"I love human nature," she said.

I knew I had only to speak. In the light of the wrong I was about to do her I freely forgave her all her past pretences towards myself. All grapes had been sour to poor Kitty, and I didn't doubt she had made brave attempts, and still braver concealments of failure. Baboon or anybody else, there she was at his pleasure so her reproach be but taken away. For already I had decided that it might as well be now as later.

"Yes," I answered, as if absently, and we walked on.

The night was slightly frosty, and over the houses to the north of the Fields the glare of Holborn shone rustily. There were few people about.

As we walked, by this time almost used to the strangeness of one another's company, I wished that the central garden of the square had not been closed; at least she would have had the a.s.sociation of a tree and a plot of gra.s.s to go with her plighting. But I knew that such weaknesses as this were not safe, and shut peremptorily down on them.

She seemed so pathetically small and skimpy by my side, and had I yielded even a little I could almost have persuaded myself of a tenderness for her. This I refused to do. I would do nothing to make easy for myself what would by-and-by prove cruel enough for her.

We were half way round the Fields on our second circuit before I spoke again. I moistened my lips and steeled myself.

"Miss Windus," I said.

I think a tremor took her instantly with my change of tone. She looked up, but I did not hear whether she said anything.

Nor did I say anything. Our hands, as we walked, were close together. I took hers.

She made no attempt to draw it away, and we walked so. Presently I took the hand in my other one, and this brought it across my breast. I daresay she felt the beating of my heart.

"Kitty," I whispered.

She pressed against me a little.

I don't think it ever entered her head that I intended anything but just that we should walk, for that one night, round Lincoln's Inn Fields like this. I don't believe she thought of anything. With even that heel and paring of love she was content--just to walk so, to-morrow if it was to be, if not then at any rate to-night, with her hand in a man's and her shoulder pressing lightly against a man's shoulder.

Well, she had it.

"Kitty," I whispered again. This was in a dark shadow on the south side of the Fields. Without prearrangement we had ceased to walk, and were standing together, she with her face turned downwards and away, quite ready to give me all she supposed I wanted of her.

She couldn't murmur my name in return. She didn't know it. It was, for her, merely "Man." But instead she gave me that for which I stooped over her. She gave it with a heartrending impulsiveness throwing back her head suddenly and leaning her bosom on mine. I felt a pair of dry, slightly cracked lips on my own and was conscious of an odour of clothes.... Then we separated again.

"Oh," she said, with a shaky little exhalation of her breath, "I ... I didn't think you'd ever look at me--Jeff!"

This last was a quick invention, to cover her ignorance of my Christian name.

She meant that she hadn't thought that anybody would ever look at her.

Every shred of the old pretence of the pertinacities and annoyances of strangers had fallen from her. She lifted up her face again--and again--as if by present gluttony to forestall insatiable hungers of the morrow and the morrow after that.

For a minute I was well-nigh resolved out of sheer compa.s.sion to keep my word and marry her.

And even then--think of it!--she had no idea that I contemplated what was, indeed, my sole reason for action--an acknowledged engagement. She never dreamed I meant to marry her. It was I who spoke of this, half-an-hour later. By that time we had been to the bottom of Chancery Lane and back, and were in the Fields again, once more in that same shadow where I had kissed her first. She looked at me.

I can hardly write it. There was first a gleam of fear in her eyes, and then a leaping.

"_Jeff!_" she cried in a loud voice that cracked.

I had to catch her as she began slowly to sink at the knees.

So I became engaged. At the college it was a nine days' wonder, but I let them wonder. So did Kitty Windus, merely pretending that the thing had been for long a secret understanding. Archie, I remember, smirked through some form of congratulation when I told him: "What, _not_ Louie after all!" but it was only when Evie Soames flung her arms about Kitty Windus' neck and well-nigh about mine also that I began really to wonder what could possibly come of it all.

III

During those little pauses and lapses of study in which men scribble abstractedly on the margins of paper, idly forming letters or noughts-and-crosses or inexpert attempts at portraiture, I myself had a way of filling my blanks at that time that may serve to explain the change that had more and more come over me. I used to rub with a pencil, as evenly as possible, two little squares of grey, and then to put into the middle of the first of them a spot as black as my pencil could make it, leaving in the second a similar spot, but one of clean white. Unless you have tried it you may not believe the difference in effect. The black spot of the first seems to make denser and darker the whole square; but the white one lightens and relieves it as the sun does when it struggles through a mist. By what law of optics this is to be explained I cannot tell; I can only say that if Kitty Windus, wondering what I studied all by myself in the senior cla.s.sroom, had come upon me at these times, she would have found me pondering over these marginal trifles as in some way a symbol of my own life.

For had it not been for this gloomy blot of my betrothal to her I would not now have exchanged my life for that of any man I knew. So did hope now irradiate it. I was still an eighteen-shilling Agency clerk; I still lived in a red and green loft over a public-house; but I now believed in myself, longed to be able to respect myself, and had already grimly resolved that others should respect me.

I was in this state of mind when I first set eyes on Angela Soames.

I was taken there, of course--to Woburn Place, I mean--by Kitty Windus.

It was within a week of our engagement, so that I had not to wait long for these first-fruits of my extraordinary position. That night was the second time I walked with Evie to her abode, for Archie followed a few yards behind with Kitty Windus. We had dropped into this arrangement on leaving the college, as men tacitly pay each other's partners the courtesy of their attentions.

