Front matter (continued 2)

“But I am not suggesting that,” Mrs. Stratton replied indignantly.

“Of course you are,” I said. “The mere fact that you come here and put these ideas into my head is tantamount to a charge, an indictment.”

“I don’t mean that,” she protested.

“It doesn’t matter whether you mean it or not: the effect is the same. By bringing your indecent suspicions here you are hoping to make it impossible for me any more to be natural with this girl.”

“No, no!”

“Yes, yes,” I replied. “Excuse me if I speak with plainness, but I feel strongly about it. It is abominable. Don’t you believe that decent living and pure affection are possible in this world?”

“I am sure they are, but I am troubled about my niece’s—my brother’s only child’s—good name.”

I thanked her sarcastically for the compliment. I was conscious that I was being rude, but I could not control myself. There are some persons who always draw out our inferior qualities, just as the companionship of others can increase the value of our character by fifty per cent. Mrs. Stratton invariably evoked my worst side. Any fine edge that I possessed was blunted when we were together.

“It is what people may think and say that is so disturbing to me,” she explained. “You know how they talk.”

“I am learning,” I said. “But anyone over thirty-five should have acquired an indifference to public opinion.”

“That is a counsel of perfection,” she replied. “In ordinary life we are all governed by it, or at any rate we are largely influenced. It would be heart-breaking to me if I thought that people were saying horrid things about Rose and you. Mind, I don’t say that they are talking already,” she conceded. “But they’ll begin very soon.”

“How soon?” I asked.

“I can’t say with any definiteness. How could I?”

“Well,” I said, “I want to know. It is your business to tell me. Rose comes back on Wednesday. Will they begin on Thursday?”

“But you’re being absurd.”

“Not at all,” I said. “I want to know. I must arrange things. Will they begin on Friday? Remember—a girl of eighteen!—eighteen is just the age for these people to gloat over: eighteen and forty-five, what a titbit for you all!”

“Please don’t mix me up in this,” said Mrs. Stratton indignantly.

“I beg your pardon,” I said. “What a titbit for every one else! But, anyhow, remember that this girl of eighteen will have been alone in her guardian’s house two whole days by Friday, with nothing but the maids and whatever good character he may have built up for himself to protect her. May I safely take no steps till Friday?”

Mrs. Stratton was becoming very cross. “You’re being ridiculous,” she snapped.

“Not at all,” I said. “Logical merely. Very well then,” I went on. “If we may have two days, why not three? And if three days and there is no public clamour, and the windows are not broken by the Association for Getting Morality into Others or the Society for Suspecting Every One Else, perhaps we could have a week of innocent companionship, Rose and I? I have not unnaturally been looking forward to it. And if one week, why not two? Surely you must see that I am entitled to know this?”

“I can’t think why you never married,” was her reply. “Don’t you see how much wiser that would have been? Everything would have been simplified.”

“Rose and I have got on very well alone,” I said.

“But how much nicer for Rose to have had a woman’s guidance?”

“Why?” I retorted. “On all questions touching life, worldly education and so forth, a man can be as instructive; and in so far as protectiveness goes he can be as tender and as thorough. What remains girls get by instinct. And Rose likes me: that’s another great asset. Supposing that she did not like my wife?”

“But that’s being too fantastic.”

“Very well, then. Supposing that my wife didn’t like Rose? Women can be very disapproving of each other—very jealous.”

“All this doesn’t affect the main thing,” said Mrs. Stratton. “I am still worried by the extreme impropriety of you and my niece living here alone.”

“Then tell me,” I said, “what you propose—for you must have some proposition in your mind.”

“Rose could come to us,” said Mrs. Stratton. “We are planning to go to the Italian Riviera for the winter—to Nervi.”

“But on returning,” I said, “there would be the same opportunities for calumny.”

“Might it not be possible to have a companion for her?” Mrs. Stratton asked. “Some nice woman to live here? I know of one I could recommend.”

“No,” I said, not without emphasis, “it might not, I will not have any nice woman here. Besides, if I did, what would be the result? Simply more suspicions! I should be thought bigamous instead of merely monogamous.”

“Oh no!” said Mrs. Stratton. “I meant an elderly woman.”

“Good Heavens!” I exclaimed.

Mrs. Stratton’s visit was disturbing. I had been looking forward to two years of Rose’s company before the time arrived when she was twenty and would probably want to be independent, and I thought I was entitled to it. These two years were to be very precious—a kind of reward, if you like, for my foster-parental solicitude; and now they were threatened.

It was not public opinion that I was fearing, but the self-conscious restrictions that were being forced on me to the ruin of easy natural familiarity. I should always now be wondering if this or that excursion were wise, or what constructions the beastly world would be putting on this or that occurrence. Nothing could be simple and unselfconscious any more!

I took the problem to Mrs. O’Gorman.

“But you don’t mean to say that this comes as a surprise to you?” she asked, when I had finished the story.

“Yes, it did,” I said.

“O the poor innocent!” she exclaimed. “And for a doctor too! And haven’t I been telling you about it, for years, here in this very room where we’re sitting?”

“Well,” I said, “I hadn’t thought. I was thinking of Rose as a schoolgirl still, not a woman.”

“All girls are women,” said Mrs. O’Gorman. “That’s the difference between girls and boys. Boys go on being boys long after they’re men; girls can be women from birth. Let’s be practical now. What are the alternatives, do you say—Rose to visit about, or a duenna to be imported?”

“There seems to be no other,” I said.

Mrs. O’Gorman laughed her triumphant knowing Irish laugh. “There is at least one more,” she said. “Supposing Rose should become engaged—then no one would have anything to say. Many girls are married and mothers when they’re no older than she is now.” She paused.

“You’re frowning, Doctor,” said Mrs. O’Gorman. “You don’t like it.”

“It’s not what I was wanting,” I said.

“I’ve made you jealous,” she went on maliciously.

“How can I be jealous when I’m not in love with her?” I asked.

“Listen to the man!” she mocked. “As if jealousy had any logic, any rules or reason! Every one’s jealous—not only lovers. It’s one of the impulses of life; it’s a part of all kinds of honourable respectable emotions that every one praises, such as ambition. Possessiveness always leads to it—and that is why you’d hate Rose’s lover so, because he’d be taking her away from you: first her thoughts, and then herself. So should I be jealous if you spent more time talking with that nincompoop, Mrs. Galloway, than with me. Jealousy runs through life. It’s elemental. Listen to your spaniel growling when you’re patting my Peek. It’s no use being ashamed of jealousy, and it’s no use believing people when they say they are superior to the feeling.”

“All right,” I said. “Let us leave it at that: if Rose became engaged I should be jealous. Horribly jealous. I admit it. Disappointed, frustrated, too. I’ve hardly seen her yet, and some fellow carries her off just when she’s of age to be a companion. It’s too absurd.”

“But that’s life,” said Mrs. O’Gorman. “No sense in it whatever. Just a stupid hurrying along to the tomb. No time to do anything, except to say, at intervals, ‘Good Heavens! what have I been doing with my time!’”

“No, no!” I said. “It’s better than that.”

“Very little,” she replied. “But anyway, let you and me be practical at the moment. There are three possible courses: One—that Rose may become engaged and then Mrs. Stratton and all her friends would cease to think of you as an immoral man. Two—that you should invite some elderly spinster or widow to live in your house as a perpetual chaperon. And three—” she paused again.

“Well, what is three?”

“Three,” she resumed: “that you should go on as you are and tell them all to go to the devil. All my votes are for number three.”

“Mine too,” I said.

“But of course the first may happen—don’t forget that,” she warned me.

“I’ll wait till it does,” I said. “Thank you for your sympathy and counsel.”

“‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,’” she called after me, with a rather sinister chuckle.

The warning brought back all my misgivings, and as I walked home I knew perfectly well that the happiest years were behind me and that, to a large extent, my Rose was no more. I had lost her. Even if Mrs. Stratton proved to be wrong and the world did not talk, I had lost her. For the reason that we should be living an unnatural life. A lonely girl of eighteen has too little in common with a man of forty-five whose attitude to her is parental. It is not such as he that she would choose for a companion. Being normal, she would choose a younger man, nearer her both in age and aspirations: some one to commit, if necessary, follies with; not an old buffer.

This point of division comes in every family, but it can be less poignant with real parents. At any rate, a real father would have no such temptation as could assail me, and might have assailed me had I not always thought so naturally of myself as Theodore’s deputy, his chosen nominee to bring his daughter up and cherish her; to make her (his phrase was always coming back to me) “beat the band.” Would Rose beat the band? Had I been worthy? Can any child be depended upon to react to tuition? Impossible to count on it: the guardian at most can do his best and hope for the best.

Hitherto I had not much to reproach myself with; but I now saw that the real testing-time was on us. The real breaking-point too, for every day Rose, as she ripened and matured and became more conscious of adult things, would be growing towards her own life, her own mate, and consequently away from my life and me. Once again I realized how like ashes in the mouth the fruits of parenthood can be. The new generation is always receding from the old; the old pathetically trying to catch up and understand. The metaphor of a stream rushing between the two occurred to me: almost none able to swim and so few bridges!

