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 Llol — M«l
 
 THE RUBICON
 
 That evening the Professor of Ignorance sal long with paper 
 spread before him, and with a pen in his hand, but he wrote 
 
 nothing. 
 
 The window of his study looked out into the street, which was 
 lit by many gas lamps. At length he dipped his pen into the ink. 
 and wrote this : — 
 
 • We should judge men by their best, not by their worst ; by their 
 possibilities, not by their limitations.' 
 
 Next morning he read what he had written the night before, and 
 smiled to himself. 
 
 'I have seen that before,' he thought. 
 
 He took a book from the little shelf that stood close to his right 
 hand, and referred to it. 
 
 ' I am not quite sure that what I have written is true,' he said. 
 
 The Professor of lipjoravre.
 
 THE RUBICON 
 
 BY 
 
 E. F. BENSON 
 
 AUTHOR or ' DODO ' 
 
 AV Tiro VOLUMES 
 VOL. I. 
 
 36 ESSEX STREET, W.C 
 1894
 
 1 
 ^ 
 
 t 
 
 
 BOOK I
 
 THE RUBICON 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 'T^HE little red-roofed town of Hayes lies in a 
 furrow of the broad-backed Wiltshire Downs; 
 it was once an important posting station, and you 
 may still see there an eighteenth century inn, much 
 too large for the present requirements of the place, 
 and telling of the days when, three times a week, the 
 coach from London used to pull up at its hospitable 
 door, and wait there half-an-hour while its pas- 
 sengers dined. The inn is called the Grampound 
 Arms, and you will find that inside the church many 
 marble Grampounds recline on their tombs, or raise 
 hands of prayer, while outside in the churchyard, 
 weeping cherubs, with reversed torches, record other 
 pious and later memories of the same family. 
 But almost opposite the Grampound Arms you
 
 4 THE RUBICON 
 
 will notice a much newer inn, where commercial 
 gentlemen make merry, called the Aston Arms, and 
 on reference to monumental evidence, you would 
 also find that cherubs are shedding similar pious 
 tears for a Sir James Aston, Bart, and his wife, 
 and, thirty years later, for Sir James Aston, first 
 Lord Hayes, and his wife. But for the Astons, no 
 marble knights keep watch on Gothic tombs. 
 
 The river Kennet, in its green wanderings, has 
 already passed, before it reaches Hayes, two houses, 
 one close down by the river, the other rather higher 
 up and on the opposite bank. The smaller and 
 older of the two is the residence of Mr Grampound, 
 the larger and newer of Lord Hayes. These trifling 
 facts, which almost all the inhabitants of Hayes 
 could tell you, will sufficiently indicate the mutual 
 position of the two families in the latter half of the 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 Grampound House was a pretty, ivy-grown old 
 place, with a lawn stretching southwards almost to 
 the bank of the river, and shaded by a great cedar 
 tree, redolent of ancestors and as monumental in its 
 way as the marble, sleeping figures in the church. 
 It was useful, however, as well as being ancestral.
 
 THE RUBICON 5 
 
 and at this moment Mrs Grampound and her 
 brother were having tea under it. 
 
 It was a still, hot day at the beginning of August, 
 and through the broad, fan-like branches, stray sun- 
 beams danced and twinkled, making little cores of 
 light on the silver. Down one side of the lawn ran 
 a terrace of grey stone, bordered by a broad gravel 
 walk, and over the terrace pale monthly roses 
 climbed and blossomed. Most of the windows in 
 the house were darkened and eclipsed by Venetian 
 blinds, to keep out the sun which still lingered on 
 the face of it; and Mr Martin, also— Mrs Gram- 
 pound's brother — was in a state of eclipse for the 
 time being, for he wore a broad-brimmed Panama 
 hat, which concealed the upper part of his face, 
 while a large harlequin teacup prevented any 
 detailed examination of his mouth. Mrs Gram- 
 pound sat opposite him in a low, basket chair, and 
 appeared to be thinking. It is a privilege peculiar 
 to owners of very fine, dark grey eyes, to appear to 
 be thinking whenever they are not talking. 
 
 Mr Martin finished his tea, and lit a cigarette. 
 
 ' They've begun cutting the corn,' he said ; ' it's 
 very early.'
 
 6 THE RUBICON 
 
 Mrs Grampound did not answer, and her brother, 
 considering that he had made his sacrifice on the 
 altar of conversation, relapsed into silence again. 
 
 Perhaps the obvious inference that the summer 
 had been hot reminded her that the day was also 
 hot, for in a minute or two she said, — 
 
 ' Dear Eva ! what a stifling journey she will have. 
 She comes back to-night ; she ought to be here 
 by now.' 
 
 ' Where has she been staying ? ' 
 
 ' At the Brabizons. Lord Hayes was there. He 
 comes home at the end of the week ; his mother 
 arrived yesterday.' 
 
 ' The old witch,' murmured Mr Martin. 
 
 * Yes, but very old,' said she, whose mind was 
 apparently performing obligato variations on the 
 theme of the conversation. * Haven't you noticed — ' 
 
 She broke off, and presumably continued the obli- 
 gato variations. 
 
 Mr Martin showed no indications of having 
 noticed anything at all, and the faint sounds of 
 the summer evening pursued their whisperings un- 
 checked, until the distant rumble of carriage wheels 
 began to overscore the dim noises, and came to a
 
 THE RUBICON 7 
 
 long pause, after a big crescendo, before the front 
 door. 
 
 ' That will be Eva,' said her mother, filling up 
 the teapot ; ' they will tell her we are here.' 
 
 A few minutes afterwards, the drawing-room win- 
 dow was opened from inside, and a girl began to 
 descend the little flying staircase. 
 
 Apparently she was in no hurrj', for she stooped 
 to stroke a kitten that was investigating the nature 
 of blind cord with an almost fanatical enthusiasm. 
 The kitten was quite as eager to investigate the 
 nature of the human hand, and flew at Eva's out- 
 stretched fingers, all teeth and claws. 
 
 ' You little brute ! ' she remarked, shaking it off" 
 ' Your claws want cutting. Oh ! you are rather nice 
 Come, Kitty.' 
 
 But the kitten was indignant, and bounced 
 down the stairs in front of her, sat down on 
 the path at the bottom, and pretended to be 
 unaware of her existence. Eva stopped to pluck 
 a rose from a standard tree, and fastened it in 
 her dress. Her foot was noiseless on the soft grass, 
 and neither her uncle nor mother heard her ap- 
 proaching.
 
 8 THE RUBICON 
 
 ' The brute scratched me,' she repeated as she 
 neared them ; ' it's claws want cutting.' 
 
 Mrs Grampound was a little startled, and got 
 up quickly. 
 
 ' Oh, Eva, I didn't hear you coming. I was just 
 saying it was time you were here. How are you, 
 and have you had a nice time?' 
 
 ' Yes, quite nice ; but the Brabizons are rather 
 stupid people. Still, I enjoyed myself. I didn't see 
 you, Uncle Tom ; anyhow, I can't kiss you with 
 that hat on.' 
 
 She touched the top of his Panama hat lightly 
 with the tips of her fingers, and sat down in her 
 mother's chair, who was pouring her out a cup of 
 tea. 
 
 ' We had a tiresome journey,' she went on. ' Why 
 will people live in Lancashire? Is this your chair, 
 mother?' 
 
 Mr Martin got up. 
 
 'I'm going in,' he said; 'you can have mine. 
 At least, I'm going for a ride. Is the tea good, 
 Eva? — it has been made for some time — or shall I 
 tell them to send you out some more ? ' 
 
 ' It seems to me very bad,' said Eva, sipping it.
 
 THE RUBICON 9 
 
 ' Yes, I should like some more. Arc you going for 
 a ride? Perhaps I'll come.' 
 
 ' Yes, it's cooler now,' said he. ' Do come with 
 mc.' 
 
 'Will you order my horse, then, if jou arc going 
 in ? Perhaps you'd better tell them to have it ready 
 only, and not to bring it round. I won't come just 
 yet, anyhow. If I'm not ready, start without me, 
 and I daresay I'll follow you, if you tell mc where 
 you are going.' 
 
 ' I want to ride up to the Whitestones' to see 
 him.' 
 
 'Very well, I daresay I shall follow you.' 
 
 Mr Martin stood looking rather like a servant 
 receiving orders. Eva always managed to make 
 other people assume subordinate positions. 
 
 'How long do you think you will be?' he 
 asked. 
 
 'Perhaps half-an-hour. But don't wait for mc' 
 
 Eva threw off her hat impatiently. 
 
 ' I have been horribly hot and dusty all day,' 
 she said, ' and there was nearly an accident ; at 
 least, there was a bit of an accident. We were 
 standing in a siding for the express to pass, and
 
 lo THE RUBICON 
 
 we weren't far enough back or far enough forward 
 or something, and it crashed through a bit of the 
 last carriage. That is what made me so late. It 
 is very stupid that people, whose only business is 
 to see about trains, can't avoid that sort of thing.' 
 
 ' My darling Eva,' said her mother, ' were you 
 in the train ? ' 
 
 ' Yes ; in the next carriage — I and Lord Hayes. 
 He was dreadfully nervous all the rest of the way. 
 That is so silly. It is inconceivable that two ac- 
 cidents should happen on the same day to the 
 same train.' 
 
 ' I thought he wasn't coming back till the end 
 of the week.' 
 
 ' Yes, but he changed his mind and came with 
 mc,' said Eva. ' The Brabizons were furious. I 
 sha'n't go there again. Really, people are very 
 vulgar. I owe him three-and-sixpence for lunch. 
 He said he would call for it, if he might — he 
 always asks leave — to-morrow morning.' 
 
 Mrs Grampound did not reply, but the obligato 
 variations went on jubilantly. Eva was lying back 
 in her chair, looking more bored than ever with 
 this stupid world. Her mother's eyes surveyed
 
 THE RUBICON \\ 
 
 the slender figure with much satisfaction. It really 
 was a great thing to have such a daughter. And 
 Lord Hayes had changed the day of his departure 
 obviously in order to travel with Eva, and he was 
 coming to call to-morrow morning in order to 
 ask for three-and-six ! 
 
 Eva, quite unconscious of this commercial scrutiny, 
 was swinging her hat to and fro, looking dreamily 
 out over the green distances. 
 
 'On the whole, I sha'n't go for a ride,' she said 
 at length. ' I think I'll sit here with you, if you've 
 got nothing to do ; I rather want to talk to you.' 
 
 ' Certainly, dear,' said her mother ; ' but hadn't 
 you better send word to the stables? Then they 
 needn't get Starlight ready. I must go into the 
 house to get my work, but I sha'n't be a moment. 
 I wonder what you want to talk to me about' 
 
 ♦No,' said Eva, 'don't get your work. You can't 
 talk when you arc working. Besides, I daresay I 
 shall go later. Leave it as it is.' 
 
 ' Dear Eva,' said Mrs Grampound, ' I am so anxious 
 to hear what you have to say. Shall I be pleased ? ' 
 
 ' I don't know,' said Eva, slowly. * Well, the fact is 
 that Lord Hayes — well — will have .something to say
 
 12 THE RUBICON 
 
 to me when he comes for the thrce-and-six. He 
 would have said it at the Brabizons, only I didn't 
 allow him, and he would have said it in the train, 
 only I said I couldn't bear people who talked in the 
 train. I may be wrong, but I don't think I am. I 
 like him, you know, very much ; he is not so foolish 
 as most people. But I do not feel sure about it' 
 
 * My darling Eva,' began her mother with solemn 
 gladness. 
 
 ' It's all rather sudden,' Eva interrupted. ' I want 
 to wait a little first. Do you know, I think I shall 
 be out to-morrow when he comes, or I might send 
 him the three-and-six by post. He is not stupid ; 
 he would easily understand what I meant.' 
 
 To say that this was the cherished dream of her 
 mother's heart would almost be understating the 
 fact, and now the cherished dream was perhaps going 
 to be transformed into a most cherishable reality. 
 Mrs Grampound, if not knowing exactly how to deal 
 with Eva, at least was conscious of her ignorance 
 and was cautious. 
 
 ' Yes, darling, it's very sudden,' she said. ' Don't 
 do anything in a hurry — of course I know how 
 heavy the responsibilities will seem to you, as they
 
 THE RUBICON 13 
 
 must to every young girl who goes out from the 
 what's-its-name of home life, and all that sort of 
 thing, to those very much wider spheres, but you 
 will do your best, dear, I know. Eva, darling, I must 
 kiss you.' 
 
 Mrs Grampound surged out of her chair, and bent 
 over Eva to kiss her. Eva received the kiss with 
 absolute passivity, but sorry, perhaps, a moment 
 afterwards, for her want of responsiveness, bent for- 
 ward and kissed her again. 
 
 ' It wasn't exactly the responsibilities I was think- 
 ing of,' she said ; * it was ' — she got up from her chair 
 quickly, and stood quite still, looking down over the 
 lawn to the reddening sunset — ' it w as that I am not 
 quite sure about myself.' 
 
 Mrs Grampound seized hold of anything tan- 
 gible which Eva's speech conveyed, and sympa- 
 thised with it. 
 
 ' Yes, darling, I know,' she said. ' Just wait a 
 little, and think about it. I think your plan about 
 not seeing him to-morrow is very wise. He will, 
 probably, in any case, write to your father first. 
 It is very faint praise to say that he is not so 
 foolish as most people. A most brilliant and well-
 
 14 THE RUBICON 
 
 informed man ! He was telling me, the other day, 
 about a flower he has in his conservatory which 
 ate flies or something of the sort, which seems to 
 me most extraordinary. Such an admirable land- 
 lord, too. He has just built some new labourers' 
 cottages in Hayes, and I declare I want to go and 
 live in them myself I feel sure he will write to 
 your father, and, no doubt, he will talk to you 
 about it.' 
 
 ' You would like it, then, would you ? ' said Eva. 
 ' Tell me exactly what you think ? ' 
 
 Mrs Grampound had a very decided opinion 
 about it, and she expressed herself fully. 
 
 ' Darling, that is so sweet of you. Ah, how can 
 I have but one opinion ! It is a girl's duty to 
 marry as well as she can. This is a brilliant match. 
 I know so many mothers — good, conscientious 
 mothers — who think only of their children's happi- 
 ness, who would give anything to have Lord Hayes 
 as their son-in-law. A mother's happiness lies in 
 the happiness of her children. They are bone of 
 her bone, and all that sort of thing. How can 
 they but wish for and pray for their happiness ! 
 You sec, Eva, you are quite poor ; your father
 
 THE RUBICON 15 
 
 will leave you next to nothing. Riches are a great 
 blessing, because they enable you to do so much 
 good. Of course they are not everything, and if 
 you wanted to marry that dreadful Lord Symonds, 
 whom they tell such horrible stories about, I would 
 fall down on my knees and beseech you not to 
 mind about poverty, or anything else. Or if I 
 thought you would not be happy, for it is your 
 duty to be happy. But this is exceptional in every 
 way. You get position, wealth, title and a good 
 husband. No one can deny that the aristocracy 
 is the best class to marry into ; indeed, for you it 
 is the only class, and you bring him nothing but 
 the love he bears you, of course, and your beauty.' 
 
 ' Yes ; he pays a long price for my beauty,' said 
 Eva, meditatively. 
 
 • My dear Eva, we arc all given certain natural 
 advantages — or, if they arc withheld, you may be 
 sure that is only a blessing in disguise — talents, 
 beauty, and so on — and it is our clear duty to 
 make the most of them. Beauty has been given 
 you in a quite unusual degree, and it is your 
 duly to let it find its proper use. Don't you re- 
 member the parable of the ten talents ? We had
 
 1 6 THE RUBICON 
 
 it in church only last Sunday, and I remember 
 at the time that I was thinking of you and Lord 
 Hayes, which was quite a remarkable coincidence. 
 And then the good you can do as Lady Hayes 
 is infinitely greater than the good you can do 
 as the wife of a poor man. You have to look 
 at the practical side of things, too. Ah, dear me, 
 if life was only love, how simple and delightful 
 it would all be ! This is a work-a-day world, 
 and we are not sent here just to enjoy ourselves.' 
 
 Eva did not seem to be listening very closely. 
 
 ' Tell me about your own engagement,' she said 
 at length. ' I don't know what exactly one is 
 supposed to feel. I have many reasons for want- 
 ing to marry Lord Hayes, I like and respect 
 him very much. I believe he is a very good man ; 
 he is always agreeable and considerate.' 
 
 ' That is the best and surest basis for love to 
 rest on,' broke in her mother, who was charmed 
 to find Eva so sensible. ' That is just what I 
 have always said. Love must spring out of these 
 things, darling, just as the leaves and foliage of a 
 tree spring out of the solid wood. So many girls 
 have such foolish, sentimental notions, just as if
 
 THE RUBICON 17 
 
 they had just come away from a morning per- 
 formance at the Adelphi. That is not love; it 
 is just silly, school-girl sentimentality, which silly 
 school-girls feel for tenor singers, and a silky 
 moustache, and slim, weak-eyed young men. Real 
 love is the flower of respect and admiration, and 
 solid esteem. Aimer c'est tout comprendre ; and 
 to do that you must have no illusions — you must 
 keep the light dry — you must regard a man as 
 he is, not as you think he is.' 
 
 ' Yes, I see,' said Eva, slowly ; ' I daresay you 
 are right. I certainly never felt any school-girl 
 sentimentality for anyone. I think I shall go for 
 a ride, mother; it is nice to get a breath of fresh 
 air after a long journey.' 
 
 Mrs Grampound rose too, and drew her arm 
 through Eva's. 
 
 ' Yes, darling, it will do you good,' .she said. 
 ' And you can think about all this quietly. Your 
 father is out still ; he went down to the river just 
 before you came, to see if he could get a trout or 
 two. And Percy comes this evening. I will ring 
 the bell in the drawing-room for your horse to 
 come round, if you will go and get your habit
 
 1 8 THE RUBICON 
 
 on. Give me one more kiss, dear ; it is so nice 
 to have you home again.' 
 
 Eva put her horse into a steady canter over the 
 springy turf, and soon caught her uncle up, who 
 was ambling quietly along on a grey pony. He 
 was staying with his brother-in-law for a week or 
 two, before going back to America, being a citizen 
 of the United States. He rode for two reasons — 
 indeed, he never did anything without a reason — 
 both of which were excellent. Riding was a means 
 of progressing from one place to another, and it 
 was a sort of watch-key which wound up the 
 mechanism of the body. He was rather hypo- 
 chondriacal, and his doctor advised exercise, so he 
 obeyed his doctor and rode. He did much more 
 good than harm in this wicked world, but com- 
 paratively little of cither. 
 
 His sister had married Mr Grampound early in 
 life. She had a considerable fortune left her by 
 her father, by aid of which, as with a golden spade, 
 she hoped to bury her American extraction. This 
 she had succeeded in doing, with very decent 
 success, but her golden spade had, so to speak, 
 been broken in the act of interment, for her hus-
 
 THE RUBICON 19 
 
 band had speculated rather wildly with her money, 
 and had lost it. Mrs Grampound cared very little 
 for this ; her golden spade had done its work. 
 She had married into the ICnglish aristocracy, for 
 the Grampounds, though their accounts at banks 
 did not at all correspond to the magnificence of 
 their origin, and though the family estates had 
 been sold to the last possible acre, held, in the 
 estimation of the world, that position which, though 
 it takes only a generation or two of great wealth 
 to raise, requires an infinite number of generations 
 of poverty to demolish. 
 
 Eva found the society of her uncle very sooth- 
 ing on this particular afternoon. He very seldom 
 disagreed with anybody, chiefly because he hated 
 argument as a method of conversation, but his 
 assent was not of that distressing order which is 
 more irritating than a divergent view, for he always 
 took the trouble to let it appear that he had de- 
 voted considerable thought to the question at 
 issue, and had arrived at the same conclusions as 
 his interlocutor. 
 
 It was nearly eight when the}- reached home, 
 and the dusk was thickening into night. Mr
 
 20 THE RUBICON 
 
 Grampound had just got in, when they dismounted 
 at the door, and he greeted Eva in his usual digni- 
 fied and slightly interested manner. The extreme 
 finish of his face suggested that the number of 
 Grampounds who had been turned out of the same 
 mediaeval mould, was very considerable. 
 
 Eva's father held the door open for her to pass 
 into the inner hall, and Eva, going to the table 
 to take a bedroom candle, noticed that there was 
 a note lying there for him. She turned it over 
 quickly, and saw a coronet and ' Aston House ' on 
 the back. She handed it to her father, who took 
 it and said, — 
 
 ' From Lord Hayes. I thought he had not come 
 home yet.' 
 
 Eva was standing on the lowest step of the flight 
 of stairs. 
 
 ' Yes ; he came home with me to-day,' she said. 
 
 ' Was he with you at the Brabizons ? ' 
 
 'Yes; we travelled together.' 
 
 Eva went up to her room, not wishing to see the 
 note opened in her presence. What it would con- 
 tain she knew, or, at least, guessed. Five minutes 
 later, Mr Grampound also came upstairs and
 
 THE RUBICON 21 
 
 tapped at the door of his wife's room. She had 
 not begun to dress, and he came in with the 
 note in his hand. His cold, clean-shaven face 
 showed a good deal of gentlemanly and quiet 
 satisfaction. 
 
 ' Of course there is only one answer,' he said, 
 when she had finished reading it. ' It is a splendid 
 match for her.' 
 
 ' Eva spoke to me about it this afternoon,' said 
 his wife. 
 
 'Well?' 
 
 * She does not want to be hurried. She wants 
 to have time to decide.' 
 
 ' There is no time like the present,' observed Mr 
 Grampound. 
 
 ' I hope you won't press her, Charles. You 
 will get nothing by that. She wants to marry, I 
 know; and I said a great many very sensible 
 things to her this afternoon. She wants more 
 than a quiet home-life can give her, and she likes 
 Hayes.' 
 
 ' I must send some answer to him ; and I cer- 
 tainly shall not tell him to keep away.' 
 
 * Give her time. Say he may come in a week.
 
 22 THE RUBICON 
 
 There is no harm in waiting a little. Eva will 
 not be forced into anything against her will.' 
 
 ' I shall speak to her to-night.' 
 
 'Yes, do; but be careful. I must send you away 
 now ; it is time to dress. Percy has come.' 
 
 Eva, meanwhile, was thinking over the talk she 
 had had with her mother. Mrs Grampound's affec- 
 tionate consideration for her daughter's feelings, Eva 
 knew quite well, might only be the velvet glove to 
 an iron hand. But she was distinctly conscious that 
 there was a great deal in what her mother had 
 said. She had decided for herself that she was not 
 going to fall in love with anyone ; men seemed to 
 her to be very little lovable. At the same time, 
 she knew that, in her heart of hearts, she longed 
 for the possibilities which a great marriage would 
 give her. Perhaps then the world would open out ; 
 perhaps it was interesting after all. Her home-life 
 bored her considerably. They were in the country 
 nine months out of the twelve, living in a somewhat 
 sparsely-populated district, and Eva was totally un- 
 able to make for herself active or engrossing occu- 
 pation in the direction of district-visiting or Sunday 
 schools, or those hundred and one ways in which
 
 THE RUBICON 23 
 
 ' nice girls ' are supposed to employ themselves. 
 Her vitality was of that still, strong sort which can 
 only be reached through the emotions, and is too 
 indolent or too uninitiative to stir the emotions into 
 creating interests for themselves. The vague im- 
 perative 7ieed of doing something never wound its 
 horn to her. She could not throw herself into the 
 first pursuit that offered, simply because she had to 
 be doing something, and her emotional record was 
 a blank. The pencil and paper were there, for she 
 was two-and-twenty, but she had nothing to write. 
 She was quite unable to transform her diversions 
 into aims, a faculty which accounts completely for 
 the busy lives some women lead. 
 
 Dinner was not till half-past eight, and, when 
 Eva came down, the drawing-room was untenanted. 
 The shaded lamp left the room in comparative dim- 
 ness, but through the windows, which were open to 
 let in the cool, evening air, the last glow of the 
 sunset cast a red light on to the opposite wall. She 
 stood at the window a moment and looked at the 
 river, which lay like a string of crimson pools 
 stretching west ; and then, turning away impatiently, 
 walked up and down the room, wondering where
 
 24 THE RUBICON 
 
 everyone was. That peaceful, sleeping landscape 
 outside seemed to her an emblem of the quiet, 
 deadly days that were to come. The slow to- 
 morrow and to-morrow seemed suddenly impos- 
 sible. The door was open to her — the door leading 
 on all that the world had to offer. Perhaps it 
 was all as uninteresting as this, but it would be 
 something, at any rate, to know that — to be quite 
 certain that life was dull to the core. Then she 
 thought she could rest quiet, and, perhaps, would 
 not mind so much. What vexed and irritated her, 
 was to suspect that the world was interesting and 
 not to find it so, and she was disposed to lay the 
 blame of that on her own particular station in life. 
 Yet — yet — she could hardly say she had an ideal, 
 but there was that shrouded image called love, of 
 which she only saw the dim outline. It would be 
 a pity to smash it up before the coverings came off. 
 It might be worth having, after all. 
 
 Her eye caught sight of a book on the table with 
 a white vellum cover. Eva took it up. It was 
 called The Croivn of WonianJiood, and something 
 like a frown gathered on her face. 
 
 It was almost a relief when her mother entered
 
 THE RUBICON 25 
 
 rustling elaborately across the room, and snapping 
 a bracelet on to her comely wrist. 
 
 ' Ah ! Eva, you are before me. Percy has come. 
 I didn't expect him till to-morrow.' 
 
 ' I'm glad,' said Eva listlessly. 
 
 ' Such a lovely evening,' continued Mrs Gram- 
 pound with a strong determination to be particu- 
 larly neutral, and entirely unconscious of her talk 
 with Eva before dinner. ' Look at those exquisite 
 tints, dear. The blue so tender as to be green,' 
 she quoted with a fine disregard of accuracy. 
 
 ' Yes, it's beautiful,' said Eva, not turning her 
 head. ' Ah ! Percy, it's good to see you.' 
 
 Eva got up and walked across to meet the new- 
 comer. Percy was a favourite of hers, from the 
 time he had teased her about her dolls onward. 
 
 ' How long are you going to stop ? ' she con- 
 tinued. ' Percy, stop here a long time ; I want 
 you.' 
 
 ' I can't,' he said. ' I'm going off to Scotland on 
 the 1 2th, to the Davenports, I promised Reggie.' 
 
 'Who's Reggie?' 
 
 ' Reggie ? Reggie Davenport. He's a friend of 
 mine. I'm very fond of him. Haven't you ever
 
 26 THE RUBICON 
 
 seen him ? He falls in love about once a fortnight. 
 He's very amusing.' 
 
 ' He must be rather a fool,' said Eva. 
 
 ' Oh, but he's a nice fool. Really, he is ver>^ nice. 
 He's so dreadfully young.' 
 
 ' Well, your not very old, my lord,' said Eva. 
 
 ' But Reggie is much the youngest person I ever 
 saw. He'll never grow old.' 
 
 ' Ah ! well,' said Eva. ' I expect he's very happy.' 
 
 The gong had sounded some minutes, when Mr 
 Martin shuffled in. He wore a somewhat irregu- 
 lar white tie and grey socks, and was followed 
 almost immediately by Mr Grampound. 
 
 Eva had already written a little note to Lord 
 Hayes, and told her maid to enclose a three-and- 
 sixpenny postal order. She had also expressed a 
 vague hope, so as not to block her avenues, that 
 they would meet again soon. Her chief desire was 
 to obtain a respite ; the whole thing had been too 
 .sudden, and she wished to think it over. Meantime, 
 it was nice to see Percy again. 
 
 'What have you been doing with yourself?' she 
 asked, ' I notice that whenever young men go away 
 in novels, they always fall in love before they get
 
 THE RUBICON 27 
 
 back, or get married, or make their fortunes or lose 
 them. How many of these things have you done ? ' 
 
 ' None of them,' said Percy ; ' though I've been to 
 Monte Carlo, I did not play there. It doesn't seem 
 to me at all amusing.' 
 
 * I suppose you haven't got the gambling instinct,' 
 said Eva ; ' that's a great defect. You know none of 
 the joy of telling your cabman that you will give 
 him a shilling extra if he catches a train. It's 
 equivalent to saying, " I bet you a shilling you don't ; " 
 only he doesn't pay if he loses, and you do. But 
 that's immaterial. The joy lies in the struggle with 
 time and space. 
 
 ' Do you mean that you like to keep things in 
 uncertainty as long as possible,' asked her father, 
 looking at her. 
 
 Their eyes met, and they understood each other. 
 Eva looked at him a moment, and then dropped 
 her eyes. 
 
 ' Yes ; I'm sure I do.' 
 
 ' Even when you have all the data ready, do you 
 like not deciding?' 
 
 ' Oh ! one never knows if one has all the data ; 
 something fresh may always turn up. For instance — '
 
 28 THE RUBICON 
 
 'Well?' 
 
 ' I was thinking just before dinner that I didn't 
 know what in the world I should do with myself 
 all the autumn, and now you see Percy's arrived. 
 I shall play about with him.' 
 
 ' I go away in two days,' said Percy. 
 
 ' Oh ! well, I daresay something else will turn up. 
 I am like Mr Micawber.' 
 
 ' No, not at all,' said Mr Grampound ; ' he was 
 always doing his best to make things turn up.' 
 
 Mrs Grampound remarked that things were always 
 turning up when you expected them least, and Percy 
 hoped that his gun would turn up, because no one 
 could remember where it was. 
 
 The evening was so warm that Eva and her 
 mother sat outside on the terrace after dinner, wait- 
 ing for the others to join them. Mr Grampound 
 never sat long over his wine, and in a few minutes 
 the gentlemen followed them. Eva was rather rest- 
 less, and strolled a little way down the gravel path, 
 and, on turning, found that her father had left the 
 others and was walking towards her. 
 
 ' Come as far as the bottom of the lawn, Eva,' he 
 said ; ' I should like a little talk with you.'
 
