“I think perhaps supper may be ready,” Mrs. Madden said. “It all sounds very convincing as you speak, but I can’t help feeling that you’d be happier if you wouldn’t take everything to pieces to look at the works. Things hardly ever go so well again afterward. Oh dear, I wish you hadn’t lived together first.”
“It breaks the ice of the wedding-cake, doesn’t it?” said Sylvia.
“And I wish you wouldn’t make such bitter remarks. You don’t really mean what you say. I’m sure supper must be ready.”
“Oh, but I do,” Sylvia insisted, as they passed out into the narrow little passage and down the narrow stairs into the little dining-room. Nevertheless, in Sylvia’s mind there was a kindliness toward this little house, almost a tenderness, and far away at the back of her imagination was the vision of herself established in just such another little house.
“But even the Albert Memorial would look all right from the wrong end of a telescope,” she said to herself.
One thing was brought home very vividly during her stay in Dulwich, which was the difference between what she had deceived herself into thinking was that first maternal affection she had felt for Arthur and the true maternal love of his mother. Whenever she had helped Arthur in any way, she had always been aware of enjoying the sensation of her indispensableness; it had been an emotion altogether different from this natural selfishness of the mother; it was really one that had always reflected a kind of self-conscious credit upon herself. Here in Dulwich, with this aspect of her affection for Arthur completely overshadowed, Sylvia was able to ask herself more directly if she loved him in the immemorial way of love; and though she could not arrive at a finally positive conclusion, she was strengthened in her resolve not to let him go. Arthur himself was more in love with her than he had ever been, and she thought that perhaps this was due to that sudden and disquieting withdrawal of herself; in the midst of possession he had been dispossessed, and until he could pierce her secret reasons he would inevitably remain deeply in love, even to the point of being jealous of a boy like Lucian Hope. Sylvia understood Arthur’s having refused an engagement to tour as juvenile lead in a successful musical piece and his unwillingness to leave her alone in town; he was rewarded, too, for his action, because shortly afterward he obtained a good engagement in London to take the place of a singer who had retired from the cast of the Frivolity Theater. At that rate he would soon find himself at the Vanity Theater itself.
In June Sylvia went back to the Airdales’, and soon afterward took rooms near them in West Kensington. It was impossible to continue indefinitely to pretend that Arthur and herself were mere theatrical acquaintances, and one day Olive asked Sylvia if she intended to marry him.
“What do you advise?” Sylvia asked. “There’s a triumph, dearest Olive. Have I ever asked your advice before?”
“I like him; Jack likes him, too, and says that he ought to get on fast now; but I don’t know. Well, he’s not the sort of man I expected you to marry.”
“You’ve had an ideal for me all the time,” Sylvia exclaimed. “And you’ve never told me.”