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LIBRARY

UMIVERSiTY OF CALIFORNIA

RIVERSIDE

SOLILOQUY

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

NOVELS

THE CONFESSIONS OF A WELL- MEANING WOMAN

THE SENSATIONALISTS: Part III.— THE SECRET VICTORY

THE SENSATIONALISTS : Part II.— THE EDUCATION OF ERIC LANE

THE SENSATIONALISTS: Part I.—

LADY LILITH

SONIA MARRIED

MIDAS AND SON

NINETY-SIX HOURS' LEAVE

SONIA

THE SIXTH SENSE

SHEILA INTERVENES

THE RELUCTANT LOVER

WHILE I REMEMBER

SOLILOQUY: ^ NOVEL

By STEPHEN McKENNA

LONDON: HUTCHINSON &■ CO. PJTERNOSTER ROW

TO

THREE GRACIOUS LADIES

IN

A SMALL AND FROSTY COUNTRY

" . . . Ye may perceive the world's a dream. Life, how and what is it ? As here I lie In this state-chamber, dying by degrees, Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask •Do I live, am I dead ? ' Peace, peace seems all ..."

— Robert Browning : The Bishop Orders His Tomb

at Saint Ptaxed's Church.

SOLILOQUY

CHAPTER ONE

Frankly, my dear Ada, I came here to die because I'd nowhere else to go : Grace would have made so many difficulties, and I didn't choose to put myself under an obligation to Joan. I suppose I've patronized them both for so long that they felt they must have their revenge by sneering at me behind my back : — " my sister, Marion Shelley. Bless you, we never see her — not grand enough ! Though, if we caught a new poet, you'd find Marion coming round quickly enough to steal him for her salon — ", and, as they knew that / knew . . .

WeU ...

I found them husbands and made some kind of a position for them ; women don't easily forgive kindness. And, because they're too stupid and too lazy, I couldn't make them as good a position as my own ; no woman forgives that in her benefactor, least of all a sister. ... I found you a husband, Ada ; and whatever you and Arthur have, whatever you are, is all thanks to me. You don't find it easy to forgive that, do you ? But you tolerate me. . . . Well, partly because your incurable sense of decency tells you that one of my sisters must stand by " dear Marion " while she's dying, partly because I've told you that my money, such as it is, will come to you. Let me die here in peace, and you may take everything. . . .

But I warn you ! I'll alter my will, I'll cut you out and die on your hands without leaving you a penny if you teU me again " not to say such things," " not to be morbid," "not to be bitter"! Have I lied and pretended and

10 SOLILOQUY

kept silence for twenty years, to be told by a chit of a girl that I must go on being silent ? " It sounds so cynical." ... I was waiting for that ! The worst-abused and least understood word in the language. I'm being hovest and telling you the truth as I see it when I've no longer anything to gain by lying. I'm in pain, and you sit there expecting me to keep up pretences. I could if T wanted to ; I'm not broken . . . yet ; but I think I may possibly get some little relief by hurting myself more, biting on the aching tooth. It may hurt so much that I shall be reconciled to dying. . . . Death. . . . Yoii aren't worried by the thought of my death ; you've no love for me, you won't miss me ; but you feel it would be indecent to turn your own sister into the street, you feel you ought to like me and be grateful to me. Why ? Will you please tell me why ?

I made Arthur Venne marry you because I couldn't have people talking about " dear Marion Shelley's unhappy sisters " and wondering why T didn't marry them off ; I believe he has grown to like you, but he married you because he thought I should be such an asset as a sister- in-law. St. James'. Piccadilly, at the very least ; and, when it didn't materialize, he took to ritualism and you to babies ; as your hopes of a bishopric vanished, he talked about his " vocation " and you advertised each new arrival as " the gift of a daughter." . . . But you can't decide whether to hate me more for what I've done or for what I've failed to do. I went through the same business with Grace and Joan, so I ought to know. I was such a success myself, I knew everybody ; so I was expected to place my dear sisters. And I did. George Bartwell confidently hoped to be made a metropolitan magistrate the followng week, and Tony Mansion fancied that I should at least get him an undersecretaryship. I did what I could, but you mustn't think it was for love of them ; and, if I didn't feel any obligation to any of you, pray don't imagine that you need feel any to me. I despised you then, I despise you now. . . .

I suppose there is such a thing as family love, but it depends how much family is mixed in with the love. I had too much": I hated you — not individually, but as parts

SOLILOQUY 11

of the family institution that was suffocating me. You personally I always liked, because you were gentle and gave me no trouble and you hadn't had time to grow embittered like the rest of us ; but the herd-life at Cam- bridge and Polehampton — You can't even remember that ! — and then at Oxford. . . . The narrowness and meanness of it all, the jealousy, the vulgarity of that vile existence, our eternal man-hunts. . . . They were ! We all married, we can admit it now ! D'you wonder that we hated one another, even our own sisters, as you would say, when they blocked our one avenue of escape ? Father was always so much in the clouds, he didn't really belong to our Hfe ; but, when mother shewed us off and put us through our paces for the smirking undergraduates who made a favour of dining with us . . . There were times when I locked myself in my room for fear of attacking her . . . literally . . . with my fists, . . .

That Oxford prison. . . . And outside it, sixty miles away, was London and the great world. The men who visited father, like pilgrims — Mark Hawthorne or Robert Digby — made me want to scream. That great, spacious life where you didn't have to think whether yoiu: frock would stand another cleaning, where you had culture instead of imbecile chatter about boat-races, where you talked with the men who were doing things instead of writing about them. ... I don't know when I saw that Oxford was stifling me ; but it must have been George Brentwood — George Creal he was then — who opened my eyes to all I was losing. I determined to break away, to lay siege to London, to marry and take possession of the citadel. Nothing, I said, should stand in the way : parents, sisters, husband, children. That was the one thing worth having.

And I got it. For twenty years I ruled ; and at the end I abdicated voluntarily. Can you name a single statesman or artist of this generation who has not been my friend ? A soldier ? A scientist ? When I say " friend," I don't mean that they've dined with me once, when they could escape no longer, as with Lady Maitland ; the poli- ticians came to me for advice, the authors sent me their

la SOLILOQUY

books in manuscript and dedicated them to me — not, you may observe, to ' dear IMargaret Poyntcr.' You'll find me in Agatha Wilmot's London Memories and on every other page of IMark Hawthorne's Diaries, when you look in vain for Connie Maitland or Lady Poynter. In every part of the intellectual, dynamic life of my genera- tion I had a share : the books to read, the people to meet, the policies to follow ... it was always, "We'd better not do anything till we've heard what Marion Shelley has to say about it." . . . The one thing worth having. . . . When the papers said I was ill, there was such a procession of callers, such letters, such telephoning. ... I came here to escape it ; since then and for some time before I've been wondering whether it icas the one thing worth having. . . .

I may live a week, I may live a month ; but I hope I shan't— for both our sakcs. . . . Ah, don't be senti- mental! If you care for me at all— and there's not the least reason why you should— tell the doctor not to spare the morphia when you see I need it. After I'm gone, you can lower your eyes and talk about " my poor dear sister " to your heart's content ! If there'd been anything in the world for me to live for, I should have let them operate ; I could prolong the agony if I obeyed their ridiculous orders, instead of which I shall ask you to give me something to drink, I need stimulating. You have champagne in the house ? I thought so ; Arthur opens a bottle on your wedding-day, doesn't he, and makes a little speech, with a professional reference to God's mercies ? And brandy ? ... A bottle or two in case of illness ; I thought so ! Don't I know this life of yours inside out ? Didn't I nearly live it myself ? He wasn't a parson, but he was the same kind of thing. . . . Champagne. . . . Or brandy. . . . I'm watching to see your expression when I say — ' both ' I

Yes. you're shocked, as I expected. Well, I learnt that from Martin twenty years ago, in the first month of my married life. He did not drink it regularly ; but, if he ever wanted to make a special effort . . . Instead of an ordinary brandy and soda. You never knew I took any- thing ? My dear, is it likely that you should ? No one's

SOLILOQUY 18

ever seen me ; and no one will ever guess the agonies I've been through in other people's houses, starving for it, feeling that my brain was paralysed ; I had to give up staying with my friends. At home I used to put out the wine for dinner — always drinking water myself — and slip a bottle of brandy into a locked cupboard of my bedroom ; when it was finished, I put it with the empties and pretended I'd been decanting it. You knew I wasn't made of iron ; I should have thought you might have divined that I couldn't stand that strain without something. Brandy was the only thing I drank regularly — a good measure of it while I was dressing for luncheon and again before dinner ; the mouth-wash I always used took away the smell. Brandy doesn't affect your figure or your com- plexion like other things ; at forty-five I'm still present- able, I think, but I've burnt my liver till it must be like a piece of shrivelled leather. . . .

No, that didn't shock you ! What you couldn't stand, with your love of " decency ", was the idea that your sister drank ; you're wondering how to explain away to your servants all the empty bottles. And I don't care any longer. Six months ago, if any one had said that Marion Shelley drank . . . Now it makes me feel well and com- fortable, and I can enjoy the one pleasure left to me — being absolutely frank. The glorious relief after all these years of repression ! I don't particularly want to attack any one ; I've a grudge against life, but not against any living man or woman , assuredly I'm not trying to justify myself, because everybody thinks I've made such a wonder- ful success. . . . Perhaps it's just that : perhaps I can't bear all this reputation for success when I know the full tragedy of failure ; I feel I must tell somebody about it. . . .

The quiet, reserved Marion Shelley I Some one will probably write a little biographical sketch of me. . . . Egevia. . . . The Last of the London Salons. . . . And they'll all buy it and have it about on their tables to shew they were my friends ! . . . And for two years, I should say, you'll find that no one will try to give my sort of parties for fear people wiU say " You remember Marion Shelley's

14 SOLTT.OQTTY

wonderful evenings ? " or " 1 haven't the heart to go to these thuigs smce poor Marion Shelley died." . . .

I suppose I've really reached my high-water mark. There was a time when I was simply called a " climber " — if only Martin had lasted long enough for me to get him even a^^knighthood, it would have been so much easier 1 The help a title gives you ! — ; but I lived that down. Lived it down in triumph, so that, when I quarrelled with Her Grace of Ross, London was divided for two days and then came down on my side. I was in a position to spoil any party she tried to give, by giving one myself on the same night. As I did — to teach her the lesson — , sending out the invitations by telephone three hours before. And Eleanor Ross found it expedient to apologize to me. There was a time, too, when the superior young men, like Murray Thorndike, who had flocked to me in the days of their poverty, turned up their noses at my " plain living and high thinking " (which meant that I didn't give them champagne or allow them to monopolize the conversation). I lived that down, simply by letting them go ; when they found themselves out in the cold — and alone, without even a reviewer to fawn on — they begged to be readmitted.

I hadn't the money to compete with Connie Maitland or Margaret Poynter ; but I had something that all their money couldn't buy, something that Max Poynter *s disgusting great cigars never brought him. I don't know what it was. Personality ? That's a meaningless word ! I had intelligence, experience, resolution — oh yes ! and you'd like your cliche : "an infinite capacity for taking pains." If no one can do again what I did, it's because no one has my determination : I saw my goal from the beginning, I gave my life to it, I left nothing to chance ; though I never spoke to Valentine Arden after his vile attack on me in that book of his, I went to his memorial service and gave Seffie Wyndham a lift home. When you snatch new friends from a memorial service, you deserve to succeed. . . .

For more than twenty years. . . If I'd been a barrister or a politician, I should have been on the Bench or in the Cabinet. . . Did it make me happy ? I've been looking

SOLILOQUY IS

back over all my life and trying to decide whether I could ever say ' I was hdippy Jhen.' . . .

If I'm forty-five, you must be thirty ; so you wouldn't remember the old days at Cambridge. I don't remember much of them myself, because I was away at school for most of the time and father used to send me abroad when- ever he could aftord it. I was always supposed to have the brains of the family ; and he thought that, if he gave me a good education, I should be able to look after myself and spare you three a bigger share of the money, when he died.

I suppose 1 was happy then. We had a comfortable home, and father was so popular with the undergraduates that they made a great fuss of us all with presents and parties and picnics on the Backs. It was mother's best period, too, and I can just remember the days before she began to deteriorate : very tall and graceful she was then, with beautifully caressing manners and a splendid dignity that went so funnily with father's happy-go-lucky care- lessness. It's from her we aU learnt to move so well and hold ourselves properly. When you took away darhng father's disgraceful old pipe and brushed his hair and smartened his clothes, they were the best-looking, the most striking couple in Cambridge ; but he hated to be tidied up and enjoyed nothing so much as a romp with us before we went to bed ; and at the end of the romp his hair was ruffled and his tie under one ear, and it was all mother could do to keep him from going out into the streets hke that. Dear father ! He was such a dehghtful boy with his twinkling blue eyes and the gruff voice he used to put on for telling us stories ! He loved us, and we loved him ; the whole house was full of love, for in those days he and mother seemed to be living in an endless honeymoon. I cried all night before I went to King's Norton for my first term. . . .

And I really don't know when the change came. School was so absorbing that I wasn't very observant at home, but I do remember that, hoUdays after hohdays, there

16 SOT.ILDQT^V

seemed less sunshine in Cambridge. Mother wasn't as beautiful as she had been, and she became very impatient with us ; father began to look worried, too. At first, when he didn't play with us, I thought it was because we were growing up, then I saw he was absent-minded. I know now that this ten-years' honeymoon was over and that they were taking stock and settling down to life in earnest.

They never talked to me much about the early days, but I've been able to reconstruct them. Socially, father was nothing — the son of a very humble clerk in Somerset House — and throughout his life he remained modest and quite wonderfully grateful : grateful to be alive and well, grate- ful to have as much food as he needed, grateful to be invited about and never seeing that he was being honized, grateful to have four daughters, grateful to be married to such a wife. Mother, I believe, was felt to have thrown herself away on him : her people were old family solicitors in Liverpool, and, with her eight or nine hundred a year, they expected her to do great things ; instead, she made a pure love-match, though, if she had married for ambition, she would still not have done badly. The first ten years must have been heaven to them both ! Father was so handsome and sweet ; you can see from old photographs that we were adorable children ; and they could watch his reputa- tion growing and growing in Cambridge, in England, in Germany, in America until he stood alone, at forty, as the greatest living authority on Elizabethan literature. He loved his work and had no personal ambitions ; mother, I fancy, had, but she would have been content with her position as wife of a professor or of the head of a college. Who would not ? Unhappily, they couldn't afford to wait. Mother's money and father's salary were ample for the early years ; but, when three daughters had to be fed and dressed and sent to school, when provision had to be made for them until they married, father had to change his whole mode of life.

It was a terrible disappointment when you were born : mother didn't like girls, didn't understand them ; she was jesdous if a man even looked at us, though we were only

SOLILOQUY 17

children, and she grudged every smile that father spared us. A man's woman. . . And father, too, had been hoping so much for a son : though a boy's more expensive to start in life, there's something so hopeless about four girls, one after the other (we had to be called the Tenby Quartette at Oxford ; we were a fair mark as long as we were unmarried, and four sisters do frighten a man away : if one doesn't catch him, they all feel, another will. . . . And families where there aren't four sisters make them- selves so facetious when the clothes descend from one to another. . .). You really made father decide to leave Cambridge. The beginning of mother's illness was the end of their honeymoon : no son, no more children and very little more youth : I always fancy that father waked suddenly to his responsibilities ; and, if I had been happy — I must have been, at Cambridge and King's Norton ! — I cesLsed to be happy when father ceased to be a gay ragamuffin boy. I overheard him talking to mother one night a few months after you were bom ; he had just brought out the big edition of Marlowe, and his reputation was made ; Harvard was inviting him to lecture, all sorts of people were offering him appointments of different kinds, and he had to make up his mind what to do.

" I must go where there's most money," I remember his telling mother. " I don't want to say good-bye to Clare, but we must look ahead to the time when our girls are grown-up. It will be a struggle."

Then he went on to say something about Polehampton : but I wasn't listening, because that word " struggle " had taken hold of my attention ; and I lay on my face before the fire, pretending to read a book and puzzling, puzzling. We'd always seemed to have enough of every- thing : holidays and treats and clothes, people to meals, my friends from school to stay with me in the hoUdays — things that I subconsciously knew some of our neighbours couldn't afford — ; and, though some of the girls at King's Norton said they'd have to earn their living, it had never occurred to me that / should have to ; I imagined that, all in good time, I should marry and have a husband to provide me with money.

B

18 SOLILOQUY

If I could reconstruct my ambitions from ten to fifteen, they were very simple : I must have had some personality, for I took the lead in everything at school, and the younger girls idoUzed me — putting flowers in my desk, blushing if I spoke to them and being utterly miserable if I lost my temper and told them not to be little fools ; so I wanted to be popular, influential ; and, as I had father's vivacity and mother's good features and slim, graceful body, I wanted to match myself with an equally fascinating husband. But I didn't analyse farther than that ; I wasn't precocious in any way, cither socially or sexually, or morbid. . . . I'd have married a duke or a dustman with equal pleasure if he was good-looking ; I thought you could marry one as easily as the other ; and, to me, marriage was a thing that came at the end of every novel, not a thing of passion, not a thing that could be intimate or wonderful ... or degrading. . . . Yes, from ten to fifteen I was just a pretty, ignorant, jolly girl with more vitality than most ; full of rather shallow ideals — assuring people solemnly that I wanted to leave the world just a little better than I'd found it — , clean as a pebble in a brook, and mentally and physically as half-baked as you'd expect me to be. Oh, I made sure I should marry and live in a house like father's and have children and be quite comfortable.

That there might be any struggle or difficulty never occurred to me until I overheard father talking. . . . Then I suddenly began to think of all the women I knew who hadn't married : the sisters and daughters of the dons, the mistresses at the school, who seemed quite old to me then. If I was clever and good-looking, so had they been once ; everything, then, didn't come to everybody ; life was a fight ; perhaps I shouldn't marry and, whether I married or not, I must work hard and struggle for a place in the sun. It was hardly more than that then : when I kissed father good-night and went to bed, I determined — with some idea of helping him, because he was worried — to do wonderfully well at school, though very soon I saw that to do any good I must do better than others, better than all the others ; it wasn't long before I saw myself with my hand against every one, though as yet I had no

SOLILOQUY 19

definite ambitions. Fifteen is rather young to learn that. . . And I learnt to be jealous of all the people who didn't have to fight for themselves.

