districts, but quite probably it is.... It is the end."
She saw by the lifting of his eyebrows that he was impressed, that
he secretly admitted the justifiability of her summons to him. And
instantly she took a reasonable, wise, calm tone.

"It is a little serious, is it not? I do not frighten myself, but it
is serious. Above all, I do not wish to trouble thee. I know all thy
anxieties, and I am a woman who understands. But except thee I have
not a friend, as I have often told thee. In my heart there is a place
only for one. I have a horror of all those women. They weary me. I am
not like them, as thou well knowest. Thus my existence is solitary. I
have no relations. Not one. See! Go into no matter what interior,
and there are photographs. But here--not one. Yes, one. My own. I am
forced to regard my own portrait. What would I not give to be able
to put on my chimney-piece thy portrait! But I cannot. Do not
deceive thyself. I am not complaining. I comprehend perfectly. It
is impossible that a woman like me should have thy photograph on her
chimney-piece." She smiled, smoothing for a moment the pucker out
of her brow. "And lately I see thee so little. Thou comest less
frequently. And when thou comest, well--one embraces--a little
music--and then _pouf_! Thou art gone. Is it not so?"

He said:

"But thou knowest the reason, I am terribly busy. I have all the
preoccupations in the world. My committee--it is not all smooth,
my committee. Everything and everybody depends on me. And in the
committee I have enemies too. The fact is, I have become a beast of
burden. I dream about it. And there are others in worse case. We shall
soon be in the third year of the war. We must not forget that."

"My little rabbit," she replied very calmly and reasonably and
caressingly. "Do not imagine to thyself that I blame thee. I do not
blame thee. I comprehend too well all that thou dost, all that thou
art worth. In every way thou art stronger than me. I am ten times
nothing. I know it. I have no grievance against thee. Thou hast always
given me what thou couldst, and I on my part have never demanded too
much. Say, have I been excessive? At this hour I make no claim on
thee. I have done all that to me was possible to make thee happy. In
my soul I have always been faithful to thee. I do not praise myself
for that. I did not choose it. These things are not chosen. They come
to pass--that is all. And it arrived that I was bound to go mad about
thee, and to remain so. What wouldst thou? Speak not of the war. Is
it not because of the war that I am in exile, and that I am ruined? I
have always worked honestly for my living. And there is not on earth
an officer who has encountered me who can say that I have not been
particularly nice to him--because he was an officer. Thou wilt excuse
me if I speak of such matters. I know I am wrong. It is contrary to
my habit. But what wouldst thou? I also have done what I could for the
war. But it is my ruin. Oh, my Gilbert! Tell me what I must do. I
ask nothing from thee but advice. It was for that that I dared to
telephone thee."

G.J. answered casually:

"I see nothing to worry about. It will be necessary to take another
flat. That is all."

"But I--I know nothing of London. One tells me that it is in future
impossible for women who live alone--like me--to find a flat--that is
to say, respectable."

"Absurd! I will find a flat. I know precisely where there is a flat."

"But will they let it to me?"

"They will let it to _me_, I suppose," said he, still casually.

A pause ensued.

She said, in a voice trembling:

"Thou art not going to say to me that thou wilt put me among my own
furniture?"

"The flat is furnished. But it is the same thing."

"Do not let such a hope shine before me--me who saw before me only the
pavement. Thou art not serious."

"I never was more serious. For whom dost thou take me, little-foolish
one?"

She cried:

"Oh, you English! You are _chic_. You make love as you go to war. Like
_that_!... One word--it is decided! And there is nothing more to say!
Ah! You English!"

