It was a matter requiring great tact and discrimination, this giving to those who asked. Naturally there were other letters. Invitations poured in upon Rupert Haverford. There was scarcely a great house which had not thrown open its doors to him.
Already his small dinners had taken to themselves a cachet. If he had responded to all the invitations that were poured upon him he would scarcely have had a moment to himself. As it was, he felt that he was drifting more swiftly into the stream of society than he had any desire or intention of doing.
Not once, but a dozen times he had told himself of late that he must change this.
Life for him had a serious meaning. It was full of serious projects.
Sometimes when he was a guest at the table of some illustrious personage, or sometimes when he would be standing in a ballroom watching the dancers and listening to the strains of softest music, he would lose himself, as it were; he would go back in his imagination to those days when he had stood working with the humblest of the factory hands, working and dreaming for the time when he should be free. Working, not for this bubbling gaiety, but for those big, those noble ambitions which his father had set before him as his ideals when he had been a child of only a few years.
He threw aside the letters now, and leaned back in his chair.
It was perhaps the first time he had let himself challenge himself.
With one of those curious tricks that imagination plays us at times he was suddenly wafted from the cosy warmth of his room to that cold, damp mist of the day before. He was walking through the white fog with Camilla Lancing nestling close to him.
If he were to turn his back on London, on society, on that life which had been circling about him of late, he must turn his back on this woman, for she, and she alone, was the magnet that held him so tenaciously.
He caught his breath suddenly, like one who fights for a cold, keen wind, and got up. It had grown to be the dominant influence of his present life, this struggle with himself on the subject of Camilla Lancing. How would it end?