He was talking to Janet Cardiff at one of Lady Halifax's afternoon teas a fortnight later, when their hostess advanced toward them interrogatively. "While I think of it, Janet," said she laying a mittened hand on Miss Cardiff's arm, "what has become of your eccentric little American friend? I sent her a card a month ago, and we've neither heard nor seen anything of her."
"Elfrida Bell—oh, she's out of town, Lady Halifax, and I am rather desolate without her—we see so much of her, you know. But she will be back soon—I dare say I will be able to bring her next Thursday. How delicious this coffee is! I shall have another cup, if it keeps me awake for a week. Oh, you got my note about the concert, dear lady?"
Kendal noticed the adroitness of her chatter with amusement. Before she had half finished Lady Halifax had taken an initial step toward moving off, and Janet's last words received only a nod and a smile for reply.
"You know, then?" said he, when that excellent woman was safely out of earshot.
"Yes, I know," Janet answered, twisting the hanging end of her long-haired boa about her wrist. "I feel as if I oughtn't to, but daddy told me. Daddy went, you know, to try to persuade her to give it up. I was so angry with him for doing it. He might have known Elfrida better. And it was such a—Such a criticism!"
"I wish you would tell me-what you really think," said
Kendal audaciously.
Janet sipped her coffee nervously. "I—I have no right to think," she returned. "I am not in Frida's confidence in the matter. But of course she is perfectly right, from, her point of view."
"Ah!" Kendal said, "her point of view."
Janet looked up at him with a sudden perception of the coldness of his tone. In spite of herself it gave her keen happiness, until the reflection came that probably he resented her qualification, and turned her heart to lead. She searched her soul for words.
"If she wants to do this thing, she has taken, of course, the only way to do it well. She does not need any justification—none at all. I wish she were back," Janet went on desperately, "but only for my own sake—I don't like being out of it with her; not for any reason connected with what she is doing."
There was an appreciable pause between them. "Let me put down your cup," suggested Kendal.
Turning to her again, he said gravely, "I saw Miss Bell at Cheynemouth, too." Janet's hands trembled as she fastened the fur at her throat. "And I also wish she were back. But my reason is not, I am afraid, so simple as yours."
"Here is daddy," Janet answered, "and I know he wants to go. I don't think my father is looking quite as well as he ought to. He doesn't complain, but I suspect him of concealed neuralgia. Please give him a lecture upon over-doing—it's the predominant vice of his character!"
CHAPTER XXVI.
Elfrida spent five weeks with the Peach Blossom Company on their provincial tour, and in the end the manager was sorry to lose her. He was under the impression that she had joined them as an aspiring novice, presumably able to gratify that or any other whim. He had guessed that she was clever, and could see that she was extremely good-looking. Before the month was out he was congratulating himself upon his perception much as Rattray had a habit of doing, and was quite ready to give Elfrida every encouragement she wanted to embrace the burlesque stage seriously—it was a thundering pity she hadn't voice enough for comic opera. He had nothing to complain of; the arrangement had been for a few weeks only, and had cost him the merest trifle of travelling expenses; but the day Elfrida went back to town he was inclined to parley with her, to discuss the situation, and to make suggestions for her future plan of action. His attitude of visible regret added another thrill to the joy the girl had in the thought of her undertaking; it marked a point of her success, she thought, at least so far as preliminaries went. Already, as she shrank fastidiously into the corner of a third-class travelling-carriage, her project seemed to have reached its original and notable materialization. Chapters passed before her eyes as they do sometimes in dreams, full of charm and beauty; the book went through every phase of comedy and pathos, always ringing true. Little half-formed sentences of admirable art rose before her mind, and she hastily barred them out, feeling that she was not ready yet, and it would be mad misery to want them and to have forgotten them. The thought of what she meant to do possessed her wholly, though, and she resigned herself to dreams of the most effective arrangement of her material, the selection of her publisher, the long midnight hours alone with Buddha, in which she should give herself up to the enthralment of speaking with that voice which she could summon, that elusive voice which she lived only, only to be the medium for—that precious voice which would be heard one day, yes, and listened-to.
She was so freshly impressed with the new life-lights, curious, tawdry, fascinating, revolting, above all sharp and undisguised, of the world she had left, that she saw them already projected with a verisimilitude which, if she had possessed the art of it, would have made her indeed famous. Her own power of realization, assured her on this point—nobody could see, not divine but see, as she did, without being able to reproduce; the one implied the other. She fingered feverishly the strap of the little hand-bag in her lap, and satisfied herself by unlocking it with a key that hung on a String inside her jacket. It had two or three photographs of the women she knew among the company, another of herself in her stage uniform, a bill of the play, her powder-puff and rouge-box, a scrap of gold lace, a young Jew's letter full of blots and devotion, a rather vulgar sapphire bracelet, some artificial flowers, and a quantity of slips of paper of all sizes covered with her own enigmatically rounded handwriting. She put her hand in carefully and searched—everything was there; and up from the bag came a scent that made her shut her eyes and laugh with its power to bring her experiences back to her. She locked it; carefully again with a quivering sigh—after all she would not have many hours to wait. Presently an idea came to her that she thought worth keeping, and she thrust her hand into her pocket for paper and pencil. She drew out a crumpled oblong scrap and wrote on the back of it, then unlocked the little bag again and put it carefully in. Before it had been only the check of the Illustrated Age for a fortnight's work; now it was the record of something valuable.
The train rolled into a black and echoing station as the light in the carriage began to turn from the uncertain grayness that came in at the window to the uncertain yellowness that descended from the roof. Boys ran up and down the length of the platform in the foggy gaslit darkness shouting Banbury cakes and newspapers. Elfrida hated Banbury cakes, but she had a consuming hunger and bought some. She also hated English newspapers, but lately some queer new notable Australian things had been appearing in the St. George's Gazette—Cardiff had sent them to her—and she selected this journal from the damp lot that hung, over the newsboy's arm, on the chance of a fresh one. The doors were locked and the train hurried on. Elfrida ate two of her Banbury cakes with the malediction that only this British confection can inspire, and bestowed the rest upon a small boy who eyed her enviously over the back of an adjoining seat She and the small boy and his mother had the carriage to themselves.
