LOVE,—AND
THE PHILOSOPHER
MARIE CORELLI

LOVE,—AND
THE PHILOSOPHER

A Study in Sentiment
BY
MARIE CORELLI
AUTHOR OF
“Thelma,” “Barrabas,” “The Sorrows of Satan,”
“The Life Everlasting,” “Innocent,”
“The Young Diana,” etc.
THE RYERSON PRESS
TORONTO

COPYRIGHT, 1923,
By GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
[Illustration]
LOVE,—AND THE PHILOSOPHER. II
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FOREWORD

THE following story is of the simplest character, purposely so designed. It has no “abnormal” or “neurotic” episodes; no “problems” and no “psychoanalysis.” Its “sentiment” is of an ordinary, everyday type, common to quiet English homes where the “sensational” press finds no admittance, and where a girl may live her life as innocent of evil as a rose;—where even the most selfish of cynical “philosophers” may gradually evolve something better than Self. There are no “thrills,” no “brain storms,” no “doubtful moralities”—no unnatural overstrained “emotionalisms,” whatever. The personages who figure in the tale are drawn absolutely from life—“still life” I might call it—and are fit to make the acquaintance of any “Young Person” of either sex. I have hopes that the “Philosopher,” though selfish, may be liked, when he is known, for his unselfishness,—and that the “Sentimentalist” may waken a sister-sympathy among those many charming women, who though wishing to be gentle and just to their admirers, do not always know their own minds in affairs of love. Whether my heroine chose the right partner for life is for my readers to determine. I myself am not more sure about it than she was!

M. C.

LOVE,—AND THE PHILOSOPHER

CHAPTER I

“YOU women are always so sentimental!” said the Philosopher, leaning back in a comfortable garden chair and lazily flicking off the ash from an excellent cigar;—“You overdo the thing. You carry every emotion to an extreme limit. It shows a lamentable lack of judgment.”

She listened to him with the tiniest quiver of a smile, but offered no reply. She did not even look at the Philosopher. There were many other things which (apparently) engaged her attention, so that unless you knew her very well, you might have said she was not even aware of the Philosopher’s existence. This would have been a mistake,—but no matter! However, there was the garden, to begin with. It was a lovely garden, full of sweet-smelling, old-fashioned flowers. There were roses in such lavish quantity that they seemed to literally blaze upon the old brick walls and rustic pergolas which surrounded and hemmed in the numerous beds and borders set in among the grass. Then there were two white doves strutting on the neatly kept path and declaring their loves, doubts or special mislikings in their own curiously monotonous manner. There was also a thrush perched on a spray of emerald green leaves and singing to his own heart’s content, oblivious of an audience. All these trifles of a summer’s day pleased her;—but then, she was easily pleased.

“You magnify trifles into momentous incidents,” went on the Philosopher, placidly smoking. “Look at the way you behaved about that dead robin yesterday! Found it lying in the garden path,—picked it up and actually cried over it! Now think of the hundreds of men and women starving to death in London! You never cry over them! No! Like all women you must see a dead robin before you can cry!”

She turned her eyes towards him. They were soft eyes, with a rather pleading look just now in their blue depths.

“The poor bird!” she murmured. “Such an innocent little thing! It was sad to see it lying dead in the bright sunshine.”

“Innocent! Sad! Poor!” exclaimed the Philosopher. “Good heavens! What of the human beings who are poor and sad and innocent and all the rest of it, and who die uncared for every day? Besides, how do you know a robin is innocent or sad? I’ve watched the rascal, I tell you, many a time! He fights with all the other birds as hard as he can,—he is spiteful,—he is cruel,—and he positively trades on his red breast. Trades on it, I tell you! You women again! If he hadn’t a red breast you would never be sorry for him. You wouldn’t weep for a sparrow. I tell you, as I’ve often told you before, that you women overdo sentiment and make too much fuss about nothing.”

She perceived that his cigar had gone out, and handed him a match from a small box on a garden table near them. He accepted it condescendingly.

“If you ever fall in love—” pursued the Philosopher. Here he paused, and striking the match she had given him, relighted his cigar and began to puff out smoke with evident enjoyment. She stood patiently watching him.

“If you ever fall in love—” he went on, ... Now it was very strange that the Philosopher should pause again. He was seldom at a loss for words, but for the moment his profuse vocabulary appeared to have given out.

“If you ever fall in love—” he murmured.

Again that tiny quiver of a smile appeared on her face.

“Well! Go on!” she said.

The Philosopher nerved himself to an effort.

“If you ever fall in love,” he continued, “never try on sentiment with a man. He won’t like it. He won’t understand it. No man ever does.”

The little quivering smile deepened.

“I’m sure you are quite right!” she answered, in a voice that was almost dove-like in its humility.

The Philosopher was silent for a moment. He seemed nonplussed. There is perhaps nothing that so completely bewilders and confuses even a philosopher as an agreeable acquiescence in all his opinions, whether such opinions be sagacious or erroneous.

“Well!” he added, somewhat lamely—“Don’t you forget it!”

She moved a step or two from his side.

“I should never dream of forgetting it!” she said.

Her back was now turned to him. Furtively, and one would almost have said with an air of timidity, the Philosopher peeped at her sideways. Decidedly her back was not unpleasing. The folds of her skirt fell exactly as the Philosopher would have had them fall could he have stood in the shoes of Worth or Paquin,—her hair was arranged in precisely the way he considered becoming. The garden hat, ... but no!... no philosopher is capable of describing a woman’s garden hat. There followed a silence which was embarrassing,—not to her, but to him. Presently he said:

“Are you going?”

She turned her head, ever so slightly.

“Do you wish me to go?”

Another silence, more embarrassing than the previous one.

“I like to see you about,” said the Philosopher at last. “You give a touch to the landscape which is—which is natural and agreeable.”

She moved slowly away, her back still turned towards him, and presently stepped lightly among the flower borders, lifting a trailing rose here or setting aside a straying branch there, and looking, in her simple white gown, like the presiding goddess of the garden, as indeed she was. The Philosopher heaved a sigh,—whether of relief or vexation he hardly knew. He had a book to read,—a rather dull and drily written volume of profound essays, entitled “The Natural Evolution and Decay of Nations,” and, opening it at the place he had left off, he endeavoured to immerse himself in its contents. Nevertheless, now and again his attention wandered. His eyes roved away from the printed page and followed the slow gliding of the white-robed figure through the garden. He liked to watch it,—and yet in a curious way was half ashamed of his liking. Needless to say the Philosopher was a very well-balanced, self-restrained man. He was a profound student of logic and prided himself on his sound reasoning ability. He was also a good orator, and had astonished numerous audiences by his eloquence on the general inability of the human being to understand reason. The human being was, in his opinion, a poor creature at best, and sometimes he quite forgot that he was a human being himself. The feminine human being came into his calculations as the merest appendage to the intricate and mysterious scheme of existence—an appendage which, though apparently necessary, seemed a little unfortunate,—except—well!—except when it wore a white gown and a fascinating garden hat and moved gracefully among flowering plants and was not too much in the way. He began to think in a curious desultory fashion about incidents and circumstances which had nothing whatever to do with “The Natural Evolution and Decay of Nations.”

“She’s really quite gentle and amenable,” he said to himself—“if it were not for that sentiment of hers! She has too much of it altogether. If I allowed myself to fall in love with her she would make my life a burden—a positive burden! If I ever did anything that seemed to suggest indifference to, or neglect of her—such as reading a book like this, for example,—or a newspaper,—her eyes would fill with tears and she would say: ‘Ah! You don’t love me any more!’ She would! All women do that sort of thing! It’s the most fatal mistake in the world! But they all make it!”

Here his attention was distracted by the swinging noise of an opening gate, and turning his looks in the direction indicated, he saw a young man walking with a breezy air up the garden path to the place where the white figure with the pretty hat strolled by itself among the flowers. This young man had no eyes for the Philosopher;—he was bent on one goal, and made straight for it.

“Hello! How are you?” he called, in much too robust a voice for the Philosopher’s delicate sense of hearing. “Charming afternoon, isn’t it? Can I help you to prune the roses?”

The white figure paused. The Philosopher saw a little hand stretched out in welcome to the owner of the robust voice and heard a laugh ripple on the air.

“It isn’t the pruning season,” she answered. “But you can come and help me gather a few for the drawing-room.”

“Nothing I should like better!”—and the young man immediately joined her, thus presenting to the Philosopher the picture of two figures walking among the flowers instead of one.

Somehow the prospect was not so agreeable. The Philosopher shut out the scene by holding his book well up before his eyes and severely scanning the printed page which told him about the “Natural Evolution and Decay of Nations.” Every now and again he heard that robustious laugh which almost shattered his nerves, accompanied by a little silvery ripple of merriment, which gave his heart a rather unusual thrill. “The Natural Evolution and Decay of Nations” was fast becoming a bore. He puffed at his cigar. It had gone out. He shook the match-box on the table—there was not a match left in it. He felt in his pocket—no matches there. Whereupon he leaned back in his chair with a heavy sigh and looked forlornly at the dull end of his Havana.

“What a confounded bore!” he murmured. “If that ass were not here I’d call her—and she would come,—I’m sure she’d come!—and she’d get me a match directly.”

He thought a little, then laid the half-smoked cigar down. Sitting bolt upright he watched the two figures strolling among the flower-borders.

“How she can put up with that insufferable idiot passes my comprehension!” he ejaculated. “But women are all like that! The fool can talk a little sentiment—quotes poetry—talks about dewdrops and sunsets,—and that always goes down. Heigh-ho!”

Here he fell upon “The Natural Evolution and Decay of Nations” with a kind of avidity, and perused page after page with the sternest attention.

“I’m afraid you’ve no matches!” said a sweet voice near him. “Shall I get you some?”

He started.

“If you would be so kind,” he murmured, with elaborate courtesy.

A light movement and she was gone. Another light movement and she was back again with the box of matches desired. The Philosopher looked up as he took them from her hand.

“You have a visitor this afternoon?”

“Only Jack,” she replied.

“Jack seems a good deal about here,” remarked the Philosopher, airily.

“Yes,” she said, with gentle unconcern. “Quite harmless, I assure you!”

He laughed despite himself. There was something quaint in the accent of her voice.

“He’s a sentimental sort of boy,” she went on. “He’s very fond of gardening, and he attaches the greatest possible importance to trifles. For instance, I gave him a rose a week ago and he tells me he has pressed it in a book of favourite poems so that he may keep it for ever.”

“Young noodle!” growled the Philosopher. “Spoiling the book with messy crushed petals which are sure to stain it. I wouldn’t do such a thing for the world.”

“I know you wouldn’t,” she agreed, calmly.

He glanced at “The Natural Evolution and Decay of Nations,” marked the place where he had been reading, and shut it up.

“You know you like all that sort of thing,” he said, settling himself in his chair ready for an argument. “Has he gone?”

“Yes!”

“Well, he didn’t stay long,” admitted the Philosopher, rather reluctantly. “Did he take another rose to damage a book with?”

She laughed.

“I’m afraid he did!”

“Come now, you’re not afraid he did. You know he did! And you know you gave it to him.”

The Philosopher’s voice was decidedly raspy. She raised her eyes to his,—her face was dimpled with smiles.

“Well, if I must be accurate—” she began.

“Of course you must!” snapped the Philosopher. “Accuracy is always desirable, and accuracy is what you women always fail in! Briefly,—to be perfectly accurate, you gave him a rose. Didn’t you?”

She nodded with a charmingly assumed air of mock penitence.

“To a noodle like that,” said the Philosopher, sternly, “the gift of a rose from you means encouragement. You have given him an inch—he will take an ell. Of course if you wish to encourage him—”

“Encourage him in what?” she asked, demurely.

“In—in—his attentions to you,” said the Philosopher.

She smiled sweetly, but said nothing.

“I don’t consider it a good match,” went on the Philosopher.

“Oh! Wouldn’t it light?” she asked, innocently. “I thought it was a wax one—not one of those things that must have its own box.”

The Philosopher’s mouth twitched under his moustache and his eyes sparkled. But he maintained a dignified demeanour.

“I wasn’t speaking of either a Vesta or of a Bryant and May,” he said. “And you know I wasn’t.”

She drew a small rustic bench towards him and sat down very nearly at his feet,—then looked up from under her garden hat.

“What are you reading?” she asked.

The Philosopher wished her eyes would not swim in such liquid blue, and that the garden hat was not quite so becoming.

“Nothing that you would care for,” he answered, with condescending politeness. “It’s called ‘The Natural Evolution and Decay of Nations’.”

She nodded sagaciously.

“I know!” she said. “It’s all the same thing and it all seems no use. Nations begin and grow and progress, and then just like fruit they get over-ripe and the wasps begin to eat them and they rot and fall off the tree. Oh, yes! It can all be said in quite a few lines. There’s really no occasion to write a thick book about it; unless the man wants to show himself off.”

The Philosopher gasped and glared.

“The man! Show himself off! You foolish child! The man is a Fellow of Balliol and a most profound scholar.”

“Is he?” And she shrugged her pretty shoulders indifferently. “Well, I suppose he wants the public to know it.”

The Philosopher was for the moment rendered speechless. He looked down at her, but her face was bent and he could only see the crown of the garden hat; there was a most absurd little knot of ribbon on that crown, perfectly useless and half lost in a twisted mist of pale blue chiffon.

“I suppose you don’t care much about poetry?” she said, raising her head so suddenly that the light of her eyes quite dazzled him. “It would be too sentimental for you. But if you did, I could tell you some lines that would quite cover the ground.”

“Could you?” he murmured.

“Yes! Shall I say them?”

The Philosopher was conscious of an uncomfortable nervousness.

“If you like,” he answered, rather slowly. “But poetry is not in my line.”

“I know it isn’t,” she agreed emphatically. “But just listen!”

And in a soft musical voice she repeated slowly and with well-modulated emphasis and intonation:

“Hence pageant history!—hence gilded cheat!
Swart planet in the universe of deeds!”

“Keats!” murmured the Philosopher, dreamily. “Honey and water!”

“Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds
Along the pebbled shores of memory!
Many old rotten-timbered boats there be
Upon thy vaporous bosom magnified
To goodly vessels; many a sail of pride,
And golden-keeled, is left unlaunched and dry!
But wherefore this? What care, though owl did fly
About the great Athenian admiral’s mast
The Indus with his Macedonian numbers?
Though old Ulysses tortured from his slumbers
The glutted Cyclops, what care?...”

“Not in the least!” interposed the Philosopher. “What do you know about ‘glutted Cyclops’?”

She continued:

“Juliet leaning
Amid her window-flowers—sighing—weaning
Tenderly her fancy from its maiden snow,
Doth more avail than these: ...”

“Ah! Of course you like that,” interrupted the Philosopher.

She went on, calmly:

“the silver flow
Of Hero’s tears, the swoon of Imogen,
Fair Pastorella in the bandit’s den,
Are things to brood on with more urgency
Than the death-day of empires.”

The sweet voice ceased. The Philosopher’s hand inadvertently fell at his side and came in contact with a deliciously soft arm.

“Have you done?” he enquired, in mild accents.

“Yes!” was the reply.

“Well,” he observed, “you spoke your lines very prettily,—that’s all I can say. Your quotation is from ‘Endymion,’ and I suppose you realise that ‘Endymion’ is utterly spoilt by its excess of cloying sentimentality. Yet—”

Absent-mindedly he began to stroke the soft arm up and down with a light caress such as he would have bestowed on a child.

“What I should like to explain,” he said, with an argumentative air, “and what you women will never understand, is that any exaggeration of feeling is always bad form, both in literature and in life. You’ve got plenty of intelligence and you ought to grapple with and master this fact. Certain things are taken for granted and it is not necessary to dwell upon them. Outward displays of emotion should always be suppressed. The brave man hides his wound,—and of course in matters of love the one who says least loves most.”

“I thought,” she interposed, in the most dulcet accents, “that to be in really good form one should never love at all.”

Her eyes were full of the most melting enquiry. The Philosopher began to feel a little confusion in his head. But he rallied his forces.

“Regard and esteem,” he said, sententiously, “are safer emotions than what is called love, which is a term often used to cover the lowest passions. An affection founded on mutual respect is dignified, sober and acceptable and generally leads to great tranquillity and happiness in marriage.”

She sprang up laughing.

“How dull!” she exclaimed. “I’m sure you are quite right! You always are quite right; but, oh, how dull! Dull, dull, dismally dull!” And throwing herself into one of the most picturesque attitudes imaginable, she uttered a soft call, apparently to the air, whereupon in swift response one of the white doves on the garden path flew up and settled on her outstretched hand.

The Philosopher gazed, as well he might. Such a charming curve to the back! Such a fall and flow of the white garments!—such a sudden tilt of the garden hat, showing the clustering hair underneath it, and, oh, dear me! such a very small hand,—as white as the dove that had settled upon it. She made a perfect picture in which “The Natural Evolution and Decay of Nations” had no part. She was a living, breathing embodiment of joy, and there was no reasoning her away. The Philosopher took refuge in a kind of hypocrisy.

“Do you want any more roses gathered?” he asked, with a deep sigh.

She smiled.

“Come and choose one for yourself,” she answered.

Now the Philosopher did not want a rose. He was the last man in the world to wear a flower in his coat, and as for gathering a rose for himself—the idea was perfectly monstrous. However, he left his chair quite obediently and followed his fair guide, with the dove still perched on her hand, through the intertwisting pergolas, wondering vaguely what they all meant and where they would lead to. A bright idea presently struck the profound recesses of his brain, and this was that he would actually gather a rose on his own account and offer it to her! She might press it in a book—who could tell? Women are always so sentimental! He perceived a beautiful dewy blush-pink bud, and made for it at once, recklessly plunging his hand awkwardly through the bush to get at its stalk. Suddenly he uttered a piercing howl:

“Damnation!”

This was a rude word. It was one he was rather fond of using. A thorn had scratched him mercilessly, drawing blood.

“Look here!” he cried, loudly. “Here’s a pretty business. My hand’s disfigured for life!”

She ran to his side, her face full of the prettiest sympathy.

“Oh! You poor thing!” she murmured. “But it’s only a scratch!”

“Only a scratch! Come, I like that! The most awful cases of blood-poisoning have been set up by a scratch. I may be dead in three days! Don’t you know that? Look at the blood! Why, it’s horrible!”

She drew out the daintiest handkerchief, and dipping it in a cool spring of water that bubbled in a nook of the old rose-covered wall, bathed the wounded hand gently, though her face was dimpled all over with smiles.

