Barslett: Sept. 13.

My dearest Sarah,—I know how much you value my letters. I know more—how valuable my letters are to you. Only by letter (as I've mentioned before) can I come near telling you the truth. In your presence, no! For aren't you, your dear old stately self, in the end, a—(so glad there are hundreds of miles between us!)—a splendid semi-mendacity?

I have just answered Trix's brief note. Here I wrote just as I should have spoken: 'I'm sure you'll be so happy, dear,' above my breath; 'why, in Heaven's name, does she do it?' under the same. Trix was curt. She marries 'Airey Newton, the well-known inventor'! Little Peggy was rather more communicative; but Peggy is an enthusiast, and (politics apart) I see no use for the quality. 'The well-known inventor'! I never heard of the man. Ça n'empÊche pas, by all means. Shall we say 'Like to like'? Trix was rather a well-known inventor in her day and season—which is the one from which we are all precariously recovering. (How's the marital liver?) I wonder if we've got to say 'Like to like' in any other way, Sarah? You are no philosopher. You abound in general rules, but haven't a shred of principle. I will instruct you in my old way. But first I must tell you that Audrey is positively improving. She coquetted the other night! The floor creaked, as it seemed to me, but it bore well; and she did it. The Trans-Euphratic is, as you are aware, active even in the dead season. I fancy the Trans-Euphratic helps Audrey. There are similarities, most especially in a certain slowness in getting under way. The Trans-Euphratic is going to get there. An American engineer who came down to Barslett the other day, and said he had always dreamed of such a place (he was sallow and thin), told me so. Audrey's going to get there too. Now isn't she? Don't say it's labour wasted!

I digress. Listen, then:—

Lord B.: Do you—er—know a Mr. Airey Newton—Newton, Viola?

Myself: Very slightly. Oh, you're thinking of——?

Lord B.: I saw it in the daily paper. (He means the 'Times'—he doesn't know of any others.)

Myself (hedging): Curious, isn't it?

Lord B.: It will possibly prove very suitable—possibly. As we grow old we learn to accept things, Viola.

Myself (looking young): I suppose we do, Lord B.

Lord B.: For my own part, I hope she will be happy.

Myself (murmuring): You're always so generous!

Lord B. (clearing his throat): I am happy to think that Mortimer has recovered his balance—balance, Viola.

Myself: He'd be nothing without it, would he, Lord B.? (This needed careful delivery, but it went all right.)

Lord B. (appreciative): You're perfectly correct, Viola. (Pause.) Should you be writing to Mrs. Trevalla, express my sincere wishes for her happiness.

Now, considering that Trix knocked him down, isn't he an old dear of a gentleman?

But Mortimer? A gentleman too, my dear—except that a man shouldn't be too thankful at being rid of a woman! He showed signs once of having been shaken up. They have vanished! This is partly the prospect of the Cabinet, partly the family, a little bit Audrey, and mainly—Me! I have deliberately fostered his worst respectabilities and ministered to his profoundest conceits. As a woman? I scorn the imputation. As a friend? I wouldn't take the trouble. As an aunt? I plead guilty. I had my purposes to serve. Incidentally I have obliterated Trix Trevalla. If he talks of her at all, it is as a converted statesman does of the time when he belonged to the opposite party (as most of them have). He vindicates himself, but is bound to admit that he needs vindication. He says he couldn't have done otherwise, but tells you with a shrug that you're not to take that too seriously.

Mortimer: We were fundamentally unsuited.

Myself (tactfully): She was. (What did I mean? Sheer, base flattery, Sarah!)

Mortimer: She had not our (waving arm)—our instincts.

Myself: I think I always told you so. [!!!]

Mortimer: I daresay. I would listen to nothing. I was very impetuous. (Bless him, Sarah!)

Myself: Well, it's hardly the time—— (Do wise people ever finish sentences, Sarah?)

Mortimer: It is a curious chapter. Closed, closed! By the way, do you know anything of this Airey Newton?

Myself: A distinguished inventor, I believe, Mortimer.

Mortimer: So the papers say. (He 'glances at' them all.) What sort of man is he?

Myself: Oh, I suppose she likes him. Bohemian, you know.

Mortimer: Ah, yes, Bohemian! (A reverie.) Bo-hem-i-an! Exactly!

Myself: Is that Audrey in her habit?

Mortimer: Yes, yes, of course. Bohemian, is he? Yes! Well, I mustn't keep her waiting.

