"Presumably one can do things with a husband. He is supposed to help," replied Esther, throwing forward her general convictions in the grotesque struggle for loyalty.
"Ah, she can't. And," added the girl, conclusively, "he won't."
"How's that?"
Hilda returned violently: "I know the beggar. She stayed a Sunday with Helen when I was there this summer and—he called in the evening. He's in politics, but quite respectable. I don't know why I shouldn't come, if you really want me: I'm taking my Ph. D., too, you know. Think it over. He's what they called," said Hilda with an explicit vagueness, "'le parfait gentleman.'"
VI
Esther looked around, when she went back to the emptiness, almost with a little shiver. This was the end then: après tant de jours: après tant de fleurs. She had just for a little while known the unacademic world, people who had seen something different in her face, something rather sweet and rather sensitive.
How far all the things seemed and all alike how dim: the socialist meetings in Berlin, the cheap dinners at a droll crêmerie in Paris frescoed all around with the history of the Queen of Hearts and the immemorial tarts; even the soft after-dinner hour when she was staying with her cousins down in Leicestershire; even a delicious painter-boy who had just got into the Salon—all alike out of reach. The life before her looked poor and thin: books to be sure were at hand and one could hurry up to New York two or three times in a winter for the opera, and go abroad every summer with a companion chosen, like Hilda, expressly for her impersonality, one year to Greece, another time for the French cathedrals and châteaux.
Hilda—"she's impersonal as a Velasquez," she had written in the first week—proved for the aggrieved young woman the Griselda of companions.
Even to herself Esther would only admit a few grounds of grievance. Sydney did well to marry, though there were elements of pain in the shock and the strangeness of her elected husband, but she, or somebody else, might have sounded a note of warning. That faint sigh of amorous trouble and the consequent precipitate response! Esther found herself in the position of one running at full speed who stops short, consciously red-faced and rather blown. The picture made her angry and undigested anger made her sick and spoiled her work.
There was even a sense of participation in Sydney's guilt, a secret confession of some dawdling in Paris, some philandering, that provoked to wholesome laughter. She had moments of saying to her inward interlocutor that it was rather absurd to chafe at the loss after all of only a few months, in June she would go back to London, to Paris, to the great glad world. But these conversations shared more or less the chimerical character of the thoughts when one lies awake at night and in the bodily warmth and darkness and the inner blaze of the overheated brain, one's perceptions, one's values are all monstrous. At last she saw that she had in truth been only playing with the thought of the straight, brown-bearded young artist in his little round cap like a Holbein drawing. Him she had not left behind without annoyance, though certainly she would not have wished to bring him along; but she could not even for Sydney have left behind her lexicons and manuscripts, and comical little bricks done up in pasteboard jewel boxes.