No More Learning

He sat in the window of the Imperial Hotel, now full of guests. He
did not notice any of them. He sat there meditating, meditating. Grey
clouds covering the town with flying shadows rushed by like the old
and dishevelled eagles that Maeldune saw hurrying towards the waters
of life. Below in the street passed by country people, townspeople,
travellers, women with baskets, boys driving donkeys, old men with
sticks; sometimes he recognized a face or was recognized himself, and
welcomed by some familiar voice.

'You have come home a handsomer gentleman than your father, Misther
John, and he was a neat figure of a man, God bless him! ' said the
waiter, bringing him his lunch; and in truth Sherman had grown
handsomer for these years away. His face and gesture had more of
dignity, for on the centre of his nature life had dropped a pinch of
experience.

At four he left the hotel and waited near the schoolhouse till the
children came running out. One or two of the elder ones he recognized
but turned away.


III

Mary Carton was locking the harmonium as he went in. She came to meet
him with a surprised and joyful air.

'How often I have wished to see you! When did you come? How well you
remembered my habits to know where to find me. My dear John, how glad I
am to see you! '

'You are the same as when I left, and this room is the same, too. '

'Yes,' she answered, 'the same, only I have had some new prints hung
up--prints of fruits and leaves and bird-nests. It was only done last
week. When people choose pictures and poems for children they choose
out such domestic ones. I would not have any of the kind; children are
such undomestic animals. But, John, I am so glad to see you in this
old schoolhouse again. So little has changed with us here. Some have
died and some have been married, and we are all a little older and the
trees a little taller. '

'I have come to tell you I am going to be married. '

She became in a moment perfectly white, and sat down as though attacked
with faintness. Her hand on the edge of the chair trembled.

Sherman looked at her, and went on in a bewildered, mechanical way: 'My
betrothed is a Miss Leland. She has a good deal of money. You know my
mother always wished me to marry some one with money. Her father, when
alive, was an old client of Sherman and Saunders. She is much admired
in society. ' Gradually his voice became a mere murmur. He did not seem
to know that he was speaking. He stopped entirely. He was looking at
Mary Carton.

Everything around him was as it had been some three years before. The
table was covered with cups and the floor with crumbs. Perhaps the
mouse pulling at a crumb under the table was the same mouse as on that
other evening. The only difference was the brooding daylight of summer
and the ceaseless chirruping of the sparrows in the ivy outside. He
had a confused sense of having lost his way. It was just the same
feeling he had known as a child, when one dark night he had taken a
wrong turning, and instead of arriving at his own house, found himself
at a landmark he knew was miles from home.

A moment earlier, however difficult his life, the issues were always
definite; now suddenly had entered the obscurity of another's interest.

Before this it had not occurred to him that Mary Carton had any
stronger feeling for him than warm friendship.

He began again, speaking in the same mechanical way: 'Miss Leland
lives with her mother near us. She is very well educated and very well
connected, though she has lived always among business people. '

Miss Carton, with a great effort, had recovered her composure.

'I congratulate you,' she said. 'I hope you will be always happy. You
came here on some business for your firm, I suppose? I believe they
have some connection with the town still. '

'I only came here to tell you I was going to be married. '

'Do you not think it would have been better to have written? ' she said,
beginning to put away the children's tea-things in a cupboard by the
fireplace.

'It would have been better,' he answered, drooping his head.

Without a word, locking the door behind them, they went out. Without
a word they walked the grey streets. Now and then a woman or a child
curtseyed as they passed. Some wondered, perhaps, to see these old
friends so silent. At the rectory they bade each other good-bye.

'I hope you will be always happy,' she said. 'I will pray for you and
your wife. I am very busy with the children and old people, but I shall
always find a moment to wish you well in. Good-bye now. '

They parted; the gate in the wall closed behind her. He stayed for a
few moments looking up at the tops of the trees and bushes showing over
the wall, and at the house a little way beyond. He stood considering
his problem--her life, his life. His, at any rate, would have incident
and change; hers would be the narrow existence of a woman who, failing
to fulfil the only abiding wish she has ever formed, seeks to lose
herself in routine--mournfulest of things on this old planet.

