Few things make the natural man, a being who still occupies a large apartment in the soul of each of us, more impatient than to find people refusing to conform to his idea of the way in which they ought to seek and find happiness. So far as sane and sensible folk are concerned—there is no need to bring the Asylums into the argument—his way is the way; deviations from it, whether perversely deliberate or instinctive and unreasoned, are so many wanderings from the only right track. He likes money—then only fools omit to strive for it. Stability of mind is his ideal—what more wretched than to be tossed from mood to mood? A regular life is the sole means of preserving health in stomach and brain—it is melancholy to see persons preferring haphazard and ill-regulated existences. Nay, it makes this natural man rather vexed if we do not like his furniture, his favourite vegetable, his dentist, and so forth; his murmured "De gustibus" has a touch of scorn in it. He conceives a grudge against us for upsetting established standards of excellence in matters of life, conduct, upholstery, and the table. Our likings for people in whom he sees nothing puzzle and annoy him equally; the shrug with which he says, of a newly married couple for instance, "They seem very happy," adds quite clearly, "But on no reasonable grounds have they a right to be, and in my heart I can't quite believe they are."

Sir James Muddock—once again the occasion of generalisations—had never been able to understand why Ashley Mead did not jump at the chance of Alice Muddock's hand and a share in Buckingham Palace Road. The lad was poor, his prospects were uncertain, at the best they could not yield wealth as Sir James had learnt to count it; the prejudice against trade is only against trade on a small scale; any ambitions, social or political, would be promoted, not thwarted, by his entry into the firm. As for Alice, she was the best girl in the world, clever, kind, trustworthy; she was very fond of him; he was fond of her and appreciated her company. Ashley was turned thirty; he was not asked to surrender the liberty of early youth. He had had his fling, and to sensible men this fling was a temporary episode, to be enjoyed and done with. It was time for him to get into harness; the harness offered was very handsome, the manger well filled, the treatment all that could be desired. When Sir James summed up the case thus, he had no suspicion of what had passed during one Sunday in the country; it is fair to add that it would have made no difference in his ideas, if he had known of it. The day in the country with Ora Pinsent would have been ticketed as part of the fling and thus relegated to after-dinner memories. Sir James did not understand people to whom the fling was more than an episode, to whom all life went on being a series of flings of ever-changing dice, till at last and only in old age the box fell from paralysed fingers. Therefore he did not understand all that was in the nature of Ashley Mead; he would have understood nothing at all of what was in Ora Pinsent's.

Ashley's decision had taken itself, as it seemed, without any help or effort on his part. Here was the warrant of its inevitability. He thought, when he first read the old man's summons, that he was in for a great struggle and faced with a hard problem, with an anxious weighing of facts and a curious forecast of possibilities, that he must sit down to the scrutiny in idleness and solemnity. But somehow, as he slept or dressed or breakfasted, between glances at his paper and whiffs of his pipe, he decided to refuse many thousands a year and to ignore the implied offer of Alice Muddock's hand. In themselves thousands were good, there was nothing to be said against them; and of Alice he had been so fond and to her so accustomed that for several years back he had considered her as his most likely wife. She and the thousands were now dismissed from his life—both good things, but not good for him. He sighed once with a passing wish that he could be different; but being what he was he felt himself hopelessly at war with Sir James' scheme as a whole, and with every part of it. Contrast it with the moods, the thoughts, the atmosphere of life which had filled his yesterday! And yesterday's was his native air; thus it seemed to him, and he was so infected with this air that he did not ask whether but for yesterday his decision would have been as easy and unfaltering.

The old man was hurt, grieved, and, in spite of previous less direct rebuffs, bitterly disappointed; he had not thought that his offer would be refused when expressly made; he had not looked to see his hints about his daughter more openly ignored the more open they themselves became. His anger expressed itself in an ultimatum; he flung himself back in his elbow chair, saying,

"Well, my lad, for the last time, take it or leave it. If you take it, we'll soon put you through your facings, and then you'll be the best head in the business. But if you won't have it, I must take in somebody else."

"I know, Sir James. Don't think I expect you to go on giving me chances."

"If it's not you, it's got to be Bertie Jewett." Bertie Jewett was Herbert, son of Peter Jewett who had served through all the changes and lately died as Manager in Buckingham Palace Road. "He won't refuse, anyhow." The tone added, "He's not such a fool."