 THE RUBICON 29 
 
 They went on in silence for some steps, and then 
 her father said, — 
 
 ' I heard from Lord Hayes to-day. Your mother 
 told me that you could guess what it was about.' 
 
 She picked up a tennis-ball that was lying on the 
 edge of the grass. 
 
 ' How wet it is ! ' she said. * Yes, I suppose I 
 know what he wrote about' 
 
 'Your mother and I, naturally, have your happi- 
 ness very much at heart,' said he, ' and we both 
 agree that this is a very sure and clear chance of 
 happiness for you. It is a great match, Eva.' 
 
 Eva as a child had always rather feared her 
 father, and at this moment she found her childish 
 fear rising again in her mind. Tall, silent, rather 
 scornful-looking men may not always command 
 affection, but they usually inspire respect. Her old 
 fear for her father had grown into very strong 
 respect, but she felt now that the convert trans- 
 formation was very possible. 
 
 ' You would wish me to marry him ? ' she asked. 
 
 ' I wish you to consider it very carefully. I have 
 seen a good deal of the world, so I also wish you 
 to consider what I say to you about it. I have
 
 30 THE RUBICON 
 
 thought about it, and I have arrived at the very 
 definite conclusion I have told you. I shall write 
 to him to-night, and, with your consent, will tell 
 him that he may come and ask you in person in 
 a few days' time. You know my wishes on the 
 subject, and your mother's. Meanwhile, dear Eva, 
 I must congratulate you on the very good fortune 
 which has come in your way.' 
 
 He bent from his great height and kissed her. 
 
 ' I don't wish to force you in any way,' he said, 
 ' and I don't wish you to say anything to me 
 to-night about it. Think it over by yourself I 
 needn't speak of his position and wealth, because, 
 though, of course, they are advantages, you will rate 
 them at their proper value. But I may tell you 
 that I am a very poor man, and that I know what 
 these things mean.' 
 
 ' I should not marry him for those reasons,' said 
 Eva. 
 
 'There is no need for you to tell me that,' said 
 he. ' But it is right to tell you that I can leave 
 you nothing. In the same way I hope that any 
 foolish notions you may have got about love, from 
 the trash you may have read in novels, will not
 
 THE RUBICON 31 
 
 stand in your way either. I will leave the matter 
 in the hands of your own good sense.' 
 
 His words had an unreasonable mastery over 
 Eva, for her father never spoke idly. He was quite 
 aware of the value of speech, but knew that it is 
 enhanced by its rarity. ' No one pays any atten- 
 tion to a jabbering fool,' he had said once to his 
 wife, a propos of a somewhat voluble woman who 
 had been staying in the house, and of whose 
 abilities he and his wife entertained very contrary 
 opinions. Eva had seldom heard him express 
 his philosophy of life at such length, and she fully 
 appreciated the weight it was intended to convey.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 T ORD HAYES found Eva's note waiting for 
 him when he came down to breakfast next 
 morning, but its contents did not take away his 
 appetite at all. He was quite as willing that she 
 should think it over as her father or mother, and 
 he had no desire to force her to refuse. He was 
 fairly certain that at his time of life, for he was 
 over forty, he was not going to fall in love 
 in the ordinary sense of the word ; that sense, in 
 fact, which Eva had herself confessed she never 
 felt likely to experience. He had had a succession 
 of eligible helpmeets hurled at his head by ambi- 
 tious mothers for many years, and in sufficient 
 numbers to enable him to draw the conclusion 
 that the majority of eligible helpmeets were very 
 much like one another. 
 
 They had ready for him smiles of welcome,
 
 THE RUBICON 33 
 
 slightly diverting small-talk, pretty faces, and any 
 number of disengaged waltzes ; and after having 
 basked in their welcoming smiles, submitted to 
 their small-talk, looked at their pretty faces, and 
 hopped decorously round in their disengaged 
 waltzes, he always finished by stifling a yawn and 
 making his exit. It would convey an entirely 
 wrong impression to describe him as either a 
 misanthrope or a cynic ; the charms of marriage- 
 able maidenhood simply did not appeal to him. 
 But though he was neither misanthrope nor cynic, 
 a little vein of malevolence ran through his system, 
 and he had more than half made up his mind that 
 he would have none of these. He was quite rich 
 enough to afford a wife who would bring him 
 nothing but unpaid bills ; and provided that wife 
 brought him something which he had not yet 
 found, he was willing to pay them all. 
 
 That he was going to marry some time had long 
 been a commonplace to him, but the sight of his 
 forty-fifth milestone had lent it a loud insistence 
 which was becoming quite distracting. The thought 
 had begun to haunt him ; he saw it in the withered 
 
 flowers of his orchid house, it stuck in the corners 
 
 c
 
 34 THE RUBICON 
 
 of his coat pockets, his garden syringe gurgled it 
 at him with its expiring efforts to emit the last 
 drop of water ; even the toad which he kept in his 
 greenhouse had the knowledge of it lurking in its 
 sickly eye. 
 
 He was very seldom at Aston ; but in one of his 
 visits there, he had met Eva and had been consider- 
 ably struck by her. She was introduced to him, and 
 bowed without smiling. He had asked her whether 
 she played lawn-tennis, and she said, without simper- 
 ing, that she did. He asked her whether she enjoyed 
 the season, and she replied, without affectation, that 
 she had got so tired of it by the middle of June that 
 she had gone down into the country. He remarked 
 that London was the loser, and she reminded him that, 
 therefore, by exactly the same amount, the country 
 was the gainer. Her eyes wandered vaguely over the 
 green distance, and once met his, without shrinking 
 from or replying to his gaze. She was astonishingly 
 beautiful, and appeared quite unconscious of her 
 charms. She looked so radically indifferent to all 
 that was going on round her, that he had said, 
 ' These country parties arc rather a bore ! ' and she 
 replied candidly that she quite agreed with him. In
 
 THE RUBICON 35 
 
 a word, he felt that he might go farther and fare 
 worse, and that he was forty-five years old. 
 
 During the next few months, he had come across 
 her not infrequently, both in the country and in 
 London, and at the end of the season they had both 
 met at the Brabizons, where two Miss Brabizons 
 were alternately launched at his hand and heart — via 
 brilliant execution on the piano and district-visiting 
 — by their devoted mother, and Eva's calm neutrality 
 was rendered particularly conspicuous by the contrast. 
 His attentions to her grew more and more marked, 
 and Mrs Brabizon metaphorically threw up the 
 sponge when he changed the day of his departure 
 without ceremony, in order to travel with Eva, and 
 declared that she couldn't conceive what he found 
 in that girl. 
 
 His mother always breakfasted alone, and spent 
 the morning by herself, usually out of doors. Lord 
 Hayes was vaguely grateful for this arrangement. 
 Mr Martin, as we know, had described her as an 
 old witch, and even to her own son she seemed 
 rather a terrific person. She was tall, very well 
 preserved, and a rigid Puritan. Her hobby — for the 
 most unbending of our race have their hobby — was
 
 36 THE RUBICON 
 
 Jaeger clothing. She wore large grey boots with 
 eight holes in them, a drab-coloured dress, and 
 a head-gear that reminded the observer of a 
 volunteer forage cap. This hobby she varied by 
 a spasmodic interest in homoeopathy, and she used 
 to walk about the lanes like a mature Medea, gather- 
 ing simples from the hedges, which she used to 
 administer with appalling firmness to the village 
 people ; but, to do her justice, she always experi- 
 mented with them first in proprid persotid, and de- 
 clared she felt a great deal better afterwards. For 
 the practice of medicine - taking generally, she 
 claimed that it fortified the constitution, and it 
 must be confessed that her own constitution, at the 
 age of sixty-five, appeared simply impregnable. 
 
 But in the morning her son was conscious of an 
 agreeable relaxation. He was a neat, timid man. 
 with a careful little manner, and he inherited from 
 his mother a certain shrewdness that led him to 
 grasp the practical issues of things with rapidity. 
 For instance, on this present occasion, when he 
 had finished his breakfast, he again read over Eva's 
 letter, put it carefully away, and was quite content 
 to wait.
 
 THE RUBICON 37 
 
 Outside one of the dining-room windows opened 
 a glass-covered passage leading into an orchid 
 house, and he went down this passage with the 
 heels of his patent leather shoes tapping on the 
 tiles, and a large pair of scissors in his hand. Ev'ery 
 morning he attended personally to the require- 
 ments of this orchid house ; he snipped off dead 
 sprays, he industriously blew tobacco smoke on 
 small parasitic animals, and squirted them with soapy 
 water, and this morning, being in a particularly 
 good humour, he went so far as to tickle, with a 
 wisp of hay, the back of the useful toad. That 
 animal received his attentions with silent affa- 
 bility; it closed its eyes, and opened and shut 
 its mouth like an old gentleman awaking from 
 his after-dinner nap. 
 
 It was a warm morning, and when he had 
 finished attending to the orchids he strolled round 
 outside the house, back to the front door. The 
 house stood high above the river, and commanded 
 a good view of the green valley ; and, in the distance, 
 two miles away, the red-roofed village slanted up- 
 wards from the stream towards the downs. He 
 stood looking out over the broad, pleasant fields for
 
 38 THE RUBICON 
 
 some moments, and his eyes wandered across the 
 river to where the red front of Mr Grampound's 
 house, half hidden by the large cedar, stood, as 
 if looking up to his. The flower-beds gleamed 
 like jewels in the sunshine, and he could see two 
 figures strolling quietly down the gravel path to- 
 wards the river. One of them was a girl, tall, 
 almost as tall as the man who walked by her 
 side, and to whom she was apparently talking. 
 Just as Lord Hayes looked, they stopped suddenly, 
 and he saw her spread out her hands, which had 
 been clasped in front of her, with a quick, dramatic 
 movement. The action struck him as slightly 
 symbolical. 
 
 He was roused by the sound of crunched gravel, 
 and, turning round, saw his mother walking towards 
 him. She was in her hygienic dress, and had a 
 small, tin botanical case slung over her shoulders. 
 In her hand she held a pair of eminently useful 
 scissors, the sort of scissors with which Atropos 
 might sever the thread of life. Lord Hayes wore 
 a slightly exotic look by her side. 
 
 ' The under housemaid has fallen into a refreshing 
 sleep,' she announced, ' and the action of the skin
 
 THE RUBICON 39 
 
 has set in. In fact, she will do very well now. 
 And how are you, dear James, this morning ? ' 
 
 ' I am very well,' said he ; * very well indeed, thank 
 you, mother.' 
 
 His mother looked at him with interest. 
 
 ' You've got a touch of liver,' she remarked trucu- 
 lently.' 
 
 ' No, I think not. I feel very well, thanks. 
 
 Lady Hayes snapped her scissors. 
 
 ' I'm afraid the harvest will be very bad this year,' 
 she said. ' There's been no rain, and no rain means 
 no straw.' 
 
 'Yes, the farmers are in a bad way,' said Lord 
 Hayes. ' I shall have to make a reduction again.' 
 
 ' Well, dear,' said his mother, ' all I can say is 
 that we shall probably be beggars. But porridge 
 is wonderfully sustaining.' 
 
 'We've still got a few acres in London,' he re- 
 marked. ' Really, in these depressed times, I don't 
 know how a man could live without an acre or 
 two there.' 
 
 Old Lady Hayes laughed a hoarse, masculine 
 laugh, and strode off, snapping her scissors again. 
 Half-way across the lawn she stopped.
 
 40 THE RUBICON 
 
 'The Grampounds are at home, I suppose,' she 
 said. ' I want to see Mrs Grampound some time.' 
 
 'Oh, yes; I travelled with Miss Grampound yes- 
 terday. She said they were all at home.' 
 
 * Ha ! She is very handsome. But a modern 
 young woman, I should think.' 
 
 ' She's not very ancient. She was staying with 
 the Brabizons.' 
 
 His mother frowned and continued her walk. 
 
 Lord Hayes always felt rather like a naughty 
 child under his mother's eye. He did not at pre- 
 sent feel quite equal to telling her what his rela- 
 tions with Eva were. Modernity was the one failing 
 for which she had no sympathy, for it was a 
 characteristic of which she did not possess the 
 most rudimentary traces. To her it meant loss of 
 dignity, Americanisms, contempt for orthodoxy, and 
 general relaxation of all that is worthy in man. 
 She preferred the vices of her own generation to the 
 virtues of newer developments, and almost regretted 
 the gradual extinction of the old three-bottle school, 
 for they were, in her opinion, replaced by men 
 who smoked while they were talking to women, 
 while the corresponding women had given way to
 
 THE RUBICON 41 
 
 women who smoked themselves. For a man to 
 drink port wine in company with other men was 
 better, as being a more solid and respectable fail- 
 ing, than for him to talk to a woman with a 
 cigarette between his lips. 
 
 Eva, as Lord Hayes had guessed from his point 
 of vantage by the front door of his house, had 
 strolled out into the garden after breakfast with 
 Percy. She had not told him of Lord Hayes's 
 offer, but she could not help talking to him with 
 it in her mind. It was like a bracket preceded 
 by a minus sign, which affected all that was within 
 the bracket. 
 
 ' I wish you weren't going away, Percy,' she 
 said. ' When I woke up this morning, I thought 
 with horror of all the slow days that were coming. 
 I don't care a bit for doing all those things which 
 " nice girls " are supposed to do. I have no en- 
 thusiasms, and the enthusiasms of the people I 
 see here are unintelligible to me. The sight of a 
 dozen little boys in a Sunday school, with poma- 
 tum on their heads, inspires me with slight disgust 
 — so do bedridden old women. I suppose I have 
 no soul. That is quite possible. But, but — '
 
 42 THE RUBICON 
 
 *Ycs, I'm luckier than you,' said Percy; 'I like 
 little quiet things. I like fishing, and reading the 
 paper, and doing nothing.' 
 
 'Yes, you're luckier than I am just now,' said 
 Eva, ' but when I do get interested in things, I 
 shall be in a better position than you. I'm sure 
 there are lots of interests in the world, but I 
 don't realise it' 
 
 ' Well, I daresay you will discover them some- 
 time,' said Percy, consolingly. 
 
 ' Who can tell ? There are lots of women 
 who do not feel any interest in anything — though, 
 perhaps, fewer women than men. But why does 
 London interest you so? It seems to me just 
 as stupid in its way as this place.' 
 
 ' I like the sense of there being loads of people 
 about,' said Percy. * A lot of people together are 
 not at all the same as a number of units.' 
 
 ' How do you mean ? ' 
 
 ' Well, it's just the same as with gunpowder. 
 One grain of powder only spits if you set light 
 to it, but if you were to throw a pound of gun- 
 powder into the fire, the result would be quite 
 different from the effect of a thousand spits.'
 
 THE RUBICON 43 
 
 It was at this point that Lord Hayes was 
 watching the two from his front door. Eva 
 stopped suddenly in her walk, and spread out her 
 hands, stretching her arms out. 
 
 * That's what I want,' she said. ' I want to 
 develop and open. I fully believe the world is 
 very interesting, but I am like a blind man being 
 told about a sunset. It conveys nothing to me. 
 And I don't believe that fifty million Sunday 
 schools and mothers' meetings would do it for 
 me. It must touch me somehow else. Religion 
 and philanthropy are not the keys. I long to find 
 out what the keys are.' 
 
 'It's a pity you don't want to marry,' said 
 Percy. 
 
 ' How do you know I don't want to marry ? ' 
 ' You've told me so yourself, plenty of times. 
 You said only a few weeks ago that you thought 
 all men most uninteresting.' 
 
 'Yes, I know. But I'm not so egotistical as not 
 to suspect that the fault is mine. I don't know 
 any men well, except you, and I don't think that 
 you are at all uninteresting. If only I could be 
 certain — '
 
 44 THE RUBICON 
 
 Eva broke off suddenly, but Percy asked her 
 what she wished to be certain about. 
 
 *If I could be certain that I was right — right for 
 me, that is — certain that for me life and men and 
 women were quite uninteresting, I don't think I 
 should mind so much. I would cease thinking 
 about it altogether. I might even teach in the 
 Sunday school. If all things are uninteresting, I 
 may as well do that, and cease to expect in- 
 terest in anything.' 
 
 ' But aren't you conscious of any change in your- 
 self?' asked Percy; 'and doesn't the very fact that 
 you are getting more and more conscious that 
 everything is very dull go to prove it ? ' 
 
 ' I don't quite understand.' 
 
 Percy looked vaguely about, mentally speaking, 
 for a parallel, and his eyes, sympathetically follow- 
 ing his mind, lighted on an autumn-flowering bulb, 
 which was just beginning to push its juicy, green 
 spike above the ground. 
 
 'There,* he said, 'are you not, perhaps, like what 
 that bulb was three days ago? If it were conscious 
 it would have felt, not that it was growing, but 
 that the earth round it was pressing it more
 
 THE RUBICON 45 
 
 closely. Perhaps you are on the point of sprout- 
 ing. It couldn't have known it was sprouting.' 
 
 Eva stood thinking for a moment or two. 
 
 * What an excitement it must be, after having 
 seen nothing but brown earth and an occasional 
 worm all your life, suddenly to come out into the 
 open air and see other plants and trees and sky. 
 If I am sprouting, I hope the sky will be blue 
 when I see it first.' 
 
 ' I expect grey sky and rain makes the bulb 
 grow quicker.' 
 
 ' Oh ! but I don't care what is good for me/ said 
 Eva ; ' I only care for what is interesting. Other- 
 wise, I should have done all sorts of salutary things 
 all my life — certainly a great number of unpleas- 
 ant things ; one is always told that unpleasant 
 things are salutary.' 
 
 'I don't believe that,' said Percy; 'I think it's 
 one's duty to be happj-.' 
 
 ' Oh ! but, according to the same idea, the salutary 
 and unpleasant things produce ineffable joy, if you 
 give them time,' said Eva. 
 
 They walked back to the house in silence, Init 
 on the steps Eva stopped.
 
 46 THE RUBICON 
 
 ' Perhaps you're right, Percy/ she said ; ' perhaps 
 I am sprouting, though I don't know it. Certainly 
 I feel more and more confined by all these dull 
 days than I used to. I wonder what the world 
 will look like when I get above ground. I hope 
 you are right, Percy ; I want to sprout.' 
 
 ' It is such a comfort to think that no crisis 
 ever fails to keep its appointment,' said he. 
 * When one's nature is prepared for the crisis, the 
 crisis comes. Anything will do for a crisis. It 
 is not the incident itself that makes the difference, 
 but the change that has been going on in one- 
 .self 
 
 ' Yes, that's quite true. It is no use wanting a 
 crisis to come, or thinking that one is ready for 
 it, if one only had a chance. If one really is ready 
 for it, anything is a crisis. People who get con- 
 verted, as they think, by hearing a hymn sung, 
 think it is the hymn that has done it, and they 
 don't realise that it is what has been going on in 
 themselves first. Anything else would do as well.' 
 For the next few days all Eva's surroundings 
 combined to strengthen her already existing bias. 
 Percy went away ; her father was more stern and
 
 THE RUBICON 47 
 
 exacting than usual ; her mother, Eva felt, was 
 watching her, as one watches a barometer the day 
 before a picnic, and tapping her to see whether she 
 was inclining to fine weather or stormy. Moreover, 
 the little talk she had had with Percy strengthened 
 her desire to see and judge the world. Perhaps she 
 would always find it uninteresting. If that was so, 
 the sooner she knew it the better ; but the probability 
 was strongly against it, and if it was not uninterest- 
 ing to the core, she was simply wasting time. These 
 August days were more tedious than ever ; she read 
 novels, but they bored her ; she tried to paint, but 
 got tired of her picture almost before she had drawn 
 it in ; all the neighbours — and there were not many 
 of them — seemed to be away. Lord Hayes's 
 apparently was the only house open, and of him 
 she naturally saw nothing. 
 
 It was four days after Percy's departure that 
 Lord Hayes came to call. Eva was sitting on the 
 lawn behind the house when he arrived ; she saw 
 him coming out through the open French window in 
 the drawing-room, and down the little iron staircase. 
 She rose to meet him, and told the footman to bring 
 tea out. Her choice, she knew, was imminent, and she
 
 48 THE RUBICON 
 
 had one momentary impulse to stop him, to give her- 
 self more time, but the instant afterwards the other 
 picture rose before her — that flat perspective of level 
 days, a country without hill or stream, her own life 
 at home, and, on the other hand, the possibilities of 
 her new sphere — the world and all it contained. Was 
 this man, perhaps, the owner of the key which would 
 unlock it all to her ? Among other men she ranked 
 him high, perhaps the highest ; he had never pestered 
 her, or stared at her as if she was a picture ; he had 
 never bored her ; perhaps he understood her need ; 
 perhaps he could supply it. 
 
 They shook hands, and stood there for a moment 
 silent. Then he said, — 
 
 ' You promised to show me }'Our beautiful garden. 
 I can see it like a jewel among the trees from 
 Aston.' 
 
 ' Yes ; the flowers are very bright just now,' she 
 said, speaking naturally. ' Let us go down the 
 terrace.' 
 
 At the bottom of the terrace he stopped. The 
 cedar hid them from the house, and they were alone, 
 
 ' Your father told lue I might call here,' he said, 
 ' and tell you why I have come.'
 
 THE RUBICON 49 
 
 Eva was standing about three feet off him, with 
 her hands clasped behind her. He made a step 
 forward. 
 
 ' Eva, you know — ' 
 
 Still she made no sign. 
 
 ' I have come to ask you whether you care for 
 me at all — whether you will be my wife ? ' 
 
 ' I will be your wife,' she said, without smiling 
 but letting her hands drop down by her side. 
 
 He took one of her disengaged hands in his, and 
 bent forward to kiss it. She looked at him steadily, 
 as if questioning him — and the long perspective of 
 level days had passed from her life for ever. 
 
 D
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 'THHE account of Eva's wedding, the description 
 of her dress, the dramatic tears which Mrs 
 Grampound shed as her daughter was led to the 
 altar, the size of the celebrated family diamonds, 
 are not these things written in the Morning Post ? 
 And as they are recorded there, by pens better 
 fitted than mine to do honour to the glories of the 
 old embroidery on Eva's train, the Valenciennes 
 lace on her dress, the tulle, the pearls, the white 
 velvet and all the unfading splendours of the 
 matrimonial rite, I will merely say that everything 
 was performed on a scale of the utmost magnificence, 
 that two princes were there, and several dukes, one 
 of whom was heard remark out loud in church : 
 * By gad ! she's exquisite;' that another exalted per- 
 sonage replied, ' Lucky fellow, Hayes;' that the wife 
 
 so
 
 THE RUBICON 51 
 
 of the exalted personage fixed her lord with a stony 
 stare and said ' Sh-sh-sh-sh ;' and that he, in spite 
 of his strawberry leaves and his pedigree and his 
 frock coat, trembled in his patent leather shoes, and 
 in his confusion was vividly impressed with the idea 
 that his prayer-book consisted entirely of the service 
 for the visitation of those of riper years, to be used 
 at sea on the occasion of the Queen's accession. As 
 these portentous facts are not recorded in the Morn- 
 ing Post^ I have thought fit to mention them here, 
 with one other little detail that escaped the vigilance 
 of the newspaper reporters. It was merely that the 
 bride smiled when she was asked whether she would 
 love, honour and obey her husband. But she 
 promised to do so in a firm, clear voice ; so, of course, 
 it was all right. 
 
 And now two months had passed, and the 
 newly-married pair had emerged from those bliss- 
 ful weeks of solitude, which are designed to make 
 them more used to their happiness, to help them 
 to realise that nothing can come between them 
 but death, that they have awoke from what seemed 
 a dream and found that it was true, that a new 
 life has begun for them, and that the gates 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
 
 52 THE RUBTCOA 
 
 of Paradise are henceforward going to stand per- 
 manently open. 
 
 They had been to the Riviera, where Lord Hayes 
 had bought a large, white umbrella, under which he 
 used to smoke innumerable cigarettes and go little 
 strolls along the beach, sometimes with Eva, but 
 oftener alone. Eva quite fulfilled all the requisites 
 he had wished for in a wife ; she was dignified, 
 rather silent, more than presentable. It pleased 
 him that crowds should stand and stare at his wife 
 as she walked up and down the fashionable 
 promenades at Monte Carlo, in her still scornful 
 beauty, with her deep, unregarding eyes wearily un- 
 conscious of their scrutiny ; that the magnates of 
 the earth should stand by her chair, as she lounged 
 the southern afternoons away, indolenth- indif- 
 ferent to the gay chatter round her. She used to 
 play sometimes at the Casino, with the same air 
 of utter ennui ; though, at times, when the luck 
 went heavily in her favour or against her, her eye 
 would brighten. She played by no system what- 
 ever. 'If I had a system,' she said, ' the game 
 would cease to interest me ; by the doctrine of 
 probabilities, my losses or gains would be slight if
 
 THE RUBICON 53 
 
 I stuck to the same number ; in fact, in the long 
 run, it would diminish the element of chance almost 
 to nothing. But to me the whole point of the 
 game lies in the utter uncertainty of it ; just the 
 blind rolling of that ball, the momentum of which 
 no one knows, not even the man who sets it 
 rolling.' 
 
 On two occasions she laughed out loud at the 
 tables. The first of these occasions was when she 
 had been staking wildly on any number that hap- 
 pened to occur to her, and she had won, by almost 
 miraculous luck, six times in succession. The other 
 occasion was when she had lost ten times that sum, 
 in a few minutes, by always betting on the same 
 number. She liked the sensation of measuring- 
 herself with infinite and immeasurable forces, as 
 exhibited in the laws of gravity and momentum. 
 
 But Lord Hayes had made, as the reader will 
 have perceived, one grand mistake. He had wanted 
 a presentable, dignified and reserved wife, a wife 
 who was not sill)', who did not simper or smirk, and 
 he had got her. But what he had not recognised 
 was that such characteristics do not make up a 
 woman's soul, but are only one expression of it
 
 54 THE RUBICON 
 
 under certain circumstances, and that the soul that 
 expressed itself in such a way was capable of ex- 
 pressing itself differently under other circumstances ; 
 that all these may only be the natural and legiti- 
 mate signs of a want of development, and that they 
 give no hint whatever as to what form that develop- 
 ment will take, or what the developed soul will be. 
 In the month of June you may see everywhere, on 
 chestnut trees, certain compact pyramids of folded 
 buds, slightly glutinous to the touch. If you take 
 one of these off a hundred chestnut trees, you will 
 be unable to detect the least difference between 
 them. But two months later, three-quarters of those 
 chestnut trees are covered with spires of white 
 blossoms, and one quarter with spires of red — Fabula 
 narratur. But the presumption was that any given 
 one would be white? Certainly; but it is well to 
 remember that a certain number will be red. 
 
 Once or twice, then, Eva had shown, as it were, the 
 first hint of a coming blossom, which, somehow, was 
 strangely disconcerting to her lord ; it was not quite 
 the fair white blossom he had led himself to expect. 
 Certain of these little episodes will be worth re- 
 cording.
 
 THE RUBICON 55 
 
 They had spent ten days at Mentone, among other 
 places, and had met there a certain Mr Armine, a 
 young man of about thirty-two, of charming appear- 
 ance and manner, who was amusing himself abroad 
 for a month or two, while an army of contractors, 
 builders and decorators were making his father's 
 country house, to which he had succeeded by that 
 gentleman's death, into a place more fitting for a 
 fashionable young man to spend half the year in. 
 He knew Lord Hayes rather well, and was quite 
 willing to advance to the same degree of intimacy 
 with his wife. Everyone called him Jim, for no 
 better reason apparently than that his name was 
 Plantagenet, but that, after all, was reason enough. 
 
 Eva had received this heavily-gilded youth with 
 some cordiality, and he was clever enough to take 
 advantage of it without subjecting the silver cord to 
 too severe a strain. The silence and apathy of a 
 Grecian-browed, velvet-eyed divinity is construed 
 in quite a different manner to the interpretation put 
 on the identical phenomena when exhibited by 
 podgy though admirable members of the same sex. 
 It is quite impossible to imagine that behind the 
 Grecian brow, lurk thoughts that are not dis-
 
 56 THE RUBICON 
 
 tinguished by the same magnificence as their 
 frontlet. 
 
 In other words, Eva's silences, her long glances 
 over the weary, blue horizon, her indifference to those 
 round her, challenged conjecture, and roused eager 
 interests, which the vivacity and attractiveness of 
 other women might quite have failed to awaken- 
 
 Jim Armine began by finding immense pleasure 
 in watching her beauty, as he might have watched 
 a Greek statue, but in a few days his mere aesthetic 
 pleasure in looking at her had dwindled to insignifi- 
 cance beside the fascination of something apart from 
 her mere beauty. In those few weeks of married 
 life, an essential change had come over her: her soul 
 had awakened with throbs of surprised indignation, 
 and it found its expression in a gathered intensity 
 of indifference in her husband's presence. 
 
 She had no need to ask him why he had married 
 her ; the sense of his possession of her made itself 
 felt as an insult and an outrage. She felt she 
 had been duped, deceived, hoodwinked. The con- 
 sciousness that she was his was like an open 
 wound. She had sacrificed all her undeveloped 
 possibilities to a loveless owner ; all she had was
 
 THE RUBICON 57 
 
 no longer hers. Truly the red flowers were very 
 different from the white. 
 
 To another man who was something of an 
 observer, the signs of this which appeared on the 
 surface, as the surface of dark water heaves and 
 is stirred mysteriously and massively when the 
 depths are moved, were profoundly interesting. The 
 full import of this stirring, of course, he did not, 
 could not, guess. All he knew was, that this 
 admirably beautiful woman had moods as profound 
 as they were mysterious ; he was pre-occupied with 
 her, interested, fascinated. 
 
 They were sitting together on the verandah of 
 the Beau Site one afternoon, in the enjoyment of 
 the bright, winter sun. Lord Hayes . had departed 
 with his white umbrella, to see about the purchase 
 of a small villa which was for sale, and which stood 
 high and pleasantly among the olive woods. 
 
 They had been for a sail in the morning, and 
 Eva said to herself that she was tired and would 
 stop at home. She did not trouble to make any 
 excuse at all to her husband. He had mentioned 
 to her that he was going to see about the villa 
 which she had admired.
 
