'Really. She takes things hard. She said it was mimicking a sacred thing.'
'Oh! but, I say, how awfully funny, Helen. You must own that it's funny.'
'Funny, but sweet, too.'
'She is a sweet creature, of course, one can see that; and her moral approvals and disapprovals are firmly fixed, however funny; one likes that in her. I'll try to be good, if Frances will let me. She looked quite pretty this evening, Miss Jakes; only she dresses too stiffly. What's the matter? Couldn't you give her a hint? She is like a satin-box, and a woman ought to be like a flower; ought to look as if they'd bend if a breeze went over them. Now you can't imagine Miss Jakes bending; she'd have to stoop.'
Helen, in the darkness, smiled half bitterly, half affectionately. Gerald's nonsense always pleased her, even when she was most exasperated with him. She was not exasperated with Gerald in particular just now, but with everything and everybody, herself included, and the fact that he liked to flirt flagrantly with Lady Pickering did not move her more than usual. It was not a particular but a general irritation that edged her voice a little as she said, drawing her black scarf more closely round her shoulders, 'Frances must satisfy you there. Your tastes, I think, are becoming more and more dishevelled.'
But innocent Gerald answered with a coal of fire: 'No, she is too dishevelled. You satisfy my tastes there entirely; you flow, but you don't flop. Now if Miss Jakes would only try to dress like you she'd be immensely improved. You are perfect.' And he lightly touched her scarf as he spoke with a fraternal and appreciative hand.
Helen continued to smile in the darkness, but it was over an almost irresistible impulse to sob. The impulse was so strong that it frightened her, and it was with immense relief that she saw Althea's figure—her 'box-like' figure—appear in the lighted window. She did not want to talk to Althea, and she could not, just now, go on talking to Gerald. From their corner of the terrace she indicated the vaguely gazing Althea. 'There she is,' she said. 'Go and talk to her. Be nice to her. I'm tired and am going to have a stroll in the shrubberies before bed.'
She left Gerald obediently, if not eagerly, moving towards the window, and slipping into the obscurity of the shrubberies she threw back her scarf and drew long breaths. She was becoming terribly overwrought. It had been, since so long, a second nature to live two lives that any danger of their merging affected her with a dreadful feeling of disintegration. There was the life of comradeship, the secure little compartment where Gerald was at home, so at home that he could tell her she was perfect and touch her scarf with an approving hand, and from this familiar shelter she had looked for so long, with the calmest eye, upon his flirtations, and in it had heard, unmoved, his encomiums upon herself. The other life, the real life, was all outdoors in comparison; it was all her real self, passionate, untamed, desolate; it was like a bleak, wild moorland, and the social, the comrade self only a strongly built little lodge erected, through stress of wind and weather, in the midst of it. Since girlhood it had been a second nature to her to keep comradeship shut in and reality shut out. And to-night reality seemed to shake and batter at the doors.
She had come to Merriston House to rest, to drink eau rougie and to rest. She wanted to lapse into apathy and to recover, as far as might be, from her recent unpleasant experiments and experiences. Had she allowed herself any illusions about the experiment, the experience would have been humiliating; but Helen was not humiliated, she had not deceived herself for a moment. She had, open-eyed, been trying for the 'other things,' and she had only just missed them. She had intended to marry a very important person who much admired her. She had been almost sure that she could marry him if she wanted to, and she had found out that she couldn't. It had not been, as in her youth, her own shrinking and her own recoil at the last decisive moment. She had been resolved and unwavering; her discomfiture had been sudden and its cause the quite grotesque one of her admirer having fallen head over heels in love with a child of eighteen—a foolish, affected little child, who giggled and glanced and blushed opportunely, and who, beside these assets, had a skilful and determined mother. Without the mother to waylay, pounce, and fix, Helen did not believe that her sober, solid friend would have yielded to the momentary beguilement, and Helen herself deigned not one hint of contest; she had been resolved, but only to accept; she could never have waylaid or pounced. And now, apathetic, yet irritated, exhausted and sick at heart, she had been telling herself, as she lay in the garden-chairs at Merriston House, that it was more than probable that the time was over, even for the 'other things.' The prospect made her weary. What—with Aunt Grizel's one hundred and fifty a year—was she to do with herself in the future? What was to become of her? She didn't feel that she much cared, and yet it was all that there was left to care about, for Aunt Grizel's sake if not for her own, and she felt only fit to rest from the pressure of the question. To-night, as she turned and wandered among the trees, she said to herself that it hadn't been a propitious time to come for rest to Merriston House. Gerald had been the last person she desired to see just now. She had never been so near to feeling danger as to-night. If Gerald were nice to her—he always was—but nice in a certain way, the way that expressed so clearly his tenderness and his dreadful, his merciful unawareness, she might break down before him and sob. This would be too horrible, and when she thought that it might happen she felt, rising with the longing for tears, an old resentment against Gerald, fierce, absurd, and unconquerable. After making the round of the lawns and looking up hard and unseeingly at the stars, she came back to the terrace. Gerald and Althea were gone, and she surmised that Gerald had not taken much trouble to be nice. She was passing along an unillumined corner when she came suddenly upon a figure seated there—so suddenly that she almost fell against it. She murmured a hasty apology as Mr. Kane rose from a chair where, with folded arms, he had been seated, apparently in contemplation of the night.
'Oh, I beg your pardon,' said Helen. 'It's so dark here. I didn't see you.'