“It will give me the greatest happiness to renew the acquaintance,” said Sir Ralph and raised her hand to his lips.
Sir Ralph retired to rest that night more pleased with himself than ever.
VIII
An Artist Makes an Exhibition of Himself
No man has ever understood a woman, for the simple reason that woman is unintelligible even to her own kind. If she were not, and if she were susceptible to explanation by her own sisters, be sure that her own sisters would lose no time in telling the first man she met all about her.
Lady Moya Felton possessed that rare combination of talents, beauty and acumen. She dressed well, she spoke well, and she looked well. She was a product of Newnham, an institution which, more often than not, gives the world a being which is something less than a woman and something more than a babu. This being is crammed with erudition and for many years fights life with a textbook. Sometimes she continues to the end, very self-assured, very confident of the facts she has culled from the printed page and very determined that she will never surrender her mechanical facts or her machine-made values. Sometimes, she succumbs to the humanising influences which daily contact with the verities of life bring to her and develops into a useful and charming member of society.
Moya had absorbed just as much of life as she thought was necessary to her comfort. She stopped short of the supreme lesson which finds expression in cheerful sacrifice but she was an eminently pleasing person and never discussed biological justice or gave forth as her own the shoddy philosophies she had acquired in hall. Therefore, she was bearable. Moreover, by realising—here her instinct served her—that Newnham had turned her out fit for nothing better than a churchgoing school ma’am, she conveyed an impression of her education rather than declaimed the fact.
Practical as she was, she had a guilty secret, not only a very dear one, to be hugged tight to her heart, but one which evoked the unusual emotion of profound disapproval in the more ordered compartments of her mind. Moya was a dreamer, a cold-blooded romanticist who had wonderful adventures with wonderful people whenever she walked or rode abroad. In the privacy of her big limousine, she would be absorbed in events of her own creation, wholly monopolised by men and women who bore no likeness to and had no relation with any person in her somewhat extensive list of acquaintances. She would often find herself in situations so absurdly impossible that even the penny novelette reader would have rejected them with the scorn which their crudity deserved. She did not dream of living people, the mere mental suggestion—for the roving mind has a trick of taking charge at times—that any of her visionary heroes had his prototype in flesh and blood ensured the ejection of the offending dream-man and the substitution of another, more wildly improbable but at the same time more unlikely to challenge relationship with anybody in the material world.
She could dream and yet accept the cold practicality of a Ralph Sapson and calmly consider a marriage so hopelessly prosaic.
That was inexplicable.
For an engaged lover Ralph had been singularly remiss. He had called once since his unemotional declaration of love. To do him justice he had skipped the tender demonstrations which usually accompany even the most formal engagements and had got down to the question of settlement in the shortest space of time. This was as Moya could wish, for she also was embarrassed at the thought that a human being might possibly approach—suffering in comparison—the extravagance, wordless and intangible as it was, of her shadowy friends.
It is a remarkable circumstance that romance in concrete form did not come to Moya, until the very week she engaged herself to marry Sir Ralph Sapson. It came in a curious way. She had driven to Leicester Square to see an exhibition of pictures. It was one of those collections which dawn upon London, bringing in its wake a name which has never been heard before, save in a very select circle and is never heard again outside of that circle; an orbit which swings beyond the ken of ordinary mortals.
She went into the gallery and found it a veritable desert. Save for a young man and a small, pinched and preoccupied girl, wearing a large pendant in which was inserted the photograph of her uninteresting fiancé, the place was empty. The girl with the pendant carried her excuse in her hand, in the shape of a bunch of catalogues. There was less excuse for the young man for he was healthy in appearance and it was not raining.
Moya began a conscientious inspection of the pictures, chiefly remarkable for their colouring and for the atmosphere which the artist had managed to secure. Indeed, the pictures were all atmosphere. The girl made a slow progress along the wall, comparing each framed atrocity with her catalogue and striving to sense, dimly, something of the artist’s honourable intentions.
She looked around once to discover what effect the pictures had upon her fellow sightseer. He was standing before a long panel representing, if the catalogue had been rightly compiled, A Blue Wind on a Green Hill. His face bore an expression of the deepest gloom, his hat was tilted to the back of his head and his hands were thrust deeply into his trousers pockets. The longer he looked at the Blue Wind on the Green Hill the more morose and unhappy did he appear.
This then was the attitude which the new colourist school demanded, one of fierce but approving antagonism if the paradox be permitted.
She moved up till she was almost by his side, never
