Wharton was sitting in a secluded corner of the library of the House of Commons. He had a number of loose sheets of paper on a chair beside him, and others in his hand and on his knee. It was Friday afternoon; questions were going on in the House; and he was running rapidly for the last time through the notes of his speech, pencilling here and there, and every now and then taking up a volume of Hansard that lay near that he might verify a quotation.
An old county member, with a rugged face and eye-glasses, who had been in Parliament for a generation, came to the same corner to look up a speech. He glanced curiously at Wharton, with whom he had a familiar House-of-Commons acquaintance.
"Nervous, eh?" he said, as he put on his eye-glasses to inspect first
Wharton, then the dates on the backs of the Reports.
Wharton put his papers finally together, and gave a long stretch.
"Not particularly."
"Well, it's a beastly audience!" said the other, carrying off his book.
Wharton, lost apparently in contemplation of the ceiling, fell into a dreamy attitude. But his eye saw nothing of the ceiling, and was not at all dreamy. He was not thinking of his speech, nor of the other man's remark. He was thinking of Marcella Boyce.
When he left her the other day he had been conscious, only more vividly and intensely, more possessively as it were, than she, of the same general impression that had been left upon her. A new opening for pleasure—their meeting presented itself to him, too, in the same way. What had he been about all this time? Forget?—such a creature? Why, it was the merest wantonness! As if such women—with such a brow, such vitality, such a gait—passed in every street!
What possessed him now was an imperious eagerness to push the matter, to recover the old intimacy—and as to what might come out of it, let the gods decide! He could have had but a very raw appreciation of her at Mellor. It seemed to him that she had never forced him to think of her then in absence, as he had thought of her since the last meeting.
As for the nursing business, and the settlement in Brown's Buildings, it was, of course, mere play-acting. No doubt when she emerged she would be all the more of a personage for having done it. But she must emerge soon. To rule and shine was as much her métier as it was the métier of a bricklayer's labourer to carry hods. By George! what would not Lady Selina give for beauty of such degree and kind as that! They must be brought together. He already foresaw that the man who should launch Marcella Boyce in London would play a stroke for himself as well as for her. And she must be launched in London. Let other people nurse, and pitch their tents in little workmen's flats, and live democracy instead of preaching it. Her fate was fixed for her by her physique. Il ne faut pas sortir de son caractère.