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+Project Gutenberg's A Modern Chronicle, Volume 6, by Winston Churchill
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Modern Chronicle, Volume 6
+
+Author: Winston Churchill
+
+Release Date: October 19, 2004 [EBook #5379]
+[Last updated. July 16, 2011]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MODERN CHRONICLE, VOLUME 6 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+A MODERN CHRONICLE
+
+By Winston Churchill
+
+
+Volume 6.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+CLIO, OR THALIA?
+
+According to the ordinary and inaccurate method of measuring time, a
+fortnight may have gone by since the event last narrated, and Honora had
+tasted at last the joys of authorship. Her name was not to appear, to be
+sure, on the cover of the Life and Letters of General Angus Chiltern; nor
+indeed, so far, had she written so much as a chapter or a page of a work
+intended to inspire young and old with the virtues of citizenship. At
+present the biography was in the crucial constructive stage. Should the
+letters be put in one volume, and the life in another? or should the
+letters be inserted in the text of the life? or could not there be a
+third and judicious mixture of both of these methods? Honora's counsel on
+this and other problems was, it seems, invaluable. Her own table was
+fairly littered with biographies more or less famous which had been
+fetched from the library, and the method of each considered.
+
+Even as Mr. Garrick would never have been taken for an actor in his coach
+and four, so our heroine did not in the least resemble George Eliot, for
+instance, as she sat before her mirror at high noon with Monsieur Cadron
+and her maid Mathilde in worshipful attendance. Some of the ladies,
+indeed, who have left us those chatty memoirs of the days before the
+guillotine, she might have been likened to. Monsieur Cadron was an
+artist, and his branch of art was hair-dressing. It was by his own wish
+he was here to-day, since he had conceived a new coiffure especially
+adapted, he declared, to the type of Madame Spence. Behold him declaring
+ecstatically that seldom in his experience had he had such hairs to work
+with.
+
+"Avec une telle chevelure, l'on peut tout faire, madame. Etre simple,
+c'est le comble de l'art. Ca vous donne," he added, with clasped hands
+and a step backward, "ca vous donne tout a fait l'air d'une dame de
+Nattier."
+
+Madame took the hand-glass, and did not deny that she was eblouissante.
+If madame, suggested Monsieur Cadron, had but a little dress a la Marie
+Antoinette? Madame had, cried madame's maid, running to fetch one with
+little pink flowers and green leaves on an ecru ground. Could any
+coiffure or any gown be more appropriate for an entertainment at which
+Clio was to preside?
+
+It is obviously impossible that a masterpiece should be executed under
+the rules laid down by convention. It would never be finished. Mr.
+Chiltern was coming to lunch, and it was not the first time. On her
+appearance in the doorway he halted abruptly in his pacing of the
+drawing-room, and stared at her.
+
+"I'm sorry I kept you waiting," she said.
+
+"It was worth it," he said. And they entered the dining room. A subdued,
+golden-green light came in through the tall glass doors that opened out
+on the little garden which had been Mrs. Forsythe's pride. The scent of
+roses was in the air, and a mass of them filled a silver bowl in the
+middle of the table. On the dark walls were Mrs. Forsythe's precious
+prints, and above the mantel a portrait of a thin, aristocratic gentleman
+who resembled the poet Tennyson. In the noonday shadows of a recess was a
+dark mahogany sideboard loaded with softly gleaming silver--Honora's.
+Chiltern sat down facing her. He looked at Honora over the roses,--and
+she looked at him. A sense of unreality that was, paradoxically, stronger
+than reality itself came over her, a sense of fitness, of harmony. And
+for the moment an imagination, ever straining at its leash, was allowed
+to soar. It was Chiltern who broke the silence.
+
+"What a wonderful bowl!" he said.
+
+"It has been in my father's family a great many years. He was very fond
+of it," she answered, and with a sudden, impulsive movement she reached
+over and set the bowl aside.
+
+"That's better," he declared, "much as I admire the bowl, and the roses."
+
+She coloured faintly, and smiled. The feast of reason that we are
+impatiently awaiting is deferred. It were best to attempt to record the
+intangible things; the golden-green light, the perfumes, and the faint
+musical laughter which we can hear if we listen. Thalia's laughter,
+surely, not Clio's. Thalia, enamoured with such a theme, has taken the
+stage herself--and as Vesta, goddess of hearths. It was Vesta whom they
+felt to be presiding. They lingered, therefore, over the coffee, and
+Chiltern lighted a cigar. He did not smoke cigarettes.
+
+"I've lived long enough," he said, "to know that I have never lived at
+all. There is only one thing in life worth having."
+
+"What is it?" asked Honora.
+
+"This," he answered, with a gesture; "when it is permanent."
+
+She smiled.
+
+"And how is one to know whether it would be--permanent?"
+
+"Through experience and failure," he answered quickly, "we learn to
+distinguish the reality when it comes. It is unmistakable."
+
+"Suppose it comes too late?" she said, forgetting the ancient verse
+inscribed in her youthful diary: "Those who walk on ice will slide
+against their wills."
+
+"To admit that is to be a coward," he declared.
+
+"Such a philosophy may be fitting for a man," she replied, "but for a
+woman--"
+
+"We are no longer in the dark ages," he interrupted. "Every one, man or
+woman, has the right to happiness. There is no reason why we should
+suffer all our lives for a mistake."
+
+"A mistake!" she echoed.
+
+"Certainly," he said. "It is all a matter of luck, or fate, or whatever
+you choose to call it. Do you suppose, if I could have found fifteen
+years ago the woman to have made me happy, I should have spent so much
+time in seeking distraction?"
+
+"Perhaps you could not have been capable of appreciating her--fifteen
+years ago," suggested Honora. And, lest he might misconstrue her remark,
+she avoided his eyes.
+
+"Perhaps," he admitted. "But suppose I have found her now, when I know
+the value of things."
+
+"Suppose you should find her now--within a reasonable time. What would
+you do?"
+
+"Marry her," he exclaimed promptly. "Marry her and take her to Grenoble,
+and live the life my father lived before me."
+
+She did not reply, but rose, and he followed her to the shaded corner of
+the porch where they usually sat. The bundle of yellow-stained envelopes
+he had brought were lying on the table, and Honora picked them up
+mechanically.
+
+"I have been thinking," she said as she removed the elastics, "that it is
+a mistake to begin a biography by the enumeration of one's ancestors.
+Readers become frightfully bored before they get through the first
+chapter."
+
+"I'm beginning to believe," he laughed, "that you will have to write this
+one alone. All the ideas I have got so far have been yours. Why shouldn't
+you write it, and I arrange the material, and talk about it! That appears
+to be all I'm good for."
+
+If she allowed her mind to dwell on the vista he thus presented, she did
+not betray herself.
+
+"Another thing," she said, "it should be written like fiction."
+
+"Like fiction?"
+
+"Fact should be written like fiction, and fiction like fact. It's
+difficult to express what I mean. But this life of your father deserves
+to be widely known, and it should be entertainingly done, like Lockhart,
+or Parton's works--"
+
+An envelope fell to the floor, spilling its contents. Among them were
+several photographs.
+
+"Oh," she exclaimed, "how beautiful! What place is this?"
+
+"I hadn't gone over these letters," he answered. "I only got them
+yesterday from Cecil Grainger. These are some pictures of Grenoble which
+must leave been taken shortly before my father died."
+
+She gazed in silence at the old house half hidden by great maples and
+beeches, their weighted branches sweeping the ground. The building was of
+wood, painted white, and through an archway of verdure one saw the
+generous doorway with its circular steps, with its fan-light above, and
+its windows at the side. Other quaint windows, some of them of triple
+width, suggested an interior of mystery and interest.
+
+"My great-great-grandfather, Alexander Chiltern, built it," he said, "on
+land granted to him before the Revolution. Of course the house has been
+added to since then, but the simplicity of the original has always been
+kept. My father put on the conservatory, for instance," and Chiltern
+pointed to a portion at the end of one of the long low wings. "He got the
+idea from the orangery of a Georgian house in England, and an English
+architect designed it."
+
+Honora took up the other photographs. One of them, over which she
+lingered, was of a charming, old-fashioned garden spattered with
+sunlight, and shut out from the world by a high brick wall. Behind the
+wall, again, were the dense masses of the trees, and at the end of a path
+between nodding foxgloves and Canterbury bells, in a curved recess, a
+stone seat.
+
+She turned her face. His was at her shoulder.
+
+"How could you ever have left it?" she asked reproachfully.
+
+She voiced his own regrets, which the crowding memories had awakened.
+
+"I don't know," he answered, not without emotion. "I have often asked
+myself that question." He crossed over to the railing of the porch, swung
+about, and looked at her. Her eyes were still on the picture. "I can
+imagine you in that garden," he said.
+
+Did the garden cast the spell by which she saw herself on the seat? or
+was it Chiltern's voice? She would indeed love and cherish it. And was it
+true that she belonged there, securely infolded within those peaceful
+walls? How marvellously well was Thalia playing her comedy! Which was the
+real, and which the false? What of true value, what of peace and security
+was contained in her present existence? She had missed the meaning of
+things, and suddenly it was held up before her, in a garden.
+
+A later hour found them in Honora's runabout wandering northward along
+quiet country roads on the eastern side of the island. Chiltern, who was
+driving, seemed to take no thought of their direction, until at last,
+with an exclamation, he stopped the horse; and Honora beheld an abandoned
+mansion of a bygone age sheltered by ancient trees, with wide lands
+beside it sloping to the water.
+
+"What is it?" she asked.
+
+"Beaulieu," he replied. "It was built in the seventeenth century, I
+believe, and must have been a fascinating place in colonial days." He
+drove in between the fences and tied the horse, and came around by the
+side of the runabout. "Won't you get out and look at it?"
+
+She hesitated, and their eyes met as he held out his hand, but she
+avoided it and leaped quickly to the ground neither spoke as they walked
+around the deserted house and gazed at the quaint facade, broken by a
+crumbling, shaded balcony let in above the entrance door. No sound broke
+the stillness of the summer's day--a pregnant stillness. The air was
+heavy with perfumes, and the leaves formed a tracery against the
+marvellous blue of the sky. Mystery brooded in the place. Here, in this
+remote paradise now in ruins, people had dwelt and loved. Thought ended
+there; and feeling, which is unformed thought, began. Again she glanced
+at him, and again their eyes met, and hers faltered. They turned, as with
+one consent, down the path toward the distant water. Paradise overgrown!
+Could it be reconstructed, redeemed?
+
+In former days the ground they trod had been a pleasance the width of the
+house, bordered, doubtless, by the forest. Trees grew out of the flower
+beds now, and underbrush choked the paths. The box itself, that once
+primly lined the alleys, was gnarled and shapeless. Labyrinth had
+replaced order, nature had reaped her vengeance. At length, in the
+deepening shade, they came, at what had been the edge of the old terrace,
+to the daintiest of summer-houses, crumbling too, the shutters off their
+hinges, the floor-boards loose. Past and gone were the idyls of which it
+had been the stage.
+
+They turned to the left, through tangled box that wound hither and
+thither, until they stopped at a stone wall bordering a tree-arched lane.
+At the bottom of the lane was a glimpse of blue water.
+
+Honora sat down on the wall with her back to a great trunk. Chiltern,
+with a hand on the stones, leaped over lightly, and stood for some
+moments in the lane, his feet a little apart and firmly planted, his
+hands behind his back.
+
+What had Thalia been about to allow the message of that morning to creep
+into her comedy? a message announcing the coming of an intruder not in
+the play, in the person of a husband bearing gifts. What right had he, in
+the eternal essence of things, to return? He was out of all time and
+place. Such had been her feeling when she had first read the hastily
+written letter, but even when she had burned it it had risen again from
+the ashes. Anything but that! In trying not to think of it, she had
+picked up the newspaper, learned of a railroad accident,--and shuddered.
+Anything but his return! Her marriage was a sin,--there could be no
+sacrament in it. She would flee first, and abandon all rather than submit
+to it.
+
+Chiltern's step aroused her now. He came back to the wall where she was
+sitting, and faced her.
