CHAPTER XXII
It is always hard to return in the character of a captive to a scene in which you have played the part of victor, and Julian had told the truth to Stella when he said that what stung him most was his new relation to women. Men knew what he had done; many of them were facing the same odds. They had a common experience and a common language to fall back upon. They were his mates, but they did not come near enough to him to hurt him; they had no wish to understand or help his sufferings. It was sufficient for them to say, "Hard luck!" and leave that side of it alone. Women were different: he had pursued women.
Julian had a good average reputation. Very few women attracted him beyond a certain point; but all his experiences had been successes.
He had loved Marian with the best love his heart had known; but it had been the love of Marian as a creature to possess. It had not been an invasion of his personality. He would have given anything to possess Marian; he had not been for a moment possessed by her. It did not seem to Julian that a woman could ever do more than charm a man.
She could charm you, if you let her, to distraction; but if you had any strength, you remained intact. Nothing in you moved to meet her charm. You simply, not to put too fine a point upon it, took what you could get. Naturally, if you could no longer let a woman charm you, she became, if she wasn't merely a nuisance, a menace.
Julian acquiesced in Stella's remaining as his secretary only because he had a theory that she did not charm him. He could not make head or tail of her. He recognized that she had a mind, but it was a perplexing and unchallenging mind, a private enjoyment of her own. She never attempted to attract Julian by it. If he stirred her, she ran off like a poet or a bird, upon her subject. She did not, as Julian supposed all women did, put Julian himself at the other end of her subject.
She had attractions: sympathy, wit, a charming, fugitive smile. She arranged them no better than she arranged her hair; and it was lamentable how she arranged her hair.
Julian could not have borne her constant presence if she had not effaced herself; his bitter self-consciousness would have been up in arms against an effective personality at his elbow. Nevertheless, he was obscurely annoyed that Stella made no attempt to impress him. She would sit there morning after morning without looking at him, without noticing him, without the lift of an eyelid to make him feel that he was anything to her but the supply of copy for his chapter. She was as inhuman and unpretentious as a piece of moss on a wall.
But her voice haunted him; he would catch snatches of her talk with Lady Verny in the garden. His mother had no scruple against intimacy with Stella, and Stella was not docile with Lady Verny; she was enchanting. She had a tantalizing voice full of music, with little gusts of mischief and revolt in it.
Julian told himself that he must put up with Stella for his mother's sake. Lady Verny did not make friends easily, and liked bookworms. He dismissed Stella as a bookworm. She had ways that, he told himself, were intensely annoying. She came punctually to her work,—probably the poor town clerk had taught her that much,—but she had no other punctualities. Bells, meals, the passage of time, had no landmarks for her. She seemed to drift along the hours like a leaf upon a stream.