The next term at King's Norton I did very well indeed, but I despised the people I beat and hated the people who beat me. There were about four other girls who mattered in the Upper Fifth, and the one who got head remove into the Sixth would be Senior Monitor the next year. Mildred Stanley, Winifred Orm, Beatrice Selkirk and Joyce Armi- tage ; we shared the same dormitory, we'd gone up the school together. I'd stayed with them, they'd stayed with me ; and there wasn't much to choose between us except that Beatrice was curiously stupid in some ways and Joyce and Mildred were thoroughly idle. Well, I made up my mind to beat them, beat them all ; and, when the half- term reports went out, I was second only to Beatrice Sel- kirk. She had been my greatest friend of all since the day when she got me out of a serious scrape ; we shared the same study, her bed was next to mine, we told each other everything and wrote four and five times a week every holidays. For terms and terms she had always helped me with my sums while I helped her with her French. I was a shade cleverer than she was, though nothing like so plodding, and I knew I could master the wretched sums if I really tried. I was confirmed that term, and of course this gave me an opportunity of being as sanctimonious as I hked. I told Beatrice that I thought it was dishonest for us to do each other's work ; at the end of the term I beat her in French and arithmetic. . . . And I despised her. . . . That was my first great meanness, and, once I'd begun to play for my own hand, I never faltered ; ifs true to say that in thirty years I've not sacrificed myself for a living soul. . . .

That spoilt King's Norton for me. The people ceased to be friends and became rivals : rivals in school and rivals in life ... to be crushed or courted ; and, before I could decide which it was to be, I had to analyse them, price them. Beatrice, when once I'd beaten her, passed out of my life : she would go out to India, I knew, and join her people ; but I had to keep in with Winnie Orm, because she was

90 SOLILOQUY

always giving me presents, though I hated her for having a rich father who would see to it that there was no struggle for her. Joyce Armitage I deliberately cultivated because I thought she would be useful to me : she was an only child, and her mother wanted her to have a friend of her own age ; and / wanted them to go on asking me to stay with them in London for the holidays. Mildred I had to watch carefully ; she had no money and was frankly deter- mined to find a husband of some kind as quickly as possible; she was artful enough to get him, too, and clever enough to make a very good wife : what she didn't know about marketing, cooking, running a house . . . while she was still a child ! . . . When she went to stay with people, you couldn't keep her out of the kitchen. ... So for my last two years, you see, I was simply preparing. . . .

I tried to prepare myself, too, by learning something about life. One of the mistresses — I can't remember her name. Yes, I can ! It was Kirby — Miss Kirby interested me enormously : she had a manner that marked her off from the others, and, when I saw how they all hated her, I knew they must feel she was superior to them. So she was. I used to sit in her room, and she told me Httle bits about herself : they'd been great people, and she'd been engaged, but the man had died, and her father had lost all his money. She told me what she'd been through before she got this job and how thankful she was for it, though there was so little future for her that she simply dared not contemplate what would happen when she had to resign. From her I learnt that this struggle might go on all your life. . , . She told me a lot that I suppose she had no business to ; and I found out why the other mis- tresses hated her. They all pretended that they had a vocation for teaching ; some of them talked about " women's work " and " woman's place in the world " ; that was in the nineties, and just enough of the Ibsen influence had drifted over to fill their heads with ideas of emancipation, equal rights and a bitter hostility to men. Miss Kirby used to tell them that they were talking nonsense and that there was no substitute for marriage, however much they pretended to despise it. She was past the age of passion.

SOLILOQUY 21

and they weren't ; so they hated her for pulling away their pretences and reminding them how unhappy and wasted they really were. . . . When I told her that I wanted to take up teaching, she said, " Not until you've failed at everything else, like the rest of us here." And I think she was more right than the other soured virgins who preached to us against men and marriage . . . and wouldn't admit they'd failed.

The next holidays I heard more about Polehampton. The university there wanted a new professor of English, and father had been offered the position. He didn't want to settle down in the Midlands, but he didn't dare refuse the money. The difference between him and mother ! On the first night of the holidays I was so glad to be home that they felt the shock must be broken gently ; and father came to break it. He sauntered round my room, looking at my pictures and pulling my prizes out of the book-case; my new writing-table that Winnie Orm had given me he quite fell in love with, though it was too big for the room. Then he said :

" I don't knowwhether you've heard that we're giving up this house. I've been offered an appointment which takes me to Staffordshire and I was up there last week, looking at the new house. You'll have a better room than this — half as big again, I should say." . . .

Poor father ! Trying to bribe me ! And it was so like him to soften the blow while mother was only thinking that, if she could stand it, we could stand it too. Father was so sweet and clever that I was quite excited by the prospect of moving. Until the time came ! We'd all been at the sea while the house was being got ready ; and we plunged into Polehampton suddenly, without warning. I shall never forget our journey there ! An evening in autumn, with one horrible manufacturing town after another ; great heaps of coal and refuse with patches of dirty grass between ; inky little streams and canals, black wheels and ropes at the shaft-heads ; and blast-furnaces

22 SOLILOQUY

that looked like the entrance to Hell, belching flames that seemed to lick the sky. My hair and eyes were full of smuts, my hands and face were smeared with grime. . . .

" We're not going to live here ! " I cried, when we reached Polehampton and walked, in a nightmare, out of that roaring pitchy station into a cobbled yard filled with broken-down flies and clattering electric tram-cars.

" I'm afraid we are, my dear," father said. " Yon must try to make the best of it."

" But how long for ? " I asked. " Oh, I can't live here." . . .

Then mother told me not to worry father and said that, if it was good enough for them (or something of the kind), it was good enough for me.

I thought over that phrase until I went to sleep. . . . We drove out past all the mean shops and the factories into the residential part of Polehampton — the Netley Road, a mile long, with square, red-brick houses on either side and, in the middle, the trams that came swaying and swing- ing with a crackle of sparks from the cable overhead and a bell that never stopped—" NETLEY— STATION " and

" STATION— RECREATION GROUND "alternately

I hadn't stayed in more than four or five houses at that time, and this one of ours seemed tolerable — as a make- shift. It was hideously proportioned, but mother had done her best with the curtains and furniture. . . . And I didn't want to be told again that what was good enough for them was good enough for me. Besides, I hadn't begun to realize. ... It was when I went to bed and saw my own eiderdown and carpet, Winnie Orm's writing-table, my pictures and photographs, book-cases, prizes, all trans- planted from my room at Cambridge, that I understood father was seriously trying to make our home here. It wasn't good enough for me. . . .

I went into the next room, where Grace and Joan were already in bed, and tried to make them see it ; but, if mother or father said a thing to them, they always accepted it. That was the first time I saw that I should have to fight for my own hand even against my family ; and I was only sixteen. Grace admitted that it wasn't as nice as

SOLILOQUY 28

Cambridge, but said we should be away at school most of the time — that was no consolation for me, because I was leaving in another year — ; and father had said something about my attending lectures in this horrible university ; Joan — she was always the laziest of you all — Joan said we should get used to it in time.

I tried to get used to it. I had to, for we were there four years. You were a baby, and those two lumpy creatures were at school near Brighton. I . . . / had to face it in all its horror. Thank God, the lectures killed a good part of each day ; and at night I worked like a slave ; there was nothing, nothing I wouldn't learn if it would take me out of myself, make me forget Polehampton . . . and shew me a glimmer of hope for the future. Politics and economics, in case any one — a politician — wanted a secre- tary; history and literature, modern languages. . . . That was where I laid the foundation of all my knowledge. Father always said that I could get a first in modern history or English literature at any university in the country ; working with him, I was brought up in the great English tradition ; he taught me such perspective and taste that I afterwards made mincemeat of people like Margaret Poynter who had read nothing earlier than Tennyson, noth- ing outside their own country. And 1 made such mince- meat of the girls and boys who attended the same lectures that they were afraid to speak to me ! At first, of course, I took the lead, as I had done at school ; and they were very anxious that I should help them to create the sort of university atmosphere and spirit that they imagined I'd known at Cambridge.

" It can't be done," I told them. " Polehampton is no more like a university than a Polehampton man is hke a gentleman."

SiUy. ... I couldn't afford to make enemies if I had to live in the place or if I wanted an appointment there (father said I was too young to work away from home). And I wanted anything that would enable me to be independent and to forget my surroundings. Will you believe me, I studied metallurgy in the hopes of impressing one of these Black Country brutes ?

24 SOLILOQUY

You were too young to realize the awfulness of those years. In by tram five days a week for lectures, back by tram for lunch, in by tram again to the library, tea in the common room. On Saturday we had tennis ; father and I, the doctor and the vicar ; one week with us, one week with the doctor and so on — with supper, and home by tram. When it was wet, we played badminton in the coach- house. And on other days in summer I used to be invited to join parties on the Recreation Ground ! You never knew father's pupils in those days. They were rich, bumptious young cads who'd been sent for a few years to a grammar-school and came to the university to be " fin- ished " ; most of their time was given to the commercial diploma, but their fond parents thought they could make gentlemen of them by paying for just one course of English. And that's where father met them ; and, forgetting that he wasn't still at Cambridge, he used to invite them to tea on Sunday. They came in preposterous clothes — red and green check waistcoats, collars Uke white flower-pots filled with geraniums, tie-pins — ; and they never knew whether it was more impressive to treat me as a barmaid or a Sunday-school teacher. One of them told me that the Students' Committee was going to call the living-room at the Hostel a common room — " to be more like Oxford, you know," he said. I told Mm that it was an unfortunate name to choose. ...

In my turn I had to meet them on their heath — the Recreation Ground ; as soon as they went into business, they divided their time between " the office " and those lean, black courts, where they played wildly keen tennis for wagers which I wasn't supposed to hear. After Christ- mas they made up parties for the pantomime : and we were aB-company town. . . . Four years. . . Four years of that ! And towards the end of the time I used to get letters from Winnie and Joyce, telling me about their first dances and all the men they imagined were in love with them. . . Sometimes we were lured into dining with these . . . monsters — dinners that began at seven, where all the men seemed to wear frock-coats and white satin ties. . . Troughs of food, oceans of wine. , . And they tried to interest us

SOLILOQUY 25

in their business, and the men called their wives " mother ". They couldn't see they were something to be ashamed of ! They were proud of themselves, of Polehampton ! ' We are the great industrial midlands,' they seemed to say : * we are what has made England great ' ... I'm really not sure that they didn't pity us a little for being ' effete'.

Four years. . . We lived like Spartans because we wanted to save all we could and get away. I rebelled once or twice, but I could do nothing. If I upset father, it spoilt his work and kept us there all the longer. He was Director of Studies, which meant a few hours' office-work each week, and Professor of English, which meant eight lectures a term ; in addition, he took pupils and, in his spare time, finished the History of the Elizabethan Stage. I couldn't interrupt that ; and it was useless simply to grumble, because — after a long fight — he'd said I might try to find work for myself . . . . And I'd failed. That was a lesson I was glad to learn early.

" Here," I said, " am I, young, good-looking, clever, accomplished, miles above every other girl in Polehampton ; I shouldn't dream of marrying any one of these clods, but they ought to want to marry me (I was just beginning to be very conscious of being a woman). If I condescend to apply for a position ..."

It was the post of Lady Dean. They gave it to a podgy, stupid, fifth-rate girl, because she was so popular with the students. I saw then — I was nineteen — that merit doesn't always win ; I saw that a quick tongue frightens the stupid people ; I saw that I, too, must learn to be popular. That meant humility and hiding from people that you despised them. I learnt that lesson at nineteen, and after twenty-six years you'll find people saying " I think I really Hke dear Marion Shelley because she's so gentle and unassertive." . . .

" Yes," I always want to say, " like the starving peasant before the revolution ; but wait tiU I have power of life and death over you ! "

There were times when I believed we were rooted in Polehampton for all our days. Father thought only of his work ; mother was growing so ill and irritable that you

26 SOLILOQUY

couldn't discuss anything with her ; and no one supported me, though Grace and Joan had fined down into quite pretty girls and must have been as much bored as I was. We were rescued quite unexpectedly. About a year after the Elizabethan Sta^e the Silversmiths' Company endowed a chair of English literature at Oxford ; father was invited to apply for it, and in the summer of '95 we^shook off the smuts of Polehampton.

I remember that father sent for me on the morning when he heard of his appointment. He talked about the honour and the emoluments. . . . And. as he couldn't go back to Cambridge, how glad he'd be to go to Oxford. . . . Then he talked about mother, and I found that she'd been making difficulties. Health. . . . He wouldn't tell me what was the matter, but she was becoming a sort of vague permanent invalid and hated the idea of being uprooted. (I think that was the moment when I first hated her ; until then I'd regarded her patiently, as the act of God.) She'd lost her looks, lost her charm and become fussy, petulant and old — bitterly jealous if any one seemed to intrude between father and her and treating father as though she were his keeper and we were trying to bait him. It was not our business, she felt, to be told how ill she was ; and I found it hard to believe how wonderful she had once seemed. . . , If we went to Oxford, father said, I must be prepared gradually to take mother's place. I said I would ! I promised that, as long as I lived under his roof, I'd be wife to him and mother to you all. There's nothing I wouldn't have done to get away from Polehampton.

And 1 didn't propose to live under his roof any longer than was unavoidable. '95 ; I was twenty ; if we'd stayed on in Staffordshire, I should have been old enough now to try for an appointment at one of the big schools ; but that was to surrender everything I'd hoped of life. I remembered Miss Kirby's warning. Oxford ! When I heard that name, I felt that all my bad dreams were over. I'd never been in love, never seen a man I wanted to spend half-an-hour

SOLILOQUY 27

with ; but I determined to track one down and marry him. I didn't want titles or estates or the great world ; I wanted some man who was a gentleman, presentable, decently dressed, educated, without that appalhng Stafford- shire accent and all the talk about the " office " and the " ground." I should have been good value, too, for most men, for I was very pretty, with a good figure and the art of wearing clothes well ; I had an amazing equipment of book-knowledge, picked up in desperation at the uni- versity ; and I was pathetically anxious to please. Some- times, even now, I grow hot when I think of the things I did to attract and please men. . . .

And Oxford, I knew, was full of the very people I wanted to meet. We arrived at the end of the summer term, and I could have stretched out my arms to them as we drove to the Banbury Road. Everything that I'd loved about Cambridge came to life again in my heart. They were clean and self-possessed, these boys ; at ease in their delight- ful untidiness instead of being mute and miserable in flower- pot collars. . . And twenty was the right age for a man in his last year ; some one who was going into politics ; he had only to meet me in order to see what good value I was giving him. ... I had a glorious day-dream of the life I meant to create in Oxford (even in those days, you see, my thoughts ran on organizing a splendid circle, with my- self radiating hght from the centre) ; a hfe that should be my setting until some one came to carry me off. Mother had handed over the keys without a murmur — except for a little general disparagement — , I could do what I liked with the rest of you, and there's no denying that Grace and Joan did me credit so far as looks were concerned ; if they were content to keep their mouths shut and look beautiful while I suppHed the intelligence, I foresaw that we should take Oxford by storm.

If I'd been old enough at Cambridge to remember the official hfe, I shouldn't have laid up so much needless dis- appointment for myself. Father, of course, would have had a success an5rwhere ; but Oxford was already so full of dons' daughters that there was no welcome for three more, especially when one was clever and all three were

28 SOLILOQUY

pretty. That didn't matter : we should have won through in a fair fight if there 'd been any opportunity, but I had no scope. For terms and terms we were invited to dine with father's colleagues ; they dined with us ; and I found so much precedence and seniority that we never had a look-in. Social life ! After the formal dinners, our social life was confined to^. tea-parties where we gossiped about the other girls in North Oxford and repeated hons mots that father brought back when he'd dined in hall. You lived the tea-party life — or none ati^all !

f^. I said to myself that I'd start a ' Young Oxford ' move- ment ; we had a good-sized house, father never grudged me money for entertaining, and for the first time since we left Cambridge I wasn't ashamed to invite my friends. Mildred Stanley — I knew she'd be the first of us to get off ! — ; while we were still at Polchampton I read that she was engaged to a barrister named Burnley, some years older than herself and without much prospects, so some one told me ; and Beatrice Selkirk had gone out to India with her people ; but I had Joyce Armitage and Winnie Orm up during our first year and arranged a tiny dance and some expeditions to which we didn't invite all the old women. It didn't do ! My dear, it didn't do 1 Some one — you never know where these things start — some one said we were ' fast ' ; some one else said it was a pity mother was too ill to exercise any control ; and finally some one said that really, don't you know, this sort of thing (whatever it was) didn't look well in the daughters of one of the professors. After that, father dropped me a hint, and ' Young Oxford ' gave up trying to rejuvenate the social life of the place ; we fell back on more conven- tional methods ; fell back and failed. . , .

It was later, much later, that I realized I had cut it too fine for any hope of success. A man of twenty-one wants something younger than a girl of twenty-one, especially if she knows more about everything than he does ; he wants somebody that he can shew off to and guide and influence. These boys were frightened of me : though I'd tried, after my rebuff in Polchampton, to learn humility, I suppose I'd been snubbing the clods there too long to drop the habit

SOLILOQUY 29

in a night. I found that the clever people liked meeting me : we sharpened our ^vits and bandied epigrams : but the hungry Httle scholars who were clever enough to appreciate me were too clever to be caught by a don's daughter. And, if I'd caught them, they had no money. The others — well, they just made themselves scarce. I took some time to see it — to see that I'd plenty of solid learning and academic wit but no social arts (where was I to learn them ? From father ? In Polehampton ?) ; and then it was too late. By the time I'd set myself to iDCCome a good hostess, to make people at home instead of striking sparks out of them, to draw them out instead of damning them as bores, I'd missed the tide. T was twenty-one . . . twenty-two. Your undergraduate of twenty-one doesn't want a don's daughter of twenty-two.

It came upon me quite suddenly — this discovery that I'd been kicked upstairs from one generation to another. One year I was invited to Sunday picnics on the Cher ; the next I was left out : the next they invited Grace instead of me. She, I knew, couldn't hold her own, and I expected, somehow, they'd come back to me ; but, when they tired of her, they gave Joan a trial and, when they tired of Joan, they dropped all three of us together. It was then that I heard we were being described as the Tenby Sisters ; you began to be seen going about with us, so we were called the Tenby Quartette. I realized that we'd become an Oxford institution. And I knew well enough how the tea- parties watched other girls to guess how they were watching and gossiping about us. . . . There were moments when I was seized with agorophobia and dared not leave home. . . .