 58 THE RUBICON 
 
 ' It will be a pleasant drive up there,' he had 
 said, ' if you care to come. You said you wanted 
 to see the villa.' 
 
 Eva had rather wanted to see the villa, but 
 the prospect appeared suddenly distasteful to her. 
 
 ' I think I shall stop at home,' she said, and left 
 him standing on the hotel steps, 
 
 Jim Armine, it appeared, was going to stop at 
 home, too, and the natural consequence of this 
 was that, half an hour later, they met on the 
 great verandah facing south. 
 
 ' This place gets stupid,' she said, seating her- 
 self in a low, basket-chair. ' I think we shall have 
 to go away.' 
 
 ' Where are you going to ? ' he asked. 
 
 ' I had thought of Algiers ; we can't go north yet. 
 They are having blizzards in England. Besides, 
 February in England is always intolerable.' 
 
 ' I have never been to Algiers,' said Jim, preg- 
 nantly. 
 
 Eva looked at him a moment. 
 
 ' Well, I suppose there's no reason why you 
 shouldn't come with us. We haven't got a mono- 
 poly of the line.'
 
 THE RUBICON 59 
 
 ' I shouldn't come if you didn't want me,' he 
 said, rather sulkily. 
 
 ' Fancy asking a bride on her honeymoon whether 
 she wanted another man with her ! ' she said. 
 ' There is only one man in the moon, I've always 
 heard,' 
 
 Poor Jim found it rather hard to keep his 
 temper, more especially as he knew that he had 
 nothing to complain of. He shifted his position 
 in his chair, and fixed his eye on a sail on the 
 horizon, so that he could see Eva without looking 
 at her. 
 
 ' Algiers is quite a model place for a honey- 
 moon, I should think,' he said, ' Of course, the 
 object is to get out of the world. There is too 
 large a piece of the world at Mentone. Don't 
 you find it so?' 
 
 Eva raised her eyebrows. This last speech 
 seemed to her to savour of impertinence, and 
 needed no reply. Jim was clever enough to see 
 that he had made a mistake, and his tone altered. 
 
 ' Where are you going to stay in Algiers ? I 
 believe it is pleasanter out of the town, on the 
 hills.'
 
 6o THE RUBICON 
 
 * Oh ! Hayes has got a villa somewhere in Mus- 
 tapha Sup^rieure. He has a passion for villas. He 
 has a strong sense of possession. We have been 
 making a sort of triumphal progress. He has a 
 villa at Biarritz, which we stayed in, and now he 
 has bought one here. Personally, I prefer a hotel ; 
 but, of course, villas are more suitable to honey- 
 moons. You are more alone there. But they are 
 rather spidery affairs if they are never lived in.' 
 
 ' Oh ! spiders belong to the class of idyllic insects,' 
 said Armine. ' They swarm in hayfields on Sunday 
 evenings, which is one of the most recognised 
 idyllic settings.' 
 
 • I don't think I can be idyllic,' remarked Eva. 
 ' I never want to sit in hayfields. They make 
 one feel creepy, and all sorts of strange things 
 crawl down your back. It may be idyllic, but 
 the consciousness of the creep)' things makes one 
 want to go for the idylls with a broom. Besides, 
 spiders are so like a certain class of odious men.' 
 
 Jim recalled at that moment a little thing that 
 had struck his attention the same morning. Lord 
 Hayes had been breakfasting in the verandah on 
 the usual continental breakfast — a couple of rolls,
 
 THE RUBICON 6i 
 
 two pieces of creamy butter, coffee, and a saucer 
 of honey. A fly had found its way into the 
 honey, and Hayes had extracted it with the butt 
 end of his teaspoon. There was a methodical 
 eagerness about this action that had made Jim 
 think at that moment of a spider disentangh'ng a 
 fly from its web, and at Eva's words the scene 
 flashed up before him again. 
 
 ' 1 think I know what you mean,' he said, feel- 
 ing his way. 
 
 Eva, too, had noticed the scene in the morning, 
 and Jim's remark made her wonder whether he 
 also had it in his mind. When she had compared 
 spiders to an odious class of men, she had not in the 
 least thought of her husband. The possible imper- 
 tinence of his first remark received some confirmation. 
 She was willing to be like a spider, too, if necessary. 
 
 ' I daresay you do,' she said. ' There is nothing 
 very subtle about it. I remember thinking this 
 morning that you looked so like a spider when 
 you were helping that fly out of your honey. 
 Not that you belong to the odious class of men.' 
 
 Jim flushed. The whip tingled unpleasantly on 
 his shoulders.
 
 62 THE RUBICON 
 
 ' It was your husband who rescued the fly out 
 of his honey,' he said. 
 
 * Was it ? ' asked Eva, negligently. ' I thought 
 it was you.' 
 
 She did not feel angry with him. He had made 
 a mistake and had been punished for it. Justice 
 had been done. 
 
 ' It's getting rather cold,' she went on. ' Take 
 me for a stroll, and give me your arm if you care 
 for convention as little as you say you do. I am 
 a little tired.' 
 
 They walked up and down the gay street in front 
 of the hotel for half-an-hour or so. Eva felt a 
 vague stimulus in the homage of this presentable 
 young man, in spite of his slight awkwardnesses. 
 She felt he was not a man whom it was easy 
 to make a fool of, but she was making a some- 
 what complete fool of him, and it pleased her. 
 For the first time, perhaps, she caught a glimpse 
 of her own power as a beautiful and attractive 
 woman. That glimpse roused no vanity in her, 
 but considerable interest. The sense of personal 
 power is always pleasant ; no man or woman who 
 is alive, in any sense of the word, will acquiesce in
 
 THE RUBICON 63 
 
 being a unit among units, or will fail to feel a 
 delicate growing love of power. We brought 
 nothing into the world, and we shall assuredly take 
 nothing out ; but while we are in the world, how we 
 cling, with a persistence that no creed will shake, 
 to the passionate desire for more and more and 
 more. Eva was, in fact, on the threshold of the 
 house called ' Know Thyself It is a house of 
 varying size. To her it appeared large and well 
 furnished. 
 
 They walked along the sea-wall westwards, and 
 Eva sat down on the low balustrade. The air 
 was still and windless, and forty feet below lay 
 the smooth, grey backs of the rocks shining with 
 the salt water. 
 
 * What a frightful coward one is,' she said, ' not 
 to throw oneself down and see what happens next. 
 I always flatter myself that I'm brave ; but I am 
 not brave enough to risk anything, really. I think 
 a year ago I might have thrown myself down if it 
 had occurred very strongly to me, because I had 
 nothing to risk. But now things are beginning to 
 be interesting. I should risk a certain amount of 
 amusement and pleasure if I just stepped over that
 
 64 THE RUBICON 
 
 wall. I wish you would step over and see. Mr 
 Armine ; only that would be no good, you couldn't 
 come and tell me about it afterwards.' 
 
 ' Of course, lots of things are a bore,' said he, 
 ' but I can't imagine any existence where that 
 wouldn't be the case. I couldn't frame a life in 
 my mind where one wouldn't be bored.' 
 
 'Well, I sympathise with you. I probably am 
 incapable — in fact, I know I am incapable — of many 
 emotions, but I feel bored no longer. I used to feel 
 nothing else.' 
 
 Armine was sitting near her, looking the other 
 way. 
 
 ' What emotions can't you feel ? ' he asked sud- 
 denly. 
 
 Eva laughed. 
 
 ' Oh ! plenty, and perhaps the most important of 
 all. That is why I fully expect not to feel all the 
 emotions that Algiers should inspire in me.' 
 
 Armine thought this remark much less inconse- 
 quent than it sounded, but he kept his reflections 
 to himself 
 
 Two days afterwards, Eva and her husband left 
 Mentone for Marseilles. Jim walked down with
 
 THE RUBICON 6$ 
 
 them to the station, accounting for his action by 
 saying that he expected a box from England, and 
 it had not arrived, though it was two days overdue. 
 To Eva this appeared the most shallow and unneces- 
 sary of subterfuges. There was some slight delay 
 in starting, and he stood by their carriage window 
 with his arms on the sill until the train moved. 
 
 Eva was leaning back in her corner, talking slowly 
 but somewhat continuously. 
 
 ' I hope your box will have come,' she was saying 
 with fine cruelty. ' You must have been very eager 
 about it to come down through these dusty streets, 
 when you might be having a sail. I really thought 
 you were coming to see us off till you explained 
 about the box. I think I should have been rude 
 enough to ask you to stop at home if it had been so. 
 I hate being seen off. There is never anything to 
 say ; you feel as if you ought to make pretty little 
 farewell speeches, but the farewell speeches always 
 hang fire, I notice. And no one can continue an 
 ordinary, rational, desultory conversation with fifty 
 engines screaming at him. It is much better for 
 everyone to pretend they are not going till the last 
 moment, and then jump up quickly, say good-bye,
 
 66 THE RUBICON 
 
 and bundle into the cab. But at a railway station 
 it is impossible to pretend you are not going. The 
 apparatus of going is too obvious. Everyone is fussy 
 and stupid at a station. Ah ! we are really off, are 
 we ? Good-bye ! I wish you were coming with us.' 
 
 Eva smiled rather maliciously. The first imperti- 
 nent remark had been settled with now, and they 
 were quits again. 
 
 Jim Armine stood on the platform watching the 
 smoke of the receding train. He made a mono- 
 syllabic remark which is not worth setting down, 
 and went back to the hotel. The box which he was 
 expecting might languish alone in the parcel office 
 for all that he cared. 
 
 The bridal pair crossed in one of the French 
 Transatlantique steamers, which are built long and 
 narrow for the sake of speed, and the accurate ob- 
 servation of the effect of a cross sea. Eva, with her 
 serene immunity from human weaknesses, was sit- 
 ting near the bows of the vessel, enjoying the warm, 
 winter sun, and watched the great heaving masses of 
 water, rushing up against the side of the vessel, with 
 a sympathetic gladness in their glorious unrestraint. 
 The position presented itself in a somewhat different
 
 THE RUBICON 67 
 
 light to her husband, who retired, under the influence 
 of the same glorious unrestraint, with anything but 
 sympathetic gladness in his heart. Eva felt a little 
 contemptuous pity for him, but enjoyed being alone. 
 It was drawing near that supreme hour when the 
 sun just touches the horizon of water, and the depth 
 of colour in southern sea and sky grows almost 
 unbearable in its cruel fulness, in its air of knowing 
 something, of being able to tell one, if one could 
 only hear its message, some mystery that would 
 make things plain. Eva was sitting on the windward 
 side of the vessel, looking west, and her eyes were 
 filled with a still, questioning wonder. She had 
 arrived at that most agonising stage of feeling sure 
 that a mystery was there, without grasping what it 
 was to which she wanted any answer. Her mind 
 was full of a vague wonder and expectancy — the 
 wonder and expectancy of a mind just awakened 
 from its dreamless sleep of indifference. One arm 
 was thrown back, and her hand grasped the taffrail 
 to steady herself She had taken off her hat, and 
 her hair was blown about in the singing breeze. The 
 human interest which had begun to dawn in her 
 which had stirred and woke from its sleep with a
 
 68 THE RUBICON 
 
 sudden, startled cry, a few weeks ago, would not let 
 the other wonder slumber. The sense of the eternal 
 mystery of things watched side by side with the 
 sense of the eternal mystery of men. But for this 
 half-hour she was alone with it ; she was unconscious 
 of the heaving and tossing of the vessel ; all she knew 
 was that she questioned, with something like passion- 
 ate eagerness, the great walls of wine-dark water with 
 their heraldry of foam, the hissing monsters that 
 rose and fell round her, the luminous miracle that 
 was sinking in the west. 
 
 In the meantime, Lord Hayes had got, so to 
 speak, his second wind, had emerged from the 
 privacy of his cabin, and was walking along the 
 deck towards her with a battered, dishevelled air. 
 The punctuation of his steps was rigidly but irregu- 
 larly determined by the laws of gravity as exhibited 
 by a vessel pitching heavily in a fluid medium. 
 Eva had not seen him coming, and he stood by her 
 a few moments in silence. 
 
 ' I feel a little better,' he remarked at length, in 
 precise, well-modulated tones. 
 
 Kva started and frowned as if she had been struck. 
 She turned on him with angry impatience.
 
 THE RUBICON 69 
 
 ' Ah, you have spoiled it all,' she cried. 
 
 She looked at him a moment, and then broke out 
 into a mirthless laugh. He had wrapped a grey 
 shawl round his shoulders, and on his head was a 
 brown, deerstalker cap. 
 
 ' My dear Hayes,' she said, ' you are in vivid con- 
 trast with the sunset, and you startled me. I was 
 thinking about the sunset. However, it is nearly 
 over now. You look like a sea-sick picture of 
 twilight. That grey shawl is very twilighty. Come 
 into the saloon and get me some tea.' 
 
 That gentleman was in too enfeebled a condition 
 to feel resentment, even if he had been by nature 
 resentful. It is notorious that certain emotions of 
 the mind cannot exist under certain conditions of 
 the body. No normal man feels a tendency to anger 
 after a good dinner, or a tendency to patience in the 
 ten minutes preceding that function. No one feels 
 spiritually exalted in the middle of the morning, or 
 heroic when suffering from slight neuralgia, and I 
 venture to add that no one has spirit enough to feel 
 resentful after an hour or two of sea-sickness. 
 
 The villa at Algiers was a charming, Moorish 
 house, with a predominance of twisted pilasters and
 
 70 THE RUBICON 
 
 shining tiles, and bold, purple-belled creepers flaunt- 
 ing it over the white walls. It stood on the hills of 
 Mustapha Sup^rieure, above the Eastern-looking town, 
 surrounded by a rich, melodious garden, where the 
 winter nightingales sang in the boughs of orange 
 groves, which were bright with flower and fruit to- 
 gether, and where tall, listless eucalyptus trees shed 
 their rough, odorous fruits thick on the path. But 
 this soft beauty suited Eva's mind not so well as 
 the bold, golden sun dropping into a wine-dark sea ; 
 in fact, she cordially detested the place. How much 
 of her hatred was due to the fact that she was alone 
 with her husband she did not care to ask herself 
 Certainly, the even monotony of one face, one low, 
 well-modulated voice, was displeasing to her. 
 
 She found a malicious pleasure in giving him sur- 
 prises. Her freshly-awakened interest in the human 
 race sometimes took the bit in its teeth and ran riot, 
 and, when it ran riot in his presence, she took no care 
 to check it, but talked in a voluble, rather vicious 
 vein, that startled him. For instance, at dinner one 
 day, she had discussed certain books which he did 
 not know women even read, and announced, some- 
 what vividly, views on life and being which were
 
 THE RUBICON 71 
 
 scarcely conventional. After dinner, they had sat 
 out in the little passage that ran round the open 
 square in the centre of the house, supported on 
 twisted pillars, and Eva continued her newly-found 
 confession of faith. 
 
 ' Men seem to expect that women should be 
 sexless replicas of themselves,' she said. ' All they 
 would allow them is the inestimable privilege of 
 being good. Virtue is its own reward, they say — 
 so they cultivate their own pleasure with a fine 
 disregard of virtue, and a curious pride in perform- 
 ing actions which certainly will lay up for them 
 no store of virtuous and ineffable joy, while to 
 the women they say; "Be good; here is a blank 
 cheque on the bank of Providence. The bigger 
 the better. Au revoir'\ A delightfully simple 
 arrangement.' 
 
 Lord Hayes gave a little cough, and added 
 sugar to his coffee. 
 
 ' I should always wish,' he said, with the air of 
 an after-dinner speaker ; ' I should always wish 
 women to fulfil to the uttermost their own duties, 
 which none but women can do.' 
 
 ' The duty of being good,' said Eva. ' Exactly so.'
 
 72 rilE RUBICON 
 
 ' I fail to see the justice of your remarks about 
 the tendencies of men to regard women as sexless 
 replicas of themselves,' he said. ' The province of 
 women is quite different from that of men.' 
 
 ' Ah ! let me explain,' said Eva. ' Men are bad 
 and good mixed. Whether the bad or the good 
 predominates is beside the point. Leave out the 
 bad, and introduce no vivid good, and you get 
 the sexlessness, and what remains is a sexless 
 goodness, which is, as I say, the sexless replica of 
 the man. That is a man's woman.' 
 
 ' No doubt it is my own stupidity,' said Lord 
 Hayes, politely, 'but I still fail to agree with you. 
 You do not take into account what I ventured to 
 call the province of women, which, I say again, is 
 quite different from the province of men.' 
 
 ' Da capo' murmured Eva. ' Let us agree to 
 differ, Hayes. I am rather sleepy ; I think I shall 
 go to bed.' 
 
 Lord Hayes lighted a candle for her, and waited 
 till it had burned up. 
 
 ' Good-night,' said Eva, nodding at him. 
 
 He bent forward to kiss her, and, as before, she 
 surrendered her face to be kissed.
 
 THE RUrJCON 11 
 
 The length of these episodes calls for an apologj-, 
 but there is just this to be said. Life, for most of 
 us, consists of episodes, of interruptions, of paren- 
 theses. We can few of us keep up the epic vein 
 and go sublimely on, building up from great 
 harmonious scenes a great harmonious whole. The 
 scene-shifter perspires and tugs at his mighty card- 
 board trees and impossible castles in the forest ; 
 they are stiff, they will not turn round. And he 
 sits down — does this irresponsible and wholly un- 
 business-like scene-shifter — and meditates. After all, 
 is life really surrounded by these giants of the 
 theatrical forest ? Do we go into remote and virgin 
 woods and chant our love in irreproachable epics ? 
 When we have made our great scene, when we 
 stand in the pure, unselfish, heroic, villain-massacre- 
 ing, devoted climax of our existence, are we quite 
 sure that some one will throw the ethereal ox}-- 
 hydrogen light on to us at the right moment? 
 W^ill the audience recognise how great we are ; and, 
 even if they do, will not the slightest accident 
 with the oxy-hydrogen light turn our climax into 
 an anti-climax ? The irresponsible scene-shifter 
 begins to see a more excellent way. Roll off your
 
 74 THE RUBICON 
 
 forest trees ; send the manager of the oxy-hydrogen 
 light home, give him eighteenpence to get drunk 
 on — he will like it better than your heroic vein — 
 let us have no scenery even. Just a few chairs and 
 tables, a plain, grey sky, and no heroics. A few 
 little episodes dealing of men who are not saints 
 or silver kings, a few women who are not ab- 
 besses or Portias, who are in no epic mood, but 
 in the mood of the majority of weak, unsatisfac- 
 tory, careless, human beings, who can be unselfish 
 and pure, but who are at times a little uncertain 
 about the big riddle, unscrupulous, unkind, worldly. 
 Besides, we are only in the first act at present. 
 Perhaps the gigantic forest trees and the white 
 light will come on later, but we do not promise. 
 The irresponsible scene-shifter is right. So much, 
 then, in praise of episode. 
 
 To return from the point at which we started be- 
 fore these unconscionable episodes found their way 
 into the text, the honeymoon was over, the month 
 was April, and Lord and Lady Hayes had returned 
 to England. They were to spend a few days at 
 Aston, and, after Easter, to go straight up to 
 London. Old Lady Hayes was staying with her
 
 THE RUBICON 75 
 
 niece, who had married a certain Mr Davenport, 
 and had one son. Reggie Davenport was a favour- 
 ite with the dowager, who bullied him incessantly, 
 and who sometimes got furious, because he never 
 lost his temper with her. She was to spend a 
 fortnight in London with the Hayes, as a great 
 concession, in order to make Eva's acquaintance, 
 and would join them as soon as they had settled. 
 It may be stated at once, that she regarded 
 her son's marriage as a most unprincipled and 
 selfish act, and as an insult levelled directly at 
 herself 
 
 Mrs Grampound came up to see her daughter 
 on the first day after their arrival. 
 
 'Your father would have come with me,' she 
 explained, ' but he and Percy are away. I am quite 
 alone at home. You are looking wonderfully well, 
 dear, and I'm sure I needn't ask you whether you 
 are happy.' 
 
 'Of course,' said Eva, 'those are the things that 
 are taken for granted.' 
 
 ' I've come to have a little cosy talk with you,' 
 said Mrs Grampound, settling herself in a chair 
 and taking off her gloves.
 
 76 THE RUBICON 
 
 A cosy little soliloquy would perhaps have been 
 a more accurate description. She wandered on 
 in a sort of pious intoxication at the contempla- 
 tion of her daughter. 
 
 ' The mistress of a great house like this has 
 very great responsibilities, my darling,' she said. 
 'If dear James were not such a thoroughly able 
 and upright man, I confess I should feel a wee 
 bit nervous at seeing my darling whirled away 
 into such a circle. Be very sure exactly how 
 you are going to behave. There seems to me 
 something very beautiful in the life of all those 
 dear, last-century, great ladies, whose husbands used 
 to treat them with such charming old-fashioned 
 courtesy, and lock them up whenever they went 
 away, which must have been most tedious. Ves, 
 and send a servant to tell the groom of the 
 chambers to ask my lady if she would receive 
 him. Dear me, yes.' 
 
 ' I don't think Hayes means to lock me up 
 whenever he goes away,' said Eva. ' We haven't 
 got a groom of the chambers, either.' 
 
 ' No, dear,' said Mrs Grampound ; ' I was just 
 saying, wasn't I ? that all that was changed. Hus-
 
 THE RUBICON 77 
 
 bands lounge in their wives' boudoirs now, and 
 smoke cigarettes there. So much more human 
 and natural. You don't mind the smell of smoke, 
 do you, dear ? ' 
 
 'On the contrary,' said Eva; 'I smoke my- 
 self.' 
 
 ' Gracious, how shocking ! What a wicked child. 
 Of course, there's no harm in it, dear; lots of 
 nice women smoke. I should not let Hayes know 
 that. When a difficult time comes — there will be 
 difficult times, of course, my Eva — there is no rose 
 without its thorns — Let me see, what was I say- 
 ing — ah ! yes, those little indulgences, like letting 
 a husband have a cigarette in the drawing-room 
 every now and then, are very much appreciated. 
 A little womanly tenderness,' continued Mrs Gram- 
 pound, getting rather breathless, and volubly elo- 
 quent, ' a little tact, a little wifely sympathy, just 
 a look, the " I know, I know," which women can 
 put into one little look, is all that is required to 
 make those difficulties real advantages — concealed 
 facilities, one might really call them ; real renewals 
 of the marriage vow ; the rough places shall be 
 plain, in fact, if we may use those words.'
 
 78 THE RUBICON 
 
 ' We get on admirably together,' said Eva ; ' he 
 is most considerate for me, and most kind.' 
 
 ' I declare I positively love him,' cried her mother. 
 ' Of course, in any case, I should teach myself — 
 should compel myself — to love the man of your 
 choice, but the first time I saw him, I said to my- 
 self, that is the husband for my Eva. It was one 
 June evening,' continued Mrs Grampound with an 
 impressional vagueness, * and we were dining some- 
 where, I can't remember where, and he was there 
 too ; dear me, I recollect it all as clearly as if 
 it was yesterday. I remember old Lady Hayes 
 telling us all that brown sherry was rank poison, 
 and that she would as soon think of drinking 
 a glass of laudanum. We all laughed a great 
 deal, because our host had very famous brown 
 sherry.* 
 
 ' It must have been very pleasant,' said Eva. 
 
 * Dear old Lady Hayes,' said Mrs Grampound ; 
 ' such a wonderful woman, such strong, shrewd 
 common sense ; I wonder if she will go on liv- 
 ing with you, Eva ? I don't think it's a very good 
 plan myself — there is sure to be some little un- 
 pleasantness now and then.'
 
 THE RUBICON 79 
 
 'In spite of her strong, shrewd common sense?' 
 asked Eva. 
 
 ' Dear child, how you catch one's words up ! Of 
 course, her presence would be invaluable to you, 
 if she stopped, and with such a guest constantly 
 by you, of course you would learn a great deal. 
 But I should make it quite plain what your relative 
 positions must be. You are the mistress of the 
 house, Eva ; she is your husband's pensioner. Be 
 very kind, very courteous, but very firm. Your 
 rights are your rights. I daresay she will go to 
 live at Brighton or Bournemouth or Bath, all 
 those watering-places begin with a B ; no doubt 
 she has money of her own. You didn't think of 
 asking Lord Hayes what would be done about 
 that, did you, Eva ? You might suggest it very 
 gently and feelingly some time soon. Of course, 
 you needn't express any opinion till you see what 
 she is likely to do. Then, if it appears that she 
 is proposing to live with you, just say very quietly 
 that you will be very glad to have her. That will 
 show, I think, that you know and are ready to 
 insist on her occupying her proper position in the 
 house. And you went to Algiers, did you not ? '
 
 8o THE RUBICON 
 
 continued her mother ; ' that dear, white town set 
 lii<e a pearl and all that on the sapphire sea. I 
 forget who said that about it, but it seems to mc 
 a very poetical description. I could almost find 
 it in my heart to envy you, dearest.' 
 
 ' Yes, it's a very pretty place,' assented Eva. 
 
 ' Darling, why do you tell me so little ? ' said Mrs 
 Grampound, more soberly. ' I have been thinking 
 so continuously about you all the time you have 
 been away ; you have lived in all my thoughts. 
 I have said to myself, " Eva will be at home in four 
 weeks, three weeks, two days, one day; to-day I shall 
 see my dearest again." ' 
 
 ' What is there to tell you,' said Eva, slowly. 
 ' You assume I am happy, and I don't deny it. I 
 am also amused and interested. I find things very 
 entertaining. If you like I will show }ou some 
 photographs of Mentone and Algiers. I lost two 
 thousand francs at Monte Carlo. Hayes is very 
 generous about money matters, and he has the 
 further requirement of being very rich. He is bent 
 on my being magnificent, and so, for that matter, am 
 I. You shall sec some fine things. I have, as you 
 told mc before my marriage, great natural ad-
 
 THE RUBICON 8i 
 
 vantages in the way of beauty. Diamonds suit me 
 very well, and I have quantities of diamonds.' 
 
 Poor Mrs Grampound's mental intoxication was 
 passing away rapidly, leaving behind a feeling of 
 depression. At no time did her thoughts present 
 themselves to her with distinctness ; they were like 
 seaweeds waving about close to the surface of the 
 water. Sometimes, after a big wave had passed, 
 sundry little ends of them appeared above the sea 
 for a second or two, and Mrs Grampound made 
 anxious little grabs at these before they disappeared 
 again. Consequently, her descriptions of them, as 
 reflected in her conversation, were somewhat scrappy 
 and inorganic. 
 
 She appeared, in the short silence that followed 
 Eva's remarks, to have got hold of a new sort of 
 seaweed — a bitter, prickly fragment. At any rate 
 she said, somewhat piteously, — 
 
 ' Eva, Eva, tell me you are satisfied. You don't 
 blame me, do you, for urging it on you ? ' 
 
 Eva could be very cruel. The foam-born Aphro- 
 dite, when she came ' from barren deeps to conquer 
 all with love,' had, we may be sure, many undesir- 
 able suitors, and to these, I expect, she did not show
 
 82 THE RUBICON 
 
 any particular kindness or sympathy. She was, to 
 judge by her face, too divine to be cruel in petty, 
 irritating ways, but she was too divine not to be 
 very human. 
 
 Eva raised her eyebrows. 
 
 * Why should I blame j-ou ? I am amused and 
 interested. After all, that is more important than 
 anything else. Surely I ought to be grateful to you. 
 But, to speak quite frankly, I did not marry to 
 please you ; I married to please myself, and Hayes, 
 of course,' she added. 
 
 Mrs Grampound was very nearly shedding a few 
 vague tears, but the appearance of Lord Hayes made 
 her decide to postpone them. 
 
 * My charming mother-in-law,' he said, * I am 
 delighted to see you. Very much delighted, in fact. 
 And am I not to see my father-in-law? How do 
 you think Eva is looking ? ' 
 
 * Eva is looking wonderfully well,' said she, brisken- 
 ing herself up a little. ' She has been giving me 
 the most delightful accounts of your honeymoon. 
 Mentone, Algiers, all those charming, romantic places. 
 But Monte Carlo! Really, I was shocked. And 
 Eva tells me she lost two hundred thousand francs
 
 THE RUBICON 83 
 
 — or was it two thousand, Eva? In any case, it is 
 quite shocking, and I feel I ought to scold you for 
 leading my child into bad ways.' 
 
 ' He didn't lead me,' said Eva. ' I went by myself 
 I think you remonstrated, didn't you, Hayes ? You 
 didn't play yourself, I know. However, I got a good 
 deal of fun out of it. It was really exciting some- 
 times. After all, that is the chief thing. Two 
 thousand francs was cheap. Tell mother about the 
 new villa. I must go — I've got a hundred things to 
 do.' 
 
 Old Lady Hayes also made inquiries of her son 
 as to what was to happen to her. She was a 
 direct old lady, and she said, — 
 
 'And what is to become of me?' 
 
 Lord Hayes quailed under these unmasked bat- 
 teries, and felt most thankful that he would not 
 have to meet them alone any longer. He had 
 great confidence in Eva's courage, and felt that she 
 would be quite up to the mark on such occasions. 
 But he had, for the present, to trust to his own 
 forces, and, with the idea of making the scene as 
 little unpleasant as possible, he replied, — 
 
 ' Of course, dear mother, you will do whatever
 
 84 THE RUBICON 
 
 suits you best. Your position in the house will 
 necessarily be somewhat changed.' 
 
 ' Necessarily,' said Lady Hayes. 
 
 Her son found no pertinent reply ready.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 '"TT^HERE is something peculiarly substantial and 
 English about those houses which our aris- 
 tocracy brighten with their presence, in the more 
 fashionable parts of London, during several months 
 of the year. Those lords of the earth, who cannot 
 manage to breathe unless they have a thousand or 
 more acres round their houses in the country, be- 
 ing sensible folk, are content to live, shoulder by 
 shoulder, in rows of magnificent barracks, when 
 they are in London. A porch supported by Ionic 
 pillars, with a line of Renaissance balustrade along 
 the top, a sprinkling of Japanese awnings, a couple 
 of dozen large, square windows looking out on to 
 what is technically known as * the square garden,' 
 partly because it is round, and partly because it is 
 sparsely planted with sooty, stunted bushes, scat- 
 tered about on what courtesy interprets to he
 
 86 THE RUBICON 
 
 grass, and surrounded by large, forbidding railings, 
 are the characteristics of the best London houses. 
 They may not be distinguished by any striking, 
 artistic beauty, but they are eminently habitable. 
 