She had almost screamed, shuddering under the shock of his decision,
for which she had impossibly hoped, but whose reality overwhelmed
her. He sat there in front of her, elegant, impeccably dressed,
distinguished, aristocratic, rich, in the full wisdom of his years,
and in the strength of his dominating will, and in the righteousness
of his heart. One could absolutely trust such as him to do the right
thing, and to do it generously, and to do it all the time. And she,
_she_ had won him. He had recognised her qualities. She had denied any
claim upon him, but by his decision he had admitted a claim--a claim
that no money could satisfy. After all, for eighteen months she had
been more to him than any other woman. He had talked freely to her.
He had concealed naught from her. He had spoken to her of his
discouragements and his weaknesses. He had had no shame before her.
By her acquiescences, her skill, her warmth, her adaptability, her
intense womanliness, she had created between them a bond stronger than
anything that could keep them apart. The bond existed. It could not
during the whole future be broken save by a disloyalty. A disloyalty,
she divined, would irrevocably destroy it. But she had no fear on that
score, for she knew her own nature. His decision did more than fill
her with a dizzy sense of relief, a mad, intolerable happiness--it
re-established her self-respect. No ordinary woman, handicapped as she
was, could have captured this fastidious and shy paragon ... And the
notion that her passion for him had dwindled was utterly ridiculous,
like the notion that he would tire of her. She was saved. She burst
into wild tears.

"Ah! Pardon me!" she sobbed. "I am quite calm, really. But since the
air-raid, thou knowest, I have not been quite the same ... Thou! Thou
art different. Nothing could disturb thy calm. Ah! If thou wert a
general at the front! What sang-froid! What presence of mind! But I--"

He bent towards her, and she suddenly sprang up and seized him round
the neck, and ate his lips, and while she strangled and consumed him
she kept muttering to him:

"Hope not that I shall thank thee. I cannot. I cannot! The words with
which I could thank thee do not exist. But I am thine, thine! All of
me is thine. Humiliate me! Demand of me impossible things! I am thy
slave, thy creature! Ah! Let me kiss thy beautiful grey hairs. I love
thy hair. And thy ears ..."

The thought of her insatiable temperament flashed through her as
she held him, and of his northern sobriety, and of the profound,
unchangeable difference between these two. She would discipline
her temperament; she would subjugate it. Women were capable of
miracles--and women alone. And she was capable of miracles.

A strange, muffled noise came to them across the darkness of the
sitting-room, and G.J. raised his head slightly to listen.

"Repose! Repose thyself in the arms of thy little mother," she
breathed softly. "It is nothing. It is but the wind blowing the blind
against the curtains."

And later, when she had distilled the magic of the hour and was
tranquillised, she said:

"And where is it, this flat?"




Chapter 39

IDYLL


Christine said to Marie, otherwise La Mere Gaston, the new servant
in the new flat, who was holding in her hand a telegram addressed to
"Hoape, Albany":

"Give it to me. I will put it in front of the clock on the
mantelpiece."

And she lodged it among the gilt cupids that supported the clock on
the fringed mantelpiece in the drawing-room. She did so with a little
gesture of childlike glee expressing her satisfaction in the flat as a
whole.

The flat was dark; she did not object, loving artificial light. The
rooms were all very small; she loved cosiness. There was a garage
close by, which might have disturbed her nights; but it did not. The
bathroom was open to the bedroom; no arrangement could be better. G.J.
in enumerating the disadvantages of the flat had said also that it
was too much and too heavily furnished. Not at all. She adored the
cumbrous and rich furniture; she did not want in her flat the empty
spaces of a ball-room; she wanted to feel that she was within an
interior--inside something. She gloried in the flat. She preferred it
even to her memory of G.J.'s flat in the Albany. Its golden ornateness
flattered her. The glittering cornices, and the big carved frames
of the pictures of impossible flowers and of ladies and gentlemen in
historic coiffures and costumes, appeared marvellous to her. She had
never seen, and certainly had never hoped to inhabit, anything like
it. But then Gilbert was always better than his word.

