The Making of a Prig Part 19

"Didn't you have enough tea?" he said. But she knew by his tone that he was not laughing at her now, and she went on recklessly.

"I am certain I could not love any one very much, without hating him too. It is a horrible dual feeling that tears one to pieces. Is it the badness in me, I wonder? Other people don't seem to feel like that when they are in love. Why is it?"

"Because it is the same emotion, or set of emotions, that inspires both love and hatred," said Paul. "Circ.u.mstance does the rest, or temperament."

"It is inexplicable," said Katharine solemnly. "I can understand killing a man, because he could not understand my love for him; or casting off my own child, because it was bored by my affection. I am quite sure," she added, quaintly, "that I should bore any one in a week, if I really loved him."

"Oh, no," said Paul politely; and they again laughed away a crisis.

CHAPTER X

At the beginning of October Paul went abroad. She had thought that life without him would be unendurable, and she could not a.n.a.lyse her own feelings when she found that she could laugh with as much enjoyment as ever, and that her fits of depression were less frequent than before. In fact, she had often been far more unsettled if a letter from him had failed to arrive when it was due; and a new sensation of freedom went far to cure her of the restlessness that had possessed her all the summer. She began to probe into her truth-loving soul, to try and discover whether her feeling for him was not an illusion after all; but she found no satisfactory explanation of the problem that was puzzling her, and she put it voluntarily away from her, and turned to her work as a healthy antidote. And she had a good deal of work just then. Thanks to the influence of the Honourable Mrs.

Keeley, her private pupils were increasing in number, and these, with her lectures at the school, were producing a salary that relieved her of all financial worry for the present. She was making new friends too, and it added to her contentment to find that people asked her to go and see them because they liked her. For the first time since her arrival in town, she felt sure of being on the way to success; and the sensation was a very thrilling one. Phyllis asked her, one day, why she was looking so happy. Katharine laughed, and pondered for a moment; then answered frankly that she did not know why. "I only know that I have never been so gloriously happy in my whole life," she added; and she wondered, as she spoke, whether the mad, feverish happiness of the summer months had really been happiness at all. But Phyllis, who felt that she had no share in this strange new life of hers, looked back regretfully on the earlier days when Katharine had been lonely and in need of her sympathy. Even Ted told her she was looking "very fit," and this was the highest term of praise in his vocabulary. For, since the beginning of October, she had seen a good deal of Ted. It was very restful to come back to him, after the state of high pressure in which she had been living lately; and when she grew accustomed to his being a West-end young man, instead of an easy-going schoolboy, she found him the same delightful companion as of old. He did not allude to her many weeks of silence, nor ask her how she had spent them; he came at her bidding, and when he found that she liked him to come he came again. He was as humble as ever, except in matters of worldly knowledge, and there he showed a youthful superiority over her which amused her immensely. His laziness, which had always been more or less an a.s.sumption with him, had developed into the fashionable pose of indifference; and she tried in vain to spur him on to doing something definite with his life, instead of letting it drift away in a city office.

"Girls don't understand these things," he would say with good-natured obstinacy. "Of course I loathe the beastly hole; any decent chap would. But I may as well stop there. It's not my fault that I was ever born, is it? I get enough to live on, with what my cousin allows me; and I'm not going to grind all I know, to get a rise of five bob a week. It isn't good enough. I'm sure I'm very easily contented, and my wants are few enough. Oh, rats! I must have a frock coat; every decent chap has. And you couldn't possibly call that extravagant, because I sha'n't think of squaring it for a year at least. Of course I don't expect you to understand these things, Kitty; it's impossible for a man to do the cheap, like a woman."

