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Title: Winding Paths

Author: Gertrude Page

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Winding Paths.

By Gertrude Page.

"So many gods, so many creeds,
So many paths that wind and wind,
And just the art of being kind
Is all the sad world needs."




WINDING PATHS

CHAPTER I


There were several interesting points about Hal Pritchard and Lorraine
Vivian, but perhaps the most striking was their friendship for each
other.  From two wide-apart extremes they had somehow gravitated
together, and commenced at boarding-school a friendship which only
deepened and strengthened after their exit from the wise supervision of
the Misses Walton, and their entrance as "finished" young women into
the wide area of the world at large.

Lorraine went first.  She was six years older than Hal, and under
ordinary circumstances would hardly have been at school with her at
all.  As it was, she went at nineteen because she was not very strong,
and sea air was considered good for her.  She was a short of
parlour-boarder, sent to study languages and accomplishments while she
inhaled the sea air of Eastgate.  Why, among all the scholars, who for
the most part regarded her as a resplendent, beautifully dressed being
outside their sphere, she should have quickly developed an ardent
affection for Hal, the rough-and-ready tomboy, remained a mystery; but
far from being a passing fancy, it ripened steadily into a deep and
lasting attachment.

When Hal was fifteen, Lorraine left; and it has to be admitted that the
anxious, motherly hearts of the Misses Walton drew a deep breath of
relief, and hoped the friendship would now cease, unfed by daily
contact and daily mutual interests.  But there they under-estimated the
depth of affection already in the hearts of the girls, and their
natural loyalty, which scorned a mere question of separation, and
entered into one another's interests just as eagerly as when they were
together.

Not that they, the Misses Walton, had anything actually against
Lorraine, beyond the fact that she promised a degree of beauty likely,
they felt, coupled as it was with a charming wit and a fascinating
personality, to open out some striking career for her, and possibly
become a snare and a temptation.

On the other hand, Hal was just a homely, nondescript, untidy, riotous
type of schoolgirl, with a very strong capacity for affection, and an
unmanageable predilection for scrapes and adventures, that made her
more likely to fall under the sway of Lorraine, should it promise any
chance of excitement.

And one had only to view Lorraine among the other "young ladies" of the
seminary to fear the worst.  Miss Emily Walton would never have
admitted it; but even she, fondly clinging to the old tradition that
the terms "girls" or "women" are less impressive than "young ladies",
felt somehow that the orthodox nomenclature did not successfully fit
her two most remarkable pupils. Of course they were ladies by birth and
education, else they would certainly not have been admitted to so
select a seminary; but whereas the rest of the pupils might be said
more or less to study, and improve, and have their being in a milk and
biscuit atmosphere, Hal and Lorraine were quite uncomfortably more like
champagne and good, honest, frothing beer.

No amount of prunes and prism advice and surroundings seemed to dull
the sparkle in Lorraine, nor daunt nor suppress fearless, outspoken,
unmanageable Hal.  In separate camps, with a nice little following
each, to keep an even balance, they might merely have livened the free
hours; but as a combination it soon became apparent they would waken up
the embryo young ladies quite alarmingly, and initiate a new atmosphere
of gaiety that might become beyond the restraining, select influence
even of the Misses Walton.

The first scare came with the new French mistress, who had a perfect
Parisian accent, but knew very little English.  Of course Lorraine
easily divined this, and, being something of a French scholar already,
she soon won Mademoiselle's confidence by one or two charmingly
expressed, lucid French explanations.

Then came the translation lesson, and choosing a fable that would
specially lend itself, she started the class off translating it into an
English fabrication that convulsed both pupils and mistress.  Hal, of
course, followed suit, and the merriment grew fast and furious after a
few positively rowdy lessons.

Mademoiselle herself gave the fun away at the governesses' dinner, a
very precise and formal meal, which took place at seven o'clock, to be
followed at eight by the pupils' supper of bread-and-butter with
occasional sardines.  She related in broken English what an amusing
book they had to read, repeating a few slang terms, that would
certainly not, under anu circumstances, have been allowed to pass the
lips of the young ladies.

After that it was deemed advisable Lorraine should translate French
alone, and Hal be severely admonished.

Then there was the dreadful affair of the Boys' College.  It was not
unusual for them to walk past the school on Sunday afternoons; but it
was only after Lorraine came that a system was instituted by which, if
the four front boys all blew their noses as they passed, it was a
signal that a note, or possibly several, had been slipped under the
loose brick at the school entrance.

Further, it was only Lorraine who could have sent the answers, because
none of the other girls had an uncle often running down for a breath of
sea air, when, of course, he needed his dear niece's company.  He was
certainly a very attentive uncle, and a very generous one too, judging
by the Buszard's cakes and De Brei's chocolates, and Miss Walton could
not help eyeing him a little askance.

But then, as Miss Emily said, he was such a very striking,
distinguished-looking gentleman, people had already been interested to
learn he had a niece at the Misses Walton's seminary.  Besides, one
could not reasonably object to a relative calling, and he had seemed so
devoted to Lorraine's handsome mother when they had together brought
her to school.

But of course, after the disgraceful episode of the notes that blew
into the road, the windows had to be dulled at once, so that no one
could see the boys pass.  It was a mercy the thing had been discovered
so soon.

Then shortly after came the breaking-up dances, one for the
governesses, when the masters from the college were invited, and one
the next night for the girls, when the remains of the same supper did
duty again, and with reference to which Miss Walton gently told them
she had not been able to ask any of the boys from the school, as she
was afraid their parents would not approve; she hoped they were not
disappointed, and that the big girls would dance with the little ones,
as it pleased them so.

Lorraine immediately replied sweetly that none of them cared about
dancing with boys, and some of the children would be much more amusing.
 She made herself spokeswoman, because Miss Walton had
half-unconsciously glanced at her at the mere mention of the word boys,
fondly believing that the other well-brought-up pupils would prefer
their room to their company, whereas Lorraine might think the party
very tame.  Her answer was a pleasant surprise.

But then, who was to know that the night of the governesses' dance she
had bribed the three girls in the small dormitory to silence, and after
some half-dozen of them had gone to bed with their night-gowns over
their dresses, had given the signal to arise directly the dance was in
full swing.  After that they adjourned to the small dormitory and
spread out a repast of sweets and cakes, to which such of the younger
masters as were brave enough to risk detection slipped away up the
school staircase at intervals, to be more than rewarded by Lorraine's
inimitable mimicry.

"There will be no boys for you to dance with, dear girls," she told
them gently, "as your parents might not approve," then added, with
roguish lights in her splendid eyes: "No boys, dear girls, only a few
masters to supper in the small dormitory."

Hal's misdemeanours were of a less subtle kind.  Neither boys nor
masters interested her particularly as yet; but there were a
thousand-and-one other ways of livening things up, and she tried them
all, sometimes getting off scot free, and sometimes finding herself
uncomfortably pilloried before the rest of the school, to be
cross-questioned and severely admonished at great lenght before being
"sent to Coventry" for a stated period.

But, had she only known it, there were many chicken-hearted girls who
envied her even her disgrace, for the sake of the dauntless, shining
spirit of her that nothing ever crushed.  And as for being "sent to
Coventry", well, Hal and Lorraine easily coped with that through the
twopennyworth system.

If an offender was sent to Coventry, any other girl who spoke to her
had to pay a fine of twopence, and if either of these two glay spirits
found themselves doomed to silence, they persuaded such of the others
as were "game" enough, to have occasional "twopennyworths".

Of the two, Hal was far the greater favourite; she was in fact the
popular idol; for though the girls were full of admiration for
Lorraine, and not a little proud of her, they were also a little afraid
of a wit that could be sharp-edged, and perhaps resentful too of that
nameless something about her striking personality that made them feel
their inferiority.

Hal was quite different, and her unfailing spirits, her vigorous
championing of the oppressed, or scathing denunciation of anything
sneaky and mean, made them all look up to her, and love her, whether
she knew or not.

Even the governess felt her compelling attraction, and would often, by
a timely word, save her from the consequences of some forgetful moment.
 At the same time, the one who warned Miss Walton against the possible
ill results of the girl's growing love for Lorraine little understood
the nature she had to deal with.

When Hal found herself in the private sanctum, being gently admonished
concerning a friendship that was  thought to be growing too strong, she
was quick instantly to resent the slur on her chum.  She had been sent
for immediately after "evening prep.," and having, as usual, inked her
fingers generously, and rubbed an ink-smudge across her face, to say
nothing of really disgracefully tumbled hair, she looked a comical
enough object standing before the impressive presence of the head
mistress.

"Really, Hal," Miss Walton remonstrated, "can't you even keep tidy for
an hour in the evening?"

"Not when it's German night," answered outspoken Hal; "where to put the
verbs, and how to split them, makes my hair stand on end, and the ink
squirm out of the pot."

Miss Walton tried to look severe, remarking: "Don't be frivolous here,
my dear"; but, as Hal described it later, "she looked as if having so
often to be sedate was beginning to make her tired."

But when she proceeded to explain to Hal that neither she nor her
sister were easy in their minds about her growing devotion to Lorraine,
Hal's expressive mouth began to look rather stern, and neither the
ink-smudges nor the tousled hair could rob her of a certain naīve dignity
as she asked, "Are you implying anything against Lorraine?"

"No, no, my dear, certainly not," Miss Walton replied, feeling slightly
at a loss to express herself, "but I have never encouraged a violent
friendship between two girls that is apt to make them hold aloof from
the others, and be continually in one another's society.  And in this
instance, Lorraine being so much older than you, and of a temperament
hardly likely to appeal to your brother, as a desirable one in your
great friend -"

"I am not asking Dudley to make her his great friend -"

"Don't interrupt me, dear.  I am only speaking of what I am perfectly
aware are your brother's feeling concerning you; and seeing you have
neither father nor mother, I feel my responsibility and his the
greater."

"But what is the matter with Lorraine?" Hal cried, growing a little
exasperated.  "She is not nearly so frivolous as I am, and works far
harder."

Miss Walton hesitated a little.  "We feel she is naturally rather
worldly-minded and ambitious, whereas you -"  She paused.

"Whereas I am a simpleton," suggested Hal, with a mischievous light in
her eyes.  "Well, then, dear Miss Walton, how fortunate for me that
some one clever and briljant is willing to give me her friendship and
help to lift me out of my slough of simpletondom!"

Miss Walton looked up with a reproof on her lips, but it died away, and
a new expression came into her eyes as she seemed to see something in
this unruly pupil she had not before suspected.  Hal still looked as if
a smothered sense of injustice might presently explode into hot words;
but in the meantime the air of dignity stood its ground in spite of
smudges and untidiness.

Neither spoke for a moment, and then Miss Walton remarked: "You do not
mean to be guided by me in this matter?"

"Lorraine is my friend," Hal answered.  "I cannot let myself listen to
anything that suggests a slur upon her."

"Not even if your brother expressed a wish on the subject?"

"I do not ask Dudley to let me choose his friends."

"That is quite a different matter.  He is fifteen years your senior."

Hal was silent.  She stood with her hands behind her, and her head held
high, and her clear eyes very straight to the front; well-knit,
well-built, with a promise of that vague something which is so much
stronger a factor in the world than mere beauty.

Miss Walton, who necessarily saw much of the mediocre and commonplace
in her life-work of turning growing girls into presentable young women,
felt her feelings undergo a further change.  She also had the tact to
see an appeal would go farther than mere advice.

"I was only thinking of you, Hal," she said, a trifle tiredly. "I have
nothing against Lorraine, except that she is dangerously attractive if
she likes, and her love of admiration and excitement does not make her
a very wise friend for a girl of your age.  You are different, and your
paths are likely to lead far apart in the future.  It did not seem to
me desirable you should grow too fond of each other."

Even as she spoke she found herself wondering what Hal would say, and
in an unlooked-for way interested.

Hal answered promptly :

"I do not think our lives will lie apart.  Both of us will have to be
breadwinners at any rate, and that will be a bond."

Her mobile face seemed to change.  "Miss Walton, I'm devoted to
Lorraine.  I always shall be.  But you needn't be anxious.  The
stronger influence is not where you think.  I can bend Lorraine's will,
but she cannot bend mine.  It will always be so.  And nothing that you
nor any one can say will make me change to her."

They said little more, but when she was alone the head mistress stood
silently for some minutes looking into the dying embers of her fire.
Then she uttered to herself an enigmatical sentence:

"Beauty will give to Lorraine the great career; but the greater woman
will be Hal."

Shortly after that Lorraine departed, and about a year later embarked
in the theatrical world.

No one was surprised, but very adverse opinions were expressed among
the girls concerning her success or otherwise; those who were jealous,
or who had felt slighted during her short reign as school beauty,
condemning any possible likelihood of a hit.

Hal said very little.  She was already reaching out tentacles to the
wider world, where schoolgirl criticisms would be mere prattle; and it
was far more serious to her to wonder what Brother Dudley would think
of her having an actress for her greatest friend.

She foresaw rocks ahead, but smiled humorously to herself in spite of
them.

"What a tussle there'll be!" was her thought, "and how in the world am
I to convince Dudley that Lorraine does not represent a receptacle for
all the deadly sins?  Heigho!  The mere fact of my disagreeing will
persuade him I am already contaminated, and he will see us both
heading, like fire-engines, for the nethermost hell."