Once again I realized how pitiless life is, in its unresting urgency: moving ever on and on, no matter from what contentment, from what joy: the next moment always more important than this one!

Rose came back a woman grown. Not short, not tall—the right height—and to my eyes so sweet, so desirable, that I could not understand how any young man could fail to succumb, and I dreaded the time when Ronnie and she would meet.

But I need not have done so, for when that moment arrived it was not fraught with passion; indeed, they seemed a little constrained, Ronnie in particular, and it was not until two or three days had passed that the shyness wore off. Whatever Ronnie may have felt, he did not seek Rose’s society unduly.

I had proof that, so far as Rose was concerned, there was nothing serious, a little while after, when, regardless of Mrs. Stratton’s nastiness, we had settled down to a very delightful routine à deux. During one of our talks Rose was frank about her plan of life.

“Of course, Dombeen,” she said, “I don’t want to leave you before I must, but I want to marry some day; I think every girl who is healthy ought to, and have children.”

She stopped and looked into an unfathomable distance.

“Boys,” she said. “I don’t want girls. I should love to have a boy in the Navy, and see him in his bright buttons, with sun-burned hair, and freckles. But it would have to be the right man, of course.”

“What kind of a man would that be?” I asked, a little wistfully, I fear.

“Don’t be unhappy,” Rose said, with one of her gay smiles and a touch on my arm. “It won’t be yet, anyway. We’ll have lots more good times together before then.”

“You never can tell,” I said. “He may be just round the corner at this moment. In any case I should like to know what kind of man you are thinking of. I might”—here I made an effort to laugh lightly—“I might be able to find him for you.”

“It’s difficult,” she said.

“How old?” I asked. “Do you want him to be your own age?”

“Pretty nearly,” she said. “I want to have fun as well. Older men are rather nice, I know, but they’re rather grave too. I should hate to be tied to a stodge. Some one who could go long walks, and climb a tree if necessary, and ride, and be silly at parties. But not really silly underneath, of course; and yet,” she added, “older men are very attractive, aren’t they?”

“I hope so,” I said: “now and then.”

“Oh, you vain thing!” she replied. “No,” she went on, “he should be older than I am, anyway.”

“A fellow like young Fortescue?” I hazarded.

“Oh no. He thinks too much about his clothes.”

“But he’s very good-looking.”

“Yes, in a way. And I should want him to be handsome. I want my boys to be handsome, you see. But not like Harry Fortescue: he’s too pretty.”

“Very well then. Young Somers-Flint?”

“No, he’s too noisy. He has that terrible laugh. I should want him to be amusing, of course, and see all the funny things in life, but more quietly. Besides, I can’t stand men with thin noses. His nose is absurd.”

“If you want big noses,” I said, “what about Harold Swain?”

“Oh, but that’s just the other extreme,” she said. “The man’s a—what do you call those birds at the Zoo, all colours with little eyes set like jewels and enormous beaks? I know—toucans. The man’s a toucan.”

“But he’s over six feet and a first-class cricketer,” I said.

“Yes, I like that,” she said. “I should like him to be good at games. But he mustn’t be grotesque.”

“Surely you can mention some one who comes at any rate nearer your ideal? What about”—I did my best to make my voice sound natural—“what about Ronnie?”

I did not look at her, so I cannot say whether Rose blushed or not.

“Ronnie,” she said meditatively. “Yes, I like Ronnie. Ronnie is a dear. But—”

“Yes?”

“Ronnie is to play with,” she said. “He’s not for a husband. I should want my husband to be stronger than that.”

“And then,” I said, quite normal again, “there are other things besides looks and character. There’s employment, for example. Do you want him to be rich and idle or do you want him to be busy? And if busy, what do you want him to do?”

“Yes,” said Rose, “I want him to be busy. I want him to be away all the day, so that his return will be an event to both of us. I don’t believe in husbands muddling about at home between breakfast and dinner. I’m sure father would have been happier if his studio had been somewhere else and he had to go away to it and remain away. He got tired of the house—I can see now, although I didn’t know then—instead of looking on it as a harbour of refuge after his work was done. That’s what made him so restless and forced him to go away so much: that and his love of seeing new and beautiful things.

“It must be dreadful,” she mused, “to be an artist and have such a keen eye for lovely effects and know that they can never be really reproduced in paint. I wish we knew more about Turner and what he felt. He came nearer getting it than anyone, I suppose; but he must have suffered agonies of disappointment and failure. The worst of it is, he seemed never to let anyone know him, so we have no evidence.”

“Well, don’t go to the opposite extreme,” I said, “and marry a sailor, for you’d hardly see him at all.”

“Oh no,” she said, “I shouldn’t do that. I should want him to come back every evening, and stay back.”

“Then no doctor need apply,” I said.

“No, I’m afraid not,” said Rose. “I want all his attention when he has finished with business. That’s an essential. And a steady home that I can make like a home, and go on improving. With a big nursery.”

“In the country, or London?” I asked.

“In the country,” said Rose. “But not too far out. A place where you can hear the train come in, and go a little way across the fields to meet him and take away the fish basket.”

“Ah!” I said, “now I know. He’s something in the city.”

“I don’t mind if he is,” said Rose, “so long as he comes back every evening, and loves me, and makes enough money for me to have a hansom everywhere when I go to town, and to take the children to the sea in the summer. That’s my idea of a husband.”

“I hope you may find him,” I said, “and having found him, keep him simple and deeply rooted. And you must make me a promise. Will you?”

“Of course.”

“Let no one but me supply that big nursery with its rocking-horse.”

So we talked; not once but many times. And this Prince Charming in the guise of a businessman with a tall hat, catching the 9.15 up and the 5.46 down, became a joke with us: one of us at any rate, in the English way, which avoids facing facts, making haste to joke for fear of having to cry.

For a while it seemed as though the alarms about the censorious world were false; but I could rid myself very rarely, and then only for a few moments, of my fool’s paradise convictions. During the moments that were free from this haunting, our new united life went along happily. Rose had taken over the housekeeping by way of experience; we entertained; a school-fellow came on a visit; we walked over to Mrs. O’Gorman’s fairly often; there were parties here and there; and no serpent in the form of a successful lover entered Eden.

I was more than ever struck by Rose’s quiet detachment. She had no absorbing interests: most things found her ready to scrutinize them, but nothing captured her. Most young Britons of both sexes have their hobbies and overwork them, but Rose moved serenely through the days, getting everything done and apparently having time to turn aside if occasion called. I admired this gift immensely. My own tendency is to concentrate almost too exclusively. If she had a hobby it was the arranging of flowers, and I think that her skill and taste in this charming and neglected branch of domestic art amounted to genius.

And then, further refusals being no longer possible, Rose accepted an invitation to her Aunt Stratton’s, and nothing was ever the same again. O that woman!

I could see that something was wrong directly Rose came back. We were sufficiently on terms of intimacy for wireless to be established between us: at any rate from her to me. She did not exactly exhibit constraint, but there was something, as we say, on her mind. I was conscious of that. She talked freely enough; gathered up the strings of local life in her absence; told me something of the Strattons, the only one of whom that she really cared for being Angelica, the youngest, a girl of about twelve. Her Uncle George she liked, in a negative way; perhaps, more accurately, was sorry for. The others we didn’t discuss.

“That’s over anyway,” she said; “and nothing would get me to go abroad with them. But—” and then she stopped.

I waited for the rest of the sentence, but it never came. Instead, she asked some question about our own neighbourhood and we passed on to other interests.

But I guessed then what she was meaning to say and later discovered that I was right.

“But,”—she was thinking—“although the visit to the Strattons is over, I shall have to be away a good deal, if not altogether, because it’s not suitable for Dombeen and me to be alone in this house. People are going to talk—and I couldn’t allow Dombeen to have to suffer from that.” Such were her thoughts—the fruit of Milly Stratton’s insinuations. That she herself would suffer did not matter. Eighteen can look after itself, but forty-five must be carefully guarded—that is how she would have argued. Eighteen is too immature, but forty-five, although, of course, an incredibly advanced age, lends itself to scandal, and doctors must have sound reputations.

Then set in a broken period which I look back upon without pleasure. All parents, I suppose, have to go through similar seasons, when misunderstandings or a want of sympathy alienate them from their children, or their children from them. During the time of dependence things can be all right, and again after independence is attained; but when the wings are beginning to sprout, sons and daughters have it in them to be more than difficult. How much of it have I seen! I was no parent myself, and Rose was not pining for independence; but she was restless and disturbed because of me: she did not want to go away, but thought that she ought to, knowing that I could not.

At last I could stand it no longer. “Look here, Rose,” I said, “what’s the matter? You’re not happy. Tell me why.”

“It’s difficult to explain,” she said.

“Then I will,” I said. “You are persuaded that it is unsuitable for us to be together here alone. Your dear Aunt Milly suggested the idea, and you can’t forget it. You think people will talk.”

“Oh! Dombeen,” she said, “when did you take to clairvoyance?”

