“Moreover,” continued Azalea, unheeding the interruption, “we are impressed with his personality first and his political integrity later. People of a different calibre would relegate the mantle to its proper place, and Dilling, the orator, the statesman, would come into his own. Do you suppose,” she cried, with more heat than she realised, “that the men who mould our Imperial policies are influenced in their estimate of Raymond Dilling’s usefulness to Canada—to the Empire, indeed—by considerations of his talents and inflexibility of purpose, or by his adherence to custom in wearing a black tie or a white?”
“Now you are being stupid, Azalea,” pronounced Lady Denby. “Conventions cannot be broken without harming both the offender and the cause he represents. There never has been a telling argument in favour of conventionality, yet it persists. My charwoman may be gauche and amuse me, but similar behavior on the part of Lady Elton, for example, would disgust me and kill my respect.”
“But the Dillings are not gauche,” Azalea defended. “I know few words that could be more inaptly applied to them. Mrs. Pratt is gauche, for if she followed her instincts she would do the clumsy, cruel and vulgar thing. The Dillings, on the other hand, do the orderly, kind and decent thing. They make no pretence, use no lacquer or veneer. If they err at all, it is not due to gaucherie, but utter simplicity. They do not think that it becomes them to ape or assume the manner of the great. They even go so far as to be logical, which is the last attribute that one should have to be socially presentable. Oh, why, Lady Denby,” she cried, “why can’t people let them alone, stop this carping criticism, and applaud, if they won’t follow, the fine example that is being set them? As a man thinketh . . .”
They parted in some constraint, Lady Denby unpleasantly stirred by the truth behind Azalea’s championship, and Azalea quivering with indignation at the unreasonableness of such attacks upon the Dillings. Never had she hated her townsfolk more bitterly than at this moment. “They are like a swarm of vicious wasps,” was her thought, as she raced along through the mild spring night, “stinging a lovely and unoffending body until its sweetness is absorbed and its beauty marred.”
And Azalea was alive to another sensation. Above the clamour of her directed thinking, Lady Denby’s words rushed unbidden into her mind, and would not be dislodged.
“You would have made him a good wife, Azalea!”
“God,” she thought, “why must life be so cruel? Why is it that some of us are denied not only the privilege of having, but even that of giving? I could give him so much . . . so much . . .”
A verse filtered through her memory. It was the cry of Ibsen’s Agnes, and it spoke to her own heavy heart:
“Through the hours that drag so leaden,
Think of me shut out of sight