Mrs. Maxon Protests. Anthony Hope

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СКАЧАТЬ suppose it's really been the same in every age with thinking people, but it's more widespread now, isn't it? It gets into the newspapers even! 'Do we Believe?' 'Is Marriage a Failure?' It's not the answers that are most significant, you know, but the questions."

      "Yes, I think I see what you mean—partly." The words came in slow ruminating tones. "Do you go very far?" she went on, in accents drolly apprehensive.

      He laughed jovially. "There are no bombs. I'm married to Tora. Is it terrible that I don't go to church very often? Never, I'm bound to add in candour, if I can help it."

      "I shall go while I'm here. Do you think it funny that I should suddenly propose myself for a visit?"

      "To tell the truth, I didn't think Maxon would come."

      "Or that I should come without him?"

      "We pictured you pretty extensively married, I confess."

      "So I was—so I am, I mean." She remembered her promise; she was not to mention her great resolve. But it struck her that the pledge would be hard to keep. Already the atmosphere of Shaylor's Patch suggested that her position was eminently one to talk over, to discuss with an open-minded sympathetic friend, to speculate about in all its bearings.

      "But you mustn't think I'm absolutely hidebound," she went on. "I can think—and act—for myself." She was skirting the forbidden ground.

      "I'm glad of it. Is Maxon?" There was a humorous twinkle behind his spectacles.

      "Why are we to talk of Cyril when I've just begun my holiday?" Yet there was nothing else that she really wanted to talk about. Oh, that stupid promise! Of course she ought to have reserved the right to lay the case before her friends. But a promise is a promise, however stupid. That certainly would be Cyril's view; and it was hers. Was it, she wondered, the Shaylor's Patch view? Or might a question of ethics like that be to some extent "in solution"?

      "He thinks me an awful reprobate?" Stephen asked.

      She nodded, smiling.

      "So they do down here, but my friends in London call me a very mild specimen. I expect some of them will turn up while you're here, and you'll be able to see for yourself."

      "You don't mind being thought a reprobate down here?"

      "Why should I? I don't want their society, any more than they want mine. I'm quite well off, and I've no ambitions." He laughed. "I'm ideally placed for defying the world, if I want to. It really needs no courage at all, and would bring me no martyr's crown."

      "You mean it would be different if you had to work for your living?"

      "Might be—or if I wanted to go in for public life, or anything of that kind."

      "Or if you were a woman?"

      "Well, if I were a woman who was sensitive about what society at large thought of her. That's one of the reasons why I don't preach my views much. It's all very well for me, but my converts, if any, might end by thinking they were paying too dear, while the prophet got off for nothing."

      He had a book, she a newspaper. With an easy absence of ceremony he began to read; but she left her paper lying on the ground beside her, and let her thoughts play as they would on the great change which had come over her life and on what it would mean to her if it persisted, as she was resolute that it should.

      "I can think—and act—for myself," she had said. Perhaps, but both would be new and strange exercises. She had walked on lines very straightly ruled; she had moved to orders peremptorily conveyed. A fear mingled with the relief of emancipation. They say that men who have been long in prison are bewildered by the great free bustling world. It may be as true of prisons of the mind as of the Bastille itself.

      Stephen interrupted his reading to give another statement of his attitude. "It's like the two horses—the one in the stable-yard and the wild one. The one gets oats and no freedom, the other freedom and no oats. Now different people put very various values on freedom and on oats. And at any rate the wild horse must have fodder of some kind."

      His face vanished behind the book again, and she heard him chuckling merrily over something in it. If he did not get oats, he certainly seemed to thrive excellently on such other fodder as he found. But then it was undeniable that Cyril Maxon throve equally well—successful, rising, with no doubts as to his own opinions or his own conduct. Or had her resolve shaken him into any questionings? He had shown no signs of any when she parted from him that morning. "I shall be glad to see you back at the end of your fortnight," he had said. The words were an order.

      Tora Aikenhead, on her way to the rose-beds, with a basket and scissors in her hand, came up to them.

      "Resting?" she asked Winnie, in her low pleasant voice.

      In the telegram in which she had proposed her visit, Winnie had said that she was a little "knocked up" with the gaieties of town, but she fancied that her hostess's question referred, though distantly, to more than these, that she had discerned traces of distress, the havoc wrought by the passing of a storm.

      "Beautifully!" Winnie answered, with a grateful smile.

      "Dick Dennehy is week-ending with Godfrey Ledstone, and they're coming to lunch and tennis to-morrow; and Mrs. Lenoir is motoring down to lunch too," Tora went on to her husband.

      "Mrs. Lenoir?" He looked up from his book with that droll twinkle behind his big spectacles again.

      "Yes. Quite soon again, isn't it? She must like us, Stephen."

      Stephen laughed. His wife had not in the least understood the cause of the twinkle. She would not, he reflected. It never occurred to her that any human being could object to meeting any other, unless, indeed, actual assault and battery were to be feared. But Stephen was awake to the fact that it might be startling to Winnie Maxon to meet Mrs. Lenoir—if she knew all about her. Naturally he attributed rigid standards to Mrs. Cyril Maxon, in spite of her proud avowal of open-mindedness, which indeed had seemed to him rather amusing than convincing.

      "Ledstone's our neighbour," he told Winnie, "the only neighbour who really approves of us. He's taken a cottage here for the summer. You'll like him; he's a jolly fellow. Dennehy's an Irish London correspondent to some paper or other in the States, and a Fenian, and all that sort of thing, you know. Very good chap."

      "Well, I asked no questions about your guests, but since you've started posting me up—who's Mrs. Lenoir?"

      "Tora, who is Mrs. Lenoir?"

      "Who is she? Who should she be? She's just Mrs. Lenoir."

      Tora was obviously rather surprised at the question, and unprovided with an illuminating answer. But then there are many people in whose case it is difficult to say who they are, unless a repetition of their names be accepted as sufficient.

      "I must out with it. Mrs. Lenoir was once mixed up in a very famous case—she intervened, as they call it—and the case went against her. Some people thought she was unjustly blamed in that case, but—well, it couldn't be denied that she was a plausible person to choose for blame. It's all years ago—she must be well over fifty by now. I hope you—er—won't feel it necessary to have too long a memory, Winnie?"

      "I don't exactly see why СКАЧАТЬ