“When your pretty head became transparent,” I replied. “Well, what is to be done? If you feel like that you must go away—or—”

“Yes—or what?”

“Well, if you were to become engaged I suppose that everybody would be satisfied and we could go on as we are. Our only saviour is that punctual husband, with the tall hat and the fish-basket. And he’s not yet on the horizon.”

“No,” she said.

I soon began to have proofs of the accuracy of the Stratton prediction. It is extraordinary—especially in a country district where no one in easy circumstances has enough to do—how intensely interesting the affairs of other people, neighbours chiefly, can be, and how difficult it is not to be inquisitive and censorious. I don’t suggest that in a city there are no meddlesome onlookers, with fingers sharpened for pies that do not belong to them; but in a city there are more distractions and there are also certain impediments to familiarity. In the country you are bound, unless there has been a feud, to know your neighbours; but one may live at No. 5 in a London terrace for half a century and never meet the occupants of No. 4 and No. 6.

Hitherto I had been on terms of pleasant and easy intimacy with most of my patients; and where there was less cordiality it was probably not my fault. A certain interest in my affairs had been shown—there had been questions as to my biggest break recently, as to what I was sending to the Flower Show, the size of marrows, the chance of the Isle of Wight disease among the hives, and, of course, inquiries after Rose. But no more. No one had ventured to give advice. But now I began to detect admonitory symptoms, fumblings towards counsel as to conduct.

Lady Fergusson, for example, Ronnie’s mother, after a long talk about pelargoniums, wondered if it were true that dear Rose was going to the Riviera with the Strattons. So nice for her to be with young people. So nice to be able to go away. It was much to be hoped that nothing would interfere. How fortunate some girls were! In her youth there had been no such gadding about. And so forth.

Then the rector’s wife, Mrs. Cumnor, a good enough woman in her way but overburdened with family cares—not however so overburdened that she had no time or strength left to take on the cares of others as well: mine and Rose’s, for instance; she too began to cut in.

Rose, she said one morning, after I had finished with her second daughter’s pulse, chest and temperature, was, she knew, never ill. How enviable a state! And so active and clever too. Now that she had finished with school she would, of course, with such a constitution, go out into the world.

“Might not her vocation be at home?” I asked.

“Of course it would be hard for you to have to lose her,” Mrs. Cumnor conceded, “terribly hard; but—” and then she changed the subject.

Her husband, who had clearly been put up by his wife to contribute something to the campaign, was more jovial about it: wondering if any young men would dare to propose to a girl who was always in the company of such a handsome guardian. Was it fair to Rose to have a resident spoilsport? And so on—with plenty of hearty laughter as an ameliorative.

Mrs. O’Gorman confirmed my fears as to the neighbourhood’s determination.

“The whole pack’s in full cry after you,” she said. “You’re too happy for them: they can’t bear the sight of it. You’re free too—and so many of them are shackled for life and full of nasty envy. It’s not the best possible world! And yet,” she went on, “it’s the only one I want. Perfection would be very boring.”

“What shall we do?” I asked. “We are beaten.”

“Yes, I’m afraid you’re beaten. The pack has won. But it’s only anticipating your fate by a few months. All parents have to lose their children, and you’ve been luckier than most. Rose is certain sure to marry, and marry young too, so you’d have lost her at twenty any way, if not before. She’s on the road to nineteen now, and you mustn’t grumble.”

“And what is there left for me?” I asked.

“You?—why that doesn’t matter, because you don’t matter. You’re a sterile old stick. Sterility has no vote. You’ll just rub along, getting through the days, till the end. You’ve had your chance and lost it.”

“You don’t give me much encouragement,” I complained.

“Why should I?” she replied. “The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do. But you might marry yet?”

“Never,” I said.

“Very well then, you must rust and bear it.”

Cold comfort indeed!

If ever there were two people on this planet who might have been let alone, and wanted to be let alone, and deserved to be let alone, they were Rose and I. But it was not to be.

While with the Strattons, at some “At Home,” Rose had met a Mrs. Lovell, who was about to go into business as a florist, and she had offered Rose a post. It was to be a florist’s of a new kind, for not only were flowers to be sold but they were to be arranged too. The staff was to include flower-arrangers who on the evenings of dinner-parties would go out to decorate the tables. Premises had been taken, just off the Brompton Road, and already a connection was being formed. If Mrs. Lovell still had room for her, said Rose, she would go. It was not what she had dreamed of, but it was something definite, a start.

“There is so little for an untrained girl to do,” she said. “It isn’t as if I was brought up to have to earn my own living. I’m going to be fairly well off, aren’t I?”

“Fairly,” I said, “when you’re twenty.”

“There you are!” she said. “But at the moment, if I have to go, I should like to try to be independent. And of course, I have to go,” she added: “it was cowardly to say ‘if.’ I can’t teach: I don’t know anything. I can’t type or do shorthand. I don’t want to be a companion to an old lady—unless it were to Mrs. O’Gorman; but she’s got Julia. But I like being among flowers, even though they’re cut, and I like Mrs. Lovell, and I think that’s a Heaven-sent opening. Almost no one arranges flowers as a profession now. The only one I’ve heard of is a little Japanese man. So we shall have the field to ourselves. It’s fun to be doing something original.”

And soon afterwards she went.

Of this part of Rose’s life I have little to say. I can tell only what I know at first hand. Whenever I was in London—but that was very seldom—I called at the florist’s; and Rose came down for Sundays now and then. She seemed to be happy and uncomplicated. Whether her association with me—whether my general tutelary influence in her earlier years—was being of any use to her I had no means of judging. She might have been equally capable without it. Educationalists never know.

The flower scheme failed to prosper, but Rose did not give up London. Even if there were not the same objection to returning to live with me, she had probably lost the wish to do so. I am sure that she was fond of me, but she had made new friends. London was full of variety and attraction, and she had contracted the habit of employment and liked it. I don’t know anything about the economics of a florist’s business, except that to me the thought of having to pay money for flowers is repellent: flowers, one feels, should be free to all; but Mrs. Lovell had not enough experience and Rose was quite capable of giving a bunch of daffodils away rather than haggle over the price. Moreover, the time was not ripe for the professional arranger. I do not know that it is even yet.

To Mrs. Lovell, however, Rose remained true, and therefore continued with her as an ally in her next scheme, which was an old curiosity shop. Not an old curiosity shop where oddity was the prevailing note, but an old curiosity shop where everything had some beauty, either of shape or colour, or was picturesquely obsolete. Such shops, I have observed on my London expeditions, are now very numerous, but Mrs. Lovell’s was one of the first. They are usually directed by women. Just as a man may sell wine or be secretary to a golf club and lose no caste, so may what we call ladies keep these shops. Blue and green and purple glass; old stuff for patchwork quilts; spinning wheels; Stafford and Leeds jugs; lace; amber necklaces; beads; brass pestles and mortars; painted rolling-pins; early Victorian dolls—the place was full of things of that kind, and Rose, in a charming smock, was standing in the midst of it on the day that I unexpectedly looked in, smilingly engaged in the task—an easy one—of selling a very young and obviously adoring curate a warming-pan: not, as he was explaining, for use, but for decoration. On seeing me she blushed very becomingly and nearly broke the little divine’s heart by her too apparent eagerness to turn to the new customer.

Rose begged the afternoon off—and it was the kind of shop that did itself very little harm by shutting up for the whole day now and then—and we met for lunch and then loitered about in Kew Gardens.

“Has that little curate proposed to you yet?” I asked.

“Not yet,” said Rose.

“Any one else?”

“One or two,” she replied.

“I suppose a great many men come to that shop?” I said.

“Oh yes. They’re very jolly too, some of them, until they fall in love; and then they’re so dull. Isn’t it funny what a difference it makes? And then they propose and I lose them.”

And I, I thought to myself, have lost Rose! Is loss the rule of life? It seems to be.

It was on one of Rose’s week-end visits just before she was twenty that she took out a photograph and handed it to me. The photograph was an amateur snapshot of a group on a lawn, among whom was Rose.

“Quite good of you,” I said.

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t me that I wanted you to look at, but the man behind me.”

It is strange what effect the most ordinary words can sometimes have! Rose’s were casual enough, but my heart absolutely stopped for a moment and a mist crossed my brain. God knows I did not want to keep this child from marriage; her engagement would even be a blessing in disguise, for it would bring her back to her home; but her remark none the less was like a knell.

And yet she had told me nothing! Nothing—and to the fearful swift apprehension of a jealous foster-father, everything!

I pulled myself together and examined the man: tall, regular-featured, with a high forehead due more to thinning hair than to formation of skull. Eyeglasses. His general expression suggested a somewhat condescending benignity, with assurance. I didn’t like him.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“His name is Eustace Holt,” Rose said. “He wants me to marry him.”

“Yes?” I heard my voice say.

“I rather think I shall.”

I had no more words. I drew her to me and kissed her hair. The action, I suppose, implied a kind of possessive protectiveness. I had wondered vaguely how I should behave when the news broke: and this was the way!