He had been quite frank, telling her that he knew of the existence of
the flat simply because it had been occupied for a brief time by the
Mrs. Carlos Smith of whom she had heard and read, and who had had to
leave it on account of health. (She did not remind him that once at
the beginning of the war when she had noticed the name and portrait of
Mrs. Carlos Smith in the paper, he, sitting by her side, had concealed
from her that he knew Mrs. Carlos Smith. Judiciously, she had never
made the slightest reference to that episode.) Though she detested
the unknown Mrs. Carlos Smith, she admired and envied her for a great
illustrious personage, and was secretly very proud of succeeding Mrs.
Carlos Smith in the tenancy. And when Gilbert told her that he had had
his eye on the flat for her before Mrs. Carlos Smith took it, and had
hesitated on account of its drawbacks, she was even more proud. And
reassured also. For this detail was a proof that Gilbert had really
had the intention to put her "among her own furniture" long before the
night of the supreme appeal to him.... Only he was always so cautious.

And Gilbert was the discoverer of la mere Gaston, too, and as frank
about her as about the flat. La mere Gaston was the widow of a French
soldier, domiciled in London previous to the war, who had died of
wounds in one of the Lechford hospitals; and it was through the
Lechford Committee that Gilbert had come across her. A few weeks
earlier than the beginning of the formal liaison Mrs. Braiding
had fallen ill for a space, and Madame Gaston had been summoned as
charwoman to aid Mrs. Braiding's young sister in the Albany flat. With
excellent judgment Gilbert had chosen her to succeed Marthe, whom he
himself had reproachfully dismissed from Cork Street.

He was amazingly clever, was Gilbert, for he had so arranged things
that Christine had been able to cut off her Cork Street career as with
a knife. She had departed from Cork Street with two trunks and a few
cardboard boxes--her stove was abandoned to the landlord--and vanished
into London and left no trace. Except Gilbert, nobody who knew her in
Cork Street was aware of her new address, and nobody who knew her
in Mayfair knew that she had come from Cork Street. Her ancient
acquaintances in Cork Street would ring the bell there in vain.

Madame Gaston was a neat, plump woman of perhaps forty, not looking
her years. She had a comprehending eye. After three words from Gilbert
she had mastered the situation, and as she perfectly realised where
her interest lay she could be relied upon for discretion. In all
delicate matters only her eye talked. She was a Protestant, and went
to the French church in Soho Square, which she called the "Temple".
Christine and she had had but one Sunday together--and Christine had
gone with her to the Temple! The fact was that Christine had decided
to be a Protestant. She needed a religion, and Catholicism had an
inconvenience--confession. She had regularised her position, so much
so that by comparison with the past she was now perfectly respectable.
Yet if she had been candid in the confessional the priest would still
have convicted her of mortal sin; which would have been very unfair;
and she could not, in view of her respectability, have remained a
Catholic without confessing, however infrequently. Madame Gaston,
as soon as she was sure of her convert, referred to Catholicism as
"idolatry".

"Put your apron on, Marie," said Christine. "Monsieur will be here
directly."

"Ah, yes, madame!"

"Have you opened the kitchen-window to take away the smell of
cooking?"

"Yes, madame."

"Am I all right, Marie?"

Madame Gaston surveyed her mistress, who turned round.

"Yes, madame. I think that monsieur will much like that _negligee_."
She departed to don the apron.

Between these two it was continually "monsieur," "monsieur". He
was seldom there, but he was always there, always being consulted,
placated, invoked, revered, propitiated, magnified. He was the giver
of all good, and there was no other Allah, and he had two prophets.

Christine sang, she twittered, she pirouetted, out of sheer youthful
joy. She had forgotten care and forgotten promiscuity; good fortune
had washed her pure. She looked at herself in the massive bevelled
mirror, and saw that she was fresh and young and lithe and graceful.
And she felt triumphant. Gilbert had expressed the fear that she might
get lonely and bored. He had even said that occasionally he might
bring along a man, and that perhaps the man would have a very nice
woman friend. She had not very heartily responded. She was markedly
sympathetic towards Englishmen, but towards English women--no! And
especially she did not want to know any English women in the same
situation as herself. Lonely? Impossible! Bored? Impossible! She
had an establishment. She had a civil list. Her days passed like an
Arabian dream. She never had an unfilled moment, and when each day was
over she always remembered little things which she had meant to do and
had not found time to do.

