Front matter (continued 2)

“Oh, the Life! Are you really going to attempt a Life?” Miss Howe recovered herself with a laugh, while Mr. Flood repeated curiously—

“Yes, but then what were you after, Anita? What do you stand to gain?”

“Reflected glory,” came from behind him.

She turned as if she had been stung.

“Reflected? Let her keep it! Reflected? Am I never to have anything of my own? Oh, wait!”

“You can’t get much of yourself into a life of Madala Grey though. You’ve too much sense of style for that,” Mr. Flood insisted. “We both hate a biographer who ‘I says, says I.’”

“Oh, it shall be all Madala Grey. I promise you that,” she said with her thin smile.

“Humph! It’s a notion.” Miss Howe was really interested, I could see—yet with a flush on her cheek still. “It’s your sort of work too, Anita! You’re—happier—in critical work.”

“Oh, don’t hedge. Don’t be delicate with me. I can’t create, that’s what you mean. Do you think that’s news to me? Is there a critic who has failed to make it clear to me? I can record—but I can’t create. Good! I can’t create. I can’t do what she did—what you do, Jasper—what even Beryl here does. But——” she paused an instant, “you should be afraid of me for all that. I can pry. Little, nasty, mean word, isn’t it? It’s me!”

The Baxter girl laughed uncertainly and then stopped because Anita’s eyes were on her.

“I’ve eyes. I”—she opened and shut her tiny hands before them—“I’ve claws. I can pry you open, any of you—if I choose. I haven’t chosen. You’ve not been worth while. But—Madala!” and here she released the uneasy Baxter girl—“Madala’s my chance—my chance—my chance! Madala Grey—look at her—coming into her kingdom at twenty—that babe! And me! Look at me! Do you know what my life has been, any of you? Oh, you come to my house to meet my lionets, and we’re very good friends, and you’re afraid of my reviews, and so I have my position, I suppose. But what do you know about me? When I was fifteen—and it’s thirty years ago—I said to myself, ‘Now what shall I do with my life?’ Mother—” she shot her a glance: she didn’t even trouble to lower her voice, “she’d have drudged me and dressed me and married me, I suppose, to three hundred a year and the city—oh, with the best of motives. I fought. I fought. That’s why I’m an ungrateful daughter. I’m supposed to be, I think. My people were so sorry for my mother. My people thought me a fool. I saw through them. Yes, and I saw through myself. That’s the kind of a fool I was. Didn’t I reckon it out? I hadn’t a charm. I hadn’t a talent. I had my will. That’s all I had. I taught myself. Work? You don’t know what work means, you ten and five-talented. There’s not a book worth reading that I haven’t read. There’s not the style of a master that I haven’t studied, that I couldn’t reproduce at a pinch. There’s not a man or a woman in London today, worth knowing—from my point of view—that I haven’t contrived to know. The people who’ve arrived—how I’ve studied them, the ways of them, the methods of them. And what’s the end of it all? That” —she jerked her head to the row of her own books on the shelf behind her—“and my column in the Matins, and some comforting hundreds a year, and—my knowledge of myself. Oh, I’ve turned out good work. I know that. I have judgment. That’s why I judge myself. I’ve always been rigid with myself. And so I know when I look at my books—though I can say that they are sounder, better work, in better English, that they have more knowledge behind them, than the books of a dozen of you people who arrive—yet I know that they have failed. People don’t read me. People don’t want me. Why? I have my name. I’ve the name of a well-known critic, but—I’m only a name. I’m not alive. The public doesn’t touch hands with me. Now why? Oh, how I’ve tormented myself. Nearly thirty years I’ve given, of unremitting labour, to my art, to my career. There’s not a thought or a wish that I haven’t sacrificed to it. And then that child of twenty comes along, without knowledge, without training, without experience, and gets at one leap, mark you all, at one leap, more than I’ve achieved in thirty years. Some people, I suppose, would submit. Well, I won’t. I wouldn’t. Does my will go for nothing? I will have my share. ‘Reflected glory,’ yes, I’ve stooped to that. I’ve exploited her, if you like to call it that. When I think of the day I discovered her——” She paused an instant, dragging her hand wearily over her eyes—“I was at my zero that day. The Famous Women had been out a week. The reviews—oh, the reviews! Respectful, courteous, lukewarm. If they’d attacked me, if they’d slated, I’d have rejoiced. But they respect me and they’re bored. They know it’s sound work and they’re bored. I bore people. I bore you—all of you. Do you think I’m blind? That night I read the manuscript of Eden Walls. (Wasn’t it kind of me—it wasn’t even typed!) And then I saw my chance. I saw how far she’d got at twenty, and I thought—‘I’ll take my chance. I’ll take this genius. I’ll make her fond of me. I’ll help her. I’ll worm myself into her. I’ll abase myself. I’ll toady. I’ll do anything. But I will find out how she does it. I will find out the secret. I’ll find it and I’ll make it my own. I’ll serve for her as Jacob served for Rachel; but she shall serve me in the end.’ I have watched. I have studied. I have puzzled. I believe I’ve grasped it at last. I know myself and I know her. If genius is life—the power to give life—is it that?—then I’m barren. I can’t make life as Madala can. But—listen to me! Listen to me, all of you! I can take a living thing—I can cut it open alive. That’s what I shall do with this life-maker—this easy genius. I’ve taken her to pieces, flesh and blood, bone and ligament and muscle, every secret of her mind and her heart and her soul. The life, the real life of Madala Grey, the rise and fall of a genius, that’s what I’m going to make plain. She’s been a puzzle to you all, with her gifts and her ways and her crazy marriage—she’s not a mystery to me. I tell you I’ve got her, naked, pinned down, and now I shall make her again. Isn’t it fair? She ought to thank me. ‘Dead,’ he says. Who’s to blame? She chose to kill herself. What right had she to take risks? I—I’ve refrained. She couldn’t. She threw away her lamp. But I—I take it. I light it again. Finding’s keeping. It’s mine.”

Her voice ripped on the high note like a rag on a nail, and she checked, panting. Her hand went up to her throat as the fumy air rasped it.

“Mine!” she cried again, coughing. There was wild-fire in her eyes as she challenged them.

The little space between her solitariness and their grouped attention was filled with fog and silence and lamp-light, woven as it were into a fifth element. It was like a pool to be crossed. And across it, in answer, a laugh rippled out.

I don’t know who it was that laughed. I did not recognize the voice. Sometimes, looking back, I think it was the laugh of their collective soul.

“Oh!” cried Anita, and stopped as if she had been awakened suddenly by a blow—as if the little wondering, wincing cry had been struck out of her by a blow on the face. She stood thus a moment, uncertain. Then she, too, laughed, nervously, apologetically.

“One talks,” she said, “among friends.”

Miss Howe made a wry face.

“Lord, we’re a queer set of friends! How we love one another!”

“You’ve all of you been awfully good to me,” said the Baxter girl. But her gratitude was too general to be acceptable. Even I could have told her that.

“Oh, we do our best for you,” said Mr. Flood.

She looked at him from under her lashes.

“Yes, and she’s thinking this minute what a nice little scene this would make for her new book—touched up, of course,” said the woman behind him.

“Art—selection—Jimmy Whistler——” Mr. Flood was one indistinct murmur.

“With herself her own heroine again, eh?” Miss Howe baited her.

“I didn’t. I wasn’t.”

“Better folk than you do it, child! Anita says so. Don’t they, Anita?”

“Oh,” said Anita heavily, “I wish Madala Grey were here. I wish she hadn’t died. If she were here she wouldn’t—you’d never—she wouldn’t let you laugh at me.”

Miss Howe looked at her intently. There was a quick little run of expression across her large handsome face, like a hand playing a scale. It showed, that easily moved, easily read face, surprise, interest, concern, and, in the end, the sentimental impulse of your kind fur-clad woman to the beggar on the curb. ‘Why! I believe she’s cold! I don’t like it! Give her tuppence, quick!’ She was out of her chair, overwhelming Anita, in one impetuous heave of drapery.

“You’re right, Nita! We’re pigs! Something’s wrong with us. ’Pologize. You know we don’t mean it.”

Anita endured her right-and-left kisses.

“You do mean it,” was all she said.

She was shrunk to such a small grey creature again. I thought to myself—‘Fire? It’s not even diamond-sparkle. She’s as dull as stone.’

Miss Howe was eagerly remorseful.

“We don’t. I don’t know what’s got into us tonight. It’s the fog. There’s something evil about a fog. Distorting. It yellows over one’s soul.”

“It isn’t only tonight,” said the Baxter girl, with her sidelong, ‘can-I-risk-it?’ look at them. “The fog’s been coming on for months.”

“And you mean——?” The blonde lady never snubbed the Baxter girl. It struck me suddenly, as their eyes met, that there was the beginning of a likeness between them. The Baxter girl at fifty—with dyed hair——? But it was only an idea of mine. I’m always seeing imaginary likenesses. I remember that those Academy pictures of Kent Rehan’s always set me to work wondering—‘That woman with the face turned away—I’ve seen her somewhere—of whom does she remind me?—where have I seen her?’ And yet, of course, in those days I knew nothing of Madala Grey.

But the Baxter girl was answering—

“It—it’s cheek, I know, but it’s true. When I first came—” then, with a swift propitiatory glance at Anita—“when you first let me come—the Nights weren’t like this. You weren’t like this, any of you——”

“Upon—my—word!” said Miss Howe with her benevolent chuckle. “Nita! Listen to the infant!”

“Like what?” Mr. Flood moved uneasily.

The Baxter girl turned to him enthusiastically.

“Oh, I used to think you such wonderful people——”

“Did you now?” Miss Howe teased her.

“Let be! let be!” said Mr. Flood impatiently. “Well, dear lady?”

“Oh, I did! I’d read all your stuff. I believe I could write out The Orchid House from memory still.”

His eyes lit up as he challenged her—

“‘Sour!’ said the fox at her feet,

‘How can she ripen windy-high?

Sour!’ said the fox with his nose to the sky—”

He was as pleased as a child with a toy when she capped it—

“Then a grape dropped off. It was rotten sweet.