That is how I behave. 'O limÈd soul that, struggling to be free'—gets other people more and more engaged! Tennyson, Sarah. And when they're quite engaged, whether it's in or out of the season, I'm going to Monte Carlo—for the same reason that the gentleman in the story travelled third, you know.

Oh, I must tell you one more thing. Running up to town the other day to get my hair—— I beg your pardon, Sarah! Running up to town the other day on business connected with the family estates (a mortgage on my life-interest in the settled funds—no matter), who should shake me by the hand but Miss Connie Fricker! Where had I met Miss Connie Fricker? Once—once only. And where, Sarah? Everywhere, unless I had withstood you to the face! And I don't know why I did, because she's rather amusing. In fact, at your house, dearest. Long ago, I admit. She has come on much in appearance, and she's going to marry Beaufort Chance. I know she is, because she says it—a weak reason in the case of most girls, but not in hers. Quod vult, valde vult. (A motto in one branch of our family, meaning 'She won't be happy till she gets it.') I am vaguely sorry for our Beaufort of days gone by. These occurrences, Sarah, prejudice one in favour of morality. She has gleaming teeth and dazzling eyes (reverse the adjectives, if you like), and she has also—may I say it?—she has also—a bust! She says darling Beaufort is positively silly about her. My impression is that darling Beaufort is handling a large contract. (Metaphor, Sarah, not slang. Same thing though, generally.) That man wanted a slave; he has got—well, I shall call on them after marriage. I spoke to her of Trix Trevalla. 'I thought she'd quite gone under,' says Connie. 'Under where?' would have been my retort; but I'm weakly, and I thought perhaps she'd slap me. It's as pure a case of buying and selling as was ever done, I suppose; and if the Frickers gave hard cash I think they've got the worst of the bargain.

What's the moral, Sarah? Not that it's any good asking you. One might as well philosophise to an Established Church (of which, somehow, you always remind me very much). 'Open your mouth and shut your eyes'—that's out of date. Our eyes are open, but we open our mouths all the wider. That's superficial! In the end, each to his own, Sarah. I don't mean that as you'd mean it, O Priestess of Precedence. But through perilous ways—and through the Barslett shrubberies by night, knocking down his lordship and half a dozen things besides—perhaps she has reached a fine, a fine—— Perhaps! I hope so, for she had a wit and a soul, Sarah; and—and I'll call on them after marriage. And if that little compound of love and mischief named Peggy Ryle doesn't find twenty men to worship her and one who won't mind it, men are not what they were and women have lost their prerogative. Which God forbid! But, as my lord here would say, 'The change appears to me—humbly appears to me—to be looming—looming, Viola.'

Fol-de-rol, Sarah! Scotland as misty and slaughterous as ever? You might be a little bit nice to Mrs. Airey Newton. You liked her, and she liked you. Yes, I know you! Pretences are vain! Sarah, you have a heart! J'accuse!

Yours,
V. B.

As on a previous occasion, Mrs. Bonfill ejaculated 'Tut!' But she added, 'I'm sure I wish no harm to poor Trix Trevalla.'

It is satisfactory to be able to add that society at large shared this point of view. It is exceedingly charitable towards people who are definitely and finally out of the running. Those in the race run all; they become much more popular when it is understood that they do not compete for a prize. There was a revulsion of feeling in Trix's favour when the word went round that she was irredeemably ruined and was going to throw herself away on a certain Airey Newton.

'Who is he?' asked Lady Glentorly, bewildered but ready to be benevolent.

'Excuse me, my dear, I'm really busy with the paper.'

If Trix's object had been to rehabilitate herself socially, she could have taken no more politic step than that of contracting an utterly insignificant marriage. 'Well, we needn't see anything of him,' said quite a number of people. It is always a comfort to be able to write off the obligations that other folks' marriages may seem to entail.

Mr. Fricker had one word to say.

'Avoid her virtues and imitate her faults, and you'll get on very well with your husband, Connie.'

'Oh, I don't want to hear anything more about her,' cried Connie defiantly.

His pensive smile came to Fricker's lips.

'These little fits of restiveness—I don't mean in you—are nothing, Connie? You said you could manage him.'

'So I can—if you won't say things when he's there.'

'I'm to blame,' said Fricker gravely. 'But I'm fond of you, Connie.'

She broke out violently, 'Yes, but you wish I'd been rather different!'

'Live and let live, Connie. When's the wedding-day?'

She came to him and kissed him. Her vexation did not endure. Her next confidence amused him.

'After all, I've only got to say "Trix," and he's as quiet as a lamb,' she whispered, with her glittering laugh.

