A YOUNG woman bred to a material view of the cosmos and self-trained to cynical expression of her opinions may thoroughly persuade herself that marriage is a social bargain in which it would be absurd for sentiment to have a place, and yet when the hour comes for deciding on so trivial an engagement, may find herself in an irritatingly unequable frame of mind. For Norma the hour had all but arrived. Morland King had asked to see her alone in view of an important conversation. She had made an appointment for ten o'clock, throwing over her evening's engagements. Her parents were entertaining a couple of friends in somebody else's box at the opera, and would return in time to save the important conversation from over-tediousness. She intended to amuse herself placidly with a novel until King's arrival.

This was a week or two after her encounter with Jimmie at the picture-gallery, since which occasion she had neither seen nor heard of him. He had faded from the surface of a consciousness kept on continued strain by the thousand incidents and faces of a London season. To Jimmie the series of meetings had been a phenomenon of infinite import. She had come like a queen of romance into his homely garden, and her radiance lingered, making the roses redder and the grass more green. But the queenly apparition herself had other things to think about, and when she had grown angry and called him a fool, had dismissed him definitely from her mind. It was annoying therefore that on this particular evening the fool phrase should buzz again in her ears.

She threw down her book and went on to the balcony, where, on this close summer night, she could breathe a little cool air. A clock somewhere in the house chimed the half-hour. Morland was to come at ten. She longed for, yet dreaded, his coming; regretted that she had stayed away from the opera, where, after all, she could have observed the everlasting human comedy. She had dined early; the evening had been interminable; she felt nervous, and raged at her weakness. She was tired, out of harmony with herself, fretfully conscious too of the jarring notes in a room furnished by uneducated people of sudden wealth. The Wolff-Salamons, out of the kindness of their shrewd hearts, had offered the house for the season to the Hardacres, who had accepted the free quarters with profuse expressions of gratitude; which, however, did not prevent Mr. Hardacre from railing at the distance of the house (which was in Holland Park) from his club, or his wife from deprecating to her friends her temporary residence in what she was pleased to term the Ghetto. Nor did the Wolff-Salamons' generosity mitigate the effect of their furniture on Norma's nerves. When Jimmie's phrase came into her head with the suddenness of a mosquito, she could bear the room no longer.

She sat on the balcony and waited for Morland. There at least she was free from the flaring gold and blue, and the full-length portrait of the lady of the house, on which with delicate savagery the eminent painter had catalogued all the shades of her ancestral vulgarity. Perhaps it was this portrait that had brought back the irony of Jimmie's tribute. The poem of her life! She sat with her chin on her palm, thinking bitterly of circumstance. She had never been happy, had grown to disbelieve in so absurd and animal a state. It had always been the same, as far back as she could remember. Her childhood: nurses and governesses—a swift succession of the latter till she began to regard them as remote from her inner life as the shop girl or railway guard with whom she came into casual contact. The life broken by visits abroad to fashionable watering or gambling places where she wandered lonely and proud, neglected by her parents, watching with keen eyes and imperturbable face the frivolities, the vices, the sordidnesses, taking them all in, speculating upon them, resolving some problems unaided and storing up others for future elucidation. Her year at the expensive finishing school in Paris where the smartest daughters of America babbled and chattered of money, money, till the air seemed unfit for woman to breathe unless it were saturated with gold dust. As hers was not, came discontent and overweening ambitions. Yet the purity was not all killed. She remembered her first large dinner-party. The same Lord Wyniard of the unclean scandal had taken her down. He was thirty years older than she, and an unsavoury reputation had reached even her young ears. The man regarded her with the leer of a satyr. She realised with a shudder for the first time the meaning of a phrase she had constantly met with in French novels—“il la dÉvÊtit de ses yeux.” His manner was courtly, his air of breeding perfect; yet he managed to touch her fingers twice, and he sought to lead her on to dubious topics of conversation. She was frightened.

In the drawing-room, seeing him approach, she lost her head, took shelter with her mother, and trembling whispered to her, “Don't let that man come and talk to me again, mother, he's a beast.” She was bidden not to be a fool. The man had a title and twenty thousand a year, and she had evidently made an impression. A week afterwards her mother invited a bishop and his wife and Lord Wyniard to dinner, and Lord Wyniard took Norma down again. And that was her start in the world. She had followed the preordained course till now, with many adventures indeed by the way, but none that could justify the haunting phrase—the poem of her life!