There was nothing from the unusual Australian contributor in this number of the St. George's, and Elfrida turned its pages with the bored feeling of knowing what else she might expect. "Parliamentary Debates," of course, and the news of London, five lines from America announcing the burning of a New York hotel with hideous loss of life, an article on the situation in Persia, and one on the cultivation of artichokes, "Money," "The Seer of Hawarden," the foreign markets—book reviews. Elfrida thought also that she knew what she might expect here, and that it would be nothing very absorbing. Still, with a sense of tasting criticism in advance, she let her eye travel over the column or two the paper devoted to three or four books of the week. A moment later Janet Cardiff's name in the second paragraph had sprung at her throat, it seemed to Elfrida, and choked her.
She could not see—she could not see! The print was so bad, the light was infernal, the carriage jolted so. She got up and held the paper nearer to the lamp in the roof, staying herself against the end of a seat. As she read she grew paler, and the paper shook in her hand. "One of the valuable books of the year," "showing grasp of character and keen dramatic instinct," "a distinctly original vein," "too slender a plot for perfect symmetry, but a treatment of situation at once nervous and strong," were some of the commonplaces that said themselves over and again in her mind as she sank back into her place by the window with the paper lying across her lap.
Her heart beat furiously, her head was in a whirl; she stared hard, for calmness, into the swift-passing night outside. Presently she recognized herself to be angry with an intense still jealous anger that seemed to rise and consume her in every part of her being. A success—of course it would be a success if Janet wrote it—she was not artistic enough to fail. Ah, should Janet's friend go so far as to say that? She didn't know—she would think afterward; but Janet was of those who succeed, and there were more ways than one of deserving success. Janet was a compromise; she belonged really to the British public and the class of Academy studies from the nude which were always draped, just a little. Elfrida found a bitter satisfaction in this simile, and elaborated it. The book would be one to be commended for jeunes filles, and her lips turned down mockingly in the shadow. She fancied some well-meaning critic saying, "It should be on every drawing-room table," and she almost laughed outright. She thought of a number of other little things that might be said, of the same nature and equally amusing. Her anger flamed up again at the thought of how Janet had concealed this ambition from her, had made her, in a way, the victim of it. It was not fair—not fair! She could have prepared herself against it; she might have got her book ready sooner, and its triumphant editions might at least have come out side by side with Janet's. She was just beginning to feel that they were neck and neck, in a way, and now Janet had shot so far ahead, in a night, in a paragraph. She could never, never catch up! And from under her closed eyelids two hot tears started and ran over her cold cheeks. It came upon her suddenly that she was sick with jealousy, not envy, but pure anger at being distanced, and she tried to attack herself about it. With a strong effort she heaped opprobrium and shame upon herself, denounced herself, tried to hate herself. But she felt that it was all a kind of dumb-show, and that under it nothing could change the person she was or the real feeling she had about this—nothing except being first. Ah! then she could be generous and loyal and disinterested; then she could be really a nice person to know, she derided herself. And as her foot touched the little hand-bag on the floor she took a kind of sullen courage, which deserted her when she folded the paper on her lap and was struck again in the face with Lash and Black's advertisement on the outside page announcing Janet's novel in letters that looked half a foot long. Then she resigned herself to her wretchedness till the train sped into the glory of Paddington.
"I hope you're not bad, miss," remarked the small boy's mother as they pushed toward the door together; "them Banburys don't agree with everybody."
The effect upon Elfrida was hysterical. She controlled herself just long enough to answer with decent gravity, and escaped upon the platform to burst into a silent quivering paroxysm of laughter that brought her overcharged feeling delicious relief, and produced an answering smile on the face of a large, good-looking policeman. Her laugh rested her, calmed her, and restored something of her moral tone. She was at least able to resist the temptation of asking the boy at the book-stall where she bought "John Camberwell" whether the volume was selling rapidly or not. Buddha looked on askance while she read it, all night long and well into the morning. She reached the last page and flung down the book in pure physical exhaustion, with the framework of half a dozen reviews in her mind. When she awoke, at two in the afternoon, she decided that she must have another day or two of solitude; she would not let the Cardiffs know she had returned quite yet.
Three days afterward the Illustrated Age published a review of "John Camberwell" which brought an agreeable perplexity to Messrs. Lash and Black. It was too good to compress, and their usual advertising space would not contain it all. It was almost passionately appreciative; here and there the effect of criticism was obviously marred by the desire of the writer to let no point of beauty or of value escape divination. Quotations from the book were culled like flowers, with a delicate hand; and there was conspicuous care in the avoidance of any phrase that was hackneyed, any line of criticism that custom had impoverished. It seemed that the writer fashioned a tribute, and strove to make it perfect in every way. And so perfect it was, so cunningly devised and gracefully expressed, with such a self-conscious beauty of word and thought, that its extravagance went unsuspected, and the interest it provoked was its own.
Janet read the review in glow of remorseful affection. She was appealed to less by the exquisite manipulation with which the phrases strove to say the most and the best, than by the loyal haste to praise she saw behind, them, and she forgave their lack of blame in the happy belief that Elfrida had not the heart for it. She was not in the least angry that her friend should have done her the injustice of what would have been, less adroitly managed, indiscriminate praise; in fact, she hardly thought of the value of the critique at all, so absorbed was she in the sweet sense of the impulse that made Elfrida write it. To Janet's quick forgiveness it made up for everything; indeed, she found in it a scourge for her anger, for her resentment. Elfrida might do what she pleased, Janet would never cavil again; she was sure now of some real possession in her friend. But she longed to see Elfrida, to assure herself of the warm verity of this. Besides, she wanted to feel her work in her friend's presence, to extract the censure that was due, to take the essence of praise from her eyes and voice and hand. But she would wait. She had still no right to know that Elfrida had returned, and an odd sensitiveness prevented her from driving instantly to Essex Court to ask.
The next day passed, and the next. Lawrence Cardiff found no reason to share his daughter's scruples, and went twice, to meet Mrs. Jordan on the threshold with the implacable statement that Miss Bell had returned but was not at home. He found it impossible to mention Elfrida to Janet now.
