‘Have I not told you? Because I prefer to remain alone with you.’
He pressed her still, suspecting that her determination was caused by solicitude on his account, or some secret fear of compromising him; but when he saw that she was firm he was pleased. In the secresy of his own mind he rather dreaded the step that he proposed; lest that step, if taken, might draw them further asunder, and in more than one way lead to misconstruction. He was far too little of a Philistine to despise the theatre, to undervalue a beautiful and much-neglected art; but he knew its decadence, and understood its baser ambitions. He preferred to keep the woman he loved to himself, to screen her from the contamination of mercenary speculators and the coarse admiration of the dregs of the public which unhappily fill our theatres. The excitements of the stage, he thought, were not beneficial to a nature so overwrought as that of his wife; its morale was not edifying, its literature not spiritually ennobling, its successes were evanescent, its rewards too often achieved by ignoble means. All this he thought, yet did not say, for he honestly set his wife’s personal happiness above all considerations of prejudice; but when he heard her emphatic determination, a weight was taken from his mind.
So the interview ended, bringing the husband and wife more closely and tenderly together, but still leaving on the woman’s heart the sense of a nameless dread, which she dared not utter, and which he, of course, did not understand.
CHAPTER XXXIII.—OLD JOURNALISM—AND NEW.
Calling at Sutherland’s rooms one morning, Crieff found him surrounded by a number of unwieldy volumes, dirty and dingy enough to have been picked up, as indeed they had been, in the uncleanest shop in Holywell Street. One of these volumes he was examining with considerable impatience when Crieff entered.
‘What have you got there?’ asked the journalist, peeping over his shoulder. ‘As I live, an old volume of the “Satyrnine Review.”’
‘Yes. I saw the rubbish ticketed up very cheap, and bought it. It is not a complete set, but sufficiently so for my purpose.’
And he threw the volume down among its fellows.