Beth had no more zest for the ball after that conversation with Daniel about the money her mother had given him. She felt obliged to go to it because he insisted that it was necessary for the wives of professional men to show themselves on public occasions; but she would not get a new dress. She had never worn her white silk trimmed with myrtle, and when she came to look at it again, she decided that it was not so much out of the fashion after all, and, at any rate, it must do.

When she came down to dinner dressed in it on the night of the ball, she looked very winsome, and smiled up at Dan in shy expectation of a word of approval; but none came. In the early days of their acquaintance he had remarked that she was much more easily depressed than elated about herself, and would be the better of a little more confidence—not to say conceit; but since their marriage he had never given her the slightest sympathy or encouragement to cure her of her diffidence. If anything were amiss in her dress or appearance, he told her of it in the offensive manner of an ill-conditioned under-bred man, generally speaking when they were out of doors, or in some house where she could do nothing to put herself right, as if it were some satisfaction to him to make her feel ill at ease; and if she were complimented by any one else about anything, he had usually something derogatory to say on the subject afterwards. Now, when he had inspected her, he sat down to table without a word.

"Is there anything wrong?" Beth asked anxiously.

"No," he answered. "That stuff on your sleeves might have been fresher, that's all."

"This will be my first ball," Beth ventured, breaking a long silence.

"Well, don't go and tell everybody," he rejoined. "They'll think you want to make yourself interesting, and it's nothing to boast about. Just lay yourself out to be agreeable to people who will further your husband's interests, for once."

"But am I not always agreeable?" Beth exclaimed, much mortified.

"It doesn't appear so," he answered drily. "At any rate, you don't seem to go down here."

"How do you mean?" Beth asked.

"Why, the ladies in the place all seem to shun you, for some reason or other; not one of them ever comes near you in a friendly way."

"They were all very nice to me the other day at Beg," Beth protested, her heart sinking at this recurrence of the old reproach; for to be shunned, or in any way set apart, seemed even more dreadful to her now than it had done when she was a child.

"See that they keep it up then," he answered grimly.

"If it depends upon me, they will," said Beth, setting her sensitive mouth in a hard determined line that added ten years to her age and did not improve her beauty. And it was with a sad heart, and sorely dissatisfied with herself, that she drove to her first ball.

When they entered the ball-room, however, and Dan beamed about him on every one in his "thoroughly good fellow" way, her spirits rose. The decorations, the handsome uniforms, the brilliant dresses and jewels, the flowers and foliage plants, and, above all, the bright dance-music and festive faces, delighted her, and she gazed about her with lips just parted in a little smile, wondering to find it all so gay.

A young military man was brought up to her and introduced by one of the stewards before she had been five minutes in the room. He asked for the pleasure of a dance; but, alas! thanks to the scheme of education at the Royal Service School for Officers' Daughters having been designed by the authorities to fit the girls for the next world only, Beth could not dance. She had had some lessons at Miss Blackburne's, but not enough to give her confidence, so she was obliged to decline. Another and another would-be partner, and some quite important people, as Dan said, offered, but in vain; and he looked furious.

"Well," he exclaimed, "this is nice for me!"

"I am sorry," Beth answered nervously. She was beginning to have a painful conviction that a man had to depend almost entirely on his wife for his success in life, and the responsibility made her quail.

"I shall have to go and do my duty, at any rate," he proceeded. "I must leave you alone."

"Yes, do," said Beth. "Mrs. Kilroy and Mrs. Orton Beg have just come in; I will go and join them." She naturally expected Dan to escort her, and he probably would have done so had he waited to hear what she was saying; but his marital manners were such that he had taken himself off while she was speaking, and left her to fend for herself. She was too glad, however, to see her charming new acquaintances, who had been so kindly, to care much, and she crossed the room to them, smiling confidently. As she approached, she saw that they recognised her and said something to each other. When she came close, they both bowed coldly, and turned their heads in the opposite direction.

Beth stopped short and her heart stood still. The slight was unmistakable; but what had she done? She looked about her as if for an explanation, and saw Lady Beg close beside her, talking to Mrs. Carne.

"Ah, how do you do? Nice ball, isn't it?" Lady Beg observed, but without shaking hands.

