“If the present so derides the dignified past surely your desire lies in a future incarnating beautiful old historic dreams?”
“I do not know.”
“Ideals are not in the past. They do not exist in any future. They rush on, and away, beyond your immediate activities, beyond the horizons that are for ever fixed, for ever charging down upon us.”
“I do not know.”
“What is it you do know?” asked the exasperated saint, jerking his fountain pen to loosen its flow, and Masterman replied like a lunatic:
“I know that sealing wax is a pure and beautiful material and you get such a lot of it for a penny.”
He woke and slept no more. He cursed Kate, he sneered at Julia, he anathematized Ianthe, until the bright eye of morning began to gild once more their broken images.
IV
Between the sisters there grew a feud; Ianthe behaved evilly when she discovered their mutual infatuation for their one lover. The echoes of that feud, at first dim, but soon crashingly clear, reached him, touched him and moved him on Kate’s behalf: all his loyalty belonged to her. What did it matter if he could not fathom his own desire, that Ianthe was still his for a word, that Kate’s implacable virtue still offered its deprecatory hand, when Kate herself came back to him?
They were to spend a picnic day together and she went to him for breakfast. Her tremors of propriety were fully exercised as she cycled along to his home; she was too fond of him and he was more than fond of her; but all her qualms were lulled. He did not appear in any of the half-expected negligee, he was beautifully and amusingly at home.