‘I feel I ought to go anyhow,’ she resumed, ‘and of course it would

be jollier if you came too.

You’d get in such a muddle here by yourself, and eat wrong things,

and forget to air the rooms, and—oh, everything!’ She looked up

laughing. ‘Only,’ she added, ‘there’s the British Museum— ?’

‘But there’s a big library there’, I answered, ‘and all the hooks

of reference I could possibly want. It was of you I was thinking. You

could take up your painting again; you always sell half of what you

paint. It would be a splendid rest too, and Sussex is a jolly country

to walk in. By all means, Fanny, I advise—’

Our eyes met, as I stammered in my attempts to avoid expressing the

thought that hid in both our minds. My sister had a weakness for

dabbling in the various ‘new’ theories of the day, and Mabel, who

before her marriage had belonged to foolish societies for investigating

the future life to the neglect of the present one, had fostered this

undersirable tendency. Her amiable, impressionable temperament was

open to every psychic wind that blew. I deplored, detested the whole

business. But even more than this I abhorred the later influence that

Mr. Franklyn had steeped his wife in, capturing her body and soul in

his sombre doctrines. I had dreaded lest my sister also might be

caught.

‘Now that she is alone again—’

I stopped short. Our eyes now made pretence impossible, for the

truth had slipped out inevitably, stupidly, although unexpressed in

definite language. We laughed, turning our faces a moment to look at

other things in the room. Frances picked up a book and examined its

cover as though she had made an important discovery, while I took my

case out and lit a cigarette I did not want to smoke. We left the

matter there. I went out of the room before further explanation could

cause tension. Disagreements grow into discord from such tiny

things—wrong adjectives, or a chance inflection of the voice. Frances

had a right to her views of life as much as I had. At least, I

reflected comfortably, we had separated upon an agreement this time,

recognised mutually, though not actually stated.

And this point of meeting was, oddly enough, our way of regarding

some one who was dead.

For we had both disliked the husband with a great dislike, and

during his three years’ married life had only been to the house

once—for a weekend visit; arriving late on Saturday, we had left after

an early breakfast on Monday morning. Ascribing my sister’s dislike to

a natural jealousy at losing her old friend, I said merely that he

displeased me. Yet we both knew that the real emotion lay much deeper.

Frances, loyal, honourable creature, had kept silence; and beyond

saying that house and grounds—he altered one and laid out the

other—distressed her as an expression of his personality somehow

(“distressed” was the word she used), no further explanation had passed

her lips.

Our dislike of his personality was easily accounted for—up to a

point, since both of us shared the artist’s point of view that a

creed, cut to measure and carefully dried, was an ugly thing, and that

a dogma to which believers must subscribe or perish everlastingly was a

barbarism resting upon cruelty. But while my own dislike was purely

due to an abstract worship of Beauty, my sister’s had another twist in

it, for with her ‘new’ tendencies, she believed that all religions were

an aspect of truth and that no one, even the lowest wretch, could

escape ‘heaven’ in the long run.

Samuel Franklyn, the rich banker, was a man universally respected

and admired, and the marriage, though Mabel was fifteen years his

junior, won general applause; his bride was an heiress in her own

right—breweries—and the story of her conversion at a revivalist

meeting where Samuel Franklyn had spoken fervidly of heaven, and

terrifyingly of sin, hell and damnation, even contained a touch of

genuine romance.