That house in the Banbury Road ! After I married, I never went back to live there, of course, until father's death, but I suppose it was always the same ; you and the others carried on the tradition ? The last thing I shall see before I die will be the winding, flagged path up to the front door and the rock-garden on either side. Every time I trod that path I felt like a prisoner going back to his cell after exercise. Rock-gardens were just becoming the fashionable snobbism of the time, and I rolled off a wonderful patter about cerasiitim Biehersteinii and alyssum

30 SOLILOQUY

saxatile and the rest. No one who came to Hillcrest was spared our rock-garden ; there was bitter rivalry between mother and a retired clergyman from Boar's Hill ; and one day I discovered the mean old beast filling his pockets with cuttings. That became the staple of North Oxford conversation for a week. . . . That garden, and the cold httle new-art hall, and the oak dining-room. In those days, if your house did happen to look like an up-to-date infirmary, you were honour-bound to jumble up a refectory table and a farm-house settle and a dresser from a cottage and Jacobean chairs. . . . Father's room I liked : it was always just books and sofas and a big fire in winter ; I used to lie there dreaming and planning. The drawing- room I only went into on Sundays, when mother made me pour out tea for the undergraduates who honoured us with their company. It was a destination for a walk when they'd overeaten themselves at lunch ; they clattered across the floor in their heavy boots and stood round in blue suits, spilling crumbs and asking me if I'd been down to watch " toggers " or hear the last Union debate. And I'd ask if any of them were playing in the O.U.D.S. And then they'd look at their watches and hurry back to chapel. . . .

How I dreamed and planned I Father, who never used a chair if he could swing his legs from the edge of a table or perch at the top of a step-ladder, would sit scribbling away with a pad on his knees, running his fingers through his hair and starting an avalanche of books and papers whenever he became excited. And I lay on the hearth- rug or curled myself at one end of the sofa, staring into the fire and just seeing things as they were ! Sometimes, when father wanted another book, he'd squeeze my hand or pat my shoulder as he passed ; he knew what I was think- ing about ; and, if I caught him staring out of window or drawing patterns on the blotting-paper, I knew what he was thinking about. By this time, I suppose, he was confident that he'd have something to leave each of us ;

SOLILOQUY 31

but no one knew how longmother might hve, and he couldn't hide from himself that we weren't being given much of a chance. When we lined up, all four of us, for church on Sunday, he looked conscience-stricken, appeahng, mutely begging me to find some way out of the difficulty.

/ could only help to the extent of facing facts. On my twenty-third birthday I said to myself : " You're out of the running now for undergraduates, though you must still do j^'our best for your sisters ; for you there remain the younger dons and any chance friends of your father's." It was not an exhilarating prospect ! Penniless boys of five-and-twenty, who couldn't marry without jeopardizing their fellowships, and father's contemporaries from Durham or Edinburgh ! Still, I worked indefatigably to keep the house filled with men of any age who would do for any of us ; and, if you ever wonder why I'm hard or when I lost my bloom, you can trace it back to those years when I humbled myself to make cock-sure undergraduates run the gauntlet of dining with us — once !

One or two of them became fairly intimate — for a time. You see, they all loved father and used to ask him to lunches and dinners ; mother never went anywhere, so they invited me instead, but always as some one who could talk and make a success of their parties, always as some one of an older generation. There came a time when I definitely realized that they'd put me on the shelf. Every year we got up a party for the Infirmary Ball : three or four of our more long-suffering friends graciously con- sented to come with us if we fed them first and paid for their tickets (we, of course, had money to hum after paying for dresses, gloves, shoes. . .) ; every year I tried to break free of my frame and make them see me as a woman, a girl who danced well and was amusing to talk to, not the daughter of the Silversmith Professor, a North Oxford oddity. They hadn't enough imagination ; I was always the tea-pouring member of the Tenby Quartette. . . .

And, whenever I began to have a little bit of a success, mother spoilt it. I suppose she too saw I'd missed the tide and was determined to make one last desperate effort ; besides, Grace^and Joan were coming on. If ever

S2 SOLILOQUY

she fancied that a man hked any of us, she gave him no peace. Dinner . . . and she always thanked him loudly for that wonderful picnic which we had enjoyed so much ; thank God, I couldn't play a note, or she'd have chained me to the piano for the unhappy creature's edification ; after dinner, of course, he had to call, and then mother snared him with a tennis-party, taking no refusal and going on " Monday ? Tuesday ? Wednesday ? " until he capitu- lated or else said he was going away before his schools. If he did come, mother always tried to drive us into a corner together, and the man was never allowed to go until he'd fixed a date for coming again ; but as a rule he wrote very apologetically to say that, when he accepted Mrs. Tenby's most kind invitation, he'd quite forgotten that he was already engaged. I called those our " passing belle " letters. . . . And, if we met again, the young man was always very much embarrassed.

If he saw it and we saw it, you may be quite sure that other people saw it as well. Among undergraduates and in North Oxford we became a byword ; mother's frantic efforts to marry us off made an institution of her ; 1 heard a few of the things that were said about us and I could imagine the rest. Well, I'd long ago decided that there was no room in my hfe for pride, but I had my vanity to consider : no one can afford to be ridiculous, and I decided that, if I didn't capture one of the younger dons or the stray scholars who came to see father professionally, I must revert to Miss Kirby's counsel of despair and look about for some teaching appointment.

First of all, I considered the dons in the abstract : they were gentlemen, they were educated, their minds were in harmony with mine, and some of them would in time be professors and heads of colleges ; on the other hand, they had very little money, they were accustomed to a very pleasant bachelor life — living in college, dining in hall, going to their common rooms, travelling in the vacations — ; if I married one of them, it would mean an end of all this, and we should have to start on very small means — in North Oxford. I should have to make friends with all the people I'd allowed myself to despise and hate ; I

SOLILOQUY 33

should really have to take an interest in boat-races and steeple-chases and what the O.U.D.S. were going to do this year, because that would be my life. I should belong to North Oxford. And perhaps we should have children, daughters, four of them ; perhaps we too should have to sell ourselves into slavery at a place like Polehampton. . . .

I shivered, but I didn't altogether reject the idea ; I was beginning to see that I wasn't in a position to reject things because they didn't quite come up to my ideal standard. The alternatives. . . Well, I could try to earn my own living ; something educational, a girls' school. I thought of King's Norton and the mistresses there, clever and pretty, growing gradually faded, all of them dis- appointed women except one or two who were without sex, most of them soured, subsisting on the absurd devotion of infatuated fifteen-year-olds. Most kinds of marriage, I thought then, were preferable to that. . . .

Then I studied, in the abstract, the friends who came to stay with father. Some were men of his own standing in other universities, as a rule already married ; some were old pupils from Clare, just beginning to make their mark ; the rest were a miscellany of authors, critics, journalists and casual friends, married and single, prosperous and out-at-elbows ; they came because they were fond of him or because they wanted him to write an introduction or read the proofs of a book or tell them where to find certain authorities. For a week or two at the end of every term the house was filled with them ; and those were the only times when I was happy. They brought with them an air of the great world, they could talk, they treated me as an equal till I forgot to grizzle about the hopelessness of North Oxford. One year father and Lee-Squire and I sat round a table, drawing up the acting edition of The Alchemist; we planned the Cavendish Reprints, and I drafted the prospectus. . . .

One year, too, I remember father's saying, " Don't for- get Martin Shelley's coming to-night. I should put out an extra bottle of whisky. And for Heaven's sake tell him that he mustn't keep me up later than two."

CHAPTER TWO

That was my first meeting with Martin.

I'd heard of him, of course, long before he was famous as a critic ; father always considered him his most briUiant pupil. After winning every possible prize at Cambridge, he had gone to London and written plays, novels, short stories ; father used to say he could have made a fortune by his pen, but he was always so full of ideas and enthusiasms that he dashed from one thing to another and, having a few hundreds of his own, he was too lazy to publish any- thing. He'd been a personality, too, at Cambridge ; and he was a personality in London ; that rather spoilt him and made him care more for the figure he cut than for the work he did. Following on Clement Scott and George Augustus Sala and Willie Wilde, he wanted to eclipse them all and make himself the Colossus of Fleet Street. Father tried to dissuade him and told him that he'd win a bigger reputation if he stuck to his books and left journalism alone ; but it was no good. The Night Gazette offered him the post of dramatic critic on his own terms ; he pretended that he wanted father's advice, but I'm sure he only came to boast about the offer and to find out how much he dared ask for.

I was disappointed at first, after hearing so much about him. He was short and rather fat in those days, with a very red face and black hair combed forward to a straight fringe ; the moment we met, he began paying me marked attention, but, as he did the same thing a few minutes later with Grace and then with Joan, I didn't feel that I'd achieved any great success. And I loathed being pawed.

34

SOLILOQUY 35

Between tea and dinner he flagged and became positively boring ; then he brightened up. And after dinner, when the furnaces had been well stoked, you had Martin Shelley as he will go down to history. Though I never met Oscar Wilde, I should say that Martin hadn't his brilliancy of whim ; but for suggesting, illuminating, inspiring. . . I've never heard anything like it before or since : such wit, such knowledge all so beautifully accessible, such delicacy of discernment, such power of illustration, such humour and fun. ... I don't know when I went to bed that night. Mother slipped away as usual ; Grace and Joan looked on for a time as though he were a performing animal ; I just sat spell-bound while he poured forth ideas. ... In those days he never became affected by what he drank ; one whisky-and-soda followed another, there was one cigarette after another, and, if anything, he only seemed more brilliant. A short, tremendous Rabelaisian figure, growing more and more disputatious, entering the lists with pen for lance and pantomime dragon for horse. . . . Towards the end I joined in a little bit ; and I think I was rather a surprise to him. If you had nothing to say, he'd make you talk well ; and, as it happened, I had plenty to say. I thought, I hoped, I was making an impression ; when I said good-night, he bowed very low and kissed my hand ; but in the morning everything had evaporated, and he was only rather irritable because he'd overslept himself. After that one meeting I didn't see him for six months.

Martin rather took the colour out of father's other friends. I still studied them, in the abstract ; but none had his brilliance and promise, none was so attractive personally — apart from the whisky and the everlasting cigarettes — , very few had achieved his position. At the same time, I was beginning to think that it must be one of them or nothing, and I began to study them not quite so much in the abstract. . . .

Then came my last Infirmary Ball. Mother was a pat- roness, and we talked of nothing else for most of the term. After the figure of fun that she had made of us all, I said I wouldn't go. Joyce Armitage had invited me to spend Christmas and the New Year in London ; and I was in

36 SOLILOQUY

no hurry to get back. There was an endless wrangle, because the tickets had been bought and the usual dinner- party was pretty well arranged. I said that Grace and Joan could go ; but I was tired of these dances and would rather stay at home, if I were back in Oxford. Mother insisted that I must come home for the ball, and father said the same.

" You haven't invited a man for me," I told them, as a last line of defence, " and I'm sure I don't want you to."

" Spenser Woodrow will be staying here then," said mother, with the exaggerated carelessness she always employed in speaking of a man that she had dragged by brute force into the house.

I liked young Woodrow. He had lately been elected to a history research fellowship and was coming to work with father on some branch of seventeenth-century political pamphlets. We got on quite well together, because he was too much wrapped up in his work to make love to me, and, up to that time, I hadn't tried to make him : I was still frightened by the idea of having to spend all my life in Oxford. But I knew he didn't dance ; all the other scheming mothers had been trying to make him.

" If you want me to keep him amused," I said, " I will ; but, if he doesn't dance, why drag him to the ball when we can talk just as well at home ? "

" It's so silly to waste the tickets," mother said for about the twentieth time.

I gave in and said I'd go.

Only a woman would ruin her life rather than waste a guinea ticket.

The Armitagcs did invite me to stay on ... as I expected. And I wrote to mother for her permission ; and she gave it, not at all as I expected. Father gave it, too, and I guessed that they'd been talking about me and agreeing that I was living a pretty dull life. It was only a question of another week ; and, if I'd stayed, everything

SOLILOQUY 37

would have been different. I don't know why I didn't ; perhaps there was just a hint of reluctance in father's letter — and he asked so Uttle that I did try to do what he wanted — , perhaps my course had been marked out before- hand so that I stumbled blindly wherever I was intended to go. I don't know ; and it doesn't matter now.

I remember — it was destiny having a laugh at me, I suppose — , I remember debating half the night whether I should stay. I was enjoying myself wildly. Old Armi- tage was a rich stockbroker and the commonest human being I have ever seen with the exception of his wife ; but, if they were common, they were clever, quite clever enough to give Joyce the best possible chance and to realize how common they were. After King's Norton they had sent her to Girton and given her a year's pohsh abroad, so that, when I came to stay with them this time, I found that she was teaching them all the new tricks that they'd paid to have her taught : their list of friends had been searchingly scrutinized, old Armitage no longer tucked his napkin into his collar, and he'd been broken of calling it a serviette. I thought Joyce was doing too miraculously well — until I found that she'd hired my old friend Miss Kirby to give her a few hints.

I expect I benefited by them at second-hand to some extent ; and I certainly benefited directly by old Armitage. He had traces of decent feeling about him and always insisted that Joyce and I should run level : when at last he'd bribed some one to present her, he said I must be presented too ; and, when I blushed and said I hadn't the money for a dress, he said that I was being presented to please him, to keep Joyce company, and of course I must allow him to make me a present of the dress. . . . He was a vulgar old thing and used to chew tooth-picks till I felt physically sick ; but he had heart. . . . As I've grown older, I've learnt to discount good manners ; I've seen too much of them, they cover so much rottenness. People would tell you I had good manners !

What was I talking about ? Oh, Joyce. Yes, she made a good show, for it's never easy to present two aspects of yourself at the same time, and she had to carry me into

88 SOLILOQUY

this new life, with all my knowledge of the old, without admitting that there'd been a change of any kind. In my honour she invited Mildred Stanley — Mildred Burnley she was now — and her husband ; and Winnie Orm ; but she gave us a marvellous dinner at Prince's and took us to the best seats for Florodora and then on to supper at the Savoy, in such a way that the Burnleys didn't dare ask her back to their little flat in Hammersmith ; if you can't find any other way of killing a friendship you've outgrown, you can usually kill it by kindness, and I learnt from her that old friends are sometimes a great handicap when you're climb- ing the social scale. She was content to keep Winnie and me so long as we didn't make disastrous marriages. ••»■• And I was content to accept her precarious friendship for the good time it gave me with theatres and parties and for the experience I gained by watching her. If she could do it, I could do it ; if I hadn't her father's money to help me, I hadn't her father to hinder me. At school we'd neither of us pretended to be of the class that constitutes "society"; we were the best of the bourgeoisie and, if we'd attempted anything higher, we should have con- sidered ourselves the worst kind of snobs. I now discovered that Joyce was only undecided whether to say she was already in society or to proclaim that she would never rest till she got there. It was the last days of Queen Vic- toria's reign ; the old divisions were being broken down ; money opened almost every door, and, if in addition to being rich you were as bright and pretty as Joyce, you could get almost anywhere. Scores, hundreds of girls were pushing themselves in the same way from one social grade to another ; she couldn't resist shewing off to me a little bit ; and, though I didn't believe her at first when she reeled off all her grand names, I very soon found that she really uas being accepted at her own valuation.

I can't remember all the parties she took me to ; but I remember very distinctly standing by myself in a comer at Lady Dexton's, knowing not a soul, seeing all the people I had read about in the papers and finding Joyce accepted as one of them ! At first I was furious at being neglected, and I swore that, if I ever had the opportunity, I would

SOLILOQUY 39

punish her so that she never forgot it, but in my heart I knew she was too useful ; then I tried to discount her by sajdng to myself that she was a pushful, middle-class little nobody, but there was no disguising the fact that she'd got there. Then I said I would get there too.

I wonder why . . .

Every one has a strain of snobbishness, whether it's for titles, money, celebrities or the fashion of the moment : for all his other-world air, Arthur likes to be seen walking with a bishop ; and, when you two have been dining at the palace, you take care to let every one know. I can't explain the psychology of it. You add to your own importance, I suppose, if you know important people ; you come to feel superior if you're friends with the exclusive people who try to keep to themselves ; but, while you're calling them by their Christian names, you have to confess that they're no more amusing than any one else. I can speak from experience, for there's not one of them, man or woman, who hasn't been to my house ; but they came to me : and, when I said I would " get there too," I wasn't collecting broken-down duchesses, I wanted the people who combined to form the active life of the country and who lived spaciously, without the pettiness and the squalid cares that stunt the middle-classes. That was the difference between Joyce and me, though to the world I've no doubt we seemed to be playing an identical game ; there were always a few to say that I forced my way into society by the back-door of literature. But I don't care now what any one says. . . .

Joyce had made wonderful progress in a short time and was determined that I should see it. I owe to her my first meeting with the Duchess of Ross ! She took me to a literary party at the Maurice Haitian ds', and I saw for the first time how grotesquely ill-managed these things were in London, what ignorant charlatans too the people like Connie Maitland were. At the same time it was a dazzhng contrast to the life I'd been leading in Oxford ; and, though it wasn't quite what I wanted, it made me feel that I could never again go back to tea-parties with our neighbours, man-hunts with you three and squabbles with

40 SOLILOQUY

mother. I studied Joyce's methods and learnt something from tlu-m. She wisely left her parents at home and sallied forth like a figure cut out of its frame, without any kind of natural background ; that was worth knowing at a time when you could first count on being taken for your looks and your charm without awkward enquiries into your ante- cedents, you couldn't do that until Victorianism had passed away. Then she put herself in the hands of a woman with many relations, little money and no scruples, until she'd made an artificial background for herself (I used to hear people explaining her : " Joyce Armitage ? Oh, I should have thought you tmist have met her at the Brookstyns'. She's a cousin or niece or something of Evie Brookstyn, I believe " . . .) ; and finally she en- couraged a highly-placed young fortune-hunter to fall in love with her. I never knew whether she cared two pins for him ; but he carried her the rest of the way, forcing open the doors that still resisted her. They became engaged a few months later, and I felt she had no further heights to climb ; but the engagement was broken off either because the young man could not face old Armitage as a father-in-law or because he found some other girl better worth his while. The blow to her pride nearly killed Joyce : she hid herself away and emerged later with an insane hatred of all men. That was the last lesson she taught me : if you want to succeed in anytliing, you must keep your affections out of it.

If Joyce seemed to be carrying everything before her, I had quite a success on my own account ; I always did, whenever I came to stay with her, for I'd taught myself to be very fascinating, and London gave me the chance I needed. In every house people used to say, " Who is the tall, fair girl with Joyce Armitage ? " and most of them added what a sweet face I had or how beautifully I carried myself. Very soon — I was only there a fortnight — I was receiving invitations from all sorts of people till Joyce became a little jealous ; on the first day she'd talked about taking me to the Riviera and paying my expenses, but by the end she was saying that her plans were very uncer- tain. (If you want a definition of the perfect tyrant, I

SOLILOQUY 41

should say ' a young woman with money'.) It must have been that, I think, that decided me to return home ; the old people begged me to stay, but Joyce didn't like me to take the wind out of her sails and she hated not being able to patronize me.

And, however much I was enjojang myself, I was quite ready to go. I'd proved to my own satisfaction that I could have a success at parties and that, as soon as I was known, men and women hurried up to speak ; Joyce had proved for my benefit that any one with determination and personal charm could get on in London ; and I had made up my mind that, as an opportunity was all I needed, she should give me the opportunity as soon as she had for- gotten her pique at my modest little triumph. She pre- tended to be quite sorry when I said I was going back to Oxford, and we arranged that I should come up in the spring and do the season with her ; it would suit us both very well, for she had much more freedom when we went about together . . . and I could make certain of my opportunity.

