"I'm probably going to work in London at journalism."
"Then, great Scott, why all this preliminary tirade against it?"
"Because I don't want to bluff myself into thinking that I'm going to do anything but be a strictly professional writer," said Guy. "Or else perhaps because I don't really want to come and live in London at all, but go to Persia. Dash it all, for the first time in my life, Maurice, I don't know what I do want, and it's a very humiliating state of affairs for me."
When Guy left the studio that evening, he came away with that pleasant warming of the cockles of the brain that empirical conversation always gave. It was really very pleasant to be chattering away about aesthetic theories, to be meeting new people and to be infused with this sense of being joined up to the motive force of a city's life. At his lodgings in Vincent Square a letter from Pauline awaited his return, and with a shock he realized half way through its perusal that he was reading it listlessly. He turned back and tried to bring to its contents that old feverish absorption in magic pages, but something was wanting whether in the letter or whether in himself he did not know. He came to the point of asking himself if he loved her still as much, and almost with horror at the question vowed he loved her more than ever and that of all things on earth he only longed for their marriage. Yet in bed that night he thought more of his argument in the studio than about Pauline, and when he did think about her it was with a drowsy sense of relief. Vincent Square under the bland city moon seemed very peaceful, and in retrospect Wychford a place of endless storms.
Next morning when Guy sat down to answer Pauline's letter he found himself writing with mechanical fluency without really thinking of her at all. In fact for the moment she represented something that disturbed the Summer calm in London, and he consciously did not want to think about her until all this late troublous time had lost its actuality and he could be sure of returning to the Pauline of their love's earlier days.
These shuttlecock letters were tossed backward and forward between Wychford and London throughout the rest of June and most of July, and sometimes Guy thought they were as unreal as his own poetry. He spent his time in looking up old friends, in second-hand book shops, in the galleries of theatres. He did not see Michael Fane, who wrote to him from Rome before Guy knew he had gone there. Comeragh however he saw pretty often, and he enjoyed talking about politics nearly as much as about art. He met Sir George Gascony, and Comeragh assured him afterward that when Sir George went out to Persia in August or September he could if he liked go with him. Guy put the notion at the back of his mind whence he occasionally took it out and played with it. In the end, however, when the definite offer came he refused it. This happened at the end of his visit to London when his money was running out and when he had to be going back to Wychford to live somehow on credit, until the Michaelmas quarter replenished his overdrawn account. Before he left town he paid a visit to Mr. Worrall and told him that he wanted his poems to appear anonymously. In fact if it were not for hurting the Rector's feelings he would have stopped their publication altogether.
At the end of a hot and dusty July and about a week before the Lammas wedding of Margaret and Richard, Guy came back to Plashers Mead. The immediate effect of seeing again the place which was now associated in his mind with interminable difficulties was to make him resolute to clarify the situation once and for all, to clarify it so completely that there could never again be a repetition of that night in June. His absence had been in the strictest sense an interlude, and all the letters which marked to each the existence of the other had been but conventional forms of love and comfortable postponements of reality. When he met Pauline, Guy felt that he met her to all intents directly after that dreadful night, with only this difference that owing to the time they had had for repose he could now say things that six weeks ago he could not have said. He had arrived at Wychford for lunch, and as a matter of course they were to be together that afternoon. Ordinarily on such a piping July day he would have proposed the river for their converse, and it was a sign of how near at hand he felt their last time on the river that he proposed a walk instead.
Guy was aware of wanting to take Pauline to some place that was neither hallowed nor cursed by past hours, and avoiding familiar ways, they reached a barren cup-shaped field shut off from the road by a spinney of firs that offered such a dry and draughty shade as made the field even in the hot sun of afternoon more tolerable. They sat down on the sour stony land among the ragwort and teazles and feverfew. Summer had burnt up this abandoned pasturage, and while they sat in silence Guy rattled from the rank umbels of fools-parsley and hemlock the innumerable seeds that would only profit the rankness of another year.
"Well?" he said at last.
Pauline looked at him questioningly, and he felt impatient to be sitting here on this sour stony land and wondered how for merely this he could have refused that offer of Persian adventure. Not until now had he realized how much he had been resenting the performance of a duty.