IV

GARNETT had always foreseen that Mrs. Newell might some day ask him to do something he should greatly dislike.  He had never gone so far as to conjecture what it might be, but had simply felt that if he allowed his acquaintance with her to pass from spectatorship to participation he must be prepared to find himself, at any moment, in a queer situation.

The moment had come; and he was relieved to find that he could meet it by refusing her request.  He had not always been sure that she would leave him this alternative.  She had a way of involving people in her complications without their being aware of it, and Garnett had pictured himself in holes so tight that there might not be room for a wriggle.  Happily in this case he could still move freely.  Nothing compelled him to act as an intermediary between Mrs. Newell and her husband, and it was preposterous to suppose that, even in a life of such perpetual upheaval as hers, there were no roots which struck deeper than her casual intimacy with himself.  She had simply laid hands on him because he happened to be within reach, and he would put himself out of reach by leaving for London on the morrow.

Having thus inwardly asserted his independence, he felt free to let his fancy dwell on the strangeness of the situation.  He had always supposed that Mrs. Newell, in her flight through life, must have thrown a good many victims to the wolves, and had assumed that Mr. Newell had been among the number.  That he had been dropped overboard at an early stage in the lady’s career seemed probable from the fact that neither his wife nor his daughter ever mentioned him.  Mrs. Newell was incapable of reticence, and if her husband had still been an active element in her life he would certainly have figured in her conversation.  Garnett, if he thought of the matter at all, had concluded that divorce must long since have eliminated Mr. Newell; but he now saw how he had underrated his friend’s faculty for using up the waste material of life.  She had always struck him as the most extravagant of women, yet it turned out that by a miracle of thrift she had for years kept a superfluous husband on the chance that he might some day be useful to her.  The day had come, and Mr. Newell was to be called from his obscurity.  Garnett wondered what had become of him in the interval, and in what shape he would respond to the evocation.  The fact that his wife feared he might not respond to it at all, seemed to show that his exile was voluntary, or had at least come to appear preferable to other alternatives; but if that were the case it was curious that he should not have taken legal means to free himself.  He could hardly have had his wife’s motives for wishing to maintain the vague tie between them; but conjecture lost itself in trying to picture what his point of view was likely to be, and Garnett, on his way to the Hubbards’ dinner that evening,