Hilda | Page 4

do;"
and they regarded each other through an instant's silence with visible
good fellowship.
"A reasonably strong company this time?" Lindsay asked.
"Thank you. 'Company' is gratifying. For a month we have been a

'troupe'--in the first-class end. Fairish. Bad to middling. Fifteen of us,
and when we are not doing Hamlet and Ophelia we can please with the
latest thing in rainbow chiffon done on mirrors with a thousand
candle-power. Bradley and I will have to do most of the serious work.
But I have improved--oh, a lot. You wouldn't know my Lady
Whippleton."
It was a fervid announcement, but it carried an implication which
appeared to prevent Lindsay's kindling.
"Then Bradley is here too?" he remarked.
"Oh, yes," she said; and an instinct sheathed itself in her face. "But it is
much better than it was, really. He is hardly ever troublesome now. He
understands. And he teaches me a great deal more than I can tell you.
You know," she asserted, with the effect of taking an independent view,
"as an artist he has my unqualified respect."
"You have a fine disregard for the fact that artists are men when they
are not women;" Duff said. "I don't believe their behaviour is a bit more
affected by their artistry than it would be by a knowledge of the higher
mathematics."
She turned indignant eyes on him. "Fancy your saying that! Fancy your
having the impertinence to offer me so absurd a sophistry! At what
Calcutta dinner-table did you pick it up?" she said derisively. "Well, it
shows that one can't trust one's best friend loose among the
conventions!"
He had decided that it would be a trifle edged to say that such matters
were not often discussed at Calcutta dinner-tables, when she added,
with apparent inconsistency and real dejection, "It is a hideous bore."
Lindsay saw his point admitted, and even in the way she brushed it
aside he felt that she was generous. Yet something in him--perhaps the
primitive hunting instinct, perhaps a more sophisticated Scotch impulse
to explore the very roots of every matter, tempted him to say, "He gives
up a good deal, doesn't he, for his present gratification?"

"He gives up everything! That is the disgusting part of it. Leander
Morris offered him--but why should I tell you? It's humiliating enough
in the very back of one's mind."
"He is a clever fellow, no doubt."
"Not too clever to act with me! Oh, we go beautifully--we melt, we run
together. He has given me some essential things, and now I can give
them back to him. I begin to think that is what keeps him now. It must
be awfully satisfying to generate artistic life in--in anybody, and watch
it grow."
"Doubtless," said Lindsay, with his eyes on the carpet; and her
eyebrows twitched together, but she said nothing. Although she knew
his very moderate power of analysis, he seemed to look, with his eyes
on the carpet, straight into the subject, to perceive it with a cynical
clearness, and as Hilda watched him a little hardness came about her
mouth. "Well," he said, visibly detaching himself from the matter, "it's
a satisfaction to have you back. I have been doing nothing, literally,
since you went away, but making money and playing tennis. Existence,
as I look back upon it, is connoted by a varying margin of profit and a
vast sward."
She looked at him with eyes in which sympathy stood remotely,
considering the advisability of returning. "It's a pity you can't act," she
said; "then you could come away and let it all go."
Lindsay smiled at her across the gulf he saw fixed. "How simple life is
to you!" he said. "But any way, I couldn't act."
"Oh, no, you couldn't, you couldn't! You are too intensely absorbent,
you are too rigidly individual. The flame in you would never consent,
even for an instant, to be the flame in anybody else--any of those
people who, for the purpose of the stage, are called imaginary. Never!"
It seemed a punishment, but all Lindsay said was: "I wish you would go
on. You can't think how gratifying it is--after the tennis."

"If I went on I have an idea that I might be disagreeable."
"Oh, then stop. We can't quarrel yet--I've hardly seen you. Are you
comfortable here? Would you like some French novels?"
"Yes, thank you. Yes, please!" She grew before him into a light and
conventional person, apparently on her guard against freedom of
speech. He moved a blind and ineffectual hand about to find the spring
she had detached herself from, and after failing for a quarter of an hour
he got up to go.
"I shan't bother you again before Saturday," he said. "I know what a
week it will be