HADRIA said nothing more about her project, and when Henriette alluded to it, answered that it was still unfurnished with detail. She merely wished to know, for certain, Henriette’s views. She admitted that there had been some conversation on the subject between Hubert and herself, but would give no particulars. Henriette had to draw her own conclusions from Hadria’s haggard looks, and the suppressed excitement of her manner.

Henriette always made a point of being present when Professor Fortescue called, as she did not approve of his frequent visits. She noticed that he gave a slight start when Hadria entered. In a few days, she had grown perceptibly thinner. Her manner was restless. A day or two of rain had prevented the usual walks. When it cleared up again, the season had taken a stride. Still more glorious was the array of tree and flower, and their indescribable freshness suggested the idea that they were bathed in the mysterious elixir of life, and that if one touched them, eternal youth would be the reward. Professor Theobald gazed at Hadria with startled and enquiring eyes, when they met again.

“You look tired,” he said.

“I am, rather. The spring is always a little trying.”

“Especially this spring, I find.”

The gardens of the Priory were now at the very perfection of their beauty. The supreme moment had come of flowing wealth of foliage and delicate splendour of blossom, yet the paleness of green and tenderness of texture were still there.

Professor Theobald said suddenly, that Hadria looked as if she were turning over some project very anxiously in her mind—a project on which much depended.

“You are very penetrating,” she replied, after a moment’s hesitation, “that is exactly what I am doing. When I was a girl, my brothers and sisters and I used to discuss the question of the sovereignty of the will. Most of us believed in it devoutly. We regarded circumstance as an annoying trifle, that no person who respected himself would allow to stand in his way. I want to try that theory and see what comes of it.”

“You alarm me, Mrs. Temperley.”

“Yes, people always do seem to get alarmed when one attempts to put their favourite theories in practice.”

“But really—for a woman——”

“The sovereignty of the will is a dangerous doctrine?”

“Well, as things are; a young woman, a beautiful woman.”

“You recall an interesting memory,” she said.

“Ah, that is unkind.”

Her smile checked him.

“When you fall into a mocking humour, you are quite impracticable.”

“I merely smiled,” she said, “sweetly, as I thought.”

“It is really cruel; I have not had a word with you for days, and the universe has become a wilderness.”

“A pleasant wilderness,” she observed, looking round.

“Nature is a delightful background, but a poor subject.”

“Do you think so? I often fancy one’s general outlook would be nicer, if one had an indistinct human background and a clear foreground of unspoiled Nature. But that may be a jaundiced view.”

Hadria went off to meet Lady Engleton, who was coming down the avenue with Madame Bertaux. Professor Theobald instinctively began to follow and then stopped, reddening, as he met the glance of Miss Temperley. He flung himself into conversation with her, and became especially animated when he was passing Hadria, who did not appear to notice him. As both Professors were to leave Craddock Dene at the end of the week, this was the last meeting in the Priory gardens.

Miss Temperley found Professor Theobald entertaining, but at times a little incoherent.

“Why, there is Miss Du Prel!” exclaimed Henriette. “What an erratic person she is. She went to London the day before yesterday, and now she turns up suddenly without a word of warning.”

This confirmed Professor Theobald’s suspicions that something serious was going on at the Red House.

Valeria explained her return to Hadria, by saying that she had felt so nervous about what the latter might be going to attempt, that she had come back to see if she could be of help, or able to ward off any rash adventure.

There was a pleasant open space among the shrubberies, where several seats had been placed to command a dainty view of the garden and lawns, with the house in the distance, and here the party gradually converged, in desultory fashion, coming up and strolling off again, as the fancy inspired them.

Cigars were lighted, and a sense of sociability and enjoyment suffused itself, like a perfume, among the group.

Lady Engleton was delighted to see Miss Du Prel again. She did so want to continue the hot discussion they were having at the Red House that afternoon, when Mr. Temperley would be so horridly logical. He smiled and twisted his moustache.

“We were interrupted by some caller, and had to leave the argument at a most exciting moment.”

“An eternally interesting subject!” said Temperley; “what woman is, what she is not.”

