Quisanté | Page 9

and talked for a while; before leaving, but after
the ordinary kiss of goodnight, she came back suddenly and kissed her
again; she said nothing, but the embrace was emphatic and eloquent. It
seemed to the recipient to be forgiving also; it meant "I want you to be
happy, don't imagine I think of anything else." If Fanny kissed her like
that, it was because Fanny supposed that she had made up her mind to

marry Weston Marchmont. She was fully conscious that the inference
was not a strange one to draw from her conduct that evening. But now
the mood of impulse was entirely gone; she considered the matter in a
cool spirit, and her talk with Dick Benyon assumed unlooked-for
importance in her deliberations. To marry Marchmont was a step
entirely in harmony with the ideal which her family and the world had
of her, which Marchmont himself most thoroughly and undoubtingly
believed in. If she were really what she was supposed to be, the match
would satisfy her as well as it would everybody else. But if she were
quite different in her heart? In that case it might indeed be urged that no
marriage would or could permanently satisfy her or the whole of her
nature. This was likely enough; to see how often something of that kind
happened it was, unfortunately, only necessary to run over ten or a
dozen names which offered themselves promptly enough from the list
of her acquaintance. Still to marry knowing you would not be satisfied
was to drop below the common fate of marrying knowing that you
might not be; it gave up the golden chance; it abandoned illusion just
where illusion seemed most necessary.
Oh for life, for the movement of life! It is perhaps hard to realise how
often that cry breaks from the hearts of women. No doubt the aspiration
it expresses is rather apt to end in antics, not edifying to the onlooker,
hardly (it may be supposed) comforting to the performer. But the antics
are one thing, the aspiration another, and they have the aspiration
strongest who condemn and shun the antics. The matter may be stated
very simply, at least if the form in which it presented itself to May
Gaston in her twenty-third year be allowed to suffice. Most girls are
bred in a cage, most girls expect to escape therefrom by marriage, most
girls find that they have only walked into another cage. She had
nothing to say, so far as her own case went, against the comfort either
of the old or of the new cage; they were both indeed luxurious. But
cages they were and such she knew them to be. Doubtless there must be
limits, not only to the tolerance of Weston Marchmont and of society,
but to everything else except infinity. But there are great expanses,
wide spaces, short of infinity. When she walked out of her first cage,
the one which her mother's careful fingers had kept locked on her, she
would like not to walk into another, but to escape into some park or

forest, not boundless, yet so large as to leave room for exploring, for
the finding of new things, for speculation, for doubt, excitement,
uncertainty, even for the presence of apprehension and the possibility
of danger. As she surveyed the manner in which she was expected to
pass her life, the manner in which she was supposed (she faced now the
common interpretation of her conduct this evening) already to have
elected to pass it, she felt as a speculator feels towards Consols, as a
gambler towards threepenny whist. It seemed as though nothing could
be good which did not also hold within it the potency of being very bad,
as though certainty damned and chance alone had lures to offer. She
would have liked to take life in her hand--however precious a thing,
what use is it if you hoard it?--and see what she could make of it, what
usury its free loan to fate and fortune would earn. She might lose it;
youth made light of the risk. She might crawl back in sad plight; the
Prodigal Son did not think of that when he set out. She found herself
wishing she had nothing, that she might be free to start on the search
for anything.
Like Quisanté? Why, yes, just like Quisanté. Like that strange,
intolerable, vulgar, attractive, intermittently inspired creature, who
presented himself at life's roulette-table, not less various in his own
person than were the varying turns he courted, unaccountable as chance,
baffling as fate, changeable as luck. Indeed he was like life itself, a
thing you loved and hated, grew weary of and embraced, shrank from
and pursued. To see him then was in a way to look