“I shall be delighted to do anything, ma’am,” Lady Holme said quickly.
When she received the programme she found that her two songs came immediately after “Some Imitations” by Miss Pimpernel Schley.
She stood for a moment with the programme in her hand.
“Some Imitations”; there was a certain crudeness about the statement, a crudeness and an indefiniteness combined. Who were to be the victims? At this moment, perhaps, they were being studied. Was she to be pilloried again as she had been pilloried that night at the British Theatre? The calm malice of the American was capable of any impudent act. It seemed to Lady Holme that she had perhaps been very foolish in promising to appear in the same programme with Miss Schley. Was it by accident that their names were put together? Lady Holme did not know who had arranged the order of the performances, but it occurred to her that there was attraction to the public in the contiguity, and that probably it was a matter of design. No other two women had been discussed and compared, smiled over and whispered about that season by Society as she and Miss Schley had been.
For a moment, while she looked at the programme, she thought of the strange complications of feeling that are surely the fruit of an extreme civilisation. She saw herself caught in a spider’s web of apparently frail, yet really powerful, threads spun by an invisible spider. Her world was full of gossamer playing the part of iron, of gossamer that was compelling, that made and kept prisoners. What freedom was there for her and women like her, what reality of freedom? Even beauty, birth, money were gossamer to hold the fly. For they concentrated the gaze of those terrible watchful eyes which govern lives, dominating actions, even dominating thoughts.
She moved, had always moved, in a maze of complications. She saw them tiny yet intense, like ants in their hill. They stirred minds, hearts, as the ants stirred twigs, leaves, blossoms, and carried them to the hill for their own purposes. In this maze free will was surely lost. The beautiful woman of the world seems to the world to be a dominant being, to be imposing the yoke of her will on those around her. But is she anything but a slave?
Why were she and Miss Schley enemies? Why had they been enemies from the moment they met? There was perhaps a reason for their hostility now, a reason in Fritz. But at the beginning what reason had there been? Civilisation manufactures reasons as the spider manufactures threads, because it is the deadly enemy of peace—manufactures reasons for all those thoughts and actions which are destructive of inward and exterior peace.
For a moment it seemed to Lady Holme as if she and the American were merely victims of the morbid conditions amid which they lived; conditions which caused the natural vanity of women to become a destroying fever, the natural striving of women to please a venomous battle, the natural desire of women to be loved a fracas, in which clothes were the armour, modes of hair-dressing, manicure, perfumes, dyes, powder-puffs the weapons.
What a tremendous, noisy nothingness it was, this state of being! How could an angel be natural in it,—be an angel at all?
She laid down the programme and sighed. She felt a vague yet violent desire for release, for a fierce change, for something that would brush away the spider’s web and set free her wings. Yet where would she fly? She did not know; probably against a window-pane. And the change would never come. She and Fritz—what could they ever be but a successful couple known in a certain world and never moving beyond its orbit?