Vashti puzzled him. She seemed to avoid him. When he visited the apartment she was out, just going out or expected back shortly. He had fugitive glimpses of her hurrying off to concert engagements, or going on some pleasure jaunt with the unexplained Mr. Dak, similar to those which he and Desire enjoyed together.
Mr. Kingston Dak was a little grasshopper of a man. He had lemon-colored hair, white teeth, extremely well-kept hands and was nearly forty. His littleness was evidently a sore point with him, for the heels of his shoes were built up like a woman’s. He held himself erectly and when others were seated he usually remained standing. He seemed to be always in search of something to lean against which would enable him to tiptoe unobtrusively and to add another inch to his stature. He was clean-shaven, and in appearance shy and boyish; he would have looked excellently well in clerical attire. By hobby he was an occultist; by profession a stockbroker. His chief topic of conversation was the superiority of Mohammedanism to Christianity.
Desire called him “King” familiarly; Vashti referred to him as “My little broker.” Although in his early twenties he had been divorced and tattered by the thorns of a disastrous passion, neither of them seemed to regard him as dangerously masculine. They treated him as a maiden-aunt—as a pale person receiving affection in lieu of wages, expected to safeguard their comfort and to slip into a cupboard when he wasn’t wanted.
“King’s quite nice,” Desire told Teddy; “he was most awfully fond of her. His troubles have made him so understanding.”
Teddy wondered what had happened to the world that all its women had become Vestal Virgins and all its men unassailable St. Anthonies. He watched Mr. Dak for any sign that he remembered the days of his flesh. The little man was as perfunctory over his duties as a well-trained lackey.
Vashti’s bearing towards himself during their brief meetings was affectionately sentimental. There was a hint of the proprietary in the way she touched him, as though she regarded him already as her son. Her eyes would rest on him with veiled inquiry; she never put her question into words. She was giving him his chance, and he felt infinitely grateful to her—so grateful that he was blind to the unexplained situations which surrounded her. That she should allow his unchaperoned relations with Desire endowed her with broadmindedness. “Unto the pure all things are pure,” seemed the maxim on which she acted. In accepting that ruling for his own conduct, he had to extend the same leniency to Mr. Dak’s.
Desire stretched it a point further and made it apply to herself. He found that frequently after he had said “Good-by” to her at close on midnight, Fluffy would call with a car and carry her off to make a party of three at supper, or sometimes to join a larger party—mostly of men—in her apartment. He remonstrated with her: “It’s all very well for an actress; but I hate to think of you mixing with all kinds of people whose standards are just anyhow, and playing ’gooseberry’ for two people older than yourself.”
“I don’t see that you can complain,” she laughed. “If my standards weren’t theatrical and if I were the kind of girl who sees evil in everything, you wouldn’t be allowed to go about with me so much.”
There was his dilemma in a nut-shell. In joining the ranks of the superiorly pure, he was pledged to see purity everywhere. Divorces were pure. Nobody was to blame for anything. People ought to be sympathized with, not punished, when they got into trouble. He seemed to have made lax conventions his own by taking advantage of them for facilitating his courtship. It would look like hypocrisy to disapprove of them after marriage. It was very jolly, for instance, to hear her whisper in the jingling secrecy of a hansom, “Meester Deek, please light me a cigarette.” Very jolly to convey it from his lips to hers, and to watch the red glow of each puff make a cameo of her face against the blackness. But—— And that but was perpetually walking round new corners to confront him—if she were his wife, would the sight of her smoking afford him such abiding happiness? She had taunted him with being a King Arthur. In the presence of her emotional tolerance, which found excuses for everything and ostracized nobody, his sense of propriety seemed a lack of social charity. He guessed the reason for her continual plea that people should be forgiving—her mother. The knowledge silenced his criticisms and roused his compassion.
Two moods possessed him alternately: in the one he despised himself as an austere person, in whom an undue restraint of upbringing had dammed the stream of youth, so that it lay alone and unruffled as a mountain-tarn; in the other he saw himself as a man with a chivalrous duty.