.IBRARY 
 
 DIVERSITY OP 
 P 1RNIA 
 EGO
 
 EPISODES
 
 Uniform ivit/t t/iis Volume 
 price 3*. dd. each. 
 
 THE ATTACK ON THE MILL 
 By EMILE ZOLA 
 
 THE AVERAGE WOMAN 
 
 By WOI.COTT BALES-TIER 
 
 MADEMOISELLE MISS 
 
 By HENRY HARLAND 
 
 WRECKAGE 
 
 By HUBERT CRACKANTHORPE 
 
 BLESSED ARE THE POOR 
 By FRANCOIS COPPE 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 WILLIAM 1 1 El N EM ANN
 
 E 
 
 PISODES 
 
 BY 
 
 G. S. STREET 
 
 AUTHOR 01-' 
 
 " The Autobiography of a Boy" 
 
 LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN 
 
 MDCCCXCV BEDFORD STREET W.C.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE BLACKMAILER I 
 
 STRAY 7 
 
 A MAN OF SENTIMENT 13 
 
 IN A MAN'S LIFE 20 
 
 THE RECLAIMING OF A REPROBATE ... 25 
 
 FOR WANT OF A BETTER 37 
 
 THE EMANCIPATION OF A CURATE ... 41 
 
 THE END OF ALL THINGS 63 
 
 FROM A COMPARATIVE HISTORY .... 67 
 
 AN EPISODE IN A COMMONPLACE LIFE . . 79 
 
 TWO WOMEN ........ 90 
 
 THE EPISODE OF JOHNSON 97 
 
 A REASONABLE HUSBAND 109 
 
 THE END OF A POSE 115 
 
 A NOTE ON THE LAST EPISODE .... 125 
 
 A RECONCILIATION . .... 133
 
 vi Contents 
 
 I A(;K 
 
 AN ACT OK INTROSPECTION ... 141 
 
 THE ROMANCE OF BOBBY GORDON . . 149 
 
 THE TRUE CHIVALRY 159 
 
 PETER SANDERSON'S PASSION .... 166 
 
 A SPOILED IDEAL . iSl
 
 EPISODES
 
 THE BLACKMAILER 
 
 LORD CHARLES is a very pleasant, comfortable 
 sort of man. You meet him in the shadiest 
 haunts of dissipation, quite unperturbed and 
 casual, and equally casual and unperturbed at 
 the most exclusive houses. He turns up every- 
 where unobtrusively, and has never been 
 associated with a scandal. He talks to the 
 most disreputable people as if he and they 
 were simple, innocent children of domesticity, 
 and would assume a perfect sympathy with an 
 archbishop. Business men feel in talking to 
 him that his and their modes of life are iden- 
 tical. He does not say very much, and all his 
 friends pronounce him " such a good chap." 
 There is a little house at Roehampton, where 
 his private cab occasionally stops, which repre- 
 sents something like the equivalent of a mor- 
 A T
 
 Episodes 
 
 ganatic marriage, and Lord Charles is, I 
 believe, an excellent (if morganatic) husband. 
 He is very well known in Paris, and finds 
 gambling an agreeable stimulus and an assist- 
 ance to the digestion. But he is quite casual 
 about that also. 
 
 Lord Charles' profession is and was that of 
 living at the rate of twice his income. It is 
 rather a fatiguing profession, and it is to that 
 his friends refer when they say poor Charles 
 has a lot of trouble. 
 
 On one occasion he contemplated a different 
 pro!~ession, almost as old perhaps, as his own. 
 
 Sir John is a proprietor of something or 
 other, a Member of Parliament and of an 
 eminent political club, and the possessor of a 
 signed photograph of a fifth cousin of royalty. 
 That is about all that anybody knows of him : 
 I do not think he is cultivated for his social 
 qualities, and his tastes seem to be negative. 
 
 It happened that Lord Charles had a sister 
 who went slumming, and in the course of her 
 slumming heard the name of Sir John ; what
 
 Tie Blackmailer 
 
 she heard about him is not relevant ; it was by 
 no means a pretty story. Such as it was, she 
 told it to her brother, who was interested. He 
 made an expedition to South London, and 
 returned thoughtful and with a document. 
 But he persuaded his sister not to tell the world 
 what she had heard. 
 
 What puzzled Lord Charles in the first place 
 was the question how Sir John could have been 
 such a fool as to write the incriminating letter ; 
 still, that he had written it was clear. If it had 
 been a forgery the writer would have acted on 
 it long ago. Eut the next reflection was that 
 the letter proved Sir John not a nice man in 
 fact a man who would have been called, even 
 in Lord Charles' intimate set, a blackguard. 
 He reflected that it was infamous such a fellow 
 should be received into decent society, simply 
 because he was rich. That was rather unfair 
 to society ; but thinking of money, it occurred 
 to Lord Charles that he owed money all over 
 the place (which meant to his friends lawyers 
 and people did not count), and that he was
 
 Episodes 
 
 threatened with eviction from the morganatic 
 little house at Roehampton. Certainly Sir 
 John would be kicked out of the eminent 
 political club and the House if the world knew 
 what Lord Charles knew, and royalty's fifth 
 cousin would regret the signed photograph. 
 He pondered over these things as he lunched 
 at his club and strolled up Piccadilly to his 
 rooms. 
 
 It is fair to say that Lord Charles had never 
 done a mean thing in his life. He had never 
 consciously told lies of an enemy or too much 
 of the truth of a friend. He had never borrowed 
 without intending to repay, or betrayed a secret. 
 He was withal good-natured, would listen to 
 anybody's grievances, and gave presents to his 
 nephews. 
 
 Nevertheless, Lord Charles put these ques- 
 tions to himself: When there were so many 
 undiscovered blackguards, what did it matter to 
 the world if Sir John continued to be one of 
 these ? Would it not be a good thing if some 
 of the money of a brute like that were diverted 
 
 4
 
 The Blackmailer 
 
 to the pockets of an excellent and amiable per- 
 son ? If he made up his mind not to tell the 
 secret in any case, would it be very base to 
 plunder the Egyptians ? Not to bargain, but to 
 ask a loan ? 
 
 You see, the possibility of plundering a man 
 he disliked, without hurting anybody else, had 
 not occurred in his life before. I repeat my 
 assertion that he had so far never done a mean 
 thing. Lord Charles called on Sir John and 
 showed him the letter. Sir John entreated, 
 made excuses, and abased himself, and appeared 
 to Lord Charles the most contemptible hound 
 he had ever seen. Sir John offered him 
 money. 
 
 " God damn you," said Lord Charles, " what 
 the devil do you mean ? If you were not tuch 
 a cur, I'd " 
 
 What he did was to walk out of the house. 
 He did not tell the secret ; he had made up his 
 mind not to do so. Nor did he speak to Sir 
 John again. 
 
 It is rather a tame ending, not at all cynical.
 
 Episodes 
 
 But you see Sir John was so very offensive a 
 cur, and Lord Charles \vas a little fastidious. 
 It was wholly impossible to ask such a man for 
 a loan.
 
 STRAY 
 
 I WAS loafing in the Park in the hot weather 
 one morning, and sat down on a seat. A 
 giil who passed by set me thinking indolently 
 but with a certain alertness, for the day was 
 as yet fresh. Something in the gait as she 
 drew near and much in the face as she glanced 
 down on me set me on a train of familiar 
 imaginings. One is not prepared for such a 
 girl as one walks about London. I had a 
 glimpse of a small regular face, and a very 
 sensual mouth. I don't suppose she was 
 twenty. The eyes looked with an easy humour 
 upon the world ; the glance on me expressed 
 a mildly interested and untroubled indifference. 
 She wore her clothes with distinction, but 
 you knew they were clothes and not part of
 
 Episodes 
 
 her. And she walked like an unobtrusive, 
 unaggressive queen. The expression of the 
 whole of her was gaiety, gaiety not forced, 
 nor spasmodic, nor noisy, but gaiety overflow- 
 ing, mellow, all-irresistible. I felt as I rose 
 and followed her she was part of another 
 world. She had nothing in common with 
 plutocracy, and popular culture, and getting 
 your money's worth. She had nothing to do 
 with this amorphous mass of streets and houses. 
 She lived when London was the town, long 
 ago, before even the Germans came in with 
 
 their hatred of boets and bainters 
 
 There was no atom of discontent in her move- 
 ment ; clearly the gods had given her a lot 
 rare in modern England. 
 
 Such were my fancies, and I will tell you 
 the facts. I was convinced I could speak to 
 her without offence, if heaven gave me the 
 least excuse. I believed I was the man in all 
 London who could really understand this girl ; 
 I believed I was middle-aged enough to give 
 her an idea of it. She must have had anothc
 
 training than the common ; we could be rational 
 without vulgarity. She dropped something or 
 other ; heaven was kind and we were soon 
 conversing. I learned this : she was the 
 daughter of a solicitor, lived in West Ken- 
 sington, went to Broadstairs every year, had 
 never been out of England. Those were the 
 facts given without the asking which met 
 my fancy; but not one jot of my fancy had I 
 to resign. Any other girl so brought up one 
 would have felt was outstepping her conven- 
 tions in a vulgar spirit. This one was merely 
 impelled by a purely reasonable insistence on 
 reasonable pleasure, a purely frank response 
 to sympathy she felt instinctively. I gathered 
 that for education she had been to a few plays 
 and had read a few novels. She told me these 
 things readily, correcting a misconception she 
 inferred. 
 
 Then quickly she passed to generalities in 
 itself a curious course for her as she described 
 herself. Not one jot of my fancy had I to 
 resign, not a whit less queenly, less gay, less 
 
 9
 
 Episodes 
 
 sensual was she. She was a woman of Stuart 
 England re-incarnate ; there was no doubt of 
 that. Her attitude towards life, her unaffected 
 rule of taking the moment, the background of 
 humorous pathos she was unique of my 
 acquaintance. Probably I do not make the 
 idea of her plain, I fear it much. She was 
 difficult to seize ; but one thing was clear ; she 
 used her circle of worthy respectable young 
 men as she should have used a Court. I know 
 she shared in their pleasures and observed their 
 humours and laughed, and now and then had 
 a cry, and so was done with it. I know one or 
 two dissolute, quaint, delightful people who 
 would have appealed to her but alas ! She 
 was not discontented only once did she say 
 she wished people were less pompous and 
 reserved ; she knew no other sort of men, she 
 thought life pleasant, and she lived, I know 
 but alas ! the men she knew could never know 
 her. 
 The note of it all was pathos. The obvious 
 
 10
 
 Stray 
 
 pathos : she would never be middle-aged as I 
 am, but she would be old. She was born to 
 be a coster-girl or a king's mistress, and it would 
 be hers to break the heart of a stock-jobber 
 and to marry an essential attorney. Should 
 one wish her an awakening, and what might 
 follow ? I do not know. But behind it was a 
 pathos not obvious, the pathos that is behind 
 all gaiety and beauty not absorbingly self- 
 conscious : she was so entirely the creature of 
 sensation, and sensations are so brief read it 
 as you will. 
 
 You have told me we are all made by cir- 
 cumstance, and will tell me there was some 
 circumstance in her life's history which made 
 her too as she was. 
 
 It sounds inevitable, but allow me the old 
 "throw back." I will believe an ancestor, pass- 
 ing many generations, came out in her an 
 ancestor who ruffled it, and was wittily and 
 reasonably unrestrained. But there she was 
 unique, unappreciated, and content. I have
 
 Episodes 
 
 never seen her since, but London is less 
 prosaic in that such a girl is possible in 
 West Kensington, going to Broadstairs every 
 year.
 
 A MAN OF SENTIMENT 
 
 COLVERT was a novelist and a successful one. 
 He was not simply a man who had written 
 novels and might write more ; he was called a 
 novelist as a policeman is called a policeman ; 
 novel writing was his regular profession and he 
 produced novels methodically two a year (I 
 think), or maybe three. " Mr. Colvert's new 
 novel will be called so-and-so " was a regularly 
 recurring item in the newspapers' " Literary 
 Notes." They seldom said more, not that 
 Colvert was a reticent man, but because there 
 was never more to say. When you had read 
 one of Colvert's novels, you had read, so far as 
 scheme and the nature of their interest was 
 concerned, them all. They are not bad reading. 
 There is no subtlety and no thought in them, 
 and the plots are turned out by machine, but 
 
 13
 
 Episodes 
 
 there is a good deal of honest observation and 
 study of the outsides of life, and, for my small 
 part, I think Colvert a more meritorious writer 
 than many more startling and more obviously 
 modern people. One merit the average critic 
 always observes in them, their wholesome, 
 English sentiment, which usually comes in 
 towards the end, when the excellent hero and 
 heroine come together again. Given a sym- 
 pathetic frame of mind in the reader, it is quite 
 moving and adequate to the occasion. 
 
 But on the appearance of one of the novels a 
 reviewer on a certain paper selected this very 
 element for attack. He gave Colvert a column 
 to himself and Colvert's sentiment a good three- 
 quarters. He quoted, analysed, and came to 
 the conclusion that it was artificial and stupidly 
 so. He complimented Colvert on his general 
 level of intelligence, and deplored that he should 
 make such slips. 
 
 This review was read by Colvert with great 
 attention. His wife, who also read it, said the 
 eviewer was obviously a disappointed author, 
 14
 
 A Man of Sentiment 
 
 inspired by malice, and that his dishonesty 
 should be exposed. But Colvert knew better. 
 He was no more subject to delusions of vanity 
 than any other average man of business. More- 
 over, he was pleased that this particular reviewer 
 had remarked (as eulogists of his sentiment had 
 not always) that without parading his knowledge 
 he (Colvert) was a better educated man and 
 a writer of better English than the general 
 run of novelists, which was Colveri's opinion 
 also. 
 
 He took the paper to his study and considered 
 the matter. He was a natural, direct man, with 
 no airs and some sense of humour, and was far 
 from taking himself for a genius. He knew 
 that the books he turned out were neither 
 masterpieces nor drivel, were good so far as 
 they went. He knew that his general ability 
 was a shade above the average and would have 
 gained him much about the same success in 
 other callings. That he was a practical man 
 who had made it his first aim to secure his 
 share of loaves and fishes. But at the same
 
 Episodes 
 
 time it is hardly in human nature that one 
 should be constantly informed that he has a 
 vein of tender feeling, of love of the beautiful 
 English home, and so forth, without coming to 
 believe that it is more or less true. Colvert 
 really thought that he had a fine appreciation of 
 the longings of the human heart, or something 
 of that sort. The review was therefore a little 
 shock. He re-read it in his study. In particular 
 he remarked the reviewer's cynical account of 
 the genesis of his sentiment ; it was not true, 
 but how, as a matter of fact, did this tenderness 
 for lovers' troubles come about in his brain ? 
 Colvert was not the recipient of young people's 
 confidences : it must have been intuition. His 
 mind ran back to the sentiment in his various 
 novels, and vaguely and half-consciously ad- 
 mitted that he had repeated the same line of 
 thought. 
 
 But in the first novel ? Ah, me ! The senti- 
 mental piece there was copied from an earlier 
 novel which was never published ; which was 
 written when Colvert was not a successful novelist, 
 
 16
 
 A Man of Sentiment 
 
 but a young man who was going to recreate the 
 world. 
 
 He came to no definite conclusions, but 
 made a mental note that the paper was 
 interesting 
 
 It was some weeks later that he read of the 
 death in India of a woman he had once known 
 very well, and locked his study door that morning 
 after breakfast. 
 
 It was she who had given to a young man 
 of ordinary tastes and ordinary ambitions a 
 momentary enthusiasm. She was married 
 then, a fragile, black-eyed little woman. Her 
 husband was Colvert's friend at Cambridge 
 and his friendship with the wife had no 
 moment of direct passion in it. And yet it had 
 been a romance. She was the most sensitive, 
 the most highly developed creature (emotion- 
 ally) that Colvert had met, and she had more 
 grace and perfection of manner than men of 
 Colvert's stamp can appreciate for long. When 
 he had become a successful novelist he would 
 not have appreciated that perfection ; a warm- 
 
 l: 17
 
 Episodes 
 
 hearted and generous boy (if an ordinary), 
 fresh from the University, he had the sense to 
 worship. She gave him some faint perception of 
 what is gracious and lovely in life : he has lost 
 it long since, but did well to worship a while. 
 You might have called his feeling a kind of 
 spiritual passion, if you would ; at least it was 
 the only romance in Colvert's life, and when 
 her husband exchanged into the Line and took 
 her to India, Colvert felt the sun was darkened. 
 
 He went gloomily for a time, and then set 
 himself to work and to succeed. He began his 
 course of novels, and retired from the Civil 
 Service, and in due time married where money 
 was. He grew stout and bald and did the 
 same thing every day, and took his month's 
 holiday every year, and thought no more of the 
 black-eyed, fragile little woman who had 
 appointed him her knight. He was more like 
 a knighted alderman than Sir Lancelot now. 
 
 As Colvert mused on these things, a thought 
 occurred to him. It may have been that his 
 brain had been unconsciously busied with the 
 critic's analysis of his sentiment ; it may have 
 
 18
 
 A Man of Sentiment 
 
 been also that humour for a moment illumi- 
 nated him as he thought of his monotonous 
 existence. Colvert told himself that he was 
 feeling no genuine grief, that he had locked his 
 study door and was musing before the fire in 
 conventional recognition of the occasion. He 
 compressed his lips, unlocked a drawer, and 
 took out a slim packet of letters. He looked at 
 them one by one gay, gracious, thoughtful 
 little letters they were, which had once stirred 
 all that might be stirred in Colvert. Only a 
 few came from India, and he remembered this 
 with more feeling a bitter feeling than any- 
 thing else. But otherwise they woke nothing 
 in him now. He tried hard to remember how 
 he had felt those years ago. His mind 
 wandered to common things. He compressed 
 his lips again and put the letters away. He 
 was glad of an interruption. 
 
 If sentiment be dead in Colvert, there are 
 many things in his commonplace middle age 
 which make life worth living. He has broken 
 his eggs, but his omelette is nutritive. 
 
 But he ought to respect that reviewer. 
 
 19
 
 IN A MAN'S LIFE 
 
 IV. THAT'S not as you used. 
 
 M. Not that ? 
 
 W. No. Don't kiss me again. Tell me who 
 she is. 
 
 M. Who? 
 
 IV. Oh, I may as well hear all about it. I 
 know the main fact, and may as well hear the 
 particulars. 
 
 M. That must mean you don't 
 
 }\ T . Don't what? 
 
 M. Never mind. For God's sake change the 
 subject. 
 
 IV. You were going to say it meant I didn't 
 care for you, only you thought the assumption 
 that I had ever had a swaggering sort of thing 
 and bad form. You see I have a little pene- 
 tration. It's so funny after all that has happened
 
 /// a Man's Life 
 
 between us. But I rather like you for it. Now, 
 tell me about her. 
 
 M. Suppose she existed, I hate talking to one 
 woman about another. 
 
 W, In certain circumstances. For both their 
 sakes and your own, I suppose. I know why 
 you won't. You think all women are so vain 
 that they can't bear the idea of being superseded. 
 Of course it may be painful, sometimes, but to 
 suppose that no woman can face the fact without 
 a fit is so childish. You're a man of the world, 
 but I believe you get your ideas of women out of 
 books, after all. Of course I've seen for some 
 time that she existed. I can bear it perfectly 
 well, I assure you. 
 
 M. Too damned well 
 
 IV. What a brute you are ! I had no con- 
 ception you were so primitive. You intend to 
 go to somebody else and are furious because I 
 am not going to break my heart. I will comfort 
 you : I bear it, my dear, because I know you 
 will come back. 
 
 Jlf. I shall never oo in a sense.
 
 Episodes 
 
 W. Ah, there you admit it ; that is all com- 
 fortable. In a sense? Always friends, you 
 mean ? 
 
 M. Yes, indeed. 
 
 W. Now that is sweet of you. 1 didn't 
 mean never mind. What is the attraction ? I 
 promise you I won't scoff. 
 
 J/. If you insist there is somebody who 
 attracts me rather not quite as you suppose. 
 
 W. Tell me about her. Surely I may take as 
 much interest in you as that. 
 
 Af. She's very feminine and frivolous and that 
 sort of thing. 
 
 W. Young ? 
 
 M. Yes. 
 
 W. Pretty, of course ? 
 
 M. In her own way wonderfully pretty. 
 
 W. Ah, a reaction. A reaction from pince- 
 nez and philosophy and a sort of distinguished 
 ugliness. 
 
 J/. For God's sake 
 
 IV. Oh, my good friend, because you're in a 
 primitive mood I don't intend to grovel in a
 
 In a Man's Life 
 
 mass of make-beliefs as well. You can't be 
 always philosophical that's one of the reasons 
 I like you. Or rather you show practical phi- 
 losophy. Tell me more. Are you going to 
 marry her ? 
 
 M. She's not 
 
 W. Bring her to see me. 
 
 M. I tell you she's not 
 
 W. I understand. Since when have you 
 imagined I always consult Mrs. Grundy before 
 seeing anybody ? I wonder if you will marry 
 her, though. If you grow affectionate and she 
 isn't a fool you probably will. Educated ? 
 
 M. Not in the ordinary sense. 
 
 W. I don't think I quite understand things. 
 
 A commonplace amourette Why are you 
 
 leaving me " in a sense " ? 
 
 M. Don't you understand I feel a brute when 
 I come here ? 
 
 W. Don't I understand you don't care about 
 a quasi-love affair with me 
 
 J/. I had better go. 
 
 W. No, stay a little longer. I was reading 
 
 2 3
 
 Episodes 
 
 Catullus to-day shamefully unfeminine, wasn't 
 it ? That da mi basia mille you know. Do 
 you know I think there is something a little 
 pathetic, for all our absurdities, in us over- 
 educated and meditating women ? We miss all 
 that, that simple, foolish cooing. We needn't 
 there is no essential necessity ; but somehow we 
 do. Some little girl, very feminine and frivolous, 
 comes in, and we, with our education and good 
 sense and perception and the whole bag of 
 
 tricks, as you say, have to scuttle away 
 
 No Good-bye. 
 
 M. I don't want to go, but I know 
 
 IV. You know you will sooner or later. 
 Good-bye. Perhaps you'll come back. 
 
 M. Good-bye. Oh, what a beast I am. Don't 
 cry, for God's sake. 
 
 JJ r . Oh, go go ! I am only tired. Go. 
 Good 
 
 Af. \_To himself as he goes}. What a beast 
 I am.
 