“‘Outward displays of emotion should always be suppressed,’” she said, in a soft small voice that shook with restrained laughter. “‘The brave man hides his wound’—doesn’t he?” Here she peeped up at him in the most fascinating manner. “‘Certain things,’—like scratches—‘are taken for granted and it is not necessary to dwell on them!’ Isn’t that right? There!” And she tied the handkerchief deftly round the “disfigured” hand. “It will be all right in a very little while.”

“Not at all!” said the Philosopher, drearily, with almost a wail. “It won’t be all right—it will be all wrong! You call it a scratch. You women never pay attention to anything that’s really serious, though you make no end of a fuss over trifles. This is a positive scar! and it’s most painful—most painful, I tell you! Why, it’s quite hot and throbbing!”

She smiled up into his eyes.

“Is it? I’m so sorry! But,—do think of Napoleon’s march to Moscow!”

The Philosopher’s brow clouded.

“What’s that to do with it?” he demanded, sharply.

“Well!—the poor soldiers were starved and frozen to death,” she said, “and you are only scratched by a rose thorn. Of course the march to Moscow happened a long time ago—but that doesn’t matter!—you ought to feel it just as much—so much that your scratch should seem nothing but purest joy if you had the right sort of sentiment.”

A reluctant smile overspread his face and presently shone so broadly that in spite of his being a Philosopher he became almost good-looking.

“Don’t play!” he urged. “I’m in earnest—I am really!”

“About what?” she asked, mirthfully.

“About the scratch—and—perhaps—about you,” he said, suddenly, moved by an impulse he could not understand. “I don’t know whether you come before the scratch or after. You see I wanted to get you a rose—”

“Most kind of you,” she murmured, pretending not to be aware that his arm had somehow got round her waist. “Why?”

“I don’t know why,” he said. “Oh, that scratch! Really, joking apart, it’s very painful!”

She unbound the handkerchief and looked at the damage critically. Suddenly, and with a fleeting blush, she stooped and kissed it.

“There!” she said. “That’s what we women do to—babies! Kiss the place and make it well! All sentiment! Better now?”

“Positively I think it is!” admitted the Philosopher, his eyes beginning to shine in quite a human and unphilosophical manner. “But what a goose you are! The absurdity—”

“Yes!” she interrupted quickly. “I quite agree with you! The absurdity of a clever man,—a learned man,—a distinguished man,—giving way to his emotions on account of a scratch! Well! But that’s the way you men always go on! You neglect the most serious things of life and you fret and fidget yourselves over the merest trifles! You are the slaves of your feelings! Even swearing! Oh! Now if it had been Jack—”

“Hang Jack!” said the Philosopher. “You’re always trotting him out! You’d better marry him!”

“Would you like me to?” she asked, demurely.

His arm was still round her waist. For a Philosopher he felt fairly comfortable. He peered under the garden hat—and found an expression of face that pleased him. Proud of his discovery he enjoyed it in silence for a while.

“Would I like you to marry Jack?” he repeated. “Well! Let me consider—you know these sort of questions take a long time to answer! ‘Would I like you to marry Jack?’ No!—I don’t think so—not just yet!”

CHAPTER II

“ONE thing I will say of you,” remarked the Philosopher, condescendingly, “and that is—you are not a Nagger!”

He and she were walking together across a meadow full of buttercups and daisies, and they had just been on the point of what the middle-classes politely call “words.” He was not without temper—she was not without spirit—hence the little breeze that had for the moment ruffled the calm of their platonic friendship. Her “sentimentalism,” however, had saved the situation. When she perceived that his irritability was fast developing into downright bearishness, she had suddenly raised her eyes and shown them full of tears.

“Don’t be cross,” she had murmured, cooingly—“it’s so ugly!”

Whereat the Philosopher’s set mouth had relaxed into a rather grieved smile, and he had casually observed:

“You seem to have caught a cold. Your eyes are red!”

But to this she had made no answer,—and merely swallowing an uncomfortable lump in her throat had walked on quietly, light-footed and serene. And it was this swiftly attained composure of hers that had moved him to the implied compliment he had just uttered: “You are not a Nagger!”

She did not speak—so he went on.

“Of all detestable things in this world a Nagger is the worst! Once—years ago—I knew one.”

She turned her head towards him.

“Man or woman?” she asked.

“Woman, of course! Foolish child! Did you ever hear of a male nagger? The type is essentially feminine!”

She smiled, but was silent.

“This woman,” he continued, “was by way of being a domestic martyr. A sort of self-created aureole of glory shone over her head—and one heard the rustle of heavenly palm branches where’er she walked. ‘Pray don’t mind me!’ she would observe, with mournful sweetness, at times when she was most confoundedly in the way—‘I’m so accustomed to take a second, even a third place, that it really doesn’t matter!’ And if she and her belongings had a little difference”—here he hesitated—“such as you and I have been having—she would shed torrents of tears. ‘All my life,’ she would wail, dismally, ‘I’ve done more than my duty to you! Money could not buy such devotion as mine! And this is my reward!’ And on she would go like a flowing stream, the victim to circumstances—the ‘buffer’ of cruel mischance. Men fled from her as from the eye of Medusa, though she was not bad-looking, and had managed to secure a husband.”

“What was her husband like?”

“Oh, he was quite a decent sort of chap—a hard-working, easy-going, scientific man. She had her waves of sentiment, too,—they came rolling over her in the most unexpected places. For example, one morning, having nagged her husband till he put both hands to his head in an effort to keep his trembling scalp in its place, she suddenly altered her tone and asked him if she should bring him the ‘cure-all’ for his corns! There now!—I thought you would laugh!”

She certainly did laugh; a pretty little laugh full of subdued merriment.

“It’s much better to laugh than to cry,” said the Philosopher, sententiously. “Men don’t understand women’s tears. They’re so—so wet and uncomfortable! This Nagger I’m telling you of was always shedding them—a regular water-barrel with the tap forever turned on.”

“How unfeeling you are!” she said, reproachfully. “Poor woman!”

“Poor woman! Poor man, you mean! Think of her husband!—working hard all day and a great part of the night as well—and getting no sympathy in his aims, no touch of interest in his work—nothing but stories of domestic martyrdom nobly endured for duty’s sake, and copious weeping! Now if you were married, you wouldn’t behave like that, would you?”

“No, I shouldn’t!” she replied. “But we women are not all alike, though you men generally think so!”

“Confound it all!” and the Philosopher, suddenly stopped short in his walk, trying to rekindle his pipe. A soft wind played about the vesta he had struck and puffed it out as though in fun. “Can’t get the cursed thing to light anyhow!”

She came close up to him, and held a pair of little hands curved like a couple of shells round the bowl of his briar, while he lit a fresh vesta and made another essay,—this time successfully.

“Thanks!” he said, curtly. “You really can be very useful when you like!”

She laughed and moved away, stepping quickly over the grass as though bent on making distance between herself and him.

“Where are you going?” called the Philosopher, irritably. “Don’t skip about like that! Can’t you be quiet for five minutes?”

She came back slowly and stood still, with a quaint air of mock humility.

“You’re playing!” said the Philosopher, severely. “And I’m not always in a playing mood.”

“No?”

The question slid through a little round O of a mouth that suggested kisses. The Philosopher quickly averted his eyes.

“No!” he answered, with increased sternness. “I’m in a thinking mood to-day.”

He walked on, and she walked with him; her soft linen gown made a little “frou-frou” sound among the grasses that was pleasant and companionable. Her footsteps were too light to be heard at all, and presently the Philosopher, through two whiffs of his pipe, caught himself smiling.

“What a little goose it is!” he half murmured. “Dear little sentimental goose!”

Here he coughed loudly—quite an ugly cough.

“Are you tired?” he demanded.

“Not at all!”

“You women generally get tired after half an hour’s walking,” he said. “Would you like to sit on that stile and look at the scenery?”

“No, thanks! I would rather go on.”

The Philosopher’s face fell. The stile he had alluded to was quite a tempting thing. It was situated under an ancient tree whose broad branches spread out sheltering foliage on all sides, and it would have been very agreeable to him to sit there and rest for a few minutes, even with a “sentimental goose” for his companion. But this goose would rather go on. And she did go on;—she was over the stile, too, before he could so much as assist her, and he only caught a glimpse of a frilled flounce and the point of a buckled shoe. This was really too bad!

“You’re in such a hurry this morning,” he grumbled. “And we’ve come out for a sociable walk.”

“Oh, no, we haven’t!” she said. “Much more than that! You want to think, you know!”

“Well, a man must think sometimes,” he observed.

“Indeed he must!” she agreed, emphatically. “Not only sometimes, but always! Then he will know what he is doing!”

“Then he will know what he is doing!” echoed the Philosopher, grimly. “That’s deep,—very deep! Quite beyond me! Are there ever any occasions,—setting drink aside,—when he doesn’t know what he is doing?”

She gave him a fleeting glance.

“Oh, yes! Many!”

“Indeed! You are developing a very singular perspicuity! Could you name one of those occasions?”

She laughed.

“Well! Let us say when he’s in love!”

“In love!” The Philosopher almost snorted contempt. “In love! You women think of nothing but love! Do you know—have you ever realised—that being ‘in love’ as you call it, is the least and most unimportant part of a man’s career?”

She looked up at him.

“Is it?”

The Philosopher rather winced as she put the question. He was conscious of a little quicker beating of the heart (which, of course, might be attributed to indigestion)—and he studied the aspect of the sky critically, in order to avoid her eyes.

“Well! Perhaps I need not go so far as that,” he remarked, mildly.

“No!” And her voice was very sweet and thrilling. “I don’t think you should—if you are really a wise man—go so far as that!”

He drew his pipe slowly from his mouth—it was out again. He looked at it forlornly, and put it in his pocket. He realised that they had mutually crossed swords, and that she held him at the point of her steel. But he rose to the occasion and slipped his arm coaxingly through hers.

“Let us talk about the weather!” he said, cheerfully. “It’s a beautiful day!”

“Lovely!” she answered.

“And you are not a Nagger?”

“I hope not!”

“You will not tell me you are a martyr to the cause of—”

“Philosophy?” she suggested.

He laughed good-humouredly.

“If you like! You will not say you have toiled years and years ungrudgingly to make everybody happy, despite your own utter misery? That you are a heroine,—an angel and what not? You will not cry and say nobody cares for you—”

“No! I won’t say that!” she interrupted, with a mischievous smile.

“You won’t?”

“No! Because it wouldn’t be true!”

“It wouldn’t be true,—it wouldn’t—”

“No! Lots of people care for me—people you don’t even know! There’s Jack—but you know him!”

“Always cropping up!” murmured the Philosopher.

“Then there’s Willie, and Claude, and Fred—and—”

“No women in the list? Are they all men?”

“Well, I like men best,” she confessed.

The Philosopher emitted a curious sound between a grunt and a growl.

“Of course you do! Trust you! ‘’Twas John and Dick and Joe and Jack and Humphrey with his flail!’ And I suppose you’re ‘Kitty, the charming girl, to carry the milking pail’?”

She gave his arm a delighted little squeeze.

“Fancy you knowing that dear old song!” she exclaimed. “Oh! And you such a learned man! I should have thought it so much beneath you!”

He stroked down his moustache to hide a smile.

“Dear child!” he said, with mock-parental gravity. “I trust I am not yet out of all sympathy with the colt-like gambols of the young and foolish! I may be bordering on the sere and yellow leaf, but I still look upon the tender sprouting green of unformed minds with indulgence and compassion!”

She tried to pull her arm away, but he held it firmly.

“Now, now!” he remonstrated. “Don’t hurt yourself. Whatever my faults and failings are, my muscular strength is unquestionably superior to yours!”

She looked at him appealingly.

“Oh, how can you talk as you do!” she said. “Such nonsense!”

“I suit myself to your temperament!” he said, with a grand air. “You are full of infantile sentiment,—I try to meet it half way.”

“How good of you!” she said, and this time she succeeded in withdrawing her arm from his hold. “Is the effort exhausting?”

“Very!” And the moustache drooped over a whimsical but rather attractive smile.

She stood for a moment with her eyes downcast.

“Then why do you do it?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“Try to meet me half way?”

“I thought it might make it easier for you,” he said. “Don’t you see? Easier for you to—”

“Rise to your height!” she suggested.

“Or sink to my level,” he answered, meekly—“whichever you prefer!”

“I would rather rise to your height,” she said. “A man is always superior to a woman.”

“Oh, specious flattery!” exclaimed the Philosopher. “Are you not a Suffragette?”

Her eyes flashed.

“I? A Suffragette? How dare you suggest such a thing!”

The Philosopher linked his arm in hers again without being repulsed.

“Thank Heaven for all its mercies!” he ejaculated, piously. “You are neither a Suffragette nor a Nagger—you are—what are you?”

“Whatever you choose to call me,” she answered, laughingly.

“These things take time,” he said. “I will consider. You are—you are—let me see—a woman! That is unfortunate.”

“You think so!” And her eyes were full of dancing merriment.

“Yes—I think so. Unfortunate for yourself, I mean. Not unfortunate for me.”

“Oh! Not unfortunate for you?”

“Not exactly. Sometimes I feel it might perhaps have been better had you been a man—there are occasions—”

He paused.

“My pipe is not quite smoked out,” he said, pathetically. “Would you put your hand in my pocket—the one nearest to you—I don’t want to move my arm—and give it to me?”

She obeyed.

He sighed.

“I must move my arm after all!” he said, drearily. “What a bore! You don’t mind?”

“Mind? Certainly not!”

She stood apart from him while he went through the usual business of rekindling his tobacco.

“A pipe,” he murmured, “is such a convenient thing! It fills in awkward lapses of conversation—when—when one feels one can get no further.”

She smiled demurely, and walked slowly on.

“You see,” he said, moving easily beside her, “if you were a man it would be different.”

“It would certainly!” she agreed.

“A man would not want any attention,” he said.

“Nor do I!” she said. “You give it without being asked for it.”

“Do I?” He appeared mildly surprised. “Now that’s curious,—v-e-r-y curious!”

He seemed quite entranced in the contemplation of this novel phase of his own conduct. He glanced at her sideways when she was not looking at him.

“Delicious!” he murmured.

She turned her head quickly.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“I? Nothing!” He puffed at his pipe enjoyingly, then he went on after a pause—“What I was going to say is, that if you were a man you wouldn’t mind my looking at the scenery instead of at you!”

She laughed outright.

“Oh, my good sir! Do I mind?”

“You must mind!” he said, argumentatively. “Being a woman you are compelled to mind! No woman can forgive a man for looking at trees and skies instead of looking at her. She feels she should be the centre of his thoughts. She is very often.”

“Is she?”

“There!” And the Philosopher sighed. “I knew you would ask that question! Yes,—if you will have it, she is. But a centre implies a surrounding—and if a woman does happen to be the centre of a man’s thoughts she should realise that she is only the pin’s point round which the mightier forces of life revolve. Round which the mightier forces of life revolve!” The Philosopher took the pipe out of his mouth in order to let this sentence roll over his tongue like a luscious jujube or chocolate cream. “Do you understand?”

“Quite!” she replied.

He gave her an oblique glance in which there was something of fun mingled with fire.

“Well, you are a very good girl!” he said, suddenly. “You may do what you like now!” And he slipped his arm through hers again—“I have had a slight attack of gout. I need a little support.”

She turned her face towards his, dimpling with smiles.

“Are you sure it’s gout?” she asked.

“Quite sure!” he answered, gravely. “It was the death of my father, and my grandfather, and my great-grandfather. It will be the death of me.”

Her brows clouded. Then catching the humorous gleam in his eyes, she laughed.

“I believe you’re joking!” she said. “You want to make me anxious.”

“Would you be anxious?” he asked. “Not really?”

She was silent.

“If I had the gout,” he resumed; “if I were laid up with a burning toe, would you be sorry?”

“Of course I should!” she answered, promptly. “I’m always sorry for a man who is ill: he gets so easily frightened and bears it so badly.”

“That all?” he exclaimed. “You would only feel sorry if I was frightened! Not because I suffered? Well! You women beat everything!”

“Your fright would be worse than your suffering in any case!” she said, firmly. “I know it would! If you were laid up with a burning big toe, as you say, you would at once imagine that the trouble in the toe was bound to fly to the head—then you would turn up some dreadful medical book which would coldly inform you that gout in the head is always fatal—then you would begin to tremble inwardly,—you would pass sleepless nights thinking it out till you pictured your last end in the blackest colours—you would almost see the undertaker arriving—you would, as it were, witness your own procession to the grave—and—and—and perhaps you might feel the grief of all your friends—”

Here she turned her head, and the Philosopher heard a curious little tremolo sound—he would have almost sworn it was a suppressed sob if he had not made up his mind that it was nothing but laughter. Stimulated by sudden interest he put his hand under her chin and moved her head gently round till the blue eyes looked straight into his own. A very slight smile lifted the corners of his lips.

“You have really caught a bad cold!” he said, softly. “Your eyes are quite wet!”

She lowered them promptly till he could only see glistening lashes on flushed cheeks.

“Why,” he asked, almost coaxingly, “should you think me such an absurd idiot as to be capable of imagining all those things about myself?”

She gave him a fleeting glance in which a smile danced like a sunbeam.

“Why? Because—because you are a Philosopher!” she answered. “Philosophy is all very well in theory—but in practice—oh, the mockery of it!”

He still kept his hand under her chin.

“‘Adversity’s sweet milk, Philosophy!’” he quoted, musingly. “That’s Shakespeare! Can you give me the lines which follow?”

She made no answer. He smiled again.

“Perhaps you haven’t a very good memory,” he said, patiently. “Now listen:

‘Hang up Philosophy!
Unless Philosophy can make a Juliet!’ etc., etc.

That’s the kind of thing you women like! The learning of the ages, the equipoise of the mind, the balance and calm reasoning powers of the brain, these all go for nothing—”

“In an attack of the gout?” she suggested.

He laughed and loosed his hold of her little white chin.

“Dry your eyes!” he said, masterfully. “I’m not dead yet! And in our instructive walk of to-day I have discovered one thing,—that you would be rather sorry if I were! That’s curious! And not altogether unpleasing! Now I wonder why—”

“And I wonder,” she interrupted, quickly, “whether you would be sorry if—”

“Now, now! Take care!” he exclaimed. “There are certain subjects I will not have mentioned—subjects which you women love to harp upon! I know exactly what you are going to say. Would I be sorry if you were resolved into your original exquisite atoms of matter? Yes—I should be sorry, because there would be a blank—” Here he suddenly stopped in his walk and looked up at the fair sky with its fleecy clouds lazily sailing along the blue. “There would be a decided blank,” he repeated slowly, “where there is just now a very great centre of interest—a subject for study and—er—contemplation—and—er—considerable entertainment!”