CHAPTER II


If Dudley Pritchard's imagination did not actually picture the lurid
and violent descent Hal suggested, it certainly did view with the
utmost alarm his lively young sister's friendship with a fully fledged
actress.

As a matter of fact, Miss Walton's prognostications concerning his
attitude to Lorraine Vivian, even as a schoolgirl, had been instantly
confirmed upon their first meeting.

For no particular reason he disapproved of her.  That was rather
typical of Dudley.  He disapproved of a good many things without quite
knowing why, or being at any particular pains to find out.

Not that it made him bigoted.  He could in fact be fairly tolerant; but
as Hal affectionately observed, Dudley was so apt to pat himself on the
back for his toleration towards things that it would never have occured
to most persons needed tolerating.

She knew perfectly well that he considered himself very tolerant
towards much that was to be deprecated in her, but, far from resenting
his attitude, she shaw chiefly the humorous side, and managed to glean
a good deal of quiet amusement from it.

Considering the fifteen years' difference in their ages, and the fact
that Dudley was a hard-working architect in London, seeing life on all
sides, while Hal was still a hoydenish schoolgirl, it was really
remarkable how thoroughly she grasped and understood his character, and
a great deal concerning the world in general, while he seemed to remain
at his first decisions concerning her and most things.

It was just perhaps the difference between the book-student and the
life-student.  Dudley had always had a passion for books and for his
profession.  His clever brain was a well of knowledge concerning
ancient architectures and relics of antiquity.  He studied them because
he loved them, and, before all things else, to him they seemed worth
while.

He loved his sister also - he loved her better than any one, but it
would never have occured to him that she should be studied, or that
there was anything in her to study.  To him she was quite an ordinary
girl, rather nice-looking when she was neat, but with a most
unfortunate lack of the sedate dignity and discretion that he
considered essential to the typically admirable woman.

That there might be other traits in their place, equally admirable, did
not occur to him.  They ware not at any rate the traits he most admired.

Hal, on the other hand, was different in every respect.  She loated
books, and learning, and what she called "dead old bones and rubbish."
But she loved human nature, and studied in in every phase she could.

Left at a very tender age to Dudley's sole care and protection, she had
to grow up without the enfolding, sympathetic love of a mother, or the
gay companionship of brothers and sisters.  Not in the least depressed,
she started off at an early age in quest of adventure to see what the
world was like outside the four walls of their home.

Brought back, sometimes by a policeman, with whom she had already
become on the friendliest terms, sometimes in a cab in which some one
else had placed her, sometimes by a kindly stranger, she would yet slip
away again on the first opportunity, into the crush of mankind.
Punishment and expostulation were alike useless; Hal was just as
fascinated with people as Dudley was with books, and where her nature
called she fearlessly followed.

Through this roving trait she picked up an amount of commonplace,
everyday knowledge that would have dumbfoundered the clever young
architect, had he been in the least able to comprehend it.  But while
he dipped enthusiastically into bygone ages, and won letters and
honours in his profession, she asked questions about life in the
present, and grappled with the problem of everyday existence and the
peculiarities of human nature, in a way that made her largely his
superior, despite his letters and honours.

And best of all was her complete understanding of him.  Dudley fondly
imagined he was fulfilling to the best possible endeavours his
obligations of love and guardianship to his young sister.  The young
sister, with her tender, quizzical understanding, regarded him as a
mere child, with a deliciously humorous way of always taking himself
very seriously; a brilliant brain, an irritating fund of superiority,
and something altogether apart that made him dearer than heaven and
earth and all things therein to her.

Hal might be dearer than all else to Dudley, without finding herself
loved in any way out of the ordinary, seeing how little he cared much
about except his profession; but to be the beloved of all, to an eager,
passionate, intense nature like hers, meant that in her heart she had
placed him upon a pedestal, and, while fondly having her little smile
over his shortcomings, yet loved him with an all-embracing love.  He
did not suspect it, and he would not have understood it if he had;
being rather of the opinion that, considering all he had tried to be to
her, she might have loved him enough in return to make a greater effort
to please him.

Her obdurate resistance during the first stage of his disapproval of
Lorraine Vivian increased this feeling considerably.  He felt that if
she really cared for him she should be willing to be guided by his
judgment; and while perceiving, just as Miss Walton had done, that she
meant to have her own way, he had less perspicacity to perceive also
that nameless trait which, for want of a better word, we sometimes call
grit, and which dimly proclaimed she  might be trusted to follow her
own strenght of character.

When, later, his attitude of displeasure increased a thousandfold.

He was not told of it just at first.  Hal was then in the throes of
convincing him that her particular talents lay in the direction of
secretarial work and journalism, rather than governessing or idleness,
and persuading him to make arrangements at once for her to learn
shorthand and typewriting with a view to becoming the private secretary
of a well-known editor of one of the leading newspapers.

The editor in question was a distant connection, and quite willing to
take her if she proved herself capable, recognising, through his skill
at reading character, that she might eventually prove invaluable in
other ways than mere letter-writing.

Dudley, seeing no farther than the fact of the City office, set his
face resolutely against it as long as he could; but, of course, in the
end Hal carried the day.  Then came the shock of the knowledge that
Lorraine had gone on the stage; and if, as had been said before, he did
not actually picture the lurid exit to the lower regions Hal gave him
credit for, he was sufficiently upset to have wakeful nights and many
anxious, worried hours.

And to make it worse, Hal would not even be serious.

"Oh, don't look like that, Dudley!" she cried; "we really are not in
any immediate danger of selling our souls to the Prince of Darkness.
You dear old solemnsides!  Just because Lorraine is going on the stage,
I believe you already see me in spangles, jumping through a hoop.  Or
rather 'trying to', because it is a dead cert.  I should miss the hoop,
and do a sort of double somersault over the horse's tail."

Dudley shut his firm lips a little more tightly, and looked hard at his
boots, without vouchsafing a reply.

"As a matter of fact," continued the incorrigible, "you ought to
perceive how beautifully life balances things, by giving a dangerously
attractive person like Lorraine a matter-of-fact, commonplace pal like
myself to restrain her, and at the same time ward of possible dangers
from various unoffending humans, who might fall hurtfully under her
spell."

"It is only the danger to you that I have anything to do with."

"Oh fie, Dudley! as if I mattered half as much as Humanity with a
capital H."

"To me, personally, you matter far more in this particular case."

"And yet, really, the chief danger to me is that I might unconsciously
catch some reflection of Lorraine's charm and become dangerously
attractive myself, instead of just an outspoken hobbledehoy no one
takes seriously."

"I am not afraid of that," he said, evoking a peal of laughter of which
he could not even see the point; "but since you are quite determined to
go into the City as a secretary, instead of procuring a nice
comfortable home as a companion, or staying quietly here to improve
your mind, I naturally feel you will encounter quite enough dangers
without getting mixed up in a theatrical set.  Though, really," in a
grumbling voice, "I can't see why you don't stay at home like any
sensible girl.  If I am not rich, I have at least enough for two."

"But if I stayed at home, and lived on you, Dudley, I should feel I had
to improve my mind by way of making you some return; and you can't
think how dreadfully my mind hates the idea of being improved.  And if
I went to some dear old lady as companion, she would be sure to die in
an apoplectic fit in a month, and I should be charged with
manslaughter.  And I can't teach, because I don't know anything.  The
only serious danger I shall run as Mr. Elliott's secretary will be
putting an occasional addition of my own to his letters, in a fit of
exasperation, or driving his sub-editor mad; and he seems willing to
risk that."

"You are likely to run greater dangers than that if you allow yourself
to be drawn into a theatrical circle."

"What sort of dangers?...  Oh, my dear, saintly episcopal architect,
what foundations of darkness are you building upon now, out of a little
old-fashioned, out-of-date prejudice which you might have dug up from
some of your studies in antiquity books?  There are just as many
dangers outside the theatrical world as in it, for the sort of woman
dangers are attractive to; and little Sunday-school teachers have come
to grief, while famous actresses have won through unscathed."

Dudley's face expressed both surprise and distaste.

"I wonder what you know about it anyway.  I think you are talking at
random.  Certainly no dangers would come near you if you listened to my
wishes and settled down quietly at home.  If you don't care about
living in Bloomsbury, I will take a small house in the suburbs, and you
can amuse yourself with the housekeeping, and tennis, and that sort of
thing."

"And when you want to marry?"

"I shall not want to marry.  I am wedded to my profession."

"O Dudley!...  Dudley!..."  She slipped off the table where she had
been jauntily seated, and came and stood beside him, passing her arm
through his.  "Can't you see I'd just die of a little house in the
suburbs, looking after the housekeeping: it's the most dreadful and
awful thing on the face of the earth.  I'm not a bit sorry for slaves,
and prisoners, and shipwrecked sailors, and East-end starvelings; every
bit of sympathy I've got is used up for the girls who've got to stay in
hundrum homes, and be nothing, and do nothing, but just finished young
ladies.  Work is the finest thing in the world.  It's just splendid to
have something real to do, and be paid for it.  Why, they can't even go
to prison, or be hungry, or anything except possible wives for possible
men who may or may not happen to want them."

"Of course you are talking arrant nonsense," Dudley replied frigidly.
"I don't know where in the world you get all your queer ideas.  Woman's
sphere is most decidedly the home; you seem to -" but a small hand was
clapped vigorously over his mouth, and eyes of feigned horror searching
his.

"Do you know, I'm half afraid you've lived in your musty old books so
long, Dudley," with mock seriousness, "that you've lost all count of
time.  It is about a thousand years since sane and sensible men
believed all that drivel about women's only sphere being the home, and
since women were content to be mere chattels, stuck in with the rest of
the furniture, to look after the children.  Nowadays the jolly,
sensible woman that a man likes for wife or pal, is very often a busy
worker."

"Let her work busily at home, then!"

"Why, you'll want me to crochet antimacassars next, or cross-stitch a
sampler!  Just imagine the thing if I tried!  It would have dreadful
results, because I should be sure to use bad language - I couldn't help
it; and the article I should concoct would make people faint, or turn
cross-eyed or colour-blind.  I shan't do nearly so much harm in the end
as a City secretary with an actress pal."

"One thing is quite certain: you mean, as usual, to have your own way,
and my feelings go for nothing at all."

He turned away from her, and took up his hat to go out.

"Your protestations of affection, Hal, are apt to seem both insincere
and out of place."

The tears came swiftly to her eyes, and she took a quick step towards
him, but he had gone, and closed the door after him before she could
speak.  She watched his retreating figure, with the tears still
lingering, and then suddenly she smiled.

"Anyhow, I haven't got to besweet and gentle and housekeepy," was her
comforting reflection.  "I'm going to be a real worker, earning real
money, and have Lorraine for my pal as well.  Some day Dudley will see
it is all right, and I'm only about half as black as he supposes, and
that I love him better than anything else at heart.  In the meantime,
as I'm likely to get a biggish dose of dignified disapproval over this
theatre business, I'd better ask Dick to come out to tea this afternoon
to buck me up for what lies ahead.  Goodness! what a boon a jolly
cousin is when you happen to have been mated with your great-aunt for a
brother."





CHAPTER III



For a few years after that particular disagreement nothing of special
note happened.  Hal got quickly through her course of shorthand and
typewriting and became Mr. Elliott's private secretary and general
factotum, which last included an occasional flight into journalism as a
reporter.  Naturally, since this sometimes took her to out-of-the-way
places, and brought her in contact with human oddities, she loved it
beyond all things, and was ever ready for a jaunt, no matter whither it
took her.

Brother Dudley was discreetly left a little in the dark about it,
because nothing in the world would ever have persuaded him that a girl
of Hal's age could run promiscuously about London unmolested.  Hal knew
better.  She was perfectly well able to acquire a stony stare that
baffled the most dauntless of impertinent intruders; and se had,
moreover, an upright, grenadier-like carriage, and an air of
business-like energy that were safeguards in themselves.

A great deal of persuasive tact was necessary, however, to win Dudley's
consent to a year in America, whither Mr. Elliott had to go on
business; but on Mrs. Elliott calling upon him herself to explain that
she also was going, and would take care of Hal, he reluctantly
consented.

Curiously enough, it was that year in a great measure that changed the
current of Lorraine's life.  She came to the cross-roads, and took the
wrong turn.

Perhaps Miss Walton, with her knowledge of girls, could have foretold
it.  She might have said, in that enigmatical way of hers, "If Lorraine
comes to the cross-roads, where life offers a short cut to fame,
instead of a long, wearisome drudgery, she will probably take it.  Hal
will score off her own bat, or not at all.  Lorraine will only care
about gaining her end."


Anyhow the cross-roads came, and Hal, the stronger, was not there.  As
a matter of fact, for some little time the two had not seen much of
each other.  Lorraine was touring in the provinces, and rarely had time
to come to London.  Hal was tied by her work, and could not spare the
time to go to Lorraine.

There was for a little while a cessation of intercourse.  Neither was
the least bit less fond, but circumstances kept them apart, and they
could only wait until opportunity brought them together again.  Both
were too busy for lengthy correspondence, and only wrote short letters
occasionally, just to assure each other the friendship held firm, and
absence made no real difference.

Then Hal went off to America, and while she was away Lorraine came to
her cross-roads.

It is hardly necessary to review in detail what her life had been since
she joined the theatrical profession.  It is mostly hard work and
disillusion and disappointment for all in the beginning, and only a
very small percentage ever win through to the forefront.

