"The sun has begun to go," he said; "I assure you it is not healthy for you to linger here. Of course I will engage your sister."
Stella gave a little sigh of relief. She had found a way out for Mr. Travers.
CHAPTER XV
After the arrival of Eurydice, Mr. Travers saw very little of Stella. At certain moments of the day she came and asked him for orders, but in some mysterious manner she seemed to have withdrawn herself from personal contact. She had been impersonal before, but only in a businesslike and friendly way. She was impersonal now as if she was not there.
She could control her attention, but she no longer felt any vitality behind it. She knew where her life had gone, and she was powerless to call it back to her. It hovered restlessly about the spirit of Julian. Stella had never known what it was to repine at her own fate. If there were many things she wanted that she could not have, she had consoled herself with driving her desires into what was left to her. But she could not do this for Julian.
He had had so much farther to fall. She saw his face as she had seen it first, with its look of human strength; his frosty, blue eyes, his heavy sledge-hammer chin, and all the alertness, the controlled activity, of his young figure. She saw him again like something made of wax, emaciated and helpless, with flickering eyes. He had not believed in knocking under, and he had felt defeat incredible.
But defeat had met him, a blundering defeat that wrecked his body and left his unprotected heart to face disaster.
Would he have courage enough for this restricted battle against adversity? Courage did strange things with pain. It transformed and utilized it; but courage does not spring readily from a mortally wounded pride. Marian, with a complete lack of intention, had robbed Julian of his first weapon. She had dissipated his resources by undermining his confidence, and left him perilously near to the stultification of personal bitterness.
Would it be possible for Julian to escape resentment? Or would he pass down that long lane which has no turning, and ends in the bottomless bog of self-pity, in which the finest qualities of the human spirit sink like a stone?