 Along one of these rows, one June afternoon, a 
 smart victoria was being driven rapidly. It was 
 hung on the best possible springs, and the wheels 
 were circumscribed with the best possible india- 
 rubber tyres. A water-cart had just passed up the 
 street, and the air was full of that indescribable 
 freshness which we associate in the country with 
 summer rain, and which, in London, makes us feel 
 that art is really doing a great deal to rival Nature. 
 The progress of the well-appointed victoria was 
 therefore as free from noise, jolts and dust as loco- 
 motion is permitted to be in this imperfect world. 
 There was only one occupant of this piece of per- 
 fection — for, of course, the coachman and footman 
 are part of the carriage — and she was as perfect 
 as her equipment. In other words, Lady Hayes 
 was going home to tea. 
 
 The carriage drew up with noiseless precision at 
 the curb-stone, and Lady Hayes remained appar- 
 ently unconscious of the stoppage till the powdered
 
 THE RUBICON 87 
 
 footman had rung the bell, and turned back the 
 light crimson rug that covered her knees. Then 
 she rose languidly and trailed her skirts across the 
 pavement to the house. Above the porch was a 
 square, canvas tent, with one side, away from the 
 sun, open to admit the breeze, and Eva, as she 
 passed upstairs, said to the man standing in the 
 hall, 'Tea upstairs, above the porch.' This tent 
 opened out of a low window in the drawing-room, 
 through which Eva passed, and in which was sit- 
 ting, as gaunt and forbidding as ever, her respected 
 mother-in-law. That lady had grudgingly complied 
 with the popular but misguided prejudices of London 
 with regard to the skins wherewith the human animal 
 clothes itself, but her stiff, black silk gown was as 
 awe-inspiring as her grey, Jaeger dress and the boots 
 with eight holes a-piece in them. 
 
 They had all been in London nearly a month, and 
 the excellent old lady was living in a permanent 
 equipment of heavy armour, with which to repel, 
 assault and batter her daughter-in-law. Eva, on the 
 contrary, despised the old methods of warfare, and 
 met these attacks, or led them, with no further im- 
 plements than her own unruffled scorn, and a some-
 
 88 THE RUB ICO \ 
 
 what choice selection of small daggers and arrows, 
 in the shape of a studied delicacy of sarcasm and 
 polite impertinences. She resembled, in fact, an 
 active and accomplished pea-shooter, who success- 
 fully pelted the joints of a mature and slowly-moving 
 Goliath. The dowager glanced up as she entered. 
 One of her laborious mottoes was ' Punctuality is the 
 root of virtue,' and Eva, in consequence, held the 
 view that punctuality is the last infirmity of possibly 
 noble minds. She was quite willing to believe that 
 her mother-in-law had an incomparably noble mind ; 
 she did not underrate her antagonist's strong points ; 
 in fact, her whole system was to emphasise them. 
 
 *Ah, you've come at last,' said old Lady Hayes. 
 ' And pray, when are we to have tea ? ' 
 
 * I am late,' said Eva. * I always am late, you 
 know. Why didn't you have tea without me? Is 
 Hayes in ? ' 
 
 ' The servants have quite enough to do with the 
 dance to-night without bringing up tea twice.' 
 
 'Ah that is so thoughtful and charming of }'0u,' 
 said Eva, drawing off her long gloves. ' The merci- 
 ful man considers his beast. That is so good of 
 you.'
 
 THE RUBICON 89 
 
 ' And he considers his servants as well,' said the 
 dowager. 
 
 ' Oh ! I think servants are meant to be classed as 
 a sort of beast. The good ones are machines with 
 volition ; and if they are bad servants, of course 
 they arc beasts.' 
 
 The dowager turned over the leaves of the cur- 
 rent number of the Lancet with elaborate uncon- 
 sciousness. 
 
 Eva finished taking off her gloves, and whistled 
 a few bars of a popular tune. 
 
 ' I don't know if it's customary for women to 
 whistle now-a-days,' said the old lady, for whistling, 
 as Eva knew, was a safe draw, ' but in my time it 
 was thought most improper.' 
 
 ' Isn't there a French proverb — I daren't pro- 
 nounce French before you — about " we have changed 
 all that?" That is a very silly proverb. It is the 
 older generation who changed it themselves. They 
 made their own system of life impossible. They 
 reduced it to an absurdity.' 
 
 The dowager, who spoke French with a fine Scotch 
 accent, and knew it, finished buckling on, as it were, 
 her greaves and cuiras.s, and presented arms.
 
 90 THE RUBICON 
 
 ' I confess I don't understand you. No doubt I 
 am very stupid — I should like very much to know 
 how we have reduced our life to an absurdity.' 
 
 ' I don't say the modern generation are not quite 
 as absurd,' said Eva, * but the difference is that they 
 have not yet learned their absurdity. You see, the 
 whole race of men, since B.C. 4004 — that is the 
 correct date, is it not? — have been devoting them- 
 selves to the construction of any theory of life which 
 would hold water, and one by one they have been 
 abandoned. The new theory, that nothing matters 
 at all, has not yet been disproved, and considering 
 that no theory hitherto has ever been permanent, it 
 would be absurd to abandon this one till it is dis- 
 proved in as convincing a manner as all its prede- 
 cessors.' 
 
 ' I imagine that no previous age has ever sunk 
 so deep in mere sensuous gratifications,' said the 
 dowager, lunging heavily. 
 
 'Ah, do you think so?' said Eva. 'Of course, 
 it is impertinent in me to try to argue the matter 
 with you, as experience is the only safe guide 
 in such matters, and you have experience of at 
 least one more generation than I. But that seems
 
 THE RUBICON 91 
 
 to me altogether untrue. As we know from the 
 Bible, desire shall fail, because it has been gratified 
 to the utmost that human desire can conceive, I 
 imagine. Well, I think desire has failed to a great 
 extent. The men of your generation, for instance, 
 and the generation before, drank so much port wine 
 that this generation drink none. The daily three 
 bottles that our grandfathers and great-grandfathers 
 indulged in, has fulfilled the desire of port to the 
 uttermost. No one gets drunk now. I don't think 
 I ever saw a man drunk. They used to fall under 
 the table, did they not ? What a charming state of 
 things ! But it has at least produced a fastidiousness 
 in us, which considers heavy drinking coarse and low.' 
 
 ' My father was a teetotaler, and so was my 
 husband,' said the old lady, rather wildly. 
 
 ' I think that the habit of drinking in men,' con- 
 tinued Eva, * is really the fault of the women ; you, 
 of course, are an instance in point. Your husband 
 was a teetotaler — surely, through your influence. 
 If the men of the last generation were vile, the 
 women, I think, were viler still. What is that word ? 
 Oh ! yes, vicarious. The men sinned vicariously for 
 the women.'
 
 92 THE RUBICON 
 
 ' It is easy to speak lightly of the virtues of your 
 forefathers,' remarked the dowager ; ' much easier 
 than to practise them yourself 
 
 ' Ah ! you misunderstand me,' said Eva. ' Heaven 
 forbid that I should speak lightly of them ! Their 
 virtues were as gigantic and as loathsome to 
 them, as their vices are to me. They used to 
 go to church with the most appalling regularity, 
 and eat salt fish in Lent, and have their clergyman 
 to dinner on Sunday, which meant no port wine 
 to speak of Of course, they made up for it by 
 having a little quiet cock-fighting on Sunday after- 
 noon, but you cannot expect perfection.' 
 
 ' Cock-fighting seems to me no more brutal than 
 butchering hand-reared pheasants,' said the dow- 
 ager. 
 
 ' Ah, that is the war-cry of people who don't 
 know anything about shooting,' said Eva. ' The 
 hand-reared pheasant comes over the guns at the 
 height of about sixty feet, at forty miles an hour. 
 I watched them shooting last year at home. There 
 was a big wind, and Hayes missed seventeen 
 birds in succession. Take a gun and try for your- 
 self, or course, )'uu say the same thing about
 
 THE RURICOX 93 
 
 partridge-driving. You say the manly thing is 
 to walk your partridges up, instead of having them 
 driven to you. The truth is, that one of the 
 reasons why men go partridge-driving now is be- 
 cause it is so much more difficult than walking 
 them up. Certainly Hayes's butchery of hand- 
 reared pheasants was a most humane proceeding. 
 Did you ever see a cock-fight ? ' 
 
 ' Cock-fighting improved the breed,' said the other, 
 ' though I disapprove of it entirely.' 
 
 * Well,' said Eva, * it killed off the weak ones. 
 The survival of the fittest, of course. And we reap 
 the benefits by having particularly large eggs to 
 eat ; at least, I suppose a stalwart chicken begins 
 life in a stalwart egg.' 
 
 Old Lady Hayes rose with dignity. 
 
 ' I think tea must be ready,' she said. ' In fact, 
 it is probably cold by this time.' 
 
 'Time does pass so in conversation,' said Eva, 
 languidly. ' Ah ! they have sent some orchids. How 
 nice and cool they look.' She snapped off a spray 
 of the delicate, cultured blossoms, and fastened them 
 in her dress. ' I think tea is put in the room 
 above the porch. I rather expect Jim Armine,' she
 
 94 THE RUBICON 
 
 said, as she settled herself in a low, basket-chair. 
 ' I wonder when the absurd custom of women 
 pouring out tea will go out ; why a woman 
 should have that abominable trouble I cannot 
 think. Of course, when tea was rather a rarity, 
 a sort of up-to-date luxury, it was natural. The 
 hostess gave her guests a smart little present.' 
 
 Old Lady Hayes accepted the challenge. 
 
 ' It used to be held to be the province of women 
 to be matronly and womanly and domestic,' she 
 said. ' They were in their places at the fireside, 
 at the tea-table, not in the smoking-room and 
 in grand stands.' 
 
 ' I am referring to the manual labour of pour- 
 ing out tea,' said Eva ; ' but whatever the province 
 of women may be, they seem to me to fill it very 
 inadequately when their husbands go to bed drunk 
 every night. It is such a comfort to know that 
 your father and husband were teetotalers, for I 
 can say these things without their being personal. 
 Your father was a Presbyterian minister, was he 
 not? How do you call it in the dear Scotch lan- 
 guage — meenister, isn't it ? ' 
 
 ' He was a learned, upright man.'
 
 THE RUBICON 95 
 
 ' How nice ! ' said Eva. ' I can add a meenister 
 to my ancestry. Do " you know who my great- 
 grandfather was? He was a crossing-sweeper, 
 originally, in New York. Then he went West, you 
 know, and, being 'cute, made a pile.' 
 
 'You have very distinct traces of your American 
 origin,' said the old lady with asperity. 
 
 ' And you of the dear Scotch talk,' said Eva. * I 
 always like the Scotch so much. They are so 
 honest and sterling and serious. Hoots, mon ! ' 
 she added meditatively. 
 
 The dowager took a second cup of tea. She 
 had been accustomed to consider tea as a destruc- 
 tive agent in the days of seven o'clock dinner, but 
 as Eva refused personally to dine till half-past 
 eight, she found that, though perhaps destructive, 
 it was less unpleasant than pure inanition. She 
 had enunciated some startling warnings as to what 
 would happen to people who dined at half-past 
 eight earlier in her sojourn in London, and Eva 
 had told her, with great courtesy, that she was 
 quite at liberty to dine at seven or half-past six, 
 or six if she liked, but she was afraid that her 
 daughter-in-law would be unable to share the meal
 
 96 THE RUBICON 
 
 with her. Whether her mother-in-law's constitu- 
 tion had become so strongly fortified by the use 
 of drugs that she could now afford to play tricks 
 with it, we are not called upon to say; at any- 
 rate, the half-past eight dinner had, at present, 
 made no perceptible inroads on her digestive or 
 vital powers, 
 
 Eva had finished tea, and proceeded to light a 
 cigarette. 
 
 ' After our dreadfully keen encounter,' she ex- 
 plained, ' I want soothing. Argument is very trying 
 to the nerves. Tobacco, on the other hand, is 
 eminently soothing. Permit me to soothe myself.' 
 
 Old Lady Hayes watched these proceedings 
 through eyelids drooped over vigilant, irritated 
 eyes. 
 
 Eva's whole personality was radically abhorrent to 
 her. Her complete modernity seemed to her an 
 epitome of all that is unsuitable to woman. Even 
 her best points — her extreme tolerance, her cold 
 purity — were repugnant, because they were the out- 
 come of what she considered a wrong principle. 
 Tolerance, according to the old lady's code, was the 
 fruit of charity — Eva's tolerance was the fruit of
 
 THE RUBICON 97 
 
 indifferences. In the same way, tlie purity, the 
 utter stainlessness of Eva's mind was the result 
 of fastidiousness, which, according to the other, was 
 the sinful opposite of charity. Purity via fastidi- 
 ousness, not moraHty, was to her the fig on the 
 thistle, the grape on the thorn, which, however ex- 
 cellent in itself, could not be good because it must 
 partake of the nature of its parent stem. 
 
 ' Of course, I know how utterly you must dis- 
 approve of me,' continued Eva with sincerity ; ' my 
 whole system, or rather want of system, of life, 
 must seem to you to be utterly inexcusable. Life 
 is a complicated business and rather tiresome at 
 the best. It is continually fractious and annoying 
 and irritating. Its whole object seems to be to 
 make one angry. But my plan is to bear with it ; 
 to treat it as a tiresome child, not to let it irritate 
 and annoy me, to avoid all possible collisions with 
 it — and, to do all this, you mustn't be serious or 
 too particular.' 
 
 ' I was brought up to believe in moral responsi- 
 bilities,' said the old lady, * in some idea of duty, 
 in a notion that it was not our mission simply to 
 
 mause ourselves and disregard others.' 
 
 G
 
 98 THE RUBICON 
 
 'Just so,' said Eva; 'that illustrates very well what 
 I mean by reducing things to an absurdity. Duty 
 dominated everything, and the port wine affairs 
 were merely regarded as interludes. Of course, if 
 men are brought up to believe in these ponderous 
 responsibilities, they must have interludes. We 
 have done away, or rather you made it inevitable 
 that we should do away, with responsibilities and 
 interludes alike.' 
 
 * And not unnaturally you have nothing left.' 
 
 ' Quite so. We are human beings who find 
 
 themselves in a state of consciousness, and a 
 
 state of consciousness demands that you should 
 
 do something or think something. We fulfil those 
 
 demands to a certain extent, but we do not 
 
 make a mumbo -jumbo of them. You see there 
 
 have always been a certain number of people 
 
 with a desire to do certain things — to be kind, 
 
 to be respectable and reasonable ; and a certain 
 
 number of these have a tendency — we all have 
 
 tendencies — to construct a theory about what they 
 
 do. They have, to begin with, a genius for doing 
 
 their duty, and doing your duty is an unremuner- 
 
 aLivc occupation in this wicked world. Then there
 
 THE RUBICON 99 
 
 comes in their inexorable need of making a theory 
 Duty is unremunerative here, but amusing oneself is 
 remunerative. Therefore there must be a place 
 and a time when the balance is struck, when to 
 have done your duty is remunerative, and not to 
 have done your duty is unremunerative ; and the 
 Paradiso and the Inferno are already made.' 
 
 The blood of all the clans was up. 
 
 ' Do you mean to say,' gasped the dowager, 
 * that you deny the existence of — ' 
 
 'Ah, my dear lady,' said Eva, *do not let us 
 say things we shall be sorry for afterwards. I 
 deny nothing, and I affirm nothing. I am only 
 pointing out that many people do deny and affirm 
 a great many things. The fault lies with them. 
 If they had affirmed nothing, and denied nothing, 
 would the fact that I did the same seem so 
 horrible to you ? Would you have evolved all 
 your system of denials and affirmations out of 
 your own inner consciousness?' 
 
 This was a little too much. Old Lady Hayes 
 surged up out of her chair and confronted her. 
 
 'You believe nothing — you fear nothing — you 
 love nothing. All you care for, are your wretched
 
 loo THE RUBICON 
 
 little hair-splittings about tendencies, and the modern 
 view of life. When you call my beliefs supersti- 
 tions and inventions, you think you have annihil- 
 ated them.' 
 
 ' Excuse me,' said Eva, ' I have no wish to 
 annihilate them, nor do I pretend to do so. I 
 wish I shared them. It must make everything so 
 very easy if it is labelled right or wrong ; if every 
 choice is like a cross road with a sign - post, 
 " Heaven and Hell." It must be so like those 
 little allegories about children with bare feet walk- 
 ing along a dusty road, with flowers by the side, and 
 lions and tigers hiding among the flowers. Having 
 read the allegories, of course, you know that if you 
 only keep to the road, it will soon become flowery, 
 and beautiful boots will mysteriously grow on to 
 your feet. And you have the inestimable satisfac- 
 tion of seeing the lions and tigers gnawing at the 
 bones of the people who go to pick flowers, and 
 of reflecting that not only do they have no beauti- 
 ful boots, but that the lions and tigers have eaten 
 them up, so that the beautiful boots would be no 
 use to them even if they had them. No doubt 
 you expect me to be seized upon soon, and eaten.
 
 THE RUBICON loi 
 
 It must be very unpleasant. I notice that you 
 never go to help them ; you are too much occupied 
 in walking along your tight-rope road.' 
 
 * This is mere burlesque.* 
 
 ' And who is the author of this burlesque ? ' 
 asked Eva. 
 
 ' Perhaps it is another characteristic of your 
 generation to ridicule the most sacred beliefs of 
 others,' she replied. ' I should have thought any 
 code of good manners would have forbade that. 
 Jews take off their hats when they come into a 
 Christian church.' 
 
 Eva rose without any show of haste or im- 
 patience. 
 
 ^ Alt revoir^ she said. 'You will excuse me, I 
 know. I have half-a-hundred things to do.' 
 
 She went through the open window into the 
 drawing-room. As she passed the head of the 
 stairs, she saw a well-known figure coming up, pre- 
 ceded by a footman. 
 
 * Ah, Jim,' she cried, *how late you are. Come 
 to my room. I have been discussing religious ques- 
 tions with my mother-in-law, and, well — and so we 
 parted, in more senses than one. Have you had
 
 I02 THE RUBICON 
 
 tea? No? Bring Mr Armine some tea to my 
 room.' 
 
 'She's rather a powerful old lady, isn't she?' asked 
 Jim, who, since the Hayes' return from abroad, 
 had managed to establish himself on a fairly inti- 
 mate footing. 
 
 ' She has been abusing me with immense power 
 and vigour,' said Eva. ' I am the incarnation of all 
 that is horrible in her eyes. The one incompre- 
 hensible thing to that generation is this generation.' 
 
 ' The converse holds, too,' said he. 
 
 ' No ; I understand them perfectly. Their nature 
 is the basis of ours ; we are the heirs of all previous 
 ages, just as they were. The later development has 
 incorporated the earlier, but it is contrary to the 
 nature of the earlier to understand the later. Just 
 in the same way, I understand what I was a year 
 ago, though, if I saw now what I should be in 
 another year, it would probably be incomprehensible 
 to me.' 
 
 ' I shouldn't have thought you would change 
 much.' 
 
 Eva took a book from a small table near her. 
 and opened it with a quick, dramatic movement.
 
 THE RUBICON 103 
 
 'It is like that/ she said. 'Whether I have 
 changed, or only discovered, I don't know. But a 
 year ago the book was shut, and now I have read 
 the first chapter.' 
 
 ' At any rate, you have some ideas about the last 
 chapter, then ; I suppose all the characters have 
 come on the stage?' 
 
 ' Ah ! but who can tell what will happen to 
 them ? No character can be uninfluenced by cir- 
 cumstances. If it is a book worth reading, they 
 will have altered by the end. Circumstances have 
 led me to open the book, they will determine my 
 subsequent career ; and circumstances, in the shape 
 of gout or cancer or something, will make me 
 close it' 
 
 ' Is it interesting reading ? ' 
 
 Eva looked at him, with a smile gathering on her 
 mouth. 
 
 ' Particularly interesting,' she said. ' I am sure 
 you are interested too.' 
 
 In the silence that followed, a tap came at the 
 door, which was repeated, and Lord Hayes entered. 
 He was irreproachably dressed in a black frock coat, 
 with a fine crardenia in his button-hole. He was
 
 I04 THE RUBICON 
 
 rather short-sighted, and blinked in the manner of 
 a small, tame owl. 
 
 ' I am sure I beg your pardon,' he said ; ' but I 
 tapped, and there was no answer, and so I came in,' 
 
 Eva turned to him. 
 
 'It is of no consequence. Have you had tea?' 
 
 ' I found some tea in the drawing-room, thank you. 
 I am bound to say it was rather cold.' 
 
 ' Have you seen your mother ? ' 
 
 'Yes; she was not cordial. Her manner implied 
 that she had been a little upset about something. 
 She is going to stay with the Davenports for a week, 
 in Hyde Park Gardens, she said, before she goes 
 ilown into the country. She has, in fact, determined 
 to leave us on the day after to-morrow, instead of 
 stopping till next week.' 
 
 Eva pointed to a box of cigarettes. 
 
 'You may smoke,' she said; 'Jim, the matches 
 are by you.' 
 
 ' A cigarette would be very refreshing,' said Lord 
 Hayes. 'The heat and the noise have made me 
 a little fatigued. And, I .suppose, we .shall be up 
 very late to-night. My mother informed me she 
 would not be present at our little dance.'
 
 THE RUBICON 105 
 
 'Not even at the cotillion?' asked Eva. 
 
 ' The cotillion ought to be very pretty,' said he. ' I 
 am satisfied with the appearance of the room. I 
 sent word to Aston not to spare the choicest orchids. 
 Have you seen the staircase since they put the 
 flowers in ? ' 
 
 ' Yes,' said Eva ; ' it looks charming. I am much 
 obliged to you for taking all that trouble.' 
 
 Lord Hayes bowed. 
 
 ' I am delighted,' he said. * I am very glad j'ou 
 are satisfied. Princess Frederick is coming, is she 
 not?' 
 
 ' Yes,' said Eva ; ' I met her this afternoon. I did 
 not know she was in London. Of course I asked 
 her.' 
 
 ' It will be very brilliant,' said her husband, 
 solemnly. 
 
 Jim Armine rose to go. 
 
 ' You will be here to-night ? ' asked Eva. ' We 
 don't begin till eleven.' 
 
 ' The heat is getting very oppressive,' said Lord 
 Hayes, politely, as he opened the door for him. 
 ' The thermometer was standing at eighty-two 
 decrees in the window of White's.'
 
 io6 THE RUBICON 
 
 Eva was sitting back in her chair, in an attitude 
 that was common with her, with her two hands 
 clasped over one knee. She had developed a great 
 power of doing nothing ; whether it was a survival of 
 the days of the blank white page, or an effect of the 
 change that had given her so much to think about, 
 is doubtful ; probably the habit of the first was 
 adapted to the needs of the second. Life was 
 interesting and amusing — a new book in a new 
 language. She had found herself suddenly trans- 
 planted from a silent, pleasant garden to a crowded 
 reception-hall. Her tastes did not lie in the direc- 
 tion of gardens ; they seemed to her very mono- 
 tonous. The beautiful but silent and weary-looking 
 girl, who had been looked at and passed by, found 
 London a different place when she learned that the 
 rows of eyes in the reception-room looked to her as 
 a sort of centre. There is nothing so inexplicable 
 as the phenomenon called ' the rage.' The opera 
 screamed and starved unheard for years in London, 
 when suddenly the whole of London became aware 
 that it was the mo.st delicious thing in the world. It 
 had been there all the time ; it was advertised in the 
 morning papers, but nobody cared. In the same
 
 THE RUBICON 107 
 
 way with Eva — she was living before, and she was 
 h'ving after ; she had been advertised at balls and 
 concerts, but the advertisement had been entirely 
 unremunerative. Then a middle-aged peer had re- 
 marked that Miss Grampound seemed to him worthy 
 of the highest compliment that a man can pay a 
 woman, with the consequence that all London was 
 of one mind that she was exactly what they had been 
 looking for so long. Eva's head was not turned, nor 
 was her heart touched, but the effect was that she 
 became conscious of herself, and conscious of other 
 people. Pygmalion had touched Galatea and Gala- 
 tea sprang to life. 
 
 Pygmalion inevitably has the worst of it. When 
 a whole race of men bursts almost simultaneously 
 on one woman, it is not to be expected that she 
 will single out one. They are all queer and in- 
 teresting, some are attractive. Poor little Pygmalion 
 may beat his breast in the corner and say, ' It 
 is mine, it is all mine,' but no one will listen to 
 him ; least of all Galatea. His best course is to 
 keep on good terms with his handiwork, and be 
 very polite and obliging. He is compelled to 
 act as bear-leader to this incarnated stone, but
 
 lo8 THE RUBICON 
 
 he had better not allude to the time when he 
 called her off her pedestal ; and unless he is a 
 fool, he will not try to put any finishing stroke 
 to his handiwork. He let her have a soul, let 
 him remember that he did not let her have it. 
 The material is his, her flesh and blood, for he 
 paid for it when it came from the quarries, but 
 his possession ends there. The rest is hers and 
 all the world's. 
 
 Lord Hayes sat down again on the chair he 
 had just left, and repeated his remark about the 
 thermometer at White's. Eva stifled a yawn, 
 
 ' I suppose that was in the shade, was it not ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, yes,' he said ; ' in the sun the temperature 
 would have been much higher.' 
 
 ' Your mother and I had a somewhat plain- 
 spoken conversation this afternoon,' she said ; ' I 
 came in for a good deal of abuse.' 
 
 ' I imagined her sudden departure was owing 
 to something of the kind,' he said. ' I am .sorry 
 it has occurred ; personally, I alwaj-s avoid quarrell- 
 ing with anyone.' 
 
 'It is a mistake,' said she ; ' hut if two people 
 disagree, they must quarrel some time. l^esides,
 
 THE RUBICON log 
 
 I didn't quarrel with her, I was even amused, I 
 am sorry to say.' 
 
 ' That is — if you will pardon my saying so — the 
 surest method of quarrelling.' 
 
 Eva looked at him gravely. 
 
 *You have admirable good sense,' she said; *I 
 always thought you had. But, after all, it is a 
 good thing to be amused.'
 
 BOOK II
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 " I "^HERE are certain hours of the day which 
 seem to exist only in England, and one of 
 these is the hour before dinner in winter. We are 
 quite certain that there is a certain time in all coun- 
 tries which is identical, according to the statements 
 made by clocks and other clumsy contrivances, with 
 this sacred time, but it is not the same thing. Where 
 else in the world may we look for that sense of 
 domestic comfort, that hour thought away before 
 the fire, after a long day's tramp in the snow 
 or an afternoon on black, patient ice, that lends 
 itself to be drawn and scribbled on by the ringing, 
 clear-cutting skates ? The hour is there, the pitiful, 
 unmeaning sixty minutes, from half-past six to 
 half-past seven, but it is a mockery, a delusion, 
 with no more soul about it than a photograph or 
 a bust. Let us look at the real thing. 
 
 11
 
 114 THE RUBICON 
 
 Firelight — no candles, but bright firelight — enough 
 to think by. A chair drawn up on to the hearth- 
 rug, and two large feet resting on the fender. If 
 you look about, you will see two evening .shoes 
 lying near, and, if you are human, you will 
 sympathise with the impulse that led to their 
 temporary want of employment. 
 
 The proprietor of these large feet is proportion- 
 ately large. He has half-dressed for dinner ; that 
 is to say, a rough, Norfolk jacket takes the place 
 of a dress-coat, and he has no shoes on. He has 
 been out shooting all day, and got a very fair bag, 
 with twelve woodcock among it, which is truth, not 
 grammar. When he came in, after a bitterly cold 
 and entirely satisfactory day, he drank no less than 
 three cups of tea and ate an alarming quantity 
 of muffins. Then, being still very cold and ex- 
 tremely dirty, he wallowed for a quarter of an hour 
 in a bath about as large as a small pond, and be- 
 came warm and clean. Then he dressed for dinner, 
 barring the dress - coat, came into the smoking- 
 room, where he kicked off his shoes, lit a briar- 
 wood pipe, and proceeded to spend the next half- 
 hour in looking at the fire, enjoying the particular
 
 THE RUBICON 115 
 
 peace of mind which is inseparable from a sane 
 mind and a sane body. 
 
 While he looks into the fire and finds entertain- 
 ment there, we may as well take a look at the 
 room and then at him. It is always a good plan 
 to look well at anyone's room, for everyone leaves 
 on a room they frequent, a personal impress which 
 is almost always infallible. An aquiline nose or 
 a deep, dreamy eye are often the legitimate out- 
 come of an ancestry with certain tendencies, which 
 may have dropped out of existence in any par- 
 ticular case, though their corporeal stamp remains, 
 but no Crusader or king of Vikings will be able 
 to touch with their ghostly fingers the particular 
 sanctum of any man or woman in the nineteenth 
 century. Their portraits may frown down from 
 the walls of the dining-hall, but the clank of their 
 swords, the rhythm of their oars, is not heard in 
 the smoking-room. 
 
