Mrs. Warrens Daughter | Page 5

do hope he will take this answer as final."
_Norie_: "I suppose you are not refusing him for the same old reason--that vague suggestion that he might be your half-brother?"
_Vivie_: "Oh no! Besides I pretty well know for a fact he isn't, he simply couldn't be. I'm absolutely sure my father wasn't Sam Gardner, any more than George Crofts was. I believe it was a young Irish seminarist, some student for the priesthood whom my mother met in Belgium the year before I was born. If I ever find out more I will tell you. You haven't seen 'Soapy Sam,' the Vicar of Woodcote, or that beast, George Crofts; but if you had, you'd be as sure as I am that neither of them was my father--thank goodness! As to Frank--yes--for a short time I was fond of him--till I learnt about my mother's 'profession.' It was rather a silly sort of fondness. He was two years younger than I; I suppose my feeling for him was half motherly ... I neither encouraged him nor did I repel him. I think I was experimenting ... I rather wanted to know what it felt like to be kissed by a man. Frank was a nice creature, so far as a man can be. But all those horrid revelations that broke up our summer stay at Haslemere four years ago--when I ran away to you--gave me an utter disgust for marriage. And what a life mine would have been if I had married him then; or after he went out to South Africa! Ghastly! Want of money would have made us hate one another and Frank would have been sure to become patronizing. Because I was without a father in the legitimate way he would have thought he was conferring a great honour on me by marrying me, and would probably have expected me to drudge for him while he idled his time away.... Oh, when I think what a life I have led here, with you, full of interesting work and bright prospects, free from money anxieties--dearest, dearest Norie--I can't thank you enough. No, I'm not going to be sentimental--the New Woman is never that. I'm going to get the tea ready; and after we've had tea on the balcony we really must go into business matters. Your being away so much the last fortnight, things have accumulated that I did not like to decide for myself..."
Norie (speaking rather louder as Vivie is now busy in the adjoining roomlet, boiling the kettle on the gas stove and preparing the tea): "Yes. And I've got lots to talk over with you. All sorts of plans have come into my head. I don't know whether I have been eating anything more than usually brain stimulating--everything has a physical basis--but I have come back from this scattered holiday full of new ideas."
Presently they are seated on camp-stools sipping tea, eating strawberries and cakes, under the striped sun-blind.
Norie continues: "Do you remember Beryl Clarges at Newnham?"
_Vivie_: "Yes--the pretty girl--short, curly hair, brown eyes, rather full lips, good at mathematics--hockey ... purposely shocked you by her outspokenness--well?"
_Norie_: "Well, she's had a baby ... a month ago ... awful rumpus with her people ... Father's Dean Clarges ... Norwich or Ely, I forget which ... They've put her in a Nursing Home in Seymour Street. Mother wears a lace mantilla and cries softly. Beryl went wrong, as they call it, with an architect."
_Vivie_: "Pass your cup ... Don't take all the strawberries (_Norie_: "Sorry! Absence of mind--I've left you three fat ones") Architect? Strange! I always thought all architects were like Praddy--had no passions except for bricks and mortar and chiselled stone and twirligig iron grilles ... perhaps just a thrill over a nude statue. Why, till you told me this I'd as soon have trusted my daughter--if I had one--with an architect as with a Colonel of Engineers--You know! The kind that believes in the identity of the Ten Lost Tribes with the British and is a True Protestant! Poor Beryl! But how? what? when? why?"
_Norie_: "I think it began at Cambridge--the acquaintance did ... Later, it developed into a passion. He had already one wife in Sussex somewhere and four children. He took a flat for her in Town--a studio--because Berry had given up mathematics and was going in for sculpture; and there, whenever he could get away from Storrington or some such place and from his City office, he used to visit Beryl. This had been going on for three years. But last February she had to break it to her mother that she was six months gone. The other wife knows all about it but refuses to divorce the naughty architect, and at the same time has cut off supplies--What cowards men are and