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Dodo's Daughter: A Sequel to Dodo

by E. F. Benson · English · Gutenberg #40762 · 569,438 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Dodo's Daughter: A Sequel to Dodo

Author: E. F. Benson


        
Release date: September 14, 2012 [eBook #40762]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DODO'S DAUGHTER: A SEQUEL TO DODO ***

[Illustration: Book Cover]




DODO'S DAUGHTER




DODO'S
DAUGHTER

A SEQUEL TO DODO

       *       *       *       *       *

BY
E. F. BENSON

[Illustration]

       *       *       *       *       *

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1914




Copyright, 1913, by
THE CENTURY CO.




DODO'S DAUGHTER




CHAPTER I


Nadine Waldenech's bedroom was a large square apartment on the ground
floor at her mother's cottage at Meering in North Wales. It was rather a
large cottage, for it was capable of holding about eighteen people, but
Dodo was quite firm in the subject of its not being a house. In the days
when it was built, forty years ago, this room of Nadine's had been the
smoking-room, but since everybody now smoked wherever he or she chose,
which was mostly everywhere, just as they breathed or talked wherever
they chose, Nadine with her admirable commonsense had argued uselessness
of a special smoking-room, for she wanted it very much herself, and her
mother had been quite convinced. It opened out of the drawing-room, and
so was a convenient place for those who wished to drop in for a little
more conversation after bed-time had been officially proclaimed.
Bed-time, it may be remarked, was only officially proclaimed in order to
get rid of bores, who then secluded themselves in their tiresome
chambers.

The room at this period was completely black with regard to the color
of carpet and floor and walls and ceiling. That was Nadine's last plan
and since it was the last, of necessity, a very recent one. She had
observed that when it was all white, people looked rather discolored,
like mud on snow, whereas against a black background they seemed to be
of gem-like brilliance. But since she always looked brilliant herself,
the new scheme was prompted by a wholly altruistic motive. She liked her
friends to look brilliant too, and she would have felt thus even if she
had not been brilliant herself, for out of a strangely compounded
nature, anything akin to jealousy had been certainly omitted. There had
been a good many friends in her bedroom lately, and there were a certain
number here to-night. She expected more. Collectively they constituted
that which was known as the clan.

The bed was an enormous four-poster with mahogany columns at the corners
of it. At present it was occupied by only three people. She herself lay
on the right of it with her head on the pillow. She had already taken
off her dinner-dress when her first visitor arrived, and had on a
remarkable dressing-gown of Oriental silk, which looked like a family of
intoxicated rainbows and, leaving her arms bare, came down to her feet,
so that only the tips of her pink satin shoes peeped out. In the middle
of the bed was lying Esther Sturgis, and across it at the foot Bertie
Arbuthnot the younger, who was twenty-one years old and about the same
number of feet in height. In consequence his head dangled over one side
like a tired and sunburnt lily, and his feet over the other. He and his
hostess were both smoking cigarettes as if against time, the ash of
which they flicked upon the floor, relighting fresh ones from a silver
box that lay about the center of the bed. They neither of them had the
slightest idea what happened to the smoked-out ends. Esther Sturgis on
the other hand was occasionally sipping hot camomile tea. What she did
not sip she spilt.

"Heredity is such nonsense," said Nadine crisply, speaking with that
precision which the English-born never quite attain. "Look at me, for
instance, and how nice I am, then look at Mama and Daddy."

Esther spilt a larger quantity of camomile tea than usual.

"You shan't say a word against Aunt Dodo," she said.

"My dear, I am not proposing to. Mama is the biggest duck that ever
happened. But I don't inherit. She had such a lot of hearts--it sounds
like bridge--but she had, and here am I without one. First of all she
married poor step-papa--is it step-papa?--anyhow the Lord Chesterford
whom she married before she married Daddy. That is one heart, but I
think that was only a little one, a heartlet."

"Rhyme with tartlet," said Bertie, as if announcing a great truth.

"But we are not making rhymes," said Nadine severely. "Then she married
Daddy, which is another heart, and when she married him--of course you
know she ran away with him at top-speed--she was engaged to the other
Lord Chesterford, who succeeded the first."

"Oh, 'Jack the Ripper,'" said Esther.

Bertie raised his head a little.

"Who?" he asked.

"Jack Chesterford, because he is such a ripper," said Nadine. "And he's
coming here to-morrow. Isn't it a thrill? Mama hasn't seen him
since--since she didn't see him one day when he called, and found she
had run away--"

"Did he rip anybody?" asked Bertie, who was famed for going on asking
questions, until he completely understood.

"No, donkey. You are thinking of some criminal. Mama was engaged to him,
and she thought she couldn't--so _she_ ripped--let her rip, is it
not?--and got married to Daddy instead. He was quite mad about darling
Mama, but recovered very soon. He made a very bad recovery. Don't
interrupt, Berts: I was talking about heredity. Well, there's Mama, and
Daddy, well, we all know what Daddy is, and let me tell you he is the
best of the family, which is poor. He is a gentleman after all, whatever
he has done. And he's done a lot. Indeed he has never had an idle
moment, except when he was busy!"

Esther gave a great sigh: she always sighed when she appreciated, and
appreciation was the work of her life. She never got over the
wonderfulness of Nadine and was in a perpetual state of deep-breathing.
She admired Bertie too, and they used often to talk about getting
engaged to each other some day, in a mild and sexless fashion. But they
were neither of them in any hurry.

"Aren't your other people gentlemen?" he asked. "I thought in Austria
you were always all right if you quartered yourself into sixteen parts."

Nadine threw an almost unsmoked cigarette upon the floor with a huge
show of impatience.

"Of course one has the ordinary number of great-grandparents, else you
wouldn't be here at all," she said, "and you quarter anything you
choose. Two quarterings of my great-grandfathers were hung and drawn
apart from their quarterings. But really I don't think you understand
what I mean by gentlemen. I mean people who have brains, and who have
tastes and who have fine perceptions. English people think they know the
difference between the _bourgeoisie_ and the aristocrats. How wrong they
are! As if living in a castle like poor Esther's parents had anything to
do with it! Look at some of your marquises--Esther darling, I don't mean
Lord Ayr--what cads! Your dukes? What Aunt Sallys! Always making the
float-face, don't you call it, the _bêtise_, the stupidity. Is that the
aristocracy? Great solemn Aunt Sallys and the rest brewers! Show me an
idea: show me a brain, show me somebody with the distinction that
thoughts and taste bring about. I do not want a mere busy prating monkey
thinking it is a man. But I want people: somebody with a man or woman
inside it. Ah! give me a grocer. That will do!"

Bertie put down his head again.

"Let us be calm," he said. "I'll find you a grocer to-morrow."

Nadine laughed. She had a curiously unmelodious but wonderfully
infectious laugh. People hearing it laughed too: they caught it. But
there was no sound of silvery bells. She gave a sort of hiccup and then
gurgled.

"I get too excited over such things," she said. "And when I get excited
I forget my English and talk execrably. I will be calm again. I do not
mean that a man is not a gentleman because he is stupid, but much more I
do not mean that quarterings make him one. The whole idea is so
obsolete, so Victorian, like the old mahogany sideboards. Who cares
about a grandfather? What does a grandfather matter any more? They used
to say 'Move with the Times.' Now we move instead with the 'Daily Mail.'
I am half foreign and yet I am much more English than you all. The world
goes spinning on. If we do not wish to become obsolete we spin too. I
hate the common people, but I do not hate them because they have no
grandfathers, but just because they are common. I hate quantities of
your de Veres for the same reason. Their grandfathers make them no less
common. But also I hate your sweet people, with blue eyes, of whom there
are far too many. Put them in bottles like lollipops, and let them stick
together with their own sugar."

There was a short silence. Bertie broke it.

"How old are you?" he asked.

"Going on twenty-two. I am as old as there is any need to be. There is
only one person in the house younger than me, and that is darling Mama.
She is twenty."

Esther gave another huge sigh. She appreciated Nadine very much, but she
was not sure that she did not appreciate Aunt Dodo more. It may be
remarked that there was no sort of consanguinity between them: the
relationship was one of mere affection. She had a mother and Dodo must
be the next nearest relative. Frankly, she would have liked to change
the relationship between the two. And yet you could say things to an
aunt who wasn't an aunt more freely than to a woman who happened to be
your mother. Apart from natural love, Esther did not care for her
mother. She would not, that is to say, have cared for her if she had
been somebody else's mother, and indeed there was very little reason to
do so. She had a Roman nose and talked about the Norman Conquest, which
in the view of her family was a very upstart affair. She had not a kind
heart, but she had an immense coronet in her own right, and had married
another. Indeed she had married another coronet twice: there was a
positive triple crown on her head like the Pope. In other respects also
she was like a Pope, and was infallible with almost indecent frequency.
Nadine loved to refer to her as "Holy Mother." She felt herself
perfectly capable of managing everybody's affairs, and instead of being
as broad as she was long, was as narrow as she was tall, and resembled
an elderly guardsman.

Her degenerate daughter finished her sigh.

"Go on about your horrible family," she said to Nadine. "I think it's so
illustrious of you to see them as they are."

The door opened without any premonitory knock, and Tommy Freshfield
entered with a large black cigar in his mouth. He was rather short, and
had the misfortune to look extremely dissipated, whereas he was
hopelessly, almost pathetically, incapable of anything approaching
dissipation. He put down his bedroom candle and lay down on the bed next
Esther Sturgis.

"Have you been comforting Hughie?" she asked.

"Yes, until he went to play billiards with the Bish-dean. He used to be
a bishop but subsequently became a dean. I think Aunt Dodo believes he
is a bishop still. Lots of bishops do it now, he told me; it is the same
as putting a carriage-horse out to grass: there is no work, but less
corn. Hughie's coming up here when he's finished his game."

The appreciative Esther sat up.

"It's too wonderful of him," she said. "Nadine, Hugh is coming up here
soon. Do be nice to him."

Nadine sat up also.

"Of course," she said. "Hughie has such tact, and I love him for it.
Berts has none: he would sulk if I had just refused to marry him and
very likely would not speak to me till next day."

"You haven't had the chance to refuse me yet," remarked Berts.

"That is mere scoring for the sake of scoring, Berts darling," said she.
"But Hugh--"

"O Nadine, I wish you would marry him," said Esther. "It would make you
so gorgeously complete and golden. Did you refuse him absolutely? Or
would you rather not talk about it?"

Nadine turned a little sideways on the bed.

"No, we will not talk of it," she said. "What else were we saying? Ah,
my family! Yes, it is a wonder that I am not a horror. Daddy is the pick
of the bunch, but such a bunch, _mon Dieu_, such wild flowers; and poor
Daddy always gets a little drunk in the evening now; and to-night he was
so more than a little. But he is such an original! Fancy his coming to
stay with Mama here only a year after she divorced him. I think it is
too sweet of her to let him come, and too sweet of him to suggest it.
She is so remembering, too: she ordered him his particular brandy,
without which he is never comfortable, and it is most expensive, as well
as being strong. Well, that's Daddy: then there are my uncles: such
histories. Uncle Josef murdered a groom (there is no doubt whatever
about it) who tried to blackmail him. I think he was quite right; and I
daresay the groom was quite right, but it is a horrible thing to
blackmail; it is a cleaner thing to kill. Then there is Uncle Anthony
who ought to have been divorced like Daddy, but he was so mean and
careful and sly that they could do nothing with him. There was never
anything careful about Daddy."

She was ticking off these agreeable relations on her white fingers.

"Then Grandpapa Waldenech committed suicide," she said, "and Grandpapa
Vane fell into a cauldron at his own iron-works and was utterly burnt.
So ridiculous; they could not even bury him, there was nothing left,
except the thick smoke, and they had to open the windows. Then the
aunts. There was Aunt Lispeth who kept nothing but white rats in her
house in Vienna, hundreds and hundreds there were, the place crawled
with them. Daddy could not go near it: he was afraid of their not being
real, whereas I was afraid because they were real. Then there is Aunt
Eleanor who stole many of Daddy's gold snuff-boxes and said the Emperor
had given them her. Of course it was a long time before she was ever
suspected, for she was always going to church when she was not stealing;
she made quite a collection. Aunt Julia is more modern: she only cares
about the music of Strauss and appendicitis."

Berts gave a sympathetic wriggle.

"I had appendicitis twice," he said, "which was enough, and I went to
Electra once which was too much. How often did Aunt Julia have
appendicitis?"

"She never had it," said Nadine. "That is why she is so devoted to it,
an ideal she never attains. It is about the only thing she has never
had, and the rest fatigue her. But she always goes to the opera whenever
there is Strauss, because she cannot sleep afterwards, and so lies awake
and thinks about appendicitis. I go to the opera too, whenever there is
not Strauss, in order to think about Hugh."

"And then you refuse him?"

"Yes, but we will not talk of it. There is nothing to explain. He is
like that delicious ginger-beer I drank at dinner in stone bottles. You
can't explain! It is ginger-beer. So is Hugh."

"I had a bottle of it too," said Bertie. "More than one, I think. I hate
wine. Wine is only fit for old women who want bucking up. There's an old
man in the village at home who's ninety-five, and he never touched wine
all his life."

"That proves nothing," said Nadine. "If he had drunk wine he might have
been a hundred by now. But I like wine: perhaps I shall take after
Daddy."

A long ash off Tommy Freshfield's cigar here fell into Esther's camomile
tea. It fizzed agreeably as it was quenched, and she looked enquiringly
into the glass.

"Oh, that's really dear of you, Tommy," she said. "I can't drink any
more. John always insists upon my taking a glass of it to go to bed
with."

"Your brother John is a prig, perhaps the biggest," said Nadine.

Esther reached out across Tommy, who did not offer his assistance and
put down her glass on the small table at the head of the bed.

"I hope there's no doubt of that," she said. "John would be very much
upset if he thought he wasn't considered a prig. He is a snob too, which
is so frightfully Victorian, and thinks about lineage. Of course he
takes after mother. I found him reading Debrett once."

"What is that?" asked Nadine.

"Oh, a red book about peers and baronets," said Esther rather vaguely.
"You can look yourself up, and learn all about yourself, and see who you
are."

"Poor John!" said Nadine. "He had his camomile tea brought into the
drawing-room to-night while he was talking to the bishop about Gothic
architecture and the, well--the state of Piccadilly. He was asking if
confirmation was found to have a great hold on the masses. The bishop
didn't seem to have the slightest idea."

"John would make that all right," said his sister. "He would tell him.
Nadine, why does darling Aunt Dodo so often have a bishop staying with
her?"

Nadine sighed.

"Nobody really understands Mama except me," she said. "I thought perhaps
you did, Esther, but it is clear you don't. She is religious, that's
why. Just as artistic people like artists in their house, so religious
people like bishops. I don't say that bishops are better than other
people, any more than R.A.'s are finer artists, but they are recognized
professionals. It is so: you may think I am laughing or mocking. But I
am not. Give me more pillow, and Berts, take your face a little further
from my feet. Or I shall kick it, if I get excited again, without
intending to, but it will hurt you just the same."

Bertie followed this counsel of commonsense.

"That seems a simple explanation," he said.

Esther frowned; she was not quite so well satisfied.

"But is darling Aunt Dodo quite as religious when a bishop doesn't
happen to be here?" she asked. "I mean does she always have family
prayers?"

"No, not always, nor do you go to your slums if there is anything very
amusing elsewhere."

"But what have they got to do with religion?" asked Bertie.

"Haven't they something to do with it? I thought they had. I know Esther
looks good when she has been to the slums; though of course, it's quite
delicious of her to go. Still if it makes you feel good, it isn't wholly
unselfish. There is nothing so pleasant as feeling good. I felt good the
day before yesterday. But after all there are exactly as many ways of
being religious as there are people in the world. No one means quite the
same. I feel religious if I drive home just at dawn after a ball when
all the streets are clean and empty and pearl-colored. Darling Daddy
feels religious when he doesn't eat meat on Thursday or Friday,
whichever it is, and he has his immediate reward because he has the most
delicious things instead--truffles stuffed with mushrooms or mushrooms
stuffed with truffles. Also he drinks a good deal of wine that day,
because you may drink what you like, and he likes tremendously. He has a
particular _chef_ for the days of meager, who has to sit and think for
six days like the creation, and then work instead."

Nadine gurgled again.

"I suppose I shock you all," she said; "but English people are so
unexpected about getting shocked that it is no use being careful. But
they don't get shocked at what they do or say themselves. Whatever they
do themselves they know must be all right, and they take hands and sing
'Rule Britannia.' They are the _enfant terrible_ of Europe. They put
their big stupid feet into everything and when they have spoiled it all,
so that nobody cares for it any longer, they ask why people are vexed
with them! And then they go and play golf. I am getting very English
myself. Except when I talk fast you would not know I was not English."

Esther, since her camomile tea was quite spoiled, took a cigarette
instead, which she liked better.

"Well, darling, you know every now and then you are a shade foreign,"
she said. "Especially when you talk about nationalities. As a nation I
believe you positively loathe us. But that doesn't matter. It's he and
she who matter, not they."

Bertie had sat up at the mention of golf and was talking to Tommy.

"Yes, I won at the seventeenth," he said. "I took it in three. Two
smacks and one put."

"Gosh," said Tommy.

"I wish I hadn't mentioned that damned game," said Nadine very
distinctly. "You will talk about golf now till morning."

"Yes, but you needn't. Go on about Daddy," said Esther.

"Certainly he is more interesting than golf, and gets into just as many
holes. He is a creature of Nature. He falls in love every year, when the
hounds of spring--"

A chorus interrupted her.

"Are on winter's traces, the mother of months--"

"Oh, ripping!" said Bertie.

"Yes. How _chic_ to have written that and to have lived at Putney," said
Nadine. "Mama once took me to see Mr. Swinburne and told me to kiss his
hand as soon as ever I got into the room. So when we got in, there was
one little old man there, and I kissed his hand; but it was not Mr.
Swinburne at all, but somebody quite different."

Again the door opened, and a woman entered, tall, beautiful, vital.
There was no mistaking her. The others had not been lacking in vitality
before, but she brought in with her a far more abundant measure. She was
forty-five, perhaps, but clearly her age was the last thing to be
thought about with regard to her. You could as well wonder what was the
age of a sunlit wave breaking on the shore, or of a wind that blew from
the sea. Everybody sat up at once.

"Mama darling, come here," said Nadine, "and talk to us."

Princess Waldenech looked round her largely and brilliantly.

"I thought I should find you all here," she said. "Nadine dear, of
course you know best, but is it usual for a girl to have two young
gentlemen lying about with her on one bed? I suppose it must be, since
you all do it. Are they all going to bed here? Have they brought their
tooth-brushes and nighties? Berts, is that you, Berts? Really one can
hardly see for the smoke, but after all this used to be the
smoking-room, and I suppose it has formed the habit. Berts, you fiend,
you made me laugh at dinner just when Bishop Spenser was telling me
about the crisis of faith he went through when he was a young man so
that he nearly became a Buddhist instead of a bishop. Or do Buddhists
have bishops, too? Wasn't it dreadful? He's a dear, and he gives all his
money away to endow other bishops, both black and white--like chess. Of
course he isn't a bishop any more, but only a dean, but he keeps his
Bible like one. Hugh is playing billiards with him now, and told me in a
whisper that he marked three for every cannon he made. Of course Hughie
couldn't tell him it only counted two. It would have seemed unkind. Hugh
has such tact."

"What I was saying," said Nadine. "Mama, he proposed to me again this
evening, and I said 'no' as usual. Is he depressed?"

"No, dear, not in the least except about the cannons. Probably you will
say 'yes,' sometime. And I want a cigarette and something to drink, and
to be amused for exactly half an hour, when I shall take myself to
pieces and go to bed. I hate going to bed and it adds to the depression
to know that I shall have to get up again. If only I could be a
Christian Scientist I should know that there is no such thing as a bed,
and that therefore you can't go there. On the other hand that would be
fatiguing I suppose."

Tommy gave her a cigarette, and Nadine fetched her mother her bedroom
bottle of water out of which she drank freely, having refused camomile
tea with cigar ash in it.

"Too delicious!" she said. "Nadine darling, do marry Hugh before you are
twenty-two. Nowadays if girls don't marry before that they take a flat
or something and read at the British Museum till they are thirty and
have got spectacles, without even getting compromised--"

"Compromised? Of course not," cried Nadine. "You can't get compromised
now. There is no such thing as compromise. We die in the ditch sooner,
like poor Lord Halsbury. Being compromised was purely a Victorian sort
of decoration like--like crinolines. Oh, do tell us about those
delicious Victorian days about 1890 when you were a girl and people
thought you fast and were shocked."

"My dear, you wouldn't believe it," said Dodo; "you would think I was
describing what happened in Noah's Ark. Bertie and Tommy, for instance,
would never have been allowed to come and lie on your bed."

"Oh, why not?" asked Esther.

