CAPÍTULO 2.

 

            SOPHIA BEVAN was not backward to avail herself of the freedom conferred by her position. A frequent and welcome visitor at the houses of her friends, she insisted on having her own house full in her turn; and each autumn saw her the hostess of a gay and distinguished party of the friends whom she had met

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in London during the previous season. She owned that she liked ‘Londony’ people, and was indifferent to the vegetative denizens of the provinces. Her favourite residences were first, London, then, her own house, when she had a party of London friends, and lastly, Brighton in the winter, because all Londoners went there. Her active mind and strong human sympathies made a real living society absolutely necessary to her. In the intervals of this, she lived upon the strongest food she could find in books, to the comprehension of which she brought power of abstract thought, and a capacity for generalisation usual only in the most cultivated masculine understandings. It required little effort for her to seize the meaning of the abstrusest philosophical treatise, and assimilate it to her own vigorous mental constitution. Her large benevolence showed itself not so much in giving, as in helping others to help themselves, by infusing her own indomitable spirit of activity into their diffident or despairing minds. She lived as if, believing in no world beyond the present, she must do all she could without loss of time, by way of fulfilling her nature. To a mere lounger in life, sometimes to Noel himself, when indulging in reverie, or pleading delay to her urging him to go and distinguish himself, she would say, –

 

            ‘Oh, that soul of yours! You will never do any good till you get rid of it. It is only because you fancy you will live for ever, and have plenty of time, that you are so idle. Remember the parable of the buried talents. I apply it to this life.’

 

            Of course, there were not wanting those who interpreted such utterance as a confession of faith; and it may be admitted that those who knew her best were aware that the sentiment proceeded no less from a participation in certain modern developments of thought, than from an intense aversion to any lack of energy, mental or physical, on the part of any one with whom she came into contact.

 

            Equally free from the obligations imposed by an adherence to any particular religious system, Edmund Noel was as great a contrast to Sophia Bevan as can well be conceived. Conscious that he was wasting his years in unworthy indolence, and doubtful as to what might be his proper vocation, he hesitated to commit himself to any occupation that did not completely coincide with his idea of things, and respond to all the exigencies of his nature. He felt himself artist, but not having had the special education necessary to enable him to achieve such high

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success as he coveted, in any of the lines which attracted him, he had devoted himself to the desultory study and contemplation of beauty, under whatever guise it might present itself to his view. Beauty in Art, beauty in Nature, beauty in Character, these formed the sole Trinity of his adoration, the sole representative for him of the Infinite in the Finite. Impelled by his mental constitution to seek toward the Absolute, and striving ever to see things in their highest or most complex aspect and relation, he had attained a patience almost divine in his method of procedure with the questions, social and abstract, to which his deeper thoughts were devoted, and which would have been quite divine if mated with a high and practical purpose.

 

            Sophia Bevan was certainly the oldest and greatest friend he had, but her impulsiveness jarred upon him as much as his calmness and patience irritated her; for while he acknowledged the sting of the goad wherewith she sought to urge him on to achievement, he perceived that the effect was to hinder rather than to help him forward. His theory, by which he endeavoured to explain this to her, she either could not or would not understand.

 

            ‘The mind that would perceive truth must remain at rest. Ruffle its surface or agitate its depths, and the rays from the universe become broken and distorted, and form no definite image.’

 

            This was his idea. Hers was different as their two natures, but each was harmonious in itself.

 

            ‘The mind that pursues truth must not stand still. Truth is infinite, and the individual is an atom. We are as butterflies or bees in a garden of facts; and the insect that flies fastest and sucks most eagerly, sees most beauty and gathers most honey.’

 

            ‘Say, rather, devours most juice,’ he returned; to make it into honey requires a very different process. Herein is our point of difference.’

 

            ‘I see, I see!’ cried Sophia. ‘I get the juice, and you make it into honey. I buzz about and find the facts, and you arrange and harmonise them. On those terms we will be friends, and I will tease you no more, – except when you aggravate me by making honey too slowly.’

 

            ‘Three fine days and a thunderstorm,’ he remarked, with a smile of arch interrogation.

 

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            ‘I forgive the insinuation against my temper for the sake of its cleverness. But really we have not had a serious quarrel all the autumn. If we get through to Christmas without one I shall claim the flitch of bacon,’ and she laughed heartily at her own joke.

 

            Had Edmund’s indifference to establishing a closer relation to her been influenced by the circumstance of her loss of beauty, it would have been impossible for him to have felt at ease in her society. But the consciousness of the ‘difference between their natures had from their earliest intimacy been sufficiently strong to keep him from ever overstepping the limits of brotherly regard. His sense of harmony probably scarcely exceeded hers; but, as she herself said, ‘he allowed it to exercise more influence on his life than she considered wise or right.’ He said that it was a question of proportion. It was this that made him an unpractical man in her eyes. She declared that he would never join any political party, because of some trifling points of divergence; would never marry till he found a goddess.

 

            ‘Are you perfect yourself,’ she indignantly asked him one day, ‘that you think you have the right to have everything perfectly to your liking? Perfect knowledge and a perfect woman! How you will be taken in some day! You are just as likely to fancy you have found the desired perfection in another man’s wife, and then may heaven have mercy on you! For you will never see her close enough to lose the illusion. You are not the man to let her run away with you. That would shock your royal highness’s sense of delicacy, and you would reproach her for her demonstrativeness.’

 

            The amused twinkle of his eyes recalled her to herself, and before he could speak, she exclaimed, –

 

            ‘You are always provoking me into saying the opposite of what I really mean! You will go and think now that I have been scolding you for not running away with a married woman. I always say you are the most immoral man I know, – you make me say such things, while you all the time look knowing and say nothing. I hate people to be always afraid of committing themselves. I tell you everything, and you tell me nothing, which I call unfair, and a dereliction of our friendship.’

 

            ‘I assure you that I am no conscious hypocrite,’ he replied. ‘My reserve is only the natural reaction from your openness.’

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We both do what we can do best. Like the blessed Glendoveer, –

 

“ ’Tis yours to speak, and mine to hear”

 

One ingredient of sociability is to excite conversation in others without obtruding yourself.’

 

            ‘Well you certainly are a talent for drawing people out without revealing yourself. You are a sort of mental precipice which people go to the edge of, and look over, and straightaway fling themselves down.’

 

            ‘I hope they fall softly,’ returned Edmund, laughing. ‘But supposing your account to be correct, surely it merely means that being self-contained and reticent about myself and my own affairs, people repose confidence in me in the belief that I shall be equally so about them and theirs.’

 

            ‘I don’t believe it is anything half so nice,’ answered the lady. ‘People take you for a yawning grave, and hasten to you to bury their secrets in oblivion.’

 

 

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