 THE RECLAIMING OF A 
 REPROBATE 
 
 HENRY was a man in the Guards, Grace was 
 his sister, Eleanor was his wife, and Jack was 
 his cousin. Henry, Eleanor, and Grace lived 
 together, and Jack used frequently to dine with 
 them. But a trifle more of description is un- 
 fortunately necessary. 
 
 Henry was not amusing, but full of common 
 sense. He was fond of his profession and was 
 a gentleman. Being thrown of necessity a 
 good deal into the society of modern people 
 he secretly detested the mode of the day, and 
 found the effort to be frivolous, a bore. 
 
 Eleanor was the froth of a glass of champagne 
 made into ethereal flesh. She was sensitive 
 and had a keen sense of humour. She had an 
 instinct and a passion for everything that was
 
 Episodes 
 
 beautful and gay. She was cynical and senti- 
 mental and profound and idiotic all at once, a 
 perfect hostess and a perfect guest. Con- 
 sequently she was popular with butterflies, but 
 the women who tried to follow her fancies some- 
 times came to grief. 
 
 Jack and Henry had an affection for one 
 another, begotten of habit, and possibly got 
 relief from themselves in contrast. Henry was 
 handsome, heavy, massive ; Jack was delight- 
 fully ugly and always looked on the point of 
 death. He did nothing but hurry about between 
 London and Paris, giving supper-parties and 
 making jokes. He was morbidly artistic, and 
 revelled in the humours of British morality. 
 
 Grace was a rather substantial beauty and 
 not otherwise remarkable. Like her brother 
 she would have been more at home socially in 
 the middle Victorian period, but she was fond of 
 seeing and being seen, and had acquired the 
 superficial marks of Eleanor's friends. 
 
 The house in Berkeley Square belonged to 
 Eleanor, who was an heiress. Jack had but a 
 26
 
 7 he Reclaiming of a Reprobate 
 
 few hundreds a year and Grace had nothing ; 
 Eleanor, who adored her beauty, loved to lavish 
 dresses and jewels on her. Of course Grace 
 and Henry were allies, and Eleanor and Jack. 
 But there had been no disunion. Each went 
 his or her way unmolested, and brother and 
 sister tacitly tolerated the wife as an irresponsible 
 butterfly and the cousin as an amiable lunatic. 
 Occasionally Grace would gratify her instincts 
 by delivering a lecture on one of Eleanor's 
 eccentricities. On these occasions Eleanor 
 would pout a little, and be a little sarcastic, and 
 suddenly kiss Grace and vow she was an angel, 
 and there the incident would end. 
 
 But a little while before the episode I am 
 about to relate happened, they had a rather 
 serious conversation. It was on an afternoon 
 in October, and they sat by the firelight, Grace 
 in a large armchair, Eleanor on a stool at her 
 feet. 
 
 " Is Henry coming home to-day ? " 
 " No, poor dear boy, he can't leave Windsor. 
 Jack and I will be alone, if you must go to your 
 
 27
 
 Episodes 
 
 charming old stuffed dowager I believe she 
 was born one. Oh, Grace, it's going to be so 
 delightful ! Jack and I are going to play at 
 being wicked wife and terrible young man. He 
 has got a new place to dine at quite disreput- 
 able, he says and we're going to do all sorts of 
 idiotic things." Eleanor took her cigarette 
 from her mouth and waved a little ghost-like 
 hand. 
 
 " Eleanor, dear, I suppose I'm very heavy 
 and old-fashioned, but I wish you wouldn't. 
 You're getting quite ill. And, Eleanor, there's 
 another thing, I don't think Henry likes it.'' 
 
 " If Henry objected My cbrling child, 
 
 I know you are a dear, but you mean so dread- 
 fully well. What possible harm can there 
 be?" 
 
 "May I tell you, Xelly?" 
 
 " That means I'm not to be allowed to take 
 exception. But go on." 
 
 "Well, I'm worried a good deal about 
 it " 
 
 "You bear it nobly."
 
 1'ke Reclaiming of a Reprobate 
 
 " And it won't do any harm to have it out. 
 Of course everybody understands Jack '' 
 
 "Poor Jack !" 
 
 " And Henry is very fond of him. But I 
 know he thinks you go about with him that 
 isn't it quite, dear, I don't mean anything 
 horrid, you know. Then Jack, it's an awful 
 pity he lives as he does. With his money and 
 title and all that " 
 
 " I like his title," Eleanor murmured, " it's 
 picturesque." 
 
 " He ought not to waste his time. Oh 
 Eleanor, I'm going to vex you, but 1 must 
 say it. How can you compare him, with all 
 his follies and all that, to Henry ? Of course 
 I'm not an impartial judge, but I know Henry's 
 the most scrupulous and upright man there is." 
 
 " Poor Henry, yes ; he is, indeed. I don't 
 compare them, Grace. No\v, I don't know why, 
 I am inclined to say something very plain to 
 you. You will loathe me for it, but it is good 
 sometimes to go to the root of things. I like 
 Jack more than I can say. He is the dearest 
 
 29
 
 Episodes 
 
 boy in the world, and always understands me. 
 But I love Henry ! " 
 
 " My dear ! I beg " 
 
 " Wait ! " said Eleanor quickly. " Listen and 
 you'll hate me. But you won't understand. Jack 
 appeals to all there is good in me all that is 
 fine and artistic and intellectual. My love for 
 Henry is merely sensual." 
 
 Grace gave a little exclamation. 
 
 "Yes, it is. I don't never mind. It is simply 
 because he is handsome and big and strong. 
 Oh ! I wish I were dead." 
 
 There was silence for a minute, and then 
 Grace spoke severely : " Of course I'm not fool 
 enough to think you mean a word you say. 
 But surely it's not in good taste. Of course 
 it's absurd to talk like that about Henry, 
 and therefore doesn't matter. Still, I'm his 
 sister." 
 
 " Oh, Grace, dear, I'm sorry. Yes, of course, 
 I didn't mean it. You're a million times better 
 than I, dear. But don't scold me. It's only 
 misery to see things. Look how thin I am." 
 30
 
 The Reclaiming of a Reprobate 
 
 Indeed, with her frail little figure, and her 
 tiny little face, and her little un-English ges- 
 tures, she was a contrast to the other, leaning 
 stolidly back in her chair, a picture of plump 
 self-satisfaction. 
 
 " Forgive me, Grace." 
 
 " I didn't mean to scold you, dear. You're so 
 awfully good to me." 
 
 " My darling, as if all I had wasn't yours and 
 Henry's ! All " she became wistful " except 
 
 Jack." 
 
 * * * * 
 
 A few weeks later Grace was alone when Jack 
 came in. He was a stooping man, but moved 
 gracefully. He looked quickly round the room 
 and then a little keenly at Grace. She looked 
 up languidly and gave him a passive hand with 
 rather an imperial air. He shook it with no 
 conventional affectation, and then sat down as 
 one who could have stood no longer. 
 " Eleanor gone out?" he asked, 
 " Yes ; she won't be back till dinner-time." 
 " I suppose I bore you, interrupting your 
 
 31
 
 Episodes 
 
 reading. But I'm horribly tired ; let me stay 
 and prose a bit. Shall I bore you ? " 
 
 The girl's cheeks faintly dimpled. " That," 
 she said, with immense condescension, " re- 
 mains to be seen. You may stay a little time." 
 
 She looked at him with a cold impudence. 
 Jack's lustreless eyes gleamed for a moment, 
 and his sensual mouth twitched. 
 
 "By Jove, how I love being bullied by you. 
 Go on." 
 
 " Shall I ?" she asked lazily. " I don't know 
 that you're worth it ; but I will, if you like. 
 You're looking horribly ill, and you deserve to. 
 Been dosing yourself with chloral ? " 
 
 " I must sleep." 
 
 " It will take away all your intellect." 
 
 " I can do without my cursed intellect." 
 
 " Well, it's all you've got, so far as I can 
 see." 
 
 " Oh, no, it's not ; I've my reputation. That 
 and my integrity to Heaven." 
 
 " Is that meant to be funny ? ;; 
 
 *' Grace, how splendidly well you look."
 
 The Reclaiming of a Reprobate 
 
 " Robust ? If you had nine hours sleep every 
 night, and rode every day, you might too." 
 
 " Too late, cousin Grace. But talking of 
 riding, I saw a charming little animal you : d 
 like, the other day. Shall it pay for the 
 lecture ? " 
 
 Grace drooped her chin luxuriously. 
 
 " You may bring it round for me to see 
 to-morrow at ten. Now go and see about it." 
 
 She held out her hand. 
 
 Jack, who had been intimate with a thousand 
 and one women, and had one of the worst 
 reputations in Europe, rose like an obedient 
 schoolboy. But his head was clear, having 
 been for long accustomed to observe his heart, 
 as they call it. 
 
 " I'm growing senile," was the head's com- 
 ment. He went and leaned over her chair. 
 " You're irresistible," he said. 
 
 " Cousin Jack," she said, looking indifferently. 
 " Good-bye," 
 
 He bent down, and she interposed a well, 
 shaped arm, but did not say that which would 
 c 33
 
 Episodes 
 
 perhaps, have stopped him. He caught her 
 wrist, which was soft and warm, and then 
 kissed her mouth, a thing which might certainly 
 have been prevented. But she made no 
 response. She rose and told him he had gone 
 too far. His exit was not worthy of his repu- 
 tation. 
 
 When he was gone, Grace drew her chair to 
 the fire, and sat down quite calmly. " The 
 best thing for him and for Eleanor too," was 
 the effect of her meditation. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 "You need not explain, Jack; Henry has 
 told me all about it. It will be an admirable 
 arrangement." 
 
 " You think I am bound to do it ? " 
 
 " Yes : her ideas and everything considered, 
 I think you should. Jack, Jack, don't be a 
 humbug ; why not admit you want to ? As 
 if you would do such a thing with altruistic 
 intentions ! Surely I deserve you should be 
 frank with me." 
 
 " May I talk on the higher plane : " 
 34
 
 Ihe Reclaiming of a Reprobate 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Well, Nell, you've often known things 
 about me, and not been insulted. You know 
 my nature. You remember last year in Paris? 
 You are my friend : worth all the rest of the 
 World put together to me. Other women you 
 understand. Accident makes the consequences 
 of this very different, but really it is just the 
 same." 
 
 "My husband's sister, Jack?" 
 
 "Bah! I know myself, Nell. She will 
 always be treated as though she were the only 
 woman in the world, but the attraction is 
 simply sensual." 
 
 " Oh, Jack, I was the humbug then ; of 
 course I knew it. I don't suppose she under- 
 stands what she did, but I can see. Our 
 British morality, Jack ! Isn't it curious ? You 
 know it's the same, conversely, with Henry and 
 me. Isn't it strange? People look upon you 
 and me as at best two worthless butterflies, 
 and at worst a sort of Roman Empire people. 
 They think our intimacy at best eccentric
 
 Episodes 
 
 at worst criminal. Henry and Grace are 
 two rigid, virtuous, conventional people. 
 And I am married to Henry, and you are 
 going to marry Grace just because of what 
 is animal in us. And we are friends in every- 
 thing that is more than that." 
 
 "Shall I go back? It will mean breaking 
 with Henry. I quite see his point of view." 
 
 " It will mean not seeing me, Jack. No, go 
 on with it. I dare say you'll alter, but you'll 
 last my time. We can be friends." 
 
 " She won't try to prevent it ? " 
 
 " I think not ; she has the position of advan- 
 tage, you see, and I think she'll keep it. A 
 few years ago it would have been different : 
 you'd have freed yourself. As it is, she will 
 have no fear of losing you. We shall be 
 allowed to talk nonsense sometimes." 
 
 " I'm a horrid cad, Nell, and I wish I were 
 dead." 
 
 " It's an odd world, Jack." 
 
 " It's the damnedest world I ever saw, Nell."
 
 FOR WANT OF A BETTER 
 
 You see that man coming in at the door ? He 
 is a very important person. Observe withwhat 
 majesty he takes off his great-coat, with what 
 deliberate pomp he seats himself. See the air 
 of prime importance with which he reads the 
 menu. I can tell you something about him. 
 
 There was a time when he was a brilliant 
 young journalist. He had learned to read and 
 write, and as a very young man spent his 
 evenings, though tired with his office work, in 
 mastering the productions of each succeeding 
 cockney humourist, and in scribbling. Then 
 he began to send in his effusions to the editors 
 of popular prints, and on a day one of them 
 was accepted. Then he had a stroke of luck, 
 which perhaps he deserved for a certain civi- 
 lised power of waiting and self-control which he 
 
 37
 
 Episodes 
 
 had undoubtedly shown. His signature to an 
 article was printed by mistake, and since the 
 article attracted attention his name was allowed 
 to appear at the foot of others. (I have heard 
 him speak very sarcastically of anonymous 
 journalists.) He had an instinct for a smart 
 vulgarity of phrase which went straight to the 
 great heart of the people, and was soon popular. 
 He became prosperous and continued to be so 
 for many years. But of late, though he is still 
 well-to-do, and elderly people of a certain type 
 still think him funny, he has lost a great part of 
 his popularity, and all the distinction he had 
 among his fellows. They used to approach 
 him with reverence, and he used to smile com- 
 placently as they told him how their wives had 
 screamed over his latest effort. The papers 
 used to tell him that he had surpassed himself, 
 and say that any work from the prolific pen of 
 the ever-something Mr. X. was sure of a hearty 
 reception. Rut now the critics have found 
 other gods, and are wont to call him dull and 
 to damn him with faint praise, and even to use
 
 For Want of a Better 
 
 his name as a synonym for vulgarity. He has 
 taken to abusing the other gods, very naturally ; 
 but the result is that most of his acquaintances, 
 who in the beginning of his decline said he was 
 a good fellow personally, fight shy of his society. 
 There are left, it is true, a few rowers in the 
 same boat, and when these get together their 
 abuse of the other gods is veiy fierce and their 
 confidence in the good sense of " the public " 
 very loud. But they are rowing against the 
 tide and their arms are becoming stiff. Myself, 
 I see no pathos in it. 
 
 See ! the young man who has just passed 
 with a little nod to the ex-great man, was once 
 proud to call him friend. Now he is afraid to 
 talk to him, lest he peril his reputation, and 
 goes quickly by. Perhaps there is something 
 sad in it. The fellow was never amiable, ex- 
 cept it may be before his success. He was 
 loud-voiced and underbred, but so are many of 
 those who have deserted him. He had brought 
 himself to rely on "the public "as on a long- 
 suffering wife, and the public has eloped. And 
 
 39
 
 Episodes 
 
 now he can only bully the air and foretell a 
 reaction which never comes. It is not by 
 accident that he is going to dine alone. Indeed, 
 he would be a dull companion. He had no real 
 friends, and it is worth nobody's while now to 
 tolerate him. 
 
 Ah, he rises ! He has a guest. Do you 
 know her? This species of the genus has few- 
 individual varieties. It attracts one vaguely 
 and occasionally. The little pinched, wicked 
 face, the smiling mouth, and hard unchanging 
 eyes unchanging for such a one as he is- -they 
 have a curious sort of artificial femininity which 
 is sometimes pleasant. But the man ? He 
 used to be a most respectable man. It is desire 
 desire to plume himself and abuse others 
 unchecked. She knows nothing about it, but 
 will affect an admirable sympathy. He is 
 become very vain, and vanity must have an 
 outlet. Is not popular education a mistake ? 
 And, poor little woman, she will be so terribly 
 bored. 
 
 40
 
 THE EMANCIPATION OF A 
 CURATE 
 
 Miss ROSANNA MONTANE took herself very 
 seriously. She believed herself an inspired 
 practitioner of the art of acting, the greatest of 
 all arts, and, as such, entitled to condemn all 
 people who earned their bread in the daytime 
 all merely domestic and ordinary people what- 
 soever. She believed that any man or woman 
 was honoured by her notice. She had no doubt 
 but that she embodied all the genius of all the 
 ages. 
 
 The reality was that being a shrewd woman 
 of agreeable presence, she had attained a 
 second-race success with which the art of 
 acting had nothing to do, nothing in the 
 world. Her idea of acting was to smile 
 sweetly, to speak softly, to look ladylike as 
 
 4 1
 
 Episodes 
 
 the average pittite understands the word and 
 when she sat down, to whisk her dress so that 
 the folds of it were graceful. She was never 
 offered a part in which to look ladylike and the 
 rest of it would have been inappropriate, since 
 the limitations of her powers were understood, 
 and so her belief in the universality of her 
 genius would have been undisturbed, even if it 
 dawned upon her, as it had not, that to whisk 
 one's skirt is not the end of playing. She had 
 succeeded chiefly because she was not artistic, 
 not susceptible of rebuff, not excited by desire 
 of achievement, not cognisant of other signs of 
 merit than paragraphs in the newspapers and 
 amplitude of salary. As a girl her good looks 
 had taken her from behind a counter, and 
 placed her some way up her peculiar ladder ; 
 pertinacity and ability to use her opportunities 
 had done the rest. Now, at thirty-five, she was 
 a recognised exponent of her line, and always 
 third or fourth on the list of salaries. She was 
 handsome still, very buxom and healthy. She 
 always walked four miles a day, went to bed at
 
 The Emancipation of a Curate 
 
 half-past twelve, slept eight hours and a half, 
 and began the day with a hearty breakfast. 
 She was very severe on people who had no 
 souls. 
 
 Miss Rosanna Montane was a widow, being 
 known in private as Mrs. Spencer-Blugge. 
 Blugge was a young blood on the Stock 
 Exchange \vhcn he married her. He died 
 before he had made much of a pile, but left her 
 eight hundred a year, which lie had inherited, 
 and reminiscences of romance, of which he, 
 good man, had been all unconscious. She 
 lived, in her comfortable South Kensington 
 house, with a companion, who kept up a never- 
 dying fire of adulation, which may or may not 
 have been sincere. It began with the hearty 
 breakfast and awaited her return to a judicious 
 supper. Miss Rosanna Montane never wearied 
 of it, and, to do her justice, paid for it quite as 
 much as it was worth. It could not have been 
 amusing to the companion to read aloud long 
 notices of plays which evoked no visible 
 emotions in her hearer, except beautiful humi- 
 
 43
 
 Episodes 
 
 lity under praise of herself, and divine toleration 
 of the praises of other people ; but she had little 
 else to do beyond delivering eulogies, which 
 habit had made a sort of reflex action. The 
 great Rosanna was kind to all her inferiors, 
 who were such inhabitants of this planet as 
 came in her way. It would be difficult to ima- 
 gine a more thoroughly bourgeois temperament 
 and life than that of Miss Rosanna Montane. 
 
 Nevertheless, a curate of the church she 
 honoured every Sunday, fell in love with her 
 because she was an artist. The remark is true 
 in two manners. The original attraction to the 
 curate was that he, a raw youth from the 
 provinces, via Cambridge, found himself in 
 familiar converse with an expert in, and as it 
 were a priestess of, a life which was associated 
 in his imagination with brilliant intercourse and 
 mysterious delights. He felt that sense of 
 joyous importance which the very young and 
 raw derive from private knowledge of public 
 people, and early teaching had invested the 
 stage with a mysterious wickedness in his mind 
 14
 
 The Emancipation of a Curate 
 
 which, of course, was turned to admiration. He 
 accepted Rosanna at her own valuation from 
 the outset. 
 
 But in another and truer manner he loved 
 her because she was an artist. She was an 
 artist in femininity. Now, our curate was no 
 curate of farce. He was a vigorous, athletic 
 young fellow, and essentially virile. A delicate 
 suggestion of sex, therefore, a suggestion (by no 
 means mincing) of weakness where he was 
 strong, and in general of attractive opposition, 
 was to him irresistible. Rosanna was a true 
 artist in that she made every weapon in her 
 female armoury go home. She achieved what 
 is surely one of the greatest of a woman's 
 triumphs ; she kept him in exactly that stage of 
 devotion which was convenient to her. How 
 far she was a conscious artist, how it is that 
 women of generally mediocre intelligence and 
 tact can achieve these things, I do not know. 
 You must admit it is a tolerably complex 
 development of an instinct, and give Rosanna 
 some credit for wisdom. 
 
 45
 
 Episodes 
 
 Our curate was no curate of farce. He was 
 warm-heated. But he looked up to her as a 
 bright star, and his training and the bent of his 
 impulses and ambitions retarded direct sexual 
 feeling ; consequently he accepted the element 
 of motherly protection which she rather subtly 
 expressed, and was content to be very humble 
 and essentially distant. Our curate was clear- 
 headed. But the accidents of education, again, 
 had left his intellectual outlook narrow, his 
 logical faculty undeveloped ; when therefore 
 Rosanna expounded to him the watery theism 
 she had gathered confusedly from a popular 
 book, he neither denounced it as a stupider 
 young man might have done, nor argued about 
 it, demonstrating it wrong or old-fashioned, as 
 a better taught one : he sat wondering at 
 Rosanna ; s feet. Thus, in addition to her 
 qualities of mysterious charm and genius, she 
 possessed in his eyes a stupendous superiority 
 of intellect. He believed he was ready to be 
 burned alive for her sake, would actually have 
 cheerfully given her everything he possessed, 
 46
 
 The Emancipation of a Curate 
 
 and was content with the pressure of her hand. 
 As for marriage, young men of twenty-five and 
 slender means do not, when they are gentlemen, 
 bring themselves easily to contemplate living on 
 the exertions of their wives. 
 
 When a boyish young man of twenty-five is 
 in love with a woman ten years his senior and 
 of somewhat matronly figure, the situation is 
 apt to be a little ridiculous. But Rosanna took 
 care that the ridicule, if any, should fall on the 
 curate. She spoke of him with casual indiffer- 
 ence as a nice, but rather foolish boy, and the 
 nature of his folly, indicated by a little smile, 
 brought her a certain amount of kudos. She 
 found him useful. It rather impressed very 
 theatrical people who came to lunch to find a 
 gentlemanly young parson treating their hostess 
 with obviously sincere reverence. He was 
 useful as a respectable tame cat, and in like 
 manner as a well-trained dog, to accompany her 
 occasionally in her walks abroad. He fetched 
 and carried assiduously, and got up a series of 
 entertainments for some charity or other, of
 
 Episodes 
 
 which he had all the work and Rosanna the 
 glory, which helped substantially her social 
 position in South Kensington. 
 
