“Is that so? Is that the way we speak of Hugh? I’ll tell him you said so. No, I wouldn’t trouble his ears with anything so paltry. I wonder do you know the way he speaks of you? He thinks you must be weak in the head, and he makes excuses for you, so he does; he never says an unkind word against you, only how you ought to be locked up and not let loose like ordinary people, and how he ought to have known you were like that and explained to you in so many words beforehand the principles he wanted maintained. As if he hadn’t been too ill to explain anything, and as if any baby wouldn’t have known, and as if any honourable person wouldn’t have taken particular care, just when he was ill and away, to run things just the way he would like. And after that you call him a girls’ school mistress....”
“On the contrary,” said Eddy, crossly, “I said he wasn’t. You are horribly unfair. Is it any use continuing this conversation?”
“It is not. Nor any other.”
So, in her excitement, she got into a bus that was not going to Billy’s grandmother, and he swallowed his pride and told her so, but she would not swallow hers and listen to him, but climbed on to the top, and was carried down Piccadilly, and would have to change at Hyde Park Corner.
Eileen was singularly poor at buses, Eddy reflected bitterly. He walked down to the Embankment, too crushed and unhappy to go home and risk meeting Arnold. He had been rude and ill-tempered to Eileen, and sneered at Datcherd to her, and she had been rude and ill-tempered to him, and would never forgive him, because it had been about Datcherd, her friend, loyalty to whom was the mainspring of her life. All her other friends might go by the board, if Datcherd but prospered. How much she cared, Eddy reflected, his anger fast fading into a pity and regret that hurt. For all her bitter words to him had that basis—a poignant caring for Datcherd, with his wrecked health, and his wrecked home, and his hopeless, unsatisfied love for her—a love which would never be satisfied, because he had principles which forbade it, and she had a love for him which would always preserve his principles and his life’s work intact. And they were growing to care so much—Eddy had seen that in Eileen’s face when first he met her at the Leicester Galleries—with such intensity, such absorbing flame, that it hurt and burnt.... Eddy did not want to watch it.
But one thing it had done for him; it had killed in him the last vestiges of that absurd emotion he had had for her, an emotion which had always been so hopeless, and for that very reason had never become, and never would become, love.
But he wanted to be friends. However much she had been the aggressor in the quarrel, however unfair, and unjust, and unkind she had been, still he was minded to write and say he was sorry, and would she please come to lunch and go on being friends.
He turned into Soho Square, and went back to his rooms. There he found a letter from his editor telling him that his services on the Daily Post would not be required after the end of May. It was not unexpected. The Post was economising in its literary staff, and starting on him. It was very natural, even inevitable, that they should; for his reviewing lacked discrimination, and his interest in the Club had often made him careless about his own job. He threw the letter at Arnold, who had just come in.
Arnold said, “I feared as much.”
“What now, I wonder?” said Eddy, not caring particularly.