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The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Human Interest:
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Title: The Human Interest: A Study in Incompatibilities

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HUMAN

INTEREST: A STUDY IN INCOMPATIBILITIES ***
 THE HUMAN INTEREST

THE
HUMAN INTEREST
A STUDY IN INCOMPATIBILITIES

BY

VIOLET HUNT

AUTHOR OF
“A HARD WOMAN,” “UNKIST UNKIND,” “THE MAIDEN’S
PROGRESS.”

HERBERT S. STONE AND COMPANY

CHICAGO AND NEW YORK
MDCCCXCIX

COPYRIGHT 1899, BY
HERBERT S. STONE & CO
 THE HUMAN INTEREST
CHAPTER I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV,
XVI.
 CHAPTER I
One dull afternoon—and it was in summer—a London authoress of
some repute, whose nom-de-guerre was Egidia, was wandering along the
pavement of a dull and imposing street in Newcastle. Day was beginning to
decline, but the approach of evening was not alone responsible for the
heart-felt ejaculation of the South-country woman, “Oh, this Northern
gloom!” as she walked along under the smoky pall that, summer and winter,
shrouds the city.
She stood still presently, carefully scanning the solemn, stately houses
with pillared porticos all of the self-same pattern, which run in an
interminable row to a vanishing point seemingly far beyond conjecture.
“Each of the houses is exactly like the other,” she murmured to herself.
“In which, I wonder, does the Muse of Newcastle hold her court? Like most
muses, she gave no number. I must judge by out-sides. Oh, here we are;
green Liberty curtains in the windows—a more daring green on the door—a
knocker of mediæval tendencies! I will try.”
She went up the steps of No. 59 Savile Street and rang the bell, and
stood there pensive.
“I promised to call on this woman, and I am doing it, but I shall be
bored. She will talk of Ibsen, and Meredith, and tell me she had read Plato
through before she was fifteen. She will take herself seriously, and me too,
and inundate me with questions about the people in London. All these
provincials do. Still, she pressed me so prettily to call that I could not say
No. But I shall be bored!—Is Mrs. Mortimer Elles at home?” she enquired
of the handsome, full-blown parlour maid who opened the door widely and
invitingly.
“Oh, yes, ma’am—this is Mrs. Elles’ day at home.”
“Much too familiar!” thought Egidia, as she followed the swing of the
maid’s cap streamers through portièred doorways and past Syrian shawl-
draped cornices, and other pathetically futile attempts to conceal the
impossible architecture of a commonplace house, built in a bad period, and
decorated originally on the worst principles.
 “Muslin curtains are a mistake in an atmosphere like this of Newcastle!”
she thought, “and a parlour-maid should not aim at looking like Madame
Sans Gêne.”
She was shown into a drawing-room, “stamped with the evidences of
culture,” as the interviewer would say, and “redolent of a personality.”
Books were scattered about; the piano stood open, with the latest “mood” of
the latest fashionable composer lying on it; there were magazines, with
paper-knives negligently bisecting their leaves. There were, on the walls,
some grim old pictures—family portraits, presumably—of ill-tempered,
high-stocked old gentlemen and prim, dignified ladies, but they were
interspersed with sundry scratchy and erratic modern etchings and
photogravures; there were great bowls of flowers—whose apparent
substance, the authoress could not help suspecting, was cleverly eked out
with artificial imitations procurable at drapers’ shops. The whole effect was
rather pretty and French, and thoroughly out of keeping with the grim
realities of Northern hardness and abnegation of art-feeling that reigned
outside.
A young woman, beautifully dressed, who was sitting over the fire,
though it was not cold, rose eagerly to receive her distinguished guest,
exclaiming, with the most flattering and heart-felt emphasis,
“Oh, Miss Giles, how good of you to come! I was afraid you would have
quite forgotten me and my day!”
She was a slight woman, not tall, but slender enough to look so. Her eyes
were very large and bright, her cheeks, flushed, perhaps with the fire. She
made wrinkles when she laughed, but she did not look more than twenty-
eight. A little powder, carelessly and innocently cast there, showed on
cheeks “hollowed a little mournfully,” as the poet has it. Her hair was
arranged in hundreds of little waves and curls, and her dress—Egidia had
been in the best houses in Newcastle, during the last few days, but had seen
nothing to equal the style and taste of this little solicitor’s wife. Thought
and ingenuity had gone to the devising of that gown, but the wearer of it
had forgotten to fasten the last two buttons of her sleeve.
“The artistic sense strongly developed—but very little power of co-
ordination.” So the authoress, taking all these points into consideration and
exercising her own professional faculty of classification, mentally assessed
her hostess.
 “This is my day,” Mrs. Elles was assuring her. “I partly hope people will
come, and partly not. I would so much rather have you to myself—but then,
some of my friends were so anxious to meet you when I said I knew you—
so I had to give them a chance—you don’t mind being lionized a little, do
you? We can’t help it!”
The “celebrity” had been a “celebrity” so long that she had left off
objecting to the outward indications of her supremacy. Though she was a
lion, and gave lectures, she was modest and easily pacified. She was
fascinated by something curiously plaintive and beguiling about her
hostess’s voice and manner; a suggestion of childishness, of almost
weakness as she thought, in its artificial cadences. For it was an affectation,
Miss Giles, whose nom-de-guerre was Egidia, decided, though a pleasing
one.
“I wonder if she scolds her servants in that tone?” she thought, while
submitting to the charm, and, lying easily back in her chair, listened to her
hostess’s ecstasies about her books and her lectures, her prettily expressed
enviousness of the presumably happier conditions of her guest’s life in
London.
“Oh, what it must be to be in the midst of life, really in it—of it—part of
it! Here one sits, and yearns, and only catches the far-away echoes, the
reverberations of the delightful things that are happening, away down there,
where you are—in the very, very heart of it all!”
The peri left out of Paradise clasped her pretty, soft, pliant hands, and the
novelist asked her, willing to be instructed,
“Is Newcastle, then, worse than other provincial towns?”
“I only know Newcastle, but I am sure it’s worse. There are a few nice
advanced people, but they go away all the time, or if they bring nice people
down from London, they keep them to themselves. I never see any one
worth talking to. Oh, it is hopeless—hopeless!” She shrugged her shoulders.
“It is simply a form of Hades,—this life for me, for I have ‘glimpses of
what might make me less forlorn,’ of a life to live, a world to move in. I feel
I was not meant to merely stagnate—to vegetate—to wither gradually away,
consumed by my own wasted energies. You laugh! coming straight, as you
do, from that paradise of life and movement, that I am sure London is, you
can have no idea of what Newcastle and my life is! Inertia kills people like
me, one’s soul is starved, don’t you know?—one’s mental life has nothing
to feed on, no pabulum, except books—and they are not easy to get—new
books. I am the trial and pest of the libraries here!”
“You read a great deal?”
“Oh, yes. I live on books. They are the greatest possible comfort to me.
