No, no, he would certainly not tell Kate anything about it. Why should he? He knew very well how his wife would regard the matter, and how her condemnation would fall, not on Louise—Kate had become exceedingly fond of Louise—no, indeed, but on Dering. Kate had never cordially "taken" (a favourite word of hers, that) to Wingfield's friend; she thought him affected and unpractical, and she laughed at his turned-down collars and Liberty ties. No, no, there was no reason why Kate should be told a word of this extraordinary, this amazing story.
On leaving Abingdon Street, Philip Dering swung across the broad roadway, and made his way, almost instinctively, to the garden which lay so nearly opposite his friend's office windows. He wanted to calm down, to think things over, and to recover full possession of himself before going home.
It had cost him a considerable effort to tell Wingfield this thing. Not that he was in the least ashamed of what he and Louise had done—on the contrary, he was very proud of it—but he had often felt, during all those years, that he was being treacherous to the man who was, after all, his best friend; and there was in Dering enough of the feminine element—that element which Kate Wingfield so thoroughly despised in him—to make him feel sorry and ashamed.
However, Wingfield had taken it very well, just as he would have wished him to take it, and no doubt the lawyer had given thoroughly sound advice. This unexpected, this huge legacy made all the difference. Besides, Dering knew well enough, when he examined his own heart and conscience, that he felt very differently about all manner of things from what he had been wont to feel say ten years ago.
After all, he was following in the footsteps of men greater and wiser than he. It is impossible to be wholly consistent. If he had been consistent he would have refused to pay certain taxes—in fact, to have been wholly consistent during the last ten years would have probably landed him, England being what it is, in a lunatic asylum. He shuddered, suddenly remembering that for awhile his own mother had been insane.
Still, as he strode along the primly kept paths of the Thames-side garden, he felt a great and, as he thought, a legitimate pride in the knowledge that in this one all-important matter, so deeply affecting his own and Louise's life, he and she had triumphantly defied convention, and had come out victorious.
The young man's thoughts suddenly took a softer, a more intimate turn; he told himself, with intense secret satisfaction, that Louise was dearer, ay, far dearer and more indispensable to him now than she had been during the days when she was still the "sweet stranger whom he called his wife." He remembered once saying to Wingfield that the ideal mate should be the improbable, be able at once to clean a grate, to cook a dinner, and to discuss Ibsen! Well, Louise had more than fulfilled this early and rather absurd ideal.
From the day when they had first met and made unconventional acquaintance, with no intervening friend to form a gossip-link of introduction, Dering had found her full of ever-recurrent and enchanting surprises. Her foreign birth and upbringing gave her both original and unsuspected points of view about everything English, and he had often thought, with good-humoured pity, of all those unfortunate friends of his, Wingfield included, whose lot it had perforce been to choose their wives among their own country-women.
Dering had not seen much of Denmark, but everything he had seen had won his enthusiastic approval. Where else were modern women to be found at once so practical and so cultivated, so pure-minded and so large-hearted? Perhaps he was half aware that his heaven was of his own creation, but that, in his present exalted mood, was only an added triumph; how few human beings can evolve, and preserve at will, their own stretch of blue sky!