+
+"You are sad," he said.
+
+She shook her head at him, slowly, and tried to smile.
+
+"What has happened?" he demanded rudely. "I can't bear to see you sad."
+
+"I am going away," she said. The decision had suddenly come to her. Why
+had she not seen before that it was inevitable?
+
+He seized her wrist as it lay on the wall, and she winced from the sudden
+pain of his grip.
+
+"Honora, I love you," he said, "I must have you--I will have you. I will
+make you happy. I promise it on my soul. I can't, I won't live without
+you."
+
+She did not listen to his words--she could not have repeated them
+afterwards. The very tone of his voice was changed by passion; creation
+spoke through him, and she heard and thrilled and swayed and soared,
+forgetting heaven and earth and hell as he seized her in his arms and
+covered her face with kisses. Thus Eric the Red might have wooed. And by
+what grace she spoke the word that delivered her she never knew. As
+suddenly as he had seized her he released her, and she stood before him
+with flaming cheeks and painful breath.
+
+"I love you," he said, "I love you. I have searched the world for you and
+found you, and by all the laws of God you are mine."
+
+And love was written in her eyes. He had but to read it there, though her
+lips might deny it. This was the man of all men she would have chosen,
+and she was his by right of conquest. Yet she held up her hand with a
+gesture of entreaty.
+
+"No, Hugh--it cannot be," she said.
+
+"Cannot!" he cried. "I will take you. You love me."
+
+"I am married."
+
+"Married! Do you mean that you would let that man stand between you and
+happiness?"
+
+"What do you mean?" she asked, in a frightened voice.
+
+"Just what I say," he cried, with incredible vehemence. "Leave him
+--divorce him. You cannot live with him. He isn't worthy to touch your
+hand."
+
+The idea planted itself with the force of a barbed arrow from a
+strong-bow. Struggle as she might, she could not henceforth extract it.
+
+"Oh!" she cried.
+
+He took her arm, gently, and forced her to sit down on the wall. Such was
+the completeness of his mastery that she did not resist. He sat down
+beside her.
+
+"Listen, Honora," he said, and tried to speak calmly, though his voice
+was still vibrant; "let us look the situation in the face. As I told you
+once, the days of useless martyrdom are past. The world is more
+enlightened today, and recognizes an individual right to happiness."
+
+"To happiness," she repeated after him, like a child. He forgot his words
+as he looked into her eyes: they were lighted as with all the candles of
+heaven in his honour.
+
+"Listen," he said hoarsely, and his fingers tightened on her arm.
+
+The current running through her from him made her his instrument. Did he
+say the sky was black, she would have exclaimed at the discovery.
+
+"Yes--I am listening."
+
+"Honora!"
+
+"Hugh," she answered, and blinded him. He was possessed by the tragic
+fear that she was acting a dream; presently she would awake--and shatter
+the universe. His dominance was too complete.
+
+"I love you--I respect you. You are making it very hard for me. Please
+try to understand what I am saying," he cried almost fiercely. "This
+thing, this miracle, has happened in spite of us. Henceforth you belong
+to me--do you hear?"
+
+Once more the candles flared up.
+
+"We cannot drift. We must decide now upon some definite action. Our lives
+are our own, to make as we choose. You said you were going away. And you
+meant--alone?"
+
+The eyes were wide, now, with fright.
+
+"Oh, I must--I must," she said. "Don't--don't talk about it." And she put
+forth a hand over his.
+
+"I will talk about it," he declared, trembling. "I have thought it all
+out," and this time it was her fingers that tightened. "You are going
+away. And presently--when you are free--I will come to you."
+
+For a moment the current stopped.
+
+"No, no!" she cried, almost in terror. The first fatalist must have been
+a woman, and the vision of rent prison bars drove her mad. "No, we could
+never be happy."
+
+"We can--we will be happy," he said, with a conviction that was unshaken.
+"Do you hear me? I will not debase what I have to say by resorting to
+comparisons. But--others I know have been happy are happy, though their
+happiness cannot be spoken of with ours. Listen. You will go away--for a
+little while--and afterwards we shall be together for all time. Nothing
+shall separate us: We never have known life, either of us, until now. I,
+missing you, have run after the false gods. And you--I say it with
+truth-needed me. We will go to live at Grenoble, as my father and mother
+lived. We will take up their duties there. And if it seems possible, I
+will go into public life. When I return, I shall find you--waiting for
+me--in the garden."
+
+So real had the mirage become, that Honora did not answer. The desert and
+its journey fell away. Could such a thing, after all, be possible? Did
+fate deal twice to those whom she had made novices? The mirage, indeed,
+suddenly became reality--a mirage only because she had proclaimed it
+such. She had beheld in it, as he spoke, a Grenoble which was paradise
+regained. And why should paradise regained be a paradox? Why paradise
+regained? Paradise gained. She had never known it, until he had flung
+wide the gates. She had sought for it, and never found it until now, and
+her senses doubted it. It was a paradise of love, to be sure; but one,
+too, of duty. Duty made it real. Work was there, and fulfilment of the
+purpose of life itself. And if his days hitherto had been useless, hers
+had in truth been barren.
+
+It was only of late, after a life-long groping, that she had discovered
+their barrenness. The right to happiness! Could she begin anew, and found
+it upon a rock? And was he the rock?
+
+The question startled her, and she drew away from him first her hand, and
+then she turned her body, staring at him with widened eyes. He did not
+resist the movement; nor could he, being male, divine what was passing
+within her, though he watched her anxiously. She had no thought of the
+first days,--but afterwards. For at such times it is the woman who scans
+the veil of the future. How long would that beacon burn which flamed now
+in such prodigal waste? Would not the very springs of it dry up? She
+looked at him, and she saw the Viking. But the Viking had fled from the
+world, and they--they would be going into it. Could love prevail against
+its dangers and pitfalls and--duties? Love was the word that rang out, as
+one calling through the garden, and her thoughts ran molten. Let love
+overflow--she gloried in the waste! And let the lean years come,--she
+defied them to-day.
+
+"Oh, Hugh!" she faltered.
+
+"My dearest!" he cried, and would have seized her in his arms again but
+for a look of supplication. That he had in him this innate and
+unsuspected chivalry filled her with an exquisite sweetness.
+
+"You will--protect me?" she asked.
+
+"With my life and with my honour," he answered. "Honora, there will be no
+happiness like ours."
+
+"I wish I knew," she sighed: and then, her look returning from the veil,
+rested on him with a tenderness that was inexpressible. "I--I don't care,
+Hugh. I trust you."
+
+The sun was setting. Slowly they went back together through the paths of
+the tangled garden, which had doubtless seen many dramas, and the courses
+changed of many lives: overgrown and outworn now, yet love was loth to
+leave it. Honora paused on the lawn before the house, and looked back at
+him over her shoulder.
+
+"How happy we could have been here, in those days," she sighed.
+
+"We will be happier there," he said.
+
+Honora loved. Many times in her life had she believed herself to have had
+this sensation, and yet had known nothing of these aches and ecstasies!
+Her mortal body, unattended, went out to dinner that evening. Never, it
+is said, was her success more pronounced. The charm of Randolph
+Leffingwell, which had fascinated the nobility of three kingdoms, had
+descended on her, and hostesses had discovered that she possessed the
+magic touch necessary to make a dinner complete. Her quality, as we know,
+was not wit: it was something as old as the world, as new as modern
+psychology. It was, in short, the power to stimulate. She infused a sense
+of well-being; and ordinary people, in her presence, surprised themselves
+by saying clever things.
+
+Lord Ayllington, a lean, hard-riding gentleman, who was supposed to be on
+the verge of contracting an alliance with the eldest of the Grenfell
+girls, regretted that Mrs. Spence was neither unmarried nor an heiress.
+
+"You know," he said to Cecil Grainger, who happened to be gracing his
+wife's dinner-party, "she's the sort of woman for whom a man might
+consent to live in Venice."
+
+"And she's the sort of woman," replied, "a man couldn't get to go to
+Venice."
+
+Lord Ayllington's sigh was a proof of an intimate knowledge of the world.
+
+"I suppose not," he said. "It's always so. And there are few American
+women who would throw everything overboard for a grand passion."
+
+"You ought to see her on the beach," Mr. Grainger suggested.
+
+"I intend to," said Ayllington. "By the way, not a few of your American
+women get divorced, and keep their cake and eat it, too. It's a bit
+difficult, here at Newport, for a stranger, you know."
+
+"I'm willing to bet," declared Mr. Grainger, "that it doesn't pay. When
+you're divorced and married again you've got to keep up appearances--the
+first time you don't. Some of these people are working pretty hard."
+
+Whereupon, for the Englishman's enlightenment, he recounted a little
+gossip.
+
+This, of course, was in the smoking room. In the drawing-room, Mrs.
+Grainger's cousin did not escape, and the biography was the subject of
+laughter.
+
+"You see something of him, I hear," remarked Mrs. Playfair, a lady the
+deficiency of whose neck was supplied by jewels, and whose conversation
+sounded like liquid coming out of an inverted bottle. "Is he really
+serious about the biography?"
+
+"You'll have to ask Mr. Grainger," replied Honora.
+
+"Hugh ought to marry," Mrs. Grenfell observed.
+
+"Why did he come back?" inquired another who had just returned from a
+prolonged residence abroad. "Was there a woman in the case?"
+
+"Put it in the plural, and you'll be nearer right," laughed Mrs.
+Grenfell, and added to Honora, "You'd best take care, my dear, he's
+dangerous."
+
+Honora seemed to be looking down on them from a great height, and to
+Reginald Farwell alone is due the discovery of this altitude; his
+reputation for astuteness, after that evening, was secure. He had sat
+next her, and had merely put two and two together--an operation that is
+probably at the root of most prophecies. More than once that summer Mr.
+Farwell had taken sketches down Honora's lane, for she was on what was
+known as his list of advisers: a sheepfold of ewes, some one had called
+it, and he was always piqued when one of them went astray. In addition to
+this, intuition told him that he had taken the name of a deity in
+vain--and that deity was Chiltern. These reflections resulted in another
+after-dinner conversation to which we are not supposed to listen.
+
+He found Jerry Shorter in a receptive mood, and drew him into Cecil
+Grainger's study, where this latter gentleman, when awake, carried on his
+lifework of keeping a record of prize winners.
+
+"I believe there is something between Mrs. Spence and Hugh Chiltern,
+after all, Jerry," he said.
+
+"By jinks, you don't say so!" exclaimed Mr. Shorter, who had a profound
+respect for his friend's diagnoses in these matters. "She was dazzling
+to-night, and her eyes were like stars. I passed her in the hall just
+now, and I might as well have been in Halifax."
+
+"She fairly withered me when I made a little fun of Chiltern," declared
+Farwell.
+
+"I tell you what it is, Reggie," remarked Mr. Shorter, with more
+frankness than tact, "you could talk architecture with 'em from now to
+Christmas, and nothing'd happen, but it would take an iceberg to write a
+book with Hugh and see him alone six days out of seven. Chiltern knocks
+women into a cocked hat. I've seen 'em stark raving crazy. Why, there was
+that Mrs. Slicer six or seven years ago--you remember--that Cecil
+Grainger had such a deuce of a time with. And there was Mrs. Dutton--I
+was a committee to see her, when the old General was alive,--to say
+nothing about a good many women you and I know."
+
+Mr. Farwell nodded.
+
+"I'm confoundedly sorry if it's so," Mr. Shorter continued, with
+sincerity. "She has a brilliant future ahead of her. She's got good blood
+in her, she's stunning to look at, and she's made her own way in spite of
+that Billycock of a husband who talks like the original Rothschild. By
+the bye, Wing is using him for a good thing. He's sent him out West to
+pull that street railway chestnut out of the fire. I'm not particularly
+squeamish, Reggie, though I try to play the game straight myself--the way
+my father played it. But by the lord Harry, I can't see the difference
+between Dick Turpin and Wing and Trixy Brent. It's hold and deliver with
+those fellows. But if the police get anybody, their get Spence."
