Roden's Corner

by Henry Seton Merriman

“Ah, I know,” laughed the elder woman. “Horses are old-fashioned, and only dowagers drive in a barouche to-day. I suppose you ride a bicycle, or would do so in any country but Holland, where the roads make that craze a madness. I must be content with my old-fashioned horse. If, in moving with the times, one's movements are apt to be awkward, it is better to be left behind, is it not, Mr. Roden?”

Roden's glance expressed what he did not care to say in the presence of a third person. When a woman, whose every movement is graceful, speaks of awkwardness, she assuredly knows her ground.

Mrs. Vansittart, moreover, showed clearly enough that she was on the safe side of forty by quite a number of years when it came to settling herself in the saddle and sitting her fresh young horse.

“Which way?” she inquired when they reached the canal.

“Not that way, at all events,” answered Roden, for his companion had turned her horse's head toward the malgamite works.

He spoke with a laugh that was not pleasant to the ears, and a shadow passed through Mrs. Vansittart's dark eyes. She glanced across the yellow sand hills, where the works were effectually concealed by the rise and fall of the wind-swept land, from whence came no sign of human life, and only at times, when the north wind blew, a faint and not unpleasant odour like the smell of sealing-wax. For all that the world knew of the malgamite workers, they might have been a colony of lepers. “You speak,” said Mrs. Vansittart, “as if you were a failure instead of a brilliant success. I think”—she paused for a moment, as if the thought were a real one and not a mere conversational convenience, as are the thoughts of most people—“that the cream of social life consists of the cheery failures.”

“I have no faith in my own luck,” answered Percy Roden, gloomily, whose world was a narrow one, consisting as it did of himself and his bank-book. Moreover, most men draw aside readily enough the curtain that should hide the world in which they live, whereas women take their stand before their curtain and talk, and talk—of other things.

Mrs. Vansittart had never for a moment been mistaken in her estimate of her companion, of—as he considered himself—her lover. She had absolutely nothing in common with him. She was a physically lazy, but a mentally active woman, whose thoughts ran to abstract matters so persistently that they brought her to the verge of abstraction itself.

Percy Roden, on the other hand, would, with better health, have been an athlete. In his youth he had overtaxed his strength on the football field. When he took up a newspaper now he read the money column first and the sporting items next.

Mrs. Vansittart glanced at neither of these, and as often as not contented herself with the advertisements of new books, passing idly over the news of the world with a heedless eye. She, at all events, avoided the mistake, common to men and women of a journalistic generation, of allowing themselves to be vastly perturbed over events in far countries, which can in no way affect their lives.