John Kendal had gone back to Devonshire to look after the thinning of a bit of his woodlands—one thing after another claimed his attention there. Janet had a gay note from him now and then, always en camarade, in which he deplored himself in the character of an intelligent land-owner, but in which she detected also a growing interest and satisfaction in all that he was finding to do. Janet saw it always with a throb of pleasure; his art was much to her, but the sympathy that bound him to the practical side of his world was more, though she would not have confessed it. She was unconsciously comforted by the sense that it was on the warm, bright, comprehensible side of his interest in life that she touched him—and that Elfrida did not touch him. The idea of the country house in Devonshire excluded Elfrida, and it was an exclusion Janet could be happy in conscientiously, since Elfrida did not care.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Even in view of her popular magazine articles and her literary name Janet's novel was a surprising success. There is no reason why we should follow the example of all the London critics except Elfrida Bell, and go into the detail of its slender story, and its fairly original, broadly human qualities of treatment, to explain this; the fact will, perhaps, be accepted without demonstration. It was a common phrase among the reviewers—though Messrs. Lash and Black carefully cut it out of their selections for advertisement—that the book with all its merits was in no way remarkable; and the publishers were as much astonished as anybody else when the first edition was exhausted in three weeks. Yet the agreeable fact remained that the reviewers gave it the amount of space usually assigned to books allowed to be remarkable, and that the Athenian announced the second edition to be had "at all book-sellers'" on a certain Monday. "When they say it is not remarkable," wrote Kendal to Janet, "they mean that it is not heroic, and that it is published in one volume, at six shillings. To be remarkable—to the trade—it should have dealt with epic passion, in three volumes, at thirty."
To him the book had a charm quite apart from its literary value, in the revelation it made of its author. It was the first piece of work Janet had done from a seriously artistic point of view, into which she had thrown herself without fence or guard, and it was to him as if she had stepped from behind a mask. He wrote to her about it with the confidence of the new relation it established between them; he looked forward with warm pleasure to the closer intimacy which it would bring. To Janet, living in this new sweetness of their better understanding, only one thing was lacking—Elfrida made no sign. If Janet could have known, it was impossible. In her review Elfrida had done all she could. She had forced herself to write it before she touched a line of her own work, and now, persistently remote in her attic, she strove every night over the pile of notes which represented the ambition that sent its roots daily deeper into the fibre of her being. Twice she made up her mind to go to Kensington Square, and found she could not—the last time being the day the Decade said that a new and larger edition of "John Camberwell" was in preparation.
Ten days after her return the maid at Kensington Square, with a curious look, brought up Elfrida's card to Janet. Miss Bell was in the drawing-room, she said. Yes, she had told Miss Bell Miss Cardiff was up in the library, but Miss Bell said she would wait in the drawing-room.
Janet looked at the card in astonishment, debating with herself what it might mean—such a formality was absurd between them. Why had not Elfrida come up at once to this third-story den of theirs she knew so well? What new preposterous caprice was this? She went down gravely, chilled; but before she reached the drawing-room door she resolved to take it another way, as a whim, as matter for scolding. After all, she was glad Elfrida had come back to her on any terms. She went in radiant, with a quick step, holding the card at arm's length.
"To what," she demanded mockingly, "am I to attribute the honor of this visit?" but she seized Elfrida lightly and kissed her on both cheeks before it was possible for her to reply.
The girl disengaged herself gently. "Oh I have come, like the rest, to lay my homage at your feet," she said, with a little smile that put spaces between them. "You did not expect me to deny myself that pleasure?"
"Don't be absurd, Frida. When did you come back to town?"
"When did I come back?" Elfrida repeated slowly, watching for the effect of her words. "On the first, I think it was."
"And this is the tenth!" Janet exclaimed; adding helplessly,
"You are an enigma! Why didn't you let me know?"
"How could I suppose that you would care to know anything just now—except what the papers tell you."
Janet regarded her silently, saying nothing. Under her look Elfrida's expression changed a little, grew uncomfortable. The elder girl felt the chill, the seriousness with which she received the card upstairs, return upon her suddenly, and she became aware that she could not, with self-respect, fight it any longer.
"If you thought that," she said gravely, "it was a curious thing to think. But I believe I am indebted to you for one of the pleasantest things the papers have been telling me," she went on, with constraint. "It was very kind—much too kind. Thank you very much."
Elfrida looked up, half frightened at the revulsion of her tone. "But—but your book is delightful. I was no more charmed than everybody must be. And it has made a tremendous hit, hasn't it?"
"Thanks, I believe it is doing a fair amount of credit to its publishers. They are very pushing people."
"How delicious it must feel!" Elfrida said. Her words were more like those of their ordinary relation, but her tone and manner had the aloofness of the merest acquaintance. Janet felt a slow anger grow up in her. It was intolerable, this dictation of their relation. Elfrida desired a change—she should have it, but not at her caprice. Janet's innate dominance rose up and asserted a superior right to make the terms between them, and all the hidden jar, the unacknowledged contempt, the irritation, the hurt and the stress of the year that had passed rushed in from banishment and gained possession of her. She took just an appreciable instant to steady herself, and then her gray eyes regarded Elfrida with a calm remoteness in them which gave the other girl a quick impression of having done more than she meant to do, gone too far to return. Their glances met, and Elfrida's eyes, unquiet and undecided, dropped before Janet's. Already she had a vibrant regret.
"You enjoyed being out of town, of course," Janet said. "It is always pleasant to leave London for a while, I think."
There was a cool masterfulness in the tone of this that arrested Elfrida's feeling of half-penitence, and armed her instantly. Whatever desire she had felt to assert and indulge her individuality at any expense, in her own attitude there had been the consciousness of what they owed one another. She had defied it, perhaps, but it had been there. In this it was ignored; Janet had gone a step further—her tone expressed the blankest indifference. Elfrida drew herself up.
"Thanks, it was delightful. An escape from London always is, as you say. Unfortunately, one is obliged to come back."
Janet laughed lightly. "Oh, I don't know that I go so far as that. I rather like coming back too. And you have missed one or two things, you know, by being away."
"The Lord Mayor's Show?" asked Elfrida, angry that she could not restrain the curl of her lip.
"Oh dear, no! That comes off in November—don't you remember? Things at the theatres chiefly. Oh, Jessie, Jessie!" she went on, shaking her head at the maid who had come in with the tray, "you're a quarter of an hour late with tea! Make it for us now, where you are, and remember that Miss Bell doesn't like cream."
The maid blushed and smiled under the easy reproof, and did as she was told. Janet chatted on pleasantly about the one or two first nights she had seen, and Elfrida felt for a moment that the situation was hopelessly changed. She had an intense, unreasonable indignation. The maid had scarcely left the room when her blind search for means of retaliation succeeded.
"But one is not necessarily wholly Without diversions in the provinces. I had, for instance, the pleasure of a visit from Mr. Cardiff."
"Oh yes, I heard of that," Janet returned, smiling. "My father thought that we were being improperly robbed of your society, and went to try to persuade you to return, didn't he? I told him I thought it a shocking liberty; but you ought to forgive him—on the ground of his disappointment."
