r to
take the place of Duff Lindsay, who had fallen to the snare of beauty;
although she mentioned to herself that he took it with a difference,
a vast temperamental difference which she was aware of not having yet
quite sounded. The depths of his faith of course--there she could only
scan and hesitate, but this was a brink upon which she did not often
find herself, away from which, indeed, he sometimes gently guided her.
The atmospheres of their talk were the more bracing ones of this world,
and it was here that Hilda looked when she would make him a parallel
for Lindsay, and here that she found her measure of disappointment. He
warmed himself and dried his wings in the opulence of her spirit, and
she was not on the whole the poorer by any exchange they made, but she
was sometimes pricked to the reflection that the freemasonry between
them was all hers, and the things she said to him had still the flavour
of adventure. She found herself inclined--and the experience was new--to
make an effort for a reward which was problematical and had to be
considered in averages, a reward put out in a thin and hesitating hand
under a sacerdotal robe, with a curious concentrated quality, and a
strange flavour of incense and the air of cold churches. There was also
the impression--was it too fantastic?--of words carried over a medium,
an invisible wire which brought the soul of them and left the body by
the way. Duff Lindsay, so eminently responsive and calculable, came
running with open arms; in his rejoiceful eye-beam one saw almost a
midwife to one's idea. But the comparison was irritating, and after
a time she turned from it. She awoke once in the night, moreover, to
declare to the stars that she was less worried by the consideration of
Arnold's sex than she would have thought it possible to be--one hardly
paused to consider that he was a man at all; a reflection which would
certainly not have occurred to her about poor dear Duff. With regard to
Stephen Arnold, it was only, of course, another way of saying that she
was less oppressed, in his company, by the consideration of her own.
Perhaps it is already evident that this was her grievance with life,
when the joy of it left her time to think of a grievance, the attraction
of her personal lines, the reason of the hundred fetiches her body
claimed of her and found her willing to perform, the fact that it meant
more to her, for all her theories, that she should be looking her best
when