The Real Thing and Other Tales, by Henry James (2025)

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Real Thing and Other Tales, by Henry JamesThis eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and mostother parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms ofthe Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll haveto check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.Title: The Real Thing and Other TalesAuthor: Henry JamesRelease Date: February 14, 2015 [eBook #2715][This file was first posted on July 3, 2000]Language: EnglishCharacter set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REAL THING AND OTHER TALES***

Transcribed from 1893 Macmillan and Co. edition by DavidPrice, email [emailprotected]. Proofed by Nina Hall, MohuaSen, Bridie, Francine Smith and David.

This Edition is intended forcirculation only in India
and the British Colonies

Macmillan’s ColonialLibrary

AND OTHER TALES

BY

HENRYJAMES

London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1893

Copyright,1892,
By MACMILLAN & CO.

NorwoodPress:
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick& Smith
Boston, Mass, U.S.A.

NOTE.

The second of the following talesbore, on its first appearance, in The Cosmopolitan, adifferent title.

CONTENTS.

p. 1THE REALTHING.

I.

When the porter’s wife (sheused to answer the house-bell), announced “Agentleman—with a lady, sir,” I had, as I often had inthose days, for the wish was father to the thought, an immediatevision of sitters. Sitters my visitors in this case provedto be; but not in the sense I should have preferred.However, there was nothing at first to indicate that they mightnot have come for a portrait. The gentleman, a man offifty, very high and very straight, with a moustache slightlygrizzled and a dark grey walking-coat admirably fitted, both ofwhich I noted professionally—I don’t mean as a barberor yet as a tailor—would have struck me as a celebrity ifcelebrities often were striking. It was a truth of which Ihad for some time been conscious that a figure with a good dealof frontage was, as one might say, almost never a publicinstitution. A glance at the lady helped to remind me ofthis paradoxical law: she also looked too distinguished to be a“personality.” Moreover one would scarcely comeacross two variations together.

Neither of the pair spoke immediately—they onlyprolonged the preliminary gaze which suggested that each wishedto give the other a chance. They were visibly shy; theystood there letting me take them in—which, as I afterwardsperceived, was the most practical thing they could havedone. In this way their embarrassment served theircause. I had seen people painfully reluctant to mentionthat they desired anything so gross as to be represented oncanvas; but the scruples of my new friends appeared almostinsurmountable. Yet the gentleman might have said “Ishould like a portrait of my wife,” and the lady might havesaid “I should like a portrait of my husband.”Perhaps they were not husband and wife—this naturally wouldmake the matter more delicate. Perhaps they wished to bedone together—in which case they ought to have brought athird person to break the news.

“We come from Mr. Rivet,” the lady said at last,with a dim smile which had the effect of a moist sponge passedover a “sunk” piece of painting, as well as of avague allusion to vanished beauty. She was as tall andstraight, in her degree, as her companion, and with ten yearsless to carry. She looked as sad as a woman could lookwhose face was not charged with expression; that is her tintedoval mask showed friction as an exposed surface shows it.The hand of time had played over her freely, but only tosimplify. She was slim and stiff, and so well-dressed, indark blue cloth, with lappets and pockets and buttons, that itwas clear she employed the same tailor as her husband. Thecouple had an indefinable air of prosperous thrift—theyevidently got a good deal of luxury for their money. If Iwas to be one of their luxuries it would behove me to consider myterms.

“Ah, Claude Rivet recommended me?” I inquired; andI added that it was very kind of him, though I could reflectthat, as he only painted landscape, this was not a sacrifice.

The lady looked very hard at the gentleman, and the gentlemanlooked round the room. Then staring at the floor a momentand stroking his moustache, he rested his pleasant eyes on mewith the remark:

“He said you were the right one.”

“I try to be, when people want to sit.”

“Yes, we should like to,” said the ladyanxiously.

“Do you mean together?”

My visitors exchanged a glance. “If you could doanything with me, I suppose it would be double,” thegentleman stammered.

“Oh yes, there’s naturally a higher charge for twofigures than for one.”

“We should like to make it pay,” the husbandconfessed.

“That’s very good of you,” I returned,appreciating so unwonted a sympathy—for I supposed he meantpay the artist.

A sense of strangeness seemed to dawn on the lady.“We mean for the illustrations—Mr. Rivet said youmight put one in.”

“Put one in—an illustration?” I was equallyconfused.

“Sketch her off, you know,” said the gentleman,colouring.

It was only then that I understood the service Claude Rivethad rendered me; he had told them that I worked in black andwhite, for magazines, for story-books, for sketches ofcontemporary life, and consequently had frequent employment formodels. These things were true, but it was not less true (Imay confess it now—whether because the aspiration was tolead to everything or to nothing I leave the reader to guess),that I couldn’t get the honours, to say nothing of theemoluments, of a great painter of portraits out of my head.My “illustrations” were my pot-boilers; I looked to adifferent branch of art (far and away the most interesting it hadalways seemed to me), to perpetuate my fame. There was noshame in looking to it also to make my fortune; but that fortunewas by so much further from being made from the moment myvisitors wished to be “done” for nothing. I wasdisappointed; for in the pictorial sense I had immediatelyseen them. I had seized their type—I hadalready settled what I would do with it. Something thatwouldn’t absolutely have pleased them, I afterwardsreflected.

“Ah,you’re—you’re—a—?” I began,as soon as I had mastered my surprise. I couldn’tbring out the dingy word “models”; it seemed to fitthe case so little.

“We haven’t had much practice,” said thelady.

“We’ve got to do something, and we’vethought that an artist in your line might perhaps make somethingof us,” her husband threw off. He further mentionedthat they didn’t know many artists and that they had gonefirst, on the off-chance (he painted views of course, butsometimes put in figures—perhaps I remembered), to Mr.Rivet, whom they had met a few years before at a place in Norfolkwhere he was sketching.

“We used to sketch a little ourselves,” the ladyhinted.

“It’s very awkward, but we absolutely mustdo something,” her husband went on.

“Of course, we’re not so very young,”she admitted, with a wan smile.

With the remark that I might as well know something more aboutthem, the husband had handed me a card extracted from a neat newpocket-book (their appurtenances were all of the freshest) andinscribed with the words “Major Monarch.”Impressive as these words were they didn’t carry myknowledge much further; but my visitor presently added:“I’ve left the army, and we’ve had themisfortune to lose our money. In fact our means aredreadfully small.”

“It’s an awful bore,” said Mrs. Monarch.

They evidently wished to be discreet—to take care not toswagger because they were gentlefolks. I perceived theywould have been willing to recognise this as something of adrawback, at the same time that I guessed at an underlyingsense—their consolation in adversity—that theyhad their points. They certainly had; but theseadvantages struck me as preponderantly social; such for instanceas would help to make a drawing-room look well. However, adrawing-room was always, or ought to be, a picture.

In consequence of his wife’s allusion to their age MajorMonarch observed: “Naturally, it’s more for thefigure that we thought of going in. We can still holdourselves up.” On the instant I saw that the figurewas indeed their strong point. His “naturally”didn’t sound vain, but it lighted up the question.“She has got the best,” he continued, noddingat his wife, with a pleasant after-dinner absence ofcircumlocution. I could only reply, as if we were in factsitting over our wine, that this didn’t prevent his ownfrom being very good; which led him in turn to rejoin: “Wethought that if you ever have to do people like us, we might besomething like it. She, particularly—for alady in a book, you know.”

I was so amused by them that, to get more of it, I did my bestto take their point of view; and though it was an embarrassmentto find myself appraising physically, as if they were animals onhire or useful blacks, a pair whom I should have expected to meetonly in one of the relations in which criticism is tacit, Ilooked at Mrs. Monarch judicially enough to be able to exclaim,after a moment, with conviction: “Oh yes, a lady in abook!” She was singularly like a badillustration.

“We’ll stand up, if you like,” said theMajor; and he raised himself before me with a really grandair.

I could take his measure at a glance—he was six feet twoand a perfect gentleman. It would have paid any club inprocess of formation and in want of a stamp to engage him at asalary to stand in the principal window. What struck meimmediately was that in coming to me they had rather missed theirvocation; they could surely have been turned to better accountfor advertising purposes. I couldn’t of course seethe thing in detail, but I could see them make someone’sfortune—I don’t mean their own. There wassomething in them for a waistcoat-maker, an hotel-keeper or asoap-vendor. I could imagine “We always use it”pinned on their bosoms with the greatest effect; I had a visionof the promptitude with which they would launch a tabled’hôte.

Mrs. Monarch sat still, not from pride but from shyness, andpresently her husband said to her: “Get up my dear and showhow smart you are.” She obeyed, but she had no needto get up to show it. She walked to the end of the studio,and then she came back blushing, with her fluttered eyes on herhusband. I was reminded of an incident I had accidentallyhad a glimpse of in Paris—being with a friend there, adramatist about to produce a play—when an actress came tohim to ask to be intrusted with a part. She went throughher paces before him, walked up and down as Mrs. Monarch wasdoing. Mrs. Monarch did it quite as well, but I abstainedfrom applauding. It was very odd to see such people applyfor such poor pay. She looked as if she had ten thousand ayear. Her husband had used the word that described her: shewas, in the London current jargon, essentially and typically“smart.” Her figure was, in the same order ofideas, conspicuously and irreproachably “good.”For a woman of her age her waist was surprisingly small; herelbow moreover had the orthodox crook. She held her head atthe conventional angle; but why did she come to me?She ought to have tried on jackets at a big shop. I fearedmy visitors were not only destitute, but“artistic”—which would be a greatcomplication. When she sat down again I thanked her,observing that what a draughtsman most valued in his model wasthe faculty of keeping quiet.

“Oh, she can keep quiet,” said MajorMonarch. Then he added, jocosely: “I’ve alwayskept her quiet.”

“I’m not a nasty fidget, am I?” Mrs. Monarchappealed to her husband.

He addressed his answer to me. “Perhaps itisn’t out of place to mention—because we ought to bequite business-like, oughtn’t we?—that when I marriedher she was known as the Beautiful Statue.”

“Oh dear!” said Mrs. Monarch, ruefully.

“Of course I should want a certain amount ofexpression,” I rejoined.

“Of course!” they both exclaimed.

“And then I suppose you know that you’ll getawfully tired.”

“Oh, we never get tired!” they eagerlycried.

“Have you had any kind of practice?”

They hesitated—they looked at each other.“We’ve been photographed, immensely,”said Mrs. Monarch.

“She means the fellows have asked us,” added theMajor.

“I see—because you’re sogood-looking.”

“I don’t know what they thought, but they werealways after us.”

“We always got our photographs for nothing,”smiled Mrs. Monarch.

“We might have brought some, my dear,” her husbandremarked.

“I’m not sure we have any left. We’vegiven quantities away,” she explained to me.

“With our autographs and that sort of thing,” saidthe Major.

“Are they to be got in the shops?” I inquired, asa harmless pleasantry.

“Oh, yes; hers—they used to be.”

“Not now,” said Mrs. Monarch, with her eyes on thefloor.

II.

I could fancy the “sort ofthing” they put on the presentation-copies of theirphotographs, and I was sure they wrote a beautiful hand. Itwas odd how quickly I was sure of everything that concernedthem. If they were now so poor as to have to earn shillingsand pence, they never had had much of a margin. Their goodlooks had been their capital, and they had good-humouredly madethe most of the career that this resource marked out forthem. It was in their faces, the blankness, the deepintellectual repose of the twenty years of country-house visitingwhich had given them pleasant intonations. I could see thesunny drawing-rooms, sprinkled with periodicals she didn’tread, in which Mrs. Monarch had continuously sat; I could see thewet shrubberies in which she had walked, equipped to admirationfor either exercise. I could see the rich covers the Majorhad helped to shoot and the wonderful garments in which, late atnight, he repaired to the smoking-room to talk about them.I could imagine their leggings and waterproofs, their knowingtweeds and rugs, their rolls of sticks and cases of tackle andneat umbrellas; and I could evoke the exact appearance of theirservants and the compact variety of their luggage on theplatforms of country stations.

They gave small tips, but they were liked; they didn’tdo anything themselves, but they were welcome. They lookedso well everywhere; they gratified the general relish forstature, complexion and “form.” They knew itwithout fatuity or vulgarity, and they respected themselves inconsequence. They were not superficial; they were thoroughand kept themselves up—it had been their line. Peoplewith such a taste for activity had to have some line. Icould feel how, even in a dull house, they could have beencounted upon for cheerfulness. At present something hadhappened—it didn’t matter what, their little incomehad grown less, it had grown least—and they had to dosomething for pocket-money. Their friends liked them, butdidn’t like to support them. There was somethingabout them that represented credit—their clothes, theirmanners, their type; but if credit is a large empty pocket inwhich an occasional chink reverberates, the chink at least mustbe audible. What they wanted of me was to help to make itso. Fortunately they had no children—I soon divinedthat. They would also perhaps wish our relations to be keptsecret: this was why it was “for thefigure”—the reproduction of the face would betraythem.

I liked them—they were so simple; and I had no objectionto them if they would suit. But, somehow, with all theirperfections I didn’t easily believe in them. Afterall they were amateurs, and the ruling passion of my life was thedetestation of the amateur. Combined with this was anotherperversity—an innate preference for the represented subjectover the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be alack of representation. I liked things that appeared; thenone was sure. Whether they were or not was asubordinate and almost always a profitless question. Therewere other considerations, the first of which was that I alreadyhad two or three people in use, notably a young person with bigfeet, in alpaca, from Kilburn, who for a couple of years had cometo me regularly for my illustrations and with whom I wasstill—perhaps ignobly—satisfied. I franklyexplained to my visitors how the case stood; but they had takenmore precautions than I supposed. They had reasoned outtheir opportunity, for Claude Rivet had told them of theprojected édition de luxe of one of the writers ofour day—the rarest of the novelists—who, longneglected by the multitudinous vulgar and dearly prized by theattentive (need I mention Philip Vincent?) had had the happyfortune of seeing, late in life, the dawn and then the full lightof a higher criticism—an estimate in which, on the part ofthe public, there was something really of expiation. Theedition in question, planned by a publisher of taste, waspractically an act of high reparation; the wood-cuts with whichit was to be enriched were the homage of English art to one ofthe most independent representatives of English letters.Major and Mrs. Monarch confessed to me that they had hoped Imight be able to work them into my share of theenterprise. They knew I was to do the first of the books,“Rutland Ramsay,” but I had to make clear to themthat my participation in the rest of the affair—this firstbook was to be a test—was to depend on the satisfaction Ishould give. If this should be limited my employers woulddrop me without a scruple. It was therefore a crisis forme, and naturally I was making special preparations, lookingabout for new people, if they should be necessary, and securingthe best types. I admitted however that I should like tosettle down to two or three good models who would do foreverything.

“Should we have often to—a—put on specialclothes?” Mrs. Monarch timidly demanded.

“Dear, yes—that’s half thebusiness.”

“And should we be expected to supply our owncostumes?”

“Oh, no; I’ve got a lot of things. Apainter’s models put on—or put off—anything helikes.”

“And do you mean—a—the same?”

“The same?”

Mrs. Monarch looked at her husband again.

“Oh, she was just wondering,” he explained,“if the costumes are in general use.” Ihad to confess that they were, and I mentioned further that someof them (I had a lot of genuine, greasy last-century things), hadserved their time, a hundred years ago, on living, world-stainedmen and women. “We’ll put on anything thatfits,” said the Major.

“Oh, I arrange that—they fit in thepictures.”

“I’m afraid I should do better for the modernbooks. I would come as you like,” said Mrs.Monarch.

“She has got a lot of clothes at home: they might do forcontemporary life,” her husband continued.

“Oh, I can fancy scenes in which you’d be quitenatural.” And indeed I could see the slipshodrearrangements of stale properties—the stories I tried toproduce pictures for without the exasperation of readingthem—whose sandy tracts the good lady might help topeople. But I had to return to the fact that for this sortof work—the daily mechanical grind—I was alreadyequipped; the people I was working with were fully adequate.

“We only thought we might be more like somecharacters,” said Mrs. Monarch mildly, getting up.

Her husband also rose; he stood looking at me with a dimwistfulness that was touching in so fine a man.“Wouldn’t it be rather a pull sometimes tohave—a—to have—?” He hung fire; hewanted me to help him by phrasing what he meant. But Icouldn’t—I didn’t know. So he brought itout, awkwardly: “The real thing; a gentleman, youknow, or a lady.” I was quite ready to give a generalassent—I admitted that there was a great deal inthat. This encouraged Major Monarch to say, following uphis appeal with an unacted gulp: “It’s awfullyhard—we’ve tried everything.” The gulpwas communicative; it proved too much for his wife. BeforeI knew it Mrs. Monarch had dropped again upon a divan and burstinto tears. Her husband sat down beside her, holding one ofher hands; whereupon she quickly dried her eyes with the other,while I felt embarrassed as she looked up at me.“There isn’t a confounded job I haven’t appliedfor—waited for—prayed for. You can fancywe’d be pretty bad first. Secretaryships and thatsort of thing? You might as well ask for a peerage.I’d be anything—I’m strong; a messengeror a coalheaver. I’d put on a gold-laced cap and opencarriage-doors in front of the haberdasher’s; I’dhang about a station, to carry portmanteaus; I’d be apostman. But they won’t look at you; there arethousands, as good as yourself, already on the ground.Gentlemen, poor beggars, who have drunk their wine, whohave kept their hunters!”

I was as reassuring as I knew how to be, and my visitors werepresently on their feet again while, for the experiment, weagreed on an hour. We were discussing it when the dooropened and Miss Churm came in with a wet umbrella. MissChurm had to take the omnibus to Maida Vale and then walkhalf-a-mile. She looked a trifle blowsy and slightlysplashed. I scarcely ever saw her come in without thinkingafresh how odd it was that, being so little in herself, sheshould yet be so much in others. She was a meagre littleMiss Churm, but she was an ample heroine of romance. Shewas only a freckled cockney, but she could represent everything,from a fine lady to a shepherdess; she had the faculty, as shemight have had a fine voice or long hair.

She couldn’t spell, and she loved beer, but she had twoor three “points,” and practice, and a knack, andmother-wit, and a kind of whimsical sensibility, and a love ofthe theatre, and seven sisters, and not an ounce of respect,especially for the h. The first thing my visitorssaw was that her umbrella was wet, and in their spotlessperfection they visibly winced at it. The rain had come onsince their arrival.

“I’m all in a soak; there was a mess ofpeople in the ’bus. I wish you lived near astytion,” said Miss Churm. I requested her to getready as quickly as possible, and she passed into the room inwhich she always changed her dress. But before going outshe asked me what she was to get into this time.

“It’s the Russian princess, don’t youknow?” I answered; “the one with the ‘goldeneyes,’ in black velvet, for the long thing in theCheapside.”

“Golden eyes? I say!” cried MissChurm, while my companions watched her with intensity as shewithdrew. She always arranged herself, when she was late,before I could turn round; and I kept my visitors a little, onpurpose, so that they might get an idea, from seeing her, whatwould be expected of themselves. I mentioned that she wasquite my notion of an excellent model—she was really veryclever.

“Do you think she looks like a Russian princess?”Major Monarch asked, with lurking alarm.

“When I make her, yes.”

“Oh, if you have to make her—!” hereasoned, acutely.

“That’s the most you can ask. There are somany that are not makeable.”

“Well now, here’s a lady”—andwith a persuasive smile he passed his arm into hiswife’s—“who’s already made!”

“Oh, I’m not a Russian princess,” Mrs.Monarch protested, a little coldly. I could see that shehad known some and didn’t like them. There,immediately, was a complication of a kind that I never had tofear with Miss Churm.

This young lady came back in black velvet—the gown wasrather rusty and very low on her lean shoulders—and with aJapanese fan in her red hands. I reminded her that in thescene I was doing she had to look over someone’shead. “I forget whose it is; but it doesn’tmatter. Just look over a head.”

“I’d rather look over a stove,” said MissChurm; and she took her station near the fire. She fellinto position, settled herself into a tall attitude, gave acertain backward inclination to her head and a certain forwarddroop to her fan, and looked, at least to my prejudiced sense,distinguished and charming, foreign and dangerous. We lefther looking so, while I went down-stairs with Major and Mrs.Monarch.

“I think I could come about as near it as that,”said Mrs. Monarch.

“Oh, you think she’s shabby, but you must allowfor the alchemy of art.”

However, they went off with an evident increase of comfort,founded on their demonstrable advantage in being the realthing. I could fancy them shuddering over Miss Churm.She was very droll about them when I went back, for I told herwhat they wanted.

“Well, if she can sit I’ll tyke tobookkeeping,” said my model.

“She’s very lady-like,” I replied, as aninnocent form of aggravation.

“So much the worse for you. That means shecan’t turn round.”

“She’ll do for the fashionable novels.”

“Oh yes, she’ll do for them!” mymodel humorously declared. “Ain’t they hadenough without her?” I had often sociably denounced them toMiss Churm.

III.

It was for the elucidation of amystery in one of these works that I first tried Mrs.Monarch. Her husband came with her, to be useful ifnecessary—it was sufficiently clear that as a general thinghe would prefer to come with her. At first I wondered ifthis were for “propriety’s” sake—if hewere going to be jealous and meddling. The idea was tootiresome, and if it had been confirmed it would speedily havebrought our acquaintance to a close. But I soon saw therewas nothing in it and that if he accompanied Mrs. Monarch it was(in addition to the chance of being wanted), simply because hehad nothing else to do. When she was away from him hisoccupation was gone—she never had been away fromhim. I judged, rightly, that in their awkward situationtheir close union was their main comfort and that this union hadno weak spot. It was a real marriage, an encouragement tothe hesitating, a nut for pessimists to crack. Theiraddress was humble (I remember afterwards thinking it had beenthe only thing about them that was really professional), and Icould fancy the lamentable lodgings in which the Major would havebeen left alone. He could bear them with his wife—hecouldn’t bear them without her.

He had too much tact to try and make himself agreeable when hecouldn’t be useful; so he simply sat and waited, when I wastoo absorbed in my work to talk. But I liked to make himtalk—it made my work, when it didn’t interrupt it,less sordid, less special. To listen to him was to combinethe excitement of going out with the economy of staying athome. There was only one hindrance: that I seemed not toknow any of the people he and his wife had known. I thinkhe wondered extremely, during the term of our intercourse, whomthe deuce I did know. He hadn’t a straysixpence of an idea to fumble for; so we didn’t spin itvery fine—we confined ourselves to questions of leather andeven of liquor (saddlers and breeches-makers and how to get goodclaret cheap), and matters like “good trains” and thehabits of small game. His lore on these last subjects wasastonishing, he managed to interweave the station-master with theornithologist. When he couldn’t talk about greaterthings he could talk cheerfully about smaller, and since Icouldn’t accompany him into reminiscences of thefashionable world he could lower the conversation without avisible effort to my level.