She was a superb sleeper, and arose at noon. Three o'clock usually
struck before her day had fairly begun--unless, of course, she
happened to be very busy, in which case she would be ready for contact
with the world at the lunch-hour. Her main occupation was to charm,
allure, and gratify a man; for that she lived. Her distractions were
music, the reading of novels, _Le Journal_, and _Les Grandes Modes_.
And for the war she knitted. In her new situation it was essential
that she should do something for the war. Therefore she knitted, being
a good knitter, and her knitting generally lay about.

She popped into the dining-room to see if the table was well set
for dinner. It was, but in order to show that Marie did not know
everything, she rearranged somewhat the flowers in the central bowl.
Then she returned to the drawing-room, and sat down at the piano and
waited. The instant of arrival approached. Gilbert's punctuality was
absolute, always had been; sometimes it alarmed her. She could not
have to wait more than a minute or two, according to the inexactitude
of her clock.... The bell rang, and simultaneously she began to play a
five-finger exercise. Often in the old life she had executed upon him
this innocent subterfuge, to make him think she practised the piano
to a greater extent than she actually did, that indeed she was always
practising. It never occurred to her that he was not deceived.

Hear Marie fly to the front door! See Christine's face, see her body,
as in her pale, bright gown she peeps round the half-open door of the
drawing-room! She lives, then. Her eyes sparkle for the giver of all
good, for the adored, and her brow is puckered for him, and the jewels
on her hand burn for him, and every pleat of her garments visible and
invisible is pleated for him. She is a child. She has snatched up a
chocolate, and put it between her teeth, and so she offers the half
of it to him, smiling, silent. She is a child, but she is also a woman
intensely skilled in her art....

"Monster!" she said. "Come this way." And she led him down the tunnel
to the bedroom. There, in a corner of the bathroom, stood an antique
closed toilet-stand, such as was used by men in the days before
splashing and sousing were invented. She had removed it from the
drawing-room.

"Open it," she commanded.

He obeyed. Its little compartments, which had been empty, were filled
with a man's toilet instruments--brushes, file, scissors, shaving-soap
(his own brand), a safety-razor, &c. The set was complete. She had
known exactly the requirements.

"It is a little present from thy woman," she said. "In future thou
wilt have no excuse--Sit down. Marie!"

"Madame?"

"Take off the boots of Monsieur."

Marie knelt.

Christine found the new slippers.

"And now this!" she said, after he had washed and used the new
brushes, producing a black house-jacket with velvet collar and cuffs.

"How tired thou must be after thy day!" she murmured, patting him with
tiny pats.

"Thou knowest, my little one," she said, pointing to the gas-stove
in the bedroom fireplace. "For the other rooms a gas-stove--I am
indifferent. But the bedroom is something else. The bedroom is sacred.
I could not tolerate a gas-stove in the bedroom. A coal fire is
necessary to me. You do not think so?"

"Yes," he said. "You are quite right. It shall be seen to."

"Can I give the order? Thou permittest me to give the order?"

"Certainly."

In the drawing-room she cushioned him well in the best easy-chair,
and, sitting down on a pouf near him, began to knit like an
industrious wife who understands the seriousness of war. Nothing
escaped the attention of that man. He espied the telegram.

"What's that?"

"Ah!" she cried, springing up and giving it to him. "Stupid that I am!
I forgot."

He looked at the address.

"How did this come here?" he asked mildly.

"Marie brought it--from the Albany."

"Oh!"

He opened the telegram and read it, having dropped the envelope into
the silk-lined, gilded waste-paper basket by the fender.

"It is nothing serious?" she questioned.

"No. Business."

He might have shown it to her--he had shown her telegrams before--but
he stuck it into his pocket. Then, without a word to Christine, he
rang the bell, and Marie appeared.

"Marie! The telegram--why did you bring it here?"

"Monsieur, it was like this. I went to monsieur's flat to fetch two
aprons that I had left there. The telegram was on the console in the
ante-chamber. Knowing that monsieur was to come direct here, I brought
it."

