'Ah, thanks, thanks! It suddenly occurred to me that we might be dead against one another as rivals, and a friendship of many long--days be snapped like a--like a reed.'
'No--no--only a jest,' said Neigh, with a strangely accelerated speech. 'Love-making is an ornamental pursuit that matter-of-fact fellows like me are quite unfit for. A man must have courted at least half-a-dozen women before he's a match for one; and since triumph lies so far ahead, I shall keep out of the contest altogether.'
'Your life would be pleasanter if you were engaged. It is a nice thing, after all.'
'It is. The worst of it would be that, when the time came for breaking it off, a fellow might get into an action for breach--women are so fond of that sort of thing now; and I hate love-affairs that don't end peaceably!'
'But end it by peaceably marrying, my dear fellow!'
'It would seem so singular. Besides, I have a horror of antiquity: and you see, as long as a man keeps single, he belongs in a measure to the rising generation, however old he may be; but as soon as he marries and has children, he belongs to the last generation, however young he may be. Old Jones's son is a deal younger than young Brown's father, though they are both the same age.'
'At any rate, honest courtship cures a man of many evils he had no power to stem before.'
'By substituting an incurable matrimony!'
'Ah--two persons must have a mind for that before it can happen!' said Ladywell, sorrowfully shaking his head.
'I think you'll find that if one has a mind for it, it will be quite sufficient. But here we are at my rooms. Come in for half-an-hour?'
'Not to-night, thanks!'
They parted, and Neigh went in. When he got upstairs he murmured in his deepest chest note, 'O, lords, that I should come to this! But I shall never be such a fool as to marry her! What a flat that poor young devil was not to discover that we were tarred with the same brush. O, the deuce, the deuce!' he continued, walking about the room as if passionately stamping, but not quite doing it because another man had rooms below.
Neigh drew from his pocket-book an envelope embossed with the name of a fashionable photographer, and out of this pulled a portrait of the lady who had, in fact, enslaved his secret self equally with his frank young friend the painter. After contemplating it awhile with a face of cynical adoration, he murmured, shaking his head, 'Ah, my lady; if you only knew this, I should be snapped up like a snail!
Not a minute's peace for me till I had married you. I wonder if Ishall!--I wonder.'
Neigh was a man of five-and-thirty--Ladywell's senior by ten years;and, being of a phlegmatic temperament, he had glided thus far through the period of eligibility with impunity. He knew as well as any man how far he could go with a woman and yet keep clear of having to meet her in church without her bonnet; but it is doubtful if his mind that night were less disturbed with the question how to guide himself out of the natural course which his passion for Ethelberta might tempt him into, than was Ladywell's by his ardent wish to secure her.
About the time at which Neigh and Ladywell parted company, Christopher Julian was entering his little place in Bloomsbury. The quaint figure of Faith, in her bonnet and cloak, was kneeling on the hearth-rug endeavouring to stir a dull fire into a bright one.
'What--Faith! you have never been out alone?' he said.
Faith's soft, quick-shutting eyes looked unutterable things, and she replied, 'I have been to hear Mrs. Petherwin's story-telling again.'
'And walked all the way home through the streets at this time of night, I suppose!'
'Well, nobody molested me, either going or coming back.'
'Faith, I gave you strict orders not to go into the streets after two o'clock in the day, and now here you are taking no notice of what I say at all!'
'The truth is, Kit, I wanted to see with my spectacles what this woman was really like, and I went without them last time. I slipped in behind, and nobody saw me.'
'I don't think much of her after what I have seen tonight,' said Christopher, moodily recurring to a previous thought.
'Why? What is the matter?'
'I thought I would call on her this afternoon, but when I got there I found she had left early for the performance. So in the evening, when I thought it would be all over, I went to the private door of the Hall to speak to her as she came out, and ask her flatly a question or two which I was fool enough to think I must ask her before I went to bed. Just as I was drawing near she came out, and, instead of getting into the brougham that was waiting for her, she went round the corner. When she came back a man met her and gave her something, and they stayed talking together two or three minutes. The meeting may certainly not have been intentional on her part; but she has no business to be going on so coolly when--when--in fact, I have come to the conclusion that a woman's affection is not worth having. The only feeling which has any dignity or permanence or worth is family affection between close blood-relations.'
'And yet you snub me sometimes, Mr. Kit.'
'And, for the matter of that, you snub me. Still, you know what Imean--there's none of that off-and-on humbug between us. If we grumble with one another we are united just the same: if we don't write when we are parted, we are just the same when we meet--there has been some rational reason for silence; but as for lovers and sweethearts, there is nothing worth a rush in what they feel!'
Faith said nothing in reply to this. The opinions she had formed upon the wisdom of her brother's pursuit of Ethelberta would have come just then with an ill grace. It must, however, have been evident to Christopher, had he not been too preoccupied for observation, that Faith's impressions of Ethelberta were not quite favourable as regarded her womanhood, notwithstanding that she greatly admired her talents.