It is hopelessly symptomatic of social obscurity to be dining in London in September—and that as a matter of course, and not by way of a snatch of food between two railway stations. Yet at the date borne at the top of Lady Blixworth's notepaper something more than a dinner, almost a banquet, celebrated in town an event which had taken place some hundreds of miles away. Lady Blixworth had blessed the interval between herself and her dearest Sarah, opining that it made for candour, not to say for philosophy. Something of the same notion seemed to move in Miles Childwick's brain.

'In electing to be married in the wilds of Wales,' he remarked as he lit his cigarette, 'our friends the Newtons have shown a consideration not only for our wardrobes—a point with which, I admit, I was preoccupied—but also for our feelings. Yet we, by subscribing a shilling each towards a wire, deliberately threw away the main advantage of the telegraphic system. We could have expressed our aspirations for sixpence; as it is, we were led into something perilously like discussion. Finally, at Mrs. John's urgent request, and in order not to have sixpence left on our hands, we committed ourselves to the audacious statement that we had foreseen it from the first.'

'So I did—since Airey's dinner,' declared Mrs. John stoutly.

'A delusion of your trade, Mrs. John. For my part I hope I have something better to do than go about foreseeing people's marriages.'

'Something different, old fellow,' Arty suggested, with an air of being anxious to guard the niceties of the language.

'I wonder if I could write a story about her,' mused Mrs. John, unusually talkative.

'I have so often told Mrs. John in print—anonymously, of course, because of our friendship—that she can't write a story about anything, that I sha'n't discuss the particular case. As a general principle, I object to books about failures. Manson, do you take an interest in humble tragedies?'

'Only in a brief marked two and one,' said Manson Smith.

'Exactly! Or in a par at seven-and-six.'

'Or perhaps in a little set of verses—thrown off,' murmured Arty Kane.

'Who's talking about tragedies?' called Peggy from the other end. 'Elfreda and Horace are splendidly happy. So will Trix and Airey be.'

'And—I am sorry to mention it,' smiled Tommy Trent, 'but the latter couple will also be uncommonly well off.'

'The only touch of poetry the thing ever had, gone out of it!' grumbled Arty resentfully.

'Listen to the voice of the Philistine!' advised Miles, pointing at Tommy. 'For the humiliating reason that he's generally right.'

'No!' ejaculated Mrs. John firmly.

'That is, we shall all come to think him right. Time will corrupt us. We shall sink into marriage, merit, middle age, and, conceivably, money. In a few years we sha'n't be able to make out for the lives of us what the dickens the young fools do want.'

'Is this a sÉance?' demanded Arty Kane indignantly. 'If the veil of the future is going to be lifted, I'm off home.'

'Fancy bothering about what we shall be in ten years!' cried Peggy scornfully, 'when such a lot of fine things are sure to happen in between! Besides, I don't believe that anything of the sort need happen at all.'

The idea rather scandalised Mrs. John. It seemed to cut at the root of a scientific view of life—a thing that she flattered herself might with due diligence be discovered in her published, and was certainly to be developed in her projected, works.

'Experience, dear Peggy——' she began, with a gently authoritative air.

Miles laid a firm hand on her wrist and poured her out some more champagne; this action might be construed as an apology for his interruption. At any rate he offered no other: after all, Mrs. John was accustomed to that.

'Experience, dear Peggy—to adopt the form of expression used by my honourable friend, which commends itself to all sections of the House—(you mustn't laugh when you're complimented, Peggy!) experience, dear Peggy, enjoys two significations—first, the things that happen; secondly, what you or I may be pleased to think they mean. I have no remedy ready on the spot for the first; the cure for the second is very simple, as many great men have pointed out.'

'What is it?' asked Mrs. John rebelliously.

'Don't think so, Mrs. John.'

'What, reconstruct all your theories——?'

'Now did I say anything of the kind?' he demanded despairingly.

Peggy leant forward with eager eyes.

'Stop!' interposed Arty Kane imperiously. 'I will not be told any more that the world is full of happiness. It's nothing to me one way or the other if it is, and there's an end of it.'

Peggy leant back again, smiling at Tommy Trent.

'Any other point of view would be ungracious to our friends to-night,' said Tommy with a laugh. It appeared rather as though it would be unsuited to his own mood also.

'One thing at least we may be sure of,' said Miles, summing up the discussion with a friendly smile. 'We shall none of us do, or be, or feel, at all approximately what we think we shall. You may say what you like, but there's plenty of excitement in it. Unless you're dull yourself, there's no dulness in it.'

