THE evening was sultry. Although the windows of the dining-room were wide open, not a breath of air came in from the garden. A dull, muggy atmosphere brooded sullenly among the masses of the evergreens, and in the thick summer foliage of the old walnut tree on the lawn.

“How oppressive it is!” Valeria exclaimed.

She had been asked to allow a niece of Madame Bertaux, who was to join some friends in Italy, to make the journey under her escort, and the date of her departure was therefore fixed. She had decided to return to town on the morrow, to make her preparations.

Valeria declared impulsively that she would stay at home, after all. She could not bear to leave Hadria for so many lonely months.

“Oh, no, no,” cried Hadria in dismay, “don’t let me begin already to impoverish other lives!”

Valeria remonstrated but Hadria persisted.

“At least I have learnt that lesson,” she said. “I should have been a fool if I hadn’t, for my life has been a sermon on the text.”

Professor Fortescue gave a little frown, as he often did when some painful idea passed through his mind.

“It is happening everywhere,” said Hadria, “the poor, sterile lives exhaust the strong and full ones. I will not be one of those vampire souls, at least not while I have my senses about me.”

Again, the little frown of pain contracted the Professor’s brow.

The dusk had invaded the dinner table, but they had not thought of candles. They went straight out to the still garden. Valeria had a fan, with which she vainly tried to overcome the expression of the atmosphere. She was very low-spirited. Hadria looked ill and exhausted. Little Martha’s name was not mentioned. It was too sore a subject.

“I can’t bear the idea of leaving you, Hadria, especially when you talk like that. I wish, how I wish, that some way could be found out of this labyrinth. Is this sort of thing to be the end of all the grand new hopes and efforts of women? Is all our force to be killed and overwhelmed in this absurd way?”

“Ah, no, not all, in heaven’s name!”

“But if women won’t repudiate, in practice, the claims that they hold to be unjust, in theory, how can they hope to escape? We may talk to all eternity, if we don’t act.”

Hadria shrugged her shoulders.

“Your reasoning is indisputable, but what can one do? There are cases——in short, some things are impossible!”

Valeria was silent. “I have thought, at times, that you might make a better stand,” she said at last, clinging still to her theory of the sovereignty of the will.

Hadria did not reply.

The Professor shook his head.

“You know my present conditions,” said Hadria, after a silence. “I can’t overcome them. But perhaps some one else in my place might overcome them. I confess I don’t see how. Do you?”

Valeria hesitated. She made some vague statement about strength of character, and holding on through storm and stress to one’s purpose; had not this been the history of all lives worth living?

Hadria agreed, but pressed the practical question. And that Valeria could not answer. She could not bring herself to say that the doctor’s warnings ought to be disregarded by Hadria, at the risk of her mother’s life. It was not merely a risk, but a practical certainty that any further shock or trouble would be fatal. Valeria was tongue-tied.

“Now do you see why I feel so terrified when anyone proposes to narrow down his existence, even in the smallest particular, for my sake?” asked Hadria. “It is because I see what awful power a human being may acquire of ravaging and of ruling other lives, and I don’t want to acquire that power. I see that the tyranny may be perfectly well-intentioned, and indeed scarcely to be called tyranny, for it is but half conscious, yet only the more irresistible for that.”

“It is one’s own fault if one submits to conscious tyranny,” the Professor put in, “and I think tyrant and victim are then much on a par.”

“A mere demand can be resisted,” Hadria added; “it is grief, real grief, however unreasonable, that brings people to their knees. But, oh, may the day hasten, when people shall cease to grieve when others claim their freedom!”

Valeria smiled. “I don’t think you are in much danger of grudging liberty to your neighbours, Hadria; so you need not be so frightened of becoming a vampire, as I think you call it.”

“Not now, but how can one tell what the result of years and years of monotonous existence may be, or the effect of example? How did it happen that my mother came to feel aggrieved if her daughters claimed some right of choice in the ordering of their lives? I suppose it is because her mother felt aggrieved if she ventured to call her soul her own.”

