right things, or, even more charmingly, to hint at them.
In other ways, too, it was a very charming letter. She
told him about her music, and about a Suffrage meeting
to which Henry had taken her, and she asserted, half
seriously, that she had learnt the Greek alphabet, and
found it “fascinating.” The word was underlined. Had she
laughed when she drew that line? Was she ever serious?
Didn’t the letter show the most engaging compound of
enthusiasm and spirit and whimsicality, all tapering into
a flame of girlish freakishness, which flitted, for the rest
of the morning, as a will-o’-the-wisp, across Rodney’s
landscape. He could not resist beginning an answer to
her there and then. He found it particularly delightful to
shape a style which should express the bowing and curtsying,
advancing and retreating, which are characteristic
of one of the many million partnerships of men and
women. Katharine never trod that particular measure, he
could not help reflecting; Katharine—Cassandra;
Cassandra—Katharine—they alternated in his consciousness
all day long. It was all very well to dress oneself
carefully, compose one’s face, and start off punctually at
half-past four to a tea-party in Cheyne Walk, but Heaven
only knew what would come of it all, and when Katharine,
after sitting silent with her usual immobility, wantonly
drew from her pocket and slapped down on the table
beneath his eyes a letter addressed to Cassandra herself,
his composure deserted him. What did she mean by her
behavior?
He looked up sharply from his row of little pictures.
Katharine was disposing of the American lady in far too
arbitrary a fashion. Surely the victim herself must see
how foolish her enthusiasms appeared in the eyes of the
poet’s granddaughter. Katharine never made any attempt
to spare people’s feelings, he reflected; and, being him
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self very sensitive to all shades of comfort and discomfort,
he cut short the auctioneer’s catalog, which Katharine
was reeling off more and more absent-mindedly, and took
Mrs. Vermont Bankes, with a queer sense of fellowship in
suffering, under his own protection.
But within a few minutes the American lady had completed
her inspection, and inclining her head in a little
nod of reverential farewell to the poet and his shoes, she
was escorted downstairs by Rodney. Katharine stayed by
herself in the little room. The ceremony of ancestor-worship
had been more than usually oppressive to her. Moreover,
the room was becoming crowded beyond the bounds
of order. Only that morning a heavily insured proof-sheet
had reached them from a collector in Australia, which
recorded a change of the poet’s mind about a very famous
phrase, and, therefore, had claims to the honor of
glazing and framing. But was there room for it? Must it
be hung on the staircase, or should some other relic give
place to do it honor? Feeling unable to decide the question,
Katharine glanced at the portrait of her grandfather,
as if to ask his opinion. The artist who had painted
it was now out of fashion, and by dint of showing it to
visitors, Katharine had almost ceased to see anything
but a glow of faintly pleasing pink and brown tints, enclosed
within a circular scroll of gilt laurel-leaves. The
young man who was her grandfather looked vaguely over
her head. The sensual lips were slightly parted, and gave
the face an expression of beholding something lovely or
miraculous vanishing or just rising upon the rim of the
distance. The expression repeated itself curiously upon
Katharine’s face as she gazed up into his. They were the
same age, or very nearly so. She wondered what he was
looking for; were there waves beating upon a shore for
him, too, she wondered, and heroes riding through the
leaf-hung forests? For perhaps the first time in her life
she thought of him as a man, young, unhappy, tempestuous,
full of desires and faults; for the first time she realized
him for herself, and not from her mother’s memory.
He might have been her brother, she thought. It seemed
to her that they were akin, with the mysterious kinship
of blood which makes it seem possible to interpret the
sights which the eyes of the dead behold so intently, or
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even to believe that they look with us upon our present
joys and sorrows. He would have understood, she thought,
suddenly; and instead of laying her withered flowers upon
his shrine, she brought him her own perplexities—perhaps
a gift of greater value, should the dead be conscious
of gifts, than flowers and incense and adoration.
