ther walk than
glide, and under the gliding she caught glimpses, now and then, of her
own dark wonders. They were all very nice to her; but it was as Gerald's
wife that they were nice to her; she herself counted for nothing with
them. They were frivolous people for the most part, though some among
them were serious, and often the most frivolous were those from whom she
would have expected gravity, and the serious those whom, on a first
meeting, she had thought perturbingly frivolous. Some of the political
friends--one who was in the Cabinet, for instance--seemed to think more
about hunting and bridge than about their functions in the State; while
an aunt of Gerald's, still young and very pretty, wrote articles on
philosophy and was ardently interested in ethical societies, in spite of
the fact that she rouged her cheeks, wore clothes so fashionable as to
look recondite, and had a reputation perfectly presentable for social
uses, but not exempt from private whispers. Althea caught such whispers
with particular perturbation. The question of morals was one that she
had imagined herself to face with a cosmopolitan tolerance; but she now
realised that to live among people whose code, in this respect, seemed
one of manners only, was a very different thing from reading about them
or seeing them from afar, as it were, in foreign countries. Gerald's
friends and relatives were anything rather than Bohemian, and most of
them were flawlessly respectable; but they were also anything but
unworldly; they were very worldly, and, from the implied point of view
of all of them, what didn't come out in the world it didn't concern
anybody to recognise--except in whispers. It all resolved itself, in the
case of people one disapproved of, into a faculty for being nice to them
without really having anything to do with them; and to poor Althea this
was a difficult task to undertake; social life, in her experience, was
more involved in the life of the affections and matched it more nearly.
She found, when the fortnight was over, that she was glad, very glad, to
get away to Merriston. The comparative solitude would do her good, she
felt, and in it, above all, the charm would perhaps work more
restoringly than in London. She had been, through everything, more aware
than of any new impression that the old one held firm; but, in that
breathless fortnight, she found that the charm, persistently, would not
be to her what she had hoped it might be. It di