The cup Elfrida held shook in its saucer, and she put it down to silence it. Janet did not know, did not suspect, then. Well, she should; her indifference was too maddening.
"Under the circumstances it was not a liberty at all.
Mr. Cardiff wanted me to come back to marry him."
There! It was done, and as brutally as possible. Her vanity was avenged—she could have her triumphs too. And instant with its gratification came the cold recoil of herself upon herself, a sense of shame, a longing to undo.
Janet took the announcement with the very slightest lifting of her eyebrows. She bent her head and stirred her teacup meditatively, then looked up gravely at Elfrida.
"Really?" she said. "And may I ask—whether you have come back for that?"
"I—I hardly know," Elfrida faltered. "You know what I think about marriage—there is so much to consider."
"Doubtless," Janet returned. Her head was throbbing with the question why this girl would not go—go—go! How had she the hardihood to stay another instant! At any moment her father might come in, and then how could she support the situation? But all she added was, "I am afraid it is a matter which we cannot very well discuss." Then a bold thought came to her, and without weighing it she put it into words. The answer might put everything definitely—so definitely—at an end.
"Mr. Kendal went to remonstrate with you, too, didn't he? It must have been very troublesome and embarrassing—"
Janet stopped. Elfrida had turned paler, and her eyes greatened with excitement. "No," she said, "I did not see Mr. Kendal. What do you mean? Tell me!"
"Perhaps I have no right. But he told me that he had seen you, at Cheynemouth."
"He must have been in the audience," Elfrida returned, in a voice that was hardly audible.
"Perhaps."
For a moment there was silence between them—a natural silence, and no dumbness. They had forgotten about themselves in the absorption of other thoughts.
"I must go," Elfrida said, with an effort; rising. What had come to her with this thing Janet had told her? Why had she this strange fullness in the beating of her heart, this sense, part of shame, part of fright, part of happiness, that had taken possession of her? What had become of her strained feeling about Janet? For it had gone, gone utterly, and with it all her pride, all her self-control. She was conscious only of a great need of somebody's strength, of somebody's thought and interest —of Janet's. Yet how could she unsay anything? She held out her hand, and Janet took it. "Good-by, then," she said.
"Good-by; I hope you will escape the rain." But at the door Elfrida turned and came back. Janet was mechanically stirring the coals in the grate.
"Listen!" she said. "I want to tell you something about myself."
Janet looked up with an inward impatience. She knew these little repentant self-revealings so well.
"I know I'm a beast—I can't help it. Ever since I heard of your success I've been hating it! You can laugh if you like, but I've been jealous—oh, I'm not deceived; very well, we are acquainted, myself and I! It's pure jealousy—I admit it. I despise it, but there it is. You have everything; you succeed in all the things you do—you suffocate me—do you understand? Always the first place, always the attention, the consideration, wherever we go together. And your pretence—your lie —of believing my work as good as yours! I believe it —yes, I do, but you do not. Oh, I know you through and through, Janet Cardiff! And altogether," she went on passionately, "it has been too much for me. I have not been able to govern it. I have yielded, miserable that I am. But just now I felt it going away from me, Janet—" She paused, but there was no answer. Janet was looking contemplatively into the fire.
"And I made up my mind to say it straight out. It is better so, don't you think?"
"Oh yes, it is better so."
"I hate you sometimes—when you suffocate me with your cleverness—but I admire you tremendously always. So I suppose we can go on, can't we?"
"Ah!" Elfrida cried, noting Janet's hesitation with a kind of wonder—how should it be exacted of her to be anything more than frank? "I will go a step further to come back to you, my Janet. I will tell you a secret—the first one I ever had. Don't be afraid that I shall become your stepmother and hate me in advance. That is too absurd!" and the girl laughed ringingly. "Because—I believe I am in love with John Kendal!"
For answer Janet turned to her with the look of one pressed to the last extremity. "Is it true that you are going to write your own experiences in the corps de ballet?" she asked ironically.
"Quite true. I have done three chapters already. What do you think of it? Isn't it a good idea?"
"Do you really want to know?"
"Of course!"
"I think," said Janet slowly, looking into the fire, "that the scheme is a contemptible one, and that you are doing a very poor sort of thing in carrying it out."
"Thanks," Elfrida returned. "We are all pretty much alike, we women, aren't we, after all! Only some of us say so and some of us don't. But I shouldn't have thought you would have objected to my small rivalry before the fact!"
Janet sighed wearily, and looked out of the window. "Let me lend you an umbrella," she said; "the rain has come."
"It won't be necessary, thanks," Elfrida returned. "I hear Mr. Cardiff coming upstairs. I shall ask him to take care of me as far as the omnibuses. Good-by!"
CHAPTER XXVIII.
"Oh but—but," cried Elfrida, tragic-eyed, "you don't understand, my friend. And these pretences of mine are unendurable—I won't make another. This is the real reason why I can't go to your house: Janet knows —everything there is to know. I told her—I myself—in a fit of rage ten days ago, and then she said things and I said things, and—and there is nothing now between us any more!"
Lawrence Cardiff looked grave. "I am sorry for that," he said.
A middle-aged gentleman in apparently hopeless love does not confide in his grown-up daughter, and Janet's father had hardly thought of her seriously in connection with this new relation, which was to him so precarious and so sweet. Its realization had never been close enough for practical considerations; it was an image, something in the clouds; and if he still hoped and longed for its materialization there were times when he feared even to regard it too closely lest it should vanish. His first thought at this announcement of Elfrida's was of what it might signify of change, what bearing it had upon her feeling, upon her intention. Then he thought of its immediate results, which seemed to be unfortunate. But in the instant he had for reflection he did not consider Janet at all.
"Ah, yes! It was contemptible—but contemptible! I did it partly to hurt her, and partly, I think, to gratify my vanity. You would not have thought anything so bad of me perhaps?" She looked up at him childishly. They were strolling about the quiet spaces of the Temple Courts. It was a pleasant afternoon in February, the new grass was pushing up. They could be quite occupied with one another—they had the place almost to themselves. Elfrida's well-fitting shabby little jacket hung unbuttoned, and she swung Cardiff's light walking-stick as they sauntered. He, with his eyes on her delicately flushed face and his hands unprofessorially in his pockets, was counting the minutes that were left them.
"You wouldn't have, would you?" she insisted.
"I would think any womanly fault you like of you," he laughed, "but one—the fear to confess it."