They are literally my saviours. I quite sympathize with the heroine of a
novel I read lately, who was kept from suicide by the sight of her favourite
poets on her book-shelf! I make myself up a dream-life, don’t you know—
the life I should like to live if I could choose. One dream-life, do I say?”
Her eyes lightened and brightened: she was extraordinarily alert and vivid.
“Two or three—a perfect orgy of dream-lives! They cost nothing. But I
have always read a great deal. The classics I don’t neglect. I read Plato
before I was fifteen—in Jowett’s translation, of course.”
Egidia smiled.
“And your books?”
“Don’t! don’t!” Egidia held up her hands.
“But I love them—I go to them for comfort and help. I have them all—
on a shelf near my bed—a whole row of my favourites—Browning, and
Meredith—and Ibsen. I am a great Ibsenite—are not you?”
“It is very fashionable!”
“Oh! but really, don’t you think—?” She was becoming quite incoherent
in her excitement. “Now, Nora in the ‘Doll’s House’?—It is the story of so
many of us. Only it is a mistake of Ibsen to make the husband a cheat—that
seems to put him too much in the wrong, he is wrong enough, without that.
Oh, Nora was so right to leave him, I think. So strong! Do you know the
sound of the house door banging in that play stirs me like the sound of a
trumpet?”
“You should write a book yourself!” suggested Egidia, indulgently,
knowing well the answer she would receive.
“Ah! I haven’t time. But if I did, I could put in things—things that have
happened to me—experience—more of feeling than of incident, perhaps. I
was an only daughter; my father was in the army; I travelled a good deal;
but I have not had a life of adventure; I married when I was seventeen. My
husband was a widower then, and his son, Charles, lives with us—and his
aunt, Mrs. Poynder.” She had an involuntary little shudder. “He is a
solicitor; you know that. And he has a huge practice. He is very much
occupied, and takes no interest in the things you and I care about. Of
course, he laughs at me for my—enthusiasms—but I should die if I didn’t.”
There were tears in her eyes.
“Some day, if you will, you must come and stop with me in town,” said
Egidia, in an access of womanly compassion for this somewhat
ungrammatical but sincere tale of misfortune.
“Shall I? Shall I? Oh, how lovely that would be!” Her brilliant smile
came out again. “To see—to have a glimpse of all those wonderful literary
people in whose company your life is spent.”
“Well, I happen to know more of artists than I do of literary people,” said
Egidia. “You see, my own ‘shop’ bores me. Do you collect—I am sure you
do?” She had seen the unmistakable flame of the autograph-fever leap into
Mrs. Elles’ eyes. “I can send you some, if you like. I have one in my pocket
now that I can give you, from Edmund Rivers, the landscape painter.”
“The R. A.?” Mrs. Elles, who always took care to have a Royal Academy
Catalogue sent up to her every year, and learnt it by heart, enquired eagerly.
“Yes, the R. A. and my second cousin!” Egidia answered, carelessly
pulling a crumpled note out of her pocket and handing it to Mrs. Elles.
“Read it!”
“Dear Alice,” (read Mrs. Elles), “I am so sorry that I cannot have the
pleasure of dining with you on the 31st, but I hope to be in the North on the
26th, at latest, to begin my summer campaign. I see the spring buds in the
parks, and the Inspector of Nuisances has invited me to clip my sprouting
lilac bushes, and it all reminds me too painfully of the paradise of greenness
that is growing up in the country, and calling me. I shall soon be ‘a green
thought in a green shade’—as Marvel says, and very much in my element.
Yours ever, Edmund Rivers.”
“The twenty-sixth,” said Mrs. Elles, meditating. “This is the thirtieth.
Then he is gone.”
“Oh, yes, no one will set eyes on him again till November, when he
comes back from what he calls his summer campaign. He takes good care
that none of us shall even know where his happy hunting ground is—
somewhere in Yorkshire, I believe! Oh, yes, you may keep the letter.”
Mrs. Elles took the letter with her pretty, be-ringed fingers, and scanned
it again with the air of a connoisseur.
 “Do you know,” she said, “I take a double interest in these things; first of
all, because they are autographs of distinguished people, but, in the second
place, because I can read their characters so well from their handwritings.”
“I wonder if you can tell me anything of this man’s character, then?” said
the novelist, with a look in her eyes which set Mrs. Elles thinking. Miss
Giles, in her way, was attractive. It was not Mrs. Elles’ way, but Mrs. Elles
had sufficient discernment to see merit in a style that was not her style at
all. Miss Giles had no pose, unless it was that of bonhomie. The charm of
her face lay in its nobility, touched with shrewdness; a certain modest
mannishness as of a woman who had to look after herself, and who had cut
out a way for herself, marked her appearance. Her dress was not in any way
unfeminine, but Mrs. Elles decided that she would have looked well,
dressed as a boy. She had beautiful eyes, and dark hair that curled. She must
always have looked thirty-six, and would probably never look any older
than she looked now.
“It is a very odd, characteristic handwriting indeed,” she began gravely,
“he is complicated, tremendously complicated, I should say.”
“He is an artist, a genius indeed, in my opinion,” said the novelist,
soberly.
“Ah! then, of course, he has a right to be eccentric. They all are, aren’t
they? Well, isn’t he a little—how shall I say it?—fanciful, faddish, difficult
to get on with?”
“You have, in the words of the song, ‘got to know him first,’ ” quoted
Egidia, laughing.
“And you do know him, well, of course! But still, I should say he is what
is called a misogynist.”
She was watching the effect of her words on the other. Even the strong-
minded authoress of novels with a purpose has her weak spot, she was glad
to see.
“Hating women! Well, I can’t say he pays them much attention. I don’t
suppose he ever looked at a woman in his life!” There was certainly a touch
of bitterness in this speech, and Mrs. Elles was delighted.
“Not married then!” she exclaimed. “And yet, I should say that he is not
obtuse to the charm of material things—that he is even a great lover of
beauty—in the abstract, then, I suppose. Nature—you said he was a
landscape painter, didn’t you? Does he never put people into his pictures—
never put you, for instance?”
Egidia laughed.
“No? Well, I must say I don’t care for pictures without any human
interest at all.”
“Then you wouldn’t care for Edmund Rivers’ work, unless you could get
your romance out of the scarred, weather-beaten face of an old windmill or
a ruined castle! He leaves the human interest entirely out of his pictures.”
“And out of his life, too, it seems,” said the other, “and both suffer in
consequence. Don’t tell me; there is something wrong about a man who
doesn’t care for women! Some day one will awaken him. But meantime I
see a certain want of sympathy in the determined uprightness of these
capital N’s that refuse to merge properly into the letters that come after, and
obstinacy in the blunt endings of those g’s. And yet he must have great
delicacy of touch—he seems to feel certain words as he writes them. Isn’t
his painting very refined and delicate?”
“It is all sorts, strong and delicate at once,” Egidia asseverated with
enthusiasm.
