MR. WEBSTER

 

 

WHY Mr. Webster married her, and why she married him, is not easy to explain. She was pretty and graceful, with lovely blue eyes and black lashes, and a dimple in her left cheek that had made many men abject, and still retained its power. She was thirty-two—old enough to take care of herself, and her own people at Chelsea recognized this fact. They let her have her own sitting-room, give her own teas, occasionally even a little dinner; and she had liberty to her heart’s content. When they, rather unexpectedly, went to live abroad, there was no reason why she should not have taken a little flat on her own account and gone on living the life she liked best. Spinsterhood would not have mattered to her, since she was one of those women who would be attractive at any age, and could afford to pick and choose among men of a certain standing. They were always glad to talk to her, most of them liked her; with a certain amount of encouragement a good many would have loved her—did, as a matter of fact, or had done so, without the encouragement. She was interested in so many things, and could talk easily and brightly about anything, or almost anything, on earth; she had written once or twice for magazines, on some easy topic of the day; could draw a little, rather badly it must be owned, and painted in oils (she despised water-colours) even worse. Her pictures had been hung at one or two minor galleries, chiefly because most of the hanging committee went to tea with her on show days, and admired the daffodils with which she decorated her little studio: and she was so nice, and her paintings were so small, it would have been unkind not to find room for them. In addition to what her father called her intellectual accomplishments, she was clever in household matters—could order a dinner perfectly, had a definite taste in clarets, and had been known in company with only two or three of her most intimate friends, to smoke a cigarette with her coffee.

            Dickson Warner had been devoted to her for years, people had been certain that it would come to something; but quite suddenly he went to the Cape, to look after some diamond mines and write a book about them afterwards, and it came to be understood that everything was over between him and Emily Pierways. Then it was announced that her people were going to live abroad, and that she was to be married to Mr. Webster.

            Now Mr. Webster was a widower of forty-five with two children, a boy and a girl, aged eight and ten, called Gilbert and Maria. He lived in the Adelaide Road, and had a little house at Broadstairs, to which he frequently ran down from Saturday to Monday. He went something at Westminster, where he had an office—something connected with engineering and railways; she never quite knew what, and Mr. Webster was not a man easy to question. He was grave and solid-looking, rather tall, with firm, well-developed features; his clothes were usually black, his manner of speaking was slow and rather masterful, especially with women. He unbent to Emily Pierways a good deal before marriage, so that perhaps she did not sufficiently grasp his character, beyond seeing that he was a truthful, worthy man (which, indeed, he was), never likely to run away from his creditors, nor to do any other dishonourable action. The lively, half-intellectual society into which he had strayed by accident when he made her acquaintance was wholly new to him. The women in it were bright and individuality; they knew about things, and were companionable; in short, they had not the suppressed manner of women in his own set, who were, as a rule, the usual sort of middle-class wives, dull an unimaginative, without any keen interests of which his sex cared to hear. He had been an excellent husband, of the kind well suited to this type of woman, and intended, given the chance, to be one again. When he came across Miss Pierways he fell in love with her; so much that, for a little time, he humoured her, and gave way to her, and struggled to be agreeable—told her that he was very lonely, and all about his children. In some strange way he touched her. She was lonely too and heartsore, though she showed it little enough; she thought she they might care for each other in a quiet, unexciting fashion, and that she could be content with him. She even thought, in a happy, day-dreamy way, that she would make him the coziest home in the world, and that he would take care of her and love her, and so life would prove itself a pleasant condition after all.

            It was all done very quickly: neither of them considered the matter enough perhaps. He had long come to the conclusion that he must take a second wife; he was rather pleased with himself for having persuaded Miss Pierways to accept that proud position. So he married her with much solemnity, and meant to settle down and be happy ever after, in a sensible, unromantic manner (he was too old for nonsense, he reflected), doing his duty while she was doing hers, in the Adelaide Road.

