Ora was disappointed; she would have liked sympathy and appreciation for the letter. Since these were not to be had, she determined to send quite a short business-like letter.
"No," she said. "I won't enter on any sort of discussion. I shall just tell him that I don't feel justified in refusing him leave to come. That'll be best; afterwards we must be guided by circumstances."
The "we" amused Ashley, for undoubtedly it served to couple Ora and himself, not Ora and her husband; from time to time he awoke for a moment to the queer humour of the situation.
"We must see how he behaves himself," he said,—smiling.
"Yes," she assented gravely, but a moment later, seeing his amusement, she broke into a responsive laugh, "I know why you're smiling," she said with a little nod, "but it is like that, isn't it?"
Perhaps for the time it was, but it was very clear to him that it could not go on being. Professing to think of nothing but the renunciation, she had begun to construct an entirely impossible fabric of life on the basis of it. In this fabric Ashley played a large part; but no fabric could stand in which both he and Jack Fenning played large parts; and Jack's part was necessarily large in any fabric built with the renunciation for its cornerstone. Else where was the renunciation, where its virtue and its beauty?
To see the impossibility of a situation and its necessary tendency to run into an impasse is logically the forerunner to taking some step to end it. Since, however, logic is but one of several equal combatants in human hearts, men often do not act in accordance with its rules. They wait to have the situation ended for them from without; a sort of fatalism gains sway over them and is intensified by every growth of the difficulty in which they find themselves. Unconvinced by Ora's scheme and not thoroughly in harmony with her mood, Ashley acted as though the one satisfied and the other entirely dominated him. When they parted at the theatre door there were two understandings arrived at between them, both suggested by her, both accepted obediently by him. One was that he should not fail to come and see her next day, and the day after, and the day following on that; to this he pledged himself under sanction of his promise to be her ally in the struggle and not to forsake her. The other arrangement was that the letter of recall should be written and despatched to Jack Fenning within twenty-four hours. Ora reluctantly agreed that Ashley should not have any hand in its composition or even see it before it was sent, but she was sure that she not only must but also ought to render to him a very clear and full account of all that it did and did not contain.
"Because," she said, as she gave him her hand in unwilling farewell, "we're going to fight this battle together, aren't we?" He nodded. "I couldn't fight it without you, indeed I couldn't," were the last words she spoke to him; they came with all the added force of the last imploring look from her eyes and the last pleading smile on her lips.
Then the theatre swallowed her up, and he was left to walk home, to remember his neglected engagement, to telegraph excuses in regard to it, then speedily again to forget it, and to spend an evening in which despair, wonder, tenderness, and amusement each had their turn with him. He had not lost her yet, but he must lose her; this idea of hers was absurd, ludicrous, impossible, yet it was also sweet, persuasive, above all expressive of her in her mingled power and weakness. It was herself; and from it, therefore, he could no more escape than he could from her.