“You begin to hate her——you?—and why?”
“Are you so blind that you cannot perceive why?” she retorted, the little malign smile I knew so well playing round her lips—“Because she is happy! Because she has no scandals in her life, and because she dares to be content! One longs to make her miserable! But how to do it? She believes in a God,—she thinks all He ordains is right and good. With such a firm faith as that, she would be happy in a garret earning but a few pence a day. I see now perfectly how she has won her public,—it is by the absolute conviction she has herself of the theories of life she tries to instil. What can be done against her? Nothing! But I understand why the critics would like to ‘quash’ her,—if I were a critic, fond of whiskey-and-soda, [p 326] and music-hall women, I should like to quash her myself for being so different to the rest of her sex!”
“What an incomprehensible woman you are, Sibyl!” I exclaimed with real irritation,—“You admire Miss Clare’s books,—you have always admired them,—you have asked her to become your friend,—and almost in the same breath you aver you would like to ‘quash’ her or to make her miserable! I confess I cannot understand you!”
“Of course you cannot!” she responded tranquilly, her eyes resting upon me with a curious expression, as we paused for an instant under the deep shade of a chestnut tree before entering our own grounds—“I never supposed you could, and unlike the ordinary femme incomprise, I have never blamed you for your want of comprehension. It has taken me some time to understand myself, and even now I am not quite sure that I have gauged the depths or shallownesses of my own nature correctly. But on this matter of Mavis Clare, can you not imagine that badness may hate goodness? That the confirmed drunkard may hate the sober citizen? That the outcast may hate the innocent maiden? And that it is possible that I,—reading life as I do, and finding it loathsome in many of its aspects,—distrusting men and women utterly,—and being destitute of any faith in God,—may hate,—yes hate,”—and she clenched her hand on a tuft of drooping leaves and scattered the green fragments at her feet—“a woman who finds life beautiful, and God existent,—who takes no part in our social shams and slanders,—and who in place of my self-torturing spirit of analysis, has secured an enviable fame and the honour of thousands, allied to a serene content? Why it would be something worth living for, to make such a woman wretched for once in her life!—but, as she is constituted, it is impossible to do it.”
She turned from me and walked slowly onward,—I following in a pained silence.
“If you do not mean to be her friend, you should tell her [p 327] so,”—I said presently—“You heard what she said about pretended protestations of regard?”
“I heard,”—she replied morosely—“She is a clever woman, Geoffrey, and you may trust her to find me out without any explanation!”
As she said this, I raised my eyes and looked full at her,—her exceeding beauty was becoming almost an agony to my sight, and in a sudden fool’s paroxysm of despair I exclaimed—
“O Sibyl, Sibyl! Why were you made as you are!”
“Ah, why indeed!” she rejoined, with a faint mocking smile—“And why, being made as I am, was I born an Earl’s daughter? If I had been a drab of the street, I should have been in my proper place,—and novels would have been written about me, and plays,—and I might have become such a heroine as should cause all good men to weep for joy because of my generosity in encouraging their vices! But as an Earl’s daughter, respectably married to a millionaire, am a mistake of nature. Yet nature does make mistakes sometimes Geoffrey, and when she does they are generally irremediable!”