After a long silence Rose went on to say that he was a barrister; had been a private tutor for a while after leaving Oxford, but was now at the Bar and beginning to do well in chamber practice. Not an advocate.

I looked at the photograph again. Probably I should have been cool about any young man who had captured Rose’s heart, knowing so well that none could be worthy; but to this one I felt positive hostility. He had the effect of filling me with a sudden warm rush of affection for Ronnie.

“Well?” Rose said.

She knew me sufficiently to discern a want of sympathy; but I hope that I succeeded in concealing the greater part of my antagonism. You see, I was still a liar. Not all my intimacy with Rose and admiration for her candour had cured me. Perhaps had I said, “My dear, I hate the sight of the man: he looks priggish: do promise me to do nothing about it for six months,” it might have changed her life. At any rate it could have done no harm, and it would have had the additional merit of expressing a truth. But I couldn’t. For one thing, I had not the courage to be destructive about her own choice, when the romance was still so young; for another, I had not the right. She had seen the man and loved the man, or thought she did; and all the ground for my sudden prejudice was a tiny snapshot.

“Well?” said Rose.

“He’s not what I was expecting for you or hoping for you,” I replied. “At any rate, not in appearance. He’s—well, he’s too—too urban. Too prim. In spite of what I said about the fish-basket, I have always thought of your husband as more careless, easy-going, gayer than this. I had thought of him as having something of Nature—more of the open air or the sea—but this man’s from the Squares. He travels in the Tube. He carries an umbrella.”

“My dear Dombeen,” said Rose, “how can you know things like that? I’m sure I don’t, and I’ve seen quite a lot of him. He may be a Londoner, but that’s nothing. Barristers must live in London. I wish I hadn’t shown you that foolish picture. He’s really very distinguished looking, he has a most delightful voice, he does everything well. He’s a plus man at golf.”

“I can believe it,” I said. “But that isn’t the point. The point is not, is he a remarkable man, but is he fitted to be Rose’s husband? I’ve known you for as many years as you have been on this earth, and I’ve watched you grow up in body and mind, and perhaps I’ve been able to help you in both—and when we help people we learn about them—and I’ve thought often of the best kind of man to carry you away from me when the time came, but never was it a polished Londoner marked out for professional eminence. Where—just to mention one trifling matter—where are his jokes?”

“Jokes aren’t everything. But any way he can be quite amusing.”

“Jokes go a long way,” I said; “and you especially would be very dull without them. As for his golf, that’s nothing. Golf isn’t really a game, nor does it really carry any open-air love with it. How old is he?”

“He’s thirty-four,” said Rose.

“Thirty-four, thinning at the top, once a tutor, now a barrister, and going to marry this uncalculating child! O my dear!” I said.

It was of course absurd of me to be shocked by Rose’s choice of a husband. I suppose that there never was a girl yet whose selection did not cause surprise. The strange thing to male observers of these matches is the want of fastidiousness that even the nicest women can display. Rose had not erred in that respect, but it is notorious among men that most women do.

I took my disappointment to Mrs. O’Gorman, but she had no sympathy for me. All that she did was to laugh.

“I told you so,” she said.

“How can you be so elementary as to make use of that paltry phrase?” I replied.

She laughed again.

“Didn’t I tell you so?” she asked. “Years ago. And often since.”

“I suppose you did,” I conceded.

“Very well then, let a poor lonely old woman full of uric acid, with an extremely incompetent medical adviser, enjoy her little triumph! If poor human nature couldn’t say ‘I told you so’ now and then, we’d hardly have the courage to keep on at all at all.”

“Very well then,” I said. “You are one of the most remarkable of far-sighted women. Deborah the prophetess was a blind mute compared with you; Mother Shipton was an Aunt Sally. I give you all the praise and glory. But meanwhile, what is to be done? I’m sure that Rose is making a mistake.”

“Most people who marry do,” said this monstrous old woman.

“Then can’t it be stopped?” I asked.

“I don’t see how. Surely you’ve heard the remark—I’m not very original this afternoon, I’m afraid—’Marriage is a lottery’?”

“Well?”

“Well, then there’s nothing for you to do. It may be all right. You say that he’s respectable, a barrister, not poor, not deformed. How then can you stop it? You’ve got nothing to go on, no valid excuse. If he were a dwarf you might do something; or a tenor with long hair. But I don’t see how you could stop her even then, because in marriage the promising matches often go wrong and the apparently ill-assorted have a very good time. Besides, she’s only a few months from being her own mistress. You can grumble, but you can’t prevent.”

And that’s all the comfort that I got from Mrs. O’Gorman.

But there was one drop of sweetness in this bitter draught. Rose’s engagement meant that she returned to me; she gave up her work almost at once.

Nothing, however, was as it had been. (Nothing, says the cynic, ever is.) Our old frank intimacy was over. We had our talks and our walks and our fun still; but there was a skeleton at the feast, and he was a rising barrister. Rose didn’t mention him much, nor did I. But she wrote long letters, and received long letters, and I had no doubt that Eustace Holt received those that she wrote and signed those that she received. And then one evening she suggested that he should be asked down.

“You’ll have to see him sooner or later,” she added.

“Then it’s still on?” I inquired.

“Of course,” said Rose. “I should have told you if it hadn’t been. When you meet him you’ll like him. Or you would if you hadn’t made up your mind not to, and haven’t got the pluck to eat humble pie.”

I never liked him, but it would have been difficult to say why. He was tall, comely, well-mannered, deferential, thoughtful about details, protective of Rose (perhaps that was his real offence), uniformly quiet and easy. What he lacked most conspicuously was any exaggerated characteristic. He conversed fluently and with some knowledge upon all the cultured topics—he knew about pictures and music, as a frequenter of the National Gallery and the Crystal Palace concerts; he belonged to the London Library; he played golf at the Old Deer Park; he had good nails. He dressed well. His suit case was of the solidest leather. In fact, he was all that he should have been and—alas!—nothing that he should not. He reminded me of a well-bound book in a gentleman’s library—the kind of book that no gentleman’s library should be without, but which makes no appeal to be read.

I am not one of those who fling up their hands in despair and wonder what on earth a sensible girl like So-and-So can see in that fellow she’s going to marry. But even when one admits that the deeps that call to deeps in engaged people are and should be invisible to the rest of the world, it is permissible to parents and guardians to deplore the reciprocity. The deeps are not all: in fact the attraction of the deeps can be the least permanent and admirable element in marriage.

I knew enough of Rose’s spirit, her vividness, her dependence upon impulse, her love of life, to realize that she was doomed to spend far too much time alone. Eustace had all the virtues, but he had no imagination. He was also fixed where Rose was fluid. He had his eye on the goal success; whereas all that Rose asked from life was a gay serenity. She was in the habit of watching faces light up at her approach: “People,” you might have written on her tombstone as sufficient epitaph, “were pleased to see her”; and all of that was doomed to pass, not because she would be less liked but because she would not be free: she was to be reincarnated as the property of another, as Mrs. Eustace Holt.

Still, there is more than one kind of happiness; there is even, I have observed, a happiness to be derived from misery: all doctors would testify to this; and Rose might find, in her home duties and the practice of wifeliness, a complacency that would take the place of the old radiating freedom. I use the word “might” with emphasis: it is all that is possible to parents and guardians who are threatened with the loss of their treasure and have gloomy prevision.

In my case I was truly hoping against hope, because I had had a shock. On one of Eustace’s visits I made a discovery about him which filled me with the darkest forebodings. I had found him one afternoon just before post time seated in the library steaming a stamp off a postcard. Rose, it appears, had had occasion to write a rapid order to some shop and, having no halfpenny stamp (for those were the days before the blessings of peace had sent up the postcard rate), she had characteristically stuck on a twopenny-halfpenny one from a store which I kept for foreign correspondence; and Eustace had been entrusted with the card for the post. But his careful eye had detected the extravagance, and when I came upon him he was removing the twopenny-halfpenny stamp and substituting a halfpenny one from his own pocket. Knowing Rose as I did, I would rather have found him burgling my safe or even kissing one of the maids; for the action argued a passion for thrift which would lead in time to the sternest censure of the unthinking carelessness in money matters and the constant generosities which were among her most striking characteristics.

The worst of it was that he did not pale or start when I caught him: he merely expressed his satisfaction at having been able to correct Rose’s folly in time. He then dried the foreign stamp, handed it gravely to me for future use (“It will need a little gum,” he said) and hastened to the post. If ever a home-wrecker was saturated with innocence it was he.

I was in hopes that Rose’s formal visit to Eustace’s people might have the effect of implanting some misgivings in her. Such expeditions have had that effect in the past, when the impact of the “people” has been so startling as to cause a complete revision of the affections. But not so in Rose’s case, and she came back still an engaged woman. (By the way, I did not approve of the ring which Eustace had given her: it was not the superlatively beautiful thing that she ought to have had. Rose should have had some great noble stone in an invisible setting—a ruby or an emerald—but Eustace had chosen and sent her a muddle of little pearls and diamonds.)