For a fortnight . . . my first experience of success and power . . . the prospect of a wonderful life . , . the escape from Hillcrest and the family into that large air, . . I suppose I was happy then.

I reached home just in time to dress ; and of the night, the ball, the people I remember nothing , . . except Spenser Woodrow. I suppose we dined first, I suppose Joan and Grace had partners. When I came downstairs, there were certainly three men in the dining-room ; and, as they went to get their coats, Spenser stopped to say :

" You do look ripping in that cloak ! "

I was tired and rather depressed at getting back to the family. I wanted to think about the time I'd had in London, the time I was going to have ; it didn't occur to me that there was anything that night to look forward to in Oxford, and I'd rot exerted myself to be agreeable

42 SOLILOQUY

to any one. He hadn't either, if it comes to that ; though he'd been working with father all the term before, this was the first time he'd noticed me, but, while we waited in the hall for the fly, he evidently decided that I was worth a little trouble : the other men were just fidgeting and trying to think what to say and which to say it to, but Spenser came to me like an arrow from a bow :

" I feel an awful fraud, you know," he whispered : " my dancing's so execrable that it's kindest to say I don't dance at all."

" Well, I don't want to dance much," I said, " but mother's a patroness, so we have to put in an appearance. I shall leave at midnight."

He was beginning to stammer something about supper, when the fly drove up and we were shepherded inside.

I forget who was supposed to be chaperoning us. I forget almost everything. , . . What's your first memory of him, Ada ? Spenser, I mean. You must have been ten by this time, and there was soon so much chatter about us that I'm sure you kept your eyes open whenever he came to Hillcrest. I remember him as such an extraordinary boy, though he must have been six- or seven-and-twcnty, and his hair was retreating from his forehead. Such a good forehead, dominating the whole of that narrow face. . . All his features were good, though he looked a little too much of the Red Indian to be quite handsome ; too severe, till you saw his eyes. They were the best thing about him ; grey, wide-set and steady, oh, and shining with sheer joy of living ! His vitality blew like a clean wind through that house of death ; everything was the wildest joke to him : his work with father, this ball, mountaineering — he was off to Switzerland for a fortnight before the beginning of term — , everything ; and you saw it, in the wonderful radiance of his eyes.

I was careful to look out of the window, but I felt them on me. When you've always had to spread the net, it's almost intoxicating to know that some one admires you and is interested in you without any effort on your part : it makes you sure of yourself, even if it makes you rather cruel. I simply dawdled in the cloak-room, letting Grace

SOLlLOQtJV 48

and Joan go on without me, because I knew that Spenser would wait and I wanted to make him wait as a sop to my vanity and a punishment for all the slights I'd had from other men. And, when I came out, I wasted more time by rushing up to all the women I knew, pretending not to see him and allowing other people to ask me for dances before I noticed his existence. If he wanted me, he must break through the ring and fight for me. ... As he did, in the end. ...

" Now, will you sacrifice one to sitting out with me and talking ? " he begged, when at last I condescended to see him.

" If I have one left," I said. " You should have come before. I'm afraid you'll find me rather tired for talking."

" On second thoughts, I don't want to talk," he said. " I just want to look at you."

He'd been examining me very carefully, and I saw he admired my dress ; though I knew he admired me, too, it was delicious to be told it.

" You can do that while I'm dancing," I suggested.

" But I can't see you without telhng you how ripping you look," he answered ; " and I can't shout that across the ball-room."

He was shouting it over enough of the ball-room to make every one turn round and smile, so I led him away and we sat down out of sight, while the dowagers glared after us through their lorgnettes. At first he didn't realize that he was falling in love with me ; I was a pretty girl, he was in tearing spirits and, if he hadn't flirted with me, he'd have looked for some one else. I was just the most attrac- tive thing he'd met so far ; and, though I'd done nothing to excite his admiration, I knew that, if I wanted to keep it, I must stir myself. We talked. . . and I caught the infection of his vitality. You know how easy it is with people who are enjoying themselves ; you begin to enjoy yourself, and that makes you talk better . . . and look better. It was a delicious flirtation, and neither took the other seriously. We got on magnificently until a couple walked past and I heard one say :

44 SOLIT.OQUY

" That was number eight, wasn't it ? "

" Lord ! " cried Spenser in dismay. " Here, I must take you back."

We'd already been sitting out for two hours ! And I'd cut half a dozen partners, including the other two men who had dined with us ; and Spenser had cut Grace and Joan at least once each. They were dancing when we reached the ball-room, and, as I didn't want to face my chaperon, I said :

" I'm sure you can manage this, if you don't try to reverse. You can back me down the room when you're giddy."

I shewed him as best I could. He was rather stiff and rather unreliable, as he held me so loosely that I nearly swung out of his arms until I told him to hold me tighter. We cannoned a few people, and he trampled on me a bit, but he was improving steadily. Suddenly he exclaimed :

" By Jove, I believe I've got it ! "

And he really had. We went quicker and quicker, more and more certainly, until I almost lost consciousness ; the music in the distance, his arm at my back, pressing me to him, our bodies moving in perfect harmony. . . It was hke a dream ; and I found myself praying that it would never end, that he would never let go of me. I'd told myself that he was falling a little bit in love with me ; but now I was in love with him : I wanted to pull his head down to my breast and kiss his eyes, I wanted to be crushed in his arms. And then I felt that in another moment I should faint. I purposely put my heel through a flounce of my dress and begged him to stop.

" It was my fault ! / did it," I said, when he began to apologize.

I couldn't look at him .... I wondered whether he noticed any change in my voice. ... I dawdled as long as I decently could in being sewn up ; and, by the time I came back to him, I'd regained control of myself. I looked at him as coolly as when we met before dinner ; and I could see a change in him. In his eyes, in his voice. , . Such radiance and tenderness. ... He was in love with me, too, and my heart bounded as I saw it ; something had

SOLILOQUY 45

come to me at last, something that I'd dreamed of finding since I was a tiny child. . . . Dear God, something that in my blindness I'd been ready to throw away for the vulgar satisfaction of being married. . . And I had the advantage of him, he didn't know that I was in love, and I needn't tell him until it suited me. In all the world there's no sense of power to equal that. So long as I kept at a dis- tance, I could preserve my self-control and make him do anything I liked.

" You'll never be able to say again that you can't dance," I told him.

" You're going to give me another one, aren't you ? " he begged.

" Don't you think you ought to ask Grace and Joan ? " I suggested.

He grew very red at my little snub and at once began looking about for them. By that time, of course, their programmes were full ; and they both snubbed him for cutting their earlier dances. When he came back, ever so humbly, I was graciousness personified and told him that he might take me in to supper ; but I kept him on tenter- hooks— and made Grace and Joan furious — by breaking up the party and going home immediately afterwards. He shouldn't have too much of me all at once ! And I made him responsible for turning out the lights and went up to bed without giving him a chance of saying good-night to me alone.

Then at last I could let myself go. It was love, my first love ! I was bathed in it as though I'd been wrapped in a silken flame. I laughed and cried with it, I whispered his name over and over again. And I thanked God that I'd waited for it. If one of these children who came to tea on Sundays had married me, if I'd married one of father's old pupils ! I didn't care now about Oxford or London, I'd have gone back to Polehampton to be with Spenser. . . .

Two o'clock chimed in the hall ; three o'clock. ... I wondered what he was doing ; oh, and I hoped he hadn't been able to sleep. . . . Once a board creaked in the passage, a door closed ; I sprang out of bed to see what was happen- ing and discovered a note half-way under my door.

46 SOLILOQUY

" You went upstairs without giving nif tinu' to thank you for the most wonderful evening of my life. I shall cnntiiiue to say I can't Jance — unless you rrill dance v.ith me. Whether I shall ever forgive yon for running aivay so early depends on the reparation you make during the next ivcek. I wish I had not promised to go to Switzerland.

The words were ridiculous, but it wasn't ridiculous that he'd felt forced to write them. I pictured him pacing to and fro, sitting down, jumping up, sitting down again, perhaps pouring out his soul in page after page, just for the joy of writing to me, getting into communication with me by hook or by crook, tracing my name on the paper with every embellishment of love. . . . And then he would tear it all up when he'd seen how beautiful it looked. But still he wasn't satisfied ! Some Httle word that would actually reach me ; something that I should read next day before anything else. . .

And I hadn't betrayed myself ! For all he knew I should laugh at him. He wished he had not promised to go to Switzerland, indeed ! If I said ' Stay here,' he would have stayed. ...

I heard that creak again , and again a door closed. This time it was a longer lettei, far less ambiguous :

" My dove has not returned to me ! Then you're awake too ? I'm glad and sorry : glad to think that, though I can't see you, we are awake side by side, perhaps looking out at the same silver moon and, I'm sure, watched over and blessed by her ; but sorry , frantic , mad to think that so many hours must pass before we meet. Dear lady, tchat have you done with me .^ Am I mad? You have taken possession of me ; and, if I cannot speak to you, I must write. Would to God that I could think anything I wrote welcome to you ! Be that as it may, I must go on writing. What happened to-night ? Or, rather, what happened before to-night ^ I have forgotten everything that I icas, everything that / did until you suddenly dawned on my life. I had seen you before, but I must have been blind." . . .

SOLILOQUY 47

And so he went on. He, then, had never met love before. In those days I fancied that it must always be like this, but I've since learnt that no life has room for more than one great passion. It's our single chance. God gives us one glimpse of infinity. . . .

And one man in a thousand takes it : the rest think that it will come back. . . .

I didn't sleep much that night. . . .

In the morning I schooled and drilled myself. Though I was on fire to make sure he was all I'd pictured him in my visions, I determined that he should woo me as woman had never been wooed before " I would mock him, misunder- stand him, madden him, always holding myself aloof until neither of us could bear it longer. And then ... I would yield as woman had never before yielded to man, with all my heart and soul gushing forth in one great outburst of surrender. Passion. . . It was something new to me, something that scorched all my old calculations and blasted away all my old discontent.

I stayed in my room all the morning, though I could see him prowhng in the garden instead of working. After those two letters he had burnt his boats, but I couldn't allow him to force me to a decision until I'd enjoyed his love a little longer ; hadn't I waited all my life for it ? And I should only make him wait a week. I didn't want to be alone with him yet, I had to be niggardly of myself. When we met at lunch, I talked across him to mother about the ball and who'd been there. Spenser hung on my lips as though every word was a jewel. I thought mother must have seen, even if Grace hadn't told her — to punish me for bringing them all home so early. . . . After lunch father went for his usual walk by the upper river ; Spenser at once asked to join us, when he heard I was going, so I invited Grace and Joan, and we went out like a choir school. . . . Poor Spenser! He was furious, for I onl}^ gave him about five minutes of myself at the very end, just long enough for him to cast

48 SOLILOQUY

back to the night before and say he hoped I'd forgiven him for tearing my dress. I said he hadn't torn my dress and then I asked him about the work he was doing with father. . . .

That maddened him ! He looked at me with flashing eyes and then turned his head with a jerk and stalked along in silence, for all the world like a Red Indian going to be burnt alive ! Oh, and I was glad, because a man's not in love till he can lose his temper ; if I'd ever doubted, I knew now that it wasn't a mere flirtation. And I had to make certain before I committed myself by an inch. . . .

" You read my two notes ? " he asked, as we came in sight of Hillcrest.

" I wondered what you meant by them."

" Wasn't that fairly clear? "

" You talked about the moon," I reminded him. " I wondered whether you were moon-struck."

He walked on, hitting at pebbles and whirling his stick till it sang in the air.

" I was," he growled, between his teeth.

"You'll recover. . ." And then I laughed at him. " Really, if I'd thought your first party would go to your head like this, I wouldn't have let mother invite you. Too much excitement is bad for the young ; it will spoil your work."

That was my revenge for the cool way he'd been coming to our house all the term and bolting off to father's study as soon as he'd had tea, without deigning to notice me.

"Curse my work!" muttered Spenser.

" You told me it was your whole life."

" I thought so once."

" I expect you re overworked," I said gently. " When you've had your holiday in Switzerland "

"Curse Switzerland!" said Spenser.

"You don't make conversation very easy," I laughed.

At that he turned and faced me :

" Why won't you take me seriously ? "

" Because you tell me you're moon-struck. Those

notes "

" You don't believe I meant them ? "

SOLILOQUY 49

" You may have. Mr. Shelley, who was staying with us last term, always adopts the religion of the house he's staying in and makes love to the woman he's talking to."

" And you think I'm like that ? "

" I hardly know you," I answered. " What I do know about you rather ' '

" Makes you despise me ? " suggested Spenser.

"Amuses me," I answered.

That made him so angry that I don't know what would have happened if father and the others hadn't come up at that moment. We went in to tea, and Spenser tried to pull himself together ; but, by ill-luck, Mrs. Jacomb came in half-way through to enquire how we were after the dance. Though I'd hardly realized it before, she had been chaperon- ing us ; and she insisted on teasing Spenser about his dancing and my dress. For terms and terms he'd always said he wasn't a dancing man, so there was quite a flutter when he suddenly began — and then cut every one else to dance with me. Fool of a woman ! . . .

" I don't think Mr. Woodrow quite liked what you were saying," I told her as she went away.

" Well, really, my dear, he has only himself to blame," she said. " And you've made such a conquest that you mustn't mind a httle chaff. However, if you don't Hke it . . , Young people in love always will take themselves so seriously ! "

" But — I'd hardly spoken to him before last night," I said.

" Then you've done a great deal in a short time, my dear. You may consider yourself lucky. Let me know as soon as you have any news."

It was my turn to be angry now. A glorious romance with Spenser, the blooming of our love day by day was a very different thing from a prosaic engagement engineered under the eyes of North Oxford. I might consider myself ' lucky,' indeed ! Why couldn't these wretched women leave us alone ? I had only six days before Spenser went abroad. . . .

That night after dinner he sat down by my side in the drawing-room. Joan had gone to bed early, father was

D

50 SOLILOQUY

working, and Grace was at the piano. She was playing some of the waltzes we'd danced to the night before, and I don't know to this day whether it was a coincidence or malice or some vague idea of helping me by making Spenser sentimental ; probably that, for we were always loyal when there was a love-affair to be forwarded, and — by the mercy of heaven — we'd never hunted the same quarry.

" Am I forgiven ? " asked Spenser very humbly.

" There's notliing to forgive," I said, as I made room for him on the sofa.

As I smiled at him, his eyes lit up and devoured me like a flame. He apologized for his rudeness, violence, ill- temper. . . . The joy of abasing himself before me ! He had been mad, he was mad still, but would I ever take him seriously, ever believe him ?

" What do you want me to believe ? " I asked.

" That I love you ! That some day I hope you may come to care for me."

"I'll believe that," I promised.

"And w-will you . . . some day? " he stammered.

Then . . .

I put my elbows on my knees and looked at him over the tips of my fingers, frowning a little, perplexed, but so wonderfully tender and understanding that his eyes grew big and filled with tears before I'd done.

" I think that depends on you," I said. " Yesterday we were young, foolish ; we'd gone to that ridiculous ball to enjoy ourselves, it didn't matter what we said. When you sent me that first note, I saw that you were — well, my very dear friend, let's still call it ' moon-struck'. Then came the second note . . . and I realized. I told you this afternoon that I hardly knew you. I don't know you yet. DorCt hurry things ! You hope that, some day, I may come to care for you. Perhaps. . . But if you ask me now ! Absurd ! I — don't — know — you. But I know that you like being with me ; and I quite like being with you. Don't spoil it by being impatient ! "

Spenser gave a slow, immense sigh that ended in a quaver like a sob choked down.

SOLILOQUY 51

" Thank you," he said ; and then, with timid despera- tion, " Thank you, Marion."

Some time later I remember that Grace stifled a yawn and said she was going to bed. Spenser besought her to go on playing, and we sank back into the incredible soft warmth of intimacy ; he told me how love had come to him, like a great white light that shone through his body, melting his bones and scorching his flesh ; what he'd said, what he'd thought when he realized it and wrote to me for fear of d}dng or going mad. ... He told me about himself and his mother, his school days at Uppingham, his postmaster- ship at Merton, his first in history, the research feflow- ship ; I heard about his friends, his mother's cottage in Gloucestershire, his expeditions to Switzerland. He went there every winter with the same party : an old school friend from Cambridge, an army coach and his wife, and a mother and her daughter named Sefton. Of course, I betrayed no curiosity about Julia Sefton, but he discounted her so earnestly that you might have supposed she was an indiscretion to be concealed. I didn't contribute very much : he was content that I should listen, and I was content to sit and watch the changing lights in his eyes — grey and cold, then suddenly soft and big, charged with laughter. . . .

Grace played and played until her fingers became glued to the notes and her head drooped forward. I'm sure, now, she was doing it to help. . . . And she'd have gone on playing if father hadn't come in and said :

" D'you care about a drink, Woodrow ? "

Then I said I must go to bed. As I went to shut the windows, Spenser came to help me. His hand covered mine and pressed it ; I heard him whisper :

" Thank God for you ! "

And I smiled at him over my shoulder and whispered back :

" Be patient ! "

5

Being in love. . .

The wonderful thing, when you've made the discovery

52 SOLILOQUY

and seen the whole world bathed in a sunset glow — sunset, not sunrise ; you want to swoon away with that sunset glow in your eyes and dream of the dawn ; the ecstasy of love is in the future ; love dies when it is satisfied — the wonderful thing is not the triumph, not the joy of being wanted, not the sensual pleasure of letting yourself be kissed, not even the heaven-sent tenderness that makes you for the first time equal with God ; it's the companionship, the mystic understanding of souls, which you share with no one. In all our vulgar marriage-service the one thing beautiful to me is the symbolism of that moment when the bride throws back her veil and walks down the church on her husband's arm : they've sworn a pact, it's the two of them against all the mob herded into the pews on either side, she depends on him alone and shares everything with him.

I'd never before had any one to share my life with, never any one to whom I mattered more than all the world, never any one who had to share everything with me. Though we were living in the same house, Spenser wrote to me twice a day : one letter, when he was supposed to be working with father, which he pushed under my door at night as he went to dress ; and one in the morning as he went to his bath. I'd never had love-letters before ; and, though I can laugh now — at least, I tliink I can — , there was nothing absurd then in his outpourings about all the thoughts that came to him in the night. They were his safety-valve ; and, when he'd written them, he could behave quite rationally in the presence of other people, which was very necessary if I was to make the best of my time. When we met, I shewed him by a smile whether I was pleased, whether he could score up a few yards' progress for himself ; and sometimes I withheld the smile to make him try harder. I never sent an answer for fear of bringing everything to a head and entering into a conspiracy which mother or one of you would have noticed ; that joy of being wanted, the pretence that I was yielding inch by inch against my will were too precious. . . .