“My dread is that presently, the need for dissimulation being over, all the delightful mystery will have vanished,” said Professor Theobald. “I should tire, in a day, of a woman I could understand.”

“You tempt one to enquire the length of the reign of a satisfactory enigma,” cried Lady Engleton.

“Precisely the length of her ability to mystify me,” he replied.

“Your future wife ought to be given a hint.”

“Oh! a wife, in no case, could hold me: the mere fact that it was my duty to adore her, would be chilling. And when added to that, I knew that she had placed it among the list of her obligations to adore me—well, that would be the climax of disenchantment.”

Hubert commended his wisdom in not marrying.

“The only person I could conceivably marry would be my cook; in that case there would be no romance to spoil, no vision to destroy.”

“I fear this is a cloak for a poor opinion of our sex, Professor.”

“On the contrary. I admire your sex too much to think of subjecting them to such an ordeal. I could not endure to regard a woman I had once admired, as a matter of course, a commonplace in my existence.”

Henriette plunged headlong into the fray, in opposition to the Professor’s heresy. The conversation became general.

Professor Theobald fell out of it. He was furtively watching Hadria, whose eyes were strangely bright. She was sitting on the arm of a seat, listening to the talk, with a little smile on her lips. Her hand clasped the back of the seat rigidly, as if she were holding something down.

The qualities and defects of the female character were frankly canvassed, each view being held with fervour, but expressed with urbanity. Women were always so and so; women were absolutely never so and so: women felt, without exception, thus and thus; on the contrary, they were entirely devoid of such sentiments. A large experience and wide observation always supported each opinion, and eminent authorities swarmed to the standard.

“I do think that women want breadth of view,” said Lady Engleton.

“They sometimes want accuracy of statement,” observed Professor Theobald, with a possible second meaning in his words.

“It seems to me they lack concentration. They are too versatile,” was Hubert’s comment.

“They want a sense of honour,” was asserted.

“And a sense of humour,” some one added.

“They want a feeling of public duty.”

“They want a spice of the Devil!” exclaimed Hadria.

There was a laugh.

Hubert thought this was a lack not likely to be felt for very long. It was under rapid process of cultivation.

“Why, it is a commonplace, that if a woman is bad, she is always very bad,” cried Lady Engleton.

“A new and intoxicating experience,” said Professor Fortescue. “I sympathize.”

“New?” his colleague murmured, with a faint chuckle.

“You distress me,” said Henriette.

Professor Fortescue held that woman’s “goodness” had done as much harm in the world as men’s badness. The one was merely the obverse of the other.

“This is strange teaching!” cried Lady Engleton.

The Professor reminded her that truth was always stranger than fiction.

“To the best men,” observed Valeria, “women show all their meanest qualities. It is the fatality of their training.”

Professor Theobald had noted the same trait in other subject races.

“Pray, don’t call us a subject race!” remonstrated Lady Engleton.

“Ah, yes, the truth,” cried Hadria, “we starve for the truth.”

“You are courageous, Mrs. Temperley.”

“Like the Lady of Shallott, I am sick of shadows.”

“The bare truth, on this subject, is hard for a woman to face.”

“It is harder, in the long run, to waltz eternally round it with averted eyes.”

“But, dear me, why is the truth about ourselves hard to face?” demanded Valeria.

“I am placed between the horns of a dilemma: one lady clamours for the bare truth: another forbids me to say anything unpleasing.”

“I withdraw my objection,” Valeria offered.

“The ungracious task shall not be forced upon unwilling chivalry,” said Hadria. “If our conditions have been evil, some scars must be left and may as well be confessed. Among the faults of women, I should place a tendency to trade upon and abuse real chivalry and generosity when they meet them: a survival perhaps from the Stone Age, when the fittest to bully were the surviving elect of society.”

Hadria’s eyes sparkled with suppressed excitement.

“Freedom alone teaches us to meet generosity, generously,” said Professor Fortescue; “you can’t get the perpendicular virtues out of any but the really free-born.”

“Then do you describe women’s virtues as horizontal?” enquired Miss Du Prel, half resentfully.