There!” she flushed at him triumphantly. And then—“Now did you mean——? Who was in your mind? Were they anyone we know? I’ve always wanted to ask you.”

But before he could answer her the blonde lady leaned forward and whispered in his ear. He turned to her with a glance of interest and amusement, but with his lips still moving and his mind still running on an answer to the Baxter girl. The blonde lady whispered again, and then he turned right round to answer her, shelving his arms on her knees. I couldn’t hear what they said, but it was just as if she had beckoned him into another room. He was withdrawn from the conversation and from the Baxter girl for as long as that blonde lady chose.

Miss Howe looked at them with her broad smile.

“Tell us, Beryl! We’re listening, anyhow!” she said invitingly.

But the Baxter girl’s chin went up. The touch of annoyance in her voice made it twang, made her commonness suddenly noticeable. She was bearable when she was in awe of them, but now she was asserting herself, and that meant that she was inclined to be noisy.

“Oh, my opinion doesn’t count, of course! But”—she swung like a pendulum between her two manners—“oh, I did enjoy myself at first. It was the way you all talked. You knew everyone. You’d read everything. You frothed adventures. Like champagne it was, meeting all the people. I used to write my head off, the week after. And you were all kind to me from the first. I suppose it was Madala. She never let one feel out of it. But I thought it was all of you. I had the feeling—‘the gods aren’t jealous gods.’ But now it’s”—she looked at them pertly—“it’s fog on Olympus.”

“You needn’t—honour us, you know, Beryl,” said Anita sharply.

She answered with her furtive look.

“I know. And I don’t think—I don’t want to come as much as I did.”

“In that case——” Anita ruffled up.

“Fog! Fog!” cried Miss Howe clapping her hands. And then—“All the same, Nita, people are dropping off. The Whitneys haven’t been for weeks. When did Roy Huth come last? And the Golding crowd? I marvel that he turns up still.” She nodded towards Kent Rehan. “Oh, you know, we’re like a row of beads when the string’s been pulled out. We lie in a line for a time, but a touch will send us rolling in all directions.”

“Yes,” said the Baxter girl vehemently, “the heart’s out of it somehow. I’m not ungrateful. It’s just because I used to love coming so.”

Miss Howe looked down at Anita, not unkindly.

“Give it up, Nita! The Nights have served their turn. It sounds ungracious, but things have to end sometime or other. Hasn’t the time come? Hasn’t it come tonight?”

“But you’ve been coming all this year just the same,” said Anita stubbornly.

Miss Howe shrugged her shoulders. It was the Baxter girl who answered—

“Ah, but there was always just a chance of seeing Madala.”

At that Anita, who had been sitting as steely stiff as a needle in a pin-cushion, got up, shaking off Miss Howe’s persuasive, detaining hand and the overflow of her skirts. The cushions tumbled after her on to the floor.

“As to that,” she said, “and don’t imagine that I haven’t known what you came for, all of you——”

“Eh?”

Her voice was sharp enough to have recalled anyone and it recalled Mr. Flood. He returned to the conversation with the air of dragging the blonde lady after him. She had the manner of one hanging back and protesting, and laughing still over some secret understanding. “Eh?” said he. “What’s that about Madala?”

Anita looked from one to another.

“I’m telling you,” she said. “I’ve told you already, I can give you Madala Grey. Come here and I’ll give you Madala Grey still. That’s what you want, isn’t it, to be amused? She amused you.”

“She did, bless her!” said Miss Howe.

“It was her brains,” said the Baxter girl.

“A beautiful creature,” said Mr. Flood slowly.

“Not she!” The lady behind him was smiling. “She made you think so. She made men think so. But how? That intrigued me. Oh, she was prettyish: but that was all. I used to watch her——”

“Envy?” said he.

“No, not envy,” said that woman slowly. “She was too—innocent—how could one envy? She didn’t know her own strength. She said—‘Don’t hurt me,’ with a sword at her side.”

“Excalibur.” It came from Mr. Flood. “Magic.”

“No, Madala—just Madala.” Miss Howe sighed. “It’s no good, Anita, you can’t give us back Madala.”

But my cousin, looking at them, laughed in her turn.

“Madala? You fools! You’ve never had her. But you shall! Oh, wait! My books are dull, aren’t they? Yet you’ll be here, you know, every month, thick as bees, to listen to me. A chapter a month, that’s all I’ll give to you. I don’t write three novels a year. But you’ll come, you’ll come. Proof? There’s plenty of proof. See here.”

She went swiftly across to the outer room. There was a large carved desk standing on the little table by the window. She picked it up. It was too big for her. It filled her arms so that she staggered under the weight.

“Oh, Kent!” she called.

He came back to the foggy room with a visible wrench.

“Here, that’s too heavy for you. Let me.” He took it from her.

“The table—here. Thank you, oh, thank you, Kent.” She veiled her voice as she spoke to him. “It’s heavy—it’s so full—books—papers——”

He put it down for her and nodded, and was straying away again when she stopped him.

“Kent! Don’t sit by yourself. We”—her voice was for him alone—“we’re talking about—her. I was going to show them—Kent, stay here with us.”

He waited while she talked to him. And she talked very sweetly and kindly. She was the quiet, chiffony little creature again with the pretty, pure voice. I couldn’t make her out. She looked up at him and said something too low for me to catch, and then—

“There’s your chair. Isn’t that always your chair?” And so left him and turned to the table and the box and the others.

But he did not take the saddle-bag near Anita’s own seat. He looked irresolutely from one to another of the group that watched Anita fumbling with her keys. He looked, and his face softened, at Great-aunt, muttering over her needles. He looked at the empty chair beside me. He looked at me and found me watching him. Then, as I smiled at him just a little, he came to me and sat down. But he said nothing to me, and so I was quiet too.

But Anita was busy, hands and eyes and tongue all busy.

“When she married, you know, in that hole-and-corner fashion——” Then, as if in answer, though nobody had spoken—“Well, what else was it, when nobody knew?—when even I didn’t know——”

There was a movement in the chair beside me, and turning, I caught the ending of a glance towards my cousin. A new look, I found it, on that passive face, a roused and wondering and scornful look that transformed it. But, even as I caught it, it faded again to that other look of bleak indifference, a look to know and dread on any creature’s face, a look that must not stay on any fellow-creature’s face. I knew that well enough. So I said the first words that came, in my lowest voice, lest they should hear.

But they were talking. They did not hear.

“I’m sure that Great-aunt knew.” Indeed I thought so. I think that Great-aunt would always be kind and guessing with a girl. Then I wondered at myself for daring it and thought nervously—‘He’ll snub me. He’ll be right to snub me——’

But he looked across at Great-aunt kindly and said, in just such a withdrawn voice as mine—

“Yes, of course, if ever there was a time when——” Then he half smiled. “Poor old lady! But she’s changed. She used to be so brisk and managing, more like fifty than seventy. But this year’s aged her. She wanted, you know, to give some pearls—her own pearls. But pearls spell sorrow. And Anita would have objected. She told me all about it.”

“She was speaking of them tonight.” We both turned again and looked at her. She had dropped her knitting, or it had slipped from her knee, and she sat in her chair staring down at it with a terrible, comical air of helplessness. Then she caught his eye and forgot the knitting and nodded at him.

“I think—” I said, “I don’t think she understands. She asked me—she forgets I’m a stranger. She asked me——” I broke off. I couldn’t say to him—‘She asked me about Miss Grey and she doesn’t realize that she’s dead.’ One’s afraid of the brutality of words. But he understood. There was a simplicity about him that re-assured one. And he never said—‘It’s Anita’s business. It’s not your business,’ as anyone else might have done. He just said, once again—

“Poor old lady!” and hesitated a minute. Then he got up and went across to her and picked up her wools. I don’t think the others noticed him go. Anita didn’t. She was talking too fast.

“—left a trunk-full of papers and so on. I’d often stored boxes for her. Somehow it never got sent down. I came across it only yesterday. I thought to myself that there was no harm in putting things straight. You know I’m literary executor? Oh yes. She said to me soon after her marriage, half in joke, that she supposed she had got to make a will—and what about her MSS.? ‘I can’t have him worried.’ I offered at once. You see I know so exactly her attitude in literature. There’s a good deal of unpublished stuff—early stuff. But all in hopeless confusion. Tumbled up with bills and programmes and one or two drafts of letters—or so I imagine. She had that annoying habit—that ugly modern habit—of beginning without any invocation, and never a date. But there’s one letter—there’s the draft of a letter that’s important from my point of view.” She broke off with a half laugh. “It sounds a ridiculous statement to make about Madala Grey of all people, but do you know that she couldn’t express herself at all easily on paper?”

Miss Howe nodded.

“Do I know? I’ve known her re-write a letter half a dozen times before she got it to her liking—no, not business letters, letters to her intimates. A most comical trick. Scribble, scribble, scribble—slash! and then crunch goes the sheet into a ball, into the grate, or near it, till it looked as if she were playing snow-balls, and then Madala begins again—and again—and again. Yet she talked well. She talked easily.”

“Isn’t that in keeping?” Mr. Flood struck in. “She didn’t express so much herself in her speech as the mood of the moment.”

“As the mood of the companion of the moment more likely,” the blonde lady corrected.

He nodded agreement.

“But for herself—go to her books.”

“Or her letters—her careful, conscientious letters. But she was careless about her drafts,” said Anita significantly.

Mr. Flood looked at her curiously.

“What’s up that sleeve of yours, Anita?”

She was quick.

“You shall read it, in its place. But the trouble is——” She hesitated. She gave the little nervous cough that always ushered in her public lectures. “We’ve all written books,” she said, “all except you, Blanche——”

The blonde lady blinked her sleepy eyes.

“You’re all so strenuous,” she purred. “I love to watch you being strenuous. So soothing.”

“Well, I was going to say, it’s easy enough to end a book, but have you ever got to the beginning? I never have. One steps backward, and backward again——”

“I know,” cried the Baxter girl. “Till you get tired of it at last and begin writing from where you are, but you never really get your foot on the starting-point, on the spring-board, as you might say.”

