1 Every year, toward the end of November, Betty Masterman had been accustomed to receive an invitation to spend Christmas at Clyst Fullerford. This year, to her surprise, she received a long, carefully-worded letter in Mollie's childish handwriting: a letter which contained the unusual suggestion that Mollie should spend Christmas with her. "My dear," wrote the girl, "I simply daren't ask you down here. It's too utterly dull for words."
Betty, nothing if not extravagant, wired back an immediate answer; and met her friend, two days before Christmas eve, in the holiday bustle at Waterloo station.
"Mollie," greeted the grass-widow, "you look like a ghost. What on earth's happened to you since the summer?"
But it was not until Betty's "daily woman" had completed her hasty washing up of the dinner things, and they sat alone in front of the gas-fire in the little red-papered sitting-room, that Mollie answered the question.
"Betty dear," she said, puffing a vague cigarette. "I'm feeling too rotten for words. Nothing seems to go right with me these days."
Betty's experienced eyes sparkled with laughter. "Give sorrow words," she quoted chaffingly; and then, a note of seriousness in her voice, "What's the trouble? The sister or the Wilberforce man?"
"You've heard something then?"
"Only gossip." The other trod carefully. "But of course I'm not quite a fool. I thought when you came rushing round here from Lancaster Gate that something must have gone pretty wrong."
"Everything's gone wrong." Mollie repeated the inevitable slogan, of post-war youth, "Everything. You remember Ronald Cavendish----"
"I've met him once or twice."
"Well, Alie's run away from Hector----"
"And run away to Cavendish."
"You did know then?"
"My dear, everybody knows." Betty considered the position. "Still, that's their affair, isn't it? Why should you worry about it? There'll be a divorce, I suppose, and after that they'll get married."
"That's just the trouble."
"How do you mean?"
"Apparently, Hector's refused to divorce Alie."
"Oh!"
The pair inspected one another across the mellow firelight. After a long pause, the elder said:
"You're not much of a pal, Mollie. You've only told me half the story."
Mollie Fullerford blushed. Her reticent virginity revolted from the idea of confessing herself, to Betty, in love with James Wilberforce. Yet that she was in love with the man, most uncomfortably in love with him, Mollie knew. Despite all her efforts to maintain the pose of the modern young, the pose of cold-blooded mate-selection, she had failed as lamentably as most others of her kind to control nature. Nature and the modern creed refused to be reconciled. She realized now that she wanted--exclusively--James. She wanted to belong to him; she wanted him to belong to her; she wanted him--and no other--to father her children.
That last thought rekindled Mollie's blushes. Succeed as she might in curbing her tongue, she could not curb her feelings. She fell to wondering if Jimmy would ask her to marry him, to speculating whether, even if their friendship so abruptly broken off should be renewed (as she had subconsciously hoped it would be renewed when she invited herself to London), whether, even if Jimmy did ask her to marry him, she would be capable of sacrificing Aliette. Would she not be forced to make conditions--conditions that no man in Jimmy's position could possibly accept? Would she not be forced to say: "If I marry you, you'll have to let me receive my sister and my sister's lover"?
"How about the Wilberforce man?" Betty's words interrupted reverie. "Does he know you're in town?"
"Yes," admitted Mollie.
"You still write to each other then?"
"Only occasionally."
"My dear, how exciting! When did you hear from him last?"
But at that Aliette's sister broke off the conversation with a wry "Betty, I simply won't be cross-examined."
"You needn't get ratty, dear thing," retorted the grass-widow. "I don't want to pry into your secrets. But"--she rustled up from her chair, and made a movement to begin undressing--"if he should write that he's coming to see you, for goodness' sake try and make yourself look a little less of a 'patient Griselda.' What about face-massage? I know a man in Sloane Street who's simply wonderful!"
