"Free in all human ways, politically being one. I do not see how a man can endure to say to a woman, 'You are less free than I am, but be satisfied! you are so much freer than that wretch over there!'"
Hagar rose. Her eyes chanced to meet those of the man who had talked physics and mysticism. "We shan't," she said, "get into the Fourth Dimension while we have a shrivelled side. We can't limp into that, you know." She crossed the room and stood before a portrait hung above a sofa. "Roger Michael, come tell me about this Quaker lady!"
She left before ten, pleading an early rising for work that must be done. And Molly and Christopher would come to see her? She might be a month in London.
Christopher and the Fabian saw her into her cab, and she gave each her hand and was driven away. "That," said the Fabian, as they turned back to the house, "is a woman one could die for."
It was a long way to the hotel where the Ashendynes were staying. A mild, dark, blurred night; street lights, houses with lights and darkened houses, forms on the pavement that moved briskly, forms that idled, forms that went with stealthiness; passing vehicles, the horses' hoofs, the roll of the wheels, the onward, unfolding ribbon of the night. The air came in at the lowered window, soft and cool, with a hint now of rain. Hagar was dreaming of Gilead Balm. Up over the threshold had peered a childhood evening, and she and Thomasine and Maggie and Corker and Mary Magazine played ring-around-a-rosy, over the dewy grass until the pink in the west was ashes of roses and the fireflies were out.
CHAPTER XXII
HAGAR IN LONDON
"I have been re-reading Humboldt," said Medway Ashendyne. "What do you say, Gipsy, to risking a South American Revolution? Venezuela—Colombia—Sail from New York in September—and if you wanted ten days at Gilead Balm—"
Their drawing-room looked pleasantly out over gardens; indeed, so closely came the trees, there was a green and shimmering light in the room. It was May, and the sounds of the London streets floated pleasantly in at the open windows with the pleasant morning breeze. The waiter had taken away Medway's breakfast paraphernalia. Hagar had breakfasted much earlier. Thomson stood at the back of the room arranging upon a small table, which presently would be moved within reach of Medway's hand, smoking apparatus, papers, magazines, and what not. That eight-years-past prolonged sojourn and convalescence in Egypt had produced a liking for Mahomet, and Medway had annexed him as he annexed all possible things that he liked and that could serve him. Mahomet, speaking English now, but still in the costume of the East, had just brought in a pannier of flowers. They were all over the room, in tall vases. "Too many," said Hagar's eyes; but Medway who, when he was in search of the rarefied pleasure of adventure and novelty in strange and barbarous places, could be as ascetic as a red Indian on the warpath, loved, when he rocked in the trough of the waves, to rock in a bower.