“My dear fellow, you astonish me,” said Sir Matthew, impatiently. “With enough on your mind to burden most men heavily, you can yet find time to worry over the matrimonial squabbles that may ruffle your future peace. When once she’s your wife you’ll be able to do what you please with her.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” said Bruce Wylie. “It’s just those little, gentle women with hardly a word to say for themselves who are always astonishing people by hidden stores of force and courage and daring at some critical moment.”
“The only possible difficulty with Evereld would be her friendship for Ralph Donmead,” said Sir Matthew, “and, as ill luck will have it, the fellow turned up again to-day.”
“D——— him!” exclaimed Bruce Wylie. “How was that?”
“Saw her at the Abbey, and had the audacity to walk home with her. She told me all about it with the utmost frankness, and without so much as a change of colour. I don’t think there is any mischief done yet, but the less she sees of him the better. It seems that he is doing pretty well on the stage; at least, I gathered so.”
“Well,” said Bruce Wylie, reflectively, “it is always easy to set a scandal afloat about an actor, and if she seems losing her heart to him that is the line we must take.”
And therewith the two friends fell to talking of other business arrangements.
When Ralph turned away from the house in Queen Anne’s Gate, the happy excitement of the past hour suddenly gave place to a sobering realisation of things as they were. He, Ralph Denmead, a super at a pound a week, had had the audacity to fall in love with a girl of whose fortune he had, indeed, very vague ideas, but who had always been considered an heiress. That was a situation he liked very little, but it was characteristic of him that he did not sink into any very great depths of depression. He was not easily depressed, having been born with one of those equable tempers which are as delightful as they are rare. Then, too, his very indifference to money for its own sake, the habit he had inherited from his unworldly father of a positive dislike of all display and a contempt for all but the simplest tastes, came now to his aid. Extremes meet. And the marriage, which would have seemed a perfectly simple and desirable arrangement to a selfish fortune-hunter, seemed also perfectly possible to Ralph with his unconventional way of looking at things. He disliked her fortune, would gladly have foregone it altogether, but saw no reason in the world why it should stand as a barrier between them. If she loved him all would be well. He hoped she did love him, but was not certain. Only in that last quiet good-bye of hers something in its very self-control had given him hope; for the first time she seemed to shrink a little from showing how much she felt the parting. She was wholly unlike the little girl he had left sobbing in the schoolroom at Sir Matthew’s country cottage a few months before.
As he thought of this, a sort of wild desire to succeed in his profession, and to succeed quickly, took possession of him. His present position at the foot of the ladder seemed no longer tolerable. Patient plodding had been well enough earlier in the day, but now the fiery impatience of youth began to get the better of him. He turned eagerly to Ivy. They had by this time reached Westminster Bridge, and the cold, fresh wind from the river and the wider view seemed in harmony with his eager longing for a fuller, freer life, for an escape from the dull routine of his present work.