"Of course I can't. That's why I'm asking you."

"I know nothing. I've hardly seen her."

Miss Proctor looked as if she were seeing her that moment without f.a.n.n.y Eliott's help.

"Poor dear Anne."

Anne Fletcher had been simply dear Anne, Mrs. Walter Majendie was poor dear Anne.

Her friends were all sorry for her. They were inclined to be indignant with Edith Majendie, who, they declared, had been at the bottom of her marriage all along. She was the cause of Anne's original callings in Prior Street. If it had not been for Edith, Anne could never have penetrated that secret bachelor abode. The engagement had been an awkward, unsatisfactory, sinister affair. It was a pity that Mr.

Majendie's domestic circ.u.mstances were such that poor dear Anne appeared as having made all the necessary approaches and advances. If Mr. Majendie had had a family that family would have had to call on Anne. But Mr.

Majendie hadn't a family, he had only Edith, which was worse than having n.o.body at all. And then, besides, there was his history.

Mrs. Eliott looked distressed. Mr. Majendie's history could not be explained away as too ancient to be interesting. In Scale a seven-year-old event is still startlingly, unforgetably modern. Anne's marriage had saddled her friends with a difficult responsibility, the justification of Anne for that astounding step.

Acquaintances had been made to understand that Mrs. Eliott had had nothing to do with it. They went away baffled, but confirmed in their impression that she knew; which was, after all, what they wanted to know.

It was not so easy to satisfy the licensed curiosity of Anne's friends.

They came to-day in quant.i.ties, attracted by the news of the Majendies'

premature return from their honeymoon. Mrs. Eliott felt that Miss Proctor and the Gardners were sitting on in the hope of meeting them.

Mrs. Eliott had been obliged to accept Anne's husband, that she might retain Anne's affection. In this she did violence to her feelings, which were sore on the subject of the marriage. It was not only on account of the inglorious clouds he trailed. In any case she would have felt it as a slight that her friend should have married without her a.s.sistance, and so far outside the charmed circle of Thurston Square. She herself was for the moment disappointed with Anne. Anne had once taken them all so seriously. It was her solemn joy in Mrs. Eliott and her circle that had enabled her young superiority to put up so long with the provincial hospitalities of Scale on Humber. They, the slender aristocracy of Thurston Square, were the best that Scale had to offer her, and they had given her of their best. Socially, the step from Thurston Square to Prior Street could not be defined as a going down; but, intellectually, it was a decline, and morally (to those who knew f.a.n.n.y Eliott and to f.a.n.n.y Eliott who _knew_) it was, by comparison, a plunge into the abyss. f.a.n.n.y Eliott was the fine flower of Thurston Square. She had satisfied even the fastidiousness of Anne.

She owned that Mr. Majendie had satisfied it too. It was not that quality in Anne that made her choice so--well, so incomprehensible.

It was Dr. Gardner's word. Dr. Gardner was the President of the Scale Literary and Philosophic Society, and in any discussion of the incomprehensible his word had weight. Vagueness was his foible, the relaxation of an intellect uncomfortably keen. The spirit that looked at you through his short-sighted eyes (magnified by enormous gla.s.ses) seemed to have just returned from a solitary excursion in a dream. In that mood the incomprehensible had for him a certain charm.

Mrs. Eliott had too much good taste to criticise Anne Majendie's. They had simply got to recognise that Prior Street had more to offer her than Thurston Square. That was the way she preferred to put it, effacing herself a little ostentatiously.

Miss Proctor maintained that Prior Street had nothing to offer a creature of Anne Fletcher's kind. It had everything to take, and it seemed bent on taking everything. It was bad enough in the beginning, when she had given herself up, body and soul, to the spinal lady; but to go and marry the brother, without first disposing of the spinal lady in a comfortable home for spines, why, what must the man be like who could let her do it?

"My dear," said Mrs. Eliott, "he's a saint, if you're to believe Anne."

Even Dr. Gardner smiled. "I can't say that's exactly what I should call him."

"Need we," said Mr. Eliott, "call him anything? So long as she thinks him a saint--"

Mr. Eliott--Mr. Johnson Eliott--hovered on the borderland of culture, with a spirit purified from commerce by a Platonic pa.s.sion for the exact sciences. He was, therefore, received in Thurston Square on his own as well as his wife's merits. He too had his little weaknesses. Almost savagely determined in matters of business, at home he liked to sit in a chair and fondle the illusion of indifference. There was no part of Mr. Eliott's mental furniture that was not a fixture, yet he scorned the imputation of conviction. A hunted thing in his wife's drawing-room, Mr.

Eliott had developed in a quite remarkable degree the protective colouring of stupidity.

"How can she?" said Miss Proctor. "She's a saint herself, and she ought to know the difference."

"Perhaps," said Dr. Gardner, "that's why she doesn't."

