CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 Joseph Whitmore Barry 
 dramatic library 
 
 the gift of 
 
 two friends 
 
 of Cornell University 
 
 *934 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PR6025.O57D9 1913 
 
 Dying fires. 
 
 3 1924 013 648 849 
 
The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013648849 
 
DYING FIRES 
 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
DYING FIRES 
 
 BY 
 
 ALLAN MONKHOUSE 
 
 AUTHOR OP "A DELIVERANCE," "LOVE IN A LIFE" 
 "MART BROOME: A COMEDY." 
 
 HODDER & STOUGHTON 
 ( NEW YORK 
 GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 
 1913 
 
TO 
 E. D. M. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART I 
 
 CHAPIEB 
 
 PAQB 
 
 I. 
 
 The Tether 
 
 I 
 
 II. 
 
 Midnight Confidences - 
 
 12 
 
 III. 
 
 An Attempted Diversion 
 
 " 2 4 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Needle to the Pole 
 
 - 35 
 
 V. 
 
 Marriage - 
 
 - 4 2 
 
 VI. 
 
 The Friend 
 
 - 61 
 
 VII. 
 
 The Child 
 
 - 7° 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Jim 
 
 81 
 
 IX. 
 
 An only Child 
 
 - 99 
 
 X. 
 
 Jim dies 
 
 PART II 
 
 - in 
 
 XI. 
 
 Time's Fell Hand 
 
 125 
 
 XII. 
 
 A Standstill 
 
 - 138 
 
 XIII. 
 
 The Home Surface 
 
 - 146 
 
 XIV. 
 
 A Tentative Defence - 
 
 - 162 
 
 XV. 
 
 A Step in the Dark 
 
 - 177 
 
 XVI. 
 
 The Rebuff 
 
 - 190 
 
 XVII. 
 
 Repetitions and Experiments - 
 
 208 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 Latitude - 
 
 220 
 
 XIX. 
 
 The Parents 
 
 242 
 
 XX. 
 
 Tearing down the Veil 
 
 - 254 
 
 XXI. 
 
 Elation 
 
 - 264 
 
 XXII. 
 
 She stays 
 
 - 281 
 
 XXIII. 
 
 The Statue and the Lust 
 
 - 296 
 
PART I 
 
DYING FIRES 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE TETHER 
 
 They looked down together from the 
 gallery of the Manchester Exchange upon 
 swarming humanity. He had met her in 
 St. Ann's Square, had yielded to the im- 
 pulse — he hardly recognised it as part of 
 a perpetual craving — to speak to her, and 
 eventually an inquiry about his work had 
 led to his proposal that she should see one 
 scene of it. She saw the place with an 
 amazed curiosity, and it had the effect — 
 familiar to those who have followed a friend 
 into his strange environment — of raising some 
 shadow of a barrier between them. Yet in 
 her perturbation, in the confused attempt to 
 adjust him to this vast sum of unsounded life, 
 she was stirred to sharp sympathies. The 
 turmoil, the heat, and the reek of it were 
 disturbing, but her niceties of revolt were 
 
2 DYING FIRES 
 
 curbed by the knowledge that he belonged to 
 this, even while they were stimulated by the 
 thought that he must endure it. When her 
 glance roamed over the whole vast assembly 
 her heart lifted, but the concentration upon 
 groups of little shabby men and their obscure 
 chafferings depressed her. He gave some 
 simple explanations to which she hardly 
 listened. 
 
 She said : " You go down there, of course ? 
 You're one of them ? " 
 
 " Every day." 
 
 " It looks uncomfortable— horrid. Interest- 
 ing, too. I suppose you are interested ? " 
 
 '* One has to do it." 
 
 " You sell ?— buy ? " 
 
 " Both. I buy yarn and sell cloth. We 
 weave the yarn into cloth and you get your 
 calico." 
 
 " And all these people are contesting — 
 competing ? It's terribly severe and engross- 
 ing, I suppose." She craned down to study 
 the bearing and gestures of a group, and failed 
 to find the tension. 
 
 He laughed. " It's not so strenuous for 
 
THE TETHER 3 
 
 most of them. It's a dull place, full of mere 
 repetitions." 
 
 " But fortunes are made and lost. Don't 
 I hear about speculations that in a few 
 hours " 
 
 " Ah ! this is a humdrum, commercial 
 community. There are men here who have 
 been short of a five-pound note any time 
 these ten years, and they never break. Of 
 course, there's some speculation. Anyone 
 may speculate." 
 
 " You do not ? " 
 
 " Not more than is necessary. You see, 
 we are solid, commercial people. And this 
 place — what it represents — is my hold on 
 sanity." 
 
 He pointed out one or two notable figures ; 
 he was a little supercilious and aloof. 
 
 " What a mass ! " he said. " What a life ! 
 Shall I tear myself away before it's too late ? 
 And how should I get on without it ? " 
 
 "I can't make out," he said, as she was 
 silent, " whether this is the essential thing 
 in my life or only a background. A tremen- 
 dous lot of my energies go here, and 
 
4 DYING FIRES 
 
 sometimes one thinks pretty hard in a way, 
 but there's no fine flower about it." 
 
 She said : " We can't live on fine flowers." 
 
 " The dramas of the world are embedded, 
 really. It's a convention that makes them 
 pass before us on the stage or in history. Do 
 you read history ? It seems to me that the 
 undiscovered art of it is to give a notion of 
 the spacing out. Perhaps I'm thinking of 
 school abridgments. But how did these 
 people pass the intervening years ? One 
 thinks of Macbeths and Richards passing 
 from one great experience to another. Really, 
 there must have been some long, dull even- 
 ings with Lady Macbeth when he wished that 
 Banquo or somebody would drop in. Dull 
 years, dull occupations. Here's mine." 
 
 She said : " How curious the movement of 
 the atoms is ! Why, the whole thing is great 
 and impressive. I see they are ill-dressed 
 little men with bowler hats, but, together, 
 what a shout they could raise." 
 
 " There's a big thing behind them. All 
 the mills and spindles and looms and the 
 operatives. Manchester's only the bargaining 
 
THE TETHER 5 
 
 centre. You get to the heart of it at Oldham 
 or Burnley. They're the tragic places. Of 
 course they don't know it, and there's a queer 
 little fringe of philanthropy with parks and 
 things and arid religious sects for those who 
 like them, and great, queer interests in betting 
 and football. And you mustn't judge the 
 operatives when you meet thousands of them 
 — eager little men and boys in caps — going 
 to a football match. They're not lovable so. 
 Don't judge any class by its crowds. Mighty, 
 blind powers." 
 
 " You find it dull, and yet you're 
 interested." 
 
 " Yes — interested. You make me feel 
 that. With you here I see what a big thing 
 all this is. One can hardly let go. But it's 
 only a habit ; I've not been concerned much 
 so far in the politics of the trade. I'm 
 tethered to it. Can tethered people have 
 their dramas ? It's the privilege of an animal 
 not to be rooted, but we root ourselves." 
 
 She had liked him well enough, but now he 
 was looming larger than before, though she 
 could not accept him unquestioningly. He 
 
6 DYING FIRES 
 
 provoked criticism ; he had never been the 
 modest, charming person whom everyone likes. 
 Shrewdly, she saw something of the quality 
 of his egoism, and he was, as she was to learn, 
 a tremendous egoist. He disarmed one by 
 his consciousness of it ; his interest in himself, 
 his soundings and questionings were partly an 
 invitation to you to share the fun. In casual 
 company he was sufficiently reticent, and even 
 with his friends a hint might bring a sensitive 
 withdrawal. Of course she had not phrased 
 it to herself that he was a sensitive egoist, and 
 if she had it might not have scared her. She 
 liked him, and with a gasp it came to her that 
 it might be possible to like him very much, 
 to be overwhelmed. She looked at him fur- 
 tively, thrillingly. In such a case even frank 
 and simple women are cautious, and her mind 
 was in pretty good control. He was a clean, 
 handsome creature and he could laugh ring- 
 ingly. He was kind and could make his 
 kindness seem distinctive. His strong features 
 gave her some assurance, and yet she believed 
 that his strength was not assured. She liked 
 to reflect that she had heard him say 
 
THE TETHER 7 
 
 unbalanced things. It brought her closer to 
 him ; she might help. She could almost 
 think of him as unprotected. 
 
 He was not less bold. Indeed, his experi- 
 mental imaginings went further. His thoughts 
 almost framed themselves into : " Is this she ? " 
 But he had not resolved that there was to be 
 any she in the case ; he still shrank from the 
 great adventure. Men spoilt by civilisation 
 have their misgivings — call them irrational 
 and unnatural. The natural man in him saw 
 her in a flash that seemed to give warmth to 
 the conventional suitability ; your true lover 
 does not pine for material obstructions. Did 
 she think kindly of him ? A tremor of nerves 
 shook his self-possession for a moment, and 
 he stiffened when he saw that an acquaintance 
 below was gazing at them. By common 
 consent they retired from the balcony, and as 
 they threaded the groups to reach the door of 
 egress it seemed to him that her embarrass- 
 ment was more than this running of the 
 gauntlet of staring men should occasion. 
 And, truly, the poor girl had lost some of her 
 nerve, too, for she was oppressed with a 
 
8 DYING FIRES 
 
 ridiculous apprehension that she might be 
 taken for Richard Peel's wife. Under her 
 breath she was repeating : "I'm Letitia Mary 
 Drayton, I'm Letitia Mary Drayton," whim- 
 sically recalling the day in her childhood 
 when she was lost and had been recovered 
 through this insistence on identity. She was 
 glad to get outside. 
 
 Well, for the hour it was pleasant and 
 exciting enough. They got back to St. Ann's 
 Square, and his engagements, it seemed, 
 permitted him to invite her to tea. They 
 left their serious imaginings ; heart probings 
 could wait, and they rattled on gaily. He 
 seemed now a charming fellow that everyone 
 must like, and she admired the zest with which 
 he ate his cakes, taking them frankly as a 
 joyful contribution to the occasion. It was 
 in the mind of each that the other was 
 astonishingly good company. Yet the gaiety 
 of their exchanges took him apart from her ; 
 her dubious regard of him had come nearer 
 to intimacy, and he did not now attempt any 
 of the sentiment that may herald either a 
 flirtation or a passion ; he did not refine to 
 
THE TETHER 9 
 
 the point of tenderness. Of course the lifelong 
 compact must be made on slight preliminaries ; 
 in their hearts lovers welcome the wildness of 
 the venture. She had time presently to re- 
 flect that behind all these dim significances 
 and splendid chances there were doubts 
 enough. No, Richard Peel was not, she 
 knew, the universal favourite. Some men 
 get less than their share of approval because 
 they are confident, voluble, easy comrades. 
 They count ; they are important in the world 
 or in their little section of it, but they are 
 mistrusted or at least depreciated. They 
 gain attention, but attention is critical. We 
 warm more to the insignificant folk whose 
 reticence makes us believe that their virtues 
 are underacted. She began to imagine herself 
 on his side, contending for him. He had 
 seemed young to-day ; it was possible to think 
 of him as very young, though he must be over 
 thirty. She, at twenty-five, sometimes felt 
 like his senior. He belonged to what was 
 ranked as a good Lancashire family, and she 
 remembered to have heard that the men of 
 this family had not always married safely in 
 
io DYING FIRES 
 
 their own class. Richard, too, was an in- 
 calculable person. She felt herself to be 
 unromantically eligible. On the whole her 
 thoughts remained on prosaic levels, though 
 her feelings were stirred. She dared not 
 encourage the nobler imaginings. 
 
 For him she had romance enough, he 
 acknowledged, and that attraction of the 
 seductive woman with a high degree of 
 self-respect. She could hardly smile more 
 charmingly at a lover, but the frankness robbed 
 it of significance. He had talked a great deal 
 to women, for they are good listeners to young 
 men who want to talk, but he had had few 
 intimacies, and no vicious ones. This was a 
 very normal attraction, he told himself, and a 
 good way to calmness was a review — even an 
 appraisement — of her. He tried to think of 
 her descriptively and failed, for she charmed in 
 kindling your expectation ; when she was still 
 she lacked something, but you knew that the 
 irradiations would come. The tangible facts 
 did not matter ; the attraction could not be 
 measured in terms of colour and features ; the 
 poise of her head, delicate little movements 
 
THE TETHER n 
 
 had a mystical significance. She was a delicate 
 creature and she paid you a compliment in 
 appearing fastidious. Yet she was eager, or 
 capable of eagerness ; she expected things 
 from you and listened glowingly. It would 
 be fine to have her admiration, and horrible 
 to hurt her. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 MIDNIGHT CONFIDENCES 
 
 Peel called to see his friend James Morice 
 that night, or rather — for Morice kept journa- 
 list's hours — in the early morning. He had 
 been out to dinner and had struck a surprising 
 note of gaiety with comparatively unattractive 
 ladies. An overmastering friendliness had 
 prevailed, too, with the men, and behind his 
 back nothing harsher had been said of him 
 than that " Peel is a beggar to jaw," an ex- 
 pression which may, and did, hold a measure 
 of respect. He felt absurdly successful and 
 too hot and excited for bed, so he walked the 
 quiet streets and lanes until, passing Morice's 
 rooms in Withington, he saw by the light that 
 the journalist had got home. 
 
 Morice's reception lacked enthusiasm, per- 
 haps, for the man who is exhausted with 
 work is no match for him who is bursting 
 
MIDNIGHT CONFIDENCES 13 
 
 with flimsy possibilities. Richard Peel felt 
 something of this, for he did not get to terms 
 with his friend easily. He moved about the 
 room looking at things and taking up things. 
 At a glance it was any bachelor's room, 
 but presently there was something subdued 
 and strong about it. It seemed that Morice 
 affected dark etchings, his books had little 
 of the modern gaudiness, the patterns on his 
 walls and floor were small and close. Even 
 at noon there could be little brightness here, 
 and in the lamplight the room was darkly 
 glowing. Morice watched Peel's pere- 
 grinations rather cynically. " Taking an 
 inventory ? " he said. Peel turned, but yet 
 his instinct was for delay and even for 
 deprecation. 
 
 " You look tired," he said. " Was it the 
 ' long ' to-night ? " 
 
 " Never mind about me. What do you 
 want ? What's the urgent need now ? " 
 
 " I came to you just to be cooled down." 
 
 " Yes, I know, Peel, you're a man of moods. 
 What's the hot fit now ? " 
 
 " It's brutal to keep you out of bed." 
 
14 DYING FIRES 
 
 " That's your own point of view. It isn't 
 late for me." 
 
 " Any news to-night ? " 
 
 " There's to be a by-election at Black- 
 ington." 
 
 Richard paused for a little. " Yes, I knew 
 about that," he said. " Do you know, Morice, 
 I believe I could stand if I liked. Local 
 interest. Our mills are at Barnton, but we've 
 a finger in the Blackington pie, too." 
 
 " You'd not fit into the party machine." 
 
 " My politics are hotch-potch, I know. 
 Yes, it might be a distraction." 
 
 " Why do you want a distraction ? " 
 
 " Call it that." 
 
 " Look here, Peel. Why don't you go in 
 for cotton trade politics ? You ought to be 
 some good there if you could keep steady." 
 
 " Well, I've thought of it. It's not so easy. 
 There's plenty of room, in a way. They're 
 not overdone with intelligence, but they've 
 some shrewd, tough men. And am I the 
 man to conduct a losing fight with the 
 operatives ? My sympathies veer round to 
 them. The position of a middle-class Liberal 
 
MIDNIGHT CONFIDENCES 15 
 
 isn't good enough nowadays ; he finds himself 
 sawing off the branch he's on. I might be a 
 kind of local Rosebery, making brilliant scores 
 when they don't matter. Leaders should be 
 tough creatures like old C.-B. or Asquith, 
 pressing continually the obvious point. I 
 do want something, though. I seem to have 
 come to an impasse. I want something. I 
 want something badly. The ridiculous thing 
 is that I don't know what." 
 
 " You want the world to make you when 
 you should be making " 
 
 " A fine aphorism, my boy. I suppose I 
 might try expanding my business. There's 
 Gunton, he's for revolutionising the industry ; 
 he has his hands full — all manner of projects. 
 A shrewd man. And he fights away about 
 art and municipal theatres and the milk 
 supply. I've the indolence of scepticism. I 
 believe I only want to talk." 
 
 " Talk yourself clear, then." 
 
 " That's it, Morice. That's what I'm here 
 for. You've a way of getting at the point. 
 It's your trade, I suppose. Your leaders in 
 the Herald " 
 
16 DYING FIRES 
 
 " Oh, come — get on ! You're thinking of 
 some kind of remedy and you want to test it. 
 Let's have some whisky. Where's your 
 pipe ? " 
 
 " Remedy ? " 
 
 " Come, Peel, don't beat about the bush. 
 You're wide awake, and you lie pretty open 
 to the sympathetic friend. You're a man of 
 the world — a man in the world. And what's 
 all the world doing ? It's perpetuating itself, 
 with modifications. The obvious — a husband 
 and a father. A man must be a fool to give 
 up before he tries that. You protest and 
 talk wildly and take the obvious course. 
 Who's the lady ? " 
 
 " But can a man ' try that,' as you say ? 
 Can he approach the thing so ? To try it ? 
 To experiment with a woman " 
 
 " The woman," said Morice thoughtfully. 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " You can't make certainties of these 
 things ; you've all got to take a risk." 
 
 " Well, Morice, I want to talk to you about 
 it. You're not quite the man I want, but I've 
 no other handy. You are partly bored or 
 
MIDNIGHT CONFIDENCES 17 
 
 amused or disgusted. You don't take one 
 seriously enough." 
 
 " Don't I ? Perhaps I might take the lady 
 more seriously." 
 
 " You're a good tonic. Well, marriage, 
 then. Of course I've thought of it." 
 
 " You do — when the woman appears." 
 
 " Morice, I wouldn't talk of her to anyone 
 but you. You're not a priest, you're not 
 priestlike a bit ; but you're as cool as a saint. 
 And one must talk ; how can one think 
 otherwise ? I want to say things — to hear 
 how they sound and how they strike you. 
 It's a delicate matter. Refinements of 
 chivalry would forbid? But I want to be 
 right ; I mustn't sacrifice her — and myself — to 
 timidities. I want the truth — the possibilities 
 as they appear to a man who hasn't lost his 
 head. Do you know, I've felt like one that's 
 come to the end of things ? I've had the 
 frightful glimpse of a future with nothing in 
 it. I don't mean that I'm going to die ; I 
 don't even mean suicide. I'm thirty-three 
 and, in a way, successful. Of course, I stepped 
 into my father's shoes, but I've worn them 
 
18 DYING FIRES 
 
 well. We're bigger and more efficient. I've 
 a certain habit of work that may save me ; 
 it's a poor kind of salvation. I'm ambitious 
 without ambitions. I want a change. Par- 
 liament ? Is there something in that ? It's 
 like sending a sick man to the seaside. What 
 do you think ? " 
 
 " You'd better finish." 
 
 "I'm far enough from that. I want a long 
 innings. Well, I've come to a ' no thorough- 
 fare.' There are two kinds of scepticism — 
 the eager, searching kind and this inertia. 
 I'm tired, and yet — of course, most of us go 
 that way — some kind of youthful activity and 
 then drudgery in a groove. Respectability — 
 a country magistrate and so on. I have the 
 grace to rebel against this. As well become 
 a sot as grow middle aged. And then comes 
 this idea of marriage. And why not before ? 
 Well, Morice, I believe I've been something 
 of an idealist. The poets would make 
 celibates of us ; they set such a standard, 
 and a comfortable marriage with a nice girl 
 seems pretty poor. Is it different now ? 
 Is this the great passion — or even a 
 
MIDNIGHT CONFIDENCES 19 
 
 great illusion ? My dear fellow, I don't 
 know." 
 
 " Let's have the prose of it." 
 
 " Why do men marry ? Morice, I can 
 speak to a clean-minded man like you. Do 
 they yield at last to that perpetual tug of the 
 sex instinct ? We give it fine names, but 
 why be ashamed of the true one ? Women, 
 I daresay, marry because they wish to be 
 mothers or want an establishment, or it's the 
 usual thing, they have no other means of 
 support — and there are the wedding-presents. 
 
 But a man Of course, we fight against 
 
 the instinct, we restrain it. A simple plan is 
 to gratify it without marriage. I have the 
 cursed Puritan habit, but I believe anything 
 is better than celibacy. Men have set their 
 minds free for great work by the simple 
 expedient of a mistress. Do you blame 
 them ? " 
 
 " You keep getting off the point. And you 
 haven't said who it is. That's half the case. 
 No, no. Don't name her now. And, of 
 course, I know. I think I hate your frank- 
 ness, but I see that it's rather fine — as you 
 
20 DYING FIRES 
 
 do, no doubt. What, really, do you wait 
 for ? " 
 
 Richard said : "I could plunge into the 
 adventure readily enough but for her. What 
 would the future be ? Am I — a marrying 
 man ? Can I fulfil the contract ? This isn't 
 being in love, you'll say ; but I'm not sure. I 
 would risk myself, but I have some compunc- 
 tion. Can you trust yourself ? It comes on 
 me horribly now that I don't know what I 
 am. Am I a respectable citizen or a hopeless 
 case ? I've thought you looked at me some- 
 times as though you knew me. I've a kind of 
 fear that you can tell me the worst. . . . 
 You're a fellow with a hair-shirt, a kind of 
 seer, I suppose. I know I'm talking wildly. 
 I can't bear to think that I might somehow 
 make it hard for her. It's not a moral qualm. 
 Poor girl." 
 
 " Why do you consider yourself different 
 from the rest ? Are you so abnormal ? 
 People marry and jog along." 
 
 " Yes, I suppose it's the weakness of the 
 egoist. He thinks of himself and forgets that 
 all the manners and customs of the world will 
 
MIDNIGHT CONFIDENCES 21 
 
 back him. It's good of you to listen. We 
 expose ourselves to our friends. To any- 
 body else I might make a pretty good imitation 
 of the strong man." 
 
 " Your health's all right ? " 
 
 " Health ? Who's talking about health ? 
 This is a matter of despair — despair on a 
 small scale. Intangible." 
 
 " Might the particular point be settled by 
 her refusing you ? " 
 
 " That would simplify it." 
 
 " You're the kind of man that talks himself 
 into a fever, but I can't see anything wrong 
 with you. Your habits are all right. You're 
 all right." 
 
 " You think so, Morice ? You think I'm 
 all right ? It seems a childish question, but 
 it means something to me." 
 
 " I don't perfectly get at you, but I should 
 say you're a pretty harmless explosive. If 
 you want to marry and the lady will, why 
 make a problem of it ? Do you want some 
 kind of warning ? Well, if you marry a 
 woman who's too good for you you'll never 
 get any rest. She'll appreciate your virtues 
 
22 DYING FIRES 
 
 and want more ; her admiration must be fed. 
 If you're a man of possibilities you'll be 
 goaded. . . . But is this to the point, Peel ? 
 I've really nothing to say. No, I don't know 
 you very well. You've talked ; I suppose 
 you're clearer than when you came. It's not 
 my business. I think she's too good for you. 
 Really, I'm in as big a muddle as you are. 
 No — don't begin again. I've had enough 
 of it." 
 
 Yet Morice did not go to bed very soon 
 after his friend left him. The volubility of 
 the fellow jarred on his reticent habit, but 
 there are some people who need the confes- 
 sional. And what an amazing thing to 
 boggle about these abstractions if the alterna- 
 tive is to be the lover of Letty Drayton ! 
 The reticent habit — the cursed reticent habit 
 that lets everything go past without an 
 attempt to grasp it ! He had no pretensions ; 
 he liked her well enough and was certainly 
 not in love with her, but why was he not ? 
 Even to be in love with her ... To think 
 of her as the wife of Richard Peel was hardly 
 endurable. There's a man without reticence. 
 
MIDNIGHT CONFIDENCES 23 
 
 And, he reflected, we are friends — a queer 
 kind ; he had no deep and happy friendship 
 with which to contrast this one. Letty 
 Drayton ! He should not like to see her 
 unhappy. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 AN ATTEMPTED DIVERSION 
 
 Letty heard from Morice, who frequently 
 sought the company of her father, that 
 Richard was positively making an attempt at 
 the life political and had been accepted as 
 the Liberal candidate for Blackington. He 
 had not been near her for some time, and 
 she did not acknowledge to herself that she 
 resented this. She was glad to talk about 
 him to James Morice, who did not pretend 
 to be learned in women and could only guess 
 at the quality of her curiosity. He found 
 himself speaking kindly and generously 
 enough ; it warmed him to find himself on 
 the true lines of friendship. Yet a scholar 
 like Morice — a man of the trained, ordered 
 mind — could not admire all the results of 
 Peel's patches of cultivation. Richard Peel 
 had little of formal learning, and he had 
 
AN ATTEMPTED DIVERSION 25 
 
 dabbled in the arts without acquiring a 
 hobby ; his impulses had not been strong 
 enough to gain him a technique. " He's 
 something out of his class," Morice assured 
 her, " and that's always interesting ; if you 
 want to know a class, study those who have 
 emerged from it." He commended Richard's 
 business aptitude, and did not respond to 
 Letty's tentative inquiry about the qualifica- 
 tions of a Napoleon of commerce or finance 
 — a poor little note of the would-be hero- 
 worshipper, he thought. " No doubt," he 
 said, " it's the sign of a limited nature to 
 tire of things ; we come up against some- 
 thing hard in our limitations, even if they're 
 only limited ambitions ; but I think Richard 
 Peel's an honest man, and some of the big 
 people in commerce and politics are not. 
 The theory is that a success big enough 
 justifies what was done by the budding 
 Napoleon. He's scrupulous ; he'll hardly 
 double and treble, become a millionaire or 
 a Prime Minister." 
 
 He spoke rather casually, quite without any 
 air of special significance, and his appearance 
 
 c 
 
26 DYING FIRES 
 
 of friendly interest was impregnable. As 
 to this Blackington affair — of course, it 
 was a forlorn hope, one of those curious 
 working-class constituencies that stuck gamely 
 to the Tories. He hadn't a chance, or it was 
 barely a chance ; but if a man means to go 
 in for politics he must endure this kind 
 of apprenticeship. Morice professed some 
 interest as to how Richard Peel would 
 accomplish the necessary sail-trimming ; he 
 expected an honourable difficulty. 
 
 " It'll be a distraction for him, anyhow," 
 he said. 
 
 Later, the papers and common talk told 
 her that it could be little more. Richard 
 seemed to have discovered this at an early 
 stage of his canvass, and it pleased him to 
 divert himself. His formulas were rather 
 rusty, but he did not content himself with 
 an economic attack on the fiscal proposals 
 which were then something of a novelty. He 
 declaimed against the whole basis of the 
 Imperial idea. Morice, with mixed motives, 
 among which the desire for entertainment 
 predominated, went to one of his meetings. 
 
AN ATTEMPTED DIVERSION 27 
 
 If Parliamentary elections may fairly be taken 
 as belonging to the higher foolery, then 
 Richard was having an immense success. 
 The local party would gladly have got rid of 
 him when they discovered what he was. But 
 it was too late, unless they went without a 
 candidate altogether, and he just managed 
 to keep on the right side of outrageous 
 offence. 
 
 On the particular occasion Morice saw that 
 the chairman was perspiring something be- 
 yond the normal; and helpless little move- 
 ments that might have become plucks at 
 Richard's coat-tails showed his condition. 
 The orator rambled a little, perhaps, but he 
 eulogised the French Revolution and the 
 German character, declaring that it was 
 absurd for a civilised man to wish to trade 
 with a colony rather than with a great foreign 
 nation. The people were puzzled, but Richard 
 tipped them some windy, eloquent stuff and, 
 from time to time, he relapsed upon good 
 party cliches. Morice did not find much to 
 respect in the performance, but it was un- 
 expected and occasionally very adroit. It 
 
28 DYING FIRES 
 
 struck him that Richard was not making 
 out a good case for independence. 
 
 " It's an absurdity," he said to Morice 
 afterwards. " I can't win, and I want to be 
 frank with them as a candidate should be — for 
 an object lesson. I hate this trimming. Let 
 each candidate bare his soul and then they can 
 choose. Of course, the party-machine people 
 are horrified and I have to hark back ; I do 
 alarm myself a little. I feel a treacherous 
 wretch when one of these honest drudges, to 
 whom all this means something, comes along. 
 I'm only tolerated because I've treated some 
 of them respectfully. Of course, I'm a can- 
 didate pour rire. My opponent condescends 
 to be amused. I've a small following who 
 really relish my performance. It's the 
 end of politics for me. I shall go to the 
 poll." 
 
 Letty Drayton and her mother were sur- 
 prised when he turned up in their drawing- 
 room on an afternoon two days before the 
 polling-day. He grinned like an apologetic 
 school-boy, and Mrs. Drayton asked him if he 
 had retired. He had not, but, wearied of his 
 
AN ATTEMPTED DIVERSION 29 
 
 part, he had " slipped away." It was a 
 craving for a quiet cup of tea, he said, a 
 mighty yearning. He had thought hard of 
 strawberry jam all the way from the station. 
 His burlesque of the hunted, starving creature 
 amused Letty, but it left her uneasy. He 
 assured them that people were out looking 
 for him and that he would be in trouble when 
 he got back. Mrs. Drayton, incapable of 
 subtleties, disliking the state of puzzlement, 
 and conscious always that her husband and 
 daughter made things smooth for her, with- 
 drew with some excuse when tea was over 
 and left the two to some tentative personal 
 adjustments. 
 
 Presently Letty said : " It's hardly fair. I 
 don't know how serious you want to be. You 
 play at being serious, I suppose, and want to 
 be able to stop the play at any time. These 
 people have a grievance, I think. What 
 right have you to play off your caprices on 
 them ? " 
 
 He admitted that he was all in the wrong ; 
 not more so than other candidates, though in 
 a different way. " They are what people call 
 
30 DYING FIRES 
 
 ' on the make,' but I'm pure to the point of 
 being impersonal. Do you know, I've been 
 giving them some fine, high-principled stuff — 
 the best I had in me. It was serious, if I'm 
 not. I've forced out compliments on my 
 sincerity, but it's not a quality of sincerity 
 that I'm very proud of. It's easy to talk 
 when you're not trying to do anything. This 
 outburst of mine helps me to a respect for 
 the steady politician. If I'd really wanted to 
 do something it would have been far more 
 difficult and less effective. I have a few 
 idealists acclaiming, and the poor party men 
 are afraid to throw over me and my high- 
 sounding stuff." 
 
 He assured her that they would not only 
 lose, but lose madly. She was vastly uncom- 
 fortable, groping for something solid in all 
 this, perplexed by the want of reason and 
 unable to conceive the thing as almost pure 
 distraction. Certainly she was far enough 
 from perceiving that she had a place in it, 
 that the violence of the distraction was some 
 measure of her growing influence. Her desire 
 for some less nebulous aspect of him prompted 
 
AN ATTEMPTED DIVERSION 31 
 
 a reference to his work, but he was in the 
 disintegrating vein. 
 
 " The ridiculous thing is," he said, " that I 
 run a mill on the usual lines. I don't share 
 with my workpeople or encourage them to be 
 my social equals. Of course, I'm a fair master 
 and I assure you we have trained creepers up 
 the walls for a few yards and planted bushes 
 round the lodge. One aims at a kind of justice 
 — the current kind. I do things that give one 
 a philanthropic glow. To those who really 
 think about these matters I daresay they're 
 all fudge. Why not head some kind of social 
 revolution ? Head it ! Some humble spade- 
 work is all I'm fit for. You remember the 
 young man who had great possessions ? It 
 wasn't these that mattered ; he couldn't 
 change his enthusiasms into action ; he was 
 indolent, like the rest of us." 
 
 Then he said : "I came here to get away 
 from it all and I'm not getting away. I think 
 I like it least " — he looked at her — " in your 
 eyes. For heaven's sake tell me something 
 of yourself. I came for that. Assert your- 
 self, Miss Drayton. I believe it's the rest of 
 
32 DYING FIRES 
 
 the world, not I, that's to blame. We want 
 a conflict of assertive people ; you must get 
 up to my pitch. How's your father ? " 
 
 He knew that she liked to talk of her father, 
 and Richard humbly accepted him as a stand- 
 ing reproach. She listened eagerly to praise of 
 him, and admitted that all he did and said 
 interested her. And yet his doings and 
 sayings seemed simple. A man is not often 
 a hero to a daughter with brains, and perhaps 
 his best chance for it is in eminence in a line 
 that does not specially appeal to her. Drayton 
 was an eminent, hard-working surgeon of 
 whom everyone spoke well. This is some- 
 times a doubtful tribute, but here it was evoked 
 by a fine balance between the modest de- 
 meanour and great services. Letty had gone 
 through the preliminaries of a nurse's training, 
 and, having overcome the nausea of inex- 
 perience, had watched his operations many 
 times. It had been at first a curious experi- 
 ment not easily accepted by him, but her 
 enthusiasm for her father must penetrate 
 beyond the barrier that seemed to shut out so 
 much of the greatness — greatness she was sure 
 
AN ATTEMPTED DIVERSION 33 
 
 — of his character. She must know him ; she 
 must see him at his best. And the flutterings 
 and shrinkings had died down ; she could 
 watch him calmly and could appreciate his 
 skill. This imperturbable, unhurried skill 
 was her pride. She liked to hear the students 
 — with some literary affectation — talk of style; 
 her father was not merely a competent carver 
 of limbs, it seemed ; like Stevenson or Pater, 
 he had style. But in the intimacies of his 
 work she found fresh reserves of gentleness and 
 humanity ; the surgeon's ruthlessness had 
 ceased to daunt her. She knew that now he 
 liked her to be present, though, of course, this 
 could not be very often. Many of their 
 friends knew nothing about this precious 
 and guarded interest in her life, and Mrs. 
 Drayton had never ceased to exhibit a mild 
 astonishment at it. 
 
 Richard Peel seemed but flimsy stuff beside 
 such an impregnable rock as her father. She 
 did not force the comparison, for she felt that 
 no man could endure it. Richard and she, 
 too, were but struggling waifs, unlearned in the 
 ways of life, though they could talk variously 
 
34 DYING FIRES 
 
 about it, and perhaps they had sym- 
 pathies together that the simpler man could 
 not share. She was normal and sensitive, 
 ready for the sway of a lover and too strong 
 to look for perfect strength in him. Richard 
 spoke of her father even to the satisfaction 
 of her exacting pride, and when, presently, 
 Drayton joined them he accepted the elder 
 man's good-humoured chiding. Drayton even 
 consulted a time-table and ordered him back 
 to Blackington, and this was taken in good 
 part. 
 
 When Richard had gone he said kindly 
 enough : " The fellow plays the fool with a 
 good grace." He looked at Letty and added : 
 " I don't say he's a fool, but that side — we've 
 all got it — comes uppermost at times." 
 
 They heard presently that he was very 
 soundly beaten in the contest, and then that 
 he had started for a holiday that began on an 
 Atlantic liner and might continue anywhere. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE NEEDLE TO THE POLE 
 
 Richard Peel's flight might have been 
 disconcerting to Letty, but she was strong in 
 the correctness of her attitude and, clearly, 
 though she might be interested in them, his 
 proceedings were no business of hers. Yet 
 she was his friend, and if he had fled from the 
 reproaches or ridicule of his friends he might 
 have made distinctions ; she had some claim 
 on him. The obvious explanation of his 
 flight was given with many shades of jocu- 
 larity, and she would have liked to think that 
 he was careless about such pin-pricks. His 
 fantastic candidature had become at the last, 
 she knew, a rather tired and dogged affair. 
 He had lost interest ; he had conformed in 
 some degree to party needs ; a few of the 
 newspaper comments had been almost respect- 
 ful. Doubtless he wanted a holiday, and he 
 
36 DYING FIRES 
 
 had decisively seized an opportunity. To 
 believe that she would presently have a letter 
 from him was a reasonable concession to their 
 friendship, and so the postman began to play 
 upon her nerves. The postman, through the 
 ages, has been a disappointing figure, but even 
 his delays have revealed to women their own 
 hearts and minds. Our thoughts are our 
 own, and the world would halt poorly amidst 
 the tentative relationships that promote the 
 marriages of true minds and healthy bodies, 
 if we did really believe in a judgment-day 
 inquisition that would lay bare the sequence 
 of desires. In an assured secrecy the spirit 
 grows. 
 
 Yet if there was a great difference between 
 what was acknowledged and what was deeply 
 impressed, Letty was not the love-lorn maiden 
 of the romances, nor like to be. It must be a 
 common disappointment to sincere lovers to 
 find that they lag so far behind that romantic 
 standard of wild abandonment. They some- 
 times simulate it with comic results ; the 
 cheerful lady will drink up Esil and the man 
 of mild habits eat a crocodile. If Richard 
 
THE NEEDLE TO THE POLE 37 
 
 Peel had tarried for ever in the West, Letty 
 would not have been badly scathed ; they 
 might be capable of passion, but they were 
 only at the beginnings of things, and passion 
 does not grow in a night. But she knew that 
 he would come again ; the very prosaic reason 
 that his business would require him was an 
 assurance to her, and she could believe that 
 he had made careful arrangements about the 
 conduct of this business before he adventured 
 into the West. Men escape from an exhausted 
 interest, but her own feelings told her that 
 this relation of theirs was yet deliciously 
 unexplored. If she wanted him back again it 
 was not that she clung faithfully to a chosen 
 lover, but that he appealed to her deepest 
 curiosities. She had innumerable things to 
 say to him ; she could attack him and help 
 him at innumerable points. 
 
