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“My Dear Stephen,

“I was delighted with your letter, I believe you are feeling better, for you sounded far more like your old self. Especially the postscript, which I thought a most hopeful indication.

“Yes, I remember old Jock Wetherby. Poor old thing! How perfectly ghastly to approach the end of one’s life as a mere elderly libertine. For I feel there is very little else one could truthfully carve on his tombstone. And what a commentary on free will! He once had gifts and opportunities such as are given to few.

“Last night I went with Judy and Noel to see that enchanting sprite Karsavina. I shall never forget it. As a rule one watches people dance, but last night I danced too. I swear that my spirit left its rheumatic old body and sprang and whirled and darted in the midst of all that color and movement with the music splashing and rippling about it. For a few hours I bathed in the Fountain of Youth—that fountain whose waters, I believe, are made up of music, color, and some other ingredients that man with his slow mind has not yet discovered. Certainly I was never less conscious of flesh and bones.

“And why is it, I ask myself, that only certain combinations of sound and color can produce this effect, or give this measure of delight? Suppose, one day, some one were to hit upon the utmost perfection in arrangement of sound, color and form, would it open up a straight path like a shaft of light for our spirits to glide upon into some other world than this? For I feel we are very near that other world when our senses are so stirred and lifted up by beauty. I wonder! But perhaps there is already perfect beauty in the world, and it is only that our spirits lack the necessary freedom from earthly things—or why should we not drift into Paradise itself upon the perfume of a rose?

“At the moment my mind is very full not of Paradise but of Eric and Louise. She has decided to go and stay with her people in Norfolk for a while, where, I fear, she will continue to be unhappy. Things had come to a dangerous pass with them, and Eric is as sore and puzzled as a man can be. Hers is a strange nature. I have tried hard to find a chink in the armor of her bitterness. Poor Louise! And yet I believe she would go to the stake vowing she had been a good wife to him. There are a great many women, I find, who think that if they neither leave nor deceive their husbands they are being good wives to them. I pray that something—God knows what!—will happen, to make a change of attitude easy for her. She would have been happy, poor girl, with a dull fellow to whom she could have condescended.

“I often say to myself, Stephen, that to realize the imperfection of our relation to God, it is only necessary to realize the imperfection of our relation to one another.

“I have made a discovery of late. At least I think it is a discovery. This is it. I believe that while the majority of men are content to be merely themselves, the majority of women are busy playing some rôle or other that takes their fancy or that circumstances suggest. I think that most women are forever conscious of an audience. I shall never forget a girl I once knew—she would be a very old woman now—who pretended to have lost her lover in the Crimean War. I knew—for she made me her confidante—that it was a quite imaginary lover, and that she had invented him to make people think her inconsolable, instead of unsought, as was actually the case. So for years she played the rôle of a bereaved woman, and if she is alive she is playing it yet. Every word, every action was suited to the part, and eventually she must of course have come to believe it herself. When she talked to a girl about to be married or in love, there was always a trembling smile upon her lips, and the brightness in her eye (as the novelists say) of unshed tears.

“‘Ah, my dear, treasure your happiness. I pray you may be more fortunate than I was.’

“And youth knew her for a woman with a sad, romantic story.

“‘A liar, pure and simple,’ you may say. Not at all. Merely an actress playing her part.

“Take the case of Louise—a weak nature overshadowed by a stronger one. What does she do? Creates a rôle for herself—the rôle of a patient, slighted woman, married to a selfish and exacting man. Why? Seen under the microscope we might discover it to be an attempt to attract notice.

“Take the case of my dear Judy. Most of her friends are married. She, being very fastidious, and finding that falling in love is at present quite beyond her, creates a little rôle for herself—the rôle of a very modern, independent girl who finds that sort of love unnecessary to her happiness.

“Then there is Millicent. She too is playing a part, though she would be horrified if I told her so. Hers is to be as much as possible like her surroundings, and to imitate as closely as she can the other women of her set. She has become as conventional and as harmlessly snobbish as they. At heart she is a kindly creature, but since marrying her John she has disguised herself so well as a Pendleton that if I had not a good memory for faces I would find it hard to distinguish her from all the other Pendletons.

