Certain assertions that Canterton had made to her developed a sharp and vital significance. It ought not to be necessary for sensitive women to have to go down and work in the shambles. Money is a protective covering; art a mere piece of beautiful flimsiness that cannot protect the wearer from cold winds and contempt. The love of money is nothing more than the love of life and the harmony of full self-expression. Only amazing luck or a curious concatenation of coincidences can bring ability to the forefront when that ability starts with an empty pocket. People do not want art, but only to escape from being bored. Most of those who patronise any form of art do so for the sake of ostentation, that their money and their success may advertise themselves.
She realised now what she had lost in abandoning that life at Fernhill, and she looked back on it as something very near the ideal, green, spacious, sympathetic, free from all the mean and petty anxieties, a life wherein she could express all that was finest in her, without having to dissipate her enthusiasm on the butter-dish or the coal-box. It had meant protection and comradeship. She was sufficiently human in a feminine sense to feel the need of them, and there was a sufficiency of the clinging spirit in her to make her regret that she had gained a so-called independence. She was nearer now to discovering why some women are loved and others ignored. Evolution has taught the male to feel protective, and the expressing of this protective tenderness provides man with one of the most beautifying experiences that life can give. The aggressive and independent woman may satisfy a new steel-bright pride, but she has set herself against one of the tendencies of Nature. Argue as one may about evolving a new atmosphere, of redistributing the factors of life, this old fact remains. The aggressive and independent woman will never be loved in the same way. No doubt she will protest that her aim is to escape from this conception of love—sexual domination, that is what it has been dubbed, and rightly so in the multitude of cases. But a cloud of contentions cannot damp out the under-truth. The newmade woman will never challenge all that is best in man. She will continue to remain in ignorance of what man is.
Even in her panic moments Eve could not bring herself to write to Canterton. She felt that she could not reopen the past, when it was she who had closed it. She recoiled from putting herself in a position that might make it possible for him to offer her money.
One of the hardest parts of it all was that she had to live the whole time with her anxious economies. She could not afford to escape from them, to pay to forget. A shilling was a big consideration, a penny every bit a penny. Once or twice, when she was feeling particularly miserable, she let herself go to the desperate extent of a half-crown seat in the pit. And the next day she would regret the extravagance, and lunch on a scone and a glass of milk.
Then Mr. Parfit appeared in the light of a provider of amusements. One Thursday evening she had a note from him, written in his regular, commercial hand.
“Dear Miss Carfax,—I have three dress-circles for a matinée of ‘The Lost Daughter’ on Saturday afternoon. Jane is coming up from Croydon. Will you honour me by joining us? We might have a little lunch at Frascati’s before the theatre. I shall be proud if you accept, and I want you to meet Jane.
“Very sincerely yours,
“John Parfit.”
She did accept, glad to escape from herself for an afternoon, and refusing to ask herself any serious questions. Mr. Parfit was in great spirits. Eve discovered “Sister Jane” to be a stout, blonde, good-humoured woman with an infinite capacity for feeling domestic affection. She studied Eve with feminine interest, and meeting her brother’s eyes, smiled at him from time to time with motherly approval.
The play was a British Public play, sentimentally sexual, yet guardedly inoffensive. Eve enjoyed it. She found that John Parfit had to use his handkerchief, and that he became thick in the throat. She did not like him any the less for being capable of emotion. It seemed to be part of his personality.