“In so far as they follow the prevailing models. Women’s love, friendship, duty, the conduct of life as a whole, speaking very roughly, has been lacking in the quality that I call perpendicular; a quality implying something more than upright.”

“You seem to value but lightly the woman’s acknowledged readiness for self-sacrifice,” said Lady Engleton. “That, I suppose, is only a despised horizontal virtue.”

“Very frequently.”

“Because it is generally more or less abject,” Hadria put in. “The sacrifice is made because the woman is a woman. It is the obeisance of sex; the acknowledgment of servility; not a simple desire of service.”

“The adorable creature is not always precisely obeisant,” observed Theobald.

“No; as I say, she may be capricious and cruel enough to those who treat her justly and generously” (Hadria’s eyes instinctively turned towards the distant Priory, and Valeria’s followed them); “but ask her to sacrifice herself for nothing; ask her to cherish the selfishness of some bully or fool; assure her that it is her duty to waste her youth, lose her health, and stultify her mind, for the sake of somebody’s whim, or somebody’s fears, or somebody’s absurdity, then she needs no persuasion. She goes to the stake smiling. She swears the flames are comfortably warm, no more. Are they diminishing her in size? Oh no—not at all—besides she was rather large, for a woman. She smiles encouragement to the other chained figures, at the other stakes. Her reward? The sense of exalted worth, of humility; the belief that she has been sublimely virtuous, while the others whom she serves have been—well the less said about them the better. She has done her duty, and sent half a dozen souls to hell!”

Henriette uttered a little cry.

“Where one expects to meet her!” Hadria added.

Professor Theobald was chuckling gleefully.

Lady Engleton laughed. “Then, Mrs. Temperley, you do feel rather wicked yourself, although you don’t admire our nice, well-behaved, average woman.”

“Oh, the mere opposite of an error isn’t always truth,” said Hadria.

“The weather has run to your head!” cried Henriette.

Hadria’s eyes kindled. “Yes, it is like wine; clear, intoxicating sparkling wine, and its fumes are mounting! Why does civilisation never provide for these moments?”

“What would you have? A modified feast of Dionysius?”

“Why not? The whole earth joins in the festival and sings, except mankind. Some frolic of music and a stirring dance!—But ah! I suppose, in this tamed England of ours, we should feel it artificial; we should fear to let ourselves go. But in Greece—if we could fancy ourselves there, shorn of our little local personalities—in some classic grove, on sunlit slopes, all bubbling with the re-birth of flowers and alive with the light, the broad all-flooding light of Greece that her children dreaded to leave more than any other earthly thing, when death threatened—could one not imagine the loveliness of some garlanded dance, and fancy the naÏads, and the dryads, and all the hosts of Pan gambolling at one’s heels?”

“Really, Mrs. Temperley, you were not born for an English village. I should like Mrs. Walker to hear you!”

“Mrs. Walker knows better than to listen to me. She too hides somewhere, deep down, a poor fettered thing that would gladly join the revel, if it dared. We all do.”

Lady Engleton dwelt joyously on the image of Mrs. Walker, cavorting, garlanded, on a Greek slope, with the nymphs and water-sprites for familiar company.

Lady Engleton had risen laughing, and proposed a stroll to Hadria.

Henriette, who did not like the tone the conversation was taking, desired to join them.

“I never quite know how far you are serious, and how far you are just amusing yourself, Hadria,” said Lady Engleton. “Our talking of Greece reminds me of some remark you made the other day, about Helen. You seemed to me almost to sympathize with her.”

Hadria’s eyes seemed to be looking across miles of sea to the sunny Grecian land.

“If a slave breaks his chains and runs, I am always glad,” she said.

“I was talking about Helen.”

“So was I. If a Spartan wife throws off her bondage and defies the laws that insult her, I am still more glad.”

“But not if she sins?” Henriette coughed, warningly.

“Yes; if she sins.”

“Oh, Hadria,” remonstrated Henriette, in despair.

