This was not the sort of married life he had contemplated; and although he was too just to blame his wife for her lack of sympathy with his aims and ideals, he began to wish that Toni would sometimes lay aside her frivolity and exchange her light and ceaseless chatter about trifling matters for a slightly more profitable style of conversation.
Owen had called upon James Herrick at his bungalow, the Hope House, to thank him for rescuing Toni; and the other man had duly returned his call; but although Owen gave Herrick a very cordial general invitation to Greenriver the two men had not much in common save a mutual love of good books.
Owen thought Herrick peculiar, eccentric in his ways. It seemed odd for a man to live alone as he lived, doing his own work except for the occasional aid of a woman whom he called Mrs. Swastika. If he had had any particular work or hobby which necessitated solitude Owen could have understood it; but Herrick seemed to spend his days as idly, as aimlessly, as Toni herself.
He went on the river a good deal, took long walks with his dog, but beyond that he seemed to do nothing but lounge in a chair on the lawn, shabbily clad, with a pipe between his lips and a book, generally unopened, on his knee. His political views seemed to Owen to be as vague as were Toni's; and he had an irritating habit of setting aside any recognized standard of perfection as though the world's seal of approval meant less than nothing.
He would demolish a given institution in a few lazy words, but he never attempted to set up another in its place. He seemed content to put his finger on the weak spot in any system without troubling to point out a remedy; and to Owen, whose eager mind was ever ready to remedy abuses, this attitude of half-pitying, half-amused toleration was vaguely irritating.
Herrick seemed to view life, indeed, with a kind of large detachment, as though from the height of some soaring pinnacle one might watch, with only half-awakened interest, the doings of the dwellers on the plain; and Owen, who liked to be in the midst of things, to add his quota to the world's doings, found in this attitude of mind a pose, a half-insolent pretence at superiority, which was galling.
Without saying a disparaging word Herrick appeared to belittle the efforts made by Owen and his fellows to enlighten the world; and since everyone knows that the criticism of a non-worker is a hundred times more irritating than that of a co-operator, Owen may be excused for finding Herrick uncongenial.
And yet by nature Herrick was a kindly, cheery soul enough, who had been fired in his youth by an excessive love for humanity—for all the humanities. But shortly after his marriage he had faced a tremendous crash; and though, when the first shock was over, he had pulled himself together, and gathered up, as best he might, the fragments of his life, he had lost for ever that eager, humane, half-Quixotic spirit which had made his young manhood pass like a joyous race.
As time went on Owen got into the habit of spending most of his days in town, where he found it easier to work than at home. He begged Toni to tell him honestly whether she found herself lonely in his absence, but Toni assured him truthfully that she was perfectly happy sitting in her beautiful old garden or taking lunch and tea on the river, either alone, or in the company of her friends, Molly and Cynthia Peach. Punting alone was forbidden, but seeing Toni's disappointment, her husband had purchased for her a stout little dinghy in which she was perfectly safe, and this same craft was a source of delight to its owner.