This had been revealed: he loved Mary Carton, she loved him. He
remembered Margaret Leland, and murmured she did well to be jealous.
Then all her contemptuous words about the town and its inhabitants came
into his mind. Once they made no impression on him, but now the sense
of personal identity having been disturbed by this sudden revelation,
alien as they were to his way of thinking, they began to press in on
him. Mary, too, would have agreed with them, he thought; and might it
be that at some distant time weary monotony in abandonment would have
so weighed down the spirit of Mary Carton that she would be merely one
of the old and sleepy whose dulness filled the place like a cloud?

He went sadly towards the hotel; everything about him, the road, the
sky, the feet wherewith he walked seeming phantasmal and without
meaning.

He told the waiter he would leave by the first train in the morning.
'What! and you only just come home? ' the man answered. He ordered
coffee and could not drink it. He went out and came in again
immediately. He went down into the kitchen and talked to the servants.
They told him of everything that had happened since he had gone. He was
not interested, and went up to his room. 'I must go home and do what
people expect of me; one must be careful to do that. '

Through all the journey home his problem troubled him. He saw the
figure of Mary Carton perpetually passing through a round of monotonous
duties. He saw his own life among aliens going on endlessly, wearily.

From Holyhead to London his fellow-travellers were a lady and her three
young daughters, the eldest about twelve. The smooth faces shining with
well-being became to him ominous symbols. He hated them. They were
symbolic of the indifferent world about to absorb him, and of the vague
something that was dragging him inch by inch from the nook he had made
for himself in the chimney-corner. He was at one of those dangerous
moments when the sense of personal identity is shaken, when one's past
and present seem about to dissolve partnership. He sought refuge in
memory, and counted over every word of Mary's he could remember. He
forgot the present and the future. 'Without love,' he said to himself,
'we would be either gods or vegetables. '

The rain beat on the window of the carriage. He began to listen;
thought and memory became a blank; his mind was full of the sound of
rain-drops.


FOURTH PART

THE REV. WILLIAM HOWARD


I

After his return to London Sherman for a time kept to himself, going
straight home from his office, moody and self-absorbed, trying not to
consider his problem--her life, his life. He often repeated to himself,
'I must do what people expect of me. It does not rest with me now--my
choosing time is over. ' He felt that whatever way he turned he would do
a great evil to himself and others. To his nature all sudden decisions
were difficult, and so he kept to the groove he had entered upon. It
did not even occur to him to do otherwise. He never thought of breaking
this engagement off and letting people say what they would. He was
bound in hopelessly by a chain of congratulations.

A week passed slowly as a month. The wheels of the cabs and carriages
seemed to be rolling through his mind. He often remembered the quiet
river at the end of his garden in the town of Ballah. How the weeds
swayed there, and the salmon leaped! At the week's end came a note
from Miss Leland, complaining of his neglecting her so many days. He
sent a rather formal answer, promising to call soon. To add to his
other troubles, a cold east wind arose and made him shiver continually.

One evening he and his mother were sitting silent, the one knitting,
the other half-asleep. He had been writing letters and was now in a
reverie. Round the walls were one or two drawings, done by him at
school. His mother had got them framed. His eyes were fixed on a
drawing of a stream and some astonishing cows.

A few days ago he had found an old sketchbook for children among some
forgotten papers, which taught how to draw a horse by making three
ovals for the basis of his body, one lying down in the middle, two
standing up at each end for flank and chest, and how to draw a cow by
basing its body on a square. He kept trying to fit squares into the
cows. He was half inclined to take them out of their frames and retouch
on this new principle. Then he began somehow to remember the child with
the swollen face who threw a stone at the dog the day he resolved to
leave home first. Then some other image came. His problem moved before
him in a disjointed way. He was dropping asleep. Through his reverie
came the click, click of his mother's needles. She had found some
London children to knit for. He was at that marchland between waking
and dreaming where our thoughts begin to have a life of their own--the
region where art is nurtured and inspiration born.