"No, he's not such an ass as I am," said Ashley, answering the tone and smiling at poor Sir James with an appealing friendliness.

"That's your word, not mine; but I'm not going to quarrel with it," said Sir James without a sign of softening. "What you're after I can't see. What do you want?"

Ashley found himself unable to tell the Head of the Firm what he wanted.

"I can get along," he said lamely. "I make a bit writing for the papers, and there's a brief once in a blue moon; and of course I've got a little; and this secretaryship helps for the time."

This beggarly catalogue of inadequate means increased Sir James' scorn and bewilderment.

"Are you above it?" he asked with sudden heat.

"Good God, sir, don't think me a snob as well as an ass," prayed Ashley.

"Then I don't know what you do want."

Matters seemed to have reached a standstill. But Sir James had a last shot in his locker.

"Go up and lunch in Kensington Palace Gardens," he said. "Talk it over with the ladies, talk it over with Alice."

Ashley wanted to refuse; on this day he had no desire to see Alice. But refusal seemed impossible.

"All right, Sir James, I will," he said.

"Take a week, take a week more. If you say no then, it's Bertie Jewett—and your chance is gone for ever. For Heaven's sake don't make a fool of yourself." Affection mingling with wrath in the entreaty made it harder to resist.

Ashley walked off with the last words ringing in his ears; they recalled Lord Bowdon and the AthenÆum corner. After reflexion and against inclination Bowdon had determined not to make a fool of himself, and had intrenched his resolution with apparent security against the possibility of a relapse into a less sensible course. Here was Ashley's example; but he shied at it.

"And how the devil am I to talk to Alice about it?" he exclaimed petulantly, as he struck across the front of Buckingham Palace and headed up Constitution Hill. There had been a general impression that he would marry Alice Muddock, and a general impression about us assumes to ourselves a vaguely obligatory force. We may not justify it, but we feel the need for some apology if we refuse. Besides Ashley had, up to a certain point, shared the impression, although in a faint far-off way, regarding the suggested alliance not as the aim of his life but as a possible and not unacceptable bourn of his youth. His entrance into the firm was a topic so closely connected that he felt much awkwardness in discussing it with Alice Muddock. Of her feelings he thought less than of his own; he was not by nature a selfish man, but he had now fallen into the selfishness of a great pre-occupation. The smallest joy or the lightest sorrow for Ora Pinsent would have filled his mind. It is difficult to feel in anything like this way towards more than one person at a time. His sympathy for Alice Muddock was blunted and he excused its want of acuteness by an affected modesty which questioned her concern in him.

It chanced that Lady Kilnorton was at lunch. She seemed in high spirits and talked vigorously. Her theme was the artistic temperament; she blamed its slavishness to the moment. Lady Muddock showed an anxiety to be furnished with details for purposes of increased disapproval; Alice was judicial. One man among three women, Ashley would have been content to listen, but, when appealed to, he defended the aspersed disposition. He felt the conversation approaching Ora Pinsent, step by step; she was in all their minds; the only case in point known to Lady Muddock, the instance most interesting to Alice, an unwelcome persistent presence to Irene, to him a subject to be neither encouraged nor avoided without risk of self-betrayal. It was curious how she had come into the circle of their lives, and having entered seemed to dominate it. But presently he grew sure of his face and, for the rest, preferred that they should abuse her rather than not speak of her; he grudged every abstraction of his thoughts which banished her image.

The discussion brought its trials. Irene's well-restrained jealousy and Lady Muddock's inquisitive disapproval were merely amusing; it was Alice's judicial attitude which stirred him to resentment. To assess and assay with this cold-blooded scientific accuracy seemed inhuman, almost from its excess of science unscientific, since it was a method so unsuited to the subject.

"Now take Ora," said Irene, at last grasping the nettle. "There's nothing she wouldn't do for you at one moment, the next she wouldn't do anything at all for you."

"For her acquaintances, you mean?" Alice asked.

"Oh, no, my dear. For anybody, for her best friend. You can't call her either good or bad. She's just fluke, pure fluke."

"Well, I know it's the thing to pretend not to like flukes—" Ashley began. The thin jocularity served for a shield.

