“I never said they weren’t happy.”
“Then, my dear Ansell, why are you so cut up? It’s beastly when a friend marries,—and I grant he’s rather young,—but I should say it’s the best thing for him. A decent woman—and you have proved not one thing against her—a decent woman will keep him up to the mark and stop him getting slack. She’ll make him responsible and manly, for much as I like Rickie, I always find him a little effeminate. And, really,”—his voice grew sharper, for he was irritated by Ansell’s conceit, “and, really, you talk as if you were mixed up in the affair. They pay a civil visit to your rooms, and you see nothing but dark plots and challenges to war.”
“War!” cried Ansell, crashing his fists together. “It’s war, then!”
“Oh, what a lot of tommy-rot,” said Tilliard. “Can’t a man and woman get engaged? My dear boy—excuse me talking like this—what on earth is it to do with us?”
“We’re his friends, and I hope we always shall be, but we shan’t keep his friendship by fighting. We’re bound to fall into the background. Wife first, friends some way after. You may resent the order, but it is ordained by nature.”
“The point is, not what’s ordained by nature or any other fool, but what’s right.”
“You are hopelessly unpractical,” said Tilliard, turning away. “And let me remind you that you’ve already given away your case by acknowledging that they’re happy.”
“She is happy because she has conquered; he is happy because he has at last hung all the world’s beauty on to a single peg. He was always trying to do it. He used to call the peg humanity. Will either of these happinesses last? His can’t. Hers only for a time. I fight this woman not only because she fights me, but because I foresee the most appalling catastrophe. She wants Rickie, partly to replace another man whom she lost two years ago, partly to make something out of him. He is to write. In time she will get sick of this. He won’t get famous. She will only see how thin he is and how lame. She will long for a jollier husband, and I don’t blame her. And, having made him thoroughly miserable and degraded, she will bolt—if she can do it like a lady.”
Such were the opinions of Stewart Ansell.
IX