 With others she was ready and yet cautious 
 in his defence. She had sounded James 
 Morice, and found him disposed to cynical 
 amusement about this candidature. " It's 
 easy to do like this when you don't care," 
 Morice said. " It's the men who care deep 
 
38 DYING FIRES 
 
 down that can trim and compromise." This 
 was very much what Richard had said to her. 
 Morice gave her a little lecture about caring 
 for things. He was curiously balanced — 
 perhaps it was the effect of the duality of his 
 work — between the artist and the reformer. 
 She didn't like to discuss Richard in cold 
 blood with Morice, who became conscious of 
 her stiffening and brought in some irrelevant 
 praise of their absent friend. Nor did she like 
 this, though she dismissed the unworthy idea 
 that it might be a subtle form of detraction. 
 Meantime Richard Peel drank deep of pure 
 air and saw great mountain forms jagging 
 against an azure sky, morning and evening. 
 He slept under canvas with a comrade who 
 knew the country and its ways, or enough of 
 them to play the holiday-maker in this fine 
 fashion. They cooked their own rations and 
 played at half-civilisation exhilaratingly ; they 
 had long tramps together when Richard's 
 friend was not shooting or fishing in the 
 interests of the pot. They talked, though 
 this, perhaps, was not the best part of it, for 
 the friend was an enthusiast and a good 
 
THE NEEDLE TO THE POLE 39 
 
 receiver of enthusiasms, hearty and simple, 
 but hardly a man of ideas. Richard curbed 
 his own turbid eloquence, for it would not 
 have served him here. With another man he 
 might have gone far in confidences ; poor 
 Morice, he thought, would have had them hot 
 and strong. And this want of a confidant 
 inclined his thoughts homeward ; if he could 
 have talked about his affairs they might have 
 waited longer for his coming. As it was he 
 nursed a secret ; he had a consolation that 
 helped him to bear discomforts with good- 
 humour. After all, he was not a genuine 
 traveller any more than he had been a 
 genuine Parliamentary candidate, and there 
 were times when the drudgery and small 
 privations of the nomadic life became rather 
 tiresome. It was all perfectly inept as a test 
 of the attraction of the girl who waited— did 
 she wait ? — in England. He liked now to 
 think of her as an English girl, and though he 
 wished sometimes that he could associate her 
 with something more fragrantly English than 
 Manchester, it was exciting to think that 
 she was there. What a fool a lover must 
 
40 DYING FIRES 
 
 be, he thought, to attempt escape as he 
 had attempted it. The woman, then, means 
 England and home. She is the symbol of 
 all that is beloved and desirable. She is 
 a dazzling alternative to strangeness and 
 discomfort. 
 
 The sun rose bravely each day in a clear 
 sky and his friend clapped him on the back 
 with unabated heartiness, but he began to see 
 that it was stupendously queer that he should 
 remain here. He realised it as partly affecta- 
 tion, partly a subtle paralysis of the will. He 
 played with literary parallels ; Hamlet's in- 
 action had cause and will and strength and 
 means behind it, and Richard Feverel delayed 
 incredibly when the natural man should have 
 flown like an arrow to the mark. He had not 
 even written to her, and if his sympathy had 
 been of that penetrating kind that lives in the 
 friend's desires he would have known that 
 she craved even a letter of travelling experi- 
 ences. But could he stop at these — and had 
 he decided ? Must he at last relinquish this 
 luxury of indecision ? To come near her 
 now, he knew in his heart, would be decision 
 
THE NEEDLE TO THE POLE 41 
 
 enough. And yet, at last, it was a vision of 
 something wistful — the expression of some 
 shade of patient reticence perhaps — that he 
 had seen or imagined in her that set him in 
 motion. Delays were over, and the parting 
 with his friend was unnecessarily, indecently 
 hurried. He was the impatient lover, chafing 
 at obstructions and eager to abase himself 
 for the folly of postponements ; dreading 
 some hitch or, worse, some disillusion that 
 might leave him the free man he had pre- 
 tended to be. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 MARRIAGE 
 
 He traversed the continent and the Atlantic 
 impatiently ; on shipboard he wagered small 
 sums that the day's run would be a poor one, 
 so that, when he lost, he might gain the 
 impression of speed. He watched the cleav- 
 ing prow and the churning water, and never, 
 perhaps, had he been so happy. He enjoyed 
 the acquaintanceships of the voyage, and 
 entered with zest into its amusements. 
 Liverpool greeted him with a friendly murki- 
 ness and he lost no time in getting to Man- 
 chester. Here there must be — there might 
 be — a check, for he could not run straight to 
 Letty and fall at her feet ; and he had queer 
 fits of shakiness that took the strength out of 
 him. He went to his rooms and washed and 
 combed. It was four o'clock in the after- 
 noon, very near the time that his calculations 
 
MARRIAGE 43 
 
 of the last two or three days had anticipated. 
 No hansom came in his way, and he walked 
 with some demureness. Mrs. Drayton was 
 not at home, and his voice was hardly under 
 control when he asked for Miss Drayton. 
 The servant admitted him to the hall and 
 said that she would see. He was conscious 
 of something between embarrassment and 
 understanding in her ; it flashed through him 
 that the girl was no machine, but a kindly, 
 helpful creature, and presently with a welcom- 
 ing smile she ushered him into the library — a 
 snug, warm place with a bright fire. He 
 heard the rustle of skirts entering another 
 room, then words were spoken, and the maid- 
 servant's " more comfortable " was distin- 
 guishable. After a slight pause Letty entered, 
 and it was clear that she was less composed 
 than usual. It did not help her to perceive 
 an instinctive, nervous motion of both his 
 hands, though one was hastily withdrawn. 
 
 It was at first an affair of blushes and 
 stammers, and Richard was clumsily trying to 
 make her understand that he had not tarried 
 in coming to see her, while she persisted in a 
 
44 DYING FIRES 
 
 confused supposition that he must have been 
 in Manchester for some days. He shook him- 
 self free from these misunderstandings at last. 
 
 " No, no," he said, " I've come here first ; 
 I've come thousands of miles by land and sea 
 as straight as they would bring me. If 
 anything could have given me more speed 
 I'd have had it. I've travelled in a fever of 
 haste, with one idea." 
 
 " Some kind of wager ? " she said. 
 
 " Wager ! Well, it's the great hazard." 
 
 He approached her, and she retired a step, 
 trembling. 
 
 " Why did you go away ? " 
 
 " Ah ! why ? " he cried. " There are some 
 things so compelling that we must resist 
 them. It was a poor, vain attempt to keep 
 my own soul together — but it's the last. 
 
 I'm in subjection, and I wait — I hope " 
 
 He stammered pitifully, entreatingly ; the 
 moment of his humility was precious to her. 
 All hung in doubt, but nature swayed them, 
 and, incredibly, she was in his arms. He 
 laughed triumphantly, and she pulled away 
 from him to see his face. 
 
MARRIAGE 45 
 
 " You weren't pretending ? You weren't 
 acting ? " 
 
 " Acting ? No. When ? " 
 
 " You hesitated and doubted. You are 
 confident now. You've changed so quickly." 
 
 But she knew all was well. 
 
 He said : " Changed ? Who would not 
 change ? It's new heaven, new earth." 
 
 " You've no doubts ? " 
 
 " I've a thousand, but they're straws in the 
 fire." 
 
 " What kind are they ? " 
 
 " Oh, there's time enough for them. And 
 they don't exist." 
 
 " You'll be tethered worse than ever." 
 
 " More than ever. Better than ever." 
 
 She said : "I am perfectly happy now, 
 but I had a horrible moment before I came 
 in. It was Maud's fault. Do you know she 
 was managing — arranging for us ? That's 
 why you are in here. It would have been 
 different in the drawing-room. You don't 
 know how nearly you missed seeing me after 
 all. I forced myself to come in because I 
 knew, deep down, how much I wanted it. 
 
46 DYING FIRES 
 
 And you put out both your hands. Was it 
 invitation — entreaty ? " 
 
 " It was everything." 
 
 " We ought to discuss it. We ought to 
 get it right. This hour I shall live over again, 
 thousands of times. Well, I'll make it as 
 I like it." 
 
 They questioned and probed gently and 
 made their glorified explanations till presently 
 Maud gave the warning of a discreet clatter 
 and brought in tea-things. Their amiable 
 unconsciousness did not deceive her, and they 
 felt that the murder was out. Then Mrs. 
 Drayton came in, and stared a little to find 
 them in the library, but Richard took her 
 hand and said charming things — exactly the 
 right things, Letty felt. Mrs. Drayton dis- 
 played a proper astonishment, and a drop 
 was added to their brimming cup by her 
 excited pleasure. She said the conventional 
 things, but her eyes were dim, and Richard's 
 irony faded away in the sense of something 
 simple and primal when she embraced her 
 daughter. They were all merry together, 
 talking rather foolishly, perhaps, in high- 
 
MARRIAGE 47 
 
 pitched voices, and plans were half made and 
 ideas half explored. It was the full flood of 
 happiness that comes seldom, the inviolate 
 possession that makes the thought of death 
 less terrible. Their happiness was qualified 
 when Drayton came. Letty met him in the 
 hall and came back to them when he went 
 upstairs. 
 
 " Don't tell him yet," she said. " He's 
 had a hard day. I don't know whether 
 it's my own selfishness or not, but I can't tell 
 him now. I'll speak to him later, and you, 
 Richard " — she hesitated and spoke the name 
 with gentle precision — " come back to dinner 
 — mayn't he, mother ? " 
 
 Drayton came in before Richard left, and 
 there was a little constraint upon the party. 
 Drayton was friendly enough, and Richard 
 asked himself why the announcement was 
 delayed ; he had no apprehensions about the 
 reception of it. Yet as he watched Drayton 
 sitting there drinking his tea the question 
 seemed to be answered, or an answer was 
 possible. His pale, frowning face was very 
 remote from them. Letty, indeed, looked 
 
48 DYING FIRES 
 
 for a more genial opportunity ; she wanted 
 her memories of the great day to unfold as a 
 beautiful pageant. Presently her father 
 would be ready ; just now he glared through 
 them into an outer world of suffering and 
 misfortunes and strenuous work. She wanted 
 to be alone with him. 
 
 He relaxed a little and turned to Richard : 
 " If you have a son, think twice before making 
 him a doctor — a surgeon, anyway. I don't 
 advise you not to do it, mind." 
 
 Mrs. Drayton rose, and he watched her out 
 of the room. " I've had a baddish afternoon," 
 he said. It seemed to Richard that he took 
 them into an equal confidence, and this was 
 pleasant, and stimulated him to an active 
 sympathy. Drayton did not know their secret 
 yet, but here they sat together in a peculiar 
 intimacy. The man's reticences were gone 
 and Richard felt his own kinship to him. 
 
 " A woman died under my hands this 
 afternoon," said Drayton. " I didn't like it, 
 though I'm not blaming myself. I knew it 
 was touch and go. I told the husband so, 
 and he didn't want it done ; he was scared 
 
MARRIAGE 49 
 
 when I explained that she might die then and 
 there. He wanted things to go on quietly. 
 The ass talked about cures being effected by 
 medicine ; it wasn't that he believed in it, 
 but he wanted to procrastinate, he wanted to 
 have his tea quietly, I think, and his evening 
 in some bar parlour. Lower middle-class 
 people ; I think he's some kind of agent or 
 canvasser. I told him he was a coward. I 
 bullied him into it. There was a chance. 
 He talked about the expense ; he had children. 
 I made that right, and when he was committed 
 to it, he became solemn and important. Her 
 heart failed suddenly ; I thought it might, and 
 I was hurrying. I don't think I could have 
 done more, but — one worries over a failure. 
 I wanted to save her. The woman was all 
 right ; she had her children in — four of them. 
 A mother's a mother. I meant to get her 
 through." 
 
 He gave some technical explanations to 
 Letty. It was a relief to talk about it. " I'm 
 all right yet," he said to Richard, " but it's 
 bad when a surgeon begins to fail. I'm not 
 happy now, but what would it be if I knew 
 
50 DYING FIRES 
 
 that I'd bungled it ? There are days when 
 we're not at our best. It's so in all trades, 
 I suppose, but a surgeon living on his 
 reputation ..." 
 
 Richard asked how the husband took it. 
 
 " Badly. He did some penny gaff business, 
 with me as the villain. Garston — he was 
 with me — stopped him with some sound 
 cursing. Then the fellow turned sulky. He 
 said he wouldn't pay a farthing. He had 
 his children about him, and seemed kind to 
 them in his beery way. It was a queer glimpse 
 of family life. We come in at the end of 
 things. This man and woman, I could see, 
 were totally alien to one another. Four 
 children she'd borne him — more, perhaps. 
 He wanted to be tender and sentimental when 
 they parted, but she didn't respond ; with the 
 children it was a different thing. Cooped 
 up together for all these years ! . . . Well, 
 marriages are made in heaven." 
 
 She looked at Richard in some dismay, and 
 he rose to go. " Stop, Richard," she said. 
 " I must tell him now." At the name her 
 father was suddenly attentive. She said : 
 
MARRIAGE 51 
 
 " Oh, father, dear — don't speak against 
 marriages." 
 
 " No, no," said Drayton. He looked at 
 them. "What! is it so ? " His gaze at 
 Richard became a scrutiny. " Ah ! yes. 
 And I knew nothing about it. Is it deter- 
 mined, irrevocable ? Well, it's great news. 
 Amazing ! I want to be pleased — I am 
 pleased, I think. I congratulate you, Peel. 
 You see, I know her. As to you " — he 
 touched his shoulder kindly — " if she chooses 
 you it's enough. I could follow her blindly. 
 What ! do I commit myself, then, to ap- 
 proval ? It's sudden." 
 
 She left them together. 
 
 Drayton sat down and looked thoughtfully 
 at the fire. " I shall be cordial presently," he 
 said. " Don't ask me to force it. I do like 
 you, my dear fellow." 
 
 " I'll improve. I've not done yet. You 
 can't believe what this will do for me." 
 
 " I didn't like that electioneering." 
 
 " It was a stupidity, sir." 
 
 " Clever, people said. The same thing, no 
 doubt. You've been away ? I don't quite 
 
52 DYING FIRES 
 
 understand your recent movements. This — 
 engagement is a new thing ? " 
 
 " This afternoon." 
 
 " I hope I'm not over-curious." 
 
 " No, no, Mr. Drayton. I've been attempt- 
 ing distractions. I wanted to know — to be 
 sure. I couldn't — lightly " 
 
 " Well, my dear fellow, what I know of you 
 is good, if I don't know enough. I can't take 
 it easily, because I think she's incomparable. 
 I'm jealous, but I want to be magnanimous. 
 You'll have to take me for a friend. You 
 know she can't do without me. You can't 
 alter that." 
 
 " It's — it's" — Richard stammered eagerly — 
 " it's one of the great privileges — your friend- 
 ship." They clasped hands on it. Drayton 
 saw him boyish and sincere. He might not 
 be stolidly planted on his feet, but he was a 
 good fellow and surely a good lover. 
 
 Richard liked Drayton very much, and it 
 touched him to find that even this fine type 
 of a great profession had common ground 
 with the poor labourer who aspires to a com- 
 fortable ending. Drayton was not tired, but 
 
MARRIAGE 53 
 
 he looked forward to the time when he would 
 be so, and seemed to cherish a deferred desire 
 for rest. Doctors are sometimes said to be 
 improvident, but he lived well within his 
 means ; the provision for his family was not 
 so much a point of honour as a matter of 
 course. Richard saw that with such a man 
 a good deal would be taken as a matter of 
 course. He was provoked to a mild surmise 
 as to Mrs. Drayton's attraction for her 
 husband, but there was a vague quality of 
 wifeliness about her, and, after all, there are 
 not brilliant women to go round. With Mrs. 
 Drayton he got on uncommonly well, for she 
 liked the play of courtesies that it pleased 
 him to give, and he was never far away from 
 them with her. 
 
 The time of engagement was happy enough 
 for all of them, and it had few of the incidents 
 that make personal history, and few even of 
 the detractions from an illusion of perfect 
 amity. Letty and Richard went to the 
 theatre together one evening — Richard wanted 
 her to see the actress, though the play was 
 no great things ; she found it very interesting, 
 
54 DYING FIRES 
 
 but he was suddenly bored by it, and in the 
 interval bewailed the want of mystery in the 
 world. 
 
 " I admit I found her charming," he said ; 
 " but it grows stale ; there isn't enough of it." 
 
 " It's bad when a man loses his sense of 
 infinity," she said. " And you're tired and 
 bored. I'm boring you ; everything's boring 
 you." 
 
 It was not a happy subject for a place 
 where fragments of conversation might be 
 overheard. He shook his head, but they fell 
 into separate, heavy meditation. It is a 
 man's own fault if he comes to the end of 
 things, but there are times when he seems to 
 see with clear, disillusioned eyes. The sea 
 is so many gallons of water, and water may 
 be expressed in a scientific formula ; the 
 sands of the sea are uncounted, but a count 
 would sometime come to an end. The in- 
 finite modulations of humanity are not much 
 more than a few tricks. Here was the woman 
 on the stage with all the advantages given 
 by dramatists eager' to get fresh stuff out of 
 her, and she seemed horribly within herself 
 
MARRIAGE 55 
 
 to-night. The people about them were making 
 conventional comments, purchasing choco- 
 lates, staring about them. A lady near 
 them was heard to say : " Yes, but Irving 
 was always Irving," which flicked his mood 
 with impatience. " As though a man of 
 genius could efface himself ! " he said to Letty, 
 and felt rather the better for it. Yet his 
 moroseness got the better of him again, and he 
 muttered something about this wearisome 
 faking-up of emotions. He was spoiling 
 sport, he felt, and a glance at Letty's grave 
 profile brought remorse and another mood. 
 He did not easily win her to the happier 
 state, for a woman will not always be melted 
 by the mere desire to make amends. Yet it 
 was an evening marred, not spoilt, for he 
 came back from frigid forebodings to the 
 warm delight of the present, and was a con- 
 vincing lover again. 
 
 To Morice, the accepted friend of both, 
 their happiness appeared complete, and he 
 was generous enough — in some moods at least 
 — to be glad of it. It might have some 
 corroding or disintegrating quality, but his 
 
56 DYING FIRES 
 
 sceptical habit was decently in abeyance. 
 They admitted him frankly to their counsels, 
 and he agreed to be the best man at the 
 wedding. The best man ! He felt that his 
 life was a tame acceptance of something far 
 enough from the best. The glory of the 
 world went by him as a pageant on which, 
 at the most, he was privileged to make 
 his critical comments. The lovers were his 
 friends and he came within the circle of 
 effulgence. He respected their happiness, and 
 yet he, too, was a potential lover, and with 
 the instinct of the male he must sometimes 
 measure himself against his friend. Letty 
 had been puzzled to divine their relations, 
 for friendship, she felt, was too wide and too 
 simple a definition, and her mother un- 
 wittingly provoked a fitful illumination. In 
 her daughter's presence Mrs. Drayton treated 
 Morice to complacent reflections on the 
 marriage, and overflowed with genial apprecia- 
 tion of her coming son-in-law. As the most 
 interesting thing to do, he watched Letty 
 unobtrusively, but the situation was slack 
 enough. Then Mrs. Drayton, in the blindness 
 
MARRIAGE 57 
 
 of her self-satisfaction, made some poor, 
 nearly harmless remark on Morice's devotion 
 to his friend — a kindly clumsiness with some 
 possible implication of inferiority. Letty 
 glanced at him deprecatingly and met blazing 
 eyes. He got up abruptly and walked to the 
 window, while she vainly searched for some 
 comfortable thing to say ; she was ready for 
 any formal abasement of Richard, but to 
 strain it would have made things worse. 
 Morice recovered in a moment, and Mrs. 
 Drayton was unconscious of anything beyond 
 his restlessness. She continued to give them 
 of her platitudes, and presently remarked 
 archly that this time the course of true love 
 seemed sure to run smooth. 
 
 " Oh, that's an antiquated maxim," said 
 Morice pleasantly. " Nowadays it's smooth 
 enough up to marriage. Then the story 
 begins." 
 
 Letty laughed obediently, wondering how 
 much he meant. He hardly knew himself 
 whether there had been some shadow of 
 warning. There were times when he feared 
 that he would degenerate into a merely 
 
58 DYING FIRES 
 
 caustic person. He was annoyed with him- 
 self — savagely annoyed as he perceived or 
 divined that his agitation and its cause were 
 open to her. Presently his chance came to 
 say to her : " I'm a poor thing, but mine 
 own. I know I'm not worthy to tie his shoes, 
 but you're not going to make me just a 
 henchman." Her ready acceptance made 
 him ashamed. She thought his frankness 
 wonderfully fine. 
 
 The wedding was quite according to rule. 
 Mrs. Drayton seemed to have decreed that 
 it must be so, and nobody had the strength 
 to withstand her. So they had a large 
 company brimming with facetiousness, the 
 egregious display of wedding presents, the 
 peppering with little coloured paper balls and 
 with rice, and all the usual vapid gaieties. 
 Richard took it hilariously and Letty 
 demurely, but they had their understanding ; 
 it was absurd, but it didn't matter ; they left 
 it behind them. 
 
 To Letty the outstanding features were 
 her father's disguised preoccupation — she 
 knew that this made an immense difference 
 
MARRIAGE 59 
 
 to him — and the comic aspect of Morice, so 
 monstrously out of place as a king of the 
 revels, and striving heroically. She congratu- 
 lated him on revealing a new facet of his 
 genius, and he replied sententiously : " A 
 crisis may do little to develop character, but 
 it reveals it." He, too, was alive to the 
 comedy of his position, and he relieved it with 
 a few epigrams. Bantered by a jolly lady — 
 " When is it your turn, Mr. Morice ? But 
 you're too clever to get married. That's for 
 ordinary folk like Mr. Peel " — he said : " Ah, 
 madam, to avoid the obvious may be to miss 
 the sunshine." Letty, sensitive to the least 
 impression, was jarred a little by his diction ; 
 it went creakily, and her sympathies extended 
 to his shuddering recollection of it presently. 
 She could almost detect a wistfulness, and 
 when Morice warmed to the burlesque 
 conception of his part she might have con- 
 ceived him as the traditional jester hiding his 
 emotions. But they were all people at a 
 wedding-party and much like others in such a 
 circumstance. A few inopportune shades of 
 thought did not matter and might give salt 
 
60 DYING FIRES 
 
 to the cloying dish. Letty and her husband 
 went out into their new world in a brave 
 flutter, and if it was not unalloyed joy the old 
 familiar life must claim a share. The parting 
 from her mother had startled her ; this 
 seemed a severance indeed. She looked 
 back on Morice and her father standing side 
 by side with grave faces and waving hands. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE FRIEND 
 
 Letty and Richard got on together capitally, 
 and perhaps it is a relief to any couple to 
 discover that they can do this. You may 
 rejoice in love or passion and in a capacity 
 for the finer relations, but it is pleasant to 
 find that the daily communion does not stale. 
 Richard, in moments of frank pessimism, had 
 told himself, and sometimes even his friends, 
 that he could make a good start at things, 
 but that the infinite capacity was lacking. 
 He had started well now and he was happy, 
 for he was not given to marring the present 
 with apprehensions when the present was 
 good. The new home, in an undistinguished 
 looking but eligible semi-detached house some 
 mile or so from the Draytons', was a great 
 entertainment to them, and, like sensible 
 people, they had left a good deal of the finer 
 
62 DYING FIRES 
 
 detail of the furnishing till they could do it at 
 leisure together. This provoked many frank 
 and delightful discussions and seemed to 
 reveal infinite possibilities ; they could never 
 exhaust a subject. Their minds were excited 
 to all manner of excursions and they found 
 themselves advancing in a liberal education 
 and in the arts of life. And it is pleasant to 
 argue with the beloved one, opposing, it may 
 be, science to sentiment, and to find that in 
 any decision affecting the home both have a 
 genius for concession. It was glorious to find 
 that they were abundantly justified in their 
 choice of a lifetime if they did not acknowledge 
 it was a relief. 
 
 Morice was tacitly invited to become the 
 tame cat of the family, and he accepted the 
 position. It was hardly a deliberate choice, 
 but here, he felt, was his interest ; he dare 
 not let go of this. Much of his life was over- 
 laid and only brought up fitfully ; of course, 
 at holiday times he went off to " his people," 
 or to Switzerland or Norway with men he had 
 known in what began to seem a previous 
 existence. Here in Manchester the Peels and 
 
THE FRIEND 63 
 
 the Draytons were his chief supports, and to 
 them his other connections were vague and 
 hardly credible. He was a useful fellow and 
 a punctilious friend, and they were accustomed 
 to him. Letty liked the absence of sentiment 
 — he had an astringent quality on occasion — 
 but she thought that he maintained to the 
 world an exterior too equable. No man 
 should be as calm as that, and, she believed, 
 no man could be ; she had seen his eyes blaze 
 once. She knew that she could trust him 
 absolutely and that he would go far in her 
 service. 
 
 Perhaps Morice was not perfectly at ease. 
 He was not simply the open-hearted friend, 
 and yet if here he was something of an 
 observer he could be glad that his observa- 
 tions left him calm. The circumstances of 
 his life restricted his social intercourse, but 
 he did not regret that it had dwindled to so 
 little. His habit was austere and she stood 
 for the feminine in his world — a frightfully 
 attenuated feminine for a young man with 
 blood in him, for he could honour his friend 
 and the friend's wife. Certainly he was not 
 
64 DYING FIRES 
 
 jealous of Richard in any acceptable sense, 
 but he did not encourage heart or brain to 
 positive conclusions. He left a great deal 
 unsounded. He was capable of a great 
 reticence, of holding a passion in leash. 
 
 Richard and he were intimates and they 
 had all the formal relations of friendship. 
 They were intimate, but they were not quite 
 familiar. Perhaps historical treacheries have 
 sprung from such relations, but nowadays 
 those grosser offences are hardly known 
 among civilised men. Treachery has become 
 a more subtle thing, and this man of fine 
 imaginings was harassed sometimes by rebel- 
 lious thoughts when he seemed to be one in 
 the trio of perfect friendship. It seemed 
 that he was doomed to merely second-hand 
 experiences, and because his work was removed 
 from the world's conspicuous activities — an 
 unregarded comment upon them — he had 
 unworthy moments of distaste and even of 
 contempt for it. The man of letters or the 
 journalist is oppressed sometimes by this 
 miserable illusion, and abases himself before 
 those who lead the clattering life in the public 
 
THE FRIEND 65 
 
 eye. Certainly Morice's life was ill balanced. 
 He wrote on home and foreign politics and 
 touched literary criticism, and he knew that 
 by the standards what he did was good ; but 
 he wanted to know his mind in unrest, 
 qualified by the buffetings of the body. Some- 
 thing beyond his experiences and infinitely 
 stimulating was possible. He had a sense — 
 if not of failure — of profound dissatisfaction. 
 A man's life never corresponds to the public 
 estimate of it, and among his acquaintances 
 Morice was generally considered to be advanc- 
 ing brilliantly at the time that he felt himself 
 to be holding on doggedly. His reputation 
 would have been sufficient to get him work 
 elsewhere, and the offer of a place on the 
 staff of a London daily paper was refused. 
 He could hardly justify the refusal to himself, 
 and he did not even mention it to his friends 
 until their advice would have been too late. 
 The stimulant of a new environment might 
 have done him good ; reason told him that 
 the change was precisely what he wanted. 
 There are some men who cannot easily break 
 with their habits, who see change as a kind 
 
66 DYING FIRES 
 
 of death, and he was one of them. If he went 
 away now, he would see her again, certainly, 
 for his friendship was established ; but there 
 would be a term to their intimacy. His mind 
 projected itself into a cavernous London 
 without her, and he could not face it. Partly 
 his inaction was indolence — the indolence of 
 dulness and chagrin. 
 
 So he fetched and carried for her, and she 
 watched him with inquiry and a sympathy 
 that was puzzled and always strictly in order. 
 It would have been interesting to see his 
 eyes blaze again, but that must not be ; she 
 feared something in his incalculable nature. 
 Richard rarely talked of him to her ; he 
 seemed to be accepted by them, but she 
 knew that he was unsounded. Strangely, it 
 was impossible to talk of him with free- 
 dom ; sorrowfully she realised that a perfect 
 confidence between husband and wife is 
 impossible. 
 
 Richard had mentioned to her this rejected 
 possibility of Morice's transference to London, 
 and she ventured to speak to Morice about 
 it. He discussed the subject with a kind of 
 
THE FRIEND 67 
 
 candour ; he spoke about his relations with 
 Pryde, the editor, and his colleagues. It 
 was rather fine-drawn stuff, and in some 
 desire for simplicity, or perhaps to stimulate 
 him again by mere downrightness, she said : 
 
 You feel it, then, as a Cause. You can't 
 desert a Cause." But this would not do for 
 him ; he demurred and qualified again. " He 
 doesn't expect it," he said. " Pryde wouldn't 
 expect it ; and to do something that a certain 
 type of man doesn't expect weakens you. 
 Desert a Cause ? No. It's rather, to desert a 
 place. One's like a cat. There are habits, 
 friends. I'm the kind of person that takes 
 root. You know the kind of indolence that 
 is ready to work to the bone in the old grooves 
 and can't face leaving them." 
 
 " And you're not ambitious," she said. 
 
 " I don't care for the expansive kinds — not 
 for myself. One can conceive it for another 
 — well — to please a woman. Oh, I'm roman- 
 tic. You don't believe that ? " 
 
 " Yes, you're mysterious," she said. 
 
 " It's not the same." 
 
 " I mean you may be anything." 
 
68 DYING FIRES 
 
 " I'm as bad as that ? It's unfriendly ! " 
 
 " Perhaps a bit of mystery is what makes 
 friendship last." 
 
 He pondered on this and left it. " You 
 mustn't think that I'm a slacker," he said. 
 " I'm far from that. I keep trying for things 
 — trying to do things better. They don't 
 show much. It's a kind of egoism, and I 
 agree that there's something in appointments 
 and decorations and things." 
 
 " I suppose it's vulgar to want to see one's 
 friends blazing out." 
 
 She blushed a little. Perhaps she was 
 forcing the note of friendship, and her own 
 phrase queerly reminded her of those blazing 
 eyes which had so strangely disturbed her 
 old conception of him. He saw the blush 
 and, interpreting it as a signal of shy kind- 
 ness, he thought it charming, but he shrank 
 from any further expansions. To Richard, 
 who frankly advised him to reopen negotia- 
 tions and get to London, he hardly troubled 
 to make out a case ; he wondered a little 
 whether Letty would talk to him about it. 
 
 " You've positively refused ? " said Richard, 
 
THE FRIEND 69 
 
 and his eye took on a speculative veil. 
 " Why ? " 
 
 " For twenty reasons, and probably not a 
 good one among them." 
 
 " Well," said Richard, " I'm not interested 
 in twenty reasons. If it had been one " 
 
 " It's usually one, though you mayn't know 
 which one." 
 
 " Let's put it broadly and say you are a 
 fool," his friend suggested. 
 
 " That will do very well. I'm really rather 
 afraid of an inquisition. There are shadowy 
 things that tell." 
 
 Richard reflected again on this. " Any- 
 how," he said, " it's our gain." 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE CHILD 
 
 Richard fancied that his wife's manner was 
 constrained one evening, and he was lover 
 enough for anxious surmise, but disliked the 
 unnecessary parade of sympathies. When, 
 after dinner, they were settling to the com- 
 fortable home evening, with choice of books 
 separately or in common, he made some 
 suggestion, but she said : 
 
 " Let us talk." 
 
 " Why, yes," he said and waited, surprised. 
 
 " Not talk," she said ; " it's only some- 
 thing I've got to say." 
 
 She gave a little, nervous laugh, she blushed, 
 she looked at him fleetingly, appealingly. 
 
 " What ! You mean ? " he said. 
 
 She was standing, and he got up then and 
 held her hands ; she shrank from him and 
 wavered, but then he held her close and they 
 
THE CHILD 71 
 
 whispered tremulously together. He patted 
 her shoulder reassuringly, while his thought 
 turned swiftly in upon himself. He was some- 
 thing startled and awed, and his warmth of 
 affectionate sympathy held a reservation — 
 there was the instinctive alarm at a great call 
 to be made on one who has not cause perfectly 
 to trust himself. 
 
 She gained the relief that comes of un- 
 burdening a secret and of the encouragement 
 to happy issues. She breathed more freely ; 
 she met his eyes more frankly. Then he 
 glowed with enthusiasm for her and for all 
 this great scheme of things. It was the best 
 of news, the most glorious. He embraced 
 her passionately and tenderly, and she sub- 
 mitted in a delightful consciousness of virtue ; 
 she was the dutiful woman, clearly in the 
 right, deserving of all praise. They found a 
 delicate comedy in it ; they broke into joyous 
 laughter — his the more prolonged and the 
 heartier. She repulsed him gently at last, 
 and said demurely : " Now, you may go on 
 with the reading." He laughed again, sug- 
 gesting solid historical stuff, and recalled a 
 
72 DYING FIRES 
 
 famous passage in " Richard Feverel." But 
 they were too excited to read, and presently 
 they were discussing names — Richard stuck 
 pretty well to boys' names, though she 
 reminded him occasionally that they might 
 be unsuitable. Before the evening was over 
 he was reading passages from " Tom Brown's 
 School-days " — not, of course, that this Rugby 
 was like a typical public school to-day, but 
 it gave a certain atmosphere ; it seemed, 
 somehow, to the point. Richard had been 
 to the Manchester Grammar School and 
 Owens College, but, like all good fathers, he 
 was not content to think of a son merely 
 following in his steps. Of course, it might be 
 a daughter, and that, he agreed, would be 
 charming, too ; it might even be twins, and 
 they had a little scared facetiousness about 
 that. Richard thought that there was a great 
 deal in sending a boy to Germany for a year 
 and to France, but Oxford — they both thought 
 he must go to Oxford — " Somerville," said 
 Letty. Richard grinned and nodded. 
 " Balliol is Morice's college," he said, and 
 they agreed that they were middle-class people, 
 
THE CHILD 73 
 
 but that they could afford the best that was to 
 be had, without fripperies. Then Letty made 
 a hasty sketch of household rearrangements 
 that made him stare, for the new-comer 
 seemed to be more important than Richard 
 had supposed. They had never spent a 
 happier evening together. 
 
 During all the months Richard was an 
 affectionate and assiduous husband. Their 
 common life seemed to him a beautiful thing 
 in itself, and now this tremendous expectation 
 was a part of it. He knew that to every step 
 in the progress of man there are a thousand 
 adverse chances ; and it pained him sometimes 
 to see in the children about him creatures 
 unworthy of the affection and emotion that 
 he was' ready to lavish. The parent's control 
 is slight, and it would be better not to have 
 a child than to suffer alienation. 
 
 Yet such thoughts had little power with 
 him. And, surely, whatever might be in 
 store, this present beatitude is to the good — 
 this is a positive gain. It seemed to him that 
 there was a noble spirit in sex, as, in hope and 
 trepidation, they awaited the child's coming. 
 
74 DYING FIRES 
 
 He was a man prodigal of emotions, but not 
 therefore insincere or coarse in them, and his 
 wife basked in the fulness of his gratitude 
 and approval. The woman's calmness as the 
 time approached won his admiration, and he 
 found it wonderful to see in her methodical 
 preparation of little garments and the like 
 the acceptance of the devastating event. Mrs. 
 Drayton seemed much more perturbed, and 
 though her assistance and experience were 
 used, Letty easily took the lead in matters of 
 judgment. Certainly, Richard enjoyed him- 
 self throughout these expansive anxieties, but 
 at times he assured Letty that he envied her. 
 Hers was a great part ; he could have urged 
 her not to lose anything of this tremendous 
 opportunity for the emotions. She took it 
 with a kindly humour ; he was like an excited 
 child when there is serious work to be done. 
 She was not without timid reservations, but 
 she was upheld in an imaginative faith and, 
 presently, by the steadfast habit. It was her 
 great adventure ; different in kind from those 
 external ones — though they are not without 
 fruitful changes in the mind — by which men 
 
THE CHILD 75 
 
 and women test themselves in the world's 
 sight. There could be no greater physical 
 experience than this which lay before her, and 
 nothing more profoundly stimulating to the 
 mind. It is a strangely uncertain future that 
 the married woman faces, and to be the 
 mother of children is sometimes queerly 
 conceived as a comfortable settlement. For 
 Letty this future held a dreadful joy. In 
 leaving behind that gaiety of maidenhood she 
 had many regrets, but there was pride, too, in 
 joining these women of joys and sorrows, the 
 mothers of the race, who are ready to do their 
 part to the uttermost, trusting to nature or 
 to God. 
 
 She listened to many discourses from her 
 husband, who dilated with kindly intention 
 or natural fervour on her state. He distin- 
 guished between the women preoccupied with 
 the social compromise and her who would 
 abandon herself, unperplexed, to motherhood. 
 " A child ! " he cried ; " they would have a 
 child — a precious unit to be made the fine 
 flower of the race and a model for their 
 dilettante maternal emotions. They think 
 
76 DYING FIRES 
 
 it a virtue to restrict themselves to one or 
 two and to assure these a golden future — to 
 make them richer and finer creatures than 
 their fellows." He muttered something about 
 making a fine-lady affair of it, and his glow- 
 ing tributes to Letty's indomitable spirit 
 brought some humorous dismay to the poor 
 girl, who was hardly ready yet to contemplate 
 herself as the mother of a sturdy half-dozenr 
 She caught something of his enthusiasm, 
 nevertheless ; she was supported, as women 
 should be, by the consciousness that such 
 waiting as hers was essential service. 
 
