He was full of that concealed resolve to do and serve and accomplish great things in the world. That was surely purpose enough to hide behind an easy-going unpretending gentlemanliness. But he was also tremendously attracted by Madeleine Philips, more particularly when she was not there.
A beautiful woman may be the inspiration of a great career. This, however, he was beginning to find was not the case with himself. He had believed it at first and written as much and said as much, and said it very variously and gracefully. But becoming more and more distinctly clear to his intelligence was the fact that the very reverse was the case. Miss Madeleine Philips was making it very manifest to Captain Douglas that she herself was a career; that a lover with any other career in view need not—as the advertisements say—apply.
And the time she took up!
The distress of being with her!
And the distress of not being with her!
She was such a proud and lovely and entrancing and distressing being to remember, and such a vain and difficult thing to be with.
She knew clearly that she was made for love, for she had made herself for love; and she went through life like its empress with all mankind and numerous women at her feet. And she had an ideal of the lover who should win her which was like a oleographic copy of a Laszlo portrait of Douglas greatly magnified. He was to rise rapidly to great things, he was to be a conqueror and administrator, while attending exclusively to her. And incidentally she would gather desperate homage from all other men of mark, and these attentions would be an added glory to her love for him. At first Captain Douglas had been quite prepared to satisfy all these requirements. He had met her at Shorncliffe, for her people were quite good military people, and he had worshipped his way straight to her feet. He had made the most delightfully simple and delicate love to her. He had given up his secret vice of thinking for the writing of quite surprisingly clever love-letters, and the little white paper models had ceased for a time to flutter in lonely places.
And then the thought of his career returned to him, from a new aspect, as something he might lay at her feet. And once it had returned to him it remained with him.
“Some day,” he said, “and it may not be so very long, some of those scientific chaps will invent flying. Then the army will have to take it up, you know.”
“I should love,” she said, “to soar through the air.”