Changing Winds / A Novel

by St. John G. Ervine

He laughed nervously and looked at the others. "I've forgotten what I was going to say," he said, and went forward to greet Mrs. Graham.

"My cousin, Rachel Wynne," said Roger, introducing her to him.

Rachel Wynne was a tall, thin girl, with a curious tightened look, as if she were keeping a close hold on herself. When she held out her hand to him, he had a sensation of discomfort, not because her clasp was firm, but because she seemed to be looking, not through him, but into him. He was very sensitive to the opinion of people about him, feeling very quickly the dislike of any one who did not care for him, and in a moment he knew that Rachel Wynne was antipathetic to him. Henry was always rude to people whom he disliked ... he could not be civil to them, however hard he might try to be so, but his feeling in the presence of people who disliked him, was one of powerlessness: he was tongue-tied and nervous and very dull, and his faculties seemed to shrivel up. There was a look of cold efficiency about Rachel Wynne that frightened him. She seemed to be incapable of wasting time or of waywardness. Her career at Newnham, Roger had told him, had been one of steady brilliance. "There wasn't a flicker in it," he had said to Henry. "Rachel's always well-trimmed!"

There were no ragged edges about Rachel Wynne. Her frock was neatly made, so neatly that he was unaware of it, and her hair was bound tightly to her head by a black velvet ribbon. She had a look of cold tidiness, as if she had been frozen into her shape and could not be thawed out of it; but she was not cold in spirit, as he discovered during dinner when the conversation shifted from generalities about themselves to the work she had lately been doing. They had been talking about Gilbert's play, and then Mrs. Graham had turned to Henry and told him how much she liked his novels. Her tastes were simple, and she preferred "Broken Spears" to "Drusilla." "Of course, 'Drusilla' is very clever!" she said a little deprecatingly, and then she turned to Rachel and asked her whether she had read Henry's novels.

"No," Rachel answered. "I very seldom read novels!..."

He felt contempt for her. Now he knew why he had been chilled by her presence. She belonged to that order of prigs which will not read novels, preferring instead to read "serious" books. Such a woman would treat "Tom Jones" as a frivolous book, less illuminating than some tedious biography or history book. She might even deny that it had any illumination at all.... He could not prevent a sneer from his retort to her statement that she seldom read novels.

"I suppose," he said, "you think that novels are not sufficiently serious?"

"Oh, no," she answered quickly. "I just haven't time for novel-reading!"

That seemed to him to be worse than if she had said that she preferred to read solid books. A novel, in her imagination, was a light diversion in which one only indulged in times of unusual slackness. No wonder, he thought to himself, all reformers and serious people make such a mess of the social system when they despise and ignore the principal means of knowing the human spirit.

"That's a pity," he said aloud. "I should have thought that you'd find novels useful to you in your work. I mean, there's surely more chance of understanding the people of the eighteenth century if you read Fielding's 'Tom Jones' than there is if you read Lecky's 'England in the Eighteenth Century.'"