Perhaps you all noticed, and I was too blind to see. I know that, from the first moment of the ball, we were

SOLILOQUY 53

being discussed from one end of North Oxford to the other ; and, though mother very seldom went out, she had a genius for hearing all the tea-party gossip. I remember that my ej^es were opened when I met Mrs. Jacomb in the street and she insisted on taking me back to tea. . . , Mrs. Jacomb ! I wonder what's happened to her ! She was an unsuccessful woman who refused to become dis- appointed : the wife of a private coach, with no official position in Oxford, existing on sufferance and making herself very busy and prominent for fear of being elbowed out altogether ; she had a passion for committees and always posed as the tolerant, disillusionized woman of the world among the innocent academics of North Oxford. Oh, and she was devastatingly brave and cheerful !

" Well, my dear," she began meaningly, as she bustled about her stuffy little lodgings in Walton Street. They couldn't afford a servant, though Jacomb reviewed for several papers in addition to taking pupils. " We've all been waiting for the announcement."

" What a hurry you're in ! " I laughed, though I could have killed her for undressing my romance and gloating over it.

" What's the hitch ? " she asked briskly. " Money ? One advantage of Oxford is that it's a poor place, every one knows every one else's income pretty well, and you're not expected to pretend. People sometimes wonder how we make both ends meet, but I always say no girl can afford not to be married."

As she jerked out her questions and advice I thought of Miss Kirby and her thin-hpped, wintry little smile at the other King's Norton mistresses who pretended that they valued their emancipation so highly ! The women of forty who had succeeded, the women who had failed, all agreed that anything was better than fighting through life single-handed. Anything ! Mrs. Jacomb's shabby, utilitarian clothes ; these furnished rooms with everything hard and brilliant in the gas-light, everything either stuffy or cold, the wearisome drudgery, the small return. We should be able to keep servants, but this glimpse of Mrs. Jacomb's life suddenly frightened me : when I'd ordered

54 SOLILOQUY

the meals for the day I should have nothing to do ; nothing but jobs that I made for myself, like her com- mittees, and occasional tea-parties where I should meet people just like her. Since mother handed everything over to me, I'd ordered so many meals ; and I'd been to so many tea-parties ; it was rather dreadful to think I must simply go on doing that on a smaller scale, without father's big house and his prestige as Silversmith Professor. If I'd gone away to another part of England I should have had the excitement of making new friends and creating a circle for myself. Here I was so well known that, if I'd tried to be ambitious in any way, all these old women would have laughed at me. . . .

I thought of Joyce Armitage and the wonderful people she was meeting, the wonderful houses, that spacious life. . . .

" Marriage is too serious," I said, " to be undertaken in a hurry."

" Well," Mrs. Jacomb retorted, " if you don't marry Spenser Woodrow, you may be sure some one else will."

I hurried home to read what Spenser had been writing to me ; I wanted to see him and the radiance of love that came into his eyes whenever I looked his way at dinner. I wanted him to sit beside me and talk about himself because he felt he must share his whole life with me, though I wasn't particularly interested in friends of his whom I'd never met. Little by little I was allowing him to think that he was winning me over ; we talked more and more about the future and made plans about the things we should Uke to do and the places we wanted to visit. Switzer- land. . . Spenser loved Switzerland almost as much as he loved me and, as I'd never been there, he wanted me to see it for the first time with him ; and that would probably be the last time for some years, as he would have to give it up and work very hard . . . " if I marry," he said breath- lessly. , . , We used to talk about his work and his pros- pects : he was still so young that, though father prophesied a brilliant career for him, it would be long before he was offered any big position in England, Perhaps one of the

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American universities would find an opening for him ; or, of course, if he'd given up history and joined the staff of a paper, as he was invited to do, he would have had a good position and a good income at once. I blamed him for throwing away the opportunity, though it was done before I knew him ; but he was so much absorbed in his work that he couldn't contemplate giving it up.

I allowed him no opportunity of proposing as long as I could put off thinking about the future and as long as I could enjoy my sense of power and my thrill at being wanted. I could tease him till he was on the verge of saying good-bye and dashing off in a rage, but I could always bring him back ; and, if I liked to prove my strength by hurting him, I liked still more to prove it by comforting him afterwards, so that he frowned or smiled at my bidding. For the first time my mere word, the tone of my voice could send a man hurtling from one extreme to the other ; and you may judge that my cruelty was only skin-deep from the fact that, when I heard he wasn't sleeping properly, I was always so sweet in the evening that he went to bed happy. I could tell you at once from any of his letters whether it was written at night or in the afternoon : the night letters were full of love, tenderness, hope, gratitude ; the afternoon letters were a little petulant. And in my turn I had to be careful that he shouldn't think he could bully me into sweetness by being ill-tempered ; and I couldn't let him presume on my sweetness to drive me faster than I wanted to go. I wanted the last ounce of enjoyment before I gave in to him ; and the days were flying ! One night he said :

" To-morrow's my last day. I wish I wasn't going, and yet perhaps it's just as well."

" How shall we spend it ? " I asked him.

" Let's go for a walk somewhere," Spenser suggested. " by ourselves."

He proposed to me in the middle of our walk.

It wasn't quite what I'd expected— I don't think proposals ever are — : and I'd left him so uncertain of himself that, instead of making love to me, he talked like the chairman of a committee putting forward a compromise that would

5^ SOLILOQUY

overcome the scruples of all the members. I can see him now, leaning over a gate at Godstow, one foot on the bottom rail . . . oh, and being reasonable ! Of all uncomfortable, unromantic times and places for a proposal ! A dull, cold January day, the fields sodden with water, two inches of mud on the road beyond the gate, a melancholy audience of hens and geese, with one or two yokels lumbering home or carrying tin cans to the public-house. Perhaps even Spenser felt that the setting wasn't very attractive ; almost the first thing he said was that he didn't ask for an answer then and there.

" I want you to go on thinking it over while I'm away," he explained ; " and perhaps, when I come back at the beginning of term, you'll be able to put me out of my misery. I'm asking you to give up a tremendous lot, and, of course, we can't marry until I see what the college will do for me when my research fellowship runs out." . . .

Oh, I can't tell you what he said. There was something about waiting for two years, but I was so sick with dis- appointment that I hardly listened. I told you that, on the night after the ball, I'd made up my mind to marry Spenser ; if I played with him, it was because I wanted him to see how much he needed me ; and I wanted to remain aloof until I could bear it no longer : he should woo me, I said, as man had never wooed woman before, and I would yield as woman had never before yielded to man. If he knew how hungry I'd been for him all that week !

" Will you tell me — when I come back ? " he was saying.

I've always wondered what would have happened if he'd proposed when we weren't standing in two inches of water, with these back-bent yokels splashing along the road ! If he'd touched me, taken me in his arms ! I wanted to be held as he'd held me when we were dancing, I wanted to be kissed ! Hadn't I been saving that up for myself through a week of self-denial ? If he'd kissed me then, I'd have promised anything, anything ; but this cold, businesslike compromise was such an anticlimax that, before the end, I saw only the absurdity of it — the place, the hesitations, the hackneyed phrases. I felt tired — and

SOLILOQUY 57

. . somehow ... as though Spenser had cheated me. I was angry with him. . . .

"I'll tell you when you come back from Switzerland," I promised, as soon as I could bring myself to speak.

He helped me over the gate, and we walked in dead silence from Godstow till we struck the Woodstock Road. Dear God, if this was love! ... I wondered whether he had the same dreadful pang of spiritual hunger, as though some great ecstasy had been dangled before our eyes and then ruthlessly snatched away ; if he hadn't, he couldn't want me, and, if he had, why didn't he take me in his arms ? There was something unsatisfactory about Spenser. . . . He wouldn't kiss me ; and now he couldn't even find any- thing to say to me. I wondered whether I really was in love with him, whether I wanted him always or whether I'd just been living in anticipation of this moment which was now denied me. Certainly I had so little looked beyond it that I'd never considered this question of waitmg two years.

I wondered whether I could. . . . Another two years at Hillcrest as a new kind of Oxford tradition, the girl who had been engaged time out of mind to Spenser Woodrow . . . with all the Mrs. Jacombs wondering if I was ever going to get married. ... In two years we should be stale. And, when we did marry — I remembered Mrs. Jacomb's poky Httle rooms — , we should still be rooted to the same place.

I knew it so mercilessly well ! We'd left the country behind and were passing between the first scattered villas ; then came civilization, with lamp-posts, an unbroken hne of houses, little semi-circular drives and clumps of trees, so smug and uniform ! You could see the tables being laid for tea and the blinds being drawn. We struck across to the Banbury Road and found the same thing there, with civihzation reinforced by trams. And then the familiar gate, the familiar rock-garden, the famihar oak door. . . I know now that it was fancifulness and that Oxford had got on my nerves, but I did wonder whether I could consent to hve in a place I hated so much. Consent ? That was a ridiculous thing to say ; Spenser had been asking whether I cared enough for him to wait two years ; but, if I didn't wait, I should still be tied to Hillcrest,

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It was that or hunting in London with Joyce Armitage or earning my Hving in a school. Of course I should marry Spenser, but I doubted if I could wait two years ; in fact, it was because I wanted him so badly that I was unhappy now. If he'd only kissed me when I was ready and yearning for it !

In honour of his last night, father stayed with us in the drawing-room instead of going off to work — which wasn't at all the sort of attention that poor Spenser relished ! We both wanted our little moment together ; but, when mother and then Joan and then Grace all went up, it began to look as if father would outstay every one. So charac- teristic of him ! A night's holiday was so rare that he thoroughly enjoyed talking to us ! At last I had to take matters into my own hands ; when eleven o'clock struck, I said I must be going to bed and asked father what he'd done with a book I'd lent him. If he offered to fetch it, I should be left alone with Spenser ; if he told me where it was, Spenser could follow me.

" It's on my table in the Ubrary," said father ; and, almost before he'd said it, Spenser was murmuring that he'd left his pipe upstairs.

We met in the hall. . . .

" I had to say good-bye to you alone," Spenser whispered.

" I wanted you to ! Good-bye and God bless you ! " I said.

"I'll give you my address. If you can possibly write. . ." He broke off in bewilderment. " I'd always thought it must be fun to be in love. It's—it's simply hell to be in this suspense ! "

Isn't it curious how maternal love mingles with every- thing else in a woman ? I'd determined to say that I dreaded long engagements and would only marry him if we married at once. Now I forgot all my calculations, all the preparations for my great scene ; I only remembered that a poor, tired boy was standing before me overwrought and almost hysterical, looking reproachfully7at''me with a dog's faithful, troubled eyes. His eyes hurt me ; and I knew that I alone had made him miserable. ... I knew

SOLILOQUY 59

also that I couldn't trust myself to soften for an instant ; yet I opened my arms to him — just to comfort him and set him smiling again.

In a moment he was gripping me as though he'd never let me go, raining kisses down on my lips, my cheeks, my forehead, my hair. I seemed to melt away and drown in a great gentle wave of bliss ; I thought I was dying, I wanted to die, I didn't struggle. . . And then I found I'd fallen away from him and he was holding me up with one arm under mine ; we were panting . . . and trembling ; I heard a roaring in my ears and wondered why the drawing- room door didn't open, for father must have heard it too. And then I broke away and stumbled upstairs, flapping my hand at him so that he shouldn't follow. If he had . . . I locked my door, to keep myself in, not to keep him out. Oh, if he'd come to me and said : " Now, now ! What does it matter if we starve ? " I should have gone. I wonder what would have happened if I had. . . .

When I turned to look down he was standing in the middle of the hall with the light beating on to his face and his arms outstretched to me ; his cheeks were very white, his eyes black and shining ; and I had brought back his smile ! Yet in some way it was a different smile, he was a different man — triumphant ... as cruelly triumphant as I had been . . . almost as though he were saying to himself : " Well, you had to submit to her caprices ; she made you ridiculous, and you were fool enough to take it to heart. But it's all right now ; you've got her ; your heel's on her neck. You've learnt something about women that you'll never forget ; they're every bit as passionate as men, but they have to pretend they're being hunted against their will ; she wanted to be kissed as much as you wanted to kiss her. She's lost the advantage, you can turn her weapons against her. It was worth waiting to learn that. And now you can go back and have a drink with her father ; and then you can have your first good night for a week ; and to-morrow you can go to Switzerland with the knowledge that you've conquered."

I didn't come down next day to see him off. I couldn't have stood there in front of mother and father and Grace

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and Joan and you, murmuring : " Well, good-bye, Mr. Woodrow ; I do hope you'll have a good time. Mmd you don't kill yourself climbing." . . .

I lay in bed till I heard the cab drive away, writing to him — my first lov(;-letter. . . .

CHAPTER THREE

Mv first love-letter : eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty words !

" You tell me the suspense is hell, my dear one ; but you surely can't think I want you to suffer." . .

And then I stopped. My first love-letter ? My only love-letter. . . If I'd gone on, I must have said '' no,''^ which was absurd while I was on fire for him; or "yes." . . . And that meant, not marriage but an engagement . . . for two years . . . two years of misery and yearning, two years of seeing him and'kissing him, two years of the hell — I thank thee, Spenser, for teaching me that word ! — that I was going through at that moment. Hunger — mad. Wind hunger . . . From the moment when he kissed me, I was prepared to marry on nothing a year, to live in rooms in a back street, to be patronized by Mrs. Jacomb, to take anything that any one offered us in Birmingham, Cardiff, Polehampton ; but I couldn't wait two years. We must arrange something. . . . When Spenser came back, I'd tell him that I would only marry him if he didn't want me to wait ; and, in the meantime, I couldn't write for fear of softening towards him.

That morning reminded me of the times at King's Norton when one of the mistresses went out of the room. Such a flood of chatter was unloosed ! Mother seemed to throw off all her aches and pains ; Grace assumed an air of " Well, we've done our best for you ; did you bring it off ? " ; and Joan mooned about with a sleepy smile as much as to say : " Even I was enough awake to see what was going on." Vulgar, inquisitve beasts! Father, of course, had too much breeding to join in ; but even he said

61

62 SOLILOQUY

" Well, I shall miss Woodrow ; a thoroughly nice young fellow. . ." Just to shew his own hand in case I wanted to confide in him.

I wasn't in a position to confide in any one as yet. You see, if I'd said : " Spenser wants to marry me ; is it prac- ticable ? " father might have said : "Oh yes, I'll find the money " ; or he might have said : " You'll have to wait a little"; and that I couldn't stand. Rather than make a })resent of him to Spenser as an ally, I preferred not to consult him ; it would have been intolerable if I'd had to fight the two of them in order to get married before my husband wanted me. I'm sure that appeals to your sense of maiden delicacy, Ada ! No, I just bludgeoned mother and snubbed the other two ; and then I took myself in hand so that I should be equal to dealing with Spenser on his return. In spite of the bludgeoning they continued to be facetious at intervals until other people came to stay with us and so put a stop to it.

Put a stop to it and substituted something worse ! I'd invited Winnie Orm and the Burnlcys for a week-end ; and I suppose, in my mood of those days, they were quite the worst people for me to meet. Winnie was just engaged to a throat-specialist in Harley Street, and Mildred had by now been married to Fritz Burnley for about two years ; it was the first time we'd all three been together for more than a few minutes since leaving King's Norton, and you may guess that we talked sex and marriage morning, noon and night. I was bewildered and, frankly, shocked. Mother belonged to a generation which believed that girls should be left to learn about life by divine revelation or the light of nature ; and, though I was eaten up with curiosity, I thought it was indecent to gratify it by whisper- ing and speculating with Grace and Joan, who, I imagined, knew even less than I did. Well, Winnie Orm was a revelation to me : she seemed to think that the fact of being engaged gave her the right not only to know every- thing but to discuss it unblushingly. And Mildred Burnley was only too ready to oblige her. We used to sit in Mildred's room while she was brushing her hair and talk in a way that would have staggered father or Fritz Burnley

SOLILOQUY 68

or Spenser or the man Winnie was engaged to, if they'd heard us. And, whenever we'd broken a new record, Winnie used to say :

" It's no use being mealy-mouthed."

And Mildred would agree :

" One has to be broad-minded."

And sometimes they felt that they must be careful before a jeune fille ; and that made jne wild to tell them that I was as good as engaged . . . and, of course, entitled to hear everything that Mildred chose to tell us. I wasn't shocked for long, but that week-end left me extraordinarily unsettled. I felt it was absurd for Spenser to talk about waiting two years. I wouldn't do it !

And if he said anything else was impossible ? I began to rehearse our meeting. . . " Yes, I'll marry you and end this suspense at once. Not at once ? Oh, I'm sorry for pressing on you something that you don't want. You do want it ? Then why wait two years ? To see whether I wear well, or if you meet somebody you like better ? " All banter, of course, but the razor-edge banter of a woman who's been roused for the first time and is like a wild beast with death between her lips. People make light of lovers'- quarrels — other people's lovers'-quarrels — ,but they're the bursting of two souls under a too great charge of high- explosive. . . .

I had to brace myself for a quarrel, because it was no longer the simple question how soon we could afford to marry ; we had to leave Oxford. I felt that when you all were baiting me ; I felt it when I remembered Joyce Armitage's cold-blooded campaign of success ; I felt it when Winnie Orm told me the wonderful life she intended to live ; and I felt it when I reahzed that the Burnleys were enduring just what I refused to endure, with Hammer- smith in place of Oxford and strugghng barristers in place of struggling dons. Spenser must find work in London, but I couldn't propose it ; I should have seemed so terribly selfish if I'd made him give up his beloved history for me ; but I could make him go, make him propose it himself, when he saw that was the only means of winning me.

And if he was still obstinate, if I turned to water again

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as on the night when he kissed me. . . Well, you'll be shocked, but how much more shocked you'd have been twenty years ago in the last months of good Queen Vic- toria's reign : I was ready to become his mistress. Yes. . . . You see, it Wcisn't an unselfish love that I felt ; if he'd become infatuated with any one — this girl who always went with his party to Switzerland — and if I'd resigned all claims because I thought he'd be happier with her, thai would have been love. If I'd been willing to wait two years for the joy of his companionship ever afterwards, that would have been love ; but I was dreading a lifetime, even with him, in the setting he had chosen. My feehngs were simple and in no way discreditable : I regarded him a little bit as my child, because he was such an absurd boy, and women are always older than men of the same age ; but the rest was frank passion — clean and free and natural, my dear Ada, as the passion for air, or food, or drink. . . . That lesson I learnt from Mildred Burnley and Winifred Orm.

