“Do you think it is necessarily wasted because a woman does not marry?”
“I am old-fashioned, Israel, and I think a woman’s vocation is marriage.”
“A great many women must be without a vocation,” I laughed.
“That is no reason why as many as have the opportunity should not fulfil it. Now, when you marry, Israel——”
At that moment Miss Gascoyne entered the room. She was a little embarrassed, as if she were aware that I knew all about Wyllie’s proposal and her refusal.
She was not the woman to dismiss a lover lightly and with a mere sensation of triumph at her own conquest. She had, I was sure, suffered in a way which most women would not have done.
With most women the dismissal of a lover brings with it a certain feeling of power. It is the one moment at which their sex can be truly said to rule.
Miss Gascoyne’s manner had in it a trace of sadness, probably, I thought, expressive of regret that she had been unable to accept as a husband a man whom she thoroughly respected and who perhaps she even felt was in many ways her natural mate. Perhaps the event had led to a certain amount of retrospection and analysis of her own feelings. Lovers are modest, yet at the same time I fancy a favoured lover has as a rule a very fair impression that he is not distasteful, however fluttered he may be before he has made sure of his prize. So by some curious undercurrent flowing between us I gathered that Miss Gascoyne was more interested in my visits than she had ever been before. I had nothing very tangible to go on. There was no sudden development of coquetry, such as a smaller-minded woman would have displayed. She showed towards me the same even friendship, and we did not see more of each other. Perhaps I gathered the increasing warmth of her feelings from a certain relief and gladness at my arrival which even she could not conceal, or it might have been from a certain deference to my opinion.
To the ordinary observer it would have appeared almost incredible that this queenly, beautiful creature of good birth should prefer a stockbroker’s clerk to Mr. Hibbert-Wyllie, one of the richest men in England, and connected with half the peerage. Busybodies would have argued that her pride, her sense of family, had always been stronger than her affections; which would have shown how very wrong busybodies, who are necessarily limited to a judgment based on the superficial, can be.
I had taken Grahame Hallward to see the Gascoynes, at Mr. Gascoyne’s special invitation. The latter had met him with me in the City, and had conceived a great liking for him.