“‘Hello, is somebody in here?’ I said, as I pushed into the little conservatory.
“I looked straight at Beatrice, and she at me. We seemed to have formed an alliance in that look: she was the other half of my consciousness, I of hers. Ha! Ha! there were a lot of white narcissus, and little white hyacinths, Roman hyacinths, in the conservatory. I can see them now, great white stars, and tangles of little ones, among a bank of green; and I can recall the keen, fresh scent on the warm air; and the look of Beatrice … her great dark eyes.
“It’s funny, but Beatrice is as dead—ay, far more dead—than Dante’s. And I am not that young fool, not a bit.
“I was very romantic, fearfully emotional, and the soul of honour. Beatrice said nobody cared a thing about her. FitzHerbert was always jaunting off, the mother was a fretful invalid. So I was seventeen, earning half a guinea a week, and she was eighteen, with no money, when we ran away to Brighton and got married. Poor old Pater, he took it awfully well, I have been a frightful drag on him, you know.
“There’s the romance. I wonder how it will all end.”
Helena laughed, and he did not detect her extreme bitterness of spirit.
They walked on in silence for some time. He was thinking back, before Helena’s day. This left her very much alone, and forced on her the idea that, after all, love, which she chose to consider as single and wonderful a thing in a man’s life as birth, or adolescence, or death, was temporary, and formed only an episode. It was her hour of disillusion.
“Come to think of it,” Siegmund continued, “I have always shirked. Whenever I’ve been in a tight corner I’ve gone to Pater.”
“I think,” she said, “marriage has been a tight corner you couldn’t get out of to go to anybody.”
“Yet I’m here,” he answered simply.