"Oh, what's the use of asking a man? He just sees her face, that's all. Nobody's denying her looks." Lady Kilnorton seemed petulant.

"Of course a life like hers," observed Lady Muddock, "is very demoralising."

"My dear Lady Muddock, why?" asked Ashley, growing exasperated.

"Well, I only know what Minna Soames says, and—"

"Mother dear, Minna Soames is a goose," Alice remarked. Ashley was grateful, but still with reservations as to the judicial tone.

Irene Kilnorton, engaged in her secret task of justifying herself and taking a rosy view of Bowdon's feelings, talked more for her own ends than for those of the company.

"That sort of people suit one another very well," she went on. "They know what to expect of each other. Harm comes only when people of a different sort get entangled with them."

"You're vague," said Ashley. "What different sort?" He had partly fathomed her mood now, and his eyes were mischievous as he looked at her.

"Sensible people, Mr. Mead." There was a touch of asperity in the brief retort, which made a thrust from him seem excusable.

"Suppose Lord Bowdon had never seen you," he said with plausible gravity, "and, being in that state of darkness, had fallen in love with Miss Pinsent; would it have been so very surprising?"

"Very," said Irene Kilnorton.

"And dreadful?"

"Well, bad for him. He'd never have got on with her and—"

"There's Mr. Fenning," interposed Alice with a quiet laugh. A moment's pause ensued. Ashley had been startled at the introduction of the name, but he recovered himself directly.

"Oh, well," he said, "of course there's Mr. Fenning. I'd forgotten him. But he's quite accidental. Leave him out. He's not part of the case."

"But there's so often a Mr. Fenning," Alice persisted. "Can he be considered quite accidental?"

Ashley had made much the same remark in different words to Irene Kilnorton a few weeks before; but remarks do not bear transplanting.

"Isn't that rather a traditional view?" he asked.

"You mean a prejudiced one?"

"Well, yes."

"I suppose so. But prejudices start somehow, don't they?" Her smile was very gentle, but still, to his mind, horribly aloof and judicial. Could she not understand how a woman might be carried away, and blunder into a Mr. Fenning, per incuriam and all in a minute (so to speak)? In such a case was it to be expected that the Mr. Fenning in question should be all in all to her? In some ways perhaps she must acknowledge his existence; but at any rate she needn't Darby-and-Joan it with him!

"Poor dear Ora!" said Irene Kilnorton after a pause. Yet she was not naturally malicious any more than Ashley Mead was naturally selfish. If we are responsible for the moods we raise in others Miss Pinsent's account was mounting up. Ashley allowed himself the retort of a laugh as Lady Muddock rose from the table.

"I came to talk to you," he said to Alice, as she passed him.

"Then drink your coffee quick, and come into the garden," she answered with her usual frank kindness. When she looked at him her aspect and air became less judicial.

In the garden he opened the subject of Sir James' proposal; his eyes were set straight in front of him, hers on the ground. Her answer would have dismayed Sir James, and it surprised Ashley. She was energetically, almost passionately, opposed to his entering the business.

"It's not your line, or your taste, or your proper work," she said. "What's the good of being rich if you're doing what you hate all the time?"

"I felt just like that," he said gratefully, "but I was afraid that I felt like it because I was a fool."

"You can make your own way. Don't sell yourself to the business."

He glanced at her stealthily; her colour had risen and her lip trembled. Did she think of anything besides the business when she bade him not sell himself? A moment later she laughed uneasily, as, with a reference to the conversation at lunch, she said,

"You've too much of the artistic temperament for Buckingham Palace Road."

"I? I the artistic temperament?" He accepted the trite phrase as a useful enough symbol of what they both meant.

"Yes," she answered steadily. "A good deal of it."

"Then I come under Irene Kilnorton's censures?"

"Under a good many of them, yes."

Something in her manner again annoyed and piqued him. She was judging again, and judging him. But she was interesting him also. She spoke of him; she knew him well: and just now he was in some doubt about himself.

"I don't know what you mean," he said, seeking to draw her out.

"Oh, things carry you away; and you like it. You don't want to get to a comfortable place and stay there. I'm not saying anything you mind?"

"No. I don't think so, at least."

