To love some one
well and faithfully, to be one of a little circle vowed to eternal
fidelity one to the other,--such was the initial success of these young
lives; and it was to make them all their days safe from the dangers of
more meretricious successes.
All the same, though the chief performer in Marie Bashkirtseff's
"Confessions" interested her but little, the stage on which for a little
while she had scolded and whimpered did interest her--for should it not
have been her stage too, and Henry's stage, and Dot's stage, father's
and mother's stage too? You had only to look at father to realise that
nature had really meant him for the great stage; here in Sidon, what was
he but a god in exile, bending great powers and a splendid character
upon ridiculously unimportant interests? Indeed, was not his destiny,
more or less, their destiny as a family? Henry would escape from it
through literature, and she through Mike. But what of Dot, what of Mat,
not yet to speak of "the children"?
All she envied Marie Bashkirtseff was her opportunity. Great Goddess
Opportunity! So much had come to Marie in the cradle, and came daily to
a hundred thousand insignificant aristocratic babes, to approach which
for the Mesuriers, even ten years too late, meant convulsions of the
home, and to attain which in any satisfactory degree was probably
impossible.
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