So earnest a desire to please was touching in a man who couldso easily have knocked one down. He looked after the fireand had an opinion on the draught of the stove, without my askinghim, and I could see that he thought many of my arrangements nothalf clever enough. I remember telling him that if I wereonly rich I would offer him a salary to come and teach me how tolive. Sometimes he gave a random sigh, of which the essencewas: “Give me even such a bare old barrack as this,and I’d do something with it!” When I wanted touse him he came alone; which was an illustration of the superiorcourage of women. His wife could bear her solitary secondfloor, and she was in general more discreet; showing by varioussmall reserves that she was alive to the propriety of keeping ourrelations markedly professional—not letting them slide intosociability. She wished it to remain clear that she and theMajor were employed, not cultivated, and if she approved of me asa superior, who could be kept in his place, she never thought mequite good enough for an equal.

She sat with great intensity, giving the whole of her mind toit, and was capable of remaining for an hour almost as motionlessas if she were before a photographer’s lens. I couldsee she had been photographed often, but somehow the very habitthat made her good for that purpose unfitted her for mine.At first I was extremely pleased with her lady-like air, and itwas a satisfaction, on coming to follow her lines, to see howgood they were and how far they could lead the pencil. Butafter a few times I began to find her too insurmountably stiff;do what I would with it my drawing looked like a photograph or acopy of a photograph. Her figure had no variety ofexpression—she herself had no sense of variety. Youmay say that this was my business, was only a question of placingher. I placed her in every conceivable position, but shemanaged to obliterate their differences. She was always alady certainly, and into the bargain was always the samelady. She was the real thing, but always the samething. There were moments when I was oppressed by theserenity of her confidence that she was the realthing. All her dealings with me and all her husband’swere an implication that this was lucky for me.Meanwhile I found myself trying to invent types that approachedher own, instead of making her own transform itself—in theclever way that was not impossible, for instance, to poor MissChurm. Arrange as I would and take the precautions I would,she always, in my pictures, came out too tall—landing me inthe dilemma of having represented a fascinating woman as sevenfeet high, which, out of respect perhaps to my own very muchscantier inches, was far from my idea of such a personage.

The case was worse with the Major—nothing I could dowould keep him down, so that he became useful only for therepresentation of brawny giants. I adored variety andrange, I cherished human accidents, the illustrative note; Iwanted to characterise closely, and the thing in the world I mosthated was the danger of being ridden by a type. I hadquarrelled with some of my friends about it—I had partedcompany with them for maintaining that one had to be, andthat if the type was beautiful (witness Raphael and Leonardo),the servitude was only a gain. I was neither Leonardo norRaphael; I might only be a presumptuous young modern searcher,but I held that everything was to be sacrificed sooner thancharacter. When they averred that the haunting type inquestion could easily be character, I retorted, perhapssuperficially: “Whose?” It couldn’t beeverybody’s—it might end in being nobody’s.

After I had drawn Mrs. Monarch a dozen times I perceived moreclearly than before that the value of such a model as Miss Churmresided precisely in the fact that she had no positive stamp,combined of course with the other fact that what she did have wasa curious and inexplicable talent for imitation. Her usualappearance was like a curtain which she could draw up at requestfor a capital performance. This performance was simplysuggestive; but it was a word to the wise—it was vivid andpretty. Sometimes, even, I thought it, though she was plainherself, too insipidly pretty; I made it a reproach to her thatthe figures drawn from her were monotonously(bêtement, as we used to say) graceful.Nothing made her more angry: it was so much her pride to feelthat she could sit for characters that had nothing in common witheach other. She would accuse me at such moments of takingaway her “reputytion.”

It suffered a certain shrinkage, this queer quantity, from therepeated visits of my new friends. Miss Churm was greatlyin demand, never in want of employment, so I had no scruple inputting her off occasionally, to try them more at my ease.It was certainly amusing at first to do the real thing—itwas amusing to do Major Monarch’s trousers. Theywere the real thing, even if he did come outcolossal. It was amusing to do his wife’s back hair(it was so mathematically neat,) and the particular“smart” tension of her tight stays. She lentherself especially to positions in which the face was somewhataverted or blurred; she abounded in lady-like back views andprofils perdus. When she stood erect she tooknaturally one of the attitudes in which court-painters representqueens and princesses; so that I found myself wondering whether,to draw out this accomplishment, I couldn’t get the editorof the Cheapside to publish a really royal romance,“A Tale of Buckingham Palace.” Sometimes,however, the real thing and the make-believe came into contact;by which I mean that Miss Churm, keeping an appointment or comingto make one on days when I had much work in hand, encountered herinvidious rivals. The encounter was not on their part, forthey noticed her no more than if she had been the housemaid; notfrom intentional loftiness, but simply because, as yet,professionally, they didn’t know how to fraternise, as Icould guess that they would have liked—or at least that theMajor would. They couldn’t talk about theomnibus—they always walked; and they didn’t know whatelse to try—she wasn’t interested in good trains orcheap claret. Besides, they must have felt—in theair—that she was amused at them, secretly derisive of theirever knowing how. She was not a person to conceal herscepticism if she had had a chance to show it. On the otherhand Mrs. Monarch didn’t think her tidy; for why else didshe take pains to say to me (it was going out of the way, forMrs. Monarch), that she didn’t like dirty women?

One day when my young lady happened to be present with myother sitters (she even dropped in, when it was convenient, for achat), I asked her to be so good as to lend a hand in gettingtea—a service with which she was familiar and which was oneof a class that, living as I did in a small way, with slenderdomestic resources, I often appealed to my models torender. They liked to lay hands on my property, to breakthe sitting, and sometimes the china—I made them feelBohemian. The next time I saw Miss Churm after thisincident she surprised me greatly by making a scene aboutit—she accused me of having wished to humiliate her.She had not resented the outrage at the time, but had seemedobliging and amused, enjoying the comedy of asking Mrs. Monarch,who sat vague and silent, whether she would have cream and sugar,and putting an exaggerated simper into the question. Shehad tried intonations—as if she too wished to pass for thereal thing; till I was afraid my other visitors would takeoffence.

Oh, they were determined not to do this; and theirtouching patience was the measure of their great need. Theywould sit by the hour, uncomplaining, till I was ready to usethem; they would come back on the chance of being wanted andwould walk away cheerfully if they were not. I used to goto the door with them to see in what magnificent order theyretreated. I tried to find other employment forthem—I introduced them to several artists. But theydidn’t “take,” for reasons I could appreciate,and I became conscious, rather anxiously, that after suchdisappointments they fell back upon me with a heavierweight. They did me the honour to think that it was I whowas most their form. They were not picturesqueenough for the painters, and in those days there were not so manyserious workers in black and white. Besides, they had aneye to the great job I had mentioned to them—they hadsecretly set their hearts on supplying the right essence for mypictorial vindication of our fine novelist. They knew thatfor this undertaking I should want no costume-effects, none ofthe frippery of past ages—that it was a case in whicheverything would be contemporary and satirical and, presumably,genteel. If I could work them into it their future would beassured, for the labour would of course be long and theoccupation steady.

One day Mrs. Monarch came without her husband—sheexplained his absence by his having had to go to the City.While she sat there in her usual anxious stiffness there came, atthe door, a knock which I immediately recognised as the subduedappeal of a model out of work. It was followed by theentrance of a young man whom I easily perceived to be a foreignerand who proved in fact an Italian acquainted with no English wordbut my name, which he uttered in a way that made it seem toinclude all others. I had not then visited his country, norwas I proficient in his tongue; but as he was not so meanlyconstituted—what Italian is?—as to depend only onthat member for expression he conveyed to me, in familiar butgraceful mimicry, that he was in search of exactly the employmentin which the lady before me was engaged. I was not struckwith him at first, and while I continued to draw I emitted roughsounds of discouragement and dismissal. He stood hisground, however, not importunately, but with a dumb, dog-likefidelity in his eyes which amounted to innocentimpudence—the manner of a devoted servant (he might havebeen in the house for years), unjustly suspected. SuddenlyI saw that this very attitude and expression made a picture,whereupon I told him to sit down and wait till I should befree. There was another picture in the way he obeyed me,and I observed as I worked that there were others still in theway he looked wonderingly, with his head thrown back, about thehigh studio. He might have been crossing himself in St.Peter’s. Before I finished I said to myself:“The fellow’s a bankrupt orange-monger, buthe’s a treasure.”

When Mrs. Monarch withdrew he passed across the room like aflash to open the door for her, standing there with the rapt,pure gaze of the young Dante spellbound by the youngBeatrice. As I never insisted, in such situations, on theblankness of the British domestic, I reflected that he had themaking of a servant (and I needed one, but couldn’t pay himto be only that), as well as of a model; in short I made up mymind to adopt my bright adventurer if he would agree to officiatein the double capacity. He jumped at my offer, and in theevent my rashness (for I had known nothing about him), was notbrought home to me. He proved a sympathetic though adesultory ministrant, and had in a wonderful degree thesentiment de la pose. It was uncultivated,instinctive; a part of the happy instinct which had guided him tomy door and helped him to spell out my name on the card nailed toit. He had had no other introduction to me than a guess,from the shape of my high north window, seen outside, that myplace was a studio and that as a studio it would contain anartist. He had wandered to England in search of fortune,like other itinerants, and had embarked, with a partner and asmall green handcart, on the sale of penny ices. The iceshad melted away and the partner had dissolved in theirtrain. My young man wore tight yellow trousers with reddishstripes and his name was Oronte. He was sallow but fair,and when I put him into some old clothes of my own he looked likean Englishman. He was as good as Miss Churm, who couldlook, when required, like an Italian.

IV.

I thought Mrs. Monarch’s faceslightly convulsed when, on her coming back with her husband, shefound Oronte installed. It was strange to have to recognisein a scrap of a lazzarone a competitor to her magnificentMajor. It was she who scented danger first, for the Majorwas anecdotically unconscious. But Oronte gave us tea, witha hundred eager confusions (he had never seen such a queerprocess), and I think she thought better of me for having at lastan “establishment.” They saw a couple ofdrawings that I had made of the establishment, and Mrs. Monarchhinted that it never would have struck her that he had sat forthem. “Now the drawings you make from us, theylook exactly like us,” she reminded me, smiling in triumph;and I recognised that this was indeed just their defect.When I drew the Monarchs I couldn’t, somehow, get away fromthem—get into the character I wanted to represent; and Ihad not the least desire my model should be discoverable in mypicture. Miss Churm never was, and Mrs. Monarch thought Ihid her, very properly, because she was vulgar; whereas if shewas lost it was only as the dead who go to heaven arelost—in the gain of an angel the more.

By this time I had got a certain start with “RutlandRamsay,” the first novel in the great projected series;that is I had produced a dozen drawings, several with the help ofthe Major and his wife, and I had sent them in forapproval. My understanding with the publishers, as I havealready hinted, had been that I was to be left to do my work, inthis particular case, as I liked, with the whole book committedto me; but my connection with the rest of the series was onlycontingent. There were moments when, frankly, it wasa comfort to have the real thing under one’s hand; forthere were characters in “Rutland Ramsay” that werevery much like it. There were people presumably as straightas the Major and women of as good a fashion as Mrs.Monarch. There was a great deal of country-houselife—treated, it is true, in a fine, fanciful, ironical,generalised way—and there was a considerable implication ofknickerbockers and kilts. There were certain things I hadto settle at the outset; such things for instance as the exactappearance of the hero, the particular bloom of theheroine. The author of course gave me a lead, but there wasa margin for interpretation. I took the Monarchs into myconfidence, I told them frankly what I was about, I mentioned myembarrassments and alternatives. “Oh, takehim!” Mrs. Monarch murmured sweetly, looking at herhusband; and “What could you want better than mywife?” the Major inquired, with the comfortable candourthat now prevailed between us.

I was not obliged to answer these remarks—I was onlyobliged to place my sitters. I was not easy in mind, and Ipostponed, a little timidly perhaps, the solution of thequestion. The book was a large canvas, the other figureswere numerous, and I worked off at first some of the episodes inwhich the hero and the heroine were not concerned. Whenonce I had set them up I should have to stick tothem—I couldn’t make my young man seven feet high inone place and five feet nine in another. I inclined on thewhole to the latter measurement, though the Major more than oncereminded me that he looked about as young as anyone.It was indeed quite possible to arrange him, for the figure, sothat it would have been difficult to detect his age. Afterthe spontaneous Oronte had been with me a month, and after I hadgiven him to understand several different times that his nativeexuberance would presently constitute an insurmountable barrierto our further intercourse, I waked to a sense of his heroiccapacity. He was only five feet seven, but the remaininginches were latent. I tried him almost secretly at first,for I was really rather afraid of the judgment my other modelswould pass on such a choice. If they regarded Miss Churm aslittle better than a snare, what would they think of therepresentation by a person so little the real thing as an Italianstreet-vendor of a protagonist formed by a public school?

If I went a little in fear of them it was not because theybullied me, because they had got an oppressive foothold, butbecause in their really pathetic decorum and mysteriouslypermanent newness they counted on me so intensely. I wastherefore very glad when Jack Hawley came home: he was always ofsuch good counsel. He painted badly himself, but there wasno one like him for putting his finger on the place. He hadbeen absent from England for a year; he had beensomewhere—I don’t remember where—to get a fresheye. I was in a good deal of dread of any such organ, butwe were old friends; he had been away for months and a sense ofemptiness was creeping into my life. I hadn’t dodgeda missile for a year.

He came back with a fresh eye, but with the same old blackvelvet blouse, and the first evening he spent in my studio wesmoked cigarettes till the small hours. He had done no workhimself, he had only got the eye; so the field was clear for theproduction of my little things. He wanted to see what I haddone for the Cheapside, but he was disappointed in theexhibition. That at least seemed the meaning of two orthree comprehensive groans which, as he lounged on my big divan,on a folded leg, looking at my latest drawings, issued from hislips with the smoke of the cigarette.

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing save that I’m mystified.”

“You are indeed. You’re quite off thehinge. What’s the meaning of this new fad?” Andhe tossed me, with visible irreverence, a drawing in which Ihappened to have depicted both my majestic models. I askedif he didn’t think it good, and he replied that it struckhim as execrable, given the sort of thing I had alwaysrepresented myself to him as wishing to arrive at; but I let thatpass, I was so anxious to see exactly what he meant. Thetwo figures in the picture looked colossal, but I supposed thiswas not what he meant, inasmuch as, for aught he knew tothe contrary, I might have been trying for that. Imaintained that I was working exactly in the same way as when helast had done me the honour to commend me. “Well,there’s a big hole somewhere,” he answered;“wait a bit and I’ll discover it.” Idepended upon him to do so: where else was the fresh eye?But he produced at last nothing more luminous than “Idon’t know—I don’t like yourtypes.” This was lame, for a critic who had neverconsented to discuss with me anything but the question ofexecution, the direction of strokes and the mystery ofvalues.

“In the drawings you’ve been looking at I think mytypes are very handsome.”

“Oh, they won’t do!”

“I’ve had a couple of new models.”

“I see you have. They won’tdo.”

“Are you very sure of that?”

“Absolutely—they’re stupid.”

“You mean I am—for I ought to get roundthat.”

“You can’t—with such people.Who are they?”

I told him, as far as was necessary, and he declared,heartlessly: “Ce sont des gens qu’il faut mettreà la porte.”

“You’ve never seen them; they’re awfullygood,” I compassionately objected.

“Not seen them? Why, all this recent work of yoursdrops to pieces with them. It’s all I want to see ofthem.”

“No one else has said anything against it—theCheapside people are pleased.”

“Everyone else is an ass, and the Cheapsidepeople the biggest asses of all. Come, don’t pretend,at this time of day, to have pretty illusions about the public,especially about publishers and editors. It’s not forsuch animals you work—it’s for those who know,coloro che sanno; so keep straight for me if youcan’t keep straight for yourself. There’s acertain sort of thing you tried for from the first—and avery good thing it is. But this twaddle isn’tin it.” When I talked with Hawley later about“Rutland Ramsay” and its possible successors hedeclared that I must get back into my boat again or I would go tothe bottom. His voice in short was the voice ofwarning.

I noted the warning, but I didn’t turn my friends out ofdoors. They bored me a good deal; but the very fact thatthey bored me admonished me not to sacrifice them—if therewas anything to be done with them—simply toirritation. As I look back at this phase they seem to me tohave pervaded my life not a little. I have a vision of themas most of the time in my studio, seated, against the wall, on anold velvet bench to be out of the way, and looking like a pair ofpatient courtiers in a royal ante-chamber. I am convincedthat during the coldest weeks of the winter they held theirground because it saved them fire. Their newness was losingits gloss, and it was impossible not to feel that they wereobjects of charity. Whenever Miss Churm arrived they wentaway, and after I was fairly launched in “RutlandRamsay” Miss Churm arrived pretty often. They managedto express to me tacitly that they supposed I wanted her for thelow life of the book, and I let them suppose it, since they hadattempted to study the work—it was lying about thestudio—without discovering that it dealt only with thehighest circles. They had dipped into the most brilliant ofour novelists without deciphering many passages. I stilltook an hour from them, now and again, in spite of JackHawley’s warning: it would be time enough to dismiss them,if dismissal should be necessary, when the rigour of the seasonwas over. Hawley had made their acquaintance—he hadmet them at my fireside—and thought them a ridiculouspair. Learning that he was a painter they tried to approachhim, to show him too that they were the real thing; but he lookedat them, across the big room, as if they were miles away: theywere a compendium of everything that he most objected to in thesocial system of his country. Such people as that, allconvention and patent-leather, with ejaculations that stoppedconversation, had no business in a studio. A studio was aplace to learn to see, and how could you see through a pair offeather beds?

The main inconvenience I suffered at their hands was that, atfirst, I was shy of letting them discover how my artful littleservant had begun to sit to me for “RutlandRamsay.” They knew that I had been odd enough (theywere prepared by this time to allow oddity to artists,) to pick aforeign vagabond out of the streets, when I might have had aperson with whiskers and credentials; but it was some time beforethey learned how high I rated his accomplishments. Theyfound him in an attitude more than once, but they never doubted Iwas doing him as an organ-grinder. There were severalthings they never guessed, and one of them was that for astriking scene in the novel, in which a footman briefly figured,it occurred to me to make use of Major Monarch as themenial. I kept putting this off, I didn’t like to askhim to don the livery—besides the difficulty of finding alivery to fit him. At last, one day late in the winter,when I was at work on the despised Oronte (he caught one’sidea in an instant), and was in the glow of feeling that I wasgoing very straight, they came in, the Major and his wife, withtheir society laugh about nothing (there was less and less tolaugh at), like country-callers—they always reminded me ofthat—who have walked across the park after church and arepresently persuaded to stay to luncheon. Luncheon was over,but they could stay to tea—I knew they wanted it. Thefit was on me, however, and I couldn’t let my ardour cooland my work wait, with the fading daylight, while my modelprepared it. So I asked Mrs. Monarch if she would mindlaying it out—a request which, for an instant, brought allthe blood to her face. Her eyes were on her husband’sfor a second, and some mute telegraphy passed between them.Their folly was over the next instant; his cheerful shrewdnessput an end to it. So far from pitying their wounded pride,I must add, I was moved to give it as complete a lesson as Icould. They bustled about together and got out the cups andsaucers and made the kettle boil. I know they felt as ifthey were waiting on my servant, and when the tea was prepared Isaid: “He’ll have a cup, please—he’stired.” Mrs. Monarch brought him one where he stood,and he took it from her as if he had been a gentleman at a party,squeezing a crush-hat with an elbow.

Then it came over me that she had made a great effort forme—made it with a kind of nobleness—and that I owedher a compensation. Each time I saw her after this Iwondered what the compensation could be. I couldn’tgo on doing the wrong thing to oblige them. Oh, itwas the wrong thing, the stamp of the work for which theysat—Hawley was not the only person to say it now. Isent in a large number of the drawings I had made for“Rutland Ramsay,” and I received a warning that wasmore to the point than Hawley’s. The artistic adviserof the house for which I was working was of opinion that many ofmy illustrations were not what had been looked for. Most ofthese illustrations were the subjects in which the Monarchs hadfigured. Without going into the question of what hadbeen looked for, I saw at this rate I shouldn’t get theother books to do. I hurled myself in despair upon MissChurm, I put her through all her paces. I not only adoptedOronte publicly as my hero, but one morning when the Major lookedin to see if I didn’t require him to finish a figure forthe Cheapside, for which he had begun to sit the weekbefore, I told him that I had changed my mind—I would dothe drawing from my man. At this my visitor turned pale andstood looking at me. “Is he your idea of anEnglish gentleman?” he asked.

I was disappointed, I was nervous, I wanted to get on with mywork; so I replied with irritation: “Oh, my dearMajor—I can’t be ruined for you!”

He stood another moment; then, without a word, he quitted thestudio. I drew a long breath when he was gone, for I saidto myself that I shouldn’t see him again. I had nottold him definitely that I was in danger of having my workrejected, but I was vexed at his not having felt the catastrophein the air, read with me the moral of our fruitlesscollaboration, the lesson that, in the deceptive atmosphere ofart, even the highest respectability may fail of beingplastic.

I didn’t owe my friends money, but I did see themagain. They re-appeared together, three days later, andunder the circumstances there was something tragic in thefact. It was a proof to me that they could find nothingelse in life to do. They had threshed the matter out in adismal conference—they had digested the bad news that theywere not in for the series. If they were not useful to meeven for the Cheapside their function seemed difficult todetermine, and I could only judge at first that they had come,forgivingly, decorously, to take a last leave. This made merejoice in secret that I had little leisure for a scene; for Ihad placed both my other models in position together and I waspegging away at a drawing from which I hoped to deriveglory. It had been suggested by the passage in whichRutland Ramsay, drawing up a chair to Artemisia’spiano-stool, says extraordinary things to her while sheostensibly fingers out a difficult piece of music. I haddone Miss Churm at the piano before—it was an attitude inwhich she knew how to take on an absolutely poetic grace. Iwished the two figures to “compose” together,intensely, and my little Italian had entered perfectly into myconception. The pair were vividly before me, the piano hadbeen pulled out; it was a charming picture of blended youth andmurmured love, which I had only to catch and keep. Myvisitors stood and looked at it, and I was friendly to them overmy shoulder.

They made no response, but I was used to silent company andwent on with my work, only a little disconcerted (even thoughexhilarated by the sense that this was at least the idealthing), at not having got rid of them after all. PresentlyI heard Mrs. Monarch’s sweet voice beside, or rather aboveme: “I wish her hair was a little better done.”I looked up and she was staring with a strange fixedness at MissChurm, whose back was turned to her. “Do you mind myjust touching it?” she went on—a question which mademe spring up for an instant, as with the instinctive fear thatshe might do the young lady a harm. But she quieted me witha glance I shall never forget—I confess I should like tohave been able to paint that—and went for a momentto my model. She spoke to her softly, laying a hand uponher shoulder and bending over her; and as the girl,understanding, gratefully assented, she disposed her rough curls,with a few quick passes, in such a way as to make MissChurm’s head twice as charming. It was one of themost heroic personal services I have ever seen rendered.Then Mrs. Monarch turned away with a low sigh and, looking abouther as if for something to do, stooped to the floor with a noblehumility and picked up a dirty rag that had dropped out of mypaint-box.

