“Why is it,” he concluded, forgetting that he was making an uncomplimentary comment on his own successes, “that women always needs must love the lowest when they see it—or rather him? Curious. Particularly in this case. One would have given Rachel Quarles too much sense to be taken in by such a vacuum.”
Other people had thought so too, had also wondered why. Rachel Quarles seemed so incomparably too good for her husband. But one does not marry a set of virtues and talents; one marries an individual human being. The Sidney Quarles who had proposed to Rachel was a young man whom anyone might have fallen in love with and even believed in—anyone; and Rachel was only eighteen and particularly inexperienced. He too was young (youth is in itself a virtue), young and good looking. Broad-shouldered and proportionately tall, portly now to the verge of stoutness, Sidney Quarles was still an imposing figure. At twenty-three the big body had been athletic, the greyish hair which now surrounded a pink and polished tonsure had then been golden-brown and had covered the whole of his scalp with a waving luxuriance. The large, high-coloured, fleshy face had been fresher, firmer, less moon-like. The forehead, even before baldness had set in, had seemed intellectual in its smooth height. Nor did Sidney Quarles’s conversation belie the circumstantial evidence offered by his brow. He talked well, albeit perhaps with a little too much arrogance and self-satisfaction for every taste. Moreover, he had at that time a reputation; he had just come down from the university in something that was almost a blaze of academic and debating-society glory. On the virgin expanses of his future sanguine friends painted the brightest visions. At the time when Rachel first knew him, these prophecies had a positively reasonable air. And in any case, reasonably or unreasonably, she loved him. They were married when she was only nineteen.
From his father Sidney had inherited a handsome fortune. The business (old Mr. Quarles was in sugar) was a going concern. The estate in Essex paid its way. The town house was in Portman Square, the country house at Chamford was commodious and Georgian. Sidney’s ambitions were political. After an apprenticeship in local government, he would go into Parliament. Hard work, speeches at once sound and brilliant would mark him out as the coming man. He would be offered an assistant under-secretaryship, there would be rapid promotions. He might expect (so at least it had seemed five and thirty years ago) to realize the most extravagant ambitions.
But Sidney, as old Bidlake had said, was only a façade, an impressive appearance, a voice, a superficial cleverness, and nothing more. Behind the handsome front lived the genuine Sidney, feeble, lacking all tenacity of purpose in important matters, though obstinate where trifles were concerned, easily fired with enthusiasm, and still more easily bored. Even the cleverness turned out to be no more than the kind of cleverness which enables brilliant schoolboys to write Ovidian Latin verses or humorous parodies of Herodotus. Brought to the tests, this sixth-form ability proved to be as impotent in the purely intellectual as in the practical sphere. For when, by a course of neglect tempered by feverish speculation and mismanagement, he had half ruined his father’s business (Rachel made him sell out completely before it was too late), when his political prospects had been completely ruined by years of alternating indolence and undisciplined activity, he decided that his real vocation was to be a publicist. In the first flush of this new conviction, he actually contrived to finish a book about the principles of government. Shallow and vague, commonplace with an ordinariness made emphatic by the pretensions of an ornate style that coruscated with verbal epigrams, the book met with a deserved neglect which Sidney Quarles attributed to the machinations of political enemies. He trusted to posterity for his due.
Ever since the publication of that first book Mr. Quarles had been writing, or at least had been supposed to be writing, another, much larger and more important, about democracy. The largeness and the importance justified an almost indefinite delay in its completion. He had already been at work on it for more than seven years and as yet, he would say to anyone who asked him about the progress of the book (shaking his head as he spoke with the expression of a man who bears an almost intolerable burden), as yet he had not even finished collecting the materials.
“It’s a labour of Hercules,” he would say with an air at once martyred and fatuously arrogant. He had a way when he spoke to you of tilting his face upward and shooting his words into the air, as though he were a howitzer, looking at you meanwhile, if he condescended to look at you at all, along his nose and from under half-shut eyelids. His voice was resonant and full of those baa-ings with which the very Oxonian are accustomed to enrich the English language. “Really” in Sidney’s mouth was always “ryahly,” “mere” was “myah.” It was as though a flock of sheep had broken loose in his vocabulary. “A labour of Hercules.” The words were accompanied by a sigh. “Ryahly fyahful.”
If the questioner were sufficiently sympathetic, he would take him into his study and show him (or preferably her) the enormous apparatus of card indices and steel filing cabinets which he had accumulated round his very professional-looking roll-top desk. As time passed and the book showed no signs of getting