            That lugubrious abode fairly frightened Emily at first; but afterwards she had visions of making it more cheerful, prettier, and just a little artistic. The previous Mrs. Webster had evidently taken things a good deal as they came. There was a photograph of her in the family album, with a white tie round her neck and a large brooch fastening it into place. Emily desired to thing of her with respectful compassion, seeing that she was dead; but she felt that a woman who wore a large brooch would revel in ugly furniture. And in truth there were many terrible bits with which to struggle—the ten-guinea suite covered with poplin in the drawing-room, for instance, and the console table with the gilt legs and looking-glass.

            She gave a hint about that one day, but Mr. Webster answered, with firmness in his voice, ‘ It is an exceedingly well-made piece of furniture, Emily. I like a good, substantial thing, and could not live in a room furnished with the gimcrackery that is fashionable nowadays.’

            There was one humiliating day, too, when she had draped the large gilt frame of the looking-glass over the chimney-piece. ‘ My dear,’ asked Mr. Webster, as he walked round the drawing-room after dinner, ‘ what is that thing? is it a dusting-sheet?’

            ‘ Dear Frederick,’ she said, and put her hand on his shoulder, ‘ it’s only a little bit of Indian drapery. It is fashionable to cover up looking-glass frames nowadays. Don’t you remember that ours at home were all draped?’

            ‘ Yes, my dear, quite so,’ he answered—pleasantly, but with decision. ‘ At the same time, we will not drape ours. Be good enough to have the Indian drapery taken down to-morrow morning.’

            ‘ Let it stay up over the dinner party: it is a lovely bit of stuff,’ she coaxed.

            Mr. Webster was half inclined to give in, but being terribly afraid lest a woman should henpeck him, answered firmly, ‘ We’ll have it down before the dinner party. See that it disappear to-morrow morning, my dear.’

            So it was taken down.

            The dinner party—her first one—gave Emily Webster a sensation of being hand-tied and useless. Mr. Webster arranged the menu with her, and to every dish that she proposed he carefully objected. He inspected the table when it was laid. She had decorated it rather well, and waited for a compliment. He walked round it slowly.

            ‘ My dear,’ he said, ‘ I dislike flowers arranged on the cloth in that manner; be good enough to put them into vases.’

            ‘ Oh, Frederick, do let them stay this time: it’s getting so late. I thought you would like them.’

            ‘ Don’t be foolish, my dear. They will not take ten minutes to put into vases. Here, bring them to me—I will do it myself.’

            She would have cheerfully put them into basins or soup-plates if only his manner had been different. But Mr. Webster was masterful or nothing: he thought it a sign of strength to show that he could be uncompromising even about trifles.

            ‘ Oh, why, why won’t he let me have the least little bit of a voice in the house!’ she cried despairingly. ‘ It is my home as well as his, and I only want to make him proud of it—and me.’

            She thought of Tom Shattor and his wife. Tom boasted that he let his wife do as she pleased in the house—that it was her domain; but that if he did not like it better than any other place, and did not find his comfort and wishes considered before all things in it, he should go somewhere else. And that was quite fair, she thought, and wished that Mr. Webster would only give her the chance of showing him how charming a home she could make in Adelaide Road. But he was afraid, and put his foot down everywhere, and his hand on everything.

            ‘ I wish you would not talk quite so much at dinner, Emily, when any one is here,’ he said. ‘ I dislike women who express definite opinions—’

            ‘ I only do it about books, and pictures, and things in my own line,’ she pleaded.

            ‘ I dislike women who express definite opinions on any subject,’ he repeated firmly,  ‘ unless it is to back up those of their husbands.’

            ‘ Then I won’t do it,’ she said cheerfully, determined to please him as far as possible; and then she broached one of her foolish ambitions. ‘ Frederick, I want to be at home on Wednesdays—do you mind?—or any day you like, but one day a week.’

            ‘ What for?’

            ‘ Oh, because then people will know when to find me.’

            ‘ Women have nothing to do: they can take their chance of finding you any afternoon.’

            ‘ Yes, but men don’t like coming on the chance, and you know I like talking to artists and interesting people.’