“I don’t see that it follows that Helen did sin, however; one does not know much about her sentiments. She revolted against the tyranny that held her shut in, enslaved, body and soul, in that wonderful Greek world of hers. I am charmed to think that she gave her countrymen so much trouble to assert her husband’s right of ownership. It was at his door that the siege of Troy ought to be laid. I only wish elopements always caused as much commotion!” Lady Engleton laughed, and Miss Temperley tried to catch Hadria’s eye.

“Well, that is a strange idea! And do you really think Helen did not sin? Seriously now.”

“I don’t know. There is no evidence on that point.” Lady Engleton laughed again.

“You do amuse me. Assuming that Helen did not sin, I suppose you would (if only for the sake of paradox) accuse the virtuous Greek matrons—who sat at home, and wove, and span, and bore children—of sinning against the State!”

“Certainly,” said Hadria, undismayed. “It was they who insidiously prepared the doom for their country, as they wove and span and bore children, with stupid docility. As surely as an enemy might undermine the foundations of a city till it fell in with a crash, so surely they brought ruin upon Greece.”

“Oh, Hadria, you are quite beside yourself to-day!” cried Henriette.

“A love of paradox will lead you far!” said Lady Engleton. “We have always been taught to think a nation sound and safe whose women were docile and domestic.”

“What nation, under those conditions, has ever failed to fall in with a mighty crash, like my undermined city? Greece herself could not hold out. Ah, yes; we have our revenge! a sweet, sweet revenge!”

Lady Engleton was looking much amused and a little dismayed, when she and her companions rejoined the party.

“I never heard anyone say so many dreadful things in so short a space of time,” she cried. “You are distinctly shocking.”

“I am frank,” said Hadria. “I fancy we should all go about with our hair permanently on end, if we spoke out in chorus.”

“I don’t quite like to hear you say that, Hadria.”

“I mean no harm—merely that every one thinks thoughts and feels impulses that would be startling if expressed in speech. Don’t we all know how terrifying a thing speech is, and thought? a chartered libertine.”

“Why, you are saying almost exactly what Professor Theobald said the other day, and we were so shocked.”

“And yet my meaning has scarcely any relation to his,” Hadria hastened to say. “He meant to drag down all belief in goodness by reminding us of dark moments and hours; by placarding the whole soul with the name of some shadow that moves across it, I sometimes think from another world, some deep under-world that yawns beneath us and sends up blackness and fumes and strange cries.” Hadria’s eyes had wandered far away. “Are you never tormented by an idea, an impression that you know does not belong to you?”

Lady Engleton gave a startled negative. “Professor Fortescue, come and tell me what you think of this strange doctrine?”

“If we had to be judged by our freedom from rushes of evil impulse, rather than by our general balance of good and evil wishing, I think those would come out best, who had fewest thoughts and feelings of any kind to record.” The subject attracted a small group.

“Unless goodness is only a negative quality,” Valeria pointed out, “a mere absence, it must imply a soul that lives and struggles, and if it lives and struggles, it is open to the assaults of the devil.”

“Yes, and it is liable to go under too sometimes, one must not forget,” said Hadria, “although most people profess to believe so firmly in the triumph of the best—how I can’t conceive, since the common life of every day is an incessant harping on the moral: the smallest, meanest, poorest, thinnest, vulgarest qualities in man and woman are those selected for survival, in the struggle for existence.”

There was a cry of remonstrance from idealists.

“But what else do we mean when we talk by common consent of the world’s baseness, harshness, vulgarity, injustice? It means surely—and think of it!—that it is composed of men and women with the best of them killed out, as a nerve burnt away by acid; a heart won over to meaner things than it set out beating for; a mind persuaded to nibble at edges of dry crust that might have grown stout and serviceable on generous diet, and mellow and inspired with noble vintage.”

“You really are shockingly Bacchanalian to-day,” cried Lady Engleton.

Hadria laughed. “Metaphorically, I am a toper. The wonderful clear sparkle, the subtle flavour, the brilliancy of wine, has for me a strange fascination; it seems to signify so much in life that women lose.”

“True. What beverage should one take as a type of what they gain by the surrender?” asked Lady Engleton, who was disposed to hang back towards orthodoxy, in the presence of her uncompromising neighbour.

“Oh, toast and water!” replied Hadria.