And she lectured herself and said the fault was her own, and that it was a very much better environment than her abilities entitled her to. She recited all the moral precepts that a third person might have uttered; and the dissatisfaction remained.
To write plays ceases to be an attractive occupation when they are never produced. She had written several plays by this time, and submitted them, more or less judiciously, to several West End theatres. There had even been an instance of a manager returning a manuscript in response to her fourth application for it. But she was no nearer to success, or to an artistic circle.
A career at the Bar is not all causes célèbres, and the details of Heriot's briefs were rarely enthralling to her mind, even when he discussed them with her; and when he came into the drawing-room he did not want to discuss his briefs. He wanted to talk trifles, just as he preferred to see a musical comedy or a farce when they went out. Nor did he press her for particulars of her own pursuits during his absence. She never sighed over him, and as she appeared to be cheerful, he thought she was contented. That such allusions to her literary work as she made were careless, he took to mean that she had gradually acquired staider views. Once he perceived that it was perhaps quieter for her than for most women, for she had no intimate acquaintances; but then she had never been used to any! There were her books, and her music, and her shopping—no, he did not think she could be bored. Besides, her manner at dinner was always direct evidence to the contrary!
She was now twenty-five years old, and the Kensington flat, and abundant means had lost their novelty. She was never moved by a clever novel without detesting her own obscurity; never looked at the window of the Stereoscopic Company without a passion of envy for the successful artists; never accompanied Heriot to the solemn houses without yearning for a passport to Upper Bohemia instead. She was twenty-five years old, and marriage, without having fulfilled the demands of her temperament, had developed her sensibilities. It was at this period that she met Lucas Field.
If her existence had been a story, nothing could have surprised her less than such a meeting. It would have been at this juncture precisely that she looked for the arrival of an artist, and Lucas Field would probably have been a brilliant young man who wore his hair long and wrote decadent verse. The trite in fiction is often very astonishing in one's own life, however, and, as a matter of fact, she found their introduction an event, and foresaw nothing at all.
Lucas Field was naturally well known to her by reputation—so well known that when the hostess brought "Mr. Field" across to her, Mamie never dreamed of identifying him with the dramatist. She had long since ceased to expect to meet anybody congenial at these parties, and the fish had been reached before she discovered who it really was who had taken her down.
Field was finding it a trifle dreary himself. He had not been bred in the vicinity of the footlights—-his father had been a physician, and his mother the daughter of a Lincolnshire parson—but he had drifted into dramatic literature when he came down from Oxford, and the atmosphere of the artistic world had become essential to him by now. Portman Square, though he admitted its desirability, and would have been mortified if it had been denied to him, invariably oppressed him a shade when he entered it. He was at the present time foretasting hell in the fruitless endeavour to devise a scenario for his next play, and he had looked at Mamie with a little interest as he was conducted across the drawing-room. A beautiful woman has always an air of suggestion; she is a beginning, a "heroine" without a plot. Regarded from the easel she is all-sufficing—contemplated from the desk, she is illusive. After you have admired the tendrils of hair at the nape of her neck, you realise with despondence that she takes you no farther than if she had been plain.
Field had realised that she left him in the lurch before his soup plate had been removed. Presently he inquired if she was fond of the theatre.
"Please don't say 'yes' from politeness," he added.
"Why should I?"