Boreham spoke in emphatic tones. If May was thinking of her husband, then this piece of truth must be put before her without delay. War widows had the habit of speaking of their husbands as heroes, when all they had done was to have got themselves blown to pieces while they were trying to blow other people to pieces.

"You make questions of taste very important," said May, looking down the misty street. "Some men have a taste for virtue and generosity, and others have taste for vice and meanness."

Boreham looked at her features closely in the dim light.

"Are you angry with me?" he asked.

"Not at all," said May. "We are arguing about words. You object to the use of the word 'selfish,' so I adopt your term 'taste.'"

"There's no reason why we should argue just now," said Boreham. "Not that argument affects friendship! Friendship goes behind all that, doesn't it?" He asked this anxiously.

"I don't expect my friends to agree with me in all points," said May, smiling. "That would be very selfish!" She laughed. "I beg your pardon.

I mean that my taste in friends is pretty catholic," and here Boreham detected a sudden coldness in her voice.

"Friendship--I will say more than that--love--has nothing to do with 'points of view,'" he began hastily. "A man may fall in love with a woman as she pa.s.ses his window, though he may never exchange a word with her. Such things have happened."

"And it is just possible," suggested May, "that a protracted conversation with the lady might have had the effect of destroying the romance."

Here Boreham felt a wave of fear and hope and necessity surge through his whole being. The moment had arrived!

"Not if you were the lady," he said in a convinced tone.

May still gazed down the street, etherealised beyond its usual beauty in this thin pale light.

"I don't think any man, however magnanimous, could stand a woman long if she made protracted lamentations after the manner of Jeremiah," she said.

"You are purposely speaking ill of yourself," said Boreham. "Yet, whatever you do or say makes a man fall in love with you." He was finding words now without having to think.

"I was not aware of it," said May, rather coldly.

"It is true," he persisted. "You are different from other women; you are the only woman I have ever met whom I wanted to marry."

It was out! Not as well put as he would have liked, but it was out. Here was a proposal of marriage by word of mouth. Here was the orthodox woman's definite opportunity. May would see the seriousness of it now.

"As a personal friend of yours," said May, and her tone was not as serious as he had feverishly hoped, "I do not think you are consulting your own interests at this moment, Mr. Boreham."

"No!" began Boreham. "Not mine exclusively----"

"Your remark was hasty--ill considered," she said, interrupting him.

"You don't really want to marry. You would find it an irksome bondage, probably dull as well as irksome."

"Not with you!" exclaimed Boreham, and he touched her arm.

May's arm became miraculously hard and unsympathetic.

"Marriage is a great responsibility," she said.

"I have thought that all out," said Boreham. "There may be----"

"Then you know," she replied, "that it means----"

"I have calculated the cost," he said. "I am willing----"

"You have not only to save your own soul but to help some one else to save theirs," she went on. "You have to exercise justice and mercy. You have to forgive every day of your life, and"--she added--"to be forgiven. Wouldn't that bore you?"

Boreham's heart thumped with consternation. It might take months to make her take a reasonable view of marriage. She was more difficult than he had antic.i.p.ated.

"Marriage is a dreary business," continued May, "unless you go into it with much prayer and fasting--Jeremiah again."

Into Boreham's consternation broke a sudden anger.

"That is why," continued May, "Herod ordered Mariamne to be beheaded, and why the young woman who married the 'beloved disciple' said she couldn't realise her true self and went off with Judas Iscariot." May turned round and looked at him as she spoke.

"I was serious!" burst out Boreham.

"Not more serious than I am," said May; "I am serious enough to treat the subject you have introduced with the fearless criticism you consider right to apply to all important subjects. You ought to approve!"

And yet she smiled just a little at the corners of her mouth, because she knew that, when Boreham demanded the right of every man to criticise fearlessly--what he really had in his mind was the vision of himself, Boreham, criticising fearlessly. He thought of himself, for instance, as trying to shame the British public for saying slimily: "Let's pretend to be monogamous!" He thought of himself calling out pluckily: "Here, you self-satisfied humbugs, I'm going to say straight out--we ain't monogamous----"

He never contemplated May Dashwood coming and saying to him: "And are _you_ not a self-satisfied humbug, pretending that there is no courage, no endurance, no moral effort superior to your own?" It was this that made May smile a little.

"The fact remains," he said, feeling his way hotly, blindly, "that a man can, and does, make a woman happy, if he loves her. All I ask," he went on, "is to be allowed the chance of doing this, and you gibe."

"I don't gibe," said May, "I'm preaching. And, after all, I ought not to preach, because marriage does not concern me--directly. I shall not marry again, Mr. Boreham."

Boreham stared hard at her and his eyebrows worked. All she had just been saying provoked his anger; it disagreed with him, made him dismal, and yet, at least, he had no rival! She hadn't got hold of any so-called saint as a future husband. Middleton hadn't been meddling, nor Bingham, and there was no shadowy third anywhere in town. She was heart free!

That was something!

There was the dead husband, of course, but his memory would fade as time went on. "Just now, people who are dead or dying, are in the swim,"

thought Boreham; "but just wait till the war is over!" He swiftly imagined publishers and editors of journals refusing anything that referred to the war or to any dismal subject connected with it. The British public would have no use for the dead when the war was over. The British public would be occupied with the future; how to make money, how to spend it. Stories about love and hate among the living would be wanted, or pleasant discourses about the consolations of religion and blessed hopes of immortality for those who were making the money and spending it!

Boreham sneered as he thought this, and yet he himself desired intensely that men, and especially women, should forget the dead, and, above all, that May should forget her dead and occupy herself in being a pretty and attractive person of the female s.e.x.

"I will wait," said Boreham, eagerly; "I won't ask you for an answer now."

"Now you know my position, you will not put any question to me!" said May, very quietly.

There came a moment's oppressive silence.

"I may continue to be your friend," he demanded; "you won't punish me?"

and his voice was urgent.

"Of course not," she said.

"I may come and see you?" he urged again.

"Any friends of mine may come and see me, if they care to," she said; "but I am very much occupied during the day--and tired in the evenings."