 As the time approached, Richard's fine 
 blustering lost a good deal of its fervour, for 
 a new kind of sympathy and even appre- 
 hension encroached upon it. He was ex- 
 tremely considerate and forethoughtful in 
 sparing his wife small exertions ; a practical 
 anxiety really made him a tactful companion. 
 She was grateful and cheerful and altogether 
 admirable. Morice began to feel himself 
 pushed out of this close companionship, not 
 because of any false shame on the part of the 
 woman, whose simplicity of friendliness was 
 
THE CHILD 7 y 
 
 unaltered, but because he felt that his 
 emotions were not up to the necessary pitch. 
 Richard seemed to be a man with an in- 
 communicable secret ; it was as though 
 nobody had ever had a baby before, Morice 
 saw him as a comic character, and was him- 
 self moved to a kind of comic resentment at 
 the patronising airs of the fellow. It seemed 
 that Richard was to be the uxorious husband 
 after all, and Letty ... It was all good, 
 and yet there was a kind of disappointment 
 that he would not try to fathom. A happy 
 family, a holy family — his anticipations had 
 not gone this way. 
 
 It seemed a kind of natural compromise to 
 seek Drayton's society, and the two men — 
 both hard, efficient workers that commonly 
 spared words — found stimulation in contact. 
 They soon came to an understanding that 
 was perfectly workable, if not quite thorough, 
 about Letty and her husband. And yet 
 when Morice came to consider it this common 
 understanding meant nothing at all. All was 
 well, of course, and both of the men liked 
 Richard very much, and, naturally, the father 
 
78 DYING FIRES 
 
 thought well of his daughter. But behind 
 that agreement between Drayton and Morice 
 to leave unsounded something of Richard's 
 temper and mind, what doubt lurked ? And 
 when Drayton talked of his daughter, how 
 much of the passion of a reticent man was 
 behind his words ? The understanding of 
 the two men was deep in character and tem- 
 perament, but between this and the good 
 companionship that did friendship's service 
 great tracts were unexplored. Dimly, Morice 
 perceived that they missed something that 
 Richard Peel and his like did not miss. He, 
 in such a case as theirs, would not rest at shy 
 hints when he might boldly have explored the 
 subject of interest. Morice wanted her father 
 to talk of Letty, and Drayton would have liked 
 nothing better, but they hardly got beyond 
 the fringe. 
 
 The child was born in the small hours of a 
 still May night, and Richard's exuberance 
 was considerably reduced before the event 
 was accomplished. It was very exciting to 
 run through the quiet, dimly lighted streets 
 for the doctor, and though the world was 
 
THE CHILD 79 
 
 shivering and insecure, this coming event of 
 primal significance brought new meanings to 
 it. Later he sat shuddering and cowering, 
 amazed at nature's brutal methods and at his 
 own share in them, alienated from his wife 
 by a distress that distorted sympathy. The 
 husband's part at such a time is a poor one, 
 and it is recognised as comic in the light of 
 his coming relief. Peace and joy come by 
 strange ways, but presently they did come, and, 
 with the news that he had a son, Richard's 
 plans and aspirations roused up again. The 
 doctor was a natural recipient of them, but 
 he was a little tired, a little preoccupied. 
 He did not respond very readily to ideas, and 
 seemed indisposed to probe into the mys- 
 teries. Even as a listener he was inefficient, 
 and Richard's spirits were slightly dashed 
 by the want of a responsive friend. But it 
 was a great occasion, and he had regained 
 command of his old self again — a self, too, 
 that was glorified by this addition to it. He 
 was permitted to speak some broken words of 
 thanks and congratulation at the bedside of 
 his wife. 
 
80 DYING FIRES 
 
 This is a facetious world, and the man who 
 faces it as the father of a new-born babe 
 finds a queer contrast between his solemn 
 vigils and deep emotions and the hilarious 
 greetings of his fellows. Richard bore it all 
 well enough and was ready with the higher 
 note when anyone seemed likely to appre- 
 ciate it. He had good ground for satis- 
 faction, for Letty did well and the boy was a 
 healthy fellow with everything in his favour. 
 Soon it was arranged that the name would be 
 James, for that was Drayton's name as well as 
 Morice's. The announcement of this de- 
 cision was made to them together, and Morice 
 was forced to consider that he must take at 
 least a modest share in the honour of the 
 derivation. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 JIM 
 
 Jim it was, then, though Letty had wanted 
 Richard, but had yielded to the argument 
 that a name was useful for purposes of 
 identification, and Jim became the big thing 
 in their lives. Richard was assured — by 
 what Letty described as amateur fathers — 
 that the little beggar would become interest- 
 ing presently, but he was already that and a 
 great deal more. It began to dawn on the 
 father that he had found his vocation, that it 
 was possible to cultivate a genius for father- 
 hood. He would hasten home, deferring en- 
 gagements or avoiding them, to handle the 
 baby before he was put away or to see him 
 bathed ; and his first questioning look at 
 Letty — it had soon ceased to be an articulate 
 question — was answered by a smile or a word 
 that relieved a perpetual, slight anxiety. 
 
82 DYING FIRES 
 
 Sometimes he was too late to see the baby, and 
 then he would tiptoe into the dark room and 
 stand over the cradle. Discovered emerging 
 by Letty he had grinned and confessed, 
 " Having a sniff at the little chap," for that 
 soft smell of young babyhood was an intoxi- 
 cation to him. He and Letty had their shy 
 little jokes, their understandings, their ex- 
 perimental arguments, their grave discussions 
 about the preliminaries of the great cult 
 that had been thrust upon them. Soon 
 doubts, or the shadows of coming doubts, had 
 arisen. Richard came across a little book 
 with a grim plausibility about it that advo- 
 cated the administering of corporal punish- 
 ment for any departure from the ways of 
 virtue even before the baby had lived a month 
 in this difficult world. Of course, one cannot 
 whack a baby weeks old very severely, but the 
 ruthless guide bade him do it in the necessary 
 degree or lose the first point in the struggle 
 for the child's soul. Letty laughed at the 
 suggestion and so did Richard, but already he 
 saw himself swayed between considerations 
 that might point to training the child to 
 
JIM 83 
 
 obedience and the laws of life, or, again, to 
 stimulating it to its peculiar activities. In- 
 numerable questions were to arise, perpetual 
 problems must be faced, dubious compromises 
 must be accepted. He did not shirk it ; 
 indeed, holding Jim's warm, soft body in his 
 arms the prospect was vastly stimulating. 
 
 Soon a practical point arose, for Mrs. 
 Drayton introduced the subject of the 
 christening. Morice was of the party, and 
 rather to his surprise Letty accepted the 
 suggestion that the ceremony was necessary 
 or desirable or inevitable. Richard and 
 Drayton seemed to assent with a shrug, but it 
 was evident that they were not practicable as 
 godfathers. It was gracefully indicated by 
 Mrs. Drayton that the place was open for 
 Morice, and, astonishingly, he found that he 
 had a strong desire to accept it. The point 
 was not settled when the Draytons left, and 
 Richard, after seeing them out, came back 
 laughing. 
 
 " Why should we knuckle under to these 
 ancient superstitions ? " he said. " You, 
 Morice, of all people ! Letty's only half- 
 
84 DYING FIRES 
 
 hearted about it. She wants to please her 
 mother, and she doesn't want the child to lose 
 the shadow of a chance." 
 
 " I do want to be on the safe side with 
 Jim," she said, and added, " I'm only a 
 woman." 
 
 " We've talked about it, Morice," said 
 Richard, " and we've come to a kind of com- 
 promise. Jim is to have instalments of the 
 Jesus legend, but it isn't to be hammered in 
 too tight, and we are to be very strong about 
 the good heathen, who are about as likely to 
 be right as anybody else. In fact, his father 
 will gradually develop into a superior and 
 very righteous heathen, and Letty and I will 
 instil it into him that he will have to choose 
 for himself one day. It might be difficult 
 if she were — well — assiduous, devout 2 " 
 
 " The shame is that I'm not," said Letty. 
 " I know you think it's wretched of me, Mr. 
 Morice. I'm only half baked— I'm full of 
 old prejudices and ideas. For myself, I 
 wouldn't care, but I can't think straight for 
 Jim. I want to be sure of him. I want him 
 to be like all the other babies. I want to get 
 
JIM 85 
 
 into line with all those holy families of the 
 old painters. I want to be a mother like all 
 the other mothers. Of course, presently 
 there'll be his education, and we must have 
 our new ideas, and Richard will want him to 
 do something new in the world, and I shall 
 have more courage, but now " 
 
 " Almost thou persuadest me," said Morice. 
 " I can't be the godfather, of course ; it 
 would be simply wrong for me, but I should 
 delight in it. I think I have a passion for 
 orthodoxy — a secret passion, and I must be 
 perpetually attacking it." 
 
 Then Richard wished to define his position, 
 but they wouldn't let him, and, indeed, it was 
 not a case for his best rhetoric. There was 
 a practical discussion about eligible relations, 
 and a tentative selection was made. The 
 poor baby seemed soon to have got into the 
 clutch of customs — unnecessarily, Richard 
 thought, but he had no intention of wasting 
 his strength over non-essentials, and, be^ 
 sides, he had liberal theories of the wife's 
 share in shaping common conduct. Morice 
 could not escape the sense of a lost opportunity, 
 
86 "Z DYING FIRES 
 
 and when he got home he borrowed his 
 landlady's prayer-book, to her considerable 
 astonishment. The perusal did not help him, 
 but he was cheered a little by the remembrance 
 that godfathers commonly gave the baby 
 silver mugs or such handsome trifles. He 
 determined to claim this privilege, at least. 
 
 The child went through the usual stages 
 of " noticing " (the nurse's phrase), of positive 
 recognitions, of embryonic speech. Richard 
 knew many shades of anxiety in watching 
 fluctuations of mood that might presently, he 
 told himself, develop into tendencies. To 
 speculate over one's baby is to pursue the 
 way in which madness lies. The destiny is 
 shaping, the steps that cannot be retraced 
 are taken by the invisible spirit while yet the 
 ductile body lies obscurely growing. The 
 parent is poised to interfere, and yet inter- 
 ference is to strike in the dark where friend 
 and foe are entwined. He wished to help, 
 to guide ; he was fearful of interference. He 
 had a tentative, humorous regard for the 
 little fellow's individuality. Such refinements 
 hardly affected action. Richard laughed at 
 
JIM 87 
 
 himself, acknowledging that the broader mood 
 was better. He respected the wisdom of the 
 ages, but did not wholly trust it ; the acknow- 
 ledged dangers of experiment and Letty's 
 calm good sense kept the child's treatment 
 very much on the lines of its fellows. 
 
 Richard was accustomed to watch the 
 bathing operations when he got home early 
 in the evenings, and it was one of his delights 
 to see his son's naked body. It stimulated 
 an idealism that would have this body always 
 in the perfection of freshness and strength, 
 always the noble servant of the spirit. Yet 
 the hateful thought obtruded that all this 
 kindly care might not save it from prostitution 
 or disease. The child splashed in his bath 
 unwittingly ; he submitted good-humouredly 
 to the nurse's towelling, while his father's 
 thoughts strayed to the ugly, threatening 
 chances that await a child ungoverned or 
 misgoverned. Somehow the knowledge of 
 good and evil was to come to the boy, and 
 Richard found himself perturbed at his own 
 slovenly moral condition. It had not seemed 
 necessary to have fixed convictions, but 
 
88 DYING FIRES 
 
 presently he would be put to the interrogation. 
 He found himself clumsily attempting some 
 examination of first principles and consider 
 ing their translation into the most direct of 
 symbolism. It was good to be recalled to 
 the present by the little fellow's cries or 
 gambols. He yearned for the child's develop- 
 ment ; there were times when it seemed im- 
 possible to wait for the fruition of hopes ; but, 
 again, it seemed sometimes that the present 
 was best, that nothing could ever equal that. 
 As the boy grew, his father hungered for 
 his affection and was pathetically anxious not 
 to bore him. He wanted more than a child 
 could give. We must not make eager advances 
 to children, but watch their moods warily, and 
 then sometimes we may gain at least the 
 illusion of their affection. They are callous 
 to our advances, but if their response could 
 equal our yearning the life we share with 
 them would be too thrillingly acute. It was 
 depressing to seek for the first signs of a 
 genuine affection, to weigh the embryonic 
 motives and then to reduce them ruthlessly 
 to terms of egoism. But feelings may have 
 
JIM 89 
 
 their triumphs over the mind. The parent's 
 humility will gather all the crumbs that fall 
 from a careless table. Richard carried long 
 the remembrance of a miniature tragi-comedy 
 of feelings when the boy, then some two or 
 three years old, publicly rejected his embrace. 
 It was some occasion of farewell, and the child 
 had had his surfeit of kisses ; he stamped 
 away from his father muttering " 'nough, 
 'nough." 
 
 It was an occasion for laughter, but there 
 were times when the child's petulance was 
 strangely answered by a corresponding un- 
 reasonable resentment in the father. Some 
 trick of disobedience or persistence in crying 
 roused strong anger and even prompted rough 
 handling. It separated them so suddenly ; 
 even this stray manifestation of a puny 
 will pointed to the inevitable, ultimate es- 
 trangement when the uses of a guiding affection 
 are outworn. Richard was frankly miserable 
 after these small quarrels, though a very little 
 imagination could see to the end of them ; he 
 was vexed and sullen, waiting for Jim's 
 advances. Nothing was more charming to 
 
 G 
 
go DYING FIRES 
 
 him than the boy's magnanimity after harsh- 
 ness or punishment. There was neither fear 
 nor resentment ; the child was as gentle as 
 a beaten dog, and yet his spirit seemed 
 unscathed. Actually, Richard's practices of 
 punishment were as arbitrary as are those of 
 most fathers. He had certain tentative ideals, 
 however, and an untutored regard for the 
 science of education. The attempt to analyse 
 his relations with the child did not make 
 him less tender. He developed a courteous 
 manner toward Jim, and, indeed, with children 
 generally. It is folly not to be polite to 
 children, for they are, of all the world, the 
 people to appreciate it. He began to notice 
 children met casually in trams or trains, to 
 guess their ages, to speculate on the dis- 
 advantages that were often too evident in 
 their appearance. He entered into friendly 
 conversation with working-class mothers, and 
 compared their superstitions with those of 
 his own class, without finding much essential 
 difference. He returned to his own child with 
 quickened ideas, but commonly his impulses 
 were held in leash. Ideas coruscated about the 
 
JIM 91 
 
 little lad, but a deep-seated distrust of them 
 kept the parents somewhere near the beaten 
 track in practice. Of course, this play of ex- 
 perimental idea was visited upon the child. 
 As soon as he could talk and think his father 
 led him into fantastical speculation, told him 
 prodigious tales, encouraged him to explore 
 his own small imagination. Sometimes 
 Richard had the passing fear that he was 
 even now undermining the solid citizen, but it 
 was a superlative game to talk with him. 
 The father's sympathies made the boy into 
 a kind of Adam, a primal, created man 
 awakening into a world that is already strange 
 and must presently be beautiful. And yet to 
 the child nothing seemed strange. A ladder 
 to the moon was plausible enough ; a lion in 
 the path was a piquant possibility. Their 
 intercourse was not spoiled by a perfect 
 sympathy. 
 
 Letty, as her husband perceived, moved 
 with much more assurance in this new world. 
 She had doubts, too, but duties were near at 
 hand, and instinct and tradition together made 
 a strong line of conduct that seemed like 
 
92 DYING FIRES 
 
 safety. Richard felt that he was hovering 
 uselessly while the essential things were done. 
 The mother was equal to her task, and he 
 acknowledged it with admiration and a gush 
 of the emotion that nowadays seemed very 
 near the surface. He saw the value of care 
 and efficiency applied on lines that have no 
 full scientific warrant but have somehow 
 served to foster the race. Responsibility 
 curbed his invention, and he knew a good deal 
 of the humility of agreement. Of course, all 
 the time they were getting plenty of fun out 
 of Jim. His " crawlers " in which redundant 
 petticoats were tucked up when he took floor 
 exercise were of a cheerful, spotted material, 
 chosen by Letty in some humorous aberration, 
 and they and such things served to keep the 
 mental picture of him from becoming sur- 
 charged with serious emotions. Among other 
 things he was a resplendent joke. His range, 
 indeed, was infinite. He was a funny little 
 creature crawling about the nursery floor, and 
 a subject for meditations under stars. 
 
 So all Richard's doubts were in solution, if 
 not perfectly resolved ; he had his moments 
 
JIM 93 
 
 of reaction, but generally his home life knew 
 no dulness when he could get at his small 
 boy. As Jim grew older his father got into 
 the way of translating many of his own 
 thoughts into terms that might appeal to the 
 boy. He chafed at the delay before he 
 could meet Jim on equal terms, and some- 
 times he read with the intention of training 
 his mind to a state of competence or accom- 
 plishment that would not be quite over- 
 whelmed by the budding young intellect. 
 He felt himself already old, and calculated 
 dismally how much older he must be before 
 they got to these terms of equality — and 
 perhaps his conception of this equality, 
 generous as it was, had a leaning in favour 
 of experience. There was some formal com- 
 fort, or rather a glimmer of hope, in the 
 theory, advanced with an eagerness behind 
 which conviction lagged obscurely, that 
 parents stupidly and wilfully maintain the 
 separation from their children. The precious 
 friendship with one's child, he said, is baffled 
 and delayed by the aloofness, the pose of 
 infallibility that represses the dawning 
 
94 DYING FIRES 
 
 intelligence. The parent deals out cold bits 
 of encyclopaedic lore until, later on, he is 
 discovered to be something of an impostor, 
 and the best of confidence is gone. He 
 would not be guilty of this folly of intel- 
 lectual seclusion ; a child's mind, he declared, 
 is capable of far more rapid developments 
 than we permit or encourage. All the 
 apparatus is there, and we deceive ourselves 
 by the analogy of the animal unfit for the 
 business of primitive life till it is physically 
 mature. It was skimble-skamble stuff with 
 an idea in it, the kind of thing that would 
 grow faint before the need of any practical 
 decision. 
 
 He watched the young fellow sprawling 
 about his nursery and thought of the day 
 when he — now the enlightened modern — 
 might be tempted to be false to old convictions 
 in the desire to keep up, to engage his son's 
 sympathies for a liberal spirit. He resolved 
 to be magnanimous when he was fairly over- 
 taken — and that he should be in some sense 
 overtaken he was resolved, for his son must 
 have a far closer, more efficient training than 
 
JIM 95 
 
 his own. Humbly he would be ready to take 
 the lower place, and yet he foresaw the natural 
 striving to hold his own ; he could not endure 
 the thought of an indulgent, contemptuous 
 affection. Yes, he would hold his own ; and 
 his boy should take an impress from him. It 
 brought some gratification and much amuse- 
 ment when, presently, he was able to initiate 
 Jim into the handling of the ball,— for ball 
 games must be among the athletic recreations. 
 If he had to teach him presently how to handle 
 the ball for an off-break or to instil the habit 
 of quick decision whether to play back or 
 forward he must surely, in like manner, give 
 character and direction in the things of the 
 mind. It was a rather gloomy reflection that 
 athletically they could only meet to pass. 
 The time during which they could compete 
 equally as cricketers or runners must be short. 
 Gusts of dismay came over Richard when 
 he thought of the problems of the future — of 
 the impossibility of choosing with an assured 
 wisdom. Already he braced himself to the 
 possibilities of separation when it came to 
 that dreadful leap in the dark, the decision 
 
96 DYING FIRES 
 
 about schooling. But was it necessary to 
 part so early ? Some believe that the public 
 school is a mere makeshift for those who have 
 not worthy homes, yet he must not let himself 
 be swayed by the anticipated delight of 
 having the lad at home. He began to compile 
 a book of notes and cuttings that bore on 
 education ; he made extracts from books and 
 jotted down the remarks of anyone who spoke 
 to the point. He even probed those of his 
 acquaintances whose opinion he valued, though 
 he knew well enough that with the changing 
 conditions much of their experiences would 
 become irrelevant. It seemed that no public 
 school was good enough for such a boy, and 
 he reviewed uneasily the boys he knew. He 
 had some contempt for the ideal English boy 
 and some liking for him — that clean, slangy, 
 athletic, good fellow with an open brow and a 
 middling intelligence bounded by a traditional 
 conception of good form. His boy must be 
 liberal not only in name. 
 
 As to manners, Jim's must be fine, of 
 course ; Richard had his pride in Lancashire, 
 but perhaps Lancashire folk hardly take 
 
JIM 97 
 
 enough account of manners. He speculated 
 on the possibility of soon getting Jim to mix 
 on equal terms with poor, rough lads ; but 
 how was it to be done without some blunting 
 or coarsening of the young demi-god ? Jim's 
 liberalism must be wide and deep enough to 
 disregard that perpetual insistence on class 
 by which the inefficients seek to guard them- 
 selves. It would be a problem how to keep 
 this Christian legend at its best. Richard 
 did not want the boy to imitate the old, stiff 
 conception of the Christian gentleman, but the 
 spirit that refuses to measure souls by their 
 rank seemed immensely valuable. And he 
 must soon learn to dance and swim, and 
 presently to fence and box. Oh, what a 
 fine fellow they would make of him ! The 
 father's heart rose in proud anticipation. 
 He made good resolutions, thinking of the 
 boy ; he did good works about the mill, 
 thinking that they were worthy of what his 
 boy would be. The world seemed more of 
 a continuous affair than it had been. And 
 when this twentieth century man said 
 " Daddy " it thrilled him. 
 
98 DYING FIRES 
 
 Letty, busy herself over work for him and 
 work about him, was not in such a hurry for 
 these great developments. Perhaps she was 
 having her turn, and this coming youth of 
 splendid intelligence and attainments might 
 not be so safe and true a joy as that which 
 she had now. Her motherhood was im- 
 measurably sane and wise ; the rest was 
 doubtful. The dreads and panics were gone ; 
 she was a mother now, and not merely Jim's 
 mother, though that might seem enough. 
 Without terror, if with a little bracing of the 
 nerves, she thought that she might again have 
 a child, even many children. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 AN ONLY CHILD 
 
 As time went on it seemed probable that 
 Jim might be their only child. They were 
 conscious — they had even spoken of it together 
 — that another would make them safer ; it 
 might mitigate that remote, possible calamity 
 of their affections running to waste. It was 
 not that they could acknowledge or even 
 conceive that a substitute might be found for 
 Jim, but their apprehensions were more sincere 
 than their beliefs. To desire a provision of 
 comfort in the event of Jim's death seemed 
 like a treachery to him. There were times 
 when their anxious care became almost a 
 panic. They dare not lose him, and the 
 reckless Jim seemed to these inexperienced 
 parents to slight the laws of nature till his 
 life hung on a thread. And yet Richard, in 
 his fits of stern idealism, reproved Letty for 
 
ioo DYING FIRES 
 
 her excess of motherly care ; he complained 
 of the solicitude that would hedge the boy 
 with safeguards. He preached good, sounding 
 platitudes about the citizen and the race. 
 The boy must take his chance with the rest ; 
 he must be ready to throw away his life with 
 the best of them, and they, the parents, must 
 acquiesce ; they must even stimulate to 
 dangers, if need be. Richard ridiculed the 
 little extra chest protectors and mufflers or 
 the gentle experiments in food or medicine 
 that were invoked to counteract imaginary 
 ills. His objections were sometimes a protest 
 against the dangers of tampering with a fine 
 constitution. 
 
 An after-lunch talk at the club one day 
 turned on certain futile, disturbing problems 
 that the dilettante in conduct affects. It was 
 a father who proposed something like this : If 
 disaster impended and the choice lay between 
 saving a wagon-load of children or his own 
 child, what must the parent do ? All seemed 
 to agree — with a kind of cynicism, with some- 
 thing of nature and conviction, and something, 
 too, of the fashionable reaction against ethical 
 
AN ONLY CHILD 101 
 
 pedantry— that the parent's instinct must 
 prevail. Richard intervened suddenly with a 
 vehement protest. He took the part of the 
 absent parents ; he argued for abstract 
 justice as a compelling passion ; but chiefly 
 he pleaded the cause of his own child. He 
 had ready for use, it seemed, an ideal Jim 
 with a right to be heard ; the parent must 
 respect the noble choice of the man to be 
 who would never be. There was a good deal 
 to be said, and he argued the other men 
 silent, growing too serious for the spirit of the 
 casual problem. 
 
 He woke in the middle of the night sweat- 
 ing from the dream of that awful predicament, 
 with strange visions of a runaway wagon, 
 screaming children, and the imperturbable 
 Jim exhorting him to duty. The inconse- 
 quent dream never brought the dilemma to a 
 point and it ended with some vague shock 
 that brought consciousness and a shattered 
 kind of relief. His mind mauled the subject 
 day by day till he grew sick of it and incap- 
 able of striking any kind of balance. 
 
 On his third birthday Jim had been presented 
 
102 DYING FIRES 
 
 with the dog Pepper, and it was about 
 a year later that Pepper's death raised one of 
 their problems. They had only skirted the 
 subject of death or had led to it by various 
 euphemisms. They found themselves puzzled 
 to frame any tolerable explanation of it to 
 this budding young creature, and even Letty 
 shrank from a confident exposition of the old 
 schemes of continuity and an angelic host. 
 It was a theory that might be vaguely held, 
 though it was difficult to apply, that Jim 
 should gradually apprehend the great issues 
 by direct experiences. He took the death of 
 flies or worms easily enough, though the 
 parents' solicitude perceived a remnant of 
 troubled questioning at the end of their ex- 
 planation. And how is it possible to explain ? 
 The analogies of sleep and rest, the irrele- 
 vance of the indestructibility of matter, the 
 faith in sequence and order, may be proposed 
 to a child and may baffle it, but all the 
 accumulated terrors of the world may not 
 easily be veiled. The parent does more than 
 justice sometimes to his child's mind, but Jim 
 confronted with a dead bird seemed crammed 
 
AN ONLY CHILD 103 
 
 with significance and consciousness. They 
 read the future into him and sometimes they 
 were thrilled by plaintive words or chance 
 inflections, imitative of their own, that seemed 
 already to bring him to reasonable, perplexed 
 humanity. 
 
 And now they must face Pepper's death, 
 and the fell word called for a deeper explana- 
 tion. The dog had crawled home from some 
 accident, and they heard Jim call out twice : 
 " Pepper's funny." He lay there stark and 
 cold, and Jim had seen him before they could 
 have devised a compromise in some tale of a 
 disappearance or a long journey. Jim was 
 very curious and interested at first, but instead 
 of a confident pat he gave the body a diffident 
 poke with one finger and recoiled, a little 
 scared. 
 
 " What's the matter with Pepper ? " he 
 said. 
 
 " Pepper is dead," said Richard. 
 
 " But I don't want him dead." 
 
 And, really, this is all that can be said in 
 such a case. Richard felt within him all 
 manner of incommunicable austerities. He 
 
104 DYING FIRES 
 
 attempted some poor mixture of sentiment 
 and fantasy about the good Pepper and the 
 happy hunting-grounds, but this was brushed 
 aside with : " I don't want him dead," and a 
 whimper that passed into angry crying. Jim 
 stopped suddenly to gaze at Pepper and ask : 
 " What is dead ? " Then he said anxiously : 
 " Shall I go dead ? " 
 
 Hard things, cruel things have to be faced, 
 but as it is good and natural to comfort 
 children Richard had to listen to some queer 
 stuff about Jesus and the angels. Letty 
 boldly predicted a cordial reception for Pepper, 
 and Richard made the suggestion that the 
 angels might be able to give him a little 
 ratting. He rebelled against the sentimental 
 shelterings and, indeed, Jim did not take 
 much account of them. " I don't want to 
 be dead. I don't want anyone to be dead," 
 he cried, and with Pepper's body visibly before 
 him this talk of ethereal hunting was irrele- 
 vant. They made the burial something of 
 a pageant, but even in this there was no 
 escaping the hard facts. Jim looked rather 
 more ghoulish than angelic, peering into the 
 
AN ONLY CHILD 105 
 
 hole in which Pepper was deposited. The 
 sense of importance was duly exploited ; im- 
 portance is especially a childish quality. Jim 
 seemed rather ugly in a funny, innocent way, 
 and he enjoyed the burial rather more than 
 they would have wished. He proposed after 
 an hour or two to dig Pepper up again. 
 Scenting discouragement he said : "to see if 
 he has gone to Heaven:" 
 
 Fortunately parents are not often called 
 upon to overcome the difficulties they perceive. 
 Richard had a merciful or sentimental dislike 
 of killing, but pictures of the gay and ad- 
 venturous sportsman abound. You can hardly 
 rear a child in a world of your own, and 
 Richard was doubtful how far it was fair to 
 direct Jim into what might be eccentric 
 channels. He had a kind of faith in the little 
 chap and wanted to preserve some kind of 
 balance of instinct, so that presently his own 
 character and reason might prevail. He 
 wanted Jim to decide, but how to ensure his 
 capacity for this seemed a crazy problem. 
 He had fears that they might be sacrificing 
 the extreme of sensitiveness for a mere 
 
io6 DYING FIRES 
 
 worldly covering. The common, slaughterous 
 picture books were not absolutely forbidden ; 
 though both Richard and Letty rejected with 
 horror the proposed gift of a canary for him 
 he was taken to see the beasts in captivity 
 at the famous Belle Vue' Gardens. And Jim 
 did not indignantly demand their release. 
 It never crossed his mind — and how should 
 it ? — that there was anything pitiful or 
 thwarted here. The parents had some wist- 
 ful, unformed desire that he would show a 
 precocious sympathy, but he did nothing of 
 the kind. He had an unspoiled delight in 
 the monkeys cracking nuts in their overfed, 
 blase fashion, and it was a chief regret that 
 the lion was asleep and did not walk about 
 like the tiger. 
 
 The boy was a little over-policed, perhaps, 
 but though Richard and Letty would discuss 
 theories prodigiously they brought him up 
 very much as any other. They might shudder 
 a little as they passed a butcher's shop and 
 wonder how they would reconcile — if they 
 were put to it — this matter of the raw meat 
 with the lamb-fondling which alternated with 
 
AN ONLY CHILD 107 
 
 the chase in the pretty picture books. But 
 children accept this queer world until some 
 twist is given to their wonderment and they 
 perceive things that seem to be awry. Even 
 then they are considerate to us or judicious, 
 or they have a wise instinct that preserves 
 them from the outrageous shocks. They 
 ponder over our explanations and often refrain 
 mercifully from exposing their fallacies. Jim 
 was often reflective, and sometimes his pro- 
 found meditations encouraged the sentimental 
 fallacies of his parents. But meantime they 
 were in delighted possession of their son. 
 They had their riotous games together and 
 the quiet times when they persuaded them- 
 selves that their own affections were matched 
 and answered by his. Yet their conception 
 of him was bathed in laughter. They laughed 
 at the fancies and refinements they would 
 thrust upon him, at what Letty called his 
 slipshod morality, at all his childish queer- 
 nesses of gesture and talk. In Drayton, his 
 grandfather, and in Morice he had firm 
 friends and admirers, and his grandmother 
 poured out for his benefit a vast store of 
 
108 DYING FIRES 
 
 traditional mothers' learning qualified by 
 experimental knowledge of patent foods and 
 medicines. He throve in body and mind, and 
 the fondest consideration could hardly find an 
 ailment. 
 
 Drayton entered the nursery one day and 
 found Jim explaining the nature of an eclipse 
 to the plumber who was apologetically listen- 
 ing while he groped under boards for the pipe 
 he wanted. " You see what I mean ? " Jim 
 reiterated, and the plumber said politely : "I 
 don't know much of them things, sir." Jim 
 turned to Drayton, and with great want of 
 consideration he said : "He knows nothing 
 about eclipses." 
 
 The man took the reproof with humility. 
 
 " And why should Mr. Johnson know about 
 them ? " said Drayton. " He knows all about 
 pipes and drains and gas-fittings and a lot 
 of things that you will never know." 
 
 " And what do you know about ? " said 
 Jim. 
 
 " I make people better when they're ill." 
 
 " Do you ever make them better when 
 they're dead ? " 
 
AN ONLY CHILD 109 
 
 " Well, my way is not to let them get 
 dead." 
 
 " Would you make me better if I was very, 
 very ill ? " 
 
 " I should try very hard, Jim." 
 
 " Don't you know how much you can do 
 it ? " 
 
 " Not exactly." 
 
 " Who does know ? " 
 
 " Well, I don't." 
 
 " Perhaps you're not very clever." 
 
 But the grandfather could not agree to this, 
 for he wanted to stand well with the boy. 
 He asserted himself a little and they talked 
 on, touching some deep and common things. 
 The utterances of a child throw queer lights 
 on our beliefs, and we listen to them as to the 
 words of an oracle which may reveal the 
 essential truth. 
 
 Once, from the room where Jim took his 
 midday rest, came the sound of loud weeping 
 which swelled occasionally into the howl. 
 Letty hastened to him and then the howls 
 predominated as he asserted his right to an 
 active sympathy. She was not much alarmed, 
 
no DYING FIRES 
 
 for she recognised a self-conscious note, but 
 the reply to her inquiry startled her. He 
 said : " I've just remembered that I can't live 
 for ever." 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 JIM DIES 
 
 Jim was strong and lusty ; his limbs, his 
 complexion, the clutch of his hands, his active 
 perambulations were joyful and reassuring to 
 them. They had their little gusts of fear 
 when he tumbled or when a rash was pro- 
 claimed, but the fulness and certainty of life 
 were familiar ; he was part of the world as 
 they knew it. To Richard he had brought 
 such a change that it was inconceivable now 
 that the world could go on without him. The 
 bitterness had been taken from life and the 
 dread from its sameness. Their thoughts of 
 death in connection with him were not much 
 more than formal and sentimental. It is as 
 incredible that a child, active and growing, 
 should die as that a newly-born baby should 
 live. 
 
 Some little discords prompted them to call 
 
ii2 DYING FIRES 
 
 in a doctor, who reassured them while advising 
 precautions that made them uneasy. A 
 sudden, terrifying attack found them unpre- 
 pared. Letty and the servants worked with 
 feverish haste and agonising doubts to relieve 
 him, while Richard ran out to seek the doctor. 
 As he reached the road he saw a motor-car 
 approaching, and he rushed in front of it, 
 extending his arms. It swerved, narrowly 
 ^scaping him, and shaved the kerbstone, while 
 cries and exclamations came from the car. 
 Richard made hasty, broken explanations. 
 He climbed into the car, pointing directions. 
 The man in command was irritated and con- 
 fused. He did not apprehend the situation 
 and his mind was filled with the affront of 
 Richard's astounding intervention, and the 
 recent danger to his car and its occupants. 
 " Get off ! " he shouted, and he wheeled round 
 as if to deliver a blow. On the point of an 
 angry reply Richard checked himself and 
 gave instead apologies and a persuasive 
 explanation. The stupid man, bewildered by 
 the unusual, turned to the others, who were 
 astonished, uneasy, and incapable of initiative, 
 
JIM DIES 113 
 
 till a woman in the back seat leaned over 
 and spoke earnestly to the driver. With a 
 "What? Well— that's no way to do it," 
 and some accompaniment of curses he passed 
 to a growling acquiescence. He accepted 
 Richard's directions, and the backing and 
 wheeling processes were followed by a rapid 
 flight. Richard was wedged between two 
 women on the back seat. He was dimly 
 aware of them as highly-coloured, yellow- 
 haired creatures. He replied absently to their 
 inquiries, and soon they pulled up at the 
 doctor's. With a " Wait, please," he jumped 
 off. The driver turned to look at his com- 
 panions with an air of aggrieved astonishment. 
 The woman who had intervened said : " You 
 can see it's serious, Tom. Ten minutes 
 won't matter." The others were rather sullen 
 and ungracious. They were slightly envious, 
 conscious that she had the advantage over 
 them in this trifling adventure. She con- 
 tinued : " If we hadn't taken him there'd 
 have been a row. I thought he was going 
 for you." 
 Richard hurried out. " He's not there," he 
 
ii4 DYING FIRES 
 
 said and, mounting, waved them on. The 
 driver seemed to demur while, actually, he 
 lost no time, and the woman cried : "Go on, 
 Tom ; you're in for it." 
 
 This time they made for Drayton's, and 
 Richard brought him out in an instant. They 
 all crowded into the car, and, home again, a 
 shouted word of thanks from Richard sufficed. 
 " Pretty cool, pretty cool," grumbled the 
 driver, for the Briton is not gracious in doing 
 the right thing. The car bounded away 
 indignantly. * 
 
 They had a half-hour of anxiety and 
 suspense and yet, with all the haste and 
 excitement, there were moments of enforced 
 leisure when time went slowly and they 
 waited for the decision. Drayton had decided 
 to attempt to give relief by a slight operation, 
 hastily improvised, and Letty, assisting him, 
 had been faintly surprised at the indecision 
 of his handling. Jim seemed a little easier 
 for it, however. Unconscious, with flushed 
 cheeks and a small woolly bear clutched to 
 his breast, he was extraordinarily alluring and 
 reassuringly himself. Were they unhappy ? 
 
