"Yes. But never forgets."
* * * * *
That was the first confidence that ever had passed between Valerie West and Rita Tevis. And after it, Rita, apparently forgetting her own philosophical collapse, never ceased to urge upon Valerie the wisdom, the absolute necessity of self-preservation in considering her future relations with Louis Neville. But, like Neville's logic, Rita's failed before the innocent simplicity of the creed which Valerie had embraced. Valerie was willing that their relations should remain indefinitely as they were if the little gods of convention were to be considered; she had the courage to sever all relations with the man she loved if anybody could convince her that it was better for Neville. Marry him she would not, because she believed it meant inevitable unhappiness for him. But she was not afraid to lay her ringless hands in his for ever.
Querida called on them and was very agreeable and lively and fascinating; and when he went away Valerie asked him to come again. He did; and again after that. She and Rita dined with him once or twice; and things gradually slipped back to their old footing; and Querida remained on his best behaviour.
Neville had prolonged the visit to the parental roof. He did not explain to her why, but the reason was that he had made up his mind to tell his parents that he wished to marry and to find out once and for all what their attitudes would be toward such a girl as Valerie West. But he had not yet found courage to do it, and he was lingering on, trying to find it and the proper moment to employ it.
His father was a gentleman so utterly devoid of imagination that he had never even ventured into business, but had been emotionlessly content to marry and live upon an income sufficient to maintain the material and intellectual traditions of the house of Neville.
Tall, transparently pale, negative in character, he had made it a life object to get through life without increasing the number of his acquaintances—legacies in the second generation left him by his father, whose father before him had left the grandfathers of these friends as legacies to his son.
[Illustration: "She and Rita dined with him once or twice.">[
It was a pallid and limited society that Henry Neville and his wife frequented—a coterie of elderly, intellectual people, and their prematurely dried-out offspring. And intellectual in-breeding was thinning it to attenuation—to a bloodless meagreness in which they, who composed it, conceived a mournful pride.
Old New Yorkers all, knowing no other city, no other bourne north of Tenth Street or west of Chelsea—silent, serene, drab-toned people, whose drawing-rooms were musty with what had been fragrance once, whose science, religion, interests, desires were the beliefs, interests and emotions of a century ago, their colourless existence and passive snobbishness affronted nobody who did not come seeking affront.