+
+"The police never get anybody," said Farwell, pessimistically; for the
+change of topic bored him.
+
+"No, I suppose they don't," answered Mr. Shorter, cheerfully finishing
+his chartreuse, and fixing his eye on one of the coloured lithographs of
+lean horses on Cecil Grainger's wall. "I'd talk to Hugh, if I wasn't as
+much afraid of him as of Jim Jeffries. I don't want to see him ruin her
+career."
+
+"Why should an affair with him ruin it?" asked Farwell, unexpectedly.
+"There was Constance Witherspoon. I understand that went pretty far."
+
+"My dear boy," said Mr. Shorter, "it's the women. Bessie Grainger here,
+for instance--she'd go right up in the air. And the women had--well, a
+childhood-interest in Constance. Self-preservation is the first law--of
+women."
+
+"They say Hugh has changed--that he wants to settle down," said Farwell.
+
+"If you'd ever gone to church, Reggie," said Mr. Shorter, "you'd know
+something about the limitations of the leopard."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+"LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS"
+
+That night was Honora's soul played upon by the unknown musician of the
+sleepless hours. Now a mad, ecstatic chorus dinned in her ears and set
+her blood coursing; and again despair seized her with a dirge. Periods of
+semiconsciousness only came to her, and from one of these she was
+suddenly startled into wakefulness by her own words. "I have the right to
+make of my life what I can." But when she beheld the road of terrors that
+stretched between her and the shining places, it seemed as though she
+would never have the courage to fare forth along its way. To look back
+was to survey a prospect even more dreadful.
+
+The incidents of her life ranged by in procession. Not in natural
+sequence, but a group here and a group there. And it was given her, for
+the first time, to see many things clearly. But now she loved. God alone
+knew what she felt for this man, and when she thought of him the very
+perils of her path were dwarfed. On returning home that night she had
+given her maid her cloak, and had stood for a long time immobile,--gazing
+at her image in the pierglass.
+
+"Madame est belle comme l'Imperatrice d'Autriche!" said the maid at
+length.
+
+"Am I really beautiful, Mathilde?"
+
+Mathilde raised her eyes and hands to heaven in a gesture that admitted
+no doubt. Mathilde, moreover, could read a certain kind of history if the
+print were large enough.
+
+Honora looked in the glass again. Yes, she was beautiful. He had found
+her so, he had told her so. And here was the testimony of her own eyes.
+The bloom on the nectarines that came every morning from Mr. Chamberlin's
+greenhouse could not compare with the colour of her cheeks; her hair was
+like the dusk; her eyes like the blue pools among the rocks, and touched
+now by the sun; her neck and arms of the whiteness of sea-foam. It was
+meet that she should be thus for him and for the love he brought her.
+
+She turned suddenly to the maid.
+
+"Do you love me, Mathilde?" she asked.
+
+Mathilde was not surprised. She was, on the contrary, profoundly touched.
+
+"How can madame ask?" she cried impulsively, and seized Honora's hand.
+How was it possible to be near madame, and not love her?
+
+"And would you go--anywhere with me?"
+
+The scene came back to her in the night watches. For the little maid had
+wept and vowed eternal fidelity.
+
+It was not--until the first faint herald of the morning that Honora could
+bring herself to pronounce the fateful thing that stood between her and
+happiness, that threatened to mar the perfection of a heaven-born love
+--Divorce! And thus, having named it resolutely several times, the demon
+of salvation began gradually to assume a kindly aspect that at times
+became almost benign. In fact, this one was not a demon at all, but a
+liberator: the demon, she perceived, stalked behind him, and his name was
+Notoriety. It was he who would flay her for coquetting with the
+liberator.
+
+What if she were flayed? Once married to Chiltern, once embarked upon
+that life of usefulness, once firmly established on ground of her own
+tilling, and she was immune. And this led her to a consideration of those
+she knew who had been flayed. They were not few, and a surfeit of
+publicity is a sufficient reason for not enumerating them here. And
+during this process of exorcism Notoriety became a bogey, too: he had
+been powerless to hurt them. It must be true what Chiltern had said that
+the world was changing. The tragic and the ridiculous here joining hands,
+she remembered that Reggie Farwell had told her that he had recently made
+a trip to western New York to inspect a house he had built for a
+"remarried" couple who were not wholly unknown. The dove-cote, he had
+called it. The man, in his former marriage, had been renowned all up and
+down tidewater as a rake and a brute, and now it was an exception when he
+did not have at least one baby on his knee. And he knew, according to Mr.
+Farwell, more about infant diet than the whole staff of a maternity
+hospital.
+
+At length, as she stared into the darkness, dissolution came upon it. The
+sills of her windows outlined themselves, and a blurred foliage was
+sketched into the frame. With a problem but half solved the day had
+surprised her. She marvelled to see that it grew apace, and presently
+arose to look out upon a stillness like that of eternity: in the grey
+light the very leaves seemed to be holding their breath in expectancy of
+the thing that was to come. Presently the drooping roses raised their
+heads, from pearl to silver grew the light, and comparison ended. The
+reds were aflame, the greens resplendent, the lawn sewn with the diamonds
+of the dew.
+
+A little travelling table was beside the window, and Honora took her pen
+and wrote.
+
+   "My dearest, above all created things I love you. Morning has come,
+   and it seems to me that I have travelled far since last I saw you.
+   I have come to a new place, which is neither hell nor heaven, and in
+   the mystery of it you--you alone are real. It is to your strength
+   that I cling, and I know that you will not fail me.
+
+   "Since I saw you, Hugh, I have been through the Valley of the
+   Shadow. I have thought of many things. One truth alone is clear--
+   that I love you transcendently.. You have touched and awakened me
+   into life. I walk in a world unknown.
+
+   "There is the glory of martyrdom in this message I send you now.
+   You must not come to me again until I send for you. I cannot, I
+   will not trust myself or you. I will keep this love which has come
+   to me undefiled. It has brought with it to me a new spirit, a
+   spirit with a scorn for things base and mean. Though it were my
+   last chance in life, I would not see you if you came. If I thought
+   you would not understand what I feel, I could not love you as I do.
+
+   "I will write to you again, when I see my way more clearly. I told
+   you in the garden before you spoke that I was going away. Do not
+   seek to know my plans. For the sake of the years to come, obey me.
+
+                    "HONORA."
+
+She reread the letter, and sealed it. A new and different exaltation had
+come to her--begotten, perhaps, in the act of writing. A new courage
+filled her, and now she contemplated the ordeal with a tranquillity that
+surprised her. The disorder and chaos of the night were passed, and she
+welcomed the coming day, and those that were to follow it. As though the
+fates were inclined to humour her impatience, there was a telegram on her
+breakfast tray, dated at New York, and informing her that her husband
+would be in Newport about the middle of the afternoon. His western trip
+was finished a day earlier than he expected. Honora rang her bell.
+
+"Mathilde, I am going away."
+
+"Oui, madame."
+
+"And I should like you to go with me."
+
+"Oui, madame."
+
+"It is only fair that you should understand, Mathilde. I am going away
+alone. I am not--coming back."
+
+The maid's eyes filled with sudden tears.
+
+"Oh, madame," she cried, in a burst of loyalty, "if madame will permit me
+to stay with her!"
+
+Honora was troubled, but her strange calmness did not forsake her. The
+morning was spent in packing, which was a simple matter. She took only
+such things as she needed, and left her dinner-gowns hanging in the
+closets. A few precious books of her own she chose, but the jewellery her
+husband had given her was put in boxes and laid upon the dressing-table.
+In one of these boxes was her wedding ring. When luncheon was over, an
+astonished and perturbed butler packed the Leffingwell silver and sent it
+off to storage.
+
+There had been but one interruption in Honora's labours. A note had
+arrived--from him--a note and a box. He would obey her! She had known he
+would understand, and respect her the more. What would their love have
+been, without that respect? She shuddered to think. And he sent her this
+ring, as a token of that love, as undying as the fire in its stones.
+Would she wear it, that in her absence she might think of him? Honora
+kissed it and slipped it on her finger, where it sparkled. The letter was
+beneath her gown, though she knew it by heart. Chiltern had gone at last:
+he could not, he said, remain in Newport and not see her.
+
+At midday she made but the pretence of a meal. It was not until
+afterwards, in wandering through the lower rooms of this house, become so
+dear to her, that agitation seized her, and a desire to weep. What was
+she leaving so precipitately? and whither going? The world indeed was
+wide, and these rooms had been her home. The day had grown blue-grey, and
+in the dining room the gentle face seemed to look down upon her
+compassionately from the portrait. The scent of the roses overpowered
+her. As she listened, no sound brake the quiet of the place.
+
+Would Howard never come? The train was in--had been in ten minutes. Hark,
+the sound of wheels! Her heart beating wildly, she ran to the windows of
+the drawing-room and peered through the lilacs. Yes, there he was,
+ascending the steps.
+
+"Mrs. Spence is out, I suppose," she heard him say to the butler, who
+followed with his bag.
+
+"No, sir, she's is the drawing-room."
+
+The sight of him, with his air of satisfaction and importance, proved an
+unexpected tonic to her strength. It was as though he had brought into
+the room, marshalled behind him, all the horrors of her marriage, and she
+marvelled and shuddered anew at the thought of the years of that
+sufferance.
+
+"Well, I'm back," he said, "and we've made a great killing, as I wrote
+you. They were easier than I expected."
+
+He came forward for the usual perfunctory kiss, but she recoiled, and it
+was then that his eye seemed to grasp the significance of her travelling
+suit and veil, and he glanced at her face.
+
+"What's up? Where are you going?" he demanded. "Has anything happened?"
+
+"Everything," she said, and it was then, suddenly, that she felt the
+store of her resolution begin to ebb, and she trembled. "Howard, I am
+going away."
+
+He stopped short, and thrust his hands into the pockets of his checked
+trousers.
+
+"Going away," he repeated. "Where?"
+
+"I don't know," said Honora; "I'm going away."
+
+As though to cap the climax of tragedy, he smiled as he produced his
+cigarette case. And she was swept, as it were, by a scarlet flame that
+deprived her for the moment of speech.
+
+"Well," he said complacently, "there's no accounting for women. A case of
+nerves--eh, Honora? Been hitting the pace a little too hard, I guess." He
+lighted a match, blissfully unaware of the quality of her look. "All of
+us have to get toned up once in a while. I need it myself. I've had to
+drink a case of Scotch whiskey out West to get this deal through. Now
+what's the name of that new boat with everything on her from a cafe to a
+Stock Exchange? A German name."
+
+"I don't know," said Honora. She had answered automatically.
+
+To the imminent peril of one of the frailest of Mrs. Forsythe's chairs,
+he sat down on it, placed his hands on his knees, flung back his head,
+and blew the smoke towards the ceiling. Still she stared at him, as in a
+state of semi-hypnosis.
+
+"Instead of going off to one of those thousand-dollar-a-minute doctors,
+let me prescribe for you," he said. "I've handled some nervous men in my
+time, and I guess nervous women aren't much different. You've had these
+little attacks before, and they blow over--don't they? Wing owes me a
+vacation. If I do say it myself, there are not five men in New York who
+would have pulled off this deal for him. Now the proposition I was going
+to make to you is this: that we get cosey in a cabin de luxe on that
+German boat, hire an automobile on the other side, and do up Europe. It's
+a sort of a handicap never to have been over there."
+
+"Oh, you're making it very hard for me, Howard," she cried. "I might have
+known that you couldn't understand, that you never could understand--why
+I am going away. I've lived with you all this time, and you do not know
+me any better than you know--the scrub-woman. I'm going away from
+you--forever."
+
+In spite of herself, she ended with an uncontrollable sob.
+
+"Forever!" he repeated, but he continued to smoke and to look at her
+without any evidences of emotion, very much as though he had received an
+ultimatum in a business transaction. And then there crept into his
+expression something of a complacent pity that braced her to continue.
+"Why?" he asked.
+
+"Because--because I don't love you. Because you don't love me. You don't
+know what love is--you never will."
+
+"But we're married," he said. "We get along all right."
