Temperley laughed. “You, like Achilles, are pursued by ten thousand girls. I deeply sympathize, though it is not an inconvenience that has troubled me, even in my palmiest days.”
“Why, how old are you? Surely you are not going to talk as if those days were over?”
“Oh, I am moderately palmy still!” Temperley admitted. “Still, the hour approaches when the assaults of time will become more disastrous.”
“You and Hadria Fullerton ought to get on well together, for she is very musical,” said Harold Wilkins.
“Ah!” cried Temperley with new interest. “I could have almost told that from her face. Does she play well?”
“Well, I suppose so. She plays things without any tune that bore one to death, but I daresay you would admire it. She composes too, I am told.”
“Really? Dear me, I must make a point of having a talk with her, on the earliest opportunity.”
Meanwhile, the occupants of the pony-cart had arrived at Darachanarvan, where they were to put up the pony and have luncheon. It was a prosaic little Scottish town, with only a beautiful survival, here and there, from the past.
After luncheon, they wandered down to the banks of the river, and watched the trout and the running water. Hadria had long been wishing to find out what her oracle thought about certain burning questions on which the sisters held such strong, and such unpopular sentiments, but just because the feeling was so keen, it was difficult to broach the subject.
An opportunity came when Miss Du Prel spoke of her past. Hadria was able to read between the lines. When a mere girl, Miss Du Prel had been thrown on the world—brilliant, handsome, impulsive, generous—to pass through a fiery ordeal, and to emerge with aspirations as high as ever, but with her radiant hopes burnt out. But she did not dwell on this side of the picture; she emphasized rather, the possibility of holding on through storm and stress to the truth that is born in one; to belief in “the noblest and wildest hopes (if you like to call them so) that ever thrilled generous hearts.”
But she gave no encouragement to certain of her companion’s most vehement sentiments. She seemed to yearn for exactly that side of life from which the younger shrank with so much horror. She saw it under an entirely different aspect. Hadria felt thrown back on herself, lonely once more.
“You have seen Mrs. Gordon,” she said at length, “what do you think of her?”
“Nothing; she does not inspire thought.”
“Yet once she was a person, not a thing.”
“If a woman can’t keep her head above water in Mrs. Gordon’s position, she must be a feeble sort of person.”
“I should not dare to say that, until I had been put through the mill myself, and come out unpulverised.”
Miss Du Prel failed to see what there was so very dreadful in Mrs. Gordon’s lot. She had, perhaps, rather more children than was necessary, but otherwise——
“Oh, Miss Du Prel,” cried Hadria, “you might be a mere man! That is just what my brothers say.”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” said Miss Du Prel. “Do explain.”
“Do you actually—you of all people—not recognize and hate the idea that lies so obviously at the root of all the life that is swarming round us——?”
Valeria studied her companion’s excited face.
“Are you in revolt against the very basis of existence?” she asked curiously.
“No: at least … but this is not what I am driving at exactly,” replied Hadria, turning uneasily away from the close scrutiny. “Don’t you know—oh, don’t you see—how many women secretly hate, and shrink from this brutal domestic idea that fashions their fate for them?”
Miss Du Prel’s interest quickened.
“Nothing strikes me so much as the tamely acquiescent spirit of the average woman, and I doubt if you would find another woman in England to describe the domestic existence as you do.”
“Perhaps not; tradition prevents them from using bad language, but they feel, they feel.”
“Young girls perhaps, brought up very ignorantly, find life a little scaring at first, but they soon settle down into happy wives and mothers.”
“As the fibre grows coarser,” assented Hadria.
“No; as the affections awaken, and the instincts that hold society together, come into play. I have revolted myself from the conditions of life, but it is a hopeless business—beating one’s wings against the bars.”
“The bars are, half of them, of human construction,” said Hadria, “and against those one may surely be allowed to beat.”
“Of human construction?”
“I mean that prejudice, rather than instinct, has built up the system that Mrs. Gordon so amiably represents.”
“Prejudice has perhaps taken advantage of instinct to establish a somewhat tyrannical tradition,” Miss Du Prel admitted, “but instinct is at the bottom of it. There is, of course, in our society, no latitude for variety of type; that is the fault of so many institutions.”
“The ordinary domestic idea may have been suitable when women were emerging from the condition of simple animals,” said Hadria, “but now it seems to me to be out of date.”
“It can never be entirely out of date, dear Hadria. Nature has asked of women a great and hard service, but she has given them the maternal instinct and its joys, in compensation for the burden of this task, which would otherwise be intolerable and impossible. It can only be undertaken at the instigation of some stupendous impetus, that blinds the victim to the nature of her mission. It must be a sort of obsession; an intense personal instinct, amounting to madness. Nature, being determined to be well served in this direction, has supplied the necessary monomania, and the domestic idea, as you call it, grows up round this central fact.”
Hadria moved restlessly to and fro by the river bank. “One presumes to look upon oneself, at first—in one’s earliest youth,” she said, “as undoubtedly human, with human needs and rights and dignities. But this turns out to be an illusion. It is as an animal that one has to play the really important part in life; it is by submitting to the demands of society, in this respect, that one wins rewards and commendation. Of course, if one likes to throw in a few ornamental extras, so much the better; it keeps up appearances and the aspect of refined sentiment—but the main point——”
“You are extravagant!” cried Miss Du Prel. “That is not the right way to look at it.”
“It is certainly not the convenient way to look at it. It is doubtless wise to weave as many garlands as you can, to deck yourself for the sacrifice. By that means, you don’t quite see which way you are going, because of the masses of elegant vegetation.”
“Ah! Hadria, you exaggerate, you distort; you forget so many things—the sentiments, the affections, the thousand details that hallow that crude foundation which you see only bare and unsoftened.”
“A repulsive object tastefully decorated, is to me only the more repulsive,” returned Hadria, with suppressed passion.
“There will come a day when you will feel very differently,” prophesied Miss Du Prel.
“Perhaps. Why should I, more than the others, remain uninfluenced by the usual processes of blunting, and grinding down, and stupefying, till one grows accustomed to one’s function, one’s intolerable function?”
“My dear, my dear!”
“I am sorry if I shock you, but that is how