“That’s it. Yes, Jasper, I’ve got material up my sleeve, but frankly, I don’t know how to place it. I don’t know where to begin. The facts of her life, her conversation, her literary work, her letters—I go on adding to my material till I am overwhelmed with all that I have got to say about her. But I don’t want to begin with facts. Facts are well enough, but think how one can twist them! I want the woman behind the facts. I want the answer to the question that is the cause of a biography such as mine is to be—the question—‘What was Madala Grey?’ Not who, mark you, but further back, deeper into herself—‘What was Madala Grey?’”

“Why, a genius,” said the Baxter girl glibly.

Anita neither assented nor dissented.

“Ah—” she said, frowning, “but that’s not the beginning either. At once we take our step backward again—‘What is genius?’”

“Isn’t talent good enough?” said Mr. Flood acidly.

“But does one mean talent?” She was still frowning. “Everyone’s got talent. I’m sick of talent. But she—she mayn’t be a great one—how she’d have laughed at being called a great one!—but she makes her dolls live. And isn’t that the blood-link between the greatest gods and the littlest gods? Life-givers? Life-makers? Oh, I only speak for myself; but she made her book-world real to me, therefore for me she had genius. Whether or not I convince you is the test of whether my life-work, my Life of her—fails or succeeds.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t trust it to Madala?” said Miss Howe softly.

“Trust what?”

“To convince us.”

She answered, suspicious rather than comprehending, for indeed Miss Howe’s tone was very smooth—

“What do you mean? I’m writing her life.”

Miss Howe was inscrutable.

“Of course you are. Fire ahead. Genius, wasn’t it?”

Anita shrugged her shoulders.

“What’s in a name? It’s the quality itself that fascinates me. I want to account for it. I want to trace it to its source. Worth doing, isn’t it? But do you realize the difficulties? Sometimes I feel hopeless. I’ve known her five years, and her books I know by heart, and I’m only just beginning to decide whether to call her a romantic or a realist.”

“A realist. Look at Eden Walls,” said the Baxter girl.

“A romantic. Look at The Resting-place,” said Miss Howe.

Mr. Flood over-rode them.

“Dear ladies, you confuse the terms. It amazes me how people always confuse the terms. Your so-called realist, your writer who depicts what we call reality, the outward life, that is, of flesh and dirt and misery—don’t you see that he is in truth a romantic—a man (or woman) who lives in a fair world of his own, a paradise of the imagination? Out of that secure world of his he peers curiously at ours, and writes of it as we dare not write, writes down every sordid, garish, tragic-comic detail. Your so-called realist can afford the humour of Rabelais, the horror of Dostoevsky, the cheerful flesh and blood of Fielding. Why shouldn’t he be truthful? It’s not his world. Don’t you see? But your so-called romantic, he lives in this real world. He knows it so well that he has to shut his eyes or he would die of its reality. So he escapes into the world of romance, the world of beauty within his own mind—nowhere but in his own mind. Who is our dreamer of dreams? Shelley, the realist! Blake jogged elbows with poverty and squalor all his life, and he was the prophet and the king of all spirits. Don’t you see? And Goethe—the biographers will tell you that Goethe began as a realist and ended as a romantic. I say it was the other way round. What did he know of reality in the twenties? Its discovery was the romantic adventure of his young genius. But when he was old and worldly and wise—then he wrote his romances, to escape from his own knowledge. Oh, I tell you, you should turn the words round. Now take Shakespeare——”

“It’s not fair to take Shakespeare,” said Miss Howe. “It’s the Elephant and the Crawfishes over again. Let’s keep to the crawfishes! Let’s keep to our own generation!”

“Well, if I were Anita I should begin by showing Madala as a romantic—as the young romantic producing the most startlingly realistic book we’ve had for a decade. Indeed to me, you know, her development is marked by her books in the sharpest way. It’s the young, the curious, the observant Madala in Eden Walls. The whole book is a shout of discovery, of young, horrified discovery, of the ugliness of life. It’s as if she said—‘Listen! Listen! These things actually happen to some people. Isn’t it awful?’ She dwells on it. She insists on every detail. She can’t get away from it. And yet she can hardly believe it, that young Madala. But in Ploughed Fields already the tone’s changing. It’s a pleasanter book, a more sophisticated book. It interests profoundly, but it’s careful not to upset one—an advance, of course. Yet I, you know, hear our Madala’s voice in it still, an uneasy voice—‘Hush! Hush! These things happen to most people. Pretend not to notice.’ And in the last book, in the pretty, impossible romance, there you have your realist full-fledged—‘Shut your eyes! Come away quickly! These things are happening to me!’” He leant back again, folding his arms and dropping his chin. And then, because Miss Howe was looking at him as if she were amused—“I tell you I know. I recognize the symptoms. I’m a realist myself. That’s why I write romantic poetry. Have to. It’s that or drugs. How else shall one get through life?”

“Jasper!” said the blonde lady. But for once he didn’t turn to her. He shrugged his shoulders.

“Don’t worry. Who’ll believe me?”

The Baxter girl was breathless.

“Oh, but I do. It’s a new Madala, of course. But I believe it explains her.”

“But the facts of her life don’t agree,” began Miss Howe.

“Ah, Anita’s got to make ’em,” said Mr. Flood languidly. “Isn’t that the art of biography?”

But Anita was deadly serious.

“You don’t begin far enough back. My spring-board is not—what is Madala? but—what is genius? How does it happen? Is it immaculate birth? or is it begotten of accident upon environment? That is to say—is it inspiration or is it experience? I speak of the divine fire, you understand, not of the capacity for resolving it into words or paint or stone. That’s craft, a very different thing. You say that Madala was not a genius in the big sense—yes, I’ll admit that even, for the argument’s sake—but even you will concede her the beginnings of it. So my difficulty is just the same. I’ve never believed in instinctive genius. Yet how can she, at twenty, have had the experience (that she had the craft is amazing enough) to cope with Eden Walls? Romantic curiosity isn’t enough explanation, Jasper! Look at her certainty of touch. Look at her detail. Look how she gets inside that woman’s mind. That’s the fascination of it. It’s such a document. Now how does she know it? That’s what intrigues me. Madala and a street woman! Where’s the connection? How does she get inside her? Because she does get inside her.”

“Oh, it’s real enough,” said the blonde lady.

“It must be. You should have seen the letters she received! Amazing, some of them.”

“Anita, they amazed her. I remember her getting one while she was staying with us. She looked thoroughly frightened. She said—‘But, Lila, I didn’t realize—it was just a story. But this poor thing, she says it’s true! She says it’s happened to her! What are we to do?’ You know, she was nearly crying. It was some hysterical woman who had read the book. But Madala always believed in people. I know she wrote to her. I believe she helped her. But she never told you much about her doings.”

“Oh, her sentimental side doesn’t interest me. What I ask myself is—how does she know, as she obviously does know, all that her wretched drab of a heroine thought and felt and suffered?”

“Instinct! Imagination!” said the Baxter girl. “It must be the explanation.”

“It isn’t. It isn’t. Oh, I’ve puzzled it out. I’m convinced that from the beginning it’s experience. Don’t flare, Lila, I don’t mean literal experience. Not in Eden Walls, anyhow. Later, of course—but we’re discussing Eden Walls. Imagination, do you say, Beryl? But the imagination must have a fact for its root. I’ll grant you that imagination is so essentially a quality of youth that the merest rootlet of a reality is enough to set a young artist beanstalk climbing. But the older he grows, the wiser, the more versed in reality, the less he trusts his imagination, the more, in consequence, his imagination flags and withers; till he ends—one sees it happen again and again—as the recorder merely of his own actual experiences and emotions. It’s only the greatest who escape that decay of the imagination. Do you think that Madala did? Look at Eden Walls. Remember what we know about her. Can’t you see that the skeleton of Eden Walls is Madala’s own life? Consider her history. She leaves what seems to have been a happy childhood behind her and sets out on adventure—very young. So does the woman in Eden Walls. The parallel’s exact. Madala’s Westering Hill and the Breckonridge of the novel are the same place. The house, the lane, the country-side, she doesn’t trouble to disguise them. Again—Madala’s adventure is ushered in by calamity: and tragedy—(you can see the artist transmuting the mere physical calamity into tragedy) tragedy happens to the woman in Eden Walls. Remember how much more Madala dwelt on the sense of loneliness and lovelessness, on the anguish of the loss of something to love her, than on what one might call the—er—official emotions of a betrayed woman. Didn’t it strike you? Doesn’t that show that she was depending on her experience rather than on her imagination, fitting her own private grief to an imaginary case? Then, in America, she has the struggle for meat and drink, for mere existence. So does the woman in Eden Walls. Madala does not go under. The woman in Eden Walls does. It’s the first real difference. But I maintain that in reality the parallel still continues, that, in imagination, Madala did go under over and over again: that she had ever in front of her the ‘suppose, suppose,’ that, in drawing the woman in Eden Walls, she is saying to herself—‘Here, but for the grace of God, go I.’ And then, you know, when you think of her, hating that big city, saving up her pennies, and coming home at last in a passion of homesickness (if it was homesickness—sickness anyhow), can’t you see how it makes her write of that other woman? It’s the gift, the genius, stirring in her: born, not immaculately, but of her own literal experience. Jasper’s right—you can always make facts fit if you think them out: and because I possess that underlying shadow-work (I admit it’s no more) of fact to guide me in deciphering her method in the first book, therefore, in the second book and the third book, I find it safe to deduce facts to cover the stories, even when I don’t possess them. I consider that I’m justified, that Eden Walls justifies me. Don’t you?”

“It’s plausible,” said Mr. Flood thoughtfully.

“Oh, it’s convincing,” said the Baxter girl reverently. “I feel I’ve never known Madala Grey before. What it will be when you get it into shape, Miss Serle——”

“In fact,” said Miss Howe, “there’s only one drawback——”

“And that?” said Anita swiftly.

“Only Madala’s own account.”

“She never discussed her methods,” said Anita sharply.

“Just so! You’re not the only person who’s—pumped. I remember seeing her once surrounded, in her lion days. I remember her ingenuous explanations. She did her best to oblige them—‘Honestly, I don’t know. One just sits down and imagines.’ And then—‘That’s quite easy. But it’s awfully difficult writing it down.’ That’s the explanation, Nita. A deliberate, even unconscious self-exploitation is all nonsense. Madala’s not clever enough.”