"Because you and Nadine are girls and they are boys. That sounds simple
nonsense, doesn't it? Also because to a certain extent boys and girls
then did as older people told them to, and older people would have told
them to go away. You see we used to listen to older people because they
were older; now you don't listen to them, for identically the same
reason. We thought they were bores and obeyed them; you are perfectly
sweet to them, but they have learned never to tell you to do anything.
You would never do what I told you, dear, unless you wanted to."

"No, Mama, I suppose not. But I always do what you tell me, as it is,
because you always tell me to do exactly what I want to."

Dodo laughed.

"Yes, that is just what education means now. And how nicely we get
along. Nobody is shocked now, in consequence, which is much better for
them. You can die of shock, so doctors say, without any other injury at
all. So it is clearly wise not to be shocked. I was shocked once, when I
was eight years old, because I was taken to the dentist without being
told. I was told that I was to go for an ordinary walk with my sister
Maud. And then, before I knew where I was, there was my mouth open as
far as my uvula, and a dreadful man with a mirror and pincers was
looking at my teeth. I lost my trust in human honor, which I have since
then regained. I think Maud was more shocked than me. I think it
conduced to her death. You didn't remember Auntie Maud, Nadine, did you?
You were so little and she was so unrememberable. Yes; a quantity of
worsted work. But that's why I always want the bishop to come whenever
he can."

"I don't see why, even now," said Nadine.

"Darling, aren't you rather slow? Bishop Spenser, you know, who was
Auntie Maud's husband. Surely you've heard me call him Algie. Who ever
called a bishop by his Christian name unless he was a relation? Maud
knew him when he was a curate. She fluffed herself up in him, just as
she used to do in her worsted, and nobody ever saw her any more. But I
loved Maud, and I don't think she ever knew it. Some people don't know
you love them unless you tell them so, and it is so silly to tell your
sister that you love her. I never say I love you, either, and I don't
say I love Esther, and that silly Berts, and serious Tommy. But what's
the use of you all unless you know it? Nadine, ring the bell, please. It
all looks as if we were going to talk, and I had no dinner to speak of,
because I was being anxious about Daddy. I thought he was going to talk
Hungarian; he looked as if he was, and so I got anxious, because he only
talks Hungarian when he is what people call very much on. Certainly he
wasn't off to-night; he is off to-morrow. And so I want food. If I am
being anxious I want food immediately afterwards, as soon as the anxiety
is removed. At least I suppose Daddy has gone to bed. You haven't got
him here, have you? Fancy me being as old as any two of you. You are all
so delightful, that you mustn't put me on the shelf yet. But just think!
I was nice the other day to Berts' sister, and she told her mother she
had got a new friend, who was quite old. 'Not so old as Grannie,' she
said, 'but quite old!' And all the time I thought we were being girls
together. At least I thought I was; I thought she was rather
middle-aged. How is your mother, Berts? She doesn't approve of me, but I
hope she is quite well."

Bertie also was a nephew by affection.

"Aunt Dodo," he said, "I think mother is too silly for anything."

"I knew something was coming," said Dodo; "what's she done now?"

"Well, it is. She said she thought you were heartless."

"Silly ass," said Esther. "Go on, Berts."

Berts felt goaded.

"Of course mother is a silly ass," he said. "It's no use telling me
that. Your mother is a silly ass, too, with her coronets and all that
sort of fudge. But altogether there is very little to be said for people
over forty, except Aunt Dodo."

"Beloved Berts," remarked Dodo. "Go on about Edith."

"But it is so. They're all antiques except you, battered antiques. Let's
talk about mothers generally. Look at Esther's mother. She doesn't want
me to marry Esther because my father is only an ordinary Mister. There's
a reason! And I don't want to marry Esther because her mother is a
marchioness. After all, mine has done more than hers, who never did
anything except cut William the Conqueror when he came over, and tell
him he was of very poor, new family. But my mother wrote the 'Dods
Symphony' for instance. She's something; she was Edith Staines, and when
she has her songs sung at the Queen's Hall, she goes and conducts them."

"Bertie, in a short skirt and boots with enormous nails," said Esther.

"And why not? She may be a silly ass in some things, but she's done
something."

Bertie uncoiled all his yards of height and stood up.

"You began," he said. "I'm only answering you back. Lady Ayr has never
done anything at all except talk about her family. She doesn't think
about anything but family: she's the most antiquated and absurd type of
snob there is. And your ridiculous brother John is exactly the same.
You're the most awful family, and make one long for grocers, like
Nadine."

"Darling, what do you want a grocer for?" asked Dodo.

But Berts had not finished yet.

"And as for your brother Seymour, all that can be said about him is that
he is a perfect lady," he said, "but he ought to have been drowned when
he was a girl, like a kitten."

Esther shouted with laughter.

"Oh, Berts, I wish you would be roused oftener," she said; "I absolutely
adore you when you are roused. But you aren't quite right about Seymour.
He isn't a lady any more than he's a gentleman. And after all he has got
a brain, a real brain."

"Well, it takes all sorts to make a world," said Dodo, "and, Esther
dear, I'm often extremely grateful to Seymour. He will always come to
dinner at the very last moment--"

"That's because nobody else ever asks him," said Bertie, still fizzing
and spouting a little. "That's one of the objections to marrying you,
Esther, you will always be letting him come to dinner."

"Be quiet, Berts. As I say, he never minds how late he is asked, and he
invariably makes himself charming to the oldest and plainest woman
present. Here, for instance, he would be making himself pleasant to me."

"Poor chap!" said Berts, lighting another cigarette, and lying down
again.

A tray with some cold ham, a plate of strawberries, and a small jug of
iced lemonade which had been ordered by Nadine for her mother was here
brought in by a perfectly impassive footman, and placed on the bed
between her and Nadine. No servants in Dodo's house ever felt the
smallest surprise at anything which was demanded of them, and if Nadine
had at this moment asked him to wash her face, he would probably have
merely said, "Hot or cold water, miss?"

Nadine had not contributed anything to this discussion on Seymour,
because she was almost inconveniently aware that she did not know what
she thought about him. Certainly he had brains, and for brains she had
an enormous respect.

"Seeing things to eat always makes me feel hungry," said Nadine,
absently taking strawberries, "just as the sight of a bed makes me very
wide-awake. It is called suggestion. Really the chief use of going to
bed is that you are alone and have time to think."

"And that is so exhausting that I instantly go to sleep," remarked
Tommy.

"You get--how do you call it--into training, if you practise, Tommy,"
said Nadine. "People imagine that because they have a brain they can
think. It isn't so: you have to learn to think. You have a tongue, but
you must learn to talk: you have arms and yet you must learn how to play
your foolish golf."

"You don't learn it, darling," said Dodo.

"Mama, you are eating ham and have not been following. Really it is so.
Most people can't think. Esther can't: she confesses it."

"It's quite true," said Esther. "I felt full of ideas this morning, and
so I went away all alone along the beach to think them out. But I
couldn't. There were my ideas all right, and that was all. I couldn't
think about them. There they were, ideas: just that, framed and glazed."

Tommy rose.

"I'm worse than that," he said. "I never have any ideas. In some ways
it's an advantage, because if we all had ideas, I suppose we should want
to express them. As it is I am at leisure to listen."

Dodo took a long draught of lemonade.

"I have one idea," she said, "and that is that it's bed-time. I shall go
and exhaust myself with thought. The process of exhaustion does not take
long. Besides, if I sit up much later than twelve, my maid always pulls
my hair, and whips my head with the brush instead of treating me
kindly."

"I should dismiss her," said Nadine.

"I couldn't, dear. She is so imbecile that she would never get another
situation. Ah, there's Hugh! Hugh, did poor Algie Balearic-isles beat
you?"

A very large young man had just appeared in the doorway. He held in his
hand a sandwich out of which he had just taken an enormous semi-circular
bite. The rest of it was in his mouth, and he spoke with the mumbling
utterance necessary to those who converse when their mouths are quite
full.

"Oh, is that where he comes from?" he asked.

"No, my dear, that is where he went to; then of course since he is here
he did come from them in a sense. Dear me, if he had been bishop there
about fifty years earlier, he might have copied Chopin. How thrilling!"

"Yes, the Isles won," said Hugh, his voice clearing as he swallowed.
"Oh, Aunt Dodo"--this again was a relationship founded only on
affection--"he said your price was beyond rubies. So I said 'What price
rubies?' and as he didn't understand nor did I, we parted. What a lot of
people there seems to be here! I came to talk to Nadine. Oh, there she
is. Or would it be better taste if I didn't? Perhaps it would. I shall
go to bed instead."

"Then what you call taste is what I call peevishness," said Nadine
succinctly.

"I don't understand. What is better peevishness, then?"

"You take me at the foot of the letter," said she. "You see what I
mean."

"Yes. I see that you mean 'literally.' But in any case there are too
many people, chiefly upside down from where I am. That's Esther, isn't
it, and Berts? Tommy is the right way up. Nadine upside down also."

Esther got up.

"Why, of course, if you want to talk to Nadine, we'll go," she said.

Bertie gave a long sigh.

"I shall lie here," he said, "like the frog-footman on and off for days
and days--"

"So long as you lie off now," said Hugh.

Bertie got up.

"You can all come to my room if you like," he said, "as long as you
don't mind my going to bed. Good-night, Nadine; thanks awfully for
letting me lie down. It has made me quite sleepy."

Hugh Graves went to the window as soon as they had gone and threw it
open.

"The room smells of smoke and stale epigrams," he said in explanation.

"That's not very polite, Hugh," said she, "since I have been talking
most, and not smoking least. But I suppose you will answer that you
didn't come here to be polite."

In a moment, even as the physical atmosphere of the room altered, so
also did the spiritual. It seemed to Nadine that she and Hugh took hands
and sailed through the surface foam and brightnesses in which they had
been playing into some place which they had made for themselves, which
was dim and sub-aqueous. The foam and brightness was all perfectly
sincere, for she was never other than sincere, but it had no more than
the sincerity of soap-bubbles.

"No. I didn't come here to be polite," said Hugh, "though I didn't come
here to be rude. I came to ask you a couple of questions."

Nadine had lain down on the bed again, having put all the pillows behind
her, so that she was propped up by them. Her arms were clasped behind
her head, and the folds of her rainbow dressing-gown fell back from them
leaving them bare nearly to the shoulder. The shaded light above her bed
fell upon her hair, burnishing its gold, and her face below it was dim
and suggested rather than outlined. The most accomplished of coquettes
would, after thought, have chosen exactly that attitude and lighting, if
she wanted to appear to the greatest advantage to a man who loved her,
but Nadine had done it without motive. It may have been that it was an
instinct with her to appear to the utmost advantage, but she would have
done the same, without thought, if she was talking to a middle-aged
dentist. Hugh had seated himself at some little distance from her, and
the same light threw his face into strong line and vivid color. He had
still something of the rosiness of youth about him, but none of youth's
indeterminateness, and he looked older than his twenty-five years. When
he was moving, he moved with a boy's quickness; when he sat still he sat
with the steadiness of strong maturity.

"You needn't ask them," she said. "I can answer you without that. The
answer to them both is that I don't know."

"How? Do you know the questions yet?" said he.

"I do. You want to know whether my answer to you this evening is final.
You want also to know why I don't say 'yes.'"

His eyes admitted the correctness of this: he need not have spoken.

"After all, there was not much divination wanted," he said. "I am as
obvious as usual. And you understand me as well as usual."

She shook her head at this, not denying it, but only deprecating it.

"I always understand you too well," she said. "If only I didn't
understand you, just as I don't understand Seymour, you have suggested a
reason for why I don't say 'yes.' I think it is correct. Ah, don't quote
silly proverbs about love's being complete understanding. Most of the
proverbs are silly; Solomon was so old when he wrote them."

His mouth uncurled from its gravity.

"That wasn't one of Solomon's," he said.

"Then it might have been. In any case exactly the opposite is true. If
love is anything at all beyond the obvious physical sense of the word,
it is certainly not understanding. It is the not-understanding--"

"Mis-understanding?"

"No. The not-understanding, the mysterious, the unaccountable--" Nadine
gathered her legs up under her and sat clasping them round the knees,
and her utterance grew more rapid. Her face, young and undeveloped, and
white and exquisite, was full of eager animation.

"That is what I feel anyhow," she said. "Of course I can't say 'this is
love' and 'this is not love,' and label other people's emotions. There
is one way of love and another way of love, and another and another.
There are as many modes of love, I suppose, as there are people who are
capable of it. And don't tell me everybody is capable of it. At least,
tell me so if you like, but allow me to disagree. All I am certain of is
that I look for something which you don't give me. Perhaps I am
incapable of love. And if I was sure of that, Hughie, I would marry you.
Do you see?"

She, as was always the case with her, made him forget himself. When he
was with her, she absorbed his consciousness: his only desire was to
follow her, not caring where she led. This desire to apprehend her
corrugated his forehead into the soft wrinkles of youth, and narrowed
his eyes.

"Tell me why that is not a bad reason," he said.

"Because I should see that the highest would be denied me," she said.
"Look what quantities of people marry quite without love. I don't refer
to the obvious reason of marrying for position or wealth, but to the
people who marry from admiration or from fear. Mama, for instance: she
married Daddy because she was afraid of him. Then she learned he was a
bogey with a brandy bottle."

"I am neither," said he.

Nadine gave a little sigh, and he saw his stupidity.

"I am supplying the answer to my own question," he said. "Another answer
is that I don't understand you."

Somehow to Nadine this was unexpected, but almost instantly she
recognized the truth of it.

"That is true," she said. "I want to be the inferior, mentally,
spiritually, of the man I marry. I am just the opposite of those
terrible people who want a vote, and say they are the equal of men. That
is so _bourgeois_ an idea. What woman with any self-respect could stand
being her husband's equal if she felt herself capable of loving? It is
that. You are too easy, Hugh. I understand you, and you don't understand
me. I wish it was the other way round."

"Oh, you do wish that?" he asked.

"Yes, of course, my dear."

"Then you have answered the other question. Your answer to me to-day is
not final. I'll puzzle you yet."

"You speak of it all as if it was a conjuring trick," she said. "Don't
make conjuring tricks. Don't let me see your approaching engagement to
somebody else be announced. That would not puzzle me at all. I shall
simply see that it was meant to. Conjuring tricks don't mystify you: you
know you have been cheated and don't care."

"No, I shan't make conjuring tricks," he said.

Nadine unclasped her knees, and got up, and began walking to and fro
across the big room.

"Hugh, I wish I was altogether different," she said. "I wish I was like
one of those simple girls whom you never by any chance meet outside the
covers of six-shilling novels. They are quite human, only no human girl
was ever like them. They like music and food and sentiment and
sea-bathing and playing foolish games, just as we all do. But there is
nobody behind them: they are tastes without character. If only one's
character was nothing more than the sum total of one's tastes, how
extraordinarily simple it would all be. We should spend our lives in
making ourselves pleasant and enjoying ourselves. But there is something
that sits behind all our tastes, and though those tastes express it,
they do not express it all, nor do they express its essence. I am
something beyond and back of the things I like, and the people I like.
Something inside me says 'I want: I want.' I daresay it wants the moon,
and has as much chance of getting it as I have of reaching up into the
sky and pulling it down. Oh, Hugh, I want the moon, and what will the
moon be like? Will it be hard and cold or soft and warm? I don't care. I
shall slip it between my breasts and hold it close."

She paused a moment opposite him.

"Am I talking damned rot?" she asked. "I daresay I am. I am a rotter
then, because all I say is me. Another thing, too: morally, I am not in
the least worthy of you. I don't know any one who is. I don't really,
and I'm not flattering you, because I don't rate the moral qualities
very high. They are compatible with such low organizations. Earwigs, I
read the other day, are excellent mothers. How that seems to alter one's
conception of the beauty of the maternal instinct! It does not alter my
conception of earwigs in the least, and I shall continue to kill any
excellent mothers that I find in my room."

Hugh laughed suddenly and uproariously and then became perfectly grave
again.

"Your moral organization is probably extremely low," he said. "But I
settled long ago to overlook that."

"Ah, there we are again," said Nadine. "You deliberately propose to
misconceive me, with the kindest intentions I know, but with how wrong a
principle. You shut your eyes to me, as if--as if I was a smut! You
settle to overlook the fact that I have no real moral perception. Could
you settle to overlook the fact if I had no nose and only one tooth? I
assure you the lack of a moral nature is a more serious defect. But,
poor devil that I am, how was I to get one? We were talking about
heredity before you came in--"

Nadine paused a moment.

"As a matter of fact," she said, "I was telling them that there was no
truth in heredity. We will now take the other side of the question. How
was I, considering my family, to have moral perceptions?"

"Are you being quite consistent?" asked Hugh.

"Why should I be consistent? Who is consistent except those simple
people whom you buy so many of for six shillings, and they are
consistently tiresome. How, I said, was I to have got moral perception?
There is Daddy! If I was a doctor I would certify any one to be insane
who said Daddy was a moral organism. There is darling Mama! I would
horse-whip any one who said the same of her, for his gross stupidity and
insolence. The result is me; I am more pagan than Heliogabalus. I do not
think that anything is right or that anything is wrong. I want the moon,
but I am afraid you are not the man in it."

"And now you are flippant."

"Flippant, serious, moral, immoral," cried Nadine, "do not label me like
luggage. You will tell me my destination next, shall we call it
Abraham's bosom? Dear Hugh, you enrage me sometimes. Chiefly you enrage
me because you have such an angelic temper yourself. I am not sure that
an angelic temper is an advantage: it is always set fair, and there are
no surprises. Ah, how it all leads round to that: there are no
surprises: I understand you too well. I am very sorry. Do me the justice
to believe that. Really I believe that I am as sorry that I can't marry
you as you are."

Hugh got up.

"I don't think I do quite believe that," he said. "And now as regards
the immediate future. I think I shall go away to-morrow."

This time he succeeded in surprising her.

"Himmel, but why?" she said.

"If you understood me as well as you say, you would know," he said. "I
don't find my own heart a satisfactory diet. Of course, if I thought you
would miss me--"

Nadine was quite silent for a moment.

"You shall go if you like, of course," she said. "But you do me the most
frightful injustice: you understand nothing about me if you think I
should not miss you. You cannot be so dull as not to know that I should
miss you more than if everybody else went, literally everybody, leaving
me alone. But go if you wish."

She walked across to the window, which Hugh had thrown open, and leaned
out. A moon rode high in mid-sky, and to the West a quarter of a mile
away and far below the sea glimmered like a shield of dim silver. Below
the window the ground sloped sharply away down to the gray tumbled sand
dunes that fringed the coast, and all lay blurred and melted under the
uncertain light. And when she turned round again Hugh saw that her eyes
were blurred and melted also.

"Do exactly as you please, Hughie," she said.

He laughed.

"Would you be surprised if I did not go?" he asked.

She came towards him with both hands out.

"Ah, that is dear of you," she said. "Look out of the window with me a
moment: how dim and mysterious. There is my moon which I want so much,
too. I will build altars and burn incense to any god who will give it
me. If only I knew what it was. My moon, I mean! Now perhaps as it is
nearly two o'clock, we had better go to bed, Hughie. And I am so sorry
that things are as they are."




CHAPTER II


It had been said, by Edith Arbuthnot, perhaps unkindly, but with
sufficient humor to neutralize the acidity, that there was always
somebody awake day and night in Dodo's house tending the flame of
egoistic introspection. Edith did not generally use long words, but
chose them carefully when she indulged in polysyllables. She had not
been so careful in the choice of her confidant, for she had fired this
withering criticism at her son Berts, who in the true spirit of an
affectionate nephew instantly repeated it to Dodo, who had roared with
laughter and sent Edith an enormous telegram (costing nine shillings and
a halfpenny, including sixpence for a paid reply in case Edith wanted to
continue the discussion) describing a terrible accident that had just
happened to herself.

"A most extraordinary and tragic affair" (this was all written out in
full) "has just occurred at Meering at the house of Princess Waldenech.
The unfortunate lady has just died of a sudden though not unexpected
attack of spontaneous egoism. Loud screams were heard from her room, and
Mr. Bertie Arbuthnot, son of the celebrated Edith Arbuthnot, the musical
composer, rushed in to find the princess enveloped in sheets of blue
flame. The efforts made to quench her were of no avail and in a few
moments all that was left of her was a small handful of ashes, which
curiously enough, as they cooled, assumed the shape of a capital 'I.'
Fear is felt that this outbreak may prove to be contagious, and all
those who have been in contact with the combusted princess are busy
disinfecting themselves by talking about each other. It is believed that
Mrs. Arbuthnot has begun to write a funeral march for her friend, for
whom she felt an adoring affection amounting almost to worship, in the
unusual key of ten sharps and eleven flats. It is in brisk waltz time
and all the performers will blow their own trumpets. She is sending
copies to nearly all the crowned heads of Europe."

Edith's reply was equally characteristic.

"Dodo, I love you."

