Soberly considered, this is doubtless very grievous. But it must be said that if Beatrice was singular in this, her singularity lay rather in her frank disclosure of her attitude than in the attitude itself. I am not sure that morally her absorption in such crude pleasures as she knew, was a whit more culpable than the equal absorption of nine people out of ten at that time, in money-getting, in sport, in society functions, or in sheer idleness. The same oblivion to the sense of duty was very generally characteristic; though in other matters, no doubt, the moral sense was more active. In Beatrice it simply was not present at all.
All this was tolerably clear to me even then; but I will not pretend that it interfered much with the physical and emotional attraction which Beatrice had for me. Apart from her my life was very drab in colour. I had no recreations. In my time at Rugby and at Cambridge we either practically ignored sport (so far, at all events, as actual participation in it went), or lived for it. I had very largely ignored it. Now, Beatrice Blaine represented, not exactly recreation, perhaps—no, not that I think—but gaiety. The hours I spent in her company were the only form of gaiety that entered into my life.
My feeling for Beatrice was not serious love, not at all a grand passion; but denying myself the occasional pleasure of ministering to her appetite for little outings would have been a harder task for me than the acceptation of Sylvia Wheeler's dismissal. My attentions to Beatrice were very much those of Balzac's Provençal to his panther, after he had overcome his first terrors.
There were times when her acceptance of gifts or compliments from another man made me believe myself really in love with Beatrice. Then some peculiarly distasteful aspect of my journalistic work would be forced upon me; I would receive some striking illustration of the hopelessly sordid character of Blaine and his circle, of the policy of The Mass, of the general trend of my life; and, seeing Beatrice's indifferent acceptance of all this venality, I would turn from her with a certain sense of revulsion—for three days. After that, I would return to handsome Beatrice, with her feline graces and her warm colouring, as a chilly, tired man turns from his work to his fireside.
In short, as time went on, I became as indifferent to ends and aims as the most callous among those at whose indifference to matters of real moment I had once girded so vehemently. And I lacked their excuse. I cut no figure at all in the race for money and pleasure; unless my clinging to Beatrice be accounted pursuit of pleasure. Certainly it lacked the rapt absorption which characterized the multitude really in the race. I fear I was rapidly degenerating into a common type of Fleet Street hack; into nothing more than Clement Blaine's assistant. And then a quite new influence came into my life.
XI
MORNING CALLERS
A woman mixed of such fine elements
That were all virtue and religion dead
She'd make them newly, being what she was.
George Eliot.