Doubts, questionings, and despondencies she felt, as she
looked up, would be more welcome to him than homage,
and he would hold them but a very small burden if she
gave him, also, some share in what she suffered and
achieved. The depth of her own pride and love were not
more apparent to her than the sense that the dead asked
neither flowers nor regrets, but a share in the life which
they had given her, the life which they had lived.
Rodney found her a moment later sitting beneath her
grandfather’s portrait. She laid her hand on the seat next
her in a friendly way, and said:
“Come and sit down, William. How glad I was you were
here! I felt myself getting ruder and ruder.”
“You are not good at hiding your feelings,” he returned
dryly.
“Oh, don’t scold me—I’ve had a horrid afternoon.” She
told him how she had taken the flowers to Mrs. McCormick,
and how South Kensington impressed her as the preserve
of officers’ widows. She described how the door had
opened, and what gloomy avenues of busts and palm-
trees and umbrellas had been revealed to her. She spoke
lightly, and succeeded in putting him at his ease. Indeed,
he rapidly became too much at his ease to persist
in a condition of cheerful neutrality. He felt his composure
slipping from him. Katharine made it seem so natural
to ask her to help him, or advise him, to say straight
out what he had in his mind. The letter from Cassandra
was heavy in his pocket. There was also the letter to
Cassandra lying on the table in the next room. The atmosphere
seemed charged with Cassandra. But, unless
Katharine began the subject of her own accord, he could
not even hint—he must ignore the whole affair; it was
the part of a gentleman to preserve a bearing that was,
as far as he could make it, the bearing of an undoubting
lover. At intervals he sighed deeply. He talked rather more
quickly than usual about the possibility that some of the
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operas of Mozart would be played in the summer. He had
received a notice, he said, and at once produced a pocketbook
stuffed with papers, and began shuffling them in
search. He held a thick envelope between his finger and
thumb, as if the notice from the opera company had become
in some way inseparably attached to it.
“A letter from Cassandra?” said Katharine, in the easiest
voice in the world, looking over his shoulder. “I’ve just
written to ask her to come here, only I forgot to post it.”
He handed her the envelope in silence. She took it,
extracted the sheets, and read the letter through.
The reading seemed to Rodney to take an intolerably
long time.
“Yes,” she observed at length, “a very charming letter.”
Rodney’s face was half turned away, as if in bashfulness.
Her view of his profile almost moved her to laughter.
She glanced through the pages once more.
“I see no harm,” William blurted out, “in helping her—
with Greek, for example—if she really cares for that sort
of thing.”
“There’s no reason why she shouldn’t care,” said
Katharine, consulting the pages once more. “In fact—
ah, here it is—’The Greek alphabet is absolutely fascinating.’
Obviously she does care.”
“Well, Greek may be rather a large order. I was thinking
chiefly of English. Her criticisms of my play, though they’re
too generous, evidently immature—she can’t be more than
twenty-two, I suppose?—they certainly show the sort of
thing one wants: real feeling for poetry, understanding,
not formed, of course, but it’s at the root of everything
after all. There’d be no harm in lending her books?”
“No. Certainly not.”
“But if it—hum—led to a correspondence? I mean,
Katharine, I take it, without going into matters which
seem to me a little morbid, I mean,” he floundered, “you,
from your point of view, feel that there’s nothing disagreeable
to you in the notion? If so, you’ve only to
speak, and I never think of it again.”
She was surprised by the violence of her desire that he
never should think of it again. For an instant it seemed
to her impossible to surrender an intimacy, which might
not be the intimacy of love, but was certainly the inti
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macy of true friendship, to any woman in the world.
Cassandra would never understand him—she was not good
enough for him. The letter seemed to her a letter of flattery—
a letter addressed to his weakness, which it made
her angry to think was known to another. For he was not
weak; he had the rare strength of doing what he prom-
ised—she had only to speak, and he would never think
of Cassandra again.