 A table-cloth, betwixt and between the table and 
 the floor, and half-a-dozen cartridges, which act as 
 a drag on its slipping further, may be of too 
 ephemeral a nature to lay much stress on, but they 
 are indications which will be useful if borne out by
 
 Il6 THE RUBICON 
 
 confirmatory evidence. A book-case — that is better. 
 Badminton on shooting, Badminton on hunting, 
 Badminton on coursing, Badminton on racing, Bad- 
 minton on fishing ; let us not forget the six 
 cartridges. A book upside down on the top shelf, 
 with not more than forty pages cut — Robert Elsviere. 
 Remember that. Four volumes of Dickens, bearing 
 the mark of a well-spent and battered existence. 
 Tess of the nUrbevilles — not more than half cut, 
 but the last six pages also cut. That also, in 
 conjunction with the state of Robert Elsviere, is 
 distinctly important. Ravefishoe — signs of wear — in 
 much the same state as Pickwick. Deinosthenes de 
 Corona — dog-eared and filthy, with the meanings of 
 many unpardonably irregular Greek words, I am 
 sorry to say, written down in the margin in a minute 
 hand. The utterly abandoned, dishevelled appear- 
 ance of the rest of the book suggested that the 
 extreme care with which these were written was 
 not wholly owing to any reverential adoration of 
 that immortal author. A small Greek Lexicon, 
 from y to -^ inclusive, also filthy, with several 
 crude but vivid illustrations in red ink. A volume 
 of Browning. Certain lyrical poems, with pencil
 
 THE RUBICON ii? 
 
 marks by the side — a difficult factor, but not in- 
 explicable. 
 
 Such were the habits, so to speak, of this room, 
 to which we confidently hope to find a key in the 
 habits of the six feet something of flesh and bone 
 warming itself in front of the fire. Making all 
 possible allowance for the deceptive character of 
 appearances, we may at once hazard two epithets 
 on him — well-bred and English. In spite of the 
 thorough tanning his skin had undergone, you would 
 be right in concluding that he was a pure English- 
 man, who had been subjected lately to a tropical sun ; 
 in fact, he had only been a fortnight in England. 
 His name, to descend to less metaphysical matters, 
 was Reginald Davenport, the son of a Mr Davenport, 
 who has been mentioned incidentally in this history as 
 being the nephew, by marriage, of old Lady Hayes, 
 and whose house the dowager had selected to be her 
 ark of refuge, after she had been driven out, with loss, 
 by Eva's criticisms on religion and the last genera- 
 tion. Eva had never seen her handsome young 
 connection, for he had been travelling for the last 
 year, and only came back to England, as I have 
 said, two weeks before wc discovered him in the
 
 11 8 THE RUBICON 
 
 smoking-room — some five months after Eva had left 
 London. He was a friend of Percy, Eva's brother ; 
 in fact, that gentleman was expected here this 
 evening, to do murder and sudden death among the 
 woodcock. And someone else was coming, who, 
 to tell the truth, interested Reggie far more than 
 any number of his other friends. Percy had 
 intimated that he was in the habit of falling in 
 love once a fortnight, and he had just done so 
 to such good purpose that he was definitely and 
 irrevocably engaged. These periodic fallings in love 
 were slightly embarrassing, because the charming 
 girls with whom he fell in love — he never fell 
 in love with anyone who was not charming — some 
 times fell in love with him ; and the emotional 
 atmosphere of his neighbourhood became extremely 
 electrical and exciting. 
 
 On the whole, I feel inclined to risk another 
 epithet in this preliminary skirmishing round Reggie. 
 Yes — indubitably boyish. By boyish, I mean the 
 power of enjoying life without thinking about it. 
 Such a gift — the gift of serene receptivcness, of 
 complete irresponsibility — is rare, fascinating and, at 
 times, intensely irritating. The majority of ordinary
 
 THE RUBICON ilg 
 
 work-a-day folk have, as Eva said, a certain capa- 
 city for doing their duty, and forming theories about 
 it. Reggie knew no obscure idol called Duty, to 
 which he owed obedience, but he was ruled by 
 a quantity of cleanly, wholesome instincts, that 
 made him honest, good-natured, lovable and 
 affectionate. The worst of drawing your morality 
 from the springs of your nature is that, if a mis- 
 chievous hand gets to meddling with those springs, 
 to diverting the course of the water, or, perhaps, 
 putting a little piece of something not entirely 
 wholesome in that clear fountain, your moral 
 digestion is considerably disorganised. At the 
 same time, an innate morality is productive of a 
 more lively faith than a collection of dried plants 
 from the gardens of other men's experience. They 
 may be the same plants, but they are alive, not 
 pressed and sapless. 
 
 Reggie never hazarded any guesses as to the 
 answer of that Gordian riddle called life. The 
 how, why and wherefore of existence cannot even 
 be said to have been uninteresting to him — such 
 questions did not exist for him at all. But, by 
 virtue of an innate sweetness of disposition, he
 
 120 THE RUBICON 
 
 had an undoubted capacity for being content to 
 live, and be nice to those in the same predicament 
 of living as himself. Such natures are not often 
 saddled with great mental gifts ; but very often hold 
 a great capacity for loving and being loved, with the 
 restful love one feels for shady places on dusty 
 roads, for the ' times of refreshing ' that are so 
 divinely human. This gift is one which many 
 children possess, and which few retain beyond 
 childhood. It is dangerous, fascinating, dazzling, 
 seductive and very unsettling, but it is very sweet. 
 
 This fathom of well-bred, boyish, English life 
 was nearly asleep, but not quite. In fact, a very 
 slight sound made him particularly wakeful, for it was 
 a sound for which he had been listening — the sound 
 of carriage wheels outside. He went quickly out of 
 the room, and was in the hall before the front door 
 was opened. Ah ! well, the meeting of two young 
 lovers is very pretty, but it has happened before. 
 
 Percy arrived in time for dinner, and when Mr 
 Davenport retired from the smoking-room soon 
 after eleven, he left there the two young men, 
 who did not seem inclined to go to bed. Reggie, 
 in fact, had an alarming number of things to bay,
 
 THE RUBICON 121 
 
 and he proceeded to say them with guileless straight- 
 forwardness. 
 
 • I am awfully glad you were able to come,' he 
 began ; ' I wanted you to see Gertrude very much. 
 You must be my best man, you know. We're not 
 going to be married yet ; not for a year. You see, 
 I was half-engaged when I went to India, and 
 we settled to wait then for two years. Well, 
 one year's gone, that's something.' 
 
 ' You're a detestably lucky fellow,' said Percy, 
 on whom a charmingly pretty and thoroughly nice 
 girl had made her legitimate impression. 
 
 ' Oh ! I know I am ; detestably lucky, as you say. 
 Doesn't she sing beautifully, too? Hang it all, 
 I won't talk about it, or else I shall go on for ever, 
 and it's rather dull for you.' 
 
 Percy laughed. 
 
 'Oh, don't mind me. I'm very happy. Pour 
 out your joyful soul, but pass me a cigar first.' 
 
 Cigars ? ' said Reggie. ' I really had quite for- 
 gotten about smoking. That's what comes of being 
 in love. Really, old fellow, you had better fall in 
 love as soon as you possibly can. Depend upon 
 it, there's nothing like it. Here, catch ! '
 
 123 THE RUBICON 
 
 Reggie chucked a cigar-case across to him. 
 
 * Have you seen your new cousin yet ?' asked Percy. 
 
 'Who? Oh, Lady Hayes. No, I haven't. She's 
 perfectly lovely, isn't she ? ' 
 
 ' Eva has always been considered good-looking,' 
 remarked the other solemnly. 
 
 ' I don't particularly care for Hayes himself,' 
 said Reggie. ' He's so awfully polite and dried up. 
 But I expect your sister's made him wake up a 
 bit. I want to know her. Where is she?' 
 
 ' They're abroad again, at present. Jim Armine's 
 with them.' , 
 
 'Jim Armine?' said Reggie, doubtfully. 'That 
 pale chap with a big place in Somersetshire ? ' 
 
 ' Probably the same. I don't know why Eva 
 likes him so. I can't bear him.' 
 
 ' He's an oily sort of fellow,' remarked Reggie, 
 frankly. ' But lots of women like him. He's too 
 clever for mc. I'm awfully stupid, you know.' 
 
 ' They met him abroad on their honeymoon,' 
 said Percy, ' and he hung about a good deal, I 
 fancy.* 
 
 ' I'm blowcd if Pll have another man hanging 
 about on my honeymoon,' said Reggie.
 
 THE RUBICON 123 
 
 ' No ; I don't suppose you will. It does seem 
 one too many to the unbiassed mind. Rather like 
 the serpent in paradise, who was certainly de 
 trop: 
 
 ' What serpent ? ' said Reggie, who was obviously 
 thinking of something else. * Oh, I see, the devil, 
 you mean.' 
 
 ' No, I didn't mean the devil exactly ; I meant 
 any third person.' 
 
 'We're going shooting to-morrow over the High 
 Croft,' said Reggie, after a pause, in which he had 
 ^determined, by a rapid mental process, that he was 
 unable to initiate any more statements on the 
 subject of the serpent, ' and Gertrude and mother 
 are going to bring us lunch. You and father will 
 have to shoot alone after lunch ; I'm going to drive 
 on with Gertrude, just round about and home 
 again.' 
 
 Gertrude Carston certainly seemed a most desir- 
 able partner for Reggie ; they were really both of 
 them detestably lucky people. She had consider- 
 able beauty, of a large, breezy order ; she was quite 
 as adorably child-like as he, and showed quite as 
 few signs of any tendency to grow up. She was
 
 124 THE RUBICON 
 
 fond of hunting, lawn-tennis, animals, loud hymns, 
 anything, in fact, of a pronounced and intelligible 
 stamp ; she was quite ridiculously fond of Reggie, 
 and they both behaved in the foolish, delightful 
 manner in which people in such a predicament do 
 behave. They had both settled to get up early 
 the next morning and have a short walk before 
 breakfast, which was not till a quarter to ten, but 
 in the morning they both felt it quite impossible 
 to do so, and came down feebly a few minutes 
 after the gong had sounded, and pretended that 
 they had been up an immense time waiting for 
 the other, till that particularly flimsy falsehood 
 broke down, and they both laughed prodigiously. 
 It was obviously a good, honest love-match ; for 
 each of them only the other existed, in no ethereal, 
 mysterious form, but simply as a capital, honest 
 human being, lovable in every part. There were 
 no regrets, no unsatisfied longings, no sentimental, 
 half-morbid affection that was exacting or jealous. 
 Love, like Janus of old, is a two-headed god. On 
 some he smiles, to others his eyes are full of 
 strange, bewildering doabts ; on his lip; there's a 
 smile that is half a sigh, that wakes at times a
 
 THE RUBICON 125 
 
 tumultuous happiness, a bitter aching at others, 
 and never brings content. That love may be more 
 complex, more worthy of the agonised questionings 
 with which men and women have worshipped him, 
 more deserving of the reproach, the longing, the 
 dread, the reviling, that has found its expression in 
 bitter verses and heart-broken epigrams, but the 
 simple, smiling face is there for some to see, and 
 those are blest who see it. Their love may be on 
 a lower level, but it is very sweet, and lies among 
 pleasant gardens, and by melodious streams ; for 
 such there is no mountain top, compassed about 
 by heaven ; earth lies about them, not beneath 
 them, and for them there is no painful climbing, no 
 bleeding hands or panting breasts, and perhaps, at 
 the top, nothing but clouds and cold, palpable mist. 
 Such, at any rate, was their love at present, yet 
 nothing is safe in this uncertain world. An earth- 
 quake may rend the pleasant garden, an east 
 wind may wither its flowers, drought may drink 
 up its melodious stream. But now it was the June 
 of love, and the garden was very fair. 
 
 It was nearly luncheon time, and Reggie, in 
 spite of the woodcock, looked on to the cottage,
 
 126 THE RUBICON 
 
 where a thin, blue smoke rose, on a hill above the 
 trees, wondering whether Gertrude had come yet. 
 The beat lay over uneven ground, with some thick 
 cover, interspersed with heathery, open places, on 
 the edges of which many woodcock rose in silent 
 and ghostly flight for the last time. Reggie was 
 an excellent shot, and was having a match with 
 Percy — a shilling a woodcock — which promised to 
 be an investment with good security, and quick 
 returns. He was just arguing a disputed point, in 
 which Percy stoutly upheld that a certain bird, at 
 which they had fired simultaneously, was his own, 
 not Reggie's, and that Reggie ought never to have 
 shot at it, as it did not rise to him, when Gertrude 
 appeared on the scene. 
 
 She had seen the party approaching from the 
 cottage, and, as it was cold, .she had walked on to 
 meet them. 
 
 Percy felt much evil satisfaction at her appear- 
 ance. The ways of women at shooting parties 
 were known to him. Reggie was looking about 
 in a bush, with the keepers, for a bird he had 
 killed, and Gertrude stopped with him. She fully 
 justified Percy's expectations.
 
 THE RUBICON 127 
 
 ' Oh ! Reggie, what a pretty bird. It's an awful 
 shame to shoot them. Poor dear ! Oh ! I am sure 
 I saw it flap its wings. It can't be dead. Oh ! do 
 kill it, quick. I think you're perfectly brutal. 
 Now, you've killed it/ she added with reproach, as 
 if the object of shooting woodcock was to render 
 them immortal. 
 
 They soon caught up the others, and Percy's 
 wicked wish was fulfilled. No man in the world 
 can shoot when his affianced is walking by him, 
 making remarks on the weather, and on his home- 
 spun .stockings, and telling him that she was sure he 
 didn't hold his gun straight that time. But Reggie 
 did not feel as if he had lost very much, when he 
 handed Percy one-and-ninepence at lunch, which was 
 the nearest equivalent he had for two shillings. 
 
 Mrs Davenport was sitting by the fire when 
 they came in, preferring to get warm passively, 
 rather that actively. 
 
 'Well, boys,' she said, 'have you had good sport? 
 Fifteen woodcock ? How jolly ! ' 
 
 ' And we should have got four more if Gertrude 
 hadn't joined us,' said Reggie. 'Why did you let 
 her come, mother ? '
 
 128 THE RUBICON 
 
 Gertrude looked at him in genuine, wide-eyed 
 astonishment. 
 
 ' What have I done, you stupid boy ? ' she ex- 
 claimed. ' I only told you to hold your gun 
 straighter ; you were aiming at least five feet from 
 the bird. Besides, it's horrid to kill woodcock ; 
 they're such jolly little beasts — birds, I mean.' 
 
 'Then why did you tell me to aim straighter?' 
 asked Reggie, with reason. 
 
 ' Oh, I thought it would please you to kill them, 
 my lord,' she said. ' At least, that's why you went 
 out, wasn't it?' 
 
 Reggie was emptying his pockets of cartridges 
 in the porch, and Gertrude was standing in the 
 doorway, so that they were in comparative privacy. 
 
 ' Would you rather please me than save the 
 woodcock ? ' he asked softly. 
 
 ' Reggie, I know those cartridges will go off if 
 you drop them about so. Yes, on the whole, I 
 would. How dirty your hands are. Oh ! is that 
 blood on them?' 
 
 ' No, dear, it's red paint, like what the Indians 
 put on when they go out hunting.' 
 
 ' You extremely silly boy. Go and wash them, and
 
 THE RUBICON 129 
 
 then come to lunch. I'll come with you to the little 
 pump round the corner. You can't be trusted alone.' 
 'You'll catch cold standing about,' said Reggie, 
 not without a purpose. 
 
 'No more than you will. Besides, I want to 
 talk to you.' 
 ' Talk away, I'm listening.' 
 
 'Oh, well, it's nothing, really. I only meant to 
 chat.' 
 
 ' Let's chat, then.' 
 
 Well, stoop down, while I pump on your hands. 
 Do you know, I'm rather happy.' 
 
 ' What a funny coincidence ; so am I.' 
 And they went back to the house, feeling that 
 they had had quite a successful conversation. But 
 that was all they said. 
 
 Mr Davenport was to join them after lunch, and 
 go on shooting with Percy, and they had nearly 
 finished when he entered. He was a stout, hearty- 
 looking man of fifty, and inexpressible satisfaction 
 was his normal expression. 
 
 'Well, you people look pretty comfortable,' he 
 said. ' What sport, Reggie ? ' 
 
 'Oh! rabbits, lots of them, a few hares, ditto 
 I
 
 I30 THE RUBICON 
 
 pheasants, and fifteen woodcock,' said Reggie, with 
 his mouth full of bread and cheese, whose naturally 
 healthy appetite had not been spoiled by love. 
 
 'Reggie's going to take Gertrude a drive after 
 lunch,' said Mrs Davenport ; ' and I shall walk 
 home ; I want a walk.' 
 
 Gertrude and Reggie looked at each other, but 
 acquiesced. 
 
 ' Reggie, dear, give Gertrude my furs. She will 
 be cold driving, and I sha'n't want them walking,' 
 said Mrs Davenport, as the two started to go. 
 
 Reggie took them, and with those little attentions 
 that a woman loves so much when they are offered 
 by somebody, wrapped them closely round her. 
 
 'Well, I'm sure I ought to be warm enough,' 
 she said, as they left the door. 
 
 ' Reggie will take off his coat if you're not, I 
 daresay,' murmured Mrs Davenport, as she watched 
 them start. ' Dear boy, how happy he is.' 
 
 ' He hasn't got much to complain of,' said his 
 father. ' How old it makes one feel.' 
 
 He stretched out his hand to his wife, and she 
 took it silently. Parents feel old and young when 
 they see the young birds mate.
 
 THE RUBICON 131 
 
 ' Reggie was recommending me to fall in love as 
 quickly as possible, last night' remarked Percy. 
 ' He said there was nothing like it.' 
 
 Mr Davenport laughed. 
 
 ' Cheeky young brute,' he said, ' He gives him- 
 self the airs of an old married man. He quite 
 patronised his uncle the other day, because he was 
 a bachelor. He and Gertrude together don't make 
 up more than forty-five years between them.' 
 
 * Reggie's only just twenty-four,' said Mrs Daven- 
 port, 'and she's barely twenty. How dreadfully 
 funny their first attempt at housekeeping will be. 
 Reggie never knows what he's eating, as long as 
 there's plenty of it, and I don't think she does 
 either.' 
 
 * Ah ! well, shoulder of mutton and love is a very 
 good diet,' said his father. ' Are you ready, Percy ? 
 If so, we'll be off.' 
 
 Mrs Davenport sat a little longer over the fire 
 before she set out on her homeward walk, and ob- 
 served, with some annoyance, that it had begun to 
 snow heavily, and half wished she had driven home 
 with Reggie. The keeper's wife wanted to send 
 a boy with her, as the short cut across country,
 
 132 THE RUBICON 
 
 which she meant to take, was hardly more than a 
 sheep -track, running across a flat stretch of bleak 
 moorland. 
 
 There is, perhaps, nothing so bewildering as a 
 snow-storm. The thick network of falling flakes 
 conceals all but the nearest objects ; and the small, 
 familiar landmarks of the path are soon lost under 
 the white trouble. The consequence was that, half 
 an hour after Mrs Davenport had started, she was 
 entirely at sea as to her position, and, after trying in 
 vain to retrace her steps, she found herself, at the end 
 of an hour's tedious tramp, at a little cottage some 
 six miles from home. She was known to the labourer 
 who lived there, but, as she was too tired to continue 
 walking through the snow that was already begin- 
 ning to lie somewhat thickly on the path, he sent 
 out a lad to the neighbouring village to procure any 
 sort of conveyance. All this took time, and Mrs 
 Davenport was impatient, for the sake of those at 
 home, to get off as soon as possible. Her husband, 
 she knew, would be very anxious ; and there were 
 people coming to dinner. 
 
 Meanwhile, Reggie and Gertrude had got safely 
 home after a most satisfactory drive. In fact, they
 
 THE RUB ICO A I33 
 
 rather liked the snow, which compelled them to go 
 slower, for the sake of that sense of extreme privacy, 
 — a sort of cutting off from the rest of the world — 
 which it lent them. He had said once, *I am afraid 
 mother will have a horrid walk,' and Gertrude was 
 filled with an evanescent compunction for having 
 taken her furs, but no more allusion was made 
 to it. 
 
 They reached home about half-past four, and, 
 half an hour later, were joined by the shooters, who 
 had given up when the snow began in earnest. 
 They were sitting at tea in the dark, oak-panelled 
 hall, by a splendid fire of logs, when Mr Davenport 
 suddenly said, — 
 
 ' I suppose your mother is changing her things 
 upstairs, Reggie?' 
 
 Reggie was sitting on the floor, with his long legs 
 drawn up, and a teacup balanced somewhat pre- 
 cariously on his knees. His back was supported 
 against the head of the sofa, on which Gertrude 
 was sitting. She had put on an amazing tea-gown, 
 of some dark, mazarine stuff, trimmed with large 
 bunches of lace, and was feeling intensely happy 
 and rather languid after the day in the cold air.
 
 134 THE RUBICON 
 
 She had just asked Reggie some question, and he 
 did not hear, or, at any rate, did not fully take in 
 his father's remark. 
 
 Ten minutes passed, and Mr Davenport rose to 
 
 go- 
 
 ' You'd better ring the bell, Reggie,' he said, 
 
 ' and get your mother's maid to take her some 
 tea upstairs, or it will be getting cold. I am 
 afraid she must have got very wet' 
 
 ' I don't think mother's come in yet,' said Reggie, 
 placidly. 
 
 ' Not in yet,' he said quickly. ' Why didn't you 
 tell me? She must have lost her way over the 
 High Croft.' 
 
 The irrepressible satisfaction had died out of 
 his face. He rang the bell sharply. 
 
 ' Tell two men to go at once, with lanterns, over 
 the High Croft. Mrs Davenport must have lost 
 her way.' 
 
 Gertrude got up. 
 
 * You're not anxious about her, are you ? ' 
 
 ' No, no, dear,' said he, ' but it's a horrid 
 night. The snow may be lying very thick, and 
 perhaps she has lost her path. There's no anxiety.'
 
 THE RUBICON 135 
 
 Gertrude looked down with a little impatience 
 at her long-limbed lover. 
 
 * Reggie, you goose, why didn't you remember 
 she hadn't come in ? ' 
 
 Reggie looked up. 
 
 ' I thought nothing about it. There are lots of 
 cottages about. It was stupid of me to forget. 
 Can I do anything, father? Shall I go out with 
 the men ? ' 
 
 He was perfectly willing to do quite cheerfully 
 all that was required of him, and he would have 
 got back into his damp shooting clothes, and left 
 this comfortable hall and Gertrude without a 
 murmur. 
 
 ' No, never mind,' said he. ' I think I shall go 
 with them, because I couldn't keep quiet at home. 
 But I wish you'd remembered sooner.' 
 
 Reggie had risen and was standing by the fire- 
 place. 
 
 ' I wish you'd let me go, instead of you,' he said. 
 
 ' No ; there's no need whatever. I only go for 
 my own sake.' 
 
 Reggie was quite content. If he was not wanted 
 to go, he was quite happy to stop. He was ex-
 
 136 THE RUBICON 
 
 tremely fond of his mother, and the thought of 
 her possible discomfort was most unpleasant to 
 him, but what was the good of worrying? There 
 was absolutely no danger. Mrs Davenport was 
 an eminently sensible person, and he could not 
 lessen her discomfort by thinking about it. Let 
 us be sensible by all means ; let us take things 
 as they come, without thinking about them when 
 there is nothing to be done. Truly these boyish 
 natures are a little irritating at times ! 
 
 Mr Davenport left the hall and Reggie resumed 
 his place on the floor, and had another cup of 
 tea. 
 
 ' Poor mother ! ' he said with sincerity ; ' how 
 dreadfully wet and cold she will be.' 
 
 Percy had retired to the smoking-room, and the 
 two were alone.' 
 
 'Your father was rather vexed,' she said. 
 
 ' I'm afraid he was,' said Reggie. ' I wish he'd 
 let me go instead of him.' 
 
 ' Why don't you go with him ? ' 
 
 ' That would do no good,' said Reggie. ' He's 
 only going because he is anxious. Pm not the 
 least anxious. Mother is sure to have turned in at
 
 THE RUBICON i37 
 
 some cottage to wait till the snow was over, or 
 until she could get a carriage. If I could save her 
 anything by going out, of course I'd go.' 
 
 Gertrude was frowning at the fire. 
 
 'I think I'll ask him whether I may come with 
 him,' she said. 
 
 Reggie raised his eyebrows. 
 
 * Oh, nonsense,' he said. ' He wouldn't let you, 
 anyhow. Sit down, Gerty, and talk.' 
 
 ' Oh, well,' she said, ' I suppose it's all right' 
 There was no need, however, for Mr Davenport 
 
 to go out, for before he came down again with 
 
 thick boots, and rough clothes on, his wife had 
 
 arrived. 
 
 Reggie sprang up and welcomed her with great 
 
 eagerness and affection. 
 
 * Dear mother,' he cried, * I am so glad you have 
 come. Oh I how wet you are.' 
 
 He led her to the fire, and poured out a cup of 
 tea with almost feminine tenderness, 
 
 ' I hope you and Gerty weren't anxious,' she said. 
 
 ' Oh, no,' said Reggie, frankly, ' not a bit. I knew 
 it would be all right. But I'll run to tell father. 
 He was going out with two men to look for you.'
 
 138 THE RUBICON 
 
 ' Reggie wanted to go instead of him,' said Ger- 
 trude, feeling that her lover's conduct was capable 
 of some slight justification. 
 
 ' Dear Reggie is never anxious,' said Mrs Daven- 
 port, warming her hands. 'It is a great comfort 
 for him.' 
 
 Gertrude was rather relieved. There was no need 
 for her, apparently, to turn advocate.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 'T^HEOLOGY, in theory, at any rate, teaches us 
 that human beings are living things with 
 souls ; experience, on the other hand, which deals 
 with facts capable of proof, insists that, whatever 
 theological truth this statement may embody, for 
 practical purposes, human beings are born without 
 souls. The soul awakes, or, as experience says, is 
 born at varying times. Some men and women reach 
 maturity of body and mind without it, some, we can- 
 not help thinking, reach death without it ; some, on 
 the other hand, are but children when that perplex- 
 ing gift is handed over to their bewildered keeping. 
 But the soulless human animal often has at its 
 disposal and use a quantity of instincts which par- 
 take of the soul-like nature ; the soul, at any rate, 
 when it is born, takes them over entire. There is 
 
 no need to adapt them, or to purify them, for they 
 
 139
 
 I40 THE RUBICON 
 
 are already clean and pure ; it hardly ever vitalises 
 them, for they are already very living ; it merely 
 shows them their kinship to itself, and they are 
 forthwith embodied in it. 
 
 This birth of the soul, like all births, is the con- 
 summation of bitter pangs ; it is brought forth in 
 sorrow, through some rending asunder of the inmost 
 fibre, not by any elegant musing on devotional 
 books, nor in a flash of blinding ecstasy, but in 
 silence, save, perhaps, for the bitter cry, in darkness, 
 in solitary desolation, for the sufferer does not know 
 what is happening until the end of his pain has 
 come ; the blind pangs get fiercer and fiercer, and 
 are still unexplained till the light breaks. 
 
 It would, perhaps, be an insult to the reader to 
 state baldly the bearing of these remarks, for it will 
 be already, we hope, obvious to him that, in this 
 sense, Reggie, in spite of his frank charm, his sus- 
 ceptibility, his pretty face, his capacity for receiving 
 and inspiring affection, was, at heart, soulless. His 
 strong, hearty liking for his betrothed was of that 
 genial, animal kind, which, however wholesome and 
 satisfactory, has no more to do with the soul than 
 his power of aiming straight at woodcock. Happily,
 
 THE RUBICON 141 
 
 or unhappily, for him, the abstruse side of life was 
 scarcely less remote from Gertrude than it was from 
 himself She had at present no wish and no power 
 to give anything but the same genial, hearty liking 
 that she received, a thorough, wholesome affection 
 in which the nature of both, as far as they were 
 aware of their nature, shared to the full. Neither 
 Reggie nor Gertrude had ever fallen in love with an 
 idea, which is, perhaps, the most exacting lover that 
 man or woman ever has, but which, being wholly 
 abstract, is of an entirely different nature from the 
 love of two young people who admire and like each 
 other enormously, mind and body. This abstruser 
 side of life was a complete puzzle to Reggie. To 
 take a very small but wholly appropriate illustra- 
 tion ; he could sympathise with his mother, who might, 
 perhaps, be wandering on the High Croft in a snow- 
 storm, with a good deal of feeling, but the instinct 
 that made his father put on his damp shooting 
 clothes, and prepare to go out, not for any assist- 
 ance he could give, but for the eminently unpractical 
 reason that his wife was in the snow and he was 
 having tea, seemed inexplicable to his son. If he 
 could have done a jot or a tittle of good by standing
 
 142 THE RUBICON 
 
 in the water butt for five minutes, there is not the 
 shadow of doubt that he would have done so, shiver- 
 ingly but contentedly and without question ; but it 
 would have seemed absurd to him to put his nose 
 outside the hall door, if nothing was to come of it. 
 
 With a less sweet disposition, he would have been 
 a profound egoist ; but in his manliness was salt 
 enough, as the phrase is, to keep him sweet. The 
 egoist rates himself higher than he rates the rest of 
 the world ; he thinks more of himself, consciously or 
 unconsciously, as he thinks less of others, whereas 
 Reggie, though he was incapable of those intricacies 
 of feeling, which, for all practical purposes, are dif- 
 ferent, not merely in complexity but in kind, from 
 the simpler forms, and which make the spectacle of 
 the human race so vastly interesting, and produce, 
 it may be, love of the complex order, never contem- 
 plated himself at all, and, however little he knew of 
 others, at any rate he knew nothing of himself His 
 mind resembled, it is true, a being of two dimensions, 
 which is unable to contemplate the existence of a 
 third, but in its two dimensions it moved very 
 smoothly, and had a very charming smile for its 
 own plane horizon.
 
 THE RUBICON I43 
 
 Gertrude stopped with the Davenports nearly a 
 fortnight — a fortnight of pleasant, quiet days, which 
 are paradise to a mind content, and she was 
 supremely content. Reggie was all that a lover, 
 whom she would choose, should be ; he was uniformly 
 cheerful, affectionate, charming, full of the thought of 
 her ; and, ah ! how much that means ! Reggie was 
 one of those who show their best side when they are 
 in love ; whereas many men, who are otherwise reason- 
 able beings, behave like spoiled children when they 
 are in that predicament ; they become observant, 
 jealous, exacting, when they should be serene, in- 
 dulgent, large-hearted. 
 