JIM DIES 115 
 
 It was the moment of their strongest and 
 noblest affection for him. If the love of 
 children is good then this intense concentra- 
 tion of thoughts, emotions, or energies on the 
 child must have some quality of exhilaration. 
 And yet, while Jim's life was ebbing away and 
 there was no active service to be rendered, 
 they were sensitive to the world and even 
 conscious of an extraordinary kindliness. In 
 some errand or excursion of restlessness to 
 the kitchen Letty had encountered a girl sent 
 with some parcel or message and had lingered 
 a moment to taste the surprising quality of 
 affectionate emotion which the child's timidity 
 aroused. She and Richard were not long 
 apart ; it seemed necessary that their know- 
 ledge and hopes and fears should be in 
 common. They might look forward to the 
 emptiness of life ; their consciousness now 
 was rather of its wonderful fulness. The 
 disguises and hard shells of things had fallen 
 away ; the dying child was a powerful 
 solvent. 
 
 So, through the child they touched their 
 highest point ; his death could never be a 
 
u6 DYING FIRES 
 
 bitter memory to them. It was, at the last, 
 undisturbed by distressing physical symptoms, 
 and they had the assurance that they had 
 not failed to give him any remedial chance. 
 They had ceased to struggle for him, and, 
 with an exalted calmness, they watched him 
 die. As Richard said, — whimsically recalling 
 the phrase that had so often served for en- 
 couragement, admonition, approval — he died 
 "like a good boy." He sighed himself to 
 rest ; he paled, he receded, he passed from 
 before their eyes, leaving something strange 
 and secret. 
 
 They were dimly grateful to him for a new 
 vision that seemed to make them clearer, 
 wiser, more humane than they had been 
 before. Something of this was said between 
 them and more understood. They had never 
 been in such close sympathy ; and it was a 
 deep consciousness between them that they 
 might never have another child. Jim would 
 be all-powerful ; they looked forward — if they 
 looked forward — to a richness of memory, a 
 perpetual consciousness of him. Soon would 
 come the forebodings of a time when the 
 
JIM DIES 117 
 
 void must somehow be filled ; there is no 
 equation of memories and imaginings for a 
 sturdy boy. But now the father and 
 mother were together ; their union, they 
 felt, could never be broken and never marred. 
 It was a passion of sympathy ; at this 
 white heat of emotion each was to the 
 other perfect and sufficient. This son had 
 sprung from them, and now it seemed that 
 he was to be an immortal bond between them. 
 Morice received the shocking news from 
 Drayton, who called that night to see him. 
 Morice's comment, curiously, touched first on 
 Richard's loss as his thought struck quickly 
 at Richard's danger — the danger of a blow to 
 the ill-balanced. It was not that he did not 
 think of Letty, but she was more assured ; she 
 could wait for his incessant meditations. He 
 turned with commiseration to Drayton, who 
 was profoundly depressed. So unguarded was 
 the depression that it became a tribute to 
 friendship. He spoke almost as though his 
 career was ended. The irrelevance of it 
 struck Morice, but it seemed that a kind of 
 confession was to come. 
 
u8 DYING FIRES 
 
 " I'm selfishly shaken," he said. " It isn't 
 the boy's death that I feel so much as my 
 professional incapacity. Would you believe 
 that I bungled the case ? I was nervous ; I 
 couldn't make it impersonal ; I kept thinking 
 of the little beggar as I saw him last. I 
 hadn't much to do, and I did it badly. I 
 want to know whether to tell them." 
 
 " My dear fellow," said Morice, as lightly 
 as he could, for he was startled, " what 
 is there to tell ? Nothing could have saved 
 him ? " 
 
 " I suppose not." 
 
 " What's the point, Drayton ? What is it ? 
 You told me just now that you could really 
 have done no good if you'd been there earlier. 
 That's rather a comfort to them. What if 
 you were a shade less skilful than usual in a 
 hopeless job ? Does that matter ? My dear 
 fellow, you're right ; this is egoism." 
 
 They paused at a foot on the stairs, and 
 Richard joined them. 
 
 " You're here ? " he said to Drayton. " I 
 thought so, but Letty wanted me to come and 
 tell Morice. I'll get back." 
 
JIM DIES 119 
 
 " Stop a bit," said Drayton. " We were 
 discussing a point." 
 
 " Nonsense, Drayton," cried Morice. " Let 
 him go. Mrs. Peel " 
 
 Drayton said : " Letty was with me when I 
 made that incision in Jim's throat. Did she 
 tell you how shaky I was ? " 
 
 Richard stared at him without speaking. 
 
 " I never bungled anything worse, Richard. 
 I think you ought to know." 
 
 " Now, look here," said Morice, " am I 
 right in saying that nothing could have saved 
 him ? You said so, mind. This incision was 
 really to give relief. If you did make a slip 
 would it matter ? Peel, this ought never to 
 have been raised. He's not himself. You 
 see that." 
 
 Richard crossed to Drayton and took his 
 arm. " I don't think you made any mistake," 
 he said. " If you had it wouldn't have 
 mattered. And if it had been a fatal mistake 
 that lost us his life our gratitude to you 
 wouldn't be less. For heaven's sake don't say 
 a word to Letty. She would distress herself 
 ■ — not over him, but you." 
 
120 DYING FIRES 
 
 " Peel," said Morice, " do appreciate this 
 point, that he is making only a fantastic 
 charge against himself. If there was any slip 
 — and it's possible for a man to make a slip — 
 if there was any slip it's irrelevant," 
 
 "I see that clearly," said Richard. 
 
 " No," said Drayton. " I believe that 
 nothing could have saved him, but that hardly 
 helps me. I have to look at the efficiency of 
 the work, not the result. I suppose I shouldn't 
 say it, but I feel guilty. We'll say nothing to 
 Letty, certainly." 
 
 " It's midsummer madness," said Morice. 
 " It's like ' The Master Builder ' and all 
 those crazy people who take on calamities 
 that coincide with their stray thoughts. I 
 thought you were a reasonable man." 
 
 " Of course you're right," said Drayton ; 
 " and don't think that I'm going to collapse. 
 I have rather a heavy day to-morrow. Come 
 on, Richard. You must get back to Letty 
 and I to my wife." 
 
 Morice saw Richard's bearing with ap- 
 proval, and during the next few weeks his 
 generous admiration went out to him. 
 
JIM DIES 121 
 
 Richard went about his business soberly and, 
 seemingly without any pose, took a rational 
 interest in things. Morice acknowledged to 
 himself in a rather fitful humility that the 
 man had qualities which were not easily 
 perceived. Richard was not acting a part, 
 and yet he seemed to have got outside his 
 own character. He was ever so much simpler 
 and finer than Morice had conceived him. 
 Perhaps admiration was stimulated by chag- 
 rin at some vestiges of jealousy. He could 
 have wished to be something to Letty or 
 even to Richard at such a time, but he was 
 outside it all ; there was really no room for the 
 sympathetic friend. Richard was splendidly 
 adequate and the two were exalted in their 
 self-sufficiency. Poor Morice, eating his heart 
 out, knew what it was to subdue the romantic 
 aspirations, and now he was starved into a 
 brooding submission ; he had a fine variety of 
 minor emotions. He had always been loyal 
 to Richard in word and deed ; he would 
 always be loyal to him, but he half conceived 
 himself sometimes, and ironically, as the 
 
 treacherous friend. For he had never quite 
 
 i 
 
122 DYING FIRES 
 
 accepted him. A close acquaintanceship and 
 a first-rate interest had hardly made friend- 
 ship, and yet they had had their genial 
 moments ; Richard, certainly, would claim him 
 for a friend. And the fellow had become 
 a serious preoccupation with him ; there 
 was even an excitement in meeting him. He 
 came on Richard and Letty together walking 
 down the Palatine Road. They were closely 
 engrossed ; their recognition of him was kind 
 and perfunctory. Decidedly he was humbled. 
 They were all the world to one another. 
 
PART II 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 time's fell hand 
 
 On a Sunday afternoon three years after 
 Jim's death Morice called at the Draytons' 
 according to an old custom and found them 
 enjoying so much of summer as may be had 
 in a Manchester suburban garden. They 
 were popular, accessible people, for Drayton 
 had acquiesced in his wife's partiality for the 
 small change of society, and he dispensed a 
 rather worn geniality to her friends. Several 
 of them were sitting on deck-chairs or pacing 
 the walks with the informality of friendly 
 habit, and presently Letty and Richard 
 entered from the house and strolled to the 
 lawn. Morice did not watch them, but he 
 was always conscious of them ; he had been 
 conscious of them all these years. Study, 
 after all, is no more than such consciousness, 
 and so they had been his intense and particular 
 
126 DYING FIRES 
 
 study. There they were, husband and wife, 
 bound by intimate memories, accustomed to 
 one another, maintaining a sweetness or, at 
 least, a perfection of courtesy. They talked 
 together a little more than was necessary, and 
 perhaps some of the guests would presently 
 say that they were still bound up in one 
 another. They sat side by side just beyond 
 the shade of the big sycamore, but they did 
 not look like people rejoicing in the sun. 
 Perhaps they had reached an exquisite calm 
 in which troubles and joys were of the same 
 texture. Morice saw a good deal of them 
 and had had many opportunities to admire 
 this exquisite surface. And, of course, they 
 had all manner of activities and even vivacities. 
 Civilisation has given us common interests 
 till we can almost dispense with a life of our 
 own. We may have our mysteries, but they 
 are overlaid and overlaid. 
 
 At times Morice seemed to know these 
 people to the uttermost ; and again they 
 were hidden from him. It is only by over- 
 hearing that we can know men and women, 
 and their life seemed devised for publicity. 
 
TIME'S FELL HAND 127 
 
 If he had been excluded when Jim died 
 the barriers against him now were ten-fold. 
 These were his intimate friends, it seemed, 
 and they never spoke to him of one 
 another except about mere comings and 
 goings. 
 
 He knew everything and yet he knew 
 nothing. There had been a mystical compact 
 between them, and the closest sympathy of a 
 third could not bring him to their confidence. 
 They had sometimes spoken to him of Jim, 
 naturally and without much significance. 
 Always there seemed an implication of some- 
 thing behind, and, indeed, he could not pre- 
 sume to expect that he should share in their 
 peculiar memories. But in time their in- 
 scrutable bearing had provoked a scepticism 
 that at first he hardly recognised and then 
 fought with shame. What was it that they 
 guarded so carefully ? Did the shrine still 
 contain its treasure, or was it lost or shrunken 
 away while they maintained their attitude of 
 protection ? Perhaps even the attitude had 
 a little relaxed — or perhaps the attitude had 
 begun to serve another purpose. Meantime, 
 
128 DYING FIRES 
 
 Morice was conscious of a suspension of the 
 more active interests, his friendship seemed 
 to have become formal. He had not the 
 right to investigate ; his sympathy bred 
 suspicion. 
 
 And here on the sunny lawn there was a 
 little mild gossip, and presently it got sharper 
 and people stiffened in their chairs as they 
 talked of a certain recent shattering of the 
 suburban calm and of the cowardice of 
 suicide. 
 
 *' Well, I don't know," Morice said. '* I 
 think there would be more suicides with more 
 courage in the world. There's a good deal 
 of faintness in the orderly virtues." 
 
 Richard said : " It isn't the want of courage ; 
 it's a sufficient cause. Lots of men don't 
 commit suicide because they don't want to do 
 it quite so much as all that." 
 
 " No, but think," said an eager lady ; " they 
 were on such particularly nice terms. There 
 was no reason ; it was really temporary 
 insanity this time. Nothing wrong, health 
 good and his business — what a shock ! What 
 a bolt from the blue ! " 
 
TIME'S FELL HAND 129 
 
 " Yes," Richard said, " smooth surfaces 
 must be broken sometimes. Volcanoes can't 
 always wait for an old crater. It's this 
 surface of life that's so amazing. What's 
 the good of it ? Why all these reticences ? 
 We're all whited sepulchres, and some people 
 keep it up for ever. The astonishing thing 
 is that so little happens. Half the world is 
 perpetually on the verge of some ugly tragedy, 
 and meanwhile the rates are paid and we 
 entertain our friends charmingly. These 
 honest fellows on weekly wages get drunk 
 and kick their wives, or we should never know 
 what kind of a world it is." 
 
 Morice saw Letty's startled eyes and 
 looked away from her. Drayton was regard- 
 ing Richard attentively, and Mrs. Drayton 
 was mildly scandalised, but turned to her 
 friends with reassuring smiles which indicated 
 that there was really no harm in all this, 
 that Richard would have his little joke. 
 Morice feared a pause, and when Richard 
 stopped he continued : 
 
 " Look at Mrs. Slade. She may have 
 some frightful design on society, and yet her 
 
130 DYING FIRES 
 
 disguise is perfect. She may have the poison 
 all laid out for Mr. Slade's supper." 
 
 They were comfortable folk and the matter 
 was laughed off, though Mrs. Slade bridled 
 a little and commented to her husband later 
 on Morice's want of taste. Perhaps Richard 
 had spoken too penetratingly, but nothing 
 was broken here. They relapsed into the 
 gentle talk that suits with summer afternoons, 
 and presently the guests retired, Richard and 
 Letty went away together, and Mrs. Drayton 
 returned to the house. Morice and Drayton 
 lit their pipes and glanced round at the 
 bushes like men preparing for a confidential 
 talk. Neither of them was very anxious to 
 begin. 
 
 At last : " Richard got slightly out of gear, 
 I thought," said Drayton. 
 
 Morice replied : " He's usually a careful- 
 mannered man." 
 
 They stopped there, each wondering how 
 much the other knew or surmised, or was 
 prepared to say. 
 
 " It's a thousand pities," said Drayton, 
 " that they haven't any more children. This 
 
TIME'S FELL HAND 131 
 
 cult of a dead child may become demoralising, 
 don't you think ? " 
 
 Morice said : " It's difficult. They weather, 
 so to speak, unevenly." 
 
 " You mean " 
 
 "Is it possible that some reproach has 
 grown up between them ? Does it strike you 
 that there may be some insincerity in these 
 passions that are embalmed ? " 
 
 " But these two are not humbugs," said 
 Drayton. " They couldn't perpetually sup- 
 port the insincerities — at least, not in private." 
 
 " Not in their minds," said Morice. 
 
 " Yes, I've been wanting to speak to you, 
 Morice. It's been going wrong for a long 
 time. One doesn't acknowledge these things. 
 They don't exist till another sees them. And 
 how much do they know themselves ? " 
 
 " It's all intangible," said Morice. " Here, 
 between us, this exists. They may keep it 
 yet behind locked doors. Do you know, I 
 think that many married couples must pass 
 through a frightful period of disillusion. I 
 speak frankly to you. The disillusion is of 
 various kinds. They want to be perpetually 
 
132 DYING FIRES 
 
 fed with interests or work. They begin with 
 a great absorbing interest and they rise to 
 a great heat of emotion — I mean when Jim 
 died, you know. Then the slow petri- 
 faction and they can't understand what's 
 happening." 
 
 " You've thought about them, Morice." 
 
 " Oh, I'm always thinking about her." 
 
 " He has his work," said Drayton. 
 
 " It's worse for her." 
 
 " If they could go into something to- 
 gether " 
 
 " By-the-bye, Peel may have something to 
 rouse him. Perhaps he's devising it for a 
 distraction. You hear he's fighting his 
 Association over this short time policy ? It 
 should be good for him." 
 
 " I hadn't heard. He doesn't talk to me 
 much now." 
 
 " You must read your paper There's 
 room for a pretty quarrel. He's going 
 against the big- wigs of the trade." 
 
 " And he's right, I suppose ? " 
 
 " Well, these questions aren't easy — when 
 you're not writing about them. I think he's 
 
TIME'S FELL HAND 133 
 
 got the best of the economics. But Mrs. 
 Peel — this is no good to her. She wants 
 rousing. I'm depressed about it and I see 
 you are. Of course, it's not my business . . . 
 Drayton, we're in a kind of conspiracy. 
 We've talked frankly — or not quite frankly. 
 It's a relief to me." 
 
 " I can't very well talk to my wife about it." 
 " Of course not — of course not," said 
 Morice hastily. 
 
 " Yes, but you don't quite see. She is not 
 insensible to all this, and she knows some- 
 thing's wrong. But she wouldn't penetrate 
 to it for the world. I think she takes it as an 
 inevitable sadness or sorrow ; everybody right, 
 no blame anywhere. Of course, she sees that 
 Letty is not happy, and the death of a child 
 three years ago is enough to account for that. 
 She was bothered a good deal after Jim died. 
 Letty, you know, was almost cheerful ; she 
 was exalted, excited. The stimulation seemed 
 to last. She was devoted to her husband and 
 kind to all the world. Well, this didn't seem 
 quite right to my wife ; it was not the regu- 
 lation behaviour. So it was a kind of relief 
 
134 DYING FIRES 
 
 when Letty fell into line. Now it's time for 
 her to put on brighter colours." 
 
 Drayton smiled indulgently, and Morice 
 wondered whether it was quite in his character 
 to speak so of his wife. It was not entirely 
 respectful ; it was not chivalrous, surely. 
 But looking at his friend's face another 
 meaning dawned upon him. He was pleading 
 cunningly for his wife. He was insinuating a 
 rather better case for her than Morice had 
 imagined. It was more pathetic than any 
 stiffness of chivalry. They got up and he took 
 Drayton's arm and they walked about looking 
 at the flowers together. Drayton stopped 
 presently, and, unlinking, said : 
 
 " If I had been a woman — I mean, if I'd had 
 nothing to do I should have gone to pieces 
 after Jim died." 
 
 " What ? " cried Morice. " You're not 
 thinking of that notion you got ? I thought 
 that was all over long ago." 
 
 " It is, of course," said Drayton. " I pulled 
 myself together. Perhaps I was fanciful, 
 like a woman. We're the sons of women. 
 Womanish traits come out in all of us. But 
 
TIME'S FELL HAND 135 
 
 if I'd been one — if I'd had to brood over 
 
 that " 
 
 ' Well, you did pull yourself together, and 
 if I'm to have a major operation you're the 
 man." 
 
 " Nay, my mind might stray to you. I like 
 mere flesh and bone. Now look at these 
 sweet-peas. Not bad for Fallowfield." 
 
 Morice walked home in the evening of long 
 shadows, meditatively. He was not given to 
 bachelor cynicism, and, indeed, the talk with 
 Drayton went too deep for that. But, really, 
 these husbands and wives must often have to 
 put a good face on it. They may not be 
 frankly bored and frankly sundered. Alien- 
 ated, they must still carry on the game, for 
 — heavens ! — to be sincere would bring 
 crashes everywhere. They may be disil- 
 lusioned, spiritually starved, and inveterately 
 moral. And these widows — his thoughts 
 wandered from the particular — in their grief 
 are they often conscious of the removal of a 
 clog, or is all this kept well below the level 
 of positive consciousness ? The natural awe 
 of death and the agitation that comes with the 
 
i 3 6 DYING FIRES 
 
 terrible presence may very well appear as the 
 particular grief. We stand by and let people 
 endure ; we connive at miserable discordances. 
 Is the conventional framework worth it ? 
 One's dogmas want overhauling sometimes. 
 As to the particular case, there remained a 
 mystery that must baffle classification ; his 
 friends were not common people to be classi- 
 fied. It was amazing that Richard Peel's 
 volubility had been checked so long. The 
 case must surely be serious if he could not 
 talk about it, and he had not done so. Their 
 married life was closed in an impenetrable 
 silence. What happened when the door was 
 shut on them ? 
 
 Perhaps Richard Peel was sullenly conscious 
 of his rhetorical habit and so pursued this 
 great effort in taciturnity. He was accustomed 
 to noise things abroad, and surely he must 
 appear presently with a heart on his sleeve 
 again. He might put a case, and Morice was 
 ready with a scornful reception for it. Or was 
 there no case, no problem, no misery — nothing 
 but a little blunting of the edge of things, a 
 little indolence and acceptance of the grooves 
 
TIME'S FELL HAND 137 
 
 of habit ? Morice knew the subtle signs of 
 Letty's personality too well, and if she had 
 not been in the case he could have pitied 
 Richard, too. And people live so, or let life 
 slip away so, when they have not many years 
 before them. 
 
 K 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 A STANDSTILL 
 
 Except Mrs. Drayton, who pursued her 
 placid way towards old age unswervingly and 
 with an admirable absence of useless regrets, 
 these people now seemed all to be conscious 
 of having come to a standstill. Even to 
 Drayton one operation was very like another ; 
 he could never be a better surgeon than he 
 had been, and the time of initiative and 
 experiment seemed to be over. Sometimes 
 he thought about that time of rest when he 
 would have to test himself in a new way. 
 For what good is there in a shaky surgeon ? 
 He began to see the virtue of these dull 
 careers of definite steps that cheat a man 
 into the belief that he is advancing with his 
 income. He could sometimes have envied 
 a major-general in virtuous retirement ; he 
 wondered what strength was in his own 
 
A STANDSTILL 139 
 
 hobbies. Letty was anxious about him in a 
 tentative, deferred way, and agreed that he 
 must not go on for ever. 
 
 " I'm all right yet," he said, " and one's 
 mind is right all the time." 
 
 " Yes," she said. " Our minds may be all 
 right and yet our lives over." 
 
 She had never said so much before, he 
 thought, but possibly he was wrong to give 
 it much significance. He spoke, naturally 
 enough, of the politicians and literary men 
 and even the painters who went on working 
 to a great age — " doing no harm," as he added 
 whimsically. He tried to maintain that work 
 after maturity became decadent or eccentric 
 or drudgery. She suspected some paradox 
 of Morice, whom he quoted or exaggerated 
 sometimes, and he hardly tried to withstand 
 her rebutting examples. Their talk seemed 
 fantastic to Mrs. Drayton, occupied with the 
 tale of calls unpaid or the incalculable varia- 
 tions in prices of household stuff. 
 
 Rebellion seemed to be in the air, for 
 Letty that night entered her sitting-room to 
 find Morice engaged with Richard in strange 
 
140 DYING FIRES 
 
 comparisons of failure. She was nervous 
 and feared some kind of explosion of reckless- 
 ness from Richard — feared it and yet was not 
 far from craving it. And he met her entrance 
 with a queer sort of geniality that was strange 
 in him ; it might be undisguised irony or an 
 audacious diversion to mislead their guest. 
 
 " We're getting dismal, Letty," he said. 
 " We're tired of ourselves — not, of course, of 
 one another. You know, Morice, when you're 
 at the barber's and a man gets up from the 
 next chair and looks at himself in the glass : 
 he's been shaved and brushed, and everything 
 possible done for him, but there's the same 
 old mug, after all. I want a fresh soul and 
 body. Have you ever felt like that ? " 
 
 Their defences were nearly down, and now 
 that Morice saw so much even his curiosity 
 and an anger of sympathy with her could not 
 overcome the fear of an explosion. Richard, 
 he could have sworn, was primed, and Letty 
 looked as though she saw it coming and had 
 no heart to oppose it. He was conscious of 
 a clumsy wrench when he brought the con- 
 versation to what seemed a safe topic ; and 
 
A STANDSTILL 141 
 
 really he could have believed that they were 
 disappointed. But he got away. 
 
 Alone, they sank into silence and she took 
 up a novel. She might have liked such a 
 story years ago, but her old likings now struck 
 queerly across her life. She had talked to 
 Morice of the book and he had spoken coldly 
 and slightingly of its exposition of romantic 
 love. " It's a conventional pattern," he had 
 said. Then she had been in a panic lest he 
 should say something relevant or too pene- 
 trating, and she spoke of the story, too, with 
 light depreciation, though she yearned after 
 the old faith that it did in some fashion 
 recall. She did not frame it that she wanted 
 a lover and a husband back, but she did 
 want faith in lovers and husbands. And 
 somehow she was to blame for what the 
 world had lost. 
 
 Looking again over that amazing retrospect 
 of the last three years, she asked herself, as 
 many times before, how they had come to 
 this. Since that white heat of passionate 
 sympathy there had been no break between 
 them. Their emotions had been unmeasured, 
 
i 4 2 DYING FIRES 
 
 devastating ; sacred, yet not to be recalled 
 without a sense of shame. They could not 
 re-open the past and they could not dismiss 
 it. Deep down, surely, that sympathy still 
 existed, but it was impossible to recapture, 
 impossible even to name it. Anything short 
 of it was superficial, and so they acquired the 
 habit of estrangement. This came slowly ; 
 it was helped, perhaps, by subtle repulsions 
 of temperament. They had their understand- 
 ing and they acquired habits, but the under- 
 standing seemed to lose its force and only 
 the habits remained. And habit, as some 
 literary philosopher quoted by Morice had 
 said, is failure. And what a failure to reduce 
 to habit relations once so tender and romantic 
 as theirs ! Is failure tolerable because it is 
 long drawn out ? At first she had been the 
 one to set that seal of silence on what they 
 had so deeply in common, and later, when she 
 would have tried to remove it, Richard had 
 seemed to be unwilling. The mind is free, 
 but how timid of contact ! They both dreaded 
 sentimentalising ; they feared the wrong note, 
 and so strained and artificial had their relations 
 
A STANDSTILL 143 
 
 become that they did not see there could not 
 be a wrong note if they were natural. 
 
 Strangely, incredibly, their habits of affec- 
 tionate intercourse had lost their savour and, 
 strongly fixed as they were in the superficial 
 relation, even the forms had altered. The 
 period between passion and estrangement 
 seemed now a mere point, and yet if the fates 
 had given them another child there might 
 have been some help in that. There is sal- 
 vation in domesticity. They dared not say it 
 to one another, but a child might have broken 
 the spell. They had fallen apart now ; they 
 were strangers, and in her heart there was 
 hardly a hope — she could not acknowledge a 
 desire — of another wooing. And when they 
 went out together with that queer regard for 
 appearances that outlasts affection and mor- 
 ality and the rest — implicit in it, perhaps, 
 some vestige of the hope for a recovery — they 
 saw children about with their parents, and a 
 hateful consciousness oppressed her. There 
 was a time when she had loved children, and 
 though she did not hate them now she could 
 not look at them simply. They walked 
 
i 4 4 DYING FIRES 
 
 silently ; and there is something singularly 
 oppressive in the silence of a man whose 
 nature is expansive and voluble. He was 
 polite and considerate, with some degree of 
 sullenness ; and even these wretched relations 
 were precarious. 
 
 Many couples who have no children are 
 happily matched and would laugh at that 
 formula about habit being failure. Doubtless 
 we tend to be merely clubbable men and 
 women drudges, and if to become gradually, 
 gracefully extinct is failure it is a pleasant 
 way to fail. Parents among their children 
 have the best of life, for habit becomes a 
 perpetual refreshment ; they need not be in 
 the active band of the consciously successful. 
 Of course, one has a life outside the home, 
 and Letty and Richard did not always carry 
 their wretchedness about with them. They 
 even talked together on subjects of common 
 interest, though they had abandoned the 
 attempt to make books or pictures or music 
 a step to a deeper union. The art that 
 strikes deeply home to us is possessed alone. 
 We point things out with fervour to our 
 
A STANDSTILL 145 
 
 friends and they respond with the fervour of 
 friendliness. These things that we see to- 
 gether, well within the common measure of 
 our natures, are not what fire our spirits. 
 The moderation of friendly agreement would 
 not help them. 
 
 And all the time their brains and their 
 imaginations, working obscurely and un- 
 recognised, told them that they were missing 
 the noble things of life. When they were 
 happy they had known that men and women 
 can live and change — that indolence need 
 not overcome nor custom petrify. How this 
 dulness comes ! And the man says : "A kiss 
 is but a kiss now," and the kiss becomes a 
 baseness to the passion that first inspired it ; 
 and the woman waits eternally and the milk 
 of human kindness grows sour. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE HOME SURFACE 
 
 Decidedly it was something to her that 
 Morice, who seemed to have neglected or 
 avoided them for a time, had again become 
 a frequent visitor. It was much for him, 
 too, for that hard, intellectual life of his in 
 which he dealt continually with ideas and 
 reasons wanted badly the touch of people 
 and things. 
 
 The Peel household was more than an 
 interest : it was an excitement with an im- 
 measurable, inconceivable future in which he 
 began to feel he must have some part ; calm, 
 mystery, suspense was the sequence, and sus- 
 pense would not last for ever. And yet how 
 monstrous or impossible was the thought 
 of any kind of interference ! The man paid 
 his taxes, the woman her calls ; they were 
 respectable and even admirable members of 
 
THE HOME SURFACE 147 
 
 society. He had read somewhere of " the 
 terrible attrition of long years of familiarity 
 and normal family life," and the phrase stuck ; 
 but how could he step in with a warning 
 when the disaster was accomplished and 
 unacknowledged ? He could only wait for 
 them to betray themselves, and it seemed 
 that he was on the watch for that. He 
 told himself that it was an interesting case ; 
 he tried to regard it dispassionately. The 
 woman was suffering, perhaps, but the 
 capacity for suffering is limited, and habit 
 dulls. Long years of agony are inconceiv- 
 able, and across his sombre thought came 
 the comic interlude of the Sunday sermon 
 on hell fire and the old farmer with his 
 comment that no constitution could stand 
 it. Yet plain to his overwrought sense 
 was the tension of the woman ; and this 
 callousness of the man could not be utterly 
 unconscious. Here, then, was his interest. 
 Friends had sometimes advised him to 
 cultivate a hobby outside his work. Here 
 was his hobby. He told himself that he 
 went into it imaginatively, not charitably, 
 
148 DYING FIRES 
 
 but she tore at his heartstrings. He was 
 hardly conscious of the sexual attraction, 
 but the attractions of sex are subtle and 
 pervading. 
 
 Richard had welcomed Morice's presence 
 as some relief from the dulness that had 
 overtaken him, but the friend's position 
 in the household seemed now to lack 
 definition. He must know something, he 
 must learn something, Richard knew, but 
 Richard saw himself as unfortunate rather 
 than guilty, and the instinct for explanatory 
 rhetoric was strengthening. It would be 
 ludicrous, indeed, if Morice became a third 
 in this frightful artifice, but he could go 
 when he had had enough of it ; they must 
 remain. Meantime, decidedly he was a 
 distraction. 
 
 A vast amount of our thoughts and talk 
 takes no account of surroundings ; even 
 cautious people forget their circumstances. 
 Morice blundered on to something like a 
 discussion of the marriage tie in contrasting 
 the famous works — " One of our Conquerors " 
 and " Lord Ormont and his Aminta." The 
 
THE HOME SURFACE 149 
 
 opinions expressed are immaterial ; they 
 minced matters and so suggested to him that 
 he was on dangerous ground. Richard talked 
 vague, man-of-the-world stuff, and she was 
 almost demure. They were both capable of 
 courage and frankness, but the signal had 
 not been given and so they continued their 
 evasions. It was a blundering affair and 
 seemed to bring a general self-consciousness, 
 unless it was that his awakened perceptions 
 were over-acute. Heavens ! Had they gone 
 so far that a reference to the marriage relation 
 was unsafe ? Perhaps he was building a 
 house of cards. Her colour was high ; the 
 poor girl, surely, was in distress. She was 
 yet a girl to his sad, mature consideration, 
 and her beauty was unimpaired when she 
 could give it a chance. For she seemed a 
 woman holding her beauty in reserve ; it was 
 there, quiescent and withdrawn, but the sur- 
 face was dulled. He caught his breath at the 
 possibility of kindling her. 
 
 And yet on occasion she was equal to the 
 calls of society ; she had all the needful 
 vivacities ; her face smiled and changed 
 
150 DYING FIRES 
 
 according to the necessities of the moment. 
 It was a fanciful demand that he made for 
 something more. If she did not answer to 
 his demand for beauty her appeal was the 
 stronger to him. She had suffered a check ; 
 her eyes did not meet his with the old friend- 
 liness ; they were not shy or fearful, but the 
 life had gone. Was it possible to make them 
 glow again ? Her husband sat there a dull 
 tyrant ; representing, at least, the dull 
 tyrannies. He must be miserable, but his 
 misery did not excuse him. They were 
 both bound hand and foot by habit and 
 custom ; they were martyrs, perhaps, to the 
 holy social cause. It was appalling ; he 
 even felt some poor sense of safety in his 
 bachelorhood. 
 
 Letty looked forward to Morice's visits, and 
 they did, at least, stimulate the casual in- 
 terests. Yet she felt that in desiring them 
 she had grown reckless of concealment, for 
 Morice was an understanding man. She 
 seemed to have realised new capacities in 
 him ; she began to fear that any unguarded 
 word might provoke his close and ready 
 
THE HOME SURFACE 151 
 
 sympathy. Such a thought brought a re- 
 vulsion against the possible invasion of their 
 privacy ; she could have taken sides with 
 Richard against him. If he would be merely 
 a distraction, an interlude of interests and 
 shallow friendliness, it would be well. He 
 had, it was true, some claims to intimacy. 
 He had been their friend, but the old friend- 
 ship had hardened and contracted, its kind- 
 linesses were not easily recalled. It was 
 some comfort to remember that Morice was 
 a sensitive man who could never press a 
 discouraged claim. 
 
 Meantime Letty fulfilled her social obliga- 
 tions, and their occasional dinner-parties and 
 the like were carried off very well. It occurred 
 to her that Richard and she would make 
 capital actors, and they gave one another 
 delicate little displays of the histrionic art 
 that in their bitter way were almost enjoyable. 
 Of course, they did not attempt connubial 
 jocularity, but they played for inferences, and 
 there was a miserable piquancy in deceiving 
 their guests. The pleasant things that Richard 
 said to her now were in public, and she 
 
152 DYING FIRES 
 
 wondered sometimes whether they could be 
 devised to sting her. Yet, again, she could 
 almost have believed that with the stimula- 
 tions of the social occasions the false geniality 
 ran into a truer one and that he was positively 
 making advances to her. If it were so, they fell 
 apart quickly enough when they were alone. 
 
 She looked round upon her acquaintances 
 sometimes, and if she had dared would have 
 probed for news about the women's husbands. 
 It was difficult to get at anything, for they 
 would talk infinitely about their servants or 
 their children, but the husbands were taken as 
 a matter of course. Perhaps there was a 
 remnant of the inferior's attitude, and the 
 husbands were matters too high for discussion, 
 though casual reference did not bear this out. 
 She detected, sometimes, a readiness for 
 championship, and she, too, felt in herself 
 queer promptings for a vindication of Richard's 
 merits. The childless women interested her 
 and, feeling herself with both the great parties 
 among women or between them, she thought 
 that they were often greatly generous in 
 affection for the children of others. She 
 
THE HOME SURFACE 153 
 
 tried to perceive distinctions between those 
 who had children and the others in the 
 inclination to the husband, but the reticences 
 baffled her. There was a great deal of resigned 
 companionship and appreciation of the oppor- 
 tunities for an ordered social life. There was 
 something amazing in the quiet acceptance 
 of their failure by the childless ones, but here, 
 too, the reticences were baffling. They seemed 
 to turn briskly to the compensations, for the 
 woman who has not children may very well 
 afford a motor-car or the continental holiday. 
 They did not, anyhow, parade the racial, 
 human considerations, but as she was always 
 guarded she could hardly invite confidences. 
 In some brief moments of expansion she 
 aspired beyond her poor circumstance, and 
 could conceive a spiritual progress of the race 
 in which the propagation of children is only a 
 part. Ideas breed, too, and there is work to 
 be done. Motherhood had taken from her the 
 desire to do the things to which a generous 
 girl aspires, but now it seemed that some kind 
 of respite if not salvation might come from 
 the outside. 
 
 L 
 
154 DYING FIRES 
 
 Her mind returned often to her dead 
 child, but she seemed to have exhausted the 
 possibilities of memory. She had pored over 
 the little vestiges of his life — clothes, toys, 
 and odd scraps that held associations — and 
 faithfully she went over the visions and the 
 audible tones that remained to her. They 
 were not an expanding quantity, and she 
 tried vainly to increase the store. His 
 features had become dim to her, and as her 
 vision of him faded she became accustomed, 
 more and more, to depend upon the photo- 
 graphs, two or three of which remained. She 
 recalled how Richard and she had talked of 
 him at first, but after a time — and it was only 
 a short time — their mood was rarely exalted 
 enough for such a theme. Sometimes she 
 had attempted it and Richard had not been 
 ready ; he had listened to her indulgently. 
 Now the dead silence between them remained 
 unbroken and she could not ask him to give 
 her something of his store. Jim had faded 
 away, and left a hollow, aching place. The 
 intolerable thing was that she could not keep 
 her child ; death was death, after all. Yet in 
 
THE HOME SURFACE 155 
 
 she had but to conjure up one of her various 
 images of him or some familiar inflection and 
 the little quiver of pain came in her throat 
 inevitably. She was thankful for it, for if the 
 memories became dim and narrow she could 
 yet feel poignantly. Her feelings were trans- 
 mitted through many occasions, but this poig- 
 nancy endured. And she was to have no 
 more children, it seemed ; she had ceased to 
 hope for it. They were no longer man and 
 wife. 
 