            ‘ Nonsense! What can men have to say to you or you to them? A man doesn’t care to talk to a woman, except out of civility, unless he is looking out for a wife. You have got a husband now,’ he laughed, ‘ and can be content.’

            ‘ But you like going to the clubs sometimes,’ she urged. ‘ If I never see people, how am I to know about things?’

            ‘ I can tell you about anything it is necessary you should know,’ he answered.

‘ You have a husband and a home, and the children to look after: quite enough for any sensible woman.’

            ‘ But, Frederick,’ she said, looking up, ‘ you must let me live. I know you look down on women; and you never talk to me about outside things now, you seem to think it absurd of me even to think of anything beyond the house. You give me no companionship, but women want it nowadays; they are better educated than they were formerly. You don’t care for going out, and when we stay at home you read and say nothing to me.’

            ‘ You can read too.’

            ‘ Yes,’ she answered; ‘ and you think the subscription to Mudie’s a treat to me, and you let me read my novels as you let the children play their games. You don’t expect the children to talk of their games or lessons before you nor me to discuss my reading. If I am not to go out and be amused, and am always to stay at home without intellectual companionship of any sort, what shall I become? I shall be like the doctor’s wife, or the lawyer’s wife, and so horribly dull for you, dear—without interests or individuality, or even intelligence in time.’

            ‘ You must understand, Emily,’ he said firmly, ‘ that this sort of talk is distasteful to me. Men have one set of interests, women have another; and a woman should be content with the duties and pleasures of her sex, as a man is content with those of his sex. I particularly dislike strong-minded women.’

            ‘ And so do I—I hate them. I don’t want the suffrage, or to go on platforms or committees, or to see my name in print; but I do want to know just a little bit of what is going on in the world; and to feel in some measure that I am responsible being. Perhaps if you were very much in love with me—’ she said gently, and stopped.

            ‘ I am too old for that sort of thing,’ he answered; ‘ but if I were, what then?’

            She was silent for a moment; she hoped he might have answered differently.

            ‘ If you had been very much in love with me,’ she said softly, ‘ and I with you, I daresay I should have loved the most absolute bondage. But as it is, I feel as if I had taken a post as housekeeper, and you were my master rather than my husband. I have a round of duties and no power even in my home.’

            ‘ Most sensible men are masters in their own houses.’ He said it sternly.

            ‘ Of course they are; but they give their wives some rein and let them work out their own salvation. I thought we should be good companions, going abreast through the world together, seeing and hearing and discussing all that was going on about us. That seems to me like marriage. The husband of course should be stronger, and if either has to give way about things it should be the woman—except when the man does, as proof not of his weakness, but of his strength. But you and I, Frederick represent, not husband and wife, but woman and her master. We are two people who live in the same house—’

            ‘ I think this discussion has gone far enough, Emily. You have your views and I have mine; and as I am not likely to alter mine, you had better reconsider yours. Now I am going to the office.’ He walked out of the dining-room, put on his coat, brushed his collar with a brush kept in the hat-stand, and took down his hat from the peg.

            ‘ By the way,’ he said, coming back to the dining-room, ‘ Phillips, an old friend of mine, will dine here this evening—dinner at seven-thirty as usual. You had better give us some fried soles, a boiled chicken, and an apple tart.’

            ‘ Very well, dear,’ she said, remembering that she used to pride herself on being able to order dinner; but her pride had been nipped in the bud. At first she had tried little surprises on him—salads of new designs, savouries, and dainty little dishes of various sorts, instead of those of the strictly British and family dinner order. But he had looked at them doubtfully, and silently refused them.

            ‘ You might have some boiled custards with the apple tart,’ he added.

            ‘ Very well. Good-bye,’ she said, and put out her hand, feeling that, as things had not been going very smoothly, he would perhaps take it as a sign that she was sorry.

            ‘ Good-bye,’ he said with a nod, and closed the street door after himself with a bang.