The truth in Edith's criticism was certainly exemplified in the night of
which we are speaking, for Hugh did not leave Nadine's room, where she
had been engaged on the self-analysis given in the last chapter till two
o'clock, and at that precise moment Dodo, who had gone to bed more than
an hour before, woke up and began thinking about herself with uncommon
intensity. And indeed there was sufficient to think about in the
circumstances with which she had at this moment allowed herself to be
surrounded. For the last two days, the husband whom she had divorced
with such extreme facility had been staying with her, and to-morrow,
directly on his departure, Jack Chesterford, to whom she had been
engaged when she ran away with the husband she had just divorced, was
arriving. All her life Dodo had liked drama, as long as it occurred
outside the walls of English theaters, but better than the theaters even
of Paris were the dramas which came into real life, especially when you
could not possibly tell (even though you were acting yourself) what was
going to happen next. Best of all she liked acting herself, having a
part to play, without the slightest idea what she or anybody else was
going to do or say.

Dodo's zest for life did not decrease with years, nor did her interest
in it in the least diminish as the time of her youth began to recede
into horizons far behind her. For all the time other horizons were
getting closer to her, and she could imagine herself being quite
old--"as old as Grannie" in fact--without any of the tragic envy of past
years that so often make wormwood of the present. She had indeed settled
the mode of her procedure for those years, which were still far enough
off, with some exactitude, and was quite determined to have a mob-cap
with a blue riband in it, and gold-rimmed spectacles. Also she would
read Thomas à Kempis a great deal,--she had read a little already, and
was now deliberately keeping the rest until she was seventy--and walk
about her garden with a tall cane and pick lavender. She had, moreover,
promised herself to make no attempts at sprightliness or to have her
hair dyed, since one of the few classes of women whom she really
objected to were those whom she called grizzly kittens, who dabbed at
you with their rheumatic old paws, and pretended that they had no need
of spectacles, though it was quite clear they could not read the very
largest print. But she fully intended to remain exceedingly happy when
those years came, for happiness so it seemed to her was a gift that came
from within and could not be taken from you by any amount of external
calamities or accumulation of decades. Certainly in the years that had
passed she had had her share of annoyances, and in support of her theory
with regard to happiness it must be confessed that they had not deprived
her of one atom of it. Her late husband's conduct, for instance, had for
years been of the most disagreeable kind, and she had borne with it not
in the least like a tearful lamb but more like a cheerful lion. It had
not in the least discouraged her with life in general, but only
disgusted her with him. For the last two years before she got her
divorce, he had been, as she expressed it, "too Bacchic for anything,"
and she had sent Nadine away from their homes in Austria to live with a
variety of old friends in England. Eventually Dodo had decided that she
would waste no more time with her husband and got her freedom coupled
with an extremely handsome allowance. She continued to call herself
"Princess Waldenech," because it was still rather pleasant being a
Princess, and Waldenech told her that, as far as he was concerned, she
might call herself "Dowager-Empress Waldenech," or anything else she
chose.

So for a year now she had been in England, and had stepped back, or
rather jumped back, into the old relations with almost all that numerous
body of people who twenty years ago had helped to make life so
enchanting. And with the same swiftness and sureness she had established
herself in the hearts of the younger generation that had grown up since,
so that the sons and daughters of her old friends became her nephews and
nieces. Nadine, with the beauty, the high spirits and power of enjoyment
that was hers by birthright, had so it seemed to her mother succeeded to
a place that was very like what her own had been rather more than twenty
years ago. Of course there was a tremendous difference in their modes,
for the manners and outlook of one generation are as divergent from
those of the last, as are the clothes they wear, but the same passionate
love of life, the same curiosity and vividness inspired her daughter's
friends, even as they had inspired her own. And since she herself had
lost not one atom of her own vitality, it was not strange that the years
between them and her were easily bridged over.

       *       *       *       *       *

There were one or two voices that were silent in the chorus of welcome
with which Dodo's reappearance had been hailed. One of these was Edith
Arbuthnot, who, though she did not desire to put any restrictions on
Berts' intimacy (which was lucky, since Berts was a young gentleman
hideously gifted with the power of getting his way) loudly proclaimed
that she could never be friends with Dodo again. But the answer she had
sent to Dodo's remarkable telegram about combusted egoism a few days
before seemed to indicate that she had surrendered and, though she had
subsequently announced that Dodo was heartless, might be regarded as a
convert, especially since Jack had at last yielded too, and had invited
himself down here. Another fortress hitherto impregnable was Mrs.
Vivian, for whom Dodo in days gone by had felt as solid an affection as
she was capable of. Consequently she regretted that Mrs. Vivian was
invariably unable to come and dine, and never manifested the slightest
desire that Dodo should come to see her. Her regret was slightly
tempered by the fact that Mrs. Vivian had an ear-trumpet in these days,
which she presented to people whose conversation she desired to hear
rather in the manner that elephants at the Zoo hold out their trunks for
refreshments. Somehow that seemed to make her matter less, and Dodo had
not at present made any determined effort to beleaguer her. But she
intended when she went back to town in July to capture what was now
practically the only remaining stronghold of the disaffected.

When Dodo drowsily awoke that night just at the time that Hugh and
Nadine had finished their talk it was the thought of Jack that first
stirred in her mind. Instantly she was perfectly wide-awake. During this
last year, though he was great friends with Nadine, he had absolutely
avoided coming into contact with herself. He never went to a house where
Dodo was expected, and once finding she was staying for a
Saturday-till-Monday with the Granthams, had left within ten minutes of
his arrival. Miss Grantham had conceived this misbegotten plan of
bringing them unexpectedly face to face, with the only result that the
party numbered thirteen, and her father was very uncomfortable for
weeks afterwards. Once again they had been caught in a block in
taxi-cabs exactly opposite each other. Dodo, taking the bull by the
horns, had leaned impulsively toward him with both hands outstretched
and cried, "Ah, Jack, are we never to meet again?" On which the bull, so
to speak, paid his fare, and continued his journey on foot. Dodo had
been considerably disappointed by this rebuff: it had seemed to her that
no man should have resisted her direct appeal. On the other hand, Jack
on seeing her had nailed to his face so curiously icy a mask that his
appearance became quite ludicrous. Also he knocked his hat against the
roof of the closed half of his cab, and it fell into the road, in the
middle of an unusually deep puddle. She noticed that he was not bald
yet, which was a great relief, since she detested the sight of craniums.

And now Jack had yielded, had walked out of his citadel without any
further assault being delivered, and was to arrive to-day. At the
thought, when she woke in the stillness of earliest morning, Dodo's
brain started into fullest activity, and, as always, as much interested
in the motives that inspired actions as in the actions themselves, she
set herself to ponder the nature of the impulse which had caused so
complete a _volte-face_. But the action itself interested and charmed
her also: all this year she had wanted to see Jack again. He had
understood her better than any one, and in spite of the vile way in
which she had used him, she had more nearly loved him than either of the
men she had married. Her first husband had never been more to her than
"an old darling," and often something not nearly that. Of Waldenech she
had simply been afraid: under the fascination of fear she had done what
he told her. But Jack--

Dodo felt for the switch of her electric light: the darkness was too
close to her eyes, and she wanted to focus them on something. Clearly
there were several possibilities any of which would account for this
change in him. He might perhaps merely wish to resume ordinary and
friendly relations with her. But that did not seem a likely explanation,
since, if that was all, he would more naturally have waited till she
returned to town again after this sojourn in the country. There must
have been in his mind a cause more potent than that. Naturally the more
potent cause occurred to her, and she sat up in bed. "It is too
ludicrous," she said to herself, "it cannot possibly be that." And yet
he had remained unmarried all these years, with how many charming girls
about who would have been perfectly willing to share his wealth and
title, not to speak of himself.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dodo got out of bed altogether; and went across the room to where a big
looking-glass set in the door of her wardrobe reflected her entire
figure. She wished to be quite honest in her inspection of herself, to
see there not what she wanted to see but what there was to be seen. The
room was brightly lit, and through her thin silk nightdress she could
see the lines of her figure, molded in the soft swelling curves of her
matured womanhood. Yet something of the slimness and firm elasticity of
youth still dwelt there, even as youth still shone in the smooth
unwrinkled oval of her face and sparkled in the depths of her dark eyes.
Right down to her waist hung the thick coils of her black hair, still
untroubled by gray, and slim and shapely were her ankles, soft and rosy
from the warmth of her bed her exquisite feet. And at the sight of
herself her mouth uncurled itself into a smile: the honesty of her
scrutiny had produced no discouraging revelations. Then frankly laughing
at herself she turned away again, and wholly unconsciously and
instinctively took half a dozen dance-steps across the Persian rugs that
were laid down over the polished floor. She could no more help that
impulse of her bubbling vitality than she could help the fact that she
was five feet eight in height.

The coolness and refreshment of the two hours before dawn streamed in
through her open window, and she put on the dressing-gown with its
cascades of lace and blue ribands that lay on the chair by her
dressing-table. Supposing it was the case that Jack was coming for her,
that he wanted her now as in the old days when she had thrown his
devotion back at him like a pail of dirty water, what answer would she
make him? Really she hardly knew. Neither of her marriages had been a
conspicuous success, but for neither of her husbands had she felt
anything of that quality of emotion which she had felt for the man she
had treated so infamously. She gave a great sigh and began ticking off
certain events on her fingers.

"First of all I refused him before I married poor darling Chesterford
the first," she said to herself. "Secondly, having married Chesterford
the first, I asked Jack to run away with me. But that was in a moment of
great exasperation: it might have happened to anybody. Thirdly, as soon
as Chesterford I. was taken, I got engaged to Jack which I ought to have
done originally; and fourthly, I jilted him and married Waldenech."

Dodo had arrived at her little finger and held her other hand poised
over it.

"What the devil is fifthly to be?" she said aloud.

She got out of her chair again.

"It is very odd but I simply can't make up my mind," she thought, "and I
usually can make it up without the slightest trouble; indeed it is
usually already made up, just as one used to find eggs already boiled in
that absurd machine that always stood by Chesterford at breakfast. I
hate boiled eggs! But I wonder if I owe it to Jack to marry him if he
wants me to? Supposing he says I have spoiled his life, and he wants me
to unspoil it now? Is it my duty apart from whatever my inclination may
be, and I wish I knew what it was?"

Dodo felt herself quite unable to make up her mind on this somewhat
important point. She felt herself already embarked on an argument with
Jack, as she had been so often embarked in the old days, and on how
pleasant and summery a sea. She would certainly tell him that nobody
ought to let his life be spoiled by anybody else, and she would point to
herself as a triumphant instance of how she had refused to let her joy
of life get ever so slightly tarnished by the really trying experiences
in her partnership with Waldenech. Here was she positively as good as
new. And then unfortunately it occurred to her that Jack might say "But
then you didn't love him." And the ingenious Dodo felt herself unable to
frame any reply to this very bald suggestion. It really seemed
unanswerable.

There was a further reason which might account for Jack's coming:
Nadine. Dodo knew that the two were great friends. She had even heard it
suggested that Jack had serious thoughts with regard to her. Very likely
that was only invented by some friend who was curious to know how she
herself would take the suggestion, but clearly this was not an
improbable, far less an impossible, contingency. But that Nadine had
serious thoughts with regard to Jack was less likely. Dodo felt that her
daughter took after herself in emotional matters and was probably not at
that age seriously thinking about anybody. Yet after all she herself had
married at that age (though without serious thought) and the experiment
which seemed so sensible and promising had been a distinct
disappointment. Ought she to warn Nadine against marrying without love?
Or would that look as if, for other reasons, she did not wish her to
marry Jack? That would be an odious interpretation to put on it, and the
worst of it was that she was not perfectly certain whether there was not
some sort of foundation for it. Something within her ever so faintly
resented the idea of Jack's marrying Nadine.

Dodo's thought paused and was poised over this for a little, and she
made an eager and a conscious effort to root out from her mind this
feeling of which she was genuinely ashamed. Then suddenly all her
meditations were banished, for from outside there came the first faint
chirrupings of an awakening bird. Deep down in her, below the
trivialities and surface-complications of life, below all her
warm-heartedness and her egoism there lay a strain of natural untainted
simplicity, and these first flutings of birds in the bushes roused it.
She went to the window and drew up the blind.

The dusk still hovered over the sea and low-lying land, and in the sky
already turning dove-colored a late star lingered, remotely burning. The
bird that had called her to look at the dawn had ceased again, and a
pause holy and sweet and magical brooded over this virginal meeting of
night and day. But far off to the right the hill-tops had got the
earliest news of what was coming and were flecked with pale orient
reflections and hints of gold and scarlet and faint crimson. But here
below the dusk lay thick still, like clear dark water.

Just below her window lay the lawn, garlanded round with sleeping and
dew-drenched flower-beds and the incense of their fragrant buds and
folded petals still slept in the censer, till in the East should rise
the gold-haired priest and swing it, tossing high to heaven the
fragrance of its burning. And then from out of the bushes beyond there
scudded a thrush, perhaps the same as had called Dodo to the window. He
scurried over the shimmering lawn with innumerable footfalls, and came
so close underneath her window that she could see his eyes shining. Then
he swelled his throat, and sang one soft phrase of morning, paused as if
listening and then repeated it. All the magic of youth and joy of life
was there: there was also in Dodo's heart the indefinable yearning for
days that were dead, the sense of the fathomless well of time into which
forever dropped beauty and youth and the soft sweet days. But that
lasted but a moment, for as long as the thrush paused. Another voice and
yet another sounded from the bushes; there were other thrushes there,
and in the ivy of the house arose the cheerful jangling of sparrows.
Fresh-feathered forms ran out upon the lawn, and the air was shrill with
their pipings. Every moment the sky grew brighter with the imminent day,
the last star faded in the glow of pink translucent alabaster, and in
the green-crowned elms the breeze of morning awoke, and stirred the
tree-tops. Then it came lower, and began to move in the flower-beds, and
the wine of the dew was spilled from the chalices of new-blown roses,
and the tall lilies quivered. There was wafted up to her the
indescribable odor of moist earth and opening flowers, and on the moment
the first yellow ray of sunlight shot over the garden.

Dodo stood there dim-eyed, unspeakably and mysteriously moved. She
thought of other dawns she had seen, when coming back perhaps from a
ball where she had been the central and most brilliant figure all night
long; she thought of other troubled dawns when she had wakened from some
unquiet dream and yet dreaded the day. But here was a perfect dawn and
it seemed to symbolize to her the beginning of the life that lay in
front of her. She looked forward to it with eager anticipation, she gave
it a rapturous welcome. She was in love with life still, she longed to
see what delicious things it held in store for her. She felt sure that
God was going to be tremendously kind to her. And in turn (for she had a
certain sense of fairness) she felt most whole-heartedly grateful and
determined to deserve these favors. There were things in her life she
was very sorry for: such omissions and commissions should not occur
again. She felt that the sight of this delicious dawn had been a sort of
revelation to her. And with a great sigh of content, she went back to
bed, and without delay fell fast asleep and did not awake till her maid
came in at eight o'clock with a little tray of tea that smelt too good
for anything, and a whole sheaf of attractive-looking letters, large,
stiff square ones, which certainly contained cards that bade her to
delightful entertainments.

She always breakfasted in her room, and when she came downstairs about
half-past ten, and looked into the dining-room, she found to her
surprise that Waldenech was there eating sausages one after the other.
This was a very strange proceeding for him, since in general he adopted
slightly shark-like hours and did not breakfast till at least
lunch-time. Time, or at any rate, his habits and method of spending it,
had not been so kind to him as to Dodo and though it had not robbed him
of that look of distinction which was always his it had conferred upon
him the look of being considerably the worse for wear. He seemed as
much older than his years as Dodo appeared younger than hers, and she
was no longer in the least afraid of him. Indeed it struck her that
morning as she came in, with a sense of wonder, that she had ever found
him formidable.

"Good-morning, my dear," she said, "but how very surprising. Has
everybody else finished and gone out? Waldenech, I am so glad you
suggested coming here, and I hope you haven't regretted it."

"I have not enjoyed any days so much since you left me," he said.

"How dear of you to say that! Every one thought it so extraordinary that
you should want to come here or that I should let you, but I am
delighted you did."

He left his place, and came to sit in a chair next her. The remains of
Nadine's breakfast were on a plate opposite: half a poached egg, some
melon rind, marmalade and a cigarette end. He pushed these rather
discouraging relics away.

"It is not extraordinary that I should want to come here," he said, "for
the simple reason that you are the one woman I ever really cared about.
I always cared for you--"

"There are others who think you occasionally cared for them," remarked
Dodo.

"That may be so. Now I should like to stop on. May I do so?"

"No, my dear, I am afraid that you certainly may not," she said. "Jack
comes to-day and the situation would not be quite comfortable, not to
say decent."

"Do you think that matters?" he asked.

"It certainly is going to matter. You haven't really got a European
mind, Waldenech. Your mind is probably Thibetan. Is it Thibet where you
do exactly as you feel inclined? The place where there are Llamas."

"I do as I feel inclined wherever I am," said he.

Dodo remembered, again with wonder, the awful mastery that that sort of
sentence as delivered by him used to have for her. Now it had none of
any kind: his personality had simply ceased to be dominant with regard
to her.

"But then you won't be here," said she. "You will go by that very
excellent train that never stops at all; I have reserved a carriage for
you."

He lit a cigarette.

"I must have been insane to behave to you as I did," he said. "It was
most intensely foolish from a purely selfish point of view."

She patted his hand which lay on the table-cloth.

"Certainly it was," she said, "if you wanted to keep me. I told you so
more than once. I told you that there were limits, but you appeared to
believe there were not. That was quite like you, my dear. You always
thought yourself a Czar. I do not think we need to go into past
histories."

He got up.

"Dodo, would you ever under any circumstances come back to me?" he said.
"There is Nadine, you know. It gives her a better chance--"

Dodo interrupted him.

"You are not sincere when you say that. It isn't of Nadine that you
think. As for your question, I have never heard of any circumstances
which would induce me to do as you suggest. Of course we cannot say that
they don't exist, but I have never come across them. Don't let us think
of it, Waldenech: it is quite impossible. If you were dying, I would
come, but under the distinct understanding that I should go away again,
in case you got better, as I am sure I hope you would. I don't bear you
the slightest ill-will. You didn't spoil my life at all, though it is
true you often made me both angry and miserable. As regards Nadine, she
has an excellent chance, as you call it, under the present arrangements.
All my friends have come back to me, except Mrs. Vivian."

"Mrs. Vivian?" said he. "Oh, yes, an English type, earnest widow."

"With an ear-trumpet now," continued Dodo; "and I shall get her some
day. And Jack comes this afternoon. _Voilà_, the round table again! I
take up the old life anew, with the younger generation as well, not a
penny the worse."

"You are a good many pennies the better," said he in self-justification.
"As regards Lord Chesterford: why is he coming here?"

"I suppose because, like you, he wants to see me and Nadine or both of
us."

"Do you suppose he wants to marry you?" he asked. "Will you marry him?"

Dodo got up, reveling in her sense of liberty.

"Waldenech, you don't seem to realize that certain questions from you
to me are impertinent," she said. "My dear, what I do now is none of
your business. You have as much right to ask Mrs. Vivian whether she is
thinking of marrying again. You have been so discreet and pleasant all
these days: don't break down now. I have not the slightest idea if Jack
wants to marry me now, as a matter of fact; and I have really no idea if
I would marry him in case he did. It is more than twenty years since I
spoke to him--oh, I spoke to him out of a taxi-cab the other day, but he
did not answer--and I have no idea what he is like. In twenty years one
may become an entirely different person. However, that is all my
business, and no one else's. Now, if you have finished, let us take a
stroll in the garden before your carriage comes round."

"I ask then a favor of you," he said.

"And what is that?"

"That you be yourself just for this stroll: that you be as you used to
be when we met that summer at Zermatt."

Dodo was rather touched: she was also relieved that the favor was one so
easy to grant. She took his arm as they left the dining-room and came
out into the brilliant sunshine.

"That is dear of you to remember Zermatt," she said. "Oh, Waldenech,
think of those great mountains still standing there in their silly rows
with their noses in the air. How frightfully fatiguing! And they all
used to look as if they were cuts with each other, and there they'll be
a thousand years hence, not having changed in the least. But I'm not
sure we don't have the better time scampering about for a few years,
and running in and out like mice, though we get uglier and older every
day. Look, there is poor John Sturgis coming towards us: let us quickly
go in the opposite direction. Ah, he has seen us!--Dear John, Nadine was
looking for you, I believe. I think she expected you to read something
to her after breakfast about Goths or Gothic architecture. Or was it
Bishop Algie you were talking to last night about cathedrals? One or the
other, I am sure. He said he so much enjoyed his talk with you."

Waldenech felt that Dodo was behaving exactly as she used to behave at
Zermatt. Somehow in his sluggish and alcoholic soul there rose
vibrations like those he had felt then.

"Talk to him or me, it does not matter," he said in German to her, "but
talk like that. That is what I want."

