Chapter II

Anne was never very grand, but she was always grand enough. She was one of the best dressed women in London. Nobody ever saw her wearing anything unsuitable, and she was not an extravagant dresser, for whatever she bought was good, and never at all extreme. Anne dressed very carefully before she went to see Nina. She hoped it was not unfair to try to look her best, but she came to the conclusion that it wasn’t, because after all she was thirteen years older than Nina and nothing could be unfairer than that. She tried to plan out everything she was going to say in her mind. Anne generally acted with common-sense and judgment, but she was a slow thinker and often while she was carrying out one plan of action, the things that the action was to determine, had changed to something quite different. She wanted to give Norman up to the girl, but she wanted to explain exactly what Norman was like first. She was very anxious that Nina shouldn’t imagine that she felt any sense of possession about Norman (her going there to see the girl was greatly to prove that she hadn’t any claims) but on the other hand, she didn’t believe the girl could possibly understand Norman without her help. Anne kept trying to put herself into the girl’s mind, which would have been useful if she had known what the girl’s mind was like.

It was a long way to Maida Vale and she had gone on a ’bus because she had thought that arriving in a taxi would look as if she felt superior. Anne had not a great deal of imagination, but she used what she had to save the feelings of other people whether it made her uncomfortable or not. She had never been to Maida Vale before. The Edgware Road had always seemed to her the end of everything, and it was puzzling to find that it was only the beginning. Nothing that streamed away from it looked familiar. The houses, some of them very large, sprawled dismally on and on, getting further and further away from the thickset secluded centre which Anne always thought of as London. At last the conductor told her she was near the street she had asked for, and she got down, put her hat and veil a little straighter, and fought a dusty wind that drove at her with sudden vehemence, down a short broad alley. It was hardly a street, the houses shuffled together, with large dingy, shabby fronts; there was no sense of completion or privacy about them; they were cut up into apartments and business offices, with wastes of passages and empty halls in between. The house in which Nina’s aunt lived looked rather more uninhabitable than the rest. Anne rang a bell and waited for a long time before anyone came. Mrs. Dean herself answered the door at last. She had been cleaning, she explained, but all that had adhered to her from this process was dirt. Nina was upstairs in her room. Her aunt thought she had had a “turn” yesterday. She hadn’t gone to work to-day and refused to eat her dinner. No doubt a visitor would do her good. Would Anne mind going up three flights of stairs and knocking? Nina’s room was just opposite the stairs.

Anne took the stairs slowly and thoughtfully. She had not been prepared for Nina’s aunt. Nina’s aunt was without doubt a very nice, good woman, and apologetic; but she was not a lady. She was apologetic because she was not; but that didn’t make it any better. Anne knocked at the door and gave her name before she entered. She thought as she did so that perhaps it wasn’t going to be her name very much longer, and that it would then belong to the girl on the other side of the door.

Nina was sitting crouched on the bed under an open window. She had been crying so much that her beauty was drenched and spoilt. You could not have told what she looked like, except that her smooth short hair was very bright and that she wore (probably always) sport jerseys and a short blue serge skirt. The room was untidy, but it was quite clean, and above Nina’s flaming head was a bookcase full of modern literature. On her dressing table there was a photograph of Norman in a shining silver frame.

Anne guessed that the girl was educated, a little spoilt, and ashamed of living with her less educated and less spoilt relations.

Nina opened wide terrified eyes as her visitor entered. She looked like a bird that has flown through an open window and forgotten its way back to the sky. “Oh,” she said in a choking voice, “you’re—you’re Norman’s wife!” She looked so pitifully frightened, and at a loss, that Anne forgot all her plans. Instead she held out her arms and said, “My poor dear child!” and when Nina flew into them, something warm came with her, into Anne’s heart. “I didn’t know! I didn’t know!” Nina murmured, “he _did_ tell you I didn’t know? It was awful of him never to tell me—how could I dream that there was you? And yesterday I was so dreadfully happy—because it was the first time we’d really _said_ it! And it made everything wonderful. Up till then I had been happy, but I’d been afraid—I thought perhaps he didn’t mean anything except fun. I couldn’t believe it afterwards, when he told me about you. I thought he was laughing at me—he often does, you know—so I laughed too—and then I saw his eyes!—I flew out at him—I couldn’t help it—I always wanted to be decent to other girls—girls don’t have an easy time working in London with strange men; we often get taken in, but we can be decent to each other, and not take other people’s men—can’t we? And I thought Norman had been just pretending, and didn’t really care, and had _made_ me be unfair to you! I could have scratched his eyes out! I’d always been on my guard with other men, but Norman’s so different, isn’t he? You couldn’t think you needed to be on your guard with him. He never tried to catch me out or take advantage of me. He could have kissed me before, but he hadn’t. Only he knew he could. That’s what hurt me so when I thought he was pretending.”