“And he is a great friend of yours!” Mrs. Elles remarked conclusively,
folding up the letter and putting it in her pocket. She was now quite
confirmed in her theory that the authoress had a secret passion for the
painter. “Is he young?”
“Fifty!” said Egidia, bluntly; she was beginning to guess the drift of her
companion’s thoughts, and, though secretly amused at them, was minded to
put her off a little, “and his hair is turning grey.”
“But I adore grey hair,” Mrs. Elles exclaimed hastily and
enthusiastically, as the door opened and a Miss Drummond was announced.
“Oh dear!” ejaculated the hostess, almost in the new arrival’s hearing,
but made amends for her discourtesy by a very effusive greeting. She
introduced “Miss Giles—Egidia, you know;” with a flourish as one with
whom she was on deeply intimate terms, casting at the same time a pathetic,
imploring look in the latter’s direction, as much as to ask her not to discount
her statement. Then more people came in. The room was filling.
“Don’t go,” she whispered to Egidia, more as an appeal than a civility,
and the good-natured authoress stayed and watched her, and studied her.
 She saw that dim notions of Madame Récamier to be emulated and a
salon to be held prevailed in the mind of the lady whom she had dubbed the
Muse of Newcastle. Such culture, such an atmosphere of literary gossip as
is current in many a second-class literary centre in London, flourished here,
and Mrs. Elles led the inferior revels with aplomb and discrimination. She
manœuvred her guests very cleverly, on the whole, and talked much and
well—with the slight tendency to exaggerate which Egidia had already
noticed in her. Like many restless, excitable people, she did not seem able
to both talk and look at a person at the same time, and her restless eyes were
continually directed towards the door, as if expecting and dreading a fresh
arrival.
About half-past five the mystery was solved; a tall, well set-up woman
of fifty walked in, bonnetless, who seemed to know nearly everybody and
shook hands with all the painful effect of a bone-crushing machine, as
Egidia experienced when “my aunt, Mrs. Poynder,” was introduced to her.
The stout lady then took a tiny seat near Miss Drummond, and Egidia was
much diverted by her loudly-spoken comments on her niece’s guests. She
was a woman to whom a whisper was obviously an impossible operation.
“And which is Fibby’s grand London authoress she’s so set up with?”
she was heard to ask. “Fibby mumbles names so that I haven’t a notion
which it is! Oh, deary me, here’s the Newcastle poet. I’m sure he has no call
to stoop as he comes in; he needn’t think he’s tall enough to graze the
lintel.... But I would dearly like to cut his hair for him.... Po-uttry! No! po-
uttry I can’t stand ... why, if a man’s got anything to say, can’t he say it
straight without so much ado?” The Newcastle poet, who wore his hair
nearly as long as poets do in London, shook hands and presented a slim,
green volume to Mrs. Elles.
“You must write ‘Phœbe Elles’ in it!” his hostess said, imperiously, and
led him to a side table, where, with many a dedicatory flourish, he did as
she required. Then she introduced him to Egidia, with the air of one
introducing Theocritus and Sappho.
“And do you kill the lovers?” she asked, alluding, presumably, to
characters in the volume she held. “How relentless of you!” She added to
her guests, “I had the privilege of reading it in the proof, you know.”
“Ah! I had to kill them,” he murmured, plaintively, “sooner than let them
know the sad satiety of love.”
 “My goodness!” Mrs. Poynder muttered.
The conversation, appallingly immoral as it was, yet seemed to interest
the good lady, for she drew nearer and formed a chorus to the very modern
discussion that ensued between the poet and Egidia and her niece, of which
London and London literary society was the theme. The epigrams that were
flying about she visibly and audibly pooh-poohed. “Give me Newcastle!”
she murmured at intervals, and “You, a mere lad, too!” was elicited from
her by any world-weary extravagance of the poet’s. He was in self-defence;
driven to incidentally mention his age—quite a respectable age, as it
appeared. Mrs. Elles was not to be outdone—
“I am twenty-six,” he remarked, with an air of reluctant candour.
“And a very good age to stop at!” observed her aunt, with intention.
The novelist looked with compassion on this poor woman who, like
Widrington, fought the battle of pose and society, at such frightful odds.
The poet presently drifted in her direction and they held a short but epoch-
making—as regarded Mrs. Elles—conversation.
“Mrs. Poynder is to me just like an upas-tree,” he confided to Egidia,
wringing his hands together. “In her shadow, any poetical idea would wither
and die!”
“There is, indeed, a good deal of shadow!” remarked Egidia, alluding to
Mrs. Poynder’s truly majestic proportions. “She is a handsome woman in
her way!”
“Yes,” he replied wearily, “plenty of presence, and all of it bad, as they
said of George III. But seriously, you know, she leads our dear friend a sad
life. She contradicts her in everything, and thwarts every instinct of culture.
If Mrs. Elles had not plenty of pluck, she would have given in long ago.
And her husband!”—he held up his hands.
The poet’s indiscretions bore fruit in a hearty invitation from Egidia to
Mrs. Elles, to visit her often at the house where she was staying in
Newcastle.
“Brave little woman! I will try and cheer her up a bit!” she thought, as
she left the house.
The little party broke up soon after, and Mrs. Elles was left alone with
her aunt, who, as the door closed on the last guest, opened her lips and
gave, uncalled for, her opinions of the guest.
 “That’s a real nice woman!” she said, “that littry friend of yours; I
approve of her. It’s a good thing I didn’t take your advice, Fibby, and go
trapesing up to Jesmond, this afternoon, to call on Miss Drummond. Why,
the girl was here. And such a crowd, too. You said there wouldn’t be
anybody here to-day!”
“Did I? One never knows,” replied her niece negligently, sauntering up
to the piano, and opening it.
“I’ll be bound you knew well enough, Fibby. Wanted to be rid of the old
woman, eh? Well, I’m glad I defeated your little plans, and saw your friend,
who seemed a sensible sort of woman, not the flyabastic sort you generally
get here. Pity but she’d seen Mortimer!”
“Do you think Mortimer would have impressed her?” asked his wife,
bitterly.
“And why not? Are you ashamed of your husband, Fibby? It’s my belief
that you are ashamed of us all, and hankering after those London people
and the ramshackle life they seem to lead. Gallant times they have, to be
sure! Thinking only of themselves and their pleasures and making love to
each other’s wives! And you are just savage because you aren’t there, too!
Oh! I know you!”
Mrs. Elles had broken out into a stormy mazurka that nearly drowned
Mrs. Poynder’s words, as possibly she intended it to do. “Ay! ay!” the latter
remarked, “work it off that way—I advise you!”
“Don’t insult me, aunt!”
Mrs. Poynder laughed in her own harsh fashion, and, looking towards
the door whose handles just then turned, called out, “Come in, Mortimer!
Come and speak to this wife of yours!”
The clumsy, thick-necked man who entered stopped short and looked
round stupidly; his wife sat with her back turned, playing; his aunt stood
there, smiling her cruel, blighting smile, that showed a set of the most
perfectly formed teeth that money could buy. He took his cue from her, and
going across the room, laid a heavy hand on his wife’s shoulder, saying
kindly,
“What’s the matter, old lady?”