Elfrida shut her lips with a little proud smile. "Do you know," she said confidingly, "when you say things like that to me I like you very much—but very much!"
"But not enough," he answered her quickly, "never enough,
Frida?"
The girl's expression changed. "You are not to call me 'Frida,'" she said, frowning a little. "It has an association that will always be painful to me. When people—disappoint me, I try to forget them in every way I can." She paused, and Cardiff saw that her eyes were full of tears. He had an instant of intense resentment against his daughter. What brutality had she been guilty of toward Elfrida in that moment of unreasonable jealousy that surged up between them? He would fiercely like to know. But Elfrida was smiling again, looking up at him in wilful disregard of her wet eyes.
"Say 'Elfrida' please—all of it."
They had reached the Inner Temple Hall. "Let us go in there and sit down," he suggested. "You must be tired—dear child."
She hesitated and submitted. "Yes, I am," she said. Presently they were sitting on one of the long dark polished wooden benches in the quiet and the rich light the ages have left in this place, keeping a mutual moment of silence. "How splendid it is!" Elfrida said restlessly, looking at the great carved wooden screen they had come through.
"The man who did that had a joy in his life, hadn't he?
To-day is very cheap and common, don't you think?"
He had hardly words to answer her vague question, so absorbed was he in the beauty and the grace and the interest with which she had suddenly invested the high-backed corner she sat in. He felt no desire to analyze her charm. He did not ask himself whether it was the poetry of her eyes and lips, or her sincerity about herself, or the joy in art that was the key to her soul, or all of these, or something that was none of them. He simply allowed himself to be possessed by it and Elfrida saw his pleasure in his eager look and in every line of his delicate features. It was delicious to be able to give such pleasure, she thought. She felt like a thrice spiritualized Hebe, lifting the cup, not to Jove, but to a very superior mortal. She wished in effect, as she looked at him, that he were of her essence—she might be cup-bearer to him always then. It was a graceful and unexacting occupation. But he was not absolutely, and the question was how long—She started as he seemed to voice her thought.
"This can't go on, Elfrida!"
Cardiff had somehow possessed himself of her hand as it lay along the polished edge of the wooden seat. It was a privilege, she permitted him sometimes, with the tacit understanding that he was not to abuse it.
"And why not—for a little while? It is pleasant, I think."
"If you were in love you would know why. You are not, I know—you needn't say so. But it will come, Elfrida—only give it the chance. I would stake my soul on the certainty of being able to make you love me." His confidence in the power of his own passion was as strong as a boy's of twenty.
"If I were in love!" Elfrida repeated slowly, with an absent smile. "And you think it would come afterward. That is an exploded idea, my friend. I should feel as if I were acting out an old-fashioned novel—an old-fashioned second-rate novel."
She looked at him with eyes that invited him to share their laughter, but the smile he gave her was pitiful, if she could have known it. The strain she had bee putting upon him, and promised indefinitely to put upon him, was growing greater than he could bear.
"I am afraid I most ask you to decide," he said. "You have been telling me two things, dear. One thing with your lips and another thing with your eyes—and ways of doing. You tell me that I, must go, but you make it possible for me to stay. For God's sake let it be one or the other."
"I am so sorry. We could be friends of a sort, I think, but I can't marry you."
"You have never told me why."
"Shall I tell you truly, literally—brutally?"
"Of course!"
"Then it is not only because I don't love you—that there is not for me the common temptation to enter a form of bondage which, as I see it, is hateful. That is enough, but it is not all; it is not even the principal thing. It is"—she hesitated—"it is that—that we are different, you and I. It would-be preposterous," she went on hastily, "not to admit that you are infinitely superior—of course—and cleverer and wiser and more important in the world. And that will make me absurd in your eyes when I tell you that my whole life is wrapped up in a sense which I cannot see or feel that you have at all. You have much—oh, a great deal—outside of it, and I have nothing. My life is swayed in obedience to laws that you do not even know of. You can hardly be my friend, completely. As your wife I should suffer and you would suffer, in a false position which could never be altered."
She paused and looked at him seriously, and he felt that she believed what she had said. She had, at all events, given him full permission to go. And he was as far from being able to avail of himself of it as he had been before—further, for every moment those slender fingers rested in his made it more impossible to relinquish them, for always. So, he persisted, with a bitter sense of failure that would not wholly, honestly recognize itself.
"Is Golightly Ticke your friend—completely?"
"More—pardon me—than you could ever be," she answered him, undaunted by the contempt in his tone.
There was silence for a moment between them. Elfrida's wide-eyed gaze wandered appreciatively over the dusky interior, which for the man beside her barely existed.
"What a lot of English character there is here," she said softly. "How dignified it is, and conscientious, and restrained!"
It was as if she had not spoken. Cardiff stared with knit brows into the insoluble problem she had presented to him a moment longer. "How are we so different, Elfrida?" he broke out passionately. "You are a woman and I am a man; the world has dealt with us, educated us, differently, and I am older than I dare say I ought to be to hope for your love. But these are not differences that count, whatever their results may be. It seems to me trivial to speak of such things in this connection, but we like very much the same books, the same people. I grant you I don't know anything about pictures; but surely," he pleaded, "these are not the things that cut a man off from the happiness of a lifetime!"
"I'm afraid—" she began, and then she broke off suddenly. "I am sorry—sorrier than I have ever been before, I think. I should have liked so well to keep your friendship; it is the most chivalrous I know. But if you feel like—like this about it I suppose I must not. Shall we say good-by here and now? Truly I am sorry."
She had risen, and he could find no words to stay her. It seemed that the battle to possess her was over, and that he, had lost. Her desire for his friendship had all the mockery of freedom in it to him—in the agony of the moment it insulted him. With an effort he controlled himself—there should be no more of the futility of words. He must see the last of her some time—let it be now, then. He bent his head over the slender hand he held, brought his lips to it, and then, with sudden passion, kissed it hotly again and again, seeking the warm, uncovered little spot above the fastening. Elfrida snatched it away with a little shiver at the contact, a little angry shiver of surprised nerves. He looked at her piteously, struggling for a word, for any word to send away her repulsion, to bring her back to the mood of the moment before. But he could not find it; he seemed to have drifted hopelessly from her, to have lost all his reckonings.
"Well?" she said. She was held there partly by her sense of pity and partly by her desire to see the last, the very last of it.
"Go!" he returned, with a shrinking of pain at the word,
"I cannot."
