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He had left his heroine very much alone in "Reuben Hallard" and those occasions when he had been obliged to bring her on the stage had not been too successful. He knew nothing about women! There would be things a great many as a married man, he would have to change. Sometimes he was moody for days together and wanted to see no one.
He was still shaken with the storm of defending his ideals from profanation, and Hallard easily drew from him an admission that Mr. Dyckman was bent upon matrimony, also a scathing diatribe on the remarriage of divorced persons as one of the signs of the increasing degeneracy of public morals. Hallard's paper carried a lovely exclusive story the next morning in noisy head-lines.
For a few moments, Miss Hallard sat upright in the bed and watched her. Her mind was keyed with intuition. She was conscious of the presence of some influence in Sally's mind probably more conscious of it than Sally was herself. You could not have shaken her in that belief. Even a woman cannot act to a woman, and that decided "No" from Sally had only served the more to convince her.
"Why? Who's Miss Hallard? What is she?" "She's an artist I share rooms with her." "Why would you like me to meet her?" "I'd like to hear you two argue. She thinks just the opposite. She thinks " "I never argue with a woman," Traill interrupted. "You think so poorly of us?" She tried to say it with spirit struck the flint in her eyes, contracted her lips to the hard, thin line. "As women?
She was more than amiable when she bestowed her gifts upon Coralie. You may talk about the value of a noble heart beating in an empty corset, shining out of pinched and tired eyes; but it is a value, unmarketable, where the good things in a woman's life are given in exchange. Janet Hallard and her like have learnt the realization of that.
That Janet Hallard was an artist, now with a studio of sorts of her own, says nothing for her temperament and less for her art. She had no conception of the higher life, and to her mind the inner mysticism was a jumble of confused nonsense the blind leading the blind, for whom the ultimate ditch was a bastard theosophy.
"It may pay better than 'Reuben Hallard," she said, "there's more love interest and it ends happily. Some of it is beautifully written, some of it quite unspeakably. But really, Peter, it's the most uneven thing I've ever read. Again and again one is caught, held, stirred then, suddenly, you slip away altogether you aren't there at all, nothing's there, I could put my ringer on the places.
It is the paid army the regular troops who finally place the standard upon the enemy's heights; for it is only the forces of Life itself that, in this life, are unconquerable. This, then, is Miss Hallard adventuress in a great philosophy.
But he wondered, as he looked at it, how he had ever been able to sit there so quietly and write "Reuben Hallard." Now, between his writing and himself, a thousand things were sweeping. Far away he saw it like the height of some inaccessible hill his emotions, his adventures, the excitement of life made his thoughts, his ideas, thinner than smoke.
He could see it, he fancied, gathering in thick brown layers upon the pavement, shining and glistening as it mounted, slipping in streams into the gutter, sweeping about the foundations of the houses, climbing perhaps, one day, to the very windows. That was London. And yet he loved it, London and its dirt and darkness. Had he not written "Reuben Hallard" here!
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