They were now in the streets again, walking towards the tram centre. The shops were darkened and closed, but the cinemas lavished their unwanted illuminations on the street. There were no hurrying people, there was just strolling ease; the policemen at corners were chatting to other policemen now in private clothes. The brilliant trams rumbled and clanged and stopped, the saloons were full and musical.
"What did she warn you against?" he repeated.
"You," chuckled Ianthe.
"But what about? What has she got against me?"
"Everything. You know. You know you do." The archness of Ianthe was objectively baffling, but under it all he read the significance, its invitation.
He waited beside her for a tram, but when it came he pleaded a further engagement in the city and left her rather crest-fallen to her journey. He had no other engagement, he only wanted to be alone to sort out the things she had dangled before his mind, so he boarded the next car and walked from the Tutsan terminus to his cottage. Both girls were fond of him, then—Ianthe's candour left him no room for doubt—and they were both lying to each other about him. Well, he didn't mind that, he lied himself whenever it was necessary or suited him. Not often, but when truth was inappropriate to a sensitive-minded man, this was his protective colouring. Why after all should sympathetic mendacity be a monopoly of polite society?
"But it's also the trick of thieves and seducers," he muttered to himself. "I'm not a thief, no, I'm not a thief. As for the other thing, well, what is there against me—nothing, nothing at all." But a strange voiceless sigh seemed to echo from the trees along the dark road; he walked on more rapidly.
Three women! There was no doubt either about the third, Ianthe had thought of Julia, too, just as Kate had. What a fate for a misogamist! He felt like a mouse being taken for a ride in a bath chair. He had an invincible prejudice against marriage, not as an institution but because he was perfectly aware of his incapacity for faithfulness. His emotions were deep but unprolonged, they were fickle. Love was love, but marriage turned love into the stone of Sisyphus. At the sound of the marriage bell—a passing bell—earth at his feet would burst into flame and the sky above would pour upon him an unquenching profusion of tears. Love was a fine ennobling thing, but though he had the will to love he knew beyond the possibility of doubt that his capacity for love was a meandering strengthless thing. Even his loyalty to Julia Tern—and that had the strongest flavour of any such emotion that had ever beset him, no matter how brief its term—even that was a deviating zig-zag loyalty. For he wanted to go on being jolly and friendly with Ianthe if only Julia did not get to know. With Kate, too, that tender melancholy woman. She would be vastly unhappy. Who was this Christopher whom Ianthe fondly imagined her sister to favour? Whoever he was, poor devil, he would not thank D. M. for his intervention. But he would drop all this; however had he, of all men, come to be plumped so suddenly into a state of things for which he had shown so little fancy in the past? Julia would despise him, she would be sure to despise him, sure to; and yet if he could only believe she would not it would be pleasant to go on being friendly with Ianthe pending ... pending what?
Masterman was a very pliant man; but as things shaped themselves for him he did not go a step further with Ianthe, and it was not to Julia at all that he made love.