“But my dear, he didn’t pretend,” Anne interrupted, “he does really care for you.”

“But why! Why! Why!” Nina cried desperately. “Couldn’t he have let me alone when he had you?”

This was a difficult question for Anne to answer. She could discuss Norman, and she could discuss the girl before her, but she had not been prepared to discuss herself or Norman’s relation to herself. “Men are not quite like us,” she hazarded. “We have been married ten years, and Nina, I am really older than Norman. We are actually the same age—but I feel and look much older. I think it was not strange he should turn to someone young. He may not have found all that he wanted in our marriage. I am sure I often failed him. And then you know we have no children. That makes a difference to a man that perhaps we hardly understand.”

“But you’re not old!” Nina said impatiently, “and if you’re not exactly beautiful, you’re most awfully graceful and nice-looking.”

Anne flushed under her rival’s praise. She knew exactly how nice-looking she was. She took great pains with her appearance, and from the day of her marriage she had taken even greater pains; but she knew that though she had beautiful thick glossy hair, and a good pale skin, her face was flat and large, her grey eyes small and too near together, and her nose a little heavy and without distinction. The girl before her made the worst of herself and was lovely, Anne made the very best of herself and just escaped being plain. “I don’t think looks,” Anne said a little coldly, “have a great deal to do with it.”

“Oh don’t you?” exclaimed the girl. “But I think you’re wrong. They must. Look at chorus girls and pretty actresses. They’ll catch on to any man if they want to!”

“Norman,” said Anne, “isn’t just like ordinary men.” Then she bit her lips and looked at the face before her. Could she say that Norman had not been influenced by that face?

“No—of course he’s different,” Nina agreed doubtfully, “and we’ve always had heaps of fun together. It may have been the fun he liked. But I don’t believe, do you, that he was right not to tell me? I think he just funked it. He wanted to go on having heaps of fun and not having to pay for it.”

Anne’s flush deepened. “He is paying for it now,” she said in a low voice, “he’s very unhappy—perhaps at first neither of you realised how seriously you were going to care, but I don’t see that people are to be blamed because the depth of their feeling takes them by surprise, do you?”

“Well—it’s not quite the same thing, is it—he and me?” Nina suggested. “I hadn’t _got_ a husband—let alone a nice one—up my sleeve. It didn’t really matter if I was taken by surprise or not. But people like Norman oughtn’t to let themselves get surprised! They should keep out of things, or tell. That’s the way I look at it. Lots of girls don’t mind playing about with married men—but some do, and they ought to be _told_ anyhow. I don’t judge others and I don’t say if he’d hated you—or you’d been nasty—that I should have kicked up such a row. But he had to own he liked you awfully, and anyone can see you’re a perfect dear—so I don’t think he had _any_ excuse, and I’m _furious_ with him. I can’t pretend not to be!”

“I certainly think he should have told you for your own sake,” Anne answered thoughtfully. “But he is not a conceited man, and it never occurred to him that there was any danger for you. But I don’t want you to trouble about me. That is where I think you make a mistake. From the moment you and Norman really care for each other, the question is perfectly simple. I came here to-day to tell you that as I am convinced he _does_ really care for you in the best and most permanent way, I am going to arrange for you to be free, to be together. It may take some time, but Norman thinks it can be legally and properly done.”

Nina knitted her soft surprised eyebrows. She was silent for a moment, then she said, “It’s not as simple as you think. It isn’t only a question of whether Norman cares enough. He’s let you down, and he’s let me down. You may be willing to give him up, and nobody would blame you, but I’m not at all sure that I’m willing to take him on. A man that’ll act like Norman has acted isn’t the kind of man I want.”