Dodo gave him one glance of extraordinary meaning. This little muttered
speech strangely reminded her of the pæan in the thrush's song at dawn.
It recalled a poignancy of emotion that belonged to days long past, but
the same poignancy of feeling was hers still. She could easily feel and
habitually felt, in spite of her forty and more years, the mere
out-bubbling of life that expressed itself in out-bubbling speech. She
also rather welcomed the presence of a third party: it was easier for
her to bubble to anybody rather than to Waldenech. She buttonholed the
perfectly willing John.

"Bishop Algie is such a dear, isn't he?" she said. "He is accustomed
not to talk at all, and so talking is a treat to him, and he loved you.
He is taking a cinematograph show, all about the Acts of the Apostles,
round the country next autumn to collect funds for Maud's orphanage. The
orphanage is already built, but there are no orphans. I think the money
he collects is to get orphans to go there, scholarships I suppose. He
made all his friends group themselves for scenes in the acts, and he is
usually St. Paul. There is a delicious shipwreck where they are tying up
the boat with rug-straps and ropes. He had it taken in the bay here, and
it was extremely rough, which made it all the more realistic because
dear Algie is a very bad sailor and while he was being exceedingly
unwell over the side, his halo fell off and sank."

"We did not talk about the Acts of the Apostles last night," said John
firmly, "we talked about Gothic architecture, and Piccadilly, and
Wagner."

"But how entrancing," said Dodo. "I particularly love Siegfried because
it is like a pantomime. Do you remember when the dragon comes out of his
cave looking exactly like Paddington station, with a red light on one
side and a green one on the other, and a quantity of steam, and
whistlings, and some rails? Then afterwards a curious frosty female
appears suddenly in the hole of a tree and tells Wotan that his spear
ought to be looked to before he fights. Waldenech, we went together to
Baireuth, and you snored, but luckily on the right note, and everybody
thought it was Fafner. John, I was sitting in my window at dawn this
morning, and all the birds in the world began to sing. It made me feel
so common. Nobody ought to see the dawn except the birds, and I suppose
the worms for the sake of the birds."

Waldenech turned to her, and again spoke in German. "You are still
yourself," he said. "After all these years you are still yourself."

Dodo's German was far more expressive than his, it was also ludicrously
ungrammatical, and intensely rapid.

"There are no years," she said. "Years are only an expression used by
people who think about what is young and what is old. Every one has his
essential age, and remains that age always. This man is about sixty, the
age of his mother."

John Sturgis smiled in a kind and superior manner.

"Perhaps I had better tell you that I know German perfectly," he said.
"Also French and Italian, in case you want to say things that I shan't
understand."

Dodo stared for a moment, then pealed with laughter.

"Darling John," she said, "I think that is too nice of you. If you were
nasty you would have let me go on talking. Isn't my German execrable?
How clever of you to understand it! But you are old, aren't you? Of
course it is not your fault, nor is it your misfortune, since all ages
are equally agreeable. We grow up into our ages if we are born old, and
we grow out of them, like missing a train, if our essential age is
young. When you are eighty, you will still be sixty, which will be
delightful for you. I make plans for what I shall be when I am old, but
I wonder if I shall be able to carry them out. When I am old, I shall
be what I shall be, I suppose. The inevitable doesn't take much notice
of our plans, it sits there like the princess on the top of the
glass-hill while we all try, without the slightest success, to get at
it. Ah, my dear Waldenech, there is the motor come round for you. You
will have to start, because I have at last trained my chauffeur to give
one no time to wait at the station, and you must not jilt the
compartment I have engaged you to. It will get to London all alone: so
bad for a young compartment."

He made no further attempt to induce her to let him stop, and Dodo, with
a certain relief of mind, saw him drive off and blew a large quantity of
kisses after him.

"He was such a dear about the year you were born, John," she said, "but
you are too old to remember that. Now I must be Martha, and see the cook
and all the people who make life possible. Then I shall become Mary
again and have a delicious bathe before lunch. Certainly the good part
is much the pleasantest, as is the case always at private theatricals. I
think we must act this evening: we have not had charades or anything for
nearly two days."

       *       *       *       *       *

John, like most prigs, was of a gregarious disposition, and liked that
his own superiority of intellect, of which he was so perfectly
conscious, should be made manifest to others and, literally, he could
not imagine that Dodo should not seem to prefer burying herself in
household affairs when he was clearly at leisure to converse with her.
He did not feel himself quite in tune with the younger members of the
party, and sometimes wondered why he had come here. That wonder was
shared by others. His tediousness in ordinary intercourse was the
tediousness of his genus, for he always wanted to improve the minds of
his circle. Unfortunately he mistook quantity of information for quality
of mind, and thought that large numbers of facts, even such low facts as
dates, held in themselves the germ of culture. But since, at the present
moment, Dodo showed not the smallest desire to profit by his leisure, he
wandered off to the tennis-courts, where he had reason to believe he
should find companions. His faith was justified, for there was a rather
typical party assembled. Berts and Hugh were playing a single, while
Esther was fielding tennis-balls for them. They were both admirable
performers, equally matched and immeasurably active. At the moment
Esther standing, as before Ahasuerus, with balls ready to give to Berts,
had got in his way, and he had claimed a let.

"Thanks awfully, Esther," he said, as he took a couple of balls from
her, "but would you get a little further back? You are continually
getting rather in my way."

"Oh, Berts, I'm so sorry," she said. "You are playing so well!"

"I know. Esther was in the light, Hugh."

"Oh rather, lot, of course," said Hugh.

Nadine took no active share. She was lying on the grass at the side of
the court with Tommy, and was reading "Pride and Prejudice" aloud. When
Esther had a few moments to spare she came to listen. John joined the
reading party, and wore an appreciative smile.

Nadine came to the end of a chapter.

"Yes, Art, oh, great Art," she said, shutting the book, "but I am not
enchained. It corresponds to Madame Bovary, or the Dutch pictures. It is
beautifully done; none but an artist could have done it. But I find a
great deal of it dull."

John's smile became indulgent.

"Ah, yes," he said, "but what you call dull, I expect I should call
subtle. Surely, Nadine, you see how marvelous."

Esther groaned.

"John, you make me feel sick," she began.

"Balls, please," said Hugh.

Esther sprang up.

"Yes, Hugh, I'll get them," she said. "Aren't those two marvelous?" she
added to Nadine.

"John is more marvelous," said Nadine. "John, I wish you would get drunk
or cheat at cards. It would do you a world of good to lose a little of
your self-respect. You respect yourself far too much. Nobody is so
respectable as you think yourself. We were talking of you last night: I
wish you had been there to hear; but you had gone to bed with your
camomile tea. Perhaps you think camomile tea subtle also, whereas I
should only find it dull."

"I think you are quibbling with words," he said. "But I, too, wish I had
heard you talking last night. I always welcome criticism so long as it
is sincere."

"It was quite sincere," said Nadine, "you may rest assured. It was
unanimous, too; we were all agreed."

John found this not in the least disconcerting.

"I am not so sure that it matters then," he said. "When several people
are talking about one thing--you tell me you were talking about me--they
ought to differ. If they all agree, it shows they only see one side of
what they are discussing."

Nadine sat up, while Tommy buried his dissipated face in his hands.

"We only saw one side of you," she said, "and that was the obvious one.
You will say that it was because we were dull. But since you like
criticism you shall know. We all thought you were a prig. Esther said
you would be distressed if we thought differently. She said you like
being a prig. Do tell me: is it pleasant? Or I expect what I call prig,
you call cultured. Are you cultured?"

Tommy sat up.

"Come and listen, Esther," he shouted. "Those glorious athletes can pick
up the balls themselves for a minute."

Esther emerged from a laurel bush triumphant with a strayed reveler.

"Oh, is Nadine telling John what she thinks?" she asked.

"Nadine is!" said Tommy.

Nadine meantime collected her thoughts. When she talked she ascertained
for herself beforehand what she was going to say. In that respect she
was unlike her mother, who ascertained what she thought when she found
herself saying it. But the result in both cases had the spontaneous
ring.

"John, somehow or other you are a dear," she said, "though we find you
detestable. You think, anyhow. That gives you the badge. Anybody who
thinks--"

Hugh, like Mr. Longfellow with his arrow, flung his racquet into the
air, without looking where it went. He had a moment previously sent a
fast drive into the corner of the court, which raised whitewash in a
cloud, and won him the set.

"Nadine, are you administering the oath of the clan?" he said. "You
haven't consulted either Berts or me."

Nadine looked pained.

"Did you really think I was admitting poor John without consulting you?"
she said. "Though he complies with the regulations."

Hugh, streaming with the response that a healthy skin gives to heat,
threw himself down on the grass.

"I vote against John!" he said. "I would sooner vote for Seymour. And I
won't vote for him. Also, it is surely time to go and bathe."

"I don't know what you are all talking about," said John. "I daresay it
doesn't matter. But what is the clan?"

Hugh sat up.

"The clan is nearly prigs," he said, "but not quite. But you are, quite.
We are saved because we do laugh at ourselves--"

"And you are not saved because you don't," added Nadine.

"And is the whole object of the clan to think?" asked John.

"No, that is the subject. Also you speak as if we all had said, 'Let
there be a clan, and it was so,'" said Nadine. "You mustn't think that.
There was a clan, and we discovered it, like Newton and the orange."

"Apple, surely," said John.

Nadine looked brilliantly round.

"I knew he would say that," she said. "You see you correct what I say,
whereas a clansman would be content to understand what I mean."

"Bishop Algie is clan, by the way," said Hugh. "I went down to bathe
before breakfast, and found him kneeling down on the beach saying his
prayers. That is tremendously clannish."

"I don't see why," said John.

Esther sighed.

"No, of course you wouldn't see," she said.

"Try him with another," said Nadine.

Esther considered.

"Attend, John," she said. "When the last Stevenson letters came out,
Berts bought them and looked at one page. Then he took a taxi to
Paddington and took a return ticket to Bristol."

"Swindon," said Berts.

"The station is immaterial, so long as it was far away. I daresay
Swindon is quite as far as Bristol."

John smiled.

"There you are quite wrong," he said. "Swindon comes before Bath, and
Bristol after Bath. No doubt it does not matter, though it is as well to
be accurate."

Esther looked at him with painful anxiety.

"But don't you see why Berts went to Swindon or Bristol?" she said.
"Poor dear, you do see now. That is hopeless. You ought to have felt. To
reason out what should have been a flash, is worse than not to have
understood at all."

John, again like all other prigs, was patient with those not so gifted
as himself.

"I daresay you will explain to me what it all amounts to," he said. "All
I am certain of is that Berts wanted to read Stevenson's letters and so
got into a train, where he would be undisturbed. Wouldn't it have
answered the same purpose if he had taken a room at the Paddington
hotel?"

Nadine turned to Berts.

"Oh, Berts, that would have been rather lovely," she said.

"Not at all," said he. "I wanted the sense of travel."

John got up.

"Then I should have recommended the Underground," he said. "You could
have gone round and round until you had finished. It would have been
much cheaper."

Nadine waved impotent arms of despair.

"Now you have spoiled it," she said. "There was a possibility in the
Paddington hotel, which sounds so remote. But the Underground! You might
as well say, why do I bathe, I who cannot swim? I can get clean in a
bath, though I only get dirty in the sea, and if I want the salt I can
put Tiddle-de-wink salt or whatever the name is in my bath--"

"Tidman," said John.

"I am sure you are right, though who cares? I am knocked down by cold
waves, I am cut by stones on my soles. I am pinched by crabs and
_homards_, at least I think I am; the wind gnaws at my bones, and my
hair is as salt as almonds. Between my toes is sand, and bits of seaweed
make me a plaster, and my stockings fall into rock-pools, but do I go
with rapture to have a bath in the bathroom? I hate washing. There is
nothing so sordid as to wash my face, except to brush my teeth. But to
bathe in the sea makes me think: it gives me romance. Poor John, you
never get romance. You amass information, and make a Blue Book. But we
all, we make blue mountains, which we never reach. If we reached them
they would probably turn out to be green. As it is, they are always
blue, because they are beyond. It is suggestion that we seek, not
attainment. To attain is dull, to aspire is the sugar and salt of life.
Don't you see? To realize an ideal is to lose the ideal. It is like a
man growing rich: he never sees his sovereigns: when he has gained them
he flings them forth again into something further. If he left them in a
box, the real sovereigns, under his bed, what chance would there be for
him to grow rich? But out they go, he never uses them, except that he
makes them breed. It is the same with the riches of the mind. An idea,
an ideal is yours. Do you keep it? Personally you do. But we, no. We
invest it again. It is to our credit, at this bank of the mind. We do
not hoard it, and spend it piecemeal. We put it into something else.
What I have perceived in music, I put into plays: what I have perceived
in plays I put into pictures. I never let it remain at home. But when I
shall be a millionaire of the mind, what, what then? Yes, that makes me
pause. Perhaps it will all be converted, as they convert bonds, is it
not, and I shall put it all into love. Who knows, La-la."

Nadine paused a moment, but nobody spoke. Hugh was watching her with the
absorption that was always his when she was there. But after a moment
she spoke again.

"We talk what you call rot," she said. "But it is not rot. The people
who always talk sense arrive at less. There are sparks that fly, as when
you strike one flint with another. Your English philosophers--who are
they?--Mr. Chesterton I suppose, is he not a philosopher?--or some
Machiavelli or other, they sit down soberly to think, and when they have
thought they wrap up their thought in paradox, as you wrap up a pill for
your dog, so that he swallows it, and his inside becomes bitter. That is
not the way. You must start with pure enjoyment, and when a thought
comes, you must fling it into the air. They hit a bird, or turn into a
rainbow, or fall on your head--but what matter? You others sit and
think, and when you have thought of something you put it in a beastly
book, and have finished with it. You prigs turn the world topsy-turvy
that way. You do not start with joy, and you go forth in a slough of
despondent information. Ah, yes: the child who picks up a match and rubs
it against something and finds it catches fire removes the romance of
the match, more than Mr. Bryant and May and Boots is it? who made the
match. Matches are made on earth, but the child who knows nothing about
them and strikes one is the person who is in heaven. You are not content
with the wonder and romance of the world, you prefer to explain the
rainbow away instead of looking at it. It is a sort of murder to explain
things away: you kill their souls, and demonstrate that it is only
hydrogen."

She looked up at Hugh.

"We talked about it last night," she said. "We settled that it was a
great misfortune to understand too well--"

A footman arrived at this moment with a telegram which he handed to
Berts, who opened it. He gave a shout of laughter and passed it to
Nadine.

"What shall I say?" he asked.

"But of course 'yes,'" she said. "It is quite unnecessary to ask Mama."

Berts scribbled a couple of words on the reply-paid form.

"It's only my mother," he said in general explanation. "She wants to
come over for a day or two, and see Aunt Dodo again, but she doesn't
feel sure if Aunt Dodo wants to see her. Are you sure there's a room,
Nadine?"

"There always is some kind of room," said Nadine. "She can sleep in
three-quarters of my bed, if not."

"I'm so glad she is tired of being a silly ass, as we settled she was
last night," said Berts. "Perhaps I ought to ask Aunt Dodo, Nadine."

"Pish-posh," said Nadine.

John got up, and prig-like had the last word.

"I see all about the clan," he said. "You have a quantity of vague
enthusiasm, and a lack of information. You swim like jelly-fish without
any sense of direction, and admire each other."

Nadine considered this.

"I do see what he means," she said.

"And don't live what you mean," added John.




CHAPTER III


This sojourn at Meering in the month of June, when London and its
diversions were at their midmost, was Nadine's plan. Whatever Nadine was
or was not, she was not a _poseuse_, and her contention that it was a
waste of time to spend all day in talking to a hundred people who did
not really matter, and in dancing all night with fifty of them, was
absolutely genuine.

"As long as anything amuses you," she had said, "it is not waste of
time; but when you begin to wonder if it really amuses you, it shows
that it does not. Darling Mama, may I go down to Meering for a week or
ten days? I do not want any one to come, but if anybody likes to come,
we might have a little cheerful party. Besides it is Coronation next
week, and great _corvée_! I think it is likely that Esther would wish to
escape and perhaps one or two others, and it would be enchanting at
Meering now. It would be a rest cure; a very curious sort of rest, since
we shall probably never cease bathing and talking and reading. But
anyhow we shall not be tired over things that bore us. That is the true
fatigue. You are never tired as long as you are interested, but I am not
interested in the Coronation."

Nadine's solitary week had proved in quality to be populous, and in
quantity to exceed the ten days, and it was already beginning to be
doubtful if July would see any of them settled in London again. Dodo's
house in Portman Square had been maintained in a state of habitableness
with a kitchen-maid to cook, and a housemaid to sweep, and a footman to
wait, and a chauffeur to drive, and an odd man to do whatever the other
servants didn't, and occasionally one or two of the party made a brief
excursion there for a couple of nights, if any peculiar attraction
beckoned. The whole party had gone up for a Shakespeare ball at the
Albert Hall, but had returned next day, and Dodo had hurried to St.
Paul's Cathedral to attend a thanksgiving service, especially since she,
on leaving London, had taken a season ticket, being convinced she would
be continuously employed in rushing up and down. Subsequently she had
defrauded the railway-company by lending it, though strictly
non-transferable, to any member of the party who wished to make the
journey, with the result that Bertie had been asked by a truculent
inspector whether he was really Princess Waldenech. His passionate
denial of any such identity had led to a lesser frequency of these
excursions.

Nadine with the same sincerity had mapped out for herself a course of
study at Meering, and she read Plato every afternoon in the original
Greek, with an admirable translation at hand, from three o'clock till
five. During these hours she was inaccessible, and when she emerged
rather flushed sometimes from the difficulty of comprehending what some
of the dialogues were about, she was slightly Socratic at tea, and
tried to prove, as Dodo said, that the muse of Mr. Harry Lauder was the
same as the muse of Sir George Alexander, and that she ought to be rude
to Hugh if she loved him. She was extremely clear-headed in her reason,
and referred them to the Symposium and the dialogue on Lysis, to prove
her point. But as nobody thought of contradicting her, since the
Socratic mood soon wore off, they did not attempt to find out the
Hellenic equivalents for those amazing doctrines.

She was markedly Socratic this afternoon, when the whole party were
having tea on the lawn. Esther and Bertie had been down to bathe after
lunch, and since everybody was going to bathe again after tea, they had
left their clothes behind different rocky screens above the probable
high-water level on the beach, and were clad in bathing-dress,
moderately dried in the sun, with dressing-gowns above. Berts had
nothing in the shape of what is called foot-gear on his feet, since it
was simpler to walk up barefoot, and he was wriggling his toes, one
after the other, in order to divest them of an excess of sand.

"But pain and pleasure are so closely conjoined," said Nadine, in answer
to an exclamation of his concerning stepping in a gorse-bush. "It hurts
you to have a prickle in your foot, but the pleasure of taking it out
compensates for the pain!"

"That's Socratic," said Hugh, "when they took off his chains just before
they hemlocked him. You didn't think of that, Nadine."

"I didn't claim to, but it is quite true. There is actual pleasure in
the cessation of pain. If you are unhappy and the cause of your
unhappiness is removed, your happiness is largely derived from the fact
that you were unhappy. For instance, did you ever have a fish-bone stick
in your throat, Hugh?"

"As a matter of fact, never," said Hugh. "But as I am meant to say
'yes,' I will."

"And did you cough?"

"Violently," said Hugh.

"Upon which the fish-bone returned to your mouth?"

"No," said Hugh. "I swallowed it. It never returned at all."

"It does not matter which way it went," said Nadine; "but your feeling
of pleasure at its going was dependent on the pain which its sticking
gave you."

"Is that all?" said Hugh.

"Does it not seem to you to be proved?"

"Oh, yes. It was proved long ago. But it's a pedantic point. The sort of
point John would have made."

He absently whistled the first two lines of "Am Stillen Herd," and
Nadine was diverted from her Platonisms.

"Ah, that is so much finer than the finished 'Preislied,'" she said; "he
has curled and oiled his verse like an Assyrian bull. He and Sachs had
cobbled at it too much: they had brushed and combed it. It had lost
something of springtime and sea-breeze. A finished work of art has
necessarily less quality of suggestiveness. Look at the Leonardo
drawings. Is the 'Gioconda' ever quite as suggestive? I am rather glad
it was stolen. I think Leonardo is greater without it."

John drew in his breath in a pained manner.

"'Mona Lisa' was the whole wonder of the world," he said. "I had sooner
the thief had taken away the moon. Do you remember--perhaps you didn't
notice it--the painting of the circle of rock in which she sat?"

"You are going to quote Pater," said Nadine. "Pray do not: it is a
deplorable passage, and though it has lost nothing by repetition--for
there was nothing to lose--it shows an awful ignorance of the spirit of
the Renaissance. The eyelids are not a little weary: they are a little
out of drawing only."

Esther looked across at Berts.

