It Never Can Happen Again

by William De Morgan

"No, I have never had a little sister." And then Challis felt like a liar, and heart-sick as he thought of the thoroughness with which he had accepted Kate's "little sister" as his own. What a compensation he had thought her for a mother-in-law his most gruesome anticipations had not bargained for! When did the change come about?—when?—when? Why need the memory of it all come on him now, of all times? But Judith stopped his retrospect short with: "Get me that rose-bud, if you have a knife. Don't scratch yourself on my account." For Challis to reply: "What care I how much I scratch myself, if it is on your account?" would have savoured of Chitland, musically audible afar. Challis left it unsaid.

The rose-bud was soon got with the aid of a little tortoiseshell knife that was really Marianne's. There was another twinge in ambush for her husband over that, and a sharp cross-fire between it and the soul-brush, that was being kept at work all this while—unconsciously, one hopes; but this story knows exactly what Charlotte Eldridge would have thought and said. And she might have been right, for it makes little pretence of being able to see behind the veil this Judith's beauty hides her inner soul with, nor to read her heart. All it, the story, has known of her so far has been that beauty and her love of power. A perilous quality, that!

All it can say now is that if this woman knows, as she bends, careless how close, to take the flower from the hand that gathered it; as she flashes the diamonds on her white fingers quite needlessly near his lips—if she has any insight, as she does this, into the way she is playing with a human soul, then is she a thoroughly bad woman. And to our thinking all the worse if she knows, or believes, her reputation is safe in her own keeping. For then what is she, at best, but a keen sportswoman wicked enough to poach on her fellow-woman's preserves, destroying the peace of a home merely to show what a crack shot she is. We must confess to a preference for the standard forms of honourable, straightforward lawlessness. But perhaps these reflections are doing injustice to Judith. She may be capable of good, honest, downright wickedness. Remember that she is comparatively young and inexperienced.

One should surely beware, too, of doing injustice to beautiful women—ascribing to them motives of overt fascination, to entangle man, in every simple action a discreet dowdy might practise unnoticed and unblamed. Make an image of such a one in your mind—make it ropy, bony, obliging, with unwarrantable knuckles—let it place a flower in its bosom, if any; and then say whether Charlotte Eldridge's keenest analysis could detect in its action the smallest element she could pounce on as seductive; the slightest appearance of a hook baited to captivate her John, or anybody else's? No, no!—let us be charitable, and suppose, for the present, at any rate, that Judith was unconscious in this flower incident of every trace of guile—merely wanted the flower, in fact, and asked Challis to get it, rather than risk her "Princess" skirts in the thorns which would have made shoddy of them in no time.

There are those, we believe, who hold that all the fascination of woman is due to adjuncts; that the thrill of enchantment that "goes with" adroit coiffures and well-cut skirts—especially the latter—would not survive seeing their owner, or kernel, run across a ploughed field in skin-tights—for we assume that the Lord Chamberlain would allow no more crucial experiment. It may be they are right. High Art teaches us the truth of the converse proposition. For that draggled-tailed, ill-hooked, ill-eyed, ill-buttoned thing with a bad cold and a shock of tow on its head, that is emerging from a damp omnibus to the relief of its next-door neighbour, is going, please—when it has got rid of some raiment which would certainly go to the wash with advantage—is going to sit for Aphrodite, of all persons in the world; for that very goddess and no other!—for her the light of whose eyelids and hair in the uttermost ends of the sea none shall declare or discern....

There!—it's no use talking about it, and stopping the story. Besides, Miss Arkroyd "had on" her "Princess" dress aforesaid, a strange witchery of infinitely flexible woven texture, snake-scaled and gem-fraught without loss of a fold, rustling and glittering till none could say which was rustle and which was glitter. And it all seemed a running comment on its owner—its pith and marrow, as it were!—a mysterious outward record of her inner self. Where is the gain of trying to guess how much was shell and how much was self? Enough that few women would have looked as lovely as she did, then and there.

For all this speculation—let the story confess it—is due simply to the excessive beauty the moonbeams made the most of, as its owner's eye dropped on the flower her fingers were adjusting, to make sure it was exactly in the right place, and to engineer stray thorn-points that else might scratch. As for what is really passing in her heart, the story washes its hands of it.

"Marianne refuses again, of course," said she, when the rose was happily settled—or sadly, as it must have felt the parting from its stem.

"Again, of course!" said he. "But...!"

"But how did I know, you mean? Why, you would have told me at once if she had been coming."