People of Position

by Stanley Portal Hyatt

"I ought not to have done it, Billy," she sobbed. "If anything goes wrong when it's too late, Jimmy will take it to heart so terribly. I wish I wasn't responsible, but I am, and I can't deny it."

Billy tried to comfort her. "My dear, they seem happy enough over it. I know Vera is very grateful to you."

Ethel shrugged her shoulders. "Vera! Oh, she would be happy, because she doesn't feel very deeply. She never did about anything. It was always the same with her when she was a child. But Jimmy is different. He's not in love."

"Then why did he propose?" Billy retorted. "Was it her money?"

"No, no," Ethel repudiated the idea emphatically. "Jimmy is not that sort. I think he proposed because he's been very miserable over something, and Vera took his thoughts off his other troubles. But he won't be happy."

There was no mistaking the conviction in her voice, and, for a moment, even her husband was moved out of his usual good-humoured complacency; but he soon recovered and tried to laugh away her fears, without, however, achieving much success. She was not in a mood to be reassured, although she contrived to put on a smiling face when she met the newly engaged pair at dinner.

Vera was a little inclined to blush, but obviously happy. Jimmy, on the other hand, was by turns silent, almost moody, and then feverishly talkative. Vera seemed to notice nothing amiss—possibly she put it down to natural excitement—but Ethel watched him with anxiety, which she tried hard to conceal. As she said, the whole thing was her doing. She had engineered it carefully, and she was, at least in matters like these, a clever woman. True, once or twice, she felt a slight misgiving, but she had made up her mind to succeed, and had brushed her fears aside. Only when Jimmy came with the news that her scheme had become an accomplished fact did she realise that match-making is a dangerous occupation. He neither looked nor spoke like a lover who had just been accepted, but rather like a man who sees the crisis of his life a little way ahead of him, and is fearful of his own capacity to pass through it.

Vera was quite satisfied with Jimmy's farewell kiss. Had there been passion in it she might have been frightened; but, as it was, the caress he gave her seemed very sweet. She was very proud of this lover of hers, of his undoubted cleverness, his good looks, and his powers of conversation. It would be very pleasant to see his name on all the bookstalls, to know that almost every other girl of her acquaintance would envy her the possession of her author. So far, she had hardly thought of marriage and its responsibilities; all that part seemed a long way off, in the distant future, and, for the moment, she thought only of the engagement. But as Jimmy walked home in the moonlight, Vera Farlow was hardly in his mind at all; he was thinking of other kisses he had given and received, and, try as he would, he could not drive out a horrible feeling that, every time his lips touched Vera's, he was being unfaithful to Lalage. It was absurd, wholly ridiculous, he told himself so savagely; but still a sense of shame and ingratitude remained. Lalage, who had suffered so much, and, as he realised now, had suffered, too, for him, was in that shop, the sort of place where one could spend one's whole life, and he was going to marry Vera Farlow, and cut the last slender link between himself and the girl he had once loved, was going to make her a last present, of money, and ask her not to write again.

Jimmy let himself into the cottage, fully determined to go through with the task there and then, to write the letter almost before he had time to think, and to post it immediately. Yet dawn found him still sitting at his desk with a pile of cigarette ends and an empty decanter on the tray, and a blank sheet of paper in front of him. At last, he got up with a sigh, extinguished the lamp, and stumbled wearily to bed. It was not that the spirit had affected him—he felt he would have given anything to have it do so—but he was utterly exhausted mentally, and, the moment he lay down, he went into a heavy, dreamless sleep, which lasted until ten o'clock.