CHAPTER XIII

SECRETS

Helena came to the conclusion that her mother had been right in one point: life was difficult. She decided further that it was the Mrs. Herbertsons who caused the trouble. Things would be all right if no one ever thought about them!

But she had Consolations beyond this Philosophy.

For one thing, Hubert almost instantly relented, the next day to be precise, about poor Mr. Alison. She, giving way in turn, had said she would appease the vicar's wife and golfers by seeing less of him. So all that stupid fuss was over.

This, however, was not the real Consolation. No, she had a secret.

Helena Brett's secret was not a typically wifely one. It was based, rather, on her childish games. Every little girl has secrets--to the scorn of boys--and when, like Helena, she is an only child, she has them to herself. Of course it is less satisfactory, because although by its nature even a pretending secret needs but one, the whole fun lies in telling it to some one else.

Helena told no one about hers. And it was much more thrilling than those early Devonshire affairs, which largely hinged on the exact position of a fast-decaying mole.

The secret differed too from those of many wives in this, that it was all about a woman; a woman she had never met, a woman she could never meet.

For over a year now, since causeries and lectures on assorted topics began to fit into a shapeless enough whole--a something that explained or might explain what Helena called "Things"--she had put stray thoughts down into a shilling diary. At first they had been merely sentences that touched her or inspired, things heard and read. Then as her mind began to feel its way, she wrote these extracts down, and half ashamed at first, though nobody would ever see them, added her comments on their theories. How elementary the first had been! She blushed, re-reading them. "'The best pilots are ashore'" (ran one on page two). "Then are they really pilots?"

Soon, as was to be expected, she could not endure these accusing words, even herself; and throwing the slim volume pell-mell in the fire, bought and embarked upon a more ambitious tome.

Then indeed began the proper secret, for up till now though nobody had ever known, (she could hear Hubert laughing at her and calling her "so refreshing" ...) it had not been tremendously exciting.

Now it was, however, for the new book, started ambitiously enough as a sort of brief record of her daily moods--she had so much time now that she saw less of Geoffrey Alison--gradually burgeoned into something even more colossal.

They never had been quite her own sensations in this second volume. Those were so extremely dull! No, they had been those of some one like herself: a young wife with a busy husband, some one who felt a fool and wanted not to, wanted very much, but he quite liked it really----oh yes, sometimes, the first day or two, she felt a cad. Hubert really wasn't the least bit like that; it was all over-done; but she supposed that it was easier--he always said it was--if you exaggerated than if you just kept to the truth. It all seemed rather horrid, somehow. She thought about tearing up the book.

And then--just about the time of the Kit Kat affair--began the real, astounding, secret.

Virginia, as she called the wife inwardly (for it was all in the first person)--Virginia began to grow!

It was not Helena's own moods and feelings now that went upon the paper: something endlessly more thorough, more intense, more--well, Helena's own word was "sloppy."

Frankly she despised Virginia. That scene about the Kit Kats came into her diary (it was not Helena's), quite different, about a different thing in fact, and more hysterical. She hoped she would not end up like Virginia! Yet in a way she saw herself there too, just as beneath the husband she could detect ever so cruel a parody of Hubert in his most naughty moments....

But oh, what fun it was!

When Hubert got up nowadays with some remark like; "Well, _I_ must do my work!" she no longer felt lonely or out in the cold or inferior or anything. She just said to herself: "And so must I."

It was too splendid, having secrets.

She told nobody; not even Ally, who liked her to be ambitious.

No, it was her secret.