“And then there was Connie—poor Connie! Her rôle was that of a woman of great emotions, of devastating loves—a sort of Camille. But underneath it I imagine and hope is still the simple, credulous woman who looked for happiness where happiness was not.

“‘And,’ perhaps you’ll ask, ‘don’t men make rôles for themselves?’ Rarely; and when they do they are insufferable.

“I am very tired and must stop. Tell me who else is at Cannes.

“Accept my affectionate greetings,

“Claire.”

“P.S.—You tell me nothing of your life all these years.”

* * * * * *

Time never seemed to Madame Claire to pass slowly, but it had never passed less slowly than now. Stephen de Lisle’s letters undoubtedly added a spice of excitement and anticipation to her days. She seldom went out (for she disliked fog, and London seemed just then to have gone to bed with a thick yellow blanket pulled over it) and she only asked those people to come to see her who, she said, touched her at the most points. She hated polite boredoms, and unless her visitors pleased or amused her, she preferred to be left to her own thoughts.

Of late her mind had run much upon her youngest daughter Connie, the beauty of the family—Connie who had “thrown her bonnet over the mill,” as the saying was in those days, and run off with Petrovitch, who was at that time first capturing London and Paris with his marvelous playing.

The blow had nearly broken her father, but Madame Claire was made of sterner stuff, and had long observed tendencies in her lovely daughter which promised to lead to this very dénouement. Connie Gregory had one of those entirely beautiful faces which seem so at variance with the tragedies they evoke. She had the prettiest and weakest mouth, and the most irresistible blue eyes that ever gave delight to a painter of pretty women. And she was “done” by all the fashionable artists of the day in every imaginable style of dress and posture. She had a very small share of wit, but with women like Connie, a little wit goes a long way. Her lovely head was forever turning to look down dark paths, and no one but her mother ever observed those sidelong glances. When she was twenty-two, she married a perfectly suitable young man, and Madame Claire hoped that the then serious duties of wifehood and motherhood would fill her shallow little head to the exclusion of dark romancing. But they had been married less than a year when Petrovitch with his leonine head and his matchless playing became the rage of London, and Connie, in company with a good many other women of her type, threw her youth and beauty, like a bouquet of flowers, at his feet. He was able to resist much, but the sheer loveliness of Connie made such an onslaught upon his bored indifference—wherein was mingled the most astonishing conceit—that when his contracts in London expired, he returned to Paris with the emotional and hysterical young wife clinging to his arm.

It was just at the outbreak of the Boer War, and Leonard Humphries, her husband, very naturally seized the opportunity of getting himself honorably shot. When that event took place, as it did some months later, people thought that Connie would at least legalize her irregular attachment by marriage, but Petrovitch produced a sturdy German wife, and scotched all such hopes. So London saw the lovely Connie no more.

Madame Claire bore her trouble with all the philosophy at her disposal. She never tried to avoid the subject, and was quite as willing to talk about Connie as about Eric or Millicent, in the wise belief that wounds exposed to the air now and then have the best chance of healing. For years after she sent letters and often money to Connie through her banker, for she knew well enough where a lack of funds might lead those uncertain steps. For a while her letters were answered, but it was not long before the answers ceased to come. She had heard nothing from Connie for many years now, and she no longer expected to hear. She thought of her as a foolish and unhappy woman, whose punishment would be, here or hereafter, self-inflicted, and understanding human nature as she did, she refrained from bitterness.

As for Eric, he was of the opinion that the world suffers less on the whole from women who love not wisely but too well, than from women who love too little. Weighed in the perhaps faulty scales of a man’s judgment, therefore, Connie was a better woman than Louise. Connie gave all and got nothing, while Louise took all without a thank you, and gave nothing. But men are always more inclined to forgive the generous sins than the ungenerous.