“Oh, Mortimer, please don’t call me that. I can’t bear it!”
She hid her face in the keyboard and sobbed violently.
 “Well, really!” said he.
“Hysterical!” said the aunt, still smiling. “I don’t wonder, after the
conversation we have been having, and the things we have been hearing!
Fibby’s had grand new London friends here—to put her out of love with us
all. We’re all too plain and common for Fibby now!”
Still smiling—was a smile ever so denuded of grace and benevolence?—
she gathered up her crochet and left the room. Mrs. Elles then rose from the
piano, and, dabbing her handkerchief to her eyes, made a step in the
direction of the door. But she changed her mind and stood still by the
mantelpiece with the figure half averted.
“I’m sure I beg all your pardons,” she murmured, almost inaudibly. “Oh,
damn! where’s the paper?” said Mortimer Elles. Securing it, and sinking
into an arm-chair with a great, puffing breath, he hid his face behind the
broad white sheet. His coat tails caught the Oriental cloth on a small table
near him and dragged it nearly off. Mrs. Elles rushed forward and saved one
of the many pieces of china that rested on it from destruction.
“Throw the beastly thing on the fire!” he growled out, without looking
up. “This house is far too full.”
A gong sounded.
“I am going up to dress for dinner,” she said, aggressively, standing in
front of him. “Shan’t you, Mortimer?”
“There’s nobody coming, is there?”
“No—unfortunately—but I like to dress.”
“Dress if you like, but don’t bother me!”
“Oh, I do wonder what you married me for, Mortimer?” she complained
with plaintive savageness.
“I do wish you wouldn’t talk nonsense!” he answered. “What has
marriage to do with dressing for dinner?”
“Perhaps more than you think,” she murmured still in a low key, as she
walked past him and opened the door. She crossed the hall slowly, like a
somnambulist. It was true the conversation of Egidia and of the poet, who
was no fool, and who had been brought out by the tact of the London
woman, had set her thinking, and her mind travelling in a new direction.
She trod on her gown going upstairs, and picked it up with the tragically
careless gesture of a Joan of Arc going to the stake. She made herself the
effect of a prisoner in a strange land—an alien princess in the hands of the
Saracens—the Lady of “Comus” among the rabble rout. She was a delicate
piece of porcelain among rough earthenware pots—a harp played upon by
unknowing boors. She muttered to herself phrases of philosophy and
resignation that she did not feel—her whole soul was in revolt against the
conditions of her life.
“Oh, it is all so ugly!” she murmured.
She paused on the landing and looked down. Charles, her step-son, had
just come in and hung up his hat and clattered down every other hat in the
hall.
“Hallo, Mater!” he shouted up, “don’t commit suicide over the banisters
and make a mess! Hurry up and get ready for dinner!”
“I am glad I did not have a child,” she said to herself. “He might have
been half like that!”
She dressed for dinner, in a very handsome, vaporous tea-gown, drank a
little sal-volatile, read a couple of verses of Omar Khayam, and sailed into
the dining-room, determined to be resigned, pathetic and amiable. Her
husband’s untidy, baggy shooting jacket, and Charles’s abominable
“blazer,” gave her the usual jar, while Mrs. Poynder’s cheap white lace
tippet with pink ribbons was only another item in the general tale of the
inappropriateness and disgust. She pouted, and dropped gracefully into her
accustomed seat, looking like a piece of thistledown suddenly lighted on the
dull leather-covered mahogany chair.
The mild, provincial dinner proceeded. “What’s this?” asked Mortimer,
when a dish came round to him. “Put it on the table, can’t you?”
“Chicken croquettes. I like things handed!” she pleaded.
“Do you? I don’t. I like to have what I am eating in front of me. You
won’t take any, Phœbe? Oh, very well. You want to get scraggier than you
are. A lean wife is a standing reproach to a fellow.”
“Fibby is afraid of spoiling her fashionable figure!” observed Mrs.
Poynder, drawing herself up, to show her own to the best advantage. It was
of a certain solid merit, not to be gainsaid.
With these, and other family amenities, was the time of dining enlivened.
Mrs. Elles’ attitude was one of faintly raised eyebrows, but she did not
allow herself to say anything to-day, that a heroine might regret. She was
not generally so circumspect. As soon as dinner was over, she rose and
followed Mrs. Poynder out of the room. Mrs. Poynder liked to go first, and
she was allowed to do so when no one was there. Mortimer Elles, who was
by no means in a bad humour, moved his chair a little to make way for his
wife.
“Do you call that a gown?” he said, fingering a fold of the shining satin.
“And pray, what may that have cost me?”
“Don’t!” she said, drawing it away.
“Surely I may touch it if I am to have the privilege of paying for it?”
“It is not very nice of you, Mortimer, to remind me that I haven’t a
penny of my own, and must depend on your bounty!”
“And a good job, too!” he said, laughing; he was certainly in a very good
humour. “It’s the only hold I’ve got on you—the only way I have of
keeping you in order.”
“Mortimer—I am not a child!”
“No, by Jove, not quite! Let me see, you were nineteen when I married
you—we have been married ten years—that makes you out—?”
“You needn’t trouble to go on,” she replied haughtily, “I can’t say that
the subject interests me—one only counts birthdays when one is happy.”
She escaped to her room, tore off the gauzy tea gown, and put on a black
one which she reserved for occasions like this, when the mood of gloom
preponderated. It was a little affectation of hers to dress as far as possible in
character with her mood of the moment.
Yes, she was very wretched—had been for the last ten years. She
wondered how she had borne it so long, and if she could go on bearing it.
The time had surely come for her to do something—what? She would go,
to-morrow, and call on Egidia in the big house where she was staying at
Jesmond Dene, and talk it all over with her. Egidia, being a professed
searcher into the secrets of the heart, would be able to understand, and
perhaps offer some solution of her dreadful predicament. She might even
take a professional interest in it. “She can put me in a novel if she likes,”
Phœbe Elles said to herself, wearily, “but I must speak or I shall die!”
Die of dullness, die of disappointment, die of inanition, or, what was
worse, lose her looks. “They are the silent griefs that cut the heart-strings,”
she quoted, from Heaven knows what recondite Elizabethan play, “and dull
the complexion,” she added on her responsibility. She always read
everything more or less with reference to herself, and twisted the most
impassioned utterances of poetry and the drama into apt coincidence with
her own affairs.
Up till now, she had sedulously preserved the one virtue of neglected
wives—she had never “peached.” She had scrupulously disdained the
common vulgarity of confidences, the petty relief of expansion, and no one
had ever heard her abuse her husband. She had learned to speak of him with
an amused tolerance, whose undercurrent of contempt was not necessarily
apparent to the merely superficial observer. It was a point of honour with
her; but deep below her graceful reticence lay the point of vanity—she
wanted people to think, if possible, that Mortimer, whom she had ceased to
care for, was still desperately in love with her.
