“Darling Sylvia, why do you say it so defiantly? Everybody will be delighted. Jack was talking only the other day about his perpetual dread that you’d never give yourself a chance of establishing your position finally, because you were so restless.”
Sylvia contemplated an admission to Olive of having lived with Arthur for a year in America, but in this room the fact had an ugly look and seemed to belong rather to that evil face of the past that had confronted her with such ill omen this evening, rather than to anything so homely as marriage.
“Arthur may not be anything more than an actor,” she went on. “But in my profession what else do I want? He has loved me for a long time; I’m very fond of him. It’s essential that I should have a background so that I shall never be shaken out of my self-possession by anything like this evening’s encounter. I’ve lived a life of feverish energy, and it’s only since the improvisations that I can begin to believe it wasn’t all wasted. I made a great mistake when I was seventeen, and when I was nineteen I tried to repair it with a still greater mistake. Then came Lily; she was a mistake. Oh, when I look back at it all, it’s nothing but mistake after mistake. I long for such funny ordinary little pleasures. Olive darling, I’ve tried, I’ve tried to think I can do without love, without children, without family, without friends. I can’t.”
The tears were running swiftly, and all the time more swiftly, down Sylvia’s cheeks while she was speaking. Olive jumped up from her soft and quilted chair and knelt beside her friend.
“My darling Sylvia, you have friends, you have, indeed you have.”
“I know,” Sylvia went on. “It’s ungrateful of me. Why, if it hadn’t been for you and Jack I should have gone mad. But just because you’re so happy together, and because you have Sylvius and Rose, and because I flit about on the outskirts of it all like a timid, friendly, solitary ghost, I must have some one to love me. I’ve really treated Arthur very badly. I’ve kept him waiting now for a year. I wasn’t brave enough to let him go, and I wasn’t brave enough to marry him. I’ve never been undecided in my life. It must be that the gipsy in me has gone forever, I think. This success of mine has been leading all the time to settling down properly. Most of the people who came back to me out of the past were the nice people, like my old mistress and the grown-up twins, and I want to be like them. Oh, Olive, I’m so tired of being different, of people thinking that I’m hard and brutal and cynical. I’m not. Indeed I’m not. I couldn’t have felt that truly appalling horror of Monkley this evening if I were really bad.”
“Sylvia dear, you’re working yourself up needlessly. How can you say that you’re bad? How can you say such things about yourself? You’re not religious, perhaps.”
“Listen, Olive, if I marry Arthur I swear I’ll make it a success. You know that I have a strong will. I’m not going to criticize him. I’m simply determined to make him and myself happy. It’s very easy to love him, really. He’s like a boy—very weak, you know—but with all sorts of charming qualities, and his mother would be so glad if it were all settled. Olive, I meant to tell you a whole heap of things about myself, about what I’ve done, but I won’t. I’m going to forget it all and be happy. I’m glad it’s Christmas-time. I’ve bought such ripping things for the kids. When I was buying them to-night there came into my head almost my first adventure when I was a very little girl and thought I’d found a ten-franc piece which was really the money I’d been given for the marketing. I had just such an orgy of buying to-night. Did you know that a giraffe could make a noise? Well, it can, or at any rate the giraffe I bought for Sylvius can. You twist its neck and it protests like a bronchial calf.”
The party on Christmas Eve was a great success. Lucian Hope burnt a hole in the table-cloth with what was called a drawing-room firework. Jack split his coat trying to hide inside his bureau. Arthur, sitting on a bottle with his legs crossed, lit a candle, twice running. The little red-haired singer found the ring in the pudding. Sylvia found the sixpence. Nobody found the button, so it must have been swallowed. It was a splendid party. Sylvius and Rose did not begin to cry steadily until after ten o’clock.
When the guests were getting ready to leave, about two o’clock on Christmas morning, and while Lucian Hope was telling everybody in turn that somebody must have swallowed the button inadvertently, to prove that he was quite able to pronounce “inadvertently,” Sylvia took Arthur down the front-door steps and walked with him a little way along the foggy street.