            She stood with her back to the fire, leaning against the corner of the mantel-piece, thinking. ‘ I suppose the majority of men are like him when they are married—all except a few.’ She looked straight ahead of her as if she were trying to see into the future. ‘ He’s deadly dull,’ she said, after a few minutes, and sat down in the armchair. ‘ I believe I shall die of routine and respectability. But it’s my own fault, it’s every bit my own fault. The life I have laid out for myself is the kind of one that countless women live, and are satisfied with, and try to attain and even envy. This in marriage! I feel as if my spinsterhood had been a lovely dream, and I had awakened from it to bondage and a mess of pottage. If I had only cared for him—but I thought it would have been so different, that we should at least have been comrades; then I could have been content. I wonder why he married me? I thought he cared, but his manner was different three hours after the ceremony, as if he had finished playing a part and become his natural self again with a sense of relief.’

            She was a sensible woman, not given to grieve over inevitables, so she stood up and looked at herself in the glass, and felt happier when she saw her own blue eyes, for she knew there was power in them, and something told her that the power would not remain a prisoner there. Then she looked at the marble clock on the mantel-piece. ‘ Half-past ten o’clock,’ she laughed; ‘ time to order diner. What a stupid old goose he is—he might have had such a lively time if he had only been sensible; he is so horribly afraid of being henpecked that he won’t let me call my soul my own. I don’t believe I care twopence for my husband, though I married him with the best intentions in the world, and should have been a treasure if he had only known how to manage me. Now I’ll order his lordship’s dinner, and then go up to Gilbert and Maria.’

            The children were not any more interesting than their father. The boy, who was pale and had a small nose and lank hair, never talked: he shuffled uneasily away when she wanted to talk to him. The girl had a colour, and thin lips—the mouth of a vixen.

            ‘ Oh, my dear Miss and Master Webster,’ Emily said to herself that morning, ‘ it was very adroit of your good papa to keep you out of sight before I married him. If I had seen you first, I don’t think my courage would have held out.’

            ‘ Are you ready for lessons, Gilbert?’ she asked cheerfully. ‘ Maria, will you get the books?’ Mr. Webster had explained to her, a month after marriage, that he wished her to give them morning lessons as their mother had done. She had rather liked the prospect, and worked away at French verbs, multiplication table, and five-finger exercises till she found out how thoroughly unattractive the children were,—then she hated them all. If he would have allowed her to pay for a governess out of the hundred and fifty a year that was her own, she would have been delighted; but this she did not even dare suggest. By twelve o’clock the lessons were finished; she sent the children to put on their things for the morning walk with the maid, and went down to the dining-room once more. ‘ I hope I shall never have a child to grow up and be a woman living the life I am going to live, or to be a man like Frederick. This stodgy, dreary world is full of lives like ours; the country is made up of them, and the ground beneath our feet is packed full of their graves. Marriage has given me a new view of the world altogether. I never dreamt before that the people who are free and work, the people who can do things—or attempts to do them, which is next best—the people who are not bound by conventionalities, who don’t care for respectability of this sort, who are not always trying to live up to a type, as Mr. Webster is, are just the salt of the earth.’

            A telegraph boy ran up the steps and gave a loud double knock. She looked up and laughed. ‘ It’s a delightful sound,’ she said; ‘ it comes out of the world beyond this cheerful domicile, and makes me feel as if a sensation had arrived.’ The telegram was for her, and from Mr. Webster. ‘ Order dinner for Phillips and me only: meet me with children at Victoria Station: going to send you with them to Broadstairs for a fortnight.’ 

‘ Thank you,’ she said, bewildered; ‘ you are a calm person, and I suppose I am your good and chattel, and you think you can do as you like with it.’ She sat down and thought the situation all round. ‘ I suppose I had better go,’ she concluded; ‘ wisdom and a little meekness are the better part of valour when you are married to Mr. Webster.’

            Mr. Webster met her at the station. His manner was firm and reserved, he smiled once or twice—but his smile was distinctly unyielding.