She had read many French novels, and she knew that, socially speaking,
there was one modus vivendi to be adopted by a woman in her position. She
might create for herself some outside interest—she might get up the
harmless, necessary flirtation, by which women, circumstanced as she was,
are apt to console themselves.
Without the remotest intention of actually pursuing it, she began to cast
about in her mind for a possible coadjutor in such a course of action. She
began to count heads, to consider all the eligible flirtations that Newcastle
afforded, with a drear little smile at the paucity of attractions, at the
inferiority of the subject material which presented itself to her mind.
The poet! He was handsome, clever, romantic; he admired her much, but
only on condition that she returned his compliment and admired him more!
That would not do. Besides, her present pose to him was that of a mother—
a very young mother of course—and promoter of his incipient predilection
for the handsome and “horsey” Miss Drummond, Atalanta-Diana as he was
pleased to call her; the girl of strong physique and mannish tastes, who was
the complement of his own nature. Then there was Dr. Moorsom, who lived
next door—“The man whose business it would be to doctor me if I fell ill!”
she sneered to herself. Everyone was supremely uninteresting—as
uninteresting as Mortimer. That was the worst of it—Mortimer was odious,
but then, so was everybody else.
No, better be “straight” and a martyr, than set herself, at the cost of her
reputation, perhaps, to wrest from society a merely nominal happiness, and
court a catastrophe that would have none of the elements of grandeur or
romance about it. She would go back to her “dream-lives”—to the literary
simulacra of existence which, till the epoch-making advent of the South-
country novelist, had sufficed her, and had been as the mirror Perseus held
up before Andromeda, affording her the harmless vision of the Gorgon’s
head with the snaky horror of its looks that may stand for life and the
hideous complications thereof.
 CHAPTER II
“But then, you know, I have never seen your husband,” Egidia was
saying to the pretty little woman who, sunk deep in the billowy mound of a
very easy chair, her feet upheld to the glow of a North-country fire blazing
away in the very height of summer, as usual, was expatiating in the sweetest
of voices on her matrimonial unhappiness. She was telling Egidia all the
truth, or thought she was, and the novelist, in her double capacity of friend
and gatherer of welcome “copy,” was listening sympathetically from her
sofa.
It was a charming house in the suburbs of Newcastle, the abode of
charming people, where Egidia was staying, and Mrs. Elles deeply
appreciated the friendship with the fashionable lecturer, which had gained
her the entry into this home of modernity and culture.
“Yes, if you once saw Mortimer,” Mrs. Elles went on, “you would
understand all!”
The way she uttered the last word would not have disgraced a tragic
actress.
“I want you to come and dine—will you? What day shall it be? Tell me,
and I’ll fix it. Then you will see him, and judge for yourself.”
“My dear,” said the novelist, slowly, “I will come to your dinner with
pleasure, but I shall not know any more than you have told me.”
“Yes; I have been very, very frank,” said Mrs. Elles. “And there is
another thing”—she sighed vaguely. She was alluding to her husband’s
habit of tippling, to which as a loyal wife she forbore from a more direct
allusion.
“As a general rule,” Egidia went on, a little didactically, in her capacity
of mentor, “no husband understands any wife. If he did, he wouldn’t have
cared to marry her. It is the mutual antagonism between the sexes which
makes them interesting to each other in the beginning. But, afterwards—if
they are unable to play the game—exciting enough, I should think—of
observing, of adjusting, of utilizing their mutual divergences of character
and getting amusement out of them—if she finds no pleasure in the exercise
of tact, if he none in the further analysis of the feminine vagaries that he
began by finding so charming—then, they begin to jar mutually on each
other, and turn that into tragedy which should be the comedy of life for both
of them.”
“I understand,” said Mrs. Elles, humbly; “but then—there is not, and
could not be, any comedy of life with Mortimer, or tragedy either! There
never was. I don’t seem to care to appreciate his character, I know it—it is
quite simple—I see it all spread out before me like a map—of a country I
don’t care to travel over.”
“But perhaps he can say the same of you,” hazarded Egidia.
“No, Mortimer has never understood me, never! I am a sealed book to
him,” said the wife, airily, although Miss Giles’ suggestion had indeed
given her a little shock.
“Don’t flatter yourself, my dear, that you are a sealed book to anyone. It
is the common delusion.” (Another shock to Mrs. Elles!) “One is always so
much less interesting, so much less complicated, so much less of a sphinx
than one thinks.”
“But I have always thought of mine as a very complicated nature,” Mrs.
Elles rejoined, pouting; “I am sure I can’t tell you how many thoughts pass
through my mind in a day, and I seem to have a perfectly new mood every
minute.”
“So we all have, but we don’t take cognizance of them or act on them
all. I should say that you are one of those people who begin with a radical
mistake—that of expecting too much of life. You think you have a right to
be happy. Good Heavens! You seek for midi à quatorze heures, you love
change for its own sake; you positively enjoy hot water. You would rather
have a painful emotion than none at all, you would like to cry, with Sophie
Arnould, ‘Oh, le bon temps, j’etais si malheureuse!’ You have not mastered
the great fact, that emotions are not to the emotional; to them is generally
awarded the dreary crux of the commonplace, and that I think is hardest to
bear of all, that one’s cross should come in the way of material comfort and
spiritual uneventfulness, and when it comes to the point, instead of action to
be taken there is only temper—to be kept!”
“I always scorn to nag,” said Mrs. Elles, “it seems so ungraceful.”
“I am sure, my dear, that whatever you may feel, you always manage to
look decorative!” said the other, smiling. “Still, you expect too much and
give too little to be what I call easy to live with!”
 “That is what I say,” cried Mrs. Elles, triumphantly. “I call that being
complicated.”
“Do you?” said the authoress, drily. “I should be tempted to call it want
of social tact—an almost culpable ignorance of the science of give and take,
a—you must really forgive me for my brutal frankness”—she broke off
suddenly and laughed confusedly—“but, you know, you asked me to speak
freely.”
“I love it,” declared Phœbe Elles, adjusting a cushion behind her head. “I
think I like to talk about myself, even if it is disagreeable,” she added, with
unusual frankness.
Egidia smiled irresistibly. It was impossible for her to help liking this
unconscious egotist, who confessed to her failings with such a grace, and
took plain speaking with such aplomb.
“I think,” she said, trying to give a less serious turn to the conversation,
“what you really wanted, in marriage, was a man who would have
dominated you—have beaten you, perhaps.”
“Yes, I do really believe I should,” said Mrs. Elles; “that is, if I loved
him desperately at the time and he loved me desperately—afterwards! But,”
she went on, seriously, “you have given me your views on marriage, and
my marriage in particular, but, now you know all my life, what do you
advise me to do?”
“Do? Do nothing! What can you do? What can any woman do?” asked
Egidia, raising her well-marked eyebrows, and with an air of dismissing an
impracticable subject.