This view of the question was so foreign to Anne that for a moment it completely silenced her. She had been prepared for anger and tears, she had steeled herself to listen to reproaches, and to deflect them as much as possible from their rightful object; but she had never supposed any repudiation of Norman conceivable. A sentimental renunciation, the sacrifice of the girl’s heart for hers, she could have understood without taking the slightest advantage of it; but that this girl could calmly sit there and say that under the circumstances she wasn’t sure she wanted Norman swept the ground (almost any ground) from under Anne’s feet. “But—but—” she stammered, “I thought you loved him?”

“So I do,” said Nina composedly, “in reason. But I’m not going to make a fool of myself for any man—would you?”

Anne looked doubtfully at this problem. To be strictly honest, she felt that she would. She had been brought up in a different school to the girl, a school in which making a fool of yourself (if it outraged no convention) was usually advised, and invariably admired. It was not called making a fool of yourself; it was called acting for the good of others. You did not take the others into your confidence, nor the probable cost of what you were going to do. You just saw that it would be a beautiful thing to do, and did it. The girl before her had been brought up in a harder school, in which there is no margin for irrelevant sacrifices, and where you must always know what things cost, because you have got so little to pay for them with. Anne saw the contrast for a moment, and then thrust it away from her. “You couldn’t,” she said, “make a fool of yourself by loving Norman. Nor—if we can arrange the legal part of it satisfactorily—by sharing his life. I don’t take the view that you do about him, dear child. Norman is a poet, he doesn’t see practical things clearly. It would have been impossible for him to believe that you loved him—his friendship for you was just like a wonderful fairy tale to him.”

“But,” said Nina, “it didn’t stay like a wonderful fairy tale, did it? Things don’t. That’s just what I mean. _Then_ what happens?”

Anne was annoyed at the precociousness of the girl. Nina was insistent and uncivilised—she would try to hit nails on the head. At her age Anne would never have asked these awkward questions. As far as that went, she would not have asked them now; but she saw that she had got to answer them. “I think,” she said gently, “if we are patient and quiet about it, things will grow into an even more beautiful reality.”

“Well, they may,” the girl conceded, “but who’s going to do the dirty work of getting them to grow into it? You—or Norman? And what’s going to happen to you when it’s all over? Do you suppose I’m going to walk right into your life and take everything you’ve got away from you and not even _ask_ what’s to happen to you afterwards?”

“Nothing will happen to me,” said Anne, “I have a great many friends and plenty of occupation. And it doesn’t matter—I mean I don’t mind—” Suddenly without warning, the agony Anne had had so quietly by herself all night, seized her and shook her into a violent burst of tears. She felt the girl’s arms round her, strong and tense, in a passionate protectiveness. “There, you see! You see!” said the girl in a tone fierce with tenderness, “as if I didn’t know! Poor darling—as if I didn’t know!”

Anne wrenched herself away from Nina and spoke more savagely than any girl could speak. For the first time she went down into the depths of her own heart and forgot to try to behave beautifully. “You can’t!” she said, “you can’t possibly know! You’re not his wife! But you ought to be. You _must_ be if you have any heart in you! He’s being pulled to pieces by his love for you. Do you suppose I like that? Do you think I want to see the man I love broken by wanting what he can’t have? He’s different from what you think! Infinitely finer and dearer and more true! If he’s made a blunder it’s only because he’s innocent as other men seldom are—because he respects women and wouldn’t for the world do you any harm. What can I do for him if you won’t have him? He’ll never come back to me again. I’m not the sort of woman he wants. Oh yes! I daresay he’ll go on being my husband. Do you suppose that’s going to make either of us any happier? If he’s not my lover any more, I want at any rate to know that he’s got what I can’t give him! You’re not to blame for what has happened—perhaps he is—I don’t know and I don’t care. I’m too old for all this nonsense about blame. Make him happy—that’s all I ask of you—make him happy—then perhaps I’ll forgive you both—but I’ll never forgive either of you if you don’t!”

Anne rose to her feet. She put her hands on the girl’s shoulders and felt suddenly sure of her own will and her own power. Later on she would feel overwhelmed with shame at her self-exposure; but she would have got what she wanted. The girl looked up and met her eyes unflinchingly, adoringly. “Oh, if you feel like that,” she said, “I’ll do it! I’ll do anything you like.”