The Major meanwhile had also been looking for something to doand, wandering to the other end of the studio, saw before him mybreakfast things, neglected, unremoved. “I say,can’t I be useful here?” he called out to mewith an irrepressible quaver. I assented with a laugh thatI fear was awkward and for the next ten minutes, while I worked,I heard the light clatter of china and the tinkle of spoons andglass. Mrs. Monarch assisted her husband—they washedup my crockery, they put it away. They wandered off into mylittle scullery, and I afterwards found that they had cleaned myknives and that my slender stock of plate had an unprecedentedsurface. When it came over me, the latent eloquence of whatthey were doing, I confess that my drawing was blurred for amoment—the picture swam. They had accepted theirfailure, but they couldn’t accept their fate. Theyhad bowed their heads in bewilderment to the perverse and cruellaw in virtue of which the real thing could be so much lessprecious than the unreal; but they didn’t want tostarve. If my servants were my models, my models might bemy servants. They would reverse the parts—the otherswould sit for the ladies and gentlemen, and they would dothe work. They would still be in the studio—it was anintense dumb appeal to me not to turn them out. “Takeus on,” they wanted to say—“we’ll doanything.”

When all this hung before me the afflatusvanished—my pencil dropped from my hand. My sittingwas spoiled and I got rid of my sitters, who were also evidentlyrather mystified and awestruck. Then, alone with the Majorand his wife, I had a most uncomfortable moment, He put theirprayer into a single sentence: “I say, you know—justlet us do for you, can’t you?” Icouldn’t—it was dreadful to see them emptying myslops; but I pretended I could, to oblige them, for about aweek. Then I gave them a sum of money to go away; and Inever saw them again. I obtained the remaining books, butmy friend Hawley repeats that Major and Mrs. Monarch did me apermanent harm, got me into a second-rate trick. If it betrue I am content to have paid the price—for thememory.

p. 45SIRDOMINICK FERRAND.

I.

“There are several objectionsto it, but I’ll take it if you’ll alter it,”Mr. Locket’s rather curt note had said; and there was nowaste of words in the postscript in which he had added: “Ifyou’ll come in and see me, I’ll show you what Imean.” This communication had reached Jersey Villasby the first post, and Peter Baron had scarcely swallowed hisleathery muffin before he got into motion to obey the editorialbehest. He knew that such precipitation looked eager, andhe had no desire to look eager—it was not in his interest;but how could he maintain a godlike calm, principled though hewas in favour of it, the first time one of the great magazineshad accepted, even with a cruel reservation, a specimen of hisardent young genius?

It was not till, like a child with a sea-shell at his ear, hebegan to be aware of the great roar of the“underground,” that, in his third-class carriage, thecruelty of the reservation penetrated, with the taste of acridsmoke, to his inner sense. It was really degrading to beeager in the face of having to “alter.” PeterBaron tried to figure to himself at that moment that he was notflying to betray the extremity of his need, but hurrying to fightfor some of those passages of superior boldness which wereexactly what the conductor of the “PromiscuousReview” would be sure to be down upon. He madebelieve—as if to the greasy fellow-passengeropposite—that he felt indignant; but he saw that to thesmall round eye of this still more downtrodden brother herepresented selfish success. He would have liked to lingerin the conception that he had been “approached” bythe Promiscuous; but whatever might be thought in the office ofthat periodical of some of his flights of fancy, there was nowant of vividness in his occasional suspicion that he passedthere for a familiar bore. The only thing that was clearlyflattering was the fact that the Promiscuous rarely publishedfiction. He should therefore be associated with a deviationfrom a solemn habit, and that would more than make up to him fora phrase in one of Mr. Locket’s inexorable earlier notes, aphrase which still rankled, about his showing no symptom of thefaculty really creative. “You don’t seem ableto keep a character together,” this pitiless monitor hadsomewhere else remarked. Peter Baron, as he sat in hiscorner while the train stopped, considered, in the befoggedgaslight, the bookstall standard of literature and asked himselfwhose character had fallen to pieces now. Tormenting indeedhad always seemed to him such a fate as to have the creative headwithout the creative hand.

It should be mentioned, however, that before he started on hismission to Mr. Locket his attention had been briefly engaged byan incident occurring at Jersey Villas. On leaving thehouse (he lived at No. 3, the door of which stood open to asmall front garden), he encountered the lady who, a week before,had taken possession of the rooms on the ground floor, the“parlours” of Mrs. Bundy’s terminology.He had heard her, and from his window, two or three times, hadeven seen her pass in and out, and this observation had createdin his mind a vague prejudice in her favour. Such aprejudice, it was true, had been subjected to a violent test; ithad been fairly apparent that she had a light step, but it wasstill less to be overlooked that she had a cottage piano.She had furthermore a little boy and a very sweet voice, of whichPeter Baron had caught the accent, not from her singing (for sheonly played), but from her gay admonitions to her child, whom sheoccasionally allowed to amuse himself—under restrictionsvery publicly enforced—in the tiny black patch which, as aforecourt to each house, was held, in the humble row, to be afeature. Jersey Villas stood in pairs, semi-detached, andMrs. Ryves—such was the name under which the new lodgerpresented herself—had been admitted to the house asconfessedly musical. Mrs. Bundy, the earnest proprietressof No. 3, who considered her “parlours” (they were adozen feet square), even more attractive, if possible, than thesecond floor with which Baron had had to contenthimself—Mrs. Bundy, who reserved the drawing-room for acasual dressmaking business, had threshed out the subject of thenew lodger in advance with our young man, reminding him that heraffection for his own person was a proof that, other things beingequal, she positively preferred tenants who were clever.

This was the case with Mrs. Ryves; she had satisfied Mrs.Bundy that she was not a simple strummer. Mrs. Bundyadmitted to Peter Baron that, for herself, she had a weakness fora pretty tune, and Peter could honestly reply that his ear wasequally sensitive. Everything would depend on the“touch” of their inmate. Mrs. Ryves’spiano would blight his existence if her hand should prove heavyor her selections vulgar; but if she played agreeable things andplayed them in an agreeable way she would render him rather aservice while he smoked the pipe of “form.”Mrs. Bundy, who wanted to let her rooms, guaranteed on the partof the stranger a first-class talent, and Mrs. Ryves, whoevidently knew thoroughly what she was about, had not falsifiedthis somewhat rash prediction. She never played in themorning, which was Baron’s working-time, and he foundhimself listening with pleasure at other hours to her discreetand melancholy strains. He really knew little about music,and the only criticism he would have made of Mrs. Ryves’sconception of it was that she seemed devoted to the dismal.It was not, however, that these strains were not pleasant to him;they floated up, on the contrary, as a sort of conscious responseto some of his broodings and doubts. Harmony, therefore,would have reigned supreme had it not been for the singularly badtaste of No. 4. Mrs. Ryves’s piano was on the freeside of the house and was regarded by Mrs. Bundy as open to noobjection but that of their own gentleman, who was soreasonable. As much, however, could not be said of thegentleman of No. 4, who had not even Mr. Baron’s excuse ofbeing “littery” (he kept a bull-terrier and had fivehats—the street could count them), and whom, if you hadlistened to Mrs. Bundy, you would have supposed to be dividedfrom the obnoxious instrument by walls and corridors, obstaclesand intervals, of massive structure and fabulous extent.This gentleman had taken up an attitude which had now passed intothe phase of correspondence and compromise; but it was theopinion of the immediate neighbourhood that he had not a leg tostand upon, and on whatever subject the sentiment of JerseyVillas might have been vague, it was not so on the rights and thewrongs of landladies.

Mrs. Ryves’s little boy was in the garden as Peter Baronissued from the house, and his mother appeared to have come outfor a moment, bareheaded, to see that he was doing no harm.She was discussing with him the responsibility that he mightincur by passing a piece of string round one of the iron palingsand pretending he was in command of a “geegee”; butit happened that at the sight of the other lodger the child wasseized with a finer perception of the drivable. He rushedat Baron with a flourish of the bridle, shouting, “Ougeegee!” in a manner productive of some refinedembarrassment to his mother. Baron met his advance bymounting him on a shoulder and feigning to prance an instant, sothat by the time this performance was over—it took but afew seconds—the young man felt introduced to Mrs.Ryves. Her smile struck him as charming, and such animpression shortens many steps. She said, “Oh, thankyou—you mustn’t let him worry you”; and thenas, having put down the child and raised his hat, he was turningaway, she added: “It’s very good of you not tocomplain of my piano.”

“I particularly enjoy it—you playbeautifully,” said Peter Baron.

“I have to play, you see—it’s all I cando. But the people next door don’t like it, though myroom, you know, is not against their wall. Therefore Ithank you for letting me tell them that you, in the house,don’t find me a nuisance.”

She looked gentle and bright as she spoke, and as the youngman’s eyes rested on her the tolerance for which sheexpressed herself indebted seemed to him the least indulgence shemight count upon. But he only laughed and said “Oh,no, you’re not a nuisance!” and felt more and moreintroduced.

The little boy, who was handsome, hereupon clamoured foranother ride, and she took him up herself, to moderate histransports. She stood a moment with the child in her arms,and he put his fingers exuberantly into her hair, so that whileshe smiled at Baron she slowly, permittingly shook her head toget rid of them.

“If they really make a fuss I’m afraid I shallhave to go,” she went on.

“Oh, don’t go!” Baron broke out, with asudden expressiveness which made his voice, as it fell upon hisear, strike him as the voice of another. She gave a vagueexclamation and, nodding slightly but not unsociably, passed backinto the house. She had made an impression which remainedtill the other party to the conversation reached therailway-station, when it was superseded by the thought of hisprospective discussion with Mr. Locket. This was a proof ofthe intensity of that interest.

The aftertaste of the later conference was also intense forPeter Baron, who quitted his editor with his manuscript under hisarm. He had had the question out with Mr. Locket, and hewas in a flutter which ought to have been a sense of triumph andwhich indeed at first he succeeded in regarding in thislight. Mr. Locket had had to admit that there was an ideain his story, and that was a tribute which Baron was in aposition to make the most of. But there was also a scenewhich scandalised the editorial conscience and which the youngman had promised to rewrite. The idea that Mr. Locket hadbeen so good as to disengage depended for clearness mainly onthis scene; so it was easy to see his objection wasperverse. This inference was probably a part of the joy inwhich Peter Baron walked as he carried home a contribution itpleased him to classify as accepted. He walked to work offhis excitement and to think in what manner he shouldreconstruct. He went some distance without settling thatpoint, and then, as it began to worry him, he looked vaguely intoshop-windows for solutions and hints. Mr. Locket lived inthe depths of Chelsea, in a little panelled, amiable house, andBaron took his way homeward along the King’s Road.There was a new amusement for him, a fresher bustle, in a Londonwalk in the morning; these were hours that he habitually spent athis table, in the awkward attitude engendered by the poor pieceof furniture, one of the rickety features of Mrs. Bundy’ssecond floor, which had to serve as his altar of literarysacrifice. If by exception he went out when the day wasyoung he noticed that life seemed younger with it; there werelivelier industries to profit by and shop-girls, often rosy, tolook at; a different air was in the streets and a chaff oftraffic for the observer of manners to catch. Above all, itwas the time when poor Baron made his purchases, which werewholly of the wandering mind; his extravagances, for somemysterious reason, were all matutinal, and he had a foreknowledgethat if ever he should ruin himself it would be well beforenoon. He felt lavish this morning, on the strength of whatthe Promiscuous would do for him; he had lost sight for themoment of what he should have to do for the Promiscuous.Before the old bookshops and printshops, the crowded panes of thecuriosity-mongers and the desirable exhibitions of mahogany“done up,” he used, by an innocent process, to commitluxurious follies. He refurnished Mrs. Bundy with a freedomthat cost her nothing, and lost himself in pictures of atransfigured second floor.

On this particular occasion the King’s Road provedalmost unprecedentedly expensive, and indeed this occasiondiffered from most others in containing the germ of realdanger. For once in a way he had a bad conscience—hefelt himself tempted to pick his own pocket. He never saw acommodious writing-table, with elbow-room and drawers and a fairexpanse of leather stamped neatly at the edge with gilt, withoutbeing freshly reminded of Mrs. Bundy’s dilapidations.There were several such tables in the King’sRoad—they seemed indeed particularly numerous today.Peter Baron glanced at them all through the fronts of the shops,but there was one that detained him in supremecontemplation. There was a fine assurance about it whichseemed a guarantee of masterpieces; but when at last he went inand, just to help himself on his way, asked the impossible price,the sum mentioned by the voluble vendor mocked at him even morethan he had feared. It was far too expensive, as he hinted,and he was on the point of completing his comedy by a pensiveretreat when the shopman bespoke his attention for anotherarticle of the same general character, which he described asremarkably cheap for what it was. It was an old piece, froma sale in the country, and it had been in stock some time; but ithad got pushed out of sight in one of the upper rooms—theycontained such a wilderness of treasures—and happened tohave but just come to light. Peter suffered himself to beconducted into an interminable dusky rear, where he presentlyfound himself bending over one of those square substantial desksof old mahogany, raised, with the aid of front legs, on a sort ofretreating pedestal which is fitted with small drawers,contracted conveniences known immemorially to the knowing asdavenports. This specimen had visibly seen service, but ithad an old-time solidity and to Peter Baron it unexpectedlyappealed.

He would have said in advance that such an article was exactlywhat he didn’t want, but as the shopman pushed up a chairfor him and he sat down with his elbows on the gentle slope ofthe large, firm lid, he felt that such a basis for literaturewould be half the battle. He raised the lid and lookedlovingly into the deep interior; he sat ominously silent whilehis companion dropped the striking words: “Now that’san article I personally covet!” Then when the manmentioned the ridiculous price (they were literally giving itaway), he reflected on the economy of having a literary altar onwhich one could really kindle a fire. A davenport was acompromise, but what was all life but a compromise? Hecould beat down the dealer, and at Mrs. Bundy’s he had towrite on an insincere card-table. After he had sat for aminute with his nose in the friendly desk he had a queerimpression that it might tell him a secret or two—one ofthe secrets of form, one of the sacrificialmysteries—though no doubt its career had been literary onlyin the sense of its helping some old lady to write invitations todull dinners. There was a strange, faint odour in thereceptacle, as if fragrant, hallowed things had once been putaway there. When he took his head out of it he said to theshopman: “I don’t mind meeting youhalfway.” He had been told by knowing people thatthat was the right thing. He felt rather vulgar, but thedavenport arrived that evening at Jersey Villas.

II.

“I daresay it will be allright; he seems quiet now,” said the poor lady of the“parlours” a few days later, in reference to theirlitigious neighbour and the precarious piano. The twolodgers had grown regularly acquainted, and the piano had hadmuch to do with it. Just as this instrument served, withthe gentleman at No. 4, as a theme for discussion, so betweenPeter Baron and the lady of the parlours it had become a basis ofpeculiar agreement, a topic, at any rate, of conversationfrequently renewed. Mrs. Ryves was so prepossessing thatPeter was sure that even if they had not had the piano he wouldhave found something else to thresh out with her.Fortunately however they did have it, and he, at least, made themost of it, knowing more now about his new friend, who when,widowed and fatigued, she held her beautiful child in her arms,looked dimly like a modern Madonna. Mrs. Bundy, as a letterof furnished lodgings, was characterised in general by a familiardomestic severity in respect to picturesque young women, but shehad the highest confidence in Mrs. Ryves. She was luminousabout her being a lady, and a lady who could bring Mrs. Bundyback to a gratified recognition of one of those manifestations ofmind for which she had an independent esteem. She wasprofessional, but Jersey Villas could be proud of a professionthat didn’t happen to be the wrong one—they had seensomething of that. Mrs. Ryves had a hundred a year (Baronwondered how Mrs. Bundy knew this; he thought it unlikely Mrs.Ryves had told her), and for the rest she depended on her lovelymusic. Baron judged that her music, even though lovely, wasa frail dependence; it would hardly help to fill a concert-room,and he asked himself at first whether she played country-dancesat children’s parties or gave lessons to young ladies whostudied above their station.

Very soon, indeed, he was sufficiently enlightened; it allwent fast, for the little boy had been almost as great a help asthe piano. Sidney haunted the doorstep of No. 3 hewas eminently sociable, and had established independent relationswith Peter, a frequent feature of which was an adventurous visit,upstairs, to picture books criticised for not being allgeegees and walking sticks happily more conformable. Theyoung man’s window, too, looked out on their acquaintance;through a starched muslin curtain it kept his neighbour beforehim, made him almost more aware of her comings and goings than hefelt he had a right to be. He was capable of a shyness ofcuriosity about her and of dumb little delicacies ofconsideration. She did give a few lessons; they wereessentially local, and he ended by knowing more or less what shewent out for and what she came in from. She had almost novisitors, only a decent old lady or two, and, every day, poordingy Miss Teagle, who was also ancient and who came humblyenough to governess the infant of the parlours. PeterBaron’s window had always, to his sense, looked out on agood deal of life, and one of the things it had most shown himwas that there is nobody so bereft of joy as not to be able tocommand for twopence the services of somebody less joyous.Mrs. Ryves was a struggler (Baron scarcely liked to think of it),but she occupied a pinnacle for Miss Teagle, who had livedon—and from a noble nursery—into a period of diplomasand humiliation.

Mrs. Ryves sometimes went out, like Baron himself, withmanuscripts under her arm, and, still more like Baron, she almostalways came back with them. Her vain approaches were to themusic-sellers; she tried to compose—to produce songs thatwould make a hit. A successful song was an income, sheconfided to Peter one of the first times he took Sidney,blasé and drowsy, back to his mother. It was not onone of these occasions, but once when he had come in on no betterpretext than that of simply wanting to (she had after allvirtually invited him), that she mentioned how only one song in athousand was successful and that the terrible difficulty was ingetting the right words. This rightness was just a vulgar“fluke”—there were lots of words really cleverthat were of no use at all. Peter said, laughing, that hesupposed any words he should try to produce would be sure to betoo clever; yet only three weeks after his first encounter withMrs. Ryves he sat at his delightful davenport (well aware that hehad duties more pressing), trying to string together rhymesidiotic enough to make his neighbour’s fortune. Hewas satisfied of the fineness of her musical gift—it hadthe touching note. The touching note was in her person aswell.

The davenport was delightful, after six months of itstottering predecessor, and such a re-enforcement to the youngman’s style was not impaired by his sense of somethinglawless in the way it had been gained. He had made thepurchase in anticipation of the money he expected from Mr.Locket, but Mr. Locket’s liberality was to depend on theingenuity of his contributor, who now found himself confrontedwith the consequence of a frivolous optimism. The fruit ofhis labour presented, as he stared at it with his elbows on hisdesk, an aspect uncompromising and incorruptible. It seemedto look up at him reproachfully and to say, with its essentialfinish: “How could you promise anything so base; how couldyou pass your word to mutilate and dishonour me?” Thealterations demanded by Mr. Locket were impossible; theconcessions to the platitude of his conception of the public mindwere degrading. The public mind!—as if the publichad a mind, or any principle of perception morediscoverable than the stare of huddled sheep! Peter Baronfelt that it concerned him to determine if he were only notclever enough or if he were simply not abject enough to rewritehis story. He might in truth have had less pride if he hadhad more skill, and more discretion if he had had morepractice. Humility, in the profession of letters, was halfof practice, and resignation was half of success. PoorPeter actually flushed with pain as he recognised that this wasnot success, the production of gelid prose which his editor coulddo nothing with on the one side and he himself could do nothingwith on the other. The truth about his luckless tale wasnow the more bitter from his having managed, for some days, totaste it as sweet.

As he sat there, baffled and sombre, biting his pen andwondering what was meant by the “rewards” ofliterature, he generally ended by tossing away the compositiondeflowered by Mr. Locket and trying his hand at the sort oftwaddle that Mrs. Ryves might be able to set to music.Success in these experiments wouldn’t be a reward ofliterature, but it might very well become a labour of love.The experiments would be pleasant enough for him if they werepleasant for his inscrutable neighbour. That was the way hethought of her now, for he had learned enough about her, littleby little, to guess how much there was still to learn. Tospend his mornings over cheap rhymes for her was certainly toshirk the immediate question; but there were hours when he judgedthis question to be altogether too arduous, reflecting that hemight quite as well perish by the sword as by famine.Besides, he did meet it obliquely when he considered that heshouldn’t be an utter failure if he were to produce somesongs to which Mrs. Ryves’s accompaniments would give acirculation. He had not ventured to show her anything yet,but one morning, at a moment when her little boy was in his room,it seemed to him that, by an inspiration, he had arrived at thehappy middle course (it was an art by itself), between sound andsense. If the sense was not confused it was because thesound was so familiar.

He had said to the child, to whom he had sacrificedbarley-sugar (it had no attraction for his own lips, yet in thesedays there was always some of it about), he had confided to thesmall Sidney that if he would wait a little he should beintrusted with something nice to take down to his parent.Sidney had absorbing occupation and, while Peter copied off thesong in a pretty hand, roamed, gurgling and sticky, about theroom. In this manner he lurched like a little toper intothe rear of the davenport, which stood a few steps out from therecess of the window, and, as he was fond of beating time to hisintensest joys, began to bang on the surface of it with apaper-knife which at that spot had chanced to fall upon thefloor. At the moment Sidney committed this violence hiskind friend had happened to raise the lid of the desk and, withhis head beneath it, was rummaging among a mass of papers for aproper envelope. “I say, I say, my boy!” heexclaimed, solicitous for the ancient glaze of his most cherishedpossession. Sidney paused an instant; then, while Peterstill hunted for the envelope, he administered another, and thistime a distinctly disobedient, rap. Peter heard it fromwithin and was struck with its oddity of sound—so much sothat, leaving the child for a moment under a demoralisingimpression of impunity, he waited with quick curiosity for arepetition of the stroke. It came of course immediately,and then the young man, who had at the same instant found hisenvelope and ejaculated “Hallo, this thing has a falseback!” jumped up and secured his visitor, whom with hisleft arm he held in durance on his knee while with his free handhe addressed the missive to Mrs. Ryves.

As Sidney was fond of errands he was easily got rid of, andafter he had gone Baron stood a moment at the window chinkingpennies and keys in pockets and wondering if the charmingcomposer would think his song as good, or in other words as bad,as he thought it. His eyes as he turned away fell on thewooden back of the davenport, where, to his regret, the traces ofSidney’s assault were visible in three or four uglyscratches. “Confound the little brute!” heexclaimed, feeling as if an altar had been desecrated. Hewas reminded, however, of the observation this outrage had ledhim to make, and, for further assurance, he knocked on the woodwith his knuckle. It sounded from that position commonplaceenough, but his suspicion was strongly confirmed when, againstanding beside the desk, he put his head beneath the lifted lidand gave ear while with an extended arm he tapped sharply in thesame place. The back was distinctly hollow; there was aspace between the inner and the outer pieces (he could measureit), so wide that he was a fool not to have noticed itbefore. The depth of the receptacle from front to rear wasso great that it could sacrifice a certain quantity of roomwithout detection. The sacrifice could of course only befor a purpose, and the purpose could only be the creation of asecret compartment. Peter Baron was still boy enough to bethrilled by the idea of such a feature, the more so as everyindication of it had been cleverly concealed. The people atthe shop had never noticed it, else they would have called hisattention to it as an enhancement of value. His legendarylore instructed him that where there was a hiding-place there wasalways a hidden spring, and he pried and pressed and fumbled inan eager search for the sensitive spot. The article wasreally a wonder of neat construction; everything fitted with acloseness that completely saved appearances.