2
Aliette, whom Mollie visited next day, was even more shocked than Betty Masterman at the change in her sister's appearance. The girl seemed utterly altered, utterly different from the fancy-free maiden of Moor Park. She came into the connubial room nervously; almost forgot to kiss; entirely forgot to inquire after Ronnie; refused to take off her hat, and sat down on the edge of the hard sofa gingerly as though it had been an omnibus seat.
"Rather awful, isn't it?" Aliette, with a comprehensive glance at her surroundings, broke the social ice. "You mustn't mind."
"I don't mind. But it is rather awful." A pause. "I suppose you had to do it, Alie?"
"Do what? Come and live here?"
"No. The whole thing." Aliette did not answer, and her sister went on. "I wish you hadn't had to. It's been simply rotten at home. Mother and dad----" She broke off, biting her lip. "They aren't so bad really; it's Eva who's putrid."
"Eva never did like either of us."
For the first time in their lives, the sisters felt shy with one another. Caroline Staley, entering, broad-hipped, a smile on her full lips and a tea-tray in her large hands, noticed the tension.
"My, Miss Mollie!" ejaculated the tactful Caroline, "but you aren't looking yourself at all. You ought to take that hat off and lie down awhile."
Tea relaxed the tension; but made intimate conversation no easier. Between them and their old intimacy rose--as it seemed--insurmountable barriers. It was Mollie who, involuntarily, pulled those barriers down.
"I say," she asked abruptly, "isn't Hector going to do anything?"
"I'm afraid not."
"Doesn't it make you frightfully unhappy?"
"Only for Ronnie's sake."
Mollie did her best to restrain indignation. Woman-like, she could not help blaming Ronnie for the whole occurrence. Girl-like, she could not quite divine the immensity of passion behind her sister's steady eyes; till, somehow infected by that passion, her thoughts veered to James. Suppose James had been married. Married to a lunatic, say, or a drunkard? Tied to some rotten wife, for instance, a wife who made him unhappy? Suppose that James had said to her, "Mollie, let's cut the painter"?
And suddenly Mollie's indignation passed, leaving her contrite.
"Alie," she said, "I ought to have come up to town before. I oughtn't to have left you alone all this time. I'm afraid I've been"--she faltered--"rather a beast about the whole thing."
"You haven't." Aliette came across to the sofa, and took her sister's hand. "It's been simply wonderful of you to forgive our thoughtlessness, our lack of consideration----"
"Oh, that!" interrupted Mollie. "I wasn't thinking about that." She fell silent; and again, to her contrite mind, the romance of Aliette and Ronnie assumed a personal significance.
So this was love--thought the girl--the real thing! Love without orange-blossom, without wedding-presents. Love so gloriously reckless of material considerations that it could exist in and defy the most sordid surroundings, the completest ostracism from one's kind.
"It's you who are wonderful," said Mollie.
And all that afternoon, as conversation grew easier between them, as she learned from a hesitant Aliette of the real Hector and the real Ronnie, of the snubs one had to put up with, and of the sympathy which was even harder than the snubs to bear, of the petty, almost indecent economies to be anticipated now that Ronnie's professional income looked like failing (soon it might be necessary to sacrifice Ponto, whose board and lodging at a near-by stable cost fifteen shillings a week), the girl, continually testing her own affection for James on the touchstone of Aliette's love for Ronnie, could not but find it a little lacking in that spirit of service which is truest comradeship.
"But where is Ronnie?" she asked, as they kissed au revoir.
"With his mother, I expect," smiled Aliette. "He said, when you phoned last night, that we'd probably like to be alone."
3
"Rather decent of Cavendish, leaving us alone like that," thought Mollie, waiting--befurred to the eyes--on the drafty platform at Baron's Court station.
Strangely affected by her sister's revelations, she found herself as the train got under way--comparing Ronnie with James; not, she had to admit, entirely to James's advantage.
It was all very well--went on thought--being in love with James, but why should one be in love with James? One ought to be jolly angry with the man. Taking it all round, he had behaved dis............