He started, hearing something sliding and rustling, and looked up to
see a piece of cardboard fall from one end of the mantelpiece, and,
driven by a slight gust of air, circle into the ashes under the grate.

'Oh,' said his mother, 'that is the portrait of the _locum tenens_. '
She still spoke of the Rev. William Howard by the name she had first
known him by. 'He is always being photographed. They are all over the
house, and I, an old woman, have not had one taken all my life. Take it
out with the tongs. ' Her son, after some poking in the ashes, for it
had fallen far back, brought out a somewhat dusty photograph. 'That,'
she continued, 'is one he sent us two or three months ago. It has been
lying in the letter-rack since. '

'He is not so spick-and-span-looking as usual,' said Sherman, rubbing
the ashes off the photograph with his sleeve.

'By the by,' his mother replied, 'he has lost his parish, I hear. He
is very mediaeval, you know, and he lately preached a sermon to prove
that children who die unbaptized are lost. He had been reading up the
subject and was full of it. The mothers turned against him, not being
so familiar with St. Augustine as he was. There were other reasons in
plenty too. I wonder that anyone can stand that monkeyish fantastic
family. '

As the way is with so many country-bred people, the world for her was
divided up into families rather than individuals.

While she was talking, Sherman, who had returned to his chair, leant
over the table and began to write hurriedly. She was continuing her
denunciation when he interrupted with: 'Mother, I have just written
this letter to him:--

'"MY DEAR HOWARD:

'"Will you come and spend the autumn with us? I hear
you are unoccupied just now. I am engaged to be
married, as you know; it will be a long engagement.
You will like my betrothed. I hope you will be great
friends.

'"Yours expectantly,
'"JOHN SHERMAN. "'

'You rather take me aback,' she said.

'I really like him,' he answered. 'You were always prejudiced against
the Howards. Forgive me, but I really want very much to have him here. '

'Well, if you like him, I suppose I have no objection. '

'I do like him. He is very clever,' said her son, 'and knows a great
deal. I wonder he does not marry. Do you not think he would make a good
husband? --for you must admit he is sympathetic. '

'It is not difficult to sympathize with everyone if you have no true
principles and convictions. '

Principles and convictions were her names for that strenuous
consistency attained without trouble by men and women of few ideas.

'I am sure you will like him better,' said the other, 'when you see
more of him. '

'Is that photograph quite spoilt? ' she answered.

'No; there was nothing on it but ashes. '

'That is a pity, for one less would be something. '

After this they both became silent, she knitting, he gazing at the cows
browsing at the edge of their stream, and trying to fit squares into
their bodies; but now a smile played about his lips.

Mrs. Sherman looked a little troubled. She would not object to any
visitor of her son's, but quite made up her mind in no manner to put
herself out to entertain the Rev. William Howard. She was puzzled as
well. She did not understand the suddenness of this invitation. They
usually talked over things for weeks.


II

Next day his fellow-clerks noticed a decided improvement in Sherman's
spirits. He had a lark-like cheerfulness and alacrity breaking out at
odd moments. When evening came he called, for the first time since his
return, on Miss Leland. She scolded him for having answered her note
in such a formal way, but was sincerely glad to see him return to his
allegiance. We have said he had sometimes, though rarely, a talkative
fit. He had one this evening. The last play they had been to, the
last party, the picture of the year, all in turn he glanced at. She
was delighted. Her training had not been in vain. Her barbarian was
learning to chatter. This flattered her a deal.