Their glances met, but flashed away from each other instantly,—and they continued their walk through the fields, leaving the buttercups and daisies in a glistening trail of gold and silver behind them as they passed.

CHAPTER III

“I CANNOT understand,” said Jack, irritably; “no, I cannot for my life understand what you see in him!”

She laughed a little.

“You dear, good Jack! Nor can I!”

They were sitting on a smooth thyme-scented bank close to the river—a lovely river meandering slowly under pale green tresses of willow, and gurgling softly among reeds and water-lilies,—and it was a perfect summer’s afternoon. She,—always the sentimentalist,—had been for some minutes lost in a reverie—a kind of waking dream of delight in all the exquisite things of nature about her—the ripple of the water, the swirl of the swaying leaves above her head, and the delicious blue of the sky. She was herself an exquisite thing, but she did not realise it. That was left to Jack.

“Well, if you can’t,” he pursued, “why on earth do you humour him in all his whims and fads—”

“He’s a very learned man!” she interrupted, demurely. “Most frightfully learned! He knows every thing!—or he thinks he knows!”

“Oh! That’s another story!” said Jack. “He thinks he knows! I might ‘think’ I know!—but I shouldn’t know for all that! I hate a human encyclopædia!”

“Then, he’s a Philosopher,” she went on, her smile dimpling the corners of her mouth in the most enchanting way. “He is never put out—never excited—takes everything as it comes quite calmly—”

“Except when it happens to hurt himself,” exclaimed Jack. “Then he can roar like the Biblical bulls of Bashan! I’ve heard him! Oh, yes, I grant you he’s never put out by other folks’ worries—he wouldn’t stir a finger to help any one out of a fix—not even you! Can’t you see how utterly selfish the man is?”

She considered,—resting her chin in the hollow of her little white hand. She looked very pretty in that attitude, and Jack was glad he had her company all to himself.

“Yes,” she said, at last, “I suppose—I’m afraid he is! But, you see, Jack, that’s because he’s such a philosopher! They are mostly all like that. Think of Diogenes in his tub!”

Jack laughed aloud.

“You dear, sweet, little girl!” he said, recklessly and with fervour. “You say such quaint, funny things! Diogenes was an old horror, of course!—and really, if you would only see him as he is, so is your—”

She held up a warning finger.

“Now, Jack! He’s not as bad as Diogenes! No! You can’t say that! It’s true that he’s often rude—and very indifferent to the happiness of others—and rough—and unkind—”

“To you!” cried Jack in sudden excitement.

She hesitated.

“Well!—perhaps—sometimes! But I don’t mind!”

“I do!” declared Jack, with uncommon emphasis. “Let me catch him at it! Let me catch him, I say!—he’s years older than I am,—but I’ll—I’ll knock him down!”

She peeped at him from under the brim of her hat.

“You are a dear boy!” she said, patronisingly. “But you mustn’t think of such a thing!”

“Why not?”

“Well—why not?” She still smiled. “First, because he’s old. Yes—quite old, really. I dare say he’ll never see fifty again—”

“Too old to make love to you,” said Jack, loftily. “That’s certain!”

“He doesn’t make love to me,” she replied. “Oh, dear!—you won’t understand! He doesn’t make love at all!”

“Then what does he do?” demanded Jack. “I should jolly well like to know!”

“What does he do?” she repeated, musingly. Then she suddenly laughed joyously: “Oh, Jack!—I don’t believe I know! He reads the papers and smokes—and writes a little—then he wants to go for a walk and asks me to go with him—and we talk-and—and that’s all!”

“That’s all!” and Jack looked whole volumes of incredulity. “And just to read the papers and smoke and take walks with you he comes down here miles away from London to stay with you and your father whole weeks together! A regular sponge I call him! Yes!—a sponge!”

“Dad likes him,” she said, briefly.

“I daresay! Your Dad likes any one who’ll talk history and politics to him by the hour. But you!—you don’t want history and politics!”

“Don’t I?”—and her eyes sparkled prettily. Then I’m like the poet Keats—

‘Hence, pageant History! hence, gilded cheat;
Swart planet in the universe of deeds!’”

“Ah, that’s poetry,” said Jack. “I don’t care very much about it!”

“Nor does he!” she replied. “I quoted those lines to him the other day and he said Keats was honey and water.”

“Never mind what ‘he’ said,” and Jack’s voice took on a raspy tone. “I daresay you’ll think me an impertinent sort of chap but—but you know I’m very fond of you—”

She stretched out a little white hand towards him, and he took it tenderly in his own large strong palm.

“Yes, I do know!” she said, sweetly. “And—and it’s kind of you—”

“Kind!” echoed Jack. “Kind! There’s nothing kind about it! Nobody could help being fond of you—but I—I’m just a rough chap—and I’ve no settled position yet and no money—and it wouldn’t be fair to ask you to marry me”—here his clasp tightened involuntarily on the soft fingers he held—“but I want you to, all the same!”

She laughed.

“Do you? Really?” she queried, with a bewitching uplift of her pretty eyebrows. “Oh, Jack! Marriage is such a dreadful business! Just think of the married people we know! Take the Simmonses—”

Jack whistled,—a dismal, dubious whistle.

“What of them?” he said. “You could never be like Mrs. Simmons—and I’m sure I shall never be like Mr.!”

“And the Blakes, and the Foxes, and the Meedons,” she went on, enumerating the different names on her little white fingers. “They’re all married people, and they just bore one another to death! Now you and I—we’re not married—we’re not even engaged—we’re just the best friends in the world, and we don’t bore each other to death!”

“Nor likely to,” said Jack. “But I tell you who would bore you to death if you married him!—your old Philosopher!”

She nodded.

“Yes, I’m sure he would! He bores me often now! But—Jack—that’s just the fun of it! He thinks himself the wisest, wittiest, most wonderful man alive,—and he wants me to think it too. And then there’s another funny thing—oh, such a funny thing!”

“Well, what is it?” Jack demanded, rather gruffly.

“Don’t be snappy, Jack dear! The funny thing is that he feels he’s falling a little bit in love with me!—just a little bit!—and he doesn’t want to! That’s what amuses me!”

“Oh!” Jack looked slightly puzzled. “And how long is the game to last?”

Her eyes sparkled mischievously.

“I don’t know! It depends! The ‘game’ as you call it is more fun than getting married would be!”

Jack pulled a serious face.

“Look here!” he said. “You mustn’t play too much at that sort of thing! You’ll be getting ‘entangled’ with that selfish old brute, and he’ll wriggle out of everything that could compromise himself. He won’t bother about you. You see I’m an American—”

“Good for you!” she interpolated, smiling.

“Yes, I’m proud of it. But, being one, I shouldn’t allow any woman to do menial things for me. Your Philosopher does allow it. I’ve seen you run from one end of the garden to another to fetch a pipe which the lazy beggar has left lying about somewhere,—or to get him a chair—or find his hat and walking-stick—”

“He’s old,” she said.

“Old be hanged! He’s not decrepit. Does he ever do anything for you? Fetch you a chair? Help you to find anything? Try to give you any pleasure apart from his own dull company? Now, does he?”

She made a little pink bud of her mouth as she replied, meekly—

“I’m afraid he doesn’t! You see—you see he’s so absorbed in thought!”

“I’d absorb him if I had the chance!” said Jack. “Have you ever read George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’?”

“Some of it,” she answered. “I couldn’t get through it all.”

“Nor could I,” he confessed. “But I remember old Casaubon. Dorothea married him because she thought he would be such a clever husband to have—and so he was! Too clever by half! Something like your Philosopher.”

“Not quite!” she demurred. “Casaubon had no sense of humour. My Philosopher has quite a humorous turn sometimes.”

“At other folks’ expense,” said Jack. “Oh, yes—I daresay! I’ve caught him sneering at me now and then!”

She laughed.

“That’s only because he’s jealous!”

“Jealous?”

“Yes. Jealous of you!”

Jack drew himself up and patted his own broad chest with a smile of self-satisfaction.

“That’s good news anyhow!” he said. “I’m glad I can irritate the old rascal—”

“Jack!”

“Mustn’t I call him an old rascal? All right, I won’t! But he is, you know! There are lots of his sort in London and in University towns. There are, really—only you won’t believe it—you’re a lovely lady of rose-gardens and country associations, and you don’t understand what these ‘philosophers’ are who moralise on life without having the pluck to live it!”

Her blue eyes lifted towards him with a look of surprise and questioning.

“Why, Jack, you talk quite nobly!” she exclaimed, and laughed. “Like a sort of hero in a book! But even a Philosopher who’ll never see fifty again must have ‘lived’ his life somehow?”

“On other people, no doubt,” said Jack. “The tedious old thing that comes down here so often and persuades you to make such a fuss about him and his learning has very little earning power in him I’ll swear! Besides—I could tell you a thing or two—only you won’t listen.”

“Yes, I will!” she answered, quickly. “Tell me!”

“Well, you ask him one day if he hadn’t a good old aunt, who, when he was a boy spoiled him to death, gave him all he wanted, and left him all her fortune,—a pretty decent one too. He led her an awful life I’ve heard—shook her in bed when she was dying like Queen Elizabeth shaking the woman who failed to give her Essex’s ring—and since he got the money has grown so mean that he can scarcely bear to part with sixpence. That’s why he lives on his friends and lets them pay for him.”

She looked vaguely amused.

“Jack, I think this is a yarn!” she said. “You are too brilliant, dear boy! You don’t know all this for a fact?”

“I don’t know it,” he answered. “But I’ve heard it, and I’m sure it’s true. Why, you can prove it for yourself! When you went with him the other day to the Cinema did he pay for your seat?”

She laughed.

“No, he didn’t! I paid for him and myself as well! But that was nothing!”

“Nothing?” Jack gave a short grunt of disgust. “No, it was nothing in the way of expenditure but it was something in the way of character! How he could let you pay! How you could pay for him!”

Her pretty dimples came into play again.

“Oh, well! He was very funny about it. He said he felt like a little boy being taken out by his governess for a treat. He really has a sense of humour!”

“I’m sure he has!” spluttered Jack. “By Jove! I should say he found it ‘humorous’ in the highest degree to have a woman pay for him! Suit him down to the ground!”

She stretched her rounded white arms above her head and gave a tiny yawn.

“Dear Jack, you are really exhausting!” she said. “Let’s talk of something else. Look at that dear little moor-hen!”

He followed her gaze and watched the dainty little bird breasting its way across the shining river, then said, moodily:

“I suppose he’s really a fixture just now?”

“The Philosopher? Oh, I hope not! He’s just staying with Dad. They’re doing a book together.”

“What sort of a book?”

“The sort of book that no one ever, ever reads,” she replied. “A work of such genius that it will never, never sell! The title is—let me see!—it’s so long and learned,—quite difficult to remember.”

“Then don’t bother to think about it,” said Jack.

“Oh, but I’d like to tell you!” She considered. “Yes!” she went on. “It’s this—‘The Deterioration of Language Invariably Perceived as a Precursor to the Decadence of Civilisation.’”

“Oh, Great Scott!” and Jack fell back on the grassy bank as though suddenly knocked flat.

She laughed, merrily.

“It is heavy, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s all about things that people don’t really care for,—for instance, how language gets spoilt by slang and ungrammatical expressions when people lose the sense of rectitude and honour—”

“Yes!” nodded Jack. “When they get to the low level of allowing women to pay for their amusements!”

She made a merry little grimace.

“There, Jack! You always turn the conversation back on personalities! Dear boy, it’s bad form! You should never be personal!”

He smiled. There was something so appealing in the sweet eyes uplifted to his, that the expression they conveyed gave him a sense of masterfulness, and he felt he must be very tolerant with this charming bit of wayward feminine feeling.

“Dear little lady,” he said, with quite a patronising air, “I won’t be anything you don’t want me to be! Only just try and think about commonplace facts now and then,—and don’t take your pretty ideals for realities. You have put a glamour on your old Philosopher—you think he’s so clever that he can’t afford to be anything else. But I tell you cleverness isn’t everything and most learned men are bores! Selfish bores, too—cynics and—whatd’ye-call-’em—iconoclasts. There’s a word for you!—such a mouthful!—it means—”

“Breakers of idols,” she said, softly and musingly. “Destroyers of hope and faith!—cruel mockers of noble effort—”

“That’s it!” and Jack got up from the grass, and stretched his supple, elegant figure of which he might have been proud,—but he wasn’t. “And you’ll find your Philosopher comes up to the scratch in all those particulars when you put him through his paces. ‘The Deterioration of Language Invariably Perceived’ is nothing to the Deterioration of a Man who thinks himself superior to all other men.”

She rose from her bank of moss and thyme and stood for a minute, looking at the river.

“How lovely it is here!” she said. “I should like to stay here for hours!”

“So should I,” agreed Jack, “with you!”

She laughed, and looking up at him, flushed a pretty rose-colour.

“You’re bold!” she said.

“As brass!” he responded, gaily. “I’m not a Philosopher!”

She lowered her eyes, and they began to walk homeward together. After a pause, Jack suddenly laid an entreating hand on her arm.

“You’ll not marry him?” he pleaded.

“He won’t ask me to!” she rejoined, with a smile.

“But—if he did?” persisted Jack.

“Oh, Jack! Can’t you see? He’s far too much of a Philosopher to marry! A wife would bore him to death!”

“And he’d bore a wife to death, that’s certain!” said Jack. “Well!—I suppose I must hope for the best! Anyway—you’ll try—yes, try to like me a little?”

“No need to try!” she answered, sweetly. “I like you very, very much! Oh, Jack, yes! We must always be the very best friends in the world! Swear it!”

She extended her pretty little ungloved hand, and Jack, moved by the spirit of the occasion, took off his hat, dropped on one knee and kissed it.

“I swear!” he said.

Her gay laughter rippled out on the air.

“Splendid! Like a knight in a fairy tale!”

“Fairy tales sometimes come true,” he said, as he sprang up from his chivalric attitude. “I’ve made a vow, and I mean to keep it!”

She peeped at him under her golden eyelashes.

“Good Jack!” she said. “You ought to be very, very rich,—oh, immensely rich!”

“Why?”

“Because you would do so many kind things with your money,” she answered. “You couldn’t help doing them!”

“True!” he declared, with a grandiloquent air. “I would even pay for you to go to a Cinema! I would!”

Her delightful laughter was like that of a happy child. They went on, pacing slowly over the warm short grass, a pretty pair to look at, such as Herrick might have sung of, or Shakespeare, when he carolled of “the ring-time and the spring-time” and of “sweet lovers” who love the spring. Only they were not lovers. The pretty Sentimentalist loved Love in the abstract, and feared disillusion in its reality.

CHAPTER IV

“I SAW him,” said the Philosopher, sternly. “I saw him kneeling at your feet! I saw him with my own eyes!”

She laughed.

“Really! Well, you could not see him with any one else’s eyes, could you?”

“That answer is merely flippant,” retorted the Philosopher. “Flippant—I might say rude!”

“Oh-h-h!” She made a little whistling round of her mouth, and her blue eyes flashed.

“Rude!” he repeated, rather raspily. “And I venture to say that in an open field, within a few yards of the public road, a man who is such a fool as to drop on one knee at a woman’s feet ought to be—ought to be”—here he waved one arm magisterially—“removed—forcibly removed to Hanwell or Colney Hatch! He is not responsible for his actions!”

“No,” she interposed, mischievously. “No man in love is!”

“In love!” The Philosopher snorted. “You call that love? To make a ridiculous exposure of himself and you in full view of spectators—”

She pointed a little finger at him.

“Only one spectator,—you!” she said. “And where were you?”

He gave another snort.

“I was—I was behind a tree,” he said. “I thought I saw you going towards the river—I imagined you were alone—”

“I was at first,” she said. “Jack came on later. So you must have been watching quite a long time! What a bore for you! Why did you do it?”

The Philosopher blinked his eyes and frowned.

“Why did I do it? Because—because”—he hesitated—“yes!—because I like to study the deceptive attributes of your sex and the pitfalls they prepare for unwary men! This Jack of yours is a perfect ass!”

“Why didn’t you say Jackass at once and have done with it?” she demanded, mirthfully. “You would have been nearly funny then!”

The Philosopher looked at her with what he meant to be a withering expression. She, however, did not wither.

“Nearly funny!” he echoed. “Silly child, do you really think I have not sufficient acumen to perceive an obvious play upon words, suggesting stupidity rather than humour?”

A smile dimpled her cheeks in one or two becoming places, but she said nothing.

“Am I to infer that you approved of the man’s attitude in the field?” he demanded.

The portentous air with which he put this question made her laugh outright.

“Yes!—yes, indeed!” she answered. “The man’s attitude in the field—oh, dear me!—was simply delightful!” And she clapped her hands ecstatically. “You see, he’s such a good figure!—and he can drop on one knee gracefully—really gracefully!—and he meant it as well!—he was swearing eternal friendship!”

“Eternal fiddlesticks!” snarled the Philosopher. “Where’s my pipe?”

They were in the library, a cosy room with a big window fronting the west where the last golden lines of the sunset were vanishing one by one,—and it wanted about an hour to dinner time. She moved away and went searching to and fro, on various tables and shelves, her light figure in its dainty evening attire of pale blue and white fluttering hither and thither like an embodied flower, till presently she came back towards him holding out, at a respectful distance from herself, a rather dirty briar.

“Come along, come along!” said the Philosopher, testily. “Make haste! It won’t bite you!”

“No,” and she handed him the repulsive looking object. “But it smells—horrid! If you had a wife she would not allow you to come near her with such a smell!”

“Oh, wouldn’t she?” And the Philosopher stuck the pipe between his teeth with a defiant air. “If I had a wife—which, thank God, I haven’t—”

“Yes, thank God you haven’t!” she interpolated, demurely.

He looked at her again in his “withering” way, but she only smiled.

“If I had a wife,” he continued, sucking the stem of his pipe somewhat noisily, “she would have to allow anything I pleased and be glad of the privilege! A man must be master in his own house,—and a wise woman knows how to keep her place.”

She sank gracefully into a low easy-chair, with the soft movement of a bird descending into its nest, and looked up at him with a tolerantly amused air.

“The days of Abraham are past!” she said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that the Lord doesn’t favour women-crushers so much as in the times of Moses and Aaron,” she murmured lazily. “You see, Abraham was such a ‘master in his own house’ that, after making all the use he could of Hagar, he turned her out into the wilderness to starve. Plenty of modern Abrahams would do the same thing with all the pleasure in life—but—it’s likely the modern Hagars are more than a match for them! And I’m glad—oh, so glad, that women are going to have their day—at last!”