"How do you do?" said Mrs. Carne, and then they resumed their conversation, taking no further notice of Beth, who would probably have turned and fled from the dreadful place incontinently, if Mrs. Petterick had not come up at that moment and spoken to her as one human being to another, seizing upon Beth as Beth might have seized upon her, in despair; for Mrs. Petterick had also been having her share of snubs. Oh, those Christians! how they do love one another! how tender they are to one another's feelings! how careful to make the best of one another! how gentle, good, and kind, and true! How singular it is that when the wicked unbeliever comes to live amongst them, and sees them as they are, he is not immediately moved by admiration to adopt their religion in order that he also may acquire the noble attributes so conspicuously displayed by them!

"You're not dancing, my dear," Mrs. Petterick said. "Come along and sit with me on that couch against the wall yonder. We shall see all that's going on from there."

Beth was only too thankful to go. A waltz was being played, and Dan passed them, dancing with Bertha Petterick. They glided over the floor together with the gentle voluptuous swing, dreamy eyes, and smiling lips of two perfect dancers, conscious of nothing but the sensuous delight of interwoven paces and clasping arms.

"My! but they do step well together, him and Bertha!" Mrs. Petterick exclaimed. "He's a handsome man, your husband, and a gay one—flirting about with all the ladies! I wonder you're not jealous!"

"Jealous!" Beth answered, smiling. "Not I, indeed! Jealousy is a want of faith in one's self."

"Well, my dear, if you always looked as well as you do just now, you need not want confidence in yourself," Mrs. Petterick observed. "But what would you do if your husband gave you cause for jealousy?"

"Despise him," Beth answered promptly.

Mrs. Petterick looked as if she could make nothing of this answer. Then she became uneasy. The music had stopped, but Bertha had not returned to her. "I must go and look after my daughter," she said, rising from her comfortable seat with a sigh. "Gels are a nuisance. You've got to keep your eye on them all the time, or you never know what they're up to."

Beth stayed where she was, and soon began to feel uncomfortable. People stared coldly at her as they passed, and she could not help fancying herself the subject of unpleasant remark because she was alone. She prayed hard that some one would come and speak to her. Dan had disappeared. After a time she recognised Sir George Galbraith among the groups of people at the opposite side of the room. He was receiving that attention from every one which is so generously conferred on a man or woman of consequence, whose acquaintance adds to people's own importance, and to whom it is therefore well to be seen speaking; but although his manner was courteously attentive he looked round as if anxious to make his escape, and finally, to Beth's intense relief, he recognised her, and, leaving the group about him unceremoniously, came across the room to speak to her.

"Would it be fair to ask you to sit out a dance with me?" he said. "I do not dance."

"I would rather sit out a dance with you than dance it with any one else I know here," she answered naÏvely; "but, as it happens, I do not dance either."

"Indeed! How is that? I should have thought you would like dancing."

"So I should, I am sure, if I could," she replied. "But I can't dance at all. They would not let me learn dancing at one school where I was, and I was not long enough at the other to learn properly."

"Now, that is a pity," he said, considering Beth, his professional eye having been struck by her thinness and languor. "But have some lessons. Dancing in moderation is capital exercise, and it exhilarates; and anything that exhilarates increases one's vitality. Why don't you make your husband teach you? He seems to know all about it."

"Yes," Beth answered, smiling; "but I shouldn't think teaching me is at all in his line. Why don't you dance yourself?"

"Oh, I am far too clumsy," he said good-naturedly. "My wife says if I could even learn to move about a room without getting in the way and upsetting things, it would be something."

"Is she here to-night?" Beth asked.

"No, she was not feeling up to it," he answered. "She tired herself in the garden this afternoon, helping me to bud roses."

"Oh, can you bud roses?" Beth exclaimed. "I should so like to know how it is done."

"I'll show you with pleasure."

"Will you really?" said Beth. "How kind of you."

"Not at all. Let me see, when will you be at home? We mustn't lose any time, or it will be too late in the year."

"I'm pretty nearly always at home," Beth said.

"Then if I came to-morrow morning would that be convenient?"

"Quite; and I hope you will stay lunch," Beth answered.

Dan returned to the ball-room just then, and, on seeing who was with her, he immediately joined them; but Sir George only stayed long enough to exchange greetings politely.

