The Wheel of Life | Page 2

she paused for an instant in order to establish herself securely in

her argument, for, though she could by no stretch of the imagination
regard her mind as of a meditative cast, there are hours when even to
the most flippant experience wears the borrowed mantle of philosophy.
Abstract theories of conduct diverted her but little; what she wanted
was some practical explanation of the mental weariness she felt. What
she wanted, she repeated, as if to drive in the matter with a final blow,
was to be as happy in the actual condition as she had told herself that
she might be when as yet the actual was only the ideal. Why, for
instance, when she had been wretched with but one man on the box,
should the addition of a second livery fail to produce in her the
contentment of which she had often dreamed while she disconsolately
regarded a single pair of shoulders? That happiness did not masquerade
in livery she had learned since she had triumphantly married the richest
man she knew, and the admission of this brought her almost with a
jump to the bitter conclusion of her unanswerable logic--for the
satisfaction which was not to be found in a footman was absent as well
from the imposing figure of Perry Bridewell himself. Yet she told
herself that she would have married him had he possessed merely the
historical penny, and the restless infatuation of those first months was
still sufficiently alive to lend the colour of its pleasing torment to her
existence.
Lying there, in her French embroidered night dress, with her brilliant
red hair pushed back from her forehead, she began idly to follow the
histories of the people whom she knew, and it seemed to her that each
of them was in some particular circumstance more fortunate than she.
But she would have changed place with none, not even with her best
friend, Laura Wilde, who was perfectly content because she lived
buried away in Gramercy Park and wrote vague beautiful verse that
nobody ever read. Laura filled as little part in what she called "the
world" as Gramercy Park occupied in modern progress, yet it was not
without a faint impulse of envy that Gerty recalled now the grave old
house mantled in brown creepers and the cheerful firelit room in which
Laura lived. The peace which she had missed in the thought of her
husband came back to her with the first recollection of her friend, and
her hard bright eyes softened a little while she dwelt on the vivid face
of the woman to whom she clung because of her very unlikeness to

herself. Gradually out of the mist of her unhappiness the figure of
Laura rose in the mirror before her, and she saw clearly her large white
forehead under the dark wing-like waves of hair, the singular intentness
of her eyes, and the rapt expectancy of look in which her features were
lost as in a general vagueness of light.
Though it was twenty years since she had first seen Laura Wilde as a
child of ten, the meeting came to her suddenly with all the bright
clearness of an incident of yesterday. She remembered herself as a
weak, bedraggled little girl, in wet slippers, who was led by a careless
nurse to a strange German school; and she felt again the agony of
curiosity with which, after the first blank wonder was over, she had
stared at the children who hung whispering together in the centre of the
room. As she looked a panic terror seized her like a wild beast, and she
threw up her hands and turned to rush away to the reassuring presence
of grown up creatures, when from the midst of the whispering group a
little dark girl, in an ugly brown frock, ran up to her and folded her in
her arms.
"I shall love you best of all because you are so beautiful," said the little
dark girl, "and I will do all your sums and even eat your sausage for
you." Then she had kissed her and brought her to the stove and knelt
down on the floor to take off her wet slippers. To this day Gerty had
always thought of her friend as the little girl who had shut her eyes and
gulped down those terrible sausages for her behind her teacher's back.
The maid brought the coffee, and while she sat up to drink it the door
of her husband's dressing-room opened and he came in and stood, large,
florid and impressive, beside her bed.
"I'm afraid I shan't get back to luncheon," he remarked, as he settled his
ample, carefully groomed body in his clothes with a comfortable shake,
"there's a chap from the country Pierce has