 She was a church-going woman if not a 
 religious one, and, of course, the Church pro- 
 vides its formal consolations. It does more 
 if the mother can be verily assured that the 
 child's sweet, warm young body will be 
 pressed to hers again. We are accustomed 
 to wait, but it is not good to wait patiently 
 for nothing. The woman is told that she 
 will see her child again, and she is profoundly 
 sceptical ; at the last they may cheat her 
 with some glorified image or something 
 vague and spiritual, but she is a woman still, 
 as when she carried the child in her womb 
 or suckled it at her breasts. She acquiesces in 
 
156 DYING FIRES 
 
 comfortable doctrine that is no comfort. She 
 
 can only drug herself with this irrelevance 
 
 of an immortality that stops short of the 
 
 palpable child. " Without the certainty that 
 
 I should see my child again," a mother had 
 
 said to her, " its death would have been 
 
 intolerable." There is a simple faith that 
 
 the world's hardships stop short of the 
 
 intolerable, and a queer faith it is if it 
 
 means that all the agonies of the world 
 
 are tolerable to the awakened sense. Letty 
 
 received a good deal of credit for her 
 
 resignation. In her ecstatic fervour she had 
 
 seemed to acquiesce in the loss. She 
 
 thought that she had acquiesced, but now 
 
 she had lost her child indeed and knew 
 
 the taste of black rebellion. 
 
 It chanced that she had a newly-married 
 cousin, younger than herself, but with some 
 claims of intimacy. At breakfast one morn- 
 ing she pondered over a letter from the young 
 lady, and glanced at the moody Richard 
 doubtfully. 
 
 " Here's a letter from Bertha," she said. 
 
 " Bertha ? " 
 
THE HOME SURFACE 157 
 
 " Now Mrs. Tom Speedmore." 
 
 "Ah— yes." 
 
 " She's fishing for an invitation. No, it's 
 hardly fair to say that — proposing a visit." 
 
 " Speedmore, too ? " 
 
 " NaturaUy." 
 
 " Well— d'you want them ? " 
 
 " Do you ? " 
 
 " No." 
 
 " No." 
 
 He took up the paper, saying : " You'd 
 better have them." 
 
 *' No, I think not." 
 
 " What reason for refusing ? " 
 
 "I'll tell her that we can't be bothered 
 with them." 
 
 " I don't think you'll do that." 
 
 " Perhaps not. I'll think out the real 
 reason and give it." 
 
 " What is the real reason ? " 
 
 " I suppose that we should hate the sight 
 of a pair of young lovers." 
 
 " Are you growing reckless ? " 
 
 She paused before she said : "I think 
 I am." 
 
158 DYING FIRES 
 
 He got up and took a turn about the room. 
 " I'm horribly sorry," he began, " but it's 
 no use talking of that. Ask them to come. 
 I've not the least objection. I daresay I 
 should like it, and it might amuse you. 
 Please ask them to come." 
 
 So the young people came and spent a 
 happy week and, as Letty and Richard were 
 very much on their good behaviour, they 
 considered themselves privileged to have 
 such a fine object-lesson in marital relations. 
 It was bitter comedy to the elder couple, 
 who, nevertheless, came rather nearer to one 
 another in the generous hope that this was 
 not the beginning of another wreck. They 
 had an excursion together into the country, 
 and Letty was almost surprised to find 
 that it was not all misery to her. Richard 
 and she were kind to one another in a non- 
 committal way, and it seemed sometimes 
 that only a shadow divided them. The sun 
 blazed and the trees shook in the wind, 
 and all the country sights and scents 
 stimulated her. What domestic grief could 
 endure against these ? She had a thought 
 
THE HOME SURFACE 159 
 
 of Richard and herself beginning afresh 
 somewhere away from towns and the 
 constant pressure of rooms. She could not 
 perceive any softening in him, and so she 
 hardened again. 
 
 The young wife flattered Letty by respect- 
 ful consultations, but it seemed like a treachery 
 to give advice which was supposed to come 
 from a successful experience. Yet the lessons 
 of failure may be as salutary as those of 
 success, and Letty did her best, knowing 
 that when one is blind all the world is not 
 black. In the evenings Speedmore talked to 
 Richard about " a man's responsibilities," 
 and was touchingly ready for advice. It 
 seemed that the Peels had something of a 
 reputation for a high kind of suitability in 
 the married state. In an effusive mood after 
 Jim's death Richard had talked to others 
 once or twice, and they were regarded as a 
 beautiful instance of the union that can be 
 maintained by a dead child. It was a case 
 after the sentimentalist's heart, and, indeed, 
 it may be possible to make of one's life 
 a monument, a great accretion upon a 
 
160 DYING FIRES 
 
 hidden foundation. There are many devotees 
 of the cult of mourning ; they slight 
 life for the sake of dim memories ; they 
 commit themselves to an attitude and starve 
 behind it. 
 
 Richard grew a little restive under the in- 
 fliction and gave the blunt advice : " Get 
 plenty of children. Get as many children as 
 you can." Speedmore nodded and blinked 
 in sympathetic understanding. It was rather 
 hard to bear. Richard eyed him contempt- 
 uously, not unkindly. These young people 
 would be perpetually young ; they might 
 get their selfish habits, but they would not 
 part with their illusions. It was not good 
 for him to see such a beginning of the 
 married life as this. These seemed weak 
 and sentimental, yet, as they were, perhaps 
 he and Letty had been. They had felt 
 strong even as these were strong. And if 
 this was all that they had lost what a 
 poor excuse for the tragic attitude ! The 
 young couple parted from them with 
 effusive good-will, and this benevolent 
 interlude ended well enough. It had not 
 
THE HOME SURFACE 161 
 
 humanised Letty and Richard, but they had 
 a poor bloom of satisfaction in having carried 
 off the affair so adroitly. They even compli- 
 mented one another upon it. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 A TENTATIVE DEFENCE 
 
 There are words which remain for ever 
 unspoken, though their chance provocation 
 would have changed the current of life com- 
 pletely, but there are, again, words which 
 must come. Morice was always conscious 
 now of restraint when he encountered Richard, 
 and he craved and feared some plainness of 
 speech that might at least remove his self- 
 consciousness. Richard spoke at last with- 
 out any obvious provocation and with 
 what seemed to be the frankness of a 
 friend. 
 
 " You see, Morice," he said, " you can't help 
 seeing that we are under some constraint here. 
 I can't tell you how it came about, or who's 
 to blame for it. I don't want to shirk my 
 share. She broods over the little chap's 
 
A TENTATIVE DEFENCE 163 
 
 death, and we shall never have another child, 
 I think. I can't make it up to her, and we 
 seem to have come to the end of our re- 
 sources. I suppose it may pass off some day, 
 as religious manias and midsummer mad- 
 nesses pass off, but meanwhile one has to 
 endure. I'm glad you've taken to coming 
 again. It's a distraction for both of us." 
 
 All this was very proper, and Morice took 
 it becomingly. Richard continued : " It's 
 worse for the woman, of course, in these 
 cases. I have my work and I get away. 
 There's such a thing as the pressure of a 
 house. I wonder if it would be a good thing 
 to remove. The country ? We might live 
 out of town." 
 
 " Your wife has got into what might be 
 called an unhealthy state ? " 
 
 Richard accepted the platitude unblinkingly : 
 " Exactly. An unhealthy state." 
 
 This ridiculous mildness irritated Morice. 
 " And you are in a perfectly healthy condition 
 yourself ? " he said. 
 
 " I wonder what you mean by that," said 
 Richard. 
 
164 DYING FIRES 
 
 " Well, it's not for me to cross-examine. 
 I must take what you tell me." 
 
 " You think there's another side to it." 
 " Another ! There may be a dozen." 
 " You're quite right, Morice. You'd better 
 suspend judgment. I don't think, though, 
 that it's for you to judge. I may be fright- 
 fully to blame. Of course, there's nothing 
 the matter, but everything's the matter. The 
 child ! Jim ! Do you think she suffered 
 more than I ? " 
 
 His voice shook and he turned away. 
 Morice was compelled to pity him, though this 
 was a man capable of pitying himself. Morice 
 tried to remind himself that they were friends, 
 but his sympathy with the woman hardened 
 his heart. He dreaded an outpouring from 
 Richard that might play upon his feelings, 
 for the fellow's rhetoric had sometimes almost 
 overwhelmed him. He mistrusted him ; he 
 could believe that the case would be put 
 unfairly, with an instinctive cunning against 
 which he would chafe and revolt. And so 
 far there was nothing that could fairly pro- 
 voke his indignation, though even this slight, 
 
A TENTATIVE DEFENCE 165 
 
 well-regulated glimpse of their life roused 
 him to thoughts of active partisanship. He 
 conceived in Letty a state of serene apathy, 
 shocking enough, l but not repulsive to him as 
 the sullenness that had curbed the garrulous 
 egoist. He wondered whether Peel had put 
 his case to her ; probably he had enlarged 
 upon it nauseatingly. Yet the man had been 
 his friend ; in their alienation he had yet 
 glimpses of old days when they had come 
 very close to one another; stupidly, grudgingly, 
 he had rebelled against his charm. And it 
 was not all a mistake and a futility, for, 
 surely, the chances of the man's life had 
 gone against him. 
 
 Morice was amazed to find himself weighing 
 possibilities and sounding himself for prin- 
 ciples and inclinations. The philanderer is 
 content to think of the woman ; the man 
 with the capacity for a lover looks to the 
 shaping of her life and his. He seemed, in 
 his thought, to have taken a sudden moment- 
 ous step, and he had not regarded himself as 
 a daring thinker. He was naturally on the 
 side of order, and the habits of a life cannot 
 
166 DYING FIRES 
 
 easily be broken. Clear thinking was im- 
 possible to him ; it would involve such vast 
 assumptions. His humour stirred at the 
 thought of a man, such as he, plunged into a 
 scandalous affair. He went so far as this, 
 though he shuddered to think of what it 
 might imply of miserable endurance on her 
 part, and of the withering scorn that any 
 interference of his might provoke. He went 
 much too fast ; to suppose himself acceptable 
 to her in any capacity beyond the friend's 
 was presumptuous. He conceived himself 
 as a deliverer, not as a lover, though he 
 gasped to think of the ways of deliverance. 
 And if he were ready to shatter the conven- 
 tions, what of her ? Regarded practically, it 
 was all preposterous. It was a minor con- 
 sideration that as these dissensions did not 
 appear on the outside his interference would 
 seem shocking. But his mood now was too 
 ardent to include much of mere justification, 
 though he was hardly ready to take the well- 
 worn path of the treacherous friend. His 
 thought ran far beyond any conclusions ; 
 his spirit had flown beyond the barriers that 
 
A TENTATIVE DEFENCE 167 
 
 he would never pass. He had some support 
 in the assurance that he could not lightly 
 be false to himself. 
 
 If she was oppressed — if the oppression 
 was too much to bear — could she not break 
 away ? If she remained with the oppressor 
 surely the ordeal was not too hard. But 
 what was the ordeal, and to what end ? And 
 where could she go ? What could she do ? 
 It might be fine to be society's martyr, but 
 he had a cynical idea of a wave of revelation 
 which might show that the martyrs out- 
 numbered the rest. If she were sunk in 
 apathy he might yet appear as an incentive. 
 After all, he was a young man, though he 
 had never asserted his youth and manhood. 
 He cast back on a quiet life, and in his simple, 
 friendly way he saw himself successful with 
 women. As he had never had a passion nor 
 a flirtation his experiences did not go far, and 
 he did not persist in the absurdity of weighing 
 little episodes and interludes. His thoughts 
 were not lawful, but they followed from a 
 conviction of her bondage. 
 
 He went far. The adventure, dimly 
 
168 DYING FIRES 
 
 proposed, could not be carried through on 
 frigid sympathies and attitudes. Yet the mere 
 sexual adventure was abominable to him, and 
 the promptings of his long-deferred youth 
 were overwhelmed in an exaltation that 
 was chivalrous and humane. The woman 
 possessed him, he was in love, and yet he 
 must be justified in reason. It came on him 
 darkly that his old mother was not a reason- 
 able being. She was a fine, stately old lady, 
 making to his sympathies a pictorial appeal 
 and something more. He would hate to mar 
 the picture and the old, affectionate attitude 
 between them. He repaired to her home in 
 the south for rest and refreshment. What 
 could she make of it ? She had petrified a 
 little, as these mothers do ; the filial relation 
 was the exquisite remains of what had once 
 been very real. He had read Mr. Galsworthy's 
 novel, and he wondered if she could have 
 imitated Mrs. Pendyce. But Mrs. Pendyce, if 
 she condoned her son's sin, was not baffled by 
 a reasoned explanation. Certainly, mothers 
 must take some cruel blows, and the maternal 
 in them will conform to circumstance. They 
 
A TENTATIVE DEFENCE 169 
 
 must come out into the world if they mean 
 to influence it. Morice was not a sentimen- 
 talist, but the thought of his mother dis- 
 mayed him. 
 
 Letty Peel hardly belonged to the class 
 of approachable women, and it was a cunning 
 idea of Morice's to begin to talk to her about 
 himself. It was unusual, and she cast about 
 for a reason. If she had thought that he 
 desired to give her a distraction she would 
 have received such advances coldly, but to 
 check a man who would discuss himself must 
 be a cruel rebuff ; and then, too, he was 
 interesting. His slightly appealing manner 
 was a subtle flattery, and his frank confidences 
 a more obvious one. Of course, there is the 
 natural desire, repressed or obscured by 
 civilised people, to stand well with a woman, 
 to interest her, to fill the space ; but Morice 
 was not commonly of the appealing kind. 
 His dark, inscrutable face was not made for 
 frankness ; it was the shield of a spirit that 
 must be pursued. Now he chatted about his 
 work, the isolation of the journalist and the 
 tendency of those who would possess their 
 
 M 
 
170 DYING FIRES 
 
 souls to become unclubbable men. He 
 bemoaned the pains expended on work dis- 
 regarded or outdated, and she rejoined with 
 some spirit that the printed word had an 
 unfair advantage. He wanted her to take 
 his point of view, and it struck him that he 
 was verging on the fatuous suggestion that 
 he and his fellows were not as other men. 
 He did sneer a little at some of the big-wigs 
 of journalism who are occupied in " uttering 
 the obvious with an air of heroic resolu- 
 tion," perorating about the salvation of the 
 country and always taking the line of least 
 resistance. 
 
 " Of course," he said, " it's unpopular to 
 try to screw things up a bit tighter. Mistakes 
 are scored against us, and everything's a 
 mistake. When there's a controversy lasting 
 for years and conducted by a host of people 
 there may be a few errors and rashnesses — it's 
 the duty of a journalist not to be rash — and 
 they are remembered for ever. What makes 
 politics seem so paltry is that you attack the 
 mistakes of your opponents ; it's their funda- 
 mental sincerities that you want to be at. 
 
A TENTATIVE DEFENCE 171 
 
 The newspaper, or the man, of which every- 
 one speaks well must be pretty soft, I think. 
 The queer thing is that every trifle is taken 
 for an elaborate conspiracy. A passage is 
 deleted from some windbag's letter, and he 
 thinks that the editor and his myrmidons 
 have acted treacherously. Probably the man 
 on the staff who revised it couldn't be bothered 
 to put the grammar right, or it insulted some- 
 body, or it was merely verbosity." 
 
 She laughed at so much animation over 
 trivial annoyances, and certainly his talk 
 tended to intimacy rather than to the heroic 
 posture. Yet he impressed her with his 
 seriousness in work and a sort of faith in it — 
 even the readiness to make sacrifices. His 
 isolation, too, was a little pathetic. These 
 newspaper men seem to live very much out of 
 the world — in a little world of their own, 
 according to the clubman, as Morice had 
 laughingly told her — and yet they are at vast 
 pains to move the world, to shake it or to 
 retard it. His jumble of sincerity and artifice 
 interested her. From some talk of drudgery, 
 which he suggested is inevitable and even 
 
172 DYING FIRES 
 
 beneficent if you would not be worn out too 
 soon, he passed to habit, and with some incon- 
 sistency, perhaps, reviled its tyranny : 
 
 " Habit ! We are all habit. It comes on 
 one as a terror, this habit. You meet a man 
 at the same place in the street every morn- 
 ing ; he has shaved before the same old 
 mirror and had bacon again for breakfast. 
 Do you know that public-houses have their 
 regular customers, and that the landlord is 
 mildly surprised at a new face ? It's the 
 same with all of us. We shall soon lose 
 consciousness." 
 
 There was ingenuity in this approach to 
 common ground. She saw less of him than 
 she supposed, for his reserve was real ; but, 
 certainly, he interested her. She had known 
 him long and now she was surprised at a kind 
 of development, and she could not make an 
 application of it personal to herself. His life 
 was curiously proportioned. He dealt with 
 high politics and great events authoritatively 
 or audaciously in his daily work, but his 
 personal activities were circumscribed. There 
 was not much of the middle life common to 
 
A TENTATIVE DEFENCE 173 
 
 men. She could have laughed, and did, at 
 the quiet man with his hesitations and per- 
 turbations who wrote large in print of Austria 
 or France or the errors of the Cabinet. He 
 flattered her once by incorporating an idea of 
 hers into a leader. There it was, flouting 
 the Concert of Europe, and she had an 
 impulse of respect for the power of the mind. 
 Perhaps Europe did not take much notice of 
 the idea, but there it was. Personages are 
 governing the Empire, and Letty was ready 
 to believe that the mental processes of the 
 leader-writers are not inferior to theirs ; great- 
 ness is very much a matter of position, it 
 seems. 
 
 Morice provoked her mild disapproval by 
 slighting some of the arts or their practice. 
 He suggested that the theatre should be 
 frivolous or conventional, though he was a 
 dramatic critic to be confounded by any 
 attempt to practise his theory, and she 
 accused him of experimental talk. He said 
 that the social questions which the dramatists 
 tackled nowadays were too serious to be 
 treated for show, and that, as they cared 
 
174 DYING FIRES 
 
 nothing about them, they could not move 
 anyone who did. 
 
 " They are serious to me," he said. " I 
 want them to be discussed closely and 
 reasonably with statistics and diagrams. 
 You tell me to go to Ibsen for science and art 
 and the modern spirit. A good deal of it is 
 like a fairy-tale, and good at that, but as to 
 ' Ghosts,' — which proposes to be serious all 
 through — the science is fudge ; and ' A Doll's 
 House ' is compounded of cunning falsifica- 
 tions. Ibsen didn't care for the facts. He 
 was part artist and part moralist, but his 
 morals are in the air, and he knew nothing 
 of social questions. As to these second-rate 
 dramas with a domestic explosion and a great 
 scene in the third act " 
 
 " But don't people have great scenes in 
 third acts ? " 
 
 " Oh, well," he said, " if you have a 
 drama at all you can't beat it out thin like 
 life. We've all a childish desire that things 
 should go pop. We like our hair to go white 
 in twenty-four hours, and in the drama this 
 is capital. The dramatist who knows his 
 
A TENTATIVE DEFENCE 175 
 
 business only freshens his stuff up now and 
 then with realities ; he doesn't play on our 
 knowledge of life, but on our knowledge of 
 plays. When the drama ceases to be con- 
 ventional it's ridiculous." 
 
 It entertained her, and she wondered 
 whether this was very different from the 
 kind of thing that Richard used to say to her 
 He had seemed brilliantly entertaining to her 
 sometimes, but it was so long ago that she 
 had lost the savour of it. Are men alike ? 
 How far are they alike ? The differences 
 are hardly in their conversation, she thought. 
 Civilised witty men talking together are all 
 in a tale, and if one scores oftener than 
 another the scores are similar in kind. So 
 she thought in a revulsion of dulness. She 
 remembered again that it was a miserable 
 world. 
 
 If, nevertheless, she was stimulated by 
 Morice's talk he was more deeply moved by 
 her. He had permitted himself in thought to 
 come nearer to her, and provocation came in 
 some shreds of girlishness, the echoes of an 
 old gaiety. The brisk summer breeze had 
 
176 DYING FIRES 
 
 carried her carelessly-fastened straw hat over 
 the garden hedge, and there was laughter 
 and bustle of recovery. The fall of her face 
 to its habitual gravity as Richard came out of 
 the house struck Morice sharply. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 A STEP IN THE DARK 
 
 Morice, meditating the rashness of his life, 
 reposed upon the prudent habit of delay. He 
 did not know what to do, and his fixity of 
 resolve hardly went beyond the determination 
 to break down the barrier — to offer plain 
 words of sympathy or stimulation. Yet he 
 knew well enough that to suggest to a woman 
 the sympathetic alliance against a husband 
 would hardly admit the niceties of discretion. 
 He halted lamely outside the circle of passion, 
 desiring it, conscious of his capacity and yet 
 doubtful of it, shrinking from the intrusion 
 that might provoke her dismay and resent- 
 ment. If he could move her all might be 
 well ; without this he must be scorned as an 
 impudent interloper. It was impossible that 
 he should receive the signs that give confi- 
 dence to the approved lover ; indeed, a 
 
178 DYING FIRES 
 
 melting appeal from her would have scared 
 him. 
 
 His hesitations, or a phase of them, ended 
 one day in Manchester with the sight of a 
 taxi-cab and the reflection that it would take 
 him to her in a few minutes. Even passion 
 is controlled by the conventional oppor- 
 tunities, and, fast as he went, he had time to 
 reflect that he was merely on his way to pay 
 an afternoon call and that she might be out. 
 He plunged into a circle of ladies, creating 
 mild surprise and a quickening of interest. 
 Talking Shakespeare and the musical glasses 
 he was amazed at the unreality of things, but 
 he was polite and animated and made a good 
 impression. He could have believed that 
 Letty was startled rather than surprised at 
 his appearance ; her greeting did not en- 
 lighten him ; certainly it had not the old 
 cordial ring. For the life of him he could 
 not tell how they stood. Was he on the 
 verge of a monstrous mistake ? He thought 
 of himself as safely outside the house with 
 nothing said. It should have given him 
 something of the sanity of the outside view, 
 
A STEP IN THE DARK 179 
 
 but he only tasted the bitterness of futility 
 and frustration. Some of the ladies stayed 
 rather longer than usual, perhaps because he 
 was there. He set himself doggedly to out- 
 stay them, reflecting on the hollowness of this 
 society of the tea-cups in which the slight 
 consumption of food might be taken as 
 symbolical of the pressure of life. Only a 
 few ladies remained when, rather to Morice's 
 dismay, they began to talk about women's 
 suffrage. 
 
 Several opinions were represented, and it 
 seemed that these ladies deserved some credit 
 for having so far avoided the exhaustion of 
 the obvious ; the topic when raised was seized 
 upon with a certain avidity. Necessarily they 
 talked to him or at him, and Letty exhorted 
 him to deliver his authoritative, middle-class, 
 reconciling view. Her playfulness seemed 
 rather sad to him and he avoided the pon- 
 derous pronouncement. To a pointed ques- 
 tion he admitted that he disliked or condemned 
 — he gave them the choice of degree — cer- 
 tain persistences and violences. He evaded 
 a rather sharp young lady with : "Of course, 
 
180 DYING FIRES 
 
 your case is so good that you can hardly 
 spoil it." 
 
 She did her best, however, with some 
 acerbity of logic, and Morice tried to mollify 
 with the narration of a particular experience. 
 He spoke of a meeting at which he had seen 
 an agitated young woman waiting for her 
 turn to interrupt. 
 
 " It was dreadfully harrowing, for the poor 
 girl was trembling and quaking. Her first 
 outcry was so feeble and husky that hardly 
 anyone heard it, and she subsided in confusion. 
 But she couldn't rest, and at last she piped 
 up a shrill, desperate " 
 
 He was interrupted by the militant young 
 lady, who said : " I think it's a shame for you 
 to laugh at her, and if she was afraid " 
 
 " You are mistaken," said Morice. " I 
 admired her tremendously. I never saw any- 
 thing more plucky." 
 
 He turned to Letty and met her glowing 
 eyes. He had stimulated her, then. It was 
 unexpected and irrelevant. She said nothing, 
 and the other ladies rose together. He trifled 
 with his hat, but he remained behind. 
 
A STEP IN THE DARK 181 
 
 She did not sit, nor ask him to do so, and 
 they stood till the silence must be broken, 
 and she said : "It was good of you to come 
 on my At Home day." 
 
 He jerked out a laugh at this, and her 
 startled eyes belied her smiling lips. Less 
 evasively she said : " Your girl at the meeting 
 touched me. If I had been there — one might 
 be induced without deliberate approval — and 
 why should one try to be different from the 
 rest ? I want to go with the other women. I 
 think I'm going to join a suffrage society. 
 I'm a woman. I want to feel women about 
 me. I want to help and be helped." 
 
 " You can't live by woman alone," he said. 
 It seemed an experiment in brutality. 
 
 " No," she said dully. And then : 
 " Won't you stay ? Richard should be 
 here soon." 
 
 " Richard ! " he said. 
 
 It occurred to him that her reserve was 
 precious to him. To tear that down — to strip 
 off the disguises that make life possible — 
 she would never again be the same. 
 
 Yet it was impossible to go away and 
 
182 DYING FIRES 
 
 speak no word. She was tense, she was 
 expectant ; perhaps it was that she wished 
 to ward off something. He hesitated over 
 platitudes ; he held back ridiculously, conning 
 vague expressions of friendship or devotion. 
 He despised himself as unequal to the situa- 
 tion. He was conscious that they had gone 
 far, but yet he was not quite sure of the 
 direction. He met her eyes and she turned 
 away trembling. 
 
 " I don't understand," she said. 
 
 " Perhaps I don't," he said, " but I want 
 you to know this : I'm at your service and 
 I'm at your mercy. I offer you all I have. 
 I can hold as well as give, and it's love or 
 friendship as you will — as you need. I can't 
 see clearly — not all. I don't know how to 
 act — yet. I would strike him down or I would 
 befriend him. I'll chance the charge of 
 treachery, which would be hard to bear — even 
 treachery itself. I must risk that." 
 
 Her face was inscrutable. She groped for 
 a chair and supported herself by it. " Go, 
 please," she said, and then, " Stay." 
 
 He stood looking at her, and she added: 
 
A STEP IN THE DARK 183 
 
 " Not again : I can't bear it again." Soon 
 she said : " I do understand you." 
 
 He saw in a flash her great kindliness, 
 that would not let him depart abased and 
 chagrined. It was later that he surmised 
 there was, too, some instinct to prevent his 
 breaking quite away. She had need of him ; 
 she must have need of him. To understand 
 was to confess the need. Their relations 
 were entirely changed. They could never 
 again be friendly strangers. 
 
 A little way from the house he met Richard, 
 who tried to get him to return — wished to 
 talk to him. Morice learnt that it was about 
 come crisis or difficulty in connection with his 
 business. 
 
 "I'm getting to be rather a black sheep 
 in the Association," Richard said. " I can't 
 see eye to eye with them. They have a 
 queer idea of an alliance with the men to 
 force everyone into their fold. I see trouble. 
 I'd like to talk it out with you." 
 
 Morice excused himself, promising to make 
 an opportunity, and got away. He was 
 extremely uncomfortable, and it struck him 
 
184 DYING FIRES 
 
 that Richard's face was an index to a generous 
 mind ; fair, handsome, perturbed, it appealed 
 for help and a kindly understanding. The 
 man's friendliness reproached him. It was 
 impossible that he should present to Richard 
 a clear issue, and, indeed, everything now 
 seemed vague and immeasurable. He had 
 been controlled by principles and habits ; now 
 he had embarked on the chartless sea of 
 sympathies. To translate emotions into the 
 right actions — how was that to be achieved ? 
 He had theorised often enough on the indi- 
 vidual and the law ; the old frigid theories 
 did not seem to touch the matter. He found 
 some interest in the analogy that, as there is 
 a breaking-point in every individual at which 
 compelling inclinations must prevail, so there 
 must be a breaking-point in the law when it 
 cannot and should not confine the individual. 
 It seemed ingenious to him, but he could not 
 think it out, and the absurdity of taking com- 
 fort in ingenuities struck him. After all, it 
 was not the moral law that troubled him so 
 much as that figure of the old mother and 
 the flat impossibility of any explanations. 
 
A STEP IN THE DARK 185 
 
 Many a time he had exerted his ingenuity to 
 agree with her, and no doubt her code was 
 applicable and sufficient for everyday needs. 
 Here was the case in a thousand — or was it ? 
 Did the social fabric need a shake — a loosen- 
 ing ? It was all damnably difficult. And 
 where was he by the old lady's scriptural, 
 downright standards ? Already, she might 
 say, he had committed adultery in his heart. 
 Adultery ! If he could tell her that his 
 thoughts were strictly guarded, that the most 
 faltering and innocent lover was not more 
 circumspect than he, and yet that he would, 
 if he could, take the woman from her husband, 
 what could she make of that ? His mother 
 could understand what she called wickedness ; 
 it was a necessary part of her world, and in 
 prayer and humiliation she could, in a sense, 
 get equal with it, and even, as his cynicism 
 might suggest, get some enjoyment out of 
 the processes. But what he proposed was 
 monstrous, a kind of atheism, a gratuitous sin 
 against the sacrament of marriage. So might 
 she see it. And his mother, after all, was 
 hardly more than one of the smaller difficulties. 
 
 N 
 
186 DYING FIRES 
 
 Coming back from his work late that night 
 he was accosted by a poor, draggled creature 
 of the town, who pursued him with solicita- 
 tions. It was a pathetic travesty of tempta- 
 tion, and she was sufficiently conscious of 
 its uselessness to shift her ground to that of 
 the beggar. He gave her money and kind 
 words. Elated by the one and misunder- 
 standing the other she made again some poor 
 attempt at professional airs. Sharply checked 
 by him she wandered off whimpering. And 
 here he was, anxious to help her, and didn't 
 know how. He had done something to please 
 himself — to take the edge off the poignancy 
 of his pity — but before a tribunal of Charity 
 Commissioners and professional social students 
 his action would hardly be applauded. By 
 an easy kindliness to prolong the struggle of 
 the useless and vicious — is it so much better 
 than to create them by a perversion of the 
 lusts of the body ? A short street away he 
 heard a laugh and a snatch of song ; he had 
 done something for a fellow-creature's happi- 
 ness. Looking up at the hard brilliance of the 
 stars it seemed that these trivial impulses of 
 
A STEP IN THE DARK 187 
 
 kindliness were irrelevant ; something deeper, 
 more patient and ruthless, was needed. To 
 keep straight, an eye must be kept on some- 
 thing distant. 
 
 All thoughts tended one way now, and he 
 tortured himself by the attempt to analyse 
 the impulses that impelled him to his great 
 adventure. He was a man that would always 
 be possessed by scruples ; scruples were his 
 lot whether he went forward or returned. 
 Such a man may enjoy the full flow of his 
 impulses, but he knows that they will pre- 
 sently be subjected to cold consideration. He 
 must always be thrown back on himself ; every 
 action becomes a kind of moral adjustment. 
 He craved the penetrating brain or the en- 
 veloping vision that might show him, apart 
 from egoistic subtleties, how he stood with 
 her and with the world. As great things may 
 be compared with smaller, he would help her 
 as he would help this poor woman of the 
 streets, but he could not be sure that his 
 way might not be resolved finally into the 
 selfish inclination. The man had a rather 
 rusty sense of humour, and an intrigue in 
 
188 DYING FIRES 
 
 terms of self-purification might have appealed 
 to it. Tired of grinding his soul to a fine 
 point he would have welcomed a passion 
 that might have taken its own way with 
 him. And he had tasted of it ; in those 
 few moments with Letty the current had 
 been all one way. The stars glowed more 
 benignly now. A man can but do his best, 
 and if he is wrong it is no great matter. He 
 may make a little eddy in the flood, but it 
 must soon be effaced. 
 
 It was embarrassing to him now to meet 
 Drayton. They had their confidences together, 
 but he must withhold the essential one. You 
 cannot propose even to a liberal-minded 
 father to run away with his married daughter ; 
 always, Morice saw, the problem must be 
 lifted above the world, and yet it was of the 
 world. Drayton had had rather a guarded 
 talk with Letty, it seemed. She had expressed 
 some sensitiveness to public opinion and an 
 alarm at the possibility of others having per- 
 ceived what was open to her father. Morice 
 was struck with Drayton's generosity to 
 Richard. It was not, certainly, through any 
 
A STEP IN THE DARK 189 
 
 slackness in regard to his daughter's happi- 
 ness ; the doctor, it seems, must accept 
 incurable diseases, states of things that are 
 only tolerable because they must be tolerated. 
 
 "Of course," said Drayton, "the man's an 
 egoist. He's like all those kind people who 
 do their kindnesses purely out of their own 
 nature ; they don't get within the other people 
 and go home with them imaginatively. And 
 yet — he can do it ; he does it sometimes. 
 And he blames himself ; he's not mean." 
 
 " But," said Morice, " it's quite easy and 
 pleasant to blame yourself if you begin. 
 These egoists have found that out, and they 
 want us to listen to them." 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 THE REBUFF 
 
 Morice had tasted blood now, and to fall 
 back into the old courtesies and pretences 
 was impossible. He knew that miserable 
 people will cling to the familiar misery, but 
 his imagination would not serve him when he 
 tried to penetrate to Letty's mind. He 
 might push on experimentally as a surgeon 
 probes, doubting and hurting. Perhaps he 
 had made her more wretched than ever, and 
 he could not conceive himself appealing to 
 her as a romantic or even as a reassuring 
 figure. What use could she have for a dogged 
 devotion, and how could he touch her to 
 another conception of him ? It came to him 
 that there was need here of explanations ; 
 they were all in the dark. There must be 
 plain speaking, or it would be all too madden- 
 ing. At least, he would not act as the 
 
THE REBUFF 191 
 
 surreptitious lover of the divorce courts with 
 his trumpery code of honour, in which there 
 is some confusion between reputation and 
 concealment. He must see Richard and have 
 it out with him ; he must at least warn him 
 of the formal ending of confidence and friend- 
 ship. Or perhaps the end of friendship was 
 to be the beginning of confidence. 
 
 Richard, performing his routine task on 
 the Manchester Exchange, glanced at the 
 balcony, and his eyes fell idly on the figure of 
 a woman. To his amazement he saw that it 
 was Letty, standing where she had once stood 
 with him ; alone now, and looking down into 
 the crowd of which he was a part. His emo- 
 tion was remorseful, but it was flecked with 
 surmise. Why was she there ? Did she seek 
 the melancholy after-taste, then? Perhaps 
 some impulse to recapture their old romantic 
 phase had possessed her. Her heart was a 
 dry rock from which only the miracle could 
 bring the saving gush, but he was sorry for 
 her and immensely sorry for himself. She 
 did not appear to have seen him, and he asked 
 himself whether he should go to her. It was 
 
IQ2 DYING FIRES 
 
 not that he feared any conceivable result, but 
 he could not imagine the meeting with her 
 there. He was deeply uncomfortable, for she 
 stood sadly and gazed blindly down. " Am 
 I cruel ? " he asked himself, and the un- 
 answered question pressed him sorely. It 
 was a frightful failure in the humanities, and 
 the amazing thing was that he felt he could 
 not fail to respond to an appeal from any other 
 living being. The memory of the old passion 
 did not move him, and yet he knew that it 
 had been passion. It was this that paralysed 
 him : the passion burnt out cannot be revived 
 into a genial affection. He was of the kind 
 whose thought tends to self-justification, but 
 in his isolation here among the everyday 
 crowd the flow of it was checked. He wanted 
 an auditor, an outlet. It was not entirely a 
 fatuous choice that brought him presently 
 to Morice. It was courageous, at least, for 
 Morice, he knew, was near the centre of 
 things. Morice was, indeed, unsounded, un- 
 declared, for the few words they had had 
 together did not even open the case. Yet 
 Morice, he could swear, had condemned him 
 
THE REBUFF 193 
 
 long since ; the fellow missed little, and this 
 was not a case which superficial excuses would 
 serve. 
 
 To Morice, then, he came in the late after- 
 noon. He had lost the habit of seeking him 
 at his rooms, and some kind of explanation 
 seemed to be expected. He gave none, but 
 the instinct for postponement caused him to 
 say something about cotton trade troubles and 
 his share in them. Morice found himself 
 sympathising eagerly, and, indeed, in these 
 affairs of the world he found himself con- 
 stantly and naturally on Richard's side, and 
 ready enough to admire his conduct of them. 
 But the talk died down, and neither could 
 at once decide how to begin afresh on the 
 matters that possessed them. At last Richard 
 made the plunge. 
 
 " Yes, Morice," he said, " it's an astonishing 
 thing that we can lose touch with those that 
 are near to us. You may be together for hours 
 and say nothing, because there's nothing to 
 say. You live alone, and can't realise what 
 it is. There we are with all our common 
 experiences and all life about us, and it's all 
 
194 DYING FIRES 
 
 dead. Not a thing in life — in life, man — that 
 we want to revert to. Everything has a ton 
 weight on it. And we've suffered and hoped 
 and feared together — and loved. It's terrible. 
 Of course you condemn me. That's all right. 
 It's natural. But you condemn where you 
 don't understand. You couldn't from the 
 outside. I can't — or only dimly and half 
 consciously. It's a bad case, but I fear there 
 are many. 
 
 " Many ? " 
 
 " Life's as one finds it." 
 
 " Peel," said Morice, " you come to me with 
 confidences or outpourings of some kind, but 
 don't assume that I am a sympathetic listener." 
 
 " Anything I say may be used against me ? 
 The usual warning to the criminal. That's 
 fair enough. You'll think it monstrous that I 
 should blurt out everything — the holiness of 
 married life, the holiness of misery and error 
 and frustration. You're a man of reserves 
 and I'm not — not naturally, though I've had 
 some practice lately. Well, it's all useless, I 
 suppose. You were never my friend. I see 
 that now, but I think I was yours — as near as 
 
THE REBUFF 195 
 
 I could be to anyone, at least. I may be 
 morally deformed and unfinished, though. I 
 want to know. It's this that brings me to you, 
 I think. I want to know. Am I different — 
 am I worse than the rest ? I think I should 
 get on better if I were a worse man than I 
 am. To desire that would be a treachery 
 to what's gone before. Morice, I've loved. 
 I loved her. I had life at its best. Now — if 
 she had died when Jim did, what a difference 
 it would have made to me. And how much 
 happier I should have been ! " 
 
 " You— you ! " 
 
 " The egoist again ? Well, that's what I 
 want to know. Am I different from the 
 others ? Is it virulent egoism ? You think I 
 don't care about her. Yet still — hard-baked 
 as I am — I have gushes of sympathy for her. 
 It's true they don't correspond with her needs 
 and, indeed, they haven't any result — practi- 
 cally. You have me there." 
 