It took Baron some minutes to pursue his inquiry, during whichhe reflected that the people of the shop were not such foolsafter all. They had admitted moreover that they hadaccidentally neglected this relic of gentility—it had beenoverlooked in the multiplicity of their treasures. He nowrecalled that the man had wanted to polish it up before sendingit home, and that, satisfied for his own part with its honourableappearance and averse in general to shiny furniture, he had inhis impatience declined to wait for such an operation, so thatthe object had left the place for Jersey Villas, carryingpresumably its secret with it, two or three hours after hisvisit. This secret it seemed indeed capable of keeping;there was an absurdity in being baffled, but Peter couldn’tfind the spring. He thumped and sounded, he listened andmeasured again; he inspected every joint and crevice, with theeffect of becoming surer still of the existence of a chamber andof making up his mind that his davenport was a rarity. Notonly was there a compartment between the two backs, but there wasdistinctly something in the compartment! Perhaps itwas a lost manuscript—a nice, safe, old-fashioned storythat Mr. Locket wouldn’t object to. Peter returned tothe charge, for it had occurred to him that he had perhaps notsufficiently visited the small drawers, of which, in two verticalrows, there were six in number, of different sizes, insertedsideways into that portion of the structure which formed part ofthe support of the desk. He took them out again andexamined more minutely the condition of their sockets, with thehappy result of discovering at last, in the place into which thethird on the left-hand row was fitted, a small slidingpanel. Behind the panel was a spring, like a flat button,which yielded with a click when he pressed it and which instantlyproduced a loosening of one of the pieces of the shelf formingthe highest part of the davenport—pieces adjusted to eachother with the most deceptive closeness.

This particular piece proved to be, in its turn, a slidingpanel, which, when pushed, revealed the existence of a smallerreceptacle, a narrow, oblong box, in the false back. Itscapacity was limited, but if it couldn’t hold many thingsit might hold precious ones. Baron, in presence of theingenuity with which it had been dissimulated, immediately feltthat, but for the odd chance of little Sidney Ryves’shaving hammered on the outside at the moment he himself happenedto have his head in the desk, he might have remained for yearswithout suspicion of it. This apparently would have been aloss, for he had been right in guessing that the chamber was notempty. It contained objects which, whether precious or not,had at any rate been worth somebody’s hiding. Theseobjects were a collection of small flat parcels, of the shape ofpackets of letters, wrapped in white paper and neatlysealed. The seals, mechanically figured, bore the impressneither of arms nor of initials; the paper looked old—ithad turned faintly sallow; the packets might have been there forages. Baron counted them—there were nine in all, ofdifferent sizes; he turned them over and over, felt themcuriously and snuffed in their vague, musty smell, which affectedhim with the melancholy of some smothered human accent. Thelittle bundles were neither named nor numbered—there wasnot a word of writing on any of the covers; but they plainlycontained old letters, sorted and matched according to dates orto authorship. They told some old, dead story—theywere the ashes of fires burned out.

As Peter Baron held his discoveries successively in his handshe became conscious of a queer emotion which was not altogetherelation and yet was still less pure pain. He had made afind, but it somehow added to his responsibility; he was in thepresence of something interesting, but (in a manner hecouldn’t have defined) this circumstance suddenlyconstituted a danger. It was the perception of the danger,for instance, which caused to remain in abeyance any impulse hemight have felt to break one of the seals. He looked atthem all narrowly, but he was careful not to loosen them, and hewondered uncomfortably whether the contents of the secretcompartment would be held in equity to be the property of thepeople in the King’s Road. He had given money for thedavenport, but had he given money for these buried papers?He paid by a growing consciousness that a nameless chill hadstolen into the air the penalty, which he had many a time paidbefore, of being made of sensitive stuff. It was as if anoccasion had insidiously arisen for a sacrifice—a sacrificefor the sake of a fine superstition, something like honour orkindness or justice, something indeed perhaps even finerstill—a difficult deciphering of duty, an impossibletantalising wisdom. Standing there before his ambiguoustreasure and losing himself for the moment in the sense of adawning complication, he was startled by a light, quick tap atthe door of his sitting-room. Instinctively, beforeanswering, he listened an instant—he was in the attitude ofa miser surprised while counting his hoard. Then heanswered “One moment, please!” and slipped the littleheap of packets into the biggest of the drawers of the davenport,which happened to be open. The aperture of the false backwas still gaping, and he had not time to work back thespring. He hastily laid a big book over the place and thenwent and opened his door.

It offered him a sight none the less agreeable for beingunexpected—the graceful and agitated figure of Mrs.Ryves. Her agitation was so visible that he thought atfirst that something dreadful had happened to herchild—that she had rushed up to ask for help, to beg him togo for the doctor. Then he perceived that it was probablyconnected with the desperate verses he had transmitted to her aquarter of an hour before; for she had his open manuscript in onehand and was nervously pulling it about with the other. Shelooked frightened and pretty, and if, in invading the privacy ofa fellow-lodger, she had been guilty of a departure from rigidcustom, she was at least conscious of the enormity of the stepand incapable of treating it with levity. The levity wasfor Peter Baron, who endeavoured, however, to clothe hisfamiliarity with respect, pushing forward the seat of honour andrepeating that he rejoiced in such a visit. The visitorcame in, leaving the door ajar, and after a minute during which,to help her, he charged her with the purpose of telling him thathe ought to be ashamed to send her down such rubbish, sherecovered herself sufficiently to stammer out that his song wasexactly what she had been looking for and that after reading itshe had been seized with an extraordinary, irresistibleimpulse—that of thanking him for it in person and withoutdelay.

“It was the impulse of a kind nature,” he said,“and I can’t tell you what pleasure you giveme.”

She declined to sit down, and evidently wished to appear tohave come but for a few seconds. She looked confusedly atthe place in which she found herself, and when her eyes met hisown they struck him as anxious and appealing. She wasevidently not thinking of his song, though she said three or fourtimes over that it was beautiful. “Well, I onlywanted you to know, and now I must go,” she added; but onhis hearthrug she lingered with such an odd helplessness that hefelt almost sorry for her.

“Perhaps I can improve it if you find it doesn’tgo,” said Baron. “I’m so delighted to doanything for you I can.”

“There may be a word or two that might bechanged,” she answered, rather absently. “Ishall have to think it over, to live with it a little. ButI like it, and that’s all I wanted to say.”

“Charming of you. I’m not a bit busy,”said Baron.

Again she looked at him with a troubled intensity, thensuddenly she demanded: “Is there anything the matter withyou?”

“The matter with me?”

“I mean like being ill or worried. I wondered ifthere might be; I had a sudden fancy; and that, I think, isreally why I came up.”

“There isn’t, indeed; I’m all right.But your sudden fancies are inspirations.”

“It’s absurd. You must excuse me.Good-by!” said Mrs. Ryves.

“What are the words you want changed?” Baronasked.

“I don’t want any—if you’re allright. Good-by,” his visitor repeated, fixing hereyes an instant on an object on his desk that had caughtthem. His own glanced in the same direction and he saw thatin his hurry to shuffle away the packets found in the davenporthe had overlooked one of them, which lay with its sealsexposed. For an instant he felt found out, as if he hadbeen concerned in something to be ashamed of, and it was only hisquick second thought that told him how little the incident ofwhich the packet was a sequel was an affair of Mrs.Ryves’s. Her conscious eyes came back to his as ifthey were sounding them, and suddenly this instinct of keepinghis discovery to himself was succeeded by a really startledinference that, with the rarest alertness, she had guessedsomething and that her guess (it seemed almost supernatural), hadbeen her real motive. Some secret sympathy had made hervibrate—had touched her with the knowledge that he hadbrought something to light. After an instant he saw thatshe also divined the very reflection he was then making, and thisgave him a lively desire, a grateful, happy desire, to appear tohave nothing to conceal. For herself, it determined herstill more to put an end to her momentary visit. But beforeshe had passed to the door he exclaimed: “All right?How can a fellow be anything else who has just had such afind?”

She paused at this, still looking earnest and asking:“What have you found?”

“Some ancient family papers, in a secret compartment ofmy writing-table.” And he took up the packet he hadleft out, holding it before her eyes. “A lot of otherthings like that.”

“What are they?” murmured Mrs. Ryves.

“I haven’t the least idea. They’resealed.”

“You haven’t broken the seals?” She had comefurther back.

“I haven’t had time; it only happened ten minutesago.”

“I knew it,” said Mrs. Ryves, more gaily now.

“What did you know?”

“That you were in some predicament.”

“You’re extraordinary. I never heard ofanything so miraculous; down two flights of stairs.”

“Are you in a quandary?” the visitorasked.

“Yes, about giving them back.” Peter Baronstood smiling at her and rapping his packet on the palm of hishand. “What do you advise?”

She herself smiled now, with her eyes on the sealedparcel. “Back to whom?”

“The man of whom I bought the table.”

“Ah then, they’re not from yourfamily?”

“No indeed, the piece of furniture in which they werehidden is not an ancestral possession. I bought it atsecond hand—you see it’s old—the other day inthe King’s Road. Obviously the man who sold it to mesold me more than he meant; he had no idea (from his own point ofview it was stupid of him), that there was a hidden chamber orthat mysterious documents were buried there. Ought I to goand tell him? It’s rather a nice question.”

“Are the papers of value?” Mrs. Ryvesinquired.

“I haven’t the least idea. But I canascertain by breaking a seal.”

“Don’t!” said Mrs. Ryves, with muchexpression. She looked grave again.

“It’s rather tantalising—it’s a bit ofa problem,” Baron went on, turning his packet over.

Mrs. Ryves hesitated. “Will you show me what youhave in your hand?”

He gave her the packet, and she looked at it and held it foran instant to her nose. “It has a queer, charming oldfragrance,” he said.

“Charming? It’s horrid.” Shehanded him back the packet, saying again more emphatically“Don’t!”

“Don’t break a seal?”

“Don’t give back the papers.”

“Is it honest to keep them?”

“Certainly. They’re yours as much as thepeople’s of the shop. They were in the hidden chamberwhen the table came to the shop, and the people had everyopportunity to find them out. Theydidn’t—therefore let them take theconsequences.”

Peter Baron reflected, diverted by her intensity. Shewas pale, with eyes almost ardent. “The table hadbeen in the place for years.”

“That proves the things haven’t beenmissed.”

“Let me show you how they were concealed,” herejoined; and he exhibited the ingenious recess and the workingof the curious spring. She was greatly interested, she grewexcited and became familiar; she appealed to him again not to doanything so foolish as to give up the papers, the rest of which,in their little blank, impenetrable covers, he placed in a rowbefore her. “They might be traced—theirhistory, their ownership,” he argued; to which she repliedthat this was exactly why he ought to be quiet. He declaredthat women had not the smallest sense of honour, and she retortedthat at any rate they have other perceptions more delicate thanthose of men. He admitted that the papers might be rubbish,and she conceded that nothing was more probable; yet when heoffered to settle the point off-hand she caught him by the wrist,acknowledging that, absurd as it was, she was nervous.Finally she put the whole thing on the ground of his just doingher a favour. She asked him to retain the papers, to besilent about them, simply because it would please her. Thatwould be reason enough. Baron’s acquaintance, hisagreeable relations with her, advanced many steps in thetreatment of this question; an element of friendly candour madeits way into their discussion of it.

“I can’t make out why it matters to you, one wayor the other, nor why you should think it worth talkingabout,” the young man reasoned.

“Neither can I. It’s just a whim.”

“Certainly, if it will give you any pleasure, I’llsay nothing at the shop.”

“That’s charming of you, and I’m verygrateful. I see now that this was why the spirit moved meto come up—to save them,” Mrs. Ryves went on.She added, moving away, that now she had saved them she mustreally go.

“To save them for what, if I mayn’t break theseals?” Baron asked.

“I don’t know—for a generoussacrifice.”

“Why should it be generous? What’s atstake?” Peter demanded, leaning against the doorpost as shestood on the landing.

“I don’t know what, but I feel as if something orother were in peril. Burn them up!” she exclaimedwith shining eyes.

“Ah, you ask too much—I’m so curious aboutthem!”

“Well, I won’t ask more than I ought, andI’m much obliged to you for your promise to be quiet.I trust to your discretion. Good-by.”

“You ought to reward my discretion,” saidBaron, coming out to the landing.

She had partly descended the staircase and she stopped,leaning against the baluster and smiling up at him.“Surely you’ve had your reward in the honour of myvisit.”

“That’s delightful as far as it goes. Butwhat will you do for me if I burn the papers?”

Mrs. Ryves considered a moment. “Burn them firstand you’ll see!”

On this she went rapidly downstairs, and Baron, to whom theanswer appeared inadequate and the proposition indeed in thatform grossly unfair, returned to his room. The vivacity ofher interest in a question in which she had discoverably nothingat stake mystified, amused and, in addition, irresistibly charmedhim. She was delicate, imaginative, inflammable, quick tofeel, quick to act. He didn’t complain of it, it wasthe way he liked women to be; but he was not impelled for thehour to commit the sealed packets to the flames. He droppedthem again into their secret well, and after that he wentout. He felt restless and excited; another day was lost forwork—the dreadful job to be performed for Mr. Locket wasstill further off.

III.

Ten days after Mrs. Ryves’svisit he paid by appointment another call on the editor of thePromiscuous. He found him in the little wainscoted Chelseahouse, which had to Peter’s sense the smoky brownness of anold pipebowl, surrounded with all the emblems of hisoffice—a litter of papers, a hedge of encyclopædias,a photographic gallery of popular contributors—and hepromised at first to consume very few of the moments for which somany claims competed. It was Mr. Locket himself however whopresently made the interview spacious, gave it air afterdiscovering that poor Baron had come to tell him something moreinteresting than that he couldn’t after all patch up histale. Peter had begun with this, had intimated respectfullythat it was a case in which both practice and principle rebelled,and then, perceiving how little Mr. Locket was affected by hisaudacity, had felt weak and slightly silly, left with his heroismon his hands. He had armed himself for a struggle, but thePromiscuous didn’t even protest, and there would have beennothing for him but to go away with the prospect of never comingagain had he not chanced to say abruptly, irrelevantly, as he gotup from his chair:

“Do you happen to be at all interested in Sir DominickFerrand?”

Mr. Locket, who had also got up, looked over hisglasses. “The late Sir Dominick?”

“The only one; you know the family’sextinct.”

Mr. Locket shot his young friend another sharp glance, asilent retort to the glibness of this information.“Very extinct indeed. I’m afraid the subjecttoday would scarcely be regarded as attractive.”

“Are you very sure?” Baron asked.

Mr. Locket leaned forward a little, with his fingertips on histable, in the attitude of giving permission to retire.“I might consider the question in a specialconnection.” He was silent a minute, in a way thatrelegated poor Peter to the general; but meeting the youngman’s eyes again he asked: “Areyou—a—thinking of proposing an article uponhim?”

“Not exactly proposing it—because I don’tyet quite see my way; but the idea rather appeals tome.”

Mr. Locket emitted the safe assertion that this eminentstatesman had been a striking figure in his day; then he added:“Have you been studying him?”

“I’ve been dipping into him.”

“I’m afraid he’s scarcely a question of thehour,” said Mr. Locket, shuffling papers together.

“I think I could make him one,” Peter Barondeclared.

Mr. Locket stared again; he was unable to repress anunattenuated “You?”

“I have some new material,” said the young man,colouring a little. “That often freshens up an oldstory.”

“It buries it sometimes. It’s often onlyanother tombstone.”

“That depends upon what it is. However,”Peter added, “the documents I speak of would be a crushingmonument.”

Mr. Locket, hesitating, shot another glance under hisglasses. “Do you alludeto—a—revelations?”

“Very curious ones.”

Mr. Locket, still on his feet, had kept his body at the bowingangle; it was therefore easy for him after an instant to bend alittle further and to sink into his chair with a movement of hishand toward the seat Baron had occupied. Baron resumedpossession of this convenience, and the conversation took a freshstart on a basis which such an extension of privilege couldrender but little less humiliating to our young man. He hadmatured no plan of confiding his secret to Mr. Locket, and he hadreally come out to make him conscientiously that otherannouncement as to which it appeared that so much artisticagitation had been wasted. He had indeed during the pastdays—days of painful indecision—appealed inimagination to the editor of the Promiscuous, as he had appealedto other sources of comfort; but his scruples turned their faceupon him from quarters high as well as low, and if on the onehand he had by no means made up his mind not to mention hisstrange knowledge, he had still more left to the determination ofthe moment the question of how he should introduce thesubject. He was in fact too nervous to decide; he only feltthat he needed for his peace of mind to communicate hisdiscovery. He wanted an opinion, the impression of somebodyelse, and even in this intensely professional presence, fiveminutes after he had begun to tell his queer story, he feltrelieved of half his burden. His story was very queer; hecould take the measure of that himself as he spoke; butwouldn’t this very circumstance qualify it for thePromiscuous?

“Of course the letters may be forgeries,” said Mr.Locket at last.

“I’ve no doubt that’s what many people willsay.”

“Have they been seen by any expert?”

“No indeed; they’ve been seen bynobody.”

“Have you got any of them with you?”

“No; I felt nervous about bringing them out.”

“That’s a pity. I should have liked thetestimony of my eyes.”

“You may have it if you’ll come to my rooms.If you don’t care to do that without a further guaranteeI’ll copy you out some passages.”

“Select a few of the worst!” Mr. Locketlaughed. Over Baron’s distressing information he hadbecome quite human and genial. But he added in a momentmore dryly: “You know they ought to be seen by anexpert.”

“That’s exactly what I dread,” saidPeter.

“They’ll be worth nothing to me if they’renot.”

Peter communed with his innermost spirit. “Howmuch will they be worth to me if theyare?”

Mr. Locket turned in his study-chair. “I shouldrequire to look at them before answering thatquestion.”

“I’ve been to the British museum—there aremany of his letters there. I’ve obtained permissionto see them, and I’ve compared everything carefully.I repudiate the possibility of forgery. No sign ofgenuineness is wanting; there are details, down to the verypostmarks, that no forger could have invented. Besides,whose interest could it conceivably have been? A labor ofunspeakable difficulty, and all for what advantage? Thereare so many letters, too—twenty-seven in all.”

“Lord, what an ass!” Mr. Locket exclaimed.

“It will be one of the strangest post-mortem revelationsof which history preserves the record.”

Mr. Locket, grave now, worried with a paper-knife the creviceof a drawer. “It’s very odd. But to beworth anything such documents should be subjected to a searchingcriticism—I mean of the historical kind.”

“Certainly; that would be the task of the writerintroducing them to the public.”

Again Mr. Locket considered; then with a smile he lookedup. “You had better give up original composition andtake to buying old furniture.”

“Do you mean because it will pay better?”

“For you, I should think, original compositioncouldn’t pay worse. The creative faculty’s sorare.”

“I do feel tempted to turn my attention to realheroes,” Peter replied.

“I’m bound to declare that Sir Dominick Ferrandwas never one of mine. Flashy, crafty,second-rate—that’s how I’ve always readhim. It was never a secret, moreover, that his private lifehad its weak spots. He was a mere flash in thepan.”

“He speaks to the people of this country,” saidBaron.

“He did; but his voice—the voice, I mean, of hisprestige—is scarcely audible now.”

“They’re still proud of some of the things he didat the Foreign Office—the famous ‘exchange’with Spain, in the Mediterranean, which took Europe so bysurprise and by which she felt injured, especially when it becameapparent how much we had the best of the bargain. Then thesudden, unexpected show of force by which he imposed on theUnited States our interpretation of that tiresome treaty—Icould never make out what it was about. These were bothmatters that no one really cared a straw about, but he made everyone feel as if they cared; the nation rose to the way he playedhis trumps—it was uncommon. He was one of the few menwe’ve had, in our period, who took Europe, or took America,by surprise, made them jump a bit; and the country liked hisdoing it—it was a pleasant change. The rest of theworld considered that they knew in any case exactly what we woulddo, which was usually nothing at all. Say what you like,he’s still a high name; partly also, no doubt, on accountof other things his early success and early death, his political‘cheek’ and wit; his very appearance—hecertainly was handsome—and the possibilities (of futurepersonal supremacy) which it was the fashion at the time, whichit’s the fashion still, to say had passed away withhim. He had been twice at the Foreign Office; that alonewas remarkable for a man dying at forty-four. Whattherefore will the country think when it learns he wasvenal?”

Peter Baron himself was not angry with Sir Dominick Ferrand,who had simply become to him (he had been “readingup” feverishly for a week) a very curious subject ofpsychological study; but he could easily put himself in the placeof that portion of the public whose memory was long enough fortheir patriotism to receive a shock. It was some timefortunately since the conduct of public affairs had wanted formen of disinterested ability, but the extraordinary documentsconcealed (of all places in the world—it was as fantasticas a nightmare) in a “bargain” picked up atsecond-hand by an obscure scribbler, would be a calculable blowto the retrospective mind. Baron saw vividly that if theserelics should be made public the scandal, the horror, the chatterwould be immense. Immense would be also the contribution totruth, the rectification of history. He had felt forseveral days (and it was exactly what had made him so nervous) asif he held in his hand the key to public attention.

“There are too many things to explain,” Mr. Locketwent on, “and the singular provenance of your paperswould count almost overwhelmingly against them even if the otherobjections were met. There would be a perfect and probablya very complicated pedigree to trace. How did they get intoyour davenport, as you call it, and how long had they beenthere? What hands secreted them? what hands had, soincredibly, clung to them and preserved them? Who are thepersons mentioned in them? who are the correspondents, theparties to the nefarious transactions? You say thetransactions appear to be of two distinct kinds—some ofthem connected with public business and others involving obscurepersonal relations.”

“They all have this in common,” said Peter Baron,“that they constitute evidence of uneasiness, in someinstances of painful alarm, on the writer’s part, inrelation to exposure—the exposure in the one case, as Igather, of the fact that he had availed himself of officialopportunities to promote enterprises (public works and that sortof thing) in which he had a pecuniary stake. The dread ofthe light in the other connection is evidently different, andthese letters are the earliest in date. They are addressedto a woman, from whom he had evidently received money.”

Mr. Locket wiped his glasses. “Whatwoman?”

“I haven’t the least idea. There are lots ofquestions I can’t answer, of course; lots of identities Ican’t establish; lots of gaps I can’t fill. Butas to two points I’m clear, and they are the essentialones. In the first place the papers in my possession aregenuine; in the second place they’recompromising.”

With this Peter Baron rose again, rather vexed with himselffor having been led on to advertise his treasure (it was hisinterlocutor’s perfectly natural scepticism that producedthis effect), for he felt that he was putting himself in a falseposition. He detected in Mr. Locket’s studieddetachment the fermentation of impulses from which, unsuccessfulas he was, he himself prayed to be delivered.

Mr. Locket remained seated; he watched Baron go across theroom for his hat and umbrella. “Of course, thequestion would come up of whose property today such documentswould legally he. There are heirs, descendants, executorsto consider.”