I told you I never left anything to chance ; that has been the secret of what people would call my success. I worked out to the last detail how far it was possible to live that life in Oxford, what risk of discovery we ran, how long it would continue . . . and what would happen after- wards. Almost certainly he wouldn't want to marry me then ; and of course he'd be secretly repelled when I proposed such a thing — or, rather, when I let him propose it, for the initiative would all be on his side. And it wouldn't be easy to tempt my Sir Galahad to that. On the other hand, I probably shouldn't want to marry him, though I was prepared to be the wife of an Oxford history tutor in order to secure him. You see, I had shifted my standpoint somewhat by now. I shifted it more when- ever I allowed myself to think of the price ; when I went to the theatre and imagined the excitement next term over the O.U.D.S., when I walked along the tow-path and saw my own ghost shivering on a barge year after year and watching Torpids, when I read little Jacomb's " Oxford Letter " to The Standard and found him gravely prophesy- ing gladiatorial struggles at the Union between Brown of

SOLILOQUY 65

Trinity and Green of Balliol. The futility of it all maddened me, though I said I was fooUsh and that, whatever I felt, I 'd endure it for Spenser's sake ; but it was instinctive. . . .

I don't know. . . . Perhaps it was all for the best that I saw it or felt it then ; felt it so strongly that I tore up those pitiful first two Hues of my only love-letter for fear of weakening in my resolution to get Spenser on my own terms. The agony of those days and nights when I paced the streets of Oxford hke a caged beast, timing my spring for the moment when he dared withstand me I Every one at Hillcrest imagined that Spenser had sheered off without proposing : father was troubled . . . and wonder- fully sweet ; the others, after two days' baiting, left me alone and said nothing when I disappeared at all hours for long sohtary tramps to Cumnor, Headington, Woodstock. Agony ! But, at the end, it was something to have cleared my mind ; and I felt that, when we met, I should have the best of it.

As soon as he reached Switzerland, Spenser wrote twice a day (and there'd been one loving letter from London and another, written in the train, from Paris). It was glorious to hear from him and to feel his need for me ; glorious . . . and yet I hated it, because the letters unsettled me and made me want him just when I ought to have been keeping myself dispassionate. He was beginning to take me for granted, too. Well, after the way I'd betrayed myself and sacrificed my advantage, hadn't he the right ? He still talked a Uttle about my " answer " ; but this was a formahty, relegated to a postscript. The rest of the letter was powder and jam for the days after he'd had his answer : the powder a long lament about the time " we " should have to wait, the jam a series of wonderful plans. He had his eye on a house in Holywell, which " we " might be able to take on a long lease and then sublet till it was wanted ; there were various bits of furniture that he'd privately marked down in various out-of-the-way shops. " Spenser, my dear," I said, " you're taking my hfe for granted, too."

Probably this was deliberate. Unless he was a blind fool, he must have seen how I loathed Oxford ; and, as he had to live there, I daresay he wanted to accustom me to

E

66 SOTJT.OQUY

the idea as soon as possible. Men always prefer to have bad news broken all at once ; they like to see the extent of their liabilities ; women like it broken more diplomatic- ally, by degrees : I felt that Spenser ought to have made sure he'd won me before he so coolly disposed of my hfe. And then I clenched my fists and told myself that he had won me, because I'd given myself away. . . .

As though I wasn't overwrought and discontented enough already, I used to lash myself into an artificial frenzy by walking about and whispering to myself, " I hate this place. 1 hate the streets and the houses. The trams. The people. I couldn't live here all my li^e. I shall die if I live here" — I was going to say "another hour," but that would have been ridiculous, so I substituted " much longer."

" I hate everything about it ! " I said. . . .

I was in that mood of suppressed irritation in which a girl is ready to do anything, provided it's sufficiently desperate, sufficiently foolish. It is a madness of youth and second youth, of blooming and second blooming : when a girl for no earthly reason — apparently — throws over the man she loves and breaks her heart in the pro- cess, when a woman runs away with a man she doesn't in the least care for, when all the friends wring their hands and say : " Why did she do it ? " the answer is : " Because she was mad. She didn't want to do it, she didn't want not to do it ; she didn't know what she wanted." If Spenser had dashed home to say that he'd been left a fortune and we could be married at once and live any- where I liked, I believe I should have picked a quarrel and driven him out of the hou.se.

I did want him so ! And I did want to write Above all, I wanted a decision of some kind ' Within a week North Oxford was convinced that I'd had a " disappoint- ment," and, when I met Mrs. Jacomb in the street, she first looked uncomfortable and then asked me very briskly

SOLILOQUY 67

whether I was going away at all that winter. Inane! As if anj' one ever went away from Hillcrest ! . . . After that ... I was like one rabbit against an army of ferrets : I scurried farther and farther away to find some place where no one would spy on me or ask me questions. Heaven knows where I used to walk !

One night I found myself beyond Summertown ; and I can't tell you if I was going out or coming back. I'd drifted across the road, I remember, to look at a derelict car, when I suddenly saw a pair of legs protruding from under it. I was beginning to wonder if the man was dead or alive, when he crawled out, covered with oil, and began to abuse the car with perfectly ungovernable fury. I don't greatly care for swearing, especially among the pseudo- smart young women of the present day, but I suppose it must be a tremendous relief ; all that I'd been bottling up inside me for days this man got rid of in two minutes. It was splendid to hear him ! My spirits rose, my mood chimed with his so harmoniously that I laughed with sheer delight. He spun round as though he'd been shot ; and I said, in spite of myself :

" Don't you feel much better now ? "

I don't think I've ever seen a man look quite so foolish !

" Oh, by Jove ! " he exclaimed, " I didn't know there was anybody near ! Please forgive me, I only swear under strong provocation, but God knows I've had it with this infernal machine. . . . What you must think of me ! "

In taking off his cap he had smeared one cheek with oil ; and this, when he discovered it, provoked a new outbreak which he tried to conduct out of my hearing.

" I think it's so human," I said. " When you've got it over, tell me what's happened and let's see if I can be of any use."

He looked at me suspiciously to see if I was laughing. I was ; and that made hiim laugh too, so that in a minute we both felt quite friendly and he began to teU me his chapter of accidents : a new car — and that was in the early days of motors — ; he was driving himself up from Shropshire, where he'd been addressing a meeting of his constituents ; the car had suddenly and mysteriously refused to move.

68 SOLILOQUY

" And I've had nothing to eat since breakfast," he added piteously.

Just to meet him Hke that was rather an adventure ; and I was in the mood to stretch out both hands for any- thing that would give mc excitement, distraction. I determined that, if I could contrive it, the adventure shouldn't end there.

" What are you going to do now ? " I asked.

" Leave the car to rot here, I suppose, and go up by train. I've a committee at eleven to-morrow. You don't happen to know the London trains, I suppose, or the time ? "

I told him we could lend him a time-table if he'd walk as far as Hillcrest. He turned out his lamps, took a rug and a suit-case out of the car and strode along beside me. On the way he introduced himself as George Creal — in the intervals of abusing the maker of the car and asking me about hotels.

" My name is Tenby," I said.

He bowed and walked on for a moment ; then he stopped short and tried to see my face.

" You're no relation of John Tenby, are you ? " he asked.

" He's my father," I told him.

" Oh, by Jove, but what luck ! " he cried, dropping the suit-case and wringing my hand. " I knew he'd been shifted to Oxford and I always meant to come and look him up, but I've always been too busy. Old John Tenby ! He was my tutor at Clare. Is he at home now ? Shall I be able to see him ? "

" If he hasn't gone to bed. I don't know how late it is," I said.

" Well, but what luck ! " he cried again. " Now let me think ! Did we ever meet ? I went down in '86. I remember he had children that we used to take on the Backs at the beginning of the summer term."

"Then I was certainly one of them," I said.

"I wonder if I shall remember you," he murmured, with another attempt to see my face.

I laughed and said nothing. He was an adventure ; and I wanted to meet him in the spirit of true adven-

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ture, flashing on him suddenly in the Hght of the hall. ...

It was after eleven when we reached Hillcrest. Mother and the rest of you had gone to bed, but I took him in to father and explained how we'd come across each other. Father and he were like a pair of school-boys ; and, while they were shaking hands and laughing and teUing each other how well they looked, not a day older, I took stock of my adventurer. He was tall and bony, not in the least good- looking, with loose limbs and strong, freckled hands ; his face, too, was freckled, and he had a sandy moustache and hair and china-blue eyes ; wholesome and mediocre, I decided. The name was in some way familiar to me, and, while he was washing, I looked him up in Who's Who to avoid mistakes : " Creal, Hon. George Dolman, eldest son of 4th Baron Brentwood, Born 1865. . . Unmarried. . ." He'd been at Rugby and Clare, then he'd been A.D.C. to his father in Australia, then he'd gone into the House and was an extra under secretary at the Colonial Office. . . . I sUpped the book back and was hunting for trains, when father came in and said :

" Poor Creal's had nothing to eat since breakfast. See what you can find for him, Marion."

Of course, I'd done all that, but I wanted the sugges- tion to come from father. If our guest stayed to eat any- thing, I knew he'd miss the last train. And I was glad, because father wouldn't let him go to an hotel and I wanted to see more of him. Was it simply my yearning for any kind of distraction, or does every girl teU herself stories of going out of a cottage and giving bread and cheese to a tramp and finding that he's an earl or a milhonaire on a walking tour ? Nine-tenths of the popular novels seem to be constructed on those lines. I don't think I was still romantic enough in those days to be taken in by the stories I told myself ; and George Creal, with his " Oh, by Jove, you know ! " before everything, would never have passed for the hero of a novel ; but I was in the mood for anything that would keep me from thinking of Spenser and Oxford, Oxford and Spenser. It must have been rather exciting for George Creal, too, finding a young girl standing silently

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by the road-side and offering to lead him to his old tutor ; the road was deserted, there was only a shimmer of moon- light through the clouds ; and he couldn't take his eyes off me when once I'd let him see my face. And he was the eldest son of a peer who'd been governor of a colony and owned 80,000 acres. Oh yes ! I'd had time to look up Lord Brentwood : Grosvenor Street and Eldmore Castle, Fifeshire. Do you wonder if we both felt a certain elec- tricity in the air ?

Before he began his supper, father helped him push the car into safety and I had a room made ready for him. Then he began to talk about all he'd been doing since he went down from Cambridge, jumping about from one continent to another and once or twice breaking off to say :

" But I want to hear about you, sir." Then father shook his head and took his pipe out of his mouth and said :

" Nothing to tell, George. Four years at Polehampton as Director of Studies and Professor of English ; here ever since. Happy the nation that has no history."

I wondered. . . . Cambridge, Polehampton, Oxford — and nothing more. George Creal was making me restless and discontented. When father had mentioned the names of half a dozen old colleagues, who were now married or dead, that marked the boundary of his world. George didn't seem to have any boundaries : he was at home everywhere and knew everybody. . . .

In time they reached the House of Commons and began to discuss pontics. Of course, all the people I'd read of in the papers were George's friends, he was working with them ; it was always, " I warned Chamberlain what would happen . . ."or " I tried to come to an understanding with Redmond, but it was no good," or " The Duchess of Ross gave a party on purpose ; she's sometimes very useful in smoothing over difficulties of that kind, when she doesn't over-reach herself . . ." This great world in which he moved so easily ! / wanted to play a part in it ; I felt I could play a successful part, because I'd read an enormous lot for my age : once or twice I corrected George on questions of

SOLILOQUY 71

fact that I'd learnt when I was reading for the Politics and Modern History Diploma at Polehampton, and he soon dropped into the habit of referring to me when he was out of his depth.

I realized then for the first time, I think, that most of the people who talk politics, including members and ministers, haven't read or thought ; with a little trouble I beheved I could beat them at their own game. While I was having a day-dream about that, father began to talk about the other men of George's year at Cambridge and asked whether he'd seen anything of Martin Shelley. From that they got on to the big literary figures of the day, Kipling and Shaw and Yeats and Meredith and Hardy and James and Pinero and Barrie. George seemed to know them all ; he worshipped books, he said, and could spend all his life reading. I liked him for that, and my day-dream grew. Then I found that he only cared for the fashion- able books of the moment ; and English books at that ; he knew nothing of Russian, French, German, Italian. For some reason that made me extraordinarily angry ; when George said of some fifth-rate book : " That had a great success ; everybody in London was talking about it," he implied that what these ignorant parrots repeated from reviews really mattered. Father, of course, was too polite to say they didn't know what they were talking about ; but I was less patient, I had been trained by him to a sense of proportion and I wanted to bang their empty heads together.

Meanwhile I was condemned to Cambridge, Polehampton and Oxford. . . .

That thought suddenly flamed across my vision, com- phcated with all kinds of other thoughts about Spenser and our impending struggle ; I had to let fly. And, of course, when once I began arguing with George about the things he pretended to know, he first of all stared and then tried to run away. . . .

Finally he laughed hke a boy and said :

" I don't mind trying to bluff one professor, but I'm not equal to two." . . .

72 SOLILOQUY

I let him off lightly. After all, I could see I'd made an impression and I wanted to go on with my day-dream. He had opened up — to perfection — a vista of the great world which I had always half-unconsciously wanted to enter and dominate. The fact that it was unattainable didn't make it any less attractive. I've always thought that Mrs. Humphry Ward's political novels are beneath contempt, but Marcella and her successors, if they were nothing else, were powerful to the extent of seducing the minds of otherwise quite harmless girls. In that genera- tion, if you followed the parliamentary debates or did a little slumming or read a few pamphlets and biographies or met a minister at luncheon, you saw yourself as a political hostess ; I won't pretend I hadn't had that dream ; lying before the fire in father's room I had changed the course of history once every five minutes — and, what is more, I had the necessary knowledge to do it far more effectively than most of the women I afterwards met ! But, even while I dreamed, I knew it was only a dream ; ministers didn't come to Hillcrest, and I didn't go to the places where ministers could be found to hang on my lips. . . .

Until that night. . .

George had miraculously dropped from the clouds between two crises ; he'd been expounding the policy of the govern- ment— at the request of the prime minister — in his con- stituency ; it was a controversial speech, and he was going back to defend himself next day in the House. This was a breath from the inmost sanctuary ! I was meeting statecraft at first hand I As soon as I'd made my effect with George, I let him go back to father while I fitted in my day-dream with the facts of George and the Colonial Office and the Wellington division of Shropshire. ... I saw a house like Lady Dexter's, when Joyce Armitage took me there, filled with beautiful things instead of with tlie incongruous Cambridge and Polehampton refuse that you couldn't afford to change ; in that house you would never have to ask if you could a/jfonl things, for civilized life only begins when you can cease troubling about money. Dresses

SOLILOQUY 73

and jewellery I didn't care about except in so far as they were necessary to my setting ; it was the style and spacious- ness that I needed. The hall, the staircase, the gallery. . .

And the people ! I thought of my dinners — with Mr. Chamberlain on one side of me and Sir Charles Dilke on the other ; the Duchess of Devonshire and Lady London- derry at one remove ; a journalist or two — sa5^ Labouchere ; a diplomat, Mr. Choate or his like ; an author. ... I should draw them all out and keep the ball rolling until we had arrived at something, hammered out something new — an Irish policy ! And they would come to me afterwards, as they went then to the Duchess of Ross, who was never any- thing but a very active, very inept wire-puller with a big position ; they'd say : " This is all very well, but it's your policy ; do you think you can make Lord Lansdowne see our point ? ' ' And I would arrange another party and win over Lord Lansdowne or whoever it might be. . . As I did, for ten years and more ! It was on a smaller scale, I had to fight my way in by a back-door ; but I influenced people and brought them together ; from 1905 the Whips realized that I was a force to be reckoned with. If I'd started on a higher plane, I'd have rivalled Londonderry House. . . .

It wouldn't have been all politics ; that was chiefly pro- fessional, on George's account. . . . Yes ! Day-dreams are debilitating, but they don't become actively harmful until you cease to see that they're only dreams — as I was doing for the first time ! When I began to tell myself this story about George and me and the Grosvenor Street house and the castle in Fifeshire, he was only an idealized figure ; when I looked at him, he wasn't by any means the figure of my ideal, but he was a living figure ; and of course, when I followed my dream into reality, he was a passable figure. I forgot everything except this life that I was planning for the two of us : our political parties, and the parties that we gave as a rest from politics. I intended that all the great world should come to me. Music. . . You would have seen Mr. Balfour leaning back in a corner — his corner ; and Lady de Grey. . . And every Tuesday, say, there would be a general gathering. No invitations : every one would

74 SOLILOQUY

know it was Marion Brentwood's evening, and they would all come. And I should rule them. . . .

When I wasn't entertaining, I should be going to all the other parties ; and people would rush up and beg me to arrange a meeting with some new star who had lately swum into our ken. Naturally. I was the one person who knew them all. I knew them before any one else ; / decided who was worth knowing. . . x\s I did, as I did, Ada, for more than ten years, at least with the literary people ; if I decided to make a man . . . Henry Bryant, Clara Denman, young Baxall ; I could give you a list ....

Like the thunder of voices when you're coming to after an anaesthetic, I heard George telling father that he must really go to bed if he had to make an early start next day.

" Well," said father, " you've no excuse for not looking us up now. We lie right across your route from London to your constituency. The next time you think of preaching the word to them ' '

" I shan't wait for that," George interrupted. " If you really mean it, I'll invite myself up one week-end during the next recess." Then he turned to me. " You, Miss Tenby, will hear from me within two days. I'm morally certain you were wrong over the sliding-scale amendment ; such a thing was never proposed. And on that I'll wager a dozen pairs of the best white-kid gloves against one hundred cigarettes."

" I take six-and-a-quarters," I said.

That night I tried hard to keep from thinking. If I'd really had a great success with George, it would have solved so many difficulties. If I wasn't in love with him, I was in love with his life ; if I was in love with Spenser, I now loathed his hfe till I was almost prepared to fight down my love. If only I could have taken Spenser for a time and then gone to George when we'd had our honeymoon !

I didn't lie in bed next morning till I'd heard the cab drive away ! When George came down, there was a blazing lire in the dining-room and I was waiting to give him a breakfast that Ld supervised personally. I asked him to excuse mother, who was rather delicate ; I talked a little

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about " my sisters " ; and I encouraged him to say what a glorious man father was (you can always make a good impres- sion on men by displaying extravagant loyalty to your family ; they think you're an untapped reservoir of natural affection — or, in other words, that they'll have an easy time with you) . I fancied that George was rather embar- rassed at being alone with me and allowing me to wait on him ; before he left, I thought I'd give him some encourage- ment. As he got into the cab, I said :

" Good-bye ! I hope you won't be late for your com- mittee. And I hope you meant what you said last night about coming to see us again some time. We live such a retired life that it's more than pleasant when any one comes to us from the world of affairs."

" I shall certainly come," said George. " I arranged a week-end with your father last night." Then he became rather pink. " Please forget the exhibition I made of myself in the road."

"You should apologize to the car," I suggested.

"I'm grateful to the car," said George.

" The ass was wiser than Balaam," I told him.