Eustace’s father was a clergyman in Berkshire, a rather querulous man, Rose said, but hospitable and kindly to her. Mrs. Holt was more difficult. “But then,” Rose added, “mothers always must be critical of their future daughters-in-law. No girl can be good enough for their darling sons!”

Eustace being the only son, the mother was, of course, additionally hard to please.

“How did you leave her?” I asked.

“Resigned rather than rapturous,” said Rose. “I did nothing very terrible, but I fancy that she suspects you as a trainer of youth.”

“Not so much as I suspect her,” I said, “as a judge of brides.”

The whole thing infuriated me.

Another cause of vexation at this time was Mrs. O’Gorman.

We are annoyed when our old friends like our new friends too much; but we are even more annoyed when our old friends refuse to share our antipathies to new acquaintances. Mrs. O’Gorman disappointed me deeply by not finding Eustace as unsuitable as I did. Perhaps she was only being wilfully provocative, but the effect on me was the same.

“A very intelligent old lady,” Eustace called her, to me. Perhaps a little too outspoken, a little lacking in taste. But very refreshing. A character, in fact. No one enjoyed studying a character more than he. And there were so few of them!

I have just said that few things are more annoying than an old friend’s approval of a new acquaintance that we dislike. But I think that to hear an old friend patronizingly appraised by an incompetent critic is almost worse. Mrs. O’Gorman was a character: there was no doubt about that; but Eustace had only a glimmering of that fact.

My peace of mind was further impaired by Rose’s tendency to play with the joke that I also must marry. It was not a new idea; but hitherto she had been very light with me.

“What we must do, Dombeen,” she had said to me one day not long after her decision to go to London to Mrs. Lovell, “is to get you settled.”

“What on earth do you mean?” I had asked.

“A wife,” she said, laughing. “You mustn’t be left all alone.”

“I like being alone,” I said: “that is, when you’re not here.”

“But you ought to marry,” Rose said. “Every one says so.”

“Who says so?”

“Well, Mrs. Cumnor says so.”

“I don’t pay any attention to the wives of the clergy,” I replied.

“Aunt Milly says so.”

“Oh, Aunt Milly! Of course. She has never wished me anything but ill.”

“I should feel much happier in London if I thought you were not alone,” Rose said.

“That’s absurd,” I replied. “You were not unhappy at school, and I was alone then.”

But now Rose went on to select actual wives! I used to wonder what she really thought about it all, but never discovered. It was not like her to be so persistent with a theme. She usually touched and passed on. Could it be that we were out of harmony in graver matters, and she jested to keep free of them?

She would come back to lunch, after being in the village, with new and fantastic plans for my marriage. Every spinster and widow within a five mile radius was weighed as a possible Mrs. Greville. Rose dismissed Mrs. O’Gorman as too old, but her faithful Julia came under the lens.

“But no,” she was kind enough to say, “I couldn’t let you marry her. A woman must have some spirit.”

Three unmarried sisters—the Misses Sturgis—had recently taken the Allinsons’ old house—after one or two fleeting and unattractive tenants. Rose saw a good deal of them just now, and I was on more or less familiar terms both as a doctor and a neighbour.

The sisters, who were refined and affluent, had been brought up as Quakers, but they quaked no more nor did they harbour any resentment against our “steeple-house”; they had become indeed useful members of the congregation, receiving from the rector the preferential treatment meted out to this particular sect even when it retains its nonconformity.

Rose was never tired of analysing each—Miss Sturgis, Miss Hester and Miss Honor—as a possible wife for me.

“I was looking at Hester Sturgis again this morning,” she said. “Really she’s very nice. She has very pretty hair, don’t you think? She is writing an essay on Walter Pater for the next meeting of the Lowcester Literary Society. She particularly hoped that you wouldn’t be there, Dombeen. She says you’re so critical, she’d be terrified.”

I gave Rose the assurance that I should not be there.

“I wonder if wives ought to be afraid of their husbands,” the minx went on. “I mean, of their intellects?”

I made no sign of comprehension.

“Honor Sturgis is extraordinarily nice too, isn’t she?” Rose continued. “Don’t you like the way she talks? She has the kind of voice that reminds you of that speech in King Lear. Don’t you love gentle voices, Dombeen? She is tall, too. I believe she’s only an inch shorter than you. It’s absurd when husbands are immense and their wives little, isn’t it?”

You see what an imp she could be!

“Honor is writing a description of a visit to Chamounix,” Rose went on. “I don’t know what the Lowcester Literary Society would do if the Sturgises hadn’t come to liven it up.”

“We got on very well before they arrived,” I replied.

“Miss Sturgis was in the garden,” Rose continued. “She’s wonderful with flowers, they say. If she just put a walking-stick into the ground it would grow. I expect that you and she together would have the most stunning garden in the world. And she’s not really old, not more than thirty-eight. Don’t you think that married people should be nearly of an age? Some day, when I have enough courage, I shall ask Honor—she’s the easiest, I think—why they’ve never married. With all their money, too! But Quaker girls often don’t, I believe. It’s funny, because I should think they’d make wonderful wives, so placid and sensible, don’t you know. What do you think, Dombeen?”

“I’m sick of the whole subject,” I replied.

Eustace was exhibited not only to me—and, I am aware that, to ordinary prospective bridegrooms, these probationary visits (probationary, but too late for remedy) must be a very trying ordeal and we ought not to be too hard—but to the Strattons. What Rose’s cousins thought of him I have no means of knowing, but I suppose that girls are as critical of other girls’ fiancés as we can be of the young women whom our friends so mistakenly believe to be Minervas or Venuses. But Mrs. Stratton, even if she may have had a touch of envious regret that Eustace had not first seen her daughters and fallen to one of them, was pleased with her new nephew. Or so I gathered from a letter to me in which she congratulated me upon Rose’s alliance with so promising a counsel and so worthy and seemly a man, and went on to refer with satisfaction to the cessation of unfortunate rumours which the engagement would bring about.

Eustace, I found, liked her, and had remonstrated with Rose, but with infinite patience, about her antipathy to the lady. It was her first disappointment in him.

Mrs. Stratton had expressed herself as eager that Rose should be married from her house, and Rose was willing. I was glad that she was, for many reasons: I did not, for instance, want the wedding in our church, or the reception in our house, with Eustace’s people all about; I did not want to see Rose’s husband driving away with her into a new life, alien to me, from my door, her door. I could not bear the idea of continuing to entertain the crowd after their departure, when any decent man would wish to be alone. These were selfish enough reasons, but also natural. I deny that they lay me open to any very severe censure.

At the same time I should have liked it had Rose said that only from her true home would she be married. But she did not. Not improbably she had that desire, but was anxious to spare my feelings. She knew that Eustace could never be congenial to me, and least of all as her captor.

I went to the wedding, of course; and I have never been more miserable. It was enough that my Rose was standing there at the chancel steps; but there was more. This was my first wedding for many years, and I was startled by the service. The gravity and solemnity of the promises exacted from each—such promises as not even angels are asked to make and keep, for there is notoriously no marriage or giving in marriage among them—filled me with gloom and foreboding and a sense of injustice. It seemed wrong to ask any human beings—and particularly boys and girls—to commit themselves in this way. I wondered if barristers when being married have thoughts of the Divorce Court in their minds—that overworked department of the profession where the morbid and inquisitive assemble day after day to gloat over the fragments that remain when all these sacred bonds and assurances have been broken. “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” I heard Eustace repeat after the clergyman. But did he? Does any husband? What would be a husband’s attitude if the next morning his wife said that she wanted his property—all the worldly goods with which he had publicly endowed her—at once? The commonest cause of married unhappiness that I know of is the refusal of husbands to give their wives even a requisite fraction of their worldly goods for current household expenses. But the words will go on being repeated at the chancel steps for many a year yet.

“In sickness and in health”—doctors know something about the value of that undertaking, too, and how it is honoured.

And so Rose Allinson became Rose Holt, and those of us who were nearest the young couple in kin or intimacy followed them into the vestry to wish them joy and sign the register. Having kissed my darling and written my name, I slipped away. I could not endure more. The vestry had a back door and I slipped through it, pocketed my button-hole carnation, and, after lunch, went to a sale of mezzotints at Christie’s, where I endeavoured to soothe my feelings by buying two Valentine Greens which (unless I was to die next week, when one can afford anything) I couldn’t afford. And so far as I could see then, there was no particular reason why I should not die next week—nothing, I mean, important enough to call for my continued existence.

Mrs. Eustace Holt was, I think, fairly happy in her early married life. I saw her now and then, and was not conscious of anything very wrong. She seemed to have lost tone: that was all; but I put that down largely to living in London, cooped up by bricks and mortar instead of her old free garden life. Also Eustace was not exciting. But I think she was fond of him, and I know that he was very proud of her, perhaps even to tiring her by exhibiting her too much to his friends. She was too candid to be a very easy diner-out, and too courteous not to make the effort.

And then came the tragedy. Rose’s first child died at the end of only three weeks of life. You remember what she said about wanting boys. Well, this was a boy, and Rose was in the seventh heaven of delight. She squandered herself on it. No other young mother, the nurse told me on that sad day when we buried the poor little creature, had, in her experience, been so happy. “And that, as you know,” she added to me, “is a big thing to say.”

