"Clear enough. Love is in the first place the instinct to love some one else, and only in the second place the desire to be loved in return. Ten to one, the woman puts the cart before the horse. She's thinking of the return before she's done anything to get it. She don't want to love half as much as to be _loved_--and so she finds herself left."

Lois went on with her sewing again, but she was uneasy. She thought of her confession to Thor. Could it be that there was something wrong with her love as well as with his? It was to see what he had to say further that she asked, "Finds herself left in what way?"

"Make 'emselves too sentimental," he grumbled on. "In love with love.

They like that expression, and it does 'em harm. Sets 'em to wool-gathering--with the heart. Makes 'em think love more important than it is."

"It's generally supposed to be rather important."

"Rather's the word. But it's not the only thing of which that can be said--and more. Women reason as if it was. Make their lives depend on it. Mistake. If you can get it, well and good; if not--there's compensation."

She lifted her head not less in amazement than in indignation.

"Compensation for having to do without _love_?"

"Heaps."

"And may I ask what?"

"No use telling you. Wouldn't believe me. Be like telling a man who's fond of his wine that he'd be just as well off with water."

She said, musingly, "Yes; love _is_ the wine of life, isn't it?"

"Wine that maketh glad the heart of man--and can also play the deuce with it."

She sat for some time smiling to herself with faint amus.e.m.e.nt. "Do you really disapprove of love, Uncle Sim?" she asked, at last.

He yawned loudly and stretched himself. "What 'd be the good of that?

Don't disapprove of it any more than I disapprove of the circulation of the blood. Force in life--of course! Treasure to be valued and peril to be controlled. To play with it requires skill; to utilize it calls for wisdom."

She had again been smiling gently to herself when she said, "I doubt if _you_ can ever have been in love."

"Got nothing to do with it. Not obliged to have been insane to understand insanity. As a matter of fact, best brain specialists have always kept their senses."

"Oh, then, you rate love with insanity."

"Depends on the kind. Some sorts not far from it. Obsession.

Brain-storm. Supernormal excitement. Pa.s.sing commotion of the senses.

Comes as suddenly as a summer tempest--thunder and lightning and rain--and goes the same way."

"Oh, but would you call that love?"

"You bet I'd call it love. Love the poets write about. Grand pa.s.sion.

Whirls along like a tornado--makes a noise and kicks up dust--and all over in an afternoon. That's the real thing. If you can't love like that, you can't love at all--not in the grand manner. The going just as vital as the coming. Very essence of it that it shouldn't last. That's why Shakespeare kills his Romeo and his Juliet at the end of the play--and Wagner his Tristan and his Isolde. Nothing else to do with 'em. People of that kind go through just the same set of high jinks six or eight months later with some one else; and in poetry that wouldn't do. Romantic lovers love by crises, and never pa.s.s twice the same way.

People who don't do that--and lots of 'em don't--needn't think they can be romantic. They ain't."

"But surely there _is_ a love--"

"Of the nice, tame, house-keeping variety. Of course! And it bears the same relation to the other kind as a gla.s.s of milk to a bottle of champagne. Mind you, I like milk. I approve of it. In the long run it 'll beat champagne any day--especially where you expect babies. I'm only saying that it doesn't come of the same vintage as Veuve Cliquot. Women often wish it did; and when it doesn't they make things uncomfortable.

No use. Can't make a Tristan out of good, honest, faithful William Dobbin, nohow. The thing with the fizz is bound to go flat; and the thing that stands by you, to be relied on all through life, won't have any fizz."

Feeling at liberty to reject these vaporings as those of an eccentric old man who could know little or nothing on the subject, Lois reverted to the aspect of the question which had been in her mind when she started the theme. "You still haven't answered what I asked--as to why men fall in love with inferior women, and often with a kind of infatuation they hardly ever feel for the good ones."

He took longer than usual to reflect. "Part of man's dual nature. Paul knew a good deal about that. Puts the new man in contrast to the old man--the inner man in contrast to the outer man--the spiritual man in contrast to the carnal. The old, outer, carnal man falls in love with one kind of person, and the new, inner, spiritual man with another.

Depends on which element is the stronger. The higher falls in love with the higher type; the lower with the lower."

"But suppose neither is stronger than the other?--that they're equally balanced--and--?"

"And in conflict. One of the commonest sights in life. Known fellows in love with two women at the same time--with a good wife at home, mother of the children, and all that--and another kind of woman somewhere else.

True, in a way, to 'em both. Struggle of the two natures."

Lois was distressed. "Oh, but that kind of thing can't be love."

"Can't be? 'Tis. Ask any one who's ever felt it--who's been dragged by it both ways at once. He'll tell you whether it's love or not--and each kind the real thing--while it lasts."

It was the expression "while it lasts" that Lois most resented. It reduced love to a phase--to a pa.s.sing experience that might be repeated on an indefinite number of occasions. It was more than a depreciation; it had the nature of a sacrilege. And yet no later than the following day she received a shock that showed her there was something to be said in its favor.

She had gone nominally to see Rosie, but really to verify for herself Jim Breen's report of the collapse of Jasper Fay's little industry. She found it hard to believe that after Claude's conduct toward Rosie her father-in-law could have the heart to bring further woe upon a family that had already had enough. Nothing but seeing for herself could coerce her incredulity.

