Look up to her when he was a boy! Yes; that’s how he would put it. And the rest too; how often she had heard that old analogy of the rolling stone and its victims!
“I think the war transformed him; made a man of him. He says so himself. And now he believes he’s really found his vocation; he doesn’t think of anything but his writing, and some of his poetry seems to me very beautiful. I’m only sorry,” Nollie continued thoughtfully, “that he feels obliged to give up his present job. It seems a pity, when he has so little money, and has been looking so long for a post of the sort—”
“Ah ... he’s giving it up?”
“Well, yes; he says he must have more mental elbow-room; for his writing, I mean. He can’t be tied down to hours and places.”
“Ah, no; he never could—” Again the words had nearly slipped out. The effort to suppress them left Kate dumb for a moment, though she felt that Nollie was waiting for her to speak.
“Then of course he must go,” she assented. Inwardly she was thinking: “After all, if I’m right—and this seems to prove I’m right—about him and Lilla, it’s only decent of him to give up his job.” And her eyes suddenly filled with tears at the thought of his making a sacrifice, behaving at a crucial moment as her old ideal of him would have had him behave. After all, he was perhaps right in saying that the war had made a man of him.
“Yes; but it’s a pity. And not only for him, I mean. I think he had a good influence on Lilla,” Nollie went on.
Ah, now, really they were too simple—even Nollie was! Kate could hardly keep from shouting it out at her: “But can’t you see, you simpleton, that they’re lovers, the two of them, and have cooked up this match for their own convenience, and that your stupid Maclew is their dupe, as all the rest of you are?”
But something in her—was it pride or prudence?—recoiled from such an outburst, and from the need of justifying it. In God’s name, what did it matter to her—what did it matter? The risk was removed, the dreadful risk; she was safe again—as safe as she would ever be—unless some suicidal madness drove her to self-betrayal.
With dry lips and an aching smile she said: “You must help me to choose my wedding-present for Lilla.”