"You shan't be troubled, you shan't be annoyed. I'll give up my evening treat. We'll go back to our old footing—before I spoke to you about this. I'll ask nothing of you as a lover—well, except not to decide finally against me till the wedding. Only three weeks! But as my friend, and Vivien's, I do ask you not to leave us in the lurch now—at this particular moment—and not to risk setting everybody talking. If you insist on leaving me, go after the wedding. That means no change in our plan, except that you won't come back. That'll seem quite natural; it's what they all expect."
Still never a word of Harry, no hint of resentment, nothing that could alarm her or give her a handle for offence! Whether from friend or lover, his request sounded most moderate and reasonable. Not to leave the friend in the lurch, not to decide with harsh haste against a patient lover who had been given cause for confident hope, almost for certainty! He left her no plausible answer, for she could adduce no grievance against him. He had but taken what for her own purposes she had been content to allow—first in his bluff flirtation, then in his ill-restrained endearments. There was no plausibility in turning round and pretending to resent these things now. She dared not take false points in an encounter so perilous; that would be to expose herself to a crushing reply.
"If you go now—all of a sudden, at this moment—I can't help thinking you'll put yourself under a slur, or else put me under one. People know the position you've been in here—practically mistress of the house, with Vivien in your entire charge. Very queer to leave three weeks before her wedding! You may invent excuses, or we may. An aunt dying—something of that sort! Nobody ever believes in those dying aunts!"
It was all true; people did not believe in those dying aunts, not when sudden departures of handsome young women were in question. People would talk; the thing would look odd. His plausible cunning left her no loophole.
"If you wish it, I'll stay till the wedding, on our old footing—as we were before all this, I mean. But you mustn't think there's any chance of my—my changing again."
"Thank you." He put out his hand across the table. She could not but take it. Though he seemed so cool and quiet, the hand was very hot. He held hers for a long while, his eyes intently fixed on her in a regard which she could not fathom, but which filled her anew with fear. She fell into a tremble; her lips quivered.
"Let me go now, please," she entreated, her eyes unable to meet his any longer.
He released her hand, and leant back in his chair. He smiled at her again, as he said, "Yes, go now. I'm afraid this interview has been rather trying to you—perhaps to us both."
Of all the passions, the sufferings, the undergoings of mankind, none has so relentlessly been put to run the gauntlet of ridicule as jealousy. It is the sport of the composer of light verses, the born material of the writer of farce—especially when it is well founded. It is perhaps strange to remark—could any strangeness outlast familiarity—that the supreme study of it treats of it as utterly unfounded, and finds its highest tragedy in its baselessness. Ridiculous when justifiable, tragic when all a delusion! Is that nature's view, even as it is so often art's? Certainly the race is obstinate in holding real failure in the conflict of sex as small recommendation in a hero, imagined as the opportunity for his highest effect. King Arthur hardly bears the burden of being deceived; on the baseless suspicion of it the Moor rides through murder to a triumphant death—and a general sympathy—unless nowadays women have anything to say on the latter point.
Yet this poor passion—commonly so ridiculous, even more commonly, among the polite, held ill-bred—must be allowed its features of interest. It is remarkably alert, acute, ingenious, even laborious, in its sweeping of details into its net. It works up its brief very industriously, be the instructions never so meagre—somehow it invites legal metaphor, being always plaintiff in the court of sex, always with its grievance to prove, generally faced with singularly hard swearing in the witness box. It has its successes, as witnessed by notable phrases; there is the "unwritten law," and there are "extenuating circumstances." The phrases throw back a rather startling illumination on the sport of versifiers and the material of farce. But the exceptional cases have a trick of stamping themselves on phraseology. Most of us are jealous with no very momentous results. We grumble a little, watch a little, sulk a little, and decide that there is nothing in it. Often there is not. Likewise we are ambitious without convulsing the world—or even our own family circle. So with our lives, our loves, our deaths—history, poetry, elegy find no place for them. Only nature has and keeps a mother's love for the ordinary man, and holds his doings legitimate matter for her interest, nay, essential to her eternal unresting plan. She may be figured as investing the bulk of her fortune in him, as in three per cents.—genius being her occasional "flutter."