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still well under forty. And Mouna—why
in God’s name should she be persecuting this man to marry Mouna? It was
indecent, it was shocking, it was unbelievable… Yet
not for a moment did he doubt the truth of what she said.
                 “Mouna?”
he could only repeat stupidly.
                 “Well,
you see, darling, we’re all a little anxious about Mouna. And I was so glad
when Svengaart asked to paint me, because I thought: ‘Now’s my opportunity.’
But no, it was not to be.”
                 Targatt
drew a deep breath. He seemed to be inhaling some life-giving element, and it
was with the most superficial severity that he said: “I don’t fancy this idea
of your throwing your sister at men’s heads.”
                 “No,
it was no use,” Nadeja sighed, with her usual complete unawareness of any moral
rebuke in his comment.
                 Targatt
stood up uneasily. “He wouldn’t have her at any price?”
                 She
shook her head sadly. “Foolish man!”
                 Targatt
went up to her and took her abruptly by the wrist.
                 “Look
at me, Nadeja—straight. Did he refuse her because he wanted vow?”
                 She
gave her light lift of the shoulders, and the rare colour flitted across her
pale cheeks. “Isn’t it always the way of men? What they can’t get—”
                 “Ah;
so he’s been making love to you all this time, has he?”
                 “But of course not, James. What he wished was to marry me.
That is something quite different, is it not?”
                 “Yes.
I see.”
                 Targatt
had released her wrist and turned away. He walked once or twice up and down the
length of the room, no more knowing where he was than a man dropped blindfold
onto a new planet. He knew what he wanted to do and to say; the words he had
made up his mind to speak stood out in letters of fire against the choking
blackness. “You must feel yourself free—.” Five words, and so easy to speak!
“Perfectly free—perfectly free,” a voice kept crying within him. It was the
least he could do, if he were ever to hold up his head again; but when he
opened his mouth to speak not a sound came. At last he halted before Nadeja
again, his face working like a frightened child’s.
                 “ Nad— what would you like best in the world to do? If you’ll
tell me I—I want you to do it!” he stammered. And with hands of ice he waited.
                 Nadeja
looked at him with a slowly growing surprise. She had turned very pale again.
                 “Even
if,” he continued, half choking, “you understand, Nad ,
even if—”
                 She
continued to look at him in her grave maternal way. “Is this true, what you are
now saying?” she asked very low. Targatt nodded.
                 A
little smile wavered over her lips. “Well, darling, if only I could have got
Mouna safely married, I should have said: Don’t you think that now at last we
could afford to have a baby?”‘
                 ( Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan 96 ,
February 1934)
     
                   
     
  Pomegranate
Seed.
 
 
  I.
 
 
                 Charlotte
Ashby paused on her doorstep. Dark had descended on the brilliancy of the March
afternoon, and the grinding rasping street life of the city was at its highest.
She turned her back on it, standing for a moment in the old-fashioned,
marble-flagged vestibule before she inserted her key in the lock. The sash
curtains drawn across the panes of the inner door softened the light within to
a warm blur through which no details showed. It was the hour when, in the first
months of her marriage to Kenneth Ashby, she had most liked to return to that
quiet house in a street long since deserted by business and