Was the man such a fool, after all? Was it even ignorance on his part? Was it not, rather, wisdom on a lofty plane immeasurably above the commonplaces of ignorance and knowledge? The questions presented themselves to her vaguely. She was filled with a strange unrest, a craving for she knew not what. Yet she would shortly have in her grasp all—or nearly all—that she had aimed at in life. She counted the tale of her future possessions—houses, horses, diamonds, and the like. She seemed to have owned them a thousand years.

The clock in the house chimed ten in a pretentious musical way, which irritated her nerves. The silence after the last of the ten inexorable tinkles fell gratefully. Then she realised that in a minute or two Morland would arrive. Her heart began to beat, and she clasped her hands together in a nervous suspense of which she had not dreamed herself capable. A cab turned the corner of the street, approached with crescendo rattle, and stopped at the house. She saw Morland alight and reach up to pay the cabman. For a silly moment she had a wild impulse to cry to him over the balcony to go away and leave her in peace. She waited until she heard the footman open the front door and admit him, then bracing herself, she entered the drawing-room, looked instinctively in a mirror, and sat down.

She met him cordially enough, returned his glance somewhat defiantly. The sight of him, florid, sleek, faultlessly attired, brought her back within the every-day sphere of dulled sensation. He held her hand long enough for him to say, after the first greeting:

“You can guess what I've come for, can't you?”

“I suppose I do,” she admitted in an off-hand way. “You will find frankness one of my vices. Won't you sit down?”

She motioned him to a chair, and seating herself on a sofa, prepared to listen.

“I've come to ask you to marry me,” said King.

“Well?” she asked, looking at him steadily.

“I want to know how it strikes you,” he continued after a brief pause. “I think you know practically all that I can tell you about myself. I can give you what you want up to about fifteen thousand a year—it will be more when my mother dies. We're decent folk—old county family—I can offer you whatever society you like. You and I have tastes in common, care for the same things, same sort of people. I'm sound in wind and limb—never had a day's illness in my life, so you would n't have to look after a cripple. And I'd give the eyes out of my head to have you; you know that. How does it strike you?”

Norma had averted her glance from him towards the end of his speech, and leaning back was looking intently at her hands in her lap. For the moment she felt it impossible to reply. The words that had formulated themselves in her mind, “I think, Mr. King, the arrangement will be eminently advantageous to both parties,” were too ludicrous in their adequacy to the situation. So she merely sat silent and motionless, regarding her manicured finger-nails, and awaiting another opening. King changed his seat to the sofa, by her side, and leaned forward.

“If you had been a simpler, more unsophisticated girl, Norma, I should have begun differently. I thought it would please you if I put sentiment aside.”

Her head motioned acquiescence.

“But I'm not going to put it aside,” he went on. “It has got its place in the world, even when a man makes a proposal of marriage. And when I say I'm in love with you, that I have been in love with you since the first time I saw you, it's honest truth.”

“Say you have a regard, a high regard, even,” said Norma, still not looking at him, “and I'll believe you.”

“I'm hanged if I will,” said Morland. “I say I'm in love with you.”

Norma suddenly softened. The phrase tickled her ears again—this time pleasantly. The previous half-hour's groping in the dark of herself seemed to have resulted in discovery. She gave him a fleeting smile of mockery.

“Listen,” she said. “If you will be contented with regard, a high regard, on my side, I will marry you. I really like you very much. Will that do?”

“It is all I ask now. The rest will come by and by.”

“I'm not so sure. We had better be perfectly frank with each other from the start, for we shall respect each other far more. Anyhow, if you treat me decently, as I am sure you will, you may be satisfied that I shall carry out my part of the bargain. My bosom friends tell one another that I am worldly and heartless and all that—but I've never lied seriously or broken a promise in my life.”

“Very well. Let us leave it at that,” said Morland. “I suppose your people will have no objection?”

“None whatever,” replied Norma, drily.

“When can I announce our engagement?”

“Whenever you like.”

He took two or three reflective steps about the room and reseated himself on the sofa.

“Norma,” he said softly, bending towards her, “I believe on such occasions there is a sort of privilege accorded to a fellow—may I?”

She glanced at him, hesitated, then proffered her cheek. He touched it with his lips.

The ceremony over, there ensued a few minutes of anticlimax. Norma breathed more freely. There had been no difficulties, no hypocrisies. The mild approach to rapture on Morland's part was perhaps, after all, only a matter of common decency, to be accepted by her as a convention of the scÈne À faire. So was the kiss. She broke the spell of awkwardness by rising, crossing the room, and turning off an electric pendant that illuminated the full-length portrait on the wall.

“We can't stand Mrs. Wolff-Salamon's congratulations so soon,” she said with a laugh.