"Does Mrs. Braiding know you brought it?"

"Ah! As for Mrs. Braiding, monsieur--"

Marie stopped, disclaiming any responsibility for Mrs. Braiding, of
whom she was somewhat jealous. "I thought to do well."

"I am sure of it. But surely you can see you have been indiscreet.
Don't do it again."

"No, monsieur. I ask pardon of monsieur."

Immediately afterwards he said to Christine in a gay, careless tone:

"And this gas-stove here? Is it all right? Have we tried it? Let us
try it."

"The weather is warm, dearest."

"But just to try it. I always like to satisfy myself--in time."

"Fusser!" she exclaimed, and ignited the stove.

He gazed at it absently, then picked up a cigarette and, taking the
telegram from his pocket, folded it into a spill and with it lit the
cigarette.

"Yes," he said meditatively. "It seems not a bad stove." And he held
the spill till it had burnt to his finger-ends. Then he extinguished
the stove.

She said to herself:

"He has burned the telegram on purpose. But how cleverly he did it!
Ah! That man! There is none but him!"

She was disquieted about the telegram. She feared it. Her
superstitiousness was awakened. She thought of her apostasy from
Catholicism to Protestantism. She thought of a Holy Virgin angered.
And throughout the evening and throughout the night, amid her smiles
and teasings and coaxings and caresses and ecstasies and all her
accomplished, voluptuous girlishness, the image of a resentful Holy
Virgin flitted before her. Why should he burn a business telegram?
Also, was he not at intervals a little absent-minded?




Chapter 40

THE WINDOW


G.J. sat on the oilcloth-covered seat of the large overhanging open
bay-window. Below him was the river, tributary of the Severn; in front
the Old Bridge, with an ancient street rising beyond, and above that
the silhouette of the roofs of Wrikton surmounted by the spire of its
vast church. To the left was the weir, and the cliffs were there also,
and the last tints of the sunset.

Somebody came into the coffee-room. G.J. looked round, hoping that it
might, after all, be Concepcion. But it was Concepcion's maid, Emily,
an imitative young woman who seemed to have caught from her former
employer the quality of strange, sinister provocativeness.

She paused a moment before speaking. Her thin figure was somewhat
indistinct in the twilight.

"Mrs. Smith wishes me to say that she will certainly be well enough to
take you to the station in the morning, sir," said she in her specious
tones. "But she hopes you will be able to stay till the afternoon
train."

"I shan't." He shook his head.

"Very well, sir."

And after another moment's pause Emily, apparently with a challenging
reluctance, receded through the shadows of the room and vanished.

G.J. was extremely depressed and somewhat indignant. He gazed down
bitterly at the water, following with his eye the incredibly long
branches of the tree that from the height of the buttresses drooped
perpendicularly into the water. He had had an astounding week-end; and
for having responded to Concepcion's telegram, for having taken the
telegram seriously, he had deserved what he got. Thus he argued.

She had met him on the hot Saturday afternoon in a Ford car. She did
not look ill. She looked as if she had fairly recovered from her
acute neurasthenia. She was smartly and carelessly dressed in a summer
sporting costume, and had made a strong contrast to every other human
being on the platform of the small provincial station. The car drove
not to the famous principal hotel, but to a small hotel just beyond
the bridge. She had given him tea in the coffee-room and taken him out
again, on foot, showing him the town--the half-timbered houses, the
immense castle, the market-hall, the spacious flat-fronted residences,
the multiplicity of solicitors, banks and surveyors, the bursting
provision shops with imposing fractions of animals and expensive pies,
and the drapers with ladies' blouses at 2s. 4d. Then she had conducted
him to an organ recital in the vast church where, amid faint gas-jets
and beadles and stalls and stained glass and holiness and centuries
of history and the high respectability of the town, she had whispered
sibilantly, and other people had whispered, in the long intervals of
the organ. She had removed him from the church before the collection
for the Red Cross, and when they had eaten a sort of dinner she had
borne him away to the Russian dancers in the Moot Hall.

