Page:The Relentless City.djvu/162

152 on a moor wherever the wind happened to carry it. To work—that was the impulse she had brought back with her from America—not to scheme merely with her busy brain, to intrigue, to find, as she always had found, endless amusement and entertainment in watching others, even though she exerted her intellect to its fullest in intelligently watching them; but to make some plan, and carry it out—to find some work to do, and do it.

Suddenly, in the middle of her neat, decisive clipping of the flower-stalks, she stopped and laid the scissors down. Surely there was a piece of work that lay very ready to her hand, though twice in the last day or two she had resented the responsibility being laid on her. But if she took it on herself—if she led Charlie back to interest in life, if she coaxed from him his apathy—was not that worth doing?

There were difficulties in the way sufficient to rouse enthusiasm in one who was much less on fire with the desire for production than she. She would be quite honest with him; she would not hold out any hope of which the fulfilment was not sure; she would not let him think for a moment that she would ever marry him. If the thing was to be done at all, she would do it by inciting him to live for the sake of life, by making him feel the unworthiness of giving in—the unworthiness, too, of the only condition on which he at present cared to live. She was not in love with him, but even if she had been, that would have made but a poor motive. The vitality that was hers was so abundant that surely she could impart some of it to him—make something of it bubble in his veins. His nature, his perception, were of a fine order, and though disappointment first and then disease might have dulled their sensibilities for the time, yet surely their numbness was only temporary—a passing anæsthesia. Anyhow, here lay a work worth doing.