 He retained the advantage of his volubility, 
 and Morice halted between the contempt 
 that would leave his vapid eloquence un- 
 stemmed and some practical intention of 
 
196 DYING FIRES 
 
 coming to closer terms with him. And, with 
 the dissipation of the pretences of friendship 
 between them, he found himself strangely 
 veering to the fellow's point of view. Inex- 
 cusable callousness and cruelty there was, of 
 course, but the man had suffered such an 
 immense rebuff from fortune ; his disappoint- 
 ment must be immense. 
 
 " And what's the end to it all ? " said 
 Morice. 
 
 " End ? There is no end. We go on till 
 we're old enough to die. And, mind you, we 
 have the blessing of society ; we're impec- 
 cable on the outside." 
 
 " Why should you be ? " 
 
 " What ? " 
 
 " If you confess to failure why should you 
 persist ? " 
 
 " Persist ? Well, but what's the alterna- 
 tive ? There's nothing to be done. This is 
 not the beginning of life for us. What good 
 could the public rupture do ? Where should 
 we go ? What should we do ? The explana- 
 tions and fencings would be an intolerable 
 bore." 
 
THE REBUFF 197 
 
 Morice laughed : " You would explain ? " 
 Richard was checked for a moment, and he 
 began again rather more slowly : "I claim a 
 certain credit for these explanations," he said, 
 " some courage. They're partly experimental, 
 I daresay, but I want to get at myself. Don't 
 think it's all joy and confidence. I don't 
 fear you. Of course, I have conformed and 
 truckled to opinion, and want to do it still, 
 but I'm not trying to deceive myself or you. 
 And you're the poor devil condemned to 
 listen because you're in at it — yes, you are — 
 and I may be hateful to you, but I'm interest- 
 ing. Even to you I have been plausible and 
 cautious, but that's past, I think. Do you 
 want an analogy ? Well, you know ' The 
 Ring and Book.' Count Guido Franceschini 
 presented his case plausibly, but when the 
 wretch pours out his obscene soul as plain 
 Guido we come nearer to sympathy with him. 
 Morice, I'm a bitterly disappointed man. I 
 ought to turn from what I've lost to what I 
 have — or may get. I haven't courage or 
 strength or initiative. When Jim was alive I 
 was another man. I'm selfish, you say, but I 
 
198 DYING FIRES 
 
 wasn't a selfish father. I could be a father ; 
 I'd found my occupation. It's gone ; and it 
 seems I'm helpless. It's not her fault any 
 more than mine. Why, man ! if I had courage 
 I should keep a mistress in a back street and 
 get children. It's against the usages of polite 
 society. Society's on the side of the sacra- 
 ments and the spiritual beauty of a barren 
 marriage. And people don't do such things — 
 except as acknowledged vices. One can't 
 strike a woman in the face. We must keep 
 up the forms to a wife. Of course, she's 
 miserable. I've failed lamentably — but I 
 can't strike her in the face. Arid I'm an 
 orderly person of conventional habits. We're 
 all that." 
 
 " It's courage, then, you want ? " said 
 Morice. " We all want courage. Look at it 
 this way : children make the family. For a 
 wife and husband to separate — a matter of in- 
 compatibility — it's to dissolve an unfortunate 
 partnership. A sacrament ? But the thing 
 is obviously experimental. Tepid companion- 
 ship part of a sacrament ! You must embalm 
 your failure ? " 
 
THE REBUFF 199 
 
 Richard stared at him in surprise. " That 
 seems sound sense," he said. " Children 
 should be of the essence of the contract. 
 But you can't turn adrift " 
 
 " Adrift ! " 
 
 " What, exactly, do you mean ? " 
 
 What did he mean ? It seemed that 
 Richard had given him an opening that was 
 not really an escape at all, unless to some 
 quagmire. For the logical sequence seemed 
 the proposal of an arrangement between the 
 lover and the consenting husband for the 
 transference ... It was unthinkable. The 
 old methods of the battling males seemed 
 better. He remained silent, and Richard, with 
 a dawning suspicion, waited for him to speak. 
 Richard wished now to evade the issue, to 
 obtain a little time for meditation or to analyse 
 a sudden growth of resentment. He declined 
 mildly upon generalities : 
 
 " This cursed middle-aged staleness. I 
 believe it's salvation to take to some kind 
 of collecting. Compilation, accumulation — 
 they might cheat one. We lose our edge ; 
 the zest goes out of it ; but there's a passion 
 
200 DYING FIRES 
 
 of resentment left. We stick to habit, and 
 perhaps it's best. Morality's just enshrined 
 habit, you say. Well " 
 
 He looked dubiously at Morice and took 
 his hat. " I felt like making a clean breast 
 of it to you," he said, " but what's the good ? 
 I've a thousand qualifications and explana- 
 tions, but they don't matter." 
 
 " And already, perhaps, I've listened to too 
 much," said Morice. " You say that I'm 
 in at it — wasn't that your phrase ? and do 
 you know how much I'm in at it ? Do you 
 think I see nothing ? Do you think I care 
 nothing ? She — she — your wife " 
 
 Richard struck in hastily : " After all, why 
 should you talk about my wife ? " 
 
 " I thought that you had been talking 
 about her all this time." 
 
 " That's another thing." 
 
 " Your rights are comprehensive ? " 
 
 " What are yours ? " 
 
 Morice paused. " The only claim I can 
 formulate," he said, " is that of— it's rather 
 difficult to express ... If there were anything 
 in the world I could do to help her I don't 
 
THE REBUFF 201 
 
 think any kind of consideration for you would 
 stand in the way." 
 
 Richard's frank amazement turned in the 
 twinkling of an eye to the fury of the man who 
 must blame himself for the most frightful of 
 rebuffs. He was speechless and there surged 
 in upon him the confused speculations and 
 jealousies that his blindness had so long 
 deferred. He stood there frowning, while 
 Morice wondered what was to come next and 
 almost wished for the situation to be cleared 
 by some kind of violence. " What a fool," 
 reflected Richard when his mind began to 
 clear, " is the egoist." He did not give 
 Morice the benefit of his thoughts, but they 
 might almost have been read in his open 
 visage. His egoism had overwhelmed the 
 obvious considerations and he was a mark 
 for the contempt of the man whom he had 
 treated as a mere appendage or confidant. 
 The monstrous fatuity of it was a bitter pill 
 to swallow. Of course, Letty was above the 
 grosser suspicions, but what could be more 
 clear now than that this man was, in aspira- 
 tion or intention, her lover ? And it seemed 
 
202 DYING FIRES 
 
 that he himself was capable of simple jealousy. 
 Now, however, was not the time for analysis 
 or assortment of his emotions. He took the 
 blow with a simulation of calmness and nodded 
 to Morice without further words as he left. 
 
 As he walked homewards the glow of resent- 
 ment at his folly overpowered his thoughts, 
 but presently, as he paced round and round 
 about his garden, he came to a calmer mood. 
 " We refine ; we refine," he said to himself, 
 " but at bottom we are simple enough." 
 There was almost a refreshment in conceiv- 
 ing himself as the primitive male, battered 
 and disillusioned as he was. Here he was, 
 possessed by something very like the common 
 sentiment of jealousy which, it seems, exists 
 independently of affection. Or was it possible, 
 he mused, that something of the old passion 
 might be stimulated now ? He paced the 
 garden walks looking at the flowers without 
 seeing them, and he peered at the house 
 wondering where she was. How much did 
 she know ? How much did she care ? 
 
 Morice was amazing — a man with a per- 
 emptory conscience and with principles, pre- 
 
THE REBUFF 203 
 
 possessions, interests all on the side of order. 
 Richard's thoughts had a remorseful tinge, 
 for surely to have roused Morice to his morose 
 rebellion must have required a deep cause. 
 He was no commonplace abductor, and he was 
 hardly the romantic lover. He stood now 
 for a mighty innovation, and Richard, feeling 
 himself the creature of habit, was baffled by 
 the idea that innovation might have righteous- 
 ness and reason behind it. Reason may be 
 elevated into a force and may even play tricks 
 with law and order. And Letty ? Did she 
 revolt ? Did she wait for a deliverer ? He 
 thought of her — he came closer to her than 
 he had been for very long. It was amazing 
 how little he thought of her now ; his mind 
 would switch away from her in the instinctive 
 avoidance of discomfort. The poor girl had 
 sunk into apathy. Such misery as hers does 
 not stimulate. But a deliverer ? He actu- 
 ally began to consider Morice's person ; he 
 tried to gain a fresh impression of him. 
 
 He went into the house and wandered 
 through the rooms, timidly and vaguely seed- 
 ing her. She was not at home, it seemed, and 
 
204 DYING FIRES 
 
 he settled down before a desk in the little 
 room that served as his " study." Several 
 photographs of Letty hung on the walls, 
 and a crude, charming water-colour sketch 
 of her, made by some long-lost friend when 
 she was a lanky girl. They would never be 
 added to, and never removed ; they would 
 fade for ever. He had only to open a drawer 
 to find himself among the records of his past ; 
 here were innumerable letters, trivial mem- 
 entos, all the salient hints from which he might 
 reconstruct his life. He plunged into them 
 with resolution or curiosity — he was not quite 
 sure with which. There were letters which 
 recalled the fiery centre of that dead past ; 
 he was startled by the ardour of them ; so, 
 she had written to him. Had she his letters 
 and did she ever pore over them ? And here 
 were some of his scribblings in verse when he 
 had tried to justify his passion's claim to the 
 lyrical temper. To his disillusioned eye they 
 were curious effusions. He had worked dog- 
 gedly at them, and the necessity to get in 
 those plaguey rhymes had produced some sad 
 cacophonies. And here was his last attempt 
 
THE REBUFF 205 
 
 — an unfinished sonnet written secretly and 
 experimentally, on an impulse, a doubt, a 
 suspicion, some months after Jim's death. 
 He had ground it out so far and then abandoned 
 it, not knowing, indeed, how it should be 
 finished, or whether, presently, he would be 
 ashamed to remember it. He read : 
 
 " When that the term of mortal love is run, 
 Ere yet his ever-darkening house he leaves, 
 He thinks the happy hours, so well begun, 
 To lengthen out with many make-believes ; 
 And so, in spite of Fate, he lingers still 
 Straining a little warmth from dying fires, 
 And even yet it seems that he might fill 
 With hoarded drops the cup of his desires." 
 
 So it stopped ; and he recalled some con- 
 fusion of self-contempt for the literary effort 
 of the thing and the insincerity or insufficiency 
 of it. For he had felt that he could not bring 
 Jim into it, and yet Jim then was the biggest 
 thing in the situation. Now he, too, felt that 
 Jim was very dim and distant ; it was not 
 Jim, but something to take his place, some- 
 thing with which all his faculties and interests 
 would grapple, that was wanted. He had a 
 dreadful pang of commiseration for that poor 
 barren woman, and in this there was positive 
 
206 DYING FIRES 
 
 reassurance to him. He was not inhuman, as 
 in his heart he had sometimes feared ; but 
 he had an extraordinary capacity for shutting 
 out things. Letty had long been shut out, 
 and now it seemed that from the past came 
 some feeble knocking on the door. It had 
 all come, he knew, from Morice's provoca- 
 tion, and he was ready to scorn himself for 
 this. But was it possible that there might 
 be another end to it all ? He didn't under- 
 stand his wife. He used to know her quite 
 well. In fair times she was limpid enough 
 and in perfect confidence she gave him all she 
 knew of herself. All manner of reserves 
 and quiet resentments had grown, and through 
 these the past was very dim. He was almost 
 ready to persuade himself that he had had an 
 unrequited affection for her or she for him ; 
 that they had not gone through everything 
 and come out on the other side, but that they 
 had really not penetrated beyond the surface. 
 Or was an Indian summer possible ? Here was 
 a return of the man's old buoyancy. His wife, 
 in all eyes but his, remained a charming and 
 attractive person. Was it, after all, too late ? 
 
THE REBUFF 207 
 
 And if, presently, the miracle should happen 
 and they should, after all, have a child — 
 children. . . . Life was stirring in him again ; 
 even the best of life was possible — no matter 
 how it had been brought within his vision. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 REPETITIONS AND EXPERIMENTS 
 
 It had seemed impossible, but for a time 
 they settled into the old routine again. 
 Morice came and went as before, feeling that 
 the train was laid for an explosion and that 
 any one of them could light it. The two had 
 a top layer of sympathy for Richard, who was 
 very much harassed by affairs, and talked 
 pretty freely about them. The man who sees 
 the justice of a movement may not like the 
 shake it gives to himself, and the operatives 
 in Richard's mill did not always make fine 
 distinctions between him and his class. There 
 was a point, it seemed, beyond which Letty's 
 softening would not go, but with Richard 
 she took on some kindliness of aspect ; she 
 was encouraging, if not quite heartening. 
 Her sympathies were simply and unreasonably 
 with the struggling and revolting labourer, 
 
REPETITIONS AND EXPERIMENTS 209 
 
 and it dashed her a little to hear that he was 
 sometimes a skilled artisan with three or 
 four pounds a week and a wage-earning 
 family. The question of working short time, 
 as they called it, had been answered by an 
 improvement in trade ; then came a demand 
 from the operatives for an advance in wages, 
 and Richard, who had been against his 
 colleagues of the Association on the short-time 
 question, now found himself very much against 
 them on the other. 
 
 " You see, Morice," he said, " we always 
 have these advances of wages dragged out 
 of us. We're as hard to move when 
 there's a cause for moving as when there 
 isn't. Then, too late, we offer half what they 
 want." 
 
 " What's their case ? " said Morice. 
 
 " Our profits have improved and they say 
 the cost of living's higher." 
 
 " What's yours ? " 
 
 " Our side says that the profits have only 
 just begun to improve, that they'll collapse 
 again, and that wages are now at the highest 
 point recorded." 
 
210 DYING FIRES 
 
 Letty said : " You can afford to be gener- 
 ous, surely." 
 
 " It's hardly a question of generosity," 
 said Morice. 
 
 " Why not ? " 
 
 "I'm not here to lecture on political 
 economy, but these things are settled by 
 forces. If they're strong enough to make 
 you pay you'll have to ; if you are strong 
 enough to resist you won't." 
 
 Letty said : " I don't like you to put it so. 
 They're all human beings. The two sides 
 meet and talk. Richard told me how they 
 settled the last dispute." 
 
 She faltered, remembering that occasion 
 of a sympathy with him so much deeper, so 
 passioriate. 
 
 " They're delegates," said Morice. " Gener- 
 osity in a delegate is also called treachery." 
 
 " It can't be treacherous if you're generous 
 yourself," said Letty. 
 
 " Mind you, Morice," said Richard, " the 
 personal element comes in. You can be 
 wrecked by obstinacies. I grant what you 
 say about forces — up to a point." 
 
REPETITIONS AND EXPERIMENTS 211 
 
 " Yes," said Morice. " I suppose obstinacy 
 may become a force in itself, but it won't 
 stand against a multitude." 
 
 " The multitude may be obstinate." 
 
 " Yes. It's not purely economic." 
 
 " We've a man on the Association committee 
 — Grimes. Do you know his single argument 
 on this question — his simple iteration ? In 
 his way an honest fellow. He thumps the 
 table and says : ' They've got to eat dirt.' " 
 
 " Who ? " said Letty. 
 
 " The men — their leaders. He hates them. 
 If they bite the dust he'll be happy. Of 
 course, it's not wholly selfish. He stands for 
 his class ; he fears it'll be overwhelmed. ' I'll 
 be master in my own mill,' he says. Of course, 
 he isn't, anyhow. He'll shut it up or run 
 four days a week if the Association tells 
 him to." 
 
 "As to this dirt-eating," said Morice, 
 " there are a few of your operatives saying 
 the same sort of thing." 
 
 " I know," said Richard. " We're feroci- 
 ous and inhuman on both sides. That makes 
 it so wretched — that's so hateful. I'm getting 
 
212 DYING FIRES 
 
 tired of it. I used to rejoice in the exercise 
 of my faculties, in my powers. I'm stupidly 
 irritated now. What's the use of being 
 irritated with the world ? There are times 
 
 when " He stopped, looking at them 
 
 dubiously. "Well, well," he said. "It's 
 no use being too serious." 
 
 " You don't want your work all drudgery," 
 said Morice. " These upsets should help to 
 make it interesting." 
 
 " I tire of things," Richard said. 
 
 They were both rather kind to him, and 
 when Morice had gone there was a futile little 
 semi-reconciliation that hardly dared to reach 
 to the essentials. They had been like geese 
 within the chalked circle, but they maintained 
 conventions because they had nothing better 
 to do. To break away from one another was 
 to break a distant link ; they still had Jim 
 in common, though that old state of tender 
 and noble imaginings had suffered a bitter 
 substitution of repinings. Now they did not 
 speak plain words to one another, caresses 
 were impossible — they lay beyond the deeper 
 reconcilement — but their courtesies for the 
 
REPETITIONS AND EXPERIMENTS 213 
 
 time lost some of the irony, they turned to 
 one another with inquiry and consideration. 
 It seemed to her very hard that she should 
 add to his cares ; she imagined how in 
 hearing them she might have halved them. A 
 little parenthesis of tenderness was jealously 
 guarded, and in his presence the later habit of 
 reticence and repression prevailed. Her pride 
 in him had flared up when, lately, he had in- 
 dignantly denounced a cruel display of caste in 
 the rejection of a tradesman's daughter from 
 some school or class of the neighbourhood, and 
 she had even sympathised with his furious 
 insult to an acquaintance concerned in it. 
 Morice's attempt to rationalise the affair she 
 took very coldly. 
 
 They had been rather more than polite 
 to one another, they had been almost gentle, 
 and his sanguine temperament suggested 
 again that, after all, things might not be past 
 mending. The attempt to compromise on 
 affairs of taste had been a failure, but was it 
 possible to come back to the heart of things ? 
 To recall Jim — to make him live again — was 
 that possible ? They could not begin now to 
 
214 DYING FIRES 
 
 sentimentalise over locks of hair ; an exquisite 
 sadness is not the thing. The boy had been 
 full of life ; it is a freshness and fulness of life 
 that is wanted, not the dimness of loss and 
 regrets. They sat apart in the room and yet 
 expectantly. He turned to her suddenly. 
 
 " We made a mistake," he said. " When 
 
 Jim died " Some motion of negation 
 
 made him stop. Yet she waited, and he went 
 on again : " You see, the little lad was full of 
 joys and interests, and we tried to halt our 
 joys and interests, to stop them, to taste the 
 past, to rely on sadness and memory. It 
 wasn't fair to his spirit : that wasn't the 
 way." 
 
 " What was the way ? " she said. " To 
 forget him ? " 
 
 " Not to forget, but to be free. We 
 haven't been free. He has constrained us ; 
 it's been an awful tyranny. We can hardly 
 remember him, and yet " 
 
 " What ? " she said. " You can't remember 
 him ? " 
 
 " Can you ? " 
 
 " I don't know what you mean." 
 
REPETITIONS AND EXPERIMENTS 215 
 
 " Oh, I have images and echoes and 
 illusions, but he's gone, he's dead." 
 
 " He is not dead." 
 
 " I'm not talking of the immortality of the 
 soul, my dear." 
 
 " I know all that you know. I feel all 
 that you feel." 
 
 " And yet you cling to your illusions." 
 
 " What illusions ? " 
 
 " Ah ! I have them, too." 
 
 " We are in sympathy, it seems." 
 
 " What can I do to help you ? " 
 
 " Nothing. You can do nothing." 
 
 He said bitterly : "I'm disillusion and 
 despair to you ? " 
 
 " Oh, is it worth while — all this ? " she 
 said. 
 
 He left her. He hardly felt that he had 
 failed, for success was not credible nor even 
 desirable. Letty and he dined out industri- 
 ously, and that night in the men's after-dinner 
 talk the menage of a famous painter was dis- 
 cussed, and there was a tentative contention, 
 scandalising to some of the company, that the 
 artist was better without the distractions of a 
 
216 DYING FIRES 
 
 family. A young man contended rather dog- 
 matically for the old conventions of Bohemia 
 and the advantages of the mistress over the 
 wife. He found in the slacker arrangement 
 the essence of Christianity. ' ' Take no thought 
 for the morrow," he said. " Trust in the 
 world. Our morality is founded on the idea 
 of property, which is clearly anti-Christian. 
 And property must be concentrated on a 
 limited number of children. Your women 
 will have one child, or two at the most ; it's 
 enough for the sensation of motherhood. 
 The fine old careless fecundity is going. 
 There's no trust in God." 
 
 For a company hardly inured to specula- 
 tion it was bold stuff ; the speaker was 
 conscious of that. It happened that nobody 
 Was eager to challenge him, but Richard 
 asked him rather languidly how far he would 
 make responsibility for the children extend. 
 
 "As far as you are interested," was the 
 reply. 
 
 " And what becomes of them when your 
 interest's gone ? " 
 
 " The State steps in." 
 
REPETITIONS AND EXPERIMENTS 217 
 
 " That's Socialism," said a man, with an air 
 of finality. 
 
 " Of course," and the young man sketched 
 out a scheme of some neatness, which included 
 a lethal chamber. 
 
 " Thank God for that," said Richard, and 
 the company laughed. He began to put a 
 reasonable case for society, conscious of some 
 sympathy with the youthful rebel, whose 
 crudities of design were easily attacked. The 
 company was with Richard, and all took on 
 the aspect of " we too could an we would." 
 Richard grew rather tired of his homily and 
 ended perfunctorily, when the young man 
 surprised him by saying : " You don't believe 
 all that yourself." 
 
 And, indeed, he reflected, society has not 
 much hold on a miserable man. Later he 
 talked a little, quietly, to the youngster, 
 and liked him better when his conversation 
 lost its exhibitory quality. He seemed very 
 much the decent youth who would dedicate 
 a volume of erotic poems to his mother. 
 Richard's host took an opportunity to con- 
 gratulate him on having made the young 
 
218 DYING FIRES 
 
 bounder sing small. " I couldn't very well 
 do it myself," he said. " A guest, you know. 
 But he doesn't come here again." A spirit 
 of contrariety made Richard introduce the 
 lad to Letty when they went into the drawing- 
 room, and presently he came back to find them 
 discussing no less a subject than goodness, 
 the text being, it seemed, the dying injunction 
 of a great genial spirit, who, after all experience 
 and vicissitudes, could find nothing better to 
 say than " Be good, my dear." And here 
 was this young Mr. Herbertson maintaining 
 impulsively that it was impossible to like 
 anyone who wasn't good, that he himself 
 liked or loved his fellow-creatures precisely 
 in proportion to their goodness. Perhaps 
 Richard had missed the definition of this 
 important quality ; they seemed already 
 to be using it pretty well as a counter. He 
 suggested that even goodness might lack some 
 spice or veneer of charm, but Letty, rather 
 whimsically, said : " We're past that." 
 
 " Look round on your friends," said Mr. 
 Herbertson. " Go deep enough and you'll 
 find I'm right. Of course," he said, turning 
 
REPETITIONS AND EXPERIMENTS 219 
 
 to Richard, " I'm not talking of conventional 
 morality." 
 
 Letty seemed to be gently amused by him, 
 and it struck Richard that she would be a good 
 influence on such a lad. It could hardly be 
 for this that she invited him to call on her ; 
 she had need enough of distraction. As they 
 drove home Richard mentioned Herbertson, 
 and she said : " He's rather like you." 
 He meditated on this. " Yes," he said, " I 
 feel myself being out-Heroded. He might 
 be good for me." He added : " I hope he'll 
 amuse you." She did not reply, and his mind 
 turned to the next day's plans and the work 
 that should occupy if it did not enthral him. 
 After all, work's the thing. 
 
 ter 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 LATITUDE 
 
 It was strange for Letty to reflect that 
 though she was friendly with many women 
 she had no friends among them. It was 
 strange and sometimes it was humiliating ; 
 there must be something wrong with a woman 
 who does not make friends. Yet it is a world 
 in which they are unevenly distributed, and 
 perhaps some who are formed for friendship 
 contrive to go through life without them. 
 Her schoolgirl friends had fallen off and then 
 her father had absorbed her. There, indeed, 
 was her great friendship, her justification. 
 And then she married and there was Jim, and 
 no need of anything beyond her pleasant 
 acquaintances. Now, in her sore need, she 
 was relieved to think that no woman could 
 ask for Jier confidences. She dreaded the 
 confidence that must fix the impalpable, and 
 
LATITUDE 221 
 
 yet she looked round for the ideal confidante. 
 It was a grim amusement to look for her at the 
 parties, though she had no intention of pouring 
 her heart out. Once the talk fell on a harrow- 
 ing play that had been the fashion, and Letty, 
 who had seen it, could take her part in the 
 conversation. The hero and heroine had 
 fallen apart, and had their passions of re- 
 crimination and their high tirades. Presently 
 the irritant is removed, they forgive and for- 
 get magnificently, and it is plain that the rest 
 of their lives will be spent at a full pressure 
 of exalted amity, and that they will even be 
 youthful lovers again. Letty laughed at this 
 theatrical case of rapid readjustment, which 
 once she could have accepted as a kind of 
 truth, and the other ladies were a little puzzled 
 at her contempt. Some thought it very true 
 to life ; others, more knowing, pleaded the 
 theatrical convention which must abbreviate 
 a little if we are to get home to bed ; Letty 
 would have none of it. She had begun to 
 have an amazed respect for truth, for silence 
 and slow time and the eternal things that 
 make realities ; she felt herself a part of 
 
222 DYING FIRES 
 
 the gradual processes of nature. She was as 
 old as the rocks, as changeless as the hills, 
 and not as these people of hectic passions, 
 these humpty-dumpties so easily set up again. 
 She was goaded at last to some imperfect 
 exposition of her notion of domestic differ- 
 ences and the crawling tragedies that may 
 not be shaken off, but the ladies listened with 
 polite incredulity and one said : " Happily 
 we know that Mrs. Peel does not speak from 
 her own experience." 
 
 She was a little vexed with herself, and it 
 Occurred to her that some of these women 
 might have ironical reserves when they thought 
 of their husbands, but that their habits of 
 loyalty and reticence were closer and stronger 
 than hers. Habitual broodings had become 
 an enslavement, and she longed for some kind 
 of action. What could she do short of the 
 plunge into deep waters ? Morice had avowed 
 his devotion — or had he ? He had said 
 something, he had suggested more, and she 
 had listened tentatively ; she had shut neither 
 her ears nor her heart. She could not ; she 
 could not close the way of release, even though 
 
LATITUDE 223 
 
 she would never take it. She assured herself 
 that Morice was but an idea, and so it could 
 hardly be wrong to use him — to use it — as an 
 assuagement. Yet she did think of him ; 
 she thought of the man himself. He was close 
 and quiet, he was dark and spare ; she began 
 to conceive him as romantic, and there was a 
 time when she thought of him primarily as 
 able. It was strange how she used to take 
 him for granted ; he had seemed a small, 
 shadowy creature beside Richard. He had 
 been mysterious ; she had thought of him 
 as mysterious, and it had given her a kind of 
 relief, for so much was arid and distinct. And 
 then, on that well-remembered day, lightning 
 had flashed from the sombre cloud ; without 
 preliminary and without reserve he had 
 offered perfect service. She caught her breath 
 as she remembered it. He had offered love 
 with a passion that was not, surely, that of 
 the lover. In the romances the lovers were 
 splendid sinners, daring everything for love, 
 but he was not like that ; he seemed to glow 
 with a righteous ardour ; she could picture 
 him as the deliverer. And, indeed, this 
 
224 DYING FIRES 
 
 darkly glowing, austere young man could 
 hardly be associated with a moral lapse. 
 She recalled Mr. Herbertson's whimsical pro- 
 nouncement about liking the good men, and 
 in the light of it Morice seemed extraordinarily 
 likeable. 
 
 Her thoughts were rashnesses, and she had 
 panics and reactions. In the old safe days 
 she had prided herself on her liberalism, and 
 now it seemed that this might help to betray 
 her. She had repudiated rigid moral dogmas 
 that would circumscribe charity, and now 
 with consternation she found herself on the 
 slippery downward way that might lead to 
 chaos and disgust. To make a concession is 
 to concede everything ; agree that life with a 
 husband may be intolerable and you become 
 at a stroke the wanton. Salvation is in 
 the conservative reaction, and she almost saw 
 herself, as Patience on a monument, safe 
 and circumspect and dull. She wanted help 
 and advice, or at least to get away from her 
 own churning, maddening thoughts. She even 
 thought of an unburdenment to her father, 
 whose kindness and wisdom she could trust, 
 
LATITUDE 225 
 
 but as yet this was impossible. She did not 
 reason against it, but she felt it to be impossible 
 when she tried to rehearse the scene. Besides, 
 hers was no case for the pronouncements of 
 wisdom ; nobody could be wise enough for 
 this. It was a strange and thrilling idea that 
 Morice, of all men and women, was the one 
 whom she dared consult. She could not think 
 of him as a lover, unless it was as one from 
 whom all base passions were purged, a friend 
 true as steel, always on her side rather than his 
 own. Of course it was impossible ; she would 
 not have harboured the thought but that it 
 was a safe indulgence. 
 
 The Draytons did some entertaining, as 
 Mrs. Drayton was clear, if her husband was 
 not, that their position demanded it. Per- 
 haps she thought that it was good for trade, 
 though Drayton was sufficiently well estab- 
 lished to neglect this form of advertisement, 
 which is sedulously cultivated by some genial 
 souls who recognise a valuable asset in their 
 geniality. He liked to have their dinner- 
 parties arranged for a Saturday, the news- 
 paper man's holiday, when Morice could come, 
 
226 DYING FIRES 
 
 and it was on such an occasion that Letty 
 found herself gazing across the table at her 
 husband. She had a memory of a distressed 
 romantic lady who came to such a gathering 
 as this, having left her husband and home 
 never to return to them ; and the lady had 
 been a little late in joining the company, had 
 apologised prettily and thereupon been ex- 
 tremely charming and witty, while all the 
 time she was wondering where she should 
 that night lay her head. Letty's wildness 
 was, so far, only in idea, and there could be 
 no difficulty about a lodging for the night, 
 anyhow. Suppose, indeed, that she and 
 Richard outstayed the rest of the company, 
 as was usual and natural, and then that she 
 should tell him to go home alone ? Perhaps 
 nobody would be very much surprised ; if 
 she meant to be a runaway wife that was the 
 way. It was an impossible way, an unthink- 
 able way, all the same. She could imagine her 
 father's deepening gravity, her mother's 
 incredulity, real and yet overacted. And 
 then her life would become a wearisome 
 struggle against everybody's constant, open 
 
LATITUDE 227 
 
 and concealed, conscious and instinctive, 
 efforts to head her back into the fold. And 
 she would go back — unless, indeed, Richard 
 would not have her. 
 
 After all these years she did not know what 
 he would do in a strange situation, and it ought 
 to have helped to retain his attraction ; she 
 hadn't got to the bottom of him. The 
 strangeness of their position was that they 
 were not, in the ordinary way, tired of one 
 another ; they had stiffened and retreated 
 into an antagonism that was all secrets, and 
 reticences and shrinkings. The right thing 
 was to have a burst of emotions and so to 
 crack this shell, but the right thing was 
 impossible. And there he was across the 
 table, and she watched him furtively and 
 admired him. He was in pretty good form 
 to-night, and certainly he was no mere wind- 
 bag, though he had a large share of the talking. 
 Clearly, he was a finer, nobler person than the 
 men about him ; even now she could re- 
 capture some of her old pride in him, though 
 it was little more than a vapid aftertaste. 
 When the talk ceased to be general, she saw 
 
228 DYING FIRES 
 
 how the young woman beside him listened 
 eagerly and glanced at him with glowing 
 eyes. He was no vulgar flirt, but he had a 
 great common measure of kindliness that 
 seemed tinged with devotion for every woman. 
 He let them talk a little and easily persuaded 
 them that they had kindled him, for in these 
 conversations he was sure to take the bigger 
 share. He wasn't a sham. He wasn't a 
 sham. He was all that he seemed, and how 
 much more ! But there are some romantic 
 landscapes with which we become familiar ; 
 we see through the mists and we know the 
 back of the hills, and then comes disillusion 
 that can hardly change again into the famili- 
 arity of affection. The romance was in our- 
 selves ; all the forms and lights and shadows 
 persist, but our mood will not transmute 
 them again. 
 
 The dinner-party geniality does not go 
 very deep, but it was well maintained on 
 this occasion. With stirrings of compunction 
 Letty saw her father and Richard in lively, 
 friendly disputation, and Morice joining in ; 
 how excellently, she thought, would these 
 
LATITUDE 229 
 
 three get on together if she did not exist. 
 It was not the choice of either of them that 
 the talk drifted to a play that had been at a 
 Manchester theatre, but Morice's opinion 
 was directly invited. The lady beside Richard, 
 who asked for it, added : "Of course I read 
 what you said in the paper." 
 
 "Why, then ?" 
 
 " Well, but, Mr. Morice, what do you really 
 think ? " 
 
 Morice gazed at her whimsically. " What 
 subtle form of insult is this ? " he said. " Of 
 course, it's not a new one, but I never under- 
 stood it. One tries to express an opinion 
 in reason and measure, and these intellectual 
 young ladies want you to raise it all to terms 
 they can make something of." 
 
 " Oh, I know you talked about comedy 
 and emotions and so on, but you never said 
 whether they did right or wrong." 
 
 "Who am I ?" began Morice. 
 
 " But it's what we want to know. That's 
 what we're all discussing. That's the point. 
 What ought they to have done ? " 
 
 " It's all rather remote, isn't it ? " said 
 
230 DYING FIRES 
 
 Richard. " It's like these puzzles in etiquette 
 that people solve for prizes, or the golf inquiries 
 that go to the rules committee." 
 
 The young lady turned round to look at 
 him. " Do you really think that such cases 
 are uncommon ? " she said. 
 
 " Certainly. These dramatists and novel- 
 ists can't get on with the normal. They're 
 making the world restless though." 
 
 " You really think they have some effect ? " 
 said Drayton. 
 
 " They're revolutionaries, aren't they, Peel ? " 
 said Morice. " That's your line. Mr. Peel 
 is down on the arts." 
 
 " The worst of it is," said Richard, "that 
 they're revolutionaries who do it all for fun. 
 They boast that they've no convictions, but 
 they're ready to upset the world." 
 
 " He'll get to Dickens and Thackeray 
 directly," said Morice, " as all the clever young 
 men do now." 
 
 " Of course I shall get to Dickens and 
 Thackeray. This world was good enough for 
 them. They had imagination, and your 
 modern man has only ingenuity. He wants 
 
LATITUDE 231 
 
 to push a little farther into social possibilities 
 every time." 
 
 " But how is he going to upset the world ? " 
 said the young lady. 
 
 Richard smiled upon her. " It's all right," 
 he said. " It'll last our time." 
 
 " Now, that's not taking me seriously," she 
 said with a little petulance. 
 
 " Let's not take things seriously," he said, 
 and they dropped to more confidential 
 talk. 
 
 But the subject lasted a little longer among 
 the others, and Drayton found himself expatia- 
 ting in support or explanation of Richard. 
 
 " The clever young dramatist seems to be 
 stumped," he said, "if he must stick to 
 ordinary marital relations. You'll say it's 
 always been so, but there's a difference. It's 
 not an erring woman who returns broken- 
 hearted now, but a triumphant creature who 
 stays away. Of course, you soon reach another 
 plane of convention. We'll have daring young 
 fellows all in favour of hearths and homes 
 presently." 
 
 Richard's young lady, still pressing for 
 
232 DYING FIRES 
 
 intellectual distinction, said : " What do you 
 think of Ibsen, Mr. Morice ? " 
 
 " Oh," said Morice, " I like Dickens and 
 Thackeray and Ibsen and all the old folk." 
 
 " You won't take me seriously, either," she 
 said plaintively. " Mrs. Peel, was it right 
 of him to make Nora run away ? " 
 
 " And there," said Morice, interfering 
 quickly, " you raise the interesting question 
 of Ibsen's didacticism. It's fashionable, isn't 
 it, or was when Ibsen was the fashion, to say 
 that he was just having his fun, as Peel calls 
 it ? Is he your revolutionary who doesn't 
 care about revolt, Peel ? " 
 
 A black-bearded, saturnine professor struck 
 in : " But what are the ladies who do such 
 things ? Are they doing it for fun or ? " 
 
 " High moral principles ? " said Richard. 
 His eye took in Letty casually. He had been 
 conscious of her, and in the charm she exercised 
 over other men he had glimpses of his own 
 past. And here and now she seemed a sharper, 
 finer creature than when she was Jim's 
 mother and he loved her. Oh, they admired 
 one another! " I think it's commonly that 
 
LATITUDE 233 
 
 they simply can't stand their husbands," he 
 said. 
 
