The Turnstile

by A. E. W. Mason

The great bargain, on her side at all events, was a bargain no more, could never again be a bargain. A veritable revolution had taken place in her that afternoon. She knew it from the depth of her sympathy with Harry in his failure--above all from the surprising sharpness of her disappointment when Robert Brook had returned with no answer to her scribbled message.

For the failure as a factor in their fortunes she cared not a straw. Indeed, she welcomed it, since it was that which had wakened her. She had believed herself to be defective in the quality of passion, and her sense of the defect had hurt her like a bitter humiliation; she had envied wistfully the other women who possessed passion, even the wantons who flaunted it. Now the humiliation was gone. She rejoiced. She leaned back in her chair with her eyes closed and sailed over magical seas which were joyous and golden. She loved. She was like some lady of old Italy lit to swift flame by the first kiss from her lover's lips. Only it was a trivial irony in closer keeping with our modern days that what had kindled her who had demanded ideas, was a failure due to nothing but the lack of them.

Cynthia rejoiced; for she loved. That pain and disappointment were in store for her she did not doubt. But she ran forward to meet the pain. She was young. Sooner all the pain in the world than the placidity of years without fire or inspiration. She recognized frankly that though upon her side the bargain was no longer any bargain at all, it still was just a bargain to her husband. A sign had been given to her that afternoon, a little sign, yet great in its significance. She had pleaded to herself as she sat in the ladies' gallery that when Harry rose, and just before he began to speak, he had looked up to where she sat, as though he were conscious of her presence, as though he drew strength from it. But he had not looked up. Even at the time she had known that he had not.

"I merely pretended to myself that he had," she frankly admitted now. "His movement was nothing more than the natural muscular action of a man bracing himself for an effort." She herself, Cynthia, had not been, she felt sure, at that moment, in the remotest of his thoughts.

"If Harry had changed toward me as I have toward him," she argued, "he would have looked up, not only because he wanted to, but because he would have remembered what I had said to him on that very point the afternoon when he asked me to marry him."

But in spite of her conviction she rejoiced. Some kinship she could claim with Juliet. For all her longing was to give and to give, and still to give. She had sought desperately for color in her life. She had welcomed politics in the hunt for it. She had it now and to spare--enough to daub the world. The handle of the door was tried and through the panels her astonished maid told her the hour. Cynthia sprang up and unlocked it.

"I shall dine at home to-night," she said. "The cook must get me some dinner, anything."

The maid reminded Cynthia that she had arranged to dine with some friends and visit a theatre. "I know," said Cynthia. She had made the plan so that she might not spend in loneliness the anxious hours of this evening. But since she had made the plan the world had changed its hues.

"You must telephone and say that I can't come," said Cynthia, remorselessly, as she ran upstairs.

Whilst she dressed she considered what she should do with this wonderful evening. She meant to spend it alone--yes, but that did not quite content her. Somehow it should be made memorable. Something she must do which, but for this day of days, she never would have done. Something which must not merely mark it as a harbor boom marks a turn of the channel, but must be the definite consequence of it. Cynthia, in a word, went down to her solitary dinner much more akin than she had ever been since to the girl who, eager for life with the glorious eagerness of youth, had run down the stairs on the morning of her seventeenth birthday into the dining-room of the Daventry estancia. Half-way through dinner the thing to do, in order fitly to commemorate the day, came to her in a burst of light.