According to Plato

by Frank Frankfort Moore

“Poor Joe—poor Joe!” she whispered.

“That is the sincerest congratulation I have yet had,” said Josephine. “It is the congratulation that contains the smallest amount of bitterness. When people say ‘I hope you may be happy, my dear,’ they mean that they wouldn’t give much for my chances. No, Amber, don’t come back to us until I get used to being engaged. So many people have come. Mr. Clifton is wiser: he stays away. Oh, he was always so clever! The idea of a girl like myself trying to be equal to him!—Good-bye, dear.”

Amber did not speak a word. She almost rushed from the room, while Lady Gwendolen was still talking, musingly, of the merits of a bow of pink chiffon—it need not necessarily be a large or an imposing incident in the composition of the hat with the broad brim, a mere suggestion of the tint would be enough, she thought.

Amber felt as if she had just come from the deathbed of her dearest friend. She was horrified at the tone of Josephine’s voice and at the sound of her laugh. She felt that she never wished to see again the creature who had taken the place of her dear friend Josephine West.

The daughter of a mother who was a worldling, and of a father who was a politician, Josephine had ever shown herself to be free from the influence of either. But now—well, even her father was able to assume a certain amount of sincerity in dealing with political questions, especially when a General Election was impending. He had never talked cynically of the things which were held dear by the people with the votes. And as for her mother she was in the habit of speaking with deep feeling on the subject of the right fur for opera cloaks and other matters of interest to the intelligent. But there was Josephine talking and laughing on the first day of her engagement with a cynicism that could not have been bitterer had she been married a whole year.

What did it mean? What had brought about that extraordinary change in the girl’s nature? These were the questions which distracted Amber all the way to her home.

She could not forget that, after Josephine had written that little paper defining Platonic Friendship, she had been led to ask herself why Josephine should have thought well to be so satirical on the subject; and she had come to the conclusion that Josephine’s attitude was due to the fact of her having a tender feeling not of friendship but of love for some man; and Amber’s suspicions fell upon Ernest Clifton. She felt sure that she had noticed a certain light in Josephine’s face upon occasions when Mr. Clifton was near her. And yet now that she promised to become the wife of Mr. Clifton, the light that was in her eyes was an illumination of a very different sort.

And then as the question of exultation suggested itself to her she recollected how she fancied that she had perceived such an expression on the face of her friend on the Monday morning when she had returned to The Weir by the side of Pierce Winwood. The same expression was on the face of Pierce Winwood also, and Amber had felt convinced that he had told her he loved her and that she had not rejected him.

That was why they had talked so enthusiastically on the subject of the reaping machine (blue, picked out with vermillion).

But how was she to reconcile what she had seen and heard in the drawing-room which she had just left with her recollection of the return of Josephine and the other man—not the man whom she had promised to marry—from the survey of the reaping machine?