 Letty was overwhelmed with a sudden 
 panic of self-consciousness, and was thankful 
 that Morice's gaze was resolutely withheld. 
 She said something about the acting of the 
 play that had started the discussion, which 
 languished presently. Mrs. Drayton, who 
 had found the topic an uneasy one, gathered 
 the ladies' eyes and they retired. The men 
 settled to talk that was more natural and less 
 showy, and old Dr. Buddicombe obtained his 
 long-delayed innings. The brisk exchanges 
 of the younger people had left him behind, 
 but now he delivered a little homily on per- 
 manence and the solid virtues. 
 
 " You all talk," he said, " as though it were 
 an open question whether a woman should leave 
 her husband. Why ! Drayton, in my young 
 days a man who talked like that wouldn't have 
 
 been asked out, and a woman " He poured 
 
 out a glass of port. " No," he said. " You're 
 a decadent lot and a sentimental lot. Which 
 is this, Drayton ? It's good. The world 
 has still some good port in it. And the grapes 
 
 Q 
 
234 DYING FIRES 
 
 are growing ; there's hope. Ay, but, damn it ! 
 there'll be no port presently, unless it's a bottle 
 or two at the chemist's. Do you know, 
 Drayton, that I've a niece who had some 
 '47 port left to her by her grandfather ? 
 Monstrous thing — she was residuary legatee. 
 It had been well treated ; the recorking 
 must have been excellent. Good condition. 
 Miraculous at that age. I had a bottle or 
 two. Well, I found she was giving it to the 
 poor — old, bed-ridden crones, and so on. I 
 told her to stop — abominable waste. Do you 
 know what she said ? Well, she said I ought 
 to be ashamed of myself. These poor old 
 creatures should have the best she could give 
 them — '47 port ! I offered her three bottles 
 of sound wine for every one she had. No. I 
 offered nearly its value in cash. Oh dear, 
 no ! There ought to be a law that wine cannot 
 pass to a woman — a kind of Salic law." 
 
 " Ah, Buddicombe," said Drayton, pour- 
 ing out half a glass of claret with the air of a 
 toper, " I'm afraid wine-drinking's a failing 
 art. The future's with the spare people. 
 Our day's nearly over." 
 
LATITUDE 235 
 
 " Your day ! " said Buddicombe. " You're 
 a humbug. You surgeons think you're the 
 men of the future. There'll be a revolt 
 against you, though. But think of that ! 
 Think of that, Peel ! '47 ! " 
 
 " And we've always got the poor with us," 
 said Richard. 
 
 " Eh ? " said Buddicombe. " Oh ! You. 
 Yes. You're the kind of chap to justify it. 
 I hear of your goings-on. Stick to your class, 
 man. You'll do no good. Fair employer and 
 so on, of course. But stick to your pals." 
 
 " Not quite the same thing," said Richard. 
 
 " You ought to find your pals in your own 
 class." 
 
 " I haven't a class," said Richard. 
 
 " Oh ! ho ! And you, Morice ? I suppose 
 you haven't." 
 
 " I'm in a lot of sectional ones," said Morice. 
 " I belong to the humble class, the mild class, 
 the quiet class, and so on." 
 
 " You're like that rag of yours," said 
 Buddicombe. " You belong to every class 
 but your own." 
 
 Cheerful laughter greeted this sally, for the 
 
236 DYING FIRES 
 
 Herald was no great favourite in Man- 
 chester society. It thrived on detraction, 
 hatred, criticism, respect, simulated scorn ; 
 Morice was accustomed to parry the insolence 
 of those who would invite him to private re- 
 pudiations. Old Buddicombe's good-tempered 
 jocosities did not hurt him, but looking 
 at the half-dozen men around his host, he 
 realised that it was Peel alone to whom 
 he could speak of his work, and Peel alone 
 that could speak to him understandingly of 
 its spirit. He threw a sudden, casual word 
 to Richard, who replied easily and almost 
 cordially, and the two entered upon a defensive 
 alliance against the others with Drayton as 
 the impartial chairman. Richard gave them 
 a rather strange burst of eloquence in defence 
 of certain violences of revolt ; its want of 
 measure and discretion offended Morice, who, 
 nevertheless, did his best to rationalise it : 
 
 " Peel expresses generously," he said, " what 
 so many of us feel. It's idle to denounce these 
 things and to call them good or bad. They re- 
 present forces with which we have to deal. By 
 the way, parenthetically, they are wonderfully 
 
LATITUDE 237 
 
 interesting and even beautiful forces. But 
 in the case of this strike you want to act 
 as though it were simply a moral question — 
 taking morality in a kind of schoolboy sense. 
 These fellows have broken faith, you say. In 
 a sense they have, though you might find it 
 hard to bring personal responsibility home to 
 many of them. It's no use promising not to 
 be washed away by a flood. Call'them chil- 
 dren or criminal lunatics if you like, but don't 
 just point to the moral law." 
 
 " You chaps are too damned free with the 
 moral law," said Buddicombe. 
 
 " Good sorts of fellows are, in talk," said 
 Drayton. " They feel so safe them- 
 selves." 
 
 " Oh, I know," said Buddicombe. " It's 
 straight-laced fellows like Morice that play 
 the mischief." 
 
 " How d'you know he's straight-laced ? " 
 said Richard. 
 
 " Look at him. Look at him," said Buddi- 
 combe. 
 
 " Physiognomy's an obscure science," said 
 Richard, smiling. 
 
238 DYING FIRES 
 
 Buddicombe handled the port. " It's all 
 in a man's face," he said. " Look at me. 
 Anyone can tell I'm a bibulous old ruffian. 
 Look at Drayton." 
 
 " You see it when you know," said Richard. 
 
 "By Gad! You're frank. Is that all 
 you see in me ? " 
 
 " Good heavens ! " cried Richard. " I 
 wasn't thinking of you. But anyone can see 
 you're an eminent man." 
 
 " Eminent ! What's that ? " 
 
 An eager young man, waiting for his chance, 
 broke in : " Yes, there are some men who 
 are just great. Of course, Dr. Buddicombe, 
 we know what you're eminent for. But there 
 are men who do nothing in particular ; they 
 just emanate character." 
 
 " Hard to tell them from the humbugs, I 
 should think," said Buddicombe, " but I see 
 you're getting to a more respectful line. 
 With such a port as this at hand I'm 
 easily mollified. Drayton, I thank God I'm 
 not a surgeon and I've regular consulting 
 hours. Yes, I'm a great man in the void. 
 You nippy young fellows may be doing things, 
 
LATITUDE 239 
 
 but you're small fry. Pass that port. I 
 haven't a care in the world." 
 
 " That's looking at things broadly," said 
 Morice. " That's the way of greatness." 
 
 The old man raised his eyeglasses, adjusted 
 them, and favoured Morice with a stare. " Of 
 course," he said, " you never know what a 
 fellow like that will do." 
 
 Presently Letty and Richard were in the 
 cab together, going home. She shrank into 
 her corner, but not too obviouslv. She had a 
 dread of some kind of advance from him, and 
 recollected the beginnings of their estrange- 
 ment, when it would have been a hope. And 
 she recalled, too, the cab-rides they had had 
 together when they were married lovers in 
 happy seclusion, and before that, in the early 
 days of their engagement, when it was strange 
 and thrilling and she would and she would not, 
 and he was embarrassed and recoiled too far 
 from her ill-regulated, shaky repulsions. All 
 had gone except the poor old cab ; it might 
 have been the same cab ; the musty smell 
 and the racketing noise had endured. She 
 felt that she must speak, the silence was too 
 
240 DYING FIRES 
 
 full of possibilities, and yet there was nothing 
 to say between the utterly trivial and the 
 portentous ; and they had long since ceased/ 
 to make small-talk for one another. She 
 fidgeted and coughed a little, and they had a 
 word about the disposition of the window, 
 and then there was another silence, which she 
 broke in a voice that seemed to her husky 
 and yet vibrating. She said : 
 
 " Was it amusing after we left ? " 
 
 " Left ? " 
 
 " I mean in the dining-room." 
 
 " Oh yes. So, so. Old Buddicombe got 
 an innings." 
 
 " What did he talk about ? " 
 
 " Himself, I think. Oh ! and Morice's 
 inscrutability." 
 
 " His — what a queer subject ! " 
 
 " It was only touched on." 
 
 " Do you think he's inscrutable ? " 
 
 " Morice ? No, I think he's pretty plain 
 to read." 
 
 She felt it impossible to ask any more, and 
 soon they were in their silent home again. 
 
 A few nights afterwards she went to hear 
 
LATITUDE 241 
 
 Morice deliver a lecture to an audience of 
 working men. He put the case for art with 
 an astonishing fervour and reminded them, 
 almost reproachfully, of their opportunities. 
 ' You may have dull homes and stupefying 
 work," he said, " but you've got leisure. 
 Modern conditions have given you that. 
 Well, then, everything is open to you. It's 
 spiritual adventures that matter. You've 
 books and pictures and theatres. Rambling 
 about the globe doesn't matter. You can 
 have all the contact you need with other 
 minds. The charge for admission to heaven 
 is only a few pence. I overstate the case, of 
 course." 
 
 He reminded her of Richard. He left her 
 cold and a little resentful. She looked round 
 at men and women who seemed puzzled, 
 baffled, incredulous, and felt herself their 
 sad comrade. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 THE PARENTS 
 
 Letty's life had been open to her father 
 as to no one else ; she knew him for the most 
 generous of men, with sympathies unfathom- 
 able and untiring, but she had felt any ap- 
 proach to confidence with him to be impossible. 
 Last night she had caught his eye withdrawing 
 from her as she looked towards him, and then 
 coming back to her in a friendly challenge that 
 yet lacked something. She had watched him, 
 too, sitting at the head of his table in grave 
 abstraction, — momentary, and hastily aban- 
 doned, and now she brooded on him. He had 
 lost her, he was losing her — so her sympathies 
 interpreted his look ; he was pathetic to her 
 because his calm assurance was far removed 
 from the appeals of pathos. And it came to 
 her overwhelmingly that she could not bear 
 another dumb estrangement ; she was fine 
 
THE PARENTS 243 
 
 enough to suffer with each, the single ex- 
 perience had not dulled the capacity for 
 another. She must see him ; yes, she must. 
 Her intentions hardly went beyond that ; 
 she was conscious of his solitary presence 
 in the world. He was alone, and she, too, 
 and they were infinite things to one another. 
 The reservations that had kept her from him 
 could not be shames ; they were doubts or 
 hesitations and shynesses and not all selfish ; 
 she had shrunk from striking the explicit 
 blow. Now she plucked out her watch hastily, 
 reviewing his habits, which she knew so well. 
 There was yet time to spare before he would be 
 accessible, and she paced about the house 
 restlessly, not thinking of what she should 
 do, but just cherishing her impulse and recall- 
 ing her father's face or some old tricks of 
 voice and manner. She was impatient, but 
 she waited long enough to make waiting at 
 home — she thought of it as home, then — 
 improbable. 
 
 She came on him in his room, where he was 
 reading ; he was one of the men who take up 
 a book for five minutes and read with full 
 
244 DYING FIRES 
 
 absorption. He shut it and gave her both 
 his hands, looking at her inquiringly : " Well ? " 
 he said. 
 
 " I had to come to you, after all," she said. 
 " I can't have secrets from you. It's no 
 secret, I suppose. I can see you watching 
 me. I don't resent it. I can't resent any- 
 thing you do. What has come to me ? The 
 old days are past. The times when every- 
 thing was good and safe are past. You're 
 father and mother to me. Poor old mother ! 
 Even you can't understand. The facts — 
 there are no facts. It's all in the air, all in 
 our brains. I've done nothing ; I suppose 
 I shall never do anything." 
 
 He leaned back in his chair, looking at her. 
 " It's nothing definite — against Richard ? " 
 
 " Definite ? No. I've no case." 
 
 " And he has no case ? " 
 
 " No. We've nothing to reproach one 
 another with. It's all megrims." 
 
 " Try six months apart." 
 
 " My dear father " 
 
 " I know it sounds inadequate to you. But 
 try it. Go somewhere." 
 
THE PARENTS 245 
 
 " Change of air ! " 
 
 " That's like you when you were a scornful 
 little girl. Yes, I'm a doctor. I look at 
 things that way. And I don't give cases up. 
 I don't despair." 
 
 " You think nothing's the matter ? You 
 think I'm silly." 
 
 " Never. You're ill. Your mind's ill. 
 You want rest, you want time." 
 
 " You can't help me. Even you can't help 
 me. You are so definite, father." 
 
 " Talk to me. Pour it out." 
 
 " Yes, I feel the foolish girl with you. It's 
 no use." 
 
 She had been standing, and she turned 
 to the door. He jumped up and inter- 
 vened. " Stop, stop, stop," he said. " I 
 must have a great deal more than this. 
 Think how wretched I should be if you 
 left me so. Begin. Begin. Must I question 
 you ? " 
 
 She gazed at him and hesitated. It was a 
 mighty effort to begin to speak, and she made 
 it for him, not for herself ; she wanted to go 
 away. He took her by the arm and led her 
 
246 DYING FIRES 
 
 to a chair. He left her with a caressing touch 
 and sat down again. 
 
 " You know we were ecstatic when Jim 
 died," she said. " I don't know what to 
 think of it. I suppose it was beautiful ; I 
 thought it was. It's all blurred. Were we 
 like this, really, all the time ? Had we this 
 in us ? I've lost him. I've lost Jim. Why, 
 I can hardly remember him. I'm a truthful 
 woman. I'm like you, father ; I'm truthful. 
 And it's come on me slowly and slowly — no, 
 it seemed like a flash — that I was forgetting 
 him. Of course, I do remember things-^lots 
 of things. I was terrified, and I began to 
 think of things and try to think of more, and 
 to have his face before me ; and I looked at his 
 photograph, and then it was the photograph 
 that I remembered. I couldn't cheat myself. 
 I tried to. I tried to think that I might see 
 him again — heaven, you know. I tried to 
 believe in that — but you wouldn't let me, 
 because I know I think like you. And I 
 daren't tell Richard, till one day I let out 
 something, and he was horribly philosophic 
 and manly, and I believe in his heart — in his 
 
THE PARENTS 247 
 
 heart — he was like me. It should have made 
 me pity him, but it didn't, and I couldn't talk 
 to him and we fell apart, and it was more and 
 more, and nothing could help us now. There's 
 nothing between us, but there's everything. 
 Each of us — don't you see ? — has shuddered 
 and shrunk from the other till it doesn't 
 matter what it's about. We could never 
 overcome it. At first ,we wanted another 
 child, but it didn't come, and now it's horrible 
 to think of. No, I've not forgotten Jim. 
 I'm conscious of him at every hour of the 
 day. But he's changed ; he's turned to 
 something else. I've no joy in him, no peace. 
 I've lost him and it's treachery. I've let 
 him go." 
 
 " But it's in the course of nature," he said. 
 " It's natural, it's inevitable. It's not you. 
 It's all of us. The world goes on like that." 
 
 " I've said things like that to myself, but 
 they don't help me. It wouldn't help me to 
 know that we are all dead and dying in a 
 miserable world. I've lost him, and there's 
 nothing else. Memories ! I had him. And 
 that was the bond between Richard and me, 
 
248 DYING FIRES 
 
 and it's gone. It became a sham and a 
 mockery, a great pretence, and we daren't 
 talk of it ; and so we began to hate one another, 
 I think — is it hate ? And all the other things 
 in my life became nothing — even you, father, 
 you've changed, and change is death ; we're 
 dying every day. You're not the same to 
 me. Everything passes. Well — I must suffer 
 and endure, and become strong and noble and 
 cold. Is that it ? I'm alone. Oh, I know 
 you'd do anything for me. This is black 
 ingratitude. I ought to think of others. It's 
 all selfishness. I'm no good ! " 
 
 She paused and he said : "Is this all ? " 
 
 '* It's not all." 
 
 " Go on, my dear." 
 
 " I don't know how Richard and I look 
 from the outside," she said. " I thought we 
 kept it up pretty well. But he knows — he 
 can't know everything — I don't know what 
 name to call him by. I never think of him 
 by a name. Morice — James Morice. I think 
 he must be unjust to Richard ; I'm as bad. 
 But he sees things — he feels them. And he 
 spoke to me. He dared do that. He's 
 
THE PARENTS 249 
 
 different from other people. I'm sorry for 
 him and yet he's above me. He's finer and 
 stronger. I think he's stronger. He flared 
 out. It was alarming, it was dreadful, but 
 it was very thrilling. It keeps me from being 
 quite dejected. I was alive again. Wrong ? 
 Of course it's wrong. Father, must I die 
 down just to endurance and be calm and 
 morose and dutiful ? But it was thrilling ; 
 things seemed to surge up again. Haven't 
 I the right to live ? Morality ? Duty ? I 
 know. I'm tied fast to Richard and he to 
 me. It's death in life, but it helps the others, 
 it seems ; it helps them to keep on their 
 deaths in life too. Oh, this is all wrong, I 
 know ! I'd like to think of others. Does it 
 matter to you ? " 
 
 " Your happiness matters to me." 
 
 " My happiness ? That the most ? " 
 
 " There's my idea of you. That's selfish, 1 
 
 suppose. Your spirit, your soul " 
 
 " You would have me crushed ? " 
 " Take my life, Letty — my experience ; I 
 can't get outside that. I've been paid for my 
 work, of course, and no doubt it's come very 
 
 R 
 
250 DYING FIRES 
 
 much in a routine. But it's duty that's 
 upheld me all the time. I'm not afraid to 
 say it. I've perpetually tried to do the 
 right thing. A man in my trade can't relax ; 
 he must keep himself fit and right ; he's 
 always on his guard. I can't run away with 
 people's wives ; I can't risk my body or my 
 soul in drinking or small vices. A strange 
 piece of self-assertion, this ? You'll under- 
 stand ; I'm groping for some help for you. 
 I've lived a rigid life ; I've no chance of these 
 great illuminations, these changes midway 
 that throw over all one's past. And I know 
 there are those who say : ' Yes, that's all 
 right for you ; we are of another kind. You 
 are among the drudges who keep the world 
 together. We are a law to ourselves.' I 
 hate that. I scorn it. I possess my soul in 
 pride against such people. And I know what 
 it is to hold on blindly, with all my sympathies 
 and senses in revolt, to the bare, hard belief." 
 
 " You've got your work," she cried. 
 " You've got your routine. What have I ? " 
 
 " It's true," he said, " it's harder for you. 
 My dear, you're finer and better than me. 
 
THE PARENTS 251 
 
 I've believed that ; I've hoped that. What 
 you do — what you are — it's everything to me." 
 
 " I could see myself sacrificing everything 
 for you, but not if you claim it. You've no 
 right to claim it." 
 
 " I claim nothing. Of course, I'd have 
 you what I want." 
 
 " Ah, you fathers ! You'd have us dead 
 at your feet and the ducats in our ears ! " 
 
 " Would you leave your husband and go to 
 Morice ? " 
 
 " I don't know. I've hardly thought of 
 that." 
 
 " Think of it. Think of it precisely — of 
 the various steps ; think of trains and hotels, 
 of the explanations that you or someone 
 must make, of the probable course of your 
 lives, of how long the episode would last." 
 
 " Father, do you say that to me ? " 
 
 " If you tire of one you tire of another." 
 
 " Am I such a common creature ? " 
 
 " We are all common creatures." 
 
 " A woman of the streets ? " 
 
 " Oh, my dear ! You are all the world to 
 
 me. 
 
252 DYING FIRES 
 
 " It isn't fair. It isn't fair to appeal to 
 me." 
 
 " I didn't mean to appeal. It's not for 
 myself." 
 
 " I've one hope — one ray of light. A pre- 
 tence, something to keep me from despair. 
 You'd take it away." 
 
 He raised his hand in a gesture of depreca- 
 tion and she perceived with a shock that it 
 was trembling. His right hand was tremb- 
 ling- 
 
 " I'm dreadful," she said. " I think only 
 
 of myself. It's not thought ; I can't think. 
 I can't bear to let this go. And for you and 
 me to be like this — the foundation's gone." 
 She sobered to commiseration. " What work 
 have you to do ? " she said. " I've made 
 you unfit." 
 
 " I shall be all right," he said. 
 
 "I'm frightfully warped. I'm unfor- 
 giving." 
 
 He approached her with some intention of 
 caress but she shrank away. " I don't feel 
 right to you, father," she said. She was 
 greatly moved, but her emotions were yet 
 
THE PARENTS 253 
 
 under some resentful control. And then the 
 door opened and her mother appeared. She 
 looked from one to the other in surprise and 
 turned to Letty rather plaintively and humbly, 
 as if acknowledging that her curiosity had no 
 rights. But old instincts and old habits 
 prevailed. Letty's embrace began rather 
 perfunctorily, but her mother clutched her 
 eagerly. She yielded, she began to cry like 
 a little child, she held her mother fast ; they 
 cried together. And the mother did not ask 
 for explanations ; she experienced an extra- 
 ordinary satisfaction ; she did not know it, 
 but rarely had she been so happy. When 
 Letty had gone Drayton said a few guarded 
 words about dissensions with Richard, and the 
 old lady assented almost incuriously ; she 
 preferred not to know too much. In her 
 manner to her husband there was a touch of 
 patronage, of superiority ; he might have 
 had Letty's confidence, but she had consoled 
 her. 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 TEARING DOWN THE VEIL 
 
 Richard was conscious of a difference. 
 They had been dull and strained, but now, 
 though they spoke little, he saw that she was 
 changed. She was more alert ; her voice 
 had a sharper ring and sometimes he per- 
 ceived that she was looking at him. He 
 spoke to her of Morice with friendly detach- 
 ment, and she responded coldly with some 
 poor shred of criticism, conscious of simula- 
 tion that did not deceive and scorning herself 
 for it. She was waiting for passion to waft 
 her over these shallows ; she longed some- 
 times for passion to direct her. Richard 
 spoke of Morice's position and prospects, 
 suggesting that it was time for him to 
 move on. Even the brilliant journalist 
 gets stuck. To continue a vein of brilli- 
 ance without deepening and refining is to be 
 
TEARING DOWN THE VEIL 255 
 
 stuck. They developed an interest in the 
 theme. 
 
 " Everyone gets stuck," she said. " I'm 
 stuck. So are you. Do you think his work's 
 worse than it was ? " 
 
 " No surprise about it now. Good, of 
 course. He feels it himself, I think. Still, 
 he seems to be getting a reputation." 
 
 " But quantity counts," she said, " and 
 he's knocking sense into people all the 
 time." 
 
 " Oh, good schoolmastering ! Yes," said 
 Richard. " That's not what he cares about 
 so much. It's the quality." 
 
 She remembered a remark of Morice's. 
 He had said : " It's terrible to feel that you 
 are at your best." It had surprised her, but 
 now she felt that it had foreshadowed some- 
 thing. 
 
 " He wants a big change, then," she said. 
 " He has nothing to lose ? " Her voice 
 betrayed nothing ; her self-possession sur- 
 prised her. And he was fishing in troubled 
 waters without definite intention. 
 
 An old custom, which timidity or bravado 
 
256 DYING FIRES 
 
 would not permit to lapse, took the three to 
 the annual Shakespeare play at the popular 
 theatre. It was " Othello," and they watched 
 it together from a box. To Letty it seemed 
 wildly away from their affairs and yet near 
 to them. The stress and emotion of it 
 were greatly attractive to her. She could 
 have welcomed an escape from the drab 
 disillusions of modern love to these tem- 
 pests of wrath and protest. Now all is 
 slow : we die slowly ; we are perpetually 
 taking the edge off things. Here — this stage- 
 passion did represent something in the world 
 — life is at stake and the blood runs swiftly. 
 She glanced at Richard with a revival of 
 curiosity. Was he capable of the Othello 
 fury ? But he didn't love her now. The 
 actor on the stage was a vigorous creature of 
 abundant groans and splutterings. Are these, 
 then, the outcome of love or of that persistent 
 jealousy that lives with love and outlasts it ? 
 That love has gone does not ensure that 
 jealousy has gone too. Her husband and his 
 friend watched the play inscrutably and 
 made their shrewd comments ; she took her 
 
TEARING DOWN THE VEIL 257 
 
 part, too ; they were the intelligent critics 
 with dismays and resentments deep in their 
 hearts and safely out of sight. 
 
 Desdemona would not, for all the world, 
 be false to her husband. All the noble 
 heroines of Shakespeare that had received 
 her girlish devotion, all the women of good 
 report, all those who had been near to her, 
 had been faithful to their husbands. And it 
 is the same world ; it is not a new world. 
 Well, to be false is not to be deceitful ; she 
 would hide nothing. And false to what ? 
 Othello, like the rest of men, is an egoist, but 
 he is a noble one, and to the simple Des- 
 demonas there are but the alternatives of 
 faith and treason ; you are a steadfast wife 
 or a woman of the streets. It is a new world 
 or that old one never existed ; the reports 
 of it are men's. Othello's egoism or Richard's 
 — these men are alike. And yet was it not 
 Richard's crowning offence that he had ceased 
 to direct his egoism upon her ? She had liked 
 even his volubility in the old days, and if he 
 was an egoist he had played on sympathies ; 
 he was observant, considerate, he was careful 
 
258 DYING FIRES 
 
 in giving to others their share. In cynical 
 despair or its half-felt simulation she could 
 say : All men are alike ; and if she ran away 
 with Morice — she framed her thought harshly 
 — and wearied of him, what abomination of 
 desolation was there ! Her father had warned 
 her, and in her heart she knew she was not 
 safe ; she would scorn to decline upon his 
 punctiliousness. She was oppressed with half- 
 effaced, ridiculous memories and associations 
 — the gilded cage, the villa in St. John's 
 Wood, the excursion to the Italian lakes and 
 the awful boredom of the naughty runaways. 
 It was not the breath of life, but a death of 
 weariness and ignominy. 
 
 Their casual social intercourse continued, 
 and still they waited for some spark to kindle 
 the fire. Or perhaps passion would smoulder 
 away obscurely and when it was burnt out 
 the formal friendly relations would take on 
 some significance again. Letty brooded on 
 such things, and she said to herself that it 
 was as good as a play to see Richard and 
 herself in an ostensible equality of friendliness 
 to Morice while they were as far apart as 
 
TEARING DOWN THE VEIL 259 
 
 love and hate. It was not love, and perhaps 
 it was not hate ; these pure, crude passions 
 at the most would flare up with occasion. 
 It fired her sometimes to see that Morice 
 would not keep away ; he was a sensitive 
 man with social timidities, and must have 
 been keenly alive to the slight irony of 
 Richard's welcome. He was imperturbable, 
 and at times this seemed to Letty heroical. 
 Certainly he was not conscious of heroism, 
 though he might be of devotion ; he was 
 a. dogged man and he followed his deepest 
 interest. 
 
 He called at tea-time on a quiet afternoon 
 and mentioned that he must be early at his 
 work, as the invaluable Howson was away 
 and affairs at the office a little out of gear. 
 Richard listened with some maliciousness to 
 discreet gossip about the paper and the 
 difficulties and anxieties of the staff. Morice 
 seemed fast in work and responsibilities, and 
 Richard's nimble, ironic wit suggested, fanci- 
 fully enough, that he was warning Letty that 
 his engagements would not permit him to run 
 away with her. He was less well-balanced 
 
260 DYING FIRES 
 
 than usual. Letty saw that the work was 
 really on his mind and, fanciful in her turn, 
 she surmised that the chivalrous man was 
 perplexed between duty and devotion. 
 Frankly, she acknowledged his devotion, and 
 she knew that he was the kind of man to 
 suffer when he could not be safely single- 
 minded. The situation was really very queer 
 and critical, and Richard was stung to a 
 nervous irritation. He saw in Morice a sort 
 of haggard nobility ; the fellow's face was 
 singularly disquieting ; it was a reproach 
 more forcible than words. He interjected 
 some rather contemptuous comments as 
 Morice talked to Letty. 
 
 " You're immaculate," he said, " but you 
 can't save the country by mere disagreement," 
 and, presently, more savagely : " You news- 
 paper fellows are wonderfully devoted till a 
 better offer comes." 
 
 It was a gross incitement, amazing to 
 Morice and to Letty, and like a self-inflicted 
 wound to Richard even in his reckless mood. 
 
 " We're getting to that level, then ? " said 
 Morice. 
 
TEARING DOWN THE VEIL 261 
 
 Letty's strong impulse of sympathy for her 
 husband left her silent ; it must be sharp 
 misery to provoke such a speech. 
 
 " Oh, any level," said Richard. " Let us 
 howl and curse a little for relief. Why do 
 you come here ? Let's cease to play at 
 reticences and generosities. What do you 
 want to do ? What's my part ? Let's stop 
 this absurd pretence of being on friendly 
 terms." 
 
 " Does it still exist ? " said Morice. 
 
 Richard turned to Letty. " I'd gladly do 
 something to help you," he said, " if I knew 
 how. 1 suppose you're not as tepid as you 
 seem. Are we to have a violent scandal 
 presently ? Do you really think that after 
 failing with me you could succeed with him ? 
 To fail is to fail. You'll never be a wife or 
 a mate at a second attempt. You've failed, 
 and so have I. Let's keep our dignity. 
 Don't go, Letty. Don't make that frightful 
 mistake. Do you think I'm a monster that 
 nobody could stand for long, and that, rid 
 of me, you'll be a happy woman again ? 
 Never, never ! Let's live it down. Let's get 
 
262 DYING FIRES 
 
 to something decent and dull on the other 
 side. I used to be maddened by the dulness 
 of home ; now I want it so. I want a quiet 
 place to come to." \ 
 
 " This labour affair is bothering you," said 
 Morice. 
 
 " Oh, I'm appealing, am I ? I'm pathetic ? 
 Morice, I'm capable of violence. I believe 
 I could kill you." 
 
 She was sorry for him, as he, perhaps, was 
 for her, and some of the pities are far enough 
 removed from love. It seemed that he was 
 capable of an appeal for the formalities, 
 the established order of things. She dreaded 
 the eloquent outburst ; it would have hurt 
 her for Morice to be there for the swelling 
 periods of his inflation ; shreds of what 
 had once been loyalty remained. It was 
 strange, perhaps, that what he had said 
 hardly startled her. She did not under- 
 stand her own apathy. 
 
 It seemed sometimes that these people had 
 analysed themselves to a standstill, that they 
 were hardly capable of action ; and, again, 
 that their kindled emotions might carry them 
 
TEARING DOWN THE VEIL 263 
 
 far. They were matter for comedy, perhaps, 
 but comedy implies a spectator, and they 
 did not get outside themselves with any 
 zest. They parted without a decisive word. 
 The veil had been torn down, but when it 
 pleased them they could still avert their 
 eyes. 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 
 ELATION 
 
 Richard passed an extraordinary day 
 endeavouring to patch up a peace, or at least 
 a truce, between operatives and employers. 
 It was a local dispute affecting Barnton, the 
 town in which his works were situated, but, 
 unchecked, it was likely to spread through 
 the industry. Richard's proposal of an un- 
 conditional grant of the operatives' demands 
 was received with something like a howl of 
 execration, and he did not enjoy his own 
 volubility as much as usual. A suggested 
 bargain did not wholly please those whose 
 idea of a successful settlement is to make your 
 adversary eat dirt, and a wearisome squabble 
 continued between the parties. Adroitly 
 Richard had turned the arguments for a con- 
 ditional surrender in favour of a positive one, 
 but perhaps he made a mistake in appealing 
 
ELATION 265 
 
 to plain justice and humanity. In these 
 cases it is the stronger force that wins ; the 
 parade of humanity is commonly a luxury 
 after the event. As the hours wore on he 
 perceived that the most he could accomplish 
 for the time was a postponement of hos- 
 tilities, the relegation to the near future and, 
 possibly, to more authoritative tribunals of the 
 matters in dispute. The meeting broke up 
 confusedly without any decision, and Richard 
 tried to get hold of his doughtiest opponent, 
 a pugnacious little manufacturer of no great 
 standing but considerable force of character. 
 He had missed him at the conclusion of the 
 meeting, having run the chairman into a 
 corner where a sharp altercation brought the 
 residue of the meeting about them. Amid a 
 fire of insults Richard gave notice that he 
 would resign his membership of the Manu- 
 facturers' Association in the event of a strike, 
 and that he would run his mills, paying 
 the wages demanded. Jeers and reproaches 
 goaded him to declare that any profit made 
 during a strike should go to the charities of 
 the town, less the accountant's charge for 
 
266 DYING FIRES 
 
 determining what such profit might be^ 
 This was unwise, he felt, but he could not 
 withdraw his offer, and, having repeated it, 
 with a coolness and emphasis that impressed 
 the others, he withdrew to look for his man. 
 His action, if it came to resignation, would 
 be bruited abroad ; it might become a cause 
 celsbre in the cotton trade, and gross charges v 
 of treachery may sometimes be met effectually 
 by showy pieces of abnegation. 
 
 Outside, in the mean streets dominated 
 by lofty spinning mills, which were studded 
 among the more numerous weaving sheds, 
 Richard's thoughts turned to Letty by way 
 of train times and speculation as to the hour 
 of his release. Vaguely he felt that he was 
 justifying himself ; he had fought a good 
 fight to-day, if he had made some mistakes. 
 The time was past when he might have told 
 her about it, and memories of previous 
 occasions, when he had had her sympathy over 
 his vexatious affairs, brought self-criticism. 
 Perhaps it was hardly self-criticism ; it was 
 seeing himself with her eyes. In those past 
 days he had sometimes played the egoist 
 
ELATION 267 
 
 unblushingly ; she had accepted all that as 
 part of him, but she had only to cast back her 
 thoughts to have him at an advantage now. 
 He had been fatuous, he had not gone the 
 right way to retain her ; from time to time 
 he forgot that she had not retained him ; he 
 even forgot the great part played by the 
 shadowy Jim. He was so far from Letty now 
 that there was some attraction in her strange- 
 ness ; no longer a mate, she became a woman 
 among the beckoning host of women. He had 
 the boyish desire to startle her with something 
 fine, and was presently ashamed of the idea. 
 A better one was the wish that she should 
 know him as he was to-day, a man among 
 men. He felt elated and capable of fine things. 
 He sought Turgood in several of his reputed 
 haunts, and found him in a public-house of no 
 pretensions. An acquaintance, a solicitor in 
 the town, was in the passage and informed him 
 that Turgood was within, and, strange to say, 
 with Billson. Now, Billson was the secretary 
 of the operatives' union, and a shrewd fighter ; 
 the two represented what was least recon- 
 cilable on their respective sides. Invited to 
 
268 DYING FIRES 
 
 look, Richard peered for a moment into a 
 smoky interior and saw the two leaders, who 
 appeared to be in a tentative stage of hob- 
 nobbing. They were surrounded by an inter- 
 ested throng. 
 
 Richard backed out with his friend, who 
 advised him not to be seen and presently 
 invited him to come home and dine. Mr. 
 Scholes and his family dined in the evening 
 nowadays, though his father would have 
 scorned any encroachment on the custom of 
 high tea. Richard agreed that to interrupt 
 the very informal conference might be to 
 spoil history, and yet he did not want to leave 
 the town in uncertainty about the issue. He 
 accepted the invitation, and at half-past six 
 the rather tiresome interlude of the family 
 dinner began. It was presently interrupted 
 by a messenger for Mr. Scholes, who left them 
 for a few minutes, and returned with nods and 
 winks for Richard. 
 
 " It's going all right," he said. 
 
 Rather stupidly Richard said " What ? " for 
 as Mrs. Scholes talked to him his thoughts 
 were far away. 
 
ELATION 269 
 
 ' Turgood and Billson," said Scholes. 
 
 "Oh! Well?" 
 
 Scholes chuckled. " They're getting on 
 fine," he said. " I don't think there'll be any 
 strike. When he left they'd got their arms 
 round one another's necks. If you must 
 go by the 8.52 we'll look in on the way to the 
 station. Yes, it's queer, isn't it, Mr. Peel ? 
 Get these two men on good terms and there's 
 not much fear of Barnton going wrong. It 
 was said a little time ago that Billson was 
 turning teetotal. I didn't altogether like it." 
 
 " I suppose it matters a good deal to you, 
 Mr. Scholes — strike or no strike, I mean ? " 
 
 " By Jove ! Yes. There won't be much 
 doing in house property if we've a ten weeks' 
 strike." 
 
 " And why do the others let these two 
 beery ruffians decide matters ? Why do we 
 do it ? " 
 
 " It is queer, isn't it ? Of course, I've always 
 said that you ought to be chairman, Mr. Peel. 
 Those that want things get them. Turgood 
 could have been chairman, couldn't he, if he'd 
 liked ? You should know better than I." 
 
270 DYING FIRES 
 
 " I'm not in the town," said Richard, 
 " and I couldn't be bothered. But Turgood's 
 certainly the strongest man on the council, 
 and if he were made chairman he would be 
 more moderate. I can't spend my life fight- 
 ing the little brute for nothing in particular. 
 One sees there's something in it when a time 
 like this comes." 
 
 Two grown-up daughters completed the 
 Scholes family, and by them Richard was 
 drawn into an incredibly mild disputation 
 about the merits of Victorian poets, a back- 
 wash of some University Extension course. 
 The young ladies seemed very much alike 
 and of a slightly aggressive femininity. They 
 had strangely little interest in the struggle at 
 their doors, and a quasi-liberality of outlook 
 which Richard attributed to the influence of 
 their father's calculating philosophy. The 
 mother was sharper, more definitely in her 
 class and with its shibboleths intact. The 
 family was not stimulating, and, with the 
 dregs of an excitement about him and vague, 
 hard tasks before, Richard found the polite 
 observances a bore. He was punctilious, but 
 
ELATION 271 
 
 he did not flow. It might have surprised 
 him to know that he made a good impression ; 
 his visit was long talked about. A languor, 
 unusual with him, helped, perhaps, to his 
 success. 
 
