“THE worst thing about the life of you married people,” said Valeria, “is its ridiculous rigidity. It takes more energy to get the dinner delayed for a quarter of an hour in most well-regulated houses, or some slight change in routine, than to alter a frontier, or pass an Act of Parliament.”

Hadria laughed. “Until you discovered this by personal inconvenience, you always scolded me for my disposition to jeer at the domestic scheme.”

“It is a little geometrical,” Valeria admitted.

“Geometrical! It is like a gigantic ordnance map palmed off on one instead of a real landscape.”

“Come now, to be just, say an Italian garden.”

“That flatters it, but the simile will do. The eye sees to the end of every path, and knows that it leads to nothing.”

“Ah! dear Hadria, but all the pathways of the world have that very same goal.”

“At least some of them have the good taste to wind a little, and thus disguise the fact. And think of the wild flowers one may gather by the wayside in some forest track, or among the mountain passes; but in these prim alleys what natural thing can one know? Brain and heart grow tame and clipped to match the hedges, or take on grotesque shapes——”

“That one must guard against.”

“Oh, I am sick of guarding against things. To be always warding off evil, is an evil in itself. Better let it come.”

Valeria looked at her companion anxiously.

“One knows how twirling round in a circle makes one giddy, or following the same path stupefies. How does the polar bear feel, I wonder, after he has walked up and down in his cage for years and years?”

“Used to it, I imagine,” said Valeria.

“But before he gets used to it, that is the bad time. And then it is all so confusing——”

Hadria sat on the low parapet of the terrace at the Priory. Valeria had a place on the topmost step, where the sun had been beating all the morning. Hadria had taken off her hat to enjoy the warmth. The long sprays of the roses were blown across her now and then. Once, a thorn had left a mark of blood upon her hand.

Valeria gathered a spray, and nodded slowly.

“I don’t want to allow emotion to get the better of me, Valeria. I don’t want to run rank like some overgrown weed, and so I dread the accumulation of emotion—emotion that has never had a good explosive utterance. One has to be so discreet in these Italian gardens; no one shouts or says ‘damn.’”

“Ah! you naturally feel out of your element.”

Hadria laughed. “It’s all very well to take that superior tone. You don’t reside on an ordnance map.”

There was a pause. Miss Du Prel seemed lost in thought.

“It is this dead silence that oppresses one, this hushed endurance of the travail of life. How do these women stand it?”

Valeria presently woke up, and admitted that to live in an English village would drive her out of her mind in a week. “And yet, Valeria, you have often professed to envy me, because I had what you called a place in life—as if a place in Craddock Dene were the same thing!”

“It is well that you do not mean all you say.”

“Or say all I mean.”

Valeria laid her hand on Hadria’s with wistful tenderness.

“I don’t think anyone will ever quite understand you, Hadria.”

“Including perhaps myself. I sometimes fancy that when it became necessary to provide me with a disposition, the material had run out, for the moment, nothing being left but a few remnants of other people’s characters; so a living handful of these was taken up, roughly welded together, and then the mixture was sent whirling into space, to boil and sputter itself out as best it might.”

Miss Du Prel turned to her companion.

“I see that you are incongruously situated, but don’t you think that you may be wrong yourself? Don’t you think you may be making a mistake?”

Hadria was emphatic in assent.

“Not only do I think I may be wrong, but I don’t see how—unless by pure chance—I can be anything else. For I can’t discover what is right. I see women all round me actuated by this frenzied sense of duty; I see them toiling submissively at their eternal treadmill; occupying their best years in the business of filling their nurseries; losing their youth, narrowing their intelligence, ruining their husbands, and clouding their very moral sense at last. Well, I know that such conduct is supposed to be right and virtuous. But I can’t see it. It impresses me simply as stupid and degrading. And from my narrow little point of observation, the more I see of life, the more hopelessly involved become all questions of right and wrong where our confounded sex is concerned.”

“Why? Because the standards are changing,” asserted Miss Du Prel.

“Because—look, Valeria, our present relation to life is in itself an injury, an insult—you have never seriously denied that—and how can one make for oneself a moral code that has to lay its foundation-stone in that very injury? And if one lays one’s foundation-stone in open ground beyond, then one’s code is out of touch with present fact, and one’s morality consists in sheer revolt all along the line. The whole matter is in confusion. You have to accept Mrs. Walker’s and Mrs. Gordon’s view of the case, plainly and simply, or you get off into a sort of morass and blunder into quicksands.”

“Then what happens?”

“That’s just what I don’t know. That’s just why I say that I am probably wrong, because, in this transition period, there seems to be no clear right.”

“To cease to believe in right and wrong would be to founder morally, altogether,” Valeria warned.

“I know, and yet I begin to realize how true it is that there is no such thing as absolute right or wrong. It is related to the case and the moment.”

“This leads up to some desperate deed or other, Hadria,” cried her friend, “I have feared it, or hoped it, I scarcely know which, for some time. But you alarm me to-day.”

“If I believed in the efficacy of a desperate deed, Valeria, I should not chafe as I do, against the conditions of the present scheme of things. If individuals could find a remedy for themselves, with a little courage and will, there would be less occasion to growl.”

“But can they not?”

“Can they?” asked Hadria. “A woman without means of livelihood, breaks away from her moorings—well, it is as if a child were to fall into the midst of some gigantic machinery that is going at full speed. Let her try the feat, and the cracking of her bones by the big wheels will attest its hopelessness. And yet I long to try!” Hadria added beneath her breath.

