3
In the third week of December Keble returned to Hillside after his first session in the Provincial Assembly. He had been loth to leave his wife at the ranch, but she had been too weak to accompany him and was still somewhat less energetic than she had formerly been. Keble found her on a divan in her own sitting room, with the monkey propped up beside her.
“It’s just as you said it would be,” he remarked. “Having to waste precious weeks in that dull hole makes the ranch so unbelievably wonderful a place to come back to!”
When the first questions had been answered, Louise held up a prettily bound little volume from which she had been reading. “Look! A Christmas present already,—from Walter Windrom. A collection of his own verse.”
Keble admired it, then Louise, in a tone which she succeeded in making casual, said, indicating one of the pages, “That’s a strange sort of poem, the one called ‘Constancy’. Whatever made Walter write a thing like that?”
Keble read the poem. “I’ve seen it before. It’s quite an old one. Girlie clipped it from some review or other and sent it to me.”
“What does it mean?” Louise insisted.
“How should I know?” he laughed. “Girlie had a theory about it. Walter was smitten with an American actress for a while,—what was her name? Myra something: Myra Pelter. She treated him rather shabbily. Took his present, then threw him down for somebody else, I believe, after they’d been rather thicker, as a matter of fact, than Girlie quite knew. Walter is romantic, you know, for all his careful cynicism; he’s always singing the praises of bad lots, and that makes Girlie wild, naturally. Girlie said the poem was Walter’s attempt to justify this Myra person’s uppish treatment of him, an attempt to make her out a lady with duties to art,—all that sort of blether. It’s Girlie’s prosaic imagination: she can never read a book or a poem without trying to fit it, word for word, into the author’s private life. I had quite forgotten its existence.”
It was difficult for Louise to conceal her relief after years of pent-up unhappiness caused by her over-subjective interpretation of the poem’s mission. “How could a man as clever as Walter ever take Myra Pelter and her art seriously. Miriam and I went to see her once. She’s only a Japanese doll!”
“Dolls are an important institution. They have turned wiser heads than Walter’s.”