‘Herbert, he shan’t have a penny of your money!’ Mrs. Fairfield turned confidently to her husband for ratification of this threat. ‘Tell him so.’
‘We’ll see. We’ll see. I’m not dead yet,’ said the little man, with unwonted independence. ‘I hadn’t any pennies myself when I was his age.’
His wife turned upon him a terrible Et tu Brute look.
‘Never you mind,’ he retorted, with incredible courage. ‘There’s sense in what the lad says, even though he is a bit of a hard nut. Gets that from his father perhaps.’
‘His father!’ cried the mother in scorn. ‘They’re their mother’s children, both of them. Else they’d never dare to treat me like this.’
There was pride as well as anger in the glance she flashed at Edward as she gathered up her skirts and rustled out of the room.
PART THE THIRD
Sheila Fairfield
1
ALL roads led to Edward Fairfield. His atheism, his sister, Aunt Hester’s opposition, all conspired to fling Sheila into the polite dispassionate arms of that rational young graduate from Cambridge. Kay had offered romance without intellectual comradeship: Edward offered a kind of business partnership in the propagation of rational atheology, and this proved an irresistible bait for a spirited girl hustled by disaster into premature cynicism. Edward concerns us no further, save that he married her, respected her, and practised upon her the editorials that appeared week by week in his own paper The Iconoclast. Everything that he did was in perfect taste and supported by a perfect reason. When, for example, she declared their marriage a failure, he provided her with a pair of admirable rooms in his own well-appointed house, and lived thereafter in contented celibacy. He was just to the point of inhumanity; but she, a disappointed woman, was not just. The efficient elegance of her home afflicted her. It seemed a mere piece of machinery for the daily manufacture of well-bred happiness. Her two rooms, until she had transformed them, seemed sleek, complacent: they announced to her, with the patient smile and in the incisive tones of a secularist lecturer, the supremacy of Reason. In herself, reason was far from supreme.
A woman with love must bestow it somewhere: Sheila poured it without stint upon her dream of Kay. Ten years divided them, and more, before that dream was finally destroyed. Sophie, his wife, gave birth to a child, and Sheila, impelled by who knows what medley of motives, visited her. They sat and talked about nothing in a room pervaded by yellow. A pale-brown flower perpetuated itself at intervals on the walls; a small occasional table set in the middle of a dark yellowish carpet was covered by a buff cloth; a gilt-framed oval mirror surmounted the mantelpiece. There were photographs on the mantelpiece of Sophie’s father, of Sophie’s child, of Sophie, and one of Kay standing stiffly with a book in his hand—a cruel photograph, courageously signed by the photographer. Sheila gave no second glance to it.