CHAPTER XII AT CLOSE QUARTERS
The next few days were critical for the renunciation, and consequently for the reformation which was to accompany it. In the first place, Jack Fenning was now very near; secondly, Ashley Mead's behaviour was so perfect as to suggest almost irresistibly an alternative course; finally, thanks to Alice Muddock's outspokenness, Ora was inclined to call virtue thankless and to decide that one whom all the world held wicked might just as well for all the world be wicked. She had appealed from Alice to Irene Kilnorton, hinting at the cruelty to which she had been subjected. She found no comfort; there was an ominous tightening of Irene's lips. Ora flew home and threw herself—the metaphorical just avoids passing into the literal—on Ashley's bosom. There were tears and protests against universal injustice; she cried to him, "Take me away from all of them!" What answer did she expect or desire? He could not tell. Mr. Fenning was due on Sunday, and Ora's piece was running still. Yet at the moment it seemed as though she would fly into space with him and a hand-bag, leaving renunciations, reformations, virtues, careers, and livelihoods to look after themselves, surrendering herself to the rare sweetness of unhindered impulse. For himself, he was ready; he had come to that state of mind in regard to her. His ordinary outlook on life was blocked by her image, his plan of existence, with all its lines of reason, of hope, of ambition, blurred by the touch of her finger. Only very far behind, somewhere remote in the background, lay the haunting conviction that these last, and not his present madness, would prove in the end the abiding reality. What made him refuse, or rather evade, the embracing of her request was that same helplessness in her which had restrained his kisses in the inn parlour. If she turned on him later, crying, "You could do what you liked with me, why did you do this with me?" what would he have to answer? "We'll settle it to-morrow; you must start for the theatre now," he said. "So I must. Am I awfully late?" cried Ora.
That evening he dined with Bob Muddock. Bertie Jewett and Babba Flint were his fellow-guests. All three seemed to regard him with interest—Bob's, admiring; Bertie's, scornful; Babba's, amused. Bob envied the achievement of such a conquest; Bertie despised the man who wasted time on it; Babba was sympathetic and hinted confidential surprise that anybody made any bones about it. But they none of them doubted it; and of the renunciation none knew or took account. A course of action which fails to suggest itself to anybody incurs the suspicion of being mad, or at least wrong-headed and quixotic. Ashley told himself that his conduct was all these things, and had no countervailing grace of virtue. It was no virtue to fear a reproach in Ora's eyes; it was the merest cowardice; yet that fear was all that held him back.
After dinner Bob drew him to a sofa apart from their companions and began to discuss the dramatic profession. Ashley suffered patiently, but his endurance changed to amusement when Bob passed to the neighbouring art of music, found in it a marked superiority, and observed that he had been talking over the subject with Minna Soames.
"I don't see how anybody can object to singing at concerts," said Bob, with a shake of the head for inconceivable narrow-mindedness, "not even the governor."
"Sits the wind in that quarter?" asked Ashley, laughing.
"I've got my eye on her, if that's what you mean," answered Bob. "She's ripping, isn't she?"
The vague and violent charms which the epithet seemed to imply were not Minna's. Ashley replied that she was undoubtedly pretty and charming. Bob eyed him with a questioning air; it was as though a man who had been on a merry-go-round were consulted by one who thought of venturing on the trip.
"People talk a great deal of rot," Bob reflected. "A girl isn't degraded, or unsexed, or anything of that sort, just because she sings for her living."