“I wish I had your pen,” he said, suddenly breaking the silence. “I’m all right at talking; but I want to get at the others: the men and women who never come, thinking it has nothing to do with them. I’m shy and awkward when I try to write. There seems a barrier in front of me. You break through it. One hears your voice. Tell me,” he said, “are you getting your way? Do they answer you?” He gave her a commission then and there for a heart to heart talk with a gentleman whom the editor of the Home News Department of the Daily Dispatch would have referred to as a “Leading Literary Luminary,” and who had just invented a new world in two volumes. She had asked him childish questions and had listened with wide-open eyes while he, sitting over against her, and smiling benevolently, had laid bare to her all the seeming intricacies of creation, and had explained to her in simple language the necessary alterations and improvements he was hoping to bring about in human nature. He had the sensation that his hair must be standing on end the next morning after having read in cold print what he had said. Expanding oneself before the admiring gaze of innocent simplicity and addressing the easily amused ear of an unsympathetic public are not the same thing. He ought to have thought of that.!

They both laughed, and then shot a guilty glance in Flossie’s direction. “It’s dirty work,” Flossie confided one day to Madge Singleton. “I trade on my silly face. Don’t see that I’m much different to any of these poor devils.” They were walking home in the evening from a theatre. “If I hadn’t been stony broke I’d never have taken it up. I shall get out of it as soon as I can afford to.”

“I had a long talk with Nan last night,” he said. “And, trying to explain it to her, I came a little nearer to understanding it myself. My love for you would have been strong enough to ruin both of us. I see that now. It would have dominated every other thought in me. It would have swallowed up my dreams. It would have been blind, unscrupulous. Married to you, I should have aimed only at success. It would not have been your fault. You would not have known. About mere birth I should never have troubled myself. I’ve met daughters of a hundred earls—more or less: clever, jolly little women I could have chucked under the chin and have been chummy with. Nature creates her own ranks, and puts her ban upon misalliances. Every time I took you in my arms I should have felt that you had stepped down from your proper order to mate yourself with me and that it was up to me to make the sacrifice good to you by giving you power—position. Already within the last few weeks, when it looked as if this thing was going to be possible, I have been thinking against my will of a compromise with Carleton that would give me his support. This coming election was beginning to have terrors for me that I have never before felt. The thought of defeat—having to go back to comparative poverty, to comparative obscurity, with you as my wife, was growing into a nightmare. I should have wanted wealth, fame, victory, for your sake—to see you honoured, courted, envied, finely dressed and finely housed—grateful to me for having won for you these things. It wasn’t honest, healthy love—the love that unites, that makes a man willing to take as well as to give, that I felt for you; it was worship that separates a man from a woman, that puts fear between them. It isn’t good that man should worship a woman. He can’t serve God and woman. Their interests are liable to clash. Nan’s my helpmate—just a loving woman that the Lord brought to me and gave me when I was alone—that I still love. I didn’t know it till last night. She will never stand in my way. I haven’t to put her against my duty. She will leave me free to obey the voice that calls to me. And no man can hear that voice but himself.” There was no forgetting those deep, burning eyes, though the face had changed. The thin red lips still remained its one touch of colour; but the unhealthy whiteness of the skin had given place to a delicate pallor; and the features that had been indistinct had shaped themselves in fine, firm lines. It was a beautiful, arresting face, marred only by the sullen callousness of the dark, clouded eyes. The silver clock upon her desk struck six. It had been a gift from her father when she was at Girton. It never obtruded. Its voice was a faint musical chime that she need not hear unless she cared to listen. She turned and looked at it. It seemed to be a little face looking back at her out of its two round, blinkless eyes. For the first time during all the years that it had watched beside her, she heard its quick, impatient tick.