"Berts is either out of drawing," she said, "or else his dressing-gown
is. I think both are: he is a little too long, and also the
dressing-gown is too short. They ought to proceed as far as the ankles,
but Berts' got a little weary at his knees."

"I barked my knees on those foul rocks," said Berts, examining those
injured joints.

"Barking them is worse than biting them," said Nadine.

"I never bite my knees," said he. "It is a greedy habit. Worse than
doing it to your nails."

"If you are not careful you will talk nonsense," said Nadine.

"I don't agree. If you are not careful you can't talk nonsense. If you
want to talk nonsense, you've not got to be not careful."

"There are too many 'nots,'" remarked Nadine.

"Not at all. If you are careless some sort of idea creeps into what you
say, and it ceases to be nonsense. There are lots of creeping ideas
about like microbes, any of which spoil it. Hardly anybody can be really
meaningless for five minutes. That is why the Mad Tea Party is a supreme
work of art: you can't attach the slightest sense to anything that is
said in it."

"The question is what you mean by nonsense," said Nadine. "Is it what
Mr. Bernard Shaw writes in his plays, or what Mrs. Humphry Ward writes
in her books? They neither mean anything but they are not at all alike.
In fact they are as completely opposed to each other as sense is to
nonsense."

Berts threw himself back on the turf.

"True," he said. "But they are neither of them nonsense. The lame and
the halt and the blind ideas creep into both. They both talk sense
mortally wounded."

Esther gave her appreciative sigh.

"Oh, Berts, how true!" she said. "I went to a play by Mrs. Humphry Ward
the other day, or else I read a book by Bernard Shaw, I forget which,
and all the time I kept trying to see what the sense of it had been
before it had its throat cut. But no one ever tried to see what Alice in
Wonderland meant, or what Aunt Dodo means."

"Mama is wonderful," said Nadine. "She lives up to what she says, too.
Her whole life has been complete nonsense. I do hope Jack will persuade
her to do the most ridiculous thing of all, and marry him."

"Is that why he is coming?" asked Esther.

"Oh, I hope so. It would be _the_ greatest and most absurd romance of
the century."

Hugh was eating sugar meditatively out of the sugar basin.

"I don't see that you have any right to lay down the law about nonsense,
Nadine," he said. "You are constantly reading Plato, and making
arguments, which are meant to be consecutive."

"I do that to relax my mind," said Nadine. "Berts is quite right.
Nonsense is not the absence of sense, but the negative of sense, just as
sugar is the negative of salt. To get non-salt with your egg, you must
eat sugar with it, not only abstain from salt."

"You will get a remarkably nasty taste," remarked John.

"Dear John, nobody ever wronged you so much as to suggest that you would
like nonsense. When was Leonardo born? And how old was he when he died?
And how many golden crowns did Francis of France give him for the
'Gioconda'? Your mind is full of interesting facts. That is why you are
so tedious. You are like the sand they used to put on letters, which
instantly made it dry."

Berts got up.

"We will go and bathe again," he said, "and John shall remain on the
beach and look older than the rocks he sits among. The rocks by the way
are old red sandstone. They will blossom as the rose when Granite John
sits among them. His is the head on which all the beginnings of the
world have come, and he is never weary. Dear me, if I was not a
teetotaller I should imagine I was drunk. I think it is the sea. What a
heavenly time the man who stole the 'Gioconda' must have had. He just
took it away. I can imagine him going to the Abbey at the Coronation,
and taking away the King's crown. There is genius, and it is also
nonsense. It is pure nonsense to imagine going to the Louvre and taking
'la Gioconda' away."

"I wonder what he has done with it," said Nadine. "I think he must be a
jig-saw puzzle maniac, and have felt compelled to cut it up. Probably
the Louvre will receive bits of it by registered post. The nose will
come, and then some rocks, and then a rather weary eyelid. I think John
stole it: he was absorbed in jig-saw puzzles all morning. Now that seems
to me nonsense."

"Wrong again," said Berts. "When it is put together it is sense. If
people cut up the pictures and then threw the bits away, it might be
nonsense. But they keep the pieces and these become the picture again."

"The process of cutting it up is nonsense," said Nadine.

"Yes, and the process of putting it together is nonsense," said Esther.

"And the two make sense," said Berts. "Let's go and bathe. Nadine, take
down some proper book, and read to us in the intervals."

"'Pride and Prej?'" said Nadine.

"Oh, do you think so? Not good for the sea-shore. Why not 'Poems and
Ballads'?"

"John will be shocked," said Nadine.

"Not at all. He will be old red sandstone. I know Aunt Dodo has a copy.
I think Mr. Swinburne gave it her," said Esther.

"She may value it," said Nadine. "And it may fall into the sea."

"Not if you are careful. Besides, that would be rather suitable.
Swinburne loved the sea, and also understood it. I think his spirit
would like it, if a copy was drowned."

"But Mama's spirit wouldn't," said Nadine.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the moment of her mentioned name Dodo appeared at the long window of
the drawing-room that opened upon the lawn. Simultaneously there was
heard the buzz of a motor-car stopping at the front door just round the
corner.

"Oh, all you darlings," said Dodo, in the style of the 'Omnia opera,'
"are you going to bathe, or have you bathed? Berts, dear, we know that
above the knee comes the thigh, without your showing us. Surely there
are bigger dressing-gowns somewhere? Of course it does not matter: don't
bother, and you've got beautiful legs, Berts."

"Aren't they lovely?" said Esther. "They ought to be put in plaster of
Paris."

"But if you have bathed, why not dress?" said Dodo; "and if you haven't,
why undress at present?"

"Oh, but it's both," said Berts, "and so is Esther. We have bathed, and
are going to do it again, as soon as we've eaten enough tea."

Dodo looked appreciatively round.

"You refreshing children!" she said. "If I bathed directly after tea I
should turn blue and green like a bruise. I have wasted all afternoon in
looking at a box of novels from Melland's. I don't know what has
happened to the novelists: their only object seems to tell you about
utterly dull and sordid people. There is no longer any vitality in them:
they are like leaders in the papers, full of reliable information. One
instance shocked me: the heroine in 'No. 11 Lambeth Walk' went to
Birmingham by a train that left Euston at 2:30 P. M. and her ticket cost
nine shillings and twopence halfpenny. An awful misgiving seized me that
it was all true and I rang for an A.B.C. and looked out Birmingham. It
was so: there was a train at that hour and the tickets cost exactly
that."

"How wretched!" said Nadine in a pained voice.

"Darling, don't take it too much to heart. And one of those novels was
about Home Rule and another about Soap, and another about Tariff Reform,
and a fourth about Christianity, which was absolutely convincing. But
one doesn't go to a novel in order to learn Christianity, or
soap-making. One reads novels in order to be entertained and escape from
real life into the society of imaginary and fiery people. Another
one--"

Dodo stopped suddenly, as a man came out of the drawing-room window.
Then she held both her hands out.

"Ah, Jack," she said. "Welcome, welcome!"

       *       *       *       *       *

A very kind face, grizzled as to the hair and mustache, looked down on
her from its great height, a face that was wonderfully patient and
reasonable and trustworthy. Jack Chesterford wore his years well, but he
wore them all; he did not look to be on the summer side of forty-five.
He was spare still: life had not made him the unwilling recipient of the
most voluminous and ironic of its burdens, obesity, but his movements
were rather slow and deliberate, as if he was tired of the senseless
repetition of the days. But there seemed to be no irritation mingled
with his fatigue: he but yawned and smiled, and turned over fresh pages.

But at the moment, as he stood there with both Dodo's hands in his,
there was no appearance of weariness, and indeed it would have been a
man of dough who remained uninspired by the extraordinary perfection and
cordiality of her greeting. It was almost as if she welcomed a lover: it
was quite as if she welcomed the best of friends long absent. That she
had thought out the manner of her salutation, said nothing against its
genuineness, but she could have welcomed him quite as genuinely in other
modes. She had thought indeed of putting pathos, penitence, and
shamefacedness into her greeting: she could with real emotion to endorse
it have just raised her eyes to his and let them fall again, as if
conscious of the need of forgiveness. Or (with perhaps a little less
genuineness) she could have adopted the matronly and 'too late'
attitude; but this would have been less genuine because she did not feel
at all matronly, or think that it was in the least 'too late.' But warm
and unmixed cordiality, with no consciousness of things behind, was
perhaps the most genuine and least complicated of all welcomes, and she
gave it.

She did not hold his hands more than a second or two, for Nadine and
others claimed them. But after a few minutes he and Dodo were alone
again together, for Jack declined the invitation to join the bathers, on
the plea of senility and feeling cold like David. Then when the noise of
their laughter and talk had faded seawards, he dropped the trivialities
that till now had engaged them, and turned to her.

"I have been a long time coming, Dodo," he said. "Indeed, I meant never
to come at all. But I could not help it. I do not think I need explain
either why I stopped away or why I have come now."

Apart from the perfectly authentic pleasure that Dodo felt in seeing her
old friend again, there went through her a thrill of delight at Jack's
implication of what she was to him. She loved to have that power over a
man; she loved to know how potent over him still was the spell she
wielded. In days gone by she had not behaved well to him; it would be
truer to acknowledge that she had behaved just as outrageously as was
possible for anybody not a pure-bred fiend. But he had come back. It was
unnecessary to explain why.

And then suddenly with the rush of old memories revived, memories of his
unfailing loyalty to her, his generosity, his unwearying
loving-kindness, her eyes grew dim, and her hands caught his again.

"Jack dear," she said, "I want to say one thing. I am sorry for all I
did, for my--my treachery, my--my damnedness. I was frightened: I have
no other excuse. And, my dear, I have been punished. But I tell you,
that what hurts most is your coming here--your forgiveness."

She had not meant to say any of this; it all belonged to one of the
welcomes of him which she had rejected. But the impulse was not to be
resisted.

"It is so," she said with mouth that quivered.

"Wipe it all out, Dodo," he said. "We start again to-day."

Dodo's power of rallying from perfectly sincere attacks of emotion was
absolutely amazing and quite unimpaired. Only for five seconds more did
her gravity linger.

"Dear old Jack," she said. "It is good to see you. Oh, Jack, the gray
hairs. What a lot, but they become you, and you look just as kind and
big as ever. I used to think it would be so dreadful when we were all
over forty, but I like it quite immensely, and the young generation are
such ducks, and I am not the least envious of them. But aren't some of
them weird? I wonder if we were as weird; I was always weirdish, I
suppose, and I'm too old to change now. But I've still got one defect,
though you would hardly believe it: I can't get enough into the day, and
I haven't learned how to be in two places at once. But I have just had
three telephone lines put into my house in town. Even that isn't
absolutely satisfactory, because the idea was to talk to three people at
once, and I quite forgot that I hadn't three ears. I really ought to
have been one of the people in the Central Exchange, who give you the
wrong number. You must feel really in the swim, if you are the
go-between of everybody who wants to talk to everybody else; but I
should want to talk to them all. Have you had tea? Yes? Then let us go
down to the sea, because I must have a bathe before dinner.--Oh, by the
way, Edith is coming to-night. I have not seen her yet. You and she were
the remnant of the old guard who wouldn't surrender, Jack, but went on
sullenly firing your muskets at me. I forgot Mrs. Vivian, but her
ear-trumpet seems to make her matter less."

       *       *       *       *       *

They went together across the lawn, which that morning had been so
sweetly bird-haunted, and down the steep hillside that led across the
sand-dunes to the sea. Here a mile of sands was framed between two bold
headlands that plunged steeply into the sea, and Jack and Dodo walked
along the firm, shining beach towards the huge boulders which had in
some remote cataclysm been toppled down from the cliff, and formed the
rocks than which John was so much older. Like brown amphibious sheep
with fleeces of seaweed they lay grazing on the sands, and dotted about
in the water, and from the end of them a long reef of cruel-forked rocks
jutted out a couple of hundred yards into the sea. Higher up on the
beach were more monstrous fragments, as big as cottages, behind which
the processes of dressing and undressing of bathers could discreetly and
invisibly proceed. Dodo had forgotten about this and talking rapidly was
just about to advance round one of them when an agonized trio of male
voices warned her what sight would meet her outraged eyes. The tide was
nearly at its lowest and but a little way out, at the side of the reef,
these rocks ended altogether, giving place to the wrinkled sand, and in
among them were delectable rock-pools with torpid strawberry-looking
anemones, and sideways-scuttling crabs with a perfect passion for
self-effacement, which, if effacement was impossible, turned themselves
into wide-pincered grotesques, and tried to make themselves look tall.
Bertie and Esther who were already prepared for the bathe were pursuing
marine excavations in one of these, and Dodo ecstatically pulled off her
shoes and stockings, one of which fell into the rock-pool in question.

"Oh, Jack, if you won't bathe you might at least paddle," she said.
"Berts, _do_ you see that very red-faced anemone? Isn't it like Nadine's
maid? Esther, do take care. There's an enormous crab crept under the
seaweed by your foot. Don't let it pinch you, darling: isn't cancer the
Latin for crab? It might give you cancer if it pinched you. Here are
the rest of them: I must go and put on my bathing-dress. It's in the
tent. I put up a tent for these children, Jack, at great expense, and
they none of them ever use it. Nadine, are you going to read to us all
in the water? Do wait till I come. What book is it? 'Poems and Ballads?'
And so suspiciously like the copy Mr. Swinburne gave me. Don't drop it
into the water more often than is necessary. You shall read us 'Dolores,
our Lady of Pain,' as we step on sharp rocks and are pinched by crabs.
How Mr. Swinburne would have liked to know that we read his poems as we
bathed. And there's that other delicious one 'Swallow, my Sister, oh,
Sister Swallow.' It sounds at first as if his sister was a pill, and he
had to swallow her. Jack, dear, you make me talk nonsense, somehow. Come
up with me as far as the tent, and while I get ready you shall converse
politely from outside. It is so dull undressing without anybody to talk
to."

       *       *       *       *       *

Jack, though cordially invited to take part in the usual Symposium in
Nadine's room that night at bed-time, preferred to go to his own, though
he had no intention of going to bed. He wanted to think, to ascertain
how he felt. He imagined that this would be a complicated process;
instead he found it extraordinarily simple. That there were plenty of
things to think about was perfectly true, but they all faced one way, so
to speak, one dominant emotion inspired them all. He was as much in love
with Dodo as ever. He did not, because he could not, consider how
cruelly she had wronged him: all that she had done was but a rush-light
in the mid-day sun of what she was. He was amazed at his stupidity in
letting a day, not to speak of a year, elapse without seeing her since
she was free again; it had been a wanton waste of twelve golden months
to do so. Often during these last two years, he had almost fancied
himself in love with Nadine; now he saw so clearly why. It was because
in face and corporal presence no less than in mind she reminded him so
often of what Dodo had been like. She reproduced something of Dodo's
inimitable charm: But now that he saw the two together how utterly had
the image of Nadine faded from his heart. In his affection, in his
appreciation of her beauty and vitality she was still exactly where she
was, but out of the book of love her name had been quite blotted out.
Blotted out, too, were the years of his anger and the scars of a
bleeding heart, and years of indignant suffering. But he had never let
them take entire possession of him: in his immense soul there had ever
been alight the still, secret flame that no winds or tempests could make
to flicker. And to-day, at the sight of her, that flame had shot up
again, a beacon that reached to heaven.

Hard work had helped him all these years to keep his nature unsoured.
His great estates were managed with a care and consideration for those
who lived on his land, unequaled in England, and politically he had made
for himself a name universally respected for the absolute integrity of
which it was the guarantee. But all that, so it seemed to him now, had
been his employment, not his life. His life, all these years, had lain
like some enchanted and sleeping entity, waiting for the spell that
would awaken it again. Now the spell had been spoken.

For a moment his thought paused, wondering at itself. It seemed
incredible that he should be so weak, so wax-like. Yet that seemed to
matter not at all. He might be weak or wax-like, or anything else that a
man should not be, but the point was that he was alive again.

For a little he let himself drift back upon the surface of things. He
had passed a perfectly amazing evening. Edith Arbuthnot had arrived,
bringing with her a violinist, a viola-player and a 'cellist, but
neither maid nor luggage. Her luggage, except her golf-clubs and a chest
containing music (as she was only coming for a few days) was certainly
lost, but she was not sure whether her maid had ever meant to come, for
she could not remember seeing her at the station. So the violinist had
her maid's room and the viola-player and 'cellist, young and guttural
Germans, had quarters found for them in the village, since Dodo's
cottage was completely crammed. But they had given positively the first
performance of Edith's new quartette, and at the end the violinist had
ceremoniously crowned her with a wreath of laurels which he had picked
from the shrubbery before dinner. Then they went into wild ecstasies of
homage; and drank more beer than would have been thought possible, while
Edith talked German even more remarkably than Dodo, and much louder.
With her laurel wreath tilted rakishly over one ear, a mug of beer in
her hand, and wearing an exceedingly smart dinner-gown belonging to
Dodo, and rather large walking-boots of her own, since nobody else's
shoes would fit her, she presented so astounding a spectacle, that Jack
had unexpectedly been seized with a fury of inextinguishable laughter,
and had to go outside followed by Dodo who patted him on the back. When
they returned, Edith was lecturing about the music they had just heard.
Apparently it was impossible to grasp it all at one hearing, while it
was obviously essential that they must all grasp it without delay. In
consequence it was performed all over again, while she conducted with
her wreath on. There was more homage and more beer. Then they had had
charades by Dodo and Edith, and Edith sang a long song of her own
composition with an immense trill on the last note but one, which was
'Shake'; and her band played a quantity of Siegfried, while Dodo with a
long white beard made of cotton-wool was Wotan, and Edith truculently
broke her walking-stick, and that was 'Spear,' and they did whatever
they could remember out of Macbeth, which wasn't much, but which was
'Shakespeare.'

It was all intensely silly, but Jack knew that he had not laughed so
much during all those years which to-night had rolled away.

Then he left the surface and dived down into his heart again.... There
was no question of forgiving Dodo for the way in which she had treated
him: the idea of forgiveness was as foreign to the whole question as it
would have been to forgive the barometer for going down and presaging
rain. It couldn't help it: it was like that. But in stormy weather and
fine, in tempest and in the clear shining after rain, he loved Dodo.
What his chances were he could not at present consider, for his whole
soul was absorbed in the one emotion.

Jack, for all his grizzled hair and his serious political years, had a
great deal about him that was still boyish, and with the inconsistency
of youth having settled that it was impossible to think about his
chance, proceeded very earnestly to do so. The chance seemed a
conspicuously outside one. She had had more than one opportunity of
marrying him before, and had felt herself unable to take advantage of
it: it was very little likely that she would find him desirable now.
Twice already she had embarked on the unaccountable sea; both times her
boat had foundered. Once the sea was made, in her estimate, of
cotton-wool; the second time, in anybody's estimate, of amorous brandy.
It was not to be expected that she would experiment again with so
unexpected a Proteus.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meantime a parliament of the younger generation in Nadine's room were
talking with the frankness that characterized them about exactly the
same subject as Jack was revolving alone, for Dodo had gone away with
Edith in order to epitomize the last twenty years, and begin again with
a fresh twenty to-morrow.

"It is quite certain that it is Mama he wants to marry and not me,"
said Nadine. "I thought it was going to be me. I feel a little hurt,
like when one isn't asked to a party to which one doesn't want to go.

"You don't want to go to any parties," said Hugh rather acidly, "but I
believe you love being asked to them."

Nadine turned quickly round to him.

"That is awfully unfair, Hughie," she said in a low voice, "if you mean
what I suppose you do. Do you mean that?"

"What I mean is quite obvious," he said.

Nadine got up from the window-seat where she was sitting with him.

"I think we had all better go to bed," she said. "Hugh is being odious."

"If you meant what you said," he remarked, "the odiousness is with you.
It is bad taste to tell one that you feel hurt that the Ripper doesn't
want you to marry him."

Nadine was silent a moment. Then she held out her hand to him.

"Yes, you are quite right, Hugh," she said. "It was bad taste. I am
sorry. Is that enough?"

He nodded, and dropped her hand again.

"The fact is we are all rather cross," said Esther. "We haven't had a
look in to-night."

"Mother is quite overwhelming," said Berts. "She and Aunt Dodo between
them make one feel exactly a hundred and two years old, as old as John.
Here we all sit, we old people, Nadine and Esther and Hugh and I, and
we are really much more serious than they."

"Your mother is serious enough about her music," said Nadine. "And Jack
is serious about Mama. The fact is that they are serious about serious
things."

"Do you really think of Mother as a serious person with her large boots
and her laurel-crown?" asked Berts.

"Certainly: all that is nothing to her. She doesn't heed it, while we
who think we are musical can see nothing else. I couldn't bear her
quartette either, and I know how good it was. I really believe that we
are rotten before we are ripe. I except Hugh."

Nadine got up, and began walking up and down the room as she did when
her alert analytical brain was in grips with a problem.

