Edith walked up and down the room considering this.
“Do you remember Comte’s remark when the doctors told him he was dying? He said ‘Quel per te irréparable,’” continued Peggy. “There’s the opposite of Hugh.”
“All the same, it was an irreparable loss,” said Edith, “and so are the years in which Mr. Grainger remains a private nightingale. He told me this evening that he had been asked whether he would sing in three Wagner operas next year. Oh, make him, Peggy! Or hasn’t he got stern parents of any description, or musical uncles who will cut him off with a penny if he doesn’t?”
“Well, we’ll try. I didn’t know they had made him a definite offer. But though you might not think it, Hugh is wonderfully obstinate. People clatter and shriek all around him, and he sits in the middle, brilliant and smiling and patient till they have quite finished. And then he goes on exactly as before.”
“He might do worse,” said Mrs. Allbutt. “By the way, will you ask him to the box for the first night of ‘Gambits’? You haven’t asked anybody else yet have you?”
“No; I didn’t know whether you wanted anybody in particular. I think three will be enough. Four in a box usually means that the two men are frigidly polite to one another; and both sit at the very back of the box and see nothing whatever. It’s much better to be three, so that we can all put our elbows on the cushion. Were you at the rehearsal to-day?”
“Oh, yes; I went to see a little more of my grave dug! From the way things are getting on, it should be quite ready for me to lie down in on Thursday night.”
“My dear, what nonsense! Besides, every manager likes rehearsals to go badly. Good rehearsals mean a bad first night. Bad rehearsals give a sort of courage of despair, which is far the most efficient sort. Oh, Edith, it’s good too, and you know it! Dear Andrew Robb! What a name to have chosen! Anyhow, I don’t think a soul has guessed who wrote it.”
“I don’t see how anybody could have,” said Edith. “Nobody knows except you and Mr. Jervis, and I never speak to him in the theatre. He always comes to see me afterwards, and we make what we can out of the rather undecipherable notes I have scribbled.”
Again she moved restlessly up and down the room.
“But whatever happens,” she said, “I shall never regret having written it. It really kept me alive and sane, Peggy, during the first two years after Dennis’s death. I think I must have gone mad otherwise. But the bringing to birth of that child of one’s brain kept me alive; and whether it proves to be a miserable little deformed cripple or a healthy baby is another question.”
Peggy rose to go.
“Ah, you darling!” she said, kissing her. “And it is all healed now, is it not?”
Edith smiled at her.
“Yes, I think it is healed,” she said. “But you know things can’t be quite the same; it can never be quite as if those years had never happened. If one has had a wound, a burn, though the skin grows over it and the doctors say it has healed perfectly, yet it isn’t soft and smooth like other skin. It is hard, as if Nature instinctively gave an extra protection over the place that had been hurt. And this was over my heart, dear.”
Peggy sighed.
“I know you think like that,” she said, “but you won’t always. Think how much you have regained of yourself in these three years. How much of you there is again, when a year or two ago, dear Edith, there was so little of anything. Make it complete again some day.”
“Marry, do you mean?” asked she.
“Why, of course. No woman is herself until she finds her man. And really, dear, you are beginning to sit up and take notice, as they say of children. Do find him!”
“At the age of forty-two it requires a good deal of search,” said Edith.
“You are not forty-two. People don’t have any age until they cease to matter. You matter immensely. Why, supposing I were to go about London saying you were forty-two, people would say that I must be fifty! No woman is any age until people cease to care about her.”
Edith shook her head.
“Oh, Peggy, if one suffers, then certain things become unrecapturable! One begins some day to acquiesce in one’s limitations. When one is really young everything is possible; when one is old most things are inconceivable.”
“Now you are talking like Andrew Robb,” remarked Peggy.
“Of course, because I am. One’s age is measured by what one expects from life. And to be quite candid, dear, I expect very little. I hope on my own account to continue being moderately agreeable, and quite patient, and quite pleased that other people should enjoy themselves. But as for the heart-beat, the long breath—why, that is finished.”
“That is the ridiculous heresy that women only love once,” said Peggy. “I have known heaps of women who have loved heaps of times. They have told me so themselves.”
“Go to bed, Peggy, because you are getting flippant. You don’t understand. Pleasures? Good gracious, yes, I hope to have lots of them. I shall go mad with pleasure if Andrew Robb proves successful; I shall look forward even for a whole year to seeing Mr. Grainger play Lohengrin, just as for a whole year I shall look forward to seeing whether the Delphiniums you sent me will do well at Mannington. I shall——”
“Oh, darling, you shall shut up!” said Peggy decisively. “You may call me flippant, but you are cynical, whether I call it you or not, when you speak of expecting nothing more from life. And I would sooner be anything than cynical—even a dentist. Where will you breakfast? And why my Mr. Grainger? Answer categorically, please, and don’t argue, because it is late.”
Edith laughed.
“Categorically then, it is your Mr. Grainger because you introduced him to me: I will breakfast in my room, and I want two eggs. Otherwise I don’t get through the morning.”
“Indeed? What happens instead?”
“It is interminable, of course.”
“You shall have three,” said Peggy.
No sort of grass, not even the commonest varieties, ever grew under Peggy’s feet, and thus having promised to see what could be done with regard to inducing Hugh to accept this offer of the Opera Syndicate, she laid her plans next morning without loss of time, and instead of going to church as she ought to have done, sent Toby there with Chopimalive and Sitonim—who had slept till morning—and announced to Hugh that the whole duty of this particular man was to take her out in a punt.
“And Mrs. Allbutt?” he asked.
“Will lunch with us at one-thirty,” said Peggy.
This was in the nature of an ultimatum, and Hugh, when it was thus put firmly before him, behaved like the Sultan of Turkey and did as he was told. But Peggy was not quite sure that there was not, so to speak, a good deal of Moslem-fanaticism smouldering below this apparent docility. However, she established herself comfortably on a heap of cushions, and, remarking on the beauty of the view, put up a huge contadina umbrella that extinguished it for miles round.
“Now, we won’t go far,” she said, “because you will get so dreadfully hot punting. Simply broiling, isn’t it? Oh, Hugh, how beautifully you do it! I’m sure you would win all the punt-races if you went in for them.”
Hugh put his head on one side, as if listening very carefully; then, having considered this remark in all its bearings, he put his