“In some degree perhaps; but I’ve gone into that alittle. Sir Dominick Ferrand had no children, and he leftno brothers and no sisters. His wife survived him, but shedied ten years ago. He can have had no heirs and noexecutors to speak of, for he left no property.”

“That’s to his honour and against yourtheory,” said Mr. Locket.

“I have no theory. He left a largeish massof debt,” Peter Baron added. At this Mr. Locket gotup, while his visitor pursued: “So far as I can ascertain,though of course my inquiries have had to be very rapid andsuperficial, there is no one now living, directly or indirectlyrelated to the personage in question, who would be likely tosuffer from any steps in the direction of publicity. Ithappens to be a rare instance of a life that had, as it were, noloose ends. At least there are none perceptible atpresent.”

“I see, I see,” said Mr. Locket. “ButI don’t think I should care much for yourarticle.”

“What article?”

“The one you seem to wish to write, embodying this newmatter.”

“Oh, I don’t wish to write it!” Peterexclaimed. And then he bade his host good-by.

“Good-by,” said Mr. Locket. “Mind you,I don’t say that I think there’s nothing init.”

“You would think there was something in it if you wereto see my documents.”

“I should like to see the secret compartment,” thecaustic editor rejoined. “Copy me out someextracts.”

“To what end, if there’s no question of theirbeing of use to you?”

“I don’t say that—I might like the lettersthemselves.”

“Themselves?”

“Not as the basis of a paper, but just topublish—for a sensation.”

“They’d sell your number!” Baronlaughed.

“I daresay I should like to look at them,” Mr.Locket conceded after a moment. “When should I findyou at home?”

“Don’t come,” said the young man.“I make you no offer.”

“I might make you one,” the editorhinted. “Don’t trouble yourself; I shallprobably destroy them.” With this Peter Baron tookhis departure, waiting however just afterwards, in the streetnear the house, as if he had been looking out for a stray hansom,to which he would not have signalled had it appeared. Hethought Mr. Locket might hurry after him, but Mr. Locket seemedto have other things to do, and Peter Baron returned on foot toJersey Villas.

IV.

On the evening that succeeded thisapparently pointless encounter he had an interview moreconclusive with Mrs. Bundy, for whose shrewd and philosophic viewof life he had several times expressed, even to the good womanherself, a considerable relish. The situation at JerseyVillas (Mrs. Ryves had suddenly flown off to Dover) was such asto create in him a desire for moral support, and there was a kindof domestic determination in Mrs. Bundy which seemed, in general,to advertise it. He had asked for her on coming in, but hadbeen told she was absent for the hour; upon which he hadaddressed himself mechanically to the task of doing up hisdishonoured manuscript—the ingenious fiction about whichMr. Locket had been so stupid—for further adventures andnot improbable defeats. He passed a restless, ineffectiveafternoon, asking himself if his genius were a horrid delusion,looking out of his window for something that didn’t happen,something that seemed now to be the advent of a persuasive Mr.Locket and now the return, from an absence more disappointingeven than Mrs. Bundy’s, of his interesting neighbour of theparlours. He was so nervous and so depressed that he wasunable even to fix his mind on the composition of the note withwhich, on its next peregrination, it was necessary that hismanuscript should be accompanied. He was too nervous toeat, and he forgot even to dine; he forgot to light his candles,he let his fire go out, and it was in the melancholy chill of thelate dusk that Mrs. Bundy, arriving at last with his lamp, foundhim extended moodily upon his sofa. She had been informedthat he wished to speak to her, and as she placed on themalodorous luminary an oily shade of green pasteboard sheexpressed the friendly hope that there was nothing wrong with his’ealth.

The young man rose from his couch, pulling himself togethersufficiently to reply that his health was well enough but thathis spirits were down in his hoots. He had a strongdisposition to “draw” his landlady on the subject ofMrs. Ryves, as well as a vivid conviction that she constituted atheme as to which Mrs. Bundy would require little pressure totell him even more than she knew. At the same time he hatedto appear to pry into the secrets of his absent friend; todiscuss her with their bustling hostess resembled too much forhis taste a gossip with a tattling servant about an unconsciousemployer. He left out of account however Mrs. Bundy’sknowledge of the human heart, for it was this fine principle thatbroke down the barriers after he had reflected reassuringly thatit was not meddling with Mrs. Ryves’s affairs to try andfind out if she struck such an observer as happy. Crudely,abruptly, even a little blushingly, he put the direct question toMrs. Bundy, and this led tolerably straight to another question,which, on his spirit, sat equally heavy (they were indeed butdifferent phases of the same), and which the good woman answeredwith expression when she ejaculated: “Think it a libertyfor you to run down for a few hours? If she do, my dearsir, just send her to me to talk to!” As regardshappiness indeed she warned Baron against imposing too high astandard on a young thing who had been through so much, andbefore he knew it he found himself, without the responsibility ofchoice, in submissive receipt of Mrs. Bundy’s version ofthis experience. It was an interesting picture, though ithad its infirmities, one of them congenital and consisting of thefact that it had sprung essentially from the virginal brain ofMiss Teagle. Amplified, edited, embellished by the richergenius of Mrs. Bundy, who had incorporated with it and nowliberally introduced copious interleavings of Miss Teagle’sown romance, it gave Peter Baron much food for meditation, at thesame time that it only half relieved his curiosity about thecauses of the charming woman’s underlyingstrangeness. He sounded this note experimentally in Mrs.Bundy’s ear, but it was easy to see that it didn’treverberate in her fancy. She had no idea of the picture itwould have been natural for him to desire that Mrs. Ryves shouldpresent to him, and she was therefore unable to estimate thepoints in respect to which his actual impression wasirritating. She had indeed no adequate conception of theintellectual requirements of a young man in love. Shecouldn’t tell him why their faultless friend was soisolated, so unrelated, so nervously, shrinkingly proud. Onthe other hand she could tell him (he knew it already) that shehad passed many years of her life in the acquisition ofaccomplishments at a seat of learning no less remote thanBoulogne, and that Miss Teagle had been intimately acquaintedwith the late Mr. Everard Ryves, who was a “mostrising” young man in the city, not making any year lessthan his clear twelve hundred. “Now that heisn’t there to make them, his mourning widow can’tlive as she had then, can she?” Mrs. Bundy asked.

Baron was not prepared to say that she could, but he thoughtof another way she might live as he sat, the next day, in thetrain which rattled him down to Dover. The place, as heapproached it, seemed bright and breezy to him; his roamings hadbeen neither far enough nor frequent enough to make thecockneyfied coast insipid. Mrs. Bundy had of course givenhim the address he needed, and on emerging from the station hewas on the point of asking what direction he should take.His attention however at this moment was drawn away by the bustleof the departing boat. He had been long enough shut up inLondon to be conscious of refreshment in the mere act of turninghis face to Paris. He wandered off to the pier in companywith happier tourists and, leaning on a rail, watched enviouslythe preparation, the agitation of foreign travel. It wasfor some minutes a foretaste of adventure; but, ah, when was heto have the very draught? He turned away as he dropped thisinterrogative sigh, and in doing so perceived that in anotherpart of the pier two ladies and a little boy were gathered withsomething of the same wistfulness. The little boy indeedhappened to look round for a moment, upon which, with thekeenness of the predatory age, he recognised in our young man asource of pleasures from which he lately had been weaned.He bounded forward with irrepressible cries of“Geegee!” and Peter lifted him aloft for anembrace. On putting him down the pilgrim from Jersey Villasstood confronted with a sensibly severe Miss Teagle, who hadfollowed her little charge. “What’s the matterwith the old woman?” he asked himself as he offered her ahand which she treated as the merest detail. Whatever itwas, it was (and very properly, on the part of a loyalsuivante) the same complaint as that of her employer, towhom, from a distance, for Mrs. Ryves had not advanced an inch,he flourished his hat as she stood looking at him with a facethat he imagined rather white. Mrs. Ryves’s responseto this salutation was to shift her position in such a manner asto appear again absorbed in the Calais boat. Peter Baron,however, kept hold of the child, whom Miss Teagle artfullyendeavoured to wrest from him—a policy in which he wasaided by Sidney’s own rough but instinctive loyalty; and hewas thankful for the happy effect of being dragged by hisjubilant friend in the very direction in which he had tended forso many hours. Mrs. Ryves turned once more as he came near,and then, from the sweet, strained smile with which she asked himif he were on his way to France, he saw that if she had beenangry at his having followed her she had quickly got over it.

“No, I’m not crossing; but it came over me thatyou might be, and that’s why I hurried down—to catchyou before you were off.”

“Oh, we can’t go—more’s the pity; butwhy, if we could,” Mrs. Ryves inquired, “should youwish to prevent it?”

“Because I’ve something to ask you first,something that may take some time.” He saw now thather embarrassment had really not been resentful; it had beennervous, tremulous, as the emotion of an unexpected pleasuremight have been. “That’s really why Idetermined last night, without asking your leave first to pay youthis little visit—that and the intense desire for anotherbout of horse-play with Sidney. Oh, I’ve come to seeyou,” Peter Baron went on, “and I won’t makeany secret of the fact that I expect you to resign yourselfgracefully to the trial and give me all your time. Theday’s lovely, and I’m ready to declare that the placeis as good as the day. Let me drink deep of these things,drain the cup like a man who hasn’t been out of London formonths and months. Let me walk with you and talk with youand lunch with you—I go back this afternoon. Give meall your hours in short, so that they may live in my memory asone of the sweetest occasions of life.”

The emission of steam from the French packet made such anuproar that Baron could breathe his passion into the youngwoman’s ear without scandalising the spectators; and thecharm which little by little it scattered over his fleeting visitproved indeed to be the collective influence of the conditions hehad put into words. “What is it you wish to askme?” Mrs. Ryves demanded, as they stood there together; towhich he replied that he would tell her all about it if she wouldsend Miss Teagle off with Sidney. Miss Teagle, who wasalways anticipating her cue, had already begun ostentatiously togaze at the distant shores of France and was easily enoughinduced to take an earlier start home and rise to theresponsibility of stopping on her way to contend with thebutcher. She had however to retire without Sidney, whoclung to his recovered prey, so that the rest of the episode wasseasoned, to Baron’s sense, by the importunate twitch ofthe child’s little, plump, cool hand. The friendswandered together with a conjugal air and Sidney not betweenthem, hanging wistfully, first, over the lengthened picture ofthe Calais boat, till they could look after it, as it movedrumbling away, in a spell of silence which seemed toconfess—especially when, a moment later, their eyesmet—that it produced the same fond fancy in each. Thepresence of the boy moreover was no hindrance to their talking ina manner that they made believe was very frank. Peter Baronpresently told his companion what it was he had taken a journeyto ask, and he had time afterwards to get over his discomfitureat her appearance of having fancied it might be somethinggreater. She seemed disappointed (but she was forgiving) onlearning from him that he had only wished to know if she judgedferociously his not having complied with her request to respectcertain seals.

“How ferociously do you suspect me of having judgedit?” she inquired.

“Why, to the extent of leaving the house the nextmoment.”

They were still lingering on the great granite pier when hetouched on this matter, and she sat down at the end while thebreeze, warmed by the sunshine, ruffled the purple sea. Shecoloured a little and looked troubled, and after an instant sherepeated interrogatively: “The next moment?”

“As soon as I told you what I had done. I wasscrupulous about this, you will remember; I went straightdownstairs to confess to you. You turned away from me,saying nothing; I couldn’t imagine—as I vow Ican’t imagine now—why such a matter should appear soclosely to touch you. I went out on some business and whenI returned you had quitted the house. It had all the lookof my having offended you, of your wishing to get away fromme. You didn’t even give me time to tell you how itwas that, in spite of your advice, I determined to see for myselfwhat my discovery represented. You must do me justice andhear what determined me.”

Mrs. Ryves got up from her scat and asked him, as a particularfavour, not to allude again to his discovery. It was noconcern of hers at all, and she had no warrant for prying intohis secrets. She was very sorry to have been for a momentso absurd as to appear to do so, and she humbly begged his pardonfor her meddling. Saying this she walked on with a charmingcolour in her cheek, while he laughed out, though he was reallybewildered, at the endless capriciousness of women.Fortunately the incident didn’t spoil the hour, in whichthere were other sources of satisfaction, and they took theircourse to her lodgings with such pleasant little pauses andexcursions by the way as permitted her to show him the objects ofinterest at Dover. She let him stop at awine-merchant’s and buy a bottle for luncheon, of which, inits order, they partook, together with a pudding invented by MissTeagle, which, as they hypocritically swallowed it, made themlook at each other in an intimacy of indulgence. They cameout again and, while Sidney grubbed in the gravel of the shore,sat selfishly on the Parade, to the disappointment of MissTeagle, who had fixed her hopes on a fly and a ladylike visit tothe castle. Baron had his eye on his watch—he had tothink of his train and the dismal return and many othermelancholy things; but the sea in the afternoon light was a moreappealing picture; the wind had gone down, the Channel wascrowded, the sails of the ships were white in the purpledistance. The young man had asked his companion (he hadasked her before) when she was to come back to Jersey Villas, andshe had said that she should probably stay at Dover anotherweek. It was dreadfully expensive, but it was doing thechild all the good in the world, and if Miss Teagle could go upfor some things she should probably be able to manage anextension. Earlier in the day she had said that she perhapswouldn’t return to Jersey Villas at all, or only return towind up her connection with Mrs. Bundy. At another momentshe had spoken of an early date, an immediate reoccupation of thewonderful parlours. Baron saw that she had no plan, no realreasons, that she was vague and, in secret, worried and nervous,waiting for something that didn’t depend on herself.A silence of several minutes had fallen upon them while theywatched the shining sails; to which Mrs. Ryves put an end byexclaiming abruptly, but without completing her sentence:“Oh, if you had come to tell me you had destroyedthem—”

“Those terrible papers? I like the way you talkabout ‘destroying!’ You don’t even knowwhat they are.”

“I don’t want to know; they put me into astate.”

“What sort of a state?”

“I don’t know; they haunt me.”

“They haunted me; that was why, early one morning,suddenly, I couldn’t keep my hands off them. I hadtold you I wouldn’t touch them. I had deferred toyour whim, your superstition (what is it?) but at last they gotthe better of me. I had lain awake all night threshingabout, itching with curiosity. It made me ill; my ownnerves (as I may say) were irritated, my capacity to work wasgone. It had come over me in the small hours in the shapeof an obsession, a fixed idea, that there was nothing in theridiculous relics and that my exaggerated scruples were making afool of me. It was ten to one they were rubbish, they werevain, they were empty; that they had been even a practical jokeon the part of some weak-minded gentleman of leisure, the formerpossessor of the confounded davenport. The longer I hoveredabout them with such precautions the longer I was taken in, andthe sooner I exposed their insignificance the sooner I should getback to my usual occupations. This conviction made my handso uncontrollable that that morning before breakfast I broke oneof the seals. It took me but a few minutes to perceive thatthe contents were not rubbish; the little bundle contained oldletters—very curious old letters.”

“I know—I know; ‘private andconfidential.’ So you broke the otherseals?” Mrs. Ryves looked at him with the strangeapprehension he had seen in her eyes when she appeared at hisdoor the moment after his discovery.

“You know, of course, because I told you an hour later,though you would let me tell you very little.”

Baron, as he met this queer gaze, smiled hard at her toprevent her guessing that he smarted with the fine reproachconveyed in the tone of her last words; but she appeared able toguess everything, for she reminded him that she had not had towait that morning till he came downstairs to know what hadhappened above, but had shown him at the moment how she had beenconscious of it an hour before, had passed on her side the sametormented night as he, and had had to exert extraordinaryself-command not to rush up to his rooms while the study of theopen packets was going on. “You’re sosensitively organised and you’ve such mysterious powersthat you re uncanny,” Baron declared.

“I feel what takes place at a distance; that’sall.”

“One would think somebody you liked was indanger.”

“I told you that that was what was present to me the dayI came up to see you.”

“Oh, but you don’t like me so much as that,”Baron argued, laughing.

She hesitated. “No, I don’t know that Ido.”

“It must be for someone else—the other personconcerned. The other day, however, you wouldn’t letme tell you that person’s name.”

Mrs. Ryves, at this, rose quickly. “I don’twant to know it; it’s none of my business.”

“No, fortunately, I don’t think it is,”Baron rejoined, walking with her along the Parade. She hadSidney by the hand now, and the young man was on the other sideof her. They moved toward the station—she had offeredto go part of the way. “But with your miraculous giftit’s a wonder you haven’t divined.”

“I only divine what I want,” said Mrs. Ryves.

“That’s very convenient!” exclaimed Peter,to whom Sidney had presently come round again. “Only,being thus in the dark, it’s difficult to see your motivefor wishing the papers destroyed.”

Mrs. Ryves meditated, looking fixedly at the ground.“I thought you might do it to oblige me.”

“Does it strike you that such an expectation, formed insuch conditions, is reasonable?”

Mrs. Ryves stopped short, and this time she turned on him theclouded clearness of her eyes. “What do you mean todo with them?”

It was Peter Baron’s turn to meditate, which he did, onthe empty asphalt of the Parade (the “season,” atDover, was not yet), where their shadows were long in theafternoon light. He was under such a charm as he had neverknown, and he wanted immensely to be able to reply:“I’ll do anything you like if you’ll loveme.” These words, however, would have represented aresponsibility and have constituted what was vulgarly termed anoffer. An offer of what? he quickly asked himself here, ashe had already asked himself after making in spirit other awkwarddashes in the same direction—of what but his poverty, hisobscurity, his attempts that had come to nothing, his abilitiesfor which there was nothing to show? Mrs. Ryves was notexactly a success, but she was a greater success than PeterBaron. Poor as he was he hated the sordid (he knew shedidn’t love it), and he felt small for talking ofmarriage. Therefore he didn’t put the question in thewords it would have pleased him most to hear himself utter, buthe compromised, with an angry young pang, and said to her:“What will you do for me if I put an end tothem?”

She shook her head sadly—it was always her prettiestmovement. “I can promise nothing—oh, no, Ican’t promise! We must part now,” sheadded. “You’ll miss your train.”

He looked at his watch, taking the hand she held out tohim. She drew it away quickly, and nothing then was lefthim, before hurrying to the station, but to catch up Sidney andsqueeze him till he uttered a little shriek. On the wayback to town the situation struck him as grotesque.

V.

It tormented him so the nextmorning that after threshing it out a little further he felt hehad something of a grievance. Mrs. Ryves’sintervention had made him acutely uncomfortable, for she hadtaken the attitude of exerting pressure without, it appeared,recognising on his part an equal right. She had imposedherself as an influence, yet she held herself aloof as aparticipant; there were things she looked to him to do for her,yet she could tell him of no good that would come to him from thedoing. She should either have had less to say or have beenwilling to say more, and he asked himself why he should be thesport of her moods and her mysteries. He perceived herknack of punctual interference to be striking, but it was justthis apparent infallibility that he resented. Whydidn’t she set up at once as a professional clairvoyant andeke out her little income more successfully? In purelyprivate life such a gift was disconcerting; her divinations, herevasions disturbed at any rate his own tranquillity.

What disturbed it still further was that he received early inthe day a visit from Mr. Locket, who, leaving him under noillusion as to the grounds of such an honour, remarked as soon ashe had got into the room or rather while he still panted on thesecond flight and the smudged little slavey held openBaron’s door, that he had taken up his young friend’sinvitation to look at Sir Dominick Ferrand’s letters forhimself. Peter drew them forth with a promptitude intendedto show that he recognised the commercial character of the calland without attenuating the inconsequence of this departure fromthe last determination he had expressed to Mr. Locket. Heshowed his visitor the davenport and the hidden recess, and hesmoked a cigarette, humming softly, with a sense of unwontedadvantage and triumph, while the cautious editor sat silent andhandled the papers. For all his caution Mr. Locket wasunable to keep a warmer light out of his judicial eye as he saidto Baron at last with sociable brevity—a tone that tookmany things for granted: “I’ll take them home withme—they require much attention.”

The young man looked at him a moment. “Do youthink they’re genuine?” He didn’t mean tobe mocking, he meant not to be; but the words sounded so to hisown ear, and he could see that they produced that effect on Mr.Locket.

“I can’t in the least determine. I shallhave to go into them at my leisure, and that’s why I askyou to lend them to me.”

He had shuffled the papers together with a movement charged,while he spoke, with the air of being preliminary to that ofthrusting them into a little black bag which he had brought withhim and which, resting on the shelf of the davenport, struckPeter, who viewed it askance, as an object darklyeditorial. It made our young man, somehow, suddenlyapprehensive; the advantage of which he had just been consciouswas about to be transferred by a quiet process of legerdemain toa person who already had advantages enough. Baron, inshort, felt a deep pang of anxiety; he couldn’t have saidwhy. Mr. Locket took decidedly too many things for granted,and the explorer of Sir Dominick Ferrand’s irregularitiesremembered afresh how clear he had been after all about hisindisposition to traffic in them. He asked his visitor towhat end he wished to remove the letters, since on the one handthere was no question now of the article in the Promiscuous whichwas to reveal their existence, and on the other he himself, astheir owner, had a thousand insurmountable scruples about puttingthem into circulation.

Mr. Locket looked over his spectacles as over the battlementsof a fortress. “I’m not thinking of theend—I’m thinking of the beginning. A fewglances have assured me that such documents ought to be submittedto some competent eye.”

“Oh, you mustn’t show them to anyone!” Baronexclaimed.

“You may think me presumptuous, but the eye that Iventure to allude to in those terms—”

“Is the eye now fixed so terribly on me?”Peter laughingly interrupted. “Oh, it would beinteresting, I confess, to know how they strike a man of youracuteness!” It had occurred to him that by such aconcession he might endear himself to a literary umpire hithertoimplacable. There would be no question of his publishingSir Dominick Ferrand, but he might, in due acknowledgment ofservices rendered, form the habit of publishing PeterBaron. “How long would it be your idea to retainthem?” he inquired, in a manner which, he immediatelybecame aware, was what incited Mr. Locket to begin stuffing thepapers into his bag. With this perception he came quicklycloser and, laying his hand on the gaping receptacle, lightlydrew its two lips together. In this way the two men stoodfor a few seconds, touching, almost in the attitude of combat,looking hard into each other’s eyes.

The tension was quickly relieved however by the surprisedflush which mantled on Mr. Locket’s brow. He fellback a few steps with an injured dignity that might have been aprotest against physical violence. “Really, my dearyoung sir, your attitude is tantamount to an accusation ofintended bad faith. Do you think I want to steal theconfounded things?” In reply to such a challengePeter could only hastily declare that he was guilty of nodiscourteous suspicion—he only wanted a limit named, apledge of every precaution against accident. Mr. Locketadmitted the justice of the demand, assured him he would restorethe property within three days, and completed, with Peter’sassistance, his little arrangements for removing itdiscreetly. When he was ready, his treacherous reticuledistended with its treasures, he gave a lingering look at theinscrutable davenport. “It’s how they ever gotinto that thing that puzzles one’s brain!”

