The Streets of Ascalon Part 41

"I'm speaking of _your_ world----"

"My world! The entire world knows that money is necessary--except perhaps a silly sentimentalist here and there----"

"Yes, there are one or two--here and there," he said. "But they're all poor--and prejudiced."

Molly applied her handkerchief to her eyes, viciously.

"I hope _you_ are not one, Ricky. I'm sure I'm not fool enough to expect a girl who has been accustomed to everything to be contented without anything."

"There's her husband as an a.s.set."

"Oh, my dear, don't talk slush!"

"--And--children--perhaps."

"And no money to educate them! You dear boy, there is nothing to do--absolutely nothing--unless it's based on money. You know it; I know it. People without it are intolerable--a nuisance to everybody and to themselves. What could Strelsa find in life without the means to enjoy it?"

"Nothing--perhaps.... But I believe I'll ask her."

"She'll tell you the truth, Ricky. She's an unusually truthful woman....

I must go downtown. Strelsa and I are lunching"--she reddened--"with Langly.... His aunt would kill me if she heard of it.... I positively do not dare ask Langly to Witch-Hollow because I'm so deadly afraid of that fat old woman!... Besides, I don't want him there--although--if Strelsa _has_ to marry him----"

She fell silent and thoughtful, reflecting, perhaps, that if Strelsa was going to take Langly Sprowl, her own country house might as well have the benefit of any fashionable and social glamour incident to the announcement.

Then, glancing at Quarren, her heart smote her, and she flushed:

"Come up to Witch-Hollow, Ricky dear, and get her to elope with you if you can! Will you?"

"I'll come to Witch-Hollow if you ask me."

"That's ducky of you. You _are_ a good sport, Ricky--and always were! Go on and marry her if you can. Other women have stood it.... And, I know it's vulgar and low and catty of me--but I'd love to see Mrs. Sprowl blow up--and see that hatchet-faced Langly disappointed--yes, I would, and I don't care what you think! Their ancestors were common people, and Heaven knows why a Wycherly of Wycherly should be afraid of the descendants of Dutch rum smugglers!"

Quarren looked up with a weary smile.

"But you are afraid," he said.

"I am," admitted Molly, furiously; and marched out.

As he put her into her car he said:

"Write me if you don't change your mind about asking me to Witch-Hollow."

"No fear," said the pretty little woman; "and," she added, "I hope you make mischief and raise the very d.i.c.kens all around. I sincerely hope you do!"

"I hope so, too," he said with the ghost of a smile.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "A fortnight later Strelsa wrote to Quarren for the first time in nearly two months."]

CHAPTER VIII

A fortnight later Strelsa wrote to Quarren for the first time in nearly two months.

"DEAR MR. QUARREN,

"Molly says that she saw you in town two weeks ago, and that she told you how unexpectedly my worldly affairs have altered since I last wrote to you.

"For me, somehow or other, life has been always a sequence of abrupt experiences--a series of extremes--one grotesque exaggeration after another, and all diametrically opposed. And it seems odd that such radically material transformations should so ruthlessly disturb and finally, now, end by completely altering the character of a girl whose real nature is--or was--unaccented and serene to the verge of indifference. For the woman writing this is very different from the one you knew as Strelsa Leeds.

"I am not yet sure what the outcome of this Adamant affair will be.

Neither, apparently, are my attorneys. But it is absolutely certain that if I ever recover anything at all, it will not amount to very much--not nearly enough to live on.

"When they first brought the unpleasant news to me my instinct was to sit down and write you about it. I was horribly scared, and wanted you to know it.

"I didn't yield to the impulse as you know--I cannot give you the reasons why. They were merely intuitions at first; later they became reasons as my financial situation developed in all its annoying proportions.

"I can tell you only this: before material disaster threatened me out of a clear sky, supposing that matters would always remain with me as they were--that I should never know any serious want, never apprehend actual necessity--I had made up my mind to a course of life which now has become impossible.

"It was not, perhaps, a very admirable plan of existence that I had conceived for myself, nothing radical or original. I meant, merely, _not_ to marry, to live well within my income, to divide my time between my friends and myself--that is to give myself more leisure for self-development, tranquil cultivation, and a wider and more serious interest in things worthy.

"If by dividing my time between my friends and myself I was to lose touch more or less with the lively and rather exacting society in which I live, I had decided on the sacrifice.

"And that, Mr. Quarren, is how matters stood with me until a month ago.

"Now everything is altered--even my own character I think. There is in me very little courage--and, alas, much of that cowardice which shrinks from pain and privation of any kind--which cringes the more basely, perhaps, because there has been, in my life, so much of sorrow, so little of material ease and tranquility of mind.

"I had been dreaming of a balanced and secure life with leisure to develop mental resources. .h.i.therto neglected. And your friendship--our new understanding--meant much of that part of life for me--more than I realised--far more than you do. Can you understand how deep the hurt is?--deeper because now you will learn what a coward I really am and how selfishly I surrender to the menace of material destruction. I am in dire terror of it; I simply do not choose to endure it. That I need not submit to it, inspires in me the low type of equanimity that enables me to face the future with apparent courage. My world applauds it as pluck. I have confessed to you what it really is.

"Now you know me, Mr. Quarren--a preacher of lofty ideals while prosperous, a recreant in adversity.

"I thought once that the most ign.o.ble sentiments ever entertained by man were those lesser and physical emotions which, in the world, masquerade as love--or as an essential part of it. To me they always seemed intolerable as any part of love, material, unworthy, base. To me love was intellectual--could be nothing less lofty--and should aspire to the spiritual.

"I say this because you once tried to make me understand that you loved me.

"Marriage of two minds with nothing material to sully an ideal union was what I had dreamed of. I might have cared for you that way when a marriage tainted with lesser emotions repelled me. And now, like all iconoclasts, I end by shattering my own complacent image, and the fragments have fallen to the lowest depth of all.

"For I contemplate a mariage de convenance--and I scarcely care whom I marry as long as he removes from me this terror of a sordid and needy future.

"All ideals, all desire for higher and better things--for a n.o.ble leisure and the quiet pleasures of self-development, have gone--vanished utterly. Fear sickens me night and day--the same dull dread that I have known so many, many years in my life--a blind horror of more unhappiness and pain after two years of silence--that breathless stillness which frightened wounded things know while they lie, panting, dazed listening for the coming footsteps of that remorseless Fate which struck them down from afar.

"I tell you this, Mr. Quarren, because it is due to you if you really love me--or if you once did love me--because when you have read this you will no longer care for me.

"One evening you made me understand that you cared for me; and I replied to you only by a dazed silence that neither you nor I entirely understood at the time. It was not contempt for you--yet, perhaps, I could not really have cared very deeply for such a man as you then seemed to be. It was not intellectual indifference that silenced me.... And I can say no more about it--except that--something--changed me radically from that moment--and ever since I have been trying to understand myself--to learn something about myself--and of the world I live in--and of men.