"Pauvre ami!" she said softly, and then she turned, and her light steps sounded back to him through the length of the hall.
She walked more slowly when she reached the pavement outside, and one who met her might have thought she indulged in a fairly pleasant reverie. A little smile curved about the corners of her mouth, half compassionate, half amused and triumphant. She had barely time to banish it when she heard Cardiff's step beside her, and his voice.
"I had to come after you," he said; "I've let you carry off my stick."
She looked at him in mischievous challenge of his subterfuge, and he added frankly, with a voice that shook a little notwithstanding—
"It's of no use—I find I must accept your compromise. It is very good of you to be willing to make one. And I can't let you go altogether, Elfrida."
She gave him a happy smile. "And now," she said, "shall we talk of something else?"
CHAPTER XXIX.
March brought John Kendal back to town with a few Devonshire studies and a kindling discontent with the three subjects he had in hand for the May exhibitions. It spread over everything he had done for the last six months when he found himself alone with his canvases and whole-hearted toward them. He recognized that he had been dividing his interest, that his ambition had suffered, that his hand did not leap as it had before at the suggestion of some lyric or dramatic possibility of color. He even fancied that his drawing, which was his vulnerable point, had worsened. He worked strenuously for days without satisfying himself that he had recovered ground appreciably, and then came desperately to the conclusion that he wanted the stimulus of a new idea, a subject altogether disassociated with anything he had done. It was only, he felt, when his spirit was wholly in bondage to the charm of his work that he could do it well, and he needed to be bound afresh. Literally, he told himself, the only thing he had painted in months that pleased him was that mere sketch, from memory, of the Halifax drawing-room episode. He dragged it out and looked at it, under its damaging red stripes, with enthusiasm. Whatever she did with herself, he thought, Elfrida Bell was curiously satisfying from an artistic point of view. He fell into a train of meditation, which quickened presently into a practical idea that set him striding up and down the room.
"I believe she would be delighted!" he said aloud, coming to a sudden standstill; "and, by Jove, it would be a kind of reparation!"
He delved into an abysmal cupboard for a crusted pen and a cobwebby bottle of ink, and was presently sitting among the fragments of three notes addressed, one after the other, to "Dear Miss Bell." In the end he wrote a single line without any formality whatever, and when Elfrida opened it an hour later she read:
"Will you let me paint your portrait for the Academy?
"JOHN-KENDAL.
"P.S.—Or any other exhibition you may prefer."
The last line was a stroke of policy. "She abhors Burlington
House," he had reflected.
The answer came next day, and he tore it open with rapid fingers. "I can't think why—but if you wish it, yes. But why not for the Academy, since you are disposed to do me that honor?"
"Characteristic," thought Kendal grimly, as he tore up the note. "She can't think why. But I'm glad the Academy doesn't stick in her pretty throat—I was afraid it would. It's the potent influence of the Private View."
He wrote immediately in joyful gratitude to make an appointment for the next day, went to work vigorously about his preparations, and when he had finished smoked a series of pipes to calm the turbulence of his anticipations. As a neighboring clock struck five he put on his coat. Janet must know about this new idea of his; he longed to tell her, to talk about it over the old-fashioned Spode cup of tea she would give him—Janet was a connoisseur in tea. He realized as he went downstairs how much of the pleasure of his life was centering in these occasional afternoon gossips with her, in the mingled delight of her interest and the fragrance and the comfort of that half-hour over the Spode tea-cup. The association brought him a reminiscence that sent him smiling to the nearest confectioner's shop, where he ordered a supply of Italian cakes against the next day that would make an ample provision for the advent of half a dozen unexpected visitors to the studio. He would have to do his best with afternoon sittings, Elfrida was not available in the morning; and he thought compassionately that his sitter must not be starved. "I will feed her first," he thought ironically, remembering her keen childish enjoyment of sugared things. "She will pose all the better for some tea." And he walked on to Kensington Square.
CHAPTER XXX.
"Janet," said Lawrence Cardiff a week later at breakfast, "the Halifaxes have decided upon their American tour. I saw Lady Halifax last night and she tells me they sail on the twenty-first. They want you to go with them. Do you feel disposed to do it?"
Mr. Cardiff looked at his daughter with eyes from which the hardness that entered them weeks before in the Temple Courts had never quite disappeared. His face was worn and thin, its delicacy had sharpened, and he carried about with him an habitual abstraction. Janet, regarding him day after day in the light of her secret knowledge, gave herself up to an inward storm of anger and grief and anxiety. Elfrida's name had been tacitly dropped between them, but to Janet's sensitiveness she was constantly and painfully to be reckoned with in their common life. Lawrence Cardiff's moods were accountable to his daughter obviously by Elfrida's influence. She noted bitterly that his old evenness of temper, the gay placidity that made so delightful a basis for their joint happiness, had absolutely disappeared. Instead, she found her father either irritable or despondent, or inspired by a gaiety which she had no hand in producing, and which took no account of her. That was the real pain. Janet was keenly distressed at the little drama of suffering that unfolded itself daily before her, but her disapproval of its cause very much blunted her sense of its seriousness. She had, besides, a grown-up daughter's repulsion and impatience for a parental love-affair, and it is doubtful whether she would have brought her father's to a happy conclusion without a very severe struggle if she had possessed the power to do it. But this exclusion gave her a keener pang; she had shared so much with him before, had been so important to him always. And now he could propose, with perfect equanimity that she should go to America with the Halifaxes.
"But you could not get away by the twenty-first," she returned, trying to take it for granted that the idea included him.
"Oh, I don't propose going," Mr. Cardiff returned from behind his newspaper.
"But, daddy, they intend to be away for a year."
"About that. Lady Halifax has arranged a capital itinerary.
They mean to come back by India."
"And pray what would become of you all by yourself for a year, sir?" asked Janet brightly. "Besides, we were always going to do that trip together." She had a stubborn inward determination not to recognize this difference that had sprung up between them. It was only a phase, she told herself, of her father's miserable feeling just now; it would last another week, another fortnight, and then things would be as they had been before. She would not let herself believe in it, hurt as it might.
Mr. Cardiff lowered his paper. "Don't think of that," he said over the top of it. "There is really no occasion. I shall get on very well. There is always the club, you know. And this is an opportunity you ought not to miss."
Janet said nothing, and Lawrence Cardiff went back to his newspaper. She tried to go on with her breakfast, but scalding tears stood in her eyes, and she could not swallow. She was unable to command herself far enough to ask to be excused, and she rose abruptly and left the room with her face turned carefully away.