+
+"Oh, can't you see that that makes it all the worse!" she cried. "I can
+stand it no longer. I can't live with you--I won't live with you. I'm of
+no use to you--you're sufficient unto yourself. It was all a frightful
+mistake. I brought nothing into your life, and I take nothing out of it.
+We are strangers--we have always been so. I am not even your housekeeper.
+Your whole interest in life is in your business, and you come home to
+read the newspapers and to sleep! Home! The very word is a mockery. If
+you had to choose between me and your business you wouldn't hesitate an
+instant. And I--I have been starved. It isn't your fault, perhaps, that
+you don't understand that a woman needs something more than dinner-gowns
+and jewels and--and trips abroad. Her only possible compensation for
+living with a man is love. Love--and you haven't the faintest conception
+of it. It isn't your fault, perhaps. It's my fault for marrying you. I
+didn't know any better."
+
+She paused with her breast heaving. He rose and walked over to the
+fireplace and flicked his ashes into it before he spoke. His calmness
+maddened her.
+
+"Why didn't you say something about this before?" he asked.
+
+"Because I didn't know it--I didn't realize it--until now."
+
+"When you married me," he went on, "you had an idea that you were going
+to live in a house on Fifth Avenue with a ballroom, didn't you?"
+
+"Yes," said Honora. "I do not say I am not to blame. I was a fool. My
+standards were false. In spite of the fact that my aunt and uncle are the
+most unworldly people that ever lived--perhaps because of it--I knew
+nothing of the values of life. I have but one thing to say in my defence.
+I thought I loved you, and that you could give me--what every woman
+needs."
+
+"You were never satisfied from the first," he retorted. "You wanted money
+and position--a mania with American women. I've made a success that few
+men of my age can duplicate. And even now you are not satisfied when I
+come back to tell you that I have money enough to snap my fingers at half
+these people you know."
+
+"How," asked Honora, "how did you make it?"
+
+"What do you mean?" he asked.
+
+She turned away from him with a gesture of weariness.
+
+"No, you wouldn't understand that, either, Howard."
+
+It was not until then that he showed feeling.
+
+"Somebody has been talking to you about this deal. I'm not surprised. A
+lot of these people are angry because we didn't let them in. What have
+they been saying?" he demanded.
+
+Her eyes flashed.
+
+"Nobody has spoken to me on the subject," she said. "I only know what I
+have read, and what you have told me. In the first place, you deceived
+the stockholders of these railways into believing their property was
+worthless, and in the second place, you intend to sell it to the public
+for much more than it is worth."
+
+At first he stared at her in surprise. Then he laughed.
+
+"By George, you'd make something of a financier yourself, Honora," he
+exclaimed. And seeing that she did not answer, continued: "Well, you've
+got it about right, only it's easier said than done. It takes brains.
+That's what business is--a survival of the fittest. If you don't do the
+other man, he'll do you." He opened the cigarette case once more. "And
+now," he said, "let me give you a little piece of advice. It's a good
+motto for a woman not to meddle with what doesn't concern her. It isn't
+her business to make the money, but to spend it; and she can usually do
+that to the queen's taste."
+
+"A high ideal?" she exclaimed.
+
+"You ought to have some notion of where that ideal came from," he
+retorted. "You were all for getting rich, in order to compete with these
+people. Now you've got what you want--"
+
+"And I am going to throw it away. That is like a woman, isn't it?"
+
+He glanced at her, and then at his watch.
+
+"See here, Honora, I ought to go over to Mr. Wing's. I wired him I'd be
+there at four-thirty."
+
+"Don't let me keep you," she replied.
+
+"By gad, you are pale!" he said. "What's got into the women these days?
+They never used to have these confounded nerves. Well, if you are bent on
+it, I suppose there's no use trying to stop you. Go off somewhere and
+take a rest, and when you come back you'll see things differently."
+
+She held out her hand.
+
+"Good-by, Howard," she said. "I wanted you to know that I didn't--bear
+you any ill-will--that I blame myself as much as you. More, if anything.
+I hope you will be happy--I know you will. But I must ask you to believe
+me when I say that I shan't come back. I--I am leaving all the valuable
+things you gave me. You will find them on my dressing-table. And I wanted
+to tell you that my uncle sent me a little legacy from my father-an
+unexpected one--that makes me independent."
+
+He did not take her hand, but was staring at her now, incredulously.
+
+"You mean you are actually going?" he exclaimed.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But--what shall I say to Mr. Wing? What will he think?"
+
+Despite the ache in her heart, she smiled.
+
+"Does it make any difference what Mr. Wing thinks?" she asked gently.
+"Need he know? Isn't this a matter which concerns us alone? I shall go
+off, and after a certain time people will understand that I am not coming
+back."
+
+"But--have you considered that it may interfere with my prospects?" he
+asked.
+
+"Why should it? You are invaluable to Mr. Wing. He can't afford to
+dispense with your services just because you will be divorced. That would
+be ridiculous. Some of his own associates are divorced."
+
+"Divorced!" he cried, and she saw that he had grown pasty white. "On what
+grounds? Have you been--"
+
+He did not finish.
+
+"No," she said, "you need fear no scandal. There will be nothing in any
+way harmful to your--prospects."
+
+"What can I do?" he said, though more to himself than to her. Her quick
+ear detected in his voice a note of relief. And yet, he struck in her,
+standing helplessly smoking in the middle of the floor, chords of pity.
+
+"You can do nothing, Howard," she said. "If you lived with me from now to
+the millennium you couldn't make me love you, nor could you love me--the
+way I must be loved. Try to realize it. The wrench is what you dread.
+After it is over you will be much more contented, much happier, than you
+have been with me. Believe me."
+
+His next remark astonished her.
+
+"What's the use of being so damned precipitate?" he demanded.
+
+"Precipitate!"
+
+"Because I can stand it no longer. I should go mad," she answered.
+
+He took a turn up and down the room, stopped suddenly, and stared at her
+with eyes that had grown smaller. Suspicion is slow to seize the
+complacent. Was it possible that he had been supplanted?
+
+Honora, with an instinct of what was coming, held up her head. Had he
+been angry, had he been a man, how much humiliation he would have spared
+her!
+
+"So you're in love!" he said. "I might have known that something was at
+the bottom of this."
+
+She took account of and quivered at the many meanings behind his speech
+--meanings which he was too cowardly to voice in words.
+
+"Yes," she answered, "I am in love--in love as I never hoped to be--as I
+did not think it possible to be. My love is such that I would go through
+hell fire for the sake of it. I do not expect you to believe me when I
+tell you that such is not the reason why I am leaving you. If you had
+loved me with the least spark of passion, if I thought I were in the
+least bit needful to you as a woman and as a soul, as a helper and a
+confidante, instead of a mere puppet to advertise your prosperity, this
+would not--could not--have happened. I love a man who would give up the
+world for me to-morrow. I have but one life to live, and I am going to
+find happiness if I can."
+
+She paused, afire with an eloquence that had come unsought. But her
+husband only stared at her. She was transformed beyond his recognition.
+Surely he had not married this woman! And, if the truth be told, down in
+his secret soul whispered a small, congratulatory voice. Although he did
+not yet fully realize it, he was glad he had not.
+
+Honora, with an involuntary movement, pressed her handkerchief to her
+eyes.
+
+"Good-by, Howard," she said. "I--I did not expect you to understand. If I
+had stayed, I should have made you miserably unhappy."
+
+He took her hand in a dazed manner, as though he knew not in the least
+what he was doing. He muttered something and found speech impossible. He
+gulped once, uncomfortably. The English language had ceased to be a
+medium. Great is the force of habit! In the emergency he reached for his
+cigarette case.
+
+Honora had given orders that the carriage was to wait at the door. The
+servants might suspect, but that was all. Her maid had been discreet. She
+drew down her veil as she descended the steps, and told the coachman to
+drive to the station.
+
+It was raining. Leaning forward from under the hood as the horses
+started, she took her last look at the lilacs.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+IN WHICH THE LAW BETRAYS A HEART
+
+It was still raining when she got into a carriage at Boston and drove
+under the elevated tracks, through the narrow, slippery business streets,
+to the hotel. From the windows of her room, as the night fell, she looked
+out across the dripping foliage of the Common. Below her, and robbed from
+that sacred ground, were the little granite buildings that housed the
+entrances to the subway, and for a long time she stood watching the
+people crowding into these. Most of them had homes to go to! In the
+gathering gloom the arc-lights shone, casting yellow streaks on the
+glistening pavement; wagons and carriages plunged into the maelstrom at
+the corner; pedestrians dodged and slipped; lightnings flashed from
+overhead wires, and clanging trolley cars pushed their greater bulk
+through the mass. And presently the higher toned and more ominous bell of
+an ambulance sounded on its way to the scene of an accident.
+
+It was Mathilde who ordered her dinner and pressed her to eat. But she
+had no heart for food. In her bright sitting-room, with the shades
+tightly drawn, an inexpressible loneliness assailed her. A large
+engraving of a picture of a sentimental school hung on the wall: she
+could not bear to look at it, and yet her eyes, from time to time, were
+fatally drawn thither. It was of a young girl taking leave of her lover,
+in early Christian times, before entering the arena. It haunted Honora,
+and wrought upon her imagination to such a pitch that she went into her
+bedroom to write.
+
+For a long time nothing more was written of the letter than "Dear Uncle
+Tom and Aunt Mary": what to say to them?
+
+   "I do not know what you will think of me. I do not know, to-night,
+   what to think of myself. I have left Howard. It is not because he
+   was cruel to me, or untrue. He does not love me, nor I him. I
+   cannot expect you, who have known the happiness of marriage, to
+   realize the tortures of it without love. My pain in telling you
+   this now is all the greater because I realize your belief as to the
+   sacredness of the tie--and it is not your fault that you did not
+   instil that belief into me. I have had to live and to think and to
+   suffer for myself. I do not attempt to account for my action, and I
+   hesitate to lay the blame upon the modern conditions and atmosphere
+   in which I lived; for I feel that, above all things, I must be
+   honest with myself.
+
+   "My marriage with Howard was a frightful mistake, and I have grown
+   slowly to realize it, until life with him became insupportable.
+   Since he does not love me, since his one interest is his business,
+   my departure makes no great difference to him.
+
+   "Dear Aunt Mary and Uncle Tom, I realize that I owe you much
+  --everything that I am. I do not expect you to understand or to
+   condone what I have done. I only beg that you will continue to
+  --love your niece,
+
+                         "HONORA."
+
+She tried to review this letter. Incoherent though it were and
+incomplete, in her present state of mind she was able to add but a few
+words as a postscript. "I will write you my plans in a day or two, when I
+see my way more clearly. I would fly to you--but I cannot. I am going to
+get a divorce."
+
+She sat for a time picturing the scene in the sitting-room when they
+should read it, and a longing which was almost irresistible seized her to
+go back to that shelter. One force alone held her in misery where she
+was,--her love for Chiltern; it drew her on to suffer the horrors of
+exile and publicity. When she suffered most, his image rose before her,
+and she kissed the ring on her hand. Where was he now, on this rainy
+night? On the seas?
+
+At the thought she heard again the fog-horns and the sirens.
+
+Her sleep was fitful. Many times she went over again her talk with
+Howard, and she surprised herself by wondering what he had thought and
+felt since her departure. And ever and anon she was startled out of
+chimerical dreams by the clamour of bells-the trolley cars on their
+ceaseless round passing below. At last came the slumber of exhaustion.
+
+It was nine o'clock when she awoke and faced the distasteful task she had
+set herself for the day. In her predicament she descended to the office,
+where the face of one of the clerks attracted her, and she waited until
+he was unoccupied.
+
+"I should like you to tell me--the name of some reputable lawyer," she
+said.
+
+"Certainly, Mrs. Spence," he replied, and Honora was startled at the
+sound of her name. She might have realized that he would know her. "I
+suppose a young lawyer would do--if the matter is not very important."
+
+"Oh, no!" she cried, blushing to her temples. "A young lawyer would do
+very well."
+
+The clerk reflected. He glanced at Honora again; and later in the day she
+divined what had been going on in his mind.
