Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/159

Rh best, had never, even to the last, for curiosity, quite made out what it was. The secret was one that this distinctly distanced competitor had in fact mastered as little for intellectual relief as for emulous use; and there was quite a kind of tribute to it in the way that, the night before the obsequies and addressing himself to his wife, he said after some silent thought: 'Hang it, you know, I must see the old boy through. I must go to the grave.'

Mrs. Hope looked at her husband at first in anxious silence. 'I've no patience with you. You're much more ill than he ever was.'

'Ah, but if that qualifies me but for the funerals of others!'

'It qualifies you to break my heart by your exaggerated chivalry, your renewed refusal to consider your interests. You sacrifice them to him, for thirty years, again and again, and from this supreme sacrifice—possibly that of your life—you might, in your condition, I think, be absolved.' She indeed lost patience. 'To the grave—in this weather—after his treatment of you!'

'My dear girl,' Hope replied, 'his treatment of me is a figment of your ingenious mind—your too-passionate, your beautiful loyalty. Loyalty, I mean, to me.'

'I certainly leave it to you,' she declared, 'to have any to him!'

'Well, he was, after all, one's oldest, one's earliest friend. I'm not in such bad case—I do go out; and I want to do the decent thing. The fact remains that we never broke—we always kept together.'

'Yes indeed,' she laughed in her bitterness, 'he always took care of that! He never recognised you, but he never let you go. You kept him up, and he kept you down. He used you, to the last drop he could squeeze, and left you the only one to wonder, in your incredible idealism and your incorrigible modesty, how on earth such an idiot made his way. He