She went on to the apprehension of a change in him that hitherto she had not permitted herself to see—a change in his attitude to her. There had been a time when she had seemed able without an effort to nestle inside his heart. Now she felt distinctly for the first time that that hadn't happened. She had instead a sense of her embrace sliding over a rather deliberately contracted exterior.... Of course he had been in a hurry....
She tried to follow him on his journey to Croydon. Now he'd have just passed out of London Bridge. What was he thinking and feeling about her in the train? Now he would be going into the place, wherever it was, where he gave his lecture. Did he think of Behrens and curse her under his breath as he entered that tiresome room?...
It seemed part of the prevailing inconvenience of life that Daffy should see fit to pay an afternoon call.
Marjorie heard the sobs and uproar of an arrested motor, and glanced discreetly from the window to discover the dark green car with its green-clad chauffeur which now adorned her sister's life, and which might under different circumstances, have adorned her own. Wilkins—his name was Wilkins, his hair was sandy and his expression discreet, and he afforded material for much quiet humorous observation—descended smartly and opened the door. Daffy appeared in black velvet, with a huge black fur muff, and an air of being unaware that there were such things as windows in the world.
It was just four, and the cook-general, who ought to have been now in her housemaid's phase, was still upstairs divesting herself of her more culinary characteristics. Marjorie opened the door.
"Hullo, old Daffy!" she said.
"Hullo, old Madge!" and there was an exchange of sisterly kisses and a mutual inspection.
"Nothing wrong?" asked Daffy, surveying her.
"Wrong?"
"You look pale and—tired about the eyes," said Daffy, leading the way into the drawing-room. "Thought you might be a bit off it, that's all. No offence, Madge."
"I'm all right," said Marjorie, getting her back to the light. "Want a holiday, perhaps. How's every one?"
"All right. We're off to Lake Garda next week. This new play has taken it out of Will tremendously. He wants a rest and fresh surroundings. It's to be the biggest piece of work he's done—so far, and it's straining him. And people worry him here; receptions, first nights, dinners, speeches. He's so neat, you know, in his speeches.... But it wastes him. He wants to get away. How's Rag?"
"Busy."
"Lecturing?"
"And his Research of course."
"Oh! of course. How's the Babe?"
"Just in. Come up and see the little beast, Daffy! It is getting so pretty, and it talks——"
Margharita dominated intercourse for a time. She was one of those tactful infants who exactly resemble their fathers and exactly resemble their mothers, and have a charm and individuality quite distinctly their own, and she was now beginning to converse with startling enterprise and intelligence.
"Big, big, bog," she said at the sight of Daffy.
"Remembers you," said Marjorie.
"Bog! Go ta-ta!" said Margharita.
"There!" said Marjorie, and May, the nurse in the background, smiled unlimited appreciation.
"Bably," said Margharita.
"That's herself!" said Marjorie, falling on her knees. "She talks like this all day. Oh de sweetums, den!" Was it?
Daffy made amiable gestures and canary-like noises with her lips, and Margharita responded jovially.
"You darling!" cried Marjorie, "you delight of life," kneeling by the cot and giving the crowing, healthy little mite a passionate hug.
"It's really the nicest of babies," Daffy conceded, and reflected....
"I don't know what I should do with a kiddy," said Daffy, as the infant worship came to an end; "I'm really glad we haven't one—yet. He'd love it, I know. But it would be a burthen in some ways. They are a tie. As he says, the next few years means so much for him. Of course, here his reputation is immense, and he's known in Germany, and there are translations into Russian; but he's still got to conquer America, and he isn't really well known yet in France. They read him, of course, and buy him in America, but they're—restive. Oh! I do so wish they'd give him the Nobel prize, Madge, and have done with it! It would settle everything. Still, as he says, we mustn't think of that—yet, anyhow. He isn't venerable enough. It's doubtful, he thinks, that they would give the Nobel prize to any humorist now that Mark Twain is dead. Mark Twain was different, you see, because of the German Emperor and all that white hair and everything."
At this point Margharita discovered that the conversation had drifted away from herself, and it was only when they got downstairs again that Daffy could resume the thread of Magnet's career, which had evidently become the predominant interest in her life. She brought out all the worst elements of Marjorie's nature and their sisterly relationship. There were moments when it became nakedly apparent that she was magnifying Magnet to belittle Trafford. Marjorie did her best to counter-brag. She played her chief card in the F. R. S.
"They always ask Will to the Royal Society Dinner," threw out Daffy; "but of course he can't always go. He's asked to so many things."
Five years earlier Marjorie would have kicked her shins for that.
Instead she asked pointedly, offensively, if Magnet was any balder.
"He's not really bald," said Daffy unruffled, and went on to discuss the advisability of a second motor car—purely for town use. "I tell him I don't want it," said Daffy, "but he's frightfully keen upon getting one."
§ 8
When Daffy had at last gone Marjorie went back into Trafford's study and stood on the hearthrug regarding its appointments, with something of the air of one who awakens from a dream. She had developed a new, appalling thought. Was Daffy really a better wife than herself? It was dawning upon Marjorie that she hadn't been doing the right thing by her husband, and she was as surprised as if it had been suddenly brought home to her that she was neglecting Margharita. This was her husband's study—and it showed just a little dusty in the afternoon sunshine, and everything about it denied the pretensions of serene sustained work that she had always made to herself. Here were the crumpled galley proofs of his science notes; here were unanswered letters. There, she dare not touch them, were computations, under a glass paper-weight. What did they amount to now? On the table under the window were back numbers of the Scientific Bulletin in a rather untidy pile, and on the footstool by the arm-chair she had been accustomed to sit at his feet when he stayed at home to work, and look into the fire, and watch him furtively, and sometimes give way to an overmastering tenderness and make love to him. The thought of Magnet, pampered, fenced around, revered in his industrious tiresome repetitions, variations, dramatizations and so forth of the half-dozen dry little old jokes which the British public accepted as his characteristic offering and rewarded him for so highly, contrasted vividly with her new realization of Trafford's thankless work and worried face.
And she loved him, she loved him—so. She told herself in the presence of all these facts, and without a shadow of doubt in her mind that all she wanted in the world was to make him happy.
It occurred to her as a rather drastic means to this end that she might commit suicide.
She had already gone some way in the composition of a touching letter of farewell to him, containing a luminous analysis of her own defects, before her common-sense swept away this imaginative exercise.