“Not clever enough!”

“No. You’re much cleverer than she was. You have twice her brains. You can’t think, Anita, what brains you’ve got. You’ve got far too many to understand a simple person. I don’t agree, you know, with ‘genius.’ I can’t throw a word like that about so lightly. But as far as it went with Madala, it was the same sort of genius that makes a crocus push in the spring. Your theory—oh, it’s plausible, as Jasper says, but don’t you see that it destroys all the charm of her work? It’s the innocence of her knowledge, the simplicity of her attitude to her own insight that to me is moving. She touches pitch, yet her fingers are clean. It’s her view of her story that arrests one, not her story, not her facts, not her mere plot.”

“No, the plot is conventional, I’ll grant you that. She was always content with old bottles.”

“Yes, and when the new wine burst them and made a mess on the carpet, Madala was always so surprised and indignant.”

Mr. Flood giggled.

“Pained is the word, dear lady—surprised and pained. Do you remember when Eden Walls was banned?”

“I don’t suppose she talked to you about it, Jasper,” said Miss Howe sharply.

“I? I was never of her counsels. But I got my amusement out of the affair. Dear, delightful woman? She behaved like a schoolgirl sent to Coventry. I remember congratulating her on the advertisement, and she would hardly speak to me. But it suited her, the blush.”

“Wasn’t it an advertisement!” said the Baxter girl longingly.

“If one could have got her to see it,” said Anita. “But no, she insisted on being ashamed of herself. She said to me once that the critics had ‘read in’ things that she had never dreamed of—that it made her doubt her own motives—that she felt dirtied and miserable. And yet she wouldn’t alter one of those scenes. Obstinate! She could be very obstinate.”

“Oh, which scenes?” The Baxter girl stuck her elbows on the table and her chin in her fists. Her eyes sparkled. “Oh, then, Miss Serle, did you—? did she come to you in the early days? Did you help her too?”

“My daughter—very kind to young people!”

It was a mere mutter, but I recognized the swing of the phrase. Anita didn’t. She was busy with the Baxter girl.

“I don’t say that there would be no Madala Grey today if I——”

“But——” said Mr. Flood.

“But—” said Miss Howe, “she’s Anita’s discovery. We’re never to forget that, are we, darling?”

“Oh, I knew that,” said the Baxter girl, trying to be tactful. “But Eden Walls was written before you knew her, wasn’t it? I understood—I didn’t know, I mean,” she explained to them, “that Miss Serle had—blue-pencilled——”

“I did and I didn’t.” Anita laughed, as if in spite of herself. “I confess I thought at the time that it needed revision. Mind you, I never questioned the quality, but I knew what the public would stand and what it wouldn’t. Of course, I didn’t want the essentials altered. But there were certain cuts——However, nothing would move her.”

“That’s funny. She never gave me the impression that she believed in herself so strongly.”

“Oh, her pose was diffidence,” said the blonde lady.

“But she didn’t believe in herself. It was obvious. When I went through her MS. and blue-pencilled, she was most grateful. She agreed to everything and took the MS. away to remodel.”

“And then?”

“I heard nothing more of her—for weeks. Finally I wrote and asked her to come and see me. She came. She was delightful. I had told her, you know, about the Anthology the first time I met her. I remember that I was annoyed with myself afterwards. I’m not often indiscreet. But she had a—a knack—a way with her. I hardly know how to describe it.”

“One told her things,” said the Baxter girl.

“Just so. One told her things. And she had brought me a mass of material—some charming American verse (you remember? in the last section but one) that I had never come across. She had been reading for me at the British Museum in her spare time. I confess I was touched. We talked, I remember——” She sighed reminiscently. “It was not until she made a move to go that I recollected myself. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘and how about Eden Walls?’ She fidgeted. She looked thoroughly guilty. At last it came out. She hadn’t altered a line. She had tried her utmost. She had drafted and re-drafted. She had finally given it up in despair and just got work in some obscure newspaper office—‘a most absorbing office!’ But there—you know Madala when she’s interested—was interested——”

“Don’t,” said Miss Howe softly.

But Anita went on—

“‘Well but—’ I said to her—‘that’s all very well. But you’re not going to abandon Eden Walls, are you?’ Then it all came out. Yes, she was. She knew I was right. She wasn’t conceited. She quite saw that the book was useless. It just meant that she couldn’t write novels and that she mustn’t waste any more time. ‘But, my dear Miss Grey,’ I said, ‘you mean to say that you’d rather leave the book unpublished than alter a couple of chapters, remodel a couple of characters?’ ‘But I can’t,’ she said, ‘I can’t. They happened that way.’ ‘Then make them happen differently,’ I said. But no, she couldn’t. ‘Oh well,’ I said at last—‘if you’re so absolutely sure of yourself, if you’re prepared to set up your judgment——’ That distressed her. I can hear her now. ‘But I don’t set up my judgment. I’ll burn the wretched stuff tomorrow if you say it’s trash. I knew it would be, in my heart. But—I can’t alter it, because—because it happened that way.’ Then I had an idea. ‘To you?’ I said. She looked at me. She laughed. She said—‘Miss Serle, you’ve written ten books to my one. Don’t pretend you don’t know how a story happens.’” Anita nodded at us. “You see? Evasive. I think it was from that moment that I began to have my theory of her.”

“Well—and what next?” demanded Miss Howe.

“She would have said good-bye if I had let her. I stopped her. ‘Reconsider it,’ I said. She beamed at me, chastened but quite cheerful. ‘Oh, I’ll try another some day,’ she said. ‘I suppose I’m not old enough. I was a fool to think I could.’ At that, of course, I gave in. I wasn’t going to lose sight of Eden Walls. I told her to bring it as it was and I’d see what I could do. As you know, Mitchell and Bent jumped at it.”

“But it was banned,” said the Baxter girl.

“Yes, but everybody read it. You can get it anywhere now. And I can say now—‘Thank the gods she didn’t touch it.’”

“Then she was right?”

“Of course she was right. I knew it all the time.”

“And she didn’t?”

“Of course she didn’t. Mine was critical knowledge. Hers the mere instinct of—whatever you choose to call it. I was afraid of the critics. She didn’t know enough to be afraid.”

“There’s something big about you, Anita!” said Miss Howe suddenly.

Mr. Flood gave the oblique flicker of eyes and mouth that was his smile.

“Yes,” he said slowly, “it fits her quite well.”

“What?” said Anita sharply.

“The mantle, dear lady.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Ah—Gentle dullness ever loves a joke. What, Beryl?”

“I don’t see,” the Baxter girl had harked back, “how you can call a book that has been banned conventional.”

“Only the plot——”

“Ah, that plot!” Nobody could snub Mr. Flood. “Think, dear lady! Village maiden—faithless lover—lights o’ London—unfortunate female—what more do you want?”

“Of course.” Anita resumed the reins. “It’s as old as The Vicar of Wakefield.”

“Oh, that!” The Baxter girl looked interested. “Do you know, I’ve never seen it. One of Irving’s shows, wasn’t it?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. But they were all quite solemn, even Anita. But then she never did listen to the Baxter girl. She had talked straight through her sentences.

“But it’s not the material. It’s the way it’s handled. It’s never been done quite so thoroughly, from the woman’s point of view—so unadornedly. People are afraid of their ‘poor girls.’ There’s a formula that even the Immortals follow. They are all young and beautiful, and they all die. They must. They wouldn’t be tragic in continuation. But Madala’s woman doesn’t. That’s the point. There’s no pretence at making her a heroine. She’s just the ordinary stupidish sheep of a creature, ‘gone wrong.’ There’s no romantic halo, no love-glamour, no pity and terror, just the chronicle of a sordid life. And yet you can’t put the book down. At least I couldn’t put it down.”

“Do you like it?” I said to Kent Rehan, as he paused beside me in his eternal pacing from room to room.

He looked at me oddly.

“I respect it,” he said. “I don’t like it. People misjudged——”

“If it had been the recognized love story”—Mr. Flood’s high voice silenced him—“the regularized irregularity, so to speak, it wouldn’t have been banned. It was the absence of a love story that the British public couldn’t forgive. It was cheated. It was shocked.”

“But there is a love story at the beginning, isn’t there?” I said. “I haven’t read far.”

Instantly the Baxter girl exhibited me—

“Yes, imagine! She hasn’t read it!”

“I’ve read The Vicar of Wakefield,” I said. And then I was annoyed that I had shown I was annoyed. But at once Miss Howe helped me. Miss Howe was always nice to me.

“How far have you got? Where the man tires of her? Ah, yes! Well, after that it’s just her struggle. She—she earns her living—in the inevitable way. She grows into a miser. She hoards.”

Mr. Flood looked acute.

“That’s what upset them. They don’t mind a Magdalen; but Magdalen unaware, unrepentant, Magdalen preserving her ill-gotten gains—no, that’s not quite nice.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Miss Howe. “If anyone can’t feel the spirit it’s written in, the passion of pity—I think it’s the most pitiful thing I’ve ever read. It made me shiver. That wretched creature, saving and sparing——” And then to me, for I suppose I showed I was interested—“She wants to get away, you know, to get back into the country. It’s her dream. The homesickness——”

“I suppose such a woman could——?” said the Baxter girl.

“I used to argue it with Madala. Madala always said that, with some people, that animal craving for some special place was like love—a passion that could waste you. She said that every woman must have some devouring passion, for a man, or a child, or a place—every woman. And that for a beaten creature like that, it would be place—the homing instinct of a cat or a bird. And mixed up with it, religion—the vague shadowy ideal of peace and cleanly beauty—all that the wretched creature tries to express in her phrase—‘getting out and living quiet’—that Madala typifies in the word ‘Eden.’ It meant much to Madala. Don’t you remember that passage towards the end of the book where she meets the man, the first man, and brings him home with her—and he doesn’t even recognize her, and she doesn’t even care.” She picked up a bundle of tattered proofs and turned them over. “Where is it? What an appalling hand she had!” She stood a moment, reading a page and pursing her lips. “Oh, well, what’s the use of reading it? We all know it.” She flung it down.

