“I haven’t settled yet. I’ve got to arrange one or two things in town, and then I shall go abroad. Would you be able to come with me in about a week?”
“I daresay I might,” Maurice answered, looking vaguely round the room. Already, Michael thought, the subject was floating away from his facile comprehension.
The piano had stopped, and conversation became general again.
“This is where you ought to be, if you want to write,” Maurice proclaimed to Guy. “It’s ridiculous for you to bury yourself in the country. You’ll expire of stagnation.”
“Just at present I recommend you to stay where you are,” said Castleton. “I’m almost expiring from the violence with which I am being precipitated from one to another of Maurice’s energies.”
Soon afterward Michael and Guy left the studio and walked home; and next morning Guy went back to Wychford.
Michael was astonished at his own calmness. After the first shock of the betrayal he had gone and talked to a lot of people; he had coldly made financial arrangements; he had even met and rather liked a man whom only yesterday morning he could not have regarded without hatred for the part he had played in Lily’s life. Perhaps he had lost the power to feel anything deeply for long; perhaps he was become a sort of Maurice; already Lily seemed a shade of the underworld, merely more clearly remembered than the others. Yet in the moment that he was calling her a shade his present emotion proved that she was much more than that, for the conjured image of her was an icy pang to his heart. Then the indifference returned, but always underneath it the chill remained.
Mrs. Fane asked if he would care to go to the Opera in the evening: and they went to Bohême. Michael used to be wrung by the music, but he sat unmoved to-night. Afterward, at supper, he looked at his mother as if she were a person in a picture; he was saddened by the uselessness of all beauty, and by the number of times he would have to undress at night and dress again in the morning. He had no objection to life itself, but he felt an overwhelming despair at the thought of any activity in the conduct of it. He was sorry for the people sitting here at supper and for their footmen waiting outside. He felt that he was spiritually withered, because he was aware that he was surrendering to the notion of a debased material comfort as the only condition worth achieving for a body that remained perfectly well; grossly well, it almost seemed.
“Michael, have you been bored to-night?” his mother asked, when they had come home and were sitting by the window in the drawing-room, while Michael finished a cigar.
He shook his head.