“I don’t know. How should I? I said it was his duty. Replies that he knows where his duty lies. I suggest that society demands it. He damns society. I get him to listen to me. Tell him about Chevasse. He looks at me with those blue sword-blade eyes of his, just as he looked at Hanna at the trial. ‘It’s for her sake,’ I said. ‘Pardon an old friend’s bluntness.’ ‘Of course I pardon anything you choose to say, you know that well enough,’ he replied. So I went on; told him that every woman in her position was not offered such a chance of social recognition. He calls the waiter, tosses him some silver, waves him away with a lordly gesture as he fumbles for change, and gets up. I accompany him to the street. ‘It’s very good of your wife and Chevasse—tell them so,’ says he, ‘but I’m not going to do it.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s scarcely honourable, Hugh.’ Whereupon he grips me on the shoulder—the rheumatic one, my dear; I feel it now—and bawls out, ‘Damn it, man, if you think me an infernal blackguard say so at once.’ I was nettled—also in physical pain—so I did say it. And then he gave his shoulders a shrug and stalked away like a madman.”
Mrs. Harroway looked at him demurely. “I suppose you think you managed it all beautifully.” Then she laughed. But Harroway got up indignant.
“Hang it all, Selina!” he exclaimed, “I did expect a little sympathy from you.”
Whereupon she mollified him, so that he should eat his dinner with an unruffled mind, and thus avoid indigestion. A wife’s thoughtfulness is often very far-reaching.
Meanwhile Hugh had marched away in great wrath from his friend and benefactor. A man in a false position is apt to be unreasonable. Harroway should have taken it for granted he was acting honourably to Irene. Society generally ought to take it for granted. The irony of his friends’ kind suggestion was a red rag to his anger. Marry her! It was a palpitating vision of a paradise in this world for which he would cheerfully accept damnation in the next. Even were he not tied to Minna for life, and were free to ask Irene, sheer honour and loyalty forbade him to go to her with protestations of passion. She did not love him in the common way of women. Thus there was a double barrier to the fool wish of that composite fool society! And the maddening part of it was the impossibility of saying the words and bringing forward the proofs to convince it of its folly.
If he had loved her loyally through her married life, he loved her now with a new reverence. A new sacredness had arisen in his conception of his attitude toward her, such as had not hitherto invested his thoughts of women, and her influence had made itself felt in his work-a-day life. He had vowed he would never again plead in a criminal court, and had kept his vow. He was struggling to carve out a career in chancery practice. He had to supplement his income with irregular journalism. It was a hard battle; but he was not a beaten man. If he needed stimulus there were flashing goads in Irene’s eyes.
On this evening he had arranged to dine with her at seven. It had just struck the hour when he arrived at her flat in Kensington. Jane, who opened the door, greeted him with a smile, hung up his overcoat, and showed him into the drawing-room. Irene threw down her book beside her on the sofa, and rose in her quick, impulsive fashion.
“At last. You are two minutes late. They have been tedious.”
He looked at her, his eyes strangely blinded. The gradation from her customary laughing tenderness into something tenderer had been imperceptible. Perhaps to her as much as to him.
“A welcome like that is sweet after a day’s work,” he said. “And I haven’t seen you for forty-eight hours.”