'No, there's no dulness in it,' said Peggy Ryle. 'That is the one thing to be said.'

Would Lady Blixworth have echoed that from Barslett? She would have denied it vigorously in words; but could anything be dull so long as one had brains to see the dulness—and a Sarah Bonfill to describe it to?

Peggy walked off home with Tommy. Nobody questioned, or seemed inclined to question, that arrangement now. Even Miles Childwick looked on with a smile, faintly regretful perhaps, yet considerably amused. He linked his arm in Arty Kane's and the two walked along the Strand, discussing the permutations of human feeling. There seems no need to follow their disquisition on such a well-worn subject. It is enough to catch a fragment from Miles. 'The essence being reciprocity——' was all a news-vendor got for his offer of the late edition.

'It's far too fine to drive,' Peggy declared, picking her way round a small puddle or two, left by a goodly summer shower. 'Have you plenty of time?'

'Time enough to walk with you.'

She put her arm in his. 'So that's all over!' she said regretfully. 'At least, I don't see how Trix is going to do anything else that's at all sensational.'

'I should think she doesn't want to,' said Tommy soberly.

'No, but——' She turned her laughing face to him. 'When is something else going to begin, Tommy? I'm all ready for adventures. I've spent all my money——'

'You've spent——?'

'Now don't pretend to be surprised—it's all gone in frocks, and presents, and things. But—— Why, you never asked me where I got my necklace!'

'If you wore the Koh-i-Noor should I ask you where you got it?'

'Airey sent it to me to-day. I refused it from him before, but to-day I'm going to keep it. Because of what it means to him, you know.' She pushed her cloak a little aside and fingered the pearls. 'Yes, the money's all gone,' she went on, rather pleased apparently; 'and there's no more from poor dear uncle, and—and Airey Newton won't live in Danes Inn any longer!'

Tommy was silent; he was not silent altogether without an effort, but silent he was. She pressed his arm for a moment.

'Will you be promoted to Airey Newton's place?' she asked.

'But why only tea?' said Tommy.

She waited a little before she answered.

'What should you say,' she asked at last, 'if I ever changed?' She did not tell him from what: in words she had never told him, and in words he had never asked.

'I should wait for you to change back again,' said he. Was he the man that in Lady Blixworth's opinion the situation needed?

Peggy was eager in her explanation, but she seemed a little puzzled too.

'I know how much it is to ask,' she said, 'and there's no bond, no promise from you. But somehow it seems to me that I must see some more. Oh, there it all is, Tommy—waiting, waiting! Trix has made me feel that more and more. Was she all wrong? I don't know. Airey was there in the end, you see. And now there are all sorts of things behind her, making—making a background to it. I don't want all she's had; but, Tommy, I want some more.'

He heard her with a sober smile; if there were a touch of sadness in it, there was understanding too. They had come to her door in Harriet Street, and she stopped on the threshold.

'I sha'n't starve. You'll be there at tea-time,' said she with an appealing smile.

His man's feeling was against her. It was, perhaps, too much to ask of him that he should sympathise fully with her idea; he saw its meaning, but its meaning could not be his ideal. He would have taken her now at once, when, as his thoughts put it, the bloom was fresh and she had rubbed so little against the world. The instinct in her and the longings which bore her the other way were strange to him.

She knew it; the timidity of her beseeching eyes told that she asked a great thing—a thing that must be taken on faith, and must try his faith. Yet she could not but ask. The life of to-day was not yet done. Coming now, the life of to-morrow would come too soon. Very anxiously she watched his struggle, perhaps with an undefined yet not uncertain apprehension that its issue would answer the question whether he were in truth the man to whom she must come back, whether they two would in the end make terms and live as one. What her heart asked was, Could freedom and love be reconciled? Else, which must go to the wall? She feared that she might be forced to answer that question. Or would he spare it her?

Another moment wore away. His brows were knit into a frown; he did not look at her. Her eyes were on his, full of contending feelings—of trust and love for him, of hope for herself, it may be of a little shame that she must put him to such a trial. At last he turned to her and met her gaze with a friendly cheerful smile.

'Go out into the world and have your fling, Peggy. Take your heart and mine with you; but try to bring them both back to me.'

She caught his hand in hers, delighted that she could go, enraptured that his face told her that he trusted her to go.

'Yes,' she whispered, 'I shall come back with both, because, Tommy, you have such great, great faith in me. I shall come back. But'—her voice rose again in untrammelled gaiety—'But go I must for a little while. There's so much to see!'

THE END

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