She told him that they got on excellently well, that Dollie spent a good deal of time at the piano, and that when they went out to tea people were perfectly nice and understanding. She knew, indeed, that she could depend on her friends to be that. They accepted Dollie on the terms she asked for her. From friends so near as Mrs. Crawley and Lady Wrexham she had not concealed the fact that Dollie was a misfortune; but if others thought so, they were not to show it. She still hoped, by degrees, to make Dollie a figure easier to deal with at such neighborly gatherings. She had abandoned any hope that Dollie would grow: anything so feeble and so foolish could not grow; there was no other girl under the little dancer; she was simply no more and no less than she showed herself to be; but, at this later stage of their relationship, Mrs. Bradley essayed, now and then, a deliberate if kindly severity—as to heels, as to scents, as to touches of rouge.
'Oh, but I'm as careful, just as careful, Mrs. Bradley!' Dollie protested. 'I can't walk in lower heels. They hurt my instep. I've a very high instep and it needs support.' She was genuinely amazed that any one could dislike her scent and that any one could think the rouge unbecoming. She seemed to acquiesce, but the acquiescence was followed by moods of mournfulness and even by tears. There was no capacity in her for temper or rebellion, and she was all unconscious of giving a warning as she sobbed, 'It's nothing—really nothing, Mrs. Bradley. I'm sure you mean to be kind. Only—it's rather quiet and lonely here. I've always been used to so many people—to having everything so bright and jolly.'
She was not rapacious; she was not dissolute; she could be kept respectable and even contented if she were not made too aware of the contrast between her past existence and her present lot. With an air only of pensive pride she would sometimes point out to Mrs. Bradley, in the pages of those same illustrated weeklies with which her mother-in-law associated her, the face of some former companion. One of these young ladies had recently married the son of a peer. 'She is in luck, Floss,' said Dollie. 'We always thought it would come to that. He's been gone on her for ages, but his people were horrid.'
Mrs. Bradley felt that, at all events, Dollie had no ground for thinking her 'horrid'; yet she imagined that there lay drowsing at the back of her mind a plaintive little sense of being caught and imprisoned. Floss had stepped, triumphant, from the footlights to the registrar's office, and apparently had succeeded in uniting the radiance of her past and present status. No, Dollie could be kept respectable and contented only if the pressure were of the lightest. She could not change, she could only shift; and although Mrs. Bradley felt that for herself, her life behind her, her story told, she could manage to put up with a merely shifted Dollie, she could not see how Jack was to manage it. What was Jack to do with her? was the thought that pressed with a growing weight on her mother's heart. She could never be of Jack's life; yet here she was, in it, planted there by his own generous yet inevitable act, and by hers—in its very centre, and not to be evaded or forgotten.
And the contrast between what Jack's life might have been and what it now must be was made more poignantly apparent to her when Frances Thorpe came down to stay from a Saturday to Monday: Frances in her black, tired and thin from Red-Cross work in London; bereaved in more, her old friend knew, than dear Toppie's death; yet with her leisurely, unstressed cheerfulness almost unaltered, the lightness that went with so much tenderness, the drollery that went with so much depth. Dearest, most charming of girls,—but for Jack's wretched stumble into 'fairyland' last summer, destined obviously to be his wife,—could any presence have shown more disastrously, in its contrast with poor Dollie, how Jack had done for himself?
She watched the two together that evening—Frances with her thick, crinkled hair and clearly curved brow and her merry, steady eyes, leaning, elbow on knee, to talk and listen to Dollie; and Dollie, poor Dollie, flushed, touched with an unbecoming sulkiness, aware, swiftly and unerringly, of a rival type. Frances was of the type that young men married when they did not 'do for themselves.' There was now no gulf of age or habit to veil from Dollie her disadvantage. She answered shortly, with now and then a dry, ironic little laugh; and, getting up at last, she went to the piano and loudly played.
'He couldn't have done differently. It was the only thing he could do,' Frances said that night before her bedroom fire. She did not hide her recognition of Jack's plight, but she was staunch.
'I wouldn't have had him do differently. But it will ruin his life,' said the mother. 'If he comes back, it will ruin his life.'
'No, no,' said Frances, looking at the flames. 'Why should it? A man does n't depend on his marriage like that. He has his career.'
'Yes. He has his career. A career isn't a life.'