Cardiff followed her with his eyes and gave an uncomprehending shrug. He looked at his watch; there was still half an hour before he need leave the house. It brought him an uncomfortable thought that he might go and comfort Janet—it was evident that something he had said had hurt her—she was growing absurdly hypersensitive. He dismissed the idea—Heaven only knew into what complications it might lead them. He spent the time instead in a restless walk up and down the room, revolving whether Elfrida Bell would or would not be brought to reconsider her refusal to let him take her to "Faust" that night—he never could depend upon her.
Janet had not seen John Kendal since the afternoon he came to her radiant with his intention of putting all of Elfrida's elusive charm upon canvas, full of its intrinsic difficulties, eager for her sympathy, depending on her enthusiastic interest. She had disappointed him—she did her best, but the sympathy and enthusiasm and interest would not come. She could not tell him why—her broken friendship was still sacred to her for what it had been. Besides, explanations were impossible. So she listened and approved with a strained smile, and led him, with a persistence he did not understand, to talk of other things. He went away chilled and baffled, and he had not come again. She knew that he was painting with every nerve tense and eager, in oblivion to all but his work and the face that inspired it. Elfrida, he told her, was to give him three sittings a week, of an hour each, and he complained of the scantiness of the dole. She could conjure up those hours, all too short for his delight in his model and his work. Surely it would not be long now! Elfrida cared, by her own confession—Janet felt, dully, there could now be no doubt of that—and since Elfrida cared, what could be more certain than the natural issue? She fought with herself to accept it; she spent hours in seeking for the indifference that might come of accustoming herself to the fact. And when she thought of her father she hoped that it might be soon.
There came a day when Lawrence Cardiff gave, his daughter the happiness of being almost his other self again. He had come downstairs with a headache and a touch of fever, and all day long he let her take care of him submissively, with the old pleasant gratitude that seemed to re-establish their comradeship. She had a joyful secret wonder at the change, it was so sadden and so complete; but their sympathetic relation reasserted itself naturally and at once, and she would not let herself question it. In the evening he sent her to her room for a book of his, and when she brought it to him where he lay upon the lounge in the library he detained her a moment.
"You mustn't attempt to read without a lamp now, daddy," she said, touching his forehead lightly with her lips. "You will damage your poor old eyes."
"Don't be impertinent about my poor old eyes, miss," he returned, smiling. "Janet, there is something I think you ought to know."
"Yes, daddy." The girl felt herself turning rigid.
"I want you to make friends with Elfrida again. I have every reason to believe—at all events some reason to believe—that she will become my wife." Her knowing already made it simpler to say.
"Has—has she promised, daddy?"
"Not exactly. But I think she will, Janet." His tone was very confident. "And of course you must forgive each other any little heart-burnings there may have been between you."
Any little heart-burnings! Janet had a quivering moment of indecision. "Oh, daddy! she won't! she won't!" she cried tumultuously, and hurried out of the room. Cardiff lay still, smiling pityingly. What odd ideas women managed to get into their heads about one another! Janet thought Elfrida would refuse her overtures if she made them. How little she knew Elfrida—his just, candid, generous Elfrida!
Janet flung herself upon her bed and faced the situation, dry-eyed, with burning cheeks. She could always face a situation when it admitted the possibility of anything being done, when there was a chance for resolution and action. Practical difficulties nerved her; it was only before the blankness of a problem of pure abstractness that she quailed—such a problem as the complication of her relation to John Kendal and to Elfrida Bell. She had shrunk from that for months, had put it away habitually in the furthest corner of her consciousness, and had done her best to make it stay there. She discovered how sore its fret had been only with the relief she felt when she simplified it at a stroke that afternoon on which everything came to an end between her and Elfrida. Since the burden of obligation their relation imposed had been removed Janet had analyzed her friendship, and had found it wanting in many ways to which she had been wilfully blind before. The criticism she had always silenced came forward and spoke boldly; and she recognized the impossibility of a whole-hearted intimacy where a need for enforced dumbness existed. All the girl's charm she acknowledged with a heart wrung by the thought that it was no longer for her. She dwelt separately and long upon Elfrida's keen sense of justice, her impulsive generosity, her refined consideration for other people, the delicacy of some of her personal instincts, her absolute sincerity toward herself and the world, her passionate exaltation of what was to her the ideal in art. Janet exacted from herself the last jot of justice toward Elfrida in all these things; and then she listened, as she had not done before, to the voice that spoke to her from the very depths of her being, it seemed, and said, "Nevertheless, no!" She only half comprehended, and the words brought her a sadness that would be long, she knew, in leaving her; but she listened and agreed.
And now it seemed to her that she must ignore it again, that the wise, the necessary, the expedient thing to do was to go to Elfrida and re-establish, if she could, the old relation, cost what it might. She must take up her burden of obligation again in order that it might be mutual. Then she would have the right to beg Elfrida to stop playing fast and loose with her father, to act decisively. If Elfrida only knew, only realized, the difference it made, and how little right she had to control, at her whim, the happiness of any human being —and Janet brought a strong hand to bear upon her indignation, for she had resolved to go; and to go that night.
Lawrence-Cardiff bade his daughter an early, good-night after their unusually pleasant dinner. "Do you think you can do it?" he asked her before he went Janet started at the question, for they had not mentioned Elfrida again, even remotely.
"I think I can, daddy," she answered him gravely, and they separated. She looked at her watch; by half-past nine she could be in Essex Court.
Yes, Miss Bell was in, Miss Cardiff could go straight up, Mrs. Jordan informed her, and she mounted the last flight of stairs with a beating heart. Her mission was important—oh, so important! She had compromised with her conscience in planning it, and now if it should fail! Her hand trembled as she knocked. In answer to Elfrida's "Come in!" she pushed the door slowly open. "It is I, Janet," she said; "may I?"
"But of course!"
Elfrida rose from a confusion of sheets of manuscript upon the table and came forward, holding out her hand with an odd gleam in her eyes, and an amused, slightly excited smile about her lips.
"How do you, do?" she said, with rather ostentatiously suppressed wonder. "Please sit down, but not in that chair. It is not quite reliable. This one, I think is better. How are—how are you?"
The slight emphasis she placed on the last word was airy and regardless. Janet would have preferred to have been met by one of the old affectations; she would have felt herself taken more seriously.
"It's very late to come, and I interrupt you," she said awkwardly, glancing at the manuscript.