“There was some concatenation of circumstances thatwould doubtless seem natural enough if it were explained, butthat one would have to remount the stream of time toascertain. To one course I have definitely made up my mind:not to make any statement or any inquiry at the shop. Isimply accept the mystery,” said Peter, rather grandly.

“That would be thought a cheap escape if you were to putit into a story,” Mr. Locket smiled.

“Yes, I shouldn’t offer the story toyou. I shall be impatient till I see my papersagain,” the young man called out, as his visitor hurrieddownstairs.

That evening, by the last delivery, he received, under theDover postmark, a letter that was not from Miss Teagle. Itwas a slightly confused but altogether friendly note, writtenthat morning after breakfast, the ostensible purpose of which wasto thank him for the amiability of his visit, to express regretat any appearance the writer might have had of meddling with whatdidn’t concern her, and to let him know that the eveningbefore, after he had left her, she had in a moment of inspirationgot hold of the tail of a really musical idea—a perfectaccompaniment for the song he had so kindly given her. Shehad scrawled, as a specimen, a few bars at the end of her note,mystic, mocking musical signs which had no sense for hercorrespondent. The whole letter testified to a restless butrather pointless desire to remain in communication withhim. In answering her, however, which he did that nightbefore going to bed, it was on this bright possibility of theircollaboration, its advantages for the future of each of them,that Baron principally expatiated. He spoke of this futurewith an eloquence of which he would have defended the sincerity,and drew of it a picture extravagantly rich. The nextmorning, as he was about to settle himself to tasks for some timeterribly neglected, with a sense that after all it was rather arelief not to be sitting so close to Sir Dominick Ferrand, whohad become dreadfully distracting; at the very moment at which hehabitually addressed his preliminary invocation to the muse, hewas agitated by the arrival of a telegram which proved to be anurgent request from Mr. Locket that he would immediately comedown and see him. This represented, for poor Baron, whosefunds were very low, another morning sacrificed, but somehow itdidn’t even occur to him that he might impose his own timeupon the editor of the Promiscuous, the keeper of the keys ofrenown. He had some of the plasticity of the rawcontributor. He gave the muse another holiday, feeling shewas really ashamed to take it, and in course of time foundhimself in Mr. Locket’s own chair at Mr. Locket’s owntable—so much nobler an expanse than the slippery slope ofthe davenport—considering with quick intensity, in thewhite flash of certain words just brought out by his host, thequantity of happiness, of emancipation that might reside in ahundred pounds.

Yes, that was what it meant: Mr. Locket, in the twenty-fourhours, had discovered so much in Sir Dominick’s literaryremains that his visitor found him primed with an offer. Ahundred pounds would be paid him that day, that minute, and noquestions would be either asked or answered. “I takeall the risks, I take all the risks,” the editor of thePromiscuous repeated. The letters were out on the table,Mr. Locket was on the hearthrug, like an orator on a platform,and Peter, under the influence of his sudden ultimatum, haddropped, rather weakly, into the seat which happened to benearest and which, as he became conscious it moved on a pivot, hewhirled round so as to enable himself to look at his tempter withan eye intended to be cold. What surprised him most was tofind Mr. Locket taking exactly the line about the expediency ofpublication which he would have expected Mr. Locket not totake. “Hush it all up; a barren scandal, an offencethat can’t be remedied, is the thing in the world thatleast justifies an airing—” some such line as thatwas the line he would have thought natural to a man whose lifewas spent in weighing questions of propriety and who had only theother day objected, in the light of this virtue, to a work of themost disinterested art. But the author of thatincorruptible masterpiece had put his finger on the place insaying to his interlocutor on the occasion of his last visitthat, if given to the world in the pages of the Promiscuous, SirDominick’s aberrations would sell the edition. It wasnot necessary for Mr. Locket to reiterate to his young friend hisphrase about their making a sensation. If he wished topurchase the “rights,” as theatrical people said, itwas not to protect a celebrated name or to lock them up in acupboard. That formula of Baron’s covered all theground, and one edition was a low estimate of the probableperformance of the magazine.

Peter left the letters behind him and, on withdrawing from theeditorial presence, took a long walk on the Embankment. Hisimpressions were at war with each other—he was flurried bypossibilities of which he yet denied the existence. He hadconsented to trust Mr. Locket with the papers a day or twolonger, till he should have thought out the terms on which hemight—in the event of certain occurrences—be inducedto dispose of them. A hundred pounds were not thisgentleman’s last word, nor perhaps was mere unreasoningintractability Peter’s own. He sighed as he took nonote of the pictures made by barges—sighed because it allmight mean money. He needed money bitterly; he owed it indisquieting quarters. Mr. Locket had put it before him thathe had a high responsibility—that he might vindicate thedisfigured truth, contribute a chapter to the history ofEngland. “You haven’t a right to suppress suchmomentous facts,” the hungry little editor had declared,thinking how the series (he would spread it into three numbers)would be the talk of the town. If Peter had money he mighttreat himself to ardour, to bliss. Mr. Locket had said, nodoubt justly enough, that there were ever so many questions onewould have to meet should one venture to play so daring agame. These questions, embarrassments, dangers—thedanger, for instance, of the cropping-up of some lurkinglitigious relative—he would take over unreservedly and bearthe brunt of dealing with. It was to be remembered that thepapers were discredited, vitiated by their childish pedigree;such a preposterous origin, suggesting, as he had hinted before,the feeble ingenuity of a third-rate novelist, was a thing heshould have to place himself at the positive disadvantage ofbeing silent about. He would rather give no account of thematter at all than expose himself to the ridicule that such astory would infallibly excite. Couldn’t one see themin advance, the clever, taunting things the daily and weeklypapers would say? Peter Baron had his guileless side, buthe felt, as he worried with a stick that betrayed him the graniteparapets of the Thames, that he was not such a fool as not toknow how Mr. Locket would “work” the mystery of hismarvellous find. Nothing could help it on better with thepublic than the impenetrability of the secret attached toit. If Mr. Locket should only be able to kick up dustenough over the circumstances that had guided his hand hisfortune would literally be made. Peter thought a hundredpounds a low bid, yet he wondered how the Promiscuous could bringitself to offer such a sum—so large it loomed in the lightof literary remuneration as hitherto revealed to our youngman. The explanation of this anomaly was of course that theeditor shrewdly saw a dozen ways of getting his money back.There would be in the “sensation,” at a later stage,the making of a book in large type—the book of the hour;and the profits of this scandalous volume or, if one preferredthe name, this reconstruction, before an impartial posterity, ofa great historical humbug, the sum “down,” in otherwords, that any lively publisher would give for it, figuredvividly in Mr. Locket’s calculations. It wastherefore altogether an opportunity of dealing at first hand withthe lively publisher that Peter was invited to forego.Peter gave a masterful laugh, rejoicing in his heart that, on thespot, in the repaire he had lately quitted, he had notbeen tempted by a figure that would have approximatelyrepresented the value of his property. It was a good job,he mentally added as he turned his face homeward, that there wasso little likelihood of his having to struggle with thatparticular pressure.

VI.

When, half an hour later, heapproached Jersey Villas, he noticed that the house-door wasopen; then, as he reached the gate, saw it make a frame for anunexpected presence. Mrs. Ryves, in her bonnet and jacket,looked out from it as if she were expecting something—as ifshe had been passing to and fro to watch. Yet when he hadexpressed to her that it was a delightful welcome she repliedthat she had only thought there might possibly be a cab insight. He offered to go and look for one, upon which itappeared that after all she was not, as yet at least, inneed. He went back with her into her sitting-room, whereshe let him know that within a couple of days she had seenclearer what was best; she had determined to quit Jersey Villasand had come up to take away her things, which she had just beenpacking and getting together.

“I wrote you last night a charming letter in answer toyours,” Baron said. “You didn’t mentionin yours that you were coming up.”

“It wasn’t your answer that brought me. Ithadn’t arrived when I came away.”

“You’ll see when you get back that my letter ischarming.”

“I daresay.” Baron had observed that theroom was not, as she had intimated, in confusion—Mrs.Ryves’s preparations for departure were not striking.She saw him look round and, standing in front of the firelessgrate with her hands behind her, she suddenly asked: “Wherehave you come from now?”

“From an interview with a literary friend.”

“What are you concocting between you?”

“Nothing at all. We’ve fallen out—wedon’t agree.”

“Is he a publisher?”

“He’s an editor.”

“Well, I’m glad you don’t agree. Idon’t know what he wants, but, whatever it is, don’tdo it.”

“He must do what I want!” said Baron.

“And what’s that?”

“Oh, I’ll tell you when he has doneit!” Baron begged her to let him hear the“musical idea” she had mentioned in her letter; onwhich she took off her hat and jacket and, seating herself at herpiano, gave him, with a sentiment of which the very first notesthrilled him, the accompaniment of his song. She phrasedthe words with her sketchy sweetness, and he sat there as if hehad been held in a velvet vise, throbbing with the emotion,irrecoverable ever after in its freshness, of the young artist inthe presence for the first time of“production”—the proofs of his book, thehanging of his picture, the rehearsal of his play. When shehad finished he asked again for the same delight, and then formore music and for more; it did him such a world of good, kepthim quiet and safe, smoothed out the creases of his spirit.She dropped her own experiments and gave him immortal things, andhe lounged there, pacified and charmed, feeling the mean littleroom grow large and vague and happy possibilities comeback. Abruptly, at the piano, she called out to him:“Those papers of yours—the letters youfound—are not in the house?”

“No, they’re not in the house.”

“I was sure of it! No matter—it’s allright!” she added. She herself waspacified—trouble was a false note. Later he was onthe point of asking her how she knew the objects she hadmentioned were not in the house; but he let it pass. Thesubject was a profitless riddle—a puzzle that grewgrotesquely bigger, like some monstrosity seen in the darkness,as one opened one’s eyes to it. He closed hiseyes—he wanted another vision. Besides, she had shownhim that she had extraordinary senses—her explanation wouldhave been stranger than the fact. Moreover they had otherthings to talk about, in particular the question of her puttingoff her return to Dover till the morrow and dispensing meanwhilewith the valuable protection of Sidney. This was indeed butanother face of the question of her dining with him somewherethat evening (where else should she dine?)—accompanyinghim, for instance, just for an hour of Bohemia, in their deadlyrespectable lives, to a jolly little place in Soho. Mrs.Ryves declined to have her life abused, but in fact, at theproper moment, at the jolly little place, to which she didaccompany him—it dealt in macaroni and Chianti—thepair put their elbows on the crumpled cloth and, face to face,with their little emptied coffee-cups pushed away and the youngman’s cigarette lighted by her command, became increasinglyconfidential. They went afterwards to the theatre, in cheapplaces, and came home in “busses” and underumbrellas.

On the way back Peter Baron turned something over in his mindas he had never turned anything before; it was the question ofwhether, at the end, she would let him come into her sitting-roomfor five minutes. He felt on this point a passion ofsuspense and impatience, and yet for what would it be but to tellher how poor he was? This was literally the moment to sayit, so supremely depleted had the hour of Bohemia left him.Even Bohemia was too expensive, and yet in the course of the dayhis whole temper on the subject of certain fitnesses hadchanged. At Jersey Villas (it was near midnight, and Mrs.Ryves, scratching a light for her glimmering taper, had said:“Oh, yes, come in for a minute if you like!”), in herprecarious parlour, which was indeed, after the brilliances ofthe evening, a return to ugliness and truth, she let him standwhile he explained that he had certainly everything in the way offame and fortune still to gain, but that youth and love and faithand energy—to say nothing of her supremedearness—were all on his side. Why, if one’sbeginnings were rough, should one add to the hardness of theconditions by giving up the dream which, if she would only hearhim out, would make just the blessed difference? WhetherMrs. Ryves heard him out or not is a circumstance as to whichthis chronicle happens to be silent; but after he had gotpossession of both her hands and breathed into her face for amoment all the intensity of his tenderness—in the reliefand joy of utterance he felt it carry him like a risingflood—she checked him with better reasons, with a cold,sweet afterthought in which he felt there was somethingdeep. Her procrastinating head-shake was prettier thanever, yet it had never meant so many fears andpains—impossibilities and memories, independences andpieties, and a sort of uncomplaining ache for the ruin of afriendship that had been happy. She had liked him—ifshe hadn’t she wouldn’t have let him thinkso!—but she protested that she had not, in the odiousvulgar sense, “encouraged” him. Moreover shecouldn’t talk of such things in that place, at that hour,and she begged him not to make her regret her good-nature instaying over. There were peculiarities in her position,considerations insurmountable. She got rid of him with kindand confused words, and afterwards, in the dull, humiliatednight, he felt that he had been put in his place. Women inher situation, women who after having really loved and lost,usually lived on into the new dawns in which old ghosts stealaway. But there was something in his whimsical neighbourthat struck him as terribly invulnerable.

VII.

“I’ve had time to looka little further into what we’re prepared to do, and I findthe case is one in which I should consider the advisability ofgoing to an extreme length,” said Mr. Locket. JerseyVillas the next morning had had the privilege of again receivingthe editor of the Promiscuous, and he sat once more at thedavenport, where the bone of contention, in the shape of a large,loose heap of papers that showed how much they had been handled,was placed well in view. “We shall see our way tooffering you three hundred, but we shouldn’t, I mustpositively assure you, see it a single step further.”

Peter Baron, in his dressing-gown and slippers, with his handsin his pockets, crept softly about the room, repeating, below hisbreath and with inflections that for his own sake he endeavouredto make humorous: “Three hundred—threehundred.” His state of mind was far from hilarious,for he felt poor and sore and disappointed; but he wanted toprove to himself that he was gallant—was made, in generaland in particular, of undiscourageable stuff. The firstthing he had been aware of on stepping into his front room wasthat a four-wheeled cab, with Mrs. Ryves’s luggage upon it,stood at the door of No. 3. Permitting himself, behind hiscurtain, a pardonable peep, he saw the mistress of his thoughtscome out of the house, attended by Mrs. Bundy, and take her placein the modest vehicle. After this his eyes rested for along time on the sprigged cotton back of the landlady, who keptbobbing at the window of the cab an endlessly moralising oldhead. Mrs. Ryves had really taken flight—he had madeJersey Villas impossible for her—but Mrs. Bundy, with amagnanimity unprecedented in the profession, seemed to express abelief in the purity of her motives. Baron felt that hisown separation had been, for the present at least, effected;every instinct of delicacy prompted him to stand back.

Mr. Locket talked a long time, and Peter Baron listened andwaited. He reflected that his willingness to listen wouldprobably excite hopes in his visitor—hopes which he himselfwas ready to contemplate without a scruple. He felt no pityfor Mr. Locket and had no consideration for his suspense or forhis possible illusions; he only felt sick and forsaken and inwant of comfort and of money. Yet it was a kind of outrageto his dignity to have the knife held to his throat, and he wasirritated above all by the ground on which Mr. Locket put thequestion—the ground of a service rendered to historicaltruth. It might be—he wasn’t clear; it mightbe—the question was deep, too deep, probably, for hiswisdom; at any rate he had to control himself not to interruptangrily such dry, interested palaver, the false voice of commerceand of cant. He stared tragically out of the window and sawthe stupid rain begin to fall; the day was duller even than hisown soul, and Jersey Villas looked so sordidly hideous that itwas no wonder Mrs. Ryves couldn’t endure them.Hideous as they were he should have to tell Mrs. Bundy in thecourse of the day that he was obliged to seek humblerquarters. Suddenly he interrupted Mr. Locket; he observedto him: “I take it that if I should make you thisconcession the hospitality of the Promiscuous would be by thatvery fact unrestrictedly secured to me.”

Mr. Locket stared.“Hospitality—secured?” He thumbed theproposition as if it were a hard peach.

“I mean that of course you wouldn’t—incourtsey, in gratitude—keep on declining mythings.”

“I should give them my best attention—asI’ve always done in the past.”

Peter Baron hesitated. It was a case in which therewould have seemed to be some chance for the ideally shrewdaspirant in such an advantage as he possessed; but after a momentthe blood rushed into his face with the shame of the idea ofpleading for his productions in the name of anything but theirmerit. It was as if he had stupidly uttered evil ofthem. Nevertheless be added the interrogation:

“Would you for instance publish my littlestory?”

“The one I read (and objected to some features of) theother day? Do you mean—a—with thealteration?” Mr. Locket continued.

“Oh, no, I mean utterly without it. The pages youwant altered contain, as I explained to you very lucidly, Ithink, the very raison d’être of the work, andit would therefore, it seems to me, be an imbecility of the firstmagnitude to cancel them.” Peter had really renouncedall hope that his critic would understand what he meant, but,under favour of circumstances, he couldn’t forbear to tastethe luxury, which probably never again would come within hisreach, of being really plain, for one wild moment, with aneditor.

Mr. Locket gave a constrained smile. “Think of thescandal, Mr. Baron.”

“But isn’t this other scandal just whatyou’re going in for?”

“It will be a great public service.”

“You mean it will be a big scandal, whereas my poorstory would be a very small one, and that it’s only out ofa big one that money’s to be made.”

Mr. Locket got up—he too had his dignity tovindicate. “Such a sum as I offer you ought really tobe an offset against all claims.”

“Very good—I don’t mean to make any, sinceyou don’t really care for what I write. I take noteof your offer,” Peter pursued, “and I engage to giveyou to-night (in a few words left by my own hand at your house)my absolutely definite and final reply.”

Mr. Locket’s movements, as he hovered near the relics ofthe eminent statesman, were those of some feathered parentfluttering over a threatened nest. If he had brought hishuddled brood back with him this morning it was because he hadfelt sure enough of closing the bargain to be able to begraceful. He kept a glittering eye on the papers andremarked that he was afraid that before leaving them he mustelicit some assurance that in the meanwhile Peter would not placethem in any other hands. Peter, at this, gave a laugh ofharsher cadence than he intended, asking, justly enough, on whatprivilege his visitor rested such a demand and why he himself wasdisqualified from offering his wares to the highest bidder.“Surely you wouldn’t hawk such things about?”cried Mr. Locket; but before Baron had time to retort cynicallyhe added: “I’ll publish your little story.”

“Oh, thank you!”

“I’ll publish anything you’ll sendme,” Mr. Locket continued, as he went out. Peter hadbefore this virtually given his word that for the letters hewould treat only with the Promiscuous.

The young man passed, during a portion of the rest of the day,the strangest hours of his life. Yet he thought of themafterwards not as a phase of temptation, though they had beenfull of the emotion that accompanies an intense vision ofalternatives. The struggle was already over; it seemed tohim that, poor as he was, he was not poor enough to take Mr.Locket’s money. He looked at the opposed courses withthe self-possession of a man who has chosen, but thisself-possession was in itself the most exquisite ofexcitements. It was really a high revulsion and a sort ofnoble pity. He seemed indeed to have his finger upon thepulse of history and to be in the secret of the gods. Hehad them all in his hand, the tablets and the scales and thetorch. He couldn’t keep a character together, but hemight easily pull one to pieces. That would be“creative work” of a kind—he could reconstructthe character less pleasingly, could show an unknown side ofit. Mr. Locket had had a good deal to say aboutresponsibility; and responsibility in truth sat there with himall the morning, while he revolved in his narrow cage and,watching the crude spring rain on the windows, thought of thedismalness to which, at Dover, Mrs. Ryves was going back.This influence took in fact the form, put on the physiognomy ofpoor Sir Dominick Ferrand; he was at present as perceptible init, as coldly and strangely personal, as if he had been ahaunting ghost and had risen beside his own oldhearthstone. Our friend was accustomed to his company andindeed had spent so many hours in it of late, following him up atthe museum and comparing his different portraits, engravings andlithographs, in which there seemed to be conscious, pleading eyesfor the betrayer, that their queer intimacy had grown as close asan embrace. Sir Dominick was very dumb, but he was terriblein his dependence, and Peter would not have encouraged him by somuch curiosity nor reassured him by so much deference had it notbeen for the young man’s complete acceptance of theimpossibility of getting out of a tight place by exposing anindividual. It didn’t matter that the individual wasdead; it didn’t matter that he was dishonest. Peterfelt him sufficiently alive to suffer; he perceived therectification of history so conscientiously desired by Mr. Locketto be somehow for himself not an imperative task. It hadcome over him too definitely that in a case where one’ssuccess was to hinge upon an act of extradition it would ministermost to an easy conscience to let the success go. No,no—even should he be starving he couldn’t make moneyout of Sir Dominick’s disgrace. He was almostsurprised at the violence of the horror with which, as heshuffled mournfully about, the idea of any such profit inspiredhim. What was Sir Dominick to him after all? Hewished he had never come across him.

In one of his brooding pauses at the window—the windowout of which never again apparently should he see Mrs. Ryvesglide across the little garden with the step for which he hadliked her from the first—he became aware that the rain wasabout to intermit and the sun to make some grudging amends.This was a sign that he might go out; he had a vague perceptionthat there were things to be done. He had work to look for,and a cheaper lodging, and a new idea (every idea he had evercherished had left him), in addition to which the promised littleword was to be dropped at Mr. Locket’s door. Helooked at his watch and was surprised at the hour, for he hadnothing but a heartache to show for so much time. He wouldhave to dress quickly, but as he passed to his bedroom his eyewas caught by the little pyramid of letters which Mr. Locket hadconstructed on his davenport. They startled him and,staring at them, he stopped for an instant, half-amused,half-annoyed at their being still in existence. He had socompletely destroyed them in spirit that he had taken the act forgranted, and he was now reminded of the orderly stages of whichan intention must consist to be sincere. Baron went at thepapers with all his sincerity, and at his empty grate (wherethere lately had been no fire and he had only to remove ahorrible ornament of tissue-paper dear to Mrs. Bundy) he burnedthe collection with infinite method. It made him feelhappier to watch the worst pages turn to illegible ashes—ifhappiness be the right word to apply to his sense, in theprocess, of something so crisp and crackling that it suggestedthe death-rustle of bank-notes.

When ten minutes later he came back into his sitting-room, heseemed to himself oddly, unexpectedly in the presence of a biggerview. It was as if some interfering mass had been sodisplaced that he could see more sky and more country. Yetthe opposite houses were naturally still there, and if the grimylittle place looked lighter it was doubtless only because therain had indeed stopped and the sun was pouring in. Peterwent to the window to open it to the altered air, and in doing sobeheld at the garden gate the humble “growler” inwhich a few hours before he had seen Mrs. Ryves take herdeparture. It was unmistakable—he remembered theknock-kneed white horse; but this made the fact that hisfriend’s luggage no longer surmounted it only the moremystifying. Perhaps the cabman had already removed theluggage—he was now on his box smoking the short pipe thatderived relish from inaction paid for. As Peter turned intothe room again his ears caught a knock at his own door, a knockexplained, as soon as he had responded, by the hard breathing ofMrs. Bundy.

“Please, sir, it’s to say she’ve comeback.”

“What has she come back for?” Baron’squestion sounded ungracious, but his heartache had given anotherthrob, and he felt a dread of another wound. It was like apractical joke.

“I think it’s for you, sir,” said Mrs.Bundy. “She’ll see you for a moment, ifyou’ll be so good, in the old place.”

Peter followed his hostess downstairs, and Mrs. Bundy usheredhim, with her company flourish, into the apartment she had fondlydesignated.