'I was never engaged,' she thought, 'to a more interesting creature. '

When he had risen to go, Sherman said: 'I have a friend coming to visit
me in a few days; you will suit each other delightfully. He is very
mediaeval. '

'Do tell me about him; I like everything mediaeval. '

'Oh,' he cried, with a laugh, 'his mediaevalism is not in your line. He
is neither a gay troubadour nor a wicked knight. He is a High Church
curate. '

'Do not tell me anything more about him,' she answered; 'I will try to
be civil to him, but you know I never liked curates. I have been an
agnostic for many years. You, I believe, are orthodox.
'

As Sherman was on his way home he met a fellow-clerk, and stopped him
with: 'Are you an agnostic? '

'No. Why, what is that? '

'Oh, nothing! Good-bye,' he made answer, and hurried on his way.


III

The letter reached the Rev. William Howard at the right moment,
arriving as it did in the midst of a crisis in his fortunes. In the
course of a short life he had lost many parishes. He considered
himself a martyr, but was considered by his enemies a clerical coxcomb.
He had a habit of getting his mind possessed with some strange opinion,
or what seemed so to his parishioners, and of preaching it while the
notion lasted in the most startling way. The sermon on unbaptized
children was an instance. It was not so much that he thought it true as
that it possessed him for a day. It was not so much the thought as his
own relation to it that allured him. Then, too, he loved what appeared
to his parishioners to be the most unusual and dangerous practices. He
put candles on the altar and crosses in unexpected places. He delighted
in the intricacies of High Church costume, and was known to recommend
confession and prayers for the dead.

Gradually the anger of his parishioners would increase. The rector,
the washerwoman, the labourers, the squire, the doctor, the
school-teachers, the shoemakers, the butchers, the seamstresses,
the local journalist, the master of the hounds, the innkeeper, the
veterinary surgeon, the magistrate, the children making mud pies,
all would be filled with one dread--popery. Then he would fly for
consolation to his little circle of the faithful, the younger
ladies, who still repeated his fine sentiments and saw him in their
imaginations standing perpetually before a wall covered with tapestry
and holding a crucifix in some constrained and ancient attitude. At
last he would have to go, feeling for his parishioners a gay and lofty
disdain, and for himself that reverent approbation one gives to the
captains who lead the crusade of ideas against those who merely sleep
and eat. An efficient crusader he certainly was--too efficient, indeed,
for his efficiency gave to all his thoughts a certain over-completeness
and isolation, and a kind of hardness to his mind. His intellect was
like a musician's instrument with no sounding-board. He could think
carefully and cleverly, and even with originality, but never in such
a way as to make his thoughts an illusion to something deeper than
themselves. In this he was the reverse of poetical, for poetry is
essentially a touch from behind a curtain.

This conformation of his mind helped to lead him into all manner of
needless contests and to the loss of this last parish among much
else. Did not the world exist for the sake of these hard, crystalline
thoughts, with which he played as with so many bone spilikins,
delighting in his own skill? and were not all who disliked them
merely--the many?

In this way it came about that Sherman's letter reached Howard at the
right moment. Now, next to a new parish, he loved a new friend. A visit
to London meant many. He had found he was, on the whole, a success at
the beginning of friendships.

He at once wrote an acceptance in his small and beautiful handwriting,
and arrived shortly after his letter. Sherman, on receiving him,
glanced at his neat and shining boots, the little medal at the
watch-chain and the well-brushed hat, and nodded as though in answer to
an inner query. He smiled approval at the slight elegant figure in its
black clothes, at the satiny hair, and at the face, mobile as moving
waters.

For several days the Shermans saw little of their guest. He had friends
everywhere to turn into enemies and acquaintances to turn into friends.
His days passed in visiting, visiting, visiting. Then there were
theatres and churches to see, and new clothes to be bought, over which
he was as anxious as a woman. Finally he settled down.

He passed his mornings in the smoking-room. He asked Sherman's leave
to hang on the walls one or two religious pictures, without which he
was not happy, and to place over the mantelpiece, under the pipe-rack,
an ebony crucifix. In one corner of the room he laid a rug neatly
folded for covering his knees on chilly days, and on the table a
small collection of favourite books--a curious and carefully-chosen
collection, in which Cardinal Newman and Bourget, St. Chrysostom and
Flaubert lived together in perfect friendship.