She had seen for herself. Over the little place which had always been neat even when it was forlorn there was now the stamp of desolation. The beds which had been seeded or planted a month before, and which should now have been weeded, trimmed, and hoed, were growing with an untended recklessness that had all the proverbial resemblance to moral breakdown.

In the cuc.u.mber-house the vines had become rusty and limp, sagging from the twines on which they climbed in debauched indifference to sightliness. The roof of the hothouse that had contained the flowers had a deep gash in the gla.s.s which it was no longer worth while to mend.

There was no yellow-brown plume from the furnace chimney, and the very windows of the old house with the mansard roof had in their stare the glazed, unseeing expression of eyes in which there is death. Inside, Mrs. Fay was packing up. Battered old trunks that had long been stored in some moldy hiding-place stood agape; a packing-case held the place of honor in a forbidding "best room" into which Lois had never looked before. Mrs. Fay had little to say. Tears welled into her cold eyes with the attempt to say anything. Outside, Fay himself had nothing to say at all. Lois had accosted him, and though he had ceased to regard her as an enemy, he stood grimly silent as his only response to her words of consolation.

"I know things will come all right again, Mr. Fay. They must. They look dark now; but haven't you often noticed that after the worst times in our lives we're able to look back and see that the very thing that seemed most cruel was the turning-point at which a change for the better began? You must surely have noticed that--a man with so much experience as you."

He looked vaguely about him, standing in patience till she had said her say, but giving no indication that her words had anything to do with him. The change in his appearance shocked her. Everything in his face had taken on what was to her a terrible significance. The starry mysticism had vanished from the eyes to be replaced by a look that was at once hunted and searching, vindictive and yet woebegone. The mouth was sunken as the mouths of old men become from the loss of teeth, and the thin lips which used to be kindly and vacillating were drawn with a hard, unflinching tightness. The skin that had long been gray was now ghostly, with the shadowy, not quite earthly, hue of things about to disappear.

She had talked to him for some minutes before he woke to animation. At sight of two young men--surveyor's clerks, perhaps--who had set up in the roadway what might have been a camera on a tripod, or more probably a theodolite, through which they were squinting over the buildings and the slope of the land, he left her abruptly. With a hoe in his hand he crept forward, taking his place behind a clump of syringa that grew near the gate, ready to strike if either of the lads ventured to put foot on his property. It was the situation at which, according to light-hearted Jim Breen, you would have died laughing; but Lois had difficulty in keeping back her tears.

She found Rosie in the hothouse, of which the interior corresponded to the gash in the roof. All the smaller plants had been removed, disclosing the empty, ugly, earth-stained, water-stained wooden stagings. Only some half-dozen fern-trees remained of all the former beauty.

But even here Rosie was at work, sitting at the old desk, which, deprived of its sheltering greenery, was shabbier than ever, making out bills. There was still money owing to her father, and it was important that it should be collected. Over and over again she wrote her neat "Acct. rendered," while she added as a postscript in every case: "Please remit. Going out of business."

And yet, if there was anything on the dilapidated premises that could cheer or encourage it was Rosie. With the enforced rest and seclusion following on her fruitless dash to escape, her prettiness had become more delicate, less worn. Shame at her folly had put into her greenish eyes a pleading timidity which became a quivering, babyish tremble when it reached the lips. The contrast which the girl thus presented to her parents, as well as something that was visibly developing within her, enabled Lois to affirm that which hitherto she had only hoped or suspected, that the wild leap into the pond had worked some mysterious good.

Like her father and mother, Rosie had little to say. The meeting was embarra.s.sing. There were too many unuttered and unutterable thoughts on both sides to make intercourse easy or agreeable. All they could achieve was to be sorry for each other, in a measure to respect each other, and to make up by an enforced, slightly perfunctory, good will for what they lacked in the way of spontaneity.

Lois took the chair on which Rosie had been seated at the desk, while Rosie leaned against a corner of the empty staging. It furnished the latter with something to say to be able to tell the new plans of the family. Her father had taken a job with Mr. Breen. It wouldn't be like managing his own place, but it would be better than nothing. He had also rented a tenement in a "three-family" house on the Thorley estate, to which they would move as soon as possible. It was important to make the change, so as to be settled when Matt came out of jail. Both Rosie and her mother were glad that he wouldn't be free till the 10th of July, because the lease terminated on the 9th. He would return, therefore, to absolutely new conditions, and there would be no necessity of going over any of the old ground again. As far as they were concerned--Rosie and her mother--the sooner they went the better they would like it, since they had to go; but "poor father," Rosie said, with a catch in her voice, "won't leave till the last minute has struck. Even then," she added, "I think they'll have to drive him off. This place has been his life. I don't think he'll last long after he's had to leave it."

Having given sympathetic views on these points as they came up, Lois rose to depart. She had actually shaken hands and turned away when Rosie seemed to utter a little cry. That is, her words came out with the emotion of a cry. "Mrs. Masterman! I want to ask you something!"

Lois turned in surprise. "Yes, Rosie? What?"

With one hand Rosie clung to the staging for support. The back of the other hand was pressed against her lips. She could hardly speak. "Is--is Claude staying away on my account?" Before Lois could answer, Rosie added, "Because he--he needn't."

Lois wondered. "What do you mean by that, Rosie?"

"Only that--that he needn't. I--I don't care whether he stays away or not."