“Let me see,” I said to the Baxter girl. She drew it towards me. It was the first proof I’d ever seen. It was corrected till it was difficult to read. But I made it out at last.

With the closing of the door she dismissed him with one phrase for ever from her mind—

“And that’s that!”

She had long been accustomed thus to summarize her clients, dispassionately, as one classes beasts at a show; and she judged them, not by their clothing or their speech, not by the dark endured hours of their love or by the ticklish after-moment of the reckoning, but rather, as she hovered at the door with her provocative night smile dulled to a business friendliness, by their manner of leaving her.

Always there was the fever to be gone; but some went furtively, with cautious, tiptoe feet that set the stairs a-squeak with mockery. Her smile did not change for the swaggerer who stayed long and took his luck-kiss twice, but her eyes would harden. Mean, cheating mean, to kiss again and never pay again! And some she watched and smiled upon who left her in a brutal silence. For them she had no resentment, rather the sullenness beneath her smile reached out to the revulsion of their bearing as to something welcomed and akin. And some gave back her smile with kindly words—and those she hated.

But when, after his manner, the man had gone, she had, as always, her ritual.

She locked her easy door and pulling out the key, put it before her on the table at the bedside. Left and right of it she laid her money down, adding to the night’s gains the meagre leavings of her purse. Left and right the little piles grew, one heaped high for the needs of her day and her night, for food and roof and livery, and one a thin scatter of coppers and small silver that took long weeks to change into the dear, the exquisite, the Eden-opening gold. It was the bigger pile that she thrust so carelessly back into her bag, and the scattered ha’pence that she warmed in the cup of her two hands, holding them, jingle-jingle, at her ears, dropping them to her lap again to count anew, piling them before her to a little, narrowing tower, before she opened the child’s jewel-case beside her, and, lifting the sheaf of letters that she never read but kept still and would always keep, for the savage pain they gave her when her eyes saw them and her fingers touched them, she poured out the new treasure upon the sacred hoard beneath.

Tenpence saved—and yesterday a shilling! Five shillings last week. Fifty pounds! She would soon have fifty pounds!

She put away the box of money, and so, surrendering at last to the awful bodily fatigue, lay down again upon the tousled bed, not to sleep—her sleeping time was later in the day—but to shut her eyes.

For, by the amazing pity of God, a secret that is not every man’s, was hers—the secret of the refuge appointed, behind shut eyes, of the return into eternity that is the shutting down of lids upon the eyes. The window glare, the screaming street below, the blank soiled ceiling with the flies, the walls, the unending pattern of the hateful walls, the clock, the finery, the beastly scents, the loathed familiars of stuff and wood and brass that blinked and creaked at her like voices crying—“Misery! misery! misery!”—these were her world. Yet not her only world. She, who was so dim and blunted a woman-thing, could pass, with the warm dark velvet touch of dropping lids, not into the nullity of sleep, but into the grey place, limitless, timeless, where consciousness knows nothing of the flesh.

She shut her eyes with the sigh of a tired dog, and instantly her soul lay back and floated, resting.

There was no time, no thought, no feeling. There was peace—quiet—greyness. At unmeasured intervals realization washed over her like waves, waves of peace—quiet—greyness. Greyness—she worshipped the blessed greyness. She wanted to give it a beloved name and knew none. ‘When I am dead!’—‘For ever and ever, Amen!’—So she came nearest to ‘Eternity.’

Peace—quiet—greyness: greyness enduring for ever, that could yet be rent asunder like a temple veil and let in misery—the window glare, the reeking room, the clodding footsteps, the fingers tapping at her door—a frail eternity whose walls were slips of flesh.

She called harshly—

“Get out! Get away! Put it down outside then, can’t you?”

There was a mutter and the clank of a scuttle-lid, and a thud. The footsteps shuffled out of hearing.

She shut her eyes again.

Peace—quiet—greyness. The waves were rocking her.

She did not dream. There are, by that same pity of God, no dreams permitted in the place of refuge. But, as she lay in peace, she watched her own memorial thoughts rising about her, one by one, like bubbles in a glass, like cocks crowing in the dark of the dawn.

A white road ... the hill-top wind panting down it like a runner ... dust ... bright blue sky ... sky-blue succory in the gutter ... succory is so difficult to pick ... tough ... it leaves a green cut on one’s finger ... succory in a pink vase on the mantel-piece ... the fire’s too hot for flowers ... hot buttered toast ... the armchair wants mending ... the horsehair tickles one’s ears as one lies back in it and warms one’s toes and watches the rain drowning the fields outside ... empty winter fields, all tousled and tussocky from cow dung ... grey skies ... snow ... not a soul in sight ... and succory in a pink vase on the mantel-piece ... because one’s back in Eden ... summer and winter are all one in Eden ... picking buttercups in Eden as one used to do ... all the fields grown full of buttercups ... fifty buttercups make a bunch ... fifty golden buttercups with the King’s head on them ... hurry up with the buttercups ... one more bunch of buttercups will buy back Eden—Eden—ah!

So, with a long gasping sigh would come the end. “Eden—” and the longing would be upon her, tearing like a wild beast at her eyes and her throat and her heart—“I want to go home. Oh, God, let me go home! Let me out! I want to go home——”

The chapter ended.

“And does she?” I looked up at the Baxter girl. “I’m always afraid of a bad ending. Does she get back in the end?”

The Baxter girl fluttered through the pages.

“The money’s stolen first—a man takes it—while she’s asleep——Oh, it’s beastly, that scene. She has to save it all up again. It takes her years. But—oh, yes, she does go back.”

“The railway journey,” said Miss Howe. “Do you remember?”

“If you want happy endings”—the Baxter girl flattened out the last page with a jerk—“there you are!”

I read over her shoulder. The strong scent that hung about her seemed to float between me and the page.

“Here we are—where she gets to the station. ‘Eden,’ Madala calls it, but the woman calls it ‘Breckonridge.’

At last and at last the station-board with the familiar name flashed past her window. She thrilled. The station lamps repeated it as the train slowed down. She thought—how long the platform’s grown! ... a bookstall! ... a bookstall on each side! ... there used not to be ... wasn’t the station smaller?...

She spoke to the ticket collector shyly, blushing, like a girl going to an assignation and thinking that all the world must know it.

He answered, already catching at the ticket of the traveller behind her—

“How far to Breckonridge? A mile, maybe—but you get the tram at the corner.”

She stared. She would have questioned him again, but the throng of people pressed her forward.

A tram through the village? ... queer! ... not that it mattered to her ... she would take the old short cut through the fields outside the station yard.... There was a stile ... and a wild cherry tree....

She left the yard, the unfamiliar yard with asphalt and motors and a great iron bridge, crossed the road, and stopped bewildered.

There were no fields.

‘Station Road.’ The labelled yellow villas were like a row of faces. Eyes, nose, mouth—windows, porch, steps—steps like teeth. They grinned.

In a sort of panic she ran past them down the road, a lumbering, clumsy woman. She trod on her skirt, and recovered herself with difficulty. She heard a small boy laugh and call after her. She clambered on to the tram.

“I want to go to the village—to Breckonridge——”

“It’s all Breckonridge. ’Ow far?”

She stared.

“I don’t remember. He said a mile.”

“Town ’All, I expect.” He took his toll and passed on.

She turned vaguely to a neighbour.

“Town Hall? I don’t remember. The road’s all different Where are the fields?”

The neighbour nodded.

“Built over. When were you here last? Thirty years? My word, you’ll find changes! I notice it, even in five. Very full it’s getting. Good train service. My husband can get to his office under the hour.”

She said dazedly—

“It was—it is—a little village.”

The woman laughed.

“I daresay. But how long ago?”

“There were fields,” she said under her breath. “There were flowers——”

“Here’s the Town Hall. Didn’t you want the Town Hall?”

Unsteadily she rose and got out. The tram clanged forward.

She stood on an island where four roads met and looked about her. The sun stared down at her, a brazen city sun. The asphalt was hot and soft under her feet. Road-menders were at work in the fair-way. They struck alternately at the chisel between them and it was as if the rain of blows fell upon her. She felt stupid and dizzy. She did not know where to turn. There was nothing left of her village, and yet the place was familiar. There were drab houses and rows of shops and a stream of traffic, and the figures of women and men—menacing, impersonal figures of men—that hurried towards her down the endless streets.

“Well?” said the Baxter girl.

“But that’s not the end?” I said.

The Baxter girl looked at me oddly.

“Why not?” And then—“How else could it end? How would you make it end?”

“Oh, I don’t mean——” I began. I hesitated. “I don’t think I quite understand,” I said.

That was the truth. At the time I couldn’t follow it. It moved me. It swept me along. But whether it was good or bad I didn’t know. I hadn’t the faintest idea of what it was driving at. I felt in a vague way that the people at home wouldn’t have liked it.

“What does it mean?” I said to the Baxter girl.

“That you can’t eat your cake and have it, I suppose. You can get out of Eden, but you can’t get back.”

Anita answered her contemptuously—

“Is that all it means to you?”

And yet we had spoken very softly. But Anita had eyes that ate up every movement in a room, and her small pretty ears never seemed to miss a significant word though ten people were talking. I had seen her glance uneasily at us and again at the two in the other room. I knew Great-aunt’s mutter was too low even for her, and Kent Rehan only nodded now and then, but even that annoyed her. She lifted her own voice to be sure that they should hear all that she said, as if afraid lest, even for a moment, she should be left out of their thoughts.

“Oh!” she said loudly and contemptuously, “I tell you what I see.”

She succeeded, if that pleased her. Kent Rehan raised his head and stared across at her with that impersonal expression of attention that, I was beginning to realize, could always anger her on any face. She had said a little while ago that she only cared for Miss Grey as an artist, and I believe that she believed it. But I don’t think—I shall never think it true. I think Anita depended—depends, on other people more than she dreams. Poor Anita! I can see her now, her whole personality challenging those dark abstracted eyes. But she spoke to the Baxter girl—

“When Madala Grey chose Eden Walls for her title—when she flung it in the public face——”

I saw him give a shrug of fatigue or distaste—I couldn’t tell which. Great-aunt, who had been sitting, her head on one side, with her sharp poll-parrot expression, crooked her finger at me. I went across to her and behind me I heard the Baxter girl—

“You talk as if she were in a passion——”

And Anita—

“So she was. I’m telling you. It’s the wrongs, not of one woman, but of all women, of all ages of women, that burn behind it.”