When father came down to breakfast, he said :

" Well, my dear, did you feel your ears burning last night ? Creal kept me up half an hour after you'd gone to bed, telling me what a remarkable girl you were."

Poor darling, he was so happy that I'd shewn the least sparkle of animation ! By now he'd evidently made up his mind that everything was over between Spenser and me ; when I shewed an interest in another man and he shewed an interest in me, dear father was as pleased as if he'd fallen in love himself. As I kissed him and tried to straighten his hair, which was untidy even at breakfast, he gave me a little hug. ... If my ears weren't burning before, my cheeks were now ; and I wished father hadn't talked like that in front of mother and the rest of you, especially as he added that George had actually fixed his time for coming. Only too well I knew mother's tragic love of stage-managing ! And some streak of decent feeling made me wish that he hadn't given my will that Uttle push along the line it was eilready trying so hard to follow I

76 SOLILOQUY

The odds had been so much in Spenser's favour that it did seem cruel to wipe out his advantage in his absence, when he'd done nothing to deserve it ! I hadn't abated a particle of my love for him, but within the last twelve hours my love for liim wasn't so important by comparison with other things. . . . The second post that day brought the usual letter, and for the first time I was afraid to open it ; half the time when we think we're making up our minds they're making themselves up for us, and by now I'd decided against Spenser sufficiently to feel that I wanted to start afresh with him, unbiased, to consider him in relation to everything else, not in the light of our old love. I mustn't be weak ! And his letter would weaken me ; it would make me go on wanting him when I was telling my- self that, if need be, I could get on without him, I . . . put it in a drawer and went for a longer walk than usual, trying to argue it all out. . . .

Next day I received twelve pairs of gloves from George and an apology for his having presumed to doubt my in- fallibihty. " You have given me furiously to think," he added. " What right have I to a place on the front bench while you waste your learning on the desert air of Oxford ? "

It may not have meant anything, but I thought it did. And I spent an hour before I was satisfied with my answer : two allusions, a quotation and an epigram, in four lines. I know now that he was half serious ; I knew it when he quite unnecessarily thanked me for my letter of thanks . . . and wrote again to cap my quotation. We corre- sponded— very wittily and very learnedly — until he came to stay with us. . . And, whatever it was intended to convey to me, I know now that it conveyed a sentence of death to poor Spenser. He wired one morning from Paris to say that he was crossing that day and that the whole party would spend the night at the Charing Cross Hotel — the friend from Cambridge and Mrs. Sefton and her daughter and the other man. I wrote and asked him to meet me somewhere in Oxford and come for a walk, so that we could discuss things at leisure.

He wired back :

" Top of Headington Hill three o'clock."

SOLILOQUY 77

I went by Mesopotamia, he came by road ; and I found him waiting for me under a tree at the top of the hill. When you're first in love with somebody and haven't seen him for some time, you can hardly believe that he'll still be just what you thought he was, just what you remembered; as I went towards Spenser, I had a thirty yards' view, and he was all I'd imagined — more ! Switzerland had given him a brighter colour, and his eyes were even more marvel- lously clear than usual ; but the youth, the clean outhne, the sharp-cut features, the straight back and strong hmbs were things that didn't change. I couldn't breathe ! I gave a little sob and whispered : " Oh, my dear, my dear. . ." Then I pulled myself together.

The first thing I noticed was that Spenser was in a very bad temper. It might have been anxiety, he might be angry that I'd kept him waiting ; but, when I said : "I am glad to see you again," he found it hard even to be gracious.

" I've been looking forward to this — almost unbearably," he muttered; and then : " I think you might have written, Marion."

" It was too difficult," I sighed.

" But if you had to make up your mind by a given day. . , Every hour that you cut short the waiting would have been such a present as you'll never be able to make again. How- ever, I'm so glad to see you that we needn't bother about what's past. . . . Well, Marion ? "

Just that one word . . . "Well?" ... If only he'd continued in the humble strain, anything might have happened ; but the httle frown of ill-temper and the " Well ? " which meant to me " Have you had enough ? You must give in, you know, in the end " — that seemed to rasp every nerve in my body.

I said :

" Well, Spenser ? " Then I added : "Tell me what you want me to say, my dear."

" I want you to say you'll marry me."

I know ! If that had been all, I might have answered

((

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without making you wait ; but ... is it possible ? Can we afford to marry ? That's what I've been wondering, . . . And where are we going to Hve ? And how ? Dear Spenser, instead of blaming me for not writing, you should be sorry that I've been worried out of my mind : I want what you want — there ! — but I know that before I say a word to father I shall have to present a workable scheme. We must be very patient and very wise."

Spenser nodded and didn't seem to know what to say next. I took his arm and led him back towards Mesopo- tamia. At last he blurted out, with an air of great frank- ness :

" Well, of course, I can't make out much of a case on paper. I hoped that, if we went to the professor and told

him that we were in love and wanted to be engaged "

" He'd insist on looking ahead," I interrupted. " Fathers are like that, you know. . . Spenser, it's hateful to talk about money, but, if we became engaged, how soon d'you think we could be married ? ' '

"All being well, in two years' time," he answered. " I think that father — I haven't spoken to him, of course ; it seemed premature — I think that father would insist on our waiting until it was a little nearer the time."

That seemed to bring Spenser's ill-temper to the sur- face, and he fought it down with a big effort.

" I shouldn't like to go against your father's wishes, of course," he said, with an impatient, nervous laugh, " but don't you feel this is primarily our affair ? Marriage would be a different thing altogether, but if you and I choose to say we're engaged or to consider ourselves engaged without

telling any one "

" I've thought of that," I said. " But— is it what I want ? "

That startled him. . . .

" I assumed — perhaps rashly — ," said Spenser very stiffly, " that you cared for me."

" Of course I care for you ! Should I have let you kiss me if I didn't ? . . . But I've a horror of long engagements. It would be a terrible strain for both of us, we should probably quarrel and get on each other's nerves ;

SOLILOQUY 79

if it were a secret engagement, everybody would gossip about us when we were seen together, and, if we made it pubHc, everything would seem utterly flat when we were married after waiting so long. That's what's been worrying me for the last fortnight."

"What d'you suggest, then ? " asked Spenser,

It was just what I didn't want him to say ! I didn't want to take the initiative. . . .

" Well," I said, " we haven't pretended that we don't love each other. I should have thought that meant a great deal to you — my love, the knowledge that you have it ; you can't talk about suspense any more. . . . Why not go on, just as we are, until the day when we can go to father and tell him everything ? You can be with me as much as you like until you've found some appointment which will make it possible for us to marry." . . .

That was my nearest approach to telling him that he must come to London with me, my nearest approach to offering myself to him. . . .

" And we can quarrel and get on each other's nerves," he cut in. " How is your proposal different from mine except in the one point that I want the comfort of knowing we're engaged ? Are you afraid that one of us may change ? ' '

" How does a secret engagement — father wouldn't hear of anything else — ," I said, " how does a secret engage- ment differ from what I'm proposing ? "

Try as I might, I couldn't see what he was aiming at.

" I should feel sure of you," Spenser burst out ; " and I don't now. I went through one hell when I didn't know whether you cared for me ; and I've exchanged it for another since I began to wonder how long you'd care for me." Evidently he felt he'd said too much and tried to turn it off with a laugh. " It's only natural for men to fall in love with you : if / couldn't stand out against you, it will be the same with others."

" You ought to be pleased," I suggested, "to find your judgement so well backed."

" I suppose I'm jealous."

" Can't you keep your jealousy in check until you find me falling in love with another man ? "

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Spenser frowned and said nothing. Now, he certainly wasn't getting things all his own way, and, when a man's worked up to great excitement, that's enough to make him sulky and difficult ; but he'd been sulky from the beginning. Why ? Quite clearly he was jealous, but the only man I'd spoken to since he went away was George Creal, and I felt it was impossible that he'd had time to hear of that. . . .

" You're free to do what you like at present," he com- plained. "If we were engaged, I should feel as sure of you as if we were married."

"You want to begin neglecting me from to-day," I laughed.

" I should be too much afraid of your breaking off the engagement ! "

"Then," I said, "you wouldn't have much certainty. Isn't that really the answer to everything ? If we're quite sure that we shall always love each other, it'll be all the same in two years' time ; if we're going to find that we're not very well suited, it's a thousand times better not to have all the pain of breaking off an engagement. Why, in two years you may meet some one you prefer to me ! "

" I don't think that's altogether likely," said Spenser with terrible earnestness.

"There's your friend Miss Sefton," I suggested — out of pure mischief.

" Good God, you're not jealous of her, Marion ? She's an old friend and a very sweet girl, but that's all. I've known her and her mother

" You protest too much ! " I laughed. " I daresay she isn't a rival, but she's the only girl you've ever mentioned to me. There may be others, of course ; you may be using her as a stalking-horse." . . .

I only wanted to tease him, to make liim tell me again that he loved me more than any one in the world, to shake him out of his heroics and to gain a httle time. Instead, I made him even more intense. . . .

" Since I met you, I've not looked at another woman," he cried. " Merciful Heavens, what d'you take me for ? Would you look at another man ? "

It wasn't a rhetorical question ; it was a trap. I've

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never had any proof, but I know, I know some one must have been talking to him. He'd had only half a day in Oxford, but during that time Mrs. Jacomb or Mrs. Chester- field or one of the others had told him about George Creal, quoting mother, in all probability. " Quite a romance ! His car broke down, and Marion found him wrestling with it. She brought him home for some supper, and instantly he fell such a victim that he invited himself to come and stay. . ." Mother wouldn't leave these things alone ; and I knew now why Spenser was so sulky.

" In two years 3^ou may fall in love with some one else," I said. " I want to give you a fair chance. I shouldn't want to keep you then ; and, if I met some one who would make me happier than you could ever hope to do, surely you wouldn't want to keep me ? "

" Yes, I should ! " he burst out.

" Then you don't love me enough to care whether my marriage brings me happiness ? " I asked. " You just want to stake out a claim on me and then go back to your work. If you really loved me, you'd be ready to stand aside for another man."

That was the way I used to madden him in the week before he went to Switzerland. . . . Why does one talk hke that to a man ? I suppose it's love of power and some cruel desire to hurt what is most dear to you. I could always argue Spenser into a corner so that, if he said he couldn't give me up, I told him that his love was selfish and, if he said he might give me up, I told him he didn't really want me. Why are we such beasts of prey ? I once thought it was because women have so httle open initiative in love- making, they're supposed to say "yes" or "no" — and they're not content with that ; but I know now that, if women habitually proposed to men, they'd be just as cruel, more cruel to any one who slighted them. No, the days before a woman yields are the time of her greatest power ; and she seems to drink her fill then so that she may forget the helplessness and indignities of the past and the helplessness and humiliations of the future. . . .

" I want you more than anything in life ! " said Spenser in a whisper that went through me like a red-hot needle.

F

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" That's why wc must be engaged at once. Then you wouldn't allow yourself to like any one better ! You don't suppose I can live in the same city, seeing you and always having to keep at a distance, wanting to cut the throat of any man who speaks to you ? It must be one thing or the other ! "

That was as near as he came to shaking me. • • • I z^«s shaken. He was feeling his way towards an ultimatum, and I wanted to avoid it ; while he stood there, I felt there must be some way of getting him as I wanted him ; I couldn't give up being loved by him. ...

"I'm not sure that I know what you mean," I said. "That sounded rather like a threat."

" It was a plain statement of fact," he answered. " Flesh and blood couldn't stand what you're proposing. Sooner than that, yes, sooner than that I'd try to forget I'd ever met you. One thing or the other."

And then I knew that I mustn't answer and mustn't let him say any more. He was standing with his legs apart and his hands on his hips, looking down and burning me with the Hght in his eyes. There was all the ruthless severity of the Red Indian. If he'd caught me in his arnis . . . But an ultimatum's more likely to rouse a woman's obstinacy than her love. If I'd said anything, I should have said : " Go ; and see if you can get on as well without me as I can get on without you." . . .

" Don't say anything more," I begged. " You'd better think carefully before you do something that we may both regret."

And then I gave him my hand and walked home alone. . . .

CHAPTER FOUR

" One thing or the other." . . .

When I reached home, I asked myself how we stood. Insomuch as nothing had been decided and we'd had no big scene, the meeting was not so bad as I'd feared ; but it was worse in that the sight of Spenser had shaken me. Strange that he shouldn't have seen : one more turn of the rack, and I should have given in. If he'd touched me ! But we were two cowards, threatening and blustering, but afraid to give battle. . . . And it was " one thing or the other" with me, too. I couldn't live in the same city with him, seeing him daily for two j^ears and having to repress all my love for him. Flesh and blood wouldn't stand that, either.

I had to let him take the first step. What fools we are in wars and strikes and business deals — yes, and in love ! — with all our manoeuvring for position. There 'd be some point in it if the other side didn't see everything you were doing and discount it beforehand ! If I reopened communica- tions with Spenser, it would mean that I was accepting his terms ; if he came to me, it would mean either that he was trying to wear me down by obstinate repetition or else that he had some new terms to propose. He couldn't do either without weakening on his " one thing or the other " declaration ; and, if he did nothing at all, it would mean that I refused to be engaged, that he accepted my refusal and that everything was over.

I didn't expect him that night, but I thought he might come next day. He didn't . . . nor the day after ; and I settled down to a trial of strength. In some ways I

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was glad to gain a little time, because George was coming to us at the end of a week, and I felt that the choice might be easier when I had the two alternatives thrown into con- trast ; but in other ways it was unbearable, because George was beginning to write every day, he was drifting nearer and nearer, and, while I could keep him at bay by remaining on my intellectual eminence, I did get a little tug of con- science when I saw myself playing this double game. George, I felt, could take care of himself ; numberless women must have set their caps at him, and I should think he was quite equal to making love to two women at the same time ; but it was different with Spenser : he was so single-hearted, so terribly upright and rigid about " the right thing to do " ; he was incapable of flirting with the Sefton girl when he was in love with me and, if he ever knew what I was doing, he would rank me with the lowest prostitute from the gutter. It wasn't only in appearance that he was a Red Indian : on most subjects his idealism was so uncompromising that I was always afraid of being found out. . . .

For all his directness and rigidity, he condescended to be diplomatic with me ; it's hardly too much to say that he arrived at a compromise. He wouldn't come to see me, but on the following Sunday he called on mother ! Called on her and talked to her at me and across me : he must take the earliest opportunity of paying his respects and thanking her for all her kindness to him earlier in the vacation ("Good Heavens!" I said to myself, " is it still less than a month since all this turmoil began? "), he mtist tell her what a wonderful time he'd had in Switzer- land. . . . Mother didn't know what to make of him : if he'd sheered off, it was rather funny that he should call at Hillcrest so soon ; and, though he wasn't effusive to me, I don't think she noticed any tension. As he made no particular effort to talk to me, I said good-bye at the end of tea and told mother that I'd promised to call on Mrs. Jacomb. Spenser did say then that he'd like to " accom- pany Miss Tenby," if he might.

" Miss Tenby." . . .

If he hadn't given me a cue, I shouldn't have known what

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to say ; but, as we left the house and he called me " Marion," I had to ask him what our relations were supposed to be.

" I called you ' Miss Tenby,' " he explained, " because I didn't want to startle your mother."

" I understand," I said, " but where do I fit into this scheme ? I don't like mysteries and conspiracies."

" I'm still waiting to hear from you," he answered.

" A reply to your ultimatum ? I don't hke being threatened, Spenser."

"And I don't like being played with," he retorted.

" This is much too serious for any playing. What do you want ? "

" I want you to be my wife."

There we had it, in its simplest form. . . .

" I know that, dear heart ! " I said. " I've known it from the moment when you first held me in your arms. Listen, Spenser : I've nothing to hide from you. I'd never been in love before you came into my life ; and I think we fell in love at the same moment. It was so new, so wonderful that I couldn't believe it was true ; when you said you were mad, I agreed with you and I felt that I was mad, too ; I waited to become sane, but I found this wasn't a thing one outgrew. . . . Then you asked me to marry you ; and the whole of a glorious new world rose like a comet, to redden and burst at my feet, leaving before me an enchanted land where I seemed to bow my head before the sun and kneel down among the flowers to thank God, to thank God, oh ! and to pity any one who wasn't in love. I'd have gone with you to the ends of the earth, recklessly, blindly. . ."

I was out of breath, I had to stop. . . . Spenser gripped my wrist and said :

" Don't you think you might have told me ! "

The brutal selfishness of people in love. . . .

" A girl doesn't say those things," I told him. " What she fears more than anything in the world is to offer some- thing that may be thrown back on her. She can't help it ; it's stronger than she is ; and women who would cheerfully murder me would come to my protection if a man threatened my pride. I was ready to give everything,

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but you didn't ask for it ; you wanted to stake out a claim on me . . . and come back to develop it when you felt inclined. You mustn't expect a woman to put herself up to auction. That's why I couldn't tell you or help you. And, when you did speak, I thanked God that I hadn't cheapened myself to you, that I hadn't said I'd go in that hour to the ends of the earth with you when you only wanted me to move across the street ... in two years' time ! But, when you went away, I conjured up my vision again ... to see how much you'd left of it. Shall I humble myself ? Even your caution hadn't chilled my love, Spenser : I believed that you still wanted me ; and night and day for two weeks I thought how we might live out our dream. I knew we should be poor, but, if you loved me, that didn't matter (I had a girl staying with me who'd married on nothing and cooked her own meals for the first year) ; / was ready to take the risk for a man I loved. When you came back, you asked me again to marry you ; I said ' How soon ' ; and again it was ' two years.' No question of taking a risk for me, no consulting me : 'Two years, take it or leave it, one thing or the other.' ... I really wondered whether you did care for me. I wasn't essential to you, if you could get on without me so comfortably ; you only wanted to be engaged because you liked the sense of possession and were jealous of other men. . . . That was three days ago. I've tried to make every allowance for you, I've looked soberly at the life you're proposing for us ; and I've found only the shatter- ing of a dream and the tarnishing of an ideal. I ought to hold some wonder for you, but in two years I should be a habit ! The mystery of love, the glory, the splendid adven- ture that we should make of our life together ... it would all have evaporated in two years ; Uterally, quite literally I should only be crossing the road from father's house to yours. And it's that or nothing : one thing or the other, you say. Well, my dear, I forbade you to utter a single word that you might afterwards regret ; but, if you want to say it, I can't prevent you. I hope you won't make me choose between these two ; I warn you that threats are wasted on me. If you want to marry me now "

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"I can't," he interrupted.

" Then don't let's discuss it till you can. You won't expect me to agree with you. To begin with, you could earn five times your present income in London "

" But I can't leave my work ! "

" If you were ready to come with me to the ends of the earth, you'd gladly leave everything. . . . But we won't have a vague engagement ; you mustn't rob my romance of all its glamour. Perhaps, if you don't see very much of me, you'll find you want me so badly that you'll take a risk for my sake ; perhaps you'll find that you can get on without me, and then it's best for us not to be tied in any way."