 Their relations had continued in this wise for 
 a year or so, the curate professing at intervals 
 his regret that social conventions did not permit 
 him to consecrate his possessions to the genius 
 he adored, when Rosanna benignantly devised 
 a perfectly respectable manner of accomplishing 
 his desire. She resolved to take a theatre for 
 the London season. Her idea was to get a play 
 from a popular author, to engage two or three 
 of the most popular actors available, and to 
 queen it among them as the principal woman. 
 The result was certain to be serviceable to her- 
 self in point of notices, and might easily lead to 
 a succession of leading parts. On the other 
 hand, Rosanna knew that in this way money is 
 easily lost neither popular authors nor popular 
 actors are cheap and she had no intention of 
 losing any. For years she had been steadily 
 saving, and intended to retire on not less than 
 two thousand a year. She was not, you see, 
 4 8
 
 The Emancipation of a Curate 
 
 bitten by the mania of the boards ; they were a 
 means to affluence with her. Not that she be- 
 lieved she thought so, by the way ; she was 
 convinced, as has been said, that she was an 
 inspired priestess of art. But these lofty con- 
 victions may often co-exist with perfectly 
 practical purposes, and Rosanna was to retire 
 before she was old into comfortable idleness. 
 
 Money might be lost, and it was not to be 
 hers. But if she were to induce an ordinary 
 financier to run the risk he would take the lion's 
 share of the possible profits. Clearly, a kind 
 friend was needed, and Rosanna thought of the 
 curate. He had, she knew, a little income of 
 his own, the capital of which was some few 
 thousand pounds. It was quite certain that the 
 popular author's and the popular actors' names 
 to say nothing of her own (which, she recognised 
 without the definite thought, was not quite 
 magical) would bring people enough to the play 
 to let it run on for a few months with only a 
 comparatively small loss ; the curate's thousands 
 would be sufficient. Should she ask, or rather
 
 Episodes 
 
 graciously permit him to put them at her dis- 
 posal ? The process of thought by which 
 Rosanna passed from deciding it unwise to risk 
 her own money to deciding that the curate's 
 risk would be merely formal, and that, being 
 a poor man, the almost certain gain would be a 
 godsend to him this process ot thought might 
 be described. But the description would be a 
 deal longer than the process. The curate of 
 course was full of gratitude for being permitted 
 to render this little service to her genius and 
 art. He agreed (legally) to stand the loss, if 
 any, to a certain extent (namely, the amount of 
 his capital), and to receive, on the other hand, a 
 portion of the profits. He protested against 
 this latter clause, but Rosanna sweetly insisted ; 
 in truth, the fraction was ridiculously insignifi- 
 cant. 
 
 This matter settled, the rest proceeded ad- 
 mirably. A theatre with a reputation for success 
 was taken for the beginning of May, and by the 
 middle of March the popular author had written 
 a play which he pronounced to be his best. It
 
 7 be Emancipation of a Curate 
 
 contained one excellent female part, for which 
 sweetness and ladylikeness were the chief re- 
 quisites, and two excellent male parts, to fill 
 which two of the most popular actors in London 
 were luckily engaged, both professing them- 
 selves delighted. There was one subdued foil 
 to Rossana's part, and the other female parts 
 were nothing at all. 
 
 In good time, when you are bored with 
 respectability and innocence, there falls to be 
 presented to you a person who was neither 
 innocent nor respectable. Some years before 
 the curate formed his delightful friendship with 
 Rosanna Montane, a very rich devotee of the 
 stage discovered in a girl who was playing a 
 small part in an unimportant theatre something 
 he took for genius. He brought her out in a 
 star part and the town came to see her. The 
 discoverer was justified ; for some few weeks 
 London was electrified as much as it knows 
 how to be by a display of concentrated pas- 
 sion. Dora Davenant, as she called herself, 
 was an artist all over, an artist who came of a
 
 Episodes 
 
 handsome, gentle stock, and had given herself 
 wholly to art. She had her reward for a few 
 weeks, and then gave herself wholly to real life. 
 She ran away with a ne'er-do-well, a delightful, 
 witty wastrel, whom the boredom of a debt- 
 paying marriage had driven to desperation. 
 His wife did not divorce him, and so he lived in 
 unwedded bliss with Dora at various gay places 
 abroad. He was a good-hearted and delicately- 
 mannered man, and the mutual fascination 
 lasted until he died. 
 
 Then Dora had to face the world with a child 
 and without a penny. She had her genius, but 
 genius cannot play a highwayman's part in our 
 world, and sorrow and anxiety broke down her 
 health, and she had a fever, and at the time 
 Rosanna Montane was engaging her company, 
 Dora Davenant came out of the hospital and 
 took her child to an attic in Soho. There she 
 read of Rosanna's enterprise in a theatrical 
 paper and wrote a humble letter to her. 
 Rosanna remembered her perfectly well ; she 
 had, in fact, taken a subordinate part to Dora's
 
 The Emancipation of a Curate 
 
 in that few weeks' forgotten triumph. She 
 determined to give her the part of the 
 foil, taking care it should be nothing more. 
 It pleased her vanity to reverse their old posi- 
 tions ; she liked the idea of patronage, and it 
 seemed to her that the circumstances narrated 
 in the letter \vould make Dora's services cheap. 
 Rosanna said to herself that it was a duty 
 of one woman to help another, however 
 erring. 
 
 So one afternoon Dora, the sinner, was in the 
 drawing-room in South Kensington. It was a 
 sumptuous room, and its mistress wished the 
 outcast to receive a chastening impression from 
 it ; it would be easy to send her away if any 
 respectable person called. But Dora, waiting 
 there, was too weary with the walk from Soho 
 to observe its magnificence. Her big black 
 eyes, which had been fires, looked blankly from 
 her thin, white face. The black hair on the 
 broad forehead was mingled with grey, and she 
 was twenty-six years old. Her dress was not 
 neat and black, as repentance should be ; it had 
 
 53
 
 Episodes 
 
 been bright and was faded. She wore no gloves 
 on hands which showed a mass of veins. That 
 was genius and unwisdom. She watched the 
 door anxiously, until prudence and mediocrity 
 in a dream of a tea-gown came sailing in. 
 Rosanna held out her hand with the air of 
 conferring a privilege, sweetly smiling. Then 
 looking the other in the face she said she was 
 sorry to have brought her all that way, as she 
 was afraid she could not engage her after all. 
 Dora, impulsive, excitable, and broken-hearted, 
 poured out a story of sorrow and appeal which 
 would have stirred an audience of critics, to 
 which Rosanna listened, looking very healthy 
 and respectable, and twiddling the rings on her 
 sleek fingers. Then she did what she had 
 intended to do, and offered to engage Dora at a 
 quarter of the salary she expected. She was so 
 sweet about it that the other did not realise the 
 smallness of the offer until she had accepted it 
 with gratitude. "It is not much," she said, 
 " but for my boy's sake " 
 
 "Ah, yes," interrupted virtue, "we pay for our 
 54
 
 The Emancipation of a Curate 
 
 sins. But the salary is quite as much as you 
 have a right to expect." 
 
 There was only a suggestion of scorn in the 
 black eyes. 
 
 " You have never ," she began, but broke 
 
 off. " I don't think you mean to be cruel." 
 
 " Cruel ! " said Rosanna sharply, " I'm doing 
 it simply out of compassion, and I think you 
 might be a little grateful." 
 
 There was a knock at the street-door. 
 
 " Now I'm afraid you must go. I'll let you 
 know the date of the first rehearsal, and I'll 
 send you a cheque to-night. Good-bye," she 
 said sweetly, as the door opened; " I'm so glad 
 to have been able to help you." 
 
 The curate, as he held the door for Dora to 
 go out, noticed her beauty and her sickness, 
 and saw she had been crying. 
 
 "Who is that ?" he asked Rosanna. 
 
 "A woman who has sinned and been pun- 
 ished. I'm giving her a part. It's foolish of 
 me, I suppose, but I pity her so, though she 
 was much to blame. She can't act much. 
 
 55
 
 Episodes 
 
 You don't blame me, do you? You know I 
 can never be a prude." 
 
 " How wonderfully good you are!" said the 
 curate, as he reverently pressed her soft hand. 
 He said it sincerely, but a little absently 
 withal. 
 
 When you are told that chance ordained 
 he should see much of Dora Davenant, you 
 sagaciously guess a conclusion. But the 
 development was not uninteresting. Dora 
 left Soho and came to live in two rooms in 
 a back street in South Kensington ; and the 
 curate being sent with a message to her 
 (the wisest of us make mistakes) by Rosanna, 
 found her ill, and called to see how she was, 
 and called again and again. His was a 
 healthy nature which is never for long the 
 victim of morbid feeling. His sterile devotion 
 to Rosanna, as time went on and experience 
 brought knowledge to him, began to wane. 
 Glamour was wearing off, and custom was 
 not old enough to beget a state of mesmerism, 
 even had he been a subject for it. In fine, he 
 s6
 
 The Emancipation of a Curate 
 
 was being emancipated from ideal devotion, 
 and was attached to Dora Davenant with a 
 healthy, human love. 
 
 Our curate was not a curate of farce, nor 
 was he any ideal of a curate. He had "gone 
 into the Church " because it came in his way ; 
 he was neither ascetic nor devoted to a spiri- 
 tual end. He was a man of strong natural 
 passion, which had never been repressed, but 
 which the accidents of life had never fully 
 evoked. Now they evoked it, and before it 
 everything else went down : the requirements 
 of his calling and his prejudice against Dora's 
 past life, all were nothing. Strong passion, 
 to boot, brought the man's natural powers, 
 all of them, into play. If Rosanna Montane 
 had had leisure in those days to repeat her 
 lectures on theism, she would have been 
 surprised at their reception. The curate was 
 on the point of being a curate no more. In 
 fine, his attitude to life was become a thousand 
 times more Bohemian than that of Rosanna 
 Montane.
 
 Episodes 
 
 Meanwhile the play ran its course through 
 a season. It was successful in a way, was 
 talked about, and served Rosanna's purpose. 
 Distinctly, it had done her a world of good 
 in her profession. All the critics praised her, 
 and a few gave a line to Dora Davenant's 
 insignificant part, and spiritless rendering of 
 it, regretting that her old form was gone. 
 But the popular author had made a mistake. 
 He had imbibed as he thought something that 
 somebody called the new spirit ; that may 
 have been the case, but he did not express 
 it to interest people. They came from curios- 
 ity, talked about it, and did not come again, 
 nor urge their friends very strongly to do so. 
 Expenses were heavy. Seeing that a fortune 
 could not be made out of the play, Rosanna 
 wisely determined to make it as useful as 
 possible without regard to money, within the 
 limits of the curate's security. She gave seats 
 away lavishly. She displayed her comely form 
 in a succession of wonderful dresses, which 
 (by the curate's consent) were treated as part
 
 The Emancipation of a Curate 
 
 of the general outlay, and brought her innu- 
 merable paragraphs in articles on fashion. 
 The weekly deficit was still not very great ; 
 the curate's thousands held out till the end of 
 
 Jiy. 
 
 Then she sent for him and told him how sorry 
 she was his money was lost. 
 
 " My poor boy," she said in her softest 
 manner, " I never dreamed you would lose any- 
 thing. If I could only afford it I would make it 
 up to you if you would let me, that is." 
 
 " I would not," said the curate. 
 
 " That is like you," said she with an admiring 
 glance, and held out her hand. He took it, but 
 did not press it with his old reverence. 
 
 " I've been a fool," he said, and Rosanna 
 looked up sharply. " I've thrown my money 
 away foolishly, but I have no wish to shirk the 
 consequences. I congratulate you on your 
 success, and now," he said, with rather an enig- 
 matical smile, " congratulate me on something. 
 Miss Davenant has consented to marry me." 
 
 Rosanna had acquired a manner which passes 
 
 59
 
 Episodes 
 
 with many people for good breeding. When, 
 however, good breeding has not been the habit 
 of a life, it is apt to break down in emergencies. 
 
 " Marry that marry her ! Do you know 
 
 " I know all her history." 
 
 Rosanna's manner changed. 
 
 " You might have told me before," she said in 
 a low voice. " You know I should be glad of 
 anything that was for your happiness. I 
 suppose," she continued softly, " I shall not see 
 you so much now. I'm very, very sorry. But 
 it will not be yet ? " 
 
 " I'm afraid I misstated the tense. We are 
 married." Rosanna's manner changed again. 
 
 " Do you expect me to receive her as a 
 friend ? May I ask if you intend tu keep your 
 curacy? " 
 
 "Well, no. I couldn't support a \\ife on it, 
 and my private means" Rosanna blushed ever 
 so slightly and clenched her hand " but Tin 
 going out of the Church." He touk his leave in 
 disgrace, and Rosanna talked the matter over 
 with her companion, who condo'.ed with her on 
 60
 
 The Emancipation of a Curate 
 
 having been so kind to so worthless a young 
 
 man. 
 
 T! 
 
 I'm afraid they'll be punished enough," said 
 Rosanna ; " so far as I can see they'll starve. 
 Poor things ! " she added compassionately, but 
 the tone was perfectly comfortable. 
 
 They have not starved yet, but they have not 
 always had enough to eat. Dora cannot get an 
 engagement, and the ex-curate's journalistic 
 hackery is not so far remunerative. But he is a 
 clever fellow, and with average luck is like to 
 succeed in time. He may even one day be 
 distinguished enough to renew his acquaintance 
 with Rosanna. He may possibly write a book 
 which she will be quite unable to under- 
 stand. 
 
 She meantime is handsome and buxom as 
 ever, enjoys life thoroughly, and makes an 
 exellent income from her profession. She is 
 courted a good deal, for her acting, her Sunday 
 dinners, and her beautiful life, and takes herself 
 even more seriously than before. She cannot 
 forgive the curate his emancipation, and if they 
 
 6 1
 
 Episodes 
 
 ever meet, her gentle melancholy will be very 
 pretty to see. But she has not to forgive him 
 any wrong done by her, for her companion has 
 easily persuaded her she was his kindest 
 friend.
 
 THE END OF ALL THINGS 
 
 " MADAME died early this morning. Lucile." 
 That was to say, Jean, whom I cared for more 
 than for the rest of the world, was dead. It 
 was Tuesday, no, Wednesday, that I saw her 
 last. I was to dine with her that day. Jean 
 was dead. \Ye must look straight at facts and 
 consider how they affect us. Let me think. All 
 that was over ; Jean was dead ; there was nothing 
 to interest me. ... I remembered how a few 
 mornings before I had read of some thousands 
 of Chinese being destroyed by a flood, and had 
 attempted, as I ate my breakfast, to realise what 
 that fact meant, and had failed to find in myself 
 an atom of genuine sympathy. As I sat with 
 this telegram in front of me I was (I believe) for 
 a while in the same case. A woman was dead ; 
 the fact confronted me, and I repeated it to
 
 Episodes 
 
 myself mechanically. How it affected me I 
 could not tell. Gradually her qualities, as I 
 knew them, passed before my mind, as though 
 I had called on my memory to answer a question 
 asked of me. She was nominally English, and 
 one took her at sight for a Frenchwoman. She 
 was a widow and lived alone in a toy house, 
 and we had argued about marriage and agreed 
 it was too great a risk. We saw each other, by 
 arrangement, three days a week ; on the first of 
 them she was absurdly domestic, on the second 
 cynical and captious, on the third wild and a 
 paradox. Her eyes were always contradicting 
 her speech, and I never quite understood her 
 smile. When I thought of her smile, I finished 
 dressing quickly and went out and hailed a cab ; 
 I remember waving to a man I knew in the 
 street. 
 
 I pushed past the servant who opened the 
 door and was going upstairs, when Lucile ran 
 quickly down and stopped me. " Ah, no, 
 Monsieur," she said, breathlessly, " you must 
 not go in. Why distress oneself without cause ? 
 64
 
 The End of all Things 
 
 One cannot change things ; it is better to go 
 away." A sense of oddity struck through my 
 stupor, and I looked down at Lucile. She was 
 a pretty, demure little Frenchwoman, who Jean 
 used to say was one of her two tyrants. As 
 she raised her eyes for a moment she looked 
 anxious, and not as though she had been crying. 
 " Tell me," I said. " The doctor said it was the 
 heart ; he is coming back soon. It was late 
 last night she was ill. She died peacefully ; 
 Monsieur, and her last words were of you. Poor 
 Madame, I never thought she was not strong 
 that treacherous heart ! " She pressed a hand 
 against her breast, and I noticed a big emerald, 
 which I remembered. She had followed my 
 eyes and cried, "Ah, how I forget everything. 
 I mean, Madame gave me the ring." " Damn 
 the ring ! " I said ; "let me pass, Lucile." "Ah, 
 no, no," she cried, and as I pushed her aside 
 she clung to my arm ; (i it is a friend he came 
 by accident this morning and would go up. I 
 will tell him to go ; come to the drawing-room. 
 You must not compromise Madame. J 
 
 E 6,
 
 Episodes 
 
 But something in her voice made me thrust 
 her aside and go straight into the bedroom. A 
 man rose from the side of the bed, and I stood 
 facing one I had known all my life. 
 
 Ideas seemed to rise up in my brain and 
 hold each other at a deadlock. I remember 
 nothing but that I turned on my heel and left 
 the room. 1 heard him following me. Upstairs 
 was a dead woman on a bed with what had 
 seemed a smile upon her \]p~. 
 
 00
 
 FROM A COMPARATIVE HISTORY 
 
 " LOOK here, Squashy, a word with you, my 
 young friend. You seem to think you can do 
 what you jolly well please, and that's just what 
 you jolly well can't do. Do you see? I don't 
 mind you being a brewer, but I can't stand a 
 fellow who swaggers. You must take it off, 
 Squashy. Don't let me have to say it again ! " 
 
 They were two boys at a preparatory school, 
 and were both thirteen, in iheir last term. 
 Tommy Lawclen was tall for his age, thin, fair- 
 haired, blue-eyed, clear-featured. He carried 
 himself easily and uprightly, was a fair cricketer, 
 and low down in the school. He belonged to 
 a type that is essentially aristocratic, and was 
 as a matter of fact of an old family. His father, 
 a retired colonel, had little beyond his half- 
 pay. 
 
 67
 
 Episodes 
 
 The boy called Squashy was not of an 
 aristocractic type. He was short and podgy, 
 a fat boy who looked about him with cautious 
 eyes. He was fairly sharp-witted, and in the 
 top -form ; he hated games, but played them on 
 occasion because he had social ambitions. His 
 father was a rich brewer, whose hopes were 
 centred in Squashy, and who gave him un- 
 limited pocket-money. 
 
 Squashy looked at Tommy Lawden and 
 looked away. They were alone in a class-room, 
 and he could afford to accept the rebuke. So 
 he affected to treat it as a joke, laughed un- 
 easily, and walked out of the room. A very 
 small boy ran into him ; Squashy kicked the 
 very small boy, and went on his way with 
 renewed self-respect. 
 
 That afternoon, while Tommy Lawden did 
 extra drill, Squashy, being in the top-form, 
 walked into the near little town and returned 
 laden with good things. Tommy Lawden did 
 not snare in their distribution. 
 
 63
 
 From a Comparative History 
 
 They went to the same public school. 
 Tommy Lawclen was popular with those who 
 knew him, but never rising high at work nor 
 gaining much distinction at games, he was 
 not an eminent figure. At seventeen he was 
 much as at thirteen, absolutely a gentleman and 
 a sportsman in grain, a good-natured, affec- 
 tionate lad of mediocre powers. Squashy's social 
 star rose rapidly. Any important big boy with 
 whom he could scrape an intimacy was 
 asked to Squashy's house in the holidays, where 
 he was regaled, as Squashy's father put it, on 
 " the best that could be procured." Squashy 
 played at games for the look of the thing, con- 
 ciliated the masters, and became a monitor. 
 Mis fags detested him, and some of his com- 
 peers kept up a state of neutrality towards him. 
 Ikit on most his raiment and his wealth made 
 the impression he desired. He was laboriously 
 genial to everybody, and even carefully polite to 
 his fags, who hated him all the same. I suppose 
 Squashy never did a deed in his life that was 
 merely kind ; he calculated effects as naturally 
 
 69
 
 Episodes 
 
 as he ate his dinner. This was vaguely felt, 
 and was the qualification of his success. There 
 was no need for Squashy to calculate ; his 
 general abilities would have secured him a 
 fair place among his fellows, and had he been 
 simple, he would not probably have been 
 unpopular. But Squashy was born "on the 
 make," and was determined his wealth should 
 " procure the best." So he planned and plotted, 
 and crept at last into an equivocally foremost 
 place. Towards the end of his school-time he 
 introduced into his intimate conversations 
 judicious references to the wickedness of his 
 London life, and became a sort of hero to a 
 certain set. 
 
 One afternoon Squashy, sitting in his study, 
 uplifted his voice and shouted "fag!" No 
 answering fag appeared, and he was fain to 
 go in person to the lower room of his house. 
 There, sitting before the fire and reading a 
 paper, was Tommy Lawden. He looked round 
 and turned back to his paper. 
 
 " I called ' fag,' " said Squashy. 
 70
 
 From a Comparative History 
 
 " I know ; I heard you," replied Tommy 
 Lawden. 
 
 " Why didn't you come ?" asked Squashy. 
 
 Tommy Lawden looked at him and returned 
 to his paper. He was in a form exempted by 
 custom from fagging, but supposed to "answer 
 fag" when no boy of a lower form was forth- 
 coming. Once again were he and Squashy 
 alone together in a critical situation, but this 
 time Squashy felt his ground more secure. He 
 felt that his position, if not good enough for the 
 assertion of his strict rights, would support him 
 in a course of magnanimity. 
 
 " Look here, Lawden," he said ; " if you'd 
 come, I shouldn't have fagged you. But you 
 ought to have come, and I don't think you 
 should take advantage of our having been at 
 Templeton's together to cheek me." 
 
 He spoke with a sorrowful dignity that was 
 well contrived. Tommy Lawden rose and stood 
 with his back to the fire. 
 
 '' I don't see how I can cheek you," he said, 
 ' but I'm sorry I was rude."
 
 Episodes 
 
 Squashy beamed with geniality at once. 
 
 " All right, old man ; that's all right, you know. 
 I don't see why we should quarrel because I 
 happen to be a monitor ; do you ? Let's shake 
 hands." 
 
 Tommy Lawden looked down at the rather 
 coarse hand with its three inches of spotless 
 shirt-cuff. He held out his own, which was 
 long and slender and hard, and did not like the 
 soft, clammy touch which met it. 
 
 " I hope you're getting on all right," said 
 Squashy ; "if there's anything I can do for y> u, 
 you know, let me know." 
 
 "Oh, thanks," said Tommy Lawden, as 
 Squashy, smiling agreeably, left the room. 
 
