Chapter Twelve.
“Lebong, August 20, 19—.
“Dear Katrine,—
“Your grumbly letter safely to hand. You explained the reasons right enough, for all your protests, and honestly, dear, I can’t sympathise! All is going as I could have told you it would, and in the best way possible for all concerned. You’ve only to sit still, and await events.
“I should like to meet Miss Grizel Dundas. She doesn’t sound the sort of a girl a man would look at with sorrowful eyes. I shouldn’t myself. I’d think small beer of Martin if he did. Dorothea says there’s an erratic old aunt in the question, and that no human soul can foretell what she may do. Personally I hope she’ll leave her fortune to the Home for Stray Cats, or any mad scheme which old ladies approve, rather than to fascinating Miss Grizel. A few hundreds a year to buy frocks and frills is agreeable enough, but a colossal fortune is a handicap to a girl, so far as decent, single-minded men are concerned. You are not an heiress by any chance, are you? My annual income from every source tots up to something like eight hundred a year, and as this is an expensive station, and the caste question necessitates an army of servants, it might very well be more... However! we were not talking about ourselves.
“You are wrong about Martin, dear girl, and the sooner you realise it the better. There’s no stepping down from pedestals in opening the heart to love and joy—the demoralising thing is to close it, out of a mistaken sense of duty. Are these years of repression shaping him into a kinder, wider, more generous form? Think over the question, and if you answer ‘no,’ then what is to be his cure?
“I expect the truth of it is that like most dear women the religious question troubles you. How, you ask yourself, would Martin feel, if he married again, and died, and met Juliet in another sphere? What would happen when the two wives met?—I should laugh over that question, if I did not guess that it bites deep, for what sort of a spiritual world could it be in which jealousy and self-seeking counted before love! I can imagine Juliet meeting Grizel with open arms, and blessing her for having brought back joy to the beloved’s heart; I can imagine them united by the very fact of their mutual love; what is utterly beyond my imagination is that having reached a higher plane of thought and vision, there should be any grudge, any envy, any question of who comes first!
“We’ve got to grow, little girl! Plants can grow in the dark; sickly, pale-coloured things, but they cannot flower. Think that over too. You’ll find I am right.