Early in his visit Sherman brought him to the Lelands. He was a
success. The three--Margaret, Sherman, and Howard--played tennis in the
Square. Howard was a good player, and seemed to admire Margaret. On
the way home Sherman once or twice laughed to himself. It was like the
clucking of a hen with a brood of chickens. He told Howard, too, how
wealthy Margaret was said to be.

After this Howard always joined Sherman and Margaret at the tennis.
Sometimes, too, after a little, on days when the study seemed dull and
lonely, and the unfinished essay on St. Chrysostom more than usually
laborious, he would saunter towards the Square before his friend's
arrival, to find Margaret now alone, now with an acquaintance or two.
About this time also press of work, an unusual thing with him, began
to delay Sherman in town half-an-hour after his usual time. In the
evenings they often talked of Margaret--Sherman frankly and carefully,
as though in all anxiety to describe her as she was; and Howard with
some enthusiasm: 'She has a religious vocation,' he said once, with a
slight sigh.

Sometimes they played chess--a game that Sherman had recently become
devoted to, for he found it drew him out of himself more than anything
else.

Howard now began to notice a curious thing. Sherman grew shabbier and
shabbier, and at the same time more and more cheerful. This puzzled
him, for he had noticed that he himself was not cheerful when shabby,
and did not even feel upright and clever when his hat was getting old.
He also noticed that when Sherman was talking to him he seemed to be
keeping some thought to himself. When he first came to know him long
ago in Ballah he had noticed occasionally the same thing, and set it
down to a kind of suspiciousness and over-caution, natural to one who
lived in such an out-of-the-way place. It seemed more persistent now,
however. 'He is not well-trained,' he thought; 'he is half a peasant.
He has not the brilliant candour of the man of the world. '

All this while the mind of Sherman was clucking continually over its
brood of thoughts. Ballah was being constantly suggested to him. The
grey corner of a cloud slanting its rain upon Cheapside called to mind
by some remote suggestion the clouds rushing and falling in cloven
surf on the seaward steep of a mountain north of Ballah. A certain
street-corner made him remember an angle of the Ballah fish-market. At
night a lantern, marking where the road was fenced off for mending,
made him think of a tinker's cart, with its swing-can of burning coals,
that used to stop on market days at the corner of Peter's Lane at
Ballah. Delayed by a crush in the Strand, he heard a faint trickling
of water near by; it came from a shop window where a little water-jet
balanced a wooden ball upon its point. The sound suggested a cataract
with a long Gaelic name, that leaped crying into the Gate of the Winds
at Ballah. Wandering among these memories a footstep went to and fro
continually, and the figure of Mary Carton moved among them like a
phantom. He was set dreaming a whole day by walking down one Sunday
morning to the border of the Thames--a few hundred yards from his
house--and looking at the osier-covered Chiswick eyot. It made him
remember an old day-dream of his. The source of the river that passed
his garden at home was a certain wood-bordered and islanded lake,
whither in childhood he had often gone blackberry-gathering. At the
further end was a little islet called Innisfree. Its rocky centre,
covered with many bushes, rose some forty feet above the lake. Often
when life and its difficulties had seemed to him like the lessons of
some elder boy given to a younger by mistake, it had seemed good to
dream of going away to that islet and building a wooden hut there and
burning a few years out, rowing to and fro, fishing, or lying on the
island slopes by day, and listening at night to the ripple of the water
and the quivering of the bushes--full always of unknown creatures--and
going out at morning to see the island's edge marked by the feet of
birds.

These pictures became so vivid to him that the world about him--that
Howard, Margaret, his mother even--began to seem far off. He hardly
seemed aware of anything they were thinking and feeling. The light
that dazzled him flowed from the vague and refracting regions of hope
and memory; the light that made Howard's feet unsteady was ever the
too-glaring lustre of life itself.


