It was like digging up a little
rose-tree planted with one's own hands in some poor shelter, just
when it had taken root, and setting it where the full winds would beat
against it. To do so brusque and, as it seemed to Hilary, so inhumane
a thing was foreign to his nature. There was also the little matter of
that touch of fever--the distant music he had been hearing since the
waggons came in to Covent Garden.
With a feeling that was almost misery, therefore, he waited for her on
Monday afternoon, walking to and fro in his study, where all the walls
were white, and all the woodwork coloured like the leaf of a cigar;
where the books were that colour too, in Hilary's special deerskin
binding; where there were no flowers nor any sunlight coming through
the windows, but plenty of sheets of paper--a room which youth seemed to
have left for ever, the room of middle age!
He called her in with the intention of at once saying what he had to
say, and getting it over in the fewest words. But he had not reckoned
fully either with his own nature or with woman's instinct. Nor had he
allowed--being, for all his learning, perhaps because of it, singularly
unable to gauge the effects of simple actions--for the proprietary
relations he had established in the girl's mind by giving her those
clothes.
As a dog whose master has it in his mind to go away from him, stands
gazing up with tragic inquiry in his eyes, scenting to his soul that
coming cruelty--as a dog thus soon to be bereaved, so stood the little
model.
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