Widdershins | Page 8

what it is," said Miss Bengough. "It's been used to wrap up a harp before putting it into its case."
"By Jove, that's probably just what it was," said Oleron. "I could make neither head nor tail of it...."
They finished the tour of the flat, and returned to the sitting-room.
"And who lives in the rest of the house?" Miss Bengough asked.
"I dare say a tramp sleeps in the cellar occasionally. Nobody else."
"Hm!... Well, I'll tell you what I think about it, if you like."
"I should like."
"You'll never work here."
"Oh?" said Oleron quickly. "Why not?"
"You'll never finish Romilly here. Why, I don't know, but you won't. I know it. You'll have to leave before you get on with that book."
He mused for a moment, and then said:
"Isn't that a little--prejudiced, Elsie?"
"Perfectly ridiculous. As an argument it hasn't a leg to stand on. But there it is," she replied, her mouth once more full of the large-headed hat pins.
Oleron was reaching down his hat and coat. He laughed.
"I can only hope you're entirely wrong," he said, "for I shall be in a serious mess if Romilly isn't out in the autumn."
IV
As Oleron sat by his fire that evening, pondering Miss Bengough's prognostication that difficulties awaited him in his work, he came to the conclusion that it would have been far better had she kept her beliefs to herself. No man does a thing better for having his confidence damped at the outset, and to speak of difficulties is in a sense to make them. Speech itself becomes a deterrent act, to which other discouragements accrete until the very event of which warning is given is as likely as not to come to pass. He heartily confounded her. An influence hostile to the completion of Romilly had been born.
And in some illogical, dogmatic way women seem to have, she had attached this antagonistic influence to his new abode. Was ever anything so absurd! "You'll never finish Romilly here." ... Why not? Was this her idea of the luxury that saps the springs of action and brings a man down to indolence and dropping out of the race? The place was well enough--it was entirely charming, for that matter--but it was not so demoralising as all that! No; Elsie had missed the mark that time....
He moved his chair to look round the room that smiled, positively smiled, in the firelight. He too smiled, as if pity was to be entertained for a maligned apartment. Even that slight lack of robust colour he had remarked was not noticeable in the soft glow. The drawn chintz curtains--they had a flowered and trellised pattern, with baskets and oaten pipes--fell in long quiet folds to the window-seats; the rows of bindings in old bookcases took the light richly; the last trace of sallowness had gone with the daylight; and, if the truth must be told, it had been Elsie herself who had seemed a little out of the picture.
That reflection struck him a little, and presently he returned to it. Yes, the room had, quite accidentally, done Miss Bengough a disservice that afternoon. It had, in some subtle but unmistakable way, placed her, marked a contrast of qualities. Assuming for the sake of argument the slightly ridiculous proposition that the room in which Oleron sat was characterised by a certain sparsity and lack of vigour; so much the worse for Miss Bengough; she certainly erred on the side of redundancy and general muchness. And if one must contrast abstract qualities, Oleron inclined to the austere in taste....
Yes, here Oleron had made a distinct discovery; he wondered he had not made it before. He pictured Miss Bengough again as she had appeared that afternoon--large, showy, moistly pink, with that quality of the prize bloom exuding, as it were, from her; and instantly she suffered in his thought. He even recognised now that he had noticed something odd at the time, and that unconsciously his attitude, even while she had been there, had been one of criticism. The mechanism of her was a little obvious; her melting humidity was the result of analysable processes; and behind her there had seemed to lurk some dim shape emblematic of mortality. He had never, during the ten years of their intimacy, dreamed for a moment of asking her to marry him; none the less, he now felt for the first time a thankfulness that he had not done so....
Then, suddenly and swiftly, his face flamed that he should be thinking thus of his friend. What! Elsie Bengough, with whom he had spent weeks and weeks of afternoons--she, the good chum, on whose help he would have counted had all the rest of the world failed him--she, whose loyalty to him would not, he knew, swerve as long as there was breath in her--Elsie to