"Look at Jack the Ripper," she said. "Why, he's living in high romance,
he's like a very nice gray-headed boy of twenty. Fancy keeping fresh all
that time! Hugh and he are fresh. Berts is a stale old man, who can't
make up his mind whether he wants to marry Esther or not. I am even
worse. I am interested in Plato, and in all the novels about social
reform and dull people who live in sordid respectability, which Mama
finds so utterly tedious."

Nadine threw her arms wide.

"I can't surrender myself to anybody or anything," she said. "I can be
cool and judge, but I can't get away from my mind. It sits up in a
corner like a great governess. Whereas Mama takes up her mind like one
of those flat pebbles on the shore and plays ducks and drakes with it,
throws it into the sea, and then really enjoys herself, lets herself
feel. If for a moment I attempt to feel, my mind gives me a poke and
says 'attend to your lessons, Miss Nadine!' The great Judy! If only I
could treat her like one, and take her out and throw brickbats at her.
But I can't: I am terrified of her; also I find her quite immensely
interesting. She looks at me over the top of her gold-rimmed spectacles,
and though she is very hard and angular yet somehow I adore her. I
loathe her you know, and want to escape, but I do like earning her
approbation. Silly old Judy!"

Berts gave a heavy sigh.

"What an extraordinary lot of words to tell us that you are an
intellectual egoist," he said. "And you needn't have told us at all. We
all knew it."

Nadine gave her hiccup-laugh.

"I am like the starling," she said. "I can't get out. I want to get out
and go walking with Hugh. And he can't get in. For what a pack of
miseries was _le bon Dieu_ responsible when he thought of the world."

"I should have been exceedingly annoyed if He had not thought of me,"
said Berts.

Nadine paused opposite the window-seat, where Hugh was sitting silent.

"Oh, Hugh," she said, speaking very low, "there is a real me somewhere,
I believe. But I cannot find it. I am like the poor thing in the
fairy-tale, that lost its shadow. Indeed I am in the more desperate
plight, I have got my shadow, but I have lost my substance, though not
in riotous living."

"For God's sake find it," he said, "and then give it me to keep safe."

She looked at him, with her dim smile that always seemed to him to mean
the whole world.

"When I find it, you shall have it," she said.

"And last night it was the moon you wanted," said he, "not yourself."

Nadine shrugged her shoulders.

"What would you have?" she said. "That was but another point of view. Do
not ask me to see things always from the same standpoint. And now, since
my mama and Berts have made us all feel old, let us put on our
night-caps and put some cold cream on our venerable faces and go to bed.
Perhaps to-morrow we shall feel younger."




CHAPTER IV


Seymour Sturgis (who, Berts thought, ought to have been drowned when he
was a girl) was employed one morning in July in dusting his jade. He
lived in a small flat just off Langham Place, with a large, capable,
middle-aged Frenchwoman, who worshiped the ground on which he so
delicately trod with the cloth-topped boots which she made so
resplendent. She cooked for him in the inimitable manner of her race,
she kept his flat speckless and shining, she valeted him, she did
everything in fact except dust the jade. Highly as Seymour thought of
Antoinette he could not let her do that. He always alluded to her as "my
maid," and used to take her with him, as valet, to country-houses. It
must, however, be added that he did this largely to annoy, and he
largely succeeded.

The room which was adorned by his collection of jade, seemed somehow
strangely unlike a man's room. A French writing-table stood in the
window with a writing-case and blotting-book stamped with his initials
in gilt; by the pen-tray was a smelling-bottle with a gold screw-top to
it. Thin lace blinds hung across the windows, and the carpet was of
thick fawn-colored fabric with remarkably good Persian rugs laid down
over it. On the chimney-piece was a Louis Seize garniture of clock and
candlesticks, and a quantity of invitation cards were stuck into the
mirror behind. There were half-a-dozen French chairs, a sofa, a
baby-grand, a small table or two, and a book-case of volumes all in
morocco dress-clothes. On the walls there were a few prints, and in
glazed cabinets against the wall was the jade. Nothing, except perhaps
the smelling-bottle, suggested a mistress rather than a master, but the
whole effect was feminine. Seymour rather liked that: he had very little
liking for his own sex. They seemed to him both clumsy and stupid, and
his worst enemies (of whom he had plenty) could not accuse him of being
either the one or the other. On their side they disliked him because he
was not like a man: he disliked them because they were.

But while he detested his own sex, he did not regard the other with the
ordinary feeling of a man. He liked their dresses, their perfumes, their
hair, their femininity, more than he liked them. He was quite as
charming to plain old ladies, even as Dodo had said, as he was to girls,
and he was perfectly happy, when staying in the country, to go a motor
drive with aunts and grandmothers. He had a perfectly marvelous
digestion; ate a huge lunch, sat still in the motor all afternoon, and
had quantities of buttered buns for tea. He dressed rather too carefully
to be really well-dressed and always wore a tie and socks of the same
color, which repeated in a more vivid shade the tone of his clothes. He
had a large ruby ring, a sapphire ring and an emerald ring: they were
worn singly and matched his clothes. He spoke French quite perfectly.

All these depressing traits naturally enraged such men as came in
contact with him, but though they abhorred him they could not openly
laugh at him, for he had a tongue, when he chose, of quite unparalleled
acidity, and was markedly capable of using it when required and taking
care of himself afterwards. In matters of art, he had a taste that was
faultless, and his taste was founded on real knowledge and technique, so
that really great singers delighted to perform to his accompaniment, and
in matters of jewelry he designed for Cartier. In fact, from the point
of view of his own sex, he was detestable rather than ridiculous, while
considerable numbers of the other sex did their very best to spoil him,
for none could want a more amusing companion, and his good looks were
quite undeniable. But somewhere in his nature there was a certain grit
which quite refused to be ground into the pulp of a spoiled young man.
In his slender frame, too, there were nerves of steel, and, most amazing
of all, when not better employed in designing for Cartier, or engaged in
bloodless flirtations, he was a first-class golfer. But he preferred to
go for a drive in the afternoon, and smoke a succession of rose-scented
cigarettes, which could scarcely be considered tobacco at all. He was
fond of food, and drank a good many glasses of port rather petulantly,
after dinner, as if they were medicine.

This morning he was particularly anxious that his jade should show to
advantage, for Nadine was coming to lunch with him, to ask his advice
about something which she thought was old Venetian-point lace. He had
taken particular pains also about the lunch: everything was to be _en
casserole_; there were eggs in spinach, and quails, and a marvelous
casseroled cherry tart. He could not bear that anything about him,
whether designed for the inside or the outside, should be other than
exquisite, and he would have been just as sedulous a Martha, if that
strange barbarian called Berts was coming, only he would have given
Berts an immense beefsteak as well.

The bell of his flat tinkled announcing Nadine. He did not like the
shrill treble bells, and had got one that made a low bubbling note like
the laugh of Sir Charles Wyndham; and Nadine came in.

"Enchanted!" he said. "How is Philistia?"

"Not being the least glad of you," she said. "I wish I could make people
detest me, as Berts detests you. It shows force of character. Oh,
Seymour, what jade! It is almost shameless! Isn't it shameless jade I
mean? Is any one else coming to lunch?"

"Of course not. I don't dilute you with other people; I prefer Nadine
neat. Now let's have the crisis at once. Bring out the lace."

Nadine produced a small parcel and unfolded it.

"Pretty," said he.

Then he looked at it more closely, and tossed it aside. "I hoped it was
more like Venetian point than that," he said. "It's all quite wrong:
the thread's wrong: the stitch is wrong: it smells wrong. Don't tell me
you've bought it."

"No, I shan't tell you," she said.

He took it up again and pondered.

"You got it at Ducane's," he said. "I remember seeing it. Well, take it
back to Ducane, and tell him if he sold it as Venetian, that he must
give you back your money. My dear, it is no wonder that these dealers
get rich, if they can palm off things like that. _C'est fini._--Ah, but
that is an exquisite aquamarine you are wearing. Those little diamond
points round it throw the light into it. How odd people usually are
about jewelry. They think great buns of diamonds are sufficient to make
an adornment. You might as well send up an ox's hind-leg on the table.
What makes the difference is the manner of its presentation. Who is that
lady who employs herself in writing passionate love-novels? She says on
page one that he was madly in love with her, on page two that she was
madly in love with him, on page three that they were madly in love with
each other, and then come some asterisks. (How much more artistic, by
the way, if they printed the asterisks and left out the rest! Then we
should know what it really was like.) You can appreciate nothing until
it is framed or cooked: then you can see the details. The poor lady
presents us with chunks of meat and informs us that they are amorous men
and women. I will write a novel some day, from the detached standpoint,
observing and noting. Then I shall go away, abroad. It is only
bachelors who can write about love. Do you like my tie?"

Seymour had a trick of putting expression into what he said by means of
his hands. He waved and dabbed with them: they fondled each other, and
then started apart as if they had quarreled. Sometimes one finger
pointed, sometimes another, and they were all beautifully manicured.
Antoinette did that, and as she scraped and filed and polished, he
talked his admirable French to her, and asked after the old home in
Normandy, where she learned to make wonderful soup out of carrots and
turnips and shin-bones of beef. At the moment she came in to announce
the readiness of lunch.

"Oh, is it lunch already?" said Nadine. "Can't we have it after half an
hour? I should like to see the jade."

"Oh, quite impossible," said he. "She has taken such pains. It would
distress her. For me, I should prefer not to lunch yet, but she is the
artist now. They are fragile things, Nadine, eggs in spinach. You must
come at once."

"How greedy you are," she said.

"For you that is a foolish thing to say. I am simply thinking of
Antoinette's pride. It is as if I blew a soap-bubble, all iridescent,
and you said you would come to look at it in ten minutes. You shall tell
me news: if you talk you can always eat. What has happened in
Philistia?"

Nadine frowned.

"You think of us all as Philistines," she said, "because we like
simple pleasures, and because we are enthusiastic."

"Ah, you mistake!" he said. "You couple two reasons which have nothing
to do with each other. To be enthusiastic is the best possible
condition, but you must be enthusiastic over what is worth enthusiasm.
Is it so lovely really, that Aunt Dodo has settled to marry the Ripper?
Surely that is a _rechauffée_. You wrote me the silliest letter about
it. Of course it does not matter at all. Much more important is that you
look perfectly exquisite. Antoinette, the spinach is _sans pareil_: give
me some more spinach. But it is slightly _bourgeois_ in Jack the R. to
have been faithful for so many years. It shows want of imagination, also
I think a want of vitality, only to care for one woman."

"That is one more than you ever cared for," remarked Nadine.

"I know. I said it was _bourgeois_ to care for one. There is a
difference. It is also like a troubadour. I am not in the least like a
troubadour. But I think I shall get married soon. It gives one more
liberty: people don't feel curious about one any more. English people
are so odd: they think you must lead a double life, and if you don't
lead the ordinary double life with a wife, they think you lead it with
somebody else and they get curious. I am not in the least curious about
other people: they can lead as many lives as a piano has strings for all
I care, and thump all the strings together, or play delicate arpeggios
on them. Nadine, that hat-pin of yours is simply too divine. I will eat
it pin and all if it is not Fabergé."

Nadine laughed.

"I can't imagine you married," she said. "You would make a very odd
husband."

"I would make a very odd anything," said he. "I don't find any
recognized niche that really fits me, whereas almost everybody has some
sort of niche. Indeed in the course of hundreds of years the niches,
that is the manners of life, have been evolved to suit the sorts of
types which nature produces. They live in rows and respect each other.
But why it should be considered respectable to marry and have hosts of
horrible children I cannot imagine. But it is, and I bow to the united
strength of middle-class opinion. But neither you nor I are really made
to live in rows. We are Bedouins by nature, and like to see a different
sunrise every day. There shall be another tent for Antoinette."

That admirable lady was just bringing them their coffee, and he spoke to
her in French.

"Antoinette, we start for the desert of Sahara to-morrow," he said. "We
shall live in tents."

Antoinette's plump face wrinkled itself up into enchanted smiles.

"_Bien, m'sieur_," she said. "_A quelle heure?_"

Nadine crunched up her coffee-sugar between her white teeth.

"You are as little fitted to cross the desert of Sahara as any one I
ever met," she said.

"I should not cross it: I should--"

"You would be miserable without your jade or your brocade and the sand
would get into your hair, and you would have no bath," she said. "But
every one who thinks has a Bedouin mind: it always wants me to go on and
find new horizons and get nearer to blue mountains."

"The matter with you is that you want and you don't know what you want,"
said he.

Nadine nodded at him. Sometimes when she was with him she felt as if she
was talking to a shrewd middle-aged man, sometimes to a rather affected
girl. Then occasionally, and this had been in evidence to-day, she felt
as if she was talking to some curious mixture of the two, who had a
girl's intuition and a man's judgment. Fond as she was of the friends
whom she had so easily gathered round her, gleeful as was the nonsense
they talked, serious as was her study of Plato, she felt sometimes that
all those sunny hours concerned but the surface of her, that, as she had
said before, the individual, the character that sat behind was not
really concerned in them. And Seymour, when he made mixture of his two
types, had the effect of making her very conscious of the character that
sat behind. He had described it just now in a sentence: it wanted it
knew not what.

"And I want it so frightfully," she said. "It is a pity I don't know
what it is. Because then I should probably get it. One gets what one
wants if one wants enough."

"A convenient theory," he said, "and if you don't get it, you account
for it by saying you didn't want it enough. I don't think it's true. In
any case the converse isn't; one gets a quantity of things which one
doesn't want in the least. Whereas you ought not to get, on the same
theory, the things you passionately desire not to have."

Nadine finished her sugar and lit a cigarette.

"Oh, don't upset every theory," she said. "I am really rather serious
about it."

He regarded her with his head on one side for a moment. "What has
happened is that somebody has asked you to do something, and you have
refused. You are salving your conscience by saying that he doesn't want
it enough, or you would not have refused."

She laughed.

"You are really rather uncanny sometimes," she said.

"Only a guess," he said.

"Guess again then: define," she said.

"The obvious suggestion is that Hugh has proposed to you again."

"You would have been burned as a witch two hundred years ago," said she.
"I should have contributed fagots. Oh, Seymour, that was really why I
came to see you. I didn't care two straws about the foolish lace. They
all tell me I had better marry Hugh, and I wanted to find somebody to
agree with me. I hoped perhaps you might. He is such a dear, you know,
and I should always have my own way: I could always convince him I was
right."

"Most girls would consider that an advantage."

"In that case I am not like most girls; I often wish I was. I wrote an
article a month or two ago about Tolstoi, and read it him, and he
thought it quite wonderful. Well, it wasn't. It was silly rot: I wrote
it, and so of course I know. It came out in a magazine."

"I read it," remarked Seymour in a strictly neutral voice.

"Well, wasn't it very poor stuff?" asked Nadine.

"To be quite accurate," said Seymour, "I only read some of it. I thought
it very poor indeed. If was ignorant and affected."

Nadine gave him an approving smile.

"There you are then! And with Hugh it would be the same in everything
else. He would always think what I did was quite wonderful. They say
love is blind, don't they? So much the worse for love. It seems to me a
very poor sort of thing if in order to love anybody you must lose, with
regard to her, any power of mind and judgment that you may happen to
possess. I don't want to be loved like that. I want people to sing my
praises with understanding, and sit on my defects also with discretion.
If I was perfectly blind too, I suppose it would be quite ideal to marry
him. But I'm not, and I'm not even sure that I wish I was. Again if Hugh
was perfectly critical about me, it would be quite ideal. It seems to me
you must have the same quality of love on both sides, or at any rate
the same quality of affection. People make charming marriages without
any love at all, if they have affection and esteem and respect for each
other."

They had gone back to the drawing-room and Seymour was handing pieces of
his most precious jade to Nadine, who looked at them absently and then
gave them back to him, with the same incuriousness as people give
tickets to be punched by the collector. This Seymour bore with
equanimity, for Nadine was interesting on her own account, and he did
not care whether she looked at his jade or not. But at this moment he
screamed loudly, for she put a little round medallion of exquisitely
carved yellow jade up to her mouth, as if to bite it.

"Oh, Seymour, I'm so sorry," she said. "I wasn't attending to your jade,
which is quite lovely, and subconsciously this piece appeared like a
biscuit. Tell me, do you like jade better than anything else? It is part
of a larger question, which is: 'Do you like things better than people?'
Personally I like people so far more than anything else in the world,
but I don't like any particular person nearly as much. I like them in
groups I suppose. If I married at all, I should probably be a
polyandrist. Certainly if I could marry four or five people at once, I
should marry them all. But I don't want to marry any one of them."

Seymour put the priceless biscuit back into its cabinet.

"Who," he asked, "are this quartette of fortunate swains?"

"Well, Hugh of course would be one," said she, "and I think Berts would
be another. And if it won't be a shock to you, you would be the third,
and Jack the R. would be the fourth. I should then have a variety of
interests: this would be the world and the flesh and the devil, and a
saint."

"St. Seymour," said he, as if trying how it sounded, like a Liberal peer
selecting his title.

"I am afraid you are cast for the devil," said Nadine candidly. "Berts
is the world because he thinks he is cynical. And Jack is the flesh--"

"Because he is so thin?"

"Partly. But also because he is so rich."

Seymour turned the key on his jade. This interested him much more. But
he had to make further inquiries.

"If every girl wanted four husbands," he said, "there wouldn't be enough
men to go round."

"Round what?" asked Nadine, still entirely absorbed in what she was
thinking.

"Round the marriageable females. Or does your plan include poly-womany,
whatever the word is, for men?"

"But of course. There are such lots of bachelors who would marry if they
could have two or three wives, just as there are such lots of girls who
would marry if they could have two or three husbands. All those laws
about 'one man, one wife' were made by ordinary people for ordinary
people. And ordinary people are in the majority. There ought to be a
small county set apart for ridiculous people, with a rabbit fence all
round it, and any one who could be certified to be ridiculous in his
tastes should be allowed to go and live there unmolested. That would be
much better than your plan of going to the Sahara with Antoinette. You
would have to get five householders to certify you as ridiculous, in
order to obtain admission. Then you would do what you chose within the
rabbit fence, but when you wanted to be what they call sensible again
you would come out, and be bound to behave like anybody else, as long as
you were out, under penalty of not being admitted again."

Seymour considered this.

"There's a lot in it," he said, "and there would be a lot of people in
the rabbit fence. I should go there to-morrow and never come out at all.
But a smaller county would be no use. I should start with Kent, not
Rutlandshire, and be prepared to migrate to Yorkshire. I accept the
position of one of your husbands."

"That is sweet of you. I think--"

He interrupted.

"I shall have some more wives," he said. "I should like a lunch wife and
a dinner wife. I want to see a certain kind of person from about mid-day
till tea-time."

"Is that a hint that it is time for me to go?" asked Nadine.

"Nearly. Don't interrupt. But then, if one is not in love with anybody
at all, as you are not, and as I am not, you want a perfectly different
kind of person in the evening. To be allowed only one wife, has evolved
a very tiresome type of woman; a woman who is like a general servant,
and can, so to speak, wait at table, cook a little, and make beds. You
look for somebody who, on the whole, suits you. It is like buying a
reach-me-down suit, which I have never done. It probably fits pretty
well. But if it is to be worn every day until you die, it must fit
absolutely. If it doesn't, there are fifty other suits that would do as
well."

"Translate," said Nadine.

"Surely there is no need. What I mean is that occasionally two people
are ideally fitted. But the fit only occurs intermittently: it is not
common. Short of that, as long as people don't blow their noses wrong,
or walk badly, or admire Carlo Dolci, or fail to admire Bach, so long,
in fact, as they do not have impossible tastes, any phalanx of a
thousand men can marry a similar phalanx of a thousand women, and be as
happy, the one with the other, as with any other permutation or
combination of the thousand. There is a high, big, tremulous, romantic
attachment possible, and it occasionally occurs. Short of that, with the
limitation about Carlo Dolci and Bach, anybody would be as happy with
anybody else, as anybody would be with anybody. We are all on a level,
except the highest of all, and the lowest of all. Life, not death, is
the leveler!"

"Still life is as bad as still death," said she.

Seymour groaned and waved his hands.

"You deserve a good scolding, Nadine, for saying a foolish thing like
that," he said. "You are not with your Philistines now. There is not
Esther here to tell you how marvelous you are, nor Berts to wave his
great legs and say you are like the moon coming out of the clouds over
the sea. I am not in the least impressed by a little juggling with words
such as they think clever. It isn't clever: it is a sort of parrot-talk.
You open your mouth and say something that sounds paradoxical and they
all hunt about to find some sense in it, and think they do."

Seymour got up and began walking up and down the room with his little
short-stepped, waggling walk. "It is the most amazing thing to me," he
said, "that you, who have got brains, should be content to score absurd
little successes with your dreadful clan, who have the most ordinary
intelligences. I love your Philistines, but I cannot bear that they
should think they are clever. They are stupid, and though stupid people
are excellent in their way, they become trying when they think they are
wise. You are not made wise by bathing all day in the silly salt sea,
and reading a book--"

"How did you know?" asked Nadine.