The Philosopher had stuffed his pipe with tobacco while she spoke, and now prodded it in with a very yellow finger. He looked uneasily about him for matches, but she did not offer to find them. He discovered them presently and lit his ‘fragrant weed’ without asking her permission.

“Women are going to have their day!” he echoed, ironically. “What sort of a day do you suppose it will be? Confusion worse confounded!”

She was silent.

“Woman’s day,” he went on sententiously, “means Man. Man at morn,—man at noon,—man at night. Woman adores man,—licks his boots metaphorically whenever he gives her the chance. A Man and a new Hat—that’s enough for Woman’s day!”

She laughed.

“What a funny old person you are!” she exclaimed. “You have such fossil ideas!—positively fossil!—embedded in rock!—and they’ll never change! That’s the worst of being over-learned in one direction,—I’m sure it narrows the mind!”

He began to feel irritated,—yes, really irritated with this bunch of blue and white femininity seated opposite to him in such graceful ease.

“My mind is not narrow,” he said, stiffly. “And though it may please you to consider me a fossil—”

“I didn’t say you were a fossil,” she interposed. “I said you had fossil ideas—”

“It is the same thing,” he retorted. “A man and his ideas are one. I certainly have not a mind adapted to examine the trifling sentiments which affect your sex, but the opinions I have formed are based on long experience. You express a childish pleasure in the fancy that women are going to have their day,—now I maintain that they have always had it, to the fullest extent of their very limited capabilities. Any wider range of effort would bring them nothing but disaster.”

With this he clapped a misshapen old “Homburg” hat on his head, opened the window, which was really a glass door, and went out into the garden, puffing at his briar. He had not a good figure—it was inclined to be stumpy, but there was a certain pathetic droop of his shoulders which betrayed both weariness and age, and the pretty Sentimentalist, quick to observe this, was suddenly touched and compassionate. She sprang up and ran after him.

“Don’t be cross!” she said. “I’m sorry I called your ideas fossils! But—you know—fossils are really wonderful things!”

Her laughing blue eyes, her tossing fair hair, and the bewildering “frou-frou” of her dainty blue and white silk and chiffon garments made quite a stir in the calm evening silence of the garden,—and for the moment the self-centred, self-opiniated, self-styled “Philosopher” felt a sudden twinge of shamed conscience. In his own heart he knew he was what he would call “amusing himself” with a bright feminine creature who took the world on trust and accepted him at his own inflated valuation,—he found it convenient and agreeable to stay at her father’s house and enjoy the luxuries of a well-equipped home without paying for it—especially when he could talk to a pretty hostess and subtly insinuate a kind of love-making without any reality in it. Her mother was dead—she was alone to receive and entertain such guests as her pedantic father invited to flatter him on his personal belief in himself as a great philologist,—she was,—(in that undefended condition)—“fair game” to such a man as the Philosopher. There was Jack—Jack was certainly a bore—but after all he was merely a neighbour, the eldest son of what the Philosopher called a “doubtful” American, who had taken a small cottage some little way down the river for the fishing season. Jack really didn’t count for much. So the Philosopher smoothed his furrowed brow and pretended to be appeased, as he replied to the soft voice ringing in his ears—

“I’m not cross,” he said. “I’m never cross! I never quarrel! It’s you! You! You fly into a tantrum directly you are contradicted. You can’t bear to be contradicted. And you call me a fossil! Nice way to talk! Never mind!—I forgive you!”

With which grandiloquent assurance he took her hand and patted it. She withdrew it gently,—she felt he was unjust. She knew she had not “flown into a tantrum” and that what she had said was merely playful and without any thought of “quarrel.” She walked beside him in the glamour of the late after-glow for a few paces in silence,—and he was uncomfortably conscious that the delicate subtlety of her personality expressed an unspoken but nevertheless decisive lessening of her appreciation of him as a man.

“And so,” he said, presently, with a laboured attempt at lightness—“you approve of Jack as a modern Knight-errant swearing eternal fidelity?”

“I approve of Jack entirely—as Jack,” she answered, quietly. “He’s a good fellow, and very unselfish.”

The Philosopher gave her a blinking, side-long glance.

“Really! Has he managed to impress that favourable view of himself upon your credulous mind?”

“I don’t think he has tried to impress anything at all upon me,” she said. “Only I notice that he always considers the pleasure of other people more than his own.”

“Exceedingly quixotic,” commented the Philosopher, drily. “And all the merest affectation. The man who is always looking after the pleasure of other people attracts attention to himself—which is what he seeks. The man who looks after his own comfort passes without notice,—which is the right attitude. To call people’s attention to yourself by any action whatsoever is very bad form.”

She looked at him in wondering enquiry.

“The man,” pursued the Philosopher, hugging himself as it were in the wrapping of his own theories—“who persists in handing round bread-and-butter and cake at a tea-table instead of sitting still, is a nuisance. His plain business is to help himself, and let others take care of their own needs. It is not his business to see whether the women get their bread-and-butter and cake—in these days of female emancipation they can look after themselves. He is a much more sensible creature when he does not obtrude himself upon them by tiresome and needless attentions. The same rule should apply to door-opening. There are men who invariably disturb conversation by jumping up to open a door for a woman to pass out. Detestable! I have had many a good story of mine spoilt by this atrocious habit,—Americans always do it.”

“Americans are very kind to women,” she said. “I like their ways.”

He sniffed, as though offended by some noxious odour.

“You do, do you?” he retorted. “Well—I don’t.”

There was a pause. Presently—

“How are you and Dad getting on with the book?” she asked. “Is there much more work to do?”

He drew his pipe from his mouth, and knocked its ashes out against the stump of a tree.

“A great deal,” he replied. “A very great deal more! Our researches lead us deeper and deeper—into the most astonishing intricacies of language—indeed one can positively say that language makes history. Language creates dynasties and destroys them,—Language crowns kings and equally decapitates them—Language—”

The sonorous clanging of a bell sounded persistently at this moment.

“Dinner,” she said, in a matter-of-fact tone. “That is a language every one understands! I think dinner, or the lack of it, has made more dynasties than anything! Are you coming?”

“I follow you,” he said, moved by a sort of obstinacy which led him to avoid the courtesy of accompanying her. She thereupon sprang away from him into the house, where she took her seat at the dinner table opposite her father, a choleric old gentleman who had already begun guzzling the soup. He ‘never waited for anybody’ as he informed all whom it might concern; and when the Philosopher sauntered in, a few minutes late as he always did for every meal, to the mute disgust of the parlourmaid, there was very little soup left. At this the fair Sentimentalist was not ill-pleased. It was naughty, she said to herself, to be quite glad that there was so little soup for so learned a man—still, learned as he was, he made ugly noises when he ate soup, and it was just as well that there was not much to make a noise with. She found the dinner rather boresome on this particular evening,—the Philosopher and her father prosed and prosed along in the dreariest dry ruts of conversation, now and then telling each other what they considered “good” stories, old as the oldest inhabitant of the most ancient jest-book. The Philosopher, in his assertive superiority of intelligence, had an aggravating way of prefacing any special story of his own by the question “Are you listening?” and, if the response was not entirely submissive and satisfactory, he would sniff a whole nest of embryo influenzas up his nose and remark, cuttingly, “Then I’ll wait!” The wrathful wretchedness of the persons who thus held him sniffing and “waiting” can only be imagined by discerning students of human nature. And the Sentimentalist, a little less patient with his ways than usual, felt a great relief when she could escape from the dinner table to the solitude of her own quiet room. Once there, she leaned out from the open window and looked at the bright stars, sprinkling the sky like big dewdrops,—and wondered, a trifle sadly, how life was going to turn out for her. From early childhood she had devoted every wish, every thought, every hope to her father,—and he was getting very old, very gouty and very cross. Lately he had found a certain solace for his constant irritability in the study of philology and the society of the Philosopher who assumed the same bent of research,—and, to a certain extent, she was grateful for this distraction to his frequently self-torturing mind. But she was rather a lonely little person,—and when the Philosopher first appeared on her limited horizon, she had hailed his presence with an unreasoning joy, because she loved books, and understood that he loved them too. She pictured the delightful talks she would have with this gifted personage about the authors they both admired,—and she was certain he would have a splendid character—generous, noble, patient, kind—because—oh, well!—because he had studied so much, and knew so much, and because he was a Philosopher. So she had idealised him in her mind, and accepted him at the ideal valuation,—a condition of pure romantic sentimentalism which amused him because it is rare to find nowadays, and when found, is so easy to destroy. From the merely physical and absolutely sensual side of things he was disposed to make love to her. The tentative efforts he had put forth in that direction had moved her, first to wonder, then to the faintest, half-compassionate response. He was old, she thought—and he seemed to have no one who cared for him. And she was touched to find so learned a man expressing any liking for her even by a look,—though her own intellectual ability was higher than his, had she known it. She was sorry for him too, in a way—he appeared to be a neglected sort of creature, albeit an authority on dull subjects in dull weekly journals and monthly magazines,—his coats were shabby, his shirt-cuffs frayed at the edges,—and he never at any time was what is called “well-groomed.” She did not realise that his generally unkempt condition was part of his particular “philosophic” manner,—a kind of advertised contempt for conventional cleanliness. He could be very agreeable when he chose,—almost lovable;—he could be amusing, entertaining and witty by turns; and when strangers first met him, they generally received a most favourable impression. The second meeting, however, unfortunately swamped the effect of the first,—and when he stayed on and on in a house, as he was doing now, there were times when his room was more desired than his company. But a kind of glamour,—a reflex glitter of genius in him,—had somewhat blinded the Sentimentalist to any clear perception of his true character as a man, apart altogether from his literary distinction,—and though she had begun to be uneasy and dubious as to his sincerity and good feeling, she would not give way to these thoughts, no matter how urgently they pressed upon her. And while she mused, and looked up at the stars, they seemed to look responsively down upon her in a winking, twinkling way of bright suggestiveness.

“What a quaint little soul it is!” so they might have expressed themselves in a couple of light-flashes. “Here it lives, tricking itself into thinking an egotist a great man! We know better!”

And they sparkled their emphatic meaning through the dark veil of air, while she, leaving her window-post of observation, took her embroidery and went down to the billiard-room there to sit in silent patience while her father and the Philosopher played a long game, as they did every night with an unwearying pertinacity till bed-time. They did not consider whether she was amused or bored by what to themselves was their own consummate skill in handling the cue, and she would gladly have stayed away but that her father expected her to act as “marker” if desired, and otherwise make herself useful. The whole business was frightfully dull as far as she was concerned—she was tired to death of the continuous click of the billiard balls, and sometimes heard them in her dreams, so incessantly were they rolled about night after night. The oddest thing to her mind was that the Philosopher never seemed tired of the game. He never spoke to her while engaged in it—or, for that matter, to her father except in monosyllables,—round and round the table he strutted, cue in hand, pipe in mouth, without a thought for anything or anybody but himself. He played more skilfully than his host, and never lost an opportunity of asserting the fact,—and sometimes when the gentle Sentimentalist saw her father getting redder and more congested in the face with suppressed annoyance at his various “misses” she was both sorry and anxious lest his restrained feeling should culminate in an attack of illness. However, it was no use for her to confide these fears to the Philosopher; he had the greatest contempt for illness that affected anybody but himself. But—after all!—she decided it was something of an advantage to know a man who could always get an article into the big “Reviews” provided it were only dull enough,—it was surely a privilege to associate with such a powerful personage!—and it was an understood thing that gifted men—Philosophers—were apt to become self-centred. Now Jack,—oh, Jack was not self-centred—but then he was not clever—he was—well!—he was just “Jack”!

CHAPTER V

ON a warm August morning it is not altogether unpleasant to recline on a long lounge chair in the deep soft shadow of full-foliaged trees and resign one’s self to meditation which may or may not be profitable. The Philosopher was in this condition of dolce far niente, and though he did not present an altogether elegant appearance in the recumbent attitude he was for the moment more concerned with inward comfort than exterior effect. He was in a thinking mood. He was taking himself seriously to task and considering whether he should marry. He was not really a marrying man, but it occurred to him now and then that he was no longer young, and that it might be necessary to have some one to take care of him. No one was so well adapted to “take care” of an ageing, gouty, grumpy man with a touch of intellectuality about him as a wife. A wife with a sufficiency of good looks to be agreeable to the eye,—a wife with a sufficiency of money in her own right to save her husband all extra exertion in the business of living. Now the Philosopher had just by chance found out that his little friend and hostess, the Sentimentalist, had or would have money. He thought, with pleasing placidity, of a college friend of his own, who had married a woman with money, and who had gleefully rejoiced in his position, with refreshing candour, saying,—“A Plum I tell you! A regular Plum! Ripe and ready!—fell into my mouth with a bang!”

The Philosopher was by no means certain that the Sentimentalist was a Plum. She was very kind to him,—she had pretty, docile, winsome ways, and seemed disposed to “play” with him as a kitten plays with a ball of wool,—she was evidently amused when he held her hand, or patted her shoulder,—but he felt more than positive that she would not “fall into his mouth with a bang!” Her father had confided to him that he meant to leave her a considerable fortune,—“and,” mused the Philosopher, dreamily,—“the old gentleman is getting very shaky. Memory going too,—sense of proportion quite lost.” He yawned, and drove off a bouncing bumble-bee that just then presumed to come too near his rather prominent nose,—then, stretching himself lazily half rose from his reclining attitude as he perceived a little white figure approaching him from the further garden, with a newspaper in its hand. He waited, a trifle impatiently.

“Dear me, what a time she is!” he complained sotto voce. “She doesn’t read newspapers as a rule. What’s in the wind now?”

For she had looked up suddenly, and seeing him, began to run. For a mere Sentimentalist she ran well,—gracefully and swiftly.

“Such news!” she cried, as she approached him. “Such terrible news! England has declared war with Germany!”

“Fiddlesticks!” said the Philosopher, emphatically. “I don’t believe a word of it!”

A little breathless with her run she swept some straying curls of gold from her eyes, and handed him the paper. There was the announcement sure enough—the brief, curt statement that was to drench Europe with blood. But the Philosopher was obstinate.

“All twaddle!” he declared. “Newspaper lies and twaddle!”

Her blue eyes rested upon him with something of wonder and sadness.

“You think so? I hope you may be right!” she said, earnestly. “Oh, I do hope you may be right!”

“Of course, I’m right,” he declared. “I’ve got some common sense. I know how these things are worked up I tell you! What’s it all about?” Here he scanned the newspaper again. “Belgium? What on earth have we got to do with Belgium! Nice muddle we make of everything! Belgium wants to protect France from invasion?—well, let her! There’s no need for us to put our fingers into the pie! Let them all settle their own affairs!”

“But—honour?—” she suggested.

“Honour? It depends on what’s called honour. A hundred years ago we were fighting the French at Waterloo—now we want to defend them. Why? We didn’t help them in the Franco-German war. We let them fight it out. So we should now. Twaddle, I tell you!—all twaddle!”

She smiled and sighed.

“Well, it seems to me very serious news,” she said. “It has quite spoilt the day for me.”

“Why should it spoil the day?” he demanded. “What have you got to do with it? Here you are in a nice garden,—lovely weather—and I believe you’ve got a new hat on. What else can any woman want?”

She gave a tiny shrug of her shoulders, which implied that he was not worth the trouble of answering. He continued, pleased with his own remarks:

“Women know nothing about war or politics,” he said. “They are not expected to know. They have their homes and their home duties—”

“And their men,” she interposed. “Their husbands and brothers and lovers,—in war these have to go and fight—”

“Of course they have,” agreed the Philosopher. “Most of them are only fit for cannon-fodder.”

She flushed angrily.

“Oh! Do you mean that?” she exclaimed.

“Of course I mean it! Ordinary men are exceedingly stupid—they have just two predominating ideas, food and money. The world loses nothing when this sort of eating, spending microbes are cleared out by a big war—on the contrary things go on better without them after they are killed off.”

“And the women who loved them?” she asked, indignantly.

He smiled.

“You are a dear little goose!” he said, quite kindly. “You are always thinking about people who ‘love’ each other. How many of them do you suppose there are?”

She made no reply.

“Love,” went on the Philosopher, “is a rare thing. In fact it is so rare that it may be said not to exist,—except in romantic novels and poetry,—two very unreliable forms of literature. What is called ‘love’ is merely the attraction of opposite sexes—the ordinary procedure of the world of nature.” He paused. He was much inclined to discourse on the propagation of species, but somehow he found it difficult. The graceful little figure beside him hardly suited his ideas of intended comparison with the rest of the animal world. Strictly speaking, she was of course an animal of the female gender, as he was an animal of the male,—but he could not fit in his discourse on natural selection with a bunch of white frippery, fair hair and a winsome smile. “Love,” he concluded, lamely, “is a poet’s dream.”

“I wonder you admit it is as much as that!” she said,—and her eyes flashed. “I agree with you to some extent—but to me it is God’s dream of the world!”

He gazed at her, amused.

“Very far-fetched!” he said. “Did you get that out of a book? Of course you did! Well, all I can say is that if there is a God dreaming anything about the world, the dream is something of a nightmare. You’re a woman and you don’t think. Have you ever seen a London slum? No. Well, men and women herd there together like brutes, wives striking husbands and husbands kicking wives, while little sentimentalists like you live in the country among roses and talk about ‘love.’ Love! Fiddlesticks! Very young people—girls and boys,—imagine they ‘love’ like Romeo and Juliet,—but have you ever thought how Romeo and Juliet would have got on as Mr. and Mrs. Montagu?”

She laughed—she could not help laughing.

“No, indeed!” she answered. “I’ve never gone so far as that!”

“Gone so far!” echoed the Philosopher, ironically. “That’s not going far! That’s simply the plain commonplace line of conduct. To live together as Mr. and Mrs. Montagu would have entailed far more heroism than to swallow poison or stab one’s self with a dagger after a romantic soliloquy. Mrs. Montagu would have had to order the dinner and Mr. Montagu in his turn would have had to pay the bills. All the nonsense they talked out of window to each other would have been clean forgotten. He would have shown himself in slippers and she in a dressing gown. The silks and velvets they wore as two precocious young humbugs at old Capulet’s ball—or rather the silks and velvets the actors wear who impersonate them nowadays, would have had very little place in their wardrobe. They would have settled down to the plain routine of life,—perfect commonplace, without any sentiment.”

She stood, looking at him earnestly.

