if you had told durant that the end of his first week would find him sitting under the firs in lonely conversation with miss tancred, he would have smiled at you incredulously. yet so it was. her fear of him, if fear it had been, and not indifference, was wearing away. she seemed anxious to make friends with him if possible in a less painfully conscientious manner, and he, on his side, was beginning to tolerate her. in fact, he went so far as to own that, if it had not been for that ridiculous idea of his, he would have tolerated her from the first. it was not her fault if he had been fool enough to fall in love with her before sight or at half-sight. she had disappointed him (hence his natural disgust); but the thing had happened many times before in his experience. after all, he had had no grounds for his passionate belief in miss tancred beyond the argument from defect, the vague feeling that destiny owed him amends for her intolerable shortcomings. but durant's mind was too sane and versatile to be long concerned with passion yet unborn. he was not one of those pitiable sentimentalists who imagine that every petticoat, or at any rate every well-cut skirt, conceals a probable ideal. some women of his acquaintance had defined, not to say denounced, him as [pg 256] a consummate and dangerous flirt, but these were not the most discerning of their sex. durant described himself more correctly as a sympathetic, though dispassionate, observer of womankind. in other words, he was not a vulgar flirt; he flirted with understanding.
an understanding without flirtation was springing up between him and miss tancred. in this god-forsaken place they were comrades in boredom and isolation. she had said nothing, but in some impalpable yet intimate way he knew that she, too, was bored, that the colonel bored her. the knowledge lay between them unnamed, untouched by either of them; they passed it by, she in her shame and he in his delicacy, with eyes averted from it and from each other. it was as if the horror had crept out through some invisible, intangible doorway of confession; unseen, unapproached, it remained their secret and the source of their mutual pity. meanwhile she no longer avoided him; on the contrary, she showed an unmistakable liking for his society. she would come while he was sketching and sit beside him for five minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour, remaining silent, or merely exchanging a few frank words with him before she went her way. in these matters she was gifted with an unerring tact; without a hint on durant's part she seemed to know to a nicety how far her presence was agreeable or otherwise.
this time he had gone up the hill after dinner, and had found her sitting in the accustomed place. they had been alone that evening, for the colonel was dining intimately with mrs. fazakerly. that lady, with a refined friendliness that did her credit, had refrained from including miss tancred and durant in the invitation, thereby insuring them one evening's immunity from whist. durant could make no better use of his [pg 257] freedom than by spending it alone out of doors; it seemed that miss tancred had done the same with hers.
she was sitting there on the edge of the mound, clasping her knees and gazing into the distance. he apologized for his intrusion, and she waked from her abstraction with a dreamy air, making a visible effort to take him in and realize him. but, though she said simply that she was glad he had come, the effect of his coming was to plunge her into deeper abstraction. they sat for some time without speaking. miss tancred had a prodigious faculty for silence, and durant let her have her way, being indeed indifferent to miss tancred's way.
at last she spoke.
"it's odd how some people take nature," said she; "for instance, mrs. fazakerly says she loves it because it's so soothing. she might just as well say she liked listening to an orchestra because it sends her to sleep. she can't love it for its own sake."
"you'll think me horribly rude, but i doubt if any woman can. that is the one thing a woman is incapable of—a pure passion for nature, a really disinterested love of life. it's an essentially masculine sentiment."
"i don't at all agree with you."
"don't you? to begin with, it argues more vitality than most women have got. they take to it as a substitute for other things; and to be content with it would mean that they had exhausted, outlived the other things."
"what other things?"
she was studying every line of his young, repugnant face, and durant was a little embarrassed by her steady gaze. [pg 258]
"other interests, other feelings—whatever it is that women do care for most."
"i don't know anything about women."
her remark might have borne various interpretations, either that she knew nothing about herself, that she despised her own sex too much to include herself in it, or that she had tacitly adopted durant's attitude, which seemed to leave her altogether outside of the discussion. he talked to her unconsciously, without any desire to please, as if he assumed that she expected as little from him as he from her. she never reminded him that she was a woman. it would have been absurd if she had insisted on it, and whatever she was miss tancred was not absurd.
she went on calmly, "so i can't say what they care for most; can you?"
"you know my opinion. i wanted yours."
"mine isn't worth much. but i should say that in these things no two women were alike. you talk as if they were all made of the same stuff."
"so they are inside—in their souls, i mean."
"there's more unlikeness in their souls, i imagine, than there ever is in their bodies; and you wouldn't say an ugly woman was quite the same as a pretty one, would you?"
"yes; in the obvious sense that they are both women. i admit that there may be an ugliness that cancels sex, to say nothing of a beauty that transcends it; but in either case the woman is unique."
"and if the woman, why not her soul?"