She glanced at him full for a moment as she said,

"I never think anything you'd mind, Ashley." Then she went on hastily. "But you must be prepared to see Bertie Jewett in great prosperity—a big house and so on—and to know it might all have been yours."

"I'm prepared for that," he said absently. He did not at all realise the things he was abandoning.

"But of course you'll get on. You'll be something better than rich."

"Perhaps, if I don't—don't play the fool."

"You keep calling yourself a fool to-day. Why do you? You're not a fool."

"It's only a way of speaking and not quite my own way, really," he laughed. "It means if I don't enjoy life a little instead of spoiling it all by trying to get something that isn't particularly well worth having; it means, in fact, if I don't allow scope to my artistic temperament." It meant also if he did not spend more days in the country with Ora Pinsent; for though he did not (as he had hinted) call that folly to himself, he was now on his defence against a world which would call it folly with no doubtful voice, and would exhort him earnestly to imitate Lord Bowdon's decisive measures of self-protection. It was in the power of this clear-sighted girl thus to put him on his defence, even in the full swing of his attraction towards Ora Pinsent; better than anyone, she could shew him the other side of the picture. He fell into a silence occupied with puzzled thoughts. She grew grave, except for a sober little smile; she was thinking that it was easy to be wise for others, for all the world except herself; while she was playing the judicial prudent friend to him, the idea of another part was in her head. There may be hope without expectation; it would not have been human in her to hope nothing from this talk in the garden, to build no fancies on it. But she rebuked her imagination; whatever it was that filled his mind—and his occasional air of distraction had caught her notice—she had little share in it, she knew that well.

"The talk at lunch was À propos," she said presently. "I'm going to call on Miss Pinsent this afternoon."

"You're going to call—?" The surprise was plain in his voice. This sudden throwing of the two together seemed an odd trick of circumstances! His tone brought her eyes quickly round to him and she looked at him steadily.

"Why not? She asked me. I told you so," she said. Ashley could not deny it; he shrugged his shoulders. "Shan't I like her?"

"Everybody must like her, I think," he answered, awkward, almost abashed. But then there came on him a desire to talk about Ora, not so much to justify himself as to tell another what she was, to exhibit her charm, to infect a hearer with his own fever. He contrived to preserve a cool tone, aiming at what might seem a dispassionate analysis of a fascination which everybody admitted to exist; but he was at once too copious and too happy in his description and his images. The girl beside him listened with that little smile; it could not be merry, she would not let it grow bitter, but schooled it to the neutrality of polite attention. She soon saw the state of his mind and the discovery was hard for her to bear. Yet it was not so hard as if he had come to tell her of an ordinary attachment, of a decorous engagement to some young lady of their common acquaintance, and of a decorous marriage to follow in due course. Then she would have asked, "Why her and not me?" With Ora Pinsent no such question was possible. Neither for good nor for evil could any comparison be drawn. And another thought crept in, although she did not give it willing admittance. Ora was not only exceptional; she was impossible. Impossibility might be nothing to him now, but it could not remain nothing forever. The pain was there, but the disaster not irrevocable. Among the somewhat strange chances which had marked the life of Mr. Fenning there was now to be reckoned a certain shamefaced comfort which he all unwittingly afforded to Alice Muddock. But Alice was not proud of the alliance.

Ashley broke off in a mixture of remorse and embarrassment. His description could not be very grateful to its hearer; it must have come very near to betraying its utterer. Alice did not pretend that it left her quite in the dark; she laughed a little and said jokingly:

"One would think you were in love with her. I suppose it's that artistic temperament again. Well, this afternoon I'll look and see whether she's really all you say. The male judgment needs correction."