"You seem to get on very well with Galbraith," Dan observed.

"Don't you like him?" Beth asked in surprise, detecting a note of enmity in his voice.

"I haven't had much chance," he said bitterly. "He doesn't play the agreeable to me as he does to you."

Beth missed the drift of this remark in considering the expression "play the agreeable," which was unpleasantly suggestive to her of under-bred gentility.

"You will be able to give him an opportunity to-morrow then," she said, "if you are in at lunch-time, for he is coming to show me how to bud roses, and I have asked him to stay."

"Have you, indeed?" Dan exclaimed, obviously displeased, but why or wherefore Beth could not conceive. "I hope to goodness there's something to eat in the house," he added upon reflection, fussily.

"There is as much as there always is," Beth placidly rejoined.

"Well, that's not enough then. Just think what a man like that has on his own table!"

"A man like that won't expect our table to be like his."

"You'd better make it appear so for once then, or you'll be having our hospitality criticised as I heard the Barrack fellows criticise Mrs. Jeffery's the other day. A couple of them called about lunch-time, and she asked them to stay, and they said there was nothing but beer and sherry, and the fragments of a previous feast, and they were blessed if they'd go near the old trout again."

"An elegant expression!" said Beth. "It gives the measure of the mind it comes from. Please don't introduce the person who uses it to me. But as to Sir George Galbraith, you need not be afraid that he will accept hospitality and criticise it in that spirit. He will neither grumble at a cutlet, nor describe his hostess by a vulgar epithet after eating it."

She shut her mouth hard after speaking. Disillusion is a great enlightener; our insight is never so clear as when it is turned on the character of a person in whom we used to believe; and as Dan gradually revealed himself to Beth, trait by trait, a kind of distaste seized upon her, a want of respect, which found involuntary expression in trenchant comments upon his observations and in smart retorts. She did not seek sympathy from him now for the way in which she had been slighted at the ball, knowing perfectly well that he was more likely to blame her than anybody else. He had, in fact, by this time, so far as any confidence she might have reposed in him was concerned, dropped out of her life completely, and left her as friendless and as much alone as she would have been with the veriest stranger.

That night when she went home she felt world-worn and weary, but next morning, out in the garden with Sir George Galbraith budding roses, she became young again. Before they had been together half-an-hour she was chatting to him with girlish confidence, telling him about her attempts to cultivate her mind, her reading and writing, to all of which he listened without any of that condescension in his manner which Dan displayed when perchance he was in a good-humour and Beth had ventured to expand. Sir George was genuinely interested.

Dan came in punctually to lunch, for a wonder. He glanced at Beth's animated face sharply when he entered, but took no further notice of her. He was one of those husbands who have two manners, a coarse one for their families, and another, much more polished, which they assume when it is politic to be refined. But Dan's best behaviour sat ill upon him, because it was lacking in sincerity, and Beth suffered all through lunch because of the obsequious pose he thought it proper to assume towards his distinguished guest.

After lunch, when Sir George had gone, he took up his favourite position before the mirror over the chimney-piece, and stood there for a little, looking at himself and caressing his moustache.

"You talk a great deal too much, Beth," he said at last.

"Do you think so?" she rejoined.

"Yes, I do," he assured her. "Of course Galbraith had to be polite and affect to listen, but I could see that he was bored by your chatter. He naturally wanted to talk to me about things that interest men."

"Then why on earth didn't he talk to you?" Beth asked.

"How could he when you monopolised the conversation?"

"It was he who kept me talking," she protested.

"Oh yes; I notice you are very animated when anything in the shape of a man comes in," Dan sneered.

Beth got up and left the room, less affected by the insinuation, however, than by the vulgar expression of it.

The following week Sir George came in one morning with some cuttings, and stayed a while in the garden with Beth, showing her how to set them; but he would not wait for lunch. Dan showed considerable annoyance when he heard of the visit.

"He should come when I am at home," he said. "It is damned bad taste his coming when you are alone."

The next time Sir George came Dan happened to be in, to Beth's relief. She had brought her writing down that day, and was working at it on the dining-room table, not expecting Dan till much later. He was in a genial mood, for a wonder.

"What on earth are you scribbling about there?" he asked.