"I'm sure," said Mrs. Eliott, "it was the original attraction. There could be no other for Anne."

"The attraction was the opportunity for self-sacrifice. Whatever she's makes of Mr. Majendie, she's bent on making a martyr of herself." Miss Proctor met the vague eyes of her circle with a glance that was defiance to all mystery. "It's quite simple. This marriage is a short cut to canonisation, that's all."

Then it was that little Mrs. Gardner spoke. She had been married for a year, and her face still wore its bridal look of possession that was peace, the look that it would wear when Mrs. Gardner was seventy. Her voice had a certain lucid and profound precision.

"Anne was always certain of herself. And since she cares for Mr. Majendie enough to accept him and to accept his sister, and the rather _triste_ life which is all he has to offer her, doesn't it look as if, probably, she knew her own business best?"

"I think," said Mr. Eliott firmly, "we may take it that she does."

Miss Proctor's departure was felt as a great liberation of the intellect.

Mrs. Pooley sat up in her corner and revived the conversation interrupted by Miss Proctor. Mrs. Pooley had felt that to talk about Mrs. Majendie was to waste Mrs. Eliott. Mrs. Majendie apart, Mrs. Pooley had many ideas in common with her friend; but, whereas Mrs. Eliott would spend superbly on one idea at a time, Mrs. Pooley's intellect entertained promiscuously and beyond its means. It was inclined to be hospitable to ideas that had never met outside it, whose encounter was a little distressing to everybody concerned. Whenever this happened Mrs. Pooley would appeal to Mr. Eliott, and Mr. Eliott would say, "Don't ask me. I'm a stupid fellow.

Don't ask me to decide anything."

Thus did Mr. Eliott wilfully obscure himself.

To-day he was more impregnably concealed than ever. He hadn't any opinions of his own. They were too expensive. He borrowed other people's when he wanted them. "But," said Mr. Eliott, "it is very seldom that I do want an opinion. If you have any facts to give me--well and good." For he knew that, at the mention of facts, Mrs. Pooley's intellect would retreat behind a cloud and that his wife would pursue it there.

"I suppose," said Mrs. Eliott, "there's such a thing as realising your ideals."

Her eyes gleamed and wandered and rested upon Mrs. Gardner. Mrs. Gardner had a singularly beautiful intellect which she was known to be shy of displaying. People said that Dr. Gardner had fallen in love with it years ago, and had only waited for it to mature before he married it.

Mrs. Gardner had a habit of sitting apart from the discussion and untroubled by it, tolerant in her own excess of bliss. It irritated Mrs.

Eliott, on her Thursdays, to think of the distinguished ideas that Mrs.

Gardner might have introduced and didn't. She felt Mrs. Gardner's silence as a challenge.

"I wonder" (Mrs. Eliott was always wondering) "what becomes of our ideals when we've realised them."

The doctor answered. "My dear lady, they cease to be ideals, and we have to get some more."

Mrs. Eliott, in her turn, was received into the cloud.

"Of course," said Mrs. Pooley, emerging from it joyously, "we must have them."

"Of course," said Mrs. Eliott vaguely, as her spirit struggled with the cloud.

"Of course," said Dr. Gardner. He was careful to array himself for tea-parties in all his innocent metaphysical vanities, to scatter profundities like epigrams, to flatter the pure intellects of ladies, while the solemn vagueness of his manner concealed from them the innermost frivolity of his thought. He didn't care whether they understood him or not. He knew his wife did. Her wedded spirit moved in secret and unsuspected harmony with his.

He had a certain liking for Mrs. Eliott. She seemed to him an apparition mainly pathetic. With her attenuated distinction, her hectic ardour, her brilliant and pursuing eye, she had the air of some doomed and dedicated votress of the pure intellect, haggard, disturbing and disturbed. His social self was amused with her enthusiasms, but the real Dr. Gardner accounted for them compa.s.sionately. It was no wonder, he considered, that poor Mrs. Eliott wondered. She had so little else to do. Her nursery upstairs was empty, it always had been, always would be empty. Did she wonder at that too, at the transcendental carelessness that had left her thus frustrated, thus incomplete? Mrs. Eliott would have been scandalised if she had known the real Dr. Gardner's opinion of her.

"I wonder," said she, "what will become of Anne's ideal."

"It's safe," said the doctor. "She hasn't realised it."

"I wonder, then, what will become of Anne."

Mrs. Pooley retreated altogether before this gross application of transcendent truth. She had not come to Mrs. Eliott's to talk about Mrs. Majendie.

Dr. Gardner smiled. "Oh, come," he said, "you _are_ personal."

"I'm not," said Mrs. Eliott, conscious of her lapse and ashamed of it.

"But, after all, Anne's my friend. I know people blamed me because I never told her. How could I tell her?"

"No," said Mrs. Gardner soothingly, "how could you?"