She said she had seen the Russian dancers once already, and that they
were richly worth to him a six-hours' train journey. The posters of
the Russian dancers were rather daring and seductive. The Russian
dancers themselves were the most desolating stage spectacle that G.J.
had ever witnessed. The troupe consisted of intensely English girls
of various ages, and girl-children. The costumes had obviously been
fabricated by the artistes. The artistes could neither dance, pose,
group, make an entrance, make an exit, nor even smile. The ballets,
obviously fabricated by the same persons as the costumes, had no plot,
no beginning and no end. Crude amateurishness was the characteristic
of these honest and hard-working professionals, who somehow contrived
to be neither men nor women--and assuredly not epicene--but who
travelled from country town to country town in a glamour of posters,
exciting the towns, in spite of a perfect lack of sex, because they
were the fabled Russian dancers. The Moot Hall was crammed with adults
and their cackling offspring, who heartily applauded the show, which
indeed was billed as a "return visit" due to "terrific success" on a
previous occasion. "Is it not too marvellous," Concepcion had said.
He had admitted that it was. But the boredom had been excruciating.
In the street they had bought an evening paper of which he had never
before heard the name, to learn news of the war. The war, however,
seemed very far off; it had grown unreal. "We'll talk to-morrow,"
Concepcion had said, and gone abruptly to bed! Still, he had slept
well in the soft climate, to the everlasting murmur of the weir.

Then the Sunday. She was indisposed, could not come down to breakfast,
but hoped to come down to lunch, could not come down to lunch, but
hoped to come down to tea, could not come down to tea--and so on to
nightfall. The Sunday had been like a thousand years to him. He had
learnt the town, and the suburbs of it; the grass-grown streets, the
main thoroughfares, and the slums; by the afternoon he was recognising
familiar faces in the town. He had twice made the classic round--along
the cliffs, over the New Bridge (which was an antique), up the hill to
the castle, through the market-place, down the High Street to the
Old Bridge. He had explored the brain of the landlord, who could
not grapple with a time-table, and who spent most of the time during
closed hours in patiently bolting the front door which G.J. was
continually opening. He had talked to the old customer who, whenever
the house was open, sat at a table in the garden over a mug of cider.
He had played through all the musical comedies, dance albums and
pianoforte albums that littered the piano. He had read the same Sunday
papers that he read in the Albany. And he had learnt the life-history
of the sole servant, a very young agreeable woman with a wedding-ring
and a baby, which baby she carried about with her when serving at
table. Her husband was in France. She said that as soon as she had
received his permission to do so she should leave, as she really could
not get through all the work of the hotel and mind and feed a baby.
She said also that she played the piano herself. And she regretted
that baby and pressure of work had deprived her of a sight of the
Russian dancers, because she had heard so much about them, and was
sure they were beautiful. This detail touched G.J.'s heart to a
mysterious and sweet and almost intolerable melancholy. He had not
made the acquaintance of fellow-guests--for there were none, save
Concepcion and Emily.

And in the evening as in the morning the weir placidly murmured, and
the river slipped smoothly between the huge jutting buttresses of the
Old Bridge; and the thought of the perpetuity of the river, in whose
mirror the venerable town was a mushroom, obsessed him, mastered
him, and made him as old as the river. He was wonder-struck
and sorrow-struck by life, and by his own life, and by the
incomprehensible and angering fantasy of Concepcion. His week-end took
on the appearance of the monstrous. Then the door opened again, and
Concepcion entered in a white gown, the antithesis of her sporting
costume of the day before. She approached through the thickening
shadows of the room, and the vague whiteness of her gown reminded him
of the whiteness of the form climbing the chimney-ladder on the roof
of Lechford House in the raid. Knowing her, he ought to have known
that, having made him believe that she would not come down, she
would certainly come down. He restrained himself, showed no untoward
emotion, and said in a calm, genial voice: "Oh! I'm so glad you were
well enough to come down."