            ‘ I suppose you have taken some needlework with you,’ he said, ‘ and you will find some books there, and the piano. I shall probably come down next week, from Saturday till Monday.’

            The cottage looked like a villa; it was ten minutes from the station; there was a corn-field in front of it, and two or three coloured advertisements on the open fence that parted it from the road. Behind, from the upper windows, there was a view of the sea—the grey moaning sea that met the sky in the distance: it seemed to reach out to her over the sand and towards he cottage. A fenced-in garden went round the house; scarlet geraniums and larkspur grew in it, and on one side, leaning against the house, there was a conservatory; inside the conservatory were several indiarubber plants, four pots of musk, and a creepy-jenny falling from a wire basket. The cottage itself had two square sitting-rooms with bay windows, the drawing room had a door opening into the conservatory, a study (in which he never studied) for Mr. Webster, and upstairs several square rooms without bay windows, furnished as bedrooms. The furniture was highly respectable, useful, and durable; in the drawing-room the chairs were covered with maroon velvets, in the dining-room with green leather. There was a mahogany dinner-wagon in the dining-room, and yellow silk behind the fretwork front of the piano in the drawing-room. On each bedroom mantel-piece there were two china vases. Emily looked at the staircase when she up, and again when she came down, and wondered again when she came down, and wondered foolishly whether her coffin would be carried down it or down the one in the Adelaide Road.

            ‘ But I don’t care which it is, for I shall be a rejoicing corpse inside,’ she thought. Then she went down to tea—tea with mutton chops, which Mr. Webster had ordered by telegram, thinking it would do excellently well for her and Gilbert and Maria. It was a dreary meal—the children were very silent. The tablecloth was coarse— ‘ Good enough linen for the seaside,’ Mr. Webster would have said, and so it was perhaps; but the general cheerlessness made it get on her nerves. ‘ English ugliness is so dispiriting,’ she thought. ‘ I wonder why it is. I believe it is because, in spite of all our boasting, we have as little sense of humour as of beauty. Oh, this square and vulgar villa, with its oppressive air of well-to-do-ness, as the middle class consider prosperity, how different it is from what the merest hut might be in which two happy people lived and found the world beautiful! If only Dickson—’ but she choked down her thoughts; they were treason to Mr. Webster, and she was a loyal woman and meant to make the best of things.

            ‘ I want some more bread-and-butter, please,’ Gilbert said.

            ‘ Yes, dear. Couldn’t you say “Please mother”? she asked, thinking perhaps that an element of maternity in her life might comfort her for other disappointments.

            ‘ Mother’s dead,’ he answered, with his mouth full; and she had no heart to contradict him. When the meal was over they went for a walk along a flat white road between the hedges of two fields, till presently they came to the cliff, with the long stretch of grey sea in front and the high white sky above it. It rested her to look into the distance.

            ‘ Gilbert, when you are a man would you like to go across the sea in a ship?’

            ‘ No,’ answered Gilbert vacantly. ‘ I should like to be like father.’

            ‘ We might go and look for the beach,’ she said to Maria.

            ‘ We don’t want to,’ Maria answered fretfully.

            ‘ Couldn’t we go back?’ asked Gilbert. ‘ We don’t care about walking.’

            Mr. Webster did not write for three or four days, and then it was only a scrappy letter, hoping that she had everything she wanted, and signed, ‘ Your affectionate husband.’ There was a postscript: ‘ Isabel is staying with me; perhaps I shall bring her down on Saturday.’ Isabel was his sister—the widow of a doctor. She had been living in Northumberland for the last two years. Lately she had taken rooms in London. Her eyes were very sharp and her manner was very cold.

            Emily met them at the station, and walked back with a heavy heart, and tried to be a pleasant hostess to her sister-in-law. Mrs. Oldham looked at the dinner-table with a critical eye.

            ‘ Isn’t it rather a pity to pick the flowers?’ she asked; ‘ they soon die in the house.’

