He looked at me from under his strong brows drawn down, a twinkle in his eye.
“A nice enough fellow—clever, perhaps, but someone—well, someone who will want looking after, taking care of, managing; someone who will appeal to the mother side of her—not her ideal man, but the man for whom nature intended her.”
“Perhaps with her help,” I said, “he may in time become her ideal.”
“There's a long road before him,” growled Dan.
It was Norah herself who broke to me the news of Barbara's elopement with Hal. I had seen neither of them since my return to London. Old Hasluck a month or so before I had met in the City one day by chance, and he had insisted on my lunching with him. I had found him greatly changed. His buoyant self-assurance had deserted him; in its place a fretful eagerness had become his motive force. At first he had talked boastingly: Had I seen the Post for last Monday, the Court Circular for the week before? Had I read that Barbara had danced with the Crown Prince, that the Count and Countess Huescar had been entertaining a Grand Duke? What did I think of that! and such like. Was not money master of the world? Ay, and the nobs should be made to acknowledge it!
But as he had gulped down glass after glass the brag had died away.
“No children,” he had whispered to me across the table; “that's what I can't understand. Nearly four years and no children! What'll be the good of it all? Where do I come in? What do I get? Damn these rotten popinjays! What do they think we buy them for?”
It was in the studio on a Monday morning that Norah told me. It was the talk of the town for the next day—and the following eight. She had heard it the evening before at supper, and had written to me to come and see her.
“I thought you would rather hear it quietly,” said Norah, “than learn it from a newspaper paragraph. Besides, I wanted to tell you this. She did wrong when she married, putting aside love for position. Now she has done right. She has put aside her shame with all the advantages she derived from it. She has proved herself a woman: I respect her.”
Norah would not have said that to please me had she not really thought it. I could see it from that light; but it brought me no comfort. My goddess had a heart, passions, was a mere human creature like myself. From her cold throne she had stepped down to mingle with the world. So some youthful page of Arthur's court may have felt, learning the Great Queen was but a woman.