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Updated: June 20, 2025
Her heart was wholly Godolphin's; her mind was generous, sympathising, lofty; her person unrivalled in the majesty of its loveliness; all these, too, were Godolphin's, and yet the eternal something was wanting still. "I have brought you your hat, Percy," said Constance; "you forget the dews are falling fast, and your head is uncovered."
The same fastidiousness which, in the affairs of the heart, had characterised Godolphin's habits and sentiments, characterised his new pursuits; the same thirst for the Ideal, the same worship of the Beautiful, and aspirations after the Perfect. It was not in Constance's nature to admit this smaller ambition; her taste was pure but not minute; she did not descend to the philosophy of detail.
All interest in the authorship of the article of the Ibsen crank, all interest in Godolphin's apparent forgetfulness of his solemn promises to give the rest of his natural life to the performance of the piece, was lost in amaze at the fact that he was going to revise it to please himself, and to fashion Maxwell's careful work over in his own ideal of the figure he should make in it to the public.
Godolphin's seen me before, and besides, I'm not going to propose marriage to him," he protested. "Oh, it's much more serious than that!" she sighed. "Anybody would take you, dear, but it's your play we want him to take or take back." When Maxwell reached the hotel, he did not find Godolphin there.
But, unblest by one friend really wise or good, spoilt by the world, soured by disappointment, Godolphin's very faculties made him inert, and his very wisdom taught him to be useless.
But he was less sure than in the beginning of the evening that the play was again in Godolphin's hands; and he had to confirm himself from his wife's acceptance of the facts in the belief that it was really so.
And yet nothing could be so different as was his deportment from that which she had been accustomed to admire from that manifested by the exquisites of the day. The calm, the nonchalance, the artificial smile of languor, the evenness, so insipid, yet so irreproachable, of English manners when considered most polished, all this was the reverse of Godolphin's address and air.
Constance, humbled as she was, listened in breathless silence; her cheek burned with blushes, and those blushes were at once to Radclyffe a torture and a reward. "At this moment," continued he, with constrained calmness, "at this moment he fancies in you that very coldness you lament in him. Pardon me, Lady Erpingham; but Godolphin's nature is wayward, mysterious, and exacting.
Godolphin's proportions were faultless; but your strapping heroes think of a moderate-sized man as mathematicians define a point declare that he has no length nor breadth whatsoever. "What say you, Constance?" asked Lady Erpingham, meaningly. Constance felt the meaning, and replied calmly, that Mr. Godolphin appeared to her handsomer than any one she had seen lately.
In view of all this, she peremptorily forbade herself to be uneasy at the little reticence he was practising with regard to Godolphin's having rejected his play; and imagined the splendor he could put on with the manager after he had accepted it, in telling him its history, and releasing him, if he would, from his agreement.
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