+
+"Well," he said, "there are a great many. I happen to think of Mr.
+Wentworth, because he was in the hotel this morning. He is in the Tremont
+Building."
+
+She thanked him hurriedly, and was driven to the Tremont Building,
+through the soggy street that faced the still dripping trees of the
+Common. Mounting in the elevator, she read on the glass door amongst the
+names of the four members of the firm that of Alden Wentworth, and
+suddenly found herself face to face with the young man, in his private
+office. He was well groomed and deeply tanned, and he rose to meet her
+with a smile that revealed a line of perfect white teeth.
+
+"How do you do, Mrs. Spence?" he said. "I did not think, when I met you
+at Mrs. Grenfell's, that I should see you so soon in Boston. Won't you
+sit down?"
+
+Honora sat down. There seemed nothing else to do. She remembered him
+perfectly now, and she realized that the nimble-witted clerk had meant to
+send her to a gentleman.
+
+"I thought," she faltered, "I thought I was coming to a--a stranger. They
+gave me your address at the hotel--when I asked for a lawyer."
+
+"Perhaps," suggested Mr. Wentworth, delicately, "perhaps you would prefer
+to go to some one else. I can give you any number of addresses, if you
+like."
+
+She looked up at him gratefully. He seemed very human and understanding,
+--very honourable. He belonged to her generation, after all, and she
+feared an older man.
+
+"If you will be kind enough to listen to me, I think I will stay here. It
+is only a matter of--of knowledge of the law." She looked at him again,
+and the pathos of her smile went straight to his heart. For Mr. Wentworth
+possessed that organ, although he did not wear it on his sleeve.
+
+He crossed the room, closed the door, and sat down beside her.
+
+"Anything I can do," he said.
+
+She glanced at him once more, helplessly.
+
+"I do not know how to tell you," she began. "It all seems so dreadful."
+She paused, but he had the lawyer's gift of silence--of sympathetic
+silence. "I want to get a divorce from my husband."
+
+If Mr. Wentworth was surprised, he concealed it admirably. His attitude
+of sympathy did not change, but he managed to ask her, in a business-like
+tone which she welcomed:--"On what grounds?"
+
+"I was going to ask you that question," said Honora.
+
+This time Mr. Wentworth was surprised--genuinely so, and he showed it.
+
+"But, my dear Mrs. Spence," he protested, "you must remember that--that I
+know nothing of the case."
+
+"What are the grounds one can get divorced on?" she asked.
+
+He coloured a little under his tan.
+
+"They are different in different states," he replied. "I think--perhaps
+--the best way would be to read you the Massachusetts statutes."
+
+"No--wait a moment," she said. "It's very simple, after all, what I have
+to tell you. I don't love my husband, and he doesn't love me, and it has
+become torture to live together. I have left him with his knowledge and
+consent, and he understands that I will get a divorce."
+
+Mr. Wentworth appeared to be pondering--perhaps not wholly on the legal
+aspects of the case thus naively presented. Whatever may have been his
+private comments, they were hidden. He pronounced tentatively, and a
+little absently, the word "desertion."
+
+"If the case could possibly be construed as desertion on your husband's
+part, you could probably get a divorce in three years in Massachusetts."
+
+"Three years!" cried Honora, appalled. "I could never wait three years!"
+
+She did not remark the young lawyer's smile, which revealed a greater
+knowledge of the world than one would have suspected. He said nothing,
+however.
+
+"Three years!" she repeated. "Why, it can't be, Mr. Wentworth. There are
+the Waterfords--she was Mrs. Boutwell, you remember. And--and Mrs.
+Rindge--it was scarcely a year before--"
+
+He had the grace to nod gravely, and to pretend not to notice the
+confusion in which she halted. Lawyers, even young ones with white teeth
+and clear eyes, are apt to be a little cynical. He had doubtless seen
+from the beginning that there was a man in the background. It was not his
+business to comment or to preach.
+
+"Some of the western states grant divorces on--on much easier terms," he
+said politely. "If you care to wait, I will go into our library and look
+up the laws of those states."
+
+"I wish you would," answered Honora. "I don't think I could bear to spend
+three years in such--in such an anomalous condition. And at any rate I
+should much rather go West, out of sight, and have it all as quickly over
+with as possible."
+
+He bowed, and departed on his quest. And Honora waited, at moments
+growing hot at the recollection of her conversation with him. Why--she
+asked herself should the law make it so difficult, and subject her to
+such humiliation in a course which she felt to be right and natural and
+noble? Finally, her thoughts becoming too painful, she got up and looked
+out of the window. And far below her, through the mist, she beheld the
+burying-ground of Boston's illustrious dead which her cabman had pointed
+out to her as he passed. She did not hear the door open as Mr. Wentworth
+returned, and she started at the sound of his voice.
+
+"I take it for granted that you are really serious in this matter, Mrs.
+Spence," he said.
+
+"Oh!" she exclaimed.
+
+"And that you have thoroughly reflected," he continued imperturbably.
+Evidently, in spite of the cold impartiality of the law, a New England
+conscience had assailed him in the library. "I cannot take er--the
+responsibility of advising you as to a course of action. You have asked
+me the laws of certain western states as to divorce I will read them."
+
+An office boy followed him, deposited several volumes on the taule, and
+Mr. Wentworth read from them in a voice magnificently judicial.
+
+"There's not much choice, is there?" she faltered, when he had finished.
+
+He smiled.
+
+"As places of residence--" he began, in an attempt to relieve the pathos.
+
+"Oh, I didn't mean that," she cried. "Exile is--is exile." She flushed.
+After a few moments of hesitation she named at random a state the laws of
+which required a six months' residence. She contemplated him. "I hardly
+dare to ask you to give me the name of some reputable lawyer out there."
+
+He had looked for an instant into her eyes. Men of the law are not
+invulnerable, particularly at Mr. Wentworth's age, and New England
+consciences to the contrary notwithstanding. In spite of himself, her
+eyes had made him a partisan: an accomplice, he told himself afterwards.
+
+"Really, Mrs. Spence," he began, and caught another appealing look. He
+remembered the husband now, and a lecture on finance in the Grenfell
+smoking room which Howard Spence had delivered, and which had grated on
+Boston sensibility. "It is only right to tell you that our firm does
+not--does not--take divorce cases--as a rule. Not that we are taking this
+one," he added hurriedly. "But as a friend--"
+
+"Oh, thank you!" said Honora.
+
+"Merely as a friend who would be glad to do you a service," he continued,
+"I will, during the day, try to get you the name of--of as reputable a
+lawyer as possible in that place."
+
+And Mr. Wentworth paused, as red as though he had asked her to marry him.
+
+"How good of you!" she cried. "I shall be at the Touraine until this
+evening."
+
+He escorted her through the corridor, bowed her into the elevator, and
+her spirits had risen perceptibly as she got into her cab and returned to
+the hotel. There, she studied railroad folders. One confidant was enough,
+and she dared not even ask the head porter the way to a locality
+where--it was well known--divorces were sold across a counter. And as she
+worked over the intricacies of this problem the word her husband had
+applied to her action recurred to her--precipitate. No doubt Mr.
+Wentworth, too, had thought her precipitate. Nearly every important act
+of her life had been precipitate. But she was conscious in this instance
+of no regret. Delay, she felt, would have killed her. Let her exile begin
+at once.
+
+She had scarcely finished luncheon when Mr. Wentworth was announced. For
+reasons best known to himself he had come in person; and he handed her,
+written on a card, the name of the Honourable David Beckwith.
+
+"I'll have to confess I don't know much about him, Mrs. Spence," he said,
+"except that he has been in Congress, and is one of the prominent lawyers
+of that state."
+
+The gift of enlisting sympathy and assistance was peculiarly Honora's.
+And if some one had predicted that morning to Mr. Wentworth that before
+nightfall he would not only have put a lady in distress on the highroad
+to obtaining a western divorce (which he had hitherto looked upon as
+disgraceful), but that likewise he would miss his train for Pride's
+Crossing, buy the lady's tickets, and see her off at the South Station
+for Chicago, he would have regarded the prophet as a lunatic. But that is
+precisely what Mr. Wentworth did. And when, as her train pulled out,
+Honora bade him goodby, she felt the tug at her heartstrings which comes
+at parting with an old friend.
+
+"And anything I can do for you here in the East, while--while you are out
+there, be sure to let me know," he said.
+
+She promised and waved at him from the platform as he stood motionless,
+staring after her. Romance had spent a whole day in Boston! And with Mr.
+Alden Wentworth, of all people!
+
+Fortunately for the sanity of the human race, the tension of grief is
+variable. Honora, closed in her stateroom, eased herself that night by
+writing a long, if somewhat undecipherable, letter to Chiltern; and was
+able, the next day, to read the greater portion of a novel. It was only
+when she arrived in Chicago, after nightfall, that loneliness again
+assailed her. She was within nine hours--so the timetable said--of St.
+Louis! Of all her trials, the homesickness which she experienced as she
+drove through the deserted streets of the metropolis of the Middle West
+was perhaps the worst. A great city on Sunday night! What traveller has
+not felt the depressing effect of it? And, so far as the incoming
+traveller is concerned, Chicago does not put her best foot forward. The
+way from the station to the Auditorium Hotel was hacked and bruised--so
+it seemed--by the cruel battle of trade. And she stared, in a kind of
+fascination that increased the ache in her heart; at the ugliness and
+cruelty of the twentieth century.
+
+To have imagination is unquestionably to possess a great capacity for
+suffering, and Honora was paying the penalty for hers. It ran riot now.
+The huge buildings towered like formless monsters against the blackness
+of the sky under the sickly blue of the electric lights, across the
+dirty, foot-scarred pavements, strange black human figures seemed to
+wander aimlessly: an elevated train thundered overhead. And presently she
+found herself the tenant of two rooms in that vast refuge of the
+homeless, the modern hotel, where she sat until the small hours looking
+down upon the myriad lights of the shore front, and out beyond them on
+the black waters of an inland sea.
+
+          .......................
+
+From Newport to Salomon City, in a state not far from the Pacific tier,
+is something of a transition in less than a week, though in modern life
+we should be surprised at nothing. Limited trains are wonderful enough;
+but what shall be said of the modern mind, that travels faster than
+light? and much too fast for the pages of a chronicle. Martha Washington
+and the good ladies of her acquaintance knew nothing about the upper
+waters of the Missouri, and the words "for better, for worse, for richer,
+for poorer" were not merely literature to them.
+
+'Nous avons change tout cela', although there are yet certain crudities
+to be eliminated. In these enlightened times, if in one week a lady is
+not entirely at home with husband number one, in the next week she may
+have travelled in comparative comfort some two-thirds across a continent,
+and be on the highroad to husband number two. Why travel? Why have to put
+up with all this useless expense and worry and waste of time? Why not
+have one's divorce sent, C.O.D., to one's door, or establish a new branch
+of the Post-office Department? American enterprise has surely lagged in
+this.
+
+Seated in a plush-covered rocking-chair that rocked on a track of its
+own, and thus saved the yellow-and-red hotel carpet, the Honourable Dave
+Beckwith patiently explained the vexatious process demanded by his
+particular sovereign state before she should consent to cut the Gordian
+knot of marriage. And his state--the Honourable Dave remarked--was in the
+very forefront of enlightenment in this respect: practically all that she
+demanded was that ladies in Mrs. Spence's predicament should become, pro
+tempore, her citizens. Married misery did not exist in the Honourable
+Dave's state, amongst her own bona fide citizens. And, by a wise
+provision in the Constitution of our glorious American Union, no one
+state could tie the nuptial knot so tight that another state could not
+cut it at a blow.
+
+Six months' residence, and a whole year before the divorce could be
+granted! Honora looked at the plush rocking-chair, the yellow-and-red
+carpet, the inevitable ice-water on the marble-topped table, and the
+picture of a lady the shape of a liqueur bottle playing tennis in the
+late eighties, and sighed. For one who is sensitive to surroundings, that
+room was a torture chamber.