“Votes for Women!” It was Mr. Flood’s voice.

There was a laugh and I lost an answer. I caught only a vehement blur of words, because Great-aunt had me by the wrist.

“Chatter, chatter! I can’t hear ’em. What’s my daughter talking about?”

I hesitated.

“About books, Auntie.”

“Whose books?” she pounced.

“Some writer, Auntie.”

“What’s she saying about her, eh?” She held me bent down to her. I glanced at Kent Rehan. He was listening to us. I felt harried.

“About—oh—whether a genius—whether she was a genius——”

“Madala, eh?”

“Yes, Auntie.”

I thought I heard him sigh. And at that—why, I don’t know—I turned on him. I was rude, I believe. I sounded silly and cruel, I know. Yet, heaven knows, that that was the last thing I wanted to be.

I said angrily to him—

“Oh, why do you stand there and listen? Don’t you see that I can’t help myself? Why don’t you go away? What good can it do you to stay here, to stay and listen to it all?”

Then I stopped because he looked at me for a moment, and flushed, and then did turn away, back again to his old dreary post at the street window.

Great-aunt chuckled.

“That’s right, little Jenny. Take your own way with them, Jenny!”

I said—

“Let me go, Auntie dear,” and I loosed her hand from my wrist and went after him; for of course the instant the words were out of my mouth I was ashamed of myself. I couldn’t think what had possessed me. I was badly ashamed of myself.

I came to him and said—

“Mr. Rehan—I don’t mean to be rude. Great-aunt—she doesn’t understand. She made me talk. It wasn’t rudeness; but you stood there, and I knew—I thought I knew, what you must think, must be thinking—” (but ‘feeling’ was the word I meant) “and I was sorry. I was angry because I was sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

He said—

“It’s all right. I didn’t think you rude.”

Then I said—

“But I meant it. Why do you stay? What good can it do you? Why don’t you go away from it all?”

And he—

“Where is there to go? I’ve been tramping all day.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Up and down streets. It’s—it’s blinding, it’s stifling——”

“The fog is,” I said quickly. But we didn’t mean the fog.

He let himself down into the low wicker chair. I stood leaning against the sill, watching him.

“You’re just dead tired,” I said.

He nodded. Then, as if something in my words had stung him—

“Where else? I’ve always come here. Every month. It was natural to come.”

“But now” I said (and I was so urgent with him because of all their talk that drummed still in my mind like a wasps’ nest)—“I’d go away if I were you. What good does it do you? They talk. It’s—it’s rather hateful. I’ve been listening. I’d go.”

“Where?” he said again. And I—

“Haven’t you anyone—at home?”

But as I asked I knew that he hadn’t. He had the look. Oh, he wore good clothes and I knew he wasn’t poor. But it was written all over him that he looked after himself and did it expensively and badly. He had, too, that other look that goes with it—of a man who has never found anyone more interesting to him than himself. And the queer part was that it didn’t seem selfish in him—and I’m sure it wasn’t. It was just like the way a child takes you for granted, and tells you about its own big affairs, and never guesses that you have your own little affairs too. I suppose it was a fault in him; but it made me like him. And he talked to me simply and almost as if he needed helping out; as if he’d been just anybody. I never had to help out anyone before: it had always been the other way round. I’d thought, too, that celebrated people were always superior and brilliant and overwhelming, like Anita and Mr. Flood. But he wasn’t. He was as simple as A, B, C. I liked him. I did like him. I felt happier, more at peace, standing there with him than I had felt since I had been in Anita’s house. I think he would have gone on talking to me too, if it hadn’t been for the Baxter girl. She spoilt it. She tilted back her chair, yawning, and so caught sight of us, and laughed, and leaning over to Miss Howe, whispered in her ear. She was a crazy girl. At once I got up and came across to them, panic-stricken, hating her. I had to. I didn’t want him worried, and you never knew what hateful thing the Baxter girl wouldn’t say, and think that she was pleasing you.

But without knowing it, Anita helped me. Her voice, rising excitedly in answer to some word of Mr. Flood’s, recalled the Baxter girl.

“Mystery? Of course there’s a mystery! She was at the height of her promise in Ploughed Fields. It’s as good as Eden Walls in matter and, technically, better still. The third book ought to have settled her place in modern literature for good and all. It ought to have been her master-piece. But what does she do? We expect a chaplet of pearls, and she gives us a daisy-chain. Isn’t that a mystery worth solving? Won’t people read the Life for that if for nothing else? Am I the only person who has asked what happened to her between her second and her third books?”

“I tell you, but you won’t listen,” Mr. Flood insisted. “Your romantic has become a realist and is flying from it to the resting-place of romance.”

“I do listen. Just so. You use your words and I use mine, but we mean the same thing. She’s been bruising herself against facts. She has been walled up by facts. Her vision is gone. Now what was, in her case, the all-obscuring fact?”

“She was a woman,” said the blonde lady. “It could only be one thing. Don’t I know the signs? She even lost her sense of humour.”

“Yes, she did, didn’t she?” cried the Baxter girl in a voice of relief. “Oh, I remember one day, just before the engagement was announced——”

“As if that had anything to do with it,” said Anita scornfully.

“—and she’d been so absent-minded I couldn’t get anything out of her. I thought I knew her well enough to tease her. I had told her all my affairs. So—‘I believe you’re in love,’ I said. ‘Oh, well, you’ll get over it. It’s a phase.’ Was there any harm in that? It was only repeating what you had said to me about her, you know,” she reminded the blonde lady. “But she froze instantly. She made no comment. She just changed the subject. But I felt as if I had been introduced to a new Madala. I wished I hadn’t said it.”

“You are a little fool, Beryl,” said the blonde lady tolerantly.

“But she was altered,” insisted the Baxter girl. “The old Madala would have laughed.”

“Yes, she was altered,” said Anita. “Her whole attitude to herself and her work changed that spring. How she horrified me one day. It was soon after Ploughed Fields came out, and we were talking about her new book, at least I was, pumping a little, I confess, and suddenly she said—‘Anita, I don’t think I’ll write any more. This stuff—’ she had her hands on Eden Walls, ‘it’s harsh, it’s ugly; and so’s Ploughed Fields. Isn’t it?’ ‘It’s true to life,’ I said, ‘that’s the triumph of it.’ ‘Is it?’ she said. She looked at me in an uneasy sort of way. And then—‘I’d like to write a kind book, a beautiful book.’ I told her that she couldn’t, that she was a realist. ‘That’s why,’ she said, ‘I don’t think I’ll write any more.’ I laughed, of course. Anybody would have laughed. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I mean it. I haven’t an idea in my head. I’m tired and empty. I think I shall go away for a wander. There’s always the country, anyhow.’ ‘Well, Madala,’ I said, ‘I think you’re ungrateful. You’re a made woman. You’ve got your name: you’ve got your line: you’ve got your own gift——’ ‘Oh, that!’ she said, as if she were flicking off a fly. I was irritated. It was so arrogant. ‘What more do you want?’ I asked her. ‘What more can you want?’ She said—‘I don’t know,’ looking at me, you know, as if she expected me to tell her. I disliked that mood of hers. One did expect, with a woman of her capacity, to be entertained as it were, to have ideas presented, not to be asked to provide them. Then she began, à propos of nothing at all—‘If I ever marry——’ That startled me. We’d never touched on the subject before. ‘Oh, my dear Madala,’ I said, ‘you must never think of anything so—so unnecessary. For you, of all people, it would be fatal. It would waste your time, it would distract your thoughts, it would narrow your outlook, it would end by spoiling your work altogether. I’ve seen it happen so often. It’s terrible to me even to think of a woman with a future like yours, throwing it away just for the——’ She interrupted me. ‘I wouldn’t marry for the sake of getting married, if you mean that. Not even for children.’”

“You didn’t mean that, did you, Anita?” said Miss Howe smiling a little.

“Certainly not. But I had always been afraid that she might be tempted to marry for the adventure’s sake, for the mere experience, for the——”

“Copy,” said Mr. Flood. “I always said so. Yes?”

“‘Oh well, Madala,’ I said to her, ‘you know what I think. I’m not one to quote Kipling, but—He travels fastest who travels alone.’ She looked at me so strangely. ‘Alone?’ she said. ‘Alone. Its the cruellest word in the language. There’s drowning in it.’ ‘Well, without conceit, Madala,’ I said, ‘I can affirm that I have been alone, spiritually, all my life.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ she said, ‘but you’re different.’ And that,” Anita broke off, “was what I liked in Madala. She did recognize differences. She could appreciate. She wasn’t absorbed in herself. She said to me quite humbly—‘I’m not strong, I suppose; but I don’t suffice myself. I can’t bear myself sometimes. I can’t bear the burden of myself. Can’t you understand?’ ‘Frankly,’ I said, ‘I can’t. I’m a modern woman, and the modern woman is a pioneer. She’s the Columbus of her own individuality. She must be. It’s her career. It’s her destiny.’ She answered me pettishly, like a naughty child—‘I don’t want to be a pioneer.’ ‘You’re that,’ I said, ‘already, whether you want to be or not.’ Then she said to me, with that dancing, impish look that her eyes and her lips and her white teeth used to manage between them—‘All right! If I’ve got to be, I will. But I’ll be a pioneer in my own way. I swear I’ll shock the lot of you.’”

“Oho!” said Mr. Flood with exaggerated unction.

“Exactly!” Anita gave his agreement such eager welcome. “That put me on the qui-vive. Knowing her as I did, it was a very strong hint. I awaited developments. Frankly, I was prepared for a scandal, a romance, anything you please in the way of extravagance. That’s why the Carey marriage, that tameness, upset me so. It was not what I was expecting. Really, I don’t know which was more of a shock to me, The Resting-place or the marriage. Hardly had I recovered from the one when——”

“Oh, The Resting-place was the shock of my life too.” He giggled. “I mourned, I assure you that I mourned over it. That opening, you know—‘There was once’—And the end again—‘So they were married and had children and lived happily ever after.’ Pastiche! And then to be invited to wade through a conscientious account of how they achieved it! Too bad of Madala! As if the poor but virtuous artist’s model weren’t a drug on the market already! And the impecunious artist himself—stooping, you know! Oh, I sat in ashes.”

