Mrs. Mansfield knew at once that she had broken in upon a confidential interview, not by Miss Fleet's demeanor, but by Charmian's. But she did not show her knowledge. She sat down and joined pleasantly in the talk. She had often seen Miss Fleet in London, but she did not know her well. At once she realized that Charmian had found an excellent friend. And she was not jealous because of the confidence given but not given to her. Youth, she knew, is wilful and must have its way. The nearest, for some inscrutable reason, are generally told the least.
When Miss Fleet went away, Mrs. Mansfield said:
"That is one of the most thoroughbred human beings I have ever seen. No wonder the greatest snobs like her. There is nothing a snob hates so much as snobbery in another. Viva to your new friend, Charmian!"
She wondered a little whether Miss Fleet's perception of character was as keen as her breeding was definite, when she heard that Claude Heath had met her.
Heath told Mrs. Mansfield this. Miss Fleet had made a strong impression upon him. At the moment when he had met her he had felt specially downcast. The musical critic, with whom he had gone to the concert, had been a fellow student with him at the Royal College. Being young the critic was very critical, very sure of himself, very decisive in his worship of the new idols and in his scathing contempt for the old. He spoke of Mendelssohn as if the composer of Elijah had earned undying shame, of Gounod as if he ought to have been hanged for creating his Faust. His glorification of certain modern impressionists in music depressed Heath, almost as much as his abuse of the dead who had been popular, and who were still appreciated by some thousands, perhaps millions, of nobodies. He made Heath, in his discontented condition, feel as if all art were futile.
"Why give up everything," he thought, "merely to earn in the end the active contempt of men who have given up nothing? What is it that drives me on? A sort of madness, perhaps, something to be rooted out."
He almost shivered as the conviction came to him that he must have been composing for posterity, since he did not desire present publicity. No doubt he had tried to trick himself into the belief that he had toiled for himself alone, paid the tribute of ardent work to his own soul. Now he asked himself, with bitter scepticism: "Does any man really ever do that?" And his world seemed to fall about him like shadows dropping down into a void.
Then came his five minutes of talk with Susan Fleet.
When Heath spoke of it to Mrs. Mansfield he said:
"I was a cripple when we began. When we stopped I felt as if I could climb to a peak. And she said nothing memorable. But I had been in her atmosphere."