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“The girl’s eyes filled with tears. Such a future as he promised her was too dazzling to be viewed except through such a dimness.
“Come to my aunt’s for tea to-night,” she whispered. “The Daniel Webster boarding-house, Guildford Street. My money is in my own hands. Sixty thousand dollars.”
“The legitimate end of the story has come—you have solved the question,” he murmured.
He rose and returned to his desk. Sixty thousand dollars—twelve thousand pounds. He had calculated on five millions. Sixty thousand—well, it was better than nothing.
And that insolent girl, Amber Severn, would know that all girls were not like her—that was something too.
But by the time he had come to consider this very important point, Amber Severn, full of anger against the man who had not hesitated to take advantage of his position as the master of a school in order to make a proposal to one of his pupils—the man who had outraged her sense of the protecting influences of Platonic friendship, was flying along in her motor Victoria in the direction of Palace Gate where was the town residence of the Under Secretary for the Arbitration Department. She was burning with indignation against Mr. Owen Glendower Richmond, for his having the effrontery to add to the efforts which other people had already made to shatter her theory. She had heard of preceptors—they were mostly in the musical line—taking advantage of their opportunities to make love to their pupils and she had always held such persons in contempt. But if they were contemptible, how much more so was not such a man as Mr. Richmond—a man whose business it was to give a helping hand to those who might be anxious to write books illustrating the charm of disinterested friendship between men and women?
She felt very bitterly in regard to Mr. Richmond, quite as bitterly as did Barak the son of Zippor against the professional vituperator who, when he had a chance of showing what stuff he was made of, had rounded upon his patron. Amber had great hopes that one day a novel might be written to make the world aware of the beautiful possibilities of friendship for friendship’s sake only, between the sexes, and she had looked to Mr. Richmond to help on such a project. And yet it was he who had gone further than any one else in impressing on her the weakness of the basis of her faith.
She felt greatly disappointed. She felt that she was being daily disillusioned, and no one likes to be disillusioned: it makes one feel such a fool. So great an effect had the act of Guy Overton and Mr. Richmond upon her that she actually felt glad that she had not bound herself irrevocably to her theory but that latterly she had hedged. She knew that her attitude in regard to Lord Lullworth was suggestive of the hedge. He had boldly refused any compromise with her. He had told her at the outset of their acquaintance that he scoffed at the idea of her ideal—that his object in coming to see her would be strictly anti-platonic and yet her fondness for experiments had been so great that she had not made his scoffing at her ideal of friendship a barrier to their future association. If this was not hedging there never was hedging in any question of philosophy in the world; and so far as she could make out philosophy was simply the science of hedging.
She felt glad that she had encouraged Lord Lullworth, the exponent of a cult that admitted of no compromise. With him she was at least safe. For obvious reasons, he could never cause her to feel such disappointment as she felt at the conduct of Guy Overton and at the conduct of Owen Glendower Richmond. When one is in the presence of a man who promptly avows himself a brigand one is never surprised if one feels a tug at one’s purse. The surprise and the sorrow come only when one is in the company of a professional moralist and detects him trying to wheedle one’s handkerchief out of one’s pocket.
By the time she had reached the Brompton Road Amber Severn was feeling very strongly that the companionship of professed brigands was much to be preferred to the association with philosophers who talked of disinterested friendship while in the act of pocketing your silver spoons. An avowed lover was, she was sure, infinitely safer than a man who carries Plato in his breast pocket and presses his hand upon it while he makes a glib proposal of marriage to every girl he meets.
Amber had been dwelling so much upon her philosophy and its development that she half hoped that Josephine was not at home: there was just a possibility that if Josephine was not at home, she, Amber, would get back to her own home in time to give Lord Lullworth a cup of tea on his return with the matched silks for her mother. She was therefore slightly disappointed to learn that Miss West was at home and in the drawing-room with her ladyship.
Josephine was paler than Amber had ever seen her, and she was certainly colder than she had ever known her. She scarcely made any response to Amber’s long kiss.
Resignation—that was the word which came to Amber’s mind when she held her friend by both hands and looked at her. She was a statue—a marble statue of Resignation. The worst might come; it would not move her.
“I thought—I expected—” Amber began, with a tone of reproach in her voice. “You are really going to marry him—him—Mr. Clifton?” she cried, after faltering over a word or two.
“Did you not see it in the papers, and has any one the hardihood to put the papers in the wrong?” said Josephine.
“And you are to be congratulated? I am to congratulate you?” said Amber.
“Ah, that is quite another matter, my Amber,” laughed Josephine. Amber did not like her laugh.
“Why should it be another matter?” she asked. “If you love——”
“Heavens! are you—you—you who are the exponent of the ineffable fragrance of friendship—according to Plato—are you going to talk of the lustre of love?” said Josephine. “There’s a cluster of phrases for you, my dear. ‘The fragrance of Friendship—the lustre of Love’—quite like a modern poet’s phrase, is it not? Send it to your friend Mr. Richmond to serve up to his fourth form pupils. ‘Given, the phrase to make the poem’—that’s the exercise—what does he call it—the Time Study? Do let us try it. It should run like this: ‘The Fragrance of Friendship is folly’—that’s a capital line—even though it does contain a memory of ‘Dolores.’ And then you must go on—‘The Lustre of Love is a lure’? Yes, that might do, if you can’t find anything better. And now let us talk about something agreeable for a change. Here is my dear mother dying to tell you what she thinks of your trying to entrap poor Lord Lully in your network of Platonism. She saw you in the garden at Hyde Park Gate on Monday.”