IV

On the evening of the 20th of June, after the blinds had been
pulled down and the gas lighted, Sherman was playing chess in the
smoking-room, right hand against left. Howard had gone out with a
message to the Lelands. He would often say, 'Is there any message I
can deliver for you? I know how lazy you are, and will save you the
trouble. ' A message was always found for him. A pile of books lent for
Sherman's improvement went home one by one.

'Look here,' said Howard's voice in the doorway, 'I have been watching
you for some time. You are cheating the red men most villainously. You
are forcing them to make mistakes that the white men may win. Why, a
few such games would ruin any man's moral nature. '

He was leaning against the doorway, looking, to Sherman's not too
critical eyes, an embodiment of all that was self-possessed and
brilliant. The great care with which he was dressed and his whole
manner seemed to say: 'Look at me; do I not combine perfectly the
zealot with the man of the world? ' He seemed excited to-night. He had
been talking at the Lelands, and talking well, and felt that elation
which brings us many thoughts.

'My dear Sherman,' he went on, 'do cease that game. It is very bad
for you. There is nobody alive who is honest enough to play a game
of chess fairly out--right hand against left. We are so radically
dishonest that we even cheat ourselves. We can no more play chess than
we can think altogether by ourselves with security. You had much better
play with me. '

'Very well, but you will beat me; I have not much practice,' replied
the other.

They reset the men and began to play. Sherman relied most upon his
bishops and queen. Howard was fondest of the knights. At first Sherman
was the attacking party, but in his characteristic desire to scheme
out his game many moves ahead, kept making slips, and at last had to
give up, with his men nearly all gone and his king hopelessly cornered.
Howard seemed to let nothing escape him. When the game was finished
he leant back in his chair and said, as he rolled a cigarette: 'You
do not play well. ' It gave him satisfaction to feel his proficiency
in many small arts. 'You do not do any of these things at all well,'
he went on, with an insolence peculiar to him when excited. 'You
have been really very badly brought up and stupidly educated in that
intolerable Ballah. They do not understand there any, even the least,
of the arts of life; they only believe in information. Men who are
compelled to move in the great world, and who are also cultivated,
only value the personal acquirements--self-possession, adaptability,
how to dress well, how even to play tennis decently--you would be not
so bad at that, by the by, if you practised--or how to paint or write
effectively. They know that it is better to smoke one's cigarette with
a certain charm of gesture than to have by heart all the encyclopedias.
I say this not merely as a man of the world, but as a teacher of
religion. A man when he rises from the grave will take with him only
the things that he is in himself. He will leave behind the things that
he merely possesses, learning and information not less than money and
high estate. They will stay behind with his house and his clothes and
his body. A collection of facts will no more help him than a collection
of stamps. The learned will not get into heaven as readily as the
flute-player, or even as the man who smokes a cigarette gracefully.
Now, you are not learned, but you have been brought up almost as badly
as if you were. In that wretched town they told you that education was
to know that Russia is bounded on the north by the Arctic Sea, and
on the west by the Baltic Ocean, and that Vienna is situated on the
Danube, and that William the Third came to the throne in the year
1688. They have never taught you any personal art. Even chess-playing
might have helped you at the day of judgment. '

'I am really not a worse chess-player than you. I am only more
careless. '

There was a slight resentment in Sherman's voice. The other noticed it,
and said, changing his manner from the insolent air of a young beauty
to a self-depreciatory one, which was wont to give him at times a very
genuine charm: 'It is really a great pity, for you Shermans are a deep
people, much deeper than we Howards. We are like moths or butterflies,
or rather rapid rivulets, while you and yours are deep pools in the
forest where the beasts go to drink. No! I have a better metaphor.
Your mind and mine are two arrows. Yours has got no feathers, and mine
has no metal on the point. I don't know which is most needed for right
conduct. I wonder where we are going to strike earth. I suppose it
will be all right some day when the world has gone by and they have
collected all the arrows into one quiver. '

He went over to the mantelpiece to hunt for a match, as his cigarette
had gone out. Sherman had lifted a corner of the blind and was gazing
over the roofs shining from a recent shower, and thinking how on such
a night as this he had sat with Mary Carton by the rectory fire
listening to the rain without and talking of the future and of the
training of village children.