“I am sorry for you!” she said. “Your outlook is so very dreary! It’s like opening a window on a back-yard!”

He was not displeased.

“Back-yards are useful and necessary,” he observed, complacently. “So are dust-holes. Sentiment and silliness are not necessary.”

Suddenly she laughed merrily.

“I really think you ought to get married!” she said. “You are such an admirer of the commonplace that you ought to try matrimony!”

He smiled, a superior smile.

“Possibly I may try it,” he answered, “if circumstances are favourable! But I would never play a Romeo.”

Her laughter rang out again.

“I should think not!” she exclaimed. “You couldn’t! Oh, dear, no! Fancy you under a balcony ‘sighing like a furnace’ and saying:

“‘Oh, that I were a glove upon that hand
That I might touch that cheek!’

or—

“‘She speaks,—
Oh, speak again, bright angel for thou art
As glorious to this night, being o’er my head
As is a winged messenger of heaven
Unto the white, upturned, wondering eyes
Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him
When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds
And sails upon the bosom of the air!’”

She spoke the exquisite lines with a delicious intonation of feeling, and the Philosopher nodded his head to and fro with the rhythm of the blank verse like a Chinese mandarin.

“Very good!” he said. “I notice you are fond of declamation. You should study for the stage.”

A flush swept over her features,—she was indignant, but refrained from any outward expression of her thoughts.

“Thank you!” she said, curtly.

The Philosopher felt that he had somehow stumbled into a mistake. His remark was evidently not of a kind that was pleasing to the Sentimentalist. But, like all self-centred, self-opiniated men, he went a little further into the quagmire.

“My remark was meant as a compliment,” he explained, laboriously. “Actresses are the only really successful women nowadays. They are petted and praised and their touched-up glorified portraits are in all the weekly journals—”

“Do you call that success?” she interrupted him, in coolly contemptuous tones. “Or even simple womanliness?”

He laughed quite pleasantly.

“You really are a very quaint child!” he said. “Simple womanliness! All that sort of thing went out with the second half of the reign of Victoria. I was going to say it is as extinct as the Dodo,—but that has been said before—to give it a smack of originality, let me assure you it is as extinct as Benson’s Dodo.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, still coldly. “You are too clever for me.”

He took her hand and patted it condescendingly.

“Let us leave it at that!” he said. “We’ll go and look at the roses! And the bees! ‘How doth the little busy bee’! You know the verse? And do you also know it is a much more familiar ‘poem’ to the public than the ‘Paradise Lost’? You do know that? Good! Then you are a sensible girl! And we can wait for the newspapers to fall into cackles of contradictory rumour before we believe in the war,—and for Mr. and Mrs. Montagu to come forward as a married couple before we believe in love!”

He smiled,—for a Philosopher he had quite an attractive smile,—and now and then he had a curious passing tenderness of manner that never failed to make an impression on the hearts of credulous and sympathetic women. The Sentimentalist began to think she had judged him rather hastily and hardly,—he read her thoughts in the wistful expression of her upturned blue eyes, and straightway responded by adopting for himself a quietly resigned and patient air. She grew more and more self-reproachful,—he more and more bland and condescending, and by the time they had reached the rose-walk she was in the position of a charming penitent, though she had committed no fault; and he had assumed the kindly manner of a father confessor who had just granted absolution. He pulled his black and corroded pipe from his pocket.

“I may smoke?” he queried, half coaxingly.

She nodded,—and yet she could not help wondering why he wanted to smoke just as they reached the lovely trellis work of roses that clambered and twined, and hung down their graceful heads laden with delicious perfume. The moment the fumes of tobacco were puffed into the air, all the sweetness of the exquisite blossoms would be spoilt; but she made no protest, and stood silently watching him at his old trick of prodding the “Navy-cut” into the bowl of his briar with the usual yellow finger. And she did not conceal from herself that it was an ugly performance. In due time and after some fidgeting, the pipe was lit, and the natural sweet incense of the roses was smothered by the smoke which the Philosopher emitted like a human chimney. He had the habit of opening his mouth in a studied round O, in order to make “rings” of smoke in the air as he puffed away,—it was not a habit that became him, but he was fortunately not aware of the satyr-like aspect he presented while engaged in what he considered artistry in smoking.

“Now,” he said, comfortably, after having successfully accomplished several “rings,”—“let’s talk! What does your father say of this morning’s news?”

“Dad! Oh, he isn’t at all surprised. He says it is what we all ought to have seen coming years ago, and that the country should have been prepared.”

“Oh, most sagacious Dad! Why isn’t he Prime Minister! Of course we knew!—of course every body knew!” And the Philosopher gave a short, grunting laugh. “Especially a good old gentleman living in the country and passing his time between dictionaries and cucumber-frames! If he didn’t know, who should? ‘Who dies if England lives!’ By the way what a piece of utter nonsense that is! The world would get on very well without England!”

She gave a little cry.

“Oh, how can you say so! And you an Englishman!”

“Dear child, my nationality is a mere accident of birth. I might just as well have been a kangaroo! Chance gave me English parents—and I’m not ungrateful to chance. But simply because I’m an Englishman, born in England, I’m not such a fool as to suppose my country the only respectable one in the world.”

“It’s the greatest, the noblest, the most glorious!” she said, her breast heaving and her eyes flashing. “I would die for it to-morrow if I were a man!”

He smiled.

“What’s the good of dying for it?” he queried. “Much better to live for it, and do useful work for it! Surely you agree? Suppose you—or I—or any one—dies for it—you or I or that ‘any one’ must become absolutely useless,—a mere lump of dead matter, burnt or buried and forgotten in a week! What does England gain by that? Dear child, do be reasonable! England is a charming country, and if any of us who are alive to-day can assist in adding to its charm by either our talents or our personalities, so much the better. But to die for it!—just think, by way of example, how much grace your presence gives to this garden!—a presence which, if removed, it would be difficult to replace!”

His eyes twinkled humorously,—and she hardly knew whether to be flattered or annoyed.

“If the news of the coming war be true,” she said, “many presences will be removed, never to be replaced.”

“True!” he replied. “Unquestionably true! But the removal of a considerable majority of useless persons is not so much a loss as a gain to the world. I speak from the logical and philosophic standpoint. I do not suppose the world at large is very much the worse for the destruction of Pompeii, for example. It does not appear that any one of particular note or service in the city had enough of high or singular reputation to make his loss a lasting memorial of fame. See here!” and taking her gently by the arm he stopped at an ant-hill raised in the grass path along which they strolled. “There’s a busy world! Look at the little brown citizens scampering here and there on the chief business of life, eating and breeding! Now for an eruption of Vesuvius!”—and he struck a fusee from a small box he carried, and flung it alight on the ant-hill. “What a scrimmage! What heroic deaths! Look well!—” and, as she stooped, watching the insect tragedy with keen interest and pity,—“You occupy for the moment the position of a fair goddess uplifted above the tortures of a race of beings with whom you have no concern. You can see three or four brave warriors endeavouring to drag the fusee out of the vortex in which it burns,—Horatius keeping the bridge was never more heroic than they! They go to certain death—those that perish are instantly replaced by others equally brave. Well!” and he smiled as she raised her beautiful, blue, limpid eyes to his in questioning wonder—“You look as though you asked for a meaning—it is simply that my fusee was as an eruption of Vesuvius to this particular ant-Pompeii,—and if, as the newspapers say, there is going to be a war with Germany you may take it that God, or Fate, or whatever you choose to call Natural Law, is merely flinging a fusee into an ant-hill.”

“Then you think human beings no more valuable than ants?” she demanded, half angrily.

“Less valuable sometimes,” he responded placidly. “When they are greasy multi-millionaires I give the preference to respectable ants. Every one has different tastes of course—but personally, speaking for myself alone, I would rather be an ant than a millionaire grocer.”

She laughed,—she found him thoroughly amusing,—and—yes!—he was certainly cleverer and more entertaining than Jack! He watched her, admiring with an artist’s eye the flecks of gold hair against the whiteness of her neck. He took one or two puffs at his pipe.

“I like to hear you laugh!” he said. “You do it prettily!”

She gave him a quaint little curtsey.

“Thanks!”

“It’s not a compliment,” he went on, “so thanks are superfluous. You are at your best in a pleasant humour. You have a charming smile and a fascinating manner—when you are good! But when you are put out, you look quite different—and you lose your charm.”

“That is the case with everybody,” she said.

“Not always. Some women look their best in a passion. Flashing eyes, dishevelled hair, and general tantrums, make them diabolically beautiful. But you, with your dove-like glance and soft bright hair are of the elfin type—and I believe—if fairy tales are true!—that elves are never angry.”

She looked at him and smiled. He was in his kindliest, most attractive mood, and when he allowed himself the relaxation of perfect good temper, he could be almost lovable.

“Elves,” he repeated, “are never angry. They are full of pranks and wiles, but they are never unkind to their friends—”

“I am not unkind!” she interrupted quickly.

“Dear child, I never said you were! But your incorrigible sentiment makes you hasty in judgment—quick to condemn. I’m quite sure you think me a sort of masked traitor because I fail to see any virtue in dying for England, and prefer to live for her. I’m equally positive you have your doubts as to my sense of common humanity because I say and because I mean that a very large number of people would be better out of the world than in it. And so you misunderstand me. Your Jack now—”

“He’s not ‘my’ Jack,” she interposed, swiftly.

“Well, he’d like to be,” retorted the Philosopher. “And of course he’d ‘die’ for England—no!—for ‘America and the Old Glory!’—Delightful bunkum! He’s all nobleness, patriotism, enthusiasm and heart! A nice boy—quite a nice boy,—but insufferably dull!”

She was silent.

“Dulness,” pursued the Philosopher, “is the only unforgivable sin. Now you cannot say I am dull!”

She peeped at him from under the brim of her hat,—an answer was on her lips, but she would not utter it.

“I amuse you,” he went on. “I make you laugh! That is a great thing! Isn’t it?”

She nodded, smilingly.

“I have,” went on the Philosopher, complacently, “an original turn of mind. I say things in an original manner. People quote my remarks as being new and funny. It’s a great help in social life to have a man among your friends who may be relied upon to speak in a way which no one else can imitate. It ‘lifts’ conversation. Don’t you agree with me?”

Her eyes twinkled mischievously.

“Well, I’m not sure!” she said. “There are some clever men who can be duller than very stupid ones,—though of course they always think themselves amusing. They tell the same stories over and over again—the same old jokes and witticisms,—and it is very difficult to listen to, them patiently and smile as if you were pleased, when really you’re bored!”

He nodded his head.

“True!—very true! I have met many such men. I always avoid them when I can. But the moral of the whole thing is that one should know as few people as possible and never keep up with those few longer than a month or six weeks.”

She gave him an astonished look.

“Why, then we should have no friends!” she exclaimed.

He smiled indulgently.

“Have we any friends anyhow?” he asked. “What are ‘friends’? Are they not dear sweet people who abuse you behind your back and take an inward deep pleasure in hearing of your faults and misfortunes? The friends of your youth for example? I’m not speaking personally of you, for you are still young—but if you have any so-called ‘friends’ now, and they and you live a few years longer, you’ll have these dear creatures coming along and saying, ‘Really, is it you? I shouldn’t have known you! Why it’s years and years since I saw you!—ages!’—despite the fact that it may be only five summers since you last met. But the expression ‘years and years’ and ‘ages’ is used to let you feel how old you have grown since then; I know the kind of thing I tell you! And I have always made it my business to forget schoolfellows and college companions,—drop them altogether. I don’t want their ‘reminiscences’ and I’m sure they don’t want mine. The secret of happiness in this world is to forget as you go along. Forget the past, live in the present, and don’t worry about the future.”

She was silent. And she kept silence so long that he had time to finish his pipe, knock out its ashes against a tree, and put it in his pocket. Then he looked sideways at her, and saw that the winsome face was sad. Without ceremony he took her arm, and walked on past all the roses to a smooth stretch of greensward beyond.

“You see,” he resumed gently, “we are only on this interesting planet for a short time, and it seems common sense—to me at least—that we should endeavour to make that time as pleasant as possible. If we hold on to friends who knew us as children we find them as changed as we ourselves are changed, and that isn’t pleasant. Therefore, why expose ourselves to the shock? No greater mistake was ever made by the human being—than to keep up his so-called ‘friends.’ It costs money and wastes time—”

She lifted her head quickly.

“Then if you think love a mistake and friendship a bore, can you tell what life is worth?” she asked.

“Dear elfin lady, I can! Life is worth living on account of the various agreeable sensations it provides. It is all ‘sensation’—not sentiment! Love is a ‘sensation’—a violent one—an attraction between two persons of opposite sex which is quite exhilarating and inspiring—for a short time. During that short time it has been known to move poets to their best efforts—though as a rule these individuals write their rhymes to the ‘sensation’—not to the person they imagine they adore. Friendship is also a ‘sensation,’—the feeling that one had found one’s ‘sympathy’—one’s alter ego—a most misleading idea as a rule. But any ‘sensation’ is for the moment agreeable, provided it is not physically painful—and these varying sensations are the sum bonum of life.”

She sighed.

“I do not like your outlook,” she said. “It makes everything seem so contemptible and worthless.”

He gave an airy gesture with his disengaged hand.

“What would you! Everything is contemptible and worthless, considered from the strictly philosophical standpoint. Civilisations, like men, are only born to die and be forgotten,—we trouble ourselves uselessly in efforts to keep them alive after their appointed span. Certain races attain to a high state of education and then begin to degenerate and hark back to the old roots of savagery—”

“And what do you argue from all this?” she demanded.

“Why, that we should enjoy the present hour as I am doing,” he replied, smiling agreeably. “And repel the symptoms of degeneracy in ourselves and others as forcibly as we can!”

She sighed again, and pausing, withdrew her arm from his.

“Poor, pretty, elfin lady!” he said kindly. “You do not like my way of looking at the world!”

“No! Most certainly not!” she answered, quickly. “If one thought the things you say, one would commit suicide!”

“Oh, no, one wouldn’t!” and he smiled. “Not as long as”—here he looked about him—“not as long as a butterfly exists!”—and he pointed to one just settling on a spray of clematis—“or a pretty woman!”

She moved on without a word, and he felt for his pipe in his pocket. She looked back over her shoulder.

“I am going indoors,” she called. “Do you want anything before I go?”

He took a couple of leisurely strides and came up again beside her.

“No—I have my ‘notes’ and a pencil—simple things, but they suffice! And you can leave me the newspaper—its news is false, its English detestable and its self-advertisement appalling—like all the rest of its class—but a printed Ananias always amuses me—I only regret it does not fall dead like its mythical prototype!”

She had been holding the newspaper in one hand—she now gave it him with a little wistful upward glance that somehow hurt him and made him feel uncomfortable. He realised that his ‘philosophy’ had cast a yellow fog on the sunny brightness of her day. He took her hand, looked at its dimpled whiteness critically and then gravely kissed it.

“Cheer up!” he said. “It’s a nice little world—and—you’ve got a pretty little hand! It makes life worth living—or it ought to!—for you. And also for me.”

She laughed softly.

“Oh, how absurd you are!” she said. “I don’t think you mean half you say!”

“Probably not!” he answered, mildly. “It is a very abstruse problem for a man to find out exactly what he means. I doubt if any man has ever done it—not even old Socrates. And I’m not Socrates—”

“No, indeed!” she interrupted him. “You are—you are—”

“Diogenes?” he suggested.

She laughed again, nodded and ran off.

CHAPTER VI

THE ensuing weeks proved to the Philosopher beyond a doubt that so far as the war news was concerned it was not “twaddle.” Needless to recapitulate all the cruel and terrible happenings which are burned deep into the nation’s brain, and graven ineffaceably on the recording stone of History,—and the details of such lives lived like that of the Philosopher, out of the reach of the enemy’s fire, hardly deserve to be chronicled at all save for the curious fact that despite “battle, murder and sudden death” these lives go on more or less placidly, unmoved by good or ill report of what does not immediately concern themselves. Like the old farmer pictured in “Punch” whose wife warned a visitor not to speak of the war, “Cos ’e don’t bleeve there ain’t no war,” so the Philosopher pursued the even tenor of his way, spending more and longer time in the country, especially after “raids” began to affect London’s social equanimity. He plunged deeper and deeper into labyrinths of forgotten languages, delving for the “root” of this word and the “branches” of that,—and taking care to delight his host (who daily became more gouty and irritable) with the patience of his research and the “flattering unction” he applied to the self-satisfaction of the good old gentleman, who firmly believed that his great work—“The Deterioriation of Language Invariably Perceived as a Precursor to the Decadence of Civilisation” was destined to reform the world. His pet theory was that if the language of a people could be preserved in pristine purity and elegance of speech, without the introduction of slang or flippant abbreviations, it would go a long way to check degeneration and decay. There was no doubt something in it;—as the Philosopher once sagely remarked, “there is always something in everything,”—but it was a something not likely to appeal to the average understanding. Anyway he was happy in his old age, pursuing a fox of a word through the brushwood of centuries with hounds of argument, urged on by the Philosopher,—and as long as they two could sit turning over dictionaries and comparing notes, they paid little heed to the Great War raging across Channel except as an echo of distant thunder. With the pretty Sentimentalist it was different. She busied herself with a thousand things. Punctiliously careful of her father’s household, and attentive to all his wishes and caprices, she nevertheless found time to help all sorts of “war charities,”—and as soon as she heard of a V.A.D. hospital being started in the neighbourhood she offered her services for so many hours each day,—services which were readily accepted. The “Commandant,” a sour, stern, old, county lady with more wrinkles than hairs, set her to do the dirtiest and most repulsive sort of work, for several cogent reasons—first, because she was pretty,—secondly, because her hands were white and well-kept, and as the “county” dame remarked, with an impressive sniff to herself, “Do her good to get them roughened a bit”—and thirdly, because she was a sensitive creature, and ugly sights and smells made her sick. But she was quite docile and obedient, and did all she was told to do with a patient sweetness which might have softened any heart but that of the V.A.D. “commandant” whose life-organ had apparently become tanned and hardened into a species of human leather. She never told her father or his friend the Philosopher anything about her hospital duties,—nor did they in their complete self-absorption notice that she looked frail and tired in the evenings.

“Women must have something to do,” said the Philosopher, comfortably. “And it amuses them to go fussing over wounded men and putting bandages on broken heads and limbs—it saves them,—saves them, I do assure you! That V.A.D. hospital is a perfect godsend to the women of this neighbourhood—gives them a fresh interest in life and stops their horrible “bridge” for a time. To wipe the fevered manly brow and comb the manly hair gives them a thrill of delightful excitement—it’s something new; and the plainest old spectacled harridan that ever lived likes to be called ‘Sister’ by a smart boy of twenty. Yes! the V.A.D. is a boon and a blessing!—it serves a double purpose: sick-nursing and matrimony. The blacksmith’s anvil at Gretna Green is not in it with a bed in a convalescent ward, and a good-looking ‘sister’ about.”