 Squashy felt that by all the rules of conduct 
 that he knew, his spirit in the interview had 
 been the more gentlemanly of the two, and yet 
 he felt a vague misgiving. Tommy Lawden 
 wondered why he could not respond to the 
 other's geniality. He knew, or thought he knew, 
 that he had outgrown the sort of snobbishness 
 which a house, whose one felt possession was 
 72
 
 From a Comparative History 
 
 birth, had fostered. As things were no\v, he 
 was able to reflect, there were far more people 
 to despise him for his poverty than to despise 
 Squashy for that he was a brewer. Me did not 
 think he was envious of Squashy's position ; no 
 doubt he was a clever chap. But being unac- 
 customed to self-analysis, Tommy Lawden's 
 conclusions were wholly negative. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 At Oxford there could be no question at all 
 of the relative importance of the two. Tommy 
 Lawden played cricket for his college, but not 
 for the university. He was never more than 
 sufficiently dressed. He could not afford to 
 belong to expensive clubs, to give dinners, or to 
 play cards, save for the lowest points. He loved 
 long, commonplace talks with simple folk like 
 himself. He had but a few intimates. He was 
 respected, and the choice spirits of his college 
 nodded affably to him, but he was never one of 
 their set. 
 
 But of Squashy his father remarked with 
 pride, " My son is in the very best set in the 
 
 73
 
 Episodes 
 
 place," 1 and there were many people to agree 
 with him. Squashy managed to be elected to a 
 very fashionable club. There was no undue 
 worship of money in the matter ; it was natural 
 that young men who were for the first time feel- 
 ing the pleasures of lavishness should welcome 
 one who, being passably well-mannered, was 
 lavish too. Squashy's furniture and horses and 
 special trains to London were a natural and 
 quite harmless theme of admiration. And yet 
 somehow it happened that as the " men ;; of 
 his year settled into intimacies, Squashy was 
 never treated with more than a superficial 
 familiarity. He was at all the dinners and 
 card parties that were of any fashion ; but it 
 was not to him that his companions brought 
 their troubles other than the troubles of 
 creditors and dons. The vague effects of 
 his incurable calculations followed him to Ox- 
 ford. But nobody compared him with Tommy 
 Lawden. 
 
 " Do you know that man Lawden ;; ? asked 
 one of him, and Squashy, with conscious kind- 
 74
 
 From a Comparative History 
 
 ness, replied, " Oh, yes. There's not mu'ch in 
 him, you know, but he's a very gentlemanly 
 
 man." 
 
 * * * * 
 
 Squashy left Oxford and became a young man 
 about town. He dined and went to the play or 
 a music-hall, and supped afterwards at the place 
 of the hour, and went to clubs where you did not 
 go till two in the morning. He went racing, and 
 to all places where the "best men" of his set at 
 Oxford went. He managed to get into a good 
 club, and was asked to balls in the season. He 
 was seen at Homburg and at Monte Carlo. And 
 through it all he kept himself well in hand, was 
 careful of his health, never wasted money when 
 there was none to see, and calculated consistently 
 on social rises. 
 
 Tommy Lawden became a clerk in a bank, 
 and lived, passing dully, on two hundred pounds 
 a year. It was a concern to him to find the 
 subscription to a football club and to be pro- 
 vided with a decent shirt on the few occasions 
 when he dined out. He had about three cronies 
 
 75
 
 Episodes 
 
 in London with whom he smoked interminable 
 pipes at night. 
 
 He sat one evening at a restaurant eating 
 roast beef and potatoes. It was a restaurant in 
 Piccadilly where men may eat, cheaply or not, 
 as they please. Tommy Lawden was, as always, 
 dressed with careless conformity to the mode of 
 the time, and had an air of simple distinction 
 which was perceived by the most unlikely people. 
 As (you may think) was a woman at the next 
 table, who looked hard at him and faintly smiled. 
 She was, if you care to know, a singer at a mus'c- 
 hall, and was eating a simple dinner before she 
 went to her humble performance. She was 
 neither flaunting nor evil-looking in the slightest 
 degree. She was simply a cockney girl, pretty, 
 fresh-looking, and but very slightly rouged, 
 dressed quietly, save perhaps for her big black 
 feathers. She was accustomed from childhood 
 to easy intercourse, and had no dark designs 
 whatever when she smiled at Tommy Lawden. 
 And he, who was tired and bored and dull, 
 smiled back at her and presently went to drink 
 76
 
 From a Comparative History 
 
 his coffee at her table. She talked to him with 
 no assertion of fastness, but with a natural sense 
 of fun and good companionship, and if she 
 found out his pecuniary status, it was asked 
 with inoffensive frankness. His manner and 
 speech were without any sort of affectation, so 
 that she accepted him unregretfully as her 
 superior. They became quite intimate, and he 
 asked her to sup with him when her performance 
 was over. As she considered, she looked towards 
 the door and her manner changed, and she spoke 
 hurriedly. " No, dear friend, I can't. I wish I 
 could : I like you ; you're my sort. It's the dibs, 
 my dear ; I can't afford to miss them. I didn't 
 know he'd come for me here, but thafs my little 
 lot ! " She shrugged her shoulders ever so 
 slightly, and made a little grimace of facile 
 pathos. 
 
 And Tommy Lawden, looking towards the 
 door, saw entering a sleek young man, haughty, 
 resplendent. 
 
 % * - * 
 
 Some little time later there was an announce 
 
 77
 
 Episodes 
 
 ment in the papers of the engagement of the 
 man I have called Squashy, now aged twenty- 
 six, to a woman of such qualifications as 
 Squashies do most desire in their wives. 
 
 If Tommy Lawden has reasonable luck he 
 will, when about forty-five years old, be rich 
 enough to keep a wife of his own class in reason- 
 able comfort. 
 
 And the world continues to move upon its axis.
 
 WHEN her father died, Jane Travers was 
 twenty-six years old. Having been almost alone 
 in the world for six years, in attendance on an 
 affectionate and querulous invalid, she now 
 found herself quite alone. She was tall, thin, 
 awkward in movement ; her features were large, 
 but gave one no idea of determination ; she 
 had patient eyes and a tremulous mouth. She 
 had read many books and had pondered over 
 them much ; she was neither ready nor impres- 
 sive in conversation. Necessity and habit had 
 combined with early training or an inherited 
 impulse, was it ? to foster in her a desire and 
 faculty of self-sacrifice. Providence ordained 
 that they should be exercised and developed. 
 The widow of her fathers elder brother asked 
 
 79
 
 Episodes 
 
 her to live for a while with herself and her 
 daughter until she had determined her future 
 plans. Jane had hardly ever seen Mrs. Travers 
 and her cousin Geraldine. They lived in a 
 gayer part of the town, saw a good deal of the 
 world, and had a contempt, which was not wholly 
 snobbery, for the scientific recluse and his 
 daughter. Mrs. Travers was a handsome 
 matron, a dark woman of forty-three or so, with 
 clear, even features, and a clear, pale complexion ; 
 stout, in a robust, healthy way ; a woman of a 
 limited and well-ordered intelligence and an 
 absolutely perfect digestion. 
 
 Geraldine was twenty-two at this time, an 
 active, healthy girl, who had a reputation for 
 wit and the instinct of society ; she was like her 
 mother in face, but fairer ; in body graceful and 
 supple and of a pleasant plumpness. Mother 
 and daughter were consciously careful of their 
 health, and consistent practitioners of an uncon- 
 scious theory of life ; to laugh constantly, to eat 
 and drink pleasantly, and to be clothed in the 
 mode, to be amused and admired were their
 
 An Episode in a Commonplace Life 
 
 desires, and since they gratified them they were 
 optimists. 
 
 They received Jane with the amount of kind- 
 ness and interest they would have bestowed on 
 any guest, and Jane was extravagantly grateful. 
 Her instinct for affection and service at once 
 found an outlet ; at once she began to admire, to 
 idealise, and to worship. She was caught by one 
 of those inexplicable fascinations to which poor 
 mortals are liable. Hers* If worth many times 
 her kinswomen intellectually and morally and 
 even in point of looks there were men who 
 would have chosen her odd kindliness of face 
 before her cousin's sleek and commonplace 
 regularity she came rapidly to look upon them 
 as angels to whom it was a privilege to be a 
 slave. They accepted this view complacently 
 and humoured it all day long. 
 
 At the end of three weeks an arrangement was 
 made by which she was to live permanently with 
 her aunt. Her father's five hundred a year was 
 at her own disposal ; part of it she gave directly 
 to her aunt, the rest was mostly spent in presents 
 v 81
 
 Episodes 
 
 or nominally lent to her extravagant cousin. 
 Mrs. Travers was well-oft", but appreciated these 
 additional hundreds. In time the successfully 
 commonplace triumphed over the weekly ab- 
 normal. Neither Mrs. Travers nor Geraldine 
 was conscious of regarding Jane as a being 
 existing for their comfort ; they accepted her 
 money and her services naturally and remorse- 
 lessly. They were two eupeptic, strong-willed, 
 and absolutely selfish people ; she was sensitive, 
 weak, and with a mania for self-sacrifice. It 
 was quite without thought or intention on their 
 part that she drifted into occupying her days as 
 an unpaid secretary, needlewoman, and com- 
 panion, assisting in the preparation for and con- 
 sequences of amusements in which she had 
 little part, it being understood that she was 
 delicate, and averse from society. But since 
 this was the state of their relations, they accepted 
 it as good. 
 
 It was therefore disagreeable to them when 
 this state came into jeopardy. There was about 
 town in those days a middle-aged man of letters 
 82
 
 An Episode in a Commonplace Life 
 
 called Percival, who, undistinguished though he 
 was little more than a superior hack, in fact 
 was a tolerably intimate acquaintance of Mrs. 
 Travers. He had talked a few times with Jane, 
 found that they had much in common, and by 
 way of defying the law of the attraction of 
 opposites conceived a wish to marry her. It 
 was not passion, not even desire ; he was tired 
 of being alone, and wanted somebody to take a 
 perpetual interest in his round of small ambitions 
 and contentions. He was not a man of strong 
 character nor a large-minded man, but he was 
 kindly and courteous, and Jane would perhaps 
 have found his home congenial. He would have 
 developed affection probably, and would not 
 have been distracted by wayward inclination. 
 The wish was but coldly formed, but Jane had 
 seen it. She gave it no warm response, but 
 was inclined to meet it. Some vague, virginal 
 fluttering she may have felt, but the important 
 fact was that he was alone and wanted some- 
 body. She was not tired of serving her aunt 
 and cousin, but may have unconsciously missed 
 
 83
 
 Episodes 
 
 the gratitude which she had had in his way from 
 her father and not from them. Their solicitude 
 hnd soon changed into familiar patronage, 
 varied with occasional light-hearted sarcasm on 
 Geraldine's part. Her own affection continued 
 unreasonably strong, but mingled with vague, 
 half-conscious fear and a sense of subservience. 
 A sort of mesmerism was (without their know- 
 ledge) taking the place of uncompelled love. 
 
 On a day Mr. Percival found Mrs. Travers 
 alone, and for the first time gave, in a character- 
 less and hesitating manner, expression to his 
 wish. She received it coldly. " I fear, Mr. 
 Percival, it is no use, but of course I'll tell Jane 
 what you have said to me at once. I think it 
 would perhaps be better if she wrote to you." 
 
 When she heard the hall door shut on him, 
 she sent for her daughter and told her the news. 
 Geraldine was dismayed. 
 
 " Marry ? ' : she said ; " then we shall lose 
 her ! '' 
 
 " Yes," said her mother, " that will be a pity, 
 of course. She's a good creature, and I'm 
 8-t
 
 An Episode in a Commonplace Life 
 
 thankful we gave her a home. But that's not the 
 point. I don't think Mr. Percival at all the 
 sort of mnn to make her happy. He's a curious, 
 eccentric person, and has the most extraordinary 
 principles ; I am certain he would not be a good 
 husband. Jane is so foolish ; she might think it 
 her duty or something. Thank goodness the 
 man spoke to me and not to her." 
 
 "What are you going to do?" asked Ger- 
 aldine. 
 
 " Oh, she must be told, of course, and if she's 
 inclined to accept him, we must try to make her 
 see it wouldn't do. She's very fond of us. You 
 must be gentle with her, Gerry." 
 
 " I always am." 
 
 " Yes, dear, but I daresay she would like more 
 demonstrative affection. Where is she ? I had 
 better speak to her at once." 
 
 " She's doing something for me upstairs. I'll 
 go and fetch her. What can he see in her?" 
 
 " Oh, I don't know, my dear. Those sort of 
 people are always unaccountable." 
 
 " It's a mystery," said Geraldine.
 
 Episodes 
 
 "Come and sit by me, dear," said Mrs. 
 Travers, when they entered ; " I have something 
 to tell you. Mr. Percival has been talking to 
 me about you in fact, he seems to want to 
 marry you." 
 
 Jane flushed slightly. 
 
 "Ah, dear," her aunt continued, looking at 
 her ; " listen to me before you say anything. 
 Girls are sometimes flustered in these things. 
 I know the world better than you, and I am 
 certain it would not do. Mr. Percival is an old 
 friend of mine and I like him in a way, but I 
 know he would not make you happy. He spoke 
 more as if he wanted a housekeeper than a 
 wife marriage without love is a terrible thing. 
 Some day you will see somebody whom you'll 
 really care for. You don't love him, Jane?" 
 
 " No,'' said Jane, after a pause : " not in one 
 way." Mother and daughter exchanged an 
 involuntary glance. 
 
 "Then, my dear, think no more about it. 
 You're too young to make a mere contract of 
 marriage. It would be wicked ! ;; 
 86
 
 An Episode in a Commonplace Life 
 
 " But but," Jane said, "he has told me about 
 his life. He is very lonely ; I might make 
 things bright for him." 
 
 " My dear, self-sacrifice is a beautiful thing, 
 but don't be misled by it. In this case it 
 would be foolish and useless. Mr. Percival's 
 habits are formed. Believe me, in a short 
 time he would long for his bachelor life 
 again." 
 
 Geraldine came behind her cousin, leaned 
 over her, and put an arm round her neck. 
 " Darling," she said, " don't leave us for a man 
 you don't love. Some day it may be different. 
 Wait till then. We're very fond of you ; don't 
 go away." 
 
 She laid her cheek against her cousin's. 
 Jane gave a little sob of unwonted pleasure and 
 kissed her warmly. 
 
 There was a pause, and then Jane said : " 141 
 go and finish those bows. :; 
 
 " Dear girl," said her aunt, li think over it. 
 Uon't fancy I want to dictate to you if it were 
 a question of real love, I would not say a word. 
 
 87
 
 Episodes 
 
 But remember what I have said ; I mean it for 
 your good." 
 
 She patted her niece's face, who took the 
 plump little hand and kissed it. Then she went 
 silently from the room. Mrs. Travers smiled 
 as might smile a complacent saint. 
 
 " She's a dear, good thing," she said. 
 
 Geraldine walked to the tea-table and cut her- 
 self a large slice of cake. 
 
 " I think it will be all right," she said. 
 * * * * 
 
 It was all right. There were a few more 
 conversations, and then Jane wrote a letter 
 which settled the matter. 
 
 These things happened some years ago. 
 Since then Geraldine has made a brilliant 
 marriage, and Jane is become completely 
 mesmerised. A friend said to Mrs. Travers a 
 few days ago : " How nice for you to have your 
 niece, now that you've lost Geraldine ! :; 
 
 "Yes," said Mrs. Travers, complacently and 
 truthfully ; " she's a great comfort." 
 
 " I suppose she will never marry."
 
 An Episode in a Commonplace Life 
 
 " I expect not ; a man once proposed to her, 
 but she wouldn't have him, and she was quite 
 right. She's very happy and contented, and I 
 like to think I have been like a mother to her, 
 poor dear." 
 
 If Mrs. Travers thought about it, she would 
 have no doubt that Jane owed her a great deal. 
 As for Jane she has no life except to be a comfort 
 to her aunt. Possibly her life is not altogether 
 wasted, but it has had no more episodes.
 
 TWO WOMEN 
 
 To REALISE himself wholly, to understand and 
 visualise to the limit of his intelligence what 
 manner of man he is, is given to nobody on 
 earth. It is a lesser thing to realise one's 
 material position, that wherein, to speak 
 roughly, one's fortune is better or worse than 
 the common. But it is not the habit of ordin- 
 ary people to realise even this at all extensively : 
 their introspection generally stops at the amount 
 of their incomes. 
 
 Geraldine was shrewd and had an instinct for 
 getting the utmost gratification possible out of 
 life : but she was not an extraordinary person. 
 It happened, however, that on one occasion she 
 went far towards realising her comparative ad- 
 vantages. It was three years after her brilliant 
 marriage. She went one day to lunch with her 
 90
 
 Two Women 
 
 mother, and arrived at the house half an hour 
 before the time. Her mother was out, and she 
 went up to the room which had been hers and 
 was now devoted to the many tasks of her 
 cousin, Jane Travers. The latter was stooping 
 over the writing-table, and with a look of faint 
 excitement started up. But the young matron 
 was not prodigal of caresses, and told her curtly, 
 with a patronising nod, to go on with what she 
 was doing. She observed the disappointment 
 on her cousin's face, and her plump cheeks 
 dimpled demurely : her cousin's devotion to 
 her, though she did not care to encourage 
 such foolishness, gave her a mild amuse- 
 ment. 
 
 She sat down in an arm-chair and lazily 
 watched the other. That Jane, who was intel- 
 lectual, refined, and capable of a daily complete 
 altruism not less altruistic because it was a 
 pity should be altogether devoted to herself, 
 who \vas commonplace in mind and tastes, a 
 little greedy and absolutely selfish, did not in 
 the least surprise her : she accepted it as a
 
 Episodes 
 
 natural tribute to her beauty and charm. That 
 Jane was content to live with Mrs. Travers, 
 where by the nature of the two she was neces- 
 sarily a sort of slave, so that she might have a 
 glimpse now and then of her daughter, Geral- 
 dine was aware : it did not particularly interest 
 her except in so far as Jane's occasional ser- 
 vices and income were convenient to herself. 
 At the present moment she was thinking of the 
 pleasant evening before her, the certainty of 
 an admirable dinner, and the possibility of much 
 amusement afterwards. The sun shone aslant 
 through the window, and passing the stooping 
 figure at the table played with the rings on 
 Geraldine's white hand, drooping indolently 
 over the ami of the chair. 
 
 Presently Jane leaned forward on her hand 
 as if in pain, and Geraldine condescended to 
 ask what was the matter. 
 
 " Oh, nothing much ; only a headache." 
 
 " Why don't you lie down ? ;5 asked Geraldine 
 without concern. 
 
 " It's not bad enough for that. I want to get 
 92
 
 Two Women 
 
 those accounts you gave me done before lunch. 
 It's very good of you to think of it." 
 
 Geraldine answered the look of gratitude with 
 a fat little smile, but said no more. She settled 
 herself more comfortably in the chair, and Jane 
 went on writing. 
 
 Then it chanced to occur to Geraldine that it 
 might be an unpleasant thing to add up rows of 
 figures when you have a headache. Thank 
 goodness, she never had a headache. And 
 then she went on to reflect on the satisfactory 
 difference between herself and Jane. Her re- 
 flections were a little indistinct, but. put articu- 
 lately, they amounted to this : 
 
 Jane was plain, quite ugly in fact, and had a 
 laborious, monotonous sort of life. She had no 
 pleasure and no friends. Well, she was very 
 weak and silly, and it was really the best thing 
 for her to live with some stronger person. Mrs. 
 Travers and she herself had really been awfully 
 good to her. However, she, Geraldine, was 
 very much better off. She was not a renowned 
 beauty, but she was very pretty indeed, and 
 
 93
 
 Episodes 
 
 there were several people who quite worshipped 
 her. She had a continual round of amusements, 
 of which she was not tired, and she was popular 
 everywhere. She was rich, and had a lovely 
 house and excellent servants. She was a 
 mother, and her little boy gave her no trouble 
 and was everybody's admiration. Yes, she was 
 very fond of him. Her husband idolised her, 
 and yes she loved him in a sensible sort of 
 way. But it was she who settled everything. 
 She deserved all this, she told herself. She had 
 no faults ; she could not help it if people cared 
 more for her than she did for them. She was 
 fond of eating, but then somebody had told her 
 that any taste, if refined, was art and a virtue, 
 and she was certainly fastidious. Thank good- 
 ness, she had no constitutional tendency to 
 over-stoutness. She was very careful of her 
 health, and rode and walked a good deal. Yes, 
 she deserved all the good fortune. She was 
 not at all too stout. 
 
 From your point of view the contrast was a 
 little pathetic. 
 94
 
 Two Women 
 
 The woman who was fine and had a poten- 
 tially abundant intellect and a noble spirit, was 
 spoiled and wasted, spent in voluntary service 
 to one altogether her inferior. 
 
 The woman who was quite unfeeling, some- 
 what coarse in nature, and of a very ordinary 
 intelligence, had to the full every pleasure that 
 a woman in her state of development could 
 appreciate. 
 
 But it is ridiculous to be angry with people''s 
 imitations. 
 
 Geraldine felt no sense of pathos. Her in- 
 articulate thought was, that this is the best of 
 all possible worlds. She took a little glass from 
 her pocket, and after a look at her cousin, gazed 
 placidly at her own face, her very pretty and 
 rosy face. Jane went on adding up figures, 
 occasionally stopping to press her hand to her 
 eyes. Geraldine smiled with satisfaction at the 
 looking-glass, and showed her white, firm teeth. 
 
 The luncheon bell rang, and she put away 
 the glass. 
 
 " Come, Jane, you ought to be hungry. How
 
 Episodes 
 
 long have you been doing those accounts of 
 mine ? It's so sweet of you : I really hadn't 
 time." 
 
 " Oh, all the morning, but I've such a head- 
 ache I don't think I'll go down." 
 
 " Poor Jane ! Well, I ; m awfully hungry. I 
 rode for two hours this morning. Come, help 
 me up." 
 
 She held out her fat little hands. Jane 
 jumped up and took them eagerly. 
 
 She held them a moment, as her cousin, smiling 
 radiantly, stood before her. 
 
 " Geraldine, how lovely you are!" She 
 stooped and kissed one of the pretty hands, 
 an act of homage which Geraldine took as a 
 tribute to her superior merit. 
 
 " Dear thing," she said. " Don't be silly, 
 you're just as good as I am, really. Good-bye! 
 
 She tripped down the stairs, singing, and 
 Jane returned to her figures. She did not feel 
 unhappy then, and the irony of life may not be 
 so great as it seems. 
 
