CHAPTER XXIII

MISS AZURE VERITY AND MR. DABNEY OF _THE BALANCE_ CONTINUE TO KEEP MY MIND TO A SINGLE SUBJECT

I rather liked my own rooms once, but Miss Verity's have made me discontented. What is the secret of femininity? Can it be reduced to a word? Not by me. But a literary exquisite--a Flaubert or a Maupassant--in search of it might do worse than await inspiration at Azure's flat.

She reads everything that she ought, and by some subtle influence compels publishers to bind attractively everything that she ought to read. If I buy a new book it is as likely as not dingy in hue; but if Azure buys one it is like herself, winning and gay. Her shelves smile. She likes little books, and has a dozen little table-stands for them.

Her flowers are perfection--just a few in each glass. On the larger table is a dwarf Japanese tree spreading its gnarled and venerable branches for a Liliputian smithy to shelter beneath; it is a hundred and fifty years old. On the walls are a few coloured wood blocks, a water colour or so, a Japanese print here and there, and the mask of the dead girl from the Morgue.

Azure was not there when I entered. The cleverest women are not. Having given me time to look round and catch the note, she came in, or at least suddenly she was in the room. Had I been blind and deaf I should have known it. She has a presence: she vibrates.

Sancho Panza the wise, who, it is on record, liked a man to be a man and a woman a woman, would have liked Azure Verity; but he would have marvelled too at the fine flower that civilisation has produced. For art has gone to her making as much as nature. Indeed, it is not the natural woman that she makes one think of, but this other and more formidable creation, the woman evolved from luxurious modern conditions: the woman who sets Greenlanders hunting rare arctic creatures that she may be warm, and brown peasants toiling in the vineyards about Rheims that she may drink bubbling wine and be gay, and chemists distilling perfumes from flowers that she may exhale fragrance, and Persian divers plunging for pearls that she may emphasise the beauty of her neck.

But Azure, though her salary and her wealthy spoiling friends can bring all those luxuries to her slender white hand, is in no way the victim of them. She accepts them naturally, but she keeps herself simple too--impulsive and ardent in her sympathies, very generous, and so ready for an adventure that she would be prepared to go through with it entirely on bread and cheese.

"Now," she said, after tea had been taken away and the room had gained the composure necessary for more intimate talk, "now tell me about your Naomi."

"What am I to say?" I replied.

"She is very attractive," said Azure.

"Do you think so?" I said diffidently. (I certainly think so, but I was not particularly anxious to hear others say so too.)

"Why isn't she married?" was Azure's next question.

"She has not been asked, I suppose," I said.

"Do you mean to tell me that no one has proposed to her? It's not conceivable."

"Not to my knowledge," I said.

"How absurd!" she answered reflectively. "There is a girl born to be a wife, and no one has the sense.... While I..." she broke off.

"Naturally," I said.

"Well," she exclaimed, "what are we to do?"

"Do?"

"Yes, how are we to get her married?"

"But why?" I said as bravely as I could.

"Why? Because she is far too sweet and too sensible to die an old maid."

"She is very happy," I said.

"Relatively happy, perhaps."

"Are you so convinced that every one should marry?"

"Oh no, not every one; but certainly Miss Wynne."

"But you don't know her!" I said.

"Know her! Of course I do. I saw her at the theatre."

"Only for a moment."

"Well, that's the way to see people. I never need to see any one twice to know them. My first impressions are always right. Sometimes I go back on my first impressions, but it is always a mistake to do so."

"And looking at her like that, you saw that she wanted to marry?"

"Certainly. It is fearfully plain to any one but a selfish uncle. What a pity," she added after a pause, "that you are her uncle."

My heart beat horribly. "But I'm not," I said.

"Not her uncle?" said Azure. "I thought you were. What are you then?"

I told her that Mrs. Wynne was my step-sister.

She said nothing for quite a long while, and I tried to think of something entirely different to say, but could not.

All I could say was, "To change the subject a little, how is it that you, with such belief in marriage..."

"Oh, I'm not a marrying woman," she said. "I have no courage to face a loss of liberty. I must be my own mistress."

"As you would always be," I said.

"I daren't risk it," she replied.

"And yet, ..." I said.