His gouty host grumbled assent—the Sentimentalist listened without comment. When the Philosopher talked in this sort of way she always felt herself removed very far from him,—she realised, with a little sense of pain that he and she had nothing in common. She had an appreciation of what she imagined to be his “cleverness,” but she also had a keen consciousness that he merely tolerated what he considered her stupidity under the guise of “sentiment.”

One day on her way back from her work at the V.A.D. she met Jack. She had not seen him for some time, and had lately wondered what kept him so long away, but the moment she saw him she knew. He was in khaki,—and very smart and well set up he looked. Yet there was an expression in his handsome young face that altered it somehow—and her heart beat a little more quickly as she held out her hand to him with a pleased utterance of his name:

“Jack!”

He smiled tenderly into her uplifted eyes.

“Yes, it’s me!” he said. “I’ve joined up. I had to. I couldn’t rest day or night till I did.”

“But—but you are an American!” she exclaimed.

“Yes. But I’m a man too, I hope! I couldn’t see all the brave blood of Britain starting to kill the Hun Dragon without wanting to be a bit of St. George myself. And America will be in the tussle presently. That’s what I’ve told the old man—my father—and though I’m his only hopeful (or hopeless!) he lets me go. I meant to see you somehow before training. But I never get you alone for five minutes in the house. Let’s have a stroll by the river.”

She turned, and walked slowly beside him, through a swing gate and along a little side path just wide enough for two, which meandered across a wide field to the water’s edge. It was full autumn—indeed verging on winter,—the trees were almost leafless and a chill wind blew through their branches. The river, so full of charm in the sunshine, had a dull glassy glare of cold grey on its surface and a tiny shiver ran through the veins of the Sentimentalist as she looked around her at the dreariness of the landscape which had been so fair and sunshiny in the spring.

“I hear you’ve been working at the V.A.D.,” he said, then, “Don’t you tire yourself! I won’t have it!”

She smiled, but the tears were very near her eyes.

“Won’t you?”

“No, I won’t,” he repeated, emphatically. “Where’s that old Philosopher of yours?”

“Oh, he’s at home, working at the dictionaries with Dad, as usual. He likes being here—you see it’s not very nice in London just now.”

“It’s never nice in my opinion,” replied Jack. “But if you mean air-raids and that sort of thing I rather like them! I think it’s what London wants. I shouldn’t mind if the whole place were bombed to smithereens!”

“Jack!”

He laughed at her horrified tone.

“Dear little ‘rose-lady,’ you mustn’t be cross with me! You don’t know London—I do! It’s a regular muck-heap—wants clearing badly. And cleared it will have to be before this war finishes. If it hadn’t been for muck-heap London, and muck-heap Berlin and other big cities like them, full of filth we should have had no war, at all. That’s so!”

He spoke with a kind of repressed passion—she looked up at him wonderingly and timidly. He met her sweet eyes, and his stern young face relaxed.

“Yes, dear!” he said. “It’s wickedness that has brought the war on us—wickedness in men, wickedness in women. The Supreme Being is tired of looking at the muck-heaps. He wants a clean world. And we’ve all got to help Him clean it!—with our blood and our lives!”

Timidly she put out her hand and touched his. He caught it and held it in a warm, kind grasp.

“I shan’t be sent out to France yet,” he went on. “I’ve got to be drilled into shape. And I mean to see you as often as I can before I go. Do you mind?”

“Mind? Why, of course not! I shall want to see you as much as you want to see me!”

Jack smiled.

“Oh, no, you won’t!” he said. “Though it’s nice of you to say it. But you can’t really!—because you see I’m in love with you, and you’re not in love with me!”

She drooped her head.

“I’m not in love with any one,” she murmured. “I don’t know how it is—”

“I know!” and Jack nodded his head sagaciously: “You can’t make up your mind as to whether a man’s company for life would be possible of endurance! I don’t blame you for the doubt—not a bit! But, if you are hesitating I can tell you you’d have a cheerier time of it with me than with your crusty old Philosopher!”

She laughed.

“Oh, Jack! I never think of the Philosopher that way! I wouldn’t marry him for all the world!”

“Well, that’s a comfort,” and Jack drew a long breath of relief. “That’s a real balm in Gilead! But he’ll want to marry you, you take my word for it! And when I’m gone he’ll have a clear field!”

She raised her eyes rather reproachfully.

“Then you don’t believe me’?”

“Yes, I do—of course I do!” and Jack pressed hard the little hand he held. “But I’ve got a bit of imagination, fool though I am! I see a thousand possibilities—your Dad may die—and then you’ll be all alone—and Mr. Philosopher will step in to ‘protect and console the only child of his dear dead friend!’—ugh!—I can hear him saying it!—and I shall be the Lord knows where!—and you—you are such a dainty little ‘rose-lady’ with such docile, obedient ways—”

She flashed a sudden look at him.

“You don’t know me well enough!” she said. “I’ve got a will of my own!”

“Have you?” and Jack smiled indulgently. “Well! I hope you have! And that you’ll say ‘No’ very firmly when Mr. Philosopher comes round after you and your fortune—there!—don’t look so surprised!—I heard him say he knew your father would leave you a big fortune!”

“Me?” and the astonishment was openly genuine. “Oh, Jack, you must be dreaming! Dad isn’t rich at all—he always tells me he has the greatest difficulty to make both ends meet!”

Jack laughed joyously.

“Jolly old dodger!” he said, irreverently. “But never mind! I daresay he’s right!—he’s like my father who swears he’s obliged to live down here in the country with one manservant to look after him in his fishing cottage by the river, because he can’t afford to live anywhere else! And yet I’ve heard—but after all it’s only silly rumour.”

“What is?” she enquired.

“Why, I’ve heard he’s as rich as Crœsus—but I’m sure it can’t be true, for ever since my mother died when I was a little chap of ten, we’ve always been pretty hard up.”

“But you went to college?” she said. “And you travelled abroad with a ‘crack’ tutor?”

“Oh, yes!—all that! Nothing grudged so far as my training has gone. But no superfluous cash about. And now I shan’t want anything from anybody once I’m in the Army. I shall be clothed and fed and have my pay for pocket-money! Jolly! Don’t you congratulate me?”

She looked full at him, frankly and sweetly.

“Yes, I do congratulate you!” she said. “I congratulate you on the right spirit you show, to voluntarily offer yourself to fight in the great Cause! Personally I hate the very thought of War,—it seems to me criminal, barbarous and a kind of God’s curse on the world—but if the battle is for good then all good men should join in it. I shall miss you dreadfully—”

She broke off—and a soft dew filled her pretty eyes. Jack saw,—and his heart gave a quick bound. He raised the little hand that rested so contentedly in his own and kissed it with the utmost tenderness.

“That’s enough for me!” he said. “‘I fear no foe in shining armour!’ But do take care of yourself! Don’t muck about with the V.A.D. Hospital under the orders of that virulent old dowager who has made herself ‘commandant’! If you must do that sort of thing, why not train for a real Army nurse?”

“I must not leave Dad,” she said simply. “He has only me.”

“And the Philosopher!” added Jack. “And the Deterioration of Language Invariably Perceived!”

They both laughed merrily, and the conversation became lighter and more playful. Before they parted the Sentimentalist had given him her promise that she would not become engaged to any one without giving Jack fair warning of his impending doom. And that in the meantime she would write to him once a week wherever he might happen to be, and would think of him often and kindly.

“And when you say your prayers,” he pleaded, gently, “don’t leave me out!”

“Why, Jack! Of course not!”

He looked meditative.

“I know a fat Scotchwoman,” he said, “who makes it a rule to put people into her prayers when they please her, and to take them out again when they don’t! Her husband was taken ill at a friend’s house and couldn’t be moved, and the friend nursed him tenderly, sent for a specialist and paid him fifty guineas out of her own pocket, besides spending no end of money on invalid food and luxuries,—and after the husband was cured and returned home, this same fat Scotchwoman had a slight difference with this very same loyal and devoted friend and promptly left her name out of her prayers! There’s heavenly thoughts for you! I always think she got up a grudge because her husband was cured! He was a gruff old customer, and rather a drawback to ‘home, sweet home.’ But that’s a true story!”

“Let’s hope it’s an exceptional one!” and she smiled. “No ‘slight difference’ could make me leave you out of my prayers!”

“Bless you, dear little rose-lady!” he said, fervently. “These are not King Arthur times or I should ask you for a glove or a ribbon to wear in my ‘helmet’ though it’s only a khaki cap—but—”

“Will you have this?” and unfastening a small brooch in the shape of a heart, where it held a chain in place round her neck, she gave it to him. “It’s quite small—you can tuck it in under the band and no one will ever see it—”

He was almost speechless with delight. Taking the little gold trifle he at once fastened it in his cap, secretly and securely.

“My ‘mascot’!” he said, triumphantly. “It will mean—ah!—you don’t know what it will mean to me! Everything in life!”

“Sentimental Jack!” and she smiled. “The Philosopher calls me ‘sentimental’—but you are more so than I!”

“Never mind what the Philosopher calls you,” responded Jack. “Just think for a moment if you please of what I call you—the dearest, sweetest ‘rose’ lady in the world!”

A lovely colour suffused her fair face—a true “rose” blush,—but she passed over the endearing compliment with a light gesture of dissent, and as they had unconsciously walked further along the bank of the river than they had at first intended, they turned and retraced their steps back to the open road. Here they shook hands and parted.

“You’ll hear from me very soon!” said Jack as he went, and he lifted his cap and waved it in light adieu.

She watched his agile figure swinging along till it disappeared,—then walking rather slowly herself, entered her own home in thoughtful mood. On the threshold she met the Philosopher. His face wore a grim and saturnine expression.

“Well!” and the exclamation sounded something like a snort. “Have you done playing with wounded soldiers for to-day?”

She looked him full in the eyes.

“Yes,” she replied. He was rather taken aback. He had not expected so simple an affirmative. She moved on to pass him by.

“Wait a moment,” he said. “Do you think you are really useful at that V.A.D. place?”

“I try to be,” she answered. “None of us can do very much in cases of great suffering, but every little helps.”

“Delightful platitudes!” and the Philosopher gave another snort. “Personally, I think you are much more useful at home. Your father is not very well this afternoon and has been asking for you. I left him on the sofa in the library. He seems very irritable. I’m going for a walk.”

He strolled off, pausing a moment or two to light his pipe, and she hurried to the library where she found her father on the sofa as the Philosopher had said, in a state of highly nervous irritation brought on by the gout.

“Where have you been?” he wailed, as he saw her. “Down at that d—d hospital again? God bless my soul, what sort of a daughter are you to neglect your poor old father for those miserable Tommies! All ne’er-do-wells I’ll swear!—they would have been ‘on the road’ picking and stealing and up to all sorts of mischief if they hadn’t gone into the Army! And now you must dance attendance on them as if they were your own flesh and blood—” Here he broke off with a sharp cry, wrung from him by a twinge in his gouty toe.

“Poor Dad, I didn’t know you weren’t feeling well,” she said, tenderly. “If I had I wouldn’t have gone—you know I wouldn’t! But there’s nothing to be done for the gout, dear, is there?—you must rest—and have the medicine the doctor ordered—”

“I don’t know where it is,” he growled. “The bottle has been carefully put where it can’t be found!”

She smiled, with a gently breathed, “Oh, no, it hasn’t!” and opening a cupboard by the fireplace, produced the desired palliative. He watched her pour the measured dose into a wine-glass, and took it with a puckered face like a naughty child.

“Horrid stuff!” he said, peevishly. “How do your Tommies take their medicine?”

She laughed.

“Quite nicely!—like good little boys!” she answered. “And they are so cheerful and patient! Some of the very bad cases are the most enduring. Oh!—if you could only see one poor fellow—”

“I don’t want to see him!” growled her father. “And I don’t want to hear about him! I’m worried out of my life by stories of these ‘poor fellows’ who make the ‘supreme sacrifice’ for their country,—hang it all! the ‘supreme sacrifice’ has got to be made by all of us some day anyhow—and the men who make it before their naturally allotted span would no doubt have wasted their lives in idleness and drink!”

Her eyes filled with a gentle reproach.

“Oh, dear Dad!—you talk like the Philosopher! Don’t get as callous as he is!”

“He’s not callous,” snapped out the old gentleman. “And you’re a silly little flibbertigibbet! Callous indeed! Why he’s full of feeling! He’s not sentimental—and a good job too!—but he’s reasonable and—and kind.”

“If he’s kind to you, that’s enough!” she said, smiling. “But I don’t think he pays much attention to the war, and he never realises the awful sufferings of the men who are fighting for us—”

“Why should he? God bless my soul! Why should a learned and brilliant scholar bother to ‘realise’ what these fighting fools are about? He’s got something else to do—”

“The Dictionary!” she hinted, smiling.

“Well, that’s one thing certainly. And I tell you what—ah!—you may look surprised!—but if my ideas were carried out, and language—language, I say!—preserved in refined forms, and no newspaper slang allowed, there would be no wars!—there couldn’t be!”

The smile was still on her lips.

“Dear Dad, I daresay you are quite right!” she said. “But I’m afraid it’s too late now to preserve what is lost. Elegant speech and graceful manners are very rare.”

“Glad you know it!” and her father made another grimace as his burning toe asserted its existence afresh. “You’ll appreciate my work when you see it!”

“I’m sure I shall!” She hesitated,—then added irrelevantly:

“Jack has joined up.”

“Best thing he could do! He was always idling about, with no aim in life as far as I could see—one of those stupid young men who want licking into shape!”

She made no reply. Moving quietly about the room she put things tidy and stirred the fire into a more cheerful blaze—then, seeing her father had closed his eyes in preparation for a doze she slipped away. In the outer hall she met the parlour-maid,—generally a trim, tidy little body, but now with roughened hair and swollen eyes, crying bitterly.

“Why, Annie! What’s the matter?”

The girl gave a great sob.

“My only brother, miss—he’s killed!”

Killed! The word sounded butcher-like.

“Killed! How awful! Oh, you poor girl! I’m so sorry for you!”

Annie turned away her face and went, still weeping,—comfort there is none in sudden bereavement, and to offer it is only intrusive. The gentle little Sentimentalist felt this to the very core of her responsive soul,—and her usually light step was slow and sad as she entered her own special little sitting-room and looked out on the smooth lawn and the flower-beds encircling it, brilliant just now with goldenrod, dahlias, dwarf sunflowers and other glories of autumnal bloom.

“I’m not in love with him a bit!” she murmured to the silence. “But ... yes!—I’m sure I should almost break my heart if Jack were killed!”

CHAPTER VII

WINTER closed in with a drizzling damp atmosphere far more trying to both body and mind than frost and snow, and though the country in November is seldom exhilarating except to fox-hunters and others whose physical activities keep them always “on the go”—the Philosopher found it more agreeable to spend his time in a comfortable old manor house which was kept warm and cosy, than to wander between a London flat and his club in a daily routine walk through the same streets at more or less the same hour. So that when his host urged him to stay “a week or two longer” he was not loth to accept the extended invitation; and if any twinge of shame pricked his conscience at the barefaced manner in which he allowed himself to be lodged and fed at other folks’ expense, he salved it with the inward assurance that after all was said and done, the old gentleman was gouty and ailing and that a companion of his own sex was a good thing for him.

“And I am a unique person,” he said to himself. “I have humour and originality—both qualities are worth more than gold. I make no charge for my jokes—I ask no fee for being amusing, though I really ought to do so. In the dulness created by average brains I am a kind of luminary; and if I stay on here—avoiding the November fogs in London—I give as much as I take—in fact more,—for if they feed me materially I feed them intellectually!”

Truth to tell the Philosopher was pre-eminently known as what is called a “sponge.” From his boyhood up he had always been paid for by other people. Why this was so no one could tell. But so it was. He was not a bread-winner. He had written a few books—books that resembled ancient Brazil nuts, very hard to open, and very dried-up inside—books that he wrote entirely for his own satisfaction, though for nobody else’s pleasure. Naturally the books did not sell,—but according to his view and that of many other unsuccessful dabblers in literature, that only proved their brilliancy and excellence. The oft-quoted and worn-out phrase, “The public is a hass,” expressed his opinion of that great majority whose approval every man of note, whether in literature or politics, is eager to win while openly denying its value,—and on one occasion when an old college friend remarked:

“Nobody knows you ever wrote anything and nobody cares!” he accepted the crushing statement with a bland smile and nod of acquiescence.

“Do I expect any one to know or to care?” he demanded. “Do I ask for the undiscriminating applause of the vulgar? Do I write stories about silly young women who fall in love with their guardians, and then when they are married, elope with actors and stable-men? Do I take up the rag remains of the ‘sex question’ and tear it into fresh shreds? No! Then how is it possible the man or woman ‘in the street’ should appreciate me? As well ask them to appreciate the Elgin marbles or the Parthenon! I assure you I am perfectly satisfied to be as I am—unknown and uncared for.”

The college friend looked sceptical.

“Then what’s the use of writing anything?” he asked. “And when you come to that, what’s the use of living?”

“Really, my dear fellow, you are very simple!” said the Philosopher. “Pathetically so! There is of course no use in living. But, unhappily, we have no choice in the matter. We are born,—without our own specific consent—and we die—in the same attitude of non-volition. Apparently we come into life for the purpose of propagating our kind—to no special end. Those who decline to propagate human units are considered ridiculous—even if they propagate thoughts,—through literature, painting or music,—the world does not want literature, music or painting so much as it wants squalling, guzzling babies who will grow up into squalling, guzzling men and women—most of them having no aim in life except to squall and guzzle. I have chosen a path for myself out of the squall and guzzle track—I live my own life of studious contemplation, and though I fully recognise its uselessness in common with the general futility of things, I manage to endure existence comfortably.”

His friend looked at him,—and was about to say, “At other people’s expense!” but checked the remark in time.

“You don’t—er—you don’t—er seem to care about any one?” he hinted, hesitatingly.

The Philosopher elevated his grizzled eyebrows ironically.

“Care?” he echoed. “Care about any one?... Surely a cryptic utterance!”

“I mean”—pursued the other man—“you’ve no woman—”

“Woman!” The Philosopher laughed. “My good fellow, what do you take me for! Woman? Women? As well ask me if I keep midges for amusement! No, no! I’ve ‘no woman’ as you rather clumsily put it—I might marry—it is possible—”

“Oh, really? You might?”

