Transcribed from 1893 Macmillan and Co. edition by DavidPrice, . Proofed by Nina Hall, MohuaSen, Bridie, Francine Smith and David.
“I wondered whether youwouldn’t read it to me,” said Mrs. Alsager, as theylingered a little near the fire before he took leave. Shelooked down at the fire sideways, drawing her dress away from itand making her proposal with a shy sincerity that added to hercharm. Her charm was always great for Allan Wayworth, andthe whole air of her house, which was simply a sort ofdistillation of herself, so soothing, so beguiling that he alwaysmade several false starts before departure. He had spentsome such good hours there, had forgotten, in her warm, goldendrawing-room, so much of the loneliness and so many of theworries of his life, that it had come to be the immediate answerto his longings, the cure for his aches, the harbour of refugefrom his storms. His tribulations were not unprecedented,and some of his advantages, if of a usual kind, were marked indegree, inasmuch as he was very clever for one so young, and veryindependent for one so poor. He was eight-and-twenty, buthe had lived a good deal and was full of ambitions andcuriosities and disappointments. The opportunity to talk ofsome of these in Grosvenor Place corrected perceptibly theimmense inconvenience of London. This inconvenience tookfor him principally the line of insensibility to AllanWayworth’s literary form. He had a literary form, orhe thought he had, and her intelligent recognition of thecircumstance was the sweetest consolation Mrs. Alsager could haveadministered. She was even more literary and more artisticthan he, inasmuch as he could often work off his overflow (thiswas his occupation, his profession), while the generous woman,abounding in happy thoughts, but unedited and unpublished, stoodthere in the rising tide like the nymph of a fountain in theplash of the marble basin.
The year before, in a big newspapery house, he had foundhimself next her at dinner, and they had converted the intenselymaterial hour into a feast of reason. There was no motivefor her asking him to come to see her but that she liked him,which it was the more agreeable to him to perceive as heperceived at the same time that she was exquisite. She wasenviably free to act upon her likings, and it made Wayworth feelless unsuccessful to infer that for the moment he happened to beone of them. He kept the revelation to himself, and indeedthere was nothing to turn his head in the kindness of a kindwoman. Mrs. Alsager occupied so completely the ground ofpossession that she would have been condemned to inaction had itnot been for the principle of giving. Her husband, who wastwenty years her senior, a massive personality in the City and aheavy one at home (wherever he stood, or even sat, he wasmonumental), owned half a big newspaper and the whole of a greatmany other things. He admired his wife, though she bore nochildren, and liked her to have other tastes than his, as thatseemed to give a greater acreage to their life. His ownappetites went so far he could scarcely see the boundary, and histheory was to trust her to push the limits of hers, so thatbetween them the pair should astound by their consumption. His ideas were prodigiously vulgar, but some of them had the goodfortune to be carried out by a person of perfect delicacy. Her delicacy made her play strange tricks with them, but he neverfound this out. She attenuated him without his knowing it,for what he mainly thought was that he had aggrandisedher. Without her he really would have been biggerstill, and society, breathing more freely, was practically underan obligation to her which, to do it justice, it acknowledged byan attitude of mystified respect. She felt a tremulous need