"I don't mean anything personal, of course, but apply the situation to yourself."

Halidome took out a toothpick, used it brusquely, and responded:

"I shouldn't stand any humbug--take her travelling; shake her mind up.

She'd soon come round."

"But suppose she really loathed you?"

Halidome cleared his throat; the idea was so obviously indecent. How could anybody loathe him? With great composure, however, regarding Shelton as if he were a forward but amusing child, he answered:

"There are a great many things to be taken into consideration."

"It appears to me," said Shelton, "to be a question of common pride. How can you, ask anything of a woman who doesn't want to give it."

His friend's voice became judicial.

"A man ought not to suffer," he said, poring over his whisky, "because a woman gets hysteria. You have to think of Society, your children, house, money arrangements, a thousand things. It's all very well to talk. How do you like this whisky?"

"The part of the good citizen, in fact," said Shelton, "self-preservation!"

"Common-sense," returned his friend; "I believe in justice before sentiment." He drank, and callously blew smoke at Shelton. "Besides, there are many people with religious views about it."

"It's always seemed to me," said Shelton, "to be quaint that people should a.s.sert that marriage gives them the right to 'an eye for an eye,'

and call themselves Christians. Did you ever know anybody stand on their rights except out of wounded pride or for the sake of their own comfort?

Let them call their reasons what they like, you know as well as I do that it's cant."

"I don't know about that," said Halidome, more and more superior as Shelton grew more warm; "when you stand on your rights, you do it for the sake of Society as well as for your own. If you want to do away with marriage, why don't you say so?"

"But I don't," said Shelton, "is it likely? Why, I'm going--" He stopped without adding the words "to be married myself," for it suddenly occurred to him that the reason was not the most lofty and philosophic in the world. "All I can say is," he went on soberly, "that you can't make a horse drink by driving him. Generosity is the surest way of tightening the knot with people who've any sense of decency; as to the rest, the chief thing is to prevent their breeding."

Halidome smiled.

"You're a rum chap," he said.

Shelton jerked his cigarette into the fire.

"I tell you what"--for late at night a certain power of vision came to him--"it's humbug to talk of doing things for the sake of Society; it's nothing but the instinct to keep our own heads above the water."

But Halidome remained unruffled.

"All right," he said, "call it that. I don't see why I should go to the wall; it wouldn't do any good."

"You admit, then," said Shelton, "that our morality is the sum total of everybody's private instinct of self-preservation?"

Halidome stretched his splendid frame and yawned.

"I don't know," he began, "that I should quite call it that--"

But the compelling complacency of his fine eyes, the dignified posture of his healthy body, the lofty slope of his narrow forehead, the perfectly humane look of his cultivated brutality, struck Shelton as ridiculous.

"Hang it, Hall" he cried, jumping from his chair, "what an old fraud you are! I'll be off."

"No, look here!" said Halidome; the faintest shade of doubt had appeared upon his face; he took Shelton by a lapel: "You're quite wrong--"

"Very likely; good-night, old chap!"

Shelton walked home, letting the spring wind into him. It was Sat.u.r.day, and he pa.s.sed many silent couples. In every little patch of shadow he could see two forms standing or sitting close together, and in their presence Words the Impostors seemed to hold their tongues. The wind rustled the buds; the stars, one moment bright as diamonds, vanished the next. In the lower streets a large part of the world was under the influence of drink, but by this Shelton was far from being troubled. It seemed better than Drama, than dressing-bagged men, unruffled women, and padded points of view, better than the immaculate solidity of his friend's possessions.

"So," he reflected, "it's right for every reason, social, religious, and convenient, to inflict one's society where it's not desired. There are obviously advantages about the married state; charming to feel respectable while you're acting in a way that in any other walk of life would bring on you contempt. If old Halidome showed that he was tired of me, and I continued to visit him, he'd think me a bit of a cad; but if his wife were to tell him she couldn't stand him, he'd still consider himself a perfect gentleman if he persisted in giving her the burden of his society; and he has the cheek to bring religion into it--a religion that says, 'Do unto others!'"

But in this he was unjust to Halidome, forgetting how impossible it was for him to believe that a woman could not stand him. He reached his rooms, and, the more freely to enjoy the clear lamplight, the soft, gusty breeze, and waning turmoil of the streets, waited a moment before entering.

"I wonder," thought he, "if I shall turn out a cad when I marry, like that chap in the play. It's natural. We all want our money's worth, our pound of flesh! Pity we use such fine words--'Society, Religion, Morality.' Humbug!"

