“Do you mean to say you did not feel the curious sense of aloofness, of want of sympathy with poor humanity, that the consciousness of a mission—even an art mission—seems to bring with it? Not for humanity’s woes; no one can be kinder than Edmund, if you are in real trouble, but he is the kind of man who would never notice if you had cut your finger, or had got a new frock on. Now woman wants more than that here below—at least I think so!”
She laughed, Mrs. Elles was wondering how she could talk like this about the man she cared for.
“I am being very didactic, I fear,” Egidia said suddenly. “And boring you.”
“No, no,” said the other vehemently. “I love discussing people. I have noticed all you say in Mr. Rivers, but still—— And do you know,” she went on eagerly, “all the men who speak of him seem very fond of him, so is it only women he snubs?”
“Oh, men like him and respect him, but they don’t slap him on the back, and confide their pleasant weaknesses to him! He is manly enough, but I don’t know how it is, he is quite out of it in the smoking-room.”
“He is very much at home in a woman’s boudoir, at all events!” said Mrs. Elles, a little bitterly.
“You mean mine,” the other replied with her usual directness. “Well, he is my cousin, and he knows I like to hear him discuss the only subject he cares to discuss—art. He tells me his ideas for new mediums and the experiments he is making. He laments the volatility of the prettiest colours, such as aureoline, and the impracticability of Nature as a model. We never talk of anything more personal than that, and all he condescends to look at here is a sunset over Westminster as we see it from my windows.”
“Do you like that sort of subject best yourself?” Mrs. Elles said wistfully, going out of herself for once, into the other woman’s mind, and realizing the bitterness of renunciation that informed the words so laughingly spoken.
“Oh, I—well, I am a woman, and no wiser than the rest. That is why I have been telling you all this, because if you once realize that I—have been there myself, in short—you will more readily let me help you and him. You see, though I am hopeless—absolutely hopeless”—Mrs. Elles stared; this strange woman might have been talking about cooks, for all the emotion she showed—“I am not even miserable about it. I know so well that if Edmund came to me and went down on his knees to me to marry him, I should refuse, he could not make me as happy as he makes me now. If I were a wife, I should not care to be second to anything, not even to Art, nor would you. I have realized the finality of it all, and so must you. But now, you must trust me, please, and not think, when I talk to you of your affairs and Edmund’s, that I am fighting for my own hand, and mean to secure him for myself, in the end, as soon as I have helped him to get clear of his entanglement with you. You see—I speak quite plainly.”
Mrs. Elles’s eager disclaimer of any such interpretation of Egidia’s behaviour was not so much the outcome of an emotional confidence in the woman who had so bravely, so wildly, so foolishly committed herself, as of the strong conviction which her words carried. She was secretly a little overcome and puzzled by the spectacle of so much single-mindedness and bonhomie in the unveiling of a soul’s tragedy, such as she conceived Egidia’s to be. She herself could not have been anything but tortuous in the telling of such a piece of secret history. The novelist’s methods were not hers. They went with the whole character of the woman, with the honest eyes, and shrewd, fine, but uncompromising mouth.