And suddenly I grasped the real situation. Here was Hobart for whom we longed to plan a concrete romance. And over there, in Inglese, was Viola come home again, grown wiser, more beautiful, and I had no doubt remaining as wholly lovable as before. And did I not know how willingly Madame Sally Chartres would have trusted the future of her little grandniece to Hobart Eddy? Was I not, in fact, in the secret of certain perfectly permissible ideas of Madame Sally’s on the subject? Not plans, but ideas. Moreover, now that Viola was back in America there was once more the peril of that young Telephone. And if Pelleas and I had devised the matter we could have thought of no lady lovelier than Viola. I turned to telegraph to Pelleas and I found him in the midst of the merest glance at me. It was one of the glances which need no spelling. And it was in that moment as if between us there had been spoken our universal and unqualified, Why not?
“Hobart,” said I, “you are very brave to go to Inglese. I have always thought that any man could fall in love with a woman named Viola.”
But as for Hobart he serenely took one of the side paths which he is so fond of developing.
“I don’t know,” he said reflectively, “Viola begins with a V. I’m a bit afraid of V. V—‘the viol, the violet, and the vine.’ V sounds,” he continued, as if he enjoyed it, “such an impractical letter—a kind of apotheosis of B. Wouldn’t one say that V is a sort of poet to the alphabet? None of the sturdiness of G—or the tranquillity of M—or the piquancy of K—or the all-round usefulness of E. I don’t know, really, whether a woman who begins with V could be taken seriously. I think I should feel as if I were married to a wreath, or a lyre.”
Any one save Pelleas and me would have been discouraged, but we are more than seventy years old and we understand the value of the quality of a man’s indifference. Moreover, we believed that Hobart had a heart both cold and hot but that the cold side is always turned toward the sun.
“Ah,” said I, “but Viola Chartres is another matter. She makes one wish to fall in love with a wreath, or a lyre.”
“A man always ought,” Hobart impersonally continued, “to marry a woman named Elizabeth Strong Davis or the like. Something that sounds primal—and finished. A sort of ballast-and-anchor name that one might say over in exigencies, like a golden text.”
“Ah, well, now, I don’t know,” Pelleas submitted mildly, “‘Etarre’ sounds like Camelot and Astolat and Avalon and so on to any number of unrealities. But it seems like a golden text to me.”
I wonder that I could pursue my fixed purpose, that was so charming to hear. Perhaps it is that I have partly learned to keep a purpose through charming things as well as through difficulties, though this is twofold as hard to do.
“Women’s names are wonderful things,” Hobart Eddy was going tranquilly on. “They seem to be alive—to have life on their own account. I can say over a name—or I think I could say over a name,” he corrected it, “to myself, and aloud, until it seemed Somebody there with me.”