“A deplorable state of things!” exclaimed Irene, laughing.

“Yes—­or no.  Who knows?  Such people ought to die young.  But I don’t say that it is invariably the case.  To be capable of loving, and at the same time to have other faculties, and the will to use them—­ah!  There’s your complete human being.”

“I think——­” Irene began, and stopped, her voice failing.

“You think, belle Irene?”

“Oh, I was going to say that all this seems to me sensible and right.  It doesn’t disturb me.”

“Why should it?”

“I think I will tell you, Helen, that my motive in marrying is the same as yours was.”

“I surmised it.”

“But, you know, there the similarity will end.  It is quite certain” —­she laughed—­“that I shall have no six-months’ vacations.  At present, I don’t think I shall desire them.”

“No.  To speak frankly, I auger well of your marriage.”

These words affected Irene with a sense of relief.  She had imagined that Mrs. Borisoff thought otherwise.  A bright smile sunned her countenance; Helen, observing it, smiled too, but more thoughtfully.

“You must bring your husband to see me in Paris some time next year.  By the bye, you don’t think he will disapprove of me?”

“Do you imagine Mr. Jacks——­”

“What were you going to say?”

Irene had stopped as if for want of the right word She was reflecting.

“It never struck me,” she said, “that he would wish to regulate my choice of friends.  Yet I suppose it would be within his right?”

“Conventionally speaking, undoubtedly.”

“Don’t think I am in uncertainty about this particular instance,” said Irene.  “No, he has already told me that he liked you.  But of the general question, I had never thought.”

“My dear, who does, or can, think before marriage of all that it involves?  After all, the pleasures of life consist so largely in the unexpected.”

Irene paced a few yards in silence, and when she spoke again it was of quite another subject.

Whether this sojourn with her experienced and philosophical friend made her better able to face the meeting with Arnold Jacks was not quite certain.  At moments she fancied so; she saw her position as wholly reasonable, void of anxiety; she was about to marry the man she liked and respected—­safest of all forms of marriage.  But there came troublesome moods of misgiving.  It did not flatter her self-esteem to think of herself as excluded from the number of those who are capable of love; even in Helen Borisoff’s view, the elect, the fortunate.  Of love, she had thought more in this last week or two than in all her years gone by.  Assuredly, she knew it not, this glory of the poets.  Yet she could inspire it in others; at all events, in one, whose rhythmic utterance of the passion ever and again came back to her mind.

A temptation had assailed her (but she resisted it) to repeat those verses of Piers Otway to her friend.  And in thinking of them, she half reproached herself for the total silence she had preserved towards their author.  Perhaps he was uncertain whether the verses had ever reached her.  It seemed unkind.  There would have been no harm in letting him know that she had read the lines, and—­as poetry—­liked them.