 But once, just at the end of that fortnight, there 
 arose out of the sea a little cloud like a man's hand, 
 which broke the blue horizon, though Reggie was 
 unconscious of it. A little hint of it had occurred 
 once before, on that evening when Mrs Davenport 
 lost her way over the High Croft, but on that 
 occasion it had soon passed away. 
 
 Percy, it must be owned, was not so jovially con- 
 tented with the spectacle, as the days went on, as 
 the actors themselves. He was a deductive young 
 gentleman, and, to his mind, this affair resembled too
 
 144 THE RUBICON 
 
 strongly Reggie's previous flutterings in the feminine 
 dovecotes to strike him as something altogether 
 different from a flirtation on a large scale. A 
 flirtation, after all, is only a superficial exhibition of 
 love, an attraction on one side, a liability to be 
 attracted on the other ; and the question occurred to 
 him, whether it is possible to keep a flirtation up 
 permanently, and what was left if it broke down ? 
 A strong, deep love, like the Nile in flood, leaves, like 
 a sediment behind, which in so many cases renders 
 marriages, from which the tumultuous stream has 
 passed, happy and stable, an alluvial deposit, which 
 makes the earth rich and fruitful in the sober green 
 of friendship ; but when the slender, light-hearted 
 streamlet is dried up, the effect of its passage is only 
 too often seen in the uncovering of ugly roots and 
 stones, and a removal, not a deposit of sediment. 
 Of course he knew more about those previous affairs, 
 which, to do Reggie justice, were superficial and 
 innocent enough, than did that gentleman's mother. 
 A young man, whatever his relations with his mother 
 may be, will choose some other confidant in such 
 cases. They argued, in fact, nothing more than a 
 very great susceptibility on Reggie's part to the
 
 THE RUBICON 145 
 
 influence of charming young women, and the sage 
 Percy asked himself whether the constant propin- 
 quity of one specimen of this attractive product 
 would necessarily secure him from the influence of 
 the others. That unlucky resemblance between his 
 previous skirmishes and this engagement seemed 
 to him too close to be altogether satisfactory. A 
 flirtation on a large scale, he argued, is not very 
 different from a flirtation on a small scale. 
 
 Mrs Davenport had immense confidence in Percy. 
 He was three years older than Reggie, and was 
 possessed of a certain soundness, of which that 
 young gentleman stood in need. He had been of 
 great use to him in the thousand and one uncon- 
 scious ways in which one young man can help 
 another slightly younger than himself. He had 
 a practical mastery of details that led him to re- 
 liable conclusions on their sum, which is a gift as 
 useful as intuitive judgment, though less striking 
 in its process, as it partakes of the nature of in- 
 dustry rather than brilliance. But Reggie's mother 
 did him justice, and found herself consulting him 
 as she would have consulted an older man, with 
 
 considerable respect for his opinion. 
 
 K
 
 146 THE RUBICON 
 
 ' We are all so delighted about Reggie's engage- 
 ment,' she said to him one evening after dinner. 
 * His father thought, and so did I, that a long 
 engagement was better. You see they are both 
 very young, and they ought to know each other 
 well. No one should marry on an enthusiastic first 
 impression, least of all Reggie, because he has so 
 many of them.' 
 
 ' Certainly there are no signs of wavering yet,' 
 said he. ' They are as fond of each other as — 
 as two children.' 
 
 ' Why do you say that ? ' she asked. 
 
 ' They are so healthily fond of each other,' he 
 said. ' They were trying to read two of Browning's 
 lyrics this morning, about one way of love and 
 another way of love, and they gave it up in about 
 three minutes and read Pickwick instead.' 
 
 ' Poor Reggie, I'm afraid he'll find that his way 
 of love is neither one nor the other, but I think 
 it's a good way for all that.' 
 
 * There's no nonsense about it, anyhow,' said 
 Percy, without meaning to make reflections on 
 the lyrics in question. 
 
 ' It isn't tumultuous exactly,' said Reggie's mother,
 
 THE RUBICON 147 
 
 'but it's very thorough. Still waters do run deep, 
 you know, in spite of the proverb.' 
 
 ' But the stillness is not a proof of their depth.' 
 ' No ; but when a stream is in the rapids, so to 
 speak, it is. The rapids, I mean, which come just 
 after the waterfall, the plunge into love.' 
 ' Oh, but Reggie's always falling in love.' 
 ' So I gathered ; though, of course, the boy 
 wouldn't tell me about that. But I don't think 
 that's against his present engagement' 
 
 Percy was silent, and Mrs Davenport adjusted 
 her bracelet before she added, — 
 
 ' I believe it's a healthy thing for a young man 
 to be in a chronic state of devotion. The vague 
 adoration is all sucked into the particular adora- 
 tion when that comes.' 
 
 * But is falling in love with a series of particular 
 girls to be called a vague adoration ? ' 
 
 'Yes, certainly, just as a circle is an infinite 
 number of straight lines. He falls in love with 
 womanliness in many forms.' 
 
 ' I see. No doubt you are right. Certainly he 
 is standing his long engagement very well.' 
 
 ' Poor boy ! he wants to shorten it very much,
 
 148 THE RUBICON 
 
 which is just the very reason why I want it to 
 be long.' 
 
 ' Miss Carston is satisfied, I gather ? ' 
 
 * It looks like it/ said Mrs Davenport, smiling, 
 and indicating with her eye a shady corner of the 
 room where the two lovers were sitting. 
 
 ' Old Lady Hayes was staying with us for a 
 week in London last summer,' she continued, after 
 a pause. ' She was defeated in a great battle, 
 apparently, with your sister, and came here to 
 bind up her wounds by bullying us all. I have an 
 immense admiration for anyone who can rout her.' 
 
 Percy laughed. 
 
 ' I heard something about it. Eva behaved 
 abominably, I expect.' 
 
 ' I met her several times in London,' said Mrs 
 Davenport. ' She has a wonderful way of appear- 
 ing to notice no one, and obliging every one to 
 notice her.' 
 
 ' I never saw anyone so changed in a short time 
 as Eva,' said Percy. ' She has suddenly found 
 men and women extraordinarily interesting. A 
 year ago, she was exactly the reverse. She dis- 
 liked most women, and never remembered any man.'
 
 THE RUBICON 149 
 
 ' That was the impression she gave me in the 
 summer.' 
 
 ' Ah ! but that manner is only a survival. She 
 is often silent ; at other times she talks a great 
 deal. In the old days she seldom talked at all.' 
 
 ' Poor Hayes is terribly afraid of her.' 
 
 * I think most people are afraid of her. She 
 can be very cruel.' 
 
 ' A woman with such beauty as that has an 
 unfair advantage. Her shots must always tell.' 
 
 'She is one of those people who always make 
 an impression,' said Percy ; ' because she doesn't 
 care at all what impression she makes.' 
 
 ' That is the sort of impression that produces the 
 deadliest results,' said Mrs Davenport. ' If a man 
 sees that he is being made a fool of, he can be 
 on his guard, but the effect of the other is that he 
 is dazzled, piqued, maddened. The women who 
 don't care are always those for whom men care 
 most passionately.' 
 
 * I wonder if Eva will ever fall in love,' said Percy 
 half to himself 
 
 * It will be a fine sight if she does ; she will teach 
 all these bloodless people how to do it. I think
 
 ISO THE RUBICON 
 
 she has more force than anyone I know. Does she 
 ever talk to you about her marriage?' 
 
 ' Oh ! there's nothing in the world she doesn't 
 talk about. She has begun to take an immense 
 interest in herself, as well as in other people, and 
 she watches her own development with much en- 
 tertainment. She never forces anything ; she quietly 
 waits till the change is made, and then finds out 
 exactly what has happened.' 
 
 * Her scene with old Lady Hayes must have 
 been wicked,' said Mrs Davenport, ' I can imagine 
 her so well, lolling back in her chair with infinite 
 languor, smoking cigarettes probably, and uttering 
 slow, polished blasphemies about all her mother- 
 in-law's most cherished beliefs.' 
 
 ' They are out in Algiers now,' said Percy. ' Eva 
 suddenly expressed a wish to go there again. She 
 likes the languid heat of the place. Jim Armine 
 is with them.' 
 
 Ah ! ' said Mrs Davenport, softly. * She is very 
 cruel.' 
 
 * She had the greatest distaste for her ordinary 
 home life. Last year my father lost a lot of 
 money, and we had to live very quietly at home
 
 THE RUBICON 151 
 
 in the country and retrench. Eva couldn't endure it. 
 She had quite made up her mind that she would 
 never fall in love at all. She will do something 
 sublime if she does. She is quite capable of sacri- 
 ficing herself or anybody else.' 
 
 ' A clear stage and a crowd to see,' thought Mrs 
 Davenport, ' and may I be in the stalls.' 
 
 Meanwhile, the two lovers were talking at the very 
 farthest corner of the drawing-room, but before the 
 evening was over, the little cloud, which had just 
 appeared over the horizon on the occasion when 
 Reggie's mother had lost her way in the snow, 
 gathered again, and this time it seemed to Gertrude 
 to leave a little film of mist behind. Like the other 
 two, they had been talking about Percy's sister, and 
 Reggie had said suddenly, — 
 
 ' She is perfectly lovely, I believe ; they call her 
 the most beautiful woman in London. Percy showed 
 me her photograph. I want to see her very much.' 
 This speech, made in absolute thoughtlessness, 
 jarred somehow on Gertrude's sensibilities. 
 
 ' I daresay there are many actresses as beautiful,' 
 she said, rather unnecessarily. ' I don't think I 
 should like her a bit. There was a man staying
 
 152 THE RUBICON 
 
 with us the other day who said she was perfectly 
 reckless about what she did.' 
 
 * Oh ! a woman as beautiful as that can afford to 
 be reckless,' said Reggie. 'She sets the fashion.' 
 
 * I don't think recklessness is a good fashion to 
 set, then,' said Gertrude, with some asperity. 
 
 ' Oh ! nor do I,' said Reggie. ' I only meant that 
 one excuses it more, somehow.' 
 
 * I don't see why you should excuse it because a 
 woman is beautiful,' said she, seeing the cloud rising- 
 out of the sea. 
 
 ' I don't know,' said Reggie. ' You must take a 
 person all round ; beauty is an advantage, and you 
 set it off against a corresponding disadvantage.' 
 
 * Do you mean that an incomparably beautiful 
 woman is excusable if she does unpardonably nasty 
 things ? ' 
 
 ' I suppose it comes to that in extremities,' said 
 he, doubtfully. * You see, it is impossible to believe 
 that such a woman could do anything quite un- 
 pardonable.' 
 
 ' Reggie, you're absurd,' she cried ; ' don't talk such 
 utter nonsense, and be thankful I don't believe you 
 mean what you say.'
 
 THE RUBICON 153 
 
 Reggie turned round in surprise. 
 
 ' Why, Gerty, what's the matter ? ' he asked. 
 
 'You hurt me when you talk Hke that,' she 
 said. 
 
 ' Oh ! what have I been saying ? ' said he, with an 
 air of perplexity. ' You know the worst of me is, I 
 never know what I'm talking about. When I begin 
 talking I get dreadfully puzzled.' 
 
 ' Most people explain what they mean by talking, 
 not obscure it' 
 
 ' Well, it's just the opposite way with me,' said he 
 serenely. * I know what I think all right before I 
 begin to say it, but as soon as I begin to say it, I 
 begin not to know what I think.' 
 
 This confident assertion failed to satisfy Gertrude. 
 
 ' You said you didn't mind a woman being 
 immoral, if she was only beautiful,' she said. 
 
 ' Oh ! I never said a word about immorality,' 
 exclaimed Reggie. ' I don't think it's right to talk 
 about such things. Gerty, what do you mean ? As 
 if I should say such things to you, especially since 
 I never think them at all.' 
 
 The open candour of her lover's face had its due 
 effect.
 
 154 THE RUBICON 
 
 ' Well, you're quite sure you meant nothing of the 
 sort, are you?' she asked, ready to be mollified. 
 
 * Of course I am,' said he with sincerity. * I don't 
 understand what you mean.' 
 
 ' What did you say, then ? ' 
 
 The cloud had begun to drift, but the horizon was 
 not clear yet. 
 
 ' Oh ! don't ask me,' he said tragically. * I tell 
 you I never know what I say, and I get so dreadfully 
 confused. I said — Oh, Lord ! what did I say ? I said 
 that an ugly woman — oh, dear ! — that an ugly woman 
 can't do the things which, if a beautiful woman did, 
 she wouldn't be thought a beast,' he explained, with a 
 fine disregard of coherency. 
 
 ' Oh ! but, Reggie, that's exactly what you said 
 you didn't say.' 
 
 ' No, it isn't,' said Reggie, who, though not exactly 
 bored, wanted to talk about something else. ' I said 
 something about a beautiful woman being the fashion, 
 which an ugly woman can't be.' 
 
 ' What do you mean by the fashion ? ' 
 
 ' Why, I mean the fashion,' said Reggie ; ' the 
 rage, the comme il something, the thing everybody 
 else does — balloon sleeves and dachshunds, you know.'
 
 THE RUBICON 155 
 
 ' Are you sure you only meant that sort of 
 fashion ? ' asked she. 
 
 ' Oh ! yes, of course I am. Oh ! do let's talk about 
 something else.' 
 
 But Gertrude was vaguely dissatisfied. The cloud 
 had left a little drift of mist behind. 
 
 And Reggie? Well, Reggie's cleanly, honest 
 instincts gave him no directions on this subject ; 
 they drew in their feelers like sea anemones when 
 a foreign substance touches them. A soul would 
 have had a word or two to say to him about it, but 
 Reggie unfortunately knew nothing about that. 
 
 They sat silent for a minute or two, Reggie trying 
 to think of something to say which should be 
 sufficiently remote from this puzzling topic, Gertrude 
 still rather troubled in her mind. In after years, 
 she remembered that night as the first occasion on 
 which a certain vague pain had begun, the first of 
 a series of blind pangs that stirred a new sort of 
 feeling in her, that tore asunder some fibre in her 
 inmost being. An elegant musing over devotional 
 books is, as I have mentioned before, the accredited 
 source of such an awakening. 
 
 The unerring instinct of a lover in Reggie, divined,
 
 156 THE RUBICON 
 
 though very dimly, that some little change had 
 taken place. He felt that Gertrude had felt some- 
 thing that he had not felt. In spite of his recent 
 sense of irresponsibility, of utter contentedness 
 on his own part, he could see that the edge had 
 been taken, ever so slightly, off hers. You may 
 observe something like this in the case of the more 
 human animals. A dog sometimes will know that 
 it does not understand, if the bond between itself 
 and its human friend is very strong. Its inability 
 to understand is something quite different ; it is 
 the knowledge of this inability that is rare, and 
 Reggie felt this now. 
 
 As is natural, he recovered himself first. After 
 a twinge of pain, one is prone to sit quiet a 
 minute or two, and regain one's normal level. But 
 the pain had been all on one side, and Gertrude 
 required a little space to steady herself in. 
 
 ' Gerty, let's play a game of some sort. Come 
 and see what the others are going to do.' 
 
 He got up and stood in front of her. 
 
 * Pull me up,' she said. 
 
 Her white hands lay in his great, brown paws, 
 like little patches of snow in some sheltered nook
 
 THE RUBICON i57 
 
 of the hills. But they were warm with life and 
 love, and she was very fair. He bent down and 
 kissed them gently, first one and then the other. 
 
 * You sha'n't kiss my hands,' she said. * Come, 
 let's go to the others.' 
 
 The troubled look had gone from her face, but 
 Mrs Davenport, with a woman's swift, infallible 
 intuition, saw that something, ever so small, had 
 happened. There was still in her eyes the shadow 
 of a vague wonder. 
 
 Ladies, I believe, have a bad habit of going to 
 each other's bedrooms when they are thought to 
 have gone to bed, and sitting by the fire, talking 
 things over. It is a bad plan to talk things over 
 at night, because, while you are talking, there 
 forms in the air, without your seeing it, a little 
 grey ghost, to which your words give birth. There 
 are no such things as barren words ; all words 
 uttered by you go to make up a little series of 
 figures, who come and talk to you when nobody 
 else is there. And the sort of conversation that 
 Gertrude and Mrs Davenport had that night gave 
 rise to a little, pale, anxious, grey ghost, that sat by 
 Gertrude's bedside, and, as soon as her body had
 
 158 THE RUBICON 
 
 had enough sleep — the ghost always allows his victims 
 the necessary minimum — it tapped fretfully on her 
 shoulder, and said, * Come, wake up, let us go on talk- 
 ing ! ' And Gertrude stirred in her dreamless sleep, 
 and knew that the little ghost had come to talk to her. 
 
 It is a time-honoured custom for an author to 
 describe the personal appearance of any character 
 when he decides to lay his reflections before a dis- 
 criminating public, and the neglect of this custom is 
 a red rag to the stupid, furious bull called criticism 
 So, since this little ghost's personal appearance is 
 only to be described by retailing the conversation 
 which took place between Gertrude and Mrs Daven- 
 port the night before, this obedient and peace-loving 
 author complies with the eminently English demand. 
 
 Gertrude was sitting before her fire in her dress- 
 ing-gown, when Mrs Davenport came in. Her eyes 
 still wore a troubled look, and the pictures in the 
 fire were not so pleasant as she had known them. 
 
 Mrs Davenport noticed it at once. It was the 
 same look as she had seen before that evening, a 
 little intensified. 
 
 ' Are you tired, dear ? ' she asked. ' Would you 
 rather I left you to go to bed instead of talking ? '
 
 THE RUBICON 159 
 
 Gertrude looked up. 
 
 * No, I want to talk very much.' 
 
 * Gerty, dear, is anything the matter ? ' 
 ' I don't know.' 
 
 There was a short silence. Mrs Davenport was 
 far too wise to press her. Then Gertrude said, — 
 
 ' Do you know Lady Hayes ? ' 
 
 Mrs Davenport was puzzled. The carrier-pigeon 
 always takes a few wide circles before he sets out 
 on his unerring flight home. 
 
 ' Oh ! yes, quite well,' she replied. ' Percy and I 
 were talking about her this evening. It's funny 
 that neither you nor Reggie have even seen her.' 
 
 She was feeling her way with tactful discretion. 
 But it was a very narrow path down which Gertrude 
 meant to go, and Mrs Davenport not unnaturally 
 had missed it, 
 
 ' What is she like ? ' asked Gertrude. 
 
 ' Ah ! what isn't she like ? She is the most beauti- 
 ful woman in England, I think, also one of the 
 most reckless, and, I believe, very generous. I 
 should call her dangerous as well. But she is so 
 interesting, so unlike others, that you forget every- 
 thing else, which is harder than forgiving it.'
 
 i6o THE RUBICON 
 
 Gertrude turned round and faced her. 
 ' Ah ! you too,' she said. 
 
 * I don't quite understand, dear,' said Mrs Daven- 
 port, gently ; * have you and Reggie been talking 
 about her? Tell me, Gerty. I saw something was 
 a wee bit wrong. I'm sure you haven't been 
 quarrelling, though. What has been the matter ? ' 
 
 ' I couldn't love Reggie more than I do,' said 
 Gertrude, irrelevantly, 'and I don't think he could 
 love me more than he does. It's odd that I should 
 be troubled.' 
 
 * Yes, dear, I am sure of your love for each other,' 
 said Mrs Davenport. ' But tell me what is wrong. 
 It does one good to tell things ; they become so 
 much smaller in the telling. Those vague thoughts 
 are like those great spongy puff balls that we noticed 
 to-day ; as soon as you really examine them, you 
 find there is nothing in them. What is it?' 
 
 ' I don't know,' said Gertrude again. 
 
 Ah, that infinite patience of womankind ! Mrs 
 Davenport waited a moment, and then, by an un- 
 erring instinct, laid her hand softly on Gertrude's, 
 and pressed it gently. The touch had power in 
 it, and the dumb soul spake.
 
 THE RUBICON i6i 
 
 ' I've got no right to be troubled,' said Gertrude, 
 'and I feel it's horribly ungrateful of me, when I 
 think of what Reggie is to me, and how good you 
 are all to me. But — ' 
 
 Her voice got tremulous, and she stopped 
 abruptly. 
 
 ' Yes ? ' said Mrs Davenport, softly, wanting to 
 hear more for Gertrude's sake. 
 
 ' It's just this,' she said at last, speaking rapidly, 
 and with a splendid self-control. * Reggie said 
 something this evening which hurt me. He said 
 that recklessness mattered less in a beautiful woman 
 than in another.' 
 
 ' Is that all ? ' said Mrs Davenport, with consider- 
 able relief. 
 
 ' No, that's not all,' said Gertrude. ' That was 
 all nonsense; of course I know he doesn't mean 
 that. But he didn't see it hurt me. Oh ! it's so 
 hard not to give you a wrong impression. I don't 
 mean that he was inconsiderate at all — he never 
 is anything but considerate — but he simply didn't 
 know. It wasn't tangible to his mind. If I cut 
 my finger he'd be miserable about it, but somehow 
 he was unable to understand how this hurt me, and 
 
 L
 
 1 62 THE RUBICON 
 
 so he could not see that it did hurt me. It hurt 
 me somewhere deep down, ever so little, but the 
 feeling was new and strange. This sounds horribly 
 selfish, I'm afraid, but I can't help it' 
 
 ' Ah, I think I see,' said Mrs Davenport. 
 
 ' It's like this,' said Gertrude. ' Hitherto I've 
 always felt so entirely at one with Reggie. If I 
 feel a thing, he's always seemed to feel it too, like 
 an echo, and the same with me. But just this 
 once I listened for the echo and it didn't come.' 
 
 Mrs Davenport paused a moment. 
 
 ' Did you ever hear of the man who was out 
 riding with his wife when her horse threw her, 
 and in dismounting to help her he dropped his 
 whip, and while he was picking it up, the horse 
 kicked her and killed her ? ' she asked. ' It seems 
 to me that you arc just a little like that man, 
 Gerty. Love is a very big thing ; one's own small 
 sensibilities are very little things. Take care of 
 the big thing, never mind the others.' 
 
 ' But they're so mixed up,' said the girl. ' You 
 see the little thing is a part of the big thing.' 
 
 ' You arc right — that is quite true. But there 
 arc many very lovely things which it is right to
 
 THE RUBICON 163 
 
 look at as a whole. Love is one of those. All 
 philosophers, from the beginning of the world, have 
 addled their brains over that impossible analysis. 
 You and Reggie are not philosophers, Gerty ; you 
 are young lovers, and it is not your business to 
 analyse or dissect, but to enjoy.' 
 
 Mrs Davenport was at the sore disadvantage 
 of having to temporise. She could not but suspect 
 what was at the bottom of this. But all she said 
 was quite sincere. She fully believed that the 
 strength of Gerty's love would fill the interval, 
 if there was to be an interval between her and 
 Reggie. It is best that the woman be better, finer, 
 bigger than the man, for the beautiful indulgence 
 of a woman's love has more passive endurance in 
 these early stages than a man's. In the perfect 
 marriage, the two eventually are mixed ' in spite 
 of the mortal screen,' but such mixings are rare 
 at first. They rushed together, they will inevitably 
 recoil a little, and a woman has more power of 
 waiting for that final joining together again than 
 most men. Gertrude seemed somewhat relieved, 
 but it was not quite over yet. The grey ghost 
 was waiting for his frillings.
 
 1 64 THE RUBICON 
 
 ' I was just a little disappointed, you understand ? ' 
 she said. ' I waited for the echo, but it never came. 
 Ah ! well, I am very happy. You are very good to me.' 
 
 ' God forbid that I or mine should ever give you 
 pain, said Mrs Davenport, warmly. 
 
 ' And what am I to do ? ' said Gertrude, to whom 
 the practical side of things always presented itself. 
 
 ' Be natural, dear,' said the other, ' as you always 
 are. You are both very young ; well, that is a gift 
 almost more worth having than anything else. It 
 lies in your power a great deal to keep it. And, if 
 you guard it well, it will build up in you the only 
 other gift which is worth having, which will last you 
 to your grave. They will melt into each other,' 
 
 Gertrude looked at her inquiringly. 
 
 *It is called by many names,' she said. 'It is 
 trustfulness, it is serenity, it is sympathy ; it is 
 all these, and many more. Some people call it 
 the grace of God, and I think they arc right.' 
 She kissed the girl on her forehead very tenderly. 
 ' It will tide you over the difficult places, over which 
 youth carries you now, for youth has the gift of a 
 splendid stainlessness — of going through deep waters 
 and not being drowned, of avoiding evil instinctively,
 
 THE RUBICON 165 
 
 without thought ; but the time comes to us all when 
 we avoid it with our reason as well, and with our soul.' 
 
 ' It was ridiculous of me/ said the girl suddenly. 
 ' Reggie didn't know what I felt, and I didn't tell 
 him ; and yet I was disappointed. I've probably 
 done just the same to him lots of times, and he 
 never told me. It was abominably selfish of me. 
 I hope he'll forgive me.' 
 
 ' I should think it extremely unlikely,' said Mrs 
 Davenport, with enormous gravity. ' I should ad- 
 vise you to cry yourself to sleep. I am going to 
 bed, and so are you. Good-night ! Ah ! my dear, 
 I pray you may be very happy.' 
 
 Gertrude clung to her in a long kiss, feeling a 
 new bond had sprung up between them. 
 
 But the odious, little, grey ghost, who had been 
 grinning sardonically at her easy enthusiasm, was 
 sitting by her bed, waiting till the renewal of strength, 
 brought by sleep, had quickened her capabilities for 
 listening to his cold accuracies — until that generous, 
 sudden glow had begun to burn somewhat less 
 warmly in her breast.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 T ORD HAYES had been rather troubled about 
 
 "^ his health during the winter in which the 
 foregoing events had occurred, though it had not 
 stood in the way of their giving several large house- 
 parties. But at one of these he had suddenly fainted 
 dead off in the middle of dinner, and, when the 
 house was empty again, he had gone up to London 
 to see a doctor. 
 
 Eva was sitting in her room when he returned, 
 feeling rather bored. 
 
 ' Well, Hayes,' she said, as he came in, ' what did 
 they say to you?' 
 
 Lord Hayes adjusted his trousers about the knee 
 before he answered. 
 
 ' I have all the symptoms of dangerous heart 
 
 disease,' he said. ' I may live for many years, and 
 
 1 66
 
 THE RUBICON 167 
 
 die of something else. Again, I may die almost 
 at any moment.' 
 
 Eva's book dropped off her knee. 
 
 * How horrible ! ' she said at length. ' Can nothing 
 be done? Are they sure they are right?' 
 
 ' Unfortunately, they are quite sure,' he said ; ' and 
 nothing can be done. They consider the chance of 
 my dying quite suddenly at any time as possible, 
 but not at all likely.' 
 
 Eva, in her serene health, felt a sudden, great 
 pity for him, but not unmixed with horror. She 
 had no sympathy with disease; it seemed to her 
 hardly decent. 
 
 ' Poor Hayes,' she said. ' I cannot tell you how 
 shocked I am.' 
 
 ' I thought it was best to tell you,' said he, ' but 
 let us avoid the subject altogether. I shall live to 
 bore you for many years yet' 
 
 Eva looked at him admiringly. 
 
 * You are a brave man. But you are right. Don't 
 let us talk about it.' 
 
 This took place late in November, but the fact 
 that the symptoms, which had been the result of 
 over-fatigue, did not re-occur, made Eva soon get
 
 1 68 THE RUBICON 
 
 used to the thought, and, in a measure, her hus- 
 band too. He took the doctor's advice, did not 
 over - exert himself at all, and found that 
 the discovery they had made did not affect his 
 health. The days soon began to pass on as 
 usual. 
 
 Eva had suddenly determined to go abroad for 
 a few weeks, for she had an intense dislike to an 
 English winter. Hence it came about that one 
 morning at breakfast, when she and her husband 
 were alone, she had said to him, — 
 
 ' What do you propose to do during these next 
 two months, Hayes ? ' 
 
 Lord Hayes looked up from his breakfast, not 
 quite understanding the purport of her question. 
 
 ' I suppose we shall remain here till Easter,' he 
 said. ' We are paying some visits in January, I 
 believe.' 
 
 ' I should rather like to go abroad for a few 
 weeks now this horrible weather has begun.' She 
 looked out of the window, where snow was begin- 
 ning to fall heavily, and shivered sympathetically. 
 * I hate this English weather,' she said ; ' it is like 
 being in a cold bath. Dry cold is not so bad.
 
 THE RUBICON i6f, 
 
 there is something exhilarating about it. But this 
 doesn't suit me in the least. Why shouldn't we 
 go to Algiers again?' 
 
 ' I thought you didn't like Algiers,' he said. ' Do 
 you propose that we should go alone ? ' 
 
 * Oh no, we won't make any intolerable demands 
 of that sort on each other. I think it suits us best 
 to have people with us. I daresay Percy would 
 like to come for a bit, perhaps your mother would 
 join us, and then there's Jim Armine, who always 
 wants to go abroad whenever he can.' 
 
 Eva spoke with the utmost indifference, but her 
 husband found himself wondering whether that in- 
 difference was not a very subtle piece of acting. 
 That he had some inkling of the young man's 
 feelings towards his wife was very possible, but he 
 had not the least objection to that. In fact, it 
 rather pleased him than otherwise, as it afforded a 
 sort of testimonial to his own admirable taste in 
 wishing her to become his wife, and to his enviable 
 success in securing her for that purpose. He knew 
 quite well that the role of jealous husband would 
 not suit him in the least, and he had no intention 
 of being a complaisant one, but he had sense
 
 170 THE RUBICON 
 
 enough to guess that complaisance was not neces- 
 sary. He had no reason to believe that Eva had 
 a heart at all ; and he had no desire to make a 
 mistake. If he suggested to Eva that he would 
 rather not have Jim Armine with them, his remark 
 would be liable to be interpreted in a way which 
 she might with justice resent ; in fact, that was the 
 only intrepretation open to her, for he liked the 
 young man well enough in himself. He did not 
 even admit the smallest suspicion into his mind ; 
 he only realised that there was the possibility of 
 an avenue, down which suspicion might some day 
 choose to walk ; and when suspicion was seen by 
 him walking down that avenue, he would go and 
 take its hand, and they would knock at Eva's door, 
 and show themselves. 
 
