"Oh, that's conventional. You needn't mind that with me."
"Really I'm not thinking about it." But even as she spoke her face grew thoughtful. "Our life's arranged for us, really," she said. "We haven't much to do with it. Look how I was born to the business!"
"And you'll go on in the business?"
"Yes. I used to think I should like to get away from it. Perhaps I should like still; but I never shall. There are terribly few things one gets a choice about."
"Marriage is one," Irene persisted, almost imploringly.
"Do you think it is, as a rule?" asked Alice doubtfully.
Their talk had drawn them closer together and renewed the bonds of sympathy, but herein lay its only comfort for Irene Bowdon. The disposition that Alice shewed seemed clearly to presage Bertie Jewett's success and to prove how far he had already progressed. She wondered to find so much done and to see how Ashley had lost his place in the girl's conception of what her life must be. "I should have fought more," Irene reflected, and went on to ask whether that were not because she also felt more than her friend, or at least differently; did not the temperament which occasioned defeat also soften it? Yet the girl was not happy; she was rather making the best of an apparently necessary lack of happiness; life was a niggard of joy, but by good management the small supply might be so disposed as to make a good show and so spread out as to cover a handsome space. Against the acceptance of such a view Irene's soul protested. It was dressing the shop-window finely when there was no stock inside.
"I shouldn't mind what a man had thought," she said, "if I could make him think as I wanted him to now."
"No, but you'd know him too well to imagine that you ever could," said Alice.
A little inhuman, wasn't it? The old question rose again in Irene's mind, even while she was feeling full of sympathy and of love. It was all too cold, too clear-sighted, too ruthless; if you were very fond of people, you did not let yourself know too well what you did not wish to think about them; you ought to be able to forget, to select, to idealise; else how could two people ever love one another? There must be a partiality of view; love must pretend. She could fancy Ashley's humorously alarmed look at the idea of living in company with perfect clear-sightedness. As for Ora—but surely the objection here would come even sooner and more clamorously from clear-sightedness itself?