People of Position

by Stanley Portal Hyatt

Ethel shrugged her shoulders. "I shouldn't be there to hear him; it would make May Marlow blush and send that hateful Ida Fenton white with passion. By the way, did I tell you that Ida had taken a house in town? They think she's going to be married again, to that horrid, clean-shaven man with the damp hands, who's always collecting for some mission or other. You must know him, Billy. Surely you do; we used to call him the Additional Curate. Well, to go back to Jimmy. He wouldn't give Vera up, and her money is under her own control."

"He had to give you up," Grimmer said.

His wife laughed. "He never had me to give up, really. Besides, I hardly knew you then, Billy, so it didn't count, did it?... Billy, you must not behave in that ridiculous way; you have crushed my flowers, and the gong will go in a moment."

It was a fortnight since Jimmy had met Ethel Grimmer again, and during that time he had not written a line. Every day, and often twice a day, he had been up at Drylands, at first, because Ethel had insisted on his attendance; and latterly, because it seemed the natural thing to do. His original feeling had been one of sincere relief at the break in the monotony of his exile, and he had been equally glad to see both Vera and Ethel; but after a while Ethel seemed to become almost uninteresting by comparison with the younger woman. He was not passionately in love, as he had been with Lalage. The thought of Vera gave him no sleepless nights. In fact, now he slept far better than he had done for many months past. He had a sense of restfulness to which he had long been a stranger, as though he had taken some mental opiate to soothe the pain of remembrance. London, and the flat, and the grinding drudgery of Fleet Street, the miserable little creditors worrying at the door—all these seemed now to belong to some former existence, to be part of the life of a different Jimmy Grierson. Vera knew nothing of such things; and, in her society, he himself managed to forget them.

Lalage's letter was still unanswered. Day after day he meant to write; but, somehow, there was never time. He wanted to think it over carefully, he kept on telling himself, and then deliberately turned his mind to something else.

He had smartened himself up considerably so far as appearance went. True, once or twice, it gave him a twinge of remorse when he found that he was doing again the very things on which Lalage had insisted with gentle patience in those now-distant days, observing little conventions which he had dropped during his sojourn abroad, and had lately dropped anew. Then, too, he was drinking far less. He did not need the spirit now to bring him oblivion, and he did want to keep his hand steady and his eye clear. Vera had once spoken very strongly on the subject of intemperance, which she knew only in theory; and Jimmy had listened to her words with respectful contrition. She would never forgive a man who drank, she said, and he had gone a little cold at the thought. Yet, forgetting that Lalage had known of his failing, and had tried to help him fight his demon, he told himself that Vera's was the right view for a girl of her position. She was too good and pure to come into contact with the ugly things of life.

Already, he had made up his mind to ask her to marry him, later on, when she came back from a promised visit of indefinite duration. There was no hurry, Ethel had told him so frankly, no other suitor being in the running. At first, the thought of the past troubled him a little, in the abstract, as a kind of treason to Vera; but, after a while, he put that thought aside. She need never know, and Lalage had gone out of his life now.

His book had been published a week, and the one or two reviews which had appeared had been satisfactory, almost flattering, though one reviewer apparently voiced the general opinion when he said, "Mr. Grierson seems anxious to uphold the conventions of modern society, and yet he writes of them without conviction, as though he would like to believe in them, and could not manage to do so."

Vera had frowned over the notice. "What rubbish, Mr. Grierson. It is as much as to say that you would write one of the nasty kind of book, if you dared. I think yours is very, very good and perfectly sincere." Whereupon Jimmy had gone home well pleased, feeling that, at last, he was receiving absolution, if not from his own family, at least from his own people.

When Vera went back to town, Ethel deputed Jimmy to see her off at the station, alleging that she herself had a headache.