Then, seeing the unmistakable look of disappointment in the eyes of her
feminine Telemachus, she added kindly, “Ah, you see, when we outsiders
come to the domain of practical politics, we are mere theorists—all at sea,
and just as helpless and resourceless as any of you slaves of the ring can
possibly be. I should advise you to make the best of it, and pray that you
may never meet anybody you like better than the man you have got!”
Mrs. Elles rose to go, it was late. She had had a good time. She had
enjoyed the personal discussion, but there was a wilful twist about her
mouth, as of one which had swallowed much advice, but had swallowed it
the wrong way.
“After this, I must not ask you to come and stop with me in London, I
am afraid,” added Egidia.
 “Oh, please do, and I will promise to wear blinkers.”
“Blue spectacles would be nearer the mark!” said the novelist. “Do that,
and I will engage to introduce you to Edmund Rivers with impunity.”
“Well, but you said just now he was incapable of falling in love with any
woman.”
“Yes, but I never implied that women found it impossible to fall in love
with him!” answered Egidia, quite gravely. “He is handsome and
indifferent, and I know of no combination more dangerous to the peace of
our sex!”
. . . . . . . .
Mrs. Elles’ little dinner was arranged; the invitations, written on
beautiful rough note paper with an artistic ragged edge, sent out. Mrs. Elles
had conscientiously consulted her husband’s list of engagements and saw
that he was free, and put down a large cross for the eleventh. Mortimer
would see that he was engaged, and would, as usual, be too lazy or careless
to enquire further. On the evening in question, he would necessarily see
“what was up,” and would grumblingly admit that he was “let in for one of
Phœbe’s confounded dinners” instead of a happy gathering at the
Continental Club with the “fellows.”
His wife would, of course, have got on far better without him, as far as
the success of her party was concerned, only society so far considers the
husband, even if his social capacities are nil, as a necessary adjunct to the
dinner table. He has not yet gone out with the épergne, and therefore must
be tolerated. But with regard to Mrs. Poynder and Charles, the mistress of
the house had put her foot down. She was famous for her little dinners, the
entrain of which the presence of her husband did not seem, so far, to have
materially diminished. But that of the other two would have been fatally
destructive of charm. The pair had been induced to see the matter in
somewhat of the same light—four members of a family were a little
overwhelming—and the question of economy had weight with Mrs.
Poynder. Aunt and nephew were in the habit of considerately inviting
themselves out to high tea at the house of a relation of Mortimer’s in
Newcastle on these occasions. Mrs. Poynder, indeed, owned to a want of
sympathy with the “people Fibby contrived to get together,” and she was
not informed that Miss Giles, for whom she had developed an
unaccountable fancy, was to be of the party.
 “My old woman of the sea,” so Mrs. Elles sometimes spoke of her to her
intimates, in whose eyes the ways and speeches of the terrible old lady
amply justified the want of reticence implied in her niece’s indiscreet
sobriquet. Why must she form part of the Elles household? Everybody
wondered, but Mrs. Elles knew.
For on this point the husband was immutable. He saw plainly that on
Mrs. Poynder did his manly bourgeois comfort depend. His wife only
attended to the show side of housekeeping; she saw that there was always
plenty of flowers in the drawing-room, winter and summer—but Mrs.
Poynder attended to his shirts and their proper complement of buttons. Mrs.
Elles ordered dinner, but Mrs. Poynder kept the books and interviewed the
tradesmen. His wife paid the smart calls, but Mrs. Poynder looked up his
dull and important relations, and, in her rough undiplomatic way, advanced
his affairs. She exercised a certain modest supervision over the whisky
bottle, and without saying much, curbed Mortimer’s drunken tendencies a
good deal.
Mrs. Elles herself was vaguely cognizant of the advantages of this
system, and realized that Mrs. Poynder’s presence in the ménage gave her
leisure to attend to the cultivation of the graces of her own mind and person,
and exonerated her from the thankless task of confronting Mortimer on the
tedious matters of servants, wages, and housekeeping and partial abstention.
“Aunt Poynder goes down into the arena for me, and fights with wild
beasts in the kitchen,” the ungrateful young woman used to say. “She likes
it, I verily believe.—But some of their roughness rubs off on her,” she
would add, and nobody would gainsay her. Mrs. Poynder was the professed
Disagreeable Woman of Newcastle, and people were apt to fly up side
alleys and into shops when they saw her come sailing majestically down
Granger Street.
“Oh, Mortimer, why did you go and have such awful relations?” Mrs.
Elles exclaimed casually to her husband, one afternoon, when she came
back from a visit to Egidia at Jesmond. She was impelled to say it. Mrs.
Poynder’s coarseness and Charles’ roughness seemed now-a-days more
obtrusive by contrast with the pleasant manners of the people with whom,
by the accident of her friendship with Egidia, she had been almost daily
thrown into contact. This had been her farewell visit. Egidia was going back
to town; but, in the course of many and many a long talk, she had sown a
plentiful crop of ideas in this wayward head—a seed whose harvest was to
prove a very different one to that which she had expected.
Mortimer Elles was not seriously discomposed by his wife’s remark.
“That’s a nice remark to make to a man!” was his not ungentle rejoinder. He
had ceased to expect Phœbe to curb any expression of opinion out of
respect to his feelings, and in return permitted himself his full measure of
brutality towards her.
“Well, aren’t they?” she repeated, yawning; “when is Charles going to
pass his examination and relieve us of his presence? I did not bargain for
Charles as a permanent lodger when I married you, nor Aunt Poynder
indeed, for that matter, but I suppose all is for the worst, in this dreariest of
all possible households!”
She expected no answer. These two always wrangled at cross purposes.
There was very seldom a positive engagement between them. Mrs. Elles
knew that Charles could not leave just yet, knew, too, that Mrs. Poynder
would never go, was not positively sure that she wanted her to go, but just
now, when her normal state of discontent was quadrupled by the new
influences that had lately come into her life, she could not resist a repetition
of an oft-repeated complaint.
She went on in a soft but irritating voice.
“I have no objection to Aunt Poynder’s engaging all the servants and
managing them, but I must say I wish she would let Jane alone. I have
reserved the right of choosing my own parlour-maid, and when I have
succeeded in getting one that suits me, I don’t want her bullied and the
place made impossible for her.”
“Who bullies her? An idle, good-for-nothing trollop of a creature.”
“There, you see, you don’t like her.”
“No, I don’t,” he replied brutally. “I don’t like her style. She copies you,
and you’re not a particularly good model.”
“Ah, how miserable I am!” she exclaimed, irrelevantly. “Mortimer, tell
me, why can’t we get on? It is not my fault, is it?”
“Oh! no,” he replied ironically. “You are always in the right. There is
nothing more tiresome in a woman.”
“You are frank, Mortimer, and almost epigrammatic!”
 “Shut up, can’t you?” he exclaimed, in accents of annoyance. “I wonder
why it is that you always contrive to rub me up the wrong way. Here you
are abusing me—abusing my relations—why can’t you let them alone? I
don’t abuse yours.”
“Mine are all dead!” she said, pathetically. “Fair game for you!”