+
+"But Mr. Beckwith," she exclaimed, "I never could spend a year here!
+Isn't there a--house I could get that is a--a little--a little better
+furnished? And then there is a certain publicity about staying at a
+hotel."
+
+The Honourable Dave might have been justly called the friend of ladies in
+a temporary condition of loneliness. His mission in life was not merely
+that of a liberator, but his natural goodness led him to perform a
+hundred acts of kindness to make as comfortable as possible the purgatory
+of the unfortunates under his charge. He was a man of a remarkable
+appearance, and not to be lightly forgotten. His hair, above all,
+fascinated Honora, and she found her eyes continually returning to it. So
+incredibly short it was, and so incredibly stiff, that it reminded her of
+the needle points on the cylinder of an old-fashioned music-box; and she
+wondered, if it were properly inserted, what would be the resultant
+melody.
+
+The Honourable Dave's head was like a cannon-ball painted white. Across
+the top of it (a blemish that would undoubtedly have spoiled the tune)
+was a long scar,--a relic of one of the gentleman's many personal
+difficulties. He who made the sear, Honora reflected, must have been a
+strong man. The Honourable Dave, indeed, had fought his way upward
+through life to the Congress of the United States; and many were the
+harrowing tales of frontier life he told Honora in the long winter
+evenings when the blizzards came down the river valley. They would fill a
+book; unfortunately, not this book. The growing responsibilities of
+taking care of the lonely ladies that came in increasing numbers to
+Salomon City from the effeter portions of the continent had at length
+compelled him to give up his congressional career. The Honourable Dave
+was unmarried; and, he told Honora, not likely to become so. He was thus
+at once human and invulnerable, a high priest dedicated to freedom.
+
+It is needless to say that the plush rocking-chair and the picture of the
+liqueur-bottle lady did not jar on his sensibilities. Like an eminent
+physician who has never himself experienced neurosis, the Honourable Dave
+firmly believed that he understood the trouble from which his client was
+suffering. He had seen many cases of it in ladies from the Atlantic
+coast: the first had surprised him, no doubt. Salomon City, though it
+contained the great Boon, was not esthetic. Being a keen student of human
+nature, he rightly supposed that she would not care to join the colony,
+but he thought it his duty to mention that there was a colony.
+
+Honora repeated the word.
+
+"Out there," he said, waving his cigar to the westward, "some of the
+ladies have ranches." Some of the gentlemen, too, he added, for it
+appeared that exiles were not confined to one sex. "It's social--a little
+too social, I guess," declared Mr. Beckwith, "for you." A delicate
+compliment of differentiation that Honora accepted gravely. "They've got
+a casino, and they burn a good deal of electricity first and last. They
+don't bother Salomon City much. Once in a while, in the winter, they come
+in a bunch to the theatre. Soon as I looked at you I knew you wouldn't
+want to go there."
+
+Her exclamation was sufficiently eloquent.
+
+"I've got just the thing for you," he said. "It looks a little as if I
+was reaching out into the sanitarium business. Are you acquainted by any
+chance with Mrs. Boutwell, who married a fellow named Waterford?" he
+asked, taking momentarily out of his mouth the cigar he was smoking by
+permission.
+
+Honora confessed, with no great enthusiasm, that she knew the present
+Mrs. Waterford. Not the least of her tribulations had been to listen to a
+partial recapitulation, by the Honourable Dave, of the ladies he had
+assisted to a transfer of husbands. What, indeed, had these ladies to do
+with her? She felt that the very mention of them tended to soil the pure
+garments of her martyrdom.
+
+"What I was going to say was this," the Honourable Dave continued. "Mrs.
+Boutwell--that is to say Mrs. Waterford--couldn't stand this hotel any
+more than you, and she felt like you do about the colony, so she rented a
+little house up on Wylie Street and furnished it from the East. I took
+the furniture off her hands: it's still in the house, by the way, which
+hasn't been rented. For I figured it out that another lady would be
+coming along with the same notions. Now you can look at the house any
+time you like."
+
+Although she had to overcome the distaste of its antecedents, the house,
+or rather the furniture, was too much of a find in Salomon City to be
+resisted. It had but six rooms, and was of wood, and painted grey, like
+its twin beside it. But Mrs. Waterford had removed the stained-glass
+window-lights in the front door, deftly hidden the highly ornamental
+steam radiators, and made other eliminations and improvements, including
+the white bookshelves that still contained the lady's winter reading
+fifty or more yellow-and-green-backed French novels and plays. Honora's
+first care, after taking possession, was to order her maid to remove
+these from her sight: but it is to be feared that they found their way,
+directly, to Mathilde's room. Honora would have liked to fumigate the
+house; and yet, at the same time, she thanked her stars for it. Mr.
+Beekwith obligingly found her a cook, and on Thursday evening she sat
+down to supper in her tiny dining room. She had found a temporary haven,
+at last.
+
+Suddenly she remembered that it was an anniversary. One week ago that
+day, in the old garden at Beaulieu, had occurred the momentous event that
+had changed the current of her life!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+WYLIE STREET
+
+There was a little spindle-supported porch before Honora's front door,
+and had she chosen she might have followed the example of her neighbours
+and sat there in the evenings. She preferred to watch the life about her
+from the window-seat in the little parlour. The word exile suggests,
+perhaps, to those who have never tried it, empty wastes, isolation,
+loneliness. She had been prepared for these things, and Wylie Street was
+a shock to her: in sending her there at this crisis in her life fate had
+perpetrated nothing less than a huge practical joke. Next door, for
+instance, in the twin house to hers, flaunted in the face of liberal
+divorce laws, was a young couple with five children. Honora counted them,
+from the eldest ones that ran over her little grass plot on their way to
+and from the public school, to the youngest that spent much of his time
+gazing skyward from a perambulator on the sidewalk. Six days of the week,
+about six o'clock in the evening, there was a celebration in the family.
+Father came home from work! He was a smooth-faced young man whom a
+fortnight in the woods might have helped wonderfully--a clerk in the big
+department store.
+
+He radiated happiness. When opposite Honora's front door he would open
+his arms--the signal for a race across her lawn. Sometimes it was the
+little girl, with pigtails the colour of pulled molasses candy, who won
+the prize of the first kiss: again it was her brother, a year her junior;
+and when he was raised it was seen that the seat of his trousers was
+obviously double. But each of the five received a reward, and the baby
+was invariably lifted out of the perambulator. And finally there was a
+conjugal kiss on the spindled porch.
+
+The wife was a roly-poly little body. In the mornings, at the side
+windows, Honora heard her singing as she worked, and sometimes the sun
+struck with a blinding flash the pan she was in the act of shining. And
+one day she looked up and nodded and smiled. Strange indeed was the
+effect upon our heroine of that greeting! It amazed Honora herself. A
+strange current ran through her and left her hot, and even as she smiled
+and nodded back, unbidden tears rose scalding to her eyes. What was it?
+Why was it?
+
+She went downstairs to the little bookcase, filled now with volumes that
+were not trash. For Hugh's sake, she would try to improve herself this
+winter by reading serious things. But between her eyes and the book was
+the little woman's smile. A month before, at Newport, how little she
+would have valued it.
+
+One morning, as Honora was starting out for her lonely walk--that usually
+led her to the bare clay banks of the great river--she ran across her
+neighbour on the sidewalk. The little woman was settling the baby for his
+airing, and she gave Honora the same dazzling smile.
+
+"Good morning, Mrs. Spence," she said.
+
+"Good morning," replied Honora, and in her strange confusion she leaned
+over the carriage. "Oh, what a beautiful baby!"
+
+"Isn't he!" cried the little woman. "Of all of 'em, I think he's the
+prize. His father says so. I guess," she added, "I guess it was because I
+didn't know so much about 'em when they first began to come. You take my
+word for it, the best way is to leave 'em alone. Don't dandle 'em. It's
+hard to keep your hands off 'em, but it's right."
+
+"I'm sure of it," said Honora, who was very red.
+
+They made a strange contrast as they stood on that new street, with its
+new vitrified brick paving and white stone curbs, and new little trees
+set out in front of new little houses: Mrs. Mayo (for such, Honora's cook
+had informed her, was her name) in a housekeeper's apron and a
+shirtwaist, and Honora, almost a head taller, in a walking costume of
+dark grey that would have done justice to Fifth Avenue. The admiration in
+the little woman's eyes was undisguised.
+
+"You're getting a bill, I hear," she said, after a moment.
+
+"A bill?" repeated Honora.
+
+"A bill of divorce," explained Mrs. Mayo.
+
+Honora was conscious of conflicting emotions: astonishment, resentment,
+and--most curiously--of relief that the little woman knew it.
+
+"Yes," she answered.
+
+But Mrs. Mayo did not appear to notice or resent her brevity.
+
+"I took a fancy to you the minute I saw you," she said. "I can't say as
+much for the other Easterner that was here last year. But I made up my
+mind that it must be a mighty mean man who would treat you badly."
+
+Honora stood as though rooted to the pavement. She found a reply
+impossible.
+
+"When I think of my luck," her neighbour continued, "I'm almost ashamed.
+We were married on fifteen dollars a week. Of course there have been
+trials, we must always expect that; and we've had to work hard, but--it
+hasn't hurt us." She paused and looked up at Honora, and added
+contritely: "There! I shouldn't have said anything. It's mean of me to
+talk of my happiness. I'll drop in some afternoon--if you'll let me
+--when I get through my work," said the little woman.
+
+"I wish you would," replied Honora.
+
+She had much to think of on her walk that morning, and new resolutions to
+make. Here was happiness growing and thriving, so far as she could see,
+without any of that rarer nourishment she had once thought so necessary.
+And she had come two thousand miles to behold it.
+
+She walked many miles, as a part of the regimen and discipline to which
+she had set herself. Her haunting horror in this place, as she thought of
+the colony of which Mr. Beckwith had spoken and of Mrs. Boutwell's row of
+French novels, was degeneration. She was resolved to return to Chiltern a
+better and a wiser and a truer woman, unstained by the ordeal. At the
+outskirts of the town she halted by the river's bank, breathing deeply of
+the pure air of the vast plains that surrounded her.
+
+She was seated that afternoon at her desk in the sitting-room upstairs
+when she heard the tinkle of the door-bell, and remembered her
+neighbour's promise to call. With something of a pang she pushed back her
+chair. Since the episode of the morning, the friendship of the little
+woman had grown to have a definite value; for it was no small thing, in
+Honora's situation, to feel the presence of a warm heart next door. All
+day she had been thinking of Mrs. Mayo and her strange happiness, and
+longing to talk with her again, and dreading it. And while she was
+bracing herself for the trial Mathilde entered with a card.
+
+"Tell Mrs. Mayo I shall be down in a minute," she said.
+
+It was not a lady, Mathilde replied, but a monsieur.
+
+Honora took the card. For a long time she sat staring at it, while
+Mathilde waited. It read:
+
+             Mr. Peter Erwin.
+
+"Madame will see monsieur?"
+
+A great sculptor once said to the statesman who was to be his model:
+"Wear your old coat. There is as much of a man in the back of his old
+coat, I think, as there is in his face." As Honora halted on the
+threshold, Peter was standing looking out of the five-foot plate-glass
+window, and his back was to her.
+
+She was suddenly stricken. Not since she had been a child, not even in
+the weeks just passed, had she felt that pain. And as a child, self-pity
+seized her--as a lost child, when darkness is setting in, and the will
+fails and distance appalls. Scalding tears welled into her eyes as she
+seized the frame of the door, but it must have been her breathing that he
+heard. He turned and crossed the room to her as she had known he would,
+and she clung to him as she had so often done in days gone by when, hurt
+and bruised, he had rescued and soothed her. For the moment, the delusion
+that his power was still limitless prevailed, and her faith whole again,
+so many times had he mended a world all awry.
+
+He led her to the window-seat and gently disengaged her hands from his
+shoulders and took one of them and held it between his own. He did not
+speak, for his was a rare intuition; and gradually her hand ceased to
+tremble, and the uncontrollable sobs that shook her became less frequent.
+
+"Why did you come? Why did you come?" she cried.
