“And you would rather not talk about your private opinions.”
“I’m not very good at it,” Lal admitted. “In fact, I generally make a fool of myself when I try—as on the present occasion.” The victim of aphasia had put off his apology until they were close to the hall, and further conversation was stopped by their arrival at the door.
“You’re coming in?” said Dolly, as he paused.
He shook his head.
“Don’t you approve of this?”
“I’m afraid I don’t like religion when it’s vulgar,” said Lal. He raised his hat and walked off down the street, and Dolly and her friends went in.
No cause needs salvation from its friends as does this of temperance. Intolerance, exaggeration, bad logic, bad taste, and bad grammar have all supported and do support it still, estranging men who would be content to work with the reformers if they took their stand on the noble charter given them by St. Paul: “If meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth.” At Swanborough there were two evangelists, whose names appeared on the programme as Rev. Dr. Brown and Rev. S. Jones, for your true temperance evangelist eschews the adjective the as rigidly as temperance in his speeches. The one spoke on “Gospel Dynamics”; the other proved the Bible a total-abstinence book and, incidentally, himself no orator. Angela found it hard to feel pleased; she looked at Bernard, and saw him yawning undisguisedly, and then at Dolly, who sat with hands folded, inattentive but composed.
And Dolly was composed, though she was conscious of a strange exaltation which rosed her cheek and set her heart throbbing and pulses beating in time with it in every finger. A well-spring of soft warmth suffused her frame; she shut her eyes and saw visions, she who was no dreamer—visions in which one figure alone was constant. She owned the truth. “I love him,” she told herself. Shame she did not feel; she believed that Lal loved her back, and even if he did not there was no humiliation, since her gift was voluntary, since she was proud of her love. He won her by being better than herself. Dolly was a little pagan; her love was wild as a bird; but in it ran a puritan strain which claimed an answering purity in the man she loved. Irreproachable though he was, Noel Farquhar could not give her that, nor yet could Lucian, though he was nearer to her ideal. But in Dolly’s room at home she had an engraving of Watts’s fine picture of Sir Galahad; and the artist might have drawn his young knight’s face from Lal as he looked on a Sunday morning in church, when he sat in his corner behind a pillar which hid him from sight, as he thought. Had he known that Dolly had a clear though narrow view of his profile against the black marble of a mural tablet, it would have made him retrospectively very unhappy.
Love left Dolly the same girl as before, save that it illumined a side of her nature which had been hidden, as the sunlight, creeping across from the first faint rim of the crescent, slowly enlightens the disk of the moon. True, she now felt quite charitable towards Angela; but Angela was Lal’s sister. She was also more lenient to the ungrammatical orators on the platform; for the excellent reason that she did not listen to them. These were accidents of circumstance. But when a stout lady in front ecstatically planted the hind-leg of her chair upon Dolly’s instep and sat heavily down, the ennobling power of love did not hold her back from feeling annoyed.
When they came out Dolly listened to a discussion of the meeting, and herself added her word with moderate indifference. They walked together to the station, but Dolly, whose mood was dreamy, soft, and languorous, dissociated herself from the others and walked alone. As she passed the Sailors’ Arms, which seemed a popular hostelry, the door again stood open, and again Dolly glanced in, and again saw the crowded bar; but this time Sir Galahad was leaning across the counter conversing with the bar-maid.