"Jeff!" said the colonel. Esther's coming seemed so portentous that he could not brook imperfect knowledge of it. "Jeff, did Esther come to—" He paused there. What could Esther, in the circumstances, do? Make advances? Ask to be forgiven?
But Jeff was meeting the half question comprehensively.
"I don't quite know what she came for."
"Couldn't you have persuaded her," said the colonel, hesitating, "to stay?"
"No," said Jeff. "Esther doesn't want to stay. We mustn't think of that."
"I am sorry," said the colonel, and Lydia understood him perfectly. He was not sorry Esther had gone. But he was sorry the whole business had been so muddled from the start, and that Jeff's life could not have moved on like Addington lives in general: placid, all of a piece. Lydia thought this yearning of his for the complete and perfect was because he was old. She felt quite capable of taking Jeff's life as it was, and fitting it together in a striking pattern.
"Come in, Farvie," she said. "You haven't corrected Mary Nellen's translation."
Jeff was being left alone for his own good, and he smiled after the kind little schemer, before he took his hat and went down town to find Weedon Moore. As he went, withdrawn into a solitariness of his own, so that he only absently answered the bows of those he met, he thought curiously about his own life. And he was thinking as his father had: his life was not of a pattern. It was a succession of disjointed happenings. There was the first wild frothing of the yeast of youth. There was the nemesis who didn't like youth to make such a fool of itself. She had to throw him into prison. While he was there he had actually seemed to do things that affected prison discipline. He was mentioned outside. He was even, because he could write, absurdly pardoned. It had seemed to him then desirable to write the life of a gentleman criminal, but in that he had quite lost interest. Then he had had his great idea of liberty: the freedom of the will that saved men from being prisoners. But the squalid tasks remained to him even while he bragged of being free: to warn Moore away from meddling with women's names, no matter how Madame Beattie might invite him to do her malicious will, to warn Madame Beattie even, in some fashion, and to protect Lydia. Of Esther he could not think, save in a tiring, bewildered way. She seemed, from the old habit of possession justified by a social tie, somehow a part of him, a burden of which he could never rid himself and therefore to be borne patiently, since he could not know whether the burden were actually his or not. And he began to be conscious after that morning when Esther had looked at him with primitive woman's summons to the protecting male that Esther was calling him. Sometimes it actually tired him as if he were running in answer to the call, whether toward it or away from it he could not tell. All the paths were mazes and the lines of them bewildering to his eyes. He would wake in the night and wish there were one straight path. If he could have known that at this time Reardon and Alston Choate had also, in differing ways, this same consciousness of Esther's calling it could not have surprised him. He would not have known, in his own turmoil, whether to urge them to go or not to go. Esther did not seem to him a disturbing force, only a disconcerting one. You might have to meet it to have done with it.
But now at Weedon's office door he paused a moment, hearing a voice, the little man's own, slightly declamatory, even in private, and went in. And he wished he had not gone, for Miss Amabel sat at the table, signing papers, and he instantly guessed the signatures were not in the pursuance of her business but to the advantage of Weedon Moore. Whatever she might be doing, she was not confused at seeing him. Her designs could be shouted on the housetops. But Moore gave him a foolishly cordial greeting mingled with a confused blotting of signatures and a hasty shuffling of the papers.
"Sit down, sit down," he said. "You haven't looked me up before, not since—"