"Just something I was thinking about," Beth answered evasively.

"Going in for authorship, eh?"

"Why not?" said Beth.

Dan laughed. "You are not at all ambitious," he remarked; then added patronisingly, "A little of that kind of thing will do you no harm, of course; but, my dear child, your head wouldn't contain a book, and if you were just a little cleverer you would know that yourself."

Beth bit the end of her pencil and looked at him dispassionately, and it was at this moment that Sir George Galbraith was announced.

Dan received him with effusion as usual; and also, as usual, Sir George responded with all conventional politeness, but the greeting over, he turned his attention to Beth. He had brought her a packet of books.

"This looks like work in earnest," he said, glancing at the table. "I see you have a good deal of something done. Is it nearly finished?"

"All but," Beth rejoined.

"What are you going to do with it?"

Beth looked at him, and then at her manuscript vaguely. "I don't know," she said. "What can I do with it?"

"Publish it, if it is good," he answered.

"But how am I to know?" Beth asked eagerly. "Do you think it possible I could do anything fit to publish?"

Before he could reply, Dan chimed in. "I've just been telling her," he said, "that little heads like hers can't contain books. It's all very well to scribble a little for pastime, and all that, but she mustn't seriously imagine she can do that sort of work. She'll only do herself harm. Literature is men's work."

"Yet how many women have written, and written well, too," Beth observed.

"Oh yes, of course—exceptional women."

"And why mayn't I be an exceptional woman?" Beth asked, smiling.

"Coarse and masculine!" Dan exclaimed. "No, thank you. We don't want you to be one of that kind—do we, Galbraith?"

"There is not the slightest fear," Sir George answered dryly. "Besides, I don't think any class of women workers—not even the pit-brow women—are necessarily coarse and masculine. And I differ from you, too, with regard to that head," he added, fixing his keen, kindly eyes deliberately on Beth's cranium till she laughed to cover her embarrassment, and put up both hands to feel it. "I should say there was good promise both of sense and capacity in the size and balance of it—not to mention anything else."

"Well, you ought to know if anybody does," said Dan with a facetious sort of affectation of agreement, which left no doubt of his insincerity.

"I wish," Sir George continued, addressing Beth, "you would let me show some of your work to a lady, a friend of mine, whose opinion is well worth having."

"I would rather have yours," Beth jerked out.

"Oh, mine is no good," he rejoined. "But if you will let me read what you give me to show my lady, I should be greatly interested. We were talking about style in prose the other day, and I have ventured to bring you these books—some of our own stylists, and some modern Frenchmen. You read French, I know."

"There is nothing like the French," Dan chimed in. "We have no literature at all now. Look at their work compared to ours, how short, crisp, and incisive it is! How true to life! A Frenchman will give you more real life in a hundred pages than our men do in all their interminable volumes."

"More sexuality, you mean, I suppose," said Galbraith, "Personally I find them monotonous, and barren of happy phrases to enrich the mind, of noble sentiments to expand the heart, of great thoughts to help the soul; without balance, with little of the redeeming side of life, and less aspiration towards it. If France is to be judged by the tendency of its literature and art at present, one would suppose it to be dominated and doomed to destruction by a gang of lascivious authors and artists who are sapping the manhood of the country and degrading the womanhood by idealising self-indulgence and mean intrigue. The man or woman who lives low, or even thinks low, in that sense of the word, will tend always to descend still lower in times of trial. Moral probity is the backbone of our courage; without it we have nothing to support us when a call is made upon our strength." [1]

[1] The truth of this assertion was lately proved in a terrible manner at the burning of the Charity Bazaar in the Rue Jean Goujon, when the nerves of the luxurious gentlemen present, debilitated by close intimacy with the haute cocotterie in and out of society, betrayed them, and they displayed the white feather of vice by fighting their own way out, not only leaving the ladies to their fate, but actually beating them back with their sticks and trampling on them in their frantic efforts to save themselves, as many a bruised white arm or shoulder afterwards testified. There was scarcely a man burnt on the occasion, husbands, lovers, and fathers escaped, leaving all the heroic deeds to be done by some few devoted men-servants, some workmen who happened to be passing, a stray Englishman or American, and mothers who perished in attempting to rescue their children.