            Emily thought the remark unnecessary, but she said nothing; and the evening passed off pretty well, though it was deadly dull. They all went to church on Sunday morning. In the afternoon Mr. Webster went to sleep; but he woke up with a start at four o’clock.

            ‘ My dear,’ he said, ‘ where are the children? You had better take them for a walk over the cliff.’

            ‘ I don’t want to go out again,’ she answered gently, ‘ I am so neuralgic to-day, and there’s a cutting wind.’

            ‘ Oh, nonsense,’ he answered, with civil determination; ‘ a good brisk walk will do you good. I shan’t expect you back before a quarter to six.’

            She felt like a governess being sent out with her pupils; but she did not trust herself to speak. There was a north wind, with now and then a drizzle of rain in it. She thought of her husband and his sister sitting by the fire while she walked along the cliff towards the corn-fields. It was no use trying to talk to the children; they were lumpy and silent, as usual. ‘ This is marriage; and women want it—oh, fools that they are!’ Then she felt the tears fall down her cheeks as she answered herself, ‘ No, it is not marriage; it is the cruel imitation that passes for it, and that saps the lives of men and women. Oh, it is terrible, and there is no help for it; as it is now, so it will be all through the years, till the coffin of one of us is carried out of the house. Dull and monotonous, eating and drinking and sleeping, and keeping the house in order. That’s my life. He at least has his work out of doors and its change of every day.’

            It was quite six when they returned; she felt as if she could hardly drag herself into the house. They entered by the conservatory. Mrs. Oldham and Mr. Webster were sitting over the fire.  She heard Mrs. Oldham say, ‘ She is a very lucky woman; she has a good husband and an excellent home.’ Emily knew it was meant for her, so she coughed as she went in, and then made an excuse that her head was worse in order to go and lie down. She wanted to think about the good husband and the excellent home.

            ‘ Yes, go, my dear; perhaps it will do you good,’ Mr. Webster said approvingly.

‘ I have been talking about Gilbert to Isabel, and have decided to send him to a boarding-school.’

            ‘ Why didn’t he talk to me about it?’ Emily thought. ‘ Is he always going to be like this?—for if so, I cannot bear it.’ She lay down on the bed with her eyes wide open, and stared at the darkness. ‘ Oh, if I were free,’ she cried to herself in desperation—‘ if I were only free to go here and there as I pleased—or if he were only different!’

            Presently Mr. Webster came up with a flaring candle, which he flashed across her eyes. He moved about the room noisily: she hid he face in the pillows and stopped her ears.

            ‘ I have no place in this wide world that is my very own—no place where I have a right to be wholly by myself.’

            On Monday morning Mr. Webster announced that he should stay till Tuesday, and then take Maria up to London with him. ‘ Her aunt wishes it; and I have been thinking,’ he explained to his wife, ‘ that you had better stay down here a bit, while Isabel takes care of me in London; she hasn’t any place of her own yet. We have not seemed to hit it off together very well lately, you and I. But you will be able to reflect quietly down here.’

            ‘ I see,’ she said, trying to treat it as a joke; ‘ this is the domestic penitentiary! Don’t let us separate already, Frederick,’—she held out her hand to him, but he looked past it—‘ and don’t be unkind to me. I have only wanted to feel that you gave me a little freedom, or at any rate that you took some interest in me in my bondage. Now it seems as if I were tied up and isolated. You give me no companionship, you let me give you none. You don’t even consult me as you do your sister; but appear to think that I married you merely to execute a round of domestic duties.’

            ‘ Isabel is a woman with a great deal of common sense, and she knows my views on many subjects and agrees with them. As for you, in my opinion domestic duties, as I have told you before, ought to provide enough interest for any ordinary woman. Duty,’ he added, with solemnity, ‘ is the pivot on which the world turns.’

            Some fiend seemed to whisper to her, ‘ It is also the pivot on which your soul will be burnt in hell for the sin into which Mr. Webster will have driven you.’ But she choked back the thought, and with a violent effort pushed it right out of her heart.

            ‘ I will do as you like,’ she said with a gasp—‘ will stay here or go to town.’

