“So I told him that I wouldn’t sit down, thinking of course he’d urge me to. But he just raised his eyebrows in the most quizzical way and said, ‘Well?’
“Of course I couldn’t let matters rest like that so I sat down and began talking to him, nothing much you know, just telling him how wonderful he was and letting him see that I’d be glad to know him better. You should have seen him looking at me and not saying a word. Presently he reached out his hand and touched a bell and Miss Thing-um-bob came in—your friend, you know, Miss Powell. He looked at her and nodding toward me said: ‘Take her away.’ I never felt such small potatoes in my life. I tell you he’s a personage. Wasn’t it great?”
Martha replied crossly that the whole thing seemed to her in dreadfully poor taste, while Miss Powell, after one incredulous stare at the first speaker, applied herself more sedulously to her work. Even Anthony, shocked out of his habitual moroseness pronounced the proceedings “a bit thick, Miss Lister.” Angela conscious of a swelling pride, stowed the incident away as a titbit for Virginia.
IV
Life had somehow come to a standstill; gone was its quality of high adventure and yet with the sense of tameness came no compensating note of assurance, of permanence. Angela pondered much about this; with her usual instinct for clarity, for a complete understanding of her own emotional life, she took to probing her inner consciousness. The fault, she decided, was bound up in her relationship with Roger. At present in a certain sense she might be said to be living for him; at least his was the figure about which her life resolved, revolved. Yet she no longer had the old, heady desire to feel herself completely his, to claim him as completely hers, neither for his wealth nor for the sense of security which he could afford nor for himself. For some reason he had lost his charm for her, much, she suspected, in the same way in which girls in the position which was hers, often lost their charm for their lovers.
And this realization instead of bringing to her a sense of relief, brought a certain real if somewhat fantastic shame. If there was to be no permanence in the relationship, if laying aside the question of marriage, it was to lack the dignity, the graciousness of an affair of long standing, of sympathy, of mutual need, then indeed according to the code of her childhood, according to every code of every phase of her development, she had allowed herself to drift into an inexcusably vulgar predicament. Even when her material safety and security were at stake and she had dreamed vaguely of yielding to Roger’s entreaties to ensure that safety and security, there might have been some excuse. Life, she considered, came before creed or code or convention. Or if she had loved and there had been no other way she might have argued for this as the supreme experience of her life. But she was no longer conscious of striving for marriage with Roger; and as for love—she had known a feeling of gratitude, intense interest, even intense possessiveness for him but she did not believe she had ever known love.
But because of this mingling of shame and reproach she found herself consciously striving to keep their relations on the highest plane possible in the circumstances. She wished now not so much that she had never left Jinny and the security of their common home-life, as that the necessity for it had never arisen. Now suddenly she found herself lonely, she had been in New York nearly three years but not even yet had she struck down deep into the lode of genuine friendship. Paulette was kind and generous; she desired, she said, a close woman friend but Paulette was still the adventuress. She was as likely to change her vocation and her place of dwelling as she was to change her lover. Martha Burden, at once more stable and more comprehending in the conduct of a friendship once she had elected for it, was, on the other hand, much more conservative in the expenditure of that friendliness; besides she was by her very nature as reserved as Paulette was expansive, and her native intenseness made it difficult for her to dwell very long on the needs of anyone whose problems did not centre around her own extremely fixed ideas and principles.
As for Anthony Cross—by some curious, utterly inexplicable revulsion of feeling, Angela could not bring herself to dwell long on the possibilities of a friendship with him. Somehow it seemed to her sacrilegious in her present condition to bring the memory of that far-off day in Van Cortlandt Park back to mind. As soon as his image arose she dismissed it, though there were moments when it was impossible for his vision to come before her without its instantly bringing to mind Rachel Salting’s notions of love and self-sacrifice. Well, such dreams were not for her, she told herself impatiently. For her own soul’s integrity she must make the most of this state in which she now found herself. Either she must effect through it a marriage whose excuse should be that of safety, assurance and a resulting usefulness; or she must resolve it by patience, steadfastness and affection into a very apotheosis of “free love.” Of all possible affaires du coeur this must in semblance at any rate, be the ultimate image desideration, the finest flower of chivalry and devotion.
To this end she began then devoting herself again to the renewal of that sense of possessiveness in Roger and his affairs which had once been so spontaneous within her. But to this Roger presented unexpected barriers; he grew restive under such manifestations; he who had once fought so bitterly against her indifference resented
