The Judgment of Eve | Page 7

dream. She put a hand on each of his shoulders, and looked at him with shining eyes.
"Oh, Arthur, dear, it's all too beautiful. I couldn't say anything, because I was so happy. Come, and let's look at everything all over again."
And they went, and looked at everything all over again, reviving the delight that had gone to the furnishing of that innocent interior. She cried out with joy over the cheap art serges, the brown-paper backgrounds, the blue-and-gray drugget, the oak chairs with their rush bottoms, the Borne-Jones photogravures, the "Hope" and the "Love Leading Life," and the "Love Triumphant." Their home would be the home of a material poverty, but to Aggie's mind it was also a shrine whose austere beauty sheltered the priceless spiritual ideal.
Their wedded ardor flamed when he showed her for the tenth time his wonderful contrivance for multiplying bookshelves, as their treasures accumulated year by year. They spoke with confidence of a day when the shelves would reach from floor to ceiling, to meet the inevitable expansion of the intellectual life.
They went out that very evening to a lecture on "Appearance and Reality," an inspiring lecture. They lived in it again (sitting over their cocoa in the tiny dining-room), each kindling the other with the same sacred flame. She gazed with adoration at his thin, flushed face, as, illumined by the lecture, he developed with excitement his theory of life.
[Illustration: "Over their cocoa he developed his theory of life"]
"Only think," he said, "how people wreck their lives just because they don't know the difference between appearance and reality! Now we do know. We're poor; but we don't care a rap, because we know, you and I, that that doesn't matter. It's the immaterial that matters."
Spiritually he flamed.
"I wouldn't change with my boss, though he's got five thousand a year. He's a slave--a slave to his carriage and horses, a slave to his house, a slave to the office--"
"So are you. You work hard enough."
"I work harder than he does. But I keep myself detached."
"Some more cocoa, dearie?"
"Rather. Yes, three lumps, please. Just think what we can get out of life, you and I, with our tiny income. We get what we put into it--and that's something literally priceless, and we mustn't let it go. Whatever happens we must stick to it."
"Nothing can take it away from us," said Aggie, rapt in her dream.
"No; no outside thing can. But, Aggie--we can take it from each other, if we let ourselves get slack. Whatever we do," he said, solemnly, "we mustn't get slack. We must keep it up."
"Yes," said Aggie, "we must keep it up."
They had pledged themselves to that.

IV
No fowler spreads his snares in sight of those innocent birds that perch on the tree of life in paradise. As Arthur's soul (it was a vain soul) preened its wings before her, Aggie never inquired whether the brilliance of its plumage was its own, or merely common to all feathered things in the pairing season. Young Arthur's soul was like a lark, singing in heaven its delirious nuptial hymn. Aggie sat snug in her nest and marvelled at her mate, at the mounting of his wings, the splendid and untiring ardors of his song. Nor was she alarmed at his remarkable disappearance into the empyrean. Lost to sight he might be, but she could count on his swift, inevitable descent into the nest.
The nest itself was the most wonderful nest a bird ever sat in. The two were so enthusiastic over everything that they delighted even in that dreadful, creaking, yellow villa. Its very vices entertained them. When it creaked they sat still and looked at each other, waiting for it to do it again. No other house ever possessed such ungovernable and mysterious spontaneities of sound. It was sometimes, they said, as if the villa were alive. And when all the wood-work shrank, and the winter winds streamed through their sitting-room, Aggie said nothing but put sand-bags in the window and covered them with art serge.
Her mother declared that she had never stayed in a more inconvenient house; but Aggie wouldn't hear a word against it. It was the house that Arthur had chosen. She was sorry, she said, if her mother didn't like it. Mrs. Purcell was sorry, too, because she could not honestly say that, in the circumstances, she enjoyed a visit to Aggie and her husband. They made her quite uncomfortable, the pair of them. Their ceaseless activities and enthusiasms bewildered her. She didn't care a rap about the lectures, and thought they were mad to go traipsing all the way to Hampstead to harangue about things they could have discussed just as well--now, couldn't they?--at home. Aggie, she said, would become completely undomesticated. Mrs. Purcell was never pressed to stay longer than