“I went away this morning, and I’ve only returnedfor an instant,” said Mrs. Ryves, as soon as Mrs. Bundy hadclosed the door. He saw that she was different now;something had happened that had made her indulgent.

“Have you been all the way to Dover and back?”

“No, but I’ve been to Victoria. I’veleft my luggage there—I’ve been drivingabout.”

“I hope you’ve enjoyed it.”

“Very much. I’ve been to see Mr.Morrish.”

“Mr. Morrish?”

“The musical publisher. I showed him oursong. I played it for him, and he’s delighted withit. He declares it’s just the thing. He hasgiven me fifty pounds. I think he believes in us,”Mrs. Ryves went on, while Baron stared at the wonder—toosweet to be safe, it seemed to him as yet—of her standingthere again before him and speaking of what they had incommon. “Fifty pounds! fifty pounds!” sheexclaimed, fluttering at him her happy cheque. She had comeback, the first thing, to tell him, and of course his share ofthe money would be the half. She was rosy, jubilant,natural, she chattered like a happy woman. She said theymust do more, ever so much more. Mr. Morrish hadpractically promised he would take anything that was as good asthat. She had kept her cab because she was going to Dover;she couldn’t leave the others alone. It was a vehicleinfirm and inert, but Baron, after a little, appreciated itspace, for she had consented to his getting in with her anddriving, this time in earnest, to Victoria. She had onlycome to tell him the good news—she repeated this assurancemore than once. They talked of it so profoundly that itdrove everything else for the time out of his head—his dutyto Mr. Locket, the remarkable sacrifice he had just achieved, andeven the odd coincidence, matching with the oddity of all theothers, of her having reverted to the house again, as if with oneof her famous divinations, at the very moment the trumperypapers, the origin really of their intimacy, had ceased toexist. But she, on her side, also had evidently forgottenthe trumpery papers: she never mentioned them again, and PeterBaron never boasted of what he had done with them. He wassilent for a while, from curiosity to see if her fine nerves hadreally given her a hint; and then later, when it came to be aquestion of his permanent attitude, he was silent, prodigiously,religiously, tremulously silent, in consequence of anextraordinary conversation that he had with her.

This conversation took place at Dover, when he went down togive her the money for which, at Mr. Morrish’s bank, he hadexchanged the cheque she had left with him. That cheque, orrather certain things it represented, had made somehow all thedifference in their relations. The difference was huge, andBaron could think of nothing but this confirmed vision of theirbeing able to work fruitfully together that would account for sorapid a change. She didn’t talk of impossibilitiesnow—she didn’t seem to want to stop him off; onlywhen, the day following his arrival at Dover with the fiftypounds (he had after all to agree to share them with her—hecouldn’t expect her to take a present of money from him),he returned to the question over which they had had their littlescene the night they dined together—on this occasion (hehad brought a portmanteau and he was staying) she mentioned thatthere was something very particular she had it on her conscienceto tell him before letting him commit himself. There dawnedin her face as she approached the subject a light of warning thatfrightened him; it was charged with something so strange that foran instant he held his breath. This flash of uglypossibilities passed however, and it was with the gesture oftaking still tenderer possession of her, checked indeed by thegrave, important way she held up a finger, that he answered:“Tell me everything—tell me!”

“You must know what I am—who I am; you must knowespecially what I’m not! There’s a name for it,a hideous, cruel name. It’s not my fault!Others have known, I’ve had to speak of it—it hasmade a great difference in my life. Surely you must haveguessed!” she went on, with the thinnest quaver of irony,letting him now take her hand, which felt as cold as her hardduty. “Don’t you see I’ve no belongings,no relations, no friends, nothing at all, in all the world, of myown? I was only a poor girl.”

“A poor girl?” Baron was mystified, touched,distressed, piecing dimly together what she meant, but feeling,in a great surge of pity, that it was only something more to loveher for.

“My mother—my poor mother,” said Mrs.Ryves.

She paused with this, and through gathering tears her eyes methis as if to plead with him to understand. He understood,and drew her closer, but she kept herself free still, tocontinue: “She was a poor girl—she was only agoverness; she was alone, she thought he loved her. Hedid—I think it was the only happiness she ever knew.But she died of it.”

“Oh, I’m so glad you tell me—it’s sogrand of you!” Baron murmured. “Then—yourfather?” He hesitated, as if with his hands on oldwounds.

“He had his own troubles, but he was kind to her.It was all misery and folly—he was married. Hewasn’t happy—there were good reasons, I believe, forthat. I know it from letters, I know it from a personwho’s dead. Everyone is dead now—it’s toofar off. That’s the only good thing. He wasvery kind to me; I remember him, though I didn’t know then,as a little girl, who he was. He put me with some very goodpeople—he did what he could for me. I think, later,his wife knew—a lady who came to see me once after hisdeath. I was a very little girl, but I remember manythings. What he could he did—something that helped meafterwards, something that helps me now. I think of himwith a strange pity—I see him!” said Mrs.Ryves, with the faint past in her eyes. “Youmustn’t say anything against him,” she added, gentlyand gravely.

“Never—never; for he has only made it more of arapture to care for you.”

“You must wait, you must think; we must waittogether,” she went on. “You can’t tell,and you must give me time. Now that you know, it’sall right; but you had to know. Doesn’t it make usbetter friends?” asked Mrs. Ryves, with a tired smile whichhad the effect of putting the whole story further and furtheraway. The next moment, however, she added quickly, as ifwith the sense that it couldn’t be far enough: “Youdon’t know, you can’t judge, you must let itsettle. Think of it, think of it; oh you will, and leave itso. I must have time myself, oh I must! Yes, you mustbelieve me.”

She turned away from him, and he remained looking at her amoment. “Ah, how I shall work for you!” heexclaimed.

“You must work for yourself; I’ll helpyou.” Her eyes had met his eyes again, and she added,hesitating, thinking: “You had better know, perhaps, who hewas.”

Baron shook his head, smiling confidently. “Idon’t care a straw.”

“I do—a little. He was a greatman.”

“There must indeed have been some good inhim.”

“He was a high celebrity. You’ve often heardof him.”

Baron wondered an instant. “I’ve no doubtyou’re a princess!” he said with a laugh. Shemade him nervous.

“I’m not ashamed of him. He was Sir DominickFerrand.”

Baron saw in her face, in a few seconds, that she had seensomething in his. He knew that he stared, then turned pale;it had the effect of a powerful shock. He was cold for aninstant, as he had just found her, with the sense of danger, theconfused horror of having dealt a blow. But the bloodrushed back to its courses with his still quicker consciousnessof safety, and he could make out, as he recovered his balance,that his emotion struck her simply as a violent surprise.He gave a muffled murmur: “Ah, it’s you, mybeloved!” which lost itself as he drew her close and heldher long, in the intensity of his embrace and the wonder of hisescape. It took more than a minute for him to say over tohimself often enough, with his hidden face: “Ah, she mustnever, never know!”

She never knew; she only learned, when she asked him casually,that he had in fact destroyed the old documents she had had sucha comic caprice about. The sensibility, the curiosity theyhad had the queer privilege of exciting in her had lapsed withthe event as irresponsibly as they had arisen, and she appearedto have forgotten, or rather to attribute now to other causes,the agitation and several of the odd incidents that accompaniedthem. They naturally gave Peter Baron rather more to thinkabout, much food, indeed, for clandestine meditation, some ofwhich, in spite of the pains he took not to be caught, was notedby his friend and interpreted, to his knowledge, as depressionproduced by the long probation she succeeded in imposing onhim. He was more patient than she could guess, with all herguessing, for if he was put to the proof she herself was not leftundissected. It came back to him again and again that ifthe documents he had burned proved anything they proved that SirDominick Ferrand’s human errors were not all of oneorder. The woman he loved was the daughter of her father,he couldn’t get over that. What was more to the pointwas that as he came to know her better and better—for theydid work together under Mr. Morrish’s protection—hisaffection was a quantity still less to be neglected. Hesometimes wondered, in the light of her general straightness(their marriage had brought out even more than he believed therewas of it) whether the relics in the davenport weregenuine. That piece of furniture is still almost as usefulto him as Mr. Morrish’s patronage. There is atremendous run, as this gentlemen calls it, on several of theirsongs. Baron nevertheless still tries his hand also atprose, and his offerings are now not always declined by themagazines. But he has never approached the Promiscuousagain. This periodical published in due course a highlyeulogistic study of the remarkable career of Sir DominickFerrand.

p. 131NONAVINCENT.

I.

“I wondered whether youwouldn’t read it to me,” said Mrs. Alsager, as theylingered a little near the fire before he took leave. Shelooked down at the fire sideways, drawing her dress away from itand making her proposal with a shy sincerity that added to hercharm. Her charm was always great for Allan Wayworth, andthe whole air of her house, which was simply a sort ofdistillation of herself, so soothing, so beguiling that he alwaysmade several false starts before departure. He had spentsome such good hours there, had forgotten, in her warm, goldendrawing-room, so much of the loneliness and so many of theworries of his life, that it had come to be the immediate answerto his longings, the cure for his aches, the harbour of refugefrom his storms. His tribulations were not unprecedented,and some of his advantages, if of a usual kind, were marked indegree, inasmuch as he was very clever for one so young, and veryindependent for one so poor. He was eight-and-twenty, buthe had lived a good deal and was full of ambitions andcuriosities and disappointments. The opportunity to talk ofsome of these in Grosvenor Place corrected perceptibly theimmense inconvenience of London. This inconvenience tookfor him principally the line of insensibility to AllanWayworth’s literary form. He had a literary form, orhe thought he had, and her intelligent recognition of thecircumstance was the sweetest consolation Mrs. Alsager could haveadministered. She was even more literary and more artisticthan he, inasmuch as he could often work off his overflow (thiswas his occupation, his profession), while the generous woman,abounding in happy thoughts, but unedited and unpublished, stoodthere in the rising tide like the nymph of a fountain in theplash of the marble basin.

The year before, in a big newspapery house, he had foundhimself next her at dinner, and they had converted the intenselymaterial hour into a feast of reason. There was no motivefor her asking him to come to see her but that she liked him,which it was the more agreeable to him to perceive as heperceived at the same time that she was exquisite. She wasenviably free to act upon her likings, and it made Wayworth feelless unsuccessful to infer that for the moment he happened to beone of them. He kept the revelation to himself, and indeedthere was nothing to turn his head in the kindness of a kindwoman. Mrs. Alsager occupied so completely the ground ofpossession that she would have been condemned to inaction had itnot been for the principle of giving. Her husband, who wastwenty years her senior, a massive personality in the City and aheavy one at home (wherever he stood, or even sat, he wasmonumental), owned half a big newspaper and the whole of a greatmany other things. He admired his wife, though she bore nochildren, and liked her to have other tastes than his, as thatseemed to give a greater acreage to their life. His ownappetites went so far he could scarcely see the boundary, and histheory was to trust her to push the limits of hers, so thatbetween them the pair should astound by their consumption.His ideas were prodigiously vulgar, but some of them had the goodfortune to be carried out by a person of perfect delicacy.Her delicacy made her play strange tricks with them, but he neverfound this out. She attenuated him without his knowing it,for what he mainly thought was that he had aggrandisedher. Without her he really would have been biggerstill, and society, breathing more freely, was practically underan obligation to her which, to do it justice, it acknowledged byan attitude of mystified respect. She felt a tremulous needto throw her liberty and her leisure into the things of thesoul—the most beautiful things she knew. She foundthem, when she gave time to seeking, in a hundred places, andparticularly in a dim and sacred region—the region ofactive pity—over her entrance into which she droppedcurtains so thick that it would have been an impertinence to liftthem. But she cultivated other beneficent passions, and ifshe cherished the dream of something fine the moments at which itmost seemed to her to come true were when she saw beauty pluckedflower-like in the garden of art. She loved the perfectwork—she had the artistic chord. This chord couldvibrate only to the touch of another, so that appreciation, inher spirit, had the added intensity of regret. She couldunderstand the joy of creation, and she thought it scarcelyenough to be told that she herself created happiness. Shewould have liked, at any rate, to choose her way; but it was justhere that her liberty failed her. She had not thevoice—she had only the vision. The only envy she wascapable of was directed to those who, as she said, could dosomething.

As everything in her, however, turned to gentleness, she wasadmirably hospitable to such people as a class. Shebelieved Allan Wayworth could do something, and she liked to hearhim talk of the ways in which he meant to show it. Hetalked of them almost to no one else—she spoiled him forother listeners. With her fair bloom and her quiet graceshe was indeed an ideal public, and if she had ever confided tohim that she would have liked to scribble (she had in fact notmentioned it to a creature), he would have been in a perfectposition for asking her why a woman whose face had so muchexpression should not have felt that she achieved. How inthe world could she express better? There was less thanthat in Shakespeare and Beethoven. She had never been moregenerous than when, in compliance with her invitation, which Ihave recorded, he brought his play to read to her. He hadspoken of it to her before, and one dark November afternoon, whenher red fireside was more than ever an escape from the place andthe season, he had broken out as he camein—“I’ve done it, I’ve doneit!” She made him tell her all about it—shetook an interest really minute and asked questions delightfullyapt. She had spoken from the first as if he were on thepoint of being acted, making him jump, with her participation,all sorts of dreary intervals. She liked the theatre as sheliked all the arts of expression, and he had known her to go allthe way to Paris for a particular performance. Once he hadgone with her—the time she took that stupid Mrs.Mostyn. She had been struck, when he sketched it, with thesubject of his drama, and had spoken words that helped him tobelieve in it. As soon as he had rung down his curtain onthe last act he rushed off to see her, but after that he kept thething for repeated last touches. Finally, on Christmas day,by arrangement, she sat there and listened to it. It was inthree acts and in prose, but rather of the romantic order, thoughdealing with contemporary English life, and he fondly believedthat it showed the hand if not of the master, at least of theprize pupil.

Allan Wayworth had returned to England, at two-and-twenty,after a miscellaneous continental education; his father, thecorrespondent, for years, in several foreign countriessuccessively, of a conspicuous London journal, had died justafter this, leaving his mother and her two other children,portionless girls, to subsist on a very small income in a verydull German town. The young man’s beginnings inLondon were difficult, and he had aggravated them by his dislikeof journalism. His father’s connection with it wouldhave helped him, but he was (insanely, most of his friendsjudged—the great exception was always Mrs. Alsager)intraitable on the question of form. Form—inhis sense—was not demanded by English newspapers, and hecouldn’t give it to them in their sense. Thedemand for it was not great anywhere, and Wayworth spent costlyweeks in polishing little compositions for magazines thatdidn’t pay for style. The only person who paid for itwas really Mrs. Alsager: she had an infallible instinct for theperfect. She paid in her own way, and if Allan Wayworth hadbeen a wage-earning person it would have made him feel that if hedidn’t receive his legal dues his palm was at leastoccasionally conscious of a gratuity. He had hislimitations, his perversities, but the finest parts of him werethe most alive, and he was restless and sincere. It ishowever the impression he produced on Mrs. Alsager that mostconcerns us: she thought him not only remarkably good-looking butaltogether original. There were some usual bad things hewould never do—too many prohibitive puddles for him in theshort cut to success.

For himself, he had never been so happy as since he had seenhis way, as he fondly believed, to some sort of mastery of thescenic idea, which struck him as a very different matter now thathe looked at it from within. He had had his early days ofcontempt for it, when it seemed to him a jewel, dim at the best,hidden in a dunghill, a taper burning low in an air thick withvulgarity. It was hedged about with sordid approaches, itwas not worth sacrifice and suffering. The man of letters,in dealing with it, would have to put off all literature, whichwas like asking the bearer of a noble name to forego hisimmemorial heritage. Aspects change, however, with thepoint of view: Wayworth had waked up one morning in a differentbed altogether. It is needless here to trace this accidentto its source; it would have been much more interesting to aspectator of the young man’s life to follow some of theconsequences. He had been made (as he felt) the subject ofa special revelation, and he wore his hat like a man inlove. An angel had taken him by the hand and guided him tothe shabby door which opens, it appeared, into an interior bothsplendid and austere. The scenic idea was magnificent whenonce you had embraced it—the dramatic form had a puritywhich made some others look ingloriously rough. It had thehigh dignity of the exact sciences, it was mathematical andarchitectural. It was full of the refreshment ofcalculation and construction, the incorruptibility of line andlaw. It was bare, but it was erect, it was poor, but it wasnoble; it reminded him of some sovereign famed for justice whoshould have lived in a palace despoiled. There was afearful amount of concession in it, but what you kept had a rareintensity. You were perpetually throwing over the cargo tosave the ship, but what a motion you gave her when you made herride the waves—a motion as rhythmic as the dance of agoddess! Wayworth took long London walks and thought ofthese things—London poured into his ears the mighty hum ofits suggestion. His imagination glowed and melted downmaterial, his intentions multiplied and made the air a goldenhaze. He saw not only the thing he should do, but the nextand the next and the next; the future opened before him and heseemed to walk on marble slabs. The more he tried thedramatic form the more he loved it, the more he looked at it themore he perceived in it. What he perceived in it indeed henow perceived everywhere; if he stopped, in the London dusk,before some flaring shop-window, the place immediatelyconstituted itself behind footlights, became a framed stage forhis figures. He hammered at these figures in his lonelylodging, he shaped them and he shaped their tabernacle; he waslike a goldsmith chiselling a casket, bent over with the passionfor perfection. When he was neither roaming the streetswith his vision nor worrying his problem at his table, he wasexchanging ideas on the general question with Mrs. Alsager, towhom he promised details that would amuse her in later and stillhappier hours. Her eyes were full of tears when he read herthe last words of the finished work, and she murmured,divinely—

“And now—to get it done, to get itdone!”

“Yes, indeed—to get it done!” Wayworthstared at the fire, slowly rolling up his type-copy.“But that’s a totally different part of the business,and altogether secondary.”

“But of course you want to be acted?”

“Of course I do—but it’s a suddendescent. I want to intensely, but I’m sorry I wantto.”

“It’s there indeed that the difficultiesbegin,” said Mrs. Alsager, a little off her guard.

“How can you say that? It’s there that theyend!”

“Ah, wait to see where they end!”

“I mean they’ll now be of a totally differentorder,” Wayworth explained. “It seems to methere can be nothing in the world more difficult than to write aplay that will stand an all-round test, and that in comparisonwith them the complications that spring up at this point are ofan altogether smaller kind.”

“Yes, they’re not inspiring,” said Mrs.Alsager; “they’re discouraging, because they’revulgar. The other problem, the working out of the thingitself, is pure art.”

“How well you understand everything!” Theyoung man had got up, nervously, and was leaning against thechimney-piece with his back to the fire and his armsfolded. The roll of his copy, in his fist, was squeezedinto the hollow of one of them. He looked down at Mrs.Alsager, smiling gratefully, and she answered him with a smilefrom eyes still charmed and suffused. “Yes, thevulgarity will begin now,” he presently added.

“You’ll suffer dreadfully.”

“I shall suffer in a good cause.”

“Yes, giving that to the world! You mustleave it with me, I must read it over and over,” Mrs.Alsager pleaded, rising to come nearer and draw the copy, in itscover of greenish-grey paper, which had a generic identity now tohim, out of his grasp. “Who in the world will doit?—who in the world can?” she went on, closeto him, turning over the leaves. Before he could answer shehad stopped at one of the pages; she turned the book round tohim, pointing out a speech. “That’s the mostbeautiful place—those lines are a perfection.”He glanced at the spot she indicated, and she begged him to readthem again—he had read them admirably before. He knewthem by heart, and, closing the book while she held the other endof it, he murmured them over to her—they had indeed acadence that pleased him—watching, with a facetiouscomplacency which he hoped was pardonable, the applause in herface. “Ah, who can utter such lines asthat?” Mrs. Alsager broke out; “whom can youfind to do her?”

“We’ll find people to do them all!”

“But not people who are worthy.”

“They’ll be worthy enough if they’re willingenough. I’ll work with them—I’ll grind itinto them.” He spoke as if he had produced twentyplays.

“Oh, it will be interesting!” she echoed.

“But I shall have to find my theatre first. Ishall have to get a manager to believe in me.”

“Yes—they’re so stupid!”

“But fancy the patience I shall want, and how I shallhave to watch and wait,” said Allan Wayworth.“Do you see me hawking it about London?”

“Indeed I don’t—it would besickening.”

“It’s what I shall have to do. I shall beold before it’s produced.”

“I shall be old very soon if it isn’t!” Mrs.Alsager cried. “I know one or two of them,” shemused.

“Do you mean you would speak to them?”

“The thing is to get them to read it. I could dothat.”

“That’s the utmost I ask. But it’seven for that I shall have to wait.”

She looked at him with kind sisterly eyes. “Yousha’n’t wait.”

“Ah, you dear lady!” Wayworth murmured.

“That is you may, but I won’t!Will you leave me your copy?” she went on, turning thepages again.

“Certainly; I have another.” Standing nearhim she read to herself a passage here and there; then, in hersweet voice, she read some of them out. “Oh, ifyou were only an actress!” the young manexclaimed.

“That’s the last thing I am. There’sno comedy in me!”

She had never appeared to Wayworth so much his goodgenius. “Is there any tragedy?” he asked, withthe levity of complete confidence.

She turned away from him, at this, with a strange and charminglaugh and a “Perhaps that will be for you todetermine!” But before he could disclaim such aresponsibility she had faced him again and was talking about NonaVincent as if she had been the most interesting of their friendsand her situation at that moment an irresistible appeal to theirsympathy. Nona Vincent was the heroine of the play, andMrs. Alsager had taken a tremendous fancy to her. “Ican’t tell you how I like that woman!” sheexclaimed in a pensive rapture of credulity which could only bebalm to the artistic spirit.

“I’m awfully glad she lives a bit. What Ifeel about her is that she’s a good deal likeyou,” Wayworth observed.

Mrs. Alsager stared an instant and turned faintly red.This was evidently a view that failed to strike her; shedidn’t, however, treat it as a joke. “I’mnot impressed with the resemblance. I don’t seemyself doing what she does.”

“It isn’t so much what she does,” theyoung man argued, drawing out his moustache.

“But what she does is the whole point. She simplytells her love—I should never do that.”

“If you repudiate such a proceeding with such energy,why do you like her for it?”

“It isn’t what I like her for.”

“What else, then? That’s intenselycharacteristic.”

Mrs. Alsager reflected, looking down at the fire; she had theair of having half-a-dozen reasons to choose from. But theone she produced was unexpectedly simple; it might even have beenprompted by despair at not finding others. “I likeher because you made her!” she exclaimed with alaugh, moving again away from her companion.

Wayworth laughed still louder. “You made her alittle yourself. I’ve thought of her as looking likeyou.”

“She ought to look much better,” said Mrs.Alsager. “No, certainly, I shouldn’t do whatshe does.”

“Not even in the same circumstances?”

“I should never find myself in such circumstances.They’re exactly your play, and have nothing in common withsuch a life as mine. However,” Mrs. Alsager went on,“her behaviour was natural for her, and not onlynatural, but, it seems to me, thoroughly beautiful andnoble. I can’t sufficiently admire the talent andtact with which you make one accept it, and I tell you franklythat it’s evident to me there must be a brilliant futurebefore a young man who, at the start, has been capable of such astroke as that. Thank heaven I can admire Nona Vincent asintensely as I feel that I don’t resemble her!”

