Eddy held out his hand. “Goodbye. I’m really very sorry, Datcherd. I suppose I ought to have guessed what you would feel about all this.”
“Honestly, I think you ought. But thank you very much, all the same, for all the trouble you’ve taken.... You’re doing some reviewing work now, aren’t you?” His tone implied that Eddy had better go on doing reviewing work, and desist from doing anything else.
Eddy left the house. He was sorry, and rather angry, and badly disappointed. He had been keen on the Club; he had hoped to go on helping with it. It seemed that he was not considered fit by anyone to have anything to do with clubs and such philanthropic enterprises. First the Vicar of St. Gregory’s had turned him out because he had too many interests besides (Datcherd being one), and now Datcherd turned him out because he had tried to give the Club too many interests (the cause the vicar stood for being one). Nowhere did he seem to be wanted. He was a failure and an outcast. Besides which, Datcherd thought he had behaved dishonourably. Perhaps he had. Here he saw Datcherd’s point of view. Even his friend the Ulsterman had obviously had the same thought about that. Eddy ruefully admitted that he had been an idiot not to know just how Datcherd would feel. But he was angry with Datcherd for feeling like that. Datcherd was narrow, opinionated, and unfair. So many people are, in an unfair world.
He went home and told Arnold, who said, “Of course. I can’t think why you didn’t know how it would be. I always told you you were being absurd, with your Blue Water lunatics, and your Food Tax ante-diluvians, and your conscription captains. (No, don’t tell me about it’s not being conscription; now is not the moment. You are down, and it is for me to talk.) You had better try your hand at no more good works, but stick to earning an honest livelihood, as long as they will give you any money for what you do. I daresay from a rumour I heard from Innes to-day, that it won’t be long. I believe the Daily Post are contemplating a reduction in their literary staff, and they will very probably begin with you, unless you learn to restrain your redundant appreciations a little. No paper could bear up under that weight of indiscriminate enthusiasm for long.”
“Hulbert told me I was to criticize more severely,” said Eddy. “So I try to now. It’s difficult, when I like a thing, to be severe about it. I wonder if one ought.”
But he was really wondering more what Eileen Le Moine thought and would say about his difference with Datcherd.
He didn’t discover this for a week. He called at 3, Campden Hill Road, and found both its occupants out. They did not write, as he had half expected, to ask him to come again, or to meet them anywhere. At last he met Eileen alone, coming out of an exhibition of Max Beerbohm cartoons. He had been going in, but he turned back on seeing her. She looked somehow altered, and grave, and she was more beautiful even than he had known, but tired, and with shadowed eyes of fire and softness; to him she seemed, vaguely, less of a child, and more of a woman. Perhaps it was Greece.... Somehow Greece, and all the worlds old and new, and all the seas, seemed between them as she looked at him with hardening eyes. An observer would have said from that look that she didn’t like him; yet she had always liked him a good deal. A capricious person she was; all her friends knew that.
He turned back from the entrance door to walk with her, though she said, “Aren’t you going in?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve seen them once already. I’d rather see you now, if you don’t mind. I suppose you’re going somewhere? You wouldn’t come and have tea with me first?”
She hesitated a moment, as if wondering whether she would, then said, “No; I’m going to tea with Billy’s grandmother; she wants to hear about Greece. Then Billy and I are taking Jane to the Academy, to broaden her mind. She’s never seen it yet, and it’s time her education was completed.”