 Eva rose from the table. 
 
 ' Then you don't mind coming to Algiers ? ' 
 
 It was clearly impossible to say ' No ; but I do 
 mind Jim Armine coming,' and so he proposed a 
 date some ten days off for their departure. 
 
 ' Why shouldn't we go sooner ? ' asked Eva. 
 
 ' There's been some unpleasantness down at the 
 ironworks,' he said, ' and I think that, as owner, I
 
 THE RUBICON 171 
 
 ought to just wait till it's settled in some form or 
 another.' 
 
 ' Do you mean down at Trelso ? ' 
 
 * Yes ; the men are striking, or wanting to strike, 
 for higher wages — more pay, in fact.' 
 
 'Couldn't you go down there to-day, and see the 
 agents or managers or whoever they are ? ' 
 
 'There is nothing definite yet; we only know 
 that there is a good deal of discontent.' 
 
 * Surely, then, you can leave it with your manager 
 to deal with, when it occurs. It is absurd waiting 
 in England for a handful of miners to tell you 
 what they want.' 
 
 ' It would be better, I think, if I waited,' he 
 said. 
 
 * I wish you would explain to me exactly why.' 
 
 ' Simply because, as owner,' he said, ' they would 
 wish to consult me if anything went really wrong.' 
 
 ' Surely there is a telegraph to Algiers. I should 
 infinitely prefer starting in less than a week. I 
 really cannot stand this sort of weather.' 
 
 ' I feel sure I am right to stop,' he said. ' It 
 is certainly best' 
 
 Eva hesitated a moment.
 
 172 THE RUBICON 
 
 'Would you mind my going on without you, 
 then ? Perhaps that would be the best plan. I 
 daresay Jim will come witii me.' 
 
 Her husband looked at her narrowly. He felt 
 he was playing a losing- game. 
 
 ' I will go down to Trelso to-day, and see ex- 
 actly what the state of affairs is — how they stand, 
 in fact.' 
 
 'Very good. I shall start on Thursday, then. 
 I will write to Jim to-day. I hope you won't lose 
 any more money over this.' 
 
 He smiled rather grimly. 
 
 ' I hope not. This last year has been very 
 expensive. I don't grudge it in the least ; in fact, 
 it is very interesting to me to see how much a 
 woman can spend.' 
 
 He was conscious of an impotent desire to make 
 it not quite pleasant for Eva, even if she did get 
 her own way in the main, and he was pleased to 
 see her flinch, just perceptibly. She was annoyed 
 with herself for doing it. 
 
 ' Yes, I suppose you find )'ou spend much more 
 now than you used.' 
 
 ' About ten thousand a year more.'
 
 THE RUBICON 173 
 
 'Dear me, that is a great deal. You can hardly 
 have counted the cost.' 
 
 * I did not quite realise it at the time. That's what 
 I mean b)' saying it was more than I anticipated.' 
 
 ' Ah ! of course you wouldn't anticipate it,' said 
 Ev^a. ' Love is blind, you know.' 
 
 Lord Hayes was rather sorry he had begun. 
 He was somewhat in the position of a dog which 
 runs out from its shelter to bite a passer-by, and 
 when it gets into the open, discovers that its in- 
 tended victim carries a stick. 
 
 Eva waited long enough to give him time to 
 reply if he wanted, but finding he said nothing, 
 turned and left the room. 
 
 Two days after this, as they were sitting at 
 dinner, Eva asked him what had happened about 
 the ironworks. 
 
 ' I am glad you reminded me,' he said. * I told 
 them that I wished particularly to leave England 
 at once, and asked them to telegraph to me in 
 case I was wanted. It appears that they do not 
 expect any immediate disturbance, so I shall be 
 able to come with you on Thursday — in fact, there 
 will be nothing to detain me.'
 
 174 THE RUBICON 
 
 * You had better stop if you think you are 
 wanted,' said Eva. * I can manage perfectly by 
 myself, and Jim Armine will be with me ; he wrote 
 to-day. But if they don't want you, of course 
 you'll go with me.' 
 
 ' Armine is coming, then, is he ? ' asked her hus- 
 band. 
 
 ' Yes ; you don't object to him, I hope ? ' 
 'Not in the least' 
 
 * If you do, it would have been better if you had 
 said so at once,' said Eva, carelessly. ' I've asked 
 him now.' 
 
 ' Why should you suppose I object to him ? ' 
 he asked suddenly. 
 
 'You didn't seem very cordial about it. Have 
 you asked anybody else ? ' 
 
 ' I mentioned it to my mother when I saw her 
 in Trelso, but she said she wouldn't come.' 
 
 ' Ah ! ' said Eva, with the ghost of a smile, ' did 
 she say why ? ' 
 
 'Apparently it was for your sake — because of 
 you, in fact' 
 
 ' I expect she meant for her own sake. I 
 should be charmed to have her. There is a
 
 THE RUBICON 175 
 
 straightforwardness, a refusal to compromise, in 
 her behaviour to me, that is very refreshing.' 
 
 'She speaks of you with bitterness — I might 
 almost say rancour,' remarked Lord Hayes. 
 
 ' I am more sinned against than sinning, then,' 
 said Eva. ' I always feel perfectly charitable to- 
 wards her. She loathes me ; but, after all, that is 
 not her fault. Really, it is wonderful what a fine 
 order of hatred is compatible with the most ortho- 
 dox Christianity. But of course I am one of the 
 works of the devil, which she has been led to 
 renounce from a child.' 
 
 Thus it came about that, before the middle of 
 December, Lord Hayes and his wife, and Jim 
 Armine, were installed in the charming little villa 
 at Algiers. The Gulf of Lyons was kinder on 
 this occasion to the susceptibilities of Lord Hayes, 
 and he produced his white umbrella, and sat on 
 a deck chair in untroubled contemplation. He 
 always wore a yachtsman's cap and brown shoes 
 on calm trips, which were, somehow, particularly 
 aggravating to Eva. 
 
 She was sitting on deck when he came upstairs on 
 the morning after their departure from Marseilles,
 
 176 THE RUBICON 
 
 and Eva had a long, malignant look at him as he 
 approached her. 
 
 'You look completely nautical this morning,' she 
 said slowly. ' I hope it won't get rough, for your 
 sake, or you will have to retire. The commodore 
 will be found groaning in his cabin. But, perhaps 
 you are only a fighting sailor, like Lord Nelson, 
 who was always ill, wasn't he? In that case, I hope 
 we sha'n't meet any Moorish privateers. If we are 
 attacked during a storm, you will be completely 
 exposed.' 
 
 Eva had rarely said anything to him in such 
 simple bad taste, and her husband was surprised. 
 The childishness of her strictures, however, rather 
 amused him than otherwise, for he thought he had 
 the key to them, in a rather awkward little scene 
 which had taken place the evening before. Eva had 
 been arguing some point with Jim Armine, and he 
 had got a little excited. She had just made an 
 assertion which seemed to him to contradict what 
 she had said a moment before, and by an unlucky 
 slip he exclaimed, — 
 
 * Why, Eva, you said just the opposite a minute 
 ago."
 
 THE RUBICON I77 
 
 The mistake was pardonable enough : when a man 
 is in love with a woman, he naturally thinks of her by 
 her Christian name, and it is excusable if, in some 
 momentary excitement, he uses it. Eva was startled. 
 He had never called her that before, and, losing her 
 self-control for one half second, she uttered a sudden 
 exclamation of anger, and glanced at her husband. 
 He was sitting with one leg crossed over the other, 
 looking at the sunset. He turned to Jim Armine, 
 and said politely, — 
 
 ' I think you must have misunderstood Lady 
 Hayes.' 
 
 The poor young man flushed deeply, and Eva bit 
 
 her lips, divided between her annoyance and a desire 
 
 to laugh. But the annoyance conquered in the end, 
 
 as the delicate, veiled insult of her husband's speech 
 
 dawned upon her. His words certainly bore another 
 
 interpretation, though whether he had meant it or 
 
 not she was not quite sure, and she could not ask 
 
 him. But Jim Armine evidently took them in the 
 
 obscurer sense and was horribly disconcerted, and 
 
 Eva not unnaturally felt extremely annoyed. He 
 
 was, possibly, trying to make a fool of her, and she 
 
 had not the least intention of being treated in such 
 
 M
 
 178 THE RUBICON 
 
 a manner. After a few moments she found some- 
 thing to say, but the conversation was evidently over. 
 Jim Armine soon strolled away to the other end of 
 the deck, and Eva was left alone with her husband. 
 
 As soon as the other was out of hearing, she said 
 to him, — 
 
 ' I do not wish you to speak of me in that way. 
 Please remember that.' 
 
 * I regret having offended you,' replied he, ' but 
 I do not choose that Armine should call you by 
 your Christian name, Eva, in fact' 
 
 'Your speech implied more than that,' she said. 
 
 Lord Hayes determined to make a stand. 
 
 'You are very quick at finding meanings.' 
 
 'What you said was insulting.' 
 
 ' It is insulting to you that he should call you 
 Eva?' 
 
 'Do you admit, then, that your speech bore 
 another meaning ? ' 
 
 Lord Hayes lit another cigarette. 
 
 ' I admit nothing of the sort. Not at all.' 
 
 'You will be so good as to apologise to him.' 
 
 ' I have no reason for supposing that he imagined 
 it to bear any meaning but the obvious one — the one;
 
 THE RUBICON 179 
 
 in fact, which I meant to convey. Of course you are 
 at liberty to explain to him that, if you choose.' 
 
 For the first time Eva was conscious of a sh'ght 
 disadvantage, and Lord Hayes distinctly saw it. As 
 she sat still silent, he looked at his watch and 
 remarked, — 
 
 ' I am afraid they propose to give us dinner at 
 seven. It is a barbarous custom. Perhaps you would 
 like to know that it is now five minutes to seven.' 
 
 He carefully furled his white umbrella, and walked 
 down the deck to the saloon. He made in his mind 
 a careful little note of the occurrence, against that 
 possible contingency of suspicion coming down the 
 avenue. It was characteristic of him that he was 
 as evenly polite as ever to Jim Armine, and advised 
 him to drink white wine and not red, and remarked 
 to him at tea afterwards that the Albert biscuits 
 were stale, but that it was interesting to observe that 
 the English manufactories of biscuits held their own 
 abroad ; in fact, that the makers of the stale Albert 
 biscuits were Huntly & Palmer. 
 
 This suggestive little scene accounted, in his mind, 
 for Eva's unusual want of politeness on the subject 
 of his yachtsman's cap and brown canvas shoes.
 
 i8o THE RUBICON 
 
 But he did not consider that a reason for abandon- 
 ing them ; in fact, they became to him a sort of 
 commemorative medal on the occasion of his victory. 
 A force which has an unbroken record of defeat is 
 apt to dwell on a single and unexpected victory. In 
 the main he was right in attributing Eva's irrita- 
 tion that morning to her slight discomfiture on the 
 evening before, for though she had dismissed, or 
 rather forgotten, the occurrence, there was still in 
 her a latent resentment that unconsciously vented 
 itself in this manner. 
 
 They had been at the villa four or five days, and 
 Lord Hayes had got into the habit of observing 
 his wife and Jim Armine somewhat closely. Eva 
 was rather silent; to her husband she hardly spoke 
 at all, though now and then at meals she would 
 begin talking, more to herself than the others. Jim 
 Armine was not a very wise young man, and he 
 said things sometimes that, with another woman, 
 would have betrayed him, but Eva did not seem 
 to notice them. 
 
 They were seated at lunch one day, when Eva 
 took up her parable. She had said nothing at all, 
 as her way was, for some minutes, and Lord Hayes
 
 THE RUBICON i8t 
 
 had been describing to Jim how the eucalpytus oil 
 was extracted from the tree. 
 
 'You must excuse my silence, Mr Armine,' she 
 said, ' but, you know, I have all sorts of recollections 
 about this villa. We were here, you know, on our 
 wedding tour, after we had been on the Riviera — 
 just Hayes and myself — and we used to sit out in 
 the garden and listen to the nightingales singing of 
 love. It was very romantic ; no doubt Hayes has 
 spoken to you of it, when you pour out your hearts 
 in the smoking-room, after I have gone to bed. It 
 is always odd to me that men choose that time 
 for being confidential. I should have thought it 
 would have disturbed your night's rest.' 
 
 ' How do you know that we are confidential, 
 then?' asked Jim. 
 
 ' Why, of course you are ; there isn't time to be 
 confidential during the day. Besides, that is the only 
 time when you are sure not to be invaded by women. 
 I shall hide in the smoking-room some night and 
 listen to what you say.' 
 
 ' There is nothing you might not hear,' said her 
 husband. 
 
 ' You mean that, I suppose, in order to deter me
 
 i82 THE RUBICON 
 
 from listening, assuming that, being a woman, I only 
 care to hear what is not meant for my ears. But 
 you said it very politely.' 
 
 ' Not at all ; it was a formal invitation,' said he, 
 ' an assurance of how entirely welcome you would be.' 
 
 ' Thanks. Of course you and I are under a sort 
 of mutual compact to delight in each other's society 
 at any time or place.' 
 
 Lord Hayes laughed. 
 
 ' One eternal honeymoon. Surely the golden age 
 will return.' 
 
 Jim Armine, not unnaturally, felt that this was 
 distinctly a comedy a deux, and that the presence 
 of a third person was unnecessary. But no man can 
 leave his red mullet half eaten for such reasons. 
 Everything goes to the wall before our material needs. 
 
 Lord Hayes's punctilious little manner always van- 
 ished in anything like a scene. He began to be self- 
 possessed at exactly that point when most self-pos- 
 sessed people begin to be nervous and flurried, for his 
 punctiliousness was the result not of nervousness, but 
 a desire not to be nervous, and when the occasion 
 was interesting enough to allow him to forget this, 
 his tinge of finished cynicism and indifference to his
 
 THE RUBICON 183 
 
 fellow men assumed its natural predominance. He 
 rather enjoyed a little polite sparring match with his 
 wife, until he began to get the worst of it ; as long as 
 the buttons were on the foils he could fence very 
 decently, but the sight of the bare point distinctly 
 discomposed him. 
 
 Eva flushed. 
 
 ' Let us reserve our raptures for when we are 
 alone,' she said. ' They are slightly embarrassing to 
 a third person.' 
 
 Lord Hayes smiled. For the second time the 
 banner of victory seemed to wave over his head. 
 He saw his wife flush, and knew that she was very 
 angry. That desire to avenge herself which she had 
 felt so strongly on her return from her honeymoon, 
 the sense that she had been trapped, and was being 
 exhibited as a rare bird in a cage, was very strong in 
 her ; the added insolence of the trapper pretending 
 to be on intimate and loving terms with her made 
 her furious, and the consciousness that she had 
 brought it upon herself, did not tend to diminish 
 her rage. For the second time he was trying to 
 make a fool of her before a third person. 
 
 How far a scene that took place a day or two
 
 1 84 THE RUBICON 
 
 after this was brought on by Eva's dislike of her 
 husband and her thirst for vengeance, is not part 
 of this narrative to determine. The chronicler's 
 mission is not to form conclusions, but to present 
 data, and my immediate mission is to present 
 some rather important data. 
 
 Even in December, in Algiers, it is often pleasant 
 to sit out of doors at nine in the evening, for the 
 air is cool but dry, and Eva often spent an hour 
 in the little open passage which ran round the 
 central courtyard of the house, and in which, a 
 year before, she had talked to her husband on the 
 position of women. This time it was Jim Armine 
 who was her companion ; Lord Hayes had gone 
 upstairs to write to his mother, and he proposed 
 to give her some accurate descriptions, based on 
 observation, about the date palm. 
 
 His room looked out on to the afore-mentioned 
 courtyard, and before beginning his letter, he went 
 across to the window to close it, for he had heard 
 that the night air of Algiers is unwholesome. Just 
 as he was in the act of taking this little pre- 
 caution, there lighted on his ear the grumbling 
 noise of a basket - chair being dragged in passive,
 
 THE RUBICON 185 
 
 grating resistance over a stone floor, followed by 
 the sound of Eva's voice. As he could not see 
 her, he came to the very logical conclusion that she 
 was sitting directly below his window, and where 
 she could not see him, and as she was talking, 
 and Jim Armine was the only person in the house, 
 he pictured her talking to him. After all, the even- 
 ing air was not unpleasant, and instead of closing the 
 window he stood by it and listened. The emphatic 
 deliberation of this manoeuvre was, he felt vaguely, 
 in its favour from a conventional point of view. 
 
 The voices, at first, were inaudible to him, for 
 the sense of hearing requires focussing as much as the 
 sense of sight, and he only caught a word here and 
 there. But, for the sake of the reader, it will be neces- 
 sary to give the inaudible part of the conversation. 
 
 The two seated themselves in their basket-chairs, 
 and Jim Armine lit a cigarette. There was a small 
 lamp by him, the flame of which burned steadily 
 in the still air. It cast a square of brilliant light 
 into the courtyard beyond, across which, as across 
 a magic-lantern sheet, white moths wandered from 
 time to time, losing themselves again in the sur- 
 rounding dark. There were several moments' silence.
 
 186 THE RUBICON 
 
 and then he looked at Eva, half of whose face was 
 in brilliant illumination, and said, — 
 
 'You look tired to-night' 
 
 ' No, I am not tired,' she said, ' but I am feeling 
 blank. Just now everything appears to me extremely 
 uninteresting. I know from experience that things 
 are not uninteresting really, and that is the worst of it. 
 They are there, but I cannot touch them. I live in a 
 grey fog ; there is sunshine somewhere, quite close, 
 but I cannot get to it. What else could I expect ? ' 
 
 Jim was attending eagerly. 
 
 ' Of course I mayn't say how sorry I am for you,' 
 he said in a low voice. 
 
 Eva did not turn her head, but the least sparkle 
 returned to her eyes. Perhaps things were going 
 to be amusing, after all, for a few minutes. 
 
 ' I am grateful, of course,' she said. ' One is 
 to be pitied when the fog is so palpably dense. 
 Of course, it will lift again ; fogs don't last for ever. 
 I am glad you are with us, though I don't think 
 you ought to be. After all, nothing matters much.' 
 
 Lord Hayes had by this time successfully focussed 
 his ear to the indistinct sounds, and Eva's last re- 
 mark was perfectly audible.
 
 THE RUBICON 187 
 
 ' Ah ! but things do matter,' said the young man 
 earnestly. ' And all men are not like some men.' 
 
 ' By which I suppose you mean me to understand 
 that you are not like some men. How can I know 
 that ? You have no halo round your head, no dawn- 
 ing of ineffable joy in your face. Why should I 
 suppose you are more than others ? You have 
 spoken to me before now of your great aims, your 
 enthusiasms for great causes, by which, as far as I 
 know, you only mean Home Rule, or the Unionist 
 policy — I forget what your politics are — and even 
 that seems to have been in abeyance lately. You 
 have been with us a week or more, and what have 
 you done, what have you thought about ? You seem 
 to prefer, after all, talking to me — ' 
 
 ' You are very cruel, Eva,' said he. 
 
 Lord Hayes shut his window. Perhaps the night 
 air was unwholesome after all. In any case, he had 
 heard enough. Suspicion was running down the 
 avenue, and growing clearer at every step. He 
 hesitated a moment, and then left his room and 
 walked downstairs. As lie came out into the 
 courtyard he heard the echo of Eva's light, cruel 
 laughter.
 
 1 88 THE RUBICON 
 
 jim Armine was standing in front of her, with 
 his arms hanging Hstlessly by his side. He did not 
 look exactly happy, and the sight of Lord Hayes 
 only added a very slightly deeper shade to his face. 
 
 Eva's husband never felt more methodically cool 
 in his life. He had quite determined what to do. 
 She had not seen him approach, and a smile still 
 lingered on her lips. She was lying back in her 
 chair, in indolent languor ; only in her eyes was 
 amusement and excitement. 
 
 'You looked very fine just then,' she was saying 
 to Jim, and turning, she saw her husband. 
 
 The smile died off her lips, the amusement from 
 her eyes. Only that air of utter languor was left. 
 But she saw her vengeance coming near, as Lord 
 Hayes had seen suspicion, and she met it joyfully. 
 
 Lord Hayes laid his hand on the young man's 
 shoulder. 
 
 ' The steamers only go twice a week to Marseilles,' 
 he said, ' and there will be no steamer to-morrow. 
 In the meantime, I am sure you will see the advis- 
 ability of your spending the next two nights at the 
 Hotel St George. They say it is a very good hotel. 
 Of course we shall not receive callers.'
 
 THE RUBICON 189 
 
 Eva shifted her position sh'ghtly, and looked at 
 her husband. 
 
 ' Kindly explain why he should go off so suddenly,' 
 she said. 
 
 ' I would not insult you by doing so.' 
 
 ' The insult lies in your silence. 1 suppose you 
 overheard something.' 
 
 ' Yes,' said her husband. ' I was listening.' 
 
 ' Ah ! that is so like you. What were you listen- 
 ing for?' 
 
 * I was listening more or less for what I heard.' 
 
 'In fact, you suspected something of the sort?' 
 
 ' Yes.' 
 
 ' And yet you did not warn me. Go away, Mr 
 Armine, and don't listen, please. Sit down, Hayes ; 
 I wish to talk to you. What a lovely night it is. 
 Quite idyllic. By the way, I wish to know whether 
 your suspicions are entirely confined to him.' 
 
 ' Absolutely and entirely.' 
 
 ' You are quite sure ? ' 
 
 ' Quite.' 
 
 ' That is good,' said Eva. ' But naturally I 
 wanted to know. To return — why did you not 
 warn me ? '
 
 I90 THE RUBICON 
 
 Lord Hayes found that things were not going 
 exactly as he had foreseen. 
 
 ' I did not think it would be of any use to warn 
 you,' he said at length. 
 
 ' Then, as you have no suspicions whatever of me, 
 what purpose is served by his going away?' 
 
 ' His presence here, under this roof, is an insult 
 to you and me.' 
 
 ' Yet you did not warn me,' said Eva. ' It seems 
 to me that you have cancelled the insult to yourself 
 Shall I tell you exactly what has happened, or do 
 you know it all ? ' 
 
 ' I know enough,' he said. 
 
 ' Possibly, from your point of view. But I am 
 afraid you must have left your box before the end. 
 The end was important. How much did you hear 
 exactly ? However, it doesn't matter. He said 
 something — well, extremely ill-judged, and I told 
 him he had mistaken me altogether. I laughed 
 as well. Did you hear me laugh ? I said I had 
 not the slightest doubt of his devotion, but that I 
 did not feel the least inclined to accept it. I don't 
 appreciate devotion, except my husband's, of course.' 
 
 Eva waited a moment. A refined cruelty waits
 
 THE RUBICON 191 
 
 a little every now and then for the full effect of 
 the pain to be felt. 
 
 ' It is impossible that he should remain here/ 
 he said. 
 
 * Please listen to me a moment. I have not 
 finished yet. You have insulted me grossly, twice ; 
 in the first place, by not warning me, in the second, 
 by listening. I do not like insults in the least, 
 and I have no intention of receiving them. Jim 
 committed an extreme indiscretion, for which you 
 are mainly responsible. If you had spoken to him 
 or me before, this would not have happened. Again, 
 if you had not listened, you would have known 
 nothing of it, and you will be good enough to take 
 my word for it, that no one would have been the 
 worse. He would have learnt a lesson, and I should 
 have had the pleasure of teaching it him. I did 
 not expect this in the least, for I did not think he 
 would have been so foolish as to speak of it' 
 
 The degradation which her husband would have 
 imposed on her grew^more and more bitter. She 
 stood up with intense anger intensely repressed. 
 
 * I choose that he should stop,' she said. ' I de- 
 spise you for listening. If you like, you may insist
 
 192 THE RUBICON 
 
 on his going, and, if you do, I shall go too. I tell 
 you I am perfectly reckless, and perfectly deter- 
 mined. Your point is that I have been insulted. 
 It was you who insulted me by not giving me 
 warning, and if you play the spy on me in this 
 way, I owe you absolutely nothing. That is all. 
 You may choose ; and choose quickly.' 
 
 She waited a moment, giving him time to reply. 
 
 'Apparently you have nothing to say. In fact, 
 there is nothing for you to say. That is all, then. 
 If you are going to sit out here with us, you had 
 better tell them to bring you a chair. Understand 
 me quite clearly ; it is over. I shall never allude 
 to this again, and I must ask you not to, either.' 
 
 Lord Hayes walked away without saying a word. 
 Eva stood still one moment, steadying herself, and 
 then she called out to Jim, who was leaning against 
 a pillar at the opposite corner of the court. 
 
 ' You can come back,' she said. ' We are not 
 going to send you away. Let us go on talking 
 from the last remark but two.' 
 
 She settled herself again in her chair and laughed. 
 The evening had been unexpectedly amusing. 
 
 * He will not listen again, and you will not talk
 
 THE RUBICON 193 
 
 nonsense again, I hope. Really, this is an unique 
 position, and I am the only one of the three who 
 comes out of it with credit. A suspects that B, his 
 friend, is making love to his wife. Does not warn 
 her, but listens, and hears something that confirms 
 his suspicions. Tries to drive B out of the house. 
 They all meet amicably at breakfast next morning.' 
 Certainly, if Eva had felt she had any small score 
 to wipe off against her husband, she had wiped it 
 off very cleanly. He was, for those few moments 
 when she had stood up with her intense anger 
 thoroughly in hand, mortally afraid of her, and 
 she knew it. She had used her anger as a weapon 
 against him, and had not let it act wildly, or un- 
 premeditatedly. She well knew that, as a weapon, 
 anger is most useful when it is skilfully handled, 
 controlled, compressed. A horse without a rider, 
 lashed into the enemies' lines, may, it is true, do 
 some service by promiscuous kicking, but it is a 
 blind, ungoverned force ; a skilful rider, however, who 
 adapts its savage strength to his own intelligence, 
 can guide it and direct it, and its destructive 
 potentialities are increased tenfold. 
 
 It was as a serviceable though savage brute that 
 
 N
 
 194 THE RUBICON 
 
 Eva employed her anger against her husband ; she 
 spurred it and lashed it into fury, but never gave it 
 its head. That cruel, governed anger of women is a 
 very terrible thing ; the hot, blustering anger of a 
 man is like a squib that bursts and jumps here and 
 there, sometimes singeing its immediate surround- 
 ings and, perhaps, breaking something, but it wastes 
 its force in childish, cracker-like explosions that hurt 
 nothing but sensitive nerves, which regard such 
 exhibitions as a lamentable want of taste. But Eva's 
 anger could not have offended the most fastidious ; 
 it gave no annoying little bangs, no unexpected 
 leaps, no fizzing, no unmomentous crackling ; it was 
 still, deep, intense, not pleasant to fight with. 
 
 Eva and Jim sat in the little courtyard for some 
 half-hour more, which was rather a hard burden for 
 the young man. To Eva it appeared to be no 
 effort to talk as usual. She had required just one 
 moment in which to steady herself, to dismount 
 her quivering, indignant steed, and then for her, as 
 she had told her husband, it was over. She had 
 been angry, furious, insulted, and she had used the 
 whip with a vengeance. The offence and the punish- 
 ment were past, and she threw the whip into a corner.
 
 THE RUBICON 195 
 
 But Jim was silent, which was not altogether un- 
 natural. He had no taste for scenes, and his great 
 coup^ his ace of trumps, which, to his shame, had been 
 forced from him, seemed to have fallen very flat. 
 He had played it, and Eva had seen it, but that was 
 all — it had simply been wasted. Naturally enough 
 he felt he had spoiled his hand. Eva had laughed 
 at him, but she had not been offended. Surely such 
 an attitude was almost unprecedented. 
 
 When she went upstairs half an hour later, she 
 turned into her husband's room to get a book she 
 wanted, and found him sitting by the window, as 
 if expecting her. He rose as she entered, and stood 
 like a servant waiting for orders. But Eva gave 
 no orders, and, having found her book, only re- 
 marked that it was growing a little chilly. He did 
 not reply, and she turned to look at him. There 
 was something miserably shrunken about his ap- 
 pearance which was rather pitiful. 
 
 ' You look tired,' she said. ' I should go to bed 
 if I were you.' 
 
 He did not meet her eyes, but continued to look 
 out of the window. 
 
 ' It has been a terrible night,' he said.
 
 196 THE RUBICON 
 
 Eva frowned. 
 
 ' It has been nothing of the sort,' she said. 
 ' Don't be absurd, Hayes. You made a very bad 
 mistake ; you did not treat me in the way I wish 
 to be treated, and I was intensely angry with you. 
 But I assure you I am angry no longer. It is 
 quite over, as far as I am concerned. Don't let us 
 quarrel more than is necessary. Just now, it is 
 quite unnecessary to quarrel.' 
 
 Lord Hayes had a certain potentiality for being 
 malignant. 
 
 * It is not the quarrelling,' he said ; ' it is the 
 mutual position that I find we occupy to each other.' 
 
 She grew a little impatient. 
 
 ' Let that be enough,' she said. * We only waste 
 words.' 
 
 She came a step nearer to him, and laid her hand on 
 his shoulder, as if he had been a woman, or she a man. 
 
 ' Come,' she said, ' be sensible. There is nothing 
 more to say about it. You had better go to bed. 
 Good-night !' 
 
 END OF VOL. I.
 
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 ' The disreputable lingo of Cockayne is henceforth justified before the world ; for a 
 man of genius has taken it in hand, and has shown, beyond all cavilling, that in 
 its way it also is a medium foi literature. You are grateful, and you say to 
 yourself, half in envy and half in admiration : " Here is a book ; here, or one is a 
 Dutchman, is one of the books of the year." ' — National Observer. 
 
 '"Barrack-Room Ballads' contains some of the best work thai Mi. Kipling has 
 evei done, which is saying a good deal. " Fuzzy. Wuzzy," "Gunga Din," and 
 " Tommy, " are, in our opinion, altogethei superioi to anything of the kind that 
 English literature has hitherto produced.' — Athencrum 
 
 'These ballads are as wonderful in theii descriptive powei as they are vigorous in 
 their dramatic force. There are few ballads in the English language more 
 stirring than "The Ballad of East and West," worthy to stand by the Bordei 
 ballads of Scott." — Spectator. 
 