But for Lorraine, on the top of all the rest, was a mercenary,
unscrupulous, intriguing mother, who added tenfold to what must
inevitably have been a heavy burden and strain - a mother who taxed her
utmost powers of endurance, and brought her shame as well as endless
worry; and yet to whom, let it be noted down now, to her everlasting
credit, no matter in what other way she may have erred, she never
turned a deaf ear nor treated with the smallest unkindness.

It would be impossible to gauge just what Lorraine had to go through in
her first few years on the stage.  She seemed to make no headway at
all, and at the end of the third year she felt herself as far as ever
from getting her chance.

That she was brilliantly clever and brilliantly attractive had not so
far weighed the balance to her side.  There were many others also
clever and attractive.  She felt she had practically everything except
the one thing needed - influence.

Thus her spirits were at a very low ebb.  She was still touring the
provinces, and heartily sick of all the discomfort involved.  Dingy
lodgings, hurried train journeys, much bickering and jealousy in the
company with which she was acting, and a great deal of domestic worry
over that handsome, extravagant mother, who had once taken her, in
company with the so-called uncle, to the select seminary of the Misses
Walton.

How her mother managed to live and dress as if she were rich had
puzzled Lorraine many times in those days; but when she left the
shelter of those narrow, restricting walls, where windows were
whitewashed so that even boys might not be seen passing by, she learnt
many things all too quickly.

She learnt something about the uncles too.  One of them was at great
pains to try and teach her, but with hideous shapes and suggestions
trying to crowd her mind, the thought of Hal's freshness still acted as
a sort of protection and kept her untainted.

A little later, after she had commenced to earn a salary, she found
that directly the family purse was empty, and creditors objectionably
insistent, she herself had to come to the rescue.

There were some miserable days then.  It was useless to upbraid her
mother.  She always posed as the injured one, and could not see that in
robbing her child of a real home she was strewing her path with dangers
as well, by placing her in an ambiguous, comfortless position, from
which any relief seemed worth while.

Then at last came the welcome news that Mrs. Vivian had procured a post
as lady-housekeeper to a rich stockbroker in Kensington, who had also a
large interest in a West-end theatre.

Lorraine read the glowing terms in which her mother described her new
home and employer with a deep sense of relief, seeing in the new
venture a probable escape for herself from those relentless demands
upon her own scanty purse.  A month later came the paragraph, in a
voluminous epistle:

"Mr. Raynor says you are to make his house your home whenever you are
free.  He insists upon giving you a floor all to yourself, like a
little flat, where you can receive your friends undisturbed, and feel
you have a little home of your own.  I am quite certain also that he
will try to help you in your career through his interest in the
Greenway Theatre."

If Lorraine wondered at all concerning this unknown man's interest in
her welfare she kept it to herself.

A home instead of the dingy lodgings she had grown to hate, and the
prospect of influential help, were sufficiently alluring to drown all
other reflections.

When the tour was over she went direct to Kensington, to make her home
with her mother until her next engagement.  She was already too much a
woman of the world not to notice at once that her mother and her host's
relations seemed scarcely those of employee and employer, and there was
a little passage of arms between herself and Mrs. Vivian the next
morning.

In reply to a long harangue, in which that lady set forth the
advantages Lorraine was to gain from her mother's perspicacity in
obtaining such a post, she asked rather shortly:

"And why in the world should Mr. Raynor do all this for me, simply
because you are his housekeeper?"

A red spot burned in Mrs. Vivian's cheek as she replied: "He does it
because he wants me to stay; and I have told him I cannot do so unless
he makes it possible for me to give you a comfortable, happy home here."

Lorraine's lips curled with a scorn she did not attempt to conceal, but
she only stood silently gazing across the Park.

She had already decided to make the best of her mother's deficiencies,
seeing she was almost the only relative she possessed, but she had a
natural loathing of hypocrisy, and wished she would leave facts alone
instead of attempting to gloss them over.  Ever since she left school
she had been obliged to live in lodgings, because her mother would not
take the trouble to try and provide anything more of a home.

It was a little too much, therefore, that she should now allude to her
maternal  solicitude because it happened to suit her purpose.  She felt
herself growing hard and callous and bitter under the strain of the
early struggle to succeed, handicapped as she was; and because of one
or two ugly experiences that came in the path of such a warfare.  She
was losing heart also, and feeling bitterly the stinging whip of
circumstances.  As she stood gazing across the Park, some girls about
her own age rode past, returning from their morning gallop, talking and
laughing gaily together.

Lorraine found herself wondering what life would be like with her
beauty and talent if there were no vulgarly extravagant, unprincipled
mother in the background, no insistent need to earn money, no gnawing
ambition for a fame she already began to feel might prove an empty joy.

She had not seen Hal for a year, and she felt an ache for her.  In the
shifting, unreliable, soul-numbing atmosphere of her stage career, she
still looked upon Hal as a City of Refuge; and when she had not seen
her for some time she felt herself drifting towards unknown shoals and
quicksands.

And, unfortunately, Hal was away in America, with the editor to whom
she was secretary and typist, and not very likely to be back for three
months.

No; there was nothing for it but to make te best of her mother's
explanation and the comfortable home at her feet.

As for Mr. Raynor himself, though he seemed to Lorraine vulgarly proud
of his self-made position, vulgarly ostentatious of his wealth, and
vulgarly familiar with both herself and her mother, she could not
actually lay any offence to his charge.  And in any case, he
undoubtedly could help her, if he chose, to procure at last the coveted
part in a London theatre.  With this end in view, she laid herself out
to please him and to make the most of her opportunity.

And in this way she came to chose cross-roads which had to decide her
future.

Before she had been a week in the house, Frank Raynor deserted his
housekeeper altogether, and fell in love with the housekeeper's
daughter.  Within a fortnight he had laid all his possessions a
Lorraine's feet, promising her not only wealth and devotion, but the
brilliant career she so coveted.

The man was generous, but he was no saint.  Give him herself, and she
would have the world at her feet if he could bring it there.  Give any
less, and he would have no more to say to her whatsoever.

It was the cross-roads.

Lorrain struggled manfully for a month.  She hated the idea of marrying
a man better suited in every way to her mother.  She dreaded and hated
the thought of what had perhaps been between them; yet she was afraid
to ask any question that might corroborate her worst fears.

All that was best in her of delicate and refined sensitiveness surged
upward, and she longed to run away to some remote island far removed
from the harsh realities of life.

Yet, how could she?  Without money, without influence, without rich
friends, what did the world at large hold for her?

How much easier to go with the tide - seize her opportunity - and dare
Fate to do her worst.

At the last there was a bitter scene between mother and daughter.

"If you refuse Frank Raynor now, you ruin the two of us," was Mrs.
Vivian's angry indictment.  "What can we expect from him any more?  How
are you ever going to get another such chance to make a hit?"

"And what if it ruins my life to marry him?" Lorraine asked.

"Such nonsense!  The man can give you everything.  What in the world
more do you want?  He is good enough looking; he could pass as a
gentleman, and he is rich."

A sudden nauseous spasm at all the ugliness of life shook Lorraine.
She turned on her mother swiftly, scarcely knowing what she said, and
asked:

"You are anxious enough to sell me to him.  What is he to you anyway?
What has he ever been to you?"

Mrs. Vivian blanched before the suddenness of the attack, but she held
her ground.

"You absurd child, what in the world could he be to me?  It is easy
enough to see he has no eyes for any one but you."

"And before I came?"

Lorraine took a step forward, and for a moment the two women faced each
other squarely.  The eyes of each were a little hard, the expressions a
little flinty; but behind the older woman's was a scornful,
unscrupulous indifference to any moral aspect; behind the younger's a
hunted, rather pitiful hopelessness.  The ugly things of life had
caught the one in their talons and held her there for good and all,
more or less a willing slave, the soul of the younger was still alive,
still conscious, still capable of distinguishing the good and desiring
it.

The mother turned away at last with a little harsh laugh.

"Before you came he was nothing to me.  He never has been anything."

Without waiting for Lorraine to speak, she turned again, and added:

"If you weren't a fool, you would perceive he is treating you better
than ninety-nine men in a hundred.  He has suggested marriage.  The
others might not have done."

"Oh!  I'm not a fool in that way," came the bitter reply, "but I've
wondered once or twice what your attitude would have been, supposing -
er - he had been one of the ninety-nine!"

Mrs. Vivian was saved replying by the unexpected appearance of Frank
Raynor himself.  Entering the room with a quick step, he suddenly
stopped short and looked from one to the other.  Something in their
expressions told him what had transpired.  He turned sharply on the
mother.

"You've been speaking to Lorraine about me.  I told you I wouldn't have
it.  I know your bullying ways, and I said she was to be left to decide
for herself."

Lorraine saw an angry retort on her mother's lips, and hurriedly left
the room.  She put on her hat and slipped away into the Park.  What was
she to do?... where, oh where was Hal!

Within three months the short cut was taken.  Lorraine was engaged to
play a leading part at the Greenway Theatre, and she was the wife of
Frank Raynor.





CHAPTER IV


When Hal came back from America and heard about Lorraine's marriage, it
was a great shock to her.  At first she could hardly bring herself to
believe it at all.  Nothing thoroughly convinced her until she stood in
the pretty Kensington house and beheld Mrs. Vivian's pronounced air of
triumph, and Lorraine's somewhat forced attempts at joyousness.

It was one of the few occasions in her life when Lorraine was nervous.
She did not want Hal to know the sordid facts; and she did not believe
she would be able to hide them from her.

When Hal, from a mass of somewhat jerky, contradictory information, had
gleaned that the new leading part at the London theatre had been gained
through the middle-aged bridegroom's influence, her comment was
sufficiently direct.

"Oh, that's why you did it, is it?  Well, I only hope you don't hate
the sight of him already."

"How absurd you are, Hal!...  Of course I don't hate the sight of him.
He's a dear.  He gives me everything in the world I want, if he
possibly can."

"How dull.  It's much more fun getting a few things for oneself.  And
when the only thing in all the world you want is your freedom, do you
imagine he'll give you that?"

Lorraine got up suddenly, thrusting her hands out before her, as if to
ward off some vague fear.

"Hal, you are brutal to-day.  What is the use of talking like that
now?...  Why did you go to America?...  Perhaps if you hadn't gone _"

"Give me a cigarette," said Hal, with a little catch in her voice, "I
want soothing.  At the present moment you're a greater strain than
Dudley talking down at me from a pyramid of worn-out prejudices.  I
don't know why my two Best-Belovčds should both be cast in a mould to
weigh so heavily on my shoulders."

Sitting on the table as usual, she puffed vigorously at her cigarette,
blowing clouds of smoke, through which Lorraine could not see that her
eyes were dim with tears.  For Hal's unerring instinct told her that,
at a critical moment, Lorraine had taken a wrong path.

Lorraine, however, was not looking in Hal's direction.  She had moved
to the window, and stood with her back to the room, gazing across the
Park, hiding likewise misty, tell-tale eyes.

Suddenly, as Hal continued silent, she turned to her with a swift
movement of half-expressed protest.

"Hal! you shan't condemn me, you shan't even judge me.  Probably you
can't understand, because your life is so different - always has been
so different; but at least you can try to be the same.  What difference
has it made between you and me anyhow?...  What difference need it
make?  I have got my chance now, and I am going to be a brilliant
success, instead of a struggling beginner.  What does the rest matter
between you and me?"

"It doesn't matter between you and me.  But it matters to you.  I feel
I'd give my right hand if you hadn't done it."

"How could I help doing it?  Oh, I can't explain; it's no use.  We all
have to fight our own battles in the long run - friends or no friends.
Only the friends worth having stick to one, even when it has been a
nasty, unpleasant sort of battle."

That hard look, with the hopelessness behind it, was coming back into
Lorraine's eyes.  She was too loyal to tell even Hal what her mother
had been like the last few months before the critical moment came, and
at the critical moment itself.  She could not explain just how many
difficulties her marriage had seemed a way out from.

There had been other men who had not proposed marriage.  There had been
insistent creditors - her mother's as well as her own.  There had been
that deep hunger for something approaching a real home, and for a sense
of security, in a life necessarily full of insecurities.

Obdurate, difficult theatre managers, powerful, jealous
fellow-actresses, ill health, bad luck!  Behind the glamour and the
glitter of the stage, what a world of carking care, of littleness,
meanness, jealousy, and intrigue she had found herself called upon to
do battle with.

And now, if only her husband proved amenable, proved livable with, how
different everything would be?  But in any case Hal must be there.
Somehow nothing of all this showed in her face as she fronted the
smoker, still blowing clouds of smoke before her eyes.

"What has become of Rod?" Hal asked suddenly.

Lorraine winced a little, but held her ground steadily.

"Rod had to go.  What could Rod and I have done with Ŗ500 a year?"

"My own" - from the blunt-speaking one - "it surely seems as if you
might have thought of that before you allowed Rod to run all over the
country after you, and get 'gated', and very nearly 'sent down', and
spend a year or two's income ahead in trying to give you pleasure."

Lorraine flung herself down on the sofa with a callous air, and beat
her foot on the ground impatiently.  The parting with Rod was another
thing she did not propose to describe to Hal.  It had hurt too badly,
for one thing.