I felt strong enough to challenge him like that ! Though I'd given myself away, I still had enough restraint and pride to keep me from going on my knees to him ; it was Spenser who'd made first overtures that day, and I'd have wagered my life that he would yield to my terms. . . .

" Then it's ' one thing or the other ' with you, too ? " he asked after a long silence.

" Don't let's issue ultimatums ! " I begged. " I've told you what I can do — and what I can't. Most women would feel they'd given something rather big when they'd said they would marry a man without a moment's delay ; that is apparently too little for you — or too much. You said in Switzerland that it was torture to be without me ; do you really want to say good-bye ? "

"Do you?" asked Spenser; and in that moment I saw that he was resolved on another trial of strength. It was the tone in which he'd said " Well " three days before, when I felt he was thinking : " You'll have to give in sooner or later." Spenser was still very sure of himself, though he'd already come obediently to heel that day.

" You know I don't," I told him frankly. " But now I must say good-bye for the present. Here is Mrs. Jacomb's house. Good-bye, Spenser."

"Good-bye, Marion," he answered very deliberately.

And then I left him.

Three days, I thought, would be sufficient for his demon- stration, but there was no sign of him, no letter or message

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on the fourth or fifth. I hadn't yet heard from him when George Creal came up for the week-end. . . .

My first romance, my one great passion. . . I couldn't believe it had come to an end. I waited for him to relent ; I had left the door open so that he could reestablish com- munications without loss of dignity, though it wasn't his dignity that was troubling him, it was sheer physical inabil- ity to stand the strain. / knew all about that ; I'd known it since the night he kissed me before going away. . . . Something that I just couldn't stand up to. . . .

Everyday I thought he'd come round. . . . If you'd asked me what was going on in my mind, Ada, I couldn't have told you ; women don't analyse and set out these inexor- able alternatives until afterwards ; I know now that I wanted, at all costs, to keep him in my life. . . . And I was certain, certain that he wasn't strong enough to let me go. If I'd known more, if this hadn't been my first love- affair, I could have held him : little flashes of hope, little spurrings of passion, indifference at one moment and a kiss the next, I could have kept him enslaved ; but it was my first love-affair, too. . . .

You might say that we certified the death on the day before George Creal came up for his week-end. Mrs. Jacomb and mother and the rest of North Oxford, after making up their minds that Spenser had eluded me, were bewildered when he came to call in the old way and I auto- matically went off with him ; I believe I gained a passing reputation for being very " deep " ! When he dis- appeared after that one call, mother couldn't make it out at all ; and, as she'd now decided that I couldn't look after myself without her help, she had to find out whether the ground was clear before she spread her net for George : it would be too ridiculous if she encouraged him to fall in love with me when I was already in love with some one else ; and why should she waste George when he might come in so usefully for Grace ?

SOLILOQUY 89

" When does Spenser Woodrow begin his work with you again ? " mother asked father one day — across me.

"I met him in the street the other day," said father. " He was very busy straightening things up, but I expect he'll come along soon."

When he didn't come, mother wrote and invited him to dinner ; when he wrote back that he was engaged, she tried again ; and he was still engaged. Then she tackled me. I forget how she started, but I soon found her apostro- phizing Spencer, talking at me and saying how curious, how really rather rude it was of him suddenly to drop us after we had shewn him quite a good deal of hospitality. I didn't betray myself, even when she attacked him. Then she asked whether I could suggest any reason ; and then, quite openly, she said that he and I had seemed very good friends, intimate friends, and was anything the matter ? I pretended that he was nothing more to me than any other friend of father's who came to the house, but mother at once cut in with :

" He was writing to you every day while he was in Switzerland, sometimes twice a day."

" I suppose he'd no one else to write to," I said.

But mother wasn't to be put off with that. She hadn't said anything, she told me, because I always charged her with interfering, but she'd noticed . . . And other people were noticing too. . . My dear, I know what younger sisters are ! You were probably as bad as they were. At the Infirmary Ball hundreds of people had seen us, and I had all mother's past record in man-hunting to contend with : they were all saying, ' ' Ah, Spenser Woodrow this time ! I wonder if she'll have any success with him." . . . Before Spenser went to Switzerland, North Oxford had quite definitely married us off.

Mother told me all this — rather with an air of finding what I proposed to do about it. My feelings. . . I don't think they entered into her calculations ; but North Oxford was waiting for the curtain to go up. If I'd refused him, if he'd grown tired of me, North Oxford — which was thoroughly bored and hard-up for conversation — had a ri^ht to know ; and mother, though she didn't say so,

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would have known how to play her cards with George. . . . But why hadn't I made sure of Spenser ? And, if I wasn't going to marry him, why had I so grossly misled North Oxford ?

It was all I could do to keep from screaming.

" My dear mother," I said, " Spenser and I are excellent friends, but you can be friends without wanting to marry. I don't suppose for one moment," I said, " that Spenser is in a position to marry yet ; has he any private means ? Why not believe him when he says that he's too busy to dine at present ? You know how work accumulates before the beginning of term." . . .

Mother would only say that a man must be very busy if he had no time even to be civil to his friends and that, if nothing was coming of it, I had been foolish to let people talk so much.

" Mrs. Brander- Wilson ..." she began.

Mrs. Brander- Wilson ! I've not thought of that name for ten years. She was mother's Mrs. Harris, the epitome of North Oxford : a woman who gave herself over to religious mania in the morning and work-teas in the afternoon.

" If you ever quote Mrs. Brander- Wilson to me again," I said, " I shall walk out of this house and not come back." ...

How I managed to live with mother as long as I did ! . . . I can hardly remember the day when she didn't exas- perate me. While we were children, she behaved like a sour old nurse (it may have been health even then) : "You mustn't worry your father, Marion"; "It's not what you want but what your father and I think is best for you"; how I hated her phrases and mannerisms! I was too bitter to have much toleration ; and I've never understood why I should be expected to bear with qualities in a relation when I wouldn't bear with them in any one else. So, when mother exasperated me beyond a certain point, I bludgeoned her ; and then father, who was abso- lutely loyal, though I'm sure he sjmipathized with me, used to rebuke me with great dignity and insist that I should apologize. And, when I'd said I was sorry, I used

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to go for a long walk . . . until I felt better , , . and hurry into the house without seeing it all, as it were, the winding path and the two little rock-gardens and the high oak door and the devastating sameness that I knew was waiting for me behind it. . . .

This time father didn't send for me ; but, when we met, I found him gentler and sweeter even than usual. I dis- covered afterwards that they'd had a long talk and had agreed that I was suffering from a terrible " disappoint- ment." So I was — an awful, unsatisfied longing for Spenser, the terrible knowledge that he was within a mile of me and I couldn't send for him, the knowledge — just as bad in a different way — that we might meet accidentally. I shouldn't have known what to do. . . . Father, of course, imagined that I'd been thrown over, and he was very stem if any one ever mentioned Spenser's name. . . . And I . . . I thought it best to leave things where they were ; no girl likes to have it thought — and said, as I'm sure Mrs. Brander- Wilson was sajdng — that a man has grown tired of her ; but George Creal was coming, and I felt that he would be a sufficient answer for North Oxford.

I think he was a sufficient answer for me ; I certainly couldn't have lived through the separation from Spenser if I hadn't had that vision ahead. The announcement, the wedding, the marvellous life that I'd already half planned. . . I wasn't in love with George, I couldn't have been — ever ; but he would be giving me so much instead, and love isn't essential to marriage if your house, your income, your life are big enough. Spenser would perhaps think that I had sold myself ; one night, when I was worried beyond bearing, I conjured up again that wonderful home which I was going to make, and in every room I seemed to be followed by a sort of ghost — it hadn't Spenser's face, but it spoke with his voice — ; and the ghost said something like:

" My compliments ! Your ladyship has everything here but— love ! "

Well, I was half asleep and half awake ; and that taunt worried me : Spenser's ghost gave me an absurd idea that he might commit suicide. In the morning I realized that

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he was far too level-headed for that, and immediately I had my answer ready for the ghost :

" Everything but love — true ; but, if I'd been married to you for a few years, our passion — which was the only bond — would have been cold, and I should have nothing in compensation but the privilege of pinching and scraping in a distant villa on the Woodstock Road."

When I'd said that, though I wasn't comfortable or happy, I felt an immense intellectual relief. And in those days I believed it was true. . . .

I could now give my undivided attention to George. He had been plodding away valiantly with our rather pompous interchange of epigrams, growing gradually rather more gallant, I thought, but keeping a check on his pen so that the letters were never anything more than the outpourings of an eager, scholarly mind : even when he was telling me how much he looked forward to his visit, I felt that, even at best, he was saying he must make a careful study of me before he committed himself ; his "career" must not be jeopardized!

Mother, of course, had been in bed when he came before, so I can't tell what picture she had formed ; but, inasmuch as Spenser was out of the way and George was a man in a good position with excellent prospects of every kind, I've no doubt that she had marked him down for me. There was the usual flutter of mild excitement, we made the most of our best frocks and rehearsed our poses ; you could depend on the family for good team-work, because we all reahzed the importance of impressing a stranger with our affectionate dispositions (the amount of public kissing that we indulged in for the edification of any man who came to Hillcrest ! And the laughter ... to shew our gaiety of heart !) ; and, though Grace was beginning to think I was getting more than my fair share of chances, those were the happy days when younger sisters didn't presume to marry until their elders were out of the way. ... I

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only hoped mother wouldn't shew her hand too openly, but after our wrangle over Spenser I wasn't in the mood to talk to her. Grace and Joan were prepared to regard him as fair game if I didn't want him ; but, since he was my bird, they knew they mustn't fire till he'd flown down the line, though it was quite legitimate to encourage him in their direction. Father . . . Unless he was an arch- hj^ocrite, I believe father was quite unworldly. All he said was:

"He's coming on Friday ? Well, I'll take him to dine in hall on Sunday, and you might arrange for a few people to meet him on the other nights. You'd better not tie him down for lunch, as he may have friends of his own that he'd like to see."

I forget who was invited. ... I know he sat between mother and me the first night ; and she tried to shew him how welcome he was by dragging up pointless anecdotes about his time at Clare — fifteen years before ! — just to shew how well she remembered him. When he turned round and complimented me on some phrase that I'd used in one of my notes, mother began a running commentary to explain how gifted I was. It was too appalling ! I couldn't bludgeon her in pubhc, and poor George had to sit nodding and grinning at the catalogue of my virtues until I left him to his fate and talked to the man on my other side. Even that didn't stop her : I heard fragments like " But then, of course, she had nearly a year in Germany." . . .

It doesn't require very much of that to damp the most ardent lover, but George was more ardent than I expected ; he made it quite clear that he found me even more pretty and attractive than he remembered and, personal attrac- tions apart, he was enormously impressed by my know- ledge generally and by what he was good enough to call my incomparable wit. (Later on, when I came to London and saw the women he was accustomed to meet, I wasn't sur- prised that he regarded me as a prodigy.) All the same, I shouldn't have wondered if mother had scared him right away. He was more long-suffering or more deliberate — frankly, I thought and still think him rather dense and

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thoroughly conscientious — than I expected. When he came into the drawing-room after dinner, I said :

" Haven't you had enough of me ? No doubt I shall be as bad when my time comes, but there ought to be a time-limit for maternal pride."

" That depends how well it's justified," he answered ; and then he began to pay me compliments that you could see coming a mile off.

Men are always so much better at that sort of thing if they've been sitting rather long in the dining-room ; but, though poor George had the best intentions, he was not light in the hand. I was glad when I could affect an interest in his career and make him talk about himself. That shewed off my knowledge and flattered him at the same time till I had everything my own way. After a time, by saying something about the wives of public men, I led him to discuss those who had helped and those who had hindered ; as with so many stupid men who realize that they are stupid, his career obsessed him ; soon he was talking about the difficulties of entertaining, if you were a bachelor, and before long he began, very haltingly, to make love to me. He hesitated so much that mother evi- dently thought we weren't getting on well and that she must keep the ball rolling by presenting him with a volume of old Cambridge photographs ; then I suppose she saw that she was spoiling her own game, for she almost threw it at George and scurried back to her corner. We pretended to look at it for a moment and then tried to go on with what we had been saying, but the thread was broken. . . . Something jarring. . . . George fidgeted with the book and then began looking at it again and trjdng to identify me ; he was thrown completely out of his stride. . . .

" Your mother must have been extraordinarily like you when she was your age," he said, getting rid of the book as soon as he decently could. " I remember her fifteen years ago. . . . They were the best-looking couple in Cambridge, she and your father ; and, I should think, the most brilliant." I beHeve that was true, but I'd so long regarded mother as being nearly half-witted that I couldn't imagine her as a girl, that all her generation fell in love with. . . .

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" After all, then," I said, " her maternal pride is perhaps only self-directed glory."

" Perhaps," he said. . . .

And then he became extraordinarily silent. . . .

" I beheve they're as much in love as when they first became engaged," I said.

"A marriage hke that is very wonderful," said George. . . .

But he wouldn't say anything more, and I felt that I mustn't force the pace.

He had severe attacks of silence for the rest of the time he was with us. My room was over the Ubrary, and I could hear him talking happily enough to father ; I believe he made himself very popular when he dined in hall ; he talked to mother, partly from politeness and partly to keep her from talking to him ; he talked to Grace, he talked to Joan, he cracked jokes with you ; but he had hardly a word for me.

At first I thought he was just shy and timid, perhaps waiting for me to help him — and I helped him to the hmits of decency and beyond ! Then I wondered if I'd offended him in any way. No ! It couldn't be that, because he was abject whenever he spoke — as though he'd injured me or insulted me and were trying by every means in his power to ingratiate himself. I couldn't make it out. . . . When he came back from dining in college, I was reading in father's room ; and he came in to say good-bye, as he was leaving by the breakfast train. I'd arranged the furni- ture, the lights, my dress, myself, everything with a view to my last effect, my final effort ; something told me that, if I lost him now, I should lose him for good ; and, as I put down my book and shook hands, I told him that hence- forth I should follow his career with the eyes of a friend. . ; . He said my friendship mattered to him more than any- thing in life. . . . I asked him when we were going to meet again. . . .

"I'm appallingly busy at present," he said; and I noticed that he couldn't look me in the eyes, though his face had Spenser's look of agony that night when he talked about the hell of uncertainty. . . .

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Suddenly I felt that I was losing any grip on him that I may have had.

"Good-bye," I said. "Don't wait another fifteen years."

" You'll hear from me," he said, " as soon as I want any information on any subject — which is likely to be soon." Then he allowed himself one lapse into lukewarm enthusi- asm. " You do write the most wonderful letters."

" The interest of every letter depends on what it leaves out," I said.

Heaven knows, mine were letters of the head !

And then he said good-bye, and I went to bed. Nothing more ! Not even a conventional hint that he hoped to see me if ever I came to London. ... It was all over. . . .

I sat before the fire in my room wondering why it was all over, for the man was miserable ! I felt a dull despair, but no anger, no bitterness ; what had happened was too over- whelming to leave room for bitterness. Whatever had happened. . . My brain was quite clear and rather curious ; I tried to put myself in his place. . . .

" To begin with," I could imagine him saying, " every- body expects me to make a big match." (As a matter of fact, he married a flighty httle Irish girl with big, melting eyes and a quick tongue and a temper that nearly sent him out of his mind until they separated at the end of two years. And, as she was a Catholic, he quarrelled eternally with his father before marrying her.) " Well, Marion Tenby's not a big match ; but, by Jove, you know, she's brilliantly clever and she'll be the best possible wife for me in my career. She's pretty ; and, by Jove, you know, I'm more than a little in love with her ; I think, therefore, that the ' big match ' element might possibly be left out. What remains ?

" Well, if she were a tinker's daughter, I could say : ' I'll marry you on condition that you disown your entire family ' ; but I can't do that here : the professor's a very

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distinguished man and a charming fellow, whom I wouldn't hurt for the world ; he's my wife's father and the only one of the family she really cares for. Therefore, I must keep on terms with the family and stay with them occasion- ally in Oxford. . . . But, by Jove, you know, they'll stay with me in Fifeshire and in London ! I must make no mistake about that ! Mrs. Tenby will insist. She'll write to all her friends on Castle note-paper and badger Marion to give the younger sisters a season in London and then another and then another until they're satisfactorily married off. It isn't a question of not dying happy until all the girls are well placed : Mrs. Tenby won't die at all until she's got them all off her hands. Can I face that ? . . Well, Marion's clever, and it's to her interest to finish the job as quickly as possible ; in four years we shall, in effect, be able to disown the Tenbys ; and Marion and I can settle down in peace.

" But will it be peace ? How will Marion stay the course ? Twenty years ago Mrs. Tenby was everything that Marion is now : pretty, well-dressed, quick-witted, accomplished — from the photographs they might be twin sisters — ; now she's a garrulous, irritating, officious imbecile with most of her looks and all her charm gone, and a semi-invalid into the bargain. Will Marion go that way ? How soon will she begin to break up ? . . . Good God ! I thought she was going to be a help to me in my career ; but she'll be a millstone round my neck ! The sooner I get out of this tangle, the better ; it's been the finest-run thing I've ever seen. By Jove, you know, I'm glad I met the mother and had my eyes opened when I did, because I was growing quite fond of Marion. . . . Saying good-bye to her was damnable, because I rather think she was growing fond of me. Well, no one shall say that I trifled with her affec- tions or gave her any encouragement." . , .

And . . . he . . . didn't I It may have been scruple, it may have been caution : he dropped out of my life like a stone ! When I came to London I met him, of course, as I met every one ; but he'd married his Irish girl by then. One love usually drives out another, and I've no doubt that by that time he was quite convinced — for

G

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the moment— he'd never cared for me. We became quite good friends, and I saw a lot of them both ; she was so useless that, whenever he wanted advice about his precious career, he always came to me. At the time of the separation he invited himself to dine with me alone, and I could see that I was expected to sympathize. So I did. . . .

" Looking back on it all," he said, " I suppose the whole thing was a mistake. Yet I didn't marry until I was seven- and-tliirty ; by that time I fancied that I knew what I wanted. It wasn't the only mistake I made in those days."

He wished me to drag it out of him, but he couldn't tell me anything I didn't know before. . . .

" My dear George," I said, " it's only profitable to brood over past mistakes if it keeps you from repeating them."

"I shan't have any opportunity," he said. "I don't suppose you're aware, Marion, that I once came very near asking jyow to marry me." k "Well, you stopped in time," I told him. [. "That was my mistake. , . . Did you know that? " ; "Yes," I said, "and I know why you — let me say — stopped in time."

"It was because I didn't know what I — wanted!" he answered savagely.

" It was because you