“I am rather busy just now.” Jane was very polite, very deprecating, but inwardly she reproached Eddy for letting in on her strange ladies who asked her to lunch.
That no one ought to be too busy for social engagements, was what Mrs. Crawford thought, and she turned a little crisper and cooler in manner. Molly was standing before a small drawing in a corner—a drawing of a girl, bare-legged, childish, half elfin, lying among sedges by a stream, one leg up to the knee in water, and one arm up to the elbow. Admirably the suggestion had been caught of a small wild thing, a little half-sulky animal. Molly laughed at it.
“That’s Daffy, of course. It’s not like her—and yet it is her. A sort of inside look it’s got of her; hasn’t it, Eddy? I suppose it looks different because Daffy’s always so neat and tailor-made, and never would be like that. It’s a different Daffy, but it is Daffy.”
“Your pretty little sister, isn’t it, Eddy,” said Mrs. Crawford, who had met Daphne at Welchester. “Yes, that’s clever. ‘Undine,’ you call it. Why? Has she no soul?”
Jane smiled and retired from this question. She seldom explained why her pictures were so called; they just were.
Molly was not looking at Undine. Her glance had fallen on a drawing near it. It was another drawing of a girl; a very beautiful girl, playing a violin. It was called “Life.” No one would have asked why about this; the lightly poised figure, the glowing eyes under their shadowing black brows, the fiddle tucked away under the round chin, and the dimples tucked away in the round cheeks, the fine supple hands, expressed the very spirit of life, all its joy and brilliance and genius and fire, and all its potential tragedy. Molly looked at it without comment, as she might have looked at a picture of some friend of the artist’s who had died a sad death. She knew that Eileen Le Moine had died, from her point of view; she knew that she had spent the last months of Hugh Datcherd’s life with him, for Eddy had told her. She had said to Eddy that this was dreadful and wicked. Eddy had said, “They don’t think it is, you see.” Molly had said that what they thought made no difference to right and wrong; Eddy had replied that it made all the difference in the world. She had finally turned on him with, “But you think it dreadful, Eddy?” and he had, to her dismay, shaken his head.
“Not as they’re doing it, I don’t. It’s all right. You’d know it was all right if you knew them, Molly. It’s been, all along, the most faithful, loyal, fine, simple, sad thing in the world, their love. They’ve held out against it just so long as to give in would have hurt anyone but themselves; now it won’t, and she’s giving herself to him that he may die in peace. Don’t judge them, Molly.”
But she had judged them so uncompromisingly, so unyieldingly, that she had never referred to the subject again, for fear it should come between Eddy and her. A difference of principle was the one thing Molly could not bear. To her this thing, whatever its excuse, was wrong, against the laws of the Christian Church, in fine, wicked. And it was Eddy’s friends who had done it, and he didn’t want her to judge them; she must say nothing, therefore. Molly’s ways were ways of peace.
Mrs. Crawford peered through her lorgnette at the drawing. “What’s that delicious thing? ‘Life.’ Quite; just that. That is really utterly charming. Who’s the original? Why, it’s——-” She stopped suddenly.
“It’s Mrs. Le Moine, the violinist,” said Jane.