"When you moralise, Hal, you are detestable.  Besides, it's so cheap.
Any one can sit on a table and hurl sarcasm about.  I daresay in my
place you would have married Rod, from a sense of duty or something,
and ruined all the rest of his life.  Or perhaps, after gently breaking
the news, you'd have let him come dangling round to be 'mothered'.
Well, I don't say I haven't been a bit of a brute to him; but anyhow I
tried to do the square thing in the end.  I cut the whole affair dead
off.  I told him I would not see him nor write to him again.  I've
since sent two letters back unopened, and though you mightn't think it,
I was just eating my heart out for a sight of him.  But what's the
good!  He's got to follow in the footsteps of whole centuries of highly
respectable, complacent, fat old bankers.  His father and mother would
have a fit if he didn't develop into the traditional fat old banker
himself, and beget another of the same ilk to follow on.

"I daresay with me he would have developed a little more soul, and a
little less stomach - but what of it? -" with a graceful shrug.  "For
the good of his country it is written that he shall acquire weight and
stolidity, instead of an ideal soul, and for the benefit of posterity I
sentenced him to speedy rotundity, and dull respectability, and the
begetting of future bankers.  He will presently marry some one named
Alice or Annie, and invite me to the first christening in a spirit of
Christian forgiveness."

Hal smiled more soberly than was her wont.

"And what of you?"

"What of me?... Oh, I don't come into that sort of scheme.  I never
ought to have been there at all.  Still, I'm glad I showed him he'd got
something in himself beside the stale accumulations of many banker
ancestors; if it's only for the sake of the next litte banker, who may
want to lay claim to an individual soul."

"But it hurt, Lorraine?... don't tell me it didn't hurt after... after
- "

"Oh yes, it hurt," with a low, bitter laugh; "but what of that eiter?
It's generally the woman who gets hurt; but I suppose I knew I was
riding for a fall."

"I don't suppose you are any more hurt than he is.  You know he
worshipped you."

"Yes; only presently it will be easy for him to get back into the old,
orthodox groove with 'Alice', and persuade himself that I was only a
youthful infatuation, whereas I - Oh, what does it matter, Hal!  Come
out of that 'great-aunt' mood, and let's be joly while we can.  I'll
ring for coffee and liqueurs, and then we'll make lots of ripping plans
to see everything in England worth seeing - until I can find time to go
abroad."

Hal sprang off het table.

"Oh, very well," she rejoined, "Let's get rowdy and sing the song 'Love
may go hang.'  When I've got it over with Dudley, we'll just go
straight on, keeping a good look out for the next fence.  You'd better
tell me something abouth this paternal husband of yours, just to
prepare me for our meeting.  He doesn't put his knife in his mouth, and
that sort of thing, does he?"

"No; not quite so bad.  His worst offence at present, I think, is to
call me 'wifey'."

"Wifey!" in accents of horror.  "Lorraine, how awful!"

"Yes; but I'm breaking him of it by degrees: that and his fondness for
a soft felt hat."

They sat on chatting together with apparent gayness, but Hal's heart
was no lighter after she had duly been presented to the paternal
husband, as she called him, and she journeyed solemnly home on a bus,
feeling rather as if she had been to a funeral.  She tried at first to
hide her feelings from Dudley - no difficult matter at all, since he
usually contributed little but a slightly absent "yes" and "no" to the
conversation, and if the conversation languished he took small notice.

However, he had to be told, and Hal rarely troubled to do much beating
about the bush, so, in order to rouse him speedily and thoroughly, just
as he was settling down to his newspaper she hurled the news at his
head without any preliminary preparation.

"What do you think Lorraine has done now?  Been and gone and married a
man old enough to be her father!"

"Married!...  Lorraine Vivian married!"

Dudley's newspaper went down suddenly on to his knee.

Hal had squatted on the hearthrug, tailor fashion, before the fire, and
she gave a little swaying movement backward and forward, to signify the
affirmative.  He looked at her a moment as if to make sure she was not
joking, and then said, with sarcastic lips:

"A man old enough to be her father? ... then it isn't even Rod Burrell!"

"No; it isn't even Rod Burrell."

"Some one with more money and influence, I suppose?  Well, I don't know
that Burrell needs any one's condolences."

"He does, badly."

"He won't for long.  The Burrells are a sensible lot, and no sensible
man frets over a hearless woman."

"Lorraine is not a heartless woman.  She has too much heart."

"She is certainly very generous with it."

"I don't know which is the more detestable, a sarcastic man or a
sensible one."  Hal shut her lips tightly, and stared at the fire.

"I imagine you hardly expect any sort of man to admire Miss Vivian's
action."

"It doesn't matter in the least what 'any sort of man' thinks.  I am
only concerned with the possibility that she will weary of matrimony
quickly and be miserable.  I told you, because I wanted you to hear it
from me instead of from a newspaper."

Dudley suddenly grew more serious, as he realised how it must in a
measure affect Hal also.

"Who is he?

"He is a stockbroker, named Frank Raynor, aged fifty."

"And of course she married him for his money ?

"I suppose so. Also he partly owns the Greenway Theatre."

"Pshaw . . . it's a mere bargain."

Hal was silent. She had rested her chin on her hands, and was now
gazing steadily at the embers.

"Of course if he is not a gentleman, you will have to leave off seeing
so much of her."

"Not at all. She would need me all the more.

"That is quite possible," drily; "but you owe something to yourself and
me."

"I couldn't owe failing a friend to any one. But he is a gentleman
almost - a self-made one, and he doesn't let you forget it."

"Then you've seen him?"

"Yes, to-day." Her lips suddenly twitched with irresistible humour. "He
called me 'Hal' and Lorraine 'wifey' We bore it bravely."

"What business had he to call you by your Christian name?"

"None. I suppose he just felt like it. He also alluded to my new hat as
a bonnet. Also he used to be an office-boy or something. He seemed
inordinately proud of it."

"I loathe a self-made man who is always cramming it down one's throat.
I don't see how you can have much in common with either of them any
more."

Hal got up, as if she did not want to pursue the subject.

"It won't make the smallest difference to Lorraine and me," she said.

Dudley knit his forehead in vexation and perplexity, remarking:

"Of course you mean to be obstinate about it."

"No," with a little laugh; "only firm."

She came round to his chair and leant over the back it.

"Dear old long-face, don't look so worried. None of the dreadful things
have happened yet that you expected to come of my friendship with
Lorraine. The nearest approach to them was the celebrated young author
I interviewed, who asked me to go to Paris with him for a fortnight,
and he was a clergyman's son who hadn't even heard of Lorraine. Next, I
think, was the old gentleman
who offered to take me to the White City. IL don't seem much the worse
for either encounter, do I ? and it's silly to meet trouble half way.

She bent her head and kissed him on the forehead.

"Dudley," she finished mischievously, "what are you going to give
Lorraine for a wedding-present?"

"I might buy her the book, 'Row to be Happy though Married,'" he said
dilly, "or write her a new one and call it 'Words of Warning for
Wifey.'"

"We'll give her something together," Hal exclaimed triumphantly,
knowing that, as usual, she had won the day.

Then she went off to bed, feigning a light-heartedness she was far from
feeling, and dreading, with vague misgivings, what the future might
bring forth.





CHAPTER V


It was a little over two years later that the crash came. There was
first a commonplace, sordid tale of bickering and quarrelling, with
passionate jealousy on the part of the middle-aged husband, and
callous, maddening indifference on the part of the now successful and
brilliant actress

To do Lorraine justice, she was not actively at fault.  Her sense of
fair play made her try sincerely to make the best of what had all along
been an inevitable fiasco. She did not sin in deed against the man to
whom she had sold herself, but in thought it was hardly possible for
her to give him anything but tolerance, or to feel much beyond the
callous indifference she purposely cultivated, to make their life
together endurable. The things that at first only irritated her grew
almost unbearable afterwards.

Lorraine's father had been a gentleman by birth, breeding, and nature.
If she inherited from her mother an ambitious, calculating spirit, she
also inherited from her father refinement, and tone, and a certain
fineness character, that showed itself chiefly in unorthodox ways, of
for the simple reason that her life and conditions were entirely
removed from a conventional atmosphere.

As a man she might merely have lived a double life, conforming to the
conventions when advisable, and following her own ambitions and bent in
secret, without ever apparently stepping over the line.

As a woman she could but cultivate callous indifference to a great
deal, and satisfy her soul by "playing fair" according to her lights,
in the path before her, but nothing could save her from a mental nausea
of the things in her husband which belonged to his plebeian origin and
nature, and which crossed with a shrivelling, searing touch her own
inherent refinement and high-born spirit.

The objectionable friends he brought to the house she found it easier
to bear than the things he said about them behind their backs; neither,
again, was his addiction to drink so trying as his mental coarseness. A
man who had drank too much could be avoided, but the lowness of Frank
Raynor's mind seemed to follow and drag hers down.

Yet for two years she held bravely on, cultivating a hard spirit, and
throwing herself heart and soul into the first delicious joy of
success. This last surprised even her friends and admirers. A moderate
hit was quite expected, but not a triumph which placed her almost in
the first rank, and was due not merely to her acting, but to a bigness
of spirit and comprehension she had never before had an opporturnty to
reveal.

It was, indeed, the justification of Hal's devotion. Hal, by her very
nature, could not love a small-minded woman. What she so unceasingly
loved and admired in Lorraine was a hidden something she alone had had
the
perspicacity to perceive, and could so instinctively rely upon. It was
the something which, given once a fair opening, carried her quickly
through the company of the lesser successes, and placed her on that
high plane which
demands soul as well as skill.

Then came the dreadful climax. In a drunken, mad moment her husband
hurled at her that he had been her mother's lover, and proposed to
return to his old allegiance - had, in fact, already done so.

Lorraine immediately packed up her own special belongings and left his
roof for ever.

Expostulations, promises, threats, passionate assurances that he had
not been responsible for what he said failed alike to move her. She
knew that whether responsible or not he had spoken the truth, and that
everything
else either he or her mother could say was false.

Finding her obdurate, he swore to ruin them both; but she told him she
would sing for bread in the streets before she would go back to him;
and he knew she meant it.

Fearing his influence against her and his sworn revenge, she went to
Italy for a year, and hid in quiet villages until his passion should
somewhat have died, finding herself in the dreadful position, not only
of being betrayed by her mother, but quite unable to obtain any sort of
freedom without revealing the black stain upon her only near
relation.

She could not seek a divorce under the terrible circumstances, and she
was far too proud and spirited to touch a farthing of her husband's
money. It was like a dreadful chapter in her life, of which she could
only turn down
the page; never, never, obliterate nor escape from.

In the black days and weeks of despair which followed, she often felt
she must have lost her reason without Hal, and even to her she could
not tell the actual truth. Hal asked once, and then no more. Afterwards
it was like a secret, unnamed horror between them, from which the
curtain must not be raised.

For the rest there was the usual but intenser scene of remonstrance
between Dudley and Hal with the usual resentful and obdurate
termination. This time
Dudley even got seriously angry, unable to see anything but a foolish,
unprincipled woman reaping a just reward of her own sowing; and for
nearly a week his displeasure was such that he addressed no single word
to Hal if he could help it.

Hal, for once, was too wretched about everything to resent his
attitude, and merely waited for the sun to shine again and the black,
enveloping clouds to roll away.

She saw Lorraine everyday, in the apartments whence she had fled, and
helped her to make the necessary arrangements to cancel the short
remainder of an engagement and get away. She even had one interview
with the irate husband, but no one ever knew what took place, except
that Raynor sought no repetition, and seemed afterwards to have a
respectful awe of Hal's name which spoke volumes.

Accustomed to intimidating women with a curse and an oath, he had found
himself unexpectedly dealing with two who could scorch him with a scorn
and contempt far more withering than a vulgar tirade of blasphemous
language.

Finally the break was made complete. Lorraine got safely away to Italy,
her mother retired to an English village, and Raynor departed to
America for good.

For him it was merely a case of fresh pastures for fresh money-making
and fresh intrigues.

For Mrs. Vivian only a passing exile from the gaieties and extravagance
she loved.

For Lorraine it meant a hideous memory, a hideous, overwhelming
catastrophe, and a hideous tie from which she could not hope to free
herself.

She went away in a state of nervous prostration that was an illness,
feeling the horror of it all in her very bones, and clinging with a
silent hopelessness to Hal in a way that was more heart-rending than
any hysterical outburst.

Yet that Hal was there was good indeed. Hal, who, though only
twenty-one, could look out on an ugly world with those clear eyes of
hers, and while seeing the ugliness undisguised, see always as it were
beside it the ultimate good, the ultimate hope, the silver lining
behind the blackest cloud. Hal, who could criticise unerringly, with
direct, outspoken humour,and yet scorn to judge; who had learnt, by
some strange instinct, the precious art of holding out a friendly hand
and generous friendship, even to those condemned of the orthodox,
sufferers probably through their
own wild and foolish actions, without in any way becoming besmirched
herself, or losing her own inherent freshness and purity.

It was not in the least surprising that a man as wedded to his books
and profession as Dudley should fail to realise what was, in a measure,
phenomenal. By the simple rule of A B C, he argued that ill necessarily
contaminates, if the one to come in contact is of young and impression-
able years. There might of course be exceptions, but hardly among those
as frivolous and obstinate as Hal.

He worried himself almost ill about it all, until Lorraine was safely
out of England, adding seriously to poor Hal's troubled mind, seeing
she must stand by the one while longing to soothe and please the other,
and fretting silently over his anxious expression. But once back in
their old groove, he quickly recovered his spirits, and even tried to
make up to Hal a little for what she had lost. Unfortunately, however,
he hit upon an unhappy expedient.