“And a nice lot they were!” said the man, now thoroughly roused to ill-
temper. “That is, if you have told me the truth about them. You’re pretty
good at drawing the long bow, you know.”
At this point in the discussion, Mrs. Elles withdrew. Her relations were
—or had been—a weak point, and Mortimer had suffered—in his purse—
from claims of a ne’er-do-well father-in-law, and a foolish, extravagant
mother. Phœbe had been brought up badly as a child, had been neglected in
her girlhood, and her marriage with Mortimer Elles had been the making of
her—as her people said, and as she had agreed at the time—but it was a
grievance with her that, try as she might, she could not give her history a
romantic turn in her husband’s eyes. He knew all about her, was full of
preconceived notions about her, and she resented the impossibility of
keeping up a consistent pose with him, being one of those who reverse the
proverb and expect to be heroes to their valets de chambre and heroines to
their husbands.
This weakness of hers entailed the other weakness to which her husband
had alluded—her consistent ambiguity of phrase, her frequent lapses from
truth. These lapses were for the most part unconscious, they were the good
face she put on every matter, her artistic presentment of incidents relating to
herself and other people, for, to do her justice, she applied the same method
to her fellow-creatures, and was never known to retail a spiteful or
unpicturesque version of another woman’s affairs.
She considered herself the soul of honour, it is true; she literally would
not have told a lie to save her life; but to save her pose and her dramatic
presentment from discomfiture, she shrank from no form of embellishment
or extenuation. So she “doctored” facts—served up the plain “roast and
boiled” of everyday existence with a sauce piquante of her own devising,
and thought of herself as one who, compassing under difficulties the whole
duty of woman, makes herself as charming, as romantic, as mysterious as
circumstances will allow.
. . . . . . . .
 Half an hour later she looked into the study, where Mortimer was sitting,
a revolting picture of middle-class ease, with his legs on the table, drinking
whisky and water.
“I thought I heard someone crying?”
“So you did. Jane. I have told her to go.”
“What?” she screamed.
“Yes; we’ve had a row, Jane and I. I have sent her packing. I paid her her
wages—told her to pack up and go—not later than to-morrow. She was
cheeky to me—you teach them all to be damned cheeky to me—and I won’t
stand it.” He filled his glass again, pouring with a want of precision that
spoke of many previous attacks on the bottle.
“Jane cannot have meant”—his wife murmured humbly, cowed by the
enormity of the misfortune that had befallen her. Jane was her ally, her
confidante, her all.
“Oh, yes; Jane meant it fast enough. Don’t talk to me about it. To-
morrow she goes!”
He brought his fist heavily down upon the table. His wife started, a start
partly real, partly affected.
“If Jane goes, I go.”
“Nonsense, you are not a servant—I have not dismissed you!”
“Dismiss!” She tossed her head. Then the real, imminent need of
propitiating Mortimer occurred to her. She must keep Jane at the cost of all
humiliation. “Mortimer, listen—it puts me out very much. I have a dinner
party of twelve next week!”
“The deuce you have! What a woman you are for kick-ups! And I don’t
suppose there is a soul coming that I shall care twopence for! Well, you
must put it off, that’s all!”
“One doesn’t do these things!”
“Oh, I do. I’ll write the excuses for you, if you like.”
She stamped her foot. “Mortimer—I will not be put to shame before my
friends! You have no right to do this to me! Oh, what shall I do, what shall I
do, tied to a perfect beast like you for the rest of my life?”
“Grin and bear it, I suppose. You won’t make me any better by swearing
at me!”
 “I don’t swear at you! How you speak to me! To me! to me! Your wife!
How dared you marry me, Mortimer?”
“I don’t know about dare,” he said, growing red. “When all is said and
done, I don’t think you did much to prevent me!”
“That’s enough!” she raised her hand with a theatrical gesture as if to
stop him, and, sinking into an armchair, hid her face in her hands.
“Insulting! No—I see now—you never loved me! Never! Never!”
He ostentatiously turned his back on her tragic pose.
“There you go! Always in extremes—always injured—always making
the worst of it! You couldn’t live without a grievance, I do believe! Of
course I married you for love—if you must use the absurd word—and now
you pay me back by plaguing my life out! And then begin to talk damned
sentimental rot about my never having loved you, and so on! Now, really,
don’t you think we are both a bit too old for that sort of thing?”
“Oh, you are—impossible!” she moaned. It was what she felt. It was the
one word which fitted the situation, which was no situation, except to
herself. Mortimer kicked a coal out of the grate savagely with his carpet-
slippered foot, and, her sense assaulted by the sickening smell of singed
wool, she left the room.
. . . . . . . .
Mortimer was drunk—he often was; it was the least heinous of his
crimes. She went upstairs crying, and went to bed, but she knew she could
not sleep that night, and yet she took no bromide or sulphonal. She wanted
to think—she meant to think things out—so she lay, and thought, and
thought, with extreme intensity and vigour, if with little coherence. So
intent was she that she lay quite straight out and still, and did not toss, while
the trains of thought succeeded each other with extraordinary rapidity. The
tall clock on the stairs outside her door ticked loudly and monotonously,
and the whole problem of her life arrayed itself and measured out its phases
to the beat of the pendulum, which seemed to balance them, as it were.
Mortimer was impossible! He had always been impossible! His conduct
this evening was of a piece with his whole conduct to her, ever since a few
weeks after marriage. Halcyon weeks, which every woman has a right to
expect, while they in no wise concern or affect the life that follows after.
His taunt about the circumstances of her marriage to him she dismissed, she
knew quite well that she had provoked him to it, he had not meant it, there
was no foundation for it. He had wooed and won her in the usual,
commonplace way, been timid and attentive, and had begged her for locks
of her hair. And she had been complaisant and loving, and had treasured his
photograph and made excuses for its ugliness, just like any other foolish girl
with her first sweetheart.
Why had she done all this? Why had she bought that rose-coloured satin
dress last Christmas, that she had taken such a dislike to, since, that she had
only worn it twice? Her marriage was a very nearly parallel case, only she
had been able to afford to throw aside the one bad bargain, and she had
been obliged to abide by the other.
“Yes, I can’t say I did not know my own mind, such as it was, when I
took Mortimer, but, unfortunately, it isn’t the same mind that I have now. It
was a child’s mind. The whole fabric of our bodies alters every seven years,
they say—well, that means our minds, too—body and soul are one in my
creed. It was not this me that was glad to marry Mortimer, as he so politely
put it—” she laughed bitterly. “It was another me, who had not read Ibsen.”
She laughed again. “Books alter one—reading alters one—life alters one,
after all! I married Mortimer like a blind puppy, not knowing, not seeing. I
am nothing wonderful, but I do think I am too good for him! Why did I not
see it then? Why is a girl such a fool? Why does nobody tell her? It is very
hard. They say, as one has made one’s bed, so one must lie on it.... But
suppose I decline to lie on it?”