 96
 
 THE EPISODE OF JOHNSON 
 
 THERE was an event in the life of Geraldine 
 which I regard as an episode ; for though it 
 was a climax to the other person concerned, 
 it was but an episode to her, and she was by 
 far the more important and useful member of 
 society. Reading it, a sentimental person 
 might suppose it an exposition of villainy on 
 her part, which is not the case. Her conduct 
 was natural, and may be easily explained ; 
 and apart from the absurdity of blaming any- 
 body for anything, I cannot see that a nature 
 which is merely unthinkingly selfish and a 
 little imperceptive of other people's feelings, 
 and is otherwise thoroughly healthy, is an 
 ill thing in the world. Or it may be thought 
 that in the case of the man it involves the 
 study of a disagreeably morbid character, and 
 < 97
 
 Episodes 
 
 objected that all scribbling should be healthy. 
 To such an objection there is an answer on 
 the same plane : that the moral, which is that 
 a disagreeably morbid person generally goes 
 to the wall, is good and pleasant. I think 
 this man would have gone off his head some 
 day, and ended as his did, if Geraldine had 
 never lived. 
 
 He was a young man called Johnson, and 
 came from Cambridge, where the beginning of 
 his career had been brilliant and the end 
 insignificant, to town to read for the Bar. 
 The story ought to make his character evident 
 without description, but it may be noted that, 
 for ail his absurdity, his intellect was not quite 
 futile. He had a few hundreds a year, the 
 capital of which was very wrongly in his own 
 control. Meeting Mrs. Travers, he was asked 
 to go to see her, and having gone, went 
 frequently. He found they were fond of going 
 to the play, and invented a fiction, which Mrs. 
 Travers saw no reason to disbelieve, to the 
 effect that he knew several theatrical people,
 
 The Episode of "Johnson 
 
 who gave him boxes and stalls at all the 
 popular plays. Mrs. Travers did not scruple 
 to make free use of this convenience, and in 
 return allowed him to come to tea as often 
 as he chose, which was perhaps thoughtlessly 
 kind. 
 
 This of course was in the days before 
 Geraldine made her brilliant marriage. When 
 the three were alone Johnson made no secret 
 of the fact that to him this girl was a goddess. 
 Therefore Mrs. Travers, being a sensible 
 mother, took an early occasion to tell him, 
 quite intelligibly, that Geraldine, being a 
 sensible daughter, would certainly never fall 
 in love with or marry him. Here was a clear 
 position, and a manly, self-respecting man 
 would either have taken himself off or made 
 a compact with himself to win the girl for all 
 her sense. 
 
 But here first appeared Johnson's morbidity. 
 I do not know if I understand rightly his 
 character, though I have observed it in action. 
 I fancy that his passion went, so to speak, to 
 
 09
 
 Episodes 
 
 his head. It was certainly strong, but seemed 
 to take the form usually the secondary con- 
 sequence of desire of wishing to benefit the 
 object of it, and that exclusively. Some 
 radical weakness of character there may have 
 been, and yet on his own particular lines his 
 passion never faltered nor swerved. It hap- 
 pened as a secondary cause that a sort of 
 foolish Quixotism with regard to women had 
 been his habitual ideal. There was also the 
 coincidence that at this time Geraldine, who 
 was by no means stupid, saw much of a young 
 poet, and picked up his phrases and theories, 
 of a rather vague and flowery kind. It was 
 therefore easy for Johnson to consider her a 
 very spiritual being, who should be worshipped 
 as it were in the clouds. However all this may 
 be, he replied to Mrs. Travers that he never 
 supposed that Geraldine would give him more 
 than a moderate regard, that she was for 
 somebody a million times better than he was, 
 and that he was content merely to see her 
 sometimes. Mrs. Travers, despising him in
 
 The Episode of Johnson 
 
 her heart, was amused as well and disposed 
 to be kindly; she said she would allow him to 
 come to them just the same if he really under- 
 stood. And he vowed she was kinder to him 
 than any one else had ever been, and that he 
 could never be grateful enough, and she began 
 insensibly to patronise him as one dependent 
 on her good nature. 
 
 She repeated the matter to her daughter, with 
 a certain touch of humour. It is not to be sup- 
 posed that a healthy and vigorous young woman 
 full of animal spirits, as was Geraldine, could 
 respect such an attitude on the part of a man, 
 nor indeed was it respectable. Possibly there 
 was (for it was genuine) an element of pathos in 
 it, but neither the mother, whose only trouble 
 was her double chin, nor the daughter, who had 
 no trouble at all, could be expected to be readily 
 perceptive of pathetic elements. Geralcline's 
 feelings were a mixture of vanity and irritation. 
 The consequences were that vanity forbade her 
 to send him away, and irritation impelled her to 
 snub and to tyrannise over him. This was exactly 
 
 101
 
 Episodes 
 
 the conduct to tie and to make him more ridicu- 
 lous, until, exercise increasing the love of power, 
 the snubbing and tyranny reached a point where 
 downright cruelty begins, which was Johnson's 
 fault, whose morbid submission brought out a 
 latent quality. He, for his part, used to spend 
 his time away from her in trying to frame ex- 
 cuses for her, and to believe her the spiritual 
 goddess she had been, and so powerful is passion 
 that he generally succeeded. While she, to 
 whom his various humours were incompre- 
 hensible, and who had no idea of the extent of 
 his perturbations, never troubled herself about 
 him in his absence. Once her mother, laughing, 
 after his departure, said : "You are dreadfully 
 cruel to him, Gerry." 
 
 " Perhaps," said Geraldine, in pensive amuse- 
 ment, " perhaps I am ; but when you know you 
 can make any one squirm like that, it's so hard 
 not to." 
 
 Her cruelty had been innocent enough, but 
 for that morbid strain in Johnson which she 
 could never understand. Mrs. Travers would
 
 The Episoae of Johnson 
 
 sometimes console him, and bid him not to mind, 
 when his gratitude would be extreme. Once, how- 
 ever, she found her part of comforter impossible. 
 He was with them in the brougham returning 
 from a play, and received Geraldine's abuse of 
 the dinner, the theatre, and all his conduct and 
 conversation thereat, with so absurd a piteous- 
 ness that the other two were forced to mingle 
 their laughter. That occasion, had there been 
 the faintest gift of humour in Johnson, would have 
 been his salvation. But there was not, and as 
 he drove home in a hansom afterwards, he stared 
 vacantly out of it, with no eye for the nightly 
 beauty of London nor sense of the fresh breeze 
 in his face. 
 
 Thereafter came the time when the prelimi- 
 nary stages of Geraldine's brilliant marriage 
 were in course of completion, and then Johnson 
 became a nuisance. Perhaps some spark of 
 manly rivalry was aroused in him. Its ex- 
 pression, if it existed, was in sullen ill-temper, 
 and though Geraldine left her tyranny now for 
 the most part, he remained unamiable, and did 
 
 103
 
 Episodes 
 
 not always affect amiability before their world. 
 He became at last intolerable and impossible, 
 and had to be told to go away at least until the 
 brilliant marriage was over. This task Mrs. 
 Travers accomplished with vigorous exaspera- 
 tion. Johnson went down on his knees, and was 
 otherwise contemptible and uncomfortable, and 
 she, as she told her daughter, very nearly boxed 
 his ears. She was obdurate, as she had to be, 
 to his apologies and promises, and so he went 
 away. He went away also from all respectable 
 society, and the Traverses soon forgot him. 
 
 Now, if Johnson's nature had not been 
 thoroughly morbid, it would have righted itself, 
 if ever, now. Family affection, or the society of 
 Lais, might have saved him to a reasonable 
 extent. But he had no family, and was so con- 
 stituted that the society of no woman of Lais' 
 sort was tolerable in his affliction. Some sane 
 woman of the world of his own class might have 
 extracted his confidence and appeased him in 
 time, but no such woman was his familiar friend, 
 and he gave himself no chance of meeting one. 
 104
 
 The Episode ofjohnson 
 
 He relapsed into vacuous brooding, and became 
 in due time a confirmed monomaniac. He 
 thought of but one subject till it altogether 
 filled his existence. He had, I think, no inherited 
 tendency to suicide, but made constant use of a 
 drug which not infrequently creates one. His 
 men friends fell away, and then he lived alone 
 in his chambers, shaky and prematurely old. 
 
 Two years after her marriage he stopped 
 Geraldine near her home in Park Lane. She 
 did not recognise him at first, and when she did 
 wished she had gone on. But he was a vague 
 memory, and she thought it hardly worth while 
 to make a little scene. " Mr. Johnson ! " she 
 said, not altogether ungraciously. " How ill 
 you're looking ! " 
 
 " I ventured to stop you," he said huskily, 
 "because I'm going away the day after to- 
 morrow for the rest of my life, and I want to 
 say something to you first." 
 
 He begged for an interview with her some- 
 where alone, and she, after much demur, rather 
 crossly made an appointment for the next after-
 
 Episodes 
 
 noon at her mother's house. Johnson had been 
 living on his capital, and had now about two 
 hundred pounds left at the Bank. The following 
 morning he drew it out in bank-notes, and spent 
 all but a few pounds on a bracelet. He put it 
 in his pocket, and paced the streets for hours, 
 brooding, and unconsciously making way for 
 people, resting now and then in the Park. 
 
 At the appointed time he went to Mrs. Travers' 
 house, and was shown into her boudoir. In 
 half an hour Geraldine came in unconcernedly. 
 The two were a rather violent contrast. He was 
 very thin, ill, and somewhat shabby, with a 
 trembling, vacuous stare. She, who had been 
 plump, had grown plumper, though the full lines 
 of her figure were graceful enough, was a freshly 
 radiant embodiment of health and solid delights, 
 looked calm and withal alert. She was quite 
 at her ease, gave him an interrogative glance, 
 and sat her comfortably down. As she slowly 
 pulled off a glove he, not bearing to look at her 
 face, gazed at the hand she uncovered, a very 
 pretty hand, though not artistic in shnpc and 
 
 TO 1 )
 
 The Episode of Johnson 
 
 perhaps too fat : it was small and very white, 
 and with many rings. Johnson gazed at it as 
 at a sacred thing. 
 
 " I want first to ask you to forgive me you 
 won't see me again for acting as I did just 
 before you married." 
 
 She smiled slightly and nodded. 
 
 "Oh, well," she said, "we'll forget all that. 
 Where are you going to ?" 
 
 " Oh, right away. Will you do me a great 
 favour ? I want you to accept this thing as a 
 sort of memento and sign of forgiveness." 
 
 She took the bracelet and looked at it criti- 
 cally. 
 
 " Oh, no, Mr. Johnson ; I really can't." 
 
 But he persisted, asked her to regard it as a 
 wedding present, said he could easily afford it, 
 and so on. Finally, she accepted it as one 
 doing a great favour. He spoke vaguely of his 
 journey, and then he said good-bye, stooping 
 awkwardly over her careless hand, and went. 
 Geraldine sat looking at the bracelet a minute 
 or two, humming a tune. As for Johnson, he 
 
 107
 
 Episodes 
 
 walked back to his chambers and did that 
 which the papers related the next day. 
 * # * * 
 
 " It's dreadful, dreadful ! " said Geraldine. 
 
 " Yes, terrible, poor fellow ; but of course he 
 was mad at the moment. He must have had 
 some trouble we knew nothing about." 
 
 "You don't think I ought to tell anybody 
 about his coming to see me here?" 
 
 " Certainly not," said Mrs. Travers with 
 decision. " His coming here had nothing to 
 do with his suicide. For goodness' sake, don't 
 mix yourself up with it. Nobody knew him." 
 
 "Well," said Geraldine, "I'm glad I forgave 
 him, and we parted friends." 
 
 They spoke of other things. 
 
 I cannot see that Johnson had any reason- 
 able complaint against them ; they never 
 affected any regard they did not feel, and were 
 quite ordinary people. 
 
 1 08
 
 A REASONABLE HUSBAND 
 
 WHEN the other man was gone, the husband 
 \\alked to the fire and stood with his back to 
 it, looking down on his wife. He was a tall, 
 well-built fellow, whose admirable frock-coat 
 became him and who would have looked well 
 in armour ; he was bald in an intellectual sort 
 of way, had an imperial and a pointed mous- 
 tache and very bright eyes. The wife was 
 huddled in her chair, her disarranged, fluffy 
 hair falling over the thin long hands in which 
 her face was buried. He looked down on her 
 with his thick, black eyebrows bent and his lips 
 compressed. But after a while his face cleared 
 and he gave a twist to his moustache. 
 
 " Do you mind/' he said, " if I smoke a 
 
 She looked up hurriedly and in perplexity, 
 
 109
 
 Episodes 
 
 her mouth twitching. It was a pretty face, but 
 thin and a little haggard. The eyes, which 
 had not been weeping, were watery and weak. 
 The husband looked at her without changing 
 his smile. He unbuttoned his coat and took 
 out a cigar-case. 
 
 " I know," he said, " it : s rather a theatrical 
 thing to do under the circumstances, but I 
 really want to talk at my ease." 
 
 " At your ease ! " she muttered. 
 
 "Oh, yes, at my ease. I'm aware it would 
 flatter your vanity more if I tore my hair, 
 what there is of it, and addressed inflated ob- 
 servations to God. But I really can't go so 
 far in politeness as that. On the other hand, I 
 don't intend to say anything unamiable to you. 
 So do make yourself comfortable. We can't 
 help the situation having a dramatic element 
 in it, but we needn't have a regular scene. 
 Tell me, how long have you been unfaithful 
 to me ? " 
 
 The wife rose and walked to and fro. 
 
 " What right have you to upbraid me ? Ho\v
 
 A Reasonable Husbana 
 
 long were you faithful to me? You! How 
 many women, since we married 
 
 She stopped in front of him. He laughed, 
 a laugh of simple amusement. 
 
 " Admirable ! You have been reading what's- 
 its-name. But, my dear child, we are not 
 people in a book. It's a little off the point, 
 but I really must explain to you. If I were 
 an ordinary, normal sort of husband, the 
 answer to that tu quoque of yours would be 
 easy : these are matters of emotion, not of 
 reason ; one of the strongest emotions in a 
 normal husband is the desire to have ex- 
 clusive possession of his wife ; he acts accord- 
 ingly ; his own conduct away from her is 
 irrelevant. However, I'm not a normal hus- 
 band, and whatever you may have been to me 
 when we were married, I care nothing now 
 whether you are unfaithful or not. Absolutely 
 (I assure you) my only grievance against you 
 is that you have compelled me to find you out. 
 You really have not played the game." 
 
 The wife had looked at him blankly : she
 
 Episodes 
 
 turned and walked quickly again across the 
 room and back. 
 
 " Yes, it's a harsh thing perhaps to say, but 
 you really have not played the game. All I 
 asked, tacitly of course, was that you should 
 not make me ridiculous. I never made you 
 so ; I have never asked you to receive my 
 mistress or anything of that sort. Whereas 
 
 you in my own house " He shrugged his 
 
 shoulders and flipped the ash from his cigar. 
 
 " You see," he continued, " you place me 
 in a very tiresome dilemma. I must either 
 divorce you and quarrel with a man with whom 
 I am not in the least angry he's one of my 
 oldest friends and has only acted as I have 
 acted many times or I must put myself in the 
 ridiculous position of the forgiving husband 
 and allow him to laugh at me. Think ! I must 
 either quarrel with a man who was my chum 
 at school, or appear absurd to him. See what 
 you women do ! " 
 
 He laughed in pleasant enjoyment of his 
 jest.
 
 A Reasonable Husband 
 
 " I'm making rather a long speech, I'm 
 afraid. I'll come to practical details. Of 
 course I shall not divorce you : I dare say 
 he'll understand. It suits me to be married, 
 and I detest advertisement. Been paying 
 servants, and that sort of thing, to keep the 
 secret ? " 
 
 The wife spoke at last. 
 
 "O you devil!" she said; "you insulting 
 devil!" 
 
 " My dear soul, I'm sure I take things 
 with admirable good-nature. But come, tell 
 me ; I don't care for servants to be laughing 
 at me downstairs." 
 
 " Only one, my maid. She knew I gave 
 her some things and some money.'' 
 
 " That rather pretty girl ? Well, if one must 
 be blackmailed, it's pleasant to be black- 
 mailed by anybody so nice. Give her my 
 love, if you like, and tell her if she holds her 
 tongue I'll set her up in a public-house, or a 
 shop, or something. But for God's sake be 
 discreet. We'll live apart as much as pos-
 
 Episodes 
 
 sible; but, as I said, it suits me to have a 
 wife and a respectable house and that sort 
 of thing." 
 
 The wife went from the room, sobbing. 
 
 The husband's smile vanished, and he stood 
 like a stone for five minutes by the ticking 
 clock. Then he, too, left the room without 
 throwing anything down and shut the door 
 quietly. 
 
 114
 
 THE END OF A POSE 
 
 BASIL and George had finished their last dinner 
 together, before Basil went back to school. 
 Basil was sixteen, and George was his elder 
 brother. All through the Easter holidays they 
 had lived alone at George's house in Suffolk ; 
 there was no sport, and they had loafed about 
 together, talking, and talked far into every 
 night. The twelve years between them made 
 little difference in their converse ; they had seen 
 nothing of one another for some years, and ap- 
 peared as strangers whom similar attitudes and 
 tastes made quickly intimate. Basil was an 
 extraordinarily precocious boy, dreamy and in- 
 dolent, who in pursuit of an elder's idea was 
 quite unconscious of his boyhood. George had 
 been much the same at his age, and had altered 
 little in essentials ; to him his brother, so pro- 
 
 "5
 
 Episodes 
 
 vocative of memories, and so remote from 
 criticism of himself a man who had no cordial 
 man-friend in the world was strangely attract- 
 ive. He listened with a curious interest to im- 
 mature indications of himself, and himself spoke 
 freely. There was a great sympathy between 
 the man who was appreciated and the boy who 
 was understood. Had they been of an age, they 
 would perhaps have quarrelled, as men who are 
 alike in their waywardness generally quarrel ; 
 as it was, they found a complement in one 
 another. Since George had been of age his 
 father had not spoken to him, and now his 
 father was dead, and he had come to his house 
 for the first time for seven years, and his brother 
 had joined him for his holidays. George's wife 
 remained in London. 
 
 The brothers sat with a few dishes of fruit 
 between them at one end of the long table in 
 the big dining-room ; they had pale blue eyes 
 and straw-coloured hair, were both slight, and 
 both leaned back languidly in the big chairs, 
 which had high carved backs, and the obvious 
 116
 
 The End of a Pose 
 
 difference was only that the elder was a little 
 bald and clean-shaven, and the younger had an 
 incipient moustache. 
 
 " Port, Basil ? " 
 
 " Thanks ; I'll stick to the champagne." 
 
 "Any left?" George asked, with a slight 
 laugh. 
 
 Basil met his brother's smile frankly. "It's 
 in the family," he said, and jerked his head back 
 in the direction of a portrait, the portrait 
 of a worthy who had come to his own with 
 Charles Stuart, and was supposed to have been 
 continuously drunk from that time to his death. 
 
 " He had a better constitution than either of 
 us," said George ; " but, as you say, it's in the 
 family. Ring for another bottle if you want it. 
 I'm sorry it's our last night, old man." 
 
 " You'd be sorrier if you had to go back to 
 that beastly place I have to ; there's hardly a 
 soul there I care for." 
 
 " Yes, I suppose it is a rough sort of place. 
 You don't care for games and that sort of 
 thing?"
 
 Episodes 
 
 " Loathe them. I'm only tolerated because 
 they're such snobs, and you have a title and all 
 that." 
 
 " That's bad, too ; it won't hurt you, though. 
 I don't think you'll be a snob." 
 
 " I've no excuse." 
 
 " No, but lots of chaps who have no excuse 
 are snobs all the same, with just the same 
 snobbery as though they were grocers ; they 
 don't even invent a special variety. Now, these 
 people " he looked round on the portraits 
 "were most of them blackguards, but they 
 weren't snobs. I suppose they had no occasion 
 to stand on their dignity, or couldn't sell their 
 dignity as we do. I wish you'd gone to Eton, 
 though I suppose the old boy simply wanted 
 you to do everything differently from me ; 
 idiot " 
 
 " He was good to me, George." 
 
 There was silence for a moment, and both 
 emptied their glasses. Then the younger brother 
 spoke nervously. 
 
 " George, don'i tell me if you don't want to ; 
 118
 
 The End of a Pose 
 
 but you know you asked me if he ever spoke of 
 you. Why was it" you quarrelled?" 
 
 George looked very hard at his younger 
 brother. 
 
 " He believed things about me which I could 
 not disprove. But that was only the last straw. 
 We never hit it off : he was a sportsman, and I 
 was not ; I was rather a prig, too, and showed 
 him I thought his life rather empty. He never 
 sympathised with me. Few people have. I'm 
 glad we're friends, Basil. Don't be afraid to 
 tell me things ; I've been much worse than ever 
 you'll be. If you can't stand school, of course 
 you can leave. But better stick to it a bit 
 longer ; it helps one with men, and with your 
 temperament you'll need all you can to stand 
 well with them. Everyone to his boredom ; you 
 go back to school and I go back to my wife. 
 Probably we hive the same kind of sinking 
 feeling. We'll have some more drinks." 
 
 They sat in silence until the butler had brought 
 in a fresh bottle of port. Then George looked 
 at his brother. " Shocked ?" he asked. 
 
 119
 
 Episodes 
 
 The other laughed uncomfortably. Of course 
 not." 
 
 " But you are that's affectation. You're afraid 
 I should not think you a man of the world. 
 Don't be angry, old man ; I didn't mean to be 
 rude. You were shocked, not at what I said, 
 but at my saying it. I suppose it was mean of 
 me, but you're the only person in the world I 
 should say it to simply because I have no 
 intimates. In a few years you'll be hardened 
 in that way too ; at present,. delicacy with you 
 isn't merged in indifference." 
 
 " I've only seen her once. She's very clever, 
 isn't she?" 
 
 " Very clever ; she'll argue about heaps of 
 things by the hour and so stupid that she 
 talked to you as if you were an ordinary boy. 
 It's her cleverness that bores me. She's inter- 
 ested in all sorts of things, and up to a certain 
 point is thoroughly intelligent about them. On 
 her own plane she reasons better than any 
 woman I ever knew. She gets up meetings 
 and writes letters to the papers, and is a most
 
 The End of a Pose 
 
 energetic citizen. I daresay she does almost as 
 much good as harm. I know she bores me to 
 death." 
 
 " She's fond of you, George ? " 
 
 " My dear, she detests me. It's her cleverness 
 that bores me, and it's my cleverness that ex- 
 asperates her. She knows that I understand 
 the things she cares about, and simply think 
 them uninteresting. If I were a stupid man, 
 even though I didn't care for them, she wouldn't 
 mind so much. Ifs my attitude of superiority, 
 which I can't help, that maddens her. I despise 
 her interests and she despises me." 
 