 Scholes was hearty, but Richard had a 
 fanciful notion that he was being treated as a 
 child of remarkable powers and exalted rank. 
 He had had his innings earlier in the day, but 
 he was humbled now in realising that others 
 and not he were at the centre of the struggle. 
 Force of character will prevail over drunken- 
 ness and low habits. Yet it was monstrous 
 that a great issue should depend on the 
 relations of two tipsy fellows in a bar-parlour. 
 Add a little gilt to the situation, and is there 
 much between them and accredited magnates 
 coming to an understanding over their port, 
 muzzily, but with the best of upholstery about 
 them ? And even the keen and sober repre- 
 sentatives — are they not in effect drugged with 
 prejudice, compelled by the influence behind 
 them, the traditions of their class, the momen- 
 tum of their habits ? It is not all chance, but 
 who shall see which is the inevitable and 
 
272 DYING FIRES 
 
 obey ? And if the spokesman of his race or 
 class makes the mistake does the race obey ? 
 It is an easing of the burden to think that 
 it does not, that a very little thing is not 
 commonly the cause of a very great one. And, 
 after all, a man's responsibility is to himself, 
 or, as in his swelling mood he would put it, 
 to the Godlike in him. One's soul may be 
 tranquil while cities burn ; it is the private 
 life that matters. The private life ! And 
 presently he was going home. 
 
 He did not pay much heed to Mr. Scholes's 
 discourse as they walked the crowded Barn- 
 ton streets together. The night was cloudy 
 and showery, but the people were out in high 
 excitement. It seemed that some of the 
 lasses had already donned their best ; the 
 vague and distant peril was an incitement to 
 flirtation. It was merriment and not anger 
 now. Men shouted to one another, and their 
 tones seemed to be exultant. They had what 
 is often called Confidence — the confidence 
 that does not take account of a slight, obscure 
 sinking of the heart. They were rather like 
 Shakespeare's French nobles before Agincourt. 
 
ELATION 273 
 
 And, though the mill-owners did not, like the 
 meritorious English in the play, spend their 
 night in prayer, perhaps they were more 
 perturbed, more gloomy than this gay crowd ; 
 even the young bloods among the masters 
 would hardly toast the strike to-night. And 
 it came to the sardonic Richard that it is 
 not poverty nor privation that man fears, it 
 is not that his nothing may be turned into 
 less than nothing ; it is that he may lose pos- 
 sessions, it is the possession of property that 
 sobers or depresses him. And so keen is the 
 resentment where this property is attacked 
 that men will risk it or squander it to punish 
 the aggressors. Resentment, surely, is the 
 strongest of the powers of evil. Resentment ! 
 He was going home. 
 
 The inn was still crowded when they got 
 there, and the babel of voices was so extreme 
 that it suggested some development. There 
 had been an ominous one ; the great men had 
 quarrelled. The cause was obscure, the ex- 
 tent only too clear. There had been blows ; 
 at least blows in the air. That one had given 
 t'other "one on t' jaw" was possibly the 
 
274 DYING FIRES 
 
 invention of an exhilarated partisan. Nothing 
 could be done. Turgood had gone home, 
 Billson was sunk in gloomy taciturnity ; the 
 strike, it seemed, was to go on. 
 
 Mr. Scholes shrugged his shoulders. " A 
 chance gone," he said. " It'll last about a 
 month. The difficulty is to climb down. 
 Billson's a clever man but he loses his temper. 
 He knows they'll be beaten. About a 
 month." 
 
 " I mean to settle it to-morrow," said 
 Richard. 
 
 They were in the street again. " Well, 
 now," said Scholes, " that's bravely said. 
 You've always been a bit of an idealist, Mr. 
 Peel. I've admired it in you. This is a bit 
 beyond you, though. You won't settle it 
 to-morrow." 
 
 " Well, I'll try. People don't try enough. 
 You can do a great deal when you try." 
 
 "I'll have you a new hat on it that it lasts 
 three weeks." 
 
 " You said a month." 
 
 " Ah ! But you're going to try." 
 
 The wager was made. Scholes's attitude 
 
ELATION 275 
 
 was rather that of an elder brother towards 
 a forward child. 
 
 " And yet," he said, " I'll confess that 
 you're a bit out of my reckoning, Mr. 
 Peel. I know you can be bold out of the 
 ordinary, and one can't sum up boldness. I 
 don't know what you're up to. Eh ? I 
 know this town pretty well. Of course, you 
 don't live here. It's a pity, I think, that all 
 the big manufacturers get away to live in 
 Bowdon, and Manchester suburbs, and so on. 
 They lose touch. This factory system — it's 
 not as it was in the old times. Do you know, 
 there was a time when I was a bit of an 
 idealist myself. Oh, I've read Ruskin — 
 parts of him. He was down on this kind of 
 thing. A bit inhuman, isn't it ? " 
 
 " You can't turn back," said Richard. 
 
 " No, that's what I say. You must work 
 on what you have. You can't make silk 
 purses out of sows' ears. I'm sorry for Billson. 
 He's not a bad-meaning fellow." 
 
 " What about him ? " said Richard. " By- 
 the-bye, where does he live ? I'll see him 
 early to-morrow." 
 
276 DYING FIRES 
 
 " Now, Mr. Peel, are you quite wise ? This 
 going behind the backs of your colleagues 
 won't be very popular with them." 
 
 " I'm not very popular with them as it is." 
 
 " No, and Billson's position isn't the safest. 
 This affair to-night won't help him. And if 
 he's seen colloguing with you they'll be down 
 on him. He has Norton to reckon with." 
 
 " Ah ! Norton." 
 
 " Yes, Norton wouldn't mind having his 
 job. Norton's at his elbow ready to go one 
 better. It's not beer and skittles for these 
 chaps. Like the French Revolution, you 
 know. The moderate man must shout louder 
 than the rest or he'd go down. People say 
 that the leaders are led by the mob. No. 
 Not directly. It's the seconds in command, 
 the fellows who'd like their jobs. A leader 
 is naturally cautious. Look at politics ; look 
 anywhere. I'm sorry for Billson." 
 
 " I suppose you think me a fool, Mr. 
 Scholes." 
 
 " No. Oh no. You're sanguine. You've 
 the sanguine temperament. There's a great 
 deal in feeling that you can do a thing." 
 
ELATION 277 
 
 That was it. Richard felt that his friend 
 had him. It was this preposterous elation 
 that betrayed him. He felt that he could do 
 things, or at least that he must do things. 
 There was the illusion of power and, really, it 
 was only that he had innumerable things to 
 say. He could harangue these people by the 
 hour, but could he move them ? The orator's 
 illusion — that was it. And though his brain 
 might judge him he was almost happy in this 
 sense of power. To-morrow he would do 
 wonders. He would be infinitely eloquent, 
 persuasive, cunning. He had too many ideas, 
 but he was no fool ; he was magnanimous, he 
 had an open mind, he was not controlled by 
 the coward's sense of property. His feeling 
 was half vision ; his expansions were shot 
 with irony. With some amusement and some 
 contempt he could picture himself as the hero 
 of Victorian drama, the eloquent, sacrificial 
 hero. 
 
 Scholes and he were almost cordial when 
 they parted at the station, and the lawyer 
 walked home ruminatingly. Richard felt 
 extraordinarily tired, and the thought of 
 
278 DYING FIRES 
 
 to-morrow had suddenly become an oppres- 
 sion. He cast it from him, but the alternative 
 was to think of his home. He was a man who 
 liked to look forward to some pleasure, even 
 if only to a small social excitement, but to- 
 morrow blocked the way, and to-night — there 
 came to him a remembrance, now almost 
 savourless, of a fresh interest, a hint of zest 
 in Letty's company ; it hardly survived the 
 recollection. 
 
 Arrived in Manchester he caught a tram, 
 inexplicably crowded, at the bottom of Market 
 Street, and stood with the strap-hangers, un- 
 comfortably swaying. Presently a man rose, 
 indicating his seat, which Richard took, sup- 
 posing that the man was leaving the car. 
 But he did not ; he held to the strap. He 
 was middle aged, in workman's clothes, and 
 with the stains of labour on him. 
 
 " Aren't you getting out ? " said Richard. 
 
 " Not yet, sir." 
 
 " Then why do you give me your 
 seat ? " 
 
 " Oh, it's all right, sir." 
 
 And Richard revived in a flash of anger and 
 
ELATION 279 
 
 resentment. He stood up again and in a low 
 voice upbraided the man. 
 
 " Take your seat," he said. " Do you yield 
 it to me because my coat's better than yours ? 
 You should be ashamed of yourself. I'm a 
 younger man than you. Why do you truckle 
 to me ? Have you no self-respect ? I don't 
 thank you." 
 
 The man gave way and took his seat again 
 silently. A little later he rose again. " I'm 
 getting out now," he said. "I'd like you to 
 understand you made a mistake. It wasn't 
 what you thought." 
 
 He passed out. Richard stared after him. 
 A man's back may seem to express a great 
 deal, and Richard, with an impulse of com- 
 punction, followed him. Catching him up in 
 the street he said : 
 
 " What was it ? " 
 
 The man hesitated and then he said : " You 
 don't know how tired you looked, sir." 
 
 He turned down a side street. Richard 
 followed again and clutched his arm. " I ask 
 your pardon," he said. 
 
 " It's all right, sir," said the man. 
 
280 DYING FIRES 
 
 Immensely moved, Richard pursued his 
 way. He was humiliated and exultant ; he 
 had rarely had an experience so satisfying. 
 And yet from this satisfaction sprang thoughts 
 and ideals. It was for this man and his kind 
 that he would fight to-morrow ; here was a 
 symbol for his faith. He walked now with a 
 strong ; light step, and the trams passed him 
 unheeded. The wave, of emotion carried him 
 over the miles, and he was near his own door 
 when his pace slackened. He let himself in, 
 and as he crossed the hall he heard Morice's 
 voice. 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 
 SHE STAYS 
 
 Richard crossed the hall slowly and entered 
 the drawing-room where his wife and Morice 
 stood together. They were near the door, and 
 it seemed to him that Morice, whose hat was 
 in his hand, had been going ; they had turned 
 to the door, waiting for him in attitudes of 
 arrestment. It came to him as he looked at 
 them that they, too, were tired and yet 
 exalted ; they had something in common 
 with his mood or his late mood. Yet he 
 adjusted himself but slowly to the occasion, 
 and the silence was broken by Letty's in- 
 quiry whether he needed food. He explained 
 briefly his recent movements, and when 
 Morice said : " Have you settled it ? " he 
 laughed joylessly and said : " That's for to- 
 morrow." And he did not know whether, 
 really, he had faith in the morrow or whether 
 
282 DYING FIRES 
 
 he was strong or fatuous. The habit of 
 speaking prompted him to say to Morice : 
 " Are you taking a night off ? " but he had 
 not much interest in the reply, though, 
 queerly, he knew that his interest would grow. 
 Morice looked at his watch and, incidentally, 
 as it were, showed some surprise. Deliber- 
 ately he said to Letty : " We've been talking 
 for two hours." Richard was interested 
 now. 
 
 He had interrupted, or, rather, he had ter- 
 minated their explanation. For two hours 
 they had talked together with a frankness 
 rare between man and woman ; they had 
 explored thoughts, opinions, intentions, pas- 
 sions. They had tried as honestly as human 
 creatures can to know themselves and one 
 another. In their quandary they had tried 
 truth ; they had kindled to magnanimities, 
 but they had never been insincere. They 
 had looked into one another's eyes with 
 yearning, but not quite as lovers look. He 
 had seen that love was possible and had 
 declined upon devotion. It seemed a tame 
 conclusion, impossible perhaps to those of 
 
SHE STAYS 283 
 
 young blood, but the steps to it were not 
 taken tamely. Morice, in set terms, with 
 a voice whose vibrations thrilled her, had 
 offered again the service of his complete 
 devotion, and then, strangely and bravely, 
 had proceeded to recapitulate circumstances 
 that might have the colour of reservations. 
 He told her of his mother, of his own moral 
 or puritanical prepossessions and, especially, 
 of the claims of his work, the abandonment 
 of which at this juncture would be a 
 desertion. 
 
 " The staff's short," he said. " We're hard 
 at it. Rouse is ill. They're crippled if I go. 
 I can't leave Pryde like that — he deserves 
 more of me. And it's my work. I'm trying 
 for several things ; now I see that I've my 
 heart in it. And yet — I'm yours. It's for you 
 to judge, you to choose. I'm speaking the 
 truth, or I'm trying to." 
 
 " And not a word of love," she said. It 
 was not provocative ; it was truly amaze- 
 ment. " You don't love me. I see that. 
 I know that. How could you ? And yet — 
 you're hard to understand. So romantic, so 
 
284 DYING FIRES 
 
 romantic. And yet you're hard common 
 sense. No. You'd do all this for a woman 
 you don't care for." 
 " Don't care for ? " 
 " Do you love me, then ? " 
 " It's only that I haven't dared." 
 They were near to one another then, and 
 perhaps it was her tenderness for the high 
 ideal of him that saved them from the sweep 
 of the senses. For the man was trembling on 
 the brink and yet controlled, as she divined, 
 not by a rigid ideal of his own, but by something 
 of that hard common sense that was perpetu- 
 ally at her service. With passion in leash 
 he could yet offer a passionate devotion ; and 
 so honest was he that all the drags and curbs, 
 the difficulties and duties that beset him, 
 were displayed frankly for her notice ; they 
 were not small things to him. He did not 
 dare to love, it seemed ; he spoke truly, and 
 she saw in him the shyness of the virginal 
 creature. There was craving, too, and an 
 appeal deeper than his words. They were on 
 the brink, but she was capable of vision and 
 thought and she, too, was beset with doubts 
 
SHE STAYS 285 
 
 and scruples. She might yield ; how easily 
 she could yield if he touched her ! If they 
 did not love yet they could travel fast on 
 the path of love together. The danger — her 
 instinct made it a danger — braced her, and 
 then she feared to break his reserve and so 
 mar that ideal of him. It would have been 
 selfish — it would have been hard of her — 
 but that she saw the ideal a reality. He 
 stood there positively beautiful and mag- 
 nanimous ; she would not make a mere lover 
 of him. 
 
 And so, deliberately, in her turn she re- 
 viewed cold facts and the disadvantages of the 
 dash for freedom ; implying much, almost 
 implying love for him, at least the possi- 
 bility of a steady affection. Perhaps they 
 verged on comedy here, though neither per- 
 ceived it at the moment. People do not run 
 away together out of steady affection, and, 
 though their case was exceptional, just to miss 
 the overwhelming is not the same as a 
 sufficiency. She told him that she could not 
 nerve her hand to strike a blow at her father ; 
 the compunctions on her mother's behalf 
 
286 DYING FIRES 
 
 were more formal. Even now she felt some- 
 times that she could bring her father to her 
 side — to the side of revolt — but she would 
 not, and Morice gravely agreed that their 
 defection would be a perpetual sadness to 
 him. The shades of the prison house were 
 closing on them ; they seemed to have 
 missed the way of escape, and they dreaded 
 to return. 
 
 And then she spoke of Richard, and sud- 
 denly, to his amazement and her own, she 
 said : 
 
 " I can't leave him. I think I could never 
 leave him. It's all foolishness." 
 
 Prepared for strange turns, but not for this, 
 he stared at her, and she laughed a little and 
 shamefacedly. 
 
 " I've only felt it — felt it strangely — 
 to-night. Perhaps because I was so near 
 it. I don't think I could leave him. I 
 can't break away from things. I'm not like 
 that. It has meant so much. And then 
 he — I think of him, too. You've never 
 understood him. I'm afraid of a terrible 
 mistake. I nearly forgot about him just 
 
SHE STAYS 287 
 
 now. He's anxious, he's working now from 
 morning till night and he's hard pressed. I 
 ought to understand about it and help him ; 
 he does tell me things sometimes. And even 
 yet I can see him so good and fine. Don't 
 you see it ? He's got a blind side. We've 
 both had our blind sides to one another, 
 and nothing can help us. But don't you 
 see it ? If I left him it would hurt him 
 terribly. I know it would. There's not 
 the least hope for us, ever. I suppose it's 
 cowardice." 
 
 She had grown tense and agitated, and 
 when she was composed again he had a glimpse 
 of her as a tragic figure. And the tragic 
 figure impresses, but it does not make the 
 melting appeal ; one does not love it. They 
 were apart again, and he made a rather 
 frigid, formally generous contribution to the 
 discussion of Richard's character, which struck 
 him as an incredible subject for such an 
 occasion. It was the most depressing part 
 of their interview when she sounded for praise 
 of the absent husband and, perhaps, for 
 generosities in the friend. It seemed that 
 
288 DYING FIRES 
 
 she wished to rehabilitate herself, to account 
 for her mistake. At her instigation he warmed 
 a little to the theme, but always there 
 were reservations. It seemed now that the 
 heady stuff was past, and they talked calmly 
 and as friends. And then Richard was with 
 them. 
 
 He was interested, of course he was tre- 
 mendously interested, but he was tired and 
 unequal to the occasion, full of other things. 
 They felt that they owed him some explana- 
 tion, and perhaps they were uneasy of his 
 suppositions or assumptions. He was tired, 
 he had an impulse — half affectation — to say 
 that he couldn't bother with them now 
 when he had big matters to think about; 
 but, nevertheless, he knew that they could 
 not separate so. And then he jumped to 
 the conclusion that all was over, that she 
 was leaving him, that this, at last, was the 
 crisis in their affairs. He was not angry; 
 he hardly rebelled now, but he protested. 
 Some impulses of common sense, born, per- 
 haps, out of consideration for her, made him 
 mutter : 
 
SHE STAYS 289 
 
 " You can't do it. You can't do it." 
 
 " I think I should tell you something," said 
 Morice. 
 
 " I know it already," he said. 
 
 His calm surprised and deceived them. 
 Morice paused, and then Richard began to 
 speak. 
 
 " I've been in at something to-day," 
 he said, " that seems big to me. It is big. 
 I've been involved in it. I'm tingling with 
 it now. Somehow it calms me when I come 
 home to this. Has it ever struck you, 
 Morice, that dramas are for the untethered 
 people ? I'd thought of ending all this by 
 going away myself — taking to the wilds. It 
 sounds pretty vague, but I meant something. 
 But here's work to my hand and I've got to 
 do it — or try. You were fast, too, I thought, 
 but.it seems not. If you can leave every- 
 thing I must respect you. It's a big thing to 
 do. And Letty — it's all part of my humilia- 
 tion, I suppose — she'll be rid of me at last. 
 I've felt angry and murderous about it — 
 absurdly, of course — but not now. I've no 
 claims. I'm the one that's to blame. I mean 
 
2go DYING FIRES 
 
 that. God knows how it all came about. It 
 might have been different. I'm not sorry 
 that I married you, Letty. Those were good 
 days. Yes, I'm sorry for you." 
 
 " I don't think you understand," said 
 Morice. 
 
 " Go, if it's best for you, Letty," said 
 Richard ; " but is it ? Can you do it ? I'm 
 not thinking of myself. If you stay here it'll 
 be quiet and, I think, different. We might 
 hit off some kind of friendliness. I know it's 
 ludicrous to make such offers but — well, it's 
 not jealousy of Morice, either. I'm afraid of 
 your making a horrible mistake, and all 
 through my fault. Don't go. Wait a little. 
 I can't reason with you. I feel uncommonly 
 like a child." 
 
 "I'm not going," said Letty. 
 
 " Peel," said Morice, " before you I offer 
 her my entire devotion. I'll do what she 
 tells me, I'll come when she tells me. Yes, 
 and I'll throttle you when she tells me." 
 
 " I don't think that will be necessary," said 
 Richard. He turned to Letty : " You're not 
 going ? " 
 
SHE STAYS 291 
 
 " No." 
 
 " Well, I'm immensely relieved. I mustn't 
 thank you, for it's not for me. But you're 
 not going." 
 
 " This is not a resolution for all time," said 
 Morice. " It may not be." 
 
 " Oh yes," said Richard. " If I'm a brute 
 you'll come in still." 
 
 Letty said nothing. Sudden, immense 
 changes in her life followed one another fast. 
 And Morice, lately so near, was receding ; he 
 was far from her already. They parted 
 quietly, dejectedly. 
 
 When he had gone she attended to Richard's 
 material wants, slight as they were, punc- 
 tiliously. He did not ask for an explanation 
 and she gave none. He was kind in his 
 manner to her, and she could not tell whether 
 his broodings concerned her or that other 
 preoccupation. She saw that she need not 
 fear the return of the lover in him. 
 
 And Morice walked away sadly. He had 
 a burning memory and a profound disap- 
 pointment. A certain contempt for himself 
 was, perhaps, the reflex of the Contempt that 
 
292 DYING FIRES 
 
 others might feel for him. His reason gave 
 him a formal approval. His thoughts glanced 
 at Richard without malice. He had been 
 goaded to the attack just now, but he pitied 
 the fellow. They were all pitiable together ; 
 there was no glory anywhere. He stopped for 
 a moment, struck by that. Surely it must 
 be wrong if this arrangement brought joy to 
 nobody. But he could not turn back ; right 
 or wrong, it was over. And his devotion — 
 his devotion remained. 
 
 Restored to realities he was startled to 
 perceive the time, and he took a taxi to the 
 office, where he must make some kind of 
 excuse for delay. He had been wanted to 
 write the long leader, but another man had 
 been set on it. He wrote a short one on 
 municipal enterprise and the supply of gas, 
 and presently a colleague came in to smoke 
 and talk about Russian aggression in Persia. 
 They went out to the Pressman's Club to- 
 gether and had buttered biscuits and beer. 
 There was a mellow old Irishman there and 
 a pompous youth who had been writing a 
 theatre notice, and it was amusing to hear the 
 
SHE STAYS 293 
 
 two talk on different planes about the drama. 
 They agreed, though, that Irish and Sicilian 
 and Japanese might act, but never a Briton, 
 and the youth talked at Morice, who was 
 amused to lead him on to some extravagancies. 
 The old man said he must be going, but he 
 started a string of stories which were good 
 enough to get him the stimulation of the 
 laugh, and so they were late in breaking up. 
 The old man had always one story more that 
 was worth waiting for, and his last was 
 delivered halfway down the stairs. For his 
 young friend had kindly volunteered to see 
 him home, and without resenting it he had 
 declared himself to be a bad man to see 
 home. 
 
 " Be warned by the man with the pig," he 
 said. " Did I tell you about that ? I dare- 
 say he entered on it with a light heart. No, 
 listen to this ; it's a true experience." He 
 clutched them together on the landing. " It 
 was my brother-in-law," he said. " He lived 
 on that road that goes to Sale and Bowdon. 
 My sister told me. She liked a joke. Well, 
 it was in the dead hours of the night when 
 
294 DYING FIRES 
 
 they were roused by the ringing, ringing 
 of the front door bell. He grumbled and 
 hesitated, but he had to go down. And 
 what d'ye think he found ? Only a man 
 who was driving a pig into Manchester. The 
 fellow said he couldn't get it to go one way 
 or the other, and he'd called to ask for 
 advice. Advice ! The pig was there right 
 enough. Two o'clock in the morning ! The 
 only advice they could give was a glass of 
 whisky. And away went the man to the pig 
 and his nocturnal struggle, and they vanished 
 out of Ted's life. Isn't it romantic ? " 
 
 They all laughed at this and they blundered 
 together down dark stairs. Morice left them, 
 hearing, as he retreated, scraps from the 
 genial veteran, reluctant to shorten the hours 
 of his dominance. 
 
 " You'll want some advice before you get 
 me home," came to him and : " Oh ! I must 
 tell you that story about the water-jug." 
 They drifted away, and he turned to walk 
 home, an exercise befitting his mood. Well, 
 the life of men was a vastly entertaining 
 affair, and he was not without zest for it. 
 
SHE STAYS 295 
 
 And he had his secret, his intimate possession. 
 He would always be on guard, he would be 
 always watching and ready, and she would 
 see him ; if nothing happened their romance 
 would last for ever. 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 THE STATUE AND THE BUST 
 
 Such as it was, it lasted long. He kept his 
 guard, he showed himself frequently, and if he 
 never struck it was because there was no 
 need. Ten years after their explanation they 
 all sat in the Draytons' garden, on a Sunday 
 afternoon in sumptuous autumn, like drowsy 
 old friends with no questions between them. 
 Nothing had happened, or only many things, 
 and the deliverer, it seemed, had become 
 again the friend of the family. The romance 
 had faded, but he had kept his guard. Richard 
 had not disputed his position ; it might have 
 seemed that he suffered him gladly. And 
 what is a prison when the doors are open and 
 the deliverer waits our pleasure ? At first 
 Letty lived excitedly ; their conference had 
 seemed to bring finalities, but conferences can 
 hardly settle, though they may record. And 
 
THE STATUE AND THE BUST 297 
 
 Richard behaved very well, without putting 
 them in the wrong by any parade of mag- 
 nanimity — so well that sometimes she played 
 with the illusion that all had been an illusion. 
 Any spirited girl might become impatient of 
 the routine of married life, and she knew 
 her " Modern Love " well enough to under- 
 stand how disaster follows on the passion 
 that is intolerant of change. She experi- 
 mented with the notion that her soul was not 
 really scarred ; she looked at Richard with 
 dull eyes, and he seemed a very proper 
 husband. 
 
 They went on living in the same house and, 
 as their manners were good and the few in 
 their confidence staunch, they deceived the 
 world. If they had been eminent enough for 
 obituary notices these years would have 
 been all to the honour of the marriage of true 
 minds. And to Richard, perhaps more than 
 to her, it seemed in the decline of years that 
 the frightful tension of that middle period 
 was a dream. Words had been spoken, 
 indeed, but there was no sundering crash ; 
 there was no rupture that the world had seen ; 
 
 u 
 
298 DYING FIRES 
 
 and the world counts. Life is stifled in the 
 closed chambers of the soul. 
 
 They were luckless people ; since Jim's 
 death they had had no great thing together. 
 Indeed, she had had no great thing at all 
 except that faithful figure, now the family 
 friend ; if she would, a fount of romance, but 
 it seemed that there was but a disused pump 
 on the site of the spring. Morice was inveter- 
 ately friendly ; their understanding was never 
 renewed. She took a decent interest in 
 Richard's affairs ; she encouraged his rather 
 fitful excursions into the politics of labour, 
 in which he became rather notorious as 
 a generous and candid friend of the 
 operatives and an embarrassment to his 
 fellows — with whom, however, he was not 
 unpopular. She had some pride in him. 
 Away from home, when they were sur- 
 rounded by other people, he seemed very 
 like a husband. 
 
 And Jim was distant now and vague. She 
 did not press for the poignant emotions, but 
 sometimes she stood before the drawer which 
 contained the trifles that recalled him and 
 
THE STATUE AND THE BUST 299 
 
 fell into a dim, shapeless reverie. In the 
 days of her grief she had read the passionate 
 bewailments of Shakespeare's Constance with 
 exaltation and a pride of fellowship, but 
 now all this had become ghostly, a thing of 
 strange echoes ; she avoided it. If she had 
 had other children Jim might have been a 
 precious, benignant memory. And she did 
 feel that it was hard on that kindly little 
 fellow that he should have been associated 
 with resentments. She was tired of re- 
 sentments, and they subsided ; everything 
 subsided. 
 
 She watched Morice's hair grow grey, but 
 his face kept sharp, his eyes keen. His 
 speech was all in the way of friendliness, but 
 she had moods in which she saw that this had 
 been a great thing for him ; he was the one 
 that had never known satiety. And he had 
 his life, too, of which he talked to her often. 
 She was flattered by it sometimes, which is 
 to say, perhaps, that he did not go very deep, 
 but his work was a deep, incommunicable 
 thing, it seemed ; sometimes she perceived 
 in herself a shadow of jealousy. She had 
 
300 DYING FIRES 
 
 thought him once a man without ambitions 
 or of ambitions thwarted. More than once 
 she had urged him to break away ; without 
 explicitly framing the explanation she had 
 hinted that his task was over, that he must 
 look after himself. She had found some- 
 thing fixed and indolent in his habit, but 
 she came to a better understanding, partly 
 through what she heard from others. For 
 all the time, it seemed, he went on writing 
 better and better. He had a great reputa- 
 tion in a narrow compass, and she heard 
 things about him that should and did make 
 a friend proud. Once she heard two of his 
 colleagues talk of him, and the younger — 
 taking her, too, into confidence — spoke of 
 him ardently, with emotion. But the other 
 with an air of experience, of benignity and 
 yet with humility, said : " Ah ! we've 
 each and all had an unrequited passion for 
 Morice." They spoke of him as of a great 
 man. 
 
 She had always admired him, but these 
 comrades and experts made her admiration 
 seem a little jejune, or limited, at least. She 
 
THE STATUE AND THE BUST 301 
 
 was, indeed, a little jealous of his work — the 
 romantic adventurers and deliverers had all 
 been men of one idea — and yet she was glad, 
 and, looking at his worn face, still set in that 
 familiar expression that she had interpreted 
 as watchfulness, alertness, something benig- 
 nant and reassuring, she could have rejoiced 
 greatly to think that he had a source of 
 happiness even though it had been hid from 
 her. For she had often read what he had 
 written, and sometimes with lively approval, 
 sometimes carelessly or slightingly, but always 
 taking it very much for granted. She had 
 missed a chance, unless it was not too late for 
 a kind of education that must begin in 
 humility ; it was astonishing, and even now 
 perturbing, to think that he had been so much 
 to her while yet she did not know him. Her 
 poor dabblings in the arts had not been equal 
 to the occasion ; she had failed to give him 
 what she might have given and yet she had 
 given him something. 
 
 Richard had sown the wildest of his social 
 wild oats, and though he managed to avoid 
 conformity he had settled down into a person 
 
302 DYING FIRES 
 
 of consideration. He had accepted habit and 
 routine with ironical acquiescence, and an 
 irrepressible practical ability had always given 
 him a position among his fellows. He nursed 
 a secret belief in his untamableness, and would 
 even do small queer things rather wantonly 
 and arbitrarily. To Morice he was more 
 cordial than of old and less confidential ; with 
 Drayton something like a friendship had 
 grown. 
 
 Drayton had watched Letty anxiously 
 and with growing confidence, but he had 
 never had another explanation with her. 
 As time went on he perceived something of 
 the state of things ; his generosity helped to 
 dissipate resentments, though he had felt that 
 Letty was slow to reassure him. Yet though 
 the reassurance was never formal it came ; 
 all these people had the support of habit, and 
 in its poor way habit had succoured them. 
 Even habit cannot last for ever, and Letty 
 had never endured more poignant distress 
 than when her father told her that he was 
 giving up surgery. He had begun to fail, he 
 declared, and though there was no public 
 
THE STATUE AND THE BUST 303 
 
 evidence of this the belief must be its own 
 proof. He was careful to date the beginnings 
 of the decline early enough to save her the 
 acuteness of self-reproach. And Drayton did 
 an astonishing and reassuring thing. He 
 gave up his rooms in the city and his various 
 appointments and became a general prac- 
 titioner ; presently a very successful one. 
 He managed, without offence, to advertise 
 his intention, and it soon appeared that he 
 was enormously popular. He took some 
 pleasure in his success, and it was a relief to 
 everybody and a joy to Mrs. Drayton, who 
 had always closed her mind to the association 
 of the knife. Letty was disposed to over- 
 whelm him with the expressions of her admira- 
 tion, but gently he induced moderation. 
 Their terms of affection seemed very like 
 those of the old times ; occasionally, indeed, 
 the blood did veritably flow in the old channels 
 and they were as they had been. 
 
 Richard and Letty were never effusive to 
 one another ; they never went through any 
 form of expiation or even of explanation, 
 but they found or recovered a good many 
 
304 DYING FIRES 
 
 sympathies. They talked and read together ; 
 he became the punctilious, almost the affec- 
 tionate, husband. Morice was there frequently, 
 and the three attained an extraordinary skill 
 in avoiding the personal application. For 
 much of the outside life, of the things we see 
 and the books we read, comes swiftly home 
 to the thee and me ; we must skate on thin 
 ice or plunge into the depths. There were 
 times when Richard's natural volubility was 
 curbed even pathetically, and Letty learnt to 
 respect him as a man who had never quite 
 ceased to make the conscious efforts to 
 restrain. And she knew qualifications, too, 
 of the vision of the steadfast Morice and 
 could imagine him almost comically in that 
 drama of the hat over the windmill which 
 had once come so near herself. And even 
 yet there was the idea ; passion deferred 
 must cool, but the idea may have its 
 precious revivals, and, surely, the stationary 
 passion bites deep. Letty was a fastidious 
 woman and she heard or read of scandalous 
 revelations with disgust ; and yet she knew 
 now that honour might have its roots in 
 
THE STATUE AND THE BUST 305 
 
 dishonour and that the sin which she would 
 condemn might represent what was noble 
 in lives whose record of sobriety and faith- 
 fulness is naught. She felt herself becoming 
 too old for the struggle. Morice remained 
 inscrutable, and Richard had ceased to be 
 incalculable. 
 
 On this autumn afternoon, as on many that 
 had gone, they sat together on the lawn with 
 all the familiar circumstance. The afternoon 
 wore on languidly till Drayton surprised them 
 by a vehement condemnation of those who 
 made a luxury of regrets. The ostensible 
 provocation was insignificant ; he expressed 
 an ordered conviction, and Letty was startled 
 to hear something of her own old self-reproach 
 spoken aloud. Looking steadily before him 
 he said : 
 
 " I think it's my deepest regret that 
 I've no grandchildren. I've sulked over 
 that a little, and yet— the issue is not all 
 physical. Our children are not only the 
 children of our loins. I've had to do with it 
 all—the blood and tissues, the mother and the 
 new-born child. Yes, I'd like to have seen 
 
306 DYING FIRES 
 
 my grandchildren stretching out to futurity, 
 but I'm not a materialist. I don't admit 
 that I'm a barren member of the community. 
 I've saved men and women to beget children. 
 We all march together. It's the work we do 
 and the spirit that we kindle." 
 
 The oppression of barrenness, even of 
 celibacy, was on them, nevertheless ; such 
 attempts as this to raise the veil were rare, 
 and found them too self-conscious for the 
 larger view. Drayton passed on to less 
 dangerous ground in his denunciation of 
 materialism, with the example of the sham 
 humility that is sometimes professed by the 
 artist, as when some epicure in sensations 
 compared the life of the spirit to its disad- 
 vantage with dealings in hard knocks or 
 reinforced concrete. 
 
 " Even surgery," he said — " I thought it 
 would break my pride to give it up. Not a 
 bit. I grow old and proud." 
 
 Letty, looking at him, had her pride, too, 
 in that grey, majestic head, and such a pride 
 might make amends for some of the intimacies 
 he had lost. 
 
THE STATUE AND THE BUST 307 
 
 Their agitations died down and they sat 
 there in the waning sunshine in a laxity of 
 friendliness. It was Richard who stretched 
 out his hand idly to a book which turned out 
 to be a volume of Browning. Nobody claimed 
 it till Mrs. Drayton admitted that she had 
 brought it out in mistake, and they laughed 
 at her repudiation. 
 
 " Never mind," said Richard ; " why not 
 Browning ? " He offered to read something 
 to them, and, turning over the leaves, said : 
 " Here's one I don't seem to remember — ' The 
 Statue and the Bust.' " 
 
 " Not that," said Morice. He suggested 
 " Childe Roland " and onef or two more, and 
 Richard, after turning over the leaves for 
 a time, laid the book aside. Letty's heart 
 had given a great throb after Morice spoke, 
 and when, presently, there was a dispersal 
 of the group she got the book and began to 
 read : 
 
 " There's a palace in Florence, the world knows well, 
 And a statue watches it from the square, 
 And this story of both do the townsmen tell." 
 
 That far-away lady, too, had thought to 
 
308 DYING FIRES 
 
 escape from her prison, and the lover was 
 there, perpetually at hand. But they faded 
 in one another's sight till they were but 
 frustrate ghosts. 
 
 " I hear your reproach — ' But delay was best, 
 For their end was a crime ! ' Oh, a crime will do 
 As well, I reply, to serve for a test, 
 As a virtue golden through and through." 
 
 Yes. It was a strange analogy, but that was 
 an old, romantic, unmoral affair. They were 
 different ; the differences were infinite. And 
 she had no regrets. She assured herself, almost 
 honestly, that she had no regrets. Richard 
 and she walked home together, and Morice 
 accompanied them part of the way. They 
 were all very friendly and everything seemed 
 faint and kind. The trill of a bird met them 
 as they entered their gate. She asked 
 Richard what bird it was, and when he said 
 he didn't know it crossed her mind that he 
 had known once, that he and Jim had had 
 such knowledge in common. They went 
 into the familiar house together, and when 
 the door closed on them she had no regrets 
 for the world outside. She went up to her 
 
THE STATUE AND THE BUST 309 
 
 room, and there she vacillated about the 
 drawer that held Jim's things, permitting 
 herself at last just a glance at the interior 
 and a sniff at the pervading lavender which 
 now touched her memory more quickly 
 than anything. Then she went down and 
 sat with Richard, and everything was faint 
 and kind. 
 
 The Anchor Press, Ltd., Tiptree, Essex 
 

 
 t« Hi4 Hill I 1 
 
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