Part 22 (2/2)

She promptly set herself to belittle the importance of his position and work for the sake of hearing them upheld, and she was not disappointed.

'It's easy enough to laugh at finance, and fas.h.i.+onable into the bargain,'

he said. 'But here's the truth of the matter. Money does to-day what was the work of the sword a century or so ago, and, as far as I can see, does it better. To my thinking, it should be held in quite as high esteem. You can put it aside and let it rust if you like, but other nations won't follow your good example. Then the time comes when you must use it, and you find the only men you've got to handle it are the men you can't trust--the bandit instead of the trained soldier. No! Put the best men you can find to finance, I say,' and with that he said good-bye.

'Why doesn't he drop them altogether?' asked Fielding with considerable irritation when Mrs. Willoughby informed him of Drake's intention to renew his acquaintance with the Mallinsons.

'It would only make matters worse if he did,' replied she. 'Clarice would be certain to count any falling off of her friends as a new grievance against her husband.'

'Friends?'

'He is willing to take his place as one.'

'He will find it singularly uninteresting. Friends.h.i.+p between a man and a woman!'

He shrugged his shoulders; then he laughed to himself. Mrs.

Willoughby got up nervously from her chair and walked to the opposite end of the room.

'These things,' continued Fielding in a perfectly complacent and unconscious tone, 'are best understood by their symbols.'

Mrs. Willoughby swung round. 'Symbols?' she asked curiously.

Fielding took a seat and leaned back comfortably. 'The feelings and emotions,' he began, 'have symbols in the visible world. Of these symbols the greater number are flowers. I won't trouble you with an enumeration of them, for in the first place I couldn't give it, and in the second, Shakespeare has provided a fairly comprehensive list. And by nature I am averse to challenging comparisons. There are, however, feelings of which the symbols are not flowers, and amongst them we must reckon friends.h.i.+p between man and woman. Pa.s.sion, we know, has its pa.s.sion flower, but the friends.h.i.+p I am speaking of has its symbol too'--he paused impressively--'and that symbol is cold boiled mutton.'

Mrs. Willoughby laughed awkwardly. 'What nonsense!' she said.

'A mere _jeu d'esprit_, I admit,' said he, and he waved his hand to signify that he could be equally witty every day in the week if he chose.

His satisfaction, indeed, blinded him to the fact that his speech might be construed as uncommonly near to a proposal of marriage. He thought, with a cast back to his old dilettante spirit, that it would be amusing to repeat it, especially to a woman of the sentimental kind--Clarice Mallinson, for instance. He pictured the look of injury in her eyes and laughed again.

CHAPTER XII

Clarice was indeed even more disappointed than Mrs. Willoughby imagined.

She had looked forward to her marriage, and had indeed been persuaded to look forward to it, as to the smiting of a rock in her husband's nature whence a magical spring of inspiration should flow perennially. 'The future owes us a great deal,' Mallinson had said. 'It does indeed,'

Clarice had replied in her most sentimental tones. Only she made the mistake of believing that the date of her marriage was the time appointed for payment. Instead of that spontaneous flow of inspiration, she had beneath her eyes a process of arduous work, which was not limited to a special portion of the day, like the work of a business man, and which, in the case of a man with Mallinson's temperament, inevitably produced an incessant fretfulness with his surroundings. Now, since this work was done not in an office but at home, the burden of that fretfulness fell altogether upon Clarice.

She took to reading the _Morte d'Arthur_. Fielding found her with the book in her hand when he called, and commented on her choice.

'There's no romance in the world nowadays,' she replied.

'But there has been,' he replied cheerfully; 'lots.'

Clarice professed not to understand his meaning. He proceeded to tick off upon his ringers those particular instances in which he knew her to have had a share, and mentioned the names of the gentlemen. He omitted Drake's, however, and Clarice noticed the omission. For the rest she listened quite patiently until he came to an end. Then she asked gravely, 'Do you think that is quite a nice way to talk to a married woman?'

'No,' he admitted frankly, 'I don't.' For a few minutes the conversation lagged.

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