She paused. Rodney guessed the reason. He was amazed.
“She loves me,” he thought. The woman he admired
more than any one in the world, loved him, as he had
given up hope that she would ever love him. And now
that for the first time he was sure of her love, he resented
it. He felt it as a fetter, an encumbrance, something
which made them both, but him in particular, ridiculous.
He was in her power completely, but his eyes
were open and he was no longer her slave or her dupe. He
would be her master in future. The instant prolonged itself
as Katharine realized the strength of her desire to
speak the words that should keep William for ever, and
the baseness of the temptation which assailed her to
make the movement, or speak the word, which he had
often begged her for, which she was now near enough to
feeling. She held the letter in her hand. She sat silent.
At this moment there was a stir in the other room; the
voice of Mrs. Hilbery was heard talking of proof-sheets
rescued by miraculous providence from butcher’s ledgers
in Australia; the curtain separating one room from the
other was drawn apart, and Mrs. Hilbery and Augustus
Pelham stood in the doorway. Mrs. Hilbery stopped short.
She looked at her daughter, and at the man her daughter
was to marry, with her peculiar smile that always seemed
to tremble on the brink of satire.
“The best of all my treasures, Mr. Pelham!” she exclaimed.
“Don’t move, Katharine. Sit still, William. Mr. Pelham will
come another day.”
Mr. Pelham looked, smiled, bowed, and, as his hostess
had moved on, followed her without a word. The curtain
was drawn again either by him or by Mrs. Hilbery.
But her mother had settled the question somehow.
Katharine doubted no longer.
“As I told you last night,” she said, “I think it’s your
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duty, if there’s a chance that you care for Cassandra, to
discover what your feeling is for her now. It’s your duty
to her, as well as to me. But we must tell my mother. We
can’t go on pretending.”
“That is entirely in your hands, of course,” said Rodney,
with an immediate return to the manner of a formal man
of honor.
“Very well,” said Katharine.
Directly he left her she would go to her mother, and
explain that the engagement was at an end—or it might
be better that they should go together?
“But, Katharine,” Rodney began, nervously attempting
to stuff Cassandra’s sheets back into their envelope; “if
Cassandra—should Cassandra—you’ve asked Cassandra to
stay with you.”
“Yes; but I’ve not posted the letter.”
He crossed his knees in a discomfited silence. By all his
codes it was impossible to ask a woman with whom he
had just broken off his engagement to help him to become
acquainted with another woman with a view to his
falling in love with her. If it was announced that their
engagement was over, a long and complete separation
would inevitably follow; in those circumstances, letters
and gifts were returned; after years of distance the severed
couple met, perhaps at an evening party, and touched
hands uncomfortably with an indifferent word or two. He
would be cast off completely; he would have to trust to
his own resources. He could never mention Cassandra to
Katharine again; for months, and doubtless years, he would
never see Katharine again; anything might happen to her
in his absence.
Katharine was almost as well aware of his perplexities
as he was. She knew in what direction complete generosity
pointed the way; but pride —for to remain engaged
to Rodney and to cover his experiments hurt what was
nobler in her than mere vanity—fought for its life.
“I’m to give up my freedom for an indefinite time,” she
thought, “in order that William may see Cassandra here
at his ease. He’s not the courage to manage it without
my help—he’s too much of a coward to tell me openly
what he wants. He hates the notion of a public breach.
He wants to keep us both.”
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When she reached this point, Rodney pocketed the letter
and elaborately looked at his watch. Although the
action meant that he resigned Cassandra, for he knew his
own incompetence and distrusted himself entirely, and
lost Katharine, for whom his feeling was profound though
unsatisfactory, still it appeared to him that there was
nothing else left for him to do. He was forced to go,
leaving Katharine free, as he had said, to tell her mother
that the engagement was at an end. But to do what plain
duty required of an honorable man, cost an effort which
