The Making of a Prig

by Evelyn Sharp

Paul smiled, a little regretfully.

"After years of renunciation," he murmured, "to be merely accounted a riddle! Then you think," he continued, with an interested expression, "that I am not the sort of man women would care about, eh? Well, I dare say you're right. But then, why do they ever care for any of us? I never expect them to, personally."

Heaton was looking at him in a perplexed manner.

"Perhaps I didn't express myself quite clearly," he hastened to say, with his usual wish to compromise. "I only meant that I sometimes think you never can have cared for any one seriously. But I've no doubt I'm wrong. And I never said that nobody had ever cared for you; I think that's extremely unlikely. In fact— Do you really want me to say what I think?"

"It would be most interesting," said Paul, still smiling.

"Well," said Heaton decidedly, "I think you're the sort of man who would break a woman's heart and spare her reputation, and perhaps not discover that she liked you at all. I know what women are, and they just love to pine away for a man like you who would never dream of giving them any encouragement. And you have such a fascinating way with you that you just lead them on, without meaning to in the least. You can curse, if you like, Wilton; it's great impertinence on my part, eh?"

"My dear fellow," was all Paul said. As a matter of fact, he had never liked him better than he did at that moment, and his words had set him thinking. But Heaton's next remark undid the good impression he had unwittingly made.

"The fact is," he said, "a woman's reputation is worth only half as much to her as her happiness."

And his worldly wisdom jarred on Paul's nerves, and sounded unnecessarily coarse to him in his present mood; and he did not try to detain him again, when Heaton rose for the second time to take his leave. When he had gone, Paul strolled to the window-seat and smoked another cigarette, looking down into the wind-swept court. And his thoughts deliberately turned to Katharine Austen. He had not seen her for five months, he had not written to her for two, and her last letter to him was dated six weeks back. It had not occurred to him, until he drew it from his pocket now and looked at it, that it was really so long as that since she had written to him; and he became suddenly possessed of a wish to know what those six weeks had held for her. Out there in the orange groves of the South, walking by the side of the beautiful Marion Keeley, with the rustle of her skirts so close to him and the shallow levity of her conversation in his ears, it had been easy to forget the desperately earnest child who was toiling away to earn her living in the dullest quarter of a dull city. But here, where she had so often sat and talked to him, where they had loved to quarrel and to make it up again, where she had given him rare glimpses of her quaint self and then hastily hidden it from him again, where she had been whimsical and serious by turns, where he had sometimes kissed her and felt her cheek warm at his touch,—here, all sorts of memories rushed back into his mind, and made him wonder why he had yielded so easily to the persuasions of the Keeleys, and remained so long away from England. It was impossible to name Marion Keeley in the same breath with this curiously lovable child who had held him in her sway all last summer, who had never used an art to draw him to her, and yet had succeeded, by force of qualities that she did not know she possessed, in gaining his sincere affection. Yet he had hardly thought of her for two months, and she had not written to him for six weeks. What had she been doing in those six weeks? It had not seemed to matter, when he walked by the side of Marion Keeley, how Katharine was passing her time in London; but now that Marion was no longer near him, now that he was free from her fascination and the necessity of replying to her banalities, it suddenly became of the first importance to him to know what had happened to Katharine in those six weeks. He had gone away, he told himself, because he had taken fright at the situation, because he could not analyse his own feelings for her, because everything, in the eyes of the world, was hurrying them on to marriage,—and of marriage he had the profoundest dread. And he had allowed himself to be captivated almost immediately, by the ordinary beauty of an ordinary girl, someone who knew how to play upon a certain set of his emotions which Katharine had never learnt to touch. An expression of distaste crossed his face as he threw away his cigarette only half smoked, and looked down at the fountain as he had so often stood and looked with her in the hot days of last July. Heaton's words returned to his mind with a new significance: "Their reputation is worth only half as much to them as their happiness." He remembered how he had parted from Katharine in this very room, before he went abroad; and how he had congratulated himself afterwards on having refrained from kissing her. But he had a sudden recollection now of the look on her face as she turned away from him; and, for the first time, he thought he understood its meaning.

He had never acted on an impulse in his life, before, nor yielded to a wish he could not analyse; but this afternoon he did both. It was about an hour later that Phyllis Hyam strolled into Katharine's cubicle with the announcement that a gentleman was in the hall, waiting to speak to her.