            ‘ That is sensible,’ he conceded with the air of a man who prided himself on being just.

            ‘ Perhaps I might make one of the bedrooms into a little studio,’ she added, ‘ and do some painting?’ After all, she reflected, a little solitude might be made agreeable.

            ‘ I don’t see the good of it,’ he answered, after a moment’s reflection. ‘ It’s only waste of time; it is not as if you would ever earn any money at it; and as for decorating the place, we can buy anything we want in that way cheaper and far better than you can do it. Phillips is coming down with me for a couple of days on Saturday; we shall arrive by the 5·40 train. You might get some boiled cod or any white-fish, a bit of sirloin, and a jam tart, for dinner, and see that there’s anchovy sauce with the fish. I don’t care about your—what do you call it?—hollandaise. By the way, it would be a good thing if you made Jane take up the dining-room carpet between this and then, and turn it the other way round: I noticed that it had become very shabby on the door side of the room. See that it is done during the week, my dear.’

 

 

            Dickson Warner pulled up suddenly in Oxford Street.

            ‘ Good heavens, is it you? I suppose I ought to call you Mrs. Webster.’ She looked at him with an expression on her face that was almost fright, and a joy in her eyes that she could not hide. ‘ I wondered where you were,’ he said, still holding her hand. ‘ I have not seen you since your marriage.’

            ‘ No,’ she echoed, ‘ not since my marriage.’ He knew her well, and the tone of her voice told him in a moment that all was not right. ‘ I am staying alone at Broadstairs,’ she said, ‘ but I slipped up for a day without any one’s knowledge.’

            He looked at her curiously, then he said in a low voice:

            ‘ I never understood why you did it, nor what I did to make you change towards me—but no matter what it was, let us try to be friends. Couldn’t we walk a little way towards the Park and talk over old times?’

            So they walked on, and in a quarter of an hour she hated her life more than ever, and dreaded going back to it. At first they only talked of pictures and books and the old set, of cheap wanderings in Normandy and flying visits to Paris, of climbing to the gallery of the opera on a Lohengrin night, or sitting in the orchestra at a Richter concert. He told her of the picture that Brownrigg was painting, and the book that Martin had written, and how Halliday had married and set up in a cheap flat near the Edgeware Road Station, and gave little Sunday suppers, and what fun he and his wife had together.

            ‘ I thought we should do that sort of thing,’ he added, and she broke down altogether. This was in the Park and on two convenient chairs. Then there followed explanations, and they saw all things plainly, as many others have seen them—when it was too late. Gradually she cast prudence to the winds, and told him about Mr. Webster, and betrayed the bitterness and disappointment in her heart. He understood perfectly.

            ‘ There’s no being more awful in this world,’ he said, ‘ than your fairly prosperous humdrum British middle-class husband. He ought to be left to become the prey of the average domestic woman.’

            ‘ I shall never be that.’

            ‘ You were intended for something better,’ and his arm stole round her. Nobody could see them, for it was a deserted corner of the Park—there are one or two left: and they are very convenient. ‘ I believe I love you better than ever,’ he added desperately. She covered her face with her hands. It was a terrible joy to think it: she hated herself for having heard him, and thanked Heaven that she had.

            ‘ And we were meant for each other,’ he went on. ‘ Why did we both play the fool? The result is, that I shall kick about the world and probably come to grief somehow, and you will eat out your heart in the Adelaide Road or at Broadstairs.’

            ‘ Yes, I suppose so,’— she was evidently hopeless.

            ‘ I shall hate to think of you there.’ He drew her a little nearer; and she had no strength to resist.

            ‘ I feel as if I could never go back,’ she answered chokingly.

            ‘ That means going to the devil,’ he said gently.

            Her eyes filled, but she could not speak.

            ‘ I don’t believe you care if it does,’ he whispered.

            ‘ No, I don’t,’ she whispered back.

            So he kissed her tears away, and took her there. She found it more amusing than Mr. Webster.

 

 

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