He tried to persuade her to make a friend of a certain Doris Hayward,
instead of Lorraine.

Doris's brother had been Dudley's great friend in the days when both
were articled to the same profession, but a terrible accident had later
lain him on an invalid couch for the rest of his life.

When clerk of the works of one of London's great buildings, a heavy
crane had slipped and swung sideways, flinging him into the street
below. He was picked up and carried into the nearest hospital,
apparently dead, but he had presently come back, almost from the grave,
to drag out a weary life as an incurable on an invalid sofa.

Soon afterwards his father died, leaving Basil and his two sisters the
poor pittance of Ŗ50 a year between them.

Ethel, the elder, was already a Civil Service clerk at the General Post
Office, earning Ŗ110 a year, and on these two sums they had to subsist as
best they could.

Basil earned occasional guineas for copying work, when he was well
enough to stand the strain, and Doris remained at home with him in the
little Holloway flat, as nurse and housekeeper.

Dudley, with his usual lack of comprehension where women were
concerned, evolved what seemed to him an admirable plan, in which Hal
and Doris became great friends, thereby  brightening poor Doris's dull
existence, and weaning Hal from her allegiance to the unstatisfactory
Lorraine.

His plans, however, quickly met with the discouragement and downfall
inevitable from the beginning.  At first he tried strategy, and Hal, in
a good-tempered, careless way, merely listened, while easily avoiding
any encounter.

Then Dudley went a step too far.

"I have to be out three evenings this week, so I asked Doris Hayward to
come and keep you company, as I thought you might be dull."

"You asked Doris to come and keep _me_ company!" repeated Hal, quite
taken aback.

"Yes; why not?  She is such a nice girl, and just your age.  I can't
think why you are not greater friends."

"It's pretty apparent," with a little curl of her lips.

"We haven't anything in common: that's all."

"But why haven't you?  You can't possibly know if you never meet.  She
seems such a far more sensible friend for you than Lorraine Vivian,"
with a shade of irritation.

"Probably that is exactly why I don't want her friendship," with a
light laugh.

"But you might try to be reasonable just once in a way.  Try to be
friendly to-morrow evening."

Hal, with her quick, light gracefulness, crossed to him, and playfully
gave him a little shake.

"Dudley, you dear old idiot.  I don't know about being reasonable, but
I can certainly be honest; and it's honest I'm going to be now.  I
think it is almost a slur on Lorraine to mention a little, silly,
dolly-faced, conceited creature like Doris in the same breath; and as
for being friendly to her to-morrow evening, that's impossible, because
I shall not be here.  I'm going to the Denisons, and I don't intend to
postpone it.  You will have to write and tell her I am engaged."

Dudley's mouth quickly assumed the rigidity which denoted he was
greatly displeased, and his voice was frigid as he replied:

"You are very injust to Doris.  You scarcely know her, and yet you
condemn her offhand: the fault you are always finding in me.  As for
any comparison between her and Miss Vivian, it is very certain she
would not sell herself to a man, and then run away from him because
things did not turn out as she wanted them."

Hal turned away, with a slight shrug and a humorous expression as of
helplessness.

"We won't argue, _mon frčre_, because, since you always read books
instead of people, you are not very well up in the subject.  To put it
both candidly and vulgarly, I haven't any use for Doris Hayward at all.
 Ethel I admire tremendously, though I don't think she likes me; and
Basil is a saint straight out of heaven, suffering martyrdom for no
conceivable reason, but Doris is like a useless ornamental china
shepherdess, which ought to be put on a hight shelf where it can't get
itself nor any one else into trouble.  I'm really dreadfully afraid if
I had to spend a whole evening alone with her, I should drop her and
break her to relieve my feelings."

"Well, you needn't worry" - moving coldly away.  "I have far too much
respect for Doris to allow her to come here just to be criticised by
you.  I will explain that you are unexpectedly engaged," and he openend
a paper in a manner to close the conversation.

Hal made a little grimace at him behind it, and retired discreetly to
prepare for her daily sojourn in the City.

It happened, however, when, a year later, Lorraine came back to take up
her theatrical career again in England, there was some vague change in
her that made Dudley less severe in his criticisms.  Trouble had not
hardened her, nor softened her, but it had made her a little less sure
of herself, and a little more willing to please.

Hitherto she had taken rather a pleasure in shocking Dudley, under the
impression that it would do him good and open his mind a little.  Now
she had a greater respect for his sterling side, and could smile kindly
at his little foibles and fads.  The result was that Dudley admitted, a
trifle grudgingly, she had changed for the better, and rather looked
forward to the occasional evenings she spent with Hal at their
Bloomsbury apartments.

He also had to admit that success had in no wise spoilt her, that it
probably never would.  The year of absence, it was soon seen, had not
injured her reputation in the least.  She came back to the stage
renewed and invigorated, and with still more of that depth of feeling
and atmosphere of soul wich had so enriched her personations before.

She became, very speedily, without any question, one of the leading
actressess of the day; and the veil of mystery that hung over the
sudden termination of her short married life, if anything, enhanced her
charm to a mystery-loving public.  And all the time, as Dudley could
not but see, she never changed to Hal.

From adulation and adoration, from triumphs that might easily turn any
head she always came quickly back to the little Bloomsbury sitting-room
when she could, to have one of their old gay gossips and merry laughs.
She seemed in some way to find a rest there that she could not get
elsewhere, in the company of people who expected her to live up to a
recognised standard of individuality.

And the change in Lorraine was a change for the better in Hal too, who
began now to tone down a little, and at the same time to strenghten and
deepen in character.

They were, in fact, a pair it was good to see and good to know.  In the
first few years after the break-up of her home Lorraine was at her
handsomest.  Her dark, thick hair had a gloss on it that in some lights
showed like a bronze glow, and she wore it in thick coils round her
small head, free from any exaggerated fashion, and yet with a
distinction all its own.  Her dark eyes once more showed the roguish
lights of her schooldays, and her alluring red mouth twitched
mischievously when she was in a gay mood.

A little below the medium height, she was so perfectly built as to
escape any appearance of shortness, and carried herself so well, she
sometimes appeared almost tall.

Considering what her life had been, she looked strangely young for her
years, seeming to combine most alluringly the knowledge and sympathy of
a woman of thirty-five with the freshness and capacity for enjoyment of
twenty-five.  The irrevocable tie so far had not clashed with any new
affection; her husband remained in America and made no sign; and her
art was all-sufficing.

Hal was built on quite different lines.  Tall, and slender, and well
knit, she moved with the surging grace of the athlete, and looked out
upon the world with a joyfulness and humorous kindliness that won her
friends everywhere.  She was not beautiful in any sense that could be
compared with Lorraine, but she had pretty brown hair, and fine eyes,
and a clear, warm skin that made up for other defects, and helped to
produce a very attractive whole.

Lorraine had taught her how to dress - an art of far deeper
significance than many women trouble to realise; and wherever Hal went,
if she did not create a sensation, at least she carried a dinstinction
and pleasingness that were rarely overlooked.  Her  daily sojourn in
the City, among the bread-winners, had made her large-hearted and
generously tolerant, without hurting in any degree her own innate
womanliness and charm.

She showed in her every gesture and action how it was possible to be of
those who must scramble for buses, and press for trams, and live daily
in the midst of panting, struggling, working, grasping humans, without
losing tone, or gentleness, or a radiant, fearless spritit.

At the office of the newspaper where she filled the post of secretary
and typist, she was a sort of cheerful institution to smooth worried
faces and call up a smile amidst the irritability and frowns.

Blunderers went to her with their troubles, and felt fairly secure if
she would break the news of the blunder or mistake to the irritable and
awe-inspiring chief.  He, in his turn, would be irritable before her,
but never with her; and it was a recognised fact among the staff that
she was almost the only one who could make him laugh.

Thus a few intervening years passed happily enough, briging Lorraine to
her thirty-first birthday and Hal to her twenty-fifth, without any
further upheavals to strike a discordant note across the daily round,
except such inevitable trials as Lorraine continued to meet through her
mother, and Hal through her devotion to a non-comprehending brother.
Only, while they had each other and their work, such difficulties were
not hard to cope with; and life sang a gayer, happier song to them than
she usually sings to the mere pleasure-seekers.

For work in a wide interesting sphere is a priceless boon, and the men
who would condemn women solely to pleasure-seeking and the four walls
of their home are showing the very acme of selfishness, in that they
are endeavouring to keep solely and entirely for themselves one of the
best things life has to give.





CHAPTER VI


It will be remembered, perhaps, that an occasion has already occured
when Hal had cause to congratulate herself upon the possession of a
cousin, named Dick, who acted as an antidote to a brother who sometimes
resembled a great-aunt.

Dick, or to give him his full name, Richard Alastair Bruce, was indeed
her best friend and boon companion next to Lorraine.  He was her
earliest playmate, and likewise her latest.  For many months together
they had been companions in the wildest of wild escapades as children,
at Dick's country home; and now that they were both responsible members
of the community, in the world's greatest city, they were equally
attached.

If Hal was down on her luck, she telephoned Dick to come instantly to
the rescue, and if it was humanly possible he came.  If Dick wanted a
sympathetic or gay companion, either to go out with him or to listen to
his latest inspirations, he telephoned to Hal, and little short of an
urgent, important engagement would delay her.

At the time he become of any importance in this narrative he was
established in a flat in the Cromwell Road, as one of a trio sometimes
known as the Three Graces.  The other two were Harold St. Quintin and
Alymer Hermon.

The appellation was first given to them when they were freshmen at New
College, Oxford; partly because they were inseparable, partly because
they were a particularly good-looking trio, and partly because they all
three came up from Winchester with great cricket reputations.  Within
two years they were all playing for the 'Varsity' and one of them was
made captain.

Three years from the term of their leaving, after each had gone his own
way for a season, they gravitated together again, and finally became
established in the Cromwell Road flat, once more on the old
affectionate terms.

Dick Bruce was following a literary career, of a somewhat ambiguous
nature.  He wrote weird articles for weird papers, under weird
pseudonyms, verses, under a woman's name, for women's papers, usually
of the _Home Dressmaker_ type; occasional lines to advertise some
patent medicine or soap; one or two Salvation Army hymns of a
particularly rousing nature: and sometimes a weighty, brilliant article
for a first-class paper, duly signed in his own name.

Besides all this he visited a publisher's office most days, where he
was supposed to be meditating the acquirement of a partnership.  Hal
was very apt at terse, concise definitions, and she was quite up to her
best form when she described him as "the maddest of a mad clan run
amok."

Harold St. Quintin, or Quin, as every one called him, was idealist,
etherealist, and dreamer.  His original intention had been to enter the
Church, but having gone down into East London to give six months to
slum work, he had remained two years without showing any inclination to
give it up.  Sometimes he lived at the flat, and sometimes he was lost
for a week at a time somewhere east of St. Paul's, where one might as
well have looked for him as for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Alymer Hermon, after a sojourn on the continent to study languages, was
now established with a barrister, waiting, it must be confessed,
without much concern, for his first brief.

Of the three he was the most striking.  Dick Bruce was only ordinarily
good-looking, with a very white skin, a fine forehead, and an arresting
pair of eyes - eyes that were like an index to a brain that held
volumes of original observations and whimsicalities, and revealed only
just as much or little as the author chose.

Harold St. Quintin was small and rather delicate, with never-failing
cheerfulness on his lips, and eyes that seemed always to have behind
them the recollection of the pitiful scenes among which he voluntarily
moved.

Alymer Hermon was Adonis returned to earth.  He stood six foot five and
a half inches in his socks, and was as perfectly proportioned as a man
may be; with a head and face any sculptor might have been proud to copy
line by line for a statue of masculine beauty.

When he was captain of the Oxford Eleven, people spoke of his beauty
more than his cricket, although the latter was quite sufficiently
striking in itself.  There were others who had sweepstakes on his
height, before the score he would make, or the men he would bowl.

The 'Varsity' was proud of him, as they had never been proud of a
captain before, because he upheld every tradition of manliness and
manhood at its best.  And they only liked him the better that so far
his attitude to his own comeliness was rather that of boredom than
anything else.  Certainly it weighed as nothing in the balance against
the joy of scoring a century and achieving a good average with his
bowling.

He was equally bored with the young girls who gazed at him in
adoration, and the women who petted him, and it was a considerable
source of worry to him that he might appear effeminate, because of his
blue eyes and golden hair, and fresh, clear complexion, when in reality
he was as manly as the plainest of hard-sinewed warriors, though the
indulgence of a slightly aesthetic manner and way of speech, learnt at
het University, increased rather than counteracted the suggestion of
effeminacy.

But, taking all things into consideration, he was singularly unspoilt
and unassuming; and sometimes blended with an old-fashioned, paternal
air a boyishness and power of enjoyment that could not fail to charm.

The first time that Lorraine met the trio was when Hal took her to
spend the evening at the flat one Sunday, by arrangement with her
cousin.  She herself knew all three well, having been to the flat many
times, but it had taken some little persuasion to get Lorraine to go
with her.

"Of course they are just boys," said grandiloquent twenty-five, "but
they are quite amusing, and they will be proud of it all their lives if
they can say they once had Lorraine Vivian at the flat as a guest."