“Money—and good looks together might persuade me,” resumed the Philosopher judiciously. “But I should endeavor to make myself very sure that my own special manners and customs would not be interfered with by the procedure. The first aim of life—considering its farcical ineptitude—should be personal comfort,—anything that interfered with that should be rigorously avoided.”

The friend went his way, lost in amazement at what he styled “the old chap’s d—d selfishness”—but the Philosopher smoked a pipe enjoyingly, convinced that his theories were beyond all refutation or argument, and that so far from being selfish he was one of the most virtuous and magnanimous of men. Encased in a hide of hardened egoism, tougher and more leathery than that of rhinoceros or elephant, he was unable to perceive any faults of character in himself though he was keen to mark and to satirize the smallest flaw in the conduct of other people.

While he lingered on in the country, “sponging” on his host, he took it into his head to assume a benevolence and kindness towards his host’s daughter, which, in her rather solitary way of life, greatly appealed to her over-sensitive nature. He could be an attractive personality when he chose,—he had an agreeable voice, a pleasant smile, and a coaxing manner,—and when all three were “in play” together, it was difficult not to be deceived into thinking him an exceptionally charming man. There was no doubt of his intellectuality; he was eminent in knowledge of a varied kind,—he had read widely and he was a good raconteur. Yet one got to the end of his stories in time, and he was apt to repeat them too often. He had known and still knew many “famous” people,—both in literary and political circles, and he could tell many amusing incidents in connection with them,—yet even of these incidents one got tired after hearing them for the twentieth time. What took the savour out of them was that he always rounded them up by some unkind reflection as to the stupidity of that person, the dulness of t’other, for in his whole list of acquaintance there certainly was not one who came off unscathed by his sarcasm or his ridicule.

The Sentimentalist thought of this often, and argued, sensibly enough, that what he said of any one man or woman he was likely to say of any other, so that a certain sense of uneasiness began to undermine all her talks with him. With a touch of self-humiliation she felt she was “not clever enough” to converse with him in the style he approved. As a matter of fact, she was too clever,—because she had that sure feminine instinct which discovers insincerity before it positively declares itself. And gradually, very gradually, she withdrew the frankness of her nature, curling it up as it were like the leaves of the “sensitive plant” at his touch,—and he, slow to perceive this repulsion, or rather, too self-complacent to think such repulsion was possible, became more and more patronising and “superior,” treating her for the most part as a pleasing but foolish child, easily swayed by passing emotions, and therefore capable of being “caught” by even the simulation of affection if the “counterfeiting” were well done.

“And so”—said he, one chilly afternoon when a bitter east wind blew suggestions of snow through the air—“your Jack is in khaki?”

She was sewing busily, and looked up from her work with eyes that flashed warningly.

“He is not ‘my’ Jack,” she replied, coldly. “I have told you that before.”

“Well, he is somebody’s Jack,” persisted the Philosopher, stretching out his legs comfortably before the fire. “I suppose you’ll agree to that. May I warm my feet?”

Without waiting for an answer he drew up his chair close to the fender, and slipping off his shoes, extended his woollen-socked feet towards the blaze. This sort of self-coddling was one of his “little ways”—those “little ways” of blunt familiarity which distinguish the truly “great” who make free with their friends’ houses. She glanced at him with just the smallest quiver of contempt on the usually sweet lines of her mouth, and went on sewing.

“This is a kind of domestic bliss!” he said, airily. “If you ever marry, your husband will warm his feet like this!”

She was silent.

“But I really don’t think,” he went on, “that marriage would suit you. I doubt if you would keep a husband six months!”

She stopped the flash of her needle through her work.

“I should not ‘keep’ a husband six days!” she said, quietly. “I should expect him to keep himself!—and me!”

“So like a woman to twist a meaning out of what was never meant!” retorted the Philosopher. “Your mind, being feminine, at once seizes on the wrong view of the subject. My suggestion was that, being full of sentiment, you would expect sentiment in a husband. You would not find it—you would be disappointed,—or ‘wounded’—I think ‘wounded’ is the favourite expression women use in regard to their feelings,—you would consider him a brute, and he would consider you a bore—and it would be all over!”

She nodded, resuming her sewing.

“Yes,” she agreed. “It would be all over.”

Her swift acquiescence irritated him.

“I’m glad you have the sense to see it—” he began, in a raspy voice.

“Why, of course!” she interrupted him, with a light laugh. “If I considered him a brute and he considered me a bore, we should have nothing in common, and we should separate and go our different ways.”

“Oh, that’s how you’d settle it!” and the Philosopher gave a dubious grunt. “But, if you had a husband, he would be your master, and any arrangement of that kind would have to be made to suit him, and not you!”

“Yes?” and the pretty uplift of her eyebrows emphasized the question. “Thank goodness I haven’t a husband yet!—and if your ideas of marriage are likely to be true I hope I never shall have one!”

“You see,” said the Philosopher, folding his arms and hugging himself comfortably, “you are a little person who cannot bear to be contradicted, and a husband would probably contradict you twenty or fifty times a day. His opinions would always differ from yours. The man’s point of view is entirely the reverse of the woman’s. A man’s idea of love—” He paused.

“It is difficult to explain, isn’t it?” she queried, sweetly. “I’m afraid you couldn’t put it nicely!”

“Put it nicely?” he echoed. “What do you mean? Put it nicely?”

“Well, I’m afraid I couldn’t put it nicely myself,” she said, demurely, “because—you see—sometimes a man’s idea of love isn’t nice!”

He unfolded his arms and stared at her.

“Isn’t nice!” he repeated. “What is it then? Nasty?”

She laughed.

“Perhaps! Anyway it’s nearly always selfish!”

“Oh, that’s the way you look at it, is it? And is not woman’s idea of love quite as selfish?”

“I think not,” she answered, quietly. “Women have to give all,—men are free to take all.”

He was, for the moment, silent. It dawned upon him that the Sentimentalist was not “a Plum,”—a Plum to fall into his mouth with a bang. She might be ripe,—but she was not ready. With elaborate slowness he withdrew his socked feet from the fender and slipped them into his ungainly shoes.

“Very well,—it comes to this,” he said, resignedly, “Women are always right, and men always wrong—in a woman’s opinion. As I have already remarked, you cannot bear to be contradicted.”

She looked at him with eyes dancing merrily like sparkles of light.

“Oh—h-h!” and she held up a small reproachful finger. “Who is contradicting anybody? There’s nothing to contradict! We were having just a little friendly argument which started on your last piece of rudeness.”

“Rudeness?” he exclaimed. “When and how have I been rude?”

“Don’t you think it was very rude to say that you doubted whether I would keep a husband six months?”

“Nothing rude about it,” he declared, airily. “It was a frank statement.”

“Suppose I made a ‘frank statement’ about you?” she suggested. “Do you think you would care to hear it?”

“It depends entirely on the nature of the statement,” he replied. “I should decline to listen to anything incorrect.”

Her light laugh rang out sweetly.

“Anything incorrect means anything against your own ideas,” she said. “I see! Well, I won’t be as ‘rude’ as to make any statement at all about you, to your face! One should never be personal.”

She resumed her sewing, and he walked slowly to the window, looked out at the leafless branches of the trees swaying in the wind, and then walked as slowly back again.

“I suppose you do think of getting married some day?” he queried.

“Oh, dear me! Haven’t I just said one should never be personal?” she rejoined, smiling. “No,—I can’t say I have ever thought about it!”

He bent his eyes down upon her.

“‘Gather ye roses while ye may,’” he quoted sententiously. “‘Old Time is still a-flying!’”

“Is a husband a rose?” she asked, merrily.

He wrinkled his fuzzy brows.

“Well, perhaps not altogether. He might be the useful cabbage or potato in the soup. In any case for a woman, a man’s protection is necessary.”

“But does he protect? Doesn’t he often desert?”

“In the annals of the gutter press he does,—I grant you that. Life, however, is something more than cheap sensationalism.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that!” and she raised her eyes, blue as blue cornflowers, full of a lovely earnestness. “Life is such a beautiful, holy thing!—and one feels such a desire to make it always more beautiful and more holy!”

The Philosopher got up one of his ugly noisy coughs. The Sentimentalist was becoming transcendental. He felt he must bring her down from the rainbow empyrean.

“There’s nothing beautiful or holy about it,” he grunted. “Life is life—two and two are four. A man is a man; a brute is a brute. Nature cannot be altered. If a woman’s unlucky enough to marry a brute instead of a man, she gets brutal treatment. Quite her own fault!—she should have known better!”

“But how is one to find out the difference between a man and a brute?” asked the Sentimentalist with an innocent air of enquiry.

He smiled—almost he laughed.

“Not bad!” he said. “I give you that! Not bad at all—for a woman!”

He walked up and down the room again, and finally resorting to his pipe, lit it.

“All the same,” he presently resumed, “even if your powers of perception failed to discern the brute in the man or the man in the brute, you ought to marry.”

“Really! You think so?” And she looked up from her sewing with a little mutinous air.

“Certainly I think so. An unmarried woman is a target for scandal—unless she is very old and very plain—and even then she doesn’t always escape. You,—having a fair amount of good looks, should marry quickly.”

Her face brightened with sudden dimples of mirth.

“Perhaps I might,—if I could find any one rich enough to suit me,” she said.

“Rich enough!” The Philosopher was taken aback. It had never occurred to him that she, like himself, might have a fancy for the luxuries of life.

“Rich enough!” he echoed. “Surely you have no mercenary taint?—no hankering after the flesh-pots of Egypt?”

She laughed, and made a little dab at him in the air with her needle.

“I’m not so sure!” she answered, gaily. “I like comfort and warmth, and flowers and pretty furniture—and frocks—and jewels—oh!—how shocked you look!”

“I look as I feel,” said the Philosopher, puffing slowly at his pipe. “I thought you altogether different,—of a finer mould than the merely frivolous woman—”

“Now! How can you say that?” she demanded. “When only the other day you told me that I had a new hat on, and ought to be perfectly happy in consequence!”

He looked sheepish for a moment, but soon recovered his assertiveness.

“True!—and quite unconsciously I hit upon a fact,” he said. “For now, by your own admission, your tastes lead you in the direction of mere frippery. Frocks! Jewels! Good heavens! Two frocks a year—a simple brooch of unadorned gold, and a couple of plain hats, suffice for any reasonable woman whose thoughts are trained and fixed—” he paused—then repeated, “whose thoughts are trained and fixed—” He paused again.

“Yes?” she queried. “Whose thoughts are trained and fixed?—on what?”

“On the simple ideals of life,” he said. “On domestic economies—the chemistry of the kitchen—the various useful arts by which a woman can make herself indispensable to man—”

“I know!” And she had such a dancing sparkle of mirth and mischief in her blue eyes that he could not meet her glances. “The chief art of all is to give him a good dinner! Sometimes—not always—that is why a man gets married—that he may have a cook-housekeeper on the premises!” She laughed merrily,—the Philosopher surveyed her with a kind of ironic compassion.

“You think that funny!” he observed. “But it isn’t! Your worldly wisdom is by no means profound—”

“Of course it isn’t!” she agreed. “It’s shallow—shallow as a running brook!—but quite pleasant! I should hate to be profound,—and—stagnant! And if I ever do get married, I shall try to marry a rich man, who would be kind to me and take pleasure in giving me all sorts of lovely things—and I should not be mercenary, only I should like him to do things for me, and not want me to wait upon him! I think it such a pity that our men always expect to be attended to first! Americans are quite different!—they always look after women in such a courteous, friendly way! After all, kindness is the true chivalry.”

He dropped lazily into an armchair and began his favourite pastime of puffing smoke-rings into the air, with the usual ugly distortions of face which accompanied that effort.

“You are quite eloquent!” he observed, sardonically. “I notice you have a special predilection for Americans. Why, I can’t imagine! Perhaps you are looking out for an American millionaire?”

She nodded her fair little head mischievously.

“Perhaps!” she replied.

The Philosopher made a particularly hideous O of his unbeautiful mouth at that moment, as he discharged a well-nigh perfect smoke-ring from its cavity.

“The noble and high-minded Jack scarcely answers to your requirements,” he said.

“No, poor fellow!” and she smiled. “I believe he has always been more or less hard up. His father put him into some great engineering works, but of course he had to pay to be taken at all—he was not paid. But he learned everything he could. Now he’s quite pleased he’s joined the Army—you see he’s paid there!—and has his food and clothes as well—so he’s happy and satisfied.”

“Fortunate youth!” said the Philosopher, yawning. “And doubly fortunate to have secured so much interest in his doings as you bestow upon him!”

She was silent.

The Philosopher continued making smoke-rings and she wished he would leave off. It was unreasonable of her to feel irritated with him, and yet she could not help it. He, on his part, was conscious of having come up against an obstacle in his mental plans of conquest,—a soft obstacle, something like a sand-bag in the path of a bullet. On that particular winter afternoon he had purposed “making a dash for it” as he had said to himself, and risking an attempt at love-making. He had thought of various ways of doing it, more or less approved. It was a cold, bleak day—a day that was enough to make gentle ladies shiver and draw near the fire,—if she had drawn near, he would have essayed—yes, he thought he would have essayed slipping an arm round her waist as he had done on that occasion when he had pricked or (as he would have expressed it), “lacerated” his hand among the rose-bushes, and she had “kissed the place and made it well.” Yes, she had actually done that! And now, little by little, a curious, imperceptible shadow had arisen like a dividing wall, so that she appeared to be on one side and he on the other, and he felt by a strange, almost sullen instinct that were he to “lacerate” his hand ever so severely, he would not be favoured by the light, soft touch of those rosy lips again. Now, what mood possessed her, he wondered? What fantastic feminine vagary had made her thus capricious? Wrapped in a thick hide of intellectual egotism the Philosopher could not see that he was in any sense to blame.

Had any one ventured to tell him that his ingrained selfishness and utter indifference to the feelings of any other human entity than his own, had profoundly affected the Sentimentalist and moved her to reluctant aversion, tempered with pity, he would have been virtuously indignant. For he had his own peculiar methods of estimating his own conduct.

“I! I, selfish!” he would have exclaimed. “I, who am always trying to amuse and please everybody! I give up my own wishes constantly in order to suit other people! I am a perpetual entertainment to my friends when they are too dull-witted to entertain themselves! I am really one of the most unselfish and good-natured of men! I never ‘bore’ anybody!”

And he would have argued that to stay on week after week in an extremely comfortable country house with all his food provided, was really a magnanimous condescension on his part, inasmuch as he was assisting a very irritable old gentleman to pursue literary work which interested him, and at the same time impressing by his various qualifications a very romantic and idealistic little lady who, unfortunately for herself, had an idea that all clever men must be worth knowing.

Yes,—when he had “lacerated” his hand among the roses, her manner towards him had been charmingly different from what it was now. She was then still under the glamour and delusion of his reported renown as a learned and brilliant personality. She looked at him with timid interest; she listened to him with a pretty reverence. But now her blue eyes studied him with a critical coolness,—and though she still listened to his talk, she was not, as before, earnestly attentive. Nothing seemed so impossible as to put his arm round her waist now,—and yet that was exactly what he had hoped to do on this winter’s afternoon by the fire. He took refuge in a few banalities. Heaving a deep sigh, he said suddenly:

“You are not as kind to me as you used to be! In fact you are cold!”

She smiled.

“It is cold!” she answered.

Here was a sort of five-barred gate, over which the ambling mule of the Philosopher’s philosophy could not easily jump. He thought a moment.

“Have I been so unfortunate as to displease you?” he asked, in his gentlest tone.

She was quite startled at the question and her sewing dropped from her hands.

“Displease me? Oh, no!—pray do not think such a thing! I am so sorry if I give you such an idea—you must not imagine—”

He watched her as he would have watched a butterfly writhing on a pin.

“I do not imagine,” he said. “Imagination is a kind of hysteria. I know there is something on your mind against me. Surely I may know what it is?”

She hesitated a moment,—then raised her eyes, blue and steady in their wistful, half-tender expression.

“It is nothing against you,” she said, quietly. “It is only sorrow that you who have lived so long and seen so much, and studied such deep and clever things, should be so hard and unfeeling for poor humanity. You show such indifference to the sufferings of the men in this terrible war—you never seem to consider the heart-break and agony of the women left at home—the mothers, the wives, the sweethearts—and so—you see”—she paused, with a slight tremble in her voice—“I am disappointed, because when I heard you were considered a very great man in your own line of learning, I thought you would probably be great in other things as well.”

He looked at her in a kind of quizzical amusement.

“Dear child, that does not follow by any means!” he said. “Most unfortunately for yourself you are an idealist, which means that you put your own mind’s colour on a world’s common grey canvas. When the colour comes off and the dull grey is seen, you are disappointed, and you feel you will not try putting on the same tint again. I’m afraid your life will be a repetition of this tiresome experience! And I’m sorry—yes, very sorry, you have attempted to idealise me, for I couldn’t live up to it!”

He rose from his chair and stood with his back to the fire, pipe in hand.

“You find me indifferent to the war,” he went on. “I am. I freely confess it. The war is a result of arrogance and stupidity—two human defects for which I have unbounded contempt. The war also exhibits in the most glaring manner the sheep-like tendency of men—they follow where they are led without seeking to know the reason why. If every male creature in every country flatly refused to be a soldier, tyrants and governments would be at a loss for material wherewith to fall upon each other—they could not coerce a whole world that had once made up its mind. It is because there is no strength of will in the blind majority that war is allowed still to exist—and you are right—I have no sympathy with it. To me the ‘roll of honour’ is all bunkum!—and I have no patience with people who smirk their thanks for a medal from the king in exchange for the life of a slaughtered man. Pooh! Talk of the car of the Juggernaut! The abbatoir in Flanders is a thousand times worse, because we are supposed to be a civilised, not a savage, people, though to my notion we are more savage than the primal men who broke each other’s skulls with stone hatchets. I can see no improvement—we are the same old blood-thirsty, greedy race!”

He spoke with a fervour that was almost eloquence, and knocking the ashes of his pipe out, he placed it on the mantel-shelf. Then bending his eyes on the Sentimentalist, he smiled.

“There! Now you know!” he said. “I am perfectly indifferent to the war. I don’t care how many fools kill each other! I haven’t the least sympathy with men who go to have themselves hacked about and disfigured for life, or blown into atoms by shells. They would have shown much better sense by treating the members of their stupid Governments to the same sort of fate.”

