Page:Night and Day (1919).pdf/162

 —well, you have to take what you can get,” she concluded.

“And I fancy,” Mrs. Milvain resumed, lowering her voice rather confidentially, “that John would have done more if it hadn’t been for his wife, your Aunt Emily. She was a very good woman, devoted to him, of course, but she was not ambitious for him, and if a wife isn’t ambitious for her husband, especially in a profession like the law, clients soon get to know of it. In our young days, Mr. Denham, we used to say that we knew which of our friends would become judges, by looking at the girls they married. And so it was, and so, I fancy, it always will be. I don’t think,” she added, summing up these scattered remarks, “that any man is really happy unless he succeeds in his profession.”

Mrs. Cosham approved of this sentiment with more ponderous sagacity from her side of the tea-table, in the first place by swaying her head, and in the second by remarking:

“No, men are not the same as women. I fancy Alfred Tennyson spoke the truth about that as about many other things. How I wish he’d lived to write ‘The Prince’—a sequel to ‘The Princess’! I confess I’m almost tired of Princesses. We want some one to show us what a good man can be. We have Laura and Beatrice, Antigone and Cordelia, but we have no heroic man. How do you, as a poet, account for that, Mr. Denham?”

“I’m not a poet,” said Ralph good-humouredly. “I’m only a solicitor.”

“But you write too?” Mrs. Cosham demanded, afraid lest she should be baulked of her priceless discovery, a young man truly devoted to literature.

“In my spare time,” Denham reassured her.

“In your spare time!” Mrs. Cosham echoed. “That is a proof of devotion, indeed.” She half closed her eyes, and indulged herself in a fascinating picture of a briefless