CHAPTER XXVIII
WOMAN PROPOSES
Ruth had abandoned her pleading at a clever moment, for she had left Helena with a sense of pity, and pity means more to a woman than conviction.
Poor old Hubert! She was glad now, oh so glad, that she had spared him. It had been on her tongue yesterday, when he was so contemptuous about her book being popular claptrap, herself an amateur, to answer: "Well, I have found out about your own work too: it tries to be popular and isn't,"—to tell him she had also learnt that one could write without upsetting the whole household by one's fads and poses.... But in the end she hadn't. Perhaps it was as Ruth had said: every one would always spare him. Something, in any case, had held her back, and now she was glad; for that once said, it would have been too late. She felt that Ruth had spoken truly: he never could have cared for her again.
Poor old Hugh!
Buoyed by this feeling, crushing under it all others, she went to her bureau and unlocked the drawer where she kept her secret manuscript. There were three chapters. She would destroy them before her mood changed. Then she would go to him and say that he was right, she was not clever in the way that he was—she was an amateur. He would take days perhaps, yes even weeks, before he could forgive her quite; but it was as Ruth had just said. The rivalry gone, he would soon learn to bear the rest. He would have won back his self-sufficiency, ... poor Hugh!
She took out the written sheets with all the feelings of a mother who sacrifices her own son, touching them gently as if even in this last hour they had been something sacred.
Then—weak if you will, but do not be too hard upon the-Mother-soul—then she began to read.... just a few sentences.
And as she read, the whole thing leapt to instant life; began to grow, as poor Virginia had grown. She saw the painter, strong in a way—not Geoffrey Alison at all—but with a fatal vanity. Yes, that would be his fall, of course. He would be all right with the women he admired; there were so many, he was safe enough: but when he met the woman who admired him——!
She had not thought of it like that before. She did not know where the idea had come from now. Before it went she hurriedly seized up her pen, to add a note to the confused synopsis.