I found my poor child inconsolable; in a kind of stupor of bewilderment and revolt against the blind stupidities of fate. To let this perfect little being fade into nothingness and allow the ugly, blundering world to go on!

She was long in recovering and longer still before she was herself again. I did all I could to get Eustace to let her come to me to convalesce, but he would not let her out of his sight, and took her to this and that health resort, and even for one winter to the Riviera.

It was nearly two years before I saw her again, and then I went up to dine and spend the night by way of celebrating my fiftieth birthday. That was in 1900.

Every doctor is asked for advice in matrimonial differences, or at any rate is made a confidant. One can have too many of such confidences; but I defy any general practitioner, however brusque and curmudgeonly, to escape them altogether. Most of us have seen so many couples that we can tell at a glance what is wrong—which brand of incompatibility is in use. For there are so many. Temper is supposed to have a monopoly in this matter, but that is far from the case. There can be incompatibility in other matters, apparently trifling, and trifling in fact unless lifelong fetters are involved. Incompatibility of temperature, for example, where the lute is rifted because the wife wants all the fresh air that windows and doors can let in, and the husband rejoices only in a vacuum. A doctor sees so many of such antipodal house-mates—I don’t say that all are married people—that he comes to divide the world into those who are healthily disposed and those whose only idea of a window is a thing to shut.

It is a truism that wedded felicity is a very fragile craft, liable to be swamped by any unforeseen wave, and it requires the most delicate seamanship, both at the helm and at the sail. I have seen marriages ruined by so pleasant a spice to ordinary intercourse as irony. Irony in a husband, and a tendency in a wife to depreciate her husband or make him a butt in public—these have much misery to answer for. Absence of mind in a husband can be fatal: an inability to look ahead, to reserve seats, to order a cab, to remember theatre tickets. And then, again, over-much presence of mind can be fatal too: an insistence on punctuality and too much officiousness about the house.

I could not tell which was the cause of the want of sympathy between Rose and Eustace, but I felt something was wrong almost directly I entered their door. Outwardly they were pleasant enough together; but there was no warmth in the air, no electricity. Rose Holt was not Rose Allinson—very far from it. But she was sweeter than ever to me; almost I could bring myself to be glad that all was not well, for it made her so tender, so thoughtfully attentive, to her old friend. It was the Rose of the middle teens over again, but with a richness and maturity added. Eustace was courteous, a solicitous host, and I felt spoilt between them. But there was something wrong. When their eyes met across the table no light kindled.

It was a comfortable, distinguished house. The furniture was good. The right books were scattered about, some in French; the right periodicals. Photographs after the Old Masters. In Rose’s little boudoir were water colours.

After dinner Eustace left us. He had some difficult papers to go through and master, and we were left alone.

Rose established me by the fire and sat beside me on a cushion.

“Is all well with my child?” I asked.

She did not reply.

For a long while we were silent. I could not ask her to tell me more; and she would not volunteer because only half the secret was hers.

“When are you coming to stay with me?” I asked at last.

“Oh, Dombeen, I should love to,” she said. “But it’s impossible. Eustace doesn’t like me to be away, ever. He counts so on my presence here.”

“But he could come too,” I said.

“Oh, no,” she replied. “No. He doesn’t like the house to be left. No, it can’t be done.”

I had no right to press the case. But I could not refrain from saying—“Then you are never to visit me at all?”

“Of course: some day,” she said. “But not yet. It couldn’t be for a long while. You see. . .”

And then I learned that she was again to become a mother.

How the world rushes on! A child grows to be a girl, and a girl a wife, before one can turn round. And then there is another child and the same restless urgency sets in once more. I thought of some lines I had read years and years ago that had stuck in my mind:

There is so much we ne’er can know— No time, no time! We seem to only come—to go.

I went back feeling all out of tune and dissatisfied. This may be a common experience with parents after their first visit to their married daughters; but I had not even thought of it before. True, I had set out with some vague misgivings, but so often—it is almost the rule—the realization is better than our fears for it, that I had discounted the premonition. And now I knew that my girl had made a mistake. It was not so much that she was unhappy as that she had lost her old habit of happiness. She had become passive where she had been vividly active. Instead of joy she had found resignation. I don’t mean that she was broken-spirited in any way: but she was too quiet. If I were God I should be very much ashamed of having added resignation to young wives’ armouries.

Rose’s second baby was a girl. Eustace sent me a telegram to that effect, and I wondered much on her feelings toward it. There had been no joy in her voice when she had told me of its coming.

I went up to see them when Rose the second—for the child was named after her mother—was two weeks old, and was led into the room by Eustace.

Much could be written on the different demeanour of husbands on such occasions, for some behave like impresarios and some like trespassers, some are boisterous and some are perplexed, but none, however much they want to disguise it, are totally without pride. Even those husbands who are as much embarrassed and hampered by their wives presenting them with a son or a daughter as they would be if their valets were to lose an arm, cannot wholly conceal their triumph. Eustace, although with cool reserve, belonged to the impresario class.

How often does one hear well-meaning people say, when discussing the marriages of others (and of course discussion is superfluous and insipid when marriages are satisfactory), “Ah, if only they had had a child, what a difference it would have made!” But in my experience children can divide parents quite as much as they can unite them. I may have entertained some hope that the little pink creature with the dark silky hair in Rose’s arms was to bring Rose and Eustace closer; but there was no indication of it. Again when their eyes met no light was kindled. How that other child, that boy of her desire, would have affected the love of husband and wife it was not now possible to say; but this little helpless mite in its mother’s arms obviously was without any federating gift.

Eustace said a few nice things to Rose, and something about new-born infants being no novelties to me, and left us.

“I suppose she’s perfect!” I said.

“Poor little pet, she’s so warm and dependent,” said her mother.

“A nice doctor?” I asked.

“Quite,” she said, “and the kindest nurse possible.”

“Then you’re happy,” I said, but I knew that she wasn’t.

The unwanted children—are they not tragic figures? And their name is legion. Every doctor can give you a list!

I don’t say that this minute Rose was exactly unwanted. Rose—my Rose—was incapable of coldness to anything young and soft and helpless, least of all a baby; and Eustace, I could see, liked being a father. But the Rose who had given birth to that little boy, and Rose the mother of this little girl, were worlds asunder. This Rose was affectionate, thoughtful, dutiful, protective; that other had been transfigured by maternal ecstasy and pride.

Eustace and I lunched alone, and I did my best to penetrate his armour, but in vain. How did he think of his wife? What kind of need of her had he? Was he disappointed or was all going as he had expected and wished? Why on earth had she found him attractive and how had he lost his hold on her? A hint of the possible reason of his own attitude was offered when, to my question, Didn’t he find himself a little at sea domestically when Rose was upstairs like this? he replied, No. It seemed that the direction of the household was his hobby. He arranged the meals in advance, scrutinized and paid the books, interviewed the servants. He had done this as a bachelor and liked to know how his money was being spent.

“With all my worldly goods I thee endow”—the words came back to me as he talked.

So Rose was not even mistress of her house, had no realm to queen it in. “What women want is a home” is an old-fashioned saying in which I am a believer; and Rose was without one. All that she had was a footing in Mr. Holt’s.

How I longed for some of Mrs. O’Gorman’s trenchancy and candour to tell him of his mistake! But I had none. I could observe and deduce, but I had not the courage, or arrogance, to censure.

I went back to my great empty house with a grudge against the universe. The grudge passed, for I do not dwell on injustice, but the emptiness remained. And so the next few years went on, and I grew older and probably more mannered and narrow. I also took an assistant, who was in time to be a successor. Meanwhile Eustace prospered and Rose brought up her little girl in Wilton Place, and I saw them only on rare occasions. One of the strangest things in life is the ease with which people who are fond of each other do not meet. Our tendency is to run in grooves and find it difficult to leave them. Or to change the metaphor, no matter how big the world is, most of us are at heart villagers.

Rose’s letters were regular and, up to a point, informative; and I wrote with equal regularity. But the written word, no less than the spoken, often merely conceals the truth; and I got very little inner information as to the Holt ménage. My deduction was that routine had completely taken the place of romance (if ever there had been any worth the name). Rose never complained, but also she never rejoiced. Her truth-telling impulses were checked by the fact that only half the story belonged to her. To tell more was to tell Eustace’s share too; and that was not playing the game.

One afternoon, when Rose the second was five, a message arrived from the Hall to ask me to come at once to see Master Ronnie.

“Master Ronnie! What is he doing here?” I asked in surprise. When last I had heard of him he was a soldier in a responsible post in India. I think it was at Poona; his mother had read me from time to time little bits in his letters. How old would he be now? Let me see, he was a year older than Rose, and Rose was twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. So far as I could recollect, he had never married. His mother had regretted this, but was always counting on some nice girl attracting him during his next leave. She did not want him to be caught by any of those Anglo-Indians!