"I didn't: it is merely the sort of thing I imagine you do at Meering.
Aunt Dodo is different: there is no rot about Aunt Dodo, nor is there
about Hugh. But Esther, my poor sister, and the beautiful Berts!"

Nadine took up the cudgels for the clan.

"Ah, you are quite wrong," she said. "You do us no justice at all. We
are eager, we are, really: we want to learn, we think it waste of time
to spend all day and night at parties and balls. We are critical, and
want to know how and why. Seymour, I wish we saw more of you. Whenever I
am with you, I feel like a pencil being sharpened. I can make fine marks
afterwards."

"Keep them for the clan," he said. "No, I can't stand the clan, nor
could they possibly stand me. When Esther squirms and says, 'O Nadine,
how wonderful you are,' I want to be sick, and when I wave my hands and
talk in a high voice as I frequently do, I can see Berts turning pale
with the desire to kill me. Poor Berts! Once I took his arm and he
shuddered at my baleful touch. I must remember to do it again. Really, I
don't think I can be one of your husbands if Berts is to be another."

"Very well: I'll leave out Berts," said she.

"This is almost equivalent to a proposal," said Seymour in some alarm.

She laughed.

"I won't press it," she said. "And now I must go. Thanks for sharpening
me, my dear, though you have done it rather roughly. I am going down to
Meering again to-morrow: London is a mere rabble of colonels and
colonials. Come down if you feel inclined."

"God forbid!" said Seymour piously.

Nadine had spent some time with him, but long after she had gone
something of her seemed to linger in his room. Some subtle aroma of her,
too fine to be purely physical, still haunted the room, and the sound of
her detached crisp speech echoed in the chambers of his brain. He had
never known a girl so variable in her moods: on one day she would talk
nothing but the most arrant nonsense; on another, as to-day, there
mingled with it something extraordinarily tender and wistful; on a third
day she would be an impetuous scholar; on the fourth she threw herself
heart and soul (if she had a heart) into the gay froth of this London
life. Indeed "moods" seemed to be too superficial a word to describe her
aspects: it was as if three or four different personalities were lodged
in that slim body or directed affairs from the cool brain in that small
poised head. It would be scarcely necessary to marry other wives,
according to their scheme, if Nadine was one of them, for it was
impossible to tell even from minute to minute with which of her you were
about to converse, or which of her was coming down to dinner. But all
these personalities had the same vivid quality, the same exuberance of
vitality, and in whatever character she appeared she was like some
swiftly acting tonic, that braced you up and, unlike mere alcoholic
stimulant, was not followed by a reaction. She often irritated him, but
she never resented the expression of his impatience, and above all
things she was never dull. And for once Seymour left incomplete the
dusting of the precious jade, and tried to imagine what it would be like
to have Nadine always here. He did not succeed in imagining it with any
great vividness, but it must be remembered that this was the first time
he had ever tried to imagine anything of the kind.

       *       *       *       *       *

Edith had left Meering with Dodo two days before and was going to spend
a week with her in town since she was rather tired of her own house. But
she had seen out of the railway-carriage window on the north coast of
Wales, so attractive-looking a golf-links, that she had got out with
Berts at the next station, to have a day or two golfing. The obdurate
guard had refused to take their labeled luggage out, and it was whirled
on to London to be sent back by Dodo on arrival. But Edith declared that
it gave her a sense of freedom to have no luggage, and she spent two
charming days there, and had arrived in London only this afternoon. She
had gone straight to Dodo's house, and had found Jack with her and then
learned the news of their engagement which had taken place only the day
before. Upon which she sprang up and remorselessly kissed both Dodo and
Jack.

"I can't help it if you don't like it," she said; "but that's what I
feel like. Of course it ought to have happened more than twenty years
ago, and it would have saved you both a great deal of bother. Dodo, I
haven't been so pleased since my mass was performed at the Queen's Hall.
You must get married at once, and must have some children. It will be
like living your life all over again without any of those fatal
mistakes, Dodo. Jack--I shall call you Jack now--Jack, you have been
more wonderfully faithful than anybody I ever heard of. You have seen
all along what Dodo was, without being put off by what she did--"

Dodo screamed with laughter.

"Are these meant to be congratulations?" she said. "It is the very
oddest way to congratulate a man on his engagement, by telling him that
he is so wise to overlook his future wife's past. It is also so pleasant
for me."

Edith was still shaking hands with them both, as if to see whether their
hands were fixtures or would come off if violently agitated.

"You know what I mean," she said. "It is useless my pretending to
approve of most things you have done: it is useless for Jack also. But
he marries the essential you, not a parcel of actions."

Jack kept saying "Thanks awfully" at intervals, like a minute gun, and
trying to get his hand away. Eventually Edith released it.

"I am delighted with you both," she said. "And to think that only a
fortnight ago I was still not on speaking terms with you, Dodo. And Jack
wasn't either. I love having rows with people if I know things are going
to come straight afterwards, because then you love them more than ever.
And I knew that some time I should have to make it up with you, Dodo,
though if I was Jack I don't think I could have forgiven--well, you
don't wish me to go on about that. Anyhow, you are ducks, and I shall
leave the young couple alone, and have a wash and brush-up. I have been
playing golf quite superbly."

       *       *       *       *       *

Edith banged the door behind her, and they heard her shrilly whistling
as she went off down the passages.

Then Dodo turned to Jack.

"Jack, dear, I thought I should burst when Edith kissed you," she said.
"You half shut your eyes and screwed up your face like a dog that is
just going to be whipped. But I love Edith. Now come and sit here and
talk. I have hardly seen you, since--well, since we settled that we
should see a good deal more of each other in the future. I want you to
tell me, oh, such lots of things. How often a month on the average have
you thought about me during all these years? Jack, dear, I want to be
wanted, so much."

"You have always been wanted by me," he said. "It is more a question of
how many minutes in the month I haven't thought about you. They are
easily counted."

He sat down on the sofa by her, as her hand indicated.

"Dodo," he said, "I don't make demands of you, except that you should be
yourself. But I do want that. We are all made differently: if we were
not the world would be a very stupidly simple affair. And you must know
that in one respect anyhow I am appallingly simple. I have never cared
for any woman except you. That is the fact. Let us have it out between
us just once. I have never worn my heart on my sleeve, for any woman to
pluck at, and carry away a mouthful of. There are no bits missing, I
assure you. It is all there, and it is all yours. It is in no way the
worse for wear, because it has had no wear. I feel as if--"

Jack paused a moment: he knew the meaning of his thought, but found it
not so easy to make expression of it.

"I feel as if I had been sitting all my life at a window in my heart,"
he said, "looking out, and waiting for you to come by. But you had to
come by alone. You came by once with my cousin. You came by a second
time with Waldenech. You were bored the first time, you were frightened
the second time. But you were not alone. I believe you are alone now: I
believe you look up to my window. Ah, how stupid all language is! As if
you looked up to it!"

Dodo was really moved, and when she spoke her voice was unsteady.

"I do look up to it, Jack," she said. "Oh, my dear, how the world would
laugh at the idea of a woman already twice married, having romance still
in front of her. But there is romance, Jack. You see--you see you have
run through my life just as a string runs through a necklace of pearls
or beads: beads perhaps is better--yet I don't know. Chesterford gave me
pearls, all the pearls. A necklace of pearls before swine shall we say?
I was swine, if you understand. But you always ran through it all, which
sounds as if I meant you were a spendthrift, but you know what I do
mean. Really I wonder if anybody ever made a worse mess of her life than
I have done, and found it so beautifully cleaned up in the middle. But
there you were--I ought to have married you originally: I ought to have
married you unoriginally. But I never trusted my heart. You might easily
tell me that I hadn't got one, but I had. I daresay it was a very little
one, so little that I thought it didn't matter. I suppose I was like the
man who swore something or other on the crucifix, and when he broke his
oath, he said the crucifix was such a small one."

She paused again.

"Jack, are you sure?" she asked. "I want you to have the best life that
you can have. Are you sure you give yourself the best chance with me? My
dear, there will be no syllable of reproach, on my lips or in my mind,
if you reconsider. You ought to marry a younger woman than me. You will
be still a man at sixty, I shall be just a thing at fifty-eight."

Dodo took a long breath and stood up.

"Marry Nadine," she said. "She is so like what I was: you said it
yourself. And she hasn't been battered like me. I think she would marry
you. I know how fond she is of you, anyhow, and the rest will follow. I
can't bear to think of you pushing my Bath chair. God knows, I have
spoiled many of your years. But, God knows, I don't want to spoil more
of them. She will give you all that I could have given you twenty years
ago. Ah, my dear, the years. How cruel they are! How they take away from
us all that we want most! You love children, for instance, Jack. Perhaps
I shall not be able to give you children. Nadine is twenty-one. That is
a long time ago. You should consider. I said 'yes' to you yesterday, but
perhaps I had not thought about it sufficiently. I have thought since.
Before you came down to Meering I was awake so long one night, wondering
why you came. I was quite prepared that it should be Nadine you wanted.
And, oh, how gladly I would give Nadine to you, instead of giving
myself: I should see: I should understand. At first I thought that I
should not like it, that I should be jealous, to put it quite frankly,
of Nadine. But somehow now that I know that your first desire was for
me, I am jealous no longer. Take Nadine, Jack! I want you to take
Nadine. It will be better. We know each other well enough to trust each
other, and now that I tell you that there will be nothing but rejoicing
left in my heart, if you want Nadine, you must believe that I tell you
the entire truth. I know very well about Nadine. She will not marry
Hugh. She wants somebody who has a bigger mind. She wants also to put
Hugh out of the question. She does not mean to marry him, and she would
like it to be made impossible. Woo Nadine, dear Jack, and win her. She
will give you all I could once have given you, all that I ought to have
given you."

At that moment Dodo was making the great renunciation of her life. She
had been completely stirred out of herself and she pleaded against her
own cause. She was quite sincere and she wanted Jack's happiness more
than her own. She believed even while she renounced all claim on him,
that her best chance of happiness was with him, for it had taken her no
time at all to make up her mind when he proposed to her yesterday. And
she had not exaggerated when just now she told him that he ran through
her life like a string that keeps the beads of time in place. She had
never felt for another man what she had felt for him, and her
declaration of his freedom was a real renunciation, made impulsively but
most generously and completely. She really meant it, and she did not
pause to consider that the offer was one of which no man could
conceivably take advantage. And Jack felt and knew her sincerity.

"You are absolutely free, my dear," she said. "Absolutely! And I will
come to your wedding, and dance at it if you like, for joy that you are
happy."

He got up too.

"There will be no wedding unless you come to it," he said. "Dance at it,
Dodo, but marry me. Nobody else will do."

Dodo looked him full in the face.

"Edith was quite right to remind you of--of what I have done," she said.

"And I am quite right to forget it," said he.

She shook her head, smiling a little tremulously.

"Oh, Jack," she said in a sigh.

He took her close to him.

"My beloved," he said, and kissed her.




CHAPTER V


Dodo's wedding, which took place at the end of July in Westminster
Abbey, was a very remarkable and characteristic affair. In the first
place she arrived so late that people began to wonder whether she was
going to throw Jack over again, this time at the very last moment. Jack
himself did not share these misgivings and stood at the west door rather
hot and shy but quite serene, waiting till his bride should come.
Eventually Nadine who was to have come with her mother appeared in a
taxi going miles above the legal limit, with the information that Dodo
was in floods of tears because she had been so horrible to Jack before,
and wanted to be so nice now. She said she would stop crying as soon as
she possibly could, but would Nadine ask Jack to be a dear and put off
the wedding till to-morrow, since her tears had made her a perfect
fright. On which the bridegroom took a card and wrote on it: "I won't
put off the wedding, and if you don't come at once, I shall go away. Do
be quick: there are millions and millions of people all staring."

"Oh, Jack, what a brute you are," said Nadine, as she read it, "I don't
think I can take it."

"You can and will," said he. "You will also take Dodo by the hand and
bring her here. Bring her, do you understand? Tell her that in twenty
minutes from now I shall go."

Somehow Dodo's marriage had seized the popular imagination, and the
Abbey was crammed, so also for half a mile were the pavements. The
traffic by the Abbey had been diverted, and all round the windows were
clustered with sight-seers. The choir was reserved for the more intimate
friends, and Bishop Algie who was to perform the ceremony was endorsed
by a flock of eminent clergy. The news that Dodo was in tears, but that
Nadine had been sent by the bridegroom to fetch her, traveled swiftly up
the Abbey, and a perfect babel of conversation broke out, almost
drowning the rather Debussy-like wedding march which Edith had composed
for the occasion. She had also written an anthem, "Thy wife shall be as
the fruitful vine," a highly original hymn-tune, and two chants for the
psalms written for full orchestra with percussion and an eight-part
choir. She had wanted to conduct the whole herself, and expressed her
perfect willingness to wear a surplice and her music-doctor's hood, and
keep on her cap or not, exactly as the dean preferred. But the dean
preferred that she should take no part whatever, beyond contributing the
whole of the music, which annoyed her very much, and several incisive
letters passed between them in which the topics of conventionalism,
Pharisees and cant were freely introduced. Edith had to give way, but
consoled herself by arranging that the whole of the "Marriage Suite"
should be shortly after performed at the Queen's Hall, where no dean or
other unenlightened person could prevent her conducting in any costume
she chose. But temporarily she had been extremely upset by this
ridiculous bigotry.

Dodo arrived before the twenty minutes were over, and she came up the
choir on Jack's arm, looking quite superb and singing Edith's hymn tune
very loud and occasionally incorrectly. She had just come opposite
Edith, who had, in default of conducting, secured a singularly prominent
position, when she sang a long bell-like B flat, and Edith had said "B
natural, Dodo," in a curdling, sibilant whisper. There were of course no
bridesmaids, but Dodo's train was carried by pages, both of whom she
kissed when they arrived at the end of their long march up the choir.
Mrs. Vivian, who on Dodo's engagement had finally capitulated, was next
to Edith, and Dodo said "Vivy, dear!" into her ear-trumpet, as she
passed up the aisle. Miss Grantham alone among the older friends was
absent: she had said from the beginning that it was dreadfully common of
Dodo to marry Jack, as it was a "lived-happily-ever-afterwards" kind of
ending to Dodo's unique experiences. She knew that they would both
become stout and serene and commonplace, instead of being wild and
unhappy and interesting, and to mark her disapproval, made an
appointment with her dentist at the hour at which the voice would be
breathing over Eden in the exceedingly up-to-date music which Edith had
composed. But so far from her dentist finding change and decay, he
dismissed her five minutes after she had sat down, and seized by a
sudden ungovernable fit of curiosity she drove straight off to the Abbey
to find that Dodo had not arrived, and it seemed possible that there
was a thrill coming, and everything might not end happily. But when it
became known that Dodo was only late for sentimental reasons, she left
again in disgust, and ran into Dodo at the west door, and said, "I am
disappointed, Dodo."

Dodo sang Edith's psalm with equal fervor, but thought it would be
egoistic to join in the anthem, since it was about herself. But she
whispered to Jack, "Jack, dear, it's much the most delicious marriage I
ever had. Hush, you must be grave because dear Algie is going to address
us. I hope he will give us a nice long sermon."

       *       *       *       *       *

The register was signed by almost everybody in the world, and there were
so many royalties that it looked at first as if everybody was going to
leave out their surnames. But the time of ambassadors and peers came at
last, and then it looked as if the fashion was to discard Christian
names. "In fact," said Dodo, "I suppose if you were much more royal than
anybody else, you would lose your Christian name as well, your Royal
Highness, and simply answer to Hie! or to any loud cry--Oh, are we all
ready again? We've got to go first, Jack. Darling, I hope you won't shy
at the cinematographs. I hear the porch is full of them, like Gatling
guns, and to-night you and I will be in all the music-halls of London.
Where are my ducks of pages? That's right: one on each side. Now give me
your arm, Jack. Here we go! Listen at Edith's wedding march! I wonder if
it's safe to play as loud as that in anything so old as the Abbey. I
should really be rather afraid of its falling down if Algie hadn't told
me not to be afraid with any amazement."

It took the procession a considerable time to get down the choir, since
Dodo had to kiss her bouquet (not having a hand to spare) to such an
extraordinary number of people. But in course of time they got out,
faced the battery of cameras and cinematograph machines, and got into
their car. Jack effaced himself in a corner, but Dodo bowed and smiled
with wonderful assiduity to the crowds.

"They have come to see us," she explained. "So it is essential that we
should look pleased to see them. I should so like to be the Queen, say
on Saturdays only, like the train you always want to go by on other days
in the week. Darling, can't you smile at them? Or put out your tongue,
and make a face. They would enjoy it hugely."

Eventually, as they got further away from the Abbey, it became clear to
Dodo that the people in the street were concerned with their own
businesses, and not hers, and she leaned back in the carriage.

"Oh, Jack," she said, "it is you and I at last. But I can't help talking
nonsense, dear. I only do it because I'm so happy. I am indeed. And
you?"

"It is morning with me," he said.

They left town that afternoon, though Dodo rather regretted that they
would not see themselves in the cinematograph to make sure that she had
smiled and that Jack's hair was tidy, and went down to Winston, Jack's
country place, where so many years ago Dodo had arrived before as the
bride of his cousin. He had wondered whether, for her sake, another
place would not be more suitable as a honeymoon resort, but she thought
the plan quite ideal.

"It will be like the renewal of one's youth," she said, "and I am going
to be so happy there now. Jack, we were neither of us happy when you
used to come to stay there before, and to go back like this will wipe
out all that is painful in those old memories, and keep all that isn't.
Is it much changed? I should so like my old sitting-room again if you
haven't made it something else."

"It is exactly as you left it," said he. "I couldn't alter anything."

Dodo slipped her hand into his.

"Did you try to, Jack?" she asked.

"Yes. I meant to alter it entirely: I meant to put away all that could
remind me of you. In fact, I went down there on purpose to do it. But
when I saw it, I couldn't. I sat down there, and--"

"Cried?" said Dodo softly, sympathetically.

"No, I didn't cry. I smoked a cigarette and looked round in a stupid
manner. Then I took out of its frame a big photograph of myself that I
had given you, in order to tear it up. But I put it back in its frame
again, and put the frame exactly where it was before."

Dodo gave a little moan.

"Oh, Jack, how you must have hated me!" she said.

"I hated what you had done: I hated that you could do it. But the other,
never. And, Dodo, let us never talk about all those things again, don't
let us even think of them. It is finished, and what is real is just
beginning."

"It was real all along," she said, "and I knew it was real all
along--you and me, that is to say--but I chose to tell myself that it
wasn't. I have been like the people who when they hear the scream of
somebody being murdered say it is only the cat. I have been a little
brute all my life, and in all probability it is past half-time for me
already; in fact it certainly is unless I am going to live to be ninety.
I'm not sure that I want to, and yet I don't want to die one bit."

"I should be very much annoyed if you ventured to do anything of the
sort," remarked Jack.

"Yes, and that is so wonderful of you. You ought to have wished me dead
a hundred times. What's the phrase? 'Yes, she would be better dead.'
Just now I want to be better without being dead. I often think we all
have a sort of half-time in our lives, like people in foot-ball matches,
when they stop playing and eat lemons. The lemons, you understand, are
rather sour reflections that we are no better than we might be, but a
great deal worse. And somehow that gives one a sort of a fresh start,
and we begin playing again."

       *       *       *       *       *

They arrived at Winston late in the afternoon; the village had turned
out to greet them, flags and arches made rainbow of the gray street with
its thatched houses and air of protected stability, and from the
church-tower the bells pealed welcome. Dodo, always impressionable and
impulsive, was tremendously moved, and with eyes brimming over, leaned
out of one side of the carriage and then the other to acknowledge these
salutations.

"Oh, Jack, isn't it dear of them?" she said. "Of course I know it's all
for you really, but you've endowed me with everything, and so this is
mine too. Look at that little duck whom that nice-faced woman is holding
up, waving a flag! Hark to the bells! Do you remember the poem by
Browning, 'The air broke into a mist with bells'? This is a positive
London fog of bells; can't you taste it? Is it the foghorns, in that
case, that make the fogs? And here we are at the lodge and there's the
lake, and the house! Ah, what a gracious thing a summer evening is. But
how fragile, Jack, and how soon over."

That wistful, underlying tenderness in her nature, almost melancholy but
wholly womanly, rose for the moment to the surface. It was not the less
sincere because it was seldom in evidence. It was as truly part of her
(and a growing part of her) as her brilliant enjoyment and
_insouciance_. And the expression of it gleamed darkly in her soft brown
eyes, as she leaned back in the carriage and took his hand.

"I will try to make you happy," she said.

He bent over her.

"Don't try to do anything, Dodo," he said. "Just--just be."

