According to Plato

by Frank Frankfort Moore

But there was undoubtedly gratitude in her face.

He would have given a good deal to know if she was grateful by reason of being released from the pressing care of the secret which he had imposed upon her or because she now considered herself free to listen to the other man, the man whose identity he had not been able to discover.

She herself would have given a good deal to know so much.

“I admit that I was in error from the very first,” said he. “I had no right to place you in a false position. I did not know—but I had no excuse for not knowing—how a sensitive creature such as you are could not but feel deeply—as I do now—that you were not one who needed to be held in the bondage of a promise. I know now how that the real bond that exists between us is one that is not dependent for its endurance upon any formal promise—upon any formal engagement. I trust you, my Josephine, and I know that you can trust me.”

And then he took off his hat to Sir Digby and Lady Swan, and there was something in his action, Josephine thought, that compelled them to stop and shake hands with him and with her also, for she was acquainted with the great ex-Solicitor General and his wife.

Curiously enough that little movement on his part—a movement which suggested that he expected something more than a formal recognition—imparted to her an element of distrust. But it was not until several other fellow-guests had come up and joined her group separating her effectually from Ernest Clifton, that she began to be dimly conscious of the truth—that she became aware of the fact that while he had been ostentatiously knocking off her shackles of iron he had been gently imposing on her shackles of gold. He had so contrived, by the adroitness of his words, that she should remain bound to him by a tie far stronger than that from which he had just released her.

He had spoken quite truly: in telling her that he trusted her completely he had put upon her a bondage from which she would not try to escape. He had, so to speak, torn up her I O U before her eyes and had thereby turned the debt for which he held security into a debt of honour.

She felt that she had a right to resent this, and her feeling was that of a person who has been got the better of by another in a bargain, and who has come to be aware of this fact. She resented his cleverness of attitude in regard to her. There is no love strong enough to survive a display of cleverness on the part of either the man or the woman, and in her irritation of the moment she felt very bitterly regarding the man. “Trickster” was actually the word that was in her mind at the moment. It never occurred to her that a liberal allowance should be made for any man who has attained to a foremost position as a political organiser.

She should have known that to judge a professional politician by the ordinary standards that one instinctively employs in estimating the actions of people whom one meets in social life is scarcely fair. She should have known that there is honour among politicians just as there is honour—its existence has been proverbial, among the representatives of a mode of living whose affiliation with the profession of politics has not yet been fully recognised in England, though it is in America; but the standard of honour among either is not just the same as that which prevails at a public school or even in a public house. The art of jerrymandering is scarcely one that would be practised by the Chevalier Bayard; but it is an art that statesmen have studied with great advantage to themselves, without fear and without reproach—except, of course, the reproach of the opposing statesman.

Josephine West had talked a good deal about the point of view, and the sense of perspective and other abstractions; and yet she could feel irritated because she fancied that a man who had reduced dissimulation to a science had not been quite frank with her.