"because—because—because there is a certain psychical quality that is eternal and unchangeable; because the soul is the seat of the cosmic difference we call sex. in man or woman that is the one unalterable fact—the last reality." [pg 259]
he spoke coldly, brutally almost, as if he, like herself, was blind to the pathos of her ignored and rejected womanhood.
she seemed to be thinking that last point over.
"yes," she said, "i'm glad you came. i believe you can help me."
"i shall be delighted if i can."
"what do you think of mrs. fazakerly?"
durant was a little taken aback by the suddenness of the question.
"what should i think?"
"i—i hardly know."
she knitted her black brows till they almost touched, and propped her chin with her hand, as if she were oppressed with the weight of her own thoughts. it struck him that her provincial mind entertained an unreasonable suspicion of the consummate little widow, a woman's jealousy of the superior creature compact of sex; and a sense of justice made him inclined to defend mrs. fazakerly. besides, he liked mrs. fazakerly; she, at any rate, was not a bore.
"she's a very amusing woman, and i should say she was an uncommonly good sort, too."
to his surprise her face brightened. "should you? should you say that she had a good heart?"
"really, miss tancred, i can't see into mrs. fazakerly's heart, but i wouldn't mind betting——"
"that she's good? and affectionate? and straight?"
"straight as a die."
"and honest?"
"oh, lord, yes." he wondered whatever primitive meaning she attached to the word.
"well, if you think that——"
"mind you, my opinion may be utterly worthless." [pg 260]
"no, no. it's just the very sort of opinion i want."
"why should it be?"
"because it's the opinion of a man of the world. mrs. fazakerly's a woman of the world, so i thought you'd understand her. i don't."
"i've known her exactly a week, and you?"
"two years. but then i don't observe character, and you do. and yet i have an intuition."
"then by all means trust your intuition."
"that's it—i daren't. the truth is, i'm afraid of myself—my motives."
"your motives are not yourself."
"aren't they? if it wasn't for them i should be certain. i see she's a dear little woman, and i know that i like her."
"then, for heaven's sake, go on liking her; it's the best thing you can do."
"isn't it rather horrid to like a person just because they may be of use to you?"
"not in the least. you were pleased to say i might be of use to you, and i'm sure i hope you like me."
"yes, i like you; but i think i like you for yourself. i'm afraid of liking mrs. fazakerly from the wrong motive."
"you can't like her from the wrong motive. you can't have a motive at all, if it comes to that. you might have a motive for killing her, or for cultivating her acquaintance, but not for liking her. you either like a person or not, and there's an end of it."
"if your motives are not yourself, what are they?"
"lord only knows. forces, tendencies, that determine your actions, which are the very smallest part of you. what you call intuitions, your feelings—hate (i should say you were a good hater), and love——" (her eyes, which had been fixed on his, dropped suddenly), [pg 261] "don't wait for motives. they're the only spontaneous things about you, the only realities you know." (and of these he had said just now that the last reality was sex. it was his point of view, a point from which it appeared that for him miss tancred had no existence.) "of course there may be some transcendental sense in which they're not realities at all; but as far as we are concerned they're not only real, but positively self-existent."
as he thus discoursed, durant blinked critically at the sky, while his pencil described an airy curve on the infinite blue, symbolizing the grace, the fluency, and the vastness of his thought.
"they, if you like, are you. it's very odd that you don't seem to trust them more."
she had turned from him till her face was a thin outline against the sky. she had a fine head, and carried it well, too; and at the moment the twilight dealt tenderly with her dress and face; it purified the tragic pallor of her forehead and all but defined that vague, haunting suggestion of a possible charm. durant had it a moment ago—there—then. ah! now he had lost it.
"i daren't trust my feelings. i can't. there are too many of them. they won't work the same way. they're all fighting against each other."
"then let them fight it out, and let the strongest win."
"if i only knew which was the strongest."
"you'll know some day. in the long run, you see, the strongest is bound to win."
"not necessarily. there might be a number of little ones that all together would be stronger still."
"oh, kill off the little beggars one at a time—go for them, throttle them, wring their necks, jump on them; and if they wriggle, stamp!"
"you can't jump on your own shadow. you can't stamp on them if they're you."
he groaned. miss tancred was getting too subtle; it was like sitting in the desert and playing at metaphysics with the sphinx. he had had about enough of it. he rose, stretching his long limbs, and the action suggested the hideous tension of his intellect.
"you must let yourself go, miss tancred—let yourself go!" and he laughed at his own vision of miss tancred; miss tancred insurgent, miss tancred flamboyant, miss tancred voluptuous, volatile, victorious!
and then a thought struck him.
he turned and saw miss tancred still sitting motionless, nursing her knees; her pure inflexible profile glimmered against the dusk.