Miss Howe clapped her hands.

“Jasper, I love you. I do love you. Did she pull your leg too? Both legs? She did! She did! Oh, there’s only one Madala!”

Mr. Flood’s vanity was in his cheeks while she rattled on.

“Darling Jasper, I thought better of you! Can’t you see the whole thing’s a skit? Giving the jampot public what they wanted! Why, it’s been out a year and they’re sucking the spoon still. It’s the resting-place! Ask the libraries! Oh, can’t you see?”

“If it is parody,” said Mr. Flood slowly, “then, I admit, it’s unique.”

“What else? You’ll not deny humour to her?”

“I do!” the blonde lady nodded her head. “Once a woman is in love she’s quite hopeless.”

“I don’t see how parody could be in question,” Anita broke in. “Anybody reading the book carefully must see that she’s in earnest. That’s the tragedy of it.”

“The literary tragedy?”

“Not only literary. The psychological value is enormous. It’s not art, it’s record. It’s photography. That happened. That happened, tragically, to Madala. Oh, not the trimmings, of course, not the happy-ever-after. But to me it’s perfectly clear that that lapse into Family Herald romance has had its equivalent in Madala’s own life. I’ve always felt a certain weakness in her character, you know—a certain sentimentalism.”

“In the author of Eden Walls?” said Miss Howe contemptuously.

“No, dear lady! But in the author of The Resting-place.” Mr. Flood had recovered himself.

“Skit, I tell you, skit!” she insisted. And they continued to bicker in undertones while Anita summed up the situation.

“No, my theory is this—Madala Grey met some man——”

“Carey?” asked Mr. Flood, dividing his allegiance.

“No, Carey comes later. There was—an episode——”

“Episodes?” he amended.

“Possibly. But an episode anyhow, that I place myself at the end of the Ploughed Fields period. It may have been later, it may have been the following summer while she was working at The Resting-place. I’m open to conviction there. But an episode there must have been. In The Resting-place she wrote it down as it ought to have happened.”

“Why ought?”

“Well, obviously it didn’t happen or she wouldn’t have become Mrs. Carey.”

“The gentleman loved and rode away, you mean?”

“Something of the sort. Something went wrong.”

“I see.” Miss Howe was interested. “It’s a theory, anyhow. And then in sheer savage irony at her own weakness——”

“Not a bit. In sheer weak longing——”

“I see. If your theory is correct—I don’t know what you base it on——”

“Internal evidence,” said Anita airily.

“Then I can imagine that The Resting-place was a relief to write. Poor Madala!”

“And then,” concluded Anita triumphantly, “then appears Carey, and she’s too worn out, too exhausted with her own frustrated emotions to care what happens. The book’s in her head still, and she her own heroine. He appears to her—I admit that it’s possible that even Carey might appear to her—as a refuge, a resting-place.”

“Yes, but you don’t like Mr. Carey,” said the Baxter girl. “But if Madala did? Isn’t it possible that in Madala’s eyes——? Why shouldn’t the hero be Mr. Carey himself?”

Anita’s eyes were bright with the cold anger that she always showed at the name.

“My good girl, you know nothing about John Carey, or you’d rule that out. Have you ever seen him? I thought not. And yet you have seen him. All day. Every day. When you talk of the man in the street, whom do you mean? What utterly common-place face is in your mind? Shall I tell you what is in mine? John Carey. Ordinary! Ordinary! The apotheosis of the uninspired! Oh, I haven’t any words. Look for yourself.” She rummaged furiously in the half-opened desk and flung out a fading snapshot on a mount. “There he is! That’s the thing she married!”

“What’s he doing in your holy of holies?” Mr. Flood’s eyes seemed to bore into her desk.

Anita, still thrusting down the overflowing papers, answered coldly—

“Madala sent it to Mother. She said that it wasn’t good enough but that it would give her an idea.”

“It certainly gives one an idea,” said the blonde lady languorously.

“And then she put in a post-script that it didn’t do him justice because the sun was in his eyes. Defiantly, as it were. Isn’t that significant? She’d never own to a mistake. Pride! She had the devil’s own pride. Look at the way she took her reviews! And in this case she would be bound to defend him. She’d defend anything she’d once taken under her wing.”

“Well, you know,” drawled the blonde lady, her eyes on the photograph, “according to this he topped her by two inches. I don’t somehow see him under Madala’s wing.” And then—“After all, there’s something rather fascinating in bone and muscle.”

“Yes, and I don’t see,” the Baxter girl hurried into defiance, “honestly I don’t see, Miss Serle, why she shouldn’t have been in love with him. Of course, it’s not a clever face, but it’s good-tempered, and it’s good-looking, and there’s a twinkle. Madala loved a twinkle. And I don’t see——”

Anita crushed her.

“We’re discussing the standards of Madala Grey.”

“That’s not the point either, Anita.” Mr. Flood would sometimes rouse himself to defend the Baxter girl. “You know something. You own to it. What do you know?”

“Simply that she was in love with someone else. I’ve papers that prove it. Now it was either some man whom none of us know, whom for some reason she wouldn’t let us know, or——” she hesitated. Then she began again—“Mind you, I don’t commit myself, but—has the likeness never struck you? Hugh Barrington in The Resting-place and——?” Her eyes flickered towards Kent Rehan.

Mr. Flood whistled.

“Be careful, Anita.”

“He?” Miss Howe laughed, but kindly. “He’s lost to the world. He’ll be worse than ever now.”

“There!” Anita dropped upon the sentence like a hawk upon a heather bird. “You see! You say that! And yet you tell me there was nothing—nothing—between them? Didn’t she rave about him? his talents? his personality? his charm? And then she goes and writes the story of an artist’s model!”

Miss Howe laughed again.

“When a thing’s as obvious as that, it probably isn’t so. Besides, the artist’s model marries the artist.”

“Exactly. She leaves them, and us, cloyed with love in a cottage. I repeat, the artist’s model marries the artist because Madala Grey didn’t. It’s the merest shadow of a solution as yet, but—isn’t that a living portrait in The Resting-place? Oh, I know it by heart—

“Maybe it was his height that gave you the impression, less of weakness than of vagueness, as if his high forehead touched cloud-land, and were obscured by dreams; for his cold eyes guarded his mind from you, and his dark beard hid his mouth.”

“You do know it by heart!” said Miss Howe.

“Of course I know it by heart. It was the first clue. Can anybody read those lines without recognizing him?”

The Baxter girl persisted—

“But I don’t see it. Oh, of course it is like him—but because she borrowed his face, the story needn’t be about him. Why couldn’t she just imagine the story? If she was a genius?”

“That remains the point,” said Mr. Flood.

“She was,” insisted Anita stubbornly.

Miss Howe smiled and said nothing.

He continued—

“The mere fact that she was a genius would prevent such a descent into milk and sugar, unless she were money-making or love-sick.”

The blonde lady spoke—

“Just so! Love-sick—sick of love—savage with love—savaging her holy of holies. A parody. Lila’s right.”

But Miss Howe shook her head.

“No, no. I didn’t mean that sort of parody. Madala may have had her emotions, but she’d always be good-tempered about them. She’s laughing at herself in The Resting-place as well as at us.”

“But why do you cavil at it so?” said the Baxter girl slowly.

“Only at its plain meaning. Grant the parody and——”

“But why can’t you just read it as it stands? Why do you say sentimental? I—I liked it.”

Anita took the book from her hand.

“But, my dear child, anybody can write this sort of thing. Where’s the passage the ladies’ papers rave about, where they have a day on the river together?” She whipped over the pages while I said to the Baxter girl—

“What is it? What’s it about? What’s the plot?”

“Oh, there isn’t any. That’s what they complain of. It’s just a little artist’s model who sits to an elderly, broken-down dreamer, and thinks him a god. The duke and door-mat touch. It’s just how two people fall in love and find it out. It’s as simple as A, B, C. But people ate it when it came out.”

“Treacle, I tell you,” insisted Mr. Flood.

Anita overheard him.

“Exactly! Listen to this—

... and they landed at last in a meadow of brilliant, brook-fed grass.

She had no words in which to say a thousand times ‘How beautiful!’ Words? She had never known a country June. She had never seen whole hedges clotted with bloom, she had never in all her life breathed the perfume of the may or heard a lark’s ecstasy. She had never—and to her simplicity there was no break in the chain of thought—she had never before been alone with him, unpaid, not his servant but his equal and companion. How should she have words?

She sat in the grass with the tall ox-eyes nodding at her elbow and looked at him from under her hat with a little eased sigh. This, after the dust of the journey, of the day, of her life, was bliss. She prepared herself for this bliss, deliberately, as she did everything. She was too poor and too hungry to be wasteful of her happiness: she must have every crumb. Therefore she had looked first at herself, critically, with her trained eye, fingering the frill of her blouse, flinging a scatter of skirt across her dusty city feet, lest her poverty should jar his thoughts of her.

Then she looked at him. She saw him for a moment with undazzled eyes, the blue sky enriched with clouds behind him. She was saying to herself—‘I’m not a fool. I can see straight. I know what he is. He’s just an ordinary man in a hot, black suit. He stoops, I suppose. He’s worn out with work. He’ll never be young again. And there’s nothing particular about him. Then what makes me like him? But I do. I do. He has only to turn and smile at me——’

Then he turned and smiled at her, and it seemed to her that the glamour of the gilded day passed over and into him as he smiled, glorifying him so that she caught her breath at his beauty. She knew her happiness. She knew herself and him. He was the sum of the blue sky and green, green grass, and the shining waters and the flowers with their sweet smell, and the singing birds and the hum of the little things of the air. All beauty was summed up in him: he was food to her and sunshine and music: he was her absolute good: and she thought that someone ought to see that his socks were mended properly, for there was a great ladder down one ankle, darned with wrong-coloured wool.

“Well?” She shut the book.

