“Mr. Halton is so much more interesting!” said inclination.
“The Administrator has the real power!” said reason.
It was all the harder because in the one case she knew herself sure of success, and in the other she saw probable failure—and Mrs. Lewin disliked failure. Every woman in Key Island had made tentative efforts to bind Mr. Gregory to her chariot wheels, and had quietly drawn back without a hint of her defeat, after the manner of her sex. The only difference to Mrs. Lewin’s case was that she really wished to interest Mr. Gregory in her husband and not in herself; but she could not hope that this would make her any more successful.
“Besides, he must begin by liking me, and being interested in me, though he doesn’t know it,” she said to herself candidly. “And at present he simply does not know that I exist. Well, perhaps China Town may prove useful—some day.”
She went across the house to her husband’s dressing-room, where he had slept in order that her early rising might not disturb him, and looked in before starting. Alaric was lying with his arm thrown up above his head, in a boyish fashion that made him seem very young in spite of the manliness of the bronzed dark face, and the thick moustache on his upper lip. Chum bent down and ruffled his hair rather fondly, and he sighed in his sleep and turned over, but did not wake. There was a shadow of vague yearning in her eyes as she turned away and went out on to the stoep. Marriage had touched her lightly, but this was one of the rare moments when she felt a craving after something more satisfying—something that might even be welcome pain if it were only less ephemeral.
The morning air was brisk compared to the general laxity of Key Island. Mrs. Lewin mounted the pony which the sais held for her, and rode away through the listening day, with her senses equally alert. For it seemed at this hour as if everything had ears, or a keener vitality that looked for new experiences. Even Liscarton trod daintily, and sidled through the gate into the highway, pretending that he saw bogies among the ragged fans of the bananas. Where the path dipped down into Port Victoria the hoofs of a second pony became audible, and a minute later the Commissioner overtook her and drew up alongside.
“You are before your time, Mrs. Lewin; I meant to pick you up at your own gate,” he said gaily. He also seemed in unusual harmony with Nature. “Isn’t it worth while to rise early and get the spring of the morning into one’s system? I feel like that charming person in Scripture who ‘walked delicately,’ though I am afraid he was hardly a model to copy in his after-history.”
“Agag, wasn’t it?” said Chum. “I always felt I should have liked to follow his career a little further, but one never gets a chance. Do you notice how very badly they tell a story in the Bible? They have no idea of keeping back the end of the plot. ‘Now Ahab was fallen sick of the sickness whereof he died,’ they say, and, of course, as you know what is coming, it seems superfluous to read any further.”
“In fact, you don’t care about Ahab unless he is going to live.”
“I never did care for the pawns in the game who are sacrificed. It is the big pieces who accomplish the struggle, whether they do ill or well, who interest me. I feel that they have made something out of life, instead of life making something out of them.”