'Have you seen Miss Leland in her last new dress from Paris? ' said
Howard, making one of his rapid transitions. 'It is very rich in
colour, and makes her look a little pale, like Saint Cecilia. She is
wonderful as she stands by the piano, a silver cross round her neck.
We have been talking about you. She complains to me. She says you are
a little barbarous. You seem to look down on style, and sometimes--you
must forgive me--even on manners, and you are quite without small talk.
You must really try and be worthy of that beautiful girl, with her
great soul and religious genius. She told me quite sadly, too, that you
are not improving. '

'No,' said Sherman, 'I am not going forward; I am at present trying to
go sideways like the crabs. '

'Be serious,' answered the other. 'She told me these things with the
most sad and touching voice. She makes me her confidant, you know, in
many matters, because of my wide religious experience. You must really
improve yourself. You must paint or something. '

'Well, I will paint or something. '

'I am quite serious, Sherman. Try and be worthy of her, a soul as
gentle as Saint Cecilia's. '

'She is very wealthy,' said Sherman. 'If she were engaged to you and
not to me you might hope to die a bishop. '

Howard looked at him in a mystified way and the conversation dropped.
Presently Howard got up and went to his room, and Sherman, resetting
the chess-board, began to play again, and, letting longer and longer
pauses of reverie come between his moves, played far into the morning,
cheating now in favour of the red men, now in favour of the white.


V

The next afternoon Howard found Miss Leland sitting, reading in an
alcove in her drawing-room, between a stuffed parroquet and a blue De
Morgan jar. As he was shown in he noticed, with a momentary shock, that
her features were quite commonplace. Then she saw him, and at once
seemed to vanish wrapped in an exulting flame of life. She stood up,
flinging the book on to the seat with some violence.

'I have been reading the "Imitation of Christ," and was just feeling
that I should have to become a theosophist or a socialist, or go and
join the Catholic Church, or do something. How delightful it is to see
you again! How is my savage getting on? It is so good of you to try
and help me to reform him. '

They talked on about Sherman, and Howard did his best to console her
for his shortcomings. Time would certainly improve her savage. Several
times she gazed at him with those large dark eyes of hers, of which the
pupils to-day seemed larger than usual. They made him feel dizzy and
clutch tightly the arm of his chair. Then she began to talk about her
life since childhood--how they got to the subject he never knew--and
made a number of those confidences which are so dangerous because so
flattering. To love--there is nothing else worth living for; but then
men are so shallow. She had never found a nature deep as her own.
She would not pretend that she had not often been in love, but never
had any heart rung back to her the true note. As she spoke her face
quivered with excitement. The exulting flame of life seemed spreading
from her to the other things in the room. To Howard's eyes it seemed as
though the bright pots and stuffed birds and plush curtains began to
glow with a light not of this world--to glimmer like the strange and
chaotic colours the mystic Blake imagined upon the scaled serpent of
Eden. The light seemed gradually to dim his past and future, and to
make pale his good resolves. Was it not in itself that which all men
are seeking, and for which all else exists?

He leant forward and took her hand, timidly and doubtingly. She did
not draw it away. He leant nearer and kissed her on the forehead. She
gave a joyful cry, and, casting her arms round his neck, burst out,
'Ah! you--and I. We were made for each other. I hate Sherman. He is
an egotist. He is a beast. He is selfish and foolish. ' Releasing one
of her arms she struck the seat with her hand, excitedly, and went
on, 'How angry he will be! But it serves him right! How badly he is
dressing. He does not know anything about anything. But you--you--I
knew you were meant for me the moment I saw you. '

That evening Howard flung himself into a chair in the empty
smoking-room. He lighted a cigarette; it went out. Again he lighted
it; again it went out. 'I am a traitor--and that good, stupid fellow,
Sherman, never to be jealous!