 " Why ? " 
 
 " Because she thinks I waste my abilities and 
 am selfish and retrograde, and so forth. Besides, 
 she's healthy and vigorous, and I'm corrupt and 
 effete." 
 
 The boy did not understand how that last sen- 
 tence belied his brother's previous statements. 
 
 " Why did you marry ? " 
 
 " Because her good looks, and vigour, and 
 unconventionality appealed to my jaded senses,
 
 Episodes 
 
 I suppose, and she thought she liked me perhaps ; 
 and there was the tin. I don't mean she was 
 sordid ; she saw an opportunity of furthering 
 her pet schemes." 
 
 " Well, at any rate, she doesn't care for any- 
 body more." 
 
 " I wish to God she would." 
 " Now, it's your turn for affectation." 
 " I tell you, Basil, the people we wish to get 
 rid of wish would die, sometimes are not the 
 people who injure us. They're the people who 
 bore us. Laura's absolutely reasonable in 
 theory, up to a certain point, and like so many 
 women now-a-days confines herself to theory in 
 matters where mere theory is worthless. No 
 doubt she thinks it an anachronism that two 
 people who don't suit each other should be tied 
 for their lives, and if she were logical in practice, 
 she'd go away. She ought to run away with 
 some sporting fellow who hunted five days a 
 week and thought she was a prophetess. She 
 bores me with her tedious reforms, and she 
 despises me because I'm effete, as I said." 
 
 122
 
 The End of a Pose 
 
 Once again the boy failed to see the incon- 
 sistency. 
 
 " I wonder you " said he. 
 
 " Oh, as long as she puts up with me. . . . She 
 ought to bolt, but since she won't. . . . Now 
 make your confession to me, and we'll be quits. 
 
 Basil, flushed, seemed on the point of speaking. 
 But his brother was obviously gone in a reverie, 
 and he walked to a window and looked out on 
 the rain. When he turned round George was 
 emptying the decanter, and had spilled some 
 wine on the cloth. 
 
 The butler came in with a telegram. George 
 held it in front of him for two minutes, and then 
 held it to his brother. The butler left the room. 
 
 Basil read it. " Good God ! " he said. 
 
 His brother said nothing, and Basil spoke 
 again falteringly. 
 
 " George, you know what I think. I'm 
 dreadfully sorry." 
 
 " Thanks, old man. A curious comment, isn't 
 it ? Let's have our coffee upstairs ; it's more 
 comfortable." 
 
 123
 
 Episodes 
 
 He finished his wine, and rose from the table, 
 while his brother stood looking at the floor. 
 
 Then he laughed, harshly. 
 
 "Damn it, Basil," he said, "which of us is 
 acting the most ? " 
 
 124
 
 A NOTE ON THE LAST EPISODE 
 
 LAURA and her best friend were in Laura's 
 particular study. Laura was at the writing-table, 
 her friend in a big arm-chair before the fire. 
 The room was severe ; a few architectural 
 engravings, a great many shelves of books, two 
 other tables covered with books and papers. A 
 pair of boxing gloves hung a little ostentatiously 
 on the wall. The woman in the arm-chair was 
 sinuous and thin, her hair was black, and she had 
 large black eyes ; her face was pale and long ; 
 the nose thin and long ; the thin lips, that were 
 now curled a little derisively, were ong ; her 
 throat was beautifully moulded, and the hand 
 that rested on the arm of the chair was thin and 
 long and white. She was of a type of woman 
 that you seldom see in old portraits. Her smile
 
 Episodes 
 
 was directed towards a photograph at which she 
 was looking. 
 
 Laura drew a broad unnecessary line under 
 the " E.G." of the envelope she had directed, 
 and wheeled round her chair to face the other. 
 The big eyes of her friend looked up and took 
 her in calmly the broad forehead and square 
 chin, the brown, honest eyes and full lips, the 
 round breasts the friend was rather flat- 
 chested the capable little hands and awkward 
 pose ; the full whole of ripe young womanhood. 
 Laura rose and walked to the fire. She moved 
 with a certain irritation ; her dress was common- 
 place, and as it were a grudging concession. 
 The dress of the other, who followed her with 
 her persistent smile, was all lace and subtle 
 folds. A little less intellect in Laura's face, and 
 a little more grace, and she would have fitted an 
 old portrait passing well. 
 
 "What have you there?" she asked. 
 "George's photo? Isn't it like him?" 
 
 " It doesn't flatter him, but it's not a bad 
 likeness ; the delicacy of the face "
 
 A Note on the Last Episode 
 
 " Give it to me." 
 
 She took it and tore it in half with her strong 
 little fingers and threw it into the fire. 
 
 " My dear ! " murmured her best friend. 
 
 Laura looked down at her in silent defiance, 
 until she asked : 
 
 " Have you heard from him lately ? " 
 
 " Yes. He's coming back in a week. Basil 
 his brother, you know is coming with him on 
 his way to school." 
 
 " What sort of boy is that ? " 
 
 " Oh, very like George." 
 
 "In other words ?" 
 
 " In other words, an effeminate, morbid, sick- 
 ening creature " 
 
 " My dear ! " 
 
 " You know very well how things are between 
 me and George." 
 
 " Laura, I'm going to preach to you." 
 
 " Well ? !> 
 
 " You're utterly unreasonable. You've no real 
 grievance ngainst your husband because his 
 tastes are different from yours." 
 
 127
 
 Episodes 
 
 " It's not that." 
 
 " You think it good to be in the front of things, 
 to help on modern movements, and all that. 
 His view is that things develop, and that it's no 
 good people meddling with them. I agree with 
 you, but I can quite understand his not sym- 
 pathising." 
 
 " It's not that." 
 
 " He lets you go your own way ' 
 
 " It's not that." 
 
 " And it's not fair to insist that he shall do 
 exactly as you. He's extremely clever in his 
 own way " 
 
 " Yes, yes ! " 
 
 "And understands all those things, only they 
 don't interest him. Why not give and take ? " 
 
 "Take what? But it's not that, it's not that. 
 \Vhat a hypocrite you are ! " 
 
 " I want to make things " 
 
 " Yes, yes, I know. I know you're a real 
 friend, dearest ; but you're on a wrong tack. Of 
 course I disapprove of his life ; in any reason- 
 able society he'd be made to work or starve." 
 
 123
 
 A Note on the Last Episode 
 
 She smiled a little forlornly. " But that's not it. 
 You talk as if I were some mad, rampant female, 
 and he were a quiet, common-sense husband. 
 You know it's not that. He's so weak." 
 
 " Mentally, morally, or physically?" 
 
 "Not the first, but the others yes, both of 
 them. He's so unmanly. I feel Oh ! " 
 
 She walked up and down the room with quick, 
 nervous steps. 
 
 " Do you know, one day I struck him." 
 
 " Laura ! " 
 
 " Yes. I came in here one day and saw him 
 at the table reading a report of never mind 
 which I'd copied out. He was smiling over it 
 you don't know how the thing had moved me 
 and when he came to the end he didn't see me 
 come in he leaned back and laughed out loud, 
 I went up and hit him on the face." 
 
 "Laura!" 
 
 "If he'd beaten me if he'd done anything 
 like a man " 
 
 "What did he do?" 
 
 " He spoke in his quiet, sarcastic way and I 
 i 129
 
 Episodes 
 
 knew he was really hurt, because there was 
 a great mark on his face and treated me 
 as if I were simply an ill-bred child. Why 
 should I live with a man like that ? If I had 
 known what his life was when I married him ! 
 You don't know what things I have learned 
 since." 
 
 " I can guess. Is he fond of you ? " 
 
 Laura looked down. li If if I could be sure 
 he was not. Like a spaniel sometimes he 
 seems to oh, yes ; he sometimes won't leave 
 me alone. Do you know that day I hit him, 
 after saying all the sarcastic things he could 
 think of, he came after me as I was going out of 
 the room, and asked me to forgive him ! Oh, it 
 makes me sick, sick ! If he had beaten me " 
 
 " What do you want ? " 
 
 " I want a man. He might be stupid, or 
 coarse, and care for nothing but hunting; he 
 might forbid me to speak in public " (she 
 laughed a little bitterly), "and tear up all I 
 wrote ; but if he were a man, I could be happy. 
 A man ! "
 
 A Note on the Last Episode 
 
 She sat down by the writing-table and leaned 
 her head on her hand. 
 
 Her best friend frowned and seemed to 
 think. Then she rose, and with a light in her 
 big eyes went to the table and laid a long 
 white hand on the other's shoulder. 
 
 " Laura ! " she said, in a low, musical voice ; 
 "darling, I understand. I see now what it is. 
 I really thought it was that he didn't care for 
 your interests, and all that. Now I see. 
 Laura, my dear, you're simply a woman un- 
 satisfied : you ought to have a plain, strong 
 husband and children to look after. All your 
 movements and theories mean simply that. 
 My darling, whatever you do I gue=s what 
 you're going to do, though I don't know who 
 it is remember I'm your friend. I think 
 you're right, and whatever the world says, I'll 
 stick to you. You're too sensible to care what 
 the stupid world says. And as to his being 
 fond of you, don't be deceived ; he may care 
 for you in his way now, but in a year he won't 
 think any more about it. Don't sacrifice your
 
 Episodes 
 
 happiness for that. Now I'm going. Good- 
 bye, my darling." 
 
 Laura rose and kissed her and sat down 
 again. 
 
 Her best friend went out and got into a 
 cab. As she drove off she took a letter from 
 her pocket. " I always turn to you," a sen- 
 tence in it ran, " and bore you with my 
 troubles. But you understand me ; would to 
 
 God my wife did ! I sometimes think 
 
 Never mind.'' 
 
 The woman smiled and put the letter care- 
 fully away. 
 
 "If he divorces her," reflected Laura's best 
 friend, "it won't make any difference to her 
 whom he marries afterwards. Oh, the comfort 
 of beincr out of debt ! " 
 
 132
 
 A RECONCILIATION 
 
 GERALD MANNERING lived in one of the 
 gayest sets in London. Most of the men and 
 women in it wrote, or acted, or painted. The 
 actors were men and women of genius, as are 
 all actors. Those of the set who wrote and 
 painted were, intellectually and artistically, 
 on the outermost fringe of their professions 
 financially they prospered. They drew things 
 for the papers and were extremely artistic, or 
 wrote paragraphs for the papers about " first 
 nights " and bonnets, and were very literary 
 indeed. There were a few stray barristers 
 and stockbrokers in the set, and a few people 
 who did absolutely nothing, of whom Gerald 
 Mannering was one. 
 
 How he had drifted there I do not know. 
 It suited him pretty well. He was gay, and 
 
 133
 
 Episodes 
 
 at least superficially good-natured, as were 
 the others, and had capacity to enjoy the 
 moment, and to take nobody and nothing 
 very seriously. He liked the free manners 
 and rushing about in cabs, and champagne in 
 the early morning. 
 
 But he did not marry into this gay set. 
 Gerald in town and Gerald in the country 
 were two people. It was an old family, of 
 which Gerald and his father and some distant 
 cousins were all that remained, and had 
 a rather tumble-down old house in a rather 
 neglected park. The elder Mannering lived 
 there all the year round, doing nothing very 
 comfortably ; and Gerald in the country used 
 to potter about with a gun when there 
 was anything to shoot, smoke interminable 
 pipes, and hold solemn discourse with his 
 father. 
 
 Their neighbour was a marquis not a 
 
 fashionable marquis at all, but a very simple 
 
 country gentleman, a reader of substantial 
 
 histories, and interested in flocks and herds. 
 
 134
 
 A Reconciliation 
 
 His wife was dead, having left him three girls, 
 clever, high-spirited, and perfectly thorough- 
 bred. It was not the Gerald who rushed 
 about to music-halls who married, but the 
 Gerald who was quite happy pottering about 
 with a gun ; and he married his old playmate, 
 Lady Emily. 
 
 Lady Emily's mother had died a year after the 
 girl had come out, but had lived long enough to 
 have trained her daughter as few girls are 
 trained. This training had been a veritable 
 school of love, where a naturally single-hearted 
 and brave nature had been informed with all 
 that is fair in tradition. She had known nothing 
 of unreasoned repression and dictated points of 
 view. Her quick intellect and strong affections 
 had been developed imperceptibly to herself ; 
 her habits imperceptibly formed in the ways of 
 graciousness and health. The result was a 
 rare girl indeed, a girl with a natural outlook in 
 life, neither prurient nor prudish, with a mind 
 informed and ready, and with a perfect manner. 
 Gerald Mannering admitted she was far too
 
 Episodes 
 
 good for him, but did not reflect very much on 
 the disparity. And she had a great affection 
 for him. For the last two years, since her 
 mother's death, she had lived very much in the 
 country. 
 
 So Gerald Mannering, aged twenty five, and 
 his wife, aged twenty-one, came to set up house 
 in South Kensington, and to them came flocking 
 Gerald's set : Tom from his theatre, and Dick 
 from Monte Carlo, and Harry from durance vile 
 in Holloway. His wife liked these men fairly 
 well ; they were cosmopolitan and talked 
 amiable nonsense. Some of the women also of 
 the set she met, and these she liked less. Those 
 who had reached a hand to Society (as they 
 spelled it) from Bohemia (as it still is called) 
 had too many middle- class proprieties for her 
 tastes; those who had reached a hand the other 
 way, too few restrictions. They made more fuss 
 about her than she liked. 
 
 Gerald Mannering had not rushed back to his 
 old life. He could not suddenly drop a number 
 of people who were for the most part harmless, 
 136
 
 A Reconciliation 
 
 nor refrain from going to ordinary places of 
 resort. But he had wished to devote himself to 
 his wife, and grudged at first that anybody 
 should spoil their tete-h-tete. The inevitable 
 change was quick. He could not help discover- 
 ing that his wife, if not his superior, was at least 
 other than he. She was gay and affectionate, 
 and never snubbed him ; but he had wit to feel 
 that to her his brandy-and-soda jokes were 
 somewhat crude, his fragments of hackneyed 
 "cynicism" exceedingly silly. On a day, a 
 woman of their acquaintance brought another 
 woman to the house, a very advanced woman, 
 who discoursed on equal right for the sexes, 
 the marriage laws, and the like, to whom he 
 listened with respect, as to a clever and en- 
 lightened person : when she was gone his 
 wife made utter ridicule of her, proving her 
 loud views and theories due merely to lack 
 of education and to confusion of thought. 
 He was vaguely angry and abashed, and 
 the incident was typical. The people of his 
 set who talked about literature and philo-
 
 Episodes 
 
 sophy looked up to this woman, and he had 
 not been taught to consider the intellect of his 
 wife. 
 
 As for Lady Emily, she was accustomed to 
 face her feelings, and admitted that Gerald in 
 the country, talking unaffectedly to his father 
 and rambling contentedly with her, was a 
 different person from Gerald in town, keen 
 about new plays and admiring women she her- 
 self despised. Affection, which had not been 
 her extreme capacity of passion, could not shut 
 from her the recognition of a lower nature and 
 an altogether inferior intellect. She was a true 
 and loyal girl, and did not treat the world to her 
 confidence. They had no children, and drifted 
 naturally apart. 
 
 Gerald drifted to a little woman who drove 
 about smiling in a one-horse victoria. She was 
 almost as pretty and quite as delightfully arti- 
 ficial as her bonnets ; had big, unsatisfied eyes, 
 and a tremulous mouth that was too red. Gerald 
 fluttered about with her in restaurants and 
 picture-galleries, and was quite happy and 
 138
 
 A Reconciliation 
 
 proud in listening to her complaints that some- 
 body else had sixty pounds a week and she but 
 twenty; that the public et cetera; that art and 
 so forth. 
 
 Lady Emily drifted to a prig, an old-young 
 man, bland, passionless, and well-bred. He 
 was indubitably well-educated, and the superior 
 standpoint from which, evenly ironical, he con- 
 templated his fellow-creatures, was attractive to 
 Gerald Mannering's wife. So Gerald became 
 somewhat heavily trivial ; Lady Emily somewhat 
 trivially bitter. 
 
 Then there came an episode, and they live 
 together very comfortably now. For you tire 
 of silly confidences, and a woman for whom you 
 have affection, does when she begins to disdain 
 you, attract desire so you be neither perverse 
 or inordinately conceited. Gerald courted his 
 wife with passion, as men court a mistress, and 
 appealed to something the old-young man 
 had not influenced. So passion first, and then 
 custom produced harmony. The commonplace 
 soul and the soul that was fine lived comfortably
 
 Episodes 
 
 together and owed their comfort to the flesh. 
 It is not worth enlarging upon, but worth the 
 indication, for it is the reverse that most often 
 happens.
 
 AN ACT OF INTROSPECTION 
 
 ROBERT CUNNINGHAM stooped, picked up the 
 handkerchief, and, raising his hat, gave it to 
 the girl. As she and her companion walked 
 away, he heard her say in a low voice, and 
 with a little laugh, "What a nice old gentle- 
 man ! " Robert Cunningham walked on at the 
 same pace, but when he came to the turning 
 across the fields, he leaned against the gate 
 and stood with his eyes on the ground. 
 Presently he threw back his head with a sort 
 of defiance and looked round about him, and 
 the trees and hedges took no account of him. 
 We, if you please, will be kinder. 
 
 There is surely a certain pathos when one 
 who has played the part of a young man all 
 his life hears for the first time, and from a girl, 
 that he ia old. An ordinary country girl drops 
 
 141
 
 Episodes 
 
 her handkerchief: a man passing by stoops 
 slowly and a little painfully to pick it up, and 
 when she looks at him she perceives he is bald 
 and wrinkled : "What a nice old gentleman ! " 
 The exclamation was very natural. But the 
 pathos of it all was that Robert Cunningham 
 was only forty-two. One really old in years 
 and made up as a young man, skipping on 
 gouty old feet and showing his false teeth 
 horribly, is possibly pathetic, but is certainly 
 ridiculous, and most of us can but laugh when 
 the truth is told to him. His is not the charm 
 of artificiality. But to play a young man's part 
 naturally, because no other occurred to one, to 
 feel fitted for no other, to have been conscious 
 for long that one is tired, and suddenly, at an 
 age when many men are truly young, to be told 
 that one is old, and to feel the truth of it that 
 is another matter. 
 
 Of course Robert Cunningham had faced the 
 
 question before to a certain extent. When a 
 
 young man, after a day's acquaintance, still 
 
 gave him his prefix, or when he remarked that 
 
 142
 
 An Act of Introspection 
 
 he had instinctively unfastened a gate instead 
 of climbing a stile, he grumbled and said he 
 was growing old. But then he would refer to 
 the tale of his years, and laugh the idea away, 
 or somebody would laugh for him, and point to 
 So-and-so, who was "going strong" at sixty. 
 Sometimes, again, in reading a funny story, he 
 would pause in a late smile to reflect that he 
 was not smiling spontaneously, but because it 
 was the sort of thing at which he had been 
 wont to laugh ; but then he would count it a 
 mere fancy of introspection. As for love one 
 could not of course be an enthusiastic boy for 
 ever. The light-o'-loves of Robert Cunning- 
 ham's acquaintance naturally encouraged the 
 idea that youth remained with him. But now 
 an unprejudiced country girl, who had never 
 seen him before, had given him to understand 
 that he was old and he believed it. 
 
 You perceive that Robert Cunningham had 
 the habit of self-introspection. Discontented 
 roues are common enough, but a discontented 
 row/ with the ruin of what might have been a
 
 Episodes 
 
 fine intellect, and a habit of self-introspection, 
 is pitiable indeed. Leaning against the gate, 
 he tried to think this matter out, balancing the 
 pros and cons of his past, and reckoning the 
 chances of his future. 
 
 He put the matter to himself very plainly, 
 more plainly than you would care to read. 
 Wine and women ! Brandy and " love- 
 machines!" The inheritance of an instinct 
 in excess had ruined him, as it has ruined 
 others ; but it is not unprofitable to observe 
 how his course of life had helped it. You 
 have in the beginning a youth with a bright 
 intellect and a strong body, and an abnormally 
 strong instinct ; given plenty of hard work 
 for the two former, or either of them, and the 
 last-named had been held in check. Robert 
 Cunningham went from Eton to Oxford for a 
 year, and then through the militia into the 
 Guards. At twenty-one he became master of 
 fifteen thousand a year. He was asked to do 
 little work with his hands and less with his 
 head and his life was a series of liaisons. A 
 144
 
 An Act of Introspection 
 
 great passion might with a happy conclusion 
 have saved him. But the society in which he 
 lived did not produce great passions ; a society 
 it was by no means the average society of 
 London in which marriage was a formality 
 and a speculation, and irregular connections 
 more facile than permanent. It differed from 
 the society in which the last Lord Hertford 
 lived, and which Disraeli described, that 
 society whose members recognised that " on 
 many subjects the public are the victims of 
 very vulgar prejudices, which they wished 
 neither to disturb nor to adopt," for that there, 
 we are told, though things were done, words 
 were not said. Robert Cunningham's society 
 was free of speech, and therein sacrificed, it 
 may be, a good deal ; otherwise it was civilised, 
 and tolerant, and pleasant but it did not 
 produce great passions. Robert Cunningham 
 thought he had one for his wife, the girl who 
 had been coerced into marrying him, and ran 
 away she was a little insane, people said in 
 the honeymoon. Thereon he went back to the 
 
 K 145
 
 Episodes 
 
 connection he had broken off a few months 
 before, but though lovers returning after truancy 
 are proverbially fervent, this did not produce 
 what he required. 
 
 It was at this period he discovered that 
 nothing made him feel so fit as a glass of 
 brandy He began also to feel that a settled 
 and steady affection would be his salvation, 
 and to watch his sensations, hoping and 
 questioning. This was, of course, the worst 
 thing he could have done ; it was one result of 
 an unoccupied mind. He was sure he felt a 
 real and wholesome passion for a girl in his 
 own set, who disgusted him by her flirtations 
 with the most offensive cad he had ever met. 
 He was sure he felt a passion, strange and 
 transforming, for the girl he took out of a 
 tobacconist's shop in Madrid, and as he mused, 
 leaning against the gate, he shuddered, remem- 
 bering the boredom of that winter in Spain. 
 
 His intellect was of the sort that men of 
 science, not artists, have, an analytic intellect. 
 He could not accept life as a pretty picture, an 
 146
 
 An Act of Introspection 
 
 amusing book. He wanted something practical, 
 and he wandered restlessly in a maze of intrigue. 
 A fit of reading ended always in the same way : 
 it was no use now ; he was uneducated ; it was 
 too late to begin ; it was all hopeless ; he drank 
 his brandy and went back to the woman of 
 the time. He contrived once to go among 
 people whose cleverness was acknowledged, 
 and they snubbed and flattered him back to 
 his liaisons. 
 
