The Making of a Prig Part 31

"Your--last holidays?" She felt, without seeing, that he had looked up sharply at her.

"I don't suppose it will interest you," she went on, rousing herself to be more explicit; "but I am giving up my work in London, and going home for good."

There was the slightest perceptible pause before he spoke.

"Would you care to tell me why?"

"Because," said Katharine slowly, "I happened to find out, through a friend, that I was a prig; and I am going home to try and learn not to be a prig any more." She was looking straight at him as she finished speaking. His face was quite incomprehensible just then.

"Was that a true friend?" he asked.

"People who tell us unpleasant things about ourselves are always said to be our true friends, are they not?" she said, evasively.

"That is not an answer to my question; I was not dealing in generalities when I asked it. But of course, you have every right to withhold the answer, if it pleases you--"

"I don't think I know the answer," said Katharine. "I have always found your questions too difficult to answer; and as to this one,--I wish I could be sure that it was a friend at all." He moved his chair, involuntarily, a little nearer hers.

"Can I do anything to make you feel more sure?" he asked.

She shook her head, and he moved away again. "Of course, you are the best judge in the matter," he resumed, more naturally; "but it is rather a serious step to take at the outset of your career, is it not?"

"Perhaps," she said, indifferently; "but then, I am not a man, you see. There is no career possible for a woman, because her feelings are always more important to her than all the ambition in the world. A man only draws on his feelings for his recreation; but a woman makes them the whole business of her life, and that is why she never gets on. I don't suppose you can realise this, because it is so different for you. Everybody expects a man to get on; it is made comparatively easy for him, and n.o.body ever disputes his way of doing it. A man can have as much fun as he likes, as long as he isn't found out,--and it's easy for a man not to be found out," she added, with a sigh.

"Easier than for a woman?" He spoke in the bantering tone that was so familiar to her.

"Oh, a woman is dogged by detectives from her cradle, mostly drawn from the ranks of her own s.e.x. It is a compliment we pay ourselves, in one sense. We dare not inquire into the private life of a man, because of the iniquities he is supposed to practise; but there is so little scandal attached to a woman's name, that we are anxious not to miss any of it." She laughed at her small attempt to be frivolous, and Paul brightened considerably. He could understand her when she was in this mood, and his peace of mind was undisturbed by it.

"I suppose the man is still unborn who will take the trouble to champion his s.e.x, and explain that men are not all profligates before they are married," he observed. "I wonder why women always think of us as cads, and then take us for husbands. I can't think why they want to marry us at all, though."

"And we can't think what reason there is for you to offer _us_ marriage, unless you do it for position or something like that,"

retorted Katharine, and then bit her lip and stopped short, as she realised what she had said. In the embarra.s.sing pause that followed, Marion came back into the room.

"Well, you two don't look as though you'd had much conversation," she remarked.

"We haven't," said Katharine, getting up to leave. "Mr. Wilton's conversation, you see, is all bespoken already."

"Miss Austen is a little hard on me," said Paul. "I have had so little practice in conversation with brilliant and learned young lecturers, that--"

"That I will leave you to a less dismal companion," interrupted Katharine, a little abruptly.

"Will you allow me to suggest," he went on, as he held her hand for a moment, "that you should try and think more kindly of the particular friend who was so unpleasantly frank to you?"

"If I thought that the friend in question were likely to be affected by my opinion of him, perhaps I might," she said, as she turned away.

When she had gone, Marion asked him what he had meant.

"Merely a pa.s.sing reflection on something she had been telling me,"

was his reply.

"Oh," said Marion, "did she tell you about her love affair?"

"My dear girl, Miss Austen is not likely to favour me with these interesting disclosures, is she? I didn't know she had a love affair, as you rather frankly express it."

"She isn't a bit the sort, is she? I only found it out this afternoon; he's an awful beast, I should think,--led her on, and treated her villainously, poor old Kitty! Isn't it a shame?"

"Did she tell you all that?"

"Don't look so surprised! Of course she did; at least, I guessed, because she looked so miserable. I always know; I've had so much experience, you see. But it's much worse for Kitty, don't you know, because she takes things so seriously. It's a mistake, isn't it? I would give a good lot to meet the man who has ill treated her, though!"

"Yes? What would you do to him?"

"I would tell him he was a horrid little bounder, and that Kitty was well rid of him."

"In which case there is no occasion to pity her, is there?"

