Tom went back to London about a fortnight after the baby’s birth, and plunged into his work with more vigour and earnestness than ever. His new interest in religious matters was a thing apart from his work, just as was his love for May, and it did not get between him and his models, or interpose angular substances between his hand and eye. His religion was not fanatical or aggressive: it had come to him as the explanation of his human love, and inasmuch as the white heat of that had burned out of his life all that was sordid or impure, the conduct of his life was left unchanged. According to moralists, all sin partakes of the nature of decay, and Tom’s nature was very vital. And as his religion was not fanatical, it did not fill him with any half self-conscious and wholly morbid convictions of sin, either in himself or others, and he pursued his cleanly honest life much as he had done before.

But as the days went on, and May got steadily stronger again, a doubt began to look him in the face. He remembered the Revivalist meeting at Cambridge, and his own rejection of the idea that one moment, one flash of seeming revelation could change any one. He himself had faced an anxiety{235} blacker than death, had felt a relief purer than heaven. Did not that perhaps account for it all? Was not his own case as intelligible as that of the greengrocer who became a teetotaler? And because he was honest with himself he put himself a straightforward question: “Would he feel another and a fiercer anguish if he again got to believe that Christ was merely the best man who had ever lived and no more?” The question haunted him, but he was unwilling to answer it.

To his surprise Tom found Manvers waiting for him at home one evening when he came back from some party about a week after his arrival in London. The latter was sitting in the smoking-room consuming cigarettes until Tom returned.

“I hear there are three to the ménage now,” he said. “I am delighted, of course. I should so like to have a baby. There can be nothing more interesting than to see a helpless thing with nothing it can call its own, except the tendencies it inherits from oneself, slowly acquiring intelligence.”

“It’s a great responsibility,” said Tom, throwing himself into a chair and scratching his head with an air of wisdom.

Manvers stared at him incredulously.

“My dear fellow, the man who thinks about responsibilities is no longer a responsible being. It is a sign of mania or extreme old age. The age of responsibility begins at eighty-three or eighty-four, and I once knew a man of eighty-five who was still irresponsible. You are upset and excited. Go to Paris for a week. Paris is strangely regenerative, I always find.{236}”

Tom laughed.

“Talking of Paris, why aren’t you there?”

“I am staying with the Chathams,” said Manvers. “They were in Paris just before Easter, and they asked me to come to London and see them for a week or two, and as I had nothing to do I came. I always have a great success with middle-aged gentlemen. There is something peculiarly seductive about me to the mature male.”

“I don’t care for mature males much,” said Tom.

“Oh! that is a mistake. They make one feel so young. It is so easy to be seductive to them. You have to be very deferential, but imply at the same time that it is a very great compliment, and give them the impression that you yourself have vast stores of experience at your back, but prefer that they should produce theirs.”

“Did you come here simply to make yourself seductive to Lord Chatham?”

“No, I can’t say that was my object. My coming was only the effect of my having done so. I came to see other people.”

“How is Maud? I haven’t seen her lately.”

“As charming as ever,” said Manvers with some finality.

“May is down in the country still,” said Tom, after a pause, “with my father and the baby.”

“And are you ridiculously happy still?”

“Quite ridiculously. But why still?”

“Oh, I don’t know. We are limited, and so are our emotions. I have a natural tendency myself to get tired of the things I like.{237}”

“But you said just now that Maud was as charming as ever.”

“Obviously then she is an exception.”

He rose to go.

“I must be off,” he said. “You came in so late, and I wanted to talk to you—but it’s after twelve, and they will all think it most unseductive of me to wake the house up at nameless hours. I suppose I shall see you again soon?”

“Yes, I dare say I shall come to the Chathams’ at tea-time to-morrow. I haven’t seen them for an age.”

