The awakened spirit of the woman rose with a hunger for fresh interests. To one with a keen mind, a fervent heart, and a full purse, London offers no lack of occupation. Gradually she gathered round her a little array of charitable duties, which she performed in quiet, unostentatious fashion. Again, the years of happy labour had borne ripe fruit of knowledge. She showed Hugh one day an article which she had written on “Some Unrecorded Facts of Infant Mortality.” In his enthusiastic way he bore it off to an editor of his acquaintance, who took it for his journal. It was the beginning of a series of articles signed “Delta” that attracted considerable attention. Thus Irene found a vocation. But being a very human woman, she sighed occasionally for that which she had surrendered and for the comfort that came not.
One afternoon Harroway stood in the street comically perturbed, watching the retreating figure of Hugh, who had marched away in great wrath. He shrugged his shoulders and returned to his office; but the perturbation remained and accompanied him home. It was his usual experience of Hugh Colman. The man was like a cigar that smokes mildly and comfortably until, piff! paff! with awful unexpectedness, some maliciously secreted gunpowder sends the thing to smithereens. Thus Harroway summed him up to his wife, during that evening’s dressing hour, while he tied his white tie. The imitations of the explosion, interrupting the operation and endangering the cambric, brought down conjugal rebuke.
“Your usual tact, I suppose, my dear,” said his wife suavely.
Harroway waited until the two little pats announced that he was well and duly cravatted and then burst out. Tact! If he had to humour Mr. Hugh Colman, whom on earth was he to speak straight to? A man who owed his first brief to him. A man whom he had set his heart on making the most brilliant advocate of the day—who had egregiously disappointed him. A man for whom he was even now trying to build up a chancery practice—Tact, indeed!
“You’ve said that so often, my dear,” said his wife. “If only you would tell me why he exploded to-day I might more readily sympathise with you.” Harroway explained. He had been lunching with Chevasse the artist. Talk had fallen upon Hugh and Mrs. Merriam. Chevasse, very broad-minded and kindly disposed to them both, had been talking the matter over with the Cahusacs. Mrs. Cahusac, of course, was unconventional enough to keep in with Mrs. Merriam, but Mrs. Chevasse was like Harroway’s own Selina, and drew certain lines.
“Very rightly,” interrupted Mrs. Harroway. “Hard and fast. Marriage lines.”
“Precisely,” said Harroway. “That’s Mrs. Chevasse’s attitude also. I uphold you. I’m fond of them both. I help Hugh all I can. Would help her if I could, but I’m not going to visit a woman my wife doesn’t visit. And my wife doesn’t countenance irregular liaisons. I’m old-fashioned enough to agree with you fully. Let them get married decently and we’d stretch a point. So would the Chevasses. One or two others doubtless would be ready to meet them. I dare say Gardiner and his wife. Everybody is sorry for them. As sorry as they are for Merriam. Somehow the luridness of the tragedy disposes people to forgive them.”
“The man’s pluck was heroic. Almost an atonement in itself,” said Mrs. Harroway. “Almost. So was the woman’s. But there is the eternal law, you know. Hundreds of women would be glad to meet Colman. You would, Selina.”
“Yes,” she replied frankly, “I should be willing to receive him, but he won’t come.”
“That’s where I admire the man. He mixes with men. Of course he’s obliged to. But he won’t cross the threshold of a woman who doesn’t receive Irene Merriam. He’s a strong-willed devil, and he’ll stick to that all his life. Selina, I wish to goodness I could believe the story she told Merriam! But it’s beyond possibility, and the other is only too miserably human.”