‘I believe that real love is quite calm and level, you know,’ explained Kingston. ‘Your great blazing stories are built of passion, not of love. A big love is very quiet, and goes on peacefully from day to day, almost monotonous in its imperceptible development.’
‘It sounds too like the kingdom of heaven to be very satisfactory on earth,’ said Isabel.
‘Anyhow,’ replied Kingston, hotly defending what nobody had attacked; ‘I say that the happy concert of lives and marriages—ideal lives and marriages—is based on tranquil harmonies, not on melodramatic chords.’
Isabel smiled quietly. ‘Why are we talking about love?’ she asked. ‘It was friendship we were settling on.’
He made no reply, and they entered the Castle.
CHAPTER IX
The friendship between Kingston and Isabel did not progress apace. Its development was jerky, uneven, unsatisfactory. Kingston was at once restrained and spurred on by resentment. He resented the fact of the friendship, was perpetually reluctant, suspicious, filled with a strange, alert uneasiness. Isabel, for her part, found the relation less careless and smooth than her friendships usually were. It brought an usually poignant satisfaction, and, in revenge, an unusually poignant feeling of strain and annoyance at Kingston’s refusal to meet her half-way. Normally she should not have cared a straw—by all her rules she did not care a straw—yet, none the less, the guarded hostility with which he met her advances stimulated and exasperated her to the point of defiance.
The two women did not find, as their acquaintance grew, that any intimacy ripened between them. Gundred retained her desire to keep Isabel by her side as a foil, but not even the ardour that the contrast was to keep alive in Kingston could quite reconcile her to the mental eccentricities and untidinesses of Isabel. In Gundred’s mind nothing was ever disorderly or misplaced; second-hand ideas lay neatly labelled in rows; the chaos of Isabel’s thoughts, her incessant flurry of pursuit after some wild notion or other, her ransackings of her intellectual store to find some lost fancy, to run down some far-fetched theory, were so many evidences, to Gundred, of her cousin’s unmethodical, ill-balanced nature. All thought, to Gundred, was clear, simple, obvious; she never entertained any opinion that had not been sanctioned by fashion and much previous use; she could not imagine why anyone should accept new notions, much less go wild-goose-chasing them up and down the cloudy domain of ideas. What had been thought before by wise, good teachers was quite good enough for her; to want more, to ask questions, to test ‘truths’ by reason, seemed forward, ill-bred, and unwomanly. She put down all Isabel’s vagaries of mind to her disastrous colonial education, and believed at first that a few weeks’ association with ‘nice people’—the nice people being, in the context, herself—would cure her cousin of such vagabond tendencies. So by smiles and indifference she repressed Isabel’s ebullitions; and when she found that her conduct had no effect beyond excluding herself from the conversation, she resigned herself calmly to the inevitable.
Irritated at first by Isabel’s mental jumps and flights, Gundred, after her attempts at repression had failed, grew tired and bored, made no effort to follow her cousin’s mental movements, and, with a mildly reproving air which nobody noticed, stood graciously aloof from Isabel’s dialogues with Kingston. She let them talk, and, by way of tacitly rebuking her cousin, ostentatiously ceased to take any interest in what they said.