“But”—and here the Sentimentalist plucked up courage to speak—“if we did not fight, Germany would dominate the world!”

“And why didn’t we see that before?” he demanded. “Germany was dominating the world in every corner of trade—‘peaceful penetration’ as it was called,—and if the stagey Kaiser hadn’t jumped up like a jack-in-the-box, under the demented notion that he was a new sort of Charlemagne she would have dominated it. And we should have gone on in our comfortable idleness and luxury, getting lazier and lazier, and allowing Germany to do everything for us, because it’s so much trouble to do anything for ourselves—except—play tennis and football!”

She looked at him with a flash of indignation.

“Then what a good thing for us that we’ve been shaken up out of our ‘laze’!” she said.

“Perhaps—and perhaps not,” rejoined the Philosopher. “I never accept things as ‘good’ till they prove not to be entirely bad.”

“And with all these pessimistic ideas of yours, are you happy?” she asked.

“Entirely so!” And the Philosopher smiled. “Much happier than you are, my dear child! For you expect so much from everybody and everything!—and I expect—nothing! So I am never disappointed. You are!”

“Yes, I am!” she agreed, and her sweet mouth trembled. “I am very greatly disappointed!”

“And you always will be!” he said, pleasantly. Then reaching for his pipe, he filled it. “The wind seems to have abated a little—I’ll go for a walk before dinner.”

He paused an instant, wondering if he should say anything else?—a word of tenderness?—or endearment? No, he thought not! An arm round the waist was out of the question. He could whistle rather well, so prodding his pipe, he lighted it, and whistled ‘Home they brought her warrior dead,’ to which lively accompaniment he walked out of the room.

She sprang up when he had gone, indignantly conscious that tears were in her eyes.

“I think—I really do think I hate him!” she said to the silence. “And I used to be almost fond of him! Oh, he makes all life a blank for me! There seems nothing worth doing, nothing worth living for!” She paced up and down the room. “Sneer,—sneer!—nothing but sneer! And he’s supposed to be so clever! Oh, I’d rather be human!—twenty times rather! And yet—when he first came to stay with Dad he seemed so charming and kindly! I thought he would be such a splendid friend to have!—but I don’t believe he cares a rap for anybody but himself!”

In this she was perfectly right. But nothing is so difficult to a Sentimentalist as to believe in the existence of an incurable Egotist.

CHAPTER VIII

TWO or three days later Jack called to say good-bye.

“I’m off to France this week,” he explained, “and I shan’t have another chance. I wanted to see you once more before—before crossing Channel.”

The Sentimentalist was in her own little morning-room busy with the week’s household accounts. She pushed aside all the tradesmen’s books and bills, and rose from her chair.

“Oh, Jack!” she said half whisperingly, and again, “Oh, Jack!” Then suddenly: “Let us go out in the garden! We can’t talk here!”

She took up her hat which had been lying on a table near her, and threw a fleecy wool scarf over her shoulders. It was a brilliant day, despite the wintry season, and a few red leaves still clinging to the trees made flashes of colour against the clear grey-blue of the sky.

“How’s Dad?” Jack asked, with a show of interest. “And ‘The Deterioration of Language Invariably Perceived’?”

She laughed rather tremulously. “Oh, just the same! Dad is not very well, I’m afraid. He says the war worries him so.”

“Worries him? Oh, by Jove! What has he got to worry about?”

“Nothing, really! But that’s just why he worries!”

They were now in the leafless rosery, walking side by side under intertwined boughs of thorns. Jack gave a quick comprehensive glance around him.

“Looks rather different to what it did in summer,” he said.

The fair woman at his side looked up quickly.

“Ah, yes!” she murmured. “Everything is changed!”

“No, it isn’t!” he replied briskly. “You’re not changed—and I’m not changed! You’ve got a touch of the ‘blues,’ dear little lady! It’s that old V.A.D. commandant, I bet!”

“Oh, no! No, indeed; I don’t mind her snappy ways a bit! The wounded boys make up to me for all her tantrums!”

“I should hope they did!” said Jack, approvingly. “I say! If I get wounded I’ll try and get sent here, and you’ll nurse me!”

She smiled, but there was a rising of tears in her throat and she could not speak. Jack saw just how she felt, and bravely repressed his own emotion.

“You won’t mind seeing my father now and then?” he went on. “He said the other day that he would take it kindly if you’d look in at the cottage sometimes—”

“I will, certainly!” she interrupted, eagerly. “But is he really going to stay down here all winter?”

“I think so! He’s a queer old chap and likes his own way of living,” and Jack smiled. “But his heart’s in the right place! He said the other day, ‘I’d rather feed the robins here, than dine at the Savoy!’ That’s him all over!”

“Is he—is he sorry you’re going?” she asked.

“If he is, he doesn’t show it!” Here the young fellow laughed cheerily. “Oh, he’s game, I can tell you! He told me he was giving me away like a pound of tea!—thoughts running on the American war of independence, I suppose!”

He laughed again, but she was very silent and serious. They had left the rosery, now the thornery, and were walking in a thick little coppice of fir-trees, where occasional gleams of the near river shone through. On a sudden impulse he stopped, and taking her face between his two hands turned it up to him.

“Dear little ‘rose-lady,’” he said, huskily, “say ‘God bless you, Jack!’ before I go!”

“Oh, I do say it!” she answered, sobbingly. “I do say it, and I pray it every night and morning! Jack, dear, believe me I do!”

Somehow or other he had his arms round her,—he had none of the Philosopher’s doubts or hesitations,—and he drew her fondly to him.

“You dear!” he whispered. “But I won’t have you cry! No tears!—or you’ll make a real coward of me! And just now I want to be a hero—for I think, I really do think you care for me,—just a little!”

She was silent, but she put the tiniest little flutter of a kiss on the hand that was nearest to her lips. He thrilled to that caress with all the warm ardour of a Romeo, and releasing her from his hold, drew himself up with an air of joy and pride.

“Now I’m worth twice what I was a minute ago!” he said. “And if I were a sneak, I should ask you to engage yourself to me straight away! But I won’t. You shall not be bound to a man who may be marked down by a Boche sniper before the month is out. No, dear! But you know I love you!—and you know I want to marry you!—when the war is over!”

“And you’ll wait till then?” she asked, suddenly with the prettiest air of pique and wonder.

He looked at her, and his heart beat quickly.

“I’ll try to!” he answered. “Unless you tempt me too far!”

Some further development of this situation might have occurred had not the sudden apparition of a misshaped “Homburg” hat and weedy-looking overcoat startled them away several paces from each other.

“Don’t let me intrude!”—and the Philosopher, slowly approaching, spoke in the mildest and most mellifluous of accents—“I have been taking a stroll by the river,—and you—dear me, yes!—it is you!” Here he surveyed Jack with a kind of quizzical tolerance—“I should hardly have known you in khaki had I met you by chance anywhere else!”

“I daresay not!” replied Jack airily. “It makes a fellow so much better-looking.”

The Philosopher smiled.

“You think so? Ah! Well,—possibly our ideas do not coincide. I cannot admit that mud-colour is becoming to any face or figure. And when are you off?”

“This week.” The reply was brief and blunt.

The Philosopher nodded blandly.

“So soon? And no doubt you are full of pleasurable anticipation? When one is young and has nothing very important to do, the idea of killing Germans must be more thrilling than an invitation to a grouse moor!”

The Sentimentalist looked pained and vexed—she was about to speak, but a glance from Jack silenced her.

“Quite so!” he agreed, amicably. “I’d rather kill Germans than grouse any day!”

“I envy you your humane ideas!” said the Philosopher, smiling. “Allow me to wish you a safe journey to France and all the excitement you want when you get there! It’s a great thing to be a defender of the Empire—a ve-ry great thing!—for those who consider the Empire worth defending! To a scholar and student of history, all empires are alike,—one is no worse and no better than the other, and the well-balanced man would as soon fight for Germany as Britain. Both are arrogant powers,—and it entirely depends on which sort of arrogance one prefers—military or commercial. But I forgot!—you are not British—you are American! Being so, I rather wonder you should fight at all!”

“It is curious, isn’t it!” and Jack treated him to a broad smile and a glance which took in the battered “Homburg” hat, the weedy coat, and the large boots of the learned man. “But—it amuses me!”

Something in the flash of the young man’s eyes—a lightning gleam of boldness and mirth—struck with an unusual force through the leathery consciousness of the Philosopher and made him feel uncomfortable just for a moment. He knew well enough what this voluntary soldier was prepared to meet,—the roar of guns, the crash of shells, the flying bombs, each instrument carrying death where it fell—and the light dismissal of danger in the phrase “It amuses me”—did for a brief interval move the student of many books to a sense of reluctant admiration as well as regret that he, too, was not young enough to fling a defiance at the hurling blows of the enemy. But, as a matter of fact, he had never been truly “young”—for even as a boy his utter self-absorption had set him apart from his fellows. At college, his aloofness had gained him many a “ragging,” though certain dry-as-dust professors thought they foresaw the ripening of “genius” in his unnatural self-satisfaction,—a mistake of course, and not the first by any means that dry-as-dust professors have made in their estimation of their students. There was not a touch of “genius” in him,—there was only a very great ability, chiefly shown in the absorption of other people’s ideas. Just now he took a couple of minutes to recover from the slight rap Jack had unconsciously given to his carefully balanced mentality—then he said, suavely and graciously—

“It is fortunate for the country that it can find young men who are willing to be ‘amused’ by fighting for a cause which is not their own,” and a small, grim smile furrowed his features. “In fact, I consider the war a positive godsend to the youth of both sexes—a godsend, I tell you! It makes a clearance of the useless under the name of ‘patriotism’ and it gives the idle—especially idle women—something to do.”

“Do you know any idle women?” Jack asked. “I’ve never met one.”

The Philosopher glared at him.

“Never met one?” he echoed, ironically. “Good heavens, where have you lived? Idle women swarm in every town and village—positively swarm—”

“No, they don’t,” interrupted Jack brusquely. “I’d just like you, sir, to do one day of a woman’s house-work!—you would not have much time for thought! Rich or poor she’s on the go and the grind all through!—especially if she has a husband and children to look after. And if not,—why, my spinster aunt out in California hasn’t an idle moment!”

“Wonderful!” and the Philosopher looked like a fluffy owl in the rain with its head on one side. “What does she—the spinster aunt—do, for example?”

Jack laughed, happily.

“What does she not do!” he exclaimed. “She makes all the preserves and sweets—mends the stockings—works in the garden—nurses sick neighbours—looks after orphan children—but there!—you wouldn’t be interested!”

“No, I’m afraid not!” and the Philosopher shook his head, gravely. “Preserves and sweets do appeal to me—but I prefer them manufactured rather than home produced,—and as for the rest of her energies, I think they might be better employed. However, we will not argue! I take off my hat to you”—here he suited the action to the word—“as a remarkable young man who has never met an idle woman! And I hope you will have all the amusement you expect in France!”

He made a kind of salute which comprehensively included the Sentimentalist as well as Jack and paced slowly on his way. Not till he was well out of hearing did Jack give vent to his feelings. He caught the little hand of the “rose-lady” conveniently near his own and give it an ardent squeeze.

“Promise me!” he said. “You have promised me;—but promise me again that you will not marry that cynical, selfish, mocking, old brute! He hasn’t an ounce of real feeling in his composition!”

She smiled rather sadly.

“Dear Jack, I shall not marry anybody!” she answered. “Certainly not this ‘clever’ man! I’m afraid you’re right—he has no feeling—only the other day he heard of the death of one of his oldest friends and all he said was, ‘Dear me! I shall miss him rather when I want a game at bowls!’”

“Don’t say you won’t marry anybody,” said Jack, “because, please heaven, you’ll marry me! Won’t you? But there!—I won’t bind you!”

She said nothing; only her blue eyes had wells of sweetness in them in which a poet might ask love to drown. He held her hand a little closer—and drew himself up straightly with a resolute air.

“I must go now,” he said. “Good-bye, dear! I won’t bother you to think of me or write to me—or any trouble of that sort—”

“Oh, Jack! It won’t be a trouble!”

“It might be!” and he set his lips hard. “The only thing I do ask is that you go and see my old Dad sometimes and let him come to see you. He’ll have all my news—field service post cards and everything—”

He paused. The winsome face of the Sentimentalist was uplifted—her lips were parted and tremulous—there were tears on her golden-brown lashes. In a reckless moment, not thinking of anything but carried away by the emotion of his soul, he caught her to his heart and kissed her once, twice, thrice, passionately.

“Forgive me!” he whispered. “I can’t help it! God bless you, dear! Good-bye!”

He turned with almost lightning suddenness, plunged through the brushwood by the river and disappeared.

“Jack!” she called, plaintively.

There was no answer. He had gone. She stood for a moment,—pained, bewildered, and yet thrilled by the fervour of that lover’s kiss,—the first she had ever known. How abruptly he had left her!—it was perhaps the best way—and yet,—would she ever see him again. The tears welled up suddenly and fell down her cheeks.

“Oh, Jack!” she murmured, brokenly. “It is hard! You need not go really!—it is your own choice!—and I—I am so lonely!”

CHAPTER IX

THAT same evening the Philosopher took it into his head to be uncommonly disagreeable and ill-mannered. He found fault with everything, even with his dinner (which he had neither provided nor paid for) and he was judicially severe on his host for allowing himself to be “done,” as he put it, by his tradesmen.

“Call this mutton!” he said, viciously chopping at the meat on his plate. “It’s leather!—and old leather too! No wonder you’ve got the gout!—you’re eating gout now! You’ve got a cook, I suppose, and she ought to be ashamed of herself for taking such mutton into the house—she doesn’t know her business—”

The Sentimentalist interrupted him. Her cheeks were flushed with indignation and embarrassment.

“I am the one to blame,” she said, coldly. “I am alone responsible for the housekeeping. One cannot always command perfection. But please do not irritate Dad—he is easily upset—”

“Upset? I should think so!” snorted the Philosopher. “He’s got to pay for this beastly mutton!”

For one flashing second the blue eyes of his hostess swept over him in a glance of immeasurable scorn. Then she rose from table and left the room. Outside the door she met the parlourmaid.

“Well, I never, Miss!” observed that young woman. “If your Pa were in his ’e’lth he ought to order that old curmudgeon out of the house! Call ’im a friend! The cheek of ’im!”

The Sentimentalist could not answer. As mistress of the house she smarted under the rudeness this “clever” man had inflicted upon her at her own table. If the mutton was tough, she felt that he considered the fault to be hers, though she, poor little woman, was neither the butcher nor the cook. Moreover, the bad manners displayed in finding fault with the food provided at a hospitable board on which he had “sponged” for weeks together, proved, to her regret that though he might be a distinguished University “light of learning,” he was not a gentleman. This reflection calmed the hurry of her nerves—she re-entered the dining-room and resumed her place, ignoring the quizzical and enquiring look of the Philosopher as she did so.

“What did you go out of the room like that for?” grumbled her father. “Anything important?”

She smiled.

“Yes—important to me. I had an order to give.”

“Oh! Couldn’t you have given it here?”

“No.”

Silence followed.

The Philosopher became aware that she was “queening” it. He tried to start a subject of conversation—but his efforts fell flat. She neither looked at him nor seemed to hear him. He therefore addressed himself solely to his host, who replied somewhat disjointedly to his remarks. Both men were made distinctly uncomfortable by the quiet air of sovereign indifference maintained in the attitude and expression of the charming mistress of the house, and though he was as adamant in his own egoism the Philosopher for once wished he had controlled his emotions concerning tough mutton.

Dessert and coffee served, the Sentimentalist left the “gentlemen” to themselves, and, retiring to her own room began to think, and to wonder how long the Philosopher like another “Old Man of the Sea” purposed riding on the back of her little household.

“It seems very hard!” she mused. “I can’t imagine why Dad finds him so necessary!—or why that awful book should be compiled at all!”

Then she looked back to the time when the Philosopher had been first invited to come and stay—how ardently she had looked forward to meeting this “clever” man,—how she had pictured the charming and intellectual talks they might have together,—what a friend he would be to “Dad”—such a brilliant, learned and—yes!—surely kind-hearted man! For the Sentimentalist had a very erroneous notion fixed in her little head,—and this was that men who were rich in knowledge must be likewise rich in heart; because having learnt many things they would be sure to have wise tolerance and pity for the mistakes and follies of the ignorant,—so she thought. She was wrong of course—and she had to discover the sad fact that many so-called “great” men are amazingly small of character and petty in disposition. She blushed for very shame now as she remembered that she had almost—not quite!—but almost imagined herself growing attached to the Philosopher—“Yes!” she said to her own soul, indignantly—“I actually did come near loving him for a day or two!—when he was nice—and he can be nice when he likes!—and of course I felt he was trying to make love to me!—and I thought it such an honour! But, oh!”—here she gave herself a little shake—“What an awful, awful husband he would make!—what tempers he would have!—and what nasty sarcastical things he would say if he felt like saying them! He wouldn’t care how he hurt one!—no, not he! He likes to hurt people—positively enjoys it!”

She gave herself another little shake,—then murmured irrelevantly,—

“Poor Jack!”

A sigh escaped her, and she went on talking to herself.

“Poor Jack! He’s not clever—no!—he often says the stupidest things!—but—ah!—he wouldn’t hurt any one for all the world! I think—yes, I’m sure!—I’d rather have a kind husband than a clever one!”

She lost herself in meditation for a while. All at once she heard a tap at her door.

“Come in!” she said.

And the Philosopher made his appearance.

“Where’s my pipe?” he asked.

Amazed at his cool effrontery she looked at him, hardly knowing whether to laugh, or to order him out of the room.

“Come, come!” he went on testily. “You know where everything is in the house and if anything is mislaid you can generally find it. I’ve lost my pipe—it’s not in my coat pocket and I don’t think I left it on the seat by the river this afternoon—I might have done so—”

“Perhaps you had better go and look,” she said, frigidly. “I believe there’s a moon.”

“Or I can take a lantern,” he replied. “But do you mean to say you haven’t seen it?”

“I certainly have not!”

“You are generally so kind!” he mumbled, in querulous tones. “Whenever you see it lying about you put it where I can find it—”

“But I haven’t seen it lying about this time,” she said. “You had better ask the servants.”

He stood on the threshold peering into the room.

“You have a nice little bower here,” he remarked, condescendingly. “Is this where you play at housekeeping and settle domestic quarrels?”

She made no answer.

“I see you are on your high horse!” he went on. “A tall and stalking quadruped! Can’t I assist you to alight?”

“I don’t know what you mean!” she said, looking full at him. “Please explain!”