A silence followed this profession of faith, during which Mrs. Lovegrove's face presented a singular study. She stared at her husband in undisguised amazement, while the corners of her mouth and her large soft cheeks quivered.
"Well, I should never have expected to hear you talk so, Georgie," she said huskily. "It seems unlike you somehow, almost as though you were despising your own flesh and blood."
"No, no," he answered, "I could never do that. I could never be so forgetful of all I owe to my own family and to yours, Rhoda. I am under deep obligations to both. But it would be dishonest to deny that I set a wonderfully high value on Dominic Iglesias' regard, and have done so ever since we were boys together at school. To me Dominic has always stood by himself, I knowing how superior he was to me in mind and in all else, so that it has been my truest honour and privilege to be admitted to intimacy with him. But the difference between us never came home to me as it did when I saw him in other company last night. He is fitted for a higher position than he has ever filled yet—we all used to allow that in old days at the bank—or for any society we can offer him. So, though I felt humiliated in a measure, I felt glad. For I can grudge him nothing in the way of new friends, even though they may be differently placed to ourselves and should come between him and me a little, making our intercourse less frequent and easy than in the past. From my heart I wish him the very best that is going, although it should be rather detrimental to myself."
Mrs. Lovegrove's cheeks still quivered, but the expression of her face was unresponsive once more, not to say obstinate. Jealousy, indeed, possessed her. For the first time in her whole experience she realised her husband as an individual, as a human entity independent of herself. To contemplate him otherwise than in the marital relation was a shock to her. She felt deserted, a potential Ariadne on Naxos. Hence jealousy, resentment, cruel hurt.
"Well, to be sure, what a long story!" she cried, in tones approaching sarcasm, "and all about someone who is no relation, too! Whatever possesses you, Georgie? You aren't a bit like yourself. It seems to me this morning everybody's bewitched." She heaved herself up out of her chair. "I shall go and try to make it up with Serena," she continued. "It is only Christian charity to do so; and, poor thing, I can well understand she may have had cause enough for mortification now I have made out what really did take place last night."
Usually, left alone in the dining-room, George Lovegrove would have proceeded methodically to do a number of neat little odd jobs, humming softly the while funny, shapeless little tunes to himself in the fulness of his guileless content. He would have piled up the fire with small coal and dust, thus keeping it alight but saving fuel till luncheon-time, when one skilful stir with the poker would produce a cheerful blaze. Then he would have proceeded to the little conservatory opening off his box of a sanctum at the back of the house—containing his roller-top desk, his papers, Borough Council and parish reports, his magazines, his best and second-best overcoats hung on pegs against the wall along with his silk hat. In the conservatory, still humming, he would have smoked his morning pipe, feeding the gold-fish in the small square glass tank—a tiny fountain in the centre of which it pleased him to set playing—and later carefully examining the ferns and other pot-plants in search of green-fly, scale, or blight. But to-day the innocent routine of his life was rudely broken up. He had no heart for his accustomed tidy potterings, but lingered aimlessly, fingering the gold watch-chain strained across the convex surface of his waistcoat, sand looking pitifully enough between the lace curtains out on to the Green.
The sun had climbed the sky, burning up the hoarfrost and mist, so that the houses opposite had become clearly discernible. Presently he beheld a tall, upright figure emerge from the front door of Cedar Lodge. For a moment Mr. Iglesias stood at the head of the flight of immaculately white stone steps, rolling up his umbrella and putting on his gloves preparatory to setting forth on his morning walk. And, watching him, a wave of humility and self-depreciation swept over George Lovegrove's gentle and candid soul, combined with an aching or regret that destiny had not seen fit to deal with him rather otherwise than it actually had. He felt a great longing that he, too, were possessed of a stately presence, brains, breeding, and handsome looks. There stirred in him an almost impassioned craving for romance, for escape from the interminable respectabilities and domesticities of English middle-class suburban life. He went a step further, rebelling against the feminine atmosphere which surrounded him, in which "feelings" so constantly usurped the place of actions, and suppositions that of fact. Then, the vision of a beautiful woman with a strange rose-scarlet dress, in whose eyes sorrow struggled with mocking laughter, once again assailed him. Who she might be, and what her history, he most emphatically knew not; yet that she breathed a keener and more tonic air than that to which he was habituated, that feelings in her case did not stand for actions, or suppositions for fact, he was fully convinced.
"Poor old chappie, take a brandy and soda. Got the hump?"—this, shrilly, from the parrot hanging head downwards from the roof of its cage.
At the sound of that at once unhuman and singularly confidential voice close beside him, George Lovegrove gave a guilty start.
"Yes, the wife is quite right," he said, half aloud. "If you want to keep a happy mind there is very much of which it is as well to be ignorant."