“I find it easy to get on with him,” Marjorie continued. “All the things I like to talk about seem interesting to him. With other people, no matter what I say, it doesn’t sound quite right, but with Their Excellencies and Lord Ronald, there is such a different feeling!”
She sighed. Long ago, she had observed that famous people whose names she used to revere in Pinto Plains, neither talked nor acted like the sons of God; gradually, she discovered that age was not to be confused with sapience or high life with respectability. She realised that to succeed she must say daring things to people from whom she shrunk, and repeat the latest gossip freshened by a spraying of her own invention. She divined that in being kind to men and allowing them to talk frankly with her, she earned the enmity of their wives, and that if she held herself aloof, these same women considered her a stick and a fool. She could acquire neither the smart badinage of people of parts, nor the air of those who used ponderosity to cloak their native insipidities.
“You should be very grateful for being clever,” Marjorie said. “If I were only a little bit cleverer, I shouldn’t have found Ottawa half so—so—difficult.” She blushed. “Do you know, Azalea, I used to think that everybody here would be like Lord Ronald, good and kind and friendly. I used to think Society was exactly like that!”
Azalea’s mouth grew hard. She knew, without being told, that some one had inflicted a hurt upon Marjorie’s tender spirit, and all her love rose up in revolt.
“Society!” she cried. “Can’t you see that what we dignify by that name is merely a mechanism devised to give a certain class of climbers and parasites the power to lead a comfortably otiose existence at the expense of the shrinking and the credulous?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand quite all of that,” confessed Marjorie. “But I know it’s clever. There are so many clever people, here. That is what makes me seem stupider than I really am, by comparison.”
“They are not clever,” contradicted Azalea. “They are simply experts in the art of pretence. They succeed by bluff.”
“You have to be clever to do that,” argued Marjorie. Then suddenly, “I hope you won’t mind my saying so, Azalea, but you know I’ve often thought how much better everything would have been for everybody if you had been married to Raymond!”
Azalea raised startled eyes to see Dilling standing in the doorway. That he had overheard Marjorie’s words was obvious. He stood regarding her with a strange interest as if studying her in the light of a sudden revelation. With an onrush of knowledge, he became conscious of his soul, for the first time. He knew its needs and how Azalea had met them during the months they had worked together. He saw Azalea as a woman . . . as the luminous source of all his inspiration.
A moment passed . . . a moment that held an eternity of understanding. Soul met soul, disdaining the barriers of sense. The room was filled with the sound of Marjorie’s knitting needles. The clock began to chime . . .