He went in, and, throwing his window open, remained there a long time, his figure outlined against the lighted room for the benefit of the dark square below, his hands in his pockets, his head down, a reflective frown about his eyes. A half-intoxicated old ruffian, a policeman, and a man in a straw hat had stopped below, and were holding a palaver.

"Yus," the old ruffian said, "I'm a rackety old blank; but what I say is, if we wus all alike, this would n't be a world!"

They went their way, and before the listener's eyes there rose Antonia's face, with its unruffled brow; Halidome's, all health and dignity; the forehead of the goggle-eyed man, with its line of hair parted in the centre, and brushed across. A light seemed to illumine the plane of their existence, as the electric lamp with the green shade had illumined the pages of the Matthew Arnold; serene before Shelton's vision lay that Elysium, untouched by pa.s.sion or extremes of any kind, autocratic; complacent, possessive, and well-kept as any Midland landscape. Healthy, wealthy, wise! No room but for perfection, self-preservation, the survival of the fittest! "The part of the good citizen," he thought: "no, if we were all alike, this would n't be a world!"

CHAPTER VI

MARRIAGE SETTLEMENT

"My dear Richard" (wrote Shelton's uncle the next day), "I shall be glad to see you at three o'clock to-morrow afternoon upon the question of your marriage settlement...." At that hour accordingly Shelton made his way to Lincoln's Inn Fields, where in fat black letters the names "Paramor and Herring (Commissioners for Oaths)" were written on the wall of a stone entrance. He ascended the solid steps with nervousness, and by a small red-haired boy was introduced to a back room on the first floor. Here, seated at a table in the very centre, as if he thereby better controlled his universe, a pug-featured gentleman, without a beard, was writing. He paused. "Ow, Mr. Richard!" he said; "glad to see you, sir. Take a chair. Your uncle will be disengaged in 'arf a minute"; and in the tone of his allusion to his employer was the satirical approval that comes with long and faithful service. "He will do everything himself," he went on, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up his sly, greenish, honest eyes, "and he 's not a young man."

Shelton never saw his uncle's clerk without marvelling at the prosperity deepening upon his face. In place of the look of hara.s.sment which on most faces begins to grow after the age of fifty, his old friend's countenance, as though in sympathy with the nation, had expanded--a little greasily, a little genially, a little coa.r.s.ely--every time he met it. A contemptuous tolerance for people who were not getting on was spreading beneath its surface; it left each time a deeper feeling that its owner could never be in the wrong.

"I hope you're well, sir," he resumed: "most important for you to have your health now you're going-to"--and, feeling for the delicate way to put it, he involuntarily winked--"to become a family man. We saw it in the paper. My wife said to me the other morning at breakfast: 'Bob, here's a Mr. Richard Paramor Shelton goin' to be married. Is that any relative of your Mr. Shelton?' 'My dear,' I said to her, 'it's the very man!'"

It disquieted Shelton to perceive that his old friend did not pa.s.s the whole of his life at that table writing in the centre of the room, but that somewhere (vistas of little grey houses rose before his eyes) he actually lived another life where someone called him "Bob." Bob! And this, too, was a revelation. Bob! Why, of course, it was the only name for him! A bell rang.

"That's your uncle"; and again the head clerk's voice sounded ironical.

"Good-bye, sir."

He seemed to clip off intercourse as one clips off electric light.

Shelton left him writing, and preceded the red-haired boy to an enormous room in the front where his uncle waited.

Edmund Paramor was a medium-sized and upright man of seventy, whose brown face was perfectly clean-shaven. His grey, silky hair was brushed in a c.o.c.k's comb from his fine forehead, bald on the left side. He stood before the hearth facing the room, and his figure had the springy abruptness of men who cannot fatten. There was a certain youthfulness, too, in his eyes, yet they had a look as though he had been through fire; and his mouth curled at the corners in surprising smiles. The room was like the man--morally large, void of red-tape and almost void of furniture; no tin boxes were ranged against the walls, no papers littered up the table; a single bookcase contained a complete edition of the law reports, and resting on the Law Directory was a single red rose in a gla.s.s of water. It looked the room of one with a sober magnanimity, who went to the heart of things, despised haggling, and before whose smiles the more immediate kinds of humbug faded.

"Well, d.i.c.k," said he, "how's your mother?"

Shelton replied that his mother was all right.

"Tell her that I'm going to sell her Easterns after all, and put into this Bra.s.s thing. You can say it's safe, from me."