She went away almost without another word. On her way home she was thrust by her fancied injuries into contemplating her future. As people always do when they contemplate the future, she lost sight of the infinite gradations which led from the point at which she stood to the point on which her eyes were fixed, so that all her forward life was presented to her mental vision as acid, cold, bitterly assailing her without clemency. All her desire was to escape that future, and to evade the phantoms conjured up by her own mind—a mind very similar to her mother’s and also infected by it—and to do so in a way that should, if ever so slightly, prick Annette’s conscience . . .

Ideas are too often the gaolers of our souls, which, seeking health and freedom, groping out of prison, take counsel of the first-comer, an idea whom we have fee’d with prejudice and cowardice to stand guard over us. Gertrude, seeking freedom from her home, from her own folly, from herself, accosted the first-comer, Marriage, who, with a false smile, opened a door and clapped her into another cell. This, being larger than the other, she took for a place wide open to the winds of Heaven, and passed from querulous fear of the future to excitement in the immediate view. To be sure, she only saw four walls, but there was more light on them, more air and mystery between her and them. . . . Above all, nowhere in her cell could she see the figure of her sister Mary, whom she had begun to detest, nervously and irritably. . . . Mrs. Folyat had grown more and more incapable. The work of the house was divided between Gertrude and Mary. Between the two there was a grim struggle as to which of the two should make herself the less indispensable to her mother. It was very certain, as both knew in their inmost hearts, that if one of them were to be left, that one would remain for ever, with nothing to do save to turn the hour-glass when the sands ran out. Mary, being the weaker of the two, was the more good-natured, and it was for Mary that Mrs. Folyat most often called when she dropped her knitting-needle, or mislaid her spectacles, or lost her book by sitting on it, or wished to play Patience at some inappropriate hour. Everybody said Mrs. Folyat was a dear old lady. She liked the character, clung to it and abused it. Either Gertrude or Mary must be gobbled up by her selfishness. Both Gertrude and Mary believed that their mother was a dear old lady. They dreamed not that they were in revolt against her, but fancied—as it seemed more heroical to do—that they were at grips in a fearful struggle with life. They were both very near hysteria, Gertrude, after her visit to Annette, being the nearer.

There came to live near the town at this time Mrs. Bradby-Folyat, an aunt of the Folkestone Folyats, an old lady of much wealth, whose estate was continually being augmented by legacies bequeathed by irascible Bradbys and Folyats who were sickened by the attentions of their legacy-hunting poorer relations. Mrs. Bradby-Folyat left her relations alone, and the harvest of her wisdom was great. . . . Being a lady of strong character and almost masculine intelligence she had a great fondness for the weak and almost idiotic Streeten Folyat, who long ago had abandoned his sheep-farm in Westmoreland and wandered from one profession to another, shedding in each a portion of his patrimony. Between journalism and market-gardening he spent several months with his aunt at Boynton and amused himself in the town in Frederic’s company. Occasionally he visited the house in Burdley Park. . . . Then he bought a small fleet of fishing-smacks at Scarborough, sold them after ten months at a heavy loss and returned to Boynton. His income had dwindled to four hundred. He bought houses in our town and was quickly embroiled in a law-suit—his idleness made him quarrelsome—and placed the case in Frederic’s hands. By sheer luck Frederic won the case and delighted the old lady at Boynton, who insisted on considering that he had saved Streeten from ruin. She invited Frederic and his wife to stay with her, and entrusted him with the management of her estate. Frederic was almost delirious at this access of fortune, and calculated that if the old lady lived for another ten years he would make at least six thousand pounds. He was in debt—he could not amuse himself with Streeten for nothing—and he borrowed money from a friendly moneylender whose rate of interest per cent. per mensem seemed reasonable and low.

When Frederic was not at Boynton Streeten was at Frederic’s house, and when Streeten was at Frederic’s house there also was Gertrude. Streeten was amazingly vain, a fop, and as eager to scan his features in the glass as a little boy just on the verge of adolescence, who is beginning to feel that the eyes of the world are upon him. Such men, when no mirror is near, will turn to the nearest woman. If in her he can see the faintest reflection of himself, pat he will fall in love with it. . . . There were not many mirrors in Frederic’s house. Streeten turned to Jessie but saw only Frederic, to Gertrude then, and he saw himself enlarged, heightened, dazzling. It was the most bewildering reflection of himself that he had ever seen, and at once he was prostrate before it.

Almost before he could realise what had happened he was picked up, thrust into a frock-coat and silk hat, taken to church, married to Gertrude, and packed off for a honeymoon to Ilfracombe. He was very bored and savage. He wanted to be at Boynton or amusing himself with Frederic.

It is one thing to steal glances at your own reflection when you think no one is looking, quite another to be married to it, though the mirror tell its tale never so constantly.

It were too cruel, it were indecent, to write of Gertrude’s honeymoon.

[XXVIII
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER]

Life . . . is like love. All reason is againstit, and all healthy instinct for it.
EREWHON REVISITED.