"What are you going to do this afternoon?" inquired her mother, after she had kissed her hand to Lord Hayes as he drove off.
"I am going to Wimbleton House. There is a garden-party. It is a bore, but I promised to go." Eva paused to see the sudden alacrity with which she knew her mother would receive the news, before she added—"Perhaps you would like to come with me."
"I should enjoy it very much," said her mother. "I am so fond of garden-parties, and they do them so well there."
"I didn't know that you knew the Duchess," remarked Eva, and let the subject drop.
She returned home and dined alone, and spent a long evening upstairs in her room. She reviewed again minutely from the beginning, not because she wanted to think of it, but because she could not avoid it, the events of the last weeks. It was as if a sudden light had burst in upon her soul, showing her what was meant by love, and then, just as she comprehended it, the exigencies of its very nature, the compulsion she was under to reveal herself, and that second compulsion which would not allow her to do for Reggie anything but what her sober reason told her was best for him, had left her face to face with this horrible blankness. A spring had broken out which could never, she felt, cease to flow, but she stood there, with mouth gagged, unable to drink of its coolness. In her heart she believed that, even now, if she wrote one word to him—"Come"—in two days he would be with her. But her longing and her firm renunciation seemed indivisible. She could no more have apostatised on her renunciation than she could have compelled herself to be quit of her love. Her nature was of too large and serene a type for her to feel again that one outburst of jealousy when she had torn Gertrude's photograph in half. At that moment all the worst side of her heart had leapt out—the tigress element; the animal within her had raised that one howl of anguish, but after that it had lain still, cowed to the deeper pain of that in her which was human and divine. At the moment of her renunciation a light had shone on her darkness, and though the darkness comprehended it not, it wondered and was still; and when in that light she saw and decided what course she must, for all reasons, take, the animal did not venture even to lift its head and growl.
Reader, are you burning to tell me that all this suffering on the part of Eva and Reggie—even if you allow that such a very proper chastening for the lax self-indulgence with which they slid into the mutual positions they now occupy is a subject fit to be treated of at all in a moral and Christian country, or whether you hold that I might as well describe the infliction of the cat o' nine tails on a righteously-condemned convict for some well-defined and properly-chastened offence—that this suffering was perfectly well merited; that, had Eva been a woman of even decent moral principles, or had Reggie not been subject to the calviest of calf loves, it would never have happened; that, above all, it was their, particularly her, fault? I plead guilty to all these indictments, or rather I put in no defence for my prisoners, which is the same thing. I admit that Eva was not—according to the best lights, which you, no doubt, are judging her by—a woman of decent moral principles; that it is a tenable view that this infatuation of Reggie's was only a calf love; but his last, remember, for I have told you that he was a boy no longer; and, above all, I admit that it was their, particularly her, fault.
Now, with regard to Eva's morals, you are judging her, I imagine, by your own standards, which, after all, are the only standards by which one man can judge another. No one can judge by other men's standards, whether they be lower than their own or higher—the result is a loss of moral perspective. You cannot take observations, except by applying your eye straight to the telescope; if you stand above it and squint, you will obtain an incorrect idea of what you wish to see. And in addition to venturing to assume that you judge her by your own standards, I will go further and assume, broadly, what those standards are. I have noticed that when people—as I, for the sake of argument, have made you do—refer to moral principles, they refer to a code which may vary in magnitude and comprehensiveness, but which is based on one principle—the avoidance, even in thought, of certain things which they regard instinctively, almost hysterically, as being impossible, because they are wrong. But the moral principles very seldom go so far as to say they are wrong; they stop short at impossible—they are contrary to its nature—and that is enough. Eva, I am afraid, had no morals at all of this kind. To take an exaggerated instance, I am afraid, if the truth were known, vitally and essentially, she kept her hands from picking or stealing not because it was wrong, but because she did not want the things she might have stolen. It is a very shocking confession, and it is driving a principle home to admit it, but it serves to illustrate under a distorting, or, at any rate, a very high-power lens, the difference between her and you. But—and this, I again assume, is the purport of the whole matter in your mind—it was her own fault. Ah, if I could only tell you how freely I grant you that. And what is there, in Heaven's name, of all the sufferings we ordinary people undergo, that is not our fault? From the slippers which the labourer's wife has omitted to put down to warm for her lord, and which give rise to recriminations and perhaps a few silent tears, to the pangs of remorse for some wrong done which we can never undo, what is there of which we are wholly guiltless? The supremely-suffering-babe-unborn-innocent-utterly-milk-and-water heroine of the severely classic romance is not common in this dingy, work-a-day world. It would be presumptuous in me to say she does not exist, but I have never seen her yet. She is a very beautiful and ennobling conception, and she always gets a full reward in the last chapter, where she is joined to her only love and lives happily ever afterwards, and sometimes is seen again in the epilogue, surrounded by a group of golden-haired, clean-limbed children, with their father's pensive eyes, who utter sentiments which must fill her maternal heart with pride and joy ineffable. But have you never, even in those beautiful epilogues, been faced by a grey, shadowy doubt that life is not quite like this, that even villains have good points, and heroines bad ones; that virtue does not always bring so full a reward, and that vice is not discomfited with that sublime completeness; in a word, that human nature is much more complex, more subtlely compounded than the epilogue would indicate, that a nature capable of a sublime action is also capable of one or of many that do not fall in with your moral principles, and that something is to be said even for the villain? But Eva, I maintain, though not a heroine, and though the bank of ineffable joy had not given her a blank cheque to be filled up at her pleasure, was not a villain. She had done something which no right-minded person would approve in allowing herself to fall in love with Reggie, and in allowing him to fall in love with her; and what is more, she had done something short-sighted. Not knowing the nature of love, she had tried to play with that perplexing emotion, and was finding now that it was not merely playing with her, but ordering her about in a most autocratic manner. She had committed a folly, and in this world we pay more heavily for a folly than a sin. She was bewildered, unstrung, unhappy, by her own fault, no doubt; but if we never pity those on whom justice makes its pitiless claims, whom shall we pity? Are we to class her with the villain, since we cannot class her with the heroine? After all, do not most of us belong to a class which it would be unjust or impossible to class with either the one or the other? There are more gradations between the noon-day sun and the starless night than the epilogues allow for. At any rate, all you Rhadamanthine judges, she was paying for it, and surely that is all you demand. Come a little further with me; your desire for justice, justice to the uttermost farthing, will not be disappointed.
Eva woke next morning from that dreamless sleep which only quickens our capabilities for suffering, woke with a start of pain into the full consciousness of her unimaginable future. But the absence of her husband was at least a mitigation; she felt she could not stand any extra burden just then. But would this horrible emptiness never cease—would there come no assuaging of her agony? It is hard, directly after some severe shock has been sustained, to believe in the possibly healing powers of time—all we feel is that the impossible to-morrows and to-morrows will stretch away until death, and none will be less impossible than the last. And when one is young, strong, serenely healthy, that is a serious thought. Surely Eva was paying for her folly. And still she never reconsidered her decision; she still saw with undoubted clearness that Reggie, leaving herself out of the question, would eventually be happier with Gertrude; that, for him, there were pleasant places open on this weary earth, into which he would, in all probability, soon pass and leave her for ever. His best chance of happiness lay there, and herself she did leave out of the question utterly and fearlessly. There is something to pity, and perhaps, after all, there is something to praise.