Chapter 26

THE GLAMOUR FADES.

After all, the rosy love-making and marrying and Epithalamy are no
more than the dawn of things, and to follow comes all the spacious
interval of white laborious light. Try as we may to stay those
delightful moments, they fade and pass remorselessly; there is no
returning, no recovering, only--for the foolish--the vilest peep-shows
and imitations in dens and darkened rooms. We go on--we grow. At least
we age. Our young couple, emerging presently from an atmosphere of
dusk and morning stars, found the sky gathering greyly overhead and
saw one another for the first time clearly in the light of every-day.

It might perhaps witness better to Lewisham's refinement if one could
tell only of a moderated and dignified cooling, of pathetic little
concealments of disappointment and a decent maintenance of the
sentimental atmosphere. And so at last daylight. But our young couple
were too crude for that. The first intimations of their lack of
identity have already been described, but it would be tedious and
pitiful to tell of all the little intensifications, shade by shade, of
the conflict of their individualities. They fell out, dear lady! they
came to conflict of words. The stress of perpetual worry was upon
them, of dwindling funds and the anxious search for work that would
not come. And on Ethel lay long, vacant, lonely hours in dull
surroundings. Differences arose from the most indifferent things; one
night Lewisham lay awake in unfathomable amazement because she had
convinced him she did not care a rap for the Welfare of Humanity, and
deemed his Socialism a fancy and an indiscretion. And one Sunday
afternoon they started for a walk under the pleasantest auspices, and
returned flushed and angry, satire and retort flying free--on the
score of the social conventions in Ethel's novelettes. For some
inexplicable reason Lewisham saw fit to hate her novelettes very
bitterly. These encounters indeed were mere skirmishes for the most
part, and the silences and embarrassments that followed ended sooner
or later in a "making up," tacit or definite, though once or twice
this making up only re-opened the healing wound. And always each
skirmish left its scar, effaced from yet another line of their lives
the lingering tints of romantic colour.

There came no work, no added income for either of them, saving two
trifles, for five long months. Once Lewisham won twelve shillings in
the prize competition of a penny weekly, and three times came
infinitesimal portions of typewriting from a poet who had apparently
seen the _Athenaeum_ advertisement. His name was Edwin Peak Baynes and
his handwriting was sprawling and unformed. He sent her several short
lyrics on scraps of paper with