And now here he was, and ill. Ronnie and illness were contradictions in terms, and I asked the messenger what was wrong. An accident, I presumed. But it was worse than that. He had had bad fever and could not get it out of his bones. Ordered home for a long rest and treatment. Was very thin and white and didn’t seem to relish anything.

When had he arrived?

Three days ago, but he wouldn’t let them send for me before; hated to be coddled.

I found him in a very poor state. Some malarial poison in his system and his spirits low. Poor boy, he was only the shadow of his old self. But, in a way, more attractive still, for his illness had given delicacy to his candid, merry face, and his charm of manner was unimpaired; while one’s pity for his condition increased one’s affection for him. When the admired strong become suddenly the dependent weak there can be a strengthening of their adherents.

It was while Ronnie was slowly mending, but still only the shadow of his normal self, that Rose and her little daughter came to stay with me. Rose had proposed the visit and I was only too glad to have them. Eustace, she said, was in Paris, on some commission of inquiry.

I had seen Rose-the-less occasionally, but only in London and on her best behaviour. Playing on my lawn she was more natural, and I delighted in her straight little body, her quick movements and her eager ways. She was like her mother, but unlike too—she had a hint of elfishness, which her mother lacked: she was less essentially womanly; and she had an imperious touch. She knew what she wanted and her enjoyment came largely through getting it, whereas her mother as a child had found things delectable as they came and had not chosen and demanded. But there was nothing unattractive in the child’s selective impulses: they did not suggest any kind of rapacity. For the rest, she was very like that earlier Rose. She made friends as quickly, she asked as many questions and she was happy all the time.

“Why does mother call you Dombeen?” was one of the first things she wanted to know.

I explained her difficulties with the word Greville.

“May I call you Dombeen too?” she asked.

I said that I should like nothing better.

Rose—my own Rose—I found older and graver. She could laugh still, and as her visit was prolonged she laughed oftener and gradually gave up the new habit of thinking visibly before she spoke. Her impulses being always gay or cordial or merrily mischievous, she need never have become cautious. But I could see that she had. It is melancholy indeed when a natural self-unconsciousness is destroyed: and that is what had happened. And how often I have seen it happen elsewhere! One of the prevailing superstitions of English husbands is that wives are better for being de-individualized.

One thing that a little perplexed me was Rose’s attitude to her daughter, which appeared to me curiously detached. I wondered sometimes if there were not some defective sympathy between them, as between Rose and the child’s father. Rose was kind and gentle and a delightful companion to the little girl; but no fierce maternal flame was discernible. I could have wished for a glimpse of such a fire: but there was none. It seemed to me a trifle hard on the mite that she should be at all out in the cold on account of other people’s affairs; but on the other hand she never seemed unhappy, or less happy than might be; and Rose had no intention of unfairness. Besides, human nature can’t be logical.

As Ronnie got better he came oftener and oftener to us, to lie in a deck-chair in the garden. Rose used to sit by him there and sometimes read to him, or he told little Rose about India, very much as the old Colonel had talked to her mother, but with additional modern piquancies. Now and then Rose and Ronnie returned to their battleground in the billiard-room; but he was not strong enough for a long game. Sir Edmund and Lady Fergusson would now and then walk over to accompany him back or push his wheeled chair.

Remembering the episode at St. Moritz, I was a little uneasy to see Ronnie and Rose so much together. But I did not feel strongly enough about it to interfere, even if interference had ever been my long suit. Besides, I was so glad to see Rose happy again. Moreover, Rose was grown up and a mother; Ronnie was grown up and ill. Not that being grown up adds anything to power of resistance when emotional temptations offer.

Perhaps to say that I was uneasy is too strong. Rather was I not unconscious that that popular plaything, fire, was adjacent, and yet not conscious enough to be really apprehensive. It was always possible that Ronnie’s state of dependence and fragility was the only cause of Rose’s solicitude; while it was natural enough for a convalescing soldier, such as he was, to sun himself in the company of an old playmate.

I forget how long Rose and Rose stayed with me on that occasion. But after Ronnie had been taken off to some seaside resort they returned to London and I was more alone than ever. That must have been the early summer of 1906.

The next period of importance in this rambling narrative is October of the same year, and I can place the day exactly, because on my way toward home I was stopped by some one running out of the “Crown Inn” to say that old Pritchard, the host, had had some kind of a stroke. I found him pretty bad, the result of some extra conviviality on a life of excessive and chronic alcoholism, the occasion for which—and this is how I remember the date so distinctly—was his good fortune over the Cambridgeshire, which that year was won by Polymelus.

Having done what I could to patch him up, I returned home. While I had been in the “Crown” a tempest of cold rain had set in, bringing with it a dreary consciousness of the end of fine weather. One had the feeling that the year could never recover: winter was our fate and winter to a country doctor means too much to do and a great deal of discomfort, with too few of the roadside compensations which he gathers as he drives about in the summer and the spring.

My thoughts went naturally to Rose, whose susceptibility to weather had always been so acute; in whose world, could she plan it, rain would fall only at night. I was still thinking of her as I left the car at the garage door and walked into the house.

On the hall table was an envelope addressed to me in Rose’s writing, but it had not passed through the post. I took it up with misgivings which all too soon were to be justified.

“Dearest Dombeen” (it ran), “I have gone away with Ronnie. He needs me more than anyone else does, or at least I believe so. Eustace will understand why I have gone when he begins to think.” So far it was written clearly and directly. But then came some broken sentences. “As for Rose,” she had begun, and then had stopped. “Rose is my only” she had begun again and again had stopped. “Will you” was another false start and was also scored through. The letter finished merely like this. “Dearest Dombeen, think your kindliest of me. Good-bye. Rose.”

How long I held the paper in my hand I cannot say; but I then rang to know how it had got there at all.

Suzanne answered the summons.

I asked her what she knew.

She was crying softly as she told me. Mademoiselle Rose—Madame Holt, she should say—had rushed in “toute émotionnée.” She could not wait for me. She had come in a car. She had written the note and was gone again.

Did Suzanne know what the note was about?

Ah, yes. Quel dommage! But la vie cannot be kept within fixed bounds. Pots boil over. All this in her hard Norman speech. She was fatalistic, but still she wiped her eyes.

Monsieur would not think less of Madame Holt because of this, would he?

I assured her that I was not a judge.

“La pauvre petite!” Suzanne exclaimed, with a sob.

She had been so assiduous in spoiling Rose’s daughter when they were with me that I naturally thought these words referred to the younger of them. But I was wrong. It was of the older Rose that she was still thinking, for she went on more brightly: “Mais, c’est bon. Maintenant elle sera heureuse.”

“Will she?” I asked.

Mais oui. Suzanne was certain of it. Madame Holt would not have taken so great a step if she were not to be happier for it.

I was astounded at her confidence.

My first impulse was to hasten after the fugitives and try to bring them to reason. But reflection showed me that this was impracticable. I had no notion where they had gone or even when; probably not by train, but all the way in the motor, and there has never been such an ally of runaways as petrol. In the old days there was some chance, even though faint, of tracking and overtaking a pair of horses; but motor-cars vanish into thin air, leaving rainbow splashes in the roadway to mock the pursuer in every hue.

Then I wondered if Sir Edmund and Lady Fergusson knew. For Rose to tell me at once was natural; but would not Ronnie wish to let a little time elapse before breaking the news? I guessed so. At any rate, it was not for me to be the bearer of such ill tidings. If it was for anyone to storm the citadel, that person was the wronged Eustace.

Eustace? Yes. And what of him? He had been told as well as I, I supposed. Rose had never done anything underhand or secretive in her life, and she would have made it a point of honour to let her husband know that she had cut the knot. At this moment he was probably sitting, stunned, in his library, or perhaps with his little Rose in her nursery, and most likely harbouring evil thoughts of me.

In my dismay and distress I put off dinner for an hour or so, and walked out into the rain to Mrs. O’Gorman’s. It seemed an occasion for the old Irish lady’s pitiless candour. The equally pitiless downpour would, I felt, help too. There are times when one welcomes a storm to fight one’s way through.

My thoughts were not idle as I stumbled against the torrents. No aspect of the case did they neglect. I can tell only of what I know, and I have no information as to Ronnie’s hold on Rose after his return and what steps preceded her decision to run off with him. But it is not difficult to realize, at any rate, the temptation. Here was the old friend of her happiest days once more—free and I don’t doubt more than rejoiced to see her again. He had been in strange countries, and probably had carried her image with him through all his wanderings and loneliness. He had never been articulately in love with her when they were youthful together; he had not proposed after that accident—I am sure she would have told me if he had, because she knew that I liked him. When she used to talk to me about her marriage and all those nice boys who were to gallop about the nursery, I had thought naturally of Ronnie as their father. One visualizes a figure on such occasions, and Ronnie sprang into being. But, as it happened, I was wrong. Rose had not thought of Ronnie like this: she had merely liked him, automatically so to speak, and when Eustace came along there was no earlier occupant of her heart to eject. Eustace found it all too easy.

