Malling went the next day to morning and evening service at St. Joseph's. He was not invited to lunch in Onslow Gardens, and he did not see Lady Sophia. On the whole, he was glad of this. He had enough to keep in his mind that day. The matter in which he was interested seemed growing before his eyes, like a thing coming out of the earth, but now beginning to thrust itself up into regions where perhaps it would eventually be hidden in darkness, with the great company of mysteries whose unraveling is beyond the capacity of man.
He had now, he felt sure, a clear comprehension of Lady Sophia. Their short interview at Burlington House had been illuminating. She was a typical example of the Adam's-rib woman; that is, of the woman who, intensely, almost exaggeratedly feminine, can live in any fullness only through another, and that other a man. Through Mr. Harding Lady Sophia had hitherto lived, and had doubtless, in her view, triumphed. Obviously a woman not free from a nervous vanity, and a woman of hungry ambition, her vanity and ambition had been fed by his growing notoriety, his increasing success and influence. The rib had thrilled with the body to which it belonged.
But that time of happy emotion, of admiration, of keen looking forward, was the property of the past. Lawn sleeves, purple, perhaps,—for who is more hopeful than this type of woman in the golden moments of life?—perhaps even an archiepiscopal throne faded from before the eyes they had gladdened—the eyes of faith in a man.
And a different woman was beginning to appear—a woman who might be as critical as she had formerly been admiring, a woman capable of becoming embittered.
On the Sunday of Malling's visit to Onslow Gardens, Mr. Harding's failure in the pulpit had waked up in his wife eager sympathy and eager spite, the one directed toward the man who had failed, the other toward the man who, as Malling felt sure, had caused the failure.
In Burlington House that woman, whom men with every reason adore, had given place to another less favorable toward him who had been her hero.
It seemed to Malling as if in the future a strange thing might happen, almost as if it must happen: it seemed to him as if Chichester might convey his view of his rector to his rector's wife.
"Study the link," Stepton had said. "There will be development in the link."
Already the words had proved true. There had been a development in Lady
Sophia such as Malling had certainly not anticipated. Where would it end?
Again and again, as he listened to the morning and evening sermons,
Malling had asked himself that question; again and again he had recalled
his conversation at Burlington House with Lady Sophia.
In the morning at St. Joseph's Mr. Harding had preached to a church that was half filled; in the evening Henry Chichester had preached to a church that was full to the doors. And each of the clergymen in turn had listened to the other, but how differently!