book I

have just thrown away--and I feel no compunction for having done it,--is destitute of grammar as well as decency."

"Oh, but the critics don't notice that,"--she interrupted, with a delicate mockery vibrating in her voice--"It is apparently not their business to assist in preserving the purity of the English language. What they fall into raptures over is the originality of the 'sexual' theme, though I should have thought all such matters were as old as the hills. I never read reviews as a rule, but I did happen to come across one on the book you have just drowned,--and in it, the reviewer stated he had cried over it!"

She laughed again.

"Beast!" I said emphatically--"He probably found in it some glozing-over of his own vices. But you, Sibyl--why do you read such stuff?--how can you read it?"

"Curiosity moved me in the first place,"--she answered listlessly--"I wanted to see what makes a reviewer cry! Then when I began to read, I found that the story was all about the manner in which men amuse themselves with the soiled doves of the highways and bye-ways,--and as I was not very well instructed in that sort of thing, I thought I might as well learn! You know these unpleasant morsels of information on unsavoury subjects are like the reputed suggestions of the devil,--if you listen to one, you are bound to hear more. Besides, literature is supposed to reflect the time we live in,--and that kind of literature being more prevalent than anything else, we are compelled to accept and study it as the mirror of the age."

With an expression on her face that was half mirth and half scorn, she rose from her seat, and looked down into the lovely lake below her.

"The fishes will eat that book,--" she observed--"I hope it will not poison them! If they could read and understand it, what singular ideas they would have of us human beings!"

"Why don't you read Mavis Clare's books?" I asked suddenly--"You told me you admired her."

"So I do,--immensely!" she answered,--"I admire her and wonder at her, both together. How that woman can keep her child's heart and child's faith in a world like this, is more than I can understand. It is always a perfect marvel to me,--a sort of supernatural surprise. You ask me why don't I read her books,--I do read them,--I've read them all over and over again,--but she does not write many, and one has to wait for her productions longer than for those of most authors. When I want to feel like an angel, I read Mavis Clare,--but I more often am inclined to feel the other way, and then her books are merely so many worries to me."

"Worries?" I echoed.

"Yes. It is worrying to find somebody believing in a God when _you_ can't believe in Him,--to have beautiful faiths offered to you which _you_ can't grasp,--and to know that there is a creature alive, a woman like yourself in everything except mind, who is holding fast a happiness which you can never attain,--no, not though you held out praying hands day and night and shouted wild appeals to the dull heavens!"

At that moment she looked like a queen of tragedy,--her violet eyes ablaze,--her lips apart,--her breast heaving;----I approached her with a strange nervous hesitation and touched her hand. She gave it to me passively,--I drew it through my arm, and for a minute or two we paced silently up and down the gravel walk. The lights from the monster hotel which catered for us and our wants, were beginning to twinkle from basement to roof,--and just above the châlet we rented, a triad of stars sparkled in the shape of a trefoil.

"Poor Geoffrey!" she said presently, with a quick upward glance at me,--"I am sorry for you! With all my vagaries of disposition I am not a fool, and at anyrate I have learned how to analyse myself as well as others. I read you as easily as I read a book,--I see what a strange tumult your mind is in! You love me--and you loathe me!--and the contrast of emotion makes a wreck of you and your ideals. Hush,--don't speak; I know,--I know! But what would you have me be? An angel? I cannot realize such a being for more than a fleeting moment of imagination. A saint? They were all martyred. A good woman? I never met one. Innocent?--ignorant? I told you before we married that I was neither; there is nothing left for me to discover as far as the relations between men and women are concerned,--I have taken the measure of the inherent love of vice in both sexes. There is not a pin to choose between them,--men are no worse than women,--women no worse than men. I have discovered everything--except God!--and I conclude no God could ever have designed such a crazy and mean business as human life."

While she thus spoke, I could have fallen at her feet and implored her to be silent. For she was, unknowingly, giving utterance to some of the many thoughts in which I myself had frequently indulged,--and yet, from her lips they sounded cruel, unnatural, and callous to a degree that made me shrink from her in fear and agony. We had reached a little grove of pines,--and here in the silence and shadow I took her in my arms and stared disconsolately upon the beauty of her face.

"Sibyl!" I whispered--"Sibyl, what is wrong with us both? How is it that we do not seem to find the loveliest side of love?--why is it that even in our kisses and embraces, some impalpable darkness comes between us, so that we anger or weary each other when we should be glad and satisfied? What is it? Can you tell? For you know the darkness is there!"

A curious look came into her eyes,--a far-away strained look of hungry yearning, mingled, as I thought, with compassion for me.

"Yes, it is there!" she answered slowly--"And it is of our own mutual creation. I believe you have something nobler in your nature, Geoffrey, than I have in mine,--an indefinable something that recoils from me and my theories despite your wish and will. Perhaps if you had given way to that feeling in time, you would never have married me. You speak of the loveliest side of love,--to me there is no lovely side,--it is all coarse and horrible! You and I for instance,--cultured man and woman,--we cannot, in marriage, get a flight beyond the common emotions of Hodge and his girl!" She laughed violently, and shuddered in my arms. "What liars the poets are, Geoffrey! They ought to be sentenced to life-long imprisonment for their perjuries! They help to mould the credulous beliefs of a woman's heart;--in her early youth she reads their delicious assurances, and imagines that love will be all they teach,--a thing divine and lasting beyond earthly countings;--then comes the coarse finger of prose on the butterfly-wing of poesy, and the bitterness and hideousness of complete disillusion!"

I held her still in my arms with the fierce grasp of a man clinging to a spar ere he drowns in mid-ocean.

"But I love you Sibyl!----my wife, I love you!" I said, with a passion that choked my utterance.

"You love me,--yes, I know, but how? In a way that is abhorrent to yourself!" she replied--"It is not poetic love,--it is man's love, and man's love is brute love. So it is,--so it will be,--so it must be. Moreover the brute-love soon tires,--and when it dies out from satiety there is nothing left. Nothing, Geoffrey,--absolutely nothing but a blank and civil form of intercourse, which I do not doubt we shall be able to keep up for the admiration and comment of society!"

She disengaged herself from my embrace, and moved towards the house.

"Come!" she added, turning her exquisite head back over her shoulder with a feline caressing grace that she alone possessed, "You know there is a famous lady in London who advertises her saleable charms to the outside public by means of her monogram worked into the lace of all her window-blinds, thinking it no doubt good for trade! I am not quite so bad as that! You have paid dearly for me I know;--but remember I as yet wear no jewels but yours, and crave no gifts beyond those you are generous enough to bestow,--and my dutiful desire is to give you as much full value as I can for your money."

"Sibyl, you kill me!" I cried, tortured beyond endurance, "Do you think me so base----"

I broke off with almost a sob of despair.

"You cannot help being base," she said, steadily regarding me,--"because you are a man. I am base because I am a woman. If we believed in a God, either of us, we might discover some different way of life and love--who knows?--but neither you nor I have any remnant of faith in a Being whose existence all the scientists of the day are ever at work to disprove. We are persistently taught that we are animals and nothing more,--let us therefore not be ashamed of animalism. Animalism and atheism are approved by the scientists and applauded by the press,--and the clergy are powerless to enforce the faith they preach. Come Geoffrey, don't stay mooning like a stricken Parsifal under those pines,--throw away that thing which troubles you, your conscience,--throw it away as you have thrown the