The suggestion of these words struck a peculiar chord of memory in Eve. They recalled very vividly a vulgar little cousin of hers—a boy scarcely out of his teens—who had boasted, with considerable pride, of a liaison with a young lady at a tobacconist’s. It was an unpleasant parallel, but she could not clear it from her mind.
Hitherto the physical side of Wynne had been so dormant. She had nursed the shell which held his spirit, and nourished it to a manlier form. As he stood there before speaking she realized that in body he was a man of different fibre, capable of passions not only of the mind. It would be tragic and pitiable if these were to be awakened by the same vulgar instincts which attack the little Lotharios of nineteen.
This was the man who had starved for a week to buy a copy of Walter Pater.
She fell to wondering whether, had their first meeting been now instead of then, she could have sat the night through in his rooms without fear of consequence.
And while she wondered upon these matters, Wynne’s eyes travelled critically over her face and figure.
“You’re rather drab,” he thought; “you haven’t much colour. If your hair were dressed differently it would be an improvement, perhaps. That is certainly a deplorable dress—and your hands!”
A man whose function is to produce plays acquires a ready knack of judging possible qualities by external indications. The habit is not one to be recommended in the home, for in practising it he is apt to overlook many essentials and ignore grave liabilities.
A just man would not accuse a sweep of possessing a blackened soul because his face was sooted from sweeping the flues. The instance may sound trivial enough, but it is no less trivial than the train of thought running through Wynne’s lightly-poised mind as he contemplated the wife of his own making. His eyes were deceived by petty superficiality, and blinded to the beauty veiled behind a screen of three years’ unremitting toil. He did not bother to speculate if that beauty would leap to glorious life at the touch of the hand that swept the screen away. To follow his thoughts to their inglorious anchorage, he was sensible to a wave of self-pity. It seemed rather ill-luck, with the ball of success at his feet, a fresh glow of manhood ripening in his veins, that he should be tied to a woman who had lost the fine edge of her desirability.
“I see,” said Eve at last; “and do you propose to disappoint them?”
Wynne dropped his cigarette into the grate.