 And now at forty-two he was bald and 
 wrinkled. He was jaded and bored in one 
 direction, and had not vitality to begin in 
 another. He was intelligent enough to recog- 
 nise the wasting of his life and its causes ; that 
 was all. Many another man with such a life as 
 his, would have lived in Paradise ; this man 
 craved for something else, and had never found 
 it. The village postman passed him and touched 
 his hat, and " there," he mused, " save for the 
 grace of the Devil, goes Robert Cunning- 
 ham ! " 
 
 That evening, for the first time in his life, at 
 
 147
 
 Episodes 
 
 least when women of his own class were pre- 
 sent, Robert Cunningham drank too much wine 
 at dinner, and his hostess for the first time 
 frowned on him. 
 
 One can guess the sort of end he will make.
 
 THE ROMANCE OF 
 BOBBY GORDON 
 
 TOWARDS the end of a hot June Bloomsbury is 
 not a refreshing quarter of the town, and on a 
 particularly hot afternoon the milkman ceased 
 to be raucous, a policeman stood limply, the 
 very cats went wearily in Mecklenburgh Square. 
 Bobby Gordon, strolling along the north side of 
 it, pitied the poor fellows he supposed to be 
 turning out hack literature in every other house, 
 and tilted his hat farther back on his head as he 
 thought of them. A little woman who writes 
 articles about fashion, as she took out the key 
 of her house, looked sharply at Bobby, who was 
 unquestionably one of the best dressed men in 
 London, and thought she recognised an air of 
 St. James's Street about him. Bobby sauntered 
 on, quite unconscious that he was out of place. 
 
 149
 
 Episodes 
 
 He could not have understood the little woman's 
 astonishment had she known that he had just 
 got down from a King's Cross omnibus. She 
 did not know that if the butcher, whose cart 
 was standing at Bobby's door in Grosvenor 
 Street when he came out, had offered him a lift 
 to Mecklenburgh Square, Bobby would quite 
 possibly have taken his seat there with perfect 
 unconcern. 
 
 His wife had asked him at lunch what he was 
 going to do in the afternoon. 
 
 " Going to see a friend in Mecklenburgh 
 Square." 
 
 "A literary man?" 
 
 " No a woman ; a very old friend of mine. I 
 got a letter from her this morning ; she'd only 
 just heard I was in town. I haven't seen her 
 since we were married." 
 
 " Is she married?" 
 
 " No ; she lives by herself in lodgings." 
 
 His wife looked at him with a curious 
 little smile. She was small and pretty 
 and charmingly dressed ; she was ever so 
 ISO
 
 The Romance of Bobby Gordon 
 
 slightly rouged, and had rather too many 
 rings. 
 
 ''Shall I be presented to her?" 
 
 " I don't expect you'd hit it off," he said. 
 
 His wife looked down with a little grimace. 
 
 " The Percivals want us to stay a week with 
 them in September." 
 
 " I wish they were dead. There'll be a lot of 
 vapid people who bore me." 
 
 " There'll be a lot of charming people who 
 amuse me." 
 
 " Can't you go alone ?" 
 
 " Bobby, I order you to come with me to the 
 Percivals'." 
 
 "That settles it," said Bobby. And lunch 
 being over and no servant in the room, he went 
 to his wife and kissed her on the forehead. 
 
 A marriage which is the result of an acci- 
 dental and merely physical attraction on the 
 man's part, and of quiet calculation on the 
 woman's, is occasionally a failure ; in Bobby's 
 case it was a tolerable success, if you remember 
 what a compromise the world is. He was a
 
 Episodes 
 
 quiet man of lazy habit, studious tastes, a sort 
 of hole-and-corner distinction and ten thousand 
 a year, and his most obvious characteristic was a 
 custom of reasonable intercourse. If a person's 
 conversation was agreeable to him, no distinction 
 of age, sex, or reputation was allowed to influence 
 his enjoyment of it. In the course of a day in 
 London he would hold intimate converse with 
 a guardsman, a critic, a scientist, a universally- 
 cut genius, a jockey, a parson, and a chorus-girl. 
 His wife had been the only girl of a house in 
 Scotland where he had stayed a month with an 
 old schoolfellow, and unwonted air and exercise 
 had stirred him from habitual indifference. 
 
 With her it was a lucky chance, of which she 
 made the most. She was not, however, at 
 all a wicked person ; on the contrary, she was a 
 very good-natured and straightforward young 
 woman. But good-natured young women, albeit 
 bright and pretty, cannot always get themselves 
 married in modern England, and she, having 
 outlived ideals of girlhood, and come to ix-co - 
 nise that material luxuries were to her the
 
 The Romance of Bobby Gordon 
 
 better part, may be forgiven if she accepted 
 thankfully this good thing the gods sent her. 
 She had her reward. 
 
 Bobby never pestered her about intellect, nor 
 sermonised her on frivolity. He loaded her with 
 jewels, and rejoiced in her new dresses, and 
 treated her absorption of the lion's share of his 
 income as a matter of course. She had as much 
 freedom as any modish matron of her acquaint- 
 ance. On the other hand, his time, except for 
 an occasional dinner and visit, was given to him 
 for his own, and they fell early on a convenient 
 compromise. It was nothing extraordinary 
 that while she was driven by Charley Some- 
 body to Hurlingham, Bobby should visit, in 
 Mecklenburgh Square, a woman she had never 
 seen. 
 
 Hilda, this other woman, was a Girton friend of 
 Bobby's sister. She belonged to the early gene- 
 ration of Girton girls, but was in no way typical 
 of it. She had been, in the old days, a well 
 set-up and lively girl, who chaffed and patronised 
 Bobby, then a conceited boy from Balliol.
 
 Episodes 
 
 He was twenty and she twenty-five. They 
 were friendly and intimate, and as years went 
 on she became a sort of referee to him in many 
 matters intellectual and in some matters emo- 
 tional, but an object of nothing but friendship 
 a relation more frequent than is supposed or 
 perhaps desirable. Now he was thirty and she 
 was thirty-five. 
 
 Bobby rang the bell and went up a musty 
 staircase to the second floor. He was left a 
 minute to look round the sitting-room, a rather 
 bare room with an uncompromising writing- 
 table, many shelves of books, a few big photo- 
 graphs of statues, a few more or less inviting 
 arm-chairs. 
 
 " This is so jolly of you, Mr. Gordon." 
 
 Hilda was well set-up as ever, thinner, paler, 
 and with less heartiness in her voice than of old. 
 
 " I'm not going to be called Mr. Gordon at 
 my time of life, Hilda " 
 
 " Bobby, of course. It was bourjoyce of me ; 
 I suppose it was your marriage." 
 
 "Why on earth that should make any differ- 
 154
 
 The Romance of Bobby Gordon 
 
 ence I don't know. You didn't call me Mr. 
 Gordon when I told you '' 
 
 " You shall never begin a conversation with 
 delicate matters, Bobby ; you can't keep it up. 
 Now tell me all the commonplace things that 
 have happened to you since I saw you." 
 
 So Bobby talked about his wife, calmly and 
 a little critically. It became clear to Hilda 
 that by this time he simply accepted a position 
 that was not very irksome, nor very full of 
 joys. 
 
 " Shall I meet her ? " she asked, and Bobby : 
 " There wouldn't be much point in it ; you'd only 
 bore one another. You'd think her talk trivial 
 and entirely about people you don't know, and 
 she'd think you uninteresting because you're not 
 in her particular set of idiots. Tell me about 
 yourself : still writing, I suppose ? '' 
 
 " Oh, yes ; writing, writing, writing." 
 
 " The same sort of thing ?" 
 
 " Of course. Reviewing dull books, writing 
 articles about nothing ; sometimes a pot-boiling 
 story. It's easier now, but I get just the same
 
 Episodes 
 
 sort of work. I suppose at sixty I shall still be 
 reviewing novels. I'm \\hat is called a highly- 
 educated woman, but that is all the work I can 
 get." 
 
 " Isn't there anything else ?" 
 
 " Only teaching, Bobby, which I detest. But 
 
 never mind me. Have you read ? " And so 
 
 on. 
 
 Bobby went to Mccklenburgh Square three 
 times a week for a month, and then his wife and 
 he were to leave town. Meantime a develop- 
 ment had taken place. He had found that 
 mutual toleration between two people with no 
 tastes nor a single point of view in common, 
 when they two lived in the same house, was not 
 so potent a comforter but that the existence of 
 another woman, whose sympathy with him was 
 certain and whose understanding of him was as 
 perfect as understanding of another can be, led 
 him to chafe in Grosvenor Street. And pity for 
 the dull routine of her life, its unlovely surround- 
 ings, its constant prostitution of a fine intelligence 
 to stupid tasks, the lack of friendship in it, and
 
 The Romance of Bobby Gordon 
 
 the tedium of its acquaintances this pity gave a 
 quality of warmth and eagerness to old affection. 
 
 On the visit which was to be the last of that 
 summer, as she leaned over his chair to point a 
 passage in a book, he drew her down and kissed 
 her. She looked at him sadly and smiled. 
 " One chaste kiss " she quoted and moved 
 impatiently away. 
 
 You may care to learn the end of all this. 
 Remember that Bobby and Hilda were people 
 to whom the common ideas of marriage were 
 vulgar prejudices, that he was a reasonable man, 
 and she a tired woman of thirty-five, and do not 
 be uncomfortably shocked at what I have to tell 
 you. 
 
 They decided not to interfere with Mrs. 
 Gordon's pleasures and peace ; but Bobby 
 found a delightful house for Hilda in an un- 
 known village in North Italy, and there, when 
 any pretext could procure him a month away, 
 he lived with her, and things went well for a 
 year and a day. Bobby and Hilda congratulated 
 themselves on their reasonableness, and Mrs.
 
 Episodes 
 
 Gordon was perfectly happy. And then, alas! 
 it became a conviction with Hilda that solitude 
 in North Italy was as tiresome as tedious 
 acquaintances in Mecklenburgh Square, and 
 Bobby, alas ! said he sympathised with it. 
 
 So she lives again in Mecklenburgh Square. 
 She thinks that if Mrs. Gordon elopes or dies, 
 Bobby will marry her ; he thinks about it not at 
 all. Friendship, artificially warmed and changed, 
 will cool into friendship again. Things are 
 much as they were before this episode.
 
 THE TRUE CHIVALRY 
 
 REGGIE was at the time of this episode a boy 
 of twenty-five, a tall, ordinary boy, of pleasant 
 manners and discursive conversation. He had 
 been my fag at school, came up to my University 
 in my last year, and was elected to my club 
 soon after he came to town. Most people liked 
 him, and he liked most people. He was service- 
 able in helping to get up amateur theatricals ; 
 beyond that he was quite useless, but quite 
 inoffensive, a companion on whom one could 
 always fall back with security. 
 
 Reggie became devoted to a girl a year or two 
 older than himself, a rather clever, rather pretty, 
 rather anaemic, and rather nervous girl, who 
 refused him and married a portly, prosperous, 
 and not too amiable person for reasons unknown
 
 Episodes 
 
 to me and irrelevant to this episode. A week 
 after the marriage, in the solemnity of three in 
 the morning, Reggie disclosed to my admiration 
 a fine vein of chivalry. He said he would love 
 no other woman, nor ever marry, but devote 
 his existence (as I understood) to waiting on the 
 off-chance of doing some chaste and self-sacri- 
 ficing thing for this girl. He was really impres- 
 sive and inarticulately sincere, and I confess to 
 a certain extent I took him seriously, and so, 
 as I discovered, did the girl. Reggie takes him- 
 self, in this connection, seriously still. 
 
 You will doubtless say that the episode I am 
 to relate is what the jargon of the day calls 
 " cynical," one showing " that no loves endure." 
 It may be so, but Reggie thinks it is no instance 
 of that, but a triumph of enlightened and self- 
 sacrificing benevolence over unreasoning and 
 self-defeating emotion : the terms will not bear 
 psychological analysis, but the meaning is toler- 
 ably plain. 
 
 A year or so after the marriage I have 
 mentioned, 1 met Reggie at Piccadilly Circus 
 1 60
 
 The True Chivalry 
 
 and walked with him to his rooms in Park 
 Street, discoursing as we went. It \vas in the 
 late autumn, and the afternoon, and as we turned 
 from Bond Street into Grosvenor Street we were 
 aware of the remains of a stormy sunset, and 
 Mayfair had that indefinable romance, that 
 suggestion of Georgian days and distinct sexes, 
 which it always has in the twilight, and Reggie 
 fell to discoursing on love. 
 
 He used a form of speech which is a compro- 
 mise between a naturally communicative nature 
 and the national ideal of reserve, a form of 
 speech in which particular experiences are stated 
 as general propositions. Thus Reggie would 
 ask me : " Why is it, when a woman knows she 
 can do what she likes with a man, she despises 
 him?" and I knew that he was, or fancied him- 
 self, the victim of somebody's contempt. As 
 general observations, these remarks were as true 
 as their opposites ; as fragments of a character, 
 they had a certain interest. 
 
 In the Square we fell in with a pretty, livtly- 
 looking woman, who stopped Reggie and asked 
 i- 161
 
 Episodes 
 
 him about some commission she had given him. 
 He answered eagerly, and she treated him with 
 a sort of patronising familiarity. When \ve 
 went on, Reggie fell into gloom and was 
 tedious. 
 
 When we reached his rooms it was too dark 
 to see plainly, but I noticed a letter lying on a 
 table. He took it up and glanced at it, and then 
 sat down on the hearthrug to read it by the light 
 of the fire. With his frock-coat, and his long 
 legs stretched out, and the letter held close to 
 his nose, Reggie was not a romantic picture, and 
 his sudden exclamation amused me. " Damn ! ; ' 
 he said, "this comes of chivalry !" There is 
 little humour in Reggie, and therefore his remark 
 was entertaining. " 1 wonder," he went on, " if 
 I shall be a perfectly hopeless cad if I tell you 
 about it ? ;) 
 
 I saw, of course, that he was longing to tell 
 me, and though I knew I despised him for doing 
 so, yet since I was in a mood when nothing 
 seems to matter, and one's own delicacy seems 
 especially ridiculous, I let him do so.
 
 The True Chivalry 
 
 " I won't mention names," he said, and looked 
 into the fire to avoid my smile. '' Once a 
 long time ago I cared a great deal for a 
 woman : you don't know her : I've never men- 
 tioned her name to you.'' I have seldom de- 
 spised any one so much. " Well, she married 
 don't you know ? and I told her if I could ever 
 be of service to her, she could command me to 
 any extent. Well, now she writes. Don't for a 
 moment suppose that I don't still mean what I 
 said to her. But she says she's unhappy, and 
 that sort of thing, and wants to consult me on a 
 very grave matter, and so on. Now, 1 know 
 her husband's a very decent sort of chap in his 
 way, and tries to make her happy and that sort 
 of thing, and I rather think she's a little inclined 
 to be hysterical, you know, and all that. She 
 asks me to go to her she'll be alone at nine 
 to-night. Now, as a friend, do you advise me 
 logo?" 
 
 " \Vhat.' : 1 asked, ".was the name of the woman 
 we met in Grosvenor Square to-day ? " 
 
 ' What the hell has that to do with it ? My 
 
 163
 
 Episodes 
 
 dear chap, do for God's sake be serious : I look 
 on you as a friend." 
 
 I told him, sarcastically, not to go, and so he 
 went. 
 
 That night he came to me about eleven. 
 
 " Well, old man," he said with portentous 
 gaiety, (i what have you been doing ? ;) 
 
 Presently he told me what had happened. 
 
 " I was really very anxious don't you know ? 
 to help her, and that, and who do you think 
 was the first person I saw when I was shown 
 into the cursed little drawing-room? Yes, of 
 course her husband. He said a thing he was 
 going to had been put off unexpectedly. We 
 talked about commonplace things, and about 
 ten she said she was tired and would go to bed. 
 Well, as I opened the door for her he wouldn't 
 Kt me go she asked if I'd go to-morrow, and I 
 said I was going out of town. Why do you 
 look like that ? You see, her husband's really 
 awfully good to her ; we played billiards to- 
 gether afterwards, and he's really a very good 
 chap. It isn't my business, you know. Besides
 
 The True Chivalry 
 
 one would only make things worse by interfer- 
 ing ; for her own sake, the best thing I could 
 do was to keep away. The truest chivalry is 
 not always to go blundering about trying to put 
 things right, but sometimes to defend people 
 against themselves." 
 
 He soon was praising the woman we had met 
 in Grosvenor Square. 
 
 16;
 
 PETER SANDERSON'S PASSION 
 
 AT twenty-eight, Peter Sanderson was gene- 
 rally spoken of as a dilettante young man 
 about town. That is to say, although he 
 dressed well, had a charming flat in Park 
 Place, and went occasionally to race meetings, 
 he did not keep racers; although he haunted 
 theatres and was seen at dress rehearsals. 
 he did not finance an actress or write a play ; 
 although a critic of books and pictures, of 
 wide and miscellaneous knowledge and happy 
 phrases, he had never painted a picture or 
 published a line. A century and a half ago 
 he would have been called a wit, would have 
 drawn out George Selwyn at White's, and 
 1 66
 
 Peter Sanderson's Passion 
 
 gone curiosity-hunting with Horace Walpole ; 
 lie would have been extremely nervous in the 
 society of Dr. Johnson, and delighted to pay 
 the score at the "Cheshire Cheese." His own 
 opinion was that there were too many people 
 doing things in the world, and that being a 
 rich man he filled a not altogether useless 
 place in the scheme of things as an intelligent 
 idler. As a matter of fact he had never a 
 moment to spare : young men consulted him 
 in their troubles, dissolute men sent him to 
 interview intractable ladies, and women of all 
 sorts sent him on all sorts of errands. His 
 relaxation from idling was chemistry. 
 
 At twenty-eight Peter Sanderson became a 
 slave to passion. So far he had been a 
 saunterer. He himself fancied he had "lost 
 love's rose " by reason of his too early experi- 
 ences of love's weeds. A succession of care- 
 less, mercenary loves was his emotional history 
 in this particular, a series growing more care- 
 less and intermittent with his years. He had 
 never be.n exiled or exiled himself from women 
 
 167
 
 Episodes 
 
 and girls of his own class had in fact lived 
 pretty constantly in their society. But no one 
 of them, not even any contemporary of his 
 mother, had inspired him with mad wishes. 
 I suppose the fact to have been that the sort 
 of feeling which is a mixture of desire and 
 affection and esteem in strong degrees, had 
 to fashion a slow path through the obstacles 
 of facile satisfaction. He was saved from or 
 cheated out of, as you like, the mistaken im- 
 pulses of calf-love, the simple self-deceptions 
 of green youth. But when the feeling aforesaid 
 made its way to the light, it appeared full- 
 blown, based on admitted impulse, and rising 
 to heights which no sense of humour in the 
 possessor could make ridiculous. 
 
 The woman who inspired it was of about 
 his own age. She was a tall, lithe woman, 
 good at lawn tennis. Your recollection of her 
 usually included a tailor-made dress that fitted 
 admirably, a very upright carriage and an 
 easy, graceful movement. Her intellect \\as 
 disciplined and ready, and the bent of it scien- 
 168
 
 Peter Sanderson's Passion 
 
 tific. She had been educated beyond most 
 of the crazes or movements of the moment, 
 and remarked of the woman's question that 
 most of its professors went at a tangent from 
 a misconception of its physical basis. She 
 herself was content to accept a gradual de- 
 velopment, and in her own conduct to strike a 
 happy average, which should please all sensible 
 people. If she recognised a duty, social, filial, 
 or any other, she performed it ungrudgingly, 
 as though she liked it ; when she could, she 
 exacted the like from other people. If her 
 maid were " in trouble " she would have taken 
 infinite pains to see her through it : if the same 
 maid were lazy, she would dismiss her without 
 hesitation. The motive of the conduct of such 
 a character is, I suppose, a sort of higher 
 vanity: in this case self-esteem was justified. 
 She was a serviceable woman, good and sane 
 to talk to, and cheerful with whom to live. She 
 argued coherently, and could not have written 
 a passable novel. I never heard anybody but 
 Piter Sanderson say she was handsome. 
 
 169
 
 Episodes 
 
 This woman did not return his passion. His 
 decidedly ugly face and slight, unimposing 
 figure had probably little to do with that : she 
 despised his manners and customs. She liked 
 bold, authoritative men, showing it may be 
 thereby the accidental nature of her own 
 masculinity. Peter was gentle and deferential ; 
 but above all, Peter was a professional idler, 
 and she liked professionally busy men. She 
 had not been educated beyond the idea that 
 every man ought to have a purpose in life, 
 which should be expressed in definite achieve- 
 ment. Peter's theory of the social usefulness 
 of intelligent idling was to her utterly contempt- 
 ible. Unfortunately she did not like him well 
 enough to tell him so. Very frank to those 
 who engaged the least of her sympathies, to 
 Peter she was scrupulously polite. She was 
 aware of the place she occupied in his life, and 
 I question if it even flattered her vanity. She 
 was bored, and would have liked to avoid him. 
 But they lived in much the same set, and she 
 could not help seeing a good deal of him. 
 170
 
 Peter Sanderson 's Passion 
 
 They were on that footing of superficial 
 familiarity which is often the greatest bar in 
 the world to real intimacy. Unfortunately, 
 also, Peter's passion and awe made him com- 
 paratively tongue-tied not tongue-tied as a 
 boy is under stress of tense feeling, but unable 
 to bring his brain into conversation with her. 
 He might have seemed to her a very capable 
 and well-instructed man, who needed only 
 the impulse she co'ild give him to achieve 
 what she would have thought a work worth 
 doing : as a fact he seemed to her a con- 
 ventional trifler. 
 
 The man she married was a loud-voiced, 
 determined man, who had written a book of 
 history which a set of writers was always quoting. 
 I do not know how it was done, but if you read 
 an article by X, or Y, or Z, you might rely 
 on reading, "As Mr. So-and-so tells us in his 
 admirable, etc." ; in his own articles, which were 
 many, you found quotations from X and V and Z. 
 He blew his trumpet confidently wherever he 
 went ; few people liked him, but many were 
 
 171
 
 Episodes 
 
 impressed. Of these was Peter Sanderson's lady, 
 for here was a man who had done something) 
 and was admitted to have done something by 
 the world. Peter Sanderson called him an 
 advertising cad. If the description was right, 
 she was deceived, for his voice did not jar upon 
 her, and his jokes seemed the graceful unbending 
 of a great mind. He may or may not have loved 
 her ; certainly he was at no disadvantage in her 
 society. He argued with her a good deal, and 
 brought authorities to bear whom she did not 
 know. Certainly, though, she was an heiress in 
 a modest way. When he got his Chair at a 
 Scotch University he asked her to marry him. 
 She refused, and he bore the refusal like a man. 
 She changed her mind ; they were married and 
 went to Scotland together. 
 
