1 Even average people, when obsessed by the grand passion--which is a far rarer passion among Anglo-Saxons than Anglo-Saxon novelists would have us believe--cannot be judged by average standards. Such are as surely bound to the wheels of terror as to the wheels of courage. In such, strength and weakness, misery and ecstasy, love's heaven and love's hell, mingle as wax and honey in the comb. For the grand passion is the sublime exaggerator of human emotion, the indefinable complex of the soul.
So, to Aliette, returning from her interview with Julia, it seemed as though London's self had altered its countenance, as though every face encountered on her homeward way spoke of her own newly-regained happiness. Her momentary change of feeling toward Ronnie had been trivial; an undercurrent of misunderstanding rather than an overt quarrel. Yet the relief of knowing it over was tremendous.
She found him huddled in the armchair before the gas-fire; Ponto, surreptitiously introduced into Powolney Mansions, couched at his feet. He rose as she entered; and the great dog, wagging a delighted stern, rose with him. In a flash of new insight, she saw how alike they were: the big man and the big dog--devoted both, both asking only kindness. And whimsically she thought: "I've been unkind to both of them. I ought to have gone to see Ponto when he was ill. I ought never to have let myself drift away, even in thought, from Ronnie."
As always, Ponto nuzzled his great head against her knee; Ronnie, as always, kissed her. But that night, as never since Chilworth nights, Aliette answered Ronnie's kisses, giving him all her confidence, all her tenderness.
"No more quarrels, man. No more secrets," she whispered drowsily, falling to sleep in his arms.
"Quarrels, darling?" he whispered back. "We couldn't really quarrel--you and I."
And after that, for many a day, their rose-bubble of enchantment--the frail yet impermeable magic of the grand passion--reblew itself about those twain, isolating them from their fellows, making even Powolney Mansions a paradise.
For many a day neither spiritual nor material troubles clouded the bright mirror of their joint happiness. Scarcely conscious of the discomforts in which they lived; utterly unconscious of the nascent hostility--a hostility based on some rumor which had arisen none knew whence and was tending none knew whither--among their fellow-boarders; careless alike of financial difficulties, of outlawry, and of ostracism, they went their way among their uncaring kind.
The high courts were closed; and so far, despite the promises of John Cartwright, neither county nor police courts afforded Ronnie a single brief. Wherefore he and Aliette made holiday together, with London for their playground. Wandering, Ponto at heel, her streets and her parks, her squares and her terraces, they knew the keen radium of London's morning, her smoke-gray half-lights, the red-gold radiance of her dimmed sunsets, the first out-twinkle of her street-lamps, faintly green against a faintly violet sky, her high evening arcs, and the long lit saffron parallels of her mysterious nights.
And one day, wandering casually beside London's river, wandering, to be exact, through Fulham and over Putney Bridge, they knew that, by sheerest accident, they had found them a home.
To a Lady Hermione or a Lady Cynthia, Embankment House, a great red building-block which overlooks the Thames, would have been the last word in discomfort. Except for the automatic lift (into which Ronnie, Aliette, Ponto, and the uniformed porter who showed them over, squeezed only as asparagus into a tin), and the gas-cooker left in the tiny top-floor kitchen by an absconding tenant, no luxuries whatsoever ameliorated the bareness of Flat 27, Block B. It was, in fact, hardly more than the model working-man's tenement of its original builder's dream. But since it possessed five tolerable rooms, the possibility of installing a geyser bath, and, above all things, its own front door, they decided instantaneously on its acquirement, seeking out the secretary of the house and paying the requisite deposit of a quarter's rent that very afternoon.
So excited were both at the prospect of domestic privacy, so engrossed with their plans for expending Julia's Christmas present to best advantage, that two incidents which--at any other time--would have been of immense importance, passed almost unnoticed. The first of these incidents was Rear-Admiral Billy's written confession of failure, and the second--"the scandal of Powolney Mansions." For the rumor which had arisen none knew whence, the rumor that "Mrs. Cavendish wasn't really Mrs. Cavendish at all, but the wife of a well-known society man who refused to divorce her," at last blew so strongly that Monsieur (who before the war would have called himself Herr) Mayer, proprietor of the Mansions, felt himself finally obliged to take notice of it.
"Of course, I ask you no questions, Mr. Cavendish," said Monsieur Mayer, seated undistinguished at the dusty desk in his private office. "Of course I ask you and your wife no questions. Your private affairs are your private affairs. But in a boarding-house it is not always possible to keep one's private affairs private; and there has been talk, much talk. That Miss Greenwell, she who have No. 26, and pay less than any one in the house, she gossip all the time. She gossip about you and Mrs. Cavendish. For my part," he waved a deprecatory hand, "I know it is only gossip. I make no suggestion. To me, so long as you pay your bill at the end of the week, it is all right."
To which Ronnie, in his most cautious legal manner, retorted:
"If Miss Greenwell or any of your other guests wish to make imputations against myself or my wife, I shall be glad if they will make them to me personally"--and promptly gave a fortnight's notice.
"Dash the fellow's impertinence." he laughed to Aliette, when he reported the interview. "There's no law in England to stop you from calling yourself Mrs. Cavendish." But Aliette, looking up from the wall-paper pattern-book she was studying, did not laugh; because intuitively she knew the power behind Miss Greenwell's throne.
"Hector's doing,"............