The process in which we now find James engaged is mental rather than senescent, but you would hardly guess it to look at him. He is sitting on a rock on the top of a hill at sunset, smoking a cigarette and patently enjoying it. One leg is thrown easily over the other, his body is bent slightly forward; one hand rests on the rock by his side and the other, when not employed in propelling the cigarette to and from his mouth, lies quietly on his lap. He is very quiet; James is not the sort of person to make many unnecessary motions; he picks out a comfortable position and usually remains in it until it is time to do something else. He would do this even if he were not gazing at an absorbingly lovely view over the roofs of Bar Harbor, Frenchman's Bay and the tumbled hills of the Maine Coast, and even if the mental process were not such an absorbing one as a review of his relation with Madge Elliston,—a sort of indexing of the steps by which it had developed from the vaguest of acquaintanceships into its present state.
It had really begun, he reflected, on the evening of that dinner. Before that Madge had been merely one of the group of chattery young women that he had danced with and was polite to and secretly rather afraid of; one of the genus débutante. After that she merged from her genus and, almost without going through the intermediate stages of species and variety, became an individual.
At first he had deliberately fostered and encouraged the thought of Madge, for obvious reasons. It was clearly profitable to do anything that would help weed out the thought of Beatrice. It would be fruitless even to try to enumerate the stages by which from that point on Beatrice faded from his heart and that of Madge took her place; to a far larger place, as he now realized, than Beatrice had ever occupied there.
It appeared to him now, as he looked back on the whole process, that Beatrice herself was responsible for a large part of it, Beatrice and her Working Girls' League. That had all grown quite logically out of that first evening and his inspiration about having Madge sing to the working girls. Beatrice adopted the suggestion, and the result was so successful that on the Saturday a month or two afterward, when James made his next visit to New Haven, Madge was engaged to sing to them for a second time. He accompanied Beatrice to that meeting and from that evening dated his acquaintance with the Working Girls' League and social work in general.
Madge sang for the most part old English songs, things the girls could understand, and they followed them all with the most unaffected interest and pleasure. James was surprised to see several of them actually wipe tears from their eyes when she sang the plaintive ditty "A young country maid up to London had strayed," and during one intermission he was conscious of certain inarticulate sounds coming from the audience, of which the only intelligible part was the word "husband" uttered in beseeching accents again and again.
"They want her to sing 'Oh, for a husband,'" explained Beatrice to James. "She sang that the last time and they all went crazy about it." Madge complied with a really very spirited rendering of the old song, and the girls applauded with an enthusiasm that rather touched James. There was something appealing to him in the unaffected way in which these poor shop and factory drudges, physically half-starved and mentally wholly starved, responded to the slightest efforts to give them pleasure. He felt himself suddenly warming toward the movement.
"Tell me something about this place," he found a chance to say to Madge later on, when the gathering had broken up, and even before she replied he reflected that he had had ample opportunity to ask Beatrice that.
"Oh, I'm not the person to ask—I've only just come into it.... It was started simply as a working girls' club, I believe; a place more especially for the homeless ones to come to after work hours and meet each other and spend a little time in cheerful surroundings before going back to their hall bedrooms.... Now it's become more than that; they have entertainments and dances and classes of various kinds, and we're trying to raise money enough to build them a lodging house."
"You've become one of them then, have you?"
"Oh, yes, I'm one of those that have been drawn in. The thing has flourished amazingly lately, both among the helpers and the helped. The purpose of the League is entirely secular—I suppose that's what made it go so well. The churches don't seem—they don't get a chance at many people, do they?... This is aimed to help the very lowest class of workers; all unmarried wage-earners are eligible, regardless of age or race or religion.... Poor things, they are so glad to have their bodies and minds cared for and their souls left alone! The souls follow easily enough, we find, just as Shaw says—you've read 'Major Barbara'?"