"What do you call boys?" asked Lorraine, looking amused; "I thought you
said they had all left college,"

"So they have, but that's nothing.  Dick is only twenty-five, and the
others are about twenty-four."

"A much more irritating age than mere boyhood as a rule."

"Decidedly; but they really are a little exceptional.  Dick, of course,
is quite mad - that's what makes him interesting.  Alymer Hermon is a
giant with a great cricket reputation, and Harold St. Quintin is a sort
of modern Francis Assisi with a sense of humour."

"The giant sounds the dullest.  I hope he doesn't want to talk cricket
all the time, because I don't know anything about it, except that if a
man stands before the wicket he is out, and if he stands behind it he
is not in."

"Oh no; he doesn't talk cricket.  He mostly talks drivel with Dick, and
St. Quintin laughs."

"Dick sounds quite the best, in spite of his madness.  A cricketer who
talks drivel, and a future clergyman working in the East End, don't
suggest anything that appeals to me in the least."

Nevertheless, when Lorraine, looking very lovely, entered the small
sitting-room of her three hosts, her second glance, in spite of
herself, strayed back to the young giant on the hearth-rug.  He was
looking at Hal sideways, with a quizzical air; and she heard him say:

"It may be new, but it's not the very latest fashion, because it
doesn't stick out far enough at the back, and it doesn't cover up
enough of your face."

"Oh well!" said Hal jauntily, "if I had as much time as you to study
the fashions, I daresay I should know as much about them.  But I have
to _work_ for my living," with satirical emphasis.

"What a nuisance for you," with a delightful smile.  "I only pretend to
work for mine."

"We all know that.  You sit on a stool, and look nice, and wait for a
brief to come along and beg to be taken up."

"It's a chair.  I'm not one of the clerks.  And I shouldn't get a brief
any quicker if I went and shouted on the housetops that I wanted one."

"Besides, you don't want one.  You know you wouldn't know what to do
with it if you got it.  Well, how's East London?...  "and Hall crossed
to the slum-worker, with a show of interest she evidently did not feel
for the embryo barrister.  Lorraine smiled at him, however, and he
moved leisurely forward to take the vacant seat beside her on the sofa.

"Is Hal trying to sharpen her wit at your expense?" she asked him, in a
friendly, natural way.

"Yes; but it's a very blunt weapon at the best.  People who always
think they are the only ones to work are very tiring; don't you think
so?"

"Decidedly; and I don't suppose she does half s much as you and I in
reality."

"Oh well, I could hardly belie myself so far as to assert that.  You
see, it takes a long time to make people understand what a good
barrister you would be if you got the chance to prove it."

Hald could not resist a timely shot.

"Personally, I shoud advise you to try and prove it without the chance.
 The chance might undo the proving, you see."

"What a rotten, mixed-up, meaningless remark!" he retorted.  "Is it
because you find I am so dull, you still have to talk to me?"

"Quin is never dull, he is only depressing.  Dick, do hurry up and
begin supper.  I always feel horribly hungry here, because I know Quin
has just come away from some starving family or other, and I have to
try and eat to forget."

Lorraine leant across to the dreamy-eyed first-class circketer,
voluntarily giving his life to the slums.

"Why do you do it?" she asked with sudden interest.  "It seems,
somehow, unnatural in a ... "  she hesitated, then finished a little
lamely, "a man like you."

"Oh no, not at all," he hastened to assure her.  "It's the most
fascinating work in the world.  It's full of novelty and surprises for
one thing."

She shuddered a little.

"But the misery and want and starvation.  The ... the... utter
hopelessness of it all."

"But it isn't hopeless at all.  Nothing is hopeless.  And then, knowing
the misery is there, and doing nothing, is far worse than seeing it and
doing what one can."

"Oh no, because one can forget so often."

"Some can.  I can't.  Therefore I can only choose to go and wrestle
with it."

"Of course it is heroic of you, but still! - "

Harold St. Quintin gave a gay laugh.

"It is not a bit more heroic than your work on the stage to give people
pleasure.  I get as much satisfaction in return as you do; and that is
the main point.  Slum humanity is seething with interest, and it is by
no means all sad, nor all discouraging.  There is probably more humour
and heroism there per square mile than anywhere else."

"And no doubt more animal life also," put in Dick Bruce.  "It's the
superfluous things that put me off, not the want of anything."

"It's feeling such an ass puts me off," added Hermon; "they're all so
busy and alert about one thing or another down there, they make me feel
a mere cumberer of the earth.  A woman manages a husband, and a family,
and some sort of a home, and does the breadwinning as well.  The
children try to earn pennies in their playtime; and the men work at
trying to get work.""

"Whereas you? ..."  suggested Hal with a twinkle, "work at trying not
to get work."

"Come to supper, and don't be so personal, Hal," said her cousin.  "I
wrote a poem on you last week, and called it 'Why Men Die Young.'  It
is in a rag called _The Woman's Own Newspaper_.  It is also in _The
Youth's Journal_, with the pronouns altered, and a different title; but
I forget what."

"What a waste of time - writing such drivel," Hal flung at him.  "Why
don't you compose a masterpiece, and scale Olympus?"

"Too commonplace.  Lots of men have done that.  Very few are positive
geniuses at writing drivel.  I claim to be in the front rank."

They sat down to a lively repast, and Lorraine found herself, instead
of an awe-inspiring, distinguished guest, treated with a frank
camaraderie that was both amusing and refreshing.  They all made a butt
of Hal, who was quite equal to the three of them; and when the giant
paraphrased one of her (Lorraine's) most tragic utterances on the stage
into a serio-comic dissertation on a fruit salad they were eating,
lacking in wine, she laughed as gaily as any, and felt she had known
them of years.

Then Hal insisted upon playing a game she had that moment invented,
which consisted of each one confessing his or her greatest failing, and
the gaiety grew.

She led off by informing them that she found she always jumped eagerly
at any excuse to avoid her morning bath.  Dick Bruce followed it up
with a confession that he found he was never satisfied with fewer than
four "best girls", because he liked to compare notes between them, and
write silly verses on his observations; while Harold St. Quintin owned
to an objectionable fancy for bull's-eye peppermints and blowing eggs.

Alymer Hermon confessed that he loved giving advice to people years
older than himself, concerning things he knew nothing whatever about.

Lorraine tried to cry off, but, hard pressed, she admitted that she
liked the excitement of spending money she had not got, and then having
to pawn something to satisfy her creditors.  "Spending money you will
not miss," she finished, "is very dull beside spending money you do not
possess."

Alymer Hermon then suggested they should tell each other of besetting
faults, and at once informed Hal her colossal opinion of herself and
all she did was only equalled by its entire lack of foundation.

Hal hurled back at him that every inch in height after six feet
absorbed vitality from the brain, and that, though his dense stupidity
was most trying, the reason for it claimed their compassion.

"You pride yourself beyond all reason on your stature," she said, "and
are too dense to perceive it is your undoing."

Lorraine leant towards him and said:

"Inches give magnanimity: big men are always big-hearted; you can
afford to forgive her, and retaliate that too much brain-power sinks
individuality into mere machinery.  I should say Hal's besetting fault
was rapping every one on the knuckles, as if they were the keys of a
typewriting machine."

"And yours, my dear Lorraine, is smiling into every one's eyes, as if
the world held no others for you.  Were I a man, and you smiled at me
so, I would strangle you before you had time to repeat the glance on
some one else."

"And Dick's besetting sin," murmured St. Quintin plaintively, "is a
persistent fancy for other people's ties and other people's boots.  I
have cause to bless the benign and other people's boots.  I have cause
to bless the benign providence who fashioned my shoulders sufficiently
smaller than his to prevent his wearing my coats."

"And yours, Quin," broke in Hermon, "is a fond and loathsome affection
for pipes so seasoned that the Board of Trade ought to prohibit their
use."

"After all," Hal rapped out at him, "that's not so bad as love of a
looking-glass."

"And love of a looking-glass is no worse than love of throwing stones
from glass houses," he retorted.

"Of course it isn't, Hal," broke in her cousin, "and probably if you
had anything nice to look at in your glass - "

Hal stood up.

"The meeting is adjourned," she announced solemnly, "and the honourable
member who was just spoken has the president's leave to absent himself
on the occasion of the next gathering."

"Excellent," cried Quin, while Hermon in great glee rapped the table
with his knife handle and exclaimed, "Capital, Dick!...  That drew
her...  I think you might say it took the middle stump."

"Oh, thank goodness he's got on to cricket," breathed Hal.  "He does
know a little about that, and may possibly talk sense for ten minutes.
Come along, Lorraine, and don't address Baby at present, for fear you
distract him from his game and start him off struggling to be clever
again.  As it is Sunday night, perhaps Dick would like to read us his
latest effusions in the way of boisterous hymns!"

She led the way back to the bachelor sitting-room, and for some little
time Dick amused them greatly with his experiences over editors and
magazines, and then the two went off together to Lorraine's flat.

At this time she was living at the bottom of Lower Sloane Street, with
windows looking over the river, and it was generally supposed that her
mother lived with her.

As a matter of fact, Mrs. Vivian only occupied the ground floor flat in
company with a friend.  Lorraine give her an income on condition she
should live there, and so, in a sense, act as a sort of chaperone to
silence the tongues ever ready to find food for scandal in the fact of
brilliance and beauty living alone; but mother and daughter had never
again been on terms of cordiality.

So Hal was often Lorraine's companion for several nights, coming and
going as she fancied, always sure of a welcome.  To her the flat was a
constant delight, and in the evening she loved to sit on the verandah
and watch the gliding river - not to sentimentalise and dream, but
because she loved London with all her heart and soul and strenght, and
to her the river was as the city's pulsing heart.

The moist freshness of the air coming across from Battersea Park was
only the more refreshing after Bloomsbury, and the vicinity of several
well-known names in the world of art and letters appealed porwerfully
to her imagination.  Lorraine usually sat just inside the long French
window, taking care of her voice, and listening contentedly to Hal's
chatter.

They sat thus for a little while after their return from Cromwell Road,
and it was noticeable that Lorraine was even more silent than usual.
Hald told her something about each of their three hosts in turn, while
showing an unmistakable preference for the slum-worker and her cousin.
At last Lorraine interrupted her.

"Why  do you say so little about Mr. Hermon?...  you merely told me he
was a cricketer,which doesn't, as a matter of fact, describe him at
all."

Hal shrugged her shoulders.

"I suppose he doesn't interest me except in that way."

"But it is a mere side issue.  If he weren't a cricketer he would be
just as remarkable."

"But he isn't remarkable.  He's only exceptionally big."

"He's one of the most remarkable men I've ever seen, anyway."

"Oh, nonsense, Lorraine.  Besides, he is hardly a man yet.  He's only
twenty-four."

"I can't help that," with a little laugh.  "I've seen a great many men
in my life, but I've never seen any one before like Alymer Hermon."

"Why in the world not?  What do you mean?"

"Well, to begin with, he's the most perfect specimen of manhood I've
ever beheld.  He's abnormally big without the slightest suggestion of
being either too big or awkward.  He's simply magnificent.  Most men of
that size are just leggy and gawky: he is neither.  Again, other men
built as he, are usually rather brainless and weak, or probably made so
much of by women that they become wrapped up in themselves, and are
always expecting admiration.  Alymer Hermon has the freshness of a
delightful boy, with the fine face and courtly manners of a charming
man.  If you can't see this, it's because you don't know men as well as
I do."

Hal stepped over the window sill into the room.

"Pooh!" she said impatiently.  "What in the world has happened to you?
He's just a stuffed blue-and-gold Apollo."

Lorraine got up also.

"He's more than that.  Some day you will see; unless... unles..."

"Well, unless what?"

"Oh, nothing, only a man like that can't expect to escape being spoilt.
 A certain type of woman will inevitably mark him down for her prey,
and ruin all his freshness."

"Then you had better take him under your wing," Hal laughed.  "It would
be a pity for such a paragon to be lost to society.  Personally,
stuffed blue-and-gold Apollos don't interest me in the least.  Come
along to bed.  I'm dead tired," and she dragged Lorraine away.

But instead of sleeping, the acress lay silently watching a star that
shone in at her window, and thinking a little sadly about the man
nature had chosen to endow so bountifully.  In a few weeks she would be
thirty-two and he was twenty-four.

Supposing it had been twenty-two instead of thirty-two, and out of his
splendour he had given his heart to her dark beauty, what a tale it
might have been - what a fairy-tale of sweet, impossible things, with a
golden-haired prince and a dark-eyed princess.

She awoke from her day-dream with a touch of impatience, apostrophising
herself for her folly.  After all, what had a beautiful, successful
woman at her prime to do with a youth of twenty-four, who played
foolish games at a supper-table, and was only just beginning to know
his world?  Of course he would bore her intolerably at a second
interview, and, closing her eyes resolutely, she drove his image from
her mind.





CHAPTER VII


The second interview, however, by a mere coincidence, took place at
Lorraine's flat.  She was walking leisurely down Sloane Street one
afternoon, after visiting hermilliners, when she ran into the young
giant going in the opposite direction.

"How so?..." she asked gaily, as is face lit up with a pleased smile,
and he stopped in front of her.  "Whither away at this hour?  Are you
chasing a brief?"

"Much too brief," he told her.  "I had to carry some important papers
to a certain well-known Cabinet Minister; and he did not even vouchsafe
me a glance of his countenance.  I was given an acknowledgment of them
by the footman, as if I had been a messenger boy."

