The architect father, the excellent, probably middle-class mother, who had set up a dressmaking business so that her child might live at home, and the youthful spirit of pride and intolerance that had resented the very existence of any such endeavour to shield her. Even the semi-Bohemian, semi-suburban home of the aunt and cousins at Hampstead came very clearly before his mind's eye. He felt convinced that the aunt was an elder sister of the paternal Marchrose, and that she and "Dolly" had brought much common-sense to bear upon the Clarence equation and that they must have talked the matter over and over, with a great effect of giving frank and disinterested advice.
And the girl who was tired of her work, who thought herself too good for the inhabitants of her hostel dwelling, whom "no one had ever wanted to marry"—it was not altogether wonderful, Julian thought, that she should have stifled her foolish, schoolgirl dreams of romance and accepted all that the infatuated boy of "the sort who asks one to marry him" had been ready to offer her.
Her acceptance of him was much less remarkable than her subsequent rejection.
It never occurred to Julian for an instant to question that she had taken her decisive step from any reason but the one she had given: that of knowing herself unequal to meet the supreme demand suddenly made upon her. Julian remembered the words that he had twice heard applied to that refusal of hers.
"Of course she didn't really care for him."
The literal truth, Julian reflected. And it was her resolute facing of that truth, in defiance of sentiment as of condemnation from others, that, to Julian's way of thinking, had redeemed the wrong that she had done to Clarence Isbister no less than to her own inner vision.
"For when all's said and done," said Julian to himself, "what is she but an incurable romanticist, unable to put up with the second best in that which, rightly or wrongly, she rates highest in life? But what one sees ahead for her—that's another matter."
Sir Julian, pessimist and idealist both at once, shrugged his shoulders and dismissed the speculation. But it had brought him to the thought of Mark Easter.
He thought that Mark, ten years ago, would have loved her, and that he would have made her happy. Julian, who had very completely missed happiness himself, still held that in the knowledge of it lay the secret of fulfilment. Mark had known it, knew it still. It lived, fundamental, in himself. But Miss Marchrose should have known it as a gift from without, a sudden revelation, even if enduring in its entirety for a little while only. Julian wondered whether she were destined still to know it, through the man whom he believed should teach her, through Mark Easter, and if so, at what cost?
He summed it up with his usual, "It's no business of mine. But I believe she'd think it worth while, at any price—and by Heaven, she's right!"