“Why do you ask me that?” she said in her grave voice, for her training of and by the poor had made her grave and patient.
Mrs. Wilkins flushed and looked excessively shy and frightened. “Oh, only because I saw it too, and I thought perhaps—I thought somehow—” she stammered.
Whereupon Mrs. Arbuthnot, her mind being used to getting people into lists and divisions, from habit considered, as she gazed thoughtfully at Mrs. Wilkins, under what heading, supposing she had to classify her, she could most properly be put.
“And I know you by sight,” went on Mrs. Wilkins, who, like all the shy, once she was started plunged on, frightening herself to more and more speech by the sheer sound of what she had said last in her ears. “Every Sunday—I see you every Sunday in church—”
“In church?” echoed Mrs. Arbuthnot.
“And this seems such a wonderful thing—this advertisement about the wistaria—and—”
Mrs. Wilkins, who must have been at least thirty, broke off and wriggled in her chair with the movement of an awkward and embarrassed schoolgirl.
“It seems so wonderful,” she went on in a kind of burst, “and—it is such a miserable day …”
And then she sat looking at Mrs. Arbuthnot with the eyes of an imprisoned dog.
“This poor thing,” thought Mrs. Arbuthnot, whose life was spent in helping and alleviating, “needs advice.”
She accordingly prepared herself patiently to give it.
“If you see me in church,” she said, kindly and attentively, “I suppose you live in Hampstead too?”
“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Wilkins. And she repeated, her head on its long thin neck drooping a little as if the recollection of Hampstead bowed her, “Oh yes.”
“Where?” asked Mrs. Arbuthnot, who, when advice was needed, naturally first proceeded to collect the facts.
But Mrs. Wilkins, laying her hand softly and caressingly on the part of The Times where the advertisement was, as though the mere printed words of it were precious, only said, “Perhaps that’s why this seems so wonderful.”
“No—I think that’s wonderful anyhow,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, forgetting facts and faintly sighing.
“Then you were reading it?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, her eyes going dreamy again.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful?” murmured Mrs. Wilkins.
“Wonderful,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot. Her face, which had lit up, faded into patience again. “Very wonderful,” she said. “But it’s no use wasting one’s time thinking of such things.”
“Oh, but it is,” was Mrs. Wilkins’s quick, surprising reply; surprising because it was so much unlike the rest of her—the characterless coat and skirt, the crumpled hat, the undecided wisp of hair straggling out. “And just the considering of them is worth while in itself—such a change from Hampstead—and sometimes I believe—I really do believe—if one considers hard enough one gets things.”
Mrs. Arbuthnot observed her patiently. In what category would she, supposing she had to, put her?
“Perhaps,” she said, leaning forward a little, “you will tell me your name. If we are to be friends”—she smiled her grave smile—“as I hope we are, we had better begin at the beginning.”
“Oh yes—how kind of you. I’m Mrs. Wilkins,” said Mrs. Wilkins. “I don’t expect,” she added, flushing, as Mrs. Arbuthnot said nothing, “that it conveys anything to you. Sometimes it—it doesn’t seem to convey anything to me either. But”—she looked round with a movement of seeking help—“I am Mrs. Wilkins.”
She did not like her name. It was a mean, small name, with a kind of facetious twist, she thought, about its end like the upward curve of a pugdog’s tail. There it was, however. There was no doing anything with it. Wilkins she was and Wilkins she would remain; and though her husband encouraged her to give it on all occasions as Mrs. Mellersh-Wilkins she only did that when he was within earshot, for she thought Mellersh made Wilkins worse, emphasising it in the way Chatsworth on the gateposts of a villa emphasises the villa.
When first he suggested she should add Mellersh she had objected for the above reason, and after a pause—Mellersh was much too prudent to speak except after a pause, during which presumably he was taking a careful mental copy of his coming observation—he said, much displeased, “But I am not a villa,” and looked at her as he looks who hopes, for perhaps the hundredth time, that he may not have married a fool.
Of course he was not a villa, Mrs. Wilkins assured him; she had never supposed he was; she had not dreamed of meaning … she was only just thinking …
The more she explained the more earnest became Mellersh’s hope, familiar to him by this time, for he had then been a husband for two years, that he might not by any chance have married a fool; and they had a prolonged quarrel, if that can be called a quarrel which is conducted with dignified silence on one side and earnest apology on the other, as to whether or no Mrs. Wilkins had intended to suggest that Mr. Wilkins was a villa.
“I believe,” she had thought when it was at last over—it took a long while—“that anybody would quarrel about anything when they’ve not left off being together for a single day for two whole years. What we both need is a holiday.”
“My husband,” went on Mrs. Wilkins to Mrs. Arbuthnot, trying to throw some light on herself, “is a solicitor. He—” She cast about for something she could say elucidatory of Mellersh, and found: “He’s very handsome.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot kindly, “that must be a great pleasure to you.”
“Why?” asked Mrs. Wilkins.
“Because,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, a little taken aback, for constant intercourse with the poor had accustomed her to have her pronouncements accepted without question, “because beauty—handsomeness—is a gift like any other, and