 Peter Sanderson did not become a mono- 
 maniac. He went on errands as before for a 
 time, and was as much at everybody's service. 
 P)Ut gradually he withdrew himself from the 
 world behind the footlights, and worked harder 
 at chemistry. His passion showed its strength 
 772
 
 Peter Sanderson's Passion 
 
 in that the bitterness of having missed his 
 happiness through a woman's impatience and 
 ill-judgment (as he naturally thought) was 
 altogether merged in the dull sorrow of depriva- 
 tion. If a cab knocks you down and breaks 
 your leg, you are too much hurt to abuse the 
 driver. 
 
 Peter spent much of the year at his place 
 alone, and lost much of his popularity in his 
 county by refusing invitations. He worked 
 in his laboratory or mooned about the park, 
 and would lie for hours on his back looking 
 up at the sky. He did not think incessantly 
 about the woman he had missed : he was 
 really keen in his study of chemistry. But he 
 felt that the great chance of his life had mis- 
 carried, and rejected the idea of other women. 
 He lived this life for three years, going rarely 
 to London. And then on a clay in spring his 
 blood stirred in him, and he perceived that he 
 was bored and wanted society. He had been 
 engaged in a controversy with a great man. who, 
 being a modest and a good-natured man as 
 
 173
 
 Episodes 
 
 well, had publicly complimented Peter, who was 
 thereby elated. His friends, of course, treated 
 the matter as a joke, declining to believe that 
 Peter had shown any real scientific capacity ; 
 but other men of science had written to him, 
 and in the face of these letters his theory of 
 idleness was given up. Peter was elated, felt 
 vigorous and bold, and naturally he would carry 
 his plumes to some woman. He put the idea of 
 the woman he had missed away from him. 
 
 The next day Peter Sanderson went up to 
 town, and went straight to see a woman who 
 had always b~en an ally of his, a woman married 
 to his greatest friend. But she was not at home, 
 and Peter re-entered his cab a little dejected 
 and told the man to drive to Park Place. His 
 look was undecided, and he seemed to be trying 
 to make up his mind. A very pretty girl in a 
 cab that met his own looked into his face, and 
 they two exchanged that embrace of the eyes 
 which, when one is fairly young and healthy 
 and a trifle amorous, is of the most charming 
 of life's minor pleasures. Peter gave another 
 174
 
 Peter Sanderson's Passion 
 
 address to his cabman. In a few minutes a door 
 was opened to him by a very smart maid, who 
 welcomed him with a grin. 
 
 " Madame still lives here, then ? " 
 
 " Oh yes, Monsieur. And there is no one just 
 
 now she is alone, quite alone Madame, 
 
 here is Monsieur Sanderson come back ! " 
 
 A sweet little woman, in a sweet little fluffy 
 gown, jumped up from a sofa. 
 
 " But, my dear, it is years years !" 
 
 She put htrr hands on his shoulders, looked at 
 him with innocent blue eyes, and held up her face 
 to be kissed. Peter had found what he wanted 
 for the moment. 
 
 Meantime, things had not been well with the 
 woman who went to Scotland. Her disillusion- 
 ing was very swift. She found her husband not 
 dull, but limited and shallow. She had mistaken 
 the knowledge of a specialist for the brains of 
 a man of intellect. She came to understand the 
 incessant advertisement, the coarse poses, the 
 audacious system of puffs. His knowledge of 
 his subject had justified those who chose him
 
 Episodes 
 
 for his Chair, but he was not respected in that 
 Scotch University. He was a man with real 
 knowledge in a certain limited field, whose object 
 was to be accepted as a great man all round : an 
 object transparent and contemptible to many 
 people. She wearied of his dozen jokes, and 
 the dozen stories designed to illustrate indirectly 
 his own importance and the extent of his 
 acquaintance. Even the little eccentricities 
 of dress, which had charmed her when she 
 thought them a result of careless indifference to 
 little things, disgusted her when she perceived 
 they were introduced for a calculated effect. 
 His manners fell off in domestic life ; he was 
 selfish and imperceptivc. After a fe\v arguments, 
 in which she had the advantage, on general 
 things, he snubbed her reading and any attempt 
 at rational conversation, and told her that her 
 business in life was to advance his interests. 
 
 Now when an ordinary woman of an old 
 
 type is disgusted with her husband, she can 
 
 commonly bring herself to endure the married 
 
 state. This woman was of a type that is not 
 
 176
 
 Peter Sanderson's Passion 
 
 new but is still uncommon. With her disgust 
 for her husband took a violently physical shape, 
 and to her the married state was loathsome. 
 She might have found content in children if she 
 had had any, but even this I doubt ; it is not so 
 rare as may be supposed for this disgust to re- 
 act on them. She felt herself losing touch with 
 her world, though of course, she visited it from 
 time to time. A literary scandal, in which her 
 husband was shown up as (to put it mildly) an 
 impostor, made the visits uncomfortable, and 
 she was thrown back upon the society of a man 
 whose knowledge was half and whose brains 
 were a third of hers ; on him and people, some 
 of whom she liked or respected, but who 
 neither had her traditions nor cared to gain her 
 sympathy. She thought wistfully of her world, 
 away in the North, and somehow the recollec- 
 tion of Peter Sanderson formed part of her 
 musings. She thought wistfully of his delicacy 
 and social tact, and good nature, and she 
 regretted. Then in time she read the con 
 troversy with the great man about that question
 
 Episodes 
 
 of chemistry, nnd one day, when she had read 
 the great man's recognition of the unknown 
 man's contribution to science, she very nearly 
 cried. All this did not make her in love with 
 her memory of him, but had they met at this 
 time they would have understood one another, 
 and who knows what would have followed ? 
 She told herself plainly that she owed no duty 
 to her husband. 
 
 It was three days after Peter Sanderson had 
 renewed his acquaintance with Blanchette, that 
 he came out of a little club in York Street, St. 
 James's. It was then in its brief period of 
 fashionable wickedness, and Peter had been 
 there to order a late supper. He turned into 
 St. James's Square, and saw a carriage waiting 
 outside the London Library, and as he passed 
 it was aware of a woman he knew sitting in it, 
 a woman whose face was tired and who sat 
 very upright. She spoke his name, and he 
 went to the side of the carriage. 
 
 She spoke lightly of her married life, and 
 congratulated him on the great man's eulogy.
 
 Peter Sanderson's Passion 
 
 Peter, remembering old times, thought she was 
 sarcastic. She had not the female tact to make 
 him understand, as millions of ordinary women 
 would have been able to make him, that she 
 thought differently of him now, and hoped he 
 still thought as he had once thought of her. 
 
 " I'm staying with my aunt the aunt you 
 know. I go back to Scotland to-morro\v. 
 Have you anything to do to-night ? Will you 
 come and dine ? Only two old women, but if 
 you've nothing to do " 
 
 What was it spurred Peter Sanderson to 
 refuse this invitation ? He was not yet tired of 
 Blanchette. He had sunk for a time back to 
 an old stratum of existence. It was unwise, he 
 said instinctively, to drift back into adoration 
 of this woman. He was well out of it ; he 
 would fly from the temptation. In any case, 
 Peter refused. The footman came out with 
 some books and she drove away. 
 
 Peter walked back to his rooms, regretting 
 more and more. The old magic was working 
 in him. The face was continuously in his 
 
 179
 
 Episodes 
 
 sight. He sat in his rooms saying to himself 
 with increasing difficulty that he was right. 
 When the time came to dress, he was on the 
 verge of going after all. But no ; that would 
 be ridiculous and rude ; she would snub him, 
 probably. 
 
 He kept his engagement with Blanchette, 
 and had a violent quarrel with her. The next 
 morning he went to call upon the woman 
 whom he, once more, worshipped exclusively ; 
 she was gone to Scotland, and Peter went back 
 to the country that afternoon. 
 
 She was gone to Scotland, and two months 
 later was killed by an accident in the street. 
 
 Peter Sanderson will be either a cynical and 
 querulous old man, or a sentimental and 
 amiable. I am persuaded that if he had gone 
 to dinner that night with the woman who had 
 called up the one real passion of his life, she 
 would not have gone back to Scotland. But, 
 you see, the psychological moment found him 
 unready. 
 
 i So
 
 A SPOILED IDEAL 
 
 AT about eleven o'clock one evening in the 
 early spring of last year, two men came out of a 
 club in St. James's Street, and stood talking at 
 the bottom of the steps. 
 
 " I>y the way," said one, " I want to ask you 
 Do you find it amusing, being married ?" 
 " More or less/' said the other. " Why ? " 
 ' You're sure ? I mean quite apart from your 
 wife and all that, of course. Do you find the 
 mere fact of being married the new element, 
 the difference from not being married do you 
 find it a really decided sort of sensation, one 
 that you don't get accustomed to all at once ? 
 I'll walk to the bottom of the street with you. 
 You see/' he continued, taking his friend's arm, 
 " of course one has had all the experiences of 
 marriage, except those that come from the 
 
 181
 
 Episodes 
 
 name of the thing its recognition by the world. 
 Now, what I want to know is : is that amusing ? 
 When you're the host, with your wife at the 
 other end of the table, when you refer to her in 
 conversation, and so on is all that enough to 
 give you a really new sensation, a feeling that 
 you're a different person from what you used to 
 be?" 
 
 " It's rather difficult to speak for another man 
 in my case, certainly." 
 
 "Oh, we're pretty much alike." The other 
 man smiled. " If it amuses you, it's pretty sure 
 to amuse me. So far all one's pleasure has 
 been in disregarding conventions. I'm think- 
 ing of trying what pleasure they themselves can 
 give one. A new experience, that's all. As 
 one goes on in life it might be a more artistic 
 point of departure. You understand ? " 
 
 " Oh, of course. Who is she ? ;; 
 
 " I'm not quite sure. I'll tell you all right 
 before it comes off. Good-night, old man." 
 
 " Good-night." 
 
 The man who had stated his views of mar-
 
 A Spoiled Ideal 
 
 riage strolled up the street and turned into 
 Piccadilly, walking slowly and glancing at 
 every one he met. He was slight and well set- 
 up, with rather small and delicate features. 
 When he came to Bolton Street he stopped and 
 looked up. It was a fresh evening ; there was 
 a bright moon, and the wind blew little light 
 clouds across the sky. He looked keenly at a 
 passing hansom and shook his head. A woman 
 accosted him ; he spoke pleasantly to her, and 
 sent her away laughing. The third hansom 
 seemed to please him, and he hailed it with the 
 slightest possible jerk of the head. " Drive," 
 he said, " to the end of Kensington Gardens, 
 and then drive back again." He settled himself 
 deliberately, and lit a fresh cigar from the one 
 he was smoking. If you suppose he intended 
 to meditate on marriage or any woman, you 
 wrong him. He intended simply to take the 
 fresh air, and to enjoy the lines of lamps and 
 the effect of trees by night. When the cab 
 brought him back to Bolton Street, he stopped 
 it half-way up the street, and took out his latch- 
 
 183
 
 Episodes 
 
 key. The room he entered was not remarkable ; 
 it was in good taste and comfortable. " They 
 are like every other stray man's rooms ; if they 
 were not, one would get sick of them in a week," 
 he used to say to the few intimates who knew 
 that his life and tastes were not those of any 
 other stray man. An envelope was lying on a 
 table : he looked at it and put it down. Then 
 he went into his bedroom and came out in a 
 smoking coat and slippers. He turned up a 
 lamp, drew an armchair under it, lit a pipe, 
 sat down, and proceeded to look at the photo- 
 graph which the envelope contained It was 
 a photograph of a girl he half thought of 
 marrying. 
 
 From the time that he was twenty until now 
 that he was thirty-five, he had never done any- 
 thing that he did not like doing. When a book 
 failed to interest him he put it down; when an 
 acquaintance bored him he dropped it. He 
 remained nowhere if he felt inclined to go any- 
 where else, and outraged no convention if it 
 suited him to conform to it He had several 
 184
 
 A Spoiled Ideai 
 
 intellectual interests which he had never studied 
 thoroughly, and several artistic instincts which 
 he gratified casually. He had financed an 
 actress and manageress who only talked to him 
 about her servants, and he had refused to elope 
 with an extremely clever and beautiful woman 
 of whom he was really fond. It was a question 
 of mood, he said. He was well-born and rich, 
 and his relations had refused to quarrel with 
 him. A man not without affections, he was 
 used to men in his set dying ; not without pas- 
 sions, it was some years since passion had 
 given him pain. He was not in the least brutal 
 in his attitude towards women: when they 
 interested him intellectually, he listened to them ; 
 when physically, he made love to them ; when 
 they did both, he did both. The curse of his 
 life and his temperament, he used to say, was 
 reasonableness. 
 
 He looked hard at the photograph. It was a 
 pretty face, and rather an odd one ; the forehead 
 more prominent than is usual in pretty women, 
 and the mouth a little larger. There was a
 
 Epiioaes 
 
 faint look of derision about the lips and the 
 nostrils. 
 
 The thoughts that flitted across the man's 
 brain were, among others, that he attracted the 
 girl because of certain intellectual phases and 
 because he sympathised unobtrusively with her; 
 probably she would marry him, chiefly because 
 she loathed her home. For his part he thought 
 her the ideal of a type, and a type he liked, a type 
 of woman that combined intellect and gaiety and 
 dissipation not essentially modern, after all. 
 Accepting her as the ideal of a type, he accepted 
 everything she chose to do or say. She would 
 be interesting as a wife. He looked harder at 
 the photograph, and being rather theatrical 
 when alone, shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 At the same moment, half a mile away, the 
 original of the photograph stamped her foot and 
 said " damn," and cut short her mother's lecture 
 on vulgarity by going to her own room. There 
 she sat in an armchair and read the last realistic 
 novel, which after a while she threw away. She 
 sat up uncomfortably at her writing-table and 
 186
 
 A Spoiled Ideal 
 
 read Schopenhauer, whom presently she shut 
 with a bang. She sent for her maid, spoke 
 kindly to her, and sent her to bed. Then she 
 took from the shelf a girl's book she had read 
 when she was twelve, and went to her bedroom. 
 Suddenly, as she read in bed, she turned out the 
 gas over her head and began to cry. 
 
 You see, when a girl is very intellectual and 
 has a sensual strain in her, and has thought 
 sexual conventions ridiculous, and has defied 
 them secretly, and the man could not marry her 
 until his uncle died, and he went away to Africa, 
 and was assegaied, and she finds herself at 
 twenty-seven with a past and a detested home, 
 and but a few random fancies her mind is apt 
 to go back to the days when the conventions 
 were unquestioned, and. she feels sorry for her- 
 self and cries. 
 
 The next day came a man proposing marriage. 
 He was not our friend, but quite a different sort 
 of man. He was a rising barrister, with his eye 
 on a constituency, and was pronounced a good 
 sort of chap by his friends. He had gained 
 
 187
 
 Episodes 
 
 distinguished honours at the University, and 
 written articles in monthly reviews. He had a 
 number of views and principles, and was much 
 admired by his father. 
 
 Ages ago he had been a young man. 
 
 They two met first at a philosophical society, 
 and came to have long conversations about 
 abstractions, and he fell in love in an ordinary 
 way, with a measure of desire and something of 
 affection. Part of her was somewhat attracted 
 by him : she admired his intellect, and found 
 his calm strength and definiteness refreshing. 
 Part of her was altogether unknown to him ; he 
 knew nothing of the little graces and social 
 cynicisms, nothing of the suppers and epigrams 
 and stories. 
 
 He came proposing marriage. Now, on that 
 day she was experiencing a reaction from the 
 cosmopolitan and tolerant man, and was dis- 
 satisfied and very honest. 
 
 " I can't yive you an answer now You 
 
 have done me a great honour There is 
 
 something you have a right to know ''
 
 A Spoiled Ideal 
 
 As she told him ot the man who was assegaied, 
 and what had happened before, her listener's 
 silent repugnance made itself felt by her, and 
 she, who had begun so boldly, broke down. 
 Then he spoke tediously, you would think. I 
 suppose you would call him a gentleman, but he 
 was really very solemn. Certainly he thought 
 himself heroic in formally renewing his proposal 
 of marriage. 
 
 " You had better," said the cosmopolitan man, 
 "tell me what's the matter. Very likely I shall 
 not be able to help you much. But I think I 
 should sympathise ; and one thing you know, 
 nothing you can have possibly done you say 
 you have committed a dreadful crime or some- 
 thing can make me respect you less than I 
 do, which is as much as I can respect anybody. 
 I mean that solemnly, but don't make me 
 repeat it.'' 
 
 " I feel reckless; I may as well. I must tell 
 somebody, and you understand me better than 
 
 189
 
 Episodes 
 
 anybody. You remember how you laughed 
 at that case the other day, and said people 
 made an artificial enormity of what was inno- 
 cent and unimportant.'' 
 
 " In our present stage of civilisation yes." 
 
 " Well well, years ago ' 
 
 " You mean ?" 
 
 '' The only thing possible. Don't make me 
 regret having told you." 
 
 The man had sat up suddenly in his chair. 
 
 " Is he dead, or what ? " 
 
 "He is dead." 
 
 " Does anybody know ? " 
 
 " Nobody in the world but you and one 
 other man." 
 
 "\Vho is that?" 
 
 " Somehow I don't want to go on now ; 
 it is that that makes me really mad with rage. 
 It's nobody you know, no one in your set. 
 I'.ut he asked me to marry him, and I had a 
 fit of honesty and told him, and he Oh, it 
 
 makes me mad." 
 190
 
 A Spoiled Ideal 
 
 "I see. He 'remembered of what rare he 
 was,' and held forth. I ran quite understand 
 it \v;is tiresome. By the way, is lie what is 
 called a gentleman ? I presume, of course, 
 by your telling him " 
 
 " Oh, yes. He will act as if he had never 
 heard it. But I can't marry him. He seemed 
 to pity me, I wonder how far people like you 
 and me are sincere." 
 
 The cosmopolitan man had leaned back 
 again in his chair and was looking at his 
 cigarette. 
 
 " Don't let's talk about him, please. He 
 represents a sort of canting magnanimity 
 which is simply disgusting. As for what you 
 told me, of course it's insignificant, except so 
 far as it has given you pain. You must have 
 always had the temperament ; the expression 
 of it is pure accident. Yes, we are sincere in 
 this. The absurdity of the fuss peoi le make 
 about these matters is one of those things that, 
 once seen, are never forgotten. But there's
 
 Episodes 
 
 another question. I suppose by your telling 
 that chap, you had some idea of marrying ?" 
 
 " I can't live at home ; I won't be a hospital 
 nurse. I you understand?" 
 
 "Yes. It is a matter of arrangement and 
 convenience. Well, since it is that, and you've 
 given up this other marriage, I have a sugges- 
 tion. If it wouldn't bore you tco much, I 
 should like you to marry me." 
 
 Two days afterwards he had a letter. He 
 opened it complacently and was really sur- 
 prised : 
 
 " No, I shall marry him and shall not marry 
 you. You may think me a fool and a treacher- 
 ous brute. But I don't think you will care 
 much. I cinnot explain all the reasons. For 
 all his sermonising, he never asked if the world 
 knew, as you did before you made light of it. 
 I daresay you were sincere, but you took it too 
 carelessly. You see I am absolutely feminine 
 and illogical. Don't expostulate I have given
 
 A Spoiled Ideal 
 
 him his answer, and you would be in a foolish 
 light. I have chosen a humdrum part ; you 
 will not care to keep up the acquaintance. 
 Good-bye." 
 
 He no longer thinks her the ideal of a type. 
 
 Printed by BALLANTY.NE, HANSON & Co. 
 London and Edinburgh. 
 
 N
 
 By the Same Author. 
 
 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A BOY. Passages 
 selected by his friend, G. S. STREET. 38. 6d. 
 
 A FEW REVIEWS. 
 
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 hands." The Athenaum. 
 
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 "A most brilliant satire . . . admirably written, with every line 
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 " Mr. Street has accomplished a difficult task to perfection." 
 
 Vanity Fair. 
 
 " It is admirably done throughout, full of delicate strokes of 
 ironical wit." Daily Telegraph. 
 
 " The obiter dicta of an ass do not constitute the autobiography 
 of a boy, and bear no resemblance to the famous ' Bad Boy's 
 Piary.' " Leading article in Daily News. 
 
 MINIATURES AND MOODS. 35. 6d. 
 
 " We recommend Mr. Street's essays to any one who can enjoy 
 Meredith's novels." Literary World. 
 
 " Mr. Street is better than his utmost superiority." Bookman. 
 "... a sense of the value of words." Pall Mall Gatette.
 
 Ttbe pioneer Series 
 
 OF ORIGINAL ONE-VOLUME NOVELS 
 
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 Post 8vo, in ornamental wrapper, 23. 6d. net ; 
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 Joanna Traill, Spinster 
 
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 THE SATURDAY REVIEW. "'Joanna Trail, Spinster,' is so 
 grave in subject, so passionate and earnest in treatment, and so 
 absolutely right in morals, that one might suppose the series 
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 authoress has done a good work." 
 
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 noble and courageous story of Annie E. Holdsworth. ... A 
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 point of construction and completeness it is quite a model for the 
 series it inaugurates, and it will fare far below its deserts if it 
 does not attract considerable attention."
 
 pioneer Series 
 
 VOL. II. 
 
 George Mandeville's Husband 
 
 BY 
 
 C. E. RAIMOND 
 
 THE SPECTATOR. ". . . This very clever and terse story. 
 George Mandeville herself is an even more effective picture 
 than George Mandeville's husband ; and the third figure in the 
 little group described in it their child Rosina is the most 
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 undoubtedly an artist of great power." 
 
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 The book is written in nervous and easy English. It is exceed- 
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 and it is to be sincerely hoped will not occasion a storm of blasts 
 and counterblasts, as we fear it may."
 
 Gbe pioneer Series 
 
 VOL, III. 
 
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 LAURENCE ALMA-TADEMA 
 
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 acter of a woman's passionate and unbalanced nature it is 
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 Sbe pioneer Series 
 
 VOL. IV. 
 
 The Green Carnation 
 
 BY 
 
 ROBERT S. HICHENS 
 
 THIRD EDITION 
 
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 An Altar of Earth 
 
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 LONDON 
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 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY F CILITY 
 
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