In the thirty-two years of his life Manvers had been amused at many people, had liked a rather smaller proportion, was totally indifferent to most, and had loved none. It was consequently almost distressing to him to find that Maud Wrexham was losing none of her preponderance in his thoughts. He remembered how at Athens the thought that she was in love with Tom had galled him, but left him dumb, and he had been enormously relieved and pleased to hear of Tom’s marriage. He had not much experience of the ways of girls in the upper classes, but he supposed that in such well-regulated institutions a man who married went into a different orbit, and, ceasing to be a legitimate object of affection to all the world but one, naturally ceased being an object of affection at all. He gave himself not undeserved credit for having behaved really very well. He had made it quite clear to Tom that in his opinion Maud Wrexham was approachable, and Tom had rejected the notion theoretically then, and practically a short time after{238} by marrying May. He had done all that could be expected or demanded of him by the most Lycurgan codes of friendship and honour. Those claims were satisfied, and Maud was still free. His work had kept him in Paris during the year after Tom’s marriage, and he had himself felt that it would be wise to keep away for a time. He suspected that Maud had some private business to transact with her own emotions, and that, while she was doing that, she would not perhaps wish to be interrupted. She might, in fact, declare that she would not be interrupted. Manvers, who was essentially a reasonable being, had considered that a year was time enough for her to clear off her private business, and the year was now over. He disliked waiting very much, but he summoned to his aid that admirable common-sense which had stood him in such good stead at Athens, and had worked harder than ever.

During the past week his intimacy with Maud had advanced a good deal. She evidently found considerable pleasure in his society, and he made himself uniformly entertaining and agreeable. Lady Chatham also, in the intervals of what she called “the whirl of London life,” when her genius was not devoted to ordering carriages, and picking up people with mathematical inaccuracy at street corners, found time to talk to him, and make vague arrangements for him. Consequently next morning, after her orders had been sent to the stables, and she needed a little relaxation, when she found him alone in the library, reading papers, she sat down and began to talk.

“My husband tells me you have to leave us on{239} Saturday,” she said. “I suppose you are going back to Paris. What day of the month will that be?”

“Saturday is the 26th, I think,” said Manvers.

“No, I am sure you are wrong. Saturday is the 25th. Well then, as you meant to go on the 26th, you can stop here till Sunday. We shall be able to send you to the station.”

“It’s very good of you,” said Manvers, “but I am afraid it is the day of the week that matters, and not the day of the month. I have to be in Paris on Saturday night.”

“And what do you do then? You ought to be settling down, you know.”

“I am afraid I shan’t settle down more than I have done already. I work very hard, you must know. But this holiday has been delightful.”

“It must be very widening to live about from country to country as you do,” said Lady Chatham appreciatively, “but you ought to give us the benefit of your increasing width!”

Manvers laughed.

“In what way?”

“You might write a book about the comparative tendencies of English and foreign life. Something useful—not like those little scrappy books that describe mimosa trees and amber necklaces and the Soudan, but something that really helped one to understand the difference between one nation and another, the influence of climate—climate has a great deal to do with character. Food too—the meat we eat in a day would last an Italian for a week. That must make{240} a difference. And, as I said, you ought to settle down and marry, and become the centre of a little circle.”

“Tom always fills me with the envy for married life,” said he; “he really is ridiculously happy. But as regards the other, I don’t think I am made for a centre. I prefer circling myself.”

Lady Chatham rose to go.

“Well, it is five minutes to eleven,” she said, “and I must be off. You must think over all I have said.”

“I will think it over very seriously,” he replied.

Lord Chatham was dining at the House that night, and Maud sent a note to Tom asking him to make the fourth with Manvers and her mother. There was no one else coming, and little coats and black ties were the order of the evening.

The night was beautifully warm, and after dinner they all sat on the little terrace outside the drawing-room window.

Tom was in rather a sombre mood. His account of himself was that he had unaccountably stuck in his work and had been unable to get on. Manvers administered consolation.

“That is one of the chiefest pleasures of being an artist,” he said: “one has the sort of feeling that one is really a channel through which inspiration flows. Now a solicitor or a clerk can go on copying briefs or making a digest or a précis in any mood. He is a mere machine. No doubt his work is more distasteful at one time than it is at another, but it goes on just the same. Nothing comes between him and it except death or very severe toothache, which shows he works without conviction, and is consequently a{241} very feeble sort of animal. It is the same with all mankind except artists and clergymen.”

“But what is one to do in the meanwhile?” asked Tom. “I don’t find these intervals, when some one cuts off the inspiration, at all inspiriting.”

“Why, do nothing,” said Manvers; “don’t think about it. You can’t force a mood. The mood forces you.”

“I can’t acquiesce in that,” said Tom. “I am not going to be ordered about by my own temperament.”

“Ah, my dear fellow, what are you going to be ordered about by if you are not to be ordered about by your temperament? The temperament is the only thing that can order one about. In everything else, if one wants a thing enough one gets it.”

