Gossip and conjecture had played so much with Walter Blake's name that Mrs. Selford had at first been shy of his approaches and chary of her welcome. "We must think of Anna," she had said to her husband. But thinking of or for Anna was rapidly becoming superfluous. The young woman took that department to herself. Her stylishness grew marvellously, and imposed a yoke of admiring submission. It was an extraordinary change from the awkward, dowdy, suppressed girl to this excellently appointed product. The liberty so tardily conceded was making up for lost time, and bade fair to transform itself into a tyranny. The parents were ready subjects, and cast back from the theories of to-day a delusive light on the practices of the past. They concluded that they had always indulged Anna, and that the result was most satisfactory. Then they must indulge her still. So Blake's visits went on, and the welcome became cordial. For Anna was quite clear that she at least had nothing against Blake. His attraction for her was not what had been his charm in Sibylla's eyes. Her impulse was not to reform; it was to conquer. But gossip and conjectures as to his past life were as good incentives to the one task as to the other. His good looks, his air of fashion, his comfortable means, helped the work. He widened the horizon of men for her, and made her out of conceit with her first achievements. She was content that Jeremy should disappear from her court; she became contemptuously impatient of Alec Turner's suit. She was fastidious and worldly-wise.
Again Mrs. Selford rejoiced. She had been in some consternation over Alec Turner's now obvious attachment, coming just at the time when Anna had established the right to please herself. Suppose her first use of liberty had been to throw herself away? For to what end be stylish if you are going to marry on a hundred and fifty pounds a year? But Anna was quite safe—strangely safe, Mrs. Selford thought in her heart, though she rebuked the wonder. Almost unkindly safe, she thought sometimes, as she strove to soften the blows which fell on poor Alec—since, so soon as he ceased to be dangerous, he became an object of compassion.
"Anna is so sensible," she said to Selford. "She's quite free from the silliness that girls so often show"; but she sighed just a little as she spoke.
"She'd make a good wife for any man," declared Selford proudly—a general declaration in flat contradiction to Caylesham's theories about double harness.
Anna paid no heed to opinions or comments. She went about her business and managed it with instinctive skill. It sometimes puzzled poor Alec Turner to think why his presence was so often requested, when his arrival evoked so little enthusiasm. He did not realise the part he played in Anna's scheme, nor how his visits were to appear to Walter Blake. Anna's generalship had thought all this out. The exhibition of Alec was a subsidiary move in the great strategic conception of capturing Walter Blake on the rebound from Sibylla.
But the pawn was not docile, and objected violently so soon as its function began to be apparent. Anna precipitated what she did not desire—a passionate avowal in which the theme of her own gifts and fascination was intermingled with the ideal of influencing the trend of public opinion from a modest home and on a modest income. She was told that she could be removed from the vanities of life and be her true, her highest self. When she showed no inclination to accept the path in life thus indicated, Alec passed through incredulity to anger. Had he cast his pearls before—— Well, at inappreciative feet? At this tone Anna became excusably huffy; to refuse a young man is not to deny all the higher moral obligations. Besides Alec annoyed her very much by assuming persistently that the dictates of her heart called her towards him, and that worldly considerations alone inspired her refusal.
"Oh, you're silly!" she cried. "I tell you it's nothing of the sort."
The dusk of the afternoon softened her features; the light of the fire threw up in clear outline the stylish well-gowned figure. Poor Alec, in his shabby mustard suit, stood opposite her, his hands in his pockets, in dogged misery and resentment, with all the helpless angry surprise of a first experience of this kind, fairly unable to understand how it was that love did not call forth love, obstinate in clinging to the theory of another reason as the sole explanation. Things did not exist in vain. For what was his love?
"But—but what am I to do?" he stammered.
Rather puzzled—after all rather flattered, Anna prayed him to be sensible and friendly. He consented to hope for her happiness, though he was obviously not sanguine about it. For himself all was over! So he said as he flung out of the room, knowing nothing of what lay before him on the path of life; discerning nothing of a certain daughter of a poor old political writer—a little round woman who made her own gowns, was at once very thrifty and very untidy, was inclined to think that the rulers of the earth should be forcibly exterminated, and lavished an unstinted affection on every being, human or brute, with which she was ever brought into contact. And if she did not greatly influence the trend of public opinion—well, anyhow she tried to. Just now, however, Alec knew nothing about her; he was left to think hopelessly of the trim figure and the lost ideals—the two things would mix themselves up in his mind.