When I have said that Evie's home was in Woburn Place I have gone a long way towards describing it. She lived in one of those large apartment houses that are full of j.a.panese, Americans, and Indian law students, with a half-pay officer here and there. She and her aunt had rooms of their own upstairs, but they dined in the large common dining-room downstairs, at a table that would almost have resembled that of a public dinner had it not been for the gaps left by the absent boarders, several of whom were always dining elsewhere. I never saw that table full. I have tried to carry on a conversation with my neighbour across two intervening empty chairs. I have had to accept the highly polished civilities of Indians and j.a.panese, who have refused to disturb me when I have removed a rolled napkin in a numbered ring and put a flat and freshly ironed one in its place. One met n.i.g.g.e.rs and gouty subjects and antiquated old ladies in the hall and on the stairs; and I was quite prepared to find Miss Soames the aunt one of these last.

But she was not in the least so. There was not very much more difference between her age and my own than there was between mine and Evie's--though of course what difference there was was all on the wrong side. She was, I should say, forty-three or four, and I wondered the moment I saw her how she had got through these forty odd years and remained Miss Angela. Let me say at once that she had no secret sorrow (though Kitty always vowed she had). When, later, she told me, with the greatest self-pluming in the world, that she "could have been married"

more than once or twice, she told me nothing I should not have guessed; but merely to have had these opportunities seemed entirely to content her detached and unruffled and rather aimless soul. She had had the refusal of them--and she coquetted with that. She had avoided the pains of marriage--and remained the white-haired _ingenue_. It later became one of Kitty's irritating tricks to "wish she had hair like that"--a beautiful tower of it dressed _a la Marquise_; but in nothing else could Kitty ever have resembled Angela Soames.... But perhaps I may be wrong in my estimate after all. Perhaps no man can really understand that kind of woman, who cannot lose all herself even when she marries and loses not very much less when she does not. Evie, I concluded, probably had her pa.s.sion for abandonment from her mother.

I was introduced to the elder Miss Soames in her sitting-room. This apartment, like herself, seemed to trail even into Woburn Place hems and fringes of past prosperity. The room itself was not much more than a cold-blue-papered, corniceless box--but, as the first of a number of odd little contrasts, a shield-shaped embroidered firescreen hung on a slender stem near the fire. The door was painted yellow and grained--but a pair of handsome silver candlesticks stood on the mantelpiece. There was a threadbare lodging-house carpet--and a black bear-skin hearthrug, the head of the animal worn bald by Miss Angela's paste-buckled slipper.

And so on. On the round table stood a rosy-shaded lamp (that did _not_ change to a corresponding shade of green as you looked). Miss Angela herself wore a soft old grey with a thin Indian silk shawl cast over her shoulders, and I remembered, as I looked at her, certain former angry conclusions I had come to about her. I took them all back.

Charmingly unsure of herself in everything, from her love affairs downwards, she might be, but she did not parrot precepts about the "less fortunately circ.u.mstanced." We shook hands, and I was told that I might smoke. Archie had come in smoking.

I did not talk very much during this my first call. Indeed, Miss Angela murmured, as if to herself, some half-mischievous, half-tactful remark about an "ordeal"; and my slight nervousness pa.s.sed as part of Kitty's "showing off" of me. But the others made up for me, and I listened, smiling, but silent except when I was directly addressed.

This I presently was by Miss Angela, and on a point no less interesting than the way in which Archie spent his evenings. It had already appeared that he was to celebrate a birthday two days thence, and Miss Angela had asked him to spend the evening with them.

"You've given us a very cold shoulder lately," she said; "why, your mother's been remarking on it!" She pulled a faded tapestry ha.s.sock towards her with her foot, the fire being too hot to allow her to make use of the bear's head, and reached for a paper fan with which to keep the heat from her face. "I hope it's not _you_ who take up all his time, Mr Jeffries?"

I answered that it was not, and Evie, who had removed her hat and coat and was now tidying her hair before the mantelpiece mirror, laughed.

"Mr Jeffries' time is spoken for now--isn't it, Kitty?" she said.

I saw her look at Archie as she said it. He was astride the hearthrug, allowing the smoke of his cigarette to stream up his nostrils, and she, as she arranged her hair, had to look at herself almost over his shoulder. Her occupation left the whole of her young bosom quite defenceless had there been a pair of arms to pa.s.s about it, and the soft look she gave him was a double provocation. But he did not return the look. He moved a little aside, also finding the fire hot, and flipped his cigarette ash into the fender.

"I don't think an engaged girl ought to come between a man and all his old friends," Kitty p.r.o.nounced. Her look at me was a promise that she would never come between me and Archie.

Miss Angela gave a contented little laugh.

"Ah, you all say that at first! Well...." She glanced past Evie at me, and took me into her confidence with a private smile. It was as if we two older ones understood that there was something in process that must not be disturbed. "But if you don't come, Archie," she added, "I shall write straight to your mother! You'll come too, Miss Windus?"

Kitty glanced at me.

"Oh, of course I mean Mr Jeffries too!" said Miss Angela archly.

"Oh, of course him too!" quoth Archie, from the hearthrug, loosening his scorching trousers. "Two hearts that beat as one--you bet--twopence into a penny show _now_, Jeff!"

And again Miss Angela, with a look this time past him, seemed to invite my attention to something.