But after her marriage so much had happened. And it must never be forgotten that Ronnie compelled interest, all unconsciously maybe, by the force of personality. He was quite ordinary in everything but personality, which in his case was physical more than spiritual. His ready smile, his white teeth, his gaiety, his good humour, his general friendliness and out-for-funnishness won him an easy way into the good graces of the world. He was popular almost universally. Rose, as I have said, had never to my knowledge, or even to my suspicion, been in love with him; nor he with her in any but a superficial degree, even if that; but there was always that intimate experience in Switzerland in the background; and each had since had too much time to think about the past and to speculate upon the might-have-been: Rose in the watches of the night taking stock of her marriage and its disenchantments, and Ronnie in a foreign land sick of a fever.

Both were older too—not so much older in years, but older through what had happened: the passage of time being often almost negligible in influence compared with certain experiences. A woman grows mature so swiftly: a three weeks’ honeymoon can do it, a night can do it; the birth of her first child always does it. It may be only in compartments, but maturity is there somewhere. And Rose’s child was five years of age. As for Ronnie, I suspect that such adventures among women as had fallen to him—and a handsome young officer in India has many admirers—had chiefly thrown his thoughts back, in comparison, to Rose. When he might have won her he had not; after, when he wished he had, she was another’s. I don’t say that he had brooded on this, but he probably recurred to it when least happy; and regret, like love, never stands still: it increases or it diminishes.

And her disenchantment, her starvation! Eustace’s frigid decorum, his supervision of the housekeeping books, his morbid interest in her minutest personal expenditure, his tendency to relapse into the tutor and shape her mind wholly by his, so that instead of the home containing a rising barrister and an impulsive, warm-hearted, generous woman it should contain merely a rising barrister and his female derivative—all this had surprised her and depressed her. Marriage, she had known—being a normal creature, full of the instinct of her sex, and not only the instinct but her sex’s capacity to endure—was necessarily a matter of adjustments. Any two persons agreeing to live together have to learn each other’s ways and make allowances: even two men and two women. How much more so then when the two persons suddenly thus beginning a new and intimate co-habitation are a man and a woman, natural enemies—or, at any rate, natural censors of each other, naturally jealous of each other, naturally misunderstanding each other! Perhaps the word enemies may stand.

In the case of her own marriage Rose quickly learned that the adjustments were all to be hers. The only change that Eustace made was to add a wife to his house: he kept the same habits: he played his golf at the Old Deer Park just as he had always done; he read the books from the London Library; he took her, regardless of her taste in music, to concerts. But he had never really loved; he had been attracted by Rose’s gaiety and vividness, even if he had neglected to cherish those qualities after they had passed into his keeping; he had known that rising barristers are usually furnished with wives, and that they do not rise the less because those wives are beautiful. He had known also that marriage is a natural state; that the duty of a good citizen is to have children; that wives can be more comfortable than housekeepers; and so on. I don’t say that he had put any of these thoughts into words: they were merely the outcome of common knowledge. Nor do I want to be unfair to him or to suggest that he was not proud and affectionate. I think that he was. But again I say that he had no imagination: he took things for granted, and directly a husband does that he is doomed.

Eustace’s refined and comfortable home in Wilton Place was never disgraced by anything so unseemly as passion or even eagerness. Returning from his chambers he had never upset furniture in his desire to get to her. When he brought flowers to her and she crushed them to her bosom in an ecstasy of enjoyment, a spasmodic return to nature, he warned her that she was in danger of breaking the stalks. He had brought the flowers though. That is the trouble: he was always nice and handsome and courteous. But there it stopped. Having no imagination, no instinctive knowledge of women, no sexual shorthand, he was unaware that nice men are negligible. What women want is not niceness but devotion, not courtesy but worship.

And then—I was still fumbling towards an explanation of Rose’s desperate act—then there was the disappointment about the boys. Rose, as I have said, had set her heart on being a mother, and the mother of sons, and there was only one surviving child and that was a girl. I have brought enough children into the world to know something about the part that they play in married life, and I can set it down firmly as a fact that it is all to the bad when the sex of the child is not that which the parents had desired. The girl who ought to have been a boy has to suffer for it; and so, though in a less degree, does the boy who ought to have been a girl, but he is not a common figure. Has it ever been suggested, I wonder, that some of the traditional alleged untrustworthiness of women is due to the fact that they were not wanted. I don’t say that I agree as to this inferiority of the sex, but proverbial lore, which is the wisdom of many and the wit of one, has decided that they are false and fickle, unstable, coy and hard to please, and so forth: and that may be a cause. Certain it is that the nurse who announces that the little pet is a girl is rarely treated as a bringer of good news; whereas if she can say it’s the finest boy she ever had in her arms she is, for the moment, an angel. Why should an unwanted child trouble to be constant and true and without caprice? Some revenge it is entitled to.

Rose, however, does not come within the category of the unwanted, for her sex had been determined by her father and mother months before I assisted at her début, and her name had long been chosen. Why they should have desired a girl instead of another of the lords of creation, I cannot say: probably because the father was an artist, and artists are notoriously eccentric. But there it was: they wanted a girl and they had one, whereas that girl, when her own time of fulfilment came, wanted not only a boy but many boys, and could not bring up one. Rose, I am sure, had a feeling of resentment for the girl who had lived where the boy had died. With that tiny boy baby much of her joy in life was buried. He had lived long enough in the actual world for her to make a little god of him; and before that life had been there was the life he had lived under her heart.

To say that she was not fond of Rose would be to tell an absolute falsehood—she took a grave pleasure in her, although treating her perhaps more as a toy than a daughter, as a wonderful doll whose capacities she never tired of studying—but she was steeped in a deeper rapture when her breast nurtured a son. That is all.

To put it in another way, I don’t believe that when Ronnie arrived and opened the door upon whatever fair prospect he displayed to her or she imagined she saw—whatever avenue of escape—Rose would have stepped through had the child she was to leave behind her been a little boy of five instead of a little girl.

Who knows what women feel? We may guess, but they will never tell us. They won’t even tell each other. As regards Rose and Ronnie, my guess is that his pathetic collapse attracted more than his radiant vigour would have done. Had she found him triumphant, as of old, she would have remained unscathed. Strong and masterful he might have called to her in vain, for she was never a sensualist. It was his dependence that swayed her and decided her. It was the boy Ronnie needing tenderness and care.

Involved and fantastic as it may sound, I have the belief that it was the mother instinct that took Rose off with Ronnie more than love. What I mean is that she did not go with him as most women go with men, through ordinary passion, but because he was fragile and in need of protection and she thought of him as her own, or—subconsciously of course—even as one of those unborn sons which he himself would have begotten. So mystical can women be!

But of course the wild hope of escape was present too: the wish to live a little more fully while there was yet time; the feeling that to endure another moment with Eustace was impossible and wrong.

And again Theodore’s wish came back to me. Was this “beating the band”? Could anything be farther from the ordinary conception of that successful and honourable act than running off with another man and leaving husband and child? And yet, it had required courage, devotion, disregard of the world’s censure—all the things that properly-brought-up and even universally respected people need not possess. What a muddle is our civilization!

“You must forgive this untimely and unprofessional visit,” I said, as I was shown into Mrs. O’Gorman’s over-furnished sitting-room.

“Don’t be foolish, Doctor,” she replied. “Have done with your politeness. Don’t I know why you’re here?”

“You do?” I exclaimed.

“Of course I do,” she said. “It’s about Rose. She’s bolted.”

“But surely the villagers aren’t talking?” I said in a panic of alarm. “You don’t mean to say it’s not a secret!”

“No one knows but you and me,” said the old lady.

“And Suzanne,” I corrected:

“O, Suzanne! She doesn’t matter. She’s an ally. But no one else knows. I know because I had a letter to-day. Rose took me some way into her confidence when she was staying with you. Old people often get told things. But don’t worry; it’s all right.”

“All right?” I echoed. “What do you mean? Do you want young wives to behave like this?”

“When they’re like Rose—yes,” she said. “The poor lamb was miserable. That iceberg of hers was no good except to freeze her. She wants life, love, human emotions, and she’ll get them with the young Captain.”

“But—” I exclaimed, aghast at this Bolshevism. “You talk as if people had the right to do as they please—break laws—anything.”

“Not all of them by any means, the idiots,” she replied. “But Rose—yes. Rose ought to have all she wants. I advised her to. It’s—no don’t interrupt me—it’s your own doing very largely. You brought her up to be happy and true to herself. She saw you always at work ministering to other people—Oh! I know you were paid for it—I’ve paid you myself—money thrown away too, for I only get worse—but that doesn’t matter: you’re a soft old thing at heart. Anyway, there was Rose, the apple of your eye, with a natural sweet disposition, and the centre of your circle of friends, and the mistress of your easy-going prosperous house, and she gets into kindly humane habits. Then she marries this refrigerator K.C., or whatever he is, and begins to miss everything that she had been used to. He’s a stupid fellow—he hasn’t even the sense to be ill and touch her heart that way—he can’t lose his temper—can’t swear—only be politely rasping now and then—and he gradually wore her down, diluted her sweetness, crushed her nice impulses, made her live according to Cocker.”