"'T wouldn't matter who she'd married," she replied, rubbing her nose. "You're thinking of love again, I'll be bound. I'm not talking about love, my good man, I'm talking about life."
"Then you make no allowance for sentiment," I said.
"Oh don't I! I make any amount of allowance for sentiment. It's just sentiment such women as we are talking about have to watch. That's what you mean by love, I suppose. It is always prowling round the house, trying to get in. As a rule, there's no chance, for married women are too busy to be eternally thinking about love, though to read novels you'd think they were."
"A married woman, according to you, is a highly complex organism," I observed smiling.
"A married woman, according to me, is precisely what her husband has made her," she retorted, and adding, "Think that over while you get on with your work," she left the room.
But I continued to stare out of the window. Somehow I was stirred. There seemed to me something ominous in my own preoccupation with these affairs, affairs in which I could not, even had I the right, to meddle. My friend's laconic exposition only deepened the dramatic quality of the situation. For an author I had been singularly luckless in meeting drama in my life. I had often had my artistic cupidity excited by Mr. Carville, by the way he was continually having stimulating adventures of the soul. And what stirred me now was a vision of that sober, drab-grey little man, going about his business on the great waters, with this portentous cataclysm hanging over his destiny. And yet, according to my friend, these perilous things were constantly on the brink in most men's lives. The smug, complacent commuting folk we knew all had these moments of almost unendurable stress, yet they gave no sign. I had a sudden sense of futility. As Mr. Carville had said on one occasion, we grope. We stumble against each other in the dark, we hear a whisper or two, or a cry, and the rest is silence. I understood, I thought, why so many writers avoid life, and content themselves with gay puppets in a puppet world. Life was too difficult, too dangerous, for play, and they can only play.
And then I heard the postman's knock, and sat waiting. Footsteps came down and went up again to the studio. Tea cups clinked. I realized that I had done nothing to the brochure I was writing since lunch. Lethargy is cumulative. The longer one idles the more difficult it is to make a start. I gave it up and put my pen away.
"A letter from Cecil," they said, as I appeared on the landing. Mac was crouching over an etching by the window, a big magnifying glass in his hand. I went over to him and he rose and handed the print to me.
"Oh!" I said. "This is indeed apropos."
It was an etching, by the painter-cousin, of the wrecked aeroplane of which he had spoken. As was fit and proper, it was a small plate, yet the effect upon the mind was of a vast open sky and infinite, rolling distances of land and sea. It brought to mind the grey flatness of Essex, the lonely reaches of mud, the solitary house and the neighbourly hedges of the narrow roads. And it did this quite independently of the bizarre structure that lay athwart the foreground, like some immense disabled insect in a moment of exhaustion. It lay there, prone and motionless, a sprawling emblem of despair. And aloft, high up, as though in subtle mockery of the poor human endeavour below, a sea-bird soared with wings atilt, sweeping with effortless grace towards the grey sea.