Gwen was in an unusual humour this afternoon. She was silent until they got into the fiacre, but directly it moved she began to talk in a swift even way peculiarly her own.

Everything she said had the calm cold brilliancy of steel about it, and she advanced the most dangerously heterodox opinions in a most unimpassioned and frozen style.

Strange shrugged his shoulders with grim good humour as she went on. He admired her splendid insolence, as any man would have done; all the same, he felt a half frantic longing for that picture-bride and an ever-increasing wonder as to how any woman cast in the same mould, eye for eye, mouth for mouth, dimple for dimple, curve for curve, could so atrociously belie her nature.

Suddenly Gwen veered round and turned the conversation into a personal and analytical channel. She had never done it before, except in her one brief allusion to the yellow aster.

“That boy of yours is a genius, Humphrey, your swan is no goose,” said she, “but, tell me, did I look in the very least like that woman, the day you married me?”

He looked at her face of fine scorn.

“Not in the least, except in the matter of form, and colour, and pose. These are you in tangible flesh and blood.”

“What did you mean by your ‘prophetic’?” she demanded, casting pink shadows over her face as she moved the red silk blind slowly to and fro.

“The possibility of your being as she is one day.”

“Ah!”

The blind moved a little faster and her hand held it tighter.

“I put it to you as a reasonable man—do you believe in that possibility?”

“As a reasonable man, I do,” said he watching the pink shadows playing in her dimples.

“Yes—? And how is this to come to pass?”

“Ah, there you have me!” he said, “I don’t know—possibly God may, or the modern monster, Evolution.”

“Through what processes, I should very much like to know?”

“So should I, but I don’t, you see.”

“She’d feel better if her face flushed like other women’s,” he thought; “it must be ghastly to have to consume all one’s own smoke like that.”

Gwen looked out of the window, laughing softly to herself.

“You look super-humanly cool,” she said, “but this minute your pride is all agog to knead and mould me into that bridal creature. It would be a triumph of Art assuredly, and to your credit. I wish you might have the kudos of it—why can’t you—why can’t I help you to, for the life of me?”

There came a rush of calm restrained vehemence into her cold tones that brought them to a sort of white heat. “Why am I not mouldable—or like other women?”

“My good child, you could hardly expect that from the daughter of your father and mother—you are unreasonable!”

“Yes, you are right, I had forgotten them,” she said.

“It is abominable we should be such puppets, not only present chances to play fast and loose with us, but to have to dance to the tune of old, ignorant, half-daft ones, that should go and rot in the grave of old failures! Why should they stay and torment us? We have enough of their kind to deal with on our own account. Have you ever read the Bible?”

“Have I ever read the Bible! Do I not know every inch of Syria, and every second inch of Egypt? Yes, I have read the Book, and on its native soil.”

“Perhaps that may suit it, I don’t think ours does. There was one thing, however, I read in it, that took hold of me; you may know it—‘God’s ways are past finding out,’—this seems to me to contain a whole philosophy, capable of universal application, and reaching to the present time.”

“You are going too fast, my good Gwen; isn’t that rather the philosophy of ignorance? You are arguing from a point you rarely affect—from the point of view of Jewish theology with its strong, and primitive, and mystery-loving methods. God’s ways, after all, if we choose to dig into them are no denser, and are just on the same line as Nature’s. She permits no cause without an effect, or she will very well know the reason why.”

“I wasn’t arguing from any point of view, Jewish or otherwise, I was just applying a theological axiom personally, thinking of parents and other chances.”

“Ah, that’s an idle subject, isn’t it? By the way, you have a sneaking regard yourself for that bridal creature—you admire the woman, don’t you?”

“Admire her! Yes, as a woman, of course I do. Why, she is—superb! With that mature strong tenderness in every line of her, and that divine protecting patient air of hers—that woman might be a mother of nations.”

Strange started and his mouth twitched suddenly, the blood stopped in his veins and red and blue stars swam before his eyes. Gwen went on unheeding, in her passionless tones—

“That woman is not, however, me. I am a beautiful girl—that, and no more—I contain nothing, I assure you, nothing that could be moulded into that woman.”

“You contain everything,” said her husband slowly, “only the deuce of the matter is, that none of us know where to find it!”

“No, nor ever will.”

She leant forward so that her breath touched his cheek. “Humphrey, I wish you had never seen that picture! This necessity for idealization is an insult to me and to yourself—you should have had more insight from the beginning.”

“My good child,” he said laughing softly, “I thought the experiment was an avowed fact.”

She drew in her lips sharply, and was silent.

When she spoke again her voice was rather hoarse.

“I have often tried to imagine the things that go to a murder, and I really do think I understand the impulse now. I shall never altogether hate a murderer again. I am glad I know; one feels better—more liberal, for every new sensation.”

Strange laughed.

“And, after all, it was supremely silly,” she went on, “the experiment is two-sided, but you have no idea how infinitely brutal the bald fact sounded.”

“Bald facts mostly do.”

“Well—there is reason even in experiments, and remember, once for all, I am not a dramatic creature given to sudden new developments, I am no emporium for the creation of fresh sensations; here I am, finished and complete.”

Strange laughed.

“‘Finished and complete!’ Was ever conceit like unto hers! My good girl, you are neither.”

She threw up her head.

“Well, here I am then, unfinished and incomplete.”

“Ah, but Nature invariably finishes her work if it’s worth the tools.”

“Like Providence shapes our ends,” she sneered with modulated savageness. “Ah, this marriage truly is an experiment! Look at those two at the window—that girl and that man, that stunted creature there! Perhaps he’s an artist. She has a measly look and the man’s nose is awful! They are not a scrap like Browning’s artist and the girl, and yet, I fancy, they think themselves in love with one another—tell the man to stop for a minute!—here, here, at this house—there, do you see the idiotic simpers! Ah, yes, that’s love! And the two will marry, no doubt, on next Shrove Tuesday, but it won’t be an experiment, I don’t think either of the pair looks as if he or she went in for observing new phases.”

“They’ll have enough to do to keep the wolf from the door. Perhaps in time, instead of observing new phases they’ll punch one another’s heads if they must have fresh sensations.”

“Is that the usual and orthodox end to being in love—punching the head physically or morally, according to the rank of the lovers?”

“No, the methods vary according to the quality of the love. Have you had enough, shall we drive on?”

She nodded.

“If it’s worth its salt, of course there’s no end.”

“One even continuous stream into the ocean of—Nothingness! How appallingly trite and stale—nothing fresh, nothing new!”

“The state has a quite peculiar freshness and newness of its own, I am told, which is perennial—and here we are at the door.”