Bond Street. Yet still in his face one saw the watchful look, the slight
vacancy of a cripple.
He had so very nearly lost his life, that what remained was wonderfully
precious to him. It was obvious in the anxious brightness of his eyes, how
proud he was, after the great shock, of being alive. But he had been so much
hurt that something inside him had perished, some of his feelings had gone.
There was a blank of insentience.
Constance, his wife, was a ruddy, country-looking girl with soft brown
hair and sturdy body, and slow movements, full of unusual energy. She had
big, wondering eyes, and a soft mild voice, and seemed just to have come
from her native village. It was not so at all. Her father was the once
well-known R. A., old Sir Malcolm Reid. Her mother had been one of the
cultivated Fabians in the palmy, rather pre-Raphaelite days. Between artists
and cultured socialists, Constance and her sister Hilda had had what might
be called an aesthetically unconventional upbringing. They had been taken to
Paris and Florence and Rome to breathe in art, and they had been taken also
in the other direction, to the Hague and Berlin, to great Socialist
conventions, where the speakers spoke in every civilized tongue, and no one
was abashed.
The two girls, therefore, were from an early age not the least daunted
by either art or ideal politics. It was their natural atmosphere. They were
at once cosmopolitan and provincial, with the cosmopolitan provincialism of
art that goes with pure social ideals.
They had been sent to Dresden at the age of fifteen, for music among
other things. And they had had a good time there. They lived freely among
the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and
artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better,
since they were women. And they tramped off to the forests with sturdy
youths bearing guitars, twang-twang! They sang the Wandervogel songs, and
they were free. Free! That was the great word. Out in the open world, out in
the forests of the morning, with lusty and splendid-throated young fellows,
free to do as they liked, and---above all---to say what they liked. It was
the talk that mattered supremely: the impassioned interchange of talk. Love
was only a minor accompaniment.
Both Hilda and Constance had had their tentative love-affairs by the
time they were eighteen. The young men with whom they talked so passionately
<<BackPagesTo menuForward>>