‘Oh, don’t scold me—I’ve had a horrid afternoon.’ She told him how she had taken the flowers to Mrs McCormick, and how South Kensington impressed her as the preserve of officers’ widows. She described how the door had opened, and what gloomy avenues of busts and palm-trees and umbrellas had been revealed to her. She spoke lightly, and succeeded in putting him at his ease. Indeed, he rapidly became too much at his ease to persist in a condition of cheerful neutrality. He felt his composure slipping from him. Katharine made it seem so natural to ask her to help him, or advise him, to say straight out what he had in his mind. The letter from Cassandra was heavy in his pocket. There was also the letter to Cassandra lying on the table in the next room. The atmosphere seemed charged with Cassandra. But, unless Katharine began the subject of her own accord, he could not even hint—he must ignore the whole affair; it was the part of a gentleman to preserve a bearing that was, as far as he could make it, the bearing of an un-doubting lover. At intervals he sighed deeply. He talked rather more quickly than usual about the possibility that some of the operas of Mozart would be played in the summer. He had received a notice, he said, and at once produced a pocket-book stuffed with papers, and began shuffling them in search. He held a thick envelope between his finger and thumb, as if the notice from the opera company had become in some way inseparably attached to it.
‘A letter from Cassandra?’ said Katharine, in the easiest voice in the world, looking over his shoulder. ‘I’ve just written to ask her to come here, only I forgot to post it.’
He handed her the envelope in silence. She took it, extracted the sheets, and read the letter through.
The reading seemed to Rodney to take an intolerably long time.
‘Yes,’ she observed at length, ‘a very charming letter.’
Rodney’s face was half turned away, as if in bashfulness. Her view of his profile almost moved her to laughter. She glanced through the pages once more.
‘I see no harm,’ William blurted out, ‘in helping her—with Greek, for example—if she really cares for that sort of thing.’
‘There’s no reason why she shouldn’t care,’ said Katharine, consulting the pages once more. ‘In fact—ah, here it is—“The Greek alphabet is absolutely
‘Well, Greek may be rather a large order. I was thinking chiefly of English. Her criticisms of my play, though they’re too generous, evidently immature—she can’t be more than twenty-two, I suppose?—they certainly show the sort of thing one wants: real feeling for poetry, understanding, not formed, of course, but it’s at the root of everything after all. There’d be no harm in lending her books?’
‘No. Certainly not.’
‘But if it—hum—led to a correspondence? I mean, Katharine, I take it, without going into matters which seem to me a little morbid, I mean,’ he floundered, ‘you, from your point of view, feel that there’s nothing disagreeable to you in the notion? If so, you’ve only to speak, and I never think of it again.’
She was surprised by the violence of her desire that he never should think of it again. For an instant it seemed to her impossible to surrender an intimacy, which might not be the intimacy of love, but was certainly the intimacy of true friendship, to any woman in the world. Cassandra would never understand him—she was not good enough for him. The letter seemed to her a letter of flattery—a letter addressed to his weakness, which it made her angry to think was known to another. For he was not weak; he had the rare strength of doing what he promised—she had only to speak, and he would never think of Cassandra again.
She paused. Rodney guessed the reason. He was amazed.
‘She loves me,’ he thought. The woman he admired more than any one in the world, loved him, as he had given up hope that she would ever love him. And now that for the first time he was sure of her love, he resented it. He felt it as a fetter, an encumbrance, something which made them both, but him in particular, ridiculous. He was in her power completely, but his eyes were open and he was no longer her slave or her dupe. He would be her master in future. The instant prolonged itself as Katharine realized the strength of her desire to speak the words that should keep William for ever, and the baseness of the temptation which assailed her to make the movement, or speak the word, which he had often begged her for, which she was now near enough to feeling. She held the letter in her hand. She sat silent.
At this moment there was a stir in the other room; the voice of Mrs Hilbery was heard talking of proof-sheets rescued by miraculous providence from butcher’s ledgers in Australia; the curtain separating one room from the other was drawn apart, and Mrs Hilbery and Augustus Pelham stood in the doorway. Mrs Hilbery stopped short. She looked at her daughter, and at the man her daughter was to marry, with her peculiar smile that always seemed to tremble on the brink of satire.
‘The best of all my treasures, Mr Pelham!’ she exclaimed. ‘Don’t move, Katharine. Sit still, William. Mr Pelham will come another day.’
Mr Pelham looked, smiled, bowed, and, as his hostess had moved on, followed her without a word. The curtain was drawn again either by him or by Mrs Hilbery.
But her mother had settled the question somehow. Katharine doubted no longer.
‘As I told you last night,’ she said, ‘I think it’s your duty, if there’s a chance that you care for Cassandra, to discover what your feeling is for her now. It’s your duty to her, as well as to me. But we must tell my mother. We can’t go on pretending.’
‘That is entirely in your hands, of course,’ said Rodney, with an immediate return to the manner of a formal man of honour.
‘Very well,’ said Katharine.
Directly he left her she would go to her mother, and explain that the engagement was at an end—or it might be better that they should go together?
‘But, Katharine,’ Rodney began, nervously attempting to stuff Cassandra’s sheets back into their envelope; ‘if Cassandra—should Cassandra—you’ve asked Cassandra to stay with you.’
‘Yes; but I’ve not posted the letter.’
He crossed his knees in a discomfited silence. By all his codes it was impossible to ask a woman with whom he had just broken off his engagement to help him to become acquainted with another woman with a view to his falling in love with her. If it was announced that their engagement was over, a long and complete separation would inevitably follow; in those circumstances, letters and gifts were returned; after years of distance the severed couple met, perhaps at an evening party, and touched hands uncomfortably with an indifferent word or two. He would be