And Katharine, who always wanted to reconst.i.tute society, with a very limited knowledge of its first principles, would strike in with a vigorous denunciation of his comfortable philosophy; and he would listen and laugh at her, and make no effort to support his own opinion which he continued to hold, nevertheless. He was the best companion she could have had just then; he never varied, whatever her mood was, and he kept her from thinking too much about herself, which was a habit she had acquired since she last saw him. Besides, he was a link with her childhood, that period of vague existence which had held no problems to be solved, and had never inspired her with a wish to reform human nature. So they spent many evenings and half-holidays together, and they went frequently to the theatre and sat in the gallery, which often entertained them as much as the play itself; and he loved to pay for her, with a manly air, at the box office, and always made the same kind of weak resistance afterwards, when Katharine insisted on refunding her share, under the lamp at the corner of Queen's Crescent, Marylebone. Sometimes, when they were unusually well off, they would dine at an Italian restaurant first, where they could have many wonderful dishes for two shillings, and a bottle of tenpenny claret. On one occasion--it was Ted's birthday, and his cousin had sent him a five-pound note--they had more than an ordinary jubilation.

"Buck up, and get ready!" he had rushed into the little distempered hall to say. "We'll go to a new place, where the waiters aren't dirty, and the wine isn't like sulphuric acid. And, Kitty, put on that hat with the pink roses, won't you?"

They did their best, on that memorable evening, to reduce the five pound-note, and to behave as though they were millionaires. They drove in a hansom to the restaurant in question, which was a very brilliant little one close to the theatres, where they had a waiter to themselves instead of the fifth part of a very distracted and breathless one. The state of Ted's pockets could always be estimated by the amount of attention he exacted from the waiter; and this evening there was absolutely nothing he would do for himself, from the disposal of his walking stick to the choice of the wine.

"It's a very good tip to start by taking the waiter into your confidence," he a.s.sured Kitty, when it had just been settled for them that they were to have _bisque_ soup.

"It's convenient, sometimes, when everything is written in French,"

observed Katharine. Ted changed the conversation. On his twenty-second birthday he felt inclined, for once in a way, to a.s.sert himself.

"I'm rather gone on this place; pretty, isn't it?" he continued. "All the candle-shades are red, white, and blue; mean to say you didn't twig that? You're getting less alive every day, Kit! Awfully up-to-date place, this! I don't suppose there is a single decent woman in the room, bar yourself."

He said this with such pride in the knowledge, that she would not have robbed him of his satisfaction for the world.

"They look much the same as other women to me," she observed, after a quick survey of the little tables.

"That's because you don't know. How should you? Women never do, bless them! Do you like fizz?"

"Oh, Ted, don't! Isn't it a pity to spend such a lot just for nothing?" she remonstrated. She had visions of all the unpaid bills he had disclosed to her in one of his recent pessimistic moods.

"My dear Kitty, you really must learn to enjoy life. Don't be so beastly serious over everything. Bills? What bills? There aren't any to-night. The art of living is knowing when to be extravagant."

And she had to acknowledge, for the rest of the evening, that he had certainly mastered the art of living. They went to a music hall, and sat in the stalls; and Katharine enjoyed it because Ted was there, and because he was so funny all through,--first, in his fear of being asked by the conjurer for his hat which was a new one, or his watch which was only represented by his watch chain; and secondly, because he tried so hard to distract her attention from the songs that were inclined to be risky. And Ted enjoyed it because it was the thing to do, and because there would be hardly any of that fiver left by the time he got home.

"Then you'll look me up at the office at five to-morrow; you won't forget?" he asked rather wistfully, when they parted on the doorstep.

"Of course I won't forget," she answered, hastily. "Dear old Ted, I have enjoyed it so much!"

"Good-night, dear," he said, as he turned away. And his tone haunted her rather, as she groped her way up to bed in the dark. She began to feel half afraid, with some annoyance at the thought, that this pleasant state of things could not go on for ever, and that Ted was going to spoil it all again as he had done once before, by taking their relationship seriously. So she prepared to meet him, the next afternoon, with a reserve of manner that was meant to indicate her displeasure; but he disconcerted her very much by asking her bluntly why the d.i.c.kens she was playing so poorly; and she felt unreasonably annoyed to find that her fears were groundless. So for some time longer they went on as before, in the same happy-go-lucky kind of way that had always characterised them. She learned to know several of his friends, most of them genuine boyish fellows, who appealed to her more by their affection for Ted than by any qualities they possessed themselves. They seemed very much alike, though she was bound to acknowledge that this impression may have been conveyed by the cut of their clothes and the shape of their hats, which did not differ by so much as a hair's breadth. But Ted always shone by comparison with the best of them. He was the only one of his set who did not take himself seriously; he had a sense of humour, too, and this compensated for the exhausted manner which he felt obliged to a.s.sume as a mark of fellowship with them.