She sat opposite to him in the window-seat, rather sideways, so that
her skirt was pulled close round her left thigh and flowed free over
the right. He could see her still plainly in the dusk.

"I've never yet apologised to you for my style of behaviour at the
committee of yours," she began abruptly in a soft, kind, reasonable
voice. "I know I let you down horribly. Yes, yes! I did. And I ought
to apologise to you for to-day too. But I don't think I'll apologise
to you for bringing you to Wrikton and this place. They're not real,
you know. They're an illusion. There is no such place as Wrikton and
this river and this window. There couldn't be, could there? Queen and
I motored over here once from Paulle--it's not so very far--and
we agreed that it didn't really exist. I never forgot it; I was
determined to come here again some time, and that's why I chose this
very spot when half Harley Street stood up and told me I must go away
somewhere after my cure and be by myself, far from the pernicious
influence of friends. I think I gave you a very fair idea of the town
yesterday. But I didn't show you the funniest thing in it--the inside
of a solicitor's office. You remember the large grey stone house in
Mill Street--the grass street, you know--with 'Simpover and Simpover'
on the brass plate, and the strip of green felt nailed all round the
front door to keep the wind out in winter. Well, it's all in the
same key inside. And I don't know which is the funniest, the Russian
dancers, or the green felt round the front door, or Mr. Simpover, or
the other Mr. Simpover. I'm sure neither of those men is real, though
they both somehow have children. You remember the yellow cards that
you see in so many of the windows: 'A MAN has gone from this house to
fight for King and Country!'--the elder Mr. Simpover thinks it would
be rather boastful to put the card in the window, so he keeps it on
the mantelpiece in his private office. It's for his son. And yet
I assure you the father isn't real. He is like the town, he simply
couldn't be real."

"What have _you_ been up to in the private office?" G.J. asked
lightly.

"Making my will."

"What for?"

"Isn't it the proper thing to do? I've left everything to you."

"You haven't, Con!" he protested. There was absolutely no tranquillity
about this woman. With her, the disconcerting unexpected happened
every five minutes.

"Did you suppose I was going to send any of my possessions back to my
tropical relatives in South America? I've left everything to you to do
what you like with. Squander it if you like, but I expect you'll give
it to war charities. Anyhow, I thought it would be safest in your
hands."

He retorted in a tone quietly and sardonically challenging:

"But I was under the impression you were cured."

"Of my neurasthenia?"

"Yes."

"I believe I am. I gained thirteen pounds in the nursing home, and
slept like a greengrocer. In fact, the Weir-Mitchell treatment, with
modern improvements of course, enjoyed a marvellous triumph in my
case. But that's not the point. G.J., I know you think I behaved very
childishly yesterday, and that I deserved to be ill to-day for what
I did yesterday. And I admit you're a saint for not saying so. But
I wasn't really childish, and I haven't really been ill to-day. I've
only been in a devil of a dilemma. I wanted to tell you something. I
telegraphed for you so that I could tell you. But as soon as I saw you
I was afraid to tell you. Not afraid, but I couldn't make up my mind
whether I ought to tell you or not. I've lain in bed all day trying
to decide the point. To-night I decided I oughtn't, and then all of
a sudden, just now, I became an automaton and put on some things, and
here I am telling you."

She paused. G.J. kept silence. Then she continued, in a voice in which
persuasiveness was added to calm, engaging reasonableness:

"Now you must get rid of all your conventional ideas, G.J. Because
you're rather conventional. You must be completely straight--I mean
intellectually--otherwise I can't treat you as an intellectual equal,
and I want to. You must be a realist--if any man can be." She spoke
almost with tenderness.

He felt mysteriously shy, and with a brusque movement of the head
shifted his glance from her to the river.

"Well?" he questioned, his gaze fixed on the water that continually
slipped in large, swirling, glinting sheets under the bridge.

"I'm going to kill myself."

At first the words made no impression on him. He replied:

"You were right when you said this place was an illusion. It is."

And then he began to be afraid. Did she mean it? She was capable of
anything. And he was involved in her, inescapably. Yes, he was afraid.