Valeria laughed.

“But it is true,” said Hadria. “Very few of us, if any, are in the least original as regards our sorrowing. We follow the fashion. We are not so presumptuous as to decide for ourselves what shall afflict us.”

“Or what shall transport us with joy,” added Valeria, with a shrug.

“Still less perhaps. Tradition says ‘Weep, this is the moment,’ or ‘Rejoice, the hour has come,’ and we chant our dirge or kindle our bonfires accordingly. Why, it means a little martyrdom to the occasional sinner who selects his own occasion for sorrow or for joy.”

Valeria laughed at the notion of Hadria’s being under the dictatorship of tradition, or of anything else, as to her emotions.

But Hadria held that everybody was more or less subject to the thraldom. And the thraldom increased as the mind and the experience narrowed. And as the narrowing process progressed, she said, the exhausting or vampire quality grew and grew.

“I have seen it, I have seen it! Those who have been starved in life, levy a sort of tax on the plenty of others, in the instinctive effort to replenish their own empty treasure-house. Only that is impossible. One can gain no riches in that fashion. One can only reduce one’s victim to a beggary like one’s own.”

Valeria was perturbed.

“The more I see of life, the more bitter a thing it seems to be a woman! And one of the discouraging features of it is, that women are so ready to oppress each other!”

“Because they have themselves suffered oppression,” said the Professor. “It is a law that we cannot evade; if we are injured, we pay back the injury, whether we will or not, upon our neighbours. If we are blessed, we bless, but if we are cursed, we curse.”

“These moral laws, or laws of nature, or whatever one likes to call them, seem to be stern as death!” exclaimed Valeria. “I suppose we are all inheriting the curse that has been laid upon our mothers through so many ages.”

“We are not free from the shades of our grandmothers,” said Hadria, “only I hope a little (when I have not been to the Vicarage for some time) that we may be less of a hindrance and an obsession to our granddaughters than our grandmothers have been to us.”

“Ah! that way lies hope!” cried the Professor.

“I wish, I wish I could believe!” Valeria exclaimed. “But I was born ten years too early for the faith of this generation.”

“It is you who have helped to give this generation its faith,” said Hadria.

“But have you real hope and real faith, in your heart of hearts? Tell me, Hadria.”

Hadria looked startled.

“Ah! I knew it. Women don’t really believe that the cloud will lift. If they really believed what they profess, they would prove it. They would not submit and resign themselves. Oh, why don’t you shew what a woman can do, Hadria?”

Hadria gave a faint smile.

She did not speak for some time, and when she did, her words seemed to have no direct reference to Valeria’s question.

“I believe that there are thousands and thousands of women whose lives have run on parallel lines with mine.”

She recalled a strange and grotesque vision, or waking-dream, that she had dreamt a few nights before: of a vast abyss, black and silent, which had to be filled up to the top with the bodies of women, hurled down to the depths of the pit of darkness, in order that the survivors might, at last, walk over in safety. Human bodies take but little room, and the abyss seemed to swallow them, as some greedy animal its prey. But Hadria knew, in her dream, that some day it would have claimed its last victim, and the surface would be level and solid, so that people would come and go, scarcely remembering that beneath their feet was once a chasm into which throbbing lives had to descend, to darkness and a living death.

Valeria looked anxious and ill at ease. She watched Hadria’s face.

She was longing to urge her to leave Craddock Dene, but was deterred by the knowledge of the uselessness of such advice. Hadria could not take it.

“I chafe against these situations!” cried Valeria. “I am so unused, in my own life, to such tethers and limitations. They would drive me crazy!”

“Oh,” Hadria exclaimed, with an amused smile, “this is a new cry!”

“I don’t care,” said Valeria discontentedly. “I never supposed that one could be tied hand and foot, in this way. I should never stand it. It is intolerable!”

“These are what you have frequently commended to me as ‘home ties,’” said Hadria.

“Oh, but it is impossible!”

“You attack the family!” cried the Professor.