"Too bad.  I think you deserve that another celebrity should give you a
cup of tea, to redeem your opinion of the immortals.  My flat is quite
near, and I am now returning.  Will you come?"

"Oh, won't I?" he said boyishly, and turned back.

It was the fashionable hour in Sloane Street, when many well-dressed,
well-known people are often seen walking, and when the road is full of
private motors and carriages.  Lorraine found herself moving still more
slowly.  She was accustomed to being gazed at herself, had in fact
grown a little blasé of it, but the frank admiration bestowed on her
giant amused and pleased her.

Covertly she watched, as she chatted up to him, for the tell-tale
consciousness and perhaps heightened colour.  But when he was looking
back into her face he looked straight before him, over the heads of the
admiring eyes, and paid no smallest heed to them.  Neither was he in
the least self-conscious with her.  She wondered if he even realised
that the tęte-ā-tęte he accepted so simply would have been a joy of heaven to
many.  Anyhow, far from resenting his seeming want of due appreciation,
she found it made him more interesting.

She spoke of Hal, and he immediately exclaimed: "Hal is a ripper, isn't
she?  I can't help teasing her, you know; it's the best fun in the
world."

"Do you usually tease your feminine friends?" she asked.  "I've no
doubt you have a great many."

"Oh, no, I haven't.  Men pals are far jollier."

"Still, I expect your inches bring you many fair admirers."

He shrugged his shoulders slightly, and looked a trifle bored, and she
divined that he disliked flattery and probably the subject of his
appearance.  She adroitly turned the conversation back to Hal, and
spoke of her until they reached the block of flats.

"Is this where you live?  What a ripping situation!" he exclaimed.  "I
would sooner be near the river than near Knightsbridge, even if it is
not so classy."

He followed her into the lift, and then into her charming home, full of
enthusiasm, and still without exhibiting a shade of self-consciousness.

Lorraine found her interest growing momentarily, as he took up his
stand on her hearth and gazed frankly around, with undisguised pleasure.

"What a jolly nice room.  It's one of the prettiest I've seen.  You
have the same color-scheme as the Duchess of Medstone in het boudoir,
but I like your furniture better."

Lorraine glanced up a little surprised.

"Do you know the Duchess of Medstone?"

"Well, yes" - a trifle bashfully.  "You see, those sort of people ask
me to their houses because of my cricket.  Private cricket weeks are
rather fashionable, and I get invitations as the late Oxford captain."

"And do you go to people you don't know?"

"Yes, rather, if I can raise the funds.  The nuisance is the tipping.
There's always such a rotten lot of servants; and I'm too much afraid
of them to give anything but gold."

The tea came in, and she saw him glance round for the chair best suited
to his bulk.

"My chairs were not designed for giants," she told him laughingly; "you
will have to come and sit on the settee."

He came at once, stretching his long legs out before him, with lazy
ease, and then drawing his knees up sharply, as if in sudden
remembrance that he was a guest and they were comparative strangers.
Lorraine liked him, both for the moment's forgetfulness and the sudden
remembrance, and as she glanced again at his beautiful head and
splendid shoulders, she was conscious of a sudden thrill of
appreciative admiration.

Hal was right in naming him Apollo.  The Sun God might have been
fashioned just so, when first he ravished the eyes of Venus.

"And so the duchess took you into her boudoir?" she asked, with an
unaccountable twinge of jealousy.  "I do not know her.  I'm afraid my
friends are not so aristocratic as yours.  But I believe she is
considered very handsome."

"Hard," he said, with an old-fashioned air.  "Handsome enough, but very
hard.  I did not like her nearly so much as Lady Moir, her sister."

"Still no doubt she was very nice to you?"

Lorraine rather hated herself for the question.  The ways of
aristocratic ladies, whose idle hours often supply a field of labour
for the Evil One, were perfectly well known to her; and she wondered a
little sharply how far he was still unspoilt.  The majority of big,
strong, full-blooded young men in his place would assuredly have sipped
the cup of pleasure pretty deeply by now, even at his years, but with
that fine, strong face, and the clear, frank eyes was he of these?  She
believed not, and was glad.

He did not treat her question as if it implied any special favours, and
merely replied jocularly:

"Well, I suppose, since her blood is very blue and mine merely tinged,
she was rather gracious, but of course the really 'blue' people
generally are."

"Tell me who you happen to be?"  Lorraine leant back against her
cushions, with her slow, easy grace, asking the question with a
lightness that robbed it of all pointedness or snobbery.

He seemed amused, for he smiled as he answered frankly:

"I happen to be Alymer Hadstock Hermon, one fo _the_ Hermons all right,
but not the drawing-room end, so to speak; at the same time tinged with
her family shadiness  - 'blue' of course I mean - though no doubt it
applies in other ways as well.  Does that satisfy your curiosity, or do
you want to know more?"

She loved looking at him, particularly with that humorous little smile
on his lips, so she said:

"Not half.  I want to know all the rest."

"Very well.  It's quite an open book.  I was born twenty-four years
ago.  I am an only child, and, as usula, the apple of my mother's eye
and the terror of my father's pocket.  He, my father, is not much else
just now except a recluse.  He was recently a member of parliament, a
Liberal member, and, God knows, that's little enough.  I believe he
even climbed in by a Chinese pigtail.

"My grandfather was a Judge in the Divorce Court, which doesn't somehow
sound quite respectable, and my great-grandfather was a writer of law
books, for which, personally, I think he ought to have been hanged.  I
can't go any farther back; at any rate I don't want to, because I'm
certain it's all so correct and dull there isn't even a family
skeleton."

"Is it the women or the men of the family that are beautiful?"

"Oh, both," with humorous eagerness.  "Skeletons and ghosts we sought,
and clamoured for, but ugliness, never."

"Well, it's a pity you were not a woman.  Looks are wasted in a man.
Give a man a ready tongue and a taking manner, and he can usually get
what he wants, if he's as ugly as a frog.  With you, on the other hand,
things will come too easily.  You will miss all the fun of the chase.
On my soul I'm sorry for you."

"The briefs don't come anyway, nor the 'oof': that's all I can see to
be sorry for."

"You don't want them badly enough, that's all.  If you want the one,
you'll make love to an influential woman who can get them, and if you
want the other, you'll marry an heiress."

"I say, you're giving me rather a rotten character, aren't you?"

He faced  her suddenly, and a new expression dawned in his eyes, as if
he were only just awakening to the fact that she was beautiful.

"Do you really think I'm such a rotter as all that?"

She glanced away, lowering her eyelids, so that her long lashes swept
the warm olive cheeks, and with a little callous shrug answered:

"Why should you be a rotter for doing what all the rest of the world
does?  Four-fifths of mankind would give anything for your chances."

"But you just said you were sorry for me?"

"So I am.  So I should be for the four-fifths of mankind, if they got
all they wanted just for the asking."

He smiled with a sudden, charming whimsicality.

"I don't feel much in need of sympathy, you know.  It's a ripping old
world, as long as you can indulge a few mild fancies, and be left
alone."

"Mild fancies!"

She turned on him suddenly.

"What have you to do with mild fancies?  Why, you can have the world at
your feet with a little exertion.  Haven't you any ambition?  Don't you
even want to plead in the greatest law court in the world as one of the
first barristers in Europe?"

"Not particularly.  Why should I?  It would be no end of a fag.  I'd
far rather be left alone."

"You...  you... sluggard,' breaking into a laugh.  "If I were Fate, I'd
just take you by the shoulders and shake you till you woke up.  Then
I'd go on shaking to keep you awake.  You shouldn't be wasted on mere
nonentity if I held the threads."

But his blue eyes only smiled whimsically back at her.

"I'm jolly glad you haven't a say in the matter.  Why, I should have to
give up cricket, and take to working!  You're as bad as Quin with his
slumming, and Dick with his rotten verses."

"You don't know yet that I haven't a say in the matter," she remarked
daringly.  "Have a cigarette.  I'm awfully sorry I didn't remember
sooner."

"Indeed, you ought to be," was the gay rejoinder.  "I've been just
dying for the moment when you would remember."

An electric bell rang out as they were lighting their cigarettes, and a
moment later Hal danced into the room with shining eyes and glowing
cheeks.  A few paces from the door she stopped suddenly.

"Hullo, Baby," she said, addressing Hermon, "where have you sprung
from?"

"I found it wandering alone in Sloane Street," Lorraine remarked, "and
now we've been teaing together."

Alymer did not look any too pleased at Hal's frank appellation, but
former remonstrance had only been met with derision, and he knew he had
no choice but to submit with a good grace.

"I might ask the same question, Lady-Clerk," he replied.

"Don't call me a lady-clerk - I hate the term.  I'm a typist,
secretary, bachelor-girl, city-worker, anything you like, not a
lady-clerk - bah!..."

"Then don't call me Baby."

Hal's face broke into the most attractive of smiles.

"I can't help it.  Everything about you, your size, your face, your
ways just clamour to be called 'Baby'.  Of course if you'd rather be
Apollo - "

"Good Lord, no: is that the only alternative?"

"I'm afraid so; you needn't go if you don't want to," as he prepared to
depart.  "We are not going to talk grown-up secrets."

"If I were Mr. Hermon, I'd give you one good shaking, Hal," put
Lorraine.  "I'm sure you deserve it."

"Not a bit.  Nothing could do him more good than regular interviews
with me, to undo all the harm he has received in between from silly,
idiotic women, who make him think he is something out of the ordinary.
Isn't that so, Baby?  Aren't you labouring under the delusion that
you're a remarkable fine specimen of humanity?  And all the time,
Heaven knows, you've about as much  honest purpose and brains as a big
over-grown school-boy."

"I hope you are not intending to imply he is more richly endowed with
dishonest purpose?" said Lorraine.

"Oh, I wouldn't mind that," Hal declared, "so long as it was energy and
purpose of some kind."

"Even to giving you that good shaking," he asked, coming forward a step
menacingly.

"Not in here," in alarm; "you and I scrapping in Lorraine's
drawing-room would cost a hundred pounds or so in valuables.  I'll cry
'pax'," as he still advanced.  "Of course you are rather a fine boy
really, I was only pulling your leg."

Hermon subsided with a laugh, and Hal proceeded to explain that she had
come on business, having been asked by the editor of one of their small
magazines to write up an interview with the actress for him.

"I shall say I found you having a cosy tęte-ā-tęte with a young barrister of
many inches and little brains," she laughed.  "Come, Lorraine, spout
away.  What is your favourite hors d'oeuvre?  Did you feel like a
boiled owl at your first appearance?  And which horse do you back for
next year's Derby?"

She started scribbling, to the amusement of the other two, carrying on
a desultory conversation meanwhile.

"This isn't anything to do with my department, but I like Mr. Hadley,
and he was keen about it, and offered me three guineas, so I said I'do
do it...  Are your eyes yellow or green?  For the life of me, I don't
know.  Which would you rather I called them? ...  I've got to go to
Marlboro' House to-morrow to get up a short and vivid account of a
garden party, because Miss Alton, who generally does it, is down with
'flu'.  Were you a prodigal as a kid? no; I mean a prodigy...  Fancy me
at Marlboro' House!  Awful thought, isn't it?  How they dare?

"What is your favourite pastime?  Shall I put down shooting?  I know
you don't know one end of a gun from the other, but it doesn't matter;
and it reads rather well - something unique about it in an actress."

"Why not put angling, and give some of my dear enemies a chance to ask
what for?"

"Or jam-making," suggested Alymer, "and redeem the stage in the eyes of
the British matron."

"Oh, don't talk... how can I write?  Shall I bring myself in, and dig
up the dear old chestnut of David and Jonathan?...  or shall I describe
Dudley's disapproval melting into undisguised worship," she rippled
with laughter as she scribbled on.  "Oh dear, think if Dudley were to
find it, and read it, because he hasn't even discovered yet that he has
ceased to disapprove.

"Who's your favourite poet?  I might say Dick Bruce; he would write a
book of poems at once.  And Quin might be your hero in real life.  Do
you know where you were born?  Up in the Himalayas sounds nice and
airy, and it might as well have been there as anywhere."

"If you want anymore you must get it while I eat my dinner," said
Lorraine, rising.  "I have to try and be at the theatre at seven just
now.  You may as well both dine with me, and you can come to my
dressing-room afterwards if you like, Hal."

"No, thank you"; and Hal pulled a wry face.  "I've seen quite enough of
the wings, and the green-room, and all the rest of it.  You might take
Baby, just to show him the real thing, and put him off it once for all."

She turned to Hermon.

"Have you ever been behind the scenes?  I used to go sometimes, just
for the fun of it, while it was a novelty; but it quite cured me of any
possible taste of the stage.  Most of the performers were so nervous
they could hardly speak, their teeth just chattered with cold and
fright mingled, and the gloom of it was like a vault.  And then all the
gaping, staring faces in rows, looking out of the darkness.  You can't
think how idiotic people look seen like that.  It always suggested to
me that both stage and stalls were like children playing at being
lunatics."

"That's only your dreadfully prosaic, unromantic mind, Hal.  You just
like to write newspaper articles, and type letters, and smother your
imagination under dry-and-dust facts."

"Smother my imagination," echoed Hal, with a laugh.  "Why, it would
take the imaginations of fifty ordinary people to concoct some of the
paragraphs we fix up during the week.  My imagination is a positive
goldmine at the office, at least it would be if they dare print all
that I suggest."