Miss Du Prel admitted that success was rare in the present delirious state of competition. Individuals here and there pulled through.

“I told you years ago that Nature had chosen our sex for ill-usage. Try what we may, defeat and suffering await us, in one form or another. You are dissatisfied with your form of suffering, I with mine. A creature in pain always thinks it would be more bearable if only it were on the other side.”

“Ah, I know you won’t admit it,” said Hadria, “but some day we shall all see that this is the result of human cruelty and ignorance, and that it is no more ‘intended’ or inherently necessary than that children should be born with curvature of the spine, or rickets. Some day it will be as clear as noon, that heartless ‘some day’ which can never help you or me, or any of us who live now. It is we, I suppose, who are required to help the ‘some day.’ Only how, when we are ourselves in extremis?”

“The poor are helpers of the poor,” said Valeria.

“But if they grow too poor, to starvation point, then they can help no more; they can only perish slowly.”

“I hoped,” said Valeria, “that Professor Fortescue would have poured oil upon the troubled waters.”

“He does in one sense. But in another, he makes me feel more than ever what I am missing.”

Miss Du Prel’s impulsive instincts could be kept at bay no longer.

“There is really nothing for it, but some deed of daring,” she cried. “I believe, if only your husband could get over his horror of the scandal and talk, that a separation would be best for you both. It is not as if he cared for you. One can see he does not. You are such a strange, inconsequent being, Hadria, that I believe you would feel the parting far more than he would (conventions apart).”

“No question of it,” said Hadria. “Our disharmony, radical and hopeless as it is, does not prevent my having a strong regard for Hubert. I can’t help seeing the admirable sides of his character. He is too irritated and aggrieved to feel anything but rancour against me. It is natural. I understand.”

“Ah, it will only end in some disaster, if you try to reconcile the irreconcilable. Of course I think it is a great pity that you have not more of the instincts on which homes are founded, but since you have not——”

Hadria turned sharply round. “Do you really regret that just for once the old, old game has been played unsuccessfully? Therein I can’t agree with you, though I am the loser by it.” Hadria grasped a swaying spray that the wind blew towards her, and clasped it hard in her hand, regardless of the thorns. “It gives me a keen, fierce pleasure to know that for all their training and constraining and incitement and starvation, I have not developed masses of treacly instinct in which mind and will and every human faculty struggle, in vain, to move leg or wing, like some poor fly doomed to a sweet and sticky death. At least the powers of the world shall not prevail with me by that old device. Mind and will and every human faculty may die, but they shall not drown, in the usual applauded fashion, in seas of tepid, bubbling, up-swelling instinct. I will dare anything rather than endure that. They must take the trouble to provide instruments of death from without; they must lay siege and starve me; they must attack in soldierly fashion; I will not save them the exertion by developing the means of destruction from within. There I stand at bay. They shall knock down the citadel of my mind and will, stone by stone.”

“That is a terrible challenge!” exclaimed Miss Du Prel.

A light laugh sounded across the lawn.

The afternoon sunshine threw four long shadows over the grass: of a slightly-built woman, of a very tall man, and of two smaller men.

The figures themselves were hidden by a group of shrubs, and only the shadows were visible. They paused, for a moment, as if in consultation; the lady standing, with her weight half leaning on her parasol. The tall man seemed to be talking to her vivaciously. His long, shadow-arms shot across the grass, his head wagged.

“The shadows of Fate!” cried Valeria fantastically.

Then they moved into sight, advancing towards the terrace.

“Who are they I wonder? Oh, Professor Fortescue, for one!”

“Lady Engleton and Joseph Fleming. The other I don’t know.”

He was very broad and tall, having a slight stoop, and a curious way of carrying his head, craned forward. The attitude suggested a keen observer. He was attired in knickerbockers and rough tweed Norfolk jacket, and he looked robust and powerful, almost to excess. The chin and mouth were concealed by the thick growth of dark hair, but one suspected unpleasant things of the latter. As far as one could judge his age, he seemed a man of about five-and-thirty, with vigour enough to last for another fifty years.

“That,” said Valeria, “must be Professor Theobald. He has probably come to see the house.”

“I am sure I shall hate that man,” exclaimed Hadria. “He is not to be trusted; what nonsense he is talking to Lady Engleton!”

“You can’t hear, can you?”

“No; I can see. And she laughs and smiles and bandies words with him. He is amusing certainly; there is that excuse for her; but I wonder how she can do it.”

“What an extraordinary creature you are! To take a prejudice against a man before you have spoken to him.”

“He is cruel, he is cruel!” exclaimed Hadria in a low, excited voice. “He is like some cunning wild animal. Look at Professor Fortescue! his opposite pole—why it is all clearer, at this distance, than if we were under the confusing influence of their speech. See the contrast between that quiet, firm walk, and the insinuating, conceited tread of the other man. Joseph Fleming comes out well too, honest soul!”

“He is carrying a fishing-rod. They have been fishing,” said Valeria.

“Not Professor Fortescue, I am certain. He does not find his pleasure in causing pain.”

“This hero-worship blinds you. Depend upon it, he is not without the primitive instinct to kill.”

“There are individual exceptions to all savage instincts, or the world would never move.”

“Instinct rules the world,” said Miss Du Prel. “At least it is obviously neither reason nor the moral sense that rules it.”

“Then why does it produce a Professor Fortescue now and then?”

“Possibly as a corrective.”

“Or perhaps for fun,” said Hadria.