“If the family makes itself ridiculous——?”

The Professor and Hadria laughed. Valeria was growing excited.

“The natural instinct of man to get his fun at his neighbour’s expense meets with wholesome rebuffs in the outer world,” said the Professor, “but in the family it has its chance. That’s why the family is so popular.”

Valeria, with her wonted capriciousness, veered round in defence of the institution that she had been just jeering at.

“Well, after all, it is the order of Nature to have one’s fun at the expense of someone, and I don’t believe we shall ever be able to practise any other principle, I mean on a national scale, however much we may progress.”

“Oh, but we shan’t progress unless we do,” said the Professor.

“You are always paradoxical.”

“There is no paradox here. I am just as certain as I am of my own existence, that real, solid, permanent progress is impossible to any people until they recognise, as a mere truism, that whatever is gained by cruelty, be it towards the humblest thing alive, is not gain, but the worst of loss.”

“Oh, you always go too far!” cried Valeria.

“I don’t admit that in a horror of cruelty, it is possible to go too far,” the Professor replied. “Cruelty is the one unpardonable sin.” He passed his hand across his brow, with a weary gesture, as if the pressure of misery and tumult and anguish in the world, were more than he could bear.

“You won’t give up your music, Hadria,” Valeria said, at the end of a long cogitation.

“It is a forlorn sort of pursuit,” Hadria answered, with a whimsical smile, “but I will do all I can.” Valeria seemed relieved.

“And you will not give up hope?”

“Hope? Of what?”

“Oh, of—of——. What an absurd question!”

Hadria smiled. “It is better to face facts, I think, than to shroud them away. After all, it is only by the rarest chance that character and conditions happen to suit each other so well that the powers can be developed. They are generally crushed. One more or less——.” Hadria gave a shrug.

The Professor broke in, abruptly.

“It is exactly the one more or less that sends the balance up or down, that decides the fate of men and nations. An individual often counts more than a generation. If that were not so, nothing would be possible, and hope would be insane.”

“Perhaps it is!” said Hadria beneath her breath.

The Professor had risen. He heard the last words, but made no remonstrance. Yet there was a something in his expression that gave comfort.

“I fear I shall have to be going back,” he said, looking at his watch. As he spoke, the first notes of a nightingale stole out of the shrubbery. Voices were hushed, and the three stood listening spellbound, to the wonderful impassioned song. Hadria marvelled at its strange serenity, despite the passion, and speculated vaguely as to the possibility of a paradox of the same kind in the soul of a human being. Passion and serenity? Had not the Professor combined these apparent contradictions?

There was ecstasy so supreme in the bird’s note that it had become calm again, like great heat that affects the senses, as with frost, or a flooded river that runs swift and smooth for very fulness.

Presently, a second nightingale began to answer from a distant tree, and the garden was filled with the wild music. One or two stars had already twinkled out.

“I ought really to be going,” said the Professor.

But he lingered still. His eyes wandered anxiously to Hadria’s white face. He said good-night to Valeria, and then he and Hadria walked to the gate together.

“You will come back and see us at Craddock Dene soon after you return, won’t you?” she said wistfully.

“Of course I will. And I hope that meanwhile, you will set to work to get strong and well. All your leisure ought to be devoted to that object, for the present. I should be so delighted to hear from you now and again, when you have a spare moment and the spirit moves you. I will write and tell you how I fare, if I may. If, at any time, I can be of service to you, don’t forget how great a pleasure it would be to me to render it. I hope if ever I come back to England——”

“When you come back,” Hadria corrected, hastily.

——“that we may meet oftener.”

“Indeed, that will be something to look forward to!”

They exchanged the hearty, lingering handshake of trusty friendship and deep affection. The last words, the last good wishes, were spoken, the last wistful effort was made of two human souls to bid each other be of good cheer, and to bring to one another comfort and hope. Hadria leant on the gate, a lonely figure in the dim star-light, watching the form that had already become shadowy, retreating along the road and gradually losing itself in the darkness.