"You should run a paper yourself," suggested Hermon; "a few libel
actions would made it pay like anything."

"Ah, you haven't seen Dudley," with a little grimace.  "Dudley would
have a fit and die before the first action had had time to reach its
interesting stage.  I'd take you home to see him now, but he happens to
have gone up to Holloway to dinner."

"I'm dinning out myself, so I must fly."  He turned to Lorraine, with a
gay smile.  "I say, may I come and dine with you some other time?"

"Come to the Carlton on Sunday, will you?"

Lorraine hardly knew why she made the sudden decision; she only knew
perfectly well she would have to break another engagement to keep it,
and that she was foolishly gland when he accepted.

"It's all right; you needn't ask me," volunteered Hal, as her friend
glanced at her.  "I'm going motoring with Dick, and I shall insist upon
staying out until ten or eleven.  I always try and fill my Sundays full
of fresh air.  "Where are you going to-night, Baby?" she added, with a
charmingly impudent smile.

"The Albert Hall, with Lady Selon"; and a twinkle shone in his eyes.

"Goodness gracious!  What in the world are you going to the Albert Hall
for? and who is Lady Selon?"

"She is Soccer Selon's sister-in-law, and she asked me to take her to a
concert.  Is there anything else you would like to know?"

"Her age?" archly.

"Somewhere about thirty-five, I should imagine."

"Oh! your grandmother, or thereabouts.  Well, skip along.  Tell Dick to
call for me early on Sunday."

When he had said good-bye to Lorraine and departed, Hal held up her
hand, hanging in a limp fashion.

"I wish you'd teach him to shake hands, Lorry.  It feels like shaking a
blind cord and tassel.  Are you going to mother him?  What an odd idea
for you to bother with a boy!  You surely don't mean to tell me he
interests you?"

"I like to look at him.  He's such a splendid young animal.  I feel -
oh, I don't know what I feel."

"Lots of London policemen are splendid young animals, but you don't
want tęte-ā-tęte teas with them if they are."

"You absurd child!  Is there any reason why I shouldn't have tea with
Mr. Hermon, if it amuses me?"

"None specially; but if it's just a splendid young animal to look at,
you want, I daresay it would be safer to import a polar bear from the
Zoo."

Lorraine felt a spot of colour burn in het cheeks, but she only laughed
the subject aside, and alluded to it no more before they parted at the
theatre door.

Only at a late supper-party that night she was quieter than was her
wont; and, contrary to her habit, one of the first to leave.  A
well-known rising politician, who had been paying her much attention of
late, prepared, as usual, to escort her home.  She wished he would have
stayed behind, but had no sufficient reason for refusing his company.
He taxed her with silence as they spun westwards, and she pleaded a
headache, wondering a little why all he said, and looked, and did,
somehow seemed banal and irritating to-night.

He was so sure of himself, so fashionably blasé, so carelessly clever, so
daringly frank, with all the finished air of the modern smart man,
basking callously in the assured fact of his own brilliance and
superiority.  She knew that most women would envy her the attentions of
such a one, and that his interest was undoubtedly a great compliment,
as such compliments go; but to-night she found herself remembering all
the other women who had reigned before her, all those who would
presently succeed her, and she was conscious of an impatient disgust of
all the shallowness and insincerety of the fashinable, successful man.

"May I come in?" he asked, when they reached the flat, looking rather
as if he were conferring a favour than soliciting one.

"No; it is too late.  Good-night."

"Too late!... " he laughed a little, and Lorraine felt her temper
rising.  "It is not exceptionally late, a little earlier than usual in
fact.  Why mayn't I come in?"

"Because I don't want you," she said coldly, and she saw him bite his
lip in swift vexation.

"I shall certainly not press you," he retorted, and turned away.

At the window of her drawing-room Lorraine lingered a few moments,
gazin with a half-longing expression at the gleam of the lights on the
dark flowing river.  What was it that gave her that strange sense of
heartache to-night?  Why had her usual companions bored and irritated
her?  Why did Alymer Hermon's fine, boyish, refreshing face come so
often to her mind?

She was certainly not in love with him.  The mere idea was ridiculous,
but it was equally certain that something about him had given rise to
this vague unrest and longing.  Was it perhaps that he called to her
mind the youth she had never known, the young splendid, whole-hearted
years, when it was so easy to believe and hope and enjoy that which
life had never given her time for?

True, the world was at her feet now, just as much as it would ever be
at his, but with what a difference?  For her, with the work and stain
of the knowledge of much evil, and little good.  For him, at present,
with aal the glorious freshness of the morning.

She glanced back into the dim room, and among the shadows she saw him
standing there again, towering up upon her hearthrug, before her
hearth, with that youthful, frank assurance that was so attractive.  Of
a truth he was unspoilt yet, unspoilt and splendid as the dawn of the
morning - but for how long?

What would they make of him presently, the women of the world, who must
needs worship such a man, and strew their charms before him.  How was
he to keep his freshness, when temptation hemmed him in on every side?

She felt a sudden yearning as of hungry mother-love towards him.  If he
had been her son, her very own son, how she would have fought the whole
world to help him keep his armour bright, and his colours flying high.

And instead?...

The wave of hungry mother-love was followed by one as of swift and
angry protest.  Who had ever cared whether she kept her armour bright
and her colours flying high?  Had not life itself mocked at her early
aspirations, and trampled jeeringly on her untutored, unformed high
desires?  What chance had she ever had, long as she might, to keep the
morning freshness?

Well, what of it?  She had sought and striven for fame, and fame had
come; she was a poor creature if she could not look life in the face
now, and laugh above her wounds.

And in the meantime perhaps she could help him fight some of those
other women still; the women who would drag him down for their own
satisfaction, and care nothing for the hurt to him.

Anyhow, she would try to be good pal to him, and not a temptress.  For
once she would fight for some one else's hand instead of her own, and
gain what satisfaction she could in feeling herself a true friend.





CHAPTER VIII


About the time that the three in the Chelsea flat were leave-taking, a
stream of women-clerks in the long passages of the General Post Office
proclaimed that pressure of work had again meant "overtime" to these
energetic City-workers.

In consequence, there was a lack of elasticity in the many passing
feet, and the suggestion of a tired silence in the cloak-room; for
though the girls hastened to get away from the dreary monotony of the
huge building, they were, many of them, too tired to depart as joyfully
as was their wont.

Yet most of them, behind the tiredness, looked out upon the world with
clear, capable eyes, and strong, self-reliant faces, that spoke well
for the spirit of their set.  Up there in the big office-rooms, year in
year out, these refined, well-educated women kept ledgers and accounts
and did the general office work of the Civil Service with a precision
and neatness and correctness equal to the work of any men, and
invariably to the astonishment of any interested visitor who was
permitted to inquire into the system.

Yet the majority of their salaries ranged from Ŗ90 a year to Ŗ210, and they
were obliged to pas an examination of no mean stamp to attain a post.
Small wonder that many of them, having to help support others as well
as keep themselves, had the delicate, listless, anaemic appearance of
underfed women badly in need of fresh air, good food, and wholesome
exercise.

The policy of Great Britain towards her women workers is surely one of
the greatest contradictions of our enlightened age.  Even putting aside
the vexed question of suffragism, how little has she ever done to try
and cope with the needs of working womanhood?

In som Government departments, as, for instance, the Army Clothing
Department, it is a known fact that the women are actually sweated; and
that in the higher branches, employing gentlewomen, they pay them the
lowest possible wage, not because the work is ill-done, but because,
owing to present conditions, plenty of gentlewomen are found to accept
the offer.

Many of these gentlewomen lose their health in their struggle to obtain
good food, decent lodging, and a neat appearance on  Government
salaries, knowing full well that the moment they fall out of the ranks
numbers will be waiting to fill their places.

And in the meantime enlightened authors and politicians write articles,
and make speeches, holding forth upon the charm and beauty of the Home
Woman, and drawing unflattering comparisons between her and the worker.

Comfortable elderly gentlemen, who have had successful careers and can
now afford to dine unwisely every night, and keep their daughters in
well-dressed indolence, self-satisfied, self-aggrandising,
self-advertising young politicians, who, having obtained an attentive
public, delight to cant about the rights of the citizen and the good of
the Empire, clever, intuitive, charming novelists, who apparently
possess an unaccountable vein of dense non-comprehension on some points
- all harp upon this theme of the Home Woman, and the Home Sphere, and
the infinite superiority, in their own lordly eyes, of the gentle,
domesticated scion of the family hearth.

As if one-fourth of the women wage-earners, gentle or otherwise, in
England to-day had any choice in the matter whatever.  The rapidity
with which a vacant place in the ranks is filled and the numbers
waiting for it is surely sufficient proof of that; to say nothing of
the pitiful conditions under which many, gentle and otherwise, cling to
their posts long after a merciful fate should have given them the
opportunity to save the remnants of their shattered health amidst
country breezes.

It is useless to cry out to the woman that work and competition with
men is unbecoming to her.  She _must_ work, and she _must_ compete, and
seeing this, it is surely time the British Government accepted the fact
magnanimously, and took more definite steps to assure her welfare.

If it can only be done through woman's suffrage, then woman's suffrage
must surely come, because, whether British legislators care for the
good of women or not, nature does care, and as the race moves forward
the working woman will have to be protected.

It has been seen over and over again that no band of politicians, nor
powerful men, nor tape-bound State can long defy any advancing good for
the needs of the whole.

Wheter women work or not, they are the mothers of the future; and
because this fact is greater than the sum of all other facts brought
forward by the narrowness and short- sightedness of men, we may safely
believe that, since they _must_ work, nature will see to it that they
work under the most favourable conditions, no matter what rich men have
to go the poorer for it.

Pity is that the hour is so delayed; that narrowness, and selfishness,
and self-aggrandisement still flourish, to the eternal cost of those of
England's mothers who bring weaklings into the world, through the hard
conditions of their enforced labour.

The _true patriot_ of to-day will agitate not only for the highest
possible efficiency in the Navy and Army; but, with no less resolve and
sincerety, for the best possible conditions obtainable for all
women-workers, that the Empire may not later sink suddenly to decay, in
spite of her defences, through the impoverished, feeble, sickly
off-spring who are all the men she has left.

The _true patriot_ will accept the ever-strengthening fact, however
unpalatable, that the development and emancipation of womanhood has
brought women to the front as workers, _to stay_; and he will perceive
that therefore it is incumbent upon the men to endeavour to find that
happy mean, where they can work together to the advantage of both, and
to the stability and greatness of a beloved country.

Only now the women-workers toil bravely on, heartening each other with
jests under conditions in which it is extremely likely men would merely
cavil and sulk and fill the air with their complainings; dressing
themselves daintily through personal effort in spite of meagre purses;
throwing themselves with a splendid joyousness into their few precious
days of freedom; banding themselves together often and often to wring
occasional hours of gaiety from the months of toil; keeping brave eyes
to the front and brave hearts to the task, while they wait steadfastly
for the day when their worth shall be appreciated and their claims
recognised.

Hastening to the office in the morning, or hastening home (probably to
cook their own dinner) at night, they read those clever, carefully
worded articles and speeches by the men of power and weight, harping
upon the charm and beauty and superiority of the Home Woman; and they
laugh across to each other with a frank, rather pitying, rather
irritated laughter, at the extraordinary dull-wittedness of some
brilliant brains.

They wonder gaily how these enlightened, clever gentlemen would like it
if they all became sweet Home women in the workhouses, cultivating
elegant gardens, and floating round in flowing gowns at their expense.

The men call them "new women" with derision, or mannish, or unsexed;
but those who have been among them, and known them as friends, know
that they hold in their ranks some of the most generous-hearted,
unselfish, big-souled women to exist in England to-day; and that it is
just because of that they are able to plod cheerfully on, and laugh
that indulgent, pitying little laugh, when an outraged man swells with
virtuous indignation, and waxes eloquent upon their want of womanly
attributes.

Of such as the best of these was Ethel Hayward.  Among the crowd now
hurrying more or less tiredly into the open air, she might not have
been noticed.  So many had white faces, dark-circled eyes,
shabby-genteel clothing, and just a commonplace fairness, that in the
throng it was difficult to discover distinguishing attributes.

One had to see her apart, and note the quick, urgent step, the
independent, lofty poise of her head, and the steadfastness of the
tired eyes, and firm, strong mouth, to feel that life had given her a
heavy burden, which only a noble soul could have supported with heroism.

As she left the portals of the General Post Office she hesitated a few
seconds as to her direction.  "Should she go straight back to the
little flat in Holloway, or should she go west, and get the
drawing-paper Basil was wanting?"

Doris could easily get the drawing-paper the next day, if she chose;
and at the flat Dudley Pritchard would have arrived for the evening.
She surmised hastily that it was extremely probable Doris had made some
other engagement for herself that she would be unwilling to delay, and
that Dudley would in no wise regret her own tardy return.

The last thought caused her eyes to grow a little strained, as she
walked quickly westwards - strained with the determination to face the
fact unflinchingly, and try to overcome the deep, insistent ache it
caused.

But the love of a lifetime is not dismissed at will, and looking a
little pitifully backward, though she was but twenty-eight, Ethel felt
she could not remember the time when she did not love Dudley Pritchard,
though it had perhaps only crystallised into the great feature of her
life at the time w