The Convert. Elizabeth Robins
and she half turned away from the eminent politician into whose slightly flushed face and humid eyes had come something like animation.
'Not at all. Not at all. Go on.'
'No, I've gone far enough. Do you realize that we left "Orders" and "Honours" half an hour ago, and ever since we've been talking scandal?'
'Criticizing life,' he amended—'a pursuit worthy of two philosophers.'
'I did it—' said the lady, with an air of half-amused discontent with herself; 'you know why I did it.'
He met her eye, and the faint motion that indicated the woman on his other side. 'Terrible person,' he whispered. 'She goes out to dine as a soldier goes into action.'
For the next few minutes they made common cause in heaping ridicule on 'the political woman.'
'But, after all'—Vida pulled herself up—'it may be only a case of sour grapes on my part. I'm afraid my conversation is inclined to be frivolous.'
He turned and gave her her reward—the feeling smile that says, 'Thank God!' But, strangely, it did not reflect itself in the woman's face. Something quite different there, lurking under the soft gaiety. Was it consciousness of this being the second time during the evening that she had employed the too common vaunt of the woman of that particular world? Did some ironic echo reach her of that same boast (often as mirthless and as pitiful as the painted smile on the cruder face), the 'I'm afraid I'm rather frivolous' of the well-to-do woman, whose frivolity—invaluable asset!—is beginning to show wear?
'Well, to return to our mutton,' he said; and, as his companion seemed suddenly to be overtaken by some unaccountable qualm, 'What a desert life would be,' he added encouragingly, 'if we couldn't talk to the discreet about the indiscreet.'
'I wonder if there wouldn't be still more oases in the desert,' she said idly, 'if there were a new law made——'
He glanced at her with veiled apprehension in the pause.
'You being so Liberal,' she went on with faint mockery, 'you're the very one to introduce the measure' (he shrank visibly, and seemed about to remind her of her pledge). 'It shall ordain,' she went on, 'that those who have found satisfactory husbands or wives are to rest content with their good fortune, and not be so greedy as to insist on having the children, too.'
'Oh!' His gravity relaxed.
'But, on the other hand, all the lonely women, the widows and spinsters, who haven't got anything else, they shall have the children.'
'I won't go so far as that,' he laughed, boundlessly relieved that the conversation was not taking the strenuous turn he for a moment feared. 'But I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll support a measure that shall make an allowance of one child to every single woman the proper and accepted arrangement. No questions asked, and no disgrace.'
'Disgrace!' she echoed, smiling. 'On the contrary, it should be the woman's title to honour! She should be given a beautiful Order like yours for service to the State.'
'Ah, yes! But, what then would we talk about?'
She had turned away definitely this time.
'Well,' said Borrodaile, a little mocking, 'what is it?'
'I don't know,' she answered. 'I don't know what it is that seizes hold of me after I've been chattering like this for an hour or more.'
Borrodaile bent his head, and glanced past Vida to the abandoned minister.
'Console me by saying a slight weariness.'
'More like loathing.'
'Not of both your neighbours, I hope.'
He lost the low 'Of myself.' 'But there's one person,' she said, with something like enthusiasm—'one person that I respect and admire.'
'Oh!' He glanced about the board with an air of lazy interest. 'Which one?'
'I don't know her name. I mean the woman who dares to sit quite silent and eat her dinner without looking like a lost soul.'
'I've been saying you could do that.'
She shook her head. 'No, I've been engaged for the last hour in proving I haven't the courage. It's just come over me,' she said, her eyes in their turn making a tour of the table, and coming back to Borrodaile with the look of having caught up a bran-new topic on the way—'it's just come over me, what we're all doing.'
'Are we all doing the same thing?'
'All the men are doing one thing. And all the women another.'
His idly curious look travelled up and down, and returned to her unenlightened.
'All the women,' she said, 'are trying with might and main to amuse the men, and all the men are more or less permitting the women to succeed.'
'I'm sorry,' he said, laughing, 'to hear of your being so over-worked.'
'Oh, you make it easy. And yet'—she caught the gratitude away from her voice—'I suppose I should have said something like that, even if I'd been talking to my other neighbour.'
Borrodaile's look went again from one couple to another, for, as usual in England, the talk was all tête-à-tête. The result of his inspection seemed not to lend itself to her mood.
'I can't speak for others, but for myself, I'm always conscious of wanting to be agreeable when I'm with you. I'm sorry'—he was speaking in the usual half-genial, half-jeering tone—'very sorry, if I succeed so ill.'
'I've already admitted that with me you succeed to admiration. But you only try because it's easy.'
'Oh!' he laughed.
'You rather like talking to me, you know. Now, can you lay your hand on your heart——'
'And deny it? Never!'
'Can you lay your hand on your heart, and say you've tried as hard to entertain your other neighbour as I have to keep mine going?'
'Ah, well, we men aren't as good at it. After all, it's rather the woman's "part," isn't it?'
'The art of pleasing? I suppose it is—but it's rather a Geisha view of life, don't you think?'
'Not at all; rightly viewed, it's a woman's privilege—her natural function.'
'Then the brutes are nobler than we.'
Wondering, he glanced at her. The face was wholly reassuring, but he said, with a faint uneasiness—
'If it weren't you, I'd say that sounds a little bitter.'
'Oh, no,' she laughed. 'I was only thinking about the lion's mane and the male bird's crest, and what the natural history bores say they're for.'
CHAPTER III
The darkness and the quiet of Vida Levering's bedroom were rudely dispelled at a punctual eight each morning by the entrance of a gaunt middle-aged female.
It was this person's unvarying custom to fling back the heavy curtains, as though it gratified some strong recurrent need in her, to hear brass rings run squealing along a bar; as if she counted that day lost which was not well begun—by shooting the blinds up with a clatter and a bang!
The harsh ceremonial served as a sort of setting of the pace, or a metaphorical shaking of a bony fist in the face of the day, as much as to say, 'If I admit you here you'll have to toe the mark!'
It might be taken as proof of sound nerves that the lady in the bed offered no remonstrance at being jarred awake in this ungentle fashion.
Fourteen years before, when Vida Levering was only eighteen,