Sorell, observing her, was struck anew by the signs of change and development in her. It was as though her mother and her mother’s soul showed through the girl’s slighter temperament. The old satiric aloofness in Connie’s brown eyes, an expression all her own, and not her mother’s, seemed to have slipped away; Sorell missed it. Ella Risborough’s sympathetic charm had replaced it, but with suggestions of hidden conflict and suffering, of which Lady Risborough’s bright sweetness had known nothing. It was borne in upon him that, since her arrival in Oxford, Constance had gone through a great deal, and gone through it alone. For after all what had his efforts amounted to? What can a man friend do for a young girl in the fermenting years of her youth! And when the man friend knows very well that, but for an iron force upon himself, he himself would be among her lovers? Sorell felt himself powerless—in all the greater matters—and was inclined to think that he deserved to be powerless. Yet he had done his best; and through his Greek lessons he humbly knew that he had helped her spiritual growth, just as the Greek immortals had helped and chastened his own youth. They had been reading Homer together—parts both of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey”; and through “that ageless mouth of all the world,” what splendid things had spoken to her!—Hector’s courage, and Andromache’s tenderness, the bitter sorrow of Priam, the pity of Achilles, mother love and wife love, death and the scorn of death. He had felt her glow and tremble in the grip of that supreme poetry; for himself he had found her the dearest and most responsive of pupils.
But what use was anything, if after all, as Radowitz vowed, she was in love with Douglas Falloden? The antagonism between the man of Sorell’s type—disinterested, pure-minded, poetic, and liable, often, in action to the scrupulosity which destroys action; and the men of Falloden’s type—strong, claimant, self-centred, arrogant, determined—is perennial. Nor can a man of the one type ever understand the attraction for women of the other.
Sorell sat on impatiently in the darkening garden, hoping always that Connie would explain, would confess; for he was certain that she had somehow schemed for this preposterous reconciliation—if it was a reconciliation. She wanted no doubt to heal Falloden’s conscience, and so to comfort her own. And she would sacrifice Otto, if need be, in the process! He vowed to himself that he would prevent it, if he could.