For a moment a queer little qualm came over her. Had she followed her
immediate impulse, she would have said, "I don't know how to love like
that. I have to try: I want to learn." But that would have done no
good, and in her most introspective moments Dodo was always practical.
The qualm lasted but a moment, as the door was opened, when they drew
up. But it lasted long enough to cause her to wonder whether it would be
the past that would be entered again instead of the future, entered,
too, not by another door, but by the same.

On the doorstep she paused.

"Lift me over the threshold, Jack," she said; "it is such bad luck for a
bride to stumble when she enters her home."

"My dear, what nonsense."

"Very likely, but let's be nonsensical. Let us propitiate all the gods
and demons. Lift me, Jack."

He yielded to her whim.

"That is dear of you," she said. "That was a perfect entry. Aren't I
silly? But no Austrian would ever dream of letting his wife walk over
the threshold for the first time. And--and that's all about Austria,"
she added rather hastily.

Dodo looked swiftly round the old, remembered hall. Opposite was the big
open fireplace round which they so often had sat, preferring its
wide-flaring homely comfort to the more formal drawing-rooms. To-day, no
fire burned there, for it was midsummer weather; but as in old times a
big yellow collie sprawled in front of it, grandson perhaps, so short
are the generations of dogs, to the yellow collies of the time when she
was here last. He, too, gave good omen, for he rose and stretched and
waved a banner of a tail, and came stately towards them with a
thrusting nose of welcome. The same pictures hung on the walls; high up
there ran round the palisade of stags' heads and Dodo (with a conscious
sense of most creditable memory) recognized the butler as having been
her first husband's valet. She also remembered his name.

"Why, Vincent," she said, holding out her hand, "It is nice to see
another old face. And you don't look one day older, any more than his
lordship does. Tea? Yes, let us have tea at once, Jack. I am so hungry:
happiness is frightfully exhausting, and I don't mind how exhausted I
am."

Suddenly Dodo caught sight of the portrait of herself which had been
painted when this house was for the first time her home.

"Oh, Jack, look at that little brute smiling there!" she said. "I was
rather pretty, though, but I don't think I like myself at all. Dear me,
I hope I'm not just the same now, with all the prettiness and youth
removed. I don't think I am quite, and oh, Jack, there's poor dear old
Chesterford. Ah, that hurts me; it gives me a bitter little heart-ache.
Would you mind, Jack, if--"

Jack felt horribly annoyed with himself in not having seen to this.

"My dear," he said, "it was awfully thoughtless of me. Of course, it
shall go. It was stupid, but, Dodo, I was so happy all this last month,
that I have thought of nothing except myself."

Dodo turned away from the picture to him.

"And all the time I thought you were thinking about me!" she said.
"Jack, what a deceiver!"

He shook his head.

"No: it is that you don't understand. You _are_ me.

"Am I? I should be a much nicer fellow if I was. Jack, don't have that
picture moved. It only hurt for a moment: it was a ghost that startled
me merely because I did not expect it. It is a dear ghost: it is not
jealous, it will not spoil things or come between us. It--it wants us to
be happy, for he told me, you know, it was the last thing he said--that
I was to marry you. It is a long time ago, oh, how long ago, though I
say it to my shame. Besides, if you are to pull down or put away all
that reminds me of that dreadful young woman"--Dodo put out her tongue
and made a face at her own picture--"you will have to pull down the
house and drink up the lake and cut down the trees. Ah, how lovely the
garden looks! I was never here in the summer before: we only came for
the shooting and hunting and the garden invariably consisted of rows of
blackened salvias and decaying dahlias. But it is summer now, Jack."

There was no mistaking the figurative sense in which she meant him to
understand the word "summer." It had been winter, winter of
discontent--so the glance she gave him inevitably implied--when she was
here before, and she rejoiced in and admired this excellent glory of
summer-time. And yet but a moment before the picture in the hall had
"hurt" her, until she remembered that even on his death-bed her first
husband had bidden her marry the man who had brought her back here
to-day. She had neglected to do as she was told for about a quarter of a
century, and had married somebody else instead, and yet this amazing
variety of topics that concerned her heart, any one of which, you would
have expected, was of sufficient import to fill her mind to the
exclusion of all else, but bowled across it, as the shadows of clouds
bowl across the fields on a day of spring winds, leaving the untarnished
sunshine after their passage. It was not because she was heartless that
she touched on this series of somewhat tremendous topics: it was rather
that her vitality instantly reasserted itself: it was undeterred,
impervious to discouraging or disturbing reflections.

Dodo ate what may be termed a good tea, and smoked several cigarettes.
Then noticing that a small golf links had been laid out in the fields
below the garden, she rushed indoors to change her dress, and play a
game with her husband.

"It won't be much fun for you, darling," she said, "because my golf is a
species of landscape gardening, and I dig immense hollows with my club
and alter the lie of the country generally. Also I sometimes cheat, if
nobody is looking, so admire the beauties of nature if you hear me say
that I have a bad lie, because if you looked you would see me pushing
the ball into a pleasanter place, and that would give you a low opinion
of me. But a little exercise would be so good for us both after being
married: the Abbey was terribly stuffy."

The fifth hole brought them near the memorial chapel in the Park, where
her first husband was buried.

"Darling, that puts you five up," she said, "and would you mind waiting
here a minute, while I go in alone? I don't want even you with me: I
want to go alone and kneel for a minute by his grave, and say my
prayers, and tell him I have come back again with you. Will you wait for
a minute, Jack? I shan't be long."

Dodo wasn't long: she said her prayers with remarkable celerity, and
came out again wiping her eyes.

"Oh, Jack," she said, "what a beautiful monument: it wasn't finished,
you know, when I went away and I hadn't seen it. And it's so touching to
have just those three words, 'Lead, kindly Light': the dear old boy was
so fond of that hymn. It's all so lovely and peaceful, and if ever there
was a saint in the nineteenth century, it was he. Somehow I felt as if
he knew about us and approved, and I remember we had 'Lead, kindly
Light' on the very last Sunday evening of all. I am so glad I went in."

Dodo gave a little sigh.

"Where are we?" she said. "Am I one hole up or two? Two, isn't it? Do
let it be two. And what a lovely piece of marble. It looks like the most
wonderful cold cream turned to stone. It must be Carrara. Oh, Jack, what
a beautiful drive! It went much faster than the legal limit."

       *       *       *       *       *

The flames of the summer-sunset were beginning to fade in the sky when
they got back to the house, and it was near dinner-time. Dodo's spirits
and appetite were both of the most excellent order, and all the
memories that this house brought back to her, so far from causing any
aching resuscitation of past years, were, owing to the incomparable
alchemy of her mind, but transformed into a soft and suitable background
for the present. Afterwards, they sat on the terrace in the warm dusk.

"I must telegraph to Nadine to-morrow," she said, "and tell her how
happy I am. Jack, sometimes Nadine seems to me exactly what I should
expect a very attractive aunt to be. Do you know what I mean? I feel she
could have warned me of all the mistakes I have made in my life, before
they happened, if she had been born. And she approves of you and me;
isn't it lucky? I wonder why I feel so young on the very day on which I
should most naturally be thinking what a lot of life has passed. Jack, I
don't want any more events. Some people reckon life by events, and that
is so unreasonable. Events are thrust upon you; what counts is what you
feel."

He moved his chair a little nearer to hers.

"I am satisfied with what I feel," he said. "And though I have felt it
for very many years, it has never lost its freshness. I have always
wanted, and now I have got."

Suddenly Dodo's mood changed.

"Oh, you take a great risk," she said. "Who is to assure you that I
shan't disappoint you, disappoint you horribly? I can't assure you of
that, Jack. It is easy to understand other people, but the silly
proverb that tells you to know yourself, makes a far more difficult
demand. If I disappoint you, what are we to do?"

"You can't disappoint me if you are yourself," he said.

"You say that! To me, too, who have outraged every sort of decency with
regard to you?"

He was silent a moment.

"Yes, I say that to you," he said.

Dodo gave a little bubbling laugh.

"You are not very polite," she said. "I say that I have outraged every
sort of decency and you don't even contradict me."

"No. What you say is--is perfectly true. But the comment of you and me
sitting here on our bridal night is sufficient, is it not? Dodo, there
is no use in your calling yourself names. Leave it all alone: we are
here, you and I. And it is getting late, my darling."

       *       *       *       *       *

The same night Lady Ayr was giving one of her awful dinner-parties. Her
family, John, Esther and Seymour were always bidden to them, and went in
to dinner in exactly their proper places as sons and daughters of a
marquis. Before now it had happened that Seymour had to take Esther in
to dinner, and it was so to-night. But in the general way they saw so
little of each other, that they did not very much object. They usually
quarreled before long, but made their differences up again by their
unanimity of opinion about their mother. That had already happened this
evening.

"Mother is bursting with curiosity about Aunt Dodo's wedding," said
Esther. "She wasn't asked. I told her it was a very pretty wedding."

"I went," said Seymour, "and I am going to write an account of it for
_The Lady_. If you will tell me how you were dressed, I will put it in,
that is supposing you were decently dressed. Mother asked me about it,
too, and I think I said the bridesmaids looked lovely."

"But there weren't any," said Esther.

"Of course there weren't, but it enraged her. By the way, there is some
awful stained glass put up in the staircase since I was here last. A
ruby crown has apparently had twins, one of which is a sapphire crown
and the other a diamond crown. I shouldn't mind that sort of thing
happening, if it wasn't so badly done. I shall try to break it by
accident after dinner. Did you design it? My dear, I forgot: we had
finished quarreling. Let us talk about something else. Nadine came to
see me the other day, and if you will not tell anybody, I think it quite
likely that I shall marry her. She likes jade. And she looks quite
pretty to-night, doesn't she?"

Esther had already alluded to Nadine, who was sitting opposite, as the
dream of dreams, and further appreciation was unnecessary.

"You don't happen to have asked her yet?" she said, with marked
neutrality.

"No, one doesn't ask that sort of thing until one knows the answer,"
said he. "That is, unless you are one of the ridiculous people who ask
for information. I hate the information I get by asking, unless I know
it already."

"And then you don't get it."

"No. Esther, that is a charming emerald you are wearing but it is
atrociously set. If you will send it round to-morrow, I will draw a
decent setting for it. Do look at Mother. She has got the family lace
on, which is made of string. I think it is Saxon. Oh, of course the
coronets are about her. How foolish of me not to have guessed."

"It is more foolish of you to think that Nadine would look at you," said
Esther.

"I didn't ask her to look at me, and I shan't ask her to look at me. I
shall recommend her not to look at me. But I shall marry her or
Antoinette. I don't see why you are so stuffy about it. Or perhaps you
would prefer Antoinette for a sister-in-law."

"If she is to be your wife, dear, I think I should," said Esther.

Seymour laid his hand on hers. His smelt vaguely of wall-flowers.

"How disagreeable you are," he said. "I don't think I shall say anything
about your dress in _The Lady_. I shall simply say that Lady Esther
Sturgis was there looking very plain and tired. I shall describe my own
dress instead. I had an emerald pin, properly set, instead of its being
set like that sort of cheese cake you are wearing. No, it's not exactly
a cheese cake: it is as if you had spilt some _crème-de-menthe_ and put
a little palisade of broken glass round it to prevent it spreading. What
a disgusting dinner we are having, aren't we? I never know what to do
before I dine with Mama, whether to eat so much lunch that I don't want
any dinner, or to eat none at all so that I can manage to swallow this
sort of garbage. To-night I am rather hungry: won't you come away early
with me and have some supper at home? Perhaps Nadine will come too."

"If Nadine will come, I will," said Esther. "I suppose we can chaperone
each other."

"Certainly, if it amuses you. Shall we ask anybody else? I see hardly
anybody here whom I know by sight. I think they must all be earls and
countesses. It's funny how few of one's own class are worth speaking to.
Look at Mama! I know I keep telling you to look at Mama, but she is so
remarkable. She said 'sir' just now to the man next her. He must be a
Saxon king. I wish she was responsible for the wine instead of father:
teetotalers usually give one excellent wine, because they don't imagine
they know anything about it, and tell the wine merchants just to send
round some champagne and hock. So of course they send the most
expensive."

"I think we ought to talk to our neighbors," said Esther. "Mama is
making faces."

"That is because she has eaten some of this _entrée_, I expect. I make
no face because I haven't. But I can't talk to my neighbor. I tried, but
she is unspeakable-to. I wish my nose would bleed, because then I should
go away."

One of the frequent pauses that occurred at Lady Ayr's dinners was
taking place at the moment, and Seymour's rather shrill voice was widely
audible. A buzz of vacant conversation succeeded, and he continued.

"That was heard," he said, "and really I didn't mean it to be heard. I
am sorry. I shall make myself agreeable. But tell Nadine we shall go
away soon after dinner. If you will be ready, I shall not go up into the
drawing-room at all."

Seymour turned brightly to the woman seated on his right.

"Have you been to 'The Follies'?" he asked. "I hope you haven't, because
then we can't talk about them, since I haven't either. There are enough
follies going about, without going to them."

"How amusin' you are," said his neighbor.

Seymour felt exasperated.

"I know I am," he said. "Do be amusing too; then we shall be delighted
with each other."

"But I don't know who you are," said his neighbor.

"Well, that is the case with me," said he. "But my mother--"

His neighbor's face instantly changed from a chilly neutrality to a
welcoming warmth.

"Oh, are you Lord Seymour?" she asked.

"I should find it very uncomfortable to be anybody else," said he. "I
should not know what to do."

"Then _do_ tell me, because of course you know all about these things:
Are we all going to wear slabs of jade next year? And did you see me at
Princess Waldenech's wedding this morning? And who manicures you? I hear
you have got a marvelous person." Seymour really wished to atone for the
unfortunate remark that had broken the silence and exerted himself.

"But of course," he said. "It is Antoinette. She cooks for me and calls
me: she dusts my rooms, and brushes my boots. She stirs the soup with
one hand and manicures me with the other. Fancy not knowing Antoinette!
She is fifty-two: by the time you are fifty-two you ought to be known
anywhere. If she marries I shall die: if I marry, she will still live I
hope. Now do tell me: do you recommend me to marry?"

"Doesn't it depend upon whom you marry?"

"Not much, do you think? But perhaps you are married, and so know. Are
you married? And would you mind telling me who you are, as I have told
you?"

"You never told me: I guessed. Guess who I am."

Seymour looked at her attentively. She was a woman of about fifty, with
a shrewd face, like a handsome monkey, and his millinerish eyes saw that
she was dressed without the slightest regard to expense.

"I haven't the slightest idea," he said. "But please don't tell me, if
you have any private reason for not wishing it to be known. I can
readily understand you would not like people to be able to say that you
were seen dining with Mama. Of course you are not English."

"Why do you think that?"

"Because you talk it so well. English people always talk it abominably.
But--"

He looked at her again, and a vague resemblance both in speech and in
the shape of her head struck him.

"I will guess," he said, "you are a relation of Nadine's."

"Quite right: go on."

Seymour was suddenly agitated and upset a glass of champagne that had
just been filled. He took not the slightest notice of this.

"Is it too much to hope that you are the aunt who--who had so many
snuff-boxes?" he asked. "I mean the one to whom the Emperor gave all
those lovely snuff-boxes? Or is it too good to be true?"

"Just good enough," she said.

"How wildly exciting! Will you come back to my flat as soon as we can
escape from this purgatory and Antoinette shall manicure you. Do tell me
about the snuff-boxes; I am sure they were beauties, or you would not--I
mean the Emperor would not have given you them."

"Of course not. But I am afraid I can't come to your flat to-night, as I
am going to a dance. Ask me another day. I hear you have got some lovely
jade and are going to make it the fashion. Then I suppose you will sell
it."

Seymour determined to insure his jade before Countess Eleanor entered
his rooms, for fear of its subsequently appearing that the Austrian
Emperor had followed up his present of snuff-boxes with a present of
jade. But he let no suspicion mar the cordiality of his tone.

"Yes, that's the idea," he said. "You see no younger son can possibly
live in the way he has been brought up unless he has done something
honest and commercial like that, or cheats at bridge. But that is so
difficult I am told. You have to learn bridge first, and then go to a
conjurer, during which time you probably forget bridge again. But
otherwise you can't live at all unless you marry and the only thing left
to do is to take to drink and die."

"My brother took to it and lives," said she.

"I know, but you are a very remarkable family."

A footman had wiped up the greater part of the champagne Seymour had
spilt and now stood waiting till he could speak to him.

"Her ladyship told me to tell you that you seemed to have had enough
champagne, my lord," he said.

Seymour paused for a moment, and his face turned white with indignation.

"Tell her ladyship she is quite right," he said, "and that the first sip
I took of it was more than enough."

"Very good, my lord."

"And tell her that the fish was stale," said Seymour shrilly.

"Yes, my lord."

"And tell her--" began Seymour again.

Countess Eleanor interrupted him.

"You have sent enough pleasant messages for one time," she said. "You
can talk to your mother afterwards: at present talk to me. Did you go to
the wedding this morning?"

"Yes."

Seymour rather frequently allowed himself to be ruffled, but he always
calmed down again quickly. "It is so like Mama to send a servant in the
middle of dinner to say I am drunk," he said, "but she will be sorry
now. Look, she is receiving my message, and is turning purple. That is
satisfactory. She looks unusually plain when she is purple. Yes: I am
describing the wedding for a lady's paper. I shall get four guineas for
it."

"You do not look as if that would do you much good."

"If you take four guineas often enough they--they purify the blood,"
said he, "though certainly the dose is homeopathic. It is called the
gold cure. About the wedding. I thought it was very vulgar. And it was
frightfully _bourgeois_ in spirit. It is very early Victorian to marry a
man who has waited for you since about 1820."

"But they will be very happy."

"So are the _bourgeoisie_ who change hats. At least I should have to be
frightfully happy to think of putting on anybody else's hat. I recommend
you not to eat that savory unless you have a bad cold that prevents your
tasting anything. Shall I send another message to Mama about it?"

"Ah, my dear young man," said Countess Eleanor, "we are all common when
we fall in love. You will find yourself being common too, some day. And
the people who are least _bourgeois_ become the most common of all.
Nadine, for instance: there is no one less _bourgeoise_ than Nadine, but
if she ever falls in love she will be so common that she will be
perfectly sublime. She will be the embodiment of humanity. But she is
not in love with that great boy next her, who is so clearly in love with
her. Dear me, what beautiful Sèvres dessert plates. I once collected
Sèvres as well as snuff-boxes."

"Did you--did you get together a fine collection?" asked Seymour.

"Pretty well. It is easier to get snuff-boxes. My brother has some that
used to be mine.--Ah, they are all getting up. Let me come to see your
jade some other day."

       *       *       *       *       *

Nadine and Esther escaped very soon after dinner from this dreadful
party, and went to Seymour's flat where he had preceded them and was
busy cooking with Antoinette in the kitchen when they arrived. He opened
the door for them himself with his shirt sleeves rolled up above his
elbows, showing an extremely white and delicate skin. Round one wrist he
wore a gold bangle.

"I've left the kitchen door open," he said, "so that the whole flat
shall smell as strong as possible of cooking. There is nothing so
delicious when you are hungry. We will open the windows afterwards. You
and Esther must amuse yourselves for ten minutes, and then supper will
be ready."

"Oh, may I come and cook too, Seymour?" asked Nadine.

"Certainly not. Antoinette is the only woman in the world who knows how
to cook. You would make everything messy. Go and rock the cradle or rule
the world, or whatever you consider to be a woman's sphere, until we are
ready."

Seymour disappeared again into the kitchen from which came rich
cracklings and odors of frying, and Nadine turned to Esther with a sigh.

"My dear, I have got remorse and world yearnings to-night," she said. "I
attribute it to your mother's awful party. But I daresay we shall all be
better soon. You know, if I had asked Hugh to let me come and cook, he
would have given me a golden spoon to stir with, and eaten till he burst
because I cooked it. And I don't care! He was so dear and so utterly
impossible this evening. I told him I wasn't going to the dance at the
Embassy, and he said he should go in case I changed my mind. And if it
had been Hugh cooking in there, I should have gone and cooked too, even
if he hadn't wanted me to. It's no use, Esther: I can't marry Hugh.
There's the end of it. Up till to-night I have always wondered if I
could. Now I know I can't. I think I shan't see so much of him. I shall
miss him, don't think I shan't miss him, but I want to be fair to him.
As it is now, whenever I am nice to him, which I always am, he thinks it
means that I am beginning to love him. Whereas it doesn't mean anything
whatever. I wish people hadn't got into the habit of marrying each
other, but bought their babies at a shop instead. And kissing is so
disgusting. The only person I ever like kissing is Mama, because her
skin is so delicious and smells very faintly of raspberries. Hugh smells
of cigarettes and soap--"

"Darling Nadine, you haven't been kissing Hugh, have you?" asked Esther.

"Yes, I kissed him this evening, when he was putting my cloak on, but
there were ninety-five footmen there so it wasn't compromising: we were
heavily chaperoned. And I would just as soon have kissed any of the
other ninety-five. But he wanted me to, and so I did, and then suddenly
I saw how 

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