"Oh, how unsympathetic you are! Of course it's just as bad, whatever the man is like. It's always the saints like Kitty who break their hearts for the most worthless men. I'm not made like that; I should soon console myself with some one else, and make the first one mad.

But then, I'm not clever."

"Your cousin is a most interesting psychological study," said Paul vaguely.

"What do you mean? She is a very nice girl indeed," cried Marion indignantly; and Paul silently condemned the whole s.e.x, without reservation.

It was a particularly bright and sunny evening when Katharine returned to her home,--a failure. She felt that, to be appropriate, it should have been dull and dreary; but it was on the contrary quite at variance with her feelings, and she grew unaccountably happier in spite of herself, as the train sped past the familiar landmarks on the way and brought her nearer every minute to the home of her childhood.

For there was a sneaking consideration for herself in her sudden desire to serve others; she had felt out of tune with the world since it had been the means of revealing her deficiencies to herself, and she longed for the panacea of home sympathy, which was still connected in her mind with the days when she had been supreme in a small circle, a circle that believed in her if it did not precisely understand her.

She had found something wanting in the sympathies and interests which had absorbed her for the last two years, and she turned instinctively to those earlier ones which may have offered her no great allurements at the time, but which at least contained no rude awakenings. She forgot the petty discomforts and frequent annoyances of her life at home, in her present desire for rest and peace; she was tired of fighting hard for her happiness and gaining nothing but a moiety of pleasure in return; and the weary condition of mind and body in which she found herself at the end of it all, probably helped her to exaggerate the advantages of that former existence of hers, and to mistake its monotony for restfulness.

She had her first disillusionment as she hastened out of the station.

It was no one's fault that the Rector had been obliged to attend a meeting of the archaeological society, and that Miss Esther had been detained in the village; but they had never omitted to meet her before, and that they should have done so on this particular occasion which was of so much import to her, appeared in the light of a bad omen, and she set it down sadly as another penalty that she was to pay for having neglected her real duty so long. But she had yet to learn that her ardent desire to sacrifice herself for somebody did not bring with it the necessary opportunity, and it was not encouraging to discover that no one was particularly anxious to be the recipient of her good works, and that her effort at well-doing was more resented by those in authority than her previous and undisguised course of self-indulgence. Even Miss Esther mistrusted her enthusiasm, and evidently looked upon it as another freak on the part of her capricious niece, which would probably prove as transient as the last; and Katharine felt that she was touching the extreme limits of her endurance in the first few days she spent at the Rectory.

"It is very hard," she complained to herself when she had been home about a week, "that they should make it so much easier for me to be bad than good. All the same," she added, with a touch of her old defiant spirit, "I am going to be good, whether they like it or not!"

CHAPTER XVII

Ivingdon was one of those villages, common to the chalk district, that cease to possess any charm in the wet weather. The small ranges of round-topped hills which formed the only feature in the flat green stretches of country entirely lost the few characteristics they possessed, in the absence of suns.h.i.+ne, and presented neither charm nor majesty in the heavy grey atmosphere that surrounded them. The landscape appeared even less inspiriting than usual to Katharine, on a rainy day in the late autumn, as she plodded through the most squalid part of the village, and prepared to walk home through a kind of mist that had none of the exhilarating qualities of the stormy rain that always appealed to her. After four months of dull and virtuous renunciation, such a day as this was likely to hasten the reaction that had become inevitable. It was tea time when she reached the Rectory; and the aspect of the precisely arranged table, with its rigid erection of double dahlias in the middle, and the starched figure of Miss Esther at the head of it, completed the feeling of revulsion in her mind.

"My dear," said her aunt, as Katharine flung herself into a chair, "have you no intention of making yourself tidy before we begin?"

"My only intention is that of having tea as speedily as possible,"

replied Katharine. "If Peter Bunce, or any other depressing personage is likely to turn up, he may as well see me in my wet weather hat as in anything else. Besides, I rather like myself in my wet weather hat, in spite of the disapproval it has excited among the G.o.ds of the neighbourhood."

She waited instinctively for the reproof that usually came as an accompaniment to her criticism of the neighbourhood; but Miss Esther for once was preoccupied, and allowed her to go on undisturbed. "Mrs.

Jones has got another baby," continued Katharine. "That's the seventh.

And Farmer Rickard seems to have seized the opportunity to turn her husband off for the winter. There positively isn't another sc.r.a.p of news,--so may I have some tea?"