Sally Bishop | Page 4

her feet were moving quickly, tapping on the
pavement. He prepared himself to speak to her, his hand getting ready
to lift his hat. If she had given him half the encouragement that he
imagined he required, he would have found courage; but without lifting
her head, as though she were utterly unconscious of his presence, she

hurried by in the direction of Bedford Street and the West.
Was that to be the end of it? Had he waited that full quarter of an hour
in the drizzling rain for nothing? The man of fixed intent is hardly
beaten so easily as that. There was no definite evil purpose in his mind.
He was caught in that mood when a man must talk to some one, and a
woman for preference. The waiting of fifteen minutes in that sluggish
atmosphere had only intensified it. The fact that in the first moment of
opportunity his courage had failed had had no power to move him from
his purpose, or to change the prompting of his mood.
As soon as she had passed him on the pavement, he turned resolutely
and followed her.
CHAPTER II
All life is an adventure, even the most monotonous moments of it. It is
impossible to walk the streets of London without being conscious of
that spirit of the possibility of happenings which makes life tolerable. It
was not to feast their eyes upon unknown worlds, or drench their hands
in a stream of gold, that the old marauders of England set forth upon
the high seas. Assuredly it must have been, in the hearts of them, that
love of adventure, that desire for the happenings of strange things
which spurred them on to face God in the wind, to dare Him in the
tempest, to brave Him even into the unknown.
Some of that instinct, but in its various and lesser degrees, is left in us
now. For one moment it rose in the mind of Sally Bishop, as she turned
into Bedford Street and directed her course towards Piccadilly Circus.
It had crossed her mind in suspicion--the uprush of an idea, as a bubble
struggles to the surface--that the man whom she had found waiting
outside the premises of Bonsfield & Co. had had the intention in his
mind to speak to her as she passed. Now, as she looked sideways when
she turned the corner, and found that he had altered his direction--was
following her--the suspicion became a conviction. She knew.
In the first realization, the thought of adventure thrilled her. A life,
quiet and uneventful such as hers, looks of necessity for its happiness

to the little thrills, the little emotions that combine to make one day less
monotonous than another. But when, having reached Garrick Street and,
looking hurriedly over her shoulder, she found that not only was he still
following, but that he had perceptibly lessened the distance between
them, the spirit of interest sank--died out, like a candle snuffed in a gale.
In that moment she became afraid.
It is nameless, that terror in the mind of a woman pursued. Yet without
it one of the first of her abstract attractions would be gone.
Undoubtedly it is the joy of the pursuer that the quarry should take to
flight. Would there be any chase without? But long years of study
amongst the more advanced of us have made the fact of rather common
knowledge. The woman has learnt that to be caught there must be flight,
and, in assuming it, she has acquired for herself the instincts of the
pursuer. So an army, resorting to the strategy of retreat, is still the
pursuer in the more subtle sense of the word. It is this strategy that is
cunningly taught in the modern, genteel education of the sex. The
virtue of chastity it is called, but over the length of time it has come to
be a forced growth; it has altered intrinsically in its composition.
Education has learnt to make use of chastity, rather than to acquire it
for itself. And, after all, what is it in itself, when the gilt of its glamour
is stripped, like tinsel, from the fairy's pantomimic wand?
There is, when everything has been said, only one value in chastity in
its ideal sense, so long as we are tied to these conditions of human
instinct, and that is in the value that it brings to women. Without it, a
woman may be the essence of fascination; she may be the completeness
of attraction, but for the need of the race she is undesirable. Without
chastity, a woman may be most things to a man, but she cannot be a
mother to his child.
Amongst those girls, then, whose desire in life it is to marry,
conforming