Yet it was a mixture that might have borne no practical results if left to itself, but rather a retarding.
As Lorraine had so clearly seen, the spur of ambition, and a resolute determination to succeed in other walks than that of the casual, charming, petted favourite of fortune, were indispensable to bring his traits into a harmony with each other that would achieve.
It was to this end that she had given him of her best encouragement and help; too old and too wise not to have seen that whatever her own personal feelings towards him, it was extremely probable that she had helped him towards realising his highest promise, for some one else to reap the deepest joy of it.
Well, at any rate she had had the interest and the companionship, and these had not been small things. He had come into her life just when it was wearying of triumph and adulation; when lovely frocks and jewels, and hosts of admirers—the very things she had craved for a few years earlier—had commenced to pall in the light of the little real satisfaction to be won from them. With some women perhaps they never palled. Perhaps each fresh conquest renewed them, and each fresh triumph invigorated.
In Lorraine’s complex character, the love of success was blended with a love of the deeper and richer things of life. She was of those to whom, at times, wide spaces, and fresh breezes, and the big, sweeping, elemental things call loudly, above the noise of the world of fashion; and she knew what it was to be filled with an aching nausea of all she had practically sold her soul to win, and a yearning nostalgia for something that might satisfy the finer instincts of her nature.
And in a measure her interest in Hermon had filled the void. Whatever her feeling had been in the beginning, it had undoubtedly merged now into a definite purpose for his good, from which she meant to eliminate—if the time came when he wanted to be free of her—any claim her heart might clamour to assert.
Her dealings with him were, for the time being, on a par with the generous unselfishness she had shown towards her mother. For both of them she found the courage and resolution to thrust herself in the background and give of her best as the hour required.
If the friendship had been permitted to develop quietly along these lines, a future day might have witnessed Lorraine quite naturally outgrowing her infatuation, and happily satisfied with the result of her unwearying interest and effort; while Hermon, from his proud pinnacle of success, would still have felt her his best friend.
But at the critical moment the blundering, disturbing hand was permitted to jar the harmony of the strings and spoil the melody. To what end?… who knows?… Perhaps to some unseen, mysterious widening, and deepening, and learning necessary to the onward march of Humanity towards its goal of Perfection.