Man and Maid | Page 5

developed everything, perhaps it now permits a sensitive,
delicious woman like you to love two men."
"You see, we have become so complicated"--she puffed smoke rings at
me--"One man does not seem to fulfill the needs of every
mood--Rochester would not understand some things that Jim would,
and vice versa--I do not feel any glamour about either, but it is rest and
certainty, as I told you, Nicholas, I am so tired of working and going
home to Queen Street alone."
"Shall you toss up?"
"No--Rochester is coming up from the front to-morrow just for the
night, I am going to dine with him at Larue's--alone, I shall sample him
all the time--I sampled Jim when he was last in London a fortnight
ago--"
"You will tell me about it when you have decided, won't you, Nina.
You see I have become a brother, and am interested in the
psychological aspects of things."
"Of course I will"--then she went on meditatively, her rather plaintive
voice low.
"I think all our true feeling is used up, Nicholas--our souls--if we have
souls--are blunted by the war agony. Only our senses still feel. When
Jim looks at me with his attractive blue eyes, and I see the D.S.O. and
the M.C., and his white nice teeth--and how his hair is brushed, and
how well his uniform fits, I have a jolly all-overish sensation--and I
don't much listen to what he is saying--he says lots of love--and I think
I would really like him all the time. Then, when he has gone I think of
other things, and I feel he would not understand a word about them,
and because he isn't there I don't feel the delicious all-overish sensation,
so I rather decide to marry Rochester--there would be such
risk--because when you are married to a man, it is possible to get much
fonder of him. Jim is a year younger than I am--It would be a strain,
perhaps in a year or two--especially if I got fond."

"You had better take the richer," I told her--"Money stands by one, it is
an attraction which even the effects of war never varies or lessens," and
I could hear that there was bitterness in my voice.
"You are quite right," Nina said, taking no notice of it--"but I don't
want money--I have enough for every possible need, and my boy has
his own. I want something kind and affectionate to live with."
"You want a master--and a slave."
"Yes."
"Nina, when you loved me--what did you want?"
"Just you, Nicholas--just you."
"Well, I am here now, but an eye and a leg gone, and a crooked
shoulder, changes me;--so it is true love--even the emotion of the soul,
depends upon material things--"
Nina thought for a while.
"Perhaps not the emotion of the soul--if we have souls?--but what we
know of love now certainly does. I suppose there are people who can
love with the soul, I am not one of them."
"Well, you are honest, Nina."
She had her coffee and liqueur, she was graceful and composed and
refined, either Jim or Rochester will have a very nice wife.
Burton coughed when she had left.
"Out with it, Burton!"
"Mrs. Ardilawn is a kind lady, Sir Nicholas."
"Charming."

"I believe you'd be better with some lady to look after you, Sir--."
"To hell with you. Telephone for Mr. Maurice--I don't want any
woman--we can play piquet."
This is how my day ended--.
Maurice and piquet--then the widow and the divorce for dinner--and
now alone again! The sickening rot of it all.
* * *
Sunday--Nina came for tea--she feels that I am a great comfort to her in
this moment of her life, so full of indecision--It seems that Jim has
turned up too, at the Ritz, where Rochester still is, and that his physical
charm has upset all her calculations again.
"I am really very worried Nicholas," she said, "and you, who are a dear
family friend"--I am a family friend now!--"ought to be able to help
me."
"What the devil do you want me to do, Nina?--outset them both, and
ask you to marry me?"
"My dearest Nicholas!" it seemed to her that I had suggested that she
should marry father Xmas! "How funny you are!"
Once it was the height of her desire--Nina is eight years older than I
am--I can see now her burning eyes one night on the river in the June of
1914, when she insinuated, not all playfully, that it would be good to
wed.
"I think you had better take Jim my dear, after all. You are evidently
becoming in love with him and you have proved to me that the physical
charm matters most,--or if you are afraid of that, you had better do as
another