+
+"To see you, Honora."
+
+"But you might have--warned me."
+
+"Yes," he said, "it's true, I might."
+
+She drew her hand away, and gazed steadfastly at his face.
+
+"Why aren't you angry?" she said. "You don't believe in what I have
+done--you don't sympathize with it--you don't understand it."
+
+"I have come here to try," he said.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"You can't--you can't--you never could."
+
+"Perhaps," he answered, "it may not be so difficult as you think."
+
+Grown calmer, she considered this. What did he mean by it? to imply a
+knowledge of herself?
+
+"It will be useless," she said inconsequently.
+
+"No," he said, "it will not be useless."
+
+She considered this also, and took the broader meaning that such acts are
+not wasted.
+
+"What do you intend to try to do?" she asked.
+
+He smiled a little.
+
+"To listen to as much as you care to tell me, Honora."
+
+She looked at him again, and an errant thought slipped in between her
+larger anxieties. Wherever he went, how extraordinarily he seemed to
+harmonize with his surroundings. At Silverdale, and in the drawing-room
+of the New York house, and in the little parlour in this far western
+town. What was it? His permanence? Was it his power? She felt that, but
+it was a strange kind of power--not like other men's. She felt, as she
+sat there beside him, that his was a power more difficult to combat. That
+to defeat it was at once to make it stronger, and to grow weaker. She
+summoned her pride, she summoned her wrongs: she summoned the ego which
+had winged its triumphant flight far above his kindly, disapproving eye.
+He had the ability to make her taste defeat in the very hour of victory.
+And she knew that, when she fell, he would be there in his strength to
+lift her up.
+
+"Did--did they tell you to come?" she asked.
+
+"There was no question of that, Honora. I was away when--when they
+learned you were here. As soon as I returned, I came."
+
+"Tell me how they feel," she said, in a low voice.
+
+"They think only of you. And the thought that you are unhappy overshadows
+all others. They believe that it is to them you should have come, if you
+were in trouble instead of coming here."
+
+"How could I?" she cried. "How can you ask? That is what makes it so
+hard, that I cannot be with them now. But I should only have made them
+still more unhappy, if I had gone. They would not have understood--they
+cannot understand who have every reason to believe in marriage, why those
+to whom it has been a mockery and a torture should be driven to divorce."
+
+"Why divorce?" he said.
+
+"Do you mean--do you mean that you wish me to give you the reasons why I
+felt justified in leaving my husband?"
+
+"Not unless you care to," he replied. "I have no right to demand them. I
+only ask you to remember, Honora, that you have not explained these
+reasons very clearly in your letters to your aunt and uncle. They do not
+understand them. Your uncle was unable, on many accounts, to come here;
+and he thought that--that as an old friend, you might be willing to talk
+to me."
+
+"I can't live with--with my husband," she cried. "I don't love him, and
+he doesn't love me. He doesn't know what love is."
+
+Peter Erwin glanced at her, but she was too absorbed then to see the
+thing in his eyes. He made no comment.
+
+"We haven't the same tastes, nor--nor the same way of looking at things
+--the same views about making money--for instance. We became absolute
+strangers. What more is there to say?" she added, a little defiantly.
+
+"Your husband committed no--flagrant offence against you?" he inquired.
+
+"That would have made him human, at least," she cried. "It would have
+proved that he could feel--something. No, all he cares for in the world
+is to make money, and he doesn't care how he makes it. No woman with an
+atom of soul can live with a man like that."
+
+If Peter Erwin deemed this statement a trifle revolutionary, he did not
+say so.
+
+"So you just--left him," he said.
+
+"Yes," said Honora. "He didn't care. He was rather relieved than
+otherwise. If I had lived with him till I died, I couldn't have made him
+happy."
+
+"You tried, and failed," said Peter.
+
+She flushed.
+
+"I couldn't have made him happier," she declared, correcting herself. "He
+has no conception of what real happiness is. He thinks he is happy,-he
+doesn't need me. He'll be much more--contented without me. I have nothing
+against him. I was to blame for marrying him, I know. But I have only one
+life to live, and I can't throw it away, Peter, I can't. And I can't
+believe that a woman and a man were intended to live together without
+love. It is too horrible. Surely that isn't your idea of marriage!"
+
+"My idea of marriage isn't worth very much, I'm afraid," he said. "If I
+talked about it, I should have to confine myself to theories and--and
+dreams."
+
+"The moment I saw your card, Peter, I knew why you had come here," she
+said, trying to steady her voice. "It was to induce me to go back to my
+husband. You don't know how it hurts me to give you pain. I love you--I
+love you as I love Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary. You are a part of me. But oh,
+you can't understand! I knew you could not. You have never made any
+mistakes--you have never lived. It is useless. I won't go back to him. If
+you stayed here for weeks you could not make me change my mind."
+
+He was silent.
+
+"You think that I could have prevented--this, if I had been less
+selfish," she said.
+
+"Where you are concerned, Honora, I have but one desire," he answered,
+"and that is to see you happy--in the best sense of the term. If I could
+induce you to go back and give your husband another trial, I should
+return with a lighter heart. You ask me whether I think you have been
+selfish. I answer frankly that I think you have. I don't pretend to say
+your husband has not been selfish also. Neither of you have ever tried,
+apparently, to make your marriage a success. It can't be done without an
+honest effort. You have abandoned the most serious and sacred enterprise
+in the world as lightly as though it had been a piece of embroidery. All
+that I can gather from your remarks is that you have left your husband
+because you have grown tired of him."
+
+"Yes," said Honora, "and you can never realize how tired, unless you knew
+him as I did. When love dies, it turns into hate."
+
+He rose, and walked to the other end of the room, and turned.
+
+"Could you be induced," he said, "for the sake of your aunt and uncle, if
+not for your own, to consider a legal separation?"
+
+For an instant she stared at him hopelessly, and then she buried her face
+in her hands.
+
+"No," she cried. "No, I couldn't. You don't know what you ask."
+
+He went to her, and laid his hand lightly on her shoulder.
+
+"I think I do," he said.
+
+There was a moment's tense silence, and then she got to her feet and
+looked at him proudly.
+
+"Yes," she cried, "it is true. And I am not ashamed of it. I have
+discovered what love is, and what life is, and I am going to take them
+while I can."
+
+She saw the blood slowly leave his face, and his hands tighten. It was
+not until then that she guessed at the depth of his wound, and knew that
+it was unhealed. For him had been reserved this supreme irony, that he
+should come here to plead for her husband and learn from her own lips
+that she loved another man. She was suddenly filled with awe, though he
+turned away from her that she might not see his face: And she sought in
+vain for words. She touched his hand, fearfully, and now it was he who
+trembled.
+
+"Peter," she exclaimed, "why do you bother with me? I--I am what I am. I
+can't help it. I was made so. I cannot tell you that I am sorry for what
+I have done--for what I am going to do. I will not lie to you--and you
+forced me to speak. I know that you don't understand, and that I caused
+you pain, and that I shall cause--them pain. It may be selfishness--I
+don't know. God alone knows. Whatever it is, it is stronger than I. It is
+what I am. Though I were to be thrown into eternal fire I would not
+renounce it."
+
+She looked at him again, and her breath caught. While she had been
+speaking, he had changed. There was a fire in his eyes she had never seen
+before, in all the years she had known him.
+
+"Honora," he said quietly, "the man who has done this is a scoundrel."
+
+She stared at him, doubting her senses, her pupils wide with terror.
+
+"How dare you, Peter! How dare you!" she cried.
+
+"I dare to speak the truth," he said, and crossed the room to where his
+hat was lying and picked it up. She watched him as in a trance. Then he
+came back to her.
+
+"Some day, perhaps, you will forgive me for saying that, Honora. I hope
+that day will come, although I shall never regret having said it. I have
+caused you pain. Sometimes, it seems, pain is unavoidable. I hope you
+will remember that, with the exception of your aunt and uncle, you have
+no better friend than I. Nothing can alter that friendship, wherever you
+go, whatever you do. Goodby."
+
+He caught her hand, held it for a moment in his own, and the door had
+closed before she realized that he had gone. For a few moments she stood
+motionless where he had left her, and then she went slowly up the stairs
+to her own room . . . .
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE PRICE OF FREEDOM
+
+Had he, Hugh Chiltern, been anathematized from all the high pulpits of
+the world, Honora's belief in him could not have been shaken. Ivanhoe and
+the Knights of the Round Table to the contrary, there is no chivalry so
+exalted as that of a woman who loves, no courage higher, no endurance
+greater. Her knowledge is complete; and hers the supreme faith that is
+unmoved by calumny and unbelief. She alone knows. The old Chiltern did
+not belong to her: hers was the new man sprung undefiled from the sacred
+fire of their love; and in that fire she, too, had been born again.
+Peter--even Peter had no power to share such a faith, though what he had
+said of Chiltern had wounded her--wounded her because Peter, of all
+others, should misjudge and condemn him. Sometimes she drew consolation
+from the thought that Peter had never seen him. But she knew he could not
+understand him, or her, or what they had passed through: that kind of
+understanding comes alone through experience.
+
+In the long days that followed she thought much about Peter, and failed
+to comprehend her feelings towards him. She told herself that she ought
+to hate him for what he had so cruelly said, and at times indeed her
+resentment was akin to hatred: again, his face rose before her as she had
+seen it when he had left her, and she was swept by an incomprehensible
+wave of tenderness and reverence. And yet--paradox of paradoxes
+--Chiltern possessed her!
+
+On the days when his letters came it was as his emissary that the sun
+shone to give her light in darkness, and she went about the house with a
+song on her lips. They were filled, these letters, with an elixir of
+which she drank thirstily to behold visions, and the weariness of her
+exile fell away. The elixir of High Purpose. Never was love on such a
+plane! He lifting her,--no marvel in this; and she--by a magic power of
+levitation at which she never ceased to wonder--sustaining him. By her
+aid he would make something of himself which would be worthy of her. At
+last he had the incentive to enable him to take his place in the world.
+He pictured their future life at Grenoble until her heart was strained
+with yearning for it to begin. Here would be duty,--let him who would
+gainsay it, duty and love combined with a wondrous happiness. He at a
+man's labour, she at a woman's; labour not for themselves alone, but for
+others. A paradise such as never was heard of--a God-fearing paradise,
+and the reward of courage.
+
+He told her he could not go to Grenoble now and begin the life without
+her. Until that blessed time he would remain a wanderer, avoiding the
+haunts of men. First he had cruised in the 'Folly, and then camped and
+shot in Canada; and again, as winter drew on apace, had chartered another
+yacht, a larger one, and sailed away for the West Indies, whence the
+letters came, stamped in strange ports, and sometimes as many as five
+together. He, too, was in exile until his regeneration should begin.
+
+Well he might be at such a time. One bright day in early winter Honora,
+returning from her walk across the bleak plains in the hope of letters,
+found newspapers and periodicals instead, addressed in an unknown hand.
+It matters not whose hand: Honora never sought to know. She had long
+regarded as inevitable this acutest phase of her martyrdom, and the long
+nights of tears when entire paragraphs of the loathed stuff she had
+burned ran ceaselessly in her mind. Would she had burned it before
+reading it! An insensate curiosity had seized her, and she had read and
+read again until it was beyond the reach of fire.
+
+Save for its effect upon Honora, it is immaterial to this chronicle. It
+was merely the heaviest of her heavy payments for liberty. But what, she
+asked herself shamefully, would be its effect upon Chiltern? Her face
+burned that she should doubt his loyalty and love; and yet--the question
+returned. There had been a sketch of Howard, dwelling upon the prominence
+into which he had sprung through his connection with Mr. Wing. There had
+been a sketch of her; and how she had taken what the writer was pleased
+to call Society by storm: it had been intimated, with a cruelty known
+only to writers of such paragraphs, that ambition to marry a Chiltern had
+been her motive! There had been a sketch of Chiltern's career, in
+carefully veiled but thoroughly comprehensible language, which might have
+made a Bluebeard shudder. This, of course, she bore best of all; or, let
+it be said rather, that it cost her the least suffering. Was it not she
+who had changed and redeemed him?
