"It's true," Curlew groaned. "How wise you are!"
Only that morning he had received a sharp reminder from the great brain of which The Way of the World was merely an inquisitive and insignificant tentacle, to say that the last three or four numbers of the paper had shown a marked falling off in their ability to provide what the public required.
"You have to admit that I am right," Dorothy pointed out kindly.
"Yes, but if you'd marry me, in a year or two I would give up journalism and write novels. I've got a theory about the form of the English novel which I should like to put into practice."
"I'm afraid," said Dorothy, "I have heard too many theories about the form of race-horses to believe much in theories of form about anything. Form is a capricious quality."
"It's an awful thing," poor Wilfred groaned, "for a man who knows he can write good stuff never to have an opportunity of doing so. I'm afraid I've sold my soul," he murmured, in a transport of remorse.
"We all of us do that sooner or later," she said. "And it's only when we don't get a good price for it that we repent."
Dorothy's faculty for aphorisms had no doubt been fostered by the respect which was accorded to her at Lonsdale Road, but she was far from talking merely for the sake of talking, and her inspiration was really the fruit of experience, not the mere flowering of words. She had, perhaps, been wiser than she had realized in coming home for a while. Notwithstanding those two younger sisters nearly as beautiful as herself, notwithstanding the knowledge generally diffused that she was without money, her beauty and rank were still sufficiently remarkable in West Kensington to preserve her dignity. Here she ran no risks of acquiring a deeper cynicism from the behavior of old friends like Tufton, and inasmuch as misfortune had made her more truly the equal of those around her she had no temptation now to lord it over her sisters, as no doubt they had expected she would; in the homage of West Kensington she let the pleasant side of herself develop and, by a strong effort resisting an inclination to worry about the future, she resigned herself to whatever fortune had in store for her.
Dorothy was not content with waiting for all her old friends to visit her; there was one whom she herself sought out soon after she reached West Kensington. She had not seen Olive Airdale since her marriage, and she was glad she was visiting her for the first time humbly and on foot, even if Olive should think that it was only in adversity that she cared to seek out the companions of her early days. What rubbish! As if Olive would think anything except that she was glad to see her old friend. It was an opalescent afternoon in mid-October when Dorothy rang the bell of the little red house in Gresley Road, and Olive's welcome of her was as if the mist over London had suddenly melted to reveal that very paradise which for the fanciful wayfarer existed somewhere behind these enchanting and transfigurative autumnal airs.
"My dearest Dorothy," she exclaimed. "But why do you reproach yourself? As if I hadn't always perfectly understood! I've been so worried about you. And I wish you could have met Jack—but of course he enlisted at once. You don't know him or you'd realize that of course he had to."