Alicia laid a detaining hand upon Miss Howe's skirt. "Don't go away,"

she said. Hilda sat at the other end of the sofa; there was hardly a foot between them. She went on with a curious excitement.

"My kind of life is so primitive, so simple; it is one pure pulse, you don't know. One only asks the things that minister--one goes and finds and takes them; one's feet in the straw, one's head under any roof. What difference does it make? The only thing that counts, that rules, is the chance of seeing something else, feeling something more, doing something better."

Alicia only looked at her and tightened the grasp of her fingers on the actress's skirt. Hilda made the slightest, most involuntary movement. It comprehended the shaking off of hindrance, the action of flight. Then she glanced about her again with a kind of apprais.e.m.e.nt, which ended with Alicia and embraced her. What she realised seemed to push her, I think, in some weak place of her s.e.x, to go on intensely, almost fiercely.

"Everything here is aftermath. You are a gleaner, Alicia Livingstone. We leave it all over the world for people of taste, like you, in the glow of their illusions. I couldn't make you understand our harvest; it is of the broad sun and the sincerity of things."

"I know I must seem to you dreadfully out of it," Alicia said, wearing, as it were, across her heaviness a lighter cloud of trouble.

But the other would not be stayed; she followed by compulsion her impulse to the end. "Shall I be quite candid?" she said. "I find the atmosphere about you, dear, a trifle exhausted."

Alicia, with a face of astonishment, made a half-movement toward the window before she understood. There was some timidity in her glance at Hilda and in her mechanical smile. "Oh," she said, "I see what you mean; and I don't wonder. I am so literal--I have so little imagination."

"Don't talk of it as if it were money or fabric--something you could add up or measure," Hilda cried remorselessly. "You have none!"

As if something slipped from her Alicia threw out locked hands. "At least I had enough to know you when you came!" she cried. "I felt you, too, and it's not my fault if there isn't enough of me to--to respond properly. And I can't give you up. You seem to be the one valuable thing that I can have--the only permanent fact that is left."

Hilda had a rebound of immense discomfort. "Who said anything about giving up?" she interrupted.

"Why, you did! But I'm quite willing to believe you didn't mean it, if you say so." She turned the appeal of her face and saw a sudden pitiful consideration in Hilda's, and, as if it called them forth, two tears sprang to her eyes and fell, as she lowered her delicate head, upon her lap.

"Dear thing! I didn't indeed. If I meant anything it was that I'm overstrung. I've been horribly harried lately." She possessed herself of one of Alicia's hands and stroked it. Alicia kept her head bent for a moment and then let it fall, in sudden abandonment, upon the other woman's shoulder. Her defences crumbled so utterly that Hilda felt guilty of using absurdly heavy artillery. They sat together for a moment or two in silence with only that supervening sense of successful aggression between them, and the humiliation was Hilda's. Presently it grew heavy, embarra.s.sing. Alicia got up and began a slow, restless pacing up and down before the alcove they sat in. Hilda watched her--it was a rhythmic progress--and when she came near with a sound of brushing silk and a faint fragrance which seemed a personal emanation, drew a long breath, as if she were an essence to be inhaled, and so, in a manner, obtained, a.s.similated.

"Oh, yes," Miss Livingstone said, rehabilitating herself with a smile, "I must keep you. I'll do anything you like to make myself more--worth while. I'll read for the pure idea. I think I'll take up modelling.

There's rather a good man here just now."

"Yes," Hilda a.s.sented. "Read for the pure idea--take up modelling. It is most expedient, especially if you marry. Women who like those things sometimes have geniuses for sons. But for me, so far as I count--oh, my dear, do nothing more. You are already an achieved effect--a consummation of the exquisite in every way. Generations have been chosen among for you; your person holds the inheritance of all that is gracious and tender and discriminating in a hundred years. You are as rare as I am, and if there is anything you would take from me, I would make more than one exchange for the mere niceness of your fibre--the feeling you have for fine shades of morality and taste--all that makes you a lady, my dear."