Conversation again became possible. They discussed arrangements. King suggested a marriage in the autumn. Norma, with a view to the prolongation of what appealed to her as a novel and desirable phase of existence—maidenhood relieved of the hateful duty of husband-hunting and unclouded by parental disapprobation—pleaded for delay till Christmas. She argued that in all human probability the Parliamentary vacancy at Cosford, the safe seat on which Morland reckoned, would occur in the autumn, and he could not fix the date of an election at his own good pleasure. He must, besides, devote his entire energy to the business; time enough when it was over to think of such secondary matters as weddings, bridal tours, and the setting up of establishments.

“But you have to be considered, Norma,” he said, half convinced.

“My dear Morland,” she replied with a derisive lip, “I should never dream of coming between you and your public career.”

He reflected a moment. “Why should we not get married at once?”

Norma laughed. “You are positively pastoral! No, my dear Morland, that's what the passionate young lover always says to the coy maiden in the play, but if you will remember, it does n't seem to work even there. Besides, you must let me gratify my ambitions. When I was very young, I vowed I would marry an emperor. Then I toned him down into a prince. Later, becoming more practical, I dreamed of a peer. Finally I descended to a Member of Parliament. I can't marry you before you are a Member.”

“You could have had dozens of 'em for the asking, I'm sure,” returned the prospective legislator with a grin. “Take them all round, they're a shoddy lot.”

He yielded eventually to Norma's proposal, alluding, however, with an air of ruefulness, to the infinite months of waiting he would have to endure. Tactfully she switched him off the line of sentiment to that of soberer politics. She put forward the platitude that a Parliamentary life was one of great interest. Morland did not rise even to this level of enthusiasm.

“'Pon my soul, I really don't know why I'm going in for it. I promised old Potter years ago that I would come in when he gave up, and the people down there more or less took it for granted, the duchess included, and so without having thought much of it one way or the other, I find myself caught in a net. It will be a horrible bore. The whole of the session will be one dismal yawn. Never to be certain of sitting down to one's dinner in peace and comfort. Never to know when one will have to rush off at a moment's notice to take part in a confounded division. To have shoals of correspondence on subjects one knows nothing of and cares less for. It will be the life of a sweated tailor. And I, of all people, who like to take things easy! I'm not quite sure whether I'm an idiot or a hero.”

He ended in a short laugh and leaned against the mantelpiece, his hands in his pockets.

“It would be the sweet and pretty thing for me to say,” remarked Norma, “that in my eyes you will always be heroic.”

“Well, 'pon my soul, I shall be. We 'll see precious little of one another.”

“We 'll have all the more chance of prolonging our illusions,” she replied.

On the whole, however, her conduct towards him was irreproachable. The thaw from her usual iciness to this comparatively harmless raillery flattered the lover's self-esteem. Woman-wise, as every man in the profundity of his vain heart believes himself to be, he not only attributed the change to his own powers of seduction, but interpreted as significant of a yet greater transformation. A man of Morland's type is seldom afflicted with a morbid subtlety of perception; and when he has gained for his own personal use and adornment a woman of singular distinction, he may be readily pardoned for a slight attack of fatuity.

The idyllic hour was brought to a close by the return of Norma's parents. As Norma, shrinking from the vulgarity of the prearranged scene and intolerable maternal coaching in her part, had not informed them of her appointment with Morland, alleging as an excuse for not going to the opera a disinclination to be bored to tears by Aida, they were mildly surprised by his presence in the house at so late an hour. In a few words he acquainted them with what had taken place. He formally asked their consent. Mr. Hardacre wrung his hand fervently. Mrs. Hardacre's steel-grey eyes glittered welcome into her family. She turned to her dear child and expressed her heartfelt joy. Norma, submissive to conventional decencies, suffered herself to be kissed. Mother and daughter had given up kissing as a habit for some years past, though they practised it occasionally before strangers. Mr. Hardacre put his arm around her in a diffident way and patted her back, murmuring incoherent wishes for her happiness. Everything to be said and done was effected in a perfectly well-bred manner. Norma spoke very little, regarding the proceedings with an impersonal air of satiric interest. At last Mr. Hardacre suggested to Morland a chat over whisky and soda and a cigar in the library. In unsophisticated circles it is not unusual at such a conjuncture for a girl's friends and relations to afford the lovers some unblushing opportunity of bidding each other a private farewell. Norma, anticipating any such possible though improbable departure from sanity on the part of her parents, made good her escape after shaking hands in an ordinary way with Morland. Mrs. Hardacre followed her upstairs, eager to learn details, which were eventually given with some acidity by her daughter, and the two men retired below.

“My boy,” said Mr. Hardacre, as they parted an hour afterwards, “you will find that Norma has had the training that will make her a damned fine woman.”