As their talk went on he perceived in her a brightening of spirits, a partial revival of serenity, a sort of relief; they came as a surprise to him. The lightness with which she now spoke of Ora appeared, to a large degree at least, genuine. He did not understand that she attributed to him, in more sincerity than her manner had suggested, the temper which had formed the subject of their half-serious half-jesting talk. Her impression of him did not make him less attractive to her; he was not all of the temper she blamed and feared; he had, she persuaded herself, just enough of it to save him from the purely ribbon-selling nature and (here came the point to which she fondly conducted herself) to give her both hope and patience in regard to her own relations with him. She could not help picturing herself as the fixed point to which he would, after his veerings, return in the end; meanwhile his share of the temperament excused the veerings. Lady Kilnorton had forced the game with entire apparent success, but Alice's quick eyes questioned the real completeness of that victory. She would play a waiting game. There was no question of an orthodox marriage with the young lady from over the way or round the corner, an arrangement which would have been odious in its commonplace humiliation and heart-breaking in its orderly finality. But Ora Pinsent was not a finality, any more than she was the embodiment of an orderly arrangement. That fortunate impossibility which attached to her, by virtue of Jack Fenning's existence, forbade despair, just as her fascination and her irresistibility seemed to prevent humiliation and lessen jealousy. The thing was a transient craze, such as men fell into; it would pass. If she joined her life to Ashley Mead's she was prepared (so she assured herself) for such brief wanderings of allegiance, now and then; as time went on, they would grow fewer and fewer, until at last she conquered altogether the tendency towards them. "And she must be ten years older than I am," her reflections ended; that the real interval was but seven did not destroy the importance of the point.

Having offered Ashley a lift to Piccadilly, she went off to get ready, and presently Bowdon, who had called to pick up Irene, strolled into the garden for a cigarette.

"Hullo, what are you doing here? You ought to be making your living," he cried good-humouredly.

"I've been throwing it away instead," said Ashley. "Should you like to be a partner in Muddock and Mead?"

"A sleeping one," said Bowdon with a meditative pull at his moustache.

Ashley explained that he would have been expected to take an active part. Bowdon evidently thought that he ought to have been glad to take any part, and rebuked him for his refusal.

"Take the offer and marry the girl," he counselled. "She'd have you all right, and she seems a very good sort."

"I don't feel like settling down all of a sudden," said Ashley with a smile.

They walked side by side for a few paces; then Bowdon remarked,

"Depend upon it, it's a good thing to do, though."

"It's a question of the best date," said Ashley, much amused at his companion. "Now at your age, Lord Bowdon—"

"Confound you, Ashley, I'm not a hundred! I say it's a good thing to do. And, by Jove, when it means a lump of money too!"

A pause followed; they walked and smoked in silence.

"Good creatures, women," remarked Bowdon.

Ashley did not find the remark abrupt; he traced its birth. Alice had left much the same impression behind her in his mind.

"Awfully," he answered; there was in his voice also a note of remorse, of the feeling that comes when we cannot respond to a kindness so liberally as it deserves.

"Of course they aren't all alike, though," pursued Bowdon, as though he were reasoning out an intricate subject and coming on unexpected conclusions. "In fact they differ curiously, wonderfully."

His thoughts had passed, or were passing, from Irene Kilnorton to Ora Pinsent; obedient to this guidance Ashley's followed in a parallel track from Alice Muddock to Ora Pinsent.

"They're charming in different ways," said he with a slight laugh. Bowdon shewed no signs of mirth; he was frowning a little and smoked rather fast.

"And men are often great asses," he observed a few moments later. Again Ashley had kept pace, but his face was more doubtful than his companion's and there was hesitation in his voice as he replied,

"Yes, I suppose they are."

This subterranean conversation, shewing above ground only faint indications of what it really meant to each of the talkers, had carried them to the end of the garden. Turning round at the fence, they saw Irene and Alice walking towards them, side by side. Both ladies were well dressed, Irene rather brilliantly, Alice with quiet, subdued good taste; both seemed attractive, Irene for her bright vivacity and merry kindness, Alice for her strength of regard and a fine steady friendliness. A man who was fortunate enough to gain either of them would win a wife of whom he might justly be proud when he talked with the enemy in the gate, and moreover would enjoy an unusually good prospect of being happy in his own house. The man who had won one, and the man who could, if he would, win the other, approached them in a slow leisurely stroll.

"Yes, great asses," repeated Bowdon in a reflective tone.

"I didn't say we weren't," protested Ashley Mead with an irritated laugh.

They would have found a most heartfelt endorsement of the view which they reluctantly adopted, had Sir James Muddock known how small a share of Ashley's visit had been honestly devoted to a consideration of the advantages of a partnership in Muddock and Mead, and how much larger a part had been given to a subject concerning which Sir James could have only one opinion.