Maud leaned forward.

“I don’t believe that. At least it is not true for all people. Some pass their whole lives in failing to do what they want. But they have a consolation; for they are exactly the people who for the most part give other people what they want. Personally I hardly ever get what I want, and that is why I have a passion for making other people like me.”

At the least hint of anything so superlunary as the mildest metaphysics, Lady Chatham always recorded a protest.

“Maud dear,” she said deprecatingly.

But “Maud dear” was interested, and so to judge by his face was Manvers. His dark eyes had lost their look of slight amusement, and he leaned forward eagerly to hear what Maud had to say next.{242}

“It is the old story,” she said; “half the world is active, and the other half passive.”

“But you exert yourself to be passive.”

“Oh, certainly; one is simply nothing if one doesn’t exert one’s self. My mission, I am sure, is to be material for the active people.”

“But you told me once you wanted to take the world into your hand,” said Tom, “and make its heart beat fast or slow as you wished.”

“I know I did, but I have changed.”

“Radically, completely?”

Maud lifted her eyes for a moment and looked at Tom, then dropped them again.

“My desire has not changed, but I now know I can’t do it. It’s not my line at all.”

Tom looked up.

“Do you mean you acquiesce in defeat?” he asked. “Can you contemplate wanting a thing and not getting it?”

“He is monarch of all he surveys,” remarked Manvers.

“Of course I am,” said Tom, “so is everybody.”

“Oh, but we can’t all be monarchs of all we survey,” said Maud.

“But we can,” replied Tom, “simply because we survey so very little. All our horizons are limited. As a matter of fact, of course we are terribly limited, all of us, but we have a beautiful gift of not believing that. We can be monarchs of all we understand, which is what I mean by survey, and that is why people marry. Two people understand each other, and so as they are both monarchs of each other, it is{243} a law of nature that they should then be no longer two, but one.”

This remarkable statement was received in silence.

“Then what do you make of people who are failures—real failures?” said Maud at length.

“God help them!” replied Tom; “they have tried to get what they did not understand. There is nothing so pathetic as that.”

“Why did you acquiesce, Miss Wrexham?” asked Manvers.

Maud hesitated a moment, but assuming with perfect good faith that neither Tom nor Manvers could possibly guess what she meant, replied—

“Because I could not get a thing I wanted, and therefore I assumed that I was not made to get what I wanted.”

“That is a hasty generalization,” said Tom; “perhaps you did not understand it.”

“Well, I thought I did, and either I am not meant to get what I want, or I am one of those pathetic figures you alluded to.”

Tom laughed.

“I don’t think of you as a pathetic figure,” he said.

“Oh, one can’t appear as a pathetic figure in public,” she said. “Don’t let us forget that it is a comedy we are all acting.”

She spoke bitterly, and Tom was astonished at the hard ring of her voice. But before the pause became awkward Manvers broke it.

“There is nothing more serious than taking things seriously,” he said. “I never took anything seriously yet.{244}”

“What a frightfully risky thing to say!” exclaimed Maud. “It’s as dangerous as saying you never had the toothache!”

Tom got up from his chair and perched himself on the edge of the balcony, and at that moment there came into Manvers’ mind the evening at Athens, when Tom had sat on the edge of the balcony, and the flash of lightning had illuminated Maud’s face. For the first moment he thought it was only one of those strange throbs of double consciousness which we all know so well, but the moment afterwards he recollected the prototype of the scene. And as if to confirm it in his mind, Maud went on—

“My acquiescence came quite suddenly, as suddenly as a flash of lightning.”

“When did it come?” asked Tom, innocently.

Manvers waited, in the act of flicking the ash off his cigar, for the reply, and Maud looking up saw he was watching her.

“Lord Byron woke one morning and found himself famous,” she said, “but I doubt whether a year afterwards he could have told you whether it was a Monday or a Tuesday.”

“But the occasion,” persisted Tom: “he could have told one that.”

“One occasion doesn’t change one,” said Maud, fencing; “it is always a whole string of things, half of which one forgets afterwards. It is so untrue to speak of a crisis being the effect of one moment.”

Lady Chatham rose.

“How terribly metaphysical you young people are!” she said. “I must go in and write two notes,{245} and then I think I shall go to the Ho............