+
+What tortured her most was the intimation that Chiltern's family
+connections were bringing pressure to bear upon him to save him from this
+supremest of all his follies. And when she thought of this the strange
+eyes and baffling expression of Mrs. Grainger rose before her. Was it
+true? And if true, would Chiltern resist, even as she, Honora, had
+resisted, loyally? Might this love for her not be another of his mad
+caprices?
+
+How Honora hated herself for the thought that thus insistently returned
+at this period of snows and blasts! It was January. Had he seen the
+newspapers? He had not, for he was cruising: he had, for of course they
+had been sent him. And he must have received, from his relatives,
+protesting letters. A fortnight passed, and her mail contained nothing
+from him! Perhaps something had happened to his yacht! Visions of
+shipwreck cause her to scan the newspapers for storms at sea,--but the
+shipwreck that haunted her most was that of her happiness. How easy it is
+to doubt in exile, with happiness so far away! One morning, when the wind
+dashed the snow against her windows, she found it impossible to rise.
+
+If the big doctor suspected the cause of her illness, Mathilde knew it.
+The maid tended her day and night, and sought, with the tact of her
+nation, to console and reassure her. The little woman next door came and
+sat by her bedside. Cruel and infinitely happy little woman, filled with
+compassion, who brought delicacies in the making of which she had spent
+precious hours, and which Honora could not eat! The Lord, when he had
+made Mrs. Mayo, had mercifully withheld the gift of imagination. One
+topic filled her, she lived to one end: her Alpha and Omega were husband
+and children, and she talked continually of their goodness and badness,
+of their illnesses, of their health, of their likes and dislikes, of
+their accomplishments and defects, until one day a surprising thing
+happened. Surprising for Mrs. Mayo.
+
+"Oh, don't!" cried Honora, suddenly. "Oh, don't! I can't bear it."
+
+"What is it?" cried Mrs. Mayo, frightened out of her wits. "A turn? Shall
+I telephone for the doctor?"
+
+"No," relied Honora, "but--but I can't talk any more--to-day."
+
+She apologized on the morrow, as she held Mrs. Mayo's hand. "It--it was
+your happiness," she said; "I was unstrung. I couldn't listen to it.
+Forgive me."
+
+The little woman burst into tears, and kissed her as she sat in bed.
+
+"Forgive you, deary!" she cried. "I never thought."
+
+"It has been so easy for you," Honora faltered.
+
+"Yes, it has. I ought to thank God, and I do--every night."
+
+She looked long and earnestly, through her tears, at the young lady from
+the far away East as she lay against the lace pillows, her paleness
+enhanced by the pink gown, her dark hair in two great braids on her
+shoulders.
+
+"And to think how pretty you are!" she exclaimed.
+
+It was thus she expressed her opinion of mankind in general, outside of
+her own family circle. Once she had passionately desired beauty, the high
+school and the story of Helen of Troy notwithstanding. Now she began to
+look at it askance, as a fatal gift; and to pity, rather than envy, its
+possessors.
+
+As a by-industry, Mrs. Mayo raised geraniums and carnations in her front
+cellar, near the furnace, and once in a while Peggy, with the
+pulled-molasses hair, or chubby Abraham Lincoln, would come puffing up
+Honora's stairs under the weight of a flower-pot and deposit it
+triumphantly on the table at Honora's bedside. Abraham Lincoln did not
+object to being kissed: he had, at least, grown to accept the process as
+one of the unaccountable mysteries of life. But something happened to him
+one afternoon, on the occasion of his giving proof of an intellect which
+may eventually bring him, in the footsteps of his great namesake, to the
+White House. Entering Honora's front door, he saw on the hall table a
+number of letters which the cook (not gifted with his brains) had left
+there. He seized them in one fat hand, while with the other he hugged the
+flower-pot to his breast, mounted the steps, and arrived, breathless but
+radiant, on the threshold of the beautiful lady's room, and there
+calamity overtook him in the shape of one of the thousand articles which
+are left on the floor purposely to trip up little boys.
+
+Great was the disaster. Letters, geranium, pieces of flower-pot, a
+quantity of black earth, and a howling Abraham Lincoln bestrewed the
+floor. And similar episodes, in his brief experience with this world, had
+not brought rewards. It was from sheer amazement that his tears ceased to
+flow--amazement and lack of breath--for the beautiful lady sprang up and
+seized him in her arms, and called Mathilde, who eventually brought a
+white and gold box. And while Abraham sat consuming its contents in
+ecstasy he suddenly realized that the beautiful lady had forgotten him.
+She had picked up the letters, every one, and stood reading them with
+parted lips and staring eyes.
+
+It was Mathilde who saved him from a violent illness, closing the box and
+leading him downstairs, and whispered something incomprehensible in his
+ear as she pointed him homeward.
+
+"Le vrai medecin--c'est toi, mon mignon."
+
+There was a reason why Chiltern's letters had not arrived, and great were
+Honora's self-reproach and penitence. With a party of Englishmen he had
+gone up into the interior of a Central American country to visit some
+famous ruins. He sent her photographs of them, and of the Englishmen, and
+of himself. Yes, he had seen the newspapers. If she had not seen them,
+she was not to read them if they came to her. And if she had, she was to
+remember that their love was too sacred to be soiled, and too perfect to
+be troubled. As for himself, as she knew, he was a changed man, who
+thought of his former life with loathing. She had made him clean, and
+filled him with a new strength.
+
+The winter passed. The last snow melted on the little grass plot, which
+changed by patches from brown to emerald green; and the children ran over
+it again, and tracked it in the soft places, but Honora only smiled.
+Warm, still days were interspersed between the windy ones, when the sky
+was turquoise blue, when the very river banks were steeped in new
+colours, when the distant, shadowy mountains became real. Liberty ran
+riot within her. If he thought with loathing on his former life, so did
+she. Only a year ago she had been penned up in a New York street in that
+prison-house of her own making, hemmed in by surroundings which she had
+now learned to detest from her soul.
+
+A few more penalties remained to be paid, and the heaviest of these was
+her letter to her aunt and uncle. Even as they had accepted other things
+in life, so had they accepted the hardest of all to bear--Honora's
+divorce. A memorable letter her Uncle Tom had written her after Peter's
+return to tell them that remonstrances were useless! She was their
+daughter in all but name, and they would not forsake her. When she should
+have obtained her divorce, she should go back to them. Their house, which
+had been her home, should always remain so. Honora wept and pondered long
+over that letter. Should she write and tell them the truth, as she had
+told Peter? It was not because she was ashamed of the truth that she had
+kept it from them throughout the winter: it was because she wished to
+spare them as long as possible. Cruellest circumstance of all, that a
+love so divine as hers should not be understood by them, and should cause
+them infinite pain!
+
+The weeks and months slipped by. Their letters, after that first one,
+were such as she had always received from them: accounts of the weather,
+and of the doings of her friends at home. But now the time was at hand
+when she must prepare them for her marriage with Chiltern; for they would
+expect her in St. Louis, and she could not go there. And if she wrote
+them, they might try to stop the marriage, or at least to delay it for
+some years.
+
+Was it possible that a lingering doubt remained in her mind that to
+postpone her happiness would perhaps be to lose it? In her exile she had
+learned enough to know that a divorced woman is like a rudderless ship at
+sea, at the mercy of wind and wave and current. She could not go back to
+her life in St. Louis: her situation there would be unbearable: her
+friends would not be the same friends. No, she had crossed her Rubicon
+and destroyed the bridge deep within her she felt that delay would be
+fatal, both to her and Chiltern. Long enough had the banner of their love
+been trailed in the dust.
+
+Summer came again, with its anniversaries and its dragging, interminable
+weeks: demoralizing summer, when Mrs. Mayo quite frankly appeared at her
+side window in a dressing sacque, and Honora longed to do the same. But
+time never stands absolutely still, and the day arrived when Mr. Beckwith
+called in a carriage. Honora, with an audibly beating heart, got into it,
+and they drove down town, past the department store where Mr. Mayo spent
+his days, and new blocks of banks and business houses that flanked the
+wide street, where the roaring and clanging of the ubiquitous trolley
+cars resounded.
+
+Honora could not define her sensations--excitement and shame and fear and
+hope and joy were so commingled. The colours of the red and yellow brick
+had never been so brilliant in the sunshine. They stopped before the new
+court-house and climbed the granite steps. In her sensitive state, Honora
+thought that some of the people paused to look after them, and that some
+were smiling. One woman, she thought, looked compassionate. Within, they
+crossed the marble pavement, the Honourable Dave handed her into an
+elevator, and when it stopped she followed him as in a dream to an
+oak-panelled door marked with a legend she did not read. Within was an
+office, with leather chairs, a large oak desk, a spittoon, and portraits
+of grave legal gentlemen on the wall.
+
+"This is Judge Whitman's office," explained the Honourable Dave. "He'll
+let you stay here until the case is called."
+
+"Is he the judge--before whom--the case is to be tried?" asked Honora.
+
+"He surely is," answered the Honourable Dave. "Whitman's a good friend of
+mine. In fact, I may say, without exaggeration, I had something to do
+with his election. Now you mustn't get flustered," he added. "It isn't
+anything like as bad as goin' to the dentist. It don't amount to shucks,
+as we used to say in Missouri."
+
+With these cheerful words of encouragement he slipped out of a side door
+into what was evidently the court room, for Honora heard a droning. After
+a long interval he reappeared and beckoned her with a crooked finger. She
+arose and followed him into the court room.
+
+All was bustle and confusion there, and her counsel whispered that they
+were breaking up for the day. The judge was stretching himself; several
+men who must have been lawyers, and with whom Mr. Beckwith was exchanging
+amenities behind the railing, were arranging their books and papers; some
+of the people were leaving, and others talking in groups about the room.
+The Honourable Dave whispered to the judge, a tall, lank, cadaverous
+gentleman with iron-grey hair, who nodded. Honora was led forward. The
+Honourable Dave, standing very close to the judge and some distance from
+her, read in a low voice something that she could not catch--supposedly
+the petition. It was all quite as vague to Honora as the trial of the
+Jack of Hearts; the buzzing of the groups still continued around the
+court room, and nobody appeared in the least interested. This was a
+comfort, though it robbed the ceremony of all vestige of reality. It
+seemed incredible that the majestic and awful Institution of the ages
+could be dissolved with no smoke or fire, with such infinite
+indifference, and so much spitting. What was the use of all the pomp and
+circumstance and ceremony to tie the knot if it could be cut in the
+routine of a day's business?
+
+The solemn fact that she was being put under oath meant nothing to her.
+This, too, was slurred and mumbled. She found herself, trembling,
+answering questions now from her counsel, now from the judge; and it is
+to be doubted to this day whether either heard her answers. Most
+convenient and considerate questions they were. When and where she was
+married, how long she had lived with her husband, what happened when they
+ceased to live together, and had he failed ever since to contribute to
+her support? Mercifully, Mr. Beckwith was in the habit of coaching his
+words beforehand. A reputable citizen of Salomon City was produced to
+prove her residence, and somebody cried out something, not loudly, in
+which she heard the name of Spence mentioned twice. The judge said, "Take
+your decree," and picked up a roll of papers and walked away. Her knees
+became weak, she looked around her dizzily, and beheld the triumphant
+professional smile of the Honourable Dave Beckwith.
+
+"It didn't hurt much, did it?" he asked. "Allow me to congratulate you."
+
+"Is it--is it all over?" she said, quite dazed.
+
+"Just like that," he said. "You're free."
+
+"Free!" The word rang in her ears as she drove back to the little house
+that had been her home. The Honourable Dave lifted his felt hat as he
+handed her out of the carriage, and said he would call again in the
+evening to see if he could do anything further for her. Mathilde, who had
+been watching from the window, opened the door, and led her mistress into
+the parlour.
+
+"It's--it's all over, Mathilde," she said.
+
+"Mon dieu, madame," said Mathilde, "c'est simple comme bonjour!"
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's A Modern Chronicle, Volume 6, by Winston Churchill
+
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