 'The ballads teem with imagination, they palpitate with emotion. We read them 
 with laughter and tears ; the metres throb in oui pulses, the cunningly ordered 
 words tingle with life ; and if this be not poetry,, what is?' — Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 Henley. LYRA HEROICA : An Anthology selected from the 
 best English Verse of the i6th, 17th, i8th, and 19th Centuries. By 
 William Ernest Henley, Author of 'A Book of Verse,' 'Views 
 and Reviews,' etc. Crown %vo. Stamped gilt buckram, gilt top, 
 edges uncut, 6s. 
 Mr. Henley has brought to the task of selection an instinct alike for poetry and for 
 chivalry which seems to us quite wonderfully, and even unerringly, right.' — 
 Guardian. 
 
 Tomson. A SUMMER NIGHT, AND OTHER POEMS. By 
 Graham R. Tomson. "With Frontispiece by A. Tomson. Fcap. 
 Svo. 3^. 6d. 
 Also an edition on hand-made paper, limited to 50 copies. Large crown 
 
 Svo. lOs. 6d. net. 
 ' Mrs. Tomson holds perhaps the very highest rank among poetesses of Englbh birth. 
 This selection will help her reputation.' — Black and White.
 
 Messrs. Methuen's List ii 
 
 Ibsen. BRAND, A Drama by Henrik Ibsen. Translated by 
 
 William Wilson. Crown Svo. $s. 
 
 'The greatest world-poem of the nineteenth century next to "Faust." "Brand" 
 will have an astonishing interest for Englishmen. It is in the same set with 
 "Agamemnon," with " Lear," with the literature that we now instinctively regard 
 as high and holy.' — Daily Chronicle. 
 
 ' Q." GREEN BAYS : Verses and Parodies. By " Q.," Author 
 of * Dead Man's Rock ' etc. Second Edition. Fcap. %vo. y. 6d. 
 ' The verses display a rare and versatile gift of parody, great command of metre, and 
 a very pretty turn of humour.' — Times. 
 
 "A. G." VERSES TO ORDER. By "A. G." Crown Svo, 
 cloth extra, gilt top. 2s. 6d, net, 
 A small volume of verse by a writer whose initials are well known to Oxford men. 
 ' A capital specimen of light academic poetry. These verses are very bright and 
 engaging, easy and sufficiently witty.' — St. James's Gazette. 
 
 Hosken. VERSES BY THE WAY. By J. D. Hosken. 
 
 Printed on laid paper, and bound in buckram, gilt top. ^s. 
 
 Also a small edition on large Dutch hand-made paper. Price 
 I2s. 6d. net, 
 A Volume of Lyrics and Sonnets by J. D. Hosken, the Postman Poet, of Helston, 
 Cornwall, whose interesting career is now more or less well known to the literary 
 public. Q, the Author of 'The Splendid Spur,' etc., writes a critical and 
 biographical introduction. 
 
 Langbridge. A CRACKED FIDDLE. Being Selections fronj 
 the Poems of Frederic Langbridge. With Portrait. CrownZvo. 5j. 
 
 Langbridge. BALLADS OF THE BRAVE : Poems of Chivalry 
 Enterprise, Courage, and Constancy, from the Earliest Times to the 
 Present Day. Edited, with Notes, by Rev. F. Langbridge. 
 Crown Svo. Buckram 35. 6^. School Edition, 2.s. 6d. 
 'A very happy conception happily carried out. These "Ballads of the Brave" are 
 intended to suit the real tastes of boys, and will suit the taste of the great majority.' 
 — Spectator. ' The book is full of splendid things.' — World. 
 
 History and Biography 
 
 CoUingwood. JOHN RUSKIN : His Life and Work. By 
 W. G. COLLINGWOOD, M.A., late Scholar of University College, 
 Oxford, Author of the 'Art Teaching of John Ruskin,' Editor of 
 Mr, Ruskin's Poems. 2 vols, %vo. 32^. Second Edition. 
 This important work is written by Mr. CoUingwood, who has been for some years 
 Mr. Ruskin's private secretary, and who has had unique advantages in obtaining
 
 12 Messrs. Methuen's List 
 
 materials for this book from Mr. Ruskin himself and from his friends. It contains 
 a large amount of new matter, and of letters which have never been published, 
 and is, in fact, a full and authoritative biography of Mr. Ruskin. The book 
 contains numerous portraits of Mr. Ruskin, including a coloured one from a 
 water-colour portrait by himself, and also 13 sketches, never before published, by 
 Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Arthur Severn. A bibliography is added. 
 
 ' No more magnificent volumes have been published for a long time than " The Life 
 and Work of John Ruskin." . . .' — Times. 
 
 ' This most lovingly written and most profoundly interesting book.' — Daily News. 
 
 ' It is long since we have h.ad a biography with such varied delights of substance 
 and of form. Such a book is a pleasure for the d.iy, and a joy lor ever." — Daily 
 Chronicle. 
 
 ' Mr. Ruskin could not well have been more fortunate in his biographer.' — Globe. 
 
 ' .\ noble monument of a noble subject. One of the most beautiful books about one 
 of the noblest lives of our century.' — Glasg^ow Herald. 
 
 Gladstone. THE SPEECHES AND PUBLIC ADDRESSES 
 OF THE RT. HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P. With Notes 
 and Introductions. Edited by A. W. Hutton, M.A. (Librarian of 
 the Gladstone Library), and H. J. Cohen, M.A. With Portraits. 
 %vo. Vol. X. 12s. 6d. 
 
 Kussell. THE LIFE OF ADMIRAL LORD COLLING- 
 WOOD. By W, Clark Russell, Author of ' The Wreck of the 
 Grosvenor.' With Illustrations by F. Brangwyn. Svo. i$s. 
 
 'A really good book.' — Saturday Review. 
 
 ' A most excellent and wholesome book, which we should like to see in the hands of 
 every boy in the country.' — St. James's Gazette. 
 
 Clark. THE COLLEGES OF OXFORD : Their History and 
 their Traditions. By Members of the University. Edited by A. 
 Clark, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Lincoln College. 2>vo. \2s. 6d. 
 
 'Whether the reader approaches the book as a patriotic member of a college, as an 
 antiquary, or as a student of the organic growth of college foundation, it will amply 
 reward his attention.' — Times. 
 
 'A delightful book, learned and lively. — Academy. 
 
 'A work which will certainly be appealed to for many years as the standard book on 
 the Colleges of Oxford." — Athetutum. 
 
 Hulton. RIXAE OXONIENSES : An Account of the Battles 
 of the Nations, The Struggle between Town and Gown, etc. By 
 S. F. Hulton, M.A. Crown Svo. ^s. 
 
 James. CURIOSITIES OF CHRISTIAN HISTORY PRIOR 
 TO THE REFORMATION. By Croake James, Author of 
 * Curiosities of Law and Lawyers. ' Crown Svo. "js. 6d.
 
 Messrs. Methuen's List 13 
 
 Perrens. THE HISTORY OF FLORENCE FROM THE 
 TIME OF THE MEDICIS TO THE FALL OF THE 
 REPUBLIC. By F. T. Perrens. Translated by Hannah 
 Lynch, In three volumes. Fo/. I. Svo. 12s. 6d. 
 
 This is a translation from the French of the best history of Florence in existence. 
 This volume covers a period of profound interest — political and literary — and 
 is written with great vivacity. 
 'This is a standard book by an honest and intelligent historian, who has deserved 
 well of his countrymen, and of all who are interested in Italian history.' — Man- 
 chester Guardian. 
 
 Kaufmann. CHARLES KINGSLEY. By M. Kaufmann, 
 M.A, Crown Svo, $s, 
 A biography of Kingsley, especially dealing with his achievements in social reform. 
 ' The author has certainly gone about his worlc with conscientiousness and industry.' — 
 Sheffield Daily Telegraph. 
 
 Oliphant. THOMAS CHALMERS : A Biography. By Mrs. 
 Oliphant. With Portrait. Crown %vo. Buckram, 55. 
 ' A well-executed biography, worthy of its author and of the remarkable man who is 
 its subject. Mrs. Oliphant relates lucidly and dramatically the important part 
 which Chalmers played in the memorable secession.' — Titties. 
 ' Written with all the facile literary grace that marks this indefatigable authoress' 
 work, it presents a very complete picture of Chalmers as he lived and worked. . . . 
 The salient points in his many-sided life are seized with unerring judgment.' — 
 North British Daily Mail. 
 
 Wells. THE TEACHING OF HISTORY IN SCHOOLS. A 
 Lecture delivered at the University Extension Meeting in Oxford, 
 Aug. 6th, 1892. By J. Wells, M. A., Fellow and Tutor of Wadham 
 College, and Editor of ' Oxford and Oxford Life.' Crown Svo, (yd. 
 
 Pollard. THE JESUITS IN POLAND. By A. F. Pollard, 
 B.A. Oxford Prize Essays — The Lothian Prize Essay 1892. Crown 
 Svo. 2s. 6d, net. 
 
 Clifford. THE DESCENT OF CHARLOTTE COMPTON 
 (Baroness Ferrers de Chartley). By her Great-Granddaughter, 
 Isabella G. C. Clifford. Small ^to. los. 6d. net. 
 
 General Literature 
 
 Bowden. THE IMITATION OF BUDDHA : Being Quota- 
 tions from Buddhist Literature for each Day in the Year. Compiled 
 by E. M. BowDEN. With Preface by Sir Edwin Arnold. Third 
 Edition, 16 wo. 2s, 6d,
 
 14 Messrs. Methuen's List 
 
 Ditchfield. OUR ENGLISH VILLAGES : Their Story and 
 their Antiquities. By P. H. Ditchfield, M.A., F.R.H.S., Rector 
 of Barkham, Berks. Post Svo, 2s. (>d. Illustrated. 
 ' An extremely amusing and interesting little book, which should find a place ia 
 every parochial library.' — Guardian. 
 
 Ditchfield. OLD ENGLISH SPORTS. By P. H. Ditch- 
 field, M.A. Crown Svo. 2s. 6d. Illustrated. 
 ' A charming account of old English Sports.'— Morning- Post. 
 
 Burne. PARSON AND PEASANT: Chapters of their 
 Natural History. By J. B. Burne, M.A., Rector of Wasing. 
 Crown Svo. ^s. 
 ' "Parson and Peasant " is a book not only to be interested in, but to learn something 
 from — a book which may prove a help to many a clergyman, and broaden the 
 hearts and ripen the charity of laymen.' — Derby Mercury. 
 
 Massee. A MONOGRAPH OF THE MYXOGASTRES. By 
 George Massee. With 12 Coloured Plates. Royal Svo. iSs, net. 
 
 This is the only work in English on this important group. It contains 12 Coloured 
 Plates, produced in the finest style of chromo-lithography. 
 
 'Supplies a want acutely felt. Its merits are of a high order, and it is one of the 
 most important contributions to systematic natural science which have latel" 
 appeared. ' — IVesitninsier Review. 
 
 'A work much in advance of any book in the language treating of this g^oup 01 
 organisms. It is indispensable to every student of the Mxyogastres. The 
 coloured plates deserve high praise for their accuracy and execution.' — Nature. 
 
 Cunningham. THE PATH TOWARDS KNOWLEDGE: 
 Essays on Questions of the Day. By W. Cunningham, D.D., 
 Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Professor of Economics at 
 King's College, London. Crown Svo. 4^. 6d. 
 Essays on Marriage and Population, Socialism, Money, Education, Positivism, etc. 
 
 Bushill. PROFIT SHARING AND THE LABOUR QUES- 
 TION. By T. W. Bushill, a Profit Sharing Employer. With an 
 Introduction by Sedley Taylor, Author of ' Profit Sharing between 
 Capital and Labour.' Crown Svo. 2s. 6d. 
 
 John Beever. PRACTICAL FLY-FISHING, Founded on 
 Nature, by John Beever, late of the Thwaite House, Coniston. A 
 New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author by W. G. Collingwood, 
 M.A., Author of 'The Life and Work of John Ruskin.'etc. Also 
 additional Notes and a chapter on Char-Fishing, by A. and A. R. 
 Severn. With a specially designed title-page. Crown Svo. ^s. 6d. 
 
 A little book on Fly-Fishing by an old friend of Mr. Ruskin. It has been out of 
 print for some time, and being still much in request, is now issued with a Memoir 
 of the Author by W. G. Collingwood.
 
 Messrs. Methuen's List 15 
 
 Anderson Graham. NATURE IN BOOKS : Studies in Literary 
 Biography. By P. Anderson Graham. Crown Svo. 6s. 
 
 The chapters are entitled : I. ' The Magic of the Fields ' (Jefferies). II. ' Art and 
 Nature' (Tennyson). III. 'The Doctrine of Idleness' (Thoreau). IV. 'The 
 Romance of Life ' (Scott). V. ' The Poetry of Toil ' (Burns). VI. ' The Divinity 
 of Nature ' (Wordsworth). 
 
 Wells. OXFORD AND OXFORD LIFE. By Members of 
 the University. Edited by J. Wells, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of 
 Wadham College. Crown Svo. 3^. 6d. 
 This work contains an account of life at Oxford— intellectual, social, and religious — 
 a careful estimate of necessary expenses, a review of recent changes, a statement 
 of the present position of the University, and chapters on Women's Education, 
 aids to study, and University Extension. 
 ' We congratulate Mr. Wells on the production of a readable and intelligent account 
 of Oxford as it is at the present time, written by persons who are, with hardly an 
 exception, possessed of a close acquaintance with the system and life of the 
 University.' — A ihotaum. 
 
 Driver. SERMONS ON SUBJECTS CONNECTED WITH 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT. By S. R. Driver, D.D., Canon of 
 Christ Church, Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of 
 Oxford. Crown Svo. 6s. 
 A welcome volume to the author's famous ' Introduction.' No man can read these 
 discourses without feeling that Dr. Driver is fully alive to the deeper teaching of 
 the Old Testament.' — Guardian. 
 
 Cheyne. FOUNDERS OF OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM: 
 Biographical, Descriptive, and Critical Studies. By T. K. Cheyne, 
 D.D., Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at 
 Oxford. Large crown Svo. "js. 6d. [Ready. 
 
 This important book is a historical sketch of O.T. Criticism in the form of biographi- 
 cal studies from the days of Elchhorn to those of Driver and Robertson Smith. 
 It is the only book of its kind in English. 
 
 ' The volume is one of great interest and value. It displays all the author's well- 
 known ability and learning, and its opportune publication has laid all students of 
 theology, and specially of Bible criticism, under weighty obligation.' — Scotsman. 
 
 'A very learned and instructive work.' — Times. 
 
 WORKS BY 
 S. Baring Gould, Author of ' Mehalah,' etc. 
 OLD COUNTRY LIFE. With Sixty-seven Illustrations by 
 W. Parkinson, F. D. Bedford, and F. Masey. La7-ge Crown 
 Svo, cloth super extra, top edge gilt, \os. 6d. Fourth and Cheaper 
 Edition, 6s. 
 ' " Old Country Life," as healthy wholesome reading, full of breezy life and move- 
 ment, full of quaint stories vigorously told, will not be excelled by any book 
 to be published throughout the year. Sound, hearty, and English to the core.'— 
 World.
 
 i6 Messrs. Methuen's List 
 
 HISTORIC ODDITIES AND STRANGE EVENTS. TJiird 
 Edition, Crown %vo. 6s. 
 'A collection of exciting and entertaining chapters. The whole volume is delightful 
 reading. ' — Times. 
 
 FREAKS OF FANATICISM. Third Edition. Crown Zvo. 6j. 
 
 ' Mr. Baring Gould has a keen eye for colour and effect, and the subjects he has 
 chosen gire ample scope to his descriptive and analytic faculties. A perfectly 
 fascinating book.' — Scottish Leader. 
 
 SONGS OF THE WEST : Traditional Ballads and Songs of 
 the West of England, with their Traditional Melodies. Collected 
 by S. Baring Gould, M.A., and H. Fleetwood Sheppard, 
 M.A. Arranged for Voice and Piano. In 4 Parts (containing 25 
 Songs each), Parts /., //., ///., 3^. each. Part IV,, ^s. In one 
 Vol., roan, \'^s. 
 'A rich and varied collection of humour, pathos, grace, and poetic fancy." — Saturday 
 Reuietv. 
 
 YORKSHIRE ODDITIES AND STRANGE EVENTS. 
 Fourth Edition. Crowti ?>vo. 6s. 
 
 STRANGE SURVIVALS AND SUPERSTITIONS. With 
 Illustrations. By S. Baring Gould. Crown ?>vo. 7s. 6d. 
 
 A book on such subjects as Foundations, G.ibles, Holes, Gallows, Raising the Hat, Old 
 Ballads, etc. etc. It traces in a most interesting manner their origin and history. 
 
 ' We have read Mr. Baring Gould's book from beginning to end. It is full of quaini 
 and various information, and there is not a dull page in it. ' — Notes and Queries. 
 
 THE TRAGEDY OF THE CAESARS: The 
 Emperors of the Julian and Claudian Lines. With numerous Illus- 
 trations from Busts, Gems, Cameos, etc. By S. Baring GoUld, 
 Author of ' Mehalah,' etc. Second Edition. 2 vols. Royal Svo. 30.5. 
 This book is the only one in English which deals with the personal history of the 
 Caesars, and Mr. Baring Gould has found a subject which, for picturesque detail 
 and sombre interest, is not rivalled by any work of fiction. The volumes are 
 copiously illustrated. 
 ' A most splendid and fascinating book on a subject of undying interest. The great 
 feature of the book is the use the author has made of the existing portraits of the 
 Caesars, and the admirable critical subtlety he has e.xhibited in dealing with this 
 line of research. It is brilliantly written, and the illustrations are supplied on a 
 scale of profuse magnificence.' — Daily Chronicle. 
 'The volumes will in no sense disappoint the general reader. Indeed, in their way, 
 there is nothing in any sense so good in English. . . . Mr. Baring Gould has 
 presented his narrative in such a way as not to make one dull page.' — Atlumeum. 
 
 JACQUETTA, and other Stories. Crown Zvo. "^s. 6d.
 
 Messrs. Methuen's List 17 
 
 ARM I NELL: A Social Romance. New Edition. Crown Zvo. 
 35. 6d. 
 'To say that a book is by the author of " Mehalah" is to imply that it contains a 
 story cast on strong lines, containing dramatic possibilities, vivid and sympathetic 
 descriptions of Nature, and a wealth of ingenious imagery. All these expecta- 
 tions are justified by " Arminell." ' — Speaker. 
 
 URITH: A Story of Dartmoor. Third Edition. CrownZvo. y.dd. 
 
 ' The author is at his best.' — Times. 
 
 ' He has nearly reached the high water-mark of " Mehalah." '—National Observer. 
 
 MARGERY OF QUETHER, and other Stories. Crown Zvo. 
 
 y. 6d. 
 IN THE ROAR OF THE SEA : A Tale of the Cornish Coast. 
 
 New Edition, y. 6d. 
 MRS. CURGENVEN OF CURGENVEN. Third Edition, ts. 
 
 Fiction 
 
 Pryce. TIME AND THE WOMAN. By Richard Pryce, 
 Author of ' Miss Maxwell's Affections,' 'The Quiet Mrs. Fleming,' 
 etc. New and Cheaper Edition. Crown Svo. 6s. 
 ' Mr. Pryce's work recalls the style of Octave Feuillet, by its clearness, conciseness, 
 its literary reserve.' — Athenaum. 
 
 Gray. ELSA. A Novel. By E. M 'Queen Gray. CrownZvo. ds. 
 
 ' A charming novel. The characters are not only powerful sketches, but minutely 
 and carefully finished portraits.' — Guardian. 
 
 Anthony Hope. A CHANGE OF AIR : A Novel. By 
 Anthony Hope, Author of ' Mr. Witt's Widow,' etc. i vol. 
 Crown Zvo. 6s. 
 A bright story by Mr. Hope, who has, the Athenaum says, 'a decided outlook and 
 individuality of his own.' 
 
 'A graceful, vivacious comedy, true to human nature. The characters are traced 
 with a masterly hand.' — Times. 
 
 Edna Lyall. DERRICK VAUGHAN, NOVELIST. By 
 Edna Lyall, Author of * Donovan.* Crown Zvo. 2>^st Thousand. 
 35. 6d. ; paper, \s. 
 
 Lynn Linton. THE TRUE HISTORY OF JOSHUA DAVID- 
 SON, Christian and Communist. By E. Lynn Linton. Eleventh 
 Edition. Post Zvo. is. 
 
 Dicker. A CAVALIER'S LADYE. By Constance Dicker. 
 With Illustrations. Crown Zvo. ^s. 6d.
 
 i8 Messrs. Methuen's List 
 
 Author of ' Vera.' THE DANCE OF THE HOURS. By 
 
 the Author of ' Vera,' ' Blue Roses,' etc. Crown Svo. 6s. 
 ' A musician's dream, pathetically broken off at the hour of its realisation, is vividly 
 represented in this book. . . . Well written and possessing many elements of 
 interest. The success of " The Dance of the Hours" may be safely predicted.'— 
 Morning Post. 
 
 Norris. A Deplorable Affair. By W. E. NORRIS, Author of 
 ' His Grace. ' Crown 8vo. 35. 6d. 
 'What with its interesting story, its graceful manner, and its perpetual good 
 humour, the book is as enjoyable as any that has come from its author's pen.' — 
 Scotsman. 
 
 Dickinson. A VICAR'S WIFE. By Evelyn Dickinson. 
 
 Crown Svo. ^s. 6d. 
 
 Prowse. THE POISON OF ASPS. By K Orton Prowse. 
 Crown Svo, 35. 6d. 
 
 Parker. PIERRE AND HIS PEOPLE. By Gilbert 
 
 Parker. Crown Svo. Buckram. 6j. 
 ' Stories happily conceived and finely executed. There is strength and genius in Mr. 
 Parker's style.' — Daily Telegraph. 
 
 Marriott Watson. DIOGENES OF LONDON and other 
 Sketches. By H. B. Marriott Watson, Author of ' The Web 
 of the Spider.' Crown Svo. Buckram. 6s. 
 ' By all those who delight in the uses of words, who rate the exercise of prose above 
 the exercise of verse, who rejoice in all proofs of its delicacy and its strength, who 
 believe that English prose is chief among the moulds of thought, by these 
 Mr. Marriott Watson's book will be welcomed.' — National Observer. 
 
 Methuen's Novel Series 
 
 A series of copyright Novels, by well-known Authors, \2 / r~\ 
 bound in red buckram, at the price of three shillings and kJ^ 
 sixpence. The first volumes (ready) are : — 
 
 1. JACQUETTA. By S. Baring Gould, Author of ' Mehalah,' 
 
 etc. 
 
 2. ARM I NELL : A Social Romance. By S. Baring Gould, 
 
 Author of ' Mehalah,' etc. 
 
 3. MARGERY OF QUETHER. By S. BARING GoULD. 
 
 4. URITH. By S. Baring Gould.
 
 Messrs. Methuens List 19 
 
 IN THE ROAR OF THE SEA. By S. Baring Gould. 
 DERRICK VAUGHAN, NOVELIST. With Portrait of 
 
 Author. By Edna Lyall, Author of ' Donovan,' etc. Also 
 
 paper, is. 
 JACK'S FATHER. By W. E. NoRRis. 
 MY DANISH SWEETHEART. By W. Clark Russell. 
 Other Volumes will be announced in due course. 
 
 HALF-CROWN NOVELS 
 
 A Series of Novels by popular Authors, tastefully 
 bound in cloth. 
 
 2/6 
 
 1. THE PLAN OF CAMPAIGN. By F. Mabel Robinson. 
 
 2. DISENCHANTMENT. By F. Mabel Robinson. 
 
 3. MR. BUTLER'S WARD, By Mabel Robinson. 
 
 4. HOVENDEN, V.C. By F. Mabel Robinson. 
 
 5. ELI'S CHILDREN. By G. Manville Fenn. 
 
 6. A DOUBLE KNOT. By G. Manville Fenn. 
 
 7. DISARMED. By M. Betham Edwards. 
 
 8. A LOST ILLUSION. By Leslie Keith. 
 
 9. A MARRIAGE AT SEA. By W. Clark Russell. 
 
 10. IN TENT AND BUNGALOW. By the Author of 'Indian 
 
 Idylls.' 
 
 11. MY STEWARDSHIP. By E. M'Queen Gray. 
 
 12. A REVEREND GENTLEMAN. By J. M. Cobban. 
 
 13. THE STORY OF CHRIS. By Roland Grey. 
 
 Other volumes will be announced in due course. 
 
 NEW TWO-SHILLING EDITIONS 
 
 Crown 8vo, Ornamental Boards. 
 
 ELI'S CHILDREN. By G. Manville Fenn. 
 
 DISENCHANTMENT. By F. Mabel Robinson. 
 
 THE PLAN OF CAMPAIGN. By F. Mabel Robinson 
 
 2/-
 
 20 Messrs. Metiiuen's List 
 
 Crown Svo. Picture Boards. 
 A REVEREND GENTLEMAN. By J. MacLaren Cobban. 
 MR. BUTLER'S WARD. By Mabel Robinson. 
 JACK'S FATHER. By W. E. NORRIS. 
 THE QUIET MRS. FLEMING. By RiCHARD Pryce. 
 
 Books for Boys and Girls 
 
 Cuthell. ONLY A GUARD-ROOM DOG. By Mrs. Cuthell. 
 With i6 Illustrations by W. Parkinson. Square Crown Svo. 6s. 
 
 ' This is a charming story. Tangle was but a little mongrel Skye terrier, but he had a 
 big heart in his little body, and played a hero's part more than once. The book 
 can be warmly recommended.' — Standard. 
 
 Collingwood. THE DOCTOR OF THE JULIET. By Harrv 
 COLLINGWOOD, Author of 'The Pirate Island,' etc. Illustrated by 
 Gordon Browne. Crown Svo. 6s. 
 
 ' "The Doctor of the Juliet," well illustrated by Gordon Browne, is one of Harry 
 Collingwood's best efforts.' — Morning; Post. 
 
 Clark RusseU. MASTER ROCKAFELLAR'S VOYAGE. By 
 W. Clark Russell, Author of ' The Wreck of the Grosvenor,' etc. 
 Illustrated by Gordon Browne. Crown Hvo. 2s. 6d. 
 ' Mr. Clark Russell's story of "Master Rockafellar's Voyage "will be among the 
 favourites of the Christmas books. There is a rattle and " go " all through it, and 
 its illustrations are charming in themselves, and very much above the average in 
 the way in which they are produced.' — Guardian. 
 
 Manville Fenn. SYD BELTON : Or, The Boy who would not 
 go to Sea. By G. Manville Fenn, Author of • In the King's 
 Name,' etc. Illustrated by Gordon Browne. Crown Hvo. 3^. 6d. 
 ' Who among the young story-reading public will not rejoice at the sight of the old 
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 vigour, breeziness and fun.'— Journal oy Education. 
 
 Walford. A PINCH OF EXPERIENCE. By. L. B. Wal- 
 FORD, Author of ' Mr, Smith.' With Illustrations by GORDON 
 Browne. Crown Svo. ^s. 6d. 
 'The clever authoress steers clear of namby-pamby, and invests her moral with a 
 fresh and striking dress. There is terseness and vivacity of style and the illustra- 
 tions are admirable.' — Anti-Jacobin,
 
 Messrs. Methuen's List 21 
 
 Molesworth. THE RED GRANGE. By Mrs. Molesworth, 
 Author of ' Carrots.' With Illustrations by Gordon Browne. 
 Crown 8vo. ^s. 6d. 
 
 'A volume in which girls will delight, and beautifully illustrated. '—/"a// Mali 
 Gazette. 
 
 Author of * Mdle. Mori.' THE SECRET OF MADAME DE 
 Monluc. By the Author of 'The Atelier du Lys,' 'Mdle. Mori.' 
 Crown 8vo. 3^. 6d. 
 'An exquisite literary cameo.' — World. 
 
 Parr. DUMPS. By Mrs. Parr, Author of 'Adam and Eve,' 
 'Dorothy Fox,' etc. Illustrated by W. PARKINSON. Crown 8w. 
 3J. 6d. 
 
 ' One of the prettiest stories which even this clever writer has given the world for a 
 long time.' — World. 
 
 Meade. OUT OF THE FASHION. By L. T. Meade, Author 
 of ' A Girl of the People,' etc. With 6 illustrations by W. Paget. 
 Crown Svo, y. 6d. 
 
 ' One of those charmingly-written social tales, which this"writer knows so well how to 
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 Meade. A GIRL OF THE PEOPLE. By L. T. Meade, 
 Author of ' Scamp and I,' etc. Illustrated by R. Barnes. Crown 
 8vo. 3J. (>d. 
 
 'An excellent story. Vivid portraiture of character, and broad and wholesome 
 
 lessons about life.' — Spectator. 
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 Meade. HEPSY GIPSY. By L. T. Meade. Illustrated by 
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 22 Messrs. Methuen's List 
 
 Leaders of Religion 
 
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 THE INDUSTRIAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND. By H. DE 
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 Messrs. Methuen's List 23 
 
 a history of english political economy. by 
 
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 PROBLEMS OF POVERTY : An Inquiry into the Industrial 
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 VICTORIAN POETS. By A. Sharp. 
 
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 TRADE UNIONISM— NEW AND OLD. By G. Howell, 
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 24 Messrs. Methuen's List 
 
 MUTUAL THRIFT. By Rev. J. Frome WILKINSON, M.A., 
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 PROBLEMS OF POVERTY : An Inquiry into the Industrial 
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 THE COMMERCE OF NATIONS. By C. F. Bastable, 
 
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 LAND NATIONALIZATION, By Harold Cox, B.A. 
 
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 BACK TO THE LAND : An Inquiry into the Cure for Rural 
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 I 
 
 Edinburgh ; T. .Sf A. Constable, Printtrt to Htr Majesty.
 
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