"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 could not sleep again. He cursed Kate, he jeered at Julia, he anathematised Ianthe, until the bright eye of morning began to gild once more their broken images.
4
For a time the breach between them could not be healed, and during its interregnum he began to meet Ianthe again. But her eager devotion had lost its savour now, and he was conscious of his own mere amorous predacity, of treason to the dumb but benignant Kate, the sad-visaged woman whose chilly regard had riveted him, whose reproach unspoken and indeed unseen hovered almost annoyingly in his imagination.
Ianthe behaved evilly to Kate when she discovered that mutual infatuation for their one lover. Echoes of the sisters' 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 that he could not fathom his desire for her, or that Ianthe was his for a word, or that Kate's implacable virtue still offered its deprecatory hand, when Kate herself came back to him?
Kate was devout in the perfunctory way that denotes no apprehension of the mystery of sublime recognitions but is yet an effectual moral breakwater, she could be neither saint nor sinner. But her mind held fast to its promise: she would make it up, she would make it all up some day: and she did not feel or know that this was as much a promise to herself as to the man she loved.
They were to spend a picnic day together and she went to him for breakfast. Her tremours 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-anticipated negligé, he was beautifully and amusingly at home.
"My dear!" he exclaimed in the enjoyment of her presence; she stood staring at him as she removed her wrap, the morn though bright being fresh and cool: "Why do I never do you justice! Why do I half forget! You are marvellously irresistibly lovely. How do you do it—or how do I fail so?"
She could only answer him with blushes. His bungalow had but two rooms, both on the ground floor, one a studio and the other his living and sleeping room. It was new, built of bricks and unpainted boards. The interior walls were unplastered and undecorated except for three small saucepans hung on hooks, a shelf of dusty volumes, and nails, large rusty nails projecting everywhere, one holding a discarded collar and a clothes brush. A tall flat cupboard contained a narrow bed to be lowered for sleeping; huge portmanteaus and holdalls reposed in a corner beside a bureau; there was a big brass candle-pan on a chair beside the round stove. While he prepared breakfast the girl walked about the room, making shy replies to his hilarious questions. It was warm in there, but to her tidy comfort-loving heart the room was disordered and bare. She stood looking out of the window; the April air was bright but chilly, the grass in thin tufts fluttered and shivered.
"It is very nice," she said to him once, "but it's strange, and I feel that I ought not to be here."