1 Ten days went by.
For Aliette, the trivial round of London continued.
She attended a terrific tamasha of a wedding--all frocks and roses--at St. George's, Hanover Square; she dined at the Carlton with Hector and a sumptuous client from the money-making North; she walked the park with Ponto, her harlequin Dane, who, as though he understood his mistress was troubled, kept close at heel while she footed it, and thrust a consolatory nose into her lap whenever she sat down; she played lawn-tennis at Queen's; she did her household duties at Lancaster Gate, fighting and defeating a miniature revolution among the female staff. But her emotions she could neither fight nor defeat.
These emotions were all strange, sweet, disturbing. For the first time in her life a man obscured the entire mental horizon. Constantly she thought of Ronnie--imagining him her confidant, her friend, her lover.
Her mind took a whole week to formulate that last definite word; and even then the word seemed inadequate.
Except for Mary O'Riordan and Mollie, Aliette possessed no intimates of her own sex. Common gossip, however, credited various women of her acquaintance with "lovers": some permanent, accepted as institutions by every one except the husband; some transitory of the season; most merest "tame-cats," fetch-and-carry men. Hector's wife wanted none of these. She wanted Ronnie--not an occasional Ronnie, not a clandestine Ronnie, neither a merely physical nor a merely platonic Ronnie: but Ronnie himself--all of Ronnie--Ronnie for her very own.
Comprehension of this fact--it came to her with peculiar clarity one late afternoon at a crowded tea-fight in Mary O'Riordan's house off Park Lane--brought the woman up short by the head.
She realized herself wholly in love--dangerously, perilously, passionately in love. And the realization frightened her. It meant the abandoning of her own fixed point of view. It meant, actually, if not by intention, sin. At least it ought to mean "sin"--only somehow she could no longer regard it in that light. If she had not thought of Mary as sinful, why should she apply a different standard to her own case?
If this immense new tenderness in her, this accentuation of all her femininity, was "sin"--then nature's self must be sinful. If, by religion, she belonged body and soul to Hector, forever and ever amen; if, in the sight of God, his infidelities counted for nothing; if his occasional desire to possess her (only the night before she had been subtly aware of that desire's recrudescence) constituted a lifelong claim--then religion, as she had so far understood religion, must be a mere code designed in the interest of husbands, and God Himself a mere male.
2
Meanwhile, to Ronnie's mind, the problem presented itself differently.
Having no formal religion, the aspect of "sin" did not trouble him. He came, as he imagined in those ten days, to regard the entire question from a legal point of view. He wanted a woman who belonged to somebody else; by no manner of means could he possess that woman unless the law set her free. Her freedom being outside the sphere of practical politics, one's duty was self-control, forgetfulness.
On the question of self-control there could be no compromise; but to forget Aliette was a tough job. Mere passion--since their last meeting--represented only the tiniest fraction of his feelings. Already she had given him an entirely new outlook--the lover's outlook: so that he caught himself regarding the faces of his fellows, faces in his club, at the courts, in the streets, on tubes and in omnibuses, solely from his own obsessed point of view. What secret, what emotional secret, concealed itself behind those unemotional English faces? What sentimental impulse goaded them about town?
"The sentimental impulse" was his mother's favorite phrase. She had used it no less than five times in her article for the "Contemplatory"--which article, astutely boomed by Fancourt, had very nearly created a first-class "stunt."
One paragraph of his mother's seemed peculiarly applicable to the barrister's problem.
"If," wrote Julia Cavendish, "the Sentimental Impulse--for I will never consent to regard the unlawful attraction between a married woman and a man other than her husband as love, the very essence of which is obedience and self-denial--once comes to be considered a palliation for adultery, then the entire foundations of family life will be in jeopardy."
Six months ago Ronnie would have been the first to uphold such a doctrine. Now he could only find the flaw in it. The gospel according to Julia Cavendish--argued her son's mind--amounted to this: If a married woman loves her husband, she merely does her duty. If she doesn't love him, she must do her duty just the same. Obedience, to a man; and denial, of one's own inclinations, constitute the whole duty of woman. In other words: A husband can do no wrong.
And at that precise point in his meditations Ronald Cavendish remembered certain rumors--heard and forgotten three years since, on his one leave from the East--about Hector Brunton and a certain red-headed lady of the stage.
All the same, even admitting certain modifications--a wife's right to fidelity, for instance,--did not his mother's code form the only possible basis of society? What reasoning human could substitute the sentimental impulse for the existing marriage laws? "Free love" would only mean free license for the unbalanced, the over-sexed, the abnormal, the womanizer, and the nymphomaniac. Matrimonial bolshevism, in fact!
"Matrimonial Bolshevism," he remembered, was to have been the title of his mother's next article; but for the moment she had been forced to give up work. Sir Heron Baynet, the specialist called in by Dot Fancourt's puzzled doctor, had implored her--so she told Ronnie--to rest.
"I've got to take care of myself," she said. "Sir Heron says I'm not exactly ill, but that I'm disposed to illness."
Actually, Sir Heron's words had been far more disturbing; but Julia, who had never consulted a medicine-man in her life, resented the little man's seriousness, and pooh-poohed most of his advice.
"Don't worry about me," she went on. "Except for being a little tired, I feel like a two-year-old."
Ronnie, obsessed with his own troubles, accepted her version of the interview; and went off to play tennis. Despite all the hair-splitting and all the self-analysis, despite all the resolves never to see Aliette again, and all the attempts to bluff himself lawyer against himself man, the sentimental impulse persisted. And hard physical exercise, he thought, might help to cure that impulse!