these things is perennial, and the noise of laughter
is ever in the air of the Indian capital. Between
the explosions, however, it is natural enough that
the affairs of a priest of College Street and an actress
of no address at all should slip unnoticed, especially
as they did not advertise it. Stephen mostly
came, on afternoons when there was no rehearsal, to
tea. He, Stephen, had a perception of contrasts
which answered fairly well the purposes of a sense
of humour, and nobody could question hers; it operated
obscurely to keep them in the house.
She told him buoyantly once or twice that he had been
sent to her to take the place of Duff Lindsay, who
had fallen to the snare of beauty; although she mentioned
to herself that he took it with a difference, a vast
temperamental difference which she was aware of not
having yet quite sounded. The depths of his faith
of course— there she could only scan and
hesitate, but this was a brink upon which she did
not often find herself, away from which, indeed, he
sometimes gently guided her. The atmospheres
of their talk were the more bracing ones of this world,
and it was here that Hilda looked when she would make
him a parallel for Lindsay, and here that she found
her measure of disappointment. He warmed himself
and dried his wings in the opulence of her spirit,
and she was not on the whole the poorer by any exchange
they made, but she was sometimes pricked to the reflection
that the freemasonry between them was all hers, and
the things she said to him had still the flavour of
adventure. She found herself inclined—and
the experience was new—to make an effort
for a reward which was problematical and had to be
considered in averages, a reward put out in a thin
and hesitating hand under a sacerdotal robe, with a
curious concentrated quality, and a strange flavour
of incense and the air of cold churches. There
was also the impression—was it too fantastic?—of
words carried over a medium, an invisible wire which
brought the soul of them and left the body by the way.
Duff Lindsay, so eminently responsive and calculable,
came running with open arms; in his rejoiceful eye-beam
one saw almost a midwife to one’s idea.
But the comparison was irritating, and after a time
she turned from it. She awoke once in the night,
moreover, to declare to the stars that she was less
worried by the consideration of Arnold’s sex
than she would have thought it possible to be—one
hardly paused to consider that he was a man at all;
a reflection which would certainly not have occurred
to her about poor dear Duff. With regard to
Stephen Arnold, it was only, of course, another way
of saying that she was less oppressed, in his company,
by the consideration of her own. Perhaps it is
already evident that this was her grievance with life,
when the joy of it left her time to think of a grievance,
the attraction of her personal lines, the reason of
the hundred fetiches her body claimed of her and found
her willing to perform, the fact that it meant more
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