"Well, but what more can I do than I am doing?" Young Wriford cries aloud to himself on receipt of such a letter; and thenceforward that question and alternate fits of impatience and of self-reproach over it, and letters expressive first of one frame of mind and then, in remorse, of the other—thenceforward these occupy more and more of his thoughts, and more and more mix with his work and disturb his peace of mind. Why is all this put upon him? Why can't he be left alone?
V
Here is Young Wriford in love. She is eighteen. Her name is Brida. She is working for the stage at a school of dramatic art quite close to Gamber's. He gets to know her through a friend at Gamber's whose sister is also at the school. Young Wriford and Brida happen to lunch every day—meeting without arrangement—at the same tea-shop off the Strand. She leaves her school at the same hour he leaves Gamber's in the evening, and they happen to meet every evening—without arrangement—and he walks home with her across St. James's Park to a Belgravia flat where she lives with her married sister. Young Wriford thinks of her face, day and night, as like a flower—radiant and fresh and fragrant as a flower at dawn; and of her spirit as a flower—gay as a posy, fragrant as apple-blossom, fresh as a rose, a rose!
And so one Friday evening as they cross the Park together, when suddenly she challenges his unusual silence with: "I say, you're jolly glum to-night," he replies with a plump: "I'm going to call you Brida."
"Oh, goodness!" says Brida and begins to walk very fast.
"Do you mind?"
She shakes her head.
"Don't let's hurry. Stop here a moment."
It is dusk. It is October. There is no one near them. He begins to speak. His eyes tell her what he can scarcely say: her eyes and that which tides in deepest colour across her face inform him what her answer is. He takes her in his arms. He tells her: "I love you, darling. Brida, I love you." She whispers: "Phil!"
He goes home exalted in his every pulse by what he has drunk from her lips: plumed, armed, caparisoned by that ethereal draught for any marvels, challenging the future to bring out its costliest, mightiest, bravest, best—he'd have it, he'd wrest it for his sweet, his darling! He goes home—and there is Alice waiting for him. Can't he, oh, can't he come down to Surbiton to-night, Friday, instead of waiting till to-morrow? She simply cannot bear it down there without him. It's all right when he is there. When she's alone with her mother, her mother goes on and on and on about the expenses, and about the children, and seems to throw the blame on Bill, and she answers back, and her father joins in, and there they are—at it! There's been a worse scene than ever to-day. She can't face meeting them at supper without Phil. "Phil, you'll come, won't you?"