“I like it,” said the Baxter girl stubbornly.

Mr. Flood twisted uneasily in his seat.

“Oh, pretty, of course. Of course it’s pleasant enough in a way. But Madala oughtn’t to be pretty. Think of the stuff she can do.”

“But can’t you see,” Miss Howe broke in, “how it parodies the slush and sugar school?”

Anita shook her head.

“She used another manner when she was ironical. I wish you were right. Oh, you may be—I must consider—but I’m afraid that she is in earnest. That phrase now—‘The green, green grass,’ (why double the adjective?) ‘the shining waters, the singing birds’—pitiful! And that anti-climax—‘He was her absolute good: and she thought that someone ought to see that his socks were mended properly.’ I ask you—is it art?”

“Not as serious work, of course,” said Miss Howe, “but——”

“I wish I could think so,” said Anita.

“Well, I wish I could do it,” said the Baxter girl. “What do you say, Jenny?”

But it had brought back the country to me. It had brought back home. I hadn’t anything to say to them.

“And she wouldn’t discuss it, you know. She came in after supper that night, just as I was reading the last chapter. It had only been out a day. There she sat, where you are now, Lila, smiling, with her hands in her lap and her eyes fixed on her hands, waiting for me to finish.”

“Oh—” Miss Howe gave a little gushing scream, “that reminds me—d’you know, Anita, somebody actually told me that nobody had seen The Resting-place before it was published, not even you. I was amused. I denied it, of course.”

“Why?” said Anita coldly.

Miss Howe screamed again.

“Then you didn’t? Oh, my dear?”

“Emancipation with a vengeance,” said Mr. Flood.

“It had to come, Anita,” said Miss Howe with deadly sympathy.

“It was not that. It was only—she was so extraordinarily sensitive about the Resting-place—unlike herself altogether. I think, I’ve always thought that she herself knew how unworthy it was of her. She—what’s the use of disguising it?—she, at least, had a value for my judgment,” her eyes, wandering past Miss Howe, brooded upon the Baxter girl, “and she knew what my judgment would be. She owned it. She anticipated it. I had shut the book, you know, quietly. She sat so still that I thought she was asleep. She had had one of those insane mornings——”

“Of course. She used to take a crowd of children into the country, didn’t she?”

“Once a week. Slum children.”

“I know. ‘To eat buttercups,’ she told me,” said Miss Howe.

“It was ridiculous, you know. She couldn’t afford it. Look at the way she lived! I always said to her, ‘If you can afford mad extravagances of that sort, you can afford a decent flat in a decent neighbourhood’——”

“Oh, but I loved those rooms,” said the Baxter girl, “with the Spanish leather screen round the wash-hand-stand.”

Anita glanced behind her.

“Ah, you’ve noticed? I happened to admire it one day and—you know what she is—‘Would you like it? Why, of course, it would just suit the rest of your things. Oh, you must have it. I’d like you to. It’s far too big for this room.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘if you want it housed——’ So that’s how it comes to be here. One couldn’t hurt her feelings. And you know, it was quite unsuitable to lodging-house furniture.”

Miss Howe laughed.

“It disguised the wash-hand-stand. That was all Madala cared. Only then she always took you round to show you how beautifully it did disguise it.”

“Typical,” said Mr. Flood. “Her reserves were topsy-turvy.”

“But she had her reserves,” said Miss Howe quickly.

“I doubt that,” he answered her.

“Oh, but she had.” Anita recovered her place in the talk. “Curious reserves. You know how she came to me over Eden Walls and Ploughed Fields. I saw every chapter. But as I was telling you, she wouldn’t hear a criticism of The Resting-place. That evening she pounced on me. She was as quick as light. She said—‘You don’t like it! I knew you wouldn’t! Never mind, Anita. Forget it! Put it in the fire! You like me. What do the books matter?’ She’d been watching me all the time.”

“She had eyes in the back of her head,” said Miss Howe.

“Kind eyes,” said the Baxter girl.

“And I assure you she wouldn’t have said another word on the subject if I hadn’t insisted. I told her not to be ridiculous. How could I help being disappointed? How could I separate her from her work? I was disappointed, bitterly. I made it clear. I said to her—‘Well, Madala, all I can say is that if your future output is to be on a level with this—this pot-boiler——’”

“It’s not a pot-boiler,” said the Baxter girl loudly and quite rudely. “I don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s not a pot-boiler.”

Anita stared her down.

“‘—pot-boiler,’ I said, ‘then—I wash my hands of you.’ I wanted to rouse her. I couldn’t understand her.”

“Well?” said Miss Howe.

They all laughed.

“Oh, you can guess.” Anita was petulant, but she, too, laughed a little. “You know her way. She just sat smiling and twisting a ring that she wore and looking like a scolded child.”

“But what did she say?” said the Baxter girl.

“Nothing to the point. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘but, Anita, if I’d never written anything, wouldn’t you be just as fond of me?’ Such a silly thing to say! She was distressing at times. She embarrassed me. Fond of her! She knew my interests were intellectual. Fond of her! For a woman of her brains her standard of values was childish.”

“But you were fond of her, you know,” said Miss Howe.

“Oh, as for that—there was something about her—she had a certain way——After all, if it gave her pleasure to be demonstrative, it was easier to acquiesce. But she made a fetish of such things. I was only trying to explain to her, as I tell you, that it was quite impossible to separate creator and creatures, and that to me she was Eden Walls and Ploughed Fields, and if you believe me, she was upon me like a whirlwind, shaking me by the shoulders, and crying out—‘No, no, stop! You’re to stop! It’s me you like, not the books. I hate them. I hate all that. I shall get away from all that one day.’ And I said—‘I don’t wonder you’re ashamed of The Resting-place. I advise you to get to work at once on your new book. You’ll find that if you pull yourself together——’ And all she said was—‘Nita! Nita! Don’t! And she looked at me in such a curious way——”

“How?” somebody said.

“I don’t know—laughing—despairing. She’d no right to look at me like that. It was I who was in despair.”

“I’d like to have seen you two,” said Miss Howe.

“I didn’t know what had got into her. Of course I blame myself. I ought to have followed it out. I might have prevented things. But I was annoyed and she saw it, and she——”

Miss Howe twinkled.

“She wouldn’t let you be annoyed with her long. What did she do with you, Anita?”

“She? I don’t know what you mean. We changed the subject. And as a matter of fact I was much occupied at the time with the Anthology.” She paused. “She had excellent taste,” said Anita regretfully. “Naturally I reserved to myself the final decision, but——”

“Just so,” said Mr. Flood.

“Be quiet, Jasper.” The blonde lady’s draperies dusted his shoulder intimately.

“She’d brought me a delicious thing of Lady Nairn’s, I remember, that I’d overlooked. And from talking of the Anthology we came, somehow, to talking about me. Yes—” Anita gave an embarrassed half laugh—“She began to talk to me, turning the tables as it were—about myself. She’s never, in all the years I’d known her, taken such a tone. Astonishing! As if—as if I were the younger.” She stared at them, as one combating an unuttered criticism. “I—liked it,” said Anita defiantly. “There was nothing impertinent. It was heartening. She made me feel that one person in the world, at least, knew me—knew my work. I realized, suddenly, that while I had been studying her, she must have been studying me, that she understood my capacities, my limitations, my possibilities, almost as well as I did myself. The relief of it—indescribable! She was extraordinarily plain-spoken. As a rule, you know, I thought her manner——”

“Insincere?” said the Baxter girl. “Yes, I’ve heard people say that.”

“It had that effect. It didn’t seem possible that she could like everyone as much as she made them think she did. But with me, at least, she was always frankness itself. She believes, you know,—she believed, that is, that all my work so far, even the Anthology and the Famous Women series, not to mention the lighter work, is still preliminary: that my——” she hesitated—“my master-piece, she called it, was still to come. She said that, though she appreciated all my work, I hadn’t ‘found myself.’ Yes! from that child to me it was amusing. But right, you know. She said that my line, whether I dealt with a period or a person, would always be critical, but that I’d never had a big success because so far I’d been merely critical: that I’d never become identified with my subject: that I’d always remained aloof—inhuman. Yes, she said that. A curious theory—but it interested me. But she said that it was only the real theme I needed, the engrossing subject. She said that my chance would come: that ‘she felt it in her bones.’ I can hear her voice now—‘Don’t you worry, Nita! It’ll come to you one day. A big thing. Biography, I shouldn’t wonder. And I shall sit and say—I told you so—I told you so!’ Yes, she talked like that. Oh, it’s nothing when I repeat it, but if you knew how it seemed to pour new life into me. It was the belief in her voice!”

“She always believed in you,” said Miss Howe with a certain harshness. “Insincere! You should have heard her talk of your Famous Women!” And then—“Yes. She believed in you right enough.”

“More than I did in her that night. I couldn’t forget The Resting-place. It lay on the table, and every now and then, when I felt most comfort in her, my eyes would fall on it, and it would jar me. She felt it too. When I saw her off at last—it had grown very late—she stopped at the gate and turned and came running back. I thought that she had forgotten her handbag. She nearly always forgot her handbag. But no, it was The Resting-place that was on her mind. It was—‘Nita! try it again. Maybe you’d like it better.’ And then—‘Nita! I enjoyed writing it so.’ ‘That’s something, at any rate,’ I said, not wanting, you know, to be unkind. Then she said—‘I wish you liked it. Because, you know, Nita—’ and stopped as if she wanted to tell me something and couldn’t make up her mind. ‘Well, what?’ I said. It was cold on the steps. She hesitated. She looked at me. For an instant I had an absurd impression that she was going to cry. Then she kissed me. She’d kissed me goodnight once already, though, you know, we never did as a rule. And then, off she went without another word. I was quite bewildered by her. I nearly called her back; but it was one of those deep dark blue nights: it seemed to swallow her up at once. But I heard her footsteps for a long while after—dragging steps, as if she were tired. I wasn’t. It was as if she had put something into me. I went back into the house and I worked till daylight. And all the next day I worked—worked well. I felt, I remember, so hopeful, so full of power. By the evening I had quite a mass of material to show her, if she came. I half expected her to come. But instead—” she fumbled among her papers—“I got this.”