"Such niminy piminy things," said Alicia, contradicting the light of satisfaction in her eyes. The sound of a step came from the room overhead, and the light died out. "And what good do they do me!" she cried in soft misery. "What good do they do me!"

"Considerably less than they ought. Why aren't you up there now? What more simple, honest opportunity do you want than a sick room in your own house?"

Alicia, with a frightened glance at the ceiling, flew to her side. "Oh, hush!" she cried. "Go on!"

"It ought to be there beside him, the charm of you. The room should be full of cool refreshing hints of what you are. Your profile should come between him and the twilight with a scent of violets."

"It sounds like a plot," Alicia murmured.

"It _is_ a plot. Why quibble about it? If you smile at him it's a plot.

If you put a rose in your hair it's a deep-laid scheme, deeper than you perceive--the scheme the universe is built on. We wouldn't have lent ourselves to the arrangement, we women, if we had been consulted; we're naturally too scrupulous, but n.o.body asked us. 'Without our aid He did us make,' you know."

"But--deliberately--to go so far! I couldn't, I couldn't, even if I could."

Hilda leaned back in her corner with her arms extended along the back and the end of the sofa. Her hands drooped in their vigour, her knees were crossed, and her skirts draped them in long simple lines. In her symmetry and strength and the warm cloud of her hair and the soul that sat behind the shadows of her eyes Vedder might have drawn her as a tragic symbol for the poet who sang in the King's garden of wine and death and roses.

"I would go further," she said, and looked as if some other thing charged with sweetness had come before her.

"And even if one gained, one would never trust one's success," Alicia faltered.

"Ah, if one gained one would hold," Hilda said; and while she smiled on her pupil in the arts of life, the tenderness grew in her eyes and came upon her lips. As if she knew her betrayal already complete, "I wish I had such a chance," she said.

Alicia looked at her as they might have looked, across the desert, at a mirage of the Promised Land.

"Then after all he has prevailed," she said.

"Who?"

"Hamilton Bradley."

Hilda laughed--the laugh was full and light and spontaneous, as if all the training of the notes of her throat came unconsciously to make it beautiful.

"How you will hold me to my _metier_," she said. "Hamilton Bradley has given up trying."

"Then----"

"Then think! Be clever. Be very clever."

Alicia dropped her head in the joined length of her hands. A turquoise on one of them made them whiter, more transparent than usual. Presently she drew her face up from her clinging fingers and searched the other woman with eyes that nevertheless refused confirmation for their astonishment.

"Well?" said Hilda.

"I can think of no one--there _is_ no one--except--oh, it's too absurd!

Not Stephen--poor dear Stephen!"

The faintest shadow drifted across Hilda's face, as if for an instant she contemplated a thing inscrutable. Then the light came back, dashed with a gravity, a gentleness.

"I admit the absurdity. Stephen--poor dear Stephen. How odd it seems,"

she went on, while Alicia gazed, "the announcement of it--like a thing born. But it is that--a thing born."

"I don't understand--in the least," Alicia exclaimed.

"Neither do I. I don't indeed. Sometimes I feel like a creature with its feet in a trap. The insane, _insane_ improbability of it!" She laughed again. It was delicious to hear her.

"But--he is a priest!"

"Much more difficult. He is a saint."

Alicia glanced at the floor. The record of another lighter moment twitched itself out of a day that was forgotten.

"Are you quite certain?" she said. "You told me once that--that there had been other times."

"They are useful, those foolish episodes. They explain to one the difference." The tone of this was very even, very usual, but Alicia was aware of a suggestion in it that accused her of aggression, that almost ranged her hostile. She hurried out of that position.

"If it were possible," she said, frowning at her embarra.s.sment. "I see nothing--nothing _really_--against it."

"I should think not! Can't you conceive what I could do for him?"

"And what could he do for you?" Alicia asked, with a flash of curiosity.