She almost leaped in her bed with the shock of this crude presentment of
a new idea. Then she rose, lit a candle and walked out of her room, and
across a landing, and straight into Mortimer’s room. She softly approached
the bed on which he lay, and, like Psyche over again, held the light up on
high, and looked critically down upon her sleeping husband.
She felt an indefinable pleasure in thus surveying him helpless who was
technically her master. This coarse, clumsy-fibred creature who had yet his
full complement of the shrewdness and acuteness that gave him dominion
over his fellow-men, and made him known as a “tough customer” in
business, slept the sleep—well, if not precisely that of the just, at any rate
that of the man whose balance at his bank is secure and his investment
sound. He slept like a savage who has laid aside his clubs, and enjoys the
dreamless, primitive sleep that he has earned by his feats of arms. His thick,
broad eyelids rested peacefully on the cold, blue eyes whose empty glare
his wife knew and detested. His lips were closed on his cruel little teeth in a
firm, inexpressive line, pacific and meaningless, and his clumsy hands, with
their short, square-nailed finger tips, lay palm outwards on the coverlet, as
innocently as a child’s.
She might stare at him as long as she pleased, with those burning,
insistent eyes of hers, and not fear to break his sleep; his simple nervous
system would surely withstand the hypnotism of her enquiring gaze.
But next morning, he would be “all there” as usual; the hectoring,
bantering, exacerbating personality would re-assert itself, and make its
hundred and one demands on her self-control all through the day, till
sometimes it seemed as if she could not look at him or hear his voice
without screaming.
“Why should I bear it? Why should I?” she asked herself, passionately,
aloud; and the pettish exclamation was significant of the great revulsion that
was taking place in her, a result of the passionate, elucidating fortnight she
had passed.
She went back to her room and lay down again, but she closed her eyes
no more that night, and by the time the pallid dawn of Newcastle had begun
to filter through the window curtains, a whole plan of action had shaped
itself in her mind. She came down punctually to the eight o’clock breakfast
which was exacted by Mortimer and which he had never allowed her to
forego, putting some constraint on herself to appear perfectly composed, for
her heart was beating violently, and she felt the suspicious flush mounting
to her cheek, which had so often given unkind friends occasion to say that
she painted. But Mrs. Poynder, who was presiding over the tea and coffee,
looked her over with some approval.
“Now, that’s the first decent dress I have seen you in, Fibby, for many a
long day!” she observed, contemplating the plain dress of blue serge—not
very new, not very smart—in which Mrs. Elles had chosen to array herself.
“I am glad you are pleased, Aunt Poynder,” replied her niece, demurely,
gracefully accepting her cup of coffee from the stout, red fingers where the
submerged wedding-ring, planted there by the late Mr. Poynder, glittered.
Charles Elles, who could get more noise out of a cup of coffee than
anybody, was drinking his and enjoying it thoroughly. Mrs. Poynder
somehow contrived to knock her knife and fork together on the rim of her
plate with vigour every time she took a morsel. Mortimer’s carpet slippers,
and the dish of bacon which his aunt had set down by the fire to keep warm
for him, stood by the fire in grotesque proximity.
“I am going to put off my dinner on the thirty-first,” Mrs. Elles
announced, quietly. “Jane is going, and I couldn’t attempt it with a new
parlour-maid.”
“I am glad, Fibby, to see you in such a peaceable frame of mind,” Mrs.
Poynder rejoined. “Mortimer says you were fairly put out at first about his
sending Jane away.”
“So I was, Aunt, but——”
“Ye’re quite right, Fibby, to take it calm. Husbands must have their way.
I never thought much of the girl myself; she’s lazy and wears far too much
fringe. Besides, a man must be master in his own house, and if he can’t send
away his own housemaid when it pleases him——”
“Yes, Aunt.” Mrs. Elles was playing at meekness, and the sensation was
so unusual that she found it rather amusing so far. Mrs. Poynder could not
make it out at all.
“Are ye ill, my dear?” she enquired, with some show of solicitude. “To
look at ye, I should say that your digestion was not in just apple-pie order.”
“I am all right, Aunt,” replied Mrs. Elles, with forced composure,
stamping her foot, however, under the table. Her colour was high, as Mrs.
Poynder had remarked, but very clear and bright, and she looked quite ten
years younger. Her aunt continued to make little onslaughts of this kind on
her through breakfast, but she did not retort. Her lips formed themselves
every now and again into the words, “I am going—I am going—I am
going!” as a kind of secret satisfaction. When her husband came down, she
actually got up and fetched the terribly plebeian dish of bacon from the
fender and put it down in front of him. He thanked her drily.
“If you will excuse me,” she said to them all, “I will go and write some
notes that have to be attended to at once.”
She left the room, and the scratching of a feverish pen within the
drawing-room was heard for the next twenty minutes through the open
door, while Mortimer Elles, having eaten an enormous breakfast in the short
time he had devoted to that purpose, went into the hall and began to
rummage for his stick and hat and struggle into his coat. His wife knew the
sound well.
 “Good-bye, Mortimer!” she called out. There was a slight suspicion of
mockery in her tone that he perceived and resented. He did not answer her,
but went out, banging the door behind him loudly and aggressively.
“Helmer bangs the door; not Nora!” she smiled to herself. She felt
extraordinarily gay. The more serious aspects of the step she was taking
were not obvious to her at the present moment. She was for the time merely
possessed by an irrepressible zeal for the assertion of self, and its
disassociation from all trammelling human responsibilities.
Presently Mrs. Poynder went out too, to attend some Busybodies’
committee meeting, and Mrs. Elles took three five-pound notes out of a
drawer in her desk, locked it, and, going downstairs, ordered lunch and
dinner very carefully. This duty accomplished, she went up to her room, and
presented Jane, whom she found there, with a very handsome cloth dress
she had hardly worn, and her blessing. The affectionate and devoted Jane
wept, and it was with difficulty that her mistress prevented herself from
crying too.
Then Jane went about her business, and Mrs. Elles locked herself in. She
undid the complicated arrangement of her hair and with a comb parted it as
severely as she could resign herself to do, and with a brush dipped in water
smoothed out the little curls on her forehead, sighing deeply the while. Then
she went to a cupboard, and from its most recondite recesses produced a
box containing a pair of blue spectacles—her husband’s. She put them on,
and standing resolutely in front of a cheval glass, surveyed her appearance.
“Good God, can I bear it?” she said aloud, in tones of the very deepest
anguish. Her face grew sombre for the first time since the conception of
flight had become an established fact in her mind. She desperately tugged
down a lock and disposed it becomingly on her forehead as usual, and then
put it back again.——
“No!... Yes!... I must do it like this.... It is the only way I can do it
without blame.... It shows that my intentions are honourable.... I am going
away to be free, not to flirt.... I must make all that an absolute
impossibility!”
She flung a lace scarf over the glass and busied herself with a few
necessary preparations. She got out a Gladstone bag—just the size she
could manage to carry herself—and threw in a few clothes, including a fine
white muslin dress she had worn at her “at home” that day, so fine that it
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