been taken.

"You dear," said Mrs. Eliott, holding out a suddenly caressing hand.