He asked her, one night, with some diffidence, if she would mind coming to tea in his chambers on the following Sunday.

"I shouldn't think of asking you to come alone," he hastened to add; "but Monty is going to bring his sister along, so that's all square as long as you don't mind."

"Mind! Why, of course not," said Katharine, in frank astonishment.

"What is there to mind? I want to see your chambers very much. I have often wondered why you never asked me before."

Ted stared at her for a moment, and then began tracing what remained of the pattern in the linoleum with his walking stick. They were standing, as usual, in the hall of number ten, Queen's Crescent.

"What a babe you are, Kitty!" he said, without looking up; and Katharine reddened as she suddenly realised his meaning. Of course Ted was no longer a boy, and she was no longer a child; and she was on precisely the same footing with him in the eyes of the world as she was with Paul Wilton. Unconsciously, she compared the att.i.tude of the two men under similar circ.u.mstances; Paul, who was unscrupulous in letting her visit him as long as no one knew of it; and Ted, who had no views on the matter at all but merely wished to spare her any annoyance.

"I see," she said. "Who is Monty?" She always felt nervous when he offered to introduce her to any of his friends; because she knew very well that he warned them all beforehand that she had "ideas," and this put her at a distinct disadvantage to begin with.

"Oh, Monty's awfully smart! He knows no end. You'll like Monty, I expect. He wants to meet you, awfully; says he likes the look of your photograph. I told him how bally clever you were, and all that.

Monty's clever, too; he reads Ibsen."

Katharine received this proof of Monty's intellectual ability with some cynicism which, however, she was careful to conceal.

"I shall be delighted to meet him," she said. "What time shall I come?"

"Oh, any time; four will do. And, I say, Kit, I suppose I must have cream, mustn't I? You can't give Monty milk that's been sitting for hours, and spoof him that it's cream. I've done that sometimes, but you can't spoof Monty."

"Oh, I'll bring the cream. I know a shop where they'll let me have it on Sunday," said Katharine confidently; and Ted left comforted.

After all, Monty's sister could not come; but Ted's sense of the fitness of things was satisfied by his having asked her, and, as Monty himself came and did not seem afraid of Katharine as all his other friends were, he felt that his tea-party was a success. The only thing that marred his enjoyment was the fact that Katharine, for some unaccountable caprice, refused to be intellectual in spite of the efforts of Monty, whose real name proved to be Montague, to draw her out. Monty was a young man with a gentlemanly view of life, tempered by a great desire to be thought advanced; and he began the conversation with a will.

"Awfully clever new thing at the Royalty! Suppose you've seen it, Miss Austen?" he began. "Awfully plucky of the Independent Theatre to put it on, it is really."

"Is it?" smiled Katharine. "I haven't seen it yet. Ted and I hate those advanced plays,--they're so slow as a rule. Comic operas, we like best."

Monty seemed surprised; and Ted was a little disconcerted by this frank avowal of his own ordinary tastes.

"You see, Kit only goes to those things to please me," he said, apologetically. "She's just as keen on all those humpy plays as you are, don't you know?"

Monty was not sure that he knew, but he turned to another branch of art.

"Talking about posters," he said,--which was only his favourite method of opening a conversation, for n.o.body was talking about posters at all,--"have you seen that awfully clever one of the new paper, 'The Future'? It's by quite a new man, in the French style, so bold and yet so subtle. But of course you must have seen it."

"Oh, yes," laughed Katharine, "I should think I had! You mean the red one, don't you, with a black sun and a cactus thing, and a lot of spots all over it? Ted and I were laughing at it, only yesterday. Do you really think it is good?"

Monty said he really did think so; and Ted, who was torn in two by his admiration for both of them, came to his rescue.

"You had better be careful, Kitty," he said, anxiously. "Monty does know."

"Of course," said Katharine politely, "it is only a matter of taste, isn't it, Mr. Montague?"

"Quite so," replied Monty, concealing his feelings of superiority as well as he could. "By the way, talking of taste, what do you think of the new Danish poet? Rather strong, don't you think?"