"Oh yes, I know what you mean. I have been engaged, and I let myself be run after. It's quite true, but I can't help it. I get so fond of them, and they are so nice to me; but they will spoil it all. It's all rubbish to say that marriages are made in heaven; they're not. It is courtship that is made in heaven. The dreadful thing about marriage to me is that it means the end of the engagement. The engagement is so beautiful: people are so kind to such, so understanding and sympathetic and generous and patient. And then they marry and everything is over."

"And yet you want Naomi to marry."

"Oh, Naomi is different. Naomi is a born wife; I am a born _fiancée_. Naomi would not see half the things I did. Naomi would love her husband all the more because he was ill; I should hate him. Naomi would love to have babies; I should be terrified and ashamed."

"I am afraid you are a bad citizen," I said.

"Very," she replied; "but I have the honesty to admit it; and I spend a lot of time trying to get good citizenship into others." She smiled with adorable mischief.

"Well," I said, "here we have been talking for an hour, and what have we done? You invited me to come and tell you about Venice, and I have not mentioned the place; nor have you asked me to. All we have talked about is other persons' lives."

"Well," she retorted, "and what did you expect? Aren't we in London? That is the only subject here. No matter how a conversation between a man and woman begins, it is bound, sooner or later, to reach some one else's domestic complications. As for me, I love it. One may talk books and plays and pictures and travel now and then, but the only real interest is other people--their hearts or their want of heart, their follies and their pockets."

"Much better," I replied, "have some interest in your own heart."

"Not I," she answered firmly. "That would be too serious."

On the doorstep whom should I meet but Mr. Dollie Heathcote, a picture of cool tailoring, carrying a bouquet. For the first time in our acquaintance, his expression of perfect contentment and serenity was dimmed by a passing cloud.

"What ho!" he said.

"What ho!" I replied. "I thought you were at Cromer."

"You would not have me remain idle and frivolous on the East Coast," he said, "while the funeral of my aunt is in progress in the metropolis?"

"Certainly not," I answered.

He still looked the least bit abashed.

"It's all right," I said, perceiving his thought, "I shan't mention it. For some time now I have entirely given up the habit of remembering that I ever saw any one anywhere."

He laughed quite comfortably again.

"Pip, pip!" he said, and disappeared up the stairs.

So Dollie was among the suitors! A very good thing, too.

I walked home rather thoughtfully by way of the Green Park and St. James's Park. It was a golden afternoon, and there were many lovers, and their happiness made me happy and made me sad. What would have been the result, I wondered, if steady happiness had been set on the throne of this world instead of uncertainty and change and disappointment? How would life have developed had we been born happy and well, and lived happily, and loved happily, and then, when our days were fulfilled, had suddenly died happily?

Would it have harmed the race? Have misfortune and disease and frustration and insecurity been necessary to man's ingenuity and industry? Without sorrow should we have had no telegraph? without tears, no camera? Have all the benefits of civilisation been wrung from us in some effort to escape from the blows of fate? And even if so, might not happiness, without the advantages of progress, have still been better?

I stood on the bridge and watched the birds for a long while. They too had been in love, and would be again next spring, most of them, and it was just as real to them as to the youths and maidens on the seats and in the boats, and--to me?

To me.

I walked home in a brown study.

Azure Verity had sufficiently disturbed my mind, but I was destined to receive a worse shock before the day closed. I dined at Queen Anne's Gate, and we had a very amusing evening, trying over a number of folk-songs from Somerset, which the morris-dancers are making popular. I left at about eleven, and Alderley said he would walk with me as he had something to tell me.

Briefly it was that Mr. Dabney had asked if he might pay his addresses to Naomi. He would not, he said, say anything to her until he had the parents' permission; which is punctilious of him if not romantic. I think, however, I see his point of view, which is that, being practically a Republican at heart, and certainly rather anti-English, he might be too repugnant a son-in-law for a public man like Mr. Wynne to consider, and it was therefore only honest to begin by giving the father the chance of refusal.

Alderley, however, has no such objection to him; the objection comes from Naomi herself, who informed her father that she could never love Mr. Dabney and so settled the matter at once. And since one cannot think of him as precisely the build of a blighted and suicidal lover, the matter ends.

But why should my heart again stand still as Alderley told me about it?