"Not at all. I am very happy—"
"But of course I had a special reason for coming. It is serious enough, I think, to justify me."
"What can it be!"
"Don't, Elfrida," Janet cried passionately. "Listen to me. I have come to try to make things right again between us—to ask you to forgive me for speaking as I—as I did about your writing that day. I am sorry—I am, indeed."
"I don't quite understand. You ask me to forgive you—but what question is there of forgiveness? You had a perfect right to your opinion, and I was glad to have it at last from you, frankly."
"But it offended you, Elfrida. It is what is accountable for the—the rupture between us."
"Perhaps. But not because it hurt my feelings," Elfrida returned scornfully, "in the ordinary sense. It offended me truly; but in quite another way. In what you said you put me on a different plane from yourself in the matter of artistic execution. Very well. I am content to stay there—in your opinion. But why this talk of forgiveness? Neither of us can alter anything. Only," Elfrida breathed quickly, "be sure that I will not be accepted by you upon those terms."
"That, wasn't what I meant in the least."
"What else could you have meant? And more than that," Elfrida went on rapidly—her phrases had the patness of formed conclusions—"what you said betrayed a totally different conception of art, as it expresses itself in the nudity of things, from the one I supposed you to hold. And, if you will pardon me for saying so, a much lower one. It seems to me that we cannot hold together there—that our aims and creeds are different, and that we have been comrades under false pretences. Perhaps we are both to blame for that; but we cannot change it, or the fact that we have found it out."
Janet bit her lip. The "nudity of things" brought her an instant's impulse toward hysteria—it was so characteristic a touch of candid exaggeration. But her need for reflection helped her to control it. Elfrida had taken a different ground from the one she expected—it was less simple, and a mere apology, however sincere, would not meet it. But there was one thing more which she could say, and with an effort she said it.
"Elfrida, suppose that, even as an expression of opinion—putting it aside as an expression of feeling toward you—what I said that day was not quite sincere. Suppose that I was not quite mistress of myself—I would rather not tell you why—"
"Is that true?" asked Elfrida directly.
"Yes, it is true. For the moment I wanted more than anything else in the world to break with you. I took the surest means."
The other girl regarded Janet steadfastly. "But if it is only a question of the degree of your sincerity," she persisted, "I cannot see that the situation alters much."
"I was not altogether responsible, believe me, Elfrida. I don't remember now what I said, but—but I am afraid it must have taken all its color from my feeling."
"Of course." Elfrida hesitated, and her tone showed her touched. "I can understand that what I told you about —about Mr. Cardiff must have been a shock. For the moment I became an animal, and turned upon you—upon you who had been to me the very soul of kindness. I have hated myself for it—you may be sure of that."
Janet Cardiff had a moment's inward struggle, and yielded. She would let Elfrida believe it had been that. After all it was partly true, and her lips refused absolutely to say the rest.
"Yes, it must have hurt you—more, perhaps, than I can guess." Elfrida's eyes grew wet and her voice shook. "But I can't understand your retaliating that way, if you didn't believe what you said. And if you believed it, what more is there to say?"
Janet felt herself possessed by an intense sensation of playing for stakes, unusual, exciting, and of some personal importance. She did not pause to regard her attitude from any other point of view; she succumbed at once, not without enjoyment, to the necessity for diplomacy. Under its rush of suggestions her conscience was only vaguely restive. To-morrow it would assert itself; unconsciously she put off paying attention to it until then. Elfrida must come back to her. For the moment the need was to choose her plea.
"It seems to me," she said slowly, "that there is something between us which is indestructible, Frida. We didn't make it, and we can't unmake it. For my part, I think it is worth our preserving, but I don't believe we could lose it if we tried. You may put me away from you for any reason that seems good to you, as far as you like, but so long as we both live there will be that something, recognized or unrecognized. All we can do arbitrarily is to make it a joy or a pain of it. Haven't you felt that?"
The other girl looked at her uncertainly. "I have felt it sometimes," she said, "but now it seems to me that I can never be sure that there is not some qualification in it—some hidden flaw."
"Don't you think it's worth making the best of? Can't we make up our minds to have a little charity for the flaws?"
Elfrida shook her head. "I don't think I'm capable of a friendship that demands charity," she said.
"And yet, whether we close each other's lips or not, we will always have things to say, the one to the other, in this world. Is it to be dumbness between us?"
There was a moment's silence in the room—a crucial moment, it seemed to both of them. Elfrida sat against the table with her elbows among its litter of paged manuscript, her face hidden in her hands. Janet rose and took a step or two toward her. Then she paused, and looked at the little bronze image on the table instead. Elfrida was suddenly shaken by deep, indrawn, silent sobs.
"It is finished, then," Janet said softly; "we are to separate for always, Buddha, she and I. She will not know any more of me nor I of her—it will be, so far as we can make it, like the grave. You must belong to a strange world, Buddha, always to smile!" She spoke evenly quietly, with, restraint, and still she did not look at the convulsively silent figure in the chair. "But I am glad you will always keep that face for her, Buddha. I hope the world will, too, our world that is sometimes more bitter than you can understand. And I say good-by to you, for to her I cannot say it." And she turned to go.
Elfrida stumbled to her feet and hurried to the door. "No!" she said, holding it fast. "No! You must not go that way—I owe you too much, after all. We will—we will make the best of it."
"Not on that ground," Janet answered gravely. "Neither your friendship nor mine is purchasable, I hope."
"No, no! That was bad. On any ground you like. Only stay a little—let us find ourselves again!"
Elfrida forced a smile into what she said, and Janet let herself be drawn back to a chair.
It was nearly midnight when she found herself again in her cab, driving through the empty lamplit Strand toward Kensington. She had prevailed, and now she had to scrutinize her methods. That necessity urged itself beyond her power to turn away from it, and left her sick at heart. She had prevailed—Elfrida, she believed, was hers again. They had talked as candidly as might be of her father. Elfrida had promised nothing, but she would, bring matters to an end, Janet knew she would, in a day or two, when she had had time to think how intolerable the situation would be if she didn't. Janet remembered with wonder, however, how little Elfrida seemed to realize that it need make any difference between them compared with other things, and what a trivial concession she thought it beside the restoration of the privileges of her friendship. The girl asked herself drearily how it would be possible that she should ever forget the frank cynical surprise with which Elfrida had received her entreaty, based on the fact of her father's unrest and the wretchedness of his false hopes—"You have your success; does it really matter—so very much?"