“Don’t exaggerate that,” said AllanWayworth.

“My admiration?”

“Your dissimilarity. She has your face, your air,your voice, your motion; she has many elements of yourbeing.”

“Then she’ll damn your play!” Mrs. Alsagerreplied. They joked a little over this, though it was notin the tone of pleasantry that Wayworth’s hostess soonremarked: “You’ve got your remedy, however: have herdone by the right woman.”

“Oh, have her ‘done’—have her‘done’!” the young man gently wailed.

“I see what you mean, my poor friend. What a pity,when it’s such a magnificent part—such a chance for aclever serious girl! Nona Vincent is practically yourplay—it will be open to her to carry it far or to drop itat the first corner.”

“It’s a charming prospect,” said AllanWayworth, with sudden scepticism. They looked at each otherwith eyes that, for a lurid moment, saw the worst of the worst;but before they parted they had exchanged vows and confidencesthat were dedicated wholly to the ideal. It is not to besupposed, however, that the knowledge that Mrs. Alsager wouldhelp him made Wayworth less eager to help himself. He didwhat he could and felt that she, on her side, was doing no less;but at the end of a year he was obliged to recognise that theirunited effort had mainly produced the fine flower ofdiscouragement. At the end of a year the lustre had, to hisown eyes, quite faded from his unappreciated masterpiece, and hefound himself writing for a biographical dictionary little livesof celebrities he had never heard of. To be printed,anywhere and anyhow, was a form of glory for a man so unable tobe acted, and to be paid, even at encyclopædic rates, hadthe consequence of making one resigned and verbose. Hecouldn’t smuggle style into a dictionary, but he could atleast reflect that he had done his best to learn from the dramathat it is a gross impertinence almost anywhere. He hadknocked at the door of every theatre in London, and, at a ruinousexpense, had multiplied type-copies of Nona Vincent toreplace the neat transcripts that had descended into themanagerial abyss. His play was not even declined—nosuch flattering intimation was given him that it had beenread. What the managers would do for Mrs. Alsager concernedhim little today; the thing that was relevant was that they woulddo nothing for him. That charming woman felt humbledto the earth, so little response had she had from the powers onwhich she counted. The two never talked about the play now,but he tried to show her a still finer friendship, that she mightnot think he felt she had failed him. He still walked aboutLondon with his dreams, but as months succeeded months and heleft the year behind him they were dreams not so much of successas of revenge. Success seemed a colourless name for thereward of his patience; something fiercely florid, somethingsanguinolent was more to the point. His best consolationhowever was still in the scenic idea; it was not till now that hediscovered how incurably he was in love with it. By thetime a vain second year had chafed itself away he cherished hisfruitless faculty the more for the obloquy it seemed tosuffer. He lived, in his best hours, in a world of subjectsand situations; he wrote another play and made it as differentfrom its predecessor as such a very good thing could be. Itmight be a very good thing, but when he had committed it to thetheatrical limbo indiscriminating fate took no account of thedifference. He was at last able to leave England for threeor four months; he went to Germany to pay a visit long deferredto his mother and sisters.

Shortly before the time he had fixed for his return hereceived from Mrs. Alsager a telegram consisting of the words:“Loder wishes see you—putting Nona instantrehearsal.” He spent the few hours before hisdeparture in kissing his mother and sisters, who knew enoughabout Mrs. Alsager to judge it lucky this respectable marriedlady was not there—a relief, however, accompanied withspeculative glances at London and the morrow. Loder, as ouryoung man was aware, meant the new “Renaissance,” butthough he reached home in the evening it was not to thisconvenient modern theatre that Wayworth first proceeded. Hespent a late hour with Mrs. Alsager, an hour that throbbed withcalculation. She told him that Mr. Loder was charming, hehad simply taken up the play in its turn; he had hopes of it,moreover, that on the part of a professional pessimist mightalmost be qualified as ecstatic. It had been cast, with amargin for objections, and Violet Grey was to do theheroine. She had been capable, while he was away, of a goodpiece of work at that foggy old playhouse the“Legitimate;” the piece was a clumsyréchauffé, but she at least had beenfresh. Wayworth remembered Violet Grey—hadn’the, for two years, on a fond policy of “looking out,”kept dipping into the London theatres to pick up prospectiveinterpreters? He had not picked up many as yet, and thisyoung lady at all events had never wriggled in his net. Shewas pretty and she was odd, but he had never prefigured her asNona Vincent, nor indeed found himself attracted by what healready felt sufficiently launched in the profession to speak ofas her artistic personality. Mrs. Alsager wasdifferent—she declared that she had been struck not alittle by some of her tones. The girl was interesting inthe thing at the “Legitimate,” and Mr. Loder, who hadhis eye on her, described her as ambitious and intelligent.She wanted awfully to get on—and some of those ladies wereso lazy! Wayworth was sceptical—he had seen MissViolet Grey, who was terribly itinerant, in a dozen theatres butonly in one aspect. Nona Vincent had a dozen aspects, butonly one theatre; yet with what a feverish curiosity the youngman promised himself to watch the actress on the morrow!Talking the matter over with Mrs. Alsager now seemed the verystuff that rehearsal was made of. The near prospect ofbeing acted laid a finger even on the lip of inquiry; he wantedto go on tiptoe till the first night, to make no condition butthat they should speak his lines, and he felt that hewouldn’t so much as raise an eyebrow at the scene-painterif he should give him an old oak chamber.

He became conscious, the next day, that his danger would beother than this, and yet he couldn’t have expressed tohimself what it would be. Danger was there,doubtless—danger was everywhere, in the world of art, andstill more in the world of commerce; but what he really seemed tocatch, for the hour, was the beating of the wings ofvictory. Nothing could undermine that, since it was victorysimply to be acted. It would be victory even to be actedbadly; a reflection that didn’t prevent him, however, frombanishing, in his politic optimism, the word “bad”from his vocabulary. It had no application, in thecompromise of practice; it didn’t apply even to his play,which he was conscious he had already outlived and as to which heforesaw that, in the coming weeks, frequent alarm wouldalternate, in his spirit, with frequent esteem. When hewent down to the dusky daylit theatre (it arched over him likethe temple of fame) Mr. Loder, who was as charming as Mrs.Alsager had announced, struck him as the genius ofhospitality. The manager began to explain why, for so long,he had given no sign; but that was the last thing that interestedWayworth now, and he could never remember afterwards what reasonsMr. Loder had enumerated. He liked, in the whole businessof discussion and preparation, even the things he had thought heshould probably dislike, and he revelled in those he had thoughthe should like. He watched Miss Violet Grey that eveningwith eyes that sought to penetrate her possibilities. Shecertainly had a few; they were qualities of voice and face,qualities perhaps even of intelligence; he sat there at any ratewith a fostering, coaxing attention, repeating over to himself asconvincingly as he could that she was not common—acircumstance all the more creditable as the part she was playingseemed to him desperately so. He perceived that this waswhy it pleased the audience; he divined that it was the part theyenjoyed rather than the actress. He had a private panic,wondering how, if they liked that form, they couldpossibly like his. His form had now become quite anultimate idea to him. By the time the evening was over someof Miss Violet Grey’s features, several of the turns of herhead, a certain vibration of her voice, had taken their place inthe same category. She was interesting, she wasdistinguished; at any rate he had accepted her: it came to thesame thing. But he left the theatre that night withoutspeaking to her—moved (a little even to his ownmystification) by an odd procrastinating impulse. On themorrow he was to read his three acts to the company, and then heshould have a good deal to say; what he felt for the moment was avague indisposition to commit himself. Moreover he found aslight confusion of annoyance in the fact that though he had beentrying all the evening to look at Nona Vincent in VioletGrey’s person, what subsisted in his vision was simplyViolet Grey in Nona’s. He didn’t wish to seethe actress so directly, or even so simply as that; and it hadbeen very fatiguing, the effort to focus Nona both through theperformer and through the “Legitimate.” Beforehe went to bed that night he posted three words to Mrs.Alsager—“She’s not a bit like it, but I daresay I can make her do.”

He was pleased with the way the actress listened, the nextday, at the reading; he was pleased indeed with many things, atthe reading, and most of all with the reading itself. Thewhole affair loomed large to him and he magnified it and mappedit out. He enjoyed his occupation of the big, dim, hollowtheatre, full of the echoes of “effect” and of aqueer smell of gas and success—it all seemed such a passivecanvas for his picture. For the first time in his life hewas in command of resources; he was acquainted with the phrase,but had never thought he should know the feeling. He wassurprised at what Loder appeared ready to do, though he remindedhimself that he must never show it. He foresaw that therewould be two distinct concomitants to the artistic effort ofproducing a play, one consisting of a great deal of anguish andthe other of a great deal of amusement. He looked back uponthe reading, afterwards, as the best hour in the business,because it was then that the piece had most struck him asrepresented. What came later was the doing of others; butthis, with its imperfections and failures, was all his own.The drama lived, at any rate, for that hour, with an intensitythat it was promptly to lose in the poverty and patchiness ofrehearsal; he could see its life reflected, in a way that wassweet to him, in the stillness of the little semi-circle ofattentive and inscrutable, of water-proofed and muddy-booted,actors. Miss Violet Grey was the auditor he had most to sayto, and he tried on the spot, across the shabby stage, to let herhave the soul of her part. Her attitude was graceful, butthough she appeared to listen with all her faculties her faceremained perfectly blank; a fact, however, not discouraging toWayworth, who liked her better for not being premature. Hercompanions gave discernible signs of recognising the passages ofcomedy; yet Wayworth forgave her even then for beinginexpressive. She evidently wished before everything elseto be simply sure of what it was all about.

He was more surprised even than at the revelation of the scaleon which Mr. Loder was ready to proceed by the discovery thatsome of the actors didn’t like their parts, and his heartsank as he asked himself what he could possibly do with them ifthey were going to be so stupid. This was the first of hisdisappointments; somehow he had expected every individual tobecome instantly and gratefully conscious of a rare opportunity,and from the moment such a calculation failed he was at sea, ormindful at any rate that more disappointments would come.It was impossible to make out what the manager liked or disliked;no judgment, no comment escaped him; his acceptance of the playand his views about the way it should be mounted had apparentlyconverted him into a veiled and shrouded figure. Wayworthwas able to grasp the idea that they would all move now in ahigher and sharper air than that of compliment andconfidence. When he talked with Violet Grey after thereading he gathered that she was really rather crude: what betterproof of it could there be than her failure to break outinstantly with an expression of delight about her greatchance? This reserve, however, had evidently nothing to dowith high pretensions; she had no wish to make him feel that aperson of her eminence was superior to easy raptures. Heguessed, after a little, that she was puzzled and even somewhatfrightened—to a certain extent she had notunderstood. Nothing could appeal to him more than theopportunity to clear up her difficulties, in the course of theexamination of which he quickly discovered that, so far as shehad understood, she had understood wrong. If she wascrude it was only a reason the more for talking to her; he keptsaying to her “Ask me—ask me: ask me everything youcan think of.”

She asked him, she was perpetually asking him, and at thefirst rehearsals, which were without form and void to a degreethat made them strike him much more as the death of an experimentthan as the dawn of a success, they threshed things out immenselyin a corner of the stage, with the effect of his coming to feelthat at any rate she was in earnest. He felt more and morethat his heroine was the keystone of his arch, for which indeedthe actress was very ready to take her. But when hereminded this young lady of the way the whole thing practicallydepended on her she was alarmed and even slightly scandalised:she spoke more than once as if that could scarcely be the rightway to construct a play—make it stand or fall by one poornervous girl. She was almost morbidly conscientious, and intheory he liked her for this, though he lost patience three orfour times with the things she couldn’t do and the thingsshe could. At such times the tears came to her eyes; butthey were produced by her own stupidity, she hastened to assurehim, not by the way he spoke, which was awfully kind under thecircumstances. Her sincerity made her beautiful, and hewished to heaven (and made a point of telling her so) that shecould sprinkle a little of it over Nona. Once, however, shewas so touched and troubled that the sight of it brought thetears for an instant to his own eyes; and it so happened that,turning at this moment, he found himself face to face with Mr.Loder. The manager stared, glanced at the actress, whoturned in the other direction, and then smiling at Wayworth,exclaimed, with the humour of a man who heard the gallery laughevery night:

“I say—I say!”

“What’s the matter?” Wayworth asked.

“I’m glad to see Miss Grey is taking such painswith you.”

“Oh, yes—she’ll turn me out!” said theyoung man, gaily. He was quite aware that it was apparenthe was not superficial about Nona, and abundantly determined,into the bargain, that the rehearsal of the piece should notsacrifice a shade of thoroughness to any extrinsicconsideration.

Mrs. Alsager, whom, late in the afternoon, he used often to goand ask for a cup of tea, thanking her in advance for the restshe gave him and telling her how he found that rehearsal (asthey were doing it—it was a caution!) took it out ofone—Mrs. Alsager, more and more his good genius and, as herepeatedly assured her, his ministering angel, confirmed him inthis superior policy and urged him on to every form of artisticdevotion. She had, naturally, never been more interestedthan now in his work; she wanted to hear everything abouteverything. She treated him as heroically fatigued, pliedhim with luxurious restoratives, made him stretch himself oncushions and rose-leaves. They gossipped more than ever, byher fire, about the artistic life; he confided to her, forinstance, all his hopes and fears, all his experiments andanxieties, on the subject of the representative of Nona.She was immensely interested in this young lady and showed it bytaking a box again and again (she had seen her half-a-dozen timesalready), to study her capacity through the veil of her presentpart. Like Allan Wayworth she found her encouraging only byfits, for she had fine flashes of badness. She wasintelligent, but she cried aloud for training, and the trainingwas so absent that the intelligence had only a fraction of itseffect. She was like a knife without an edge—goodsteel that had never been sharpened; she hacked away at her harddramatic loaf, she couldn’t cut it smooth.

II.

“Certainly my leading ladywon’t make Nona much like you!” Wayworth oneday gloomily remarked to Mrs. Alsager. There were days whenthe prospect seemed to him awful.

“So much the better. There’s no necessityfor that.”

“I wish you’d train her a little—you couldso easily,” the young man went on; in response to whichMrs. Alsager requested him not to make such cruel fun ofher. But she was curious about the girl, wanted to hear ofher character, her private situation, how she lived and where,seemed indeed desirous to befriend her. Wayworth might nothave known much about the private situation of Miss Violet Grey,but, as it happened, he was able, by the time his play had beenthree weeks in rehearsal, to supply information on suchpoints. She was a charming, exemplary person, educated,cultivated, with highly modern tastes, an excellentmusician. She had lost her parents and was very much alonein the world, her only two relations being a sister, who wasmarried to a civil servant (in a highly responsible post) inIndia, and a dear little old-fashioned aunt (really a great-aunt)with whom she lived at Notting Hill, who wrote children’sbooks and who, it appeared, had once written a Christmaspantomime. It was quite an artistic home—not on thescale of Mrs. Alsager’s (to compare the smallest thingswith the greatest!) but intensely refined and honourable.Wayworth went so far as to hint that it would be rather nice andhuman on Mrs. Alsager’s part to go there—they wouldtake it so kindly if she should call on them. She had actedso often on his hints that he had formed a pleasant habit ofexpecting it: it made him feel so wisely responsible about givingthem. But this one appeared to fall to the ground, so thathe let the subject drop. Mrs. Alsager, however, went yetonce more to the “Legitimate,” as he found by hersaying to him abruptly, on the morrow: “Oh, she’ll bevery good—she’ll be very good.” When theysaid “she,” in these days, they always meant VioletGrey, though they pretended, for the most part, that they meantNona Vincent.

“Oh yes,” Wayworth assented, “she wants soto!”

Mrs. Alsager was silent a moment; then she asked, a littleinconsequently, as if she had come back from a reverie:“Does she want to very much?”

“Tremendously—and it appears she has beenfascinated by the part from the first.”

“Why then didn’t she say so?”

“Oh, because she’s so funny.”

“She is funny,” said Mrs. Alsager,musingly; and presently she added: “She’s in lovewith you.”

Wayworth stared, blushed very red, then laughed out.“What is there funny in that?” he demanded; butbefore his interlocutress could satisfy him on this point heinquired, further, how she knew anything about it. After alittle graceful evasion she explained that the night before, atthe “Legitimate,” Mrs. Beaumont, the wife of theactor-manager, had paid her a visit in her box; which hadhappened, in the course of their brief gossip, to lead to herremarking that she had never been “behind.”Mrs. Beaumont offered on the spot to take her round, and thefancy had seized her to accept the invitation. She had beenamused for the moment, and in this way it befell that herconductress, at her request, had introduced her to Miss VioletGrey, who was waiting in the wing for one of her scenes.Mrs. Beaumont had been called away for three minutes, and duringthis scrap of time, face to face with the actress, she haddiscovered the poor girl’s secret. Wayworth qualifiedit as a senseless thing, but wished to know what had led to thediscovery. She characterised this inquiry as superficialfor a painter of the ways of women; and he doubtless didn’timprove it by remarking profanely that a cat might look at a kingand that such things were convenient to know. Even on thisground, however, he was threatened by Mrs. Alsager, who contendedthat it might not be a joking matter to the poor girl. Tothis Wayworth, who now professed to hate talking about thepassions he might have inspired, could only reply that he meantit couldn’t make a difference to Mrs. Alsager.

“How in the world do you know what makes a difference tome?” this lady asked, with incongruous coldness,with a haughtiness indeed remarkable in so gentle a spirit.

He saw Violet Grey that night at the theatre, and it was shewho spoke first of her having lately met a friend of his.

“She’s in love with you,” the actress said,after he had made a show of ignorance; “doesn’t thattell you anything?”

He blushed redder still than Mrs. Alsager had made him blush,but replied, quickly enough and very adequately, that hundreds ofwomen were naturally dying for him.

“Oh, I don’t care, for you’re not in lovewith her!” the girl continued.

“Did she tell you that too?” Wayworth asked; butshe had at that moment to go on.

Standing where he could see her he thought that on thisoccasion she threw into her scene, which was the best she had inthe play, a brighter art than ever before, a talent that couldplay with its problem. She was perpetually doing things outof rehearsal (she did two or three to-night, in the otherman’s piece), that he as often wished to heaven NonaVincent might have the benefit of. She appeared to be ableto do them for every one but him—that is for every one butNona. He was conscious, in these days, of an odd newfeeling, which mixed (this was a part of its oddity) with a verynatural and comparatively old one and which in its most definiteform was a dull ache of regret that this young lady’sunlucky star should have placed her on the stage. He wishedin his worst uneasiness that, without going further, she wouldgive it up; and yet it soothed that uneasiness to remind himselfthat he saw grounds to hope she would go far enough to make amarked success of Nona. There were strange and painfulmoments when, as the interpretress of Nona, he almost hated her;after which, however, he always assured himself that heexaggerated, inasmuch as what made this aversion seem great, whenhe was nervous, was simply its contrast with the growing sensethat there were grounds—totally different—onwhich she pleased him. She pleased him as a charmingcreature—by her sincerities and her perversities, by thevarieties and surprises of her character and by certain happyfacts of her person. In private her eyes were sad to himand her voice was rare. He detested the idea that sheshould have a disappointment or an humiliation, and he wanted torescue her altogether, to save and transplant her. One wayto save her was to see to it, to the best of his ability, thatthe production of his play should be a triumph; and the otherway—it was really too queer to express—was almost towish that it shouldn’t be. Then, for the future,there would be safety and peace, and not the peace ofdeath—the peace of a different life. It is to beadded that our young man clung to the former of these ways inproportion as the latter perversely tempted him. He wasnervous at the best, increasingly and intolerably nervous; butthe immediate remedy was to rehearse harder and harder, and aboveall to work it out with Violet Grey. Some of her comradesreproached him with working it out only with her, as if she werethe whole affair; to which he replied that they could afford tobe neglected, they were all so tremendously good. She wasthe only person concerned whom he didn’t flatter.

The author and the actress stuck so to the business in handthat she had very little time to speak to him again of Mrs.Alsager, of whom indeed her imagination appeared adequately tohave disposed. Wayworth once remarked to her that NonaVincent was supposed to be a good deal like his charming friend;but she gave a blank “Supposed by whom?” inconsequence of which he never returned to the subject. Heconfided his nervousness as freely as usual to Mrs. Alsager, whoeasily understood that he had a peculiar complication ofanxieties. His suspense varied in degree from hour to hour,but any relief there might have been in this was made up for byits being of several different kinds. One afternoon, as thefirst performance drew near, Mrs. Alsager said to him, in givinghim his cup of tea and on his having mentioned that he had notclosed his eyes the night before:

“You must indeed be in a dreadful state. Anxietyfor another is still worse than anxiety for one’sself.”

“For another?” Wayworth repeated, looking at herover the rim of his cup.

“My poor friend, you’re nervous about NonaVincent, but you’re infinitely more nervous about VioletGrey.”

“She is Nona Vincent!”

“No, she isn’t—not a bit!” said Mrs.Alsager, abruptly.

“Do you really think so?” Wayworth cried, spillinghis tea in his alarm.

“What I think doesn’t signify—I mean what Ithink about that. What I meant to say was that great as isyour suspense about your play, your suspense about your actressis greater still.”

“I can only repeat that my actress is myplay.”

Mrs. Alsager looked thoughtfully into the teapot.

“Your actress is your—”

“My what?” the young man asked, with a littletremor in his voice, as his hostess paused.

“Your very dear friend. You’re in love withher—at present.” And with a sharp click Mrs.Alsager dropped the lid on the fragrant receptacle.

“Not yet—not yet!” laughed her visitor.

“You will be if she pulls you through.”

“You declare that she won’t pull methrough.”

Mrs. Alsager was silent a moment, after which she softlymurmured: “I’ll pray for her.”

“You’re the most generous of women!”Wayworth cried; then coloured as if the words had not beenhappy. They would have done indeed little honour to a manof tact.

The next morning he received five hurried lines from Mrs.Alsager. She had suddenly been called to Torquay, to see arelation who was seriously ill; she should be detained thereseveral days, but she had an earnest hope of being able to returnin time for his first night. In any event he had herunrestricted good wishes. He missed her extremely, forthese last days were a great strain and there was little comfortto be derived from Violet Grey. She was even more nervousthan himself, and so pale and altered that he was afraid shewould be too ill to act. It was settled between them thatthey made each other worse and that he had now much better leaveher alone. They had pulled Nona so to pieces that nothingseemed left of her—she must at least have time to growtogether again. He left Violet Grey alone, to the best ofhis ability, but she carried out imperfectly her own side of thebargain. She came to him with new questions—shewaited for him with old doubts, and half an hour before the lastdress-rehearsal, on the eve of production, she proposed to him atotally fresh rendering of his heroine. This incident gavehim such a sense of insecurity that he turned his back on herwithout a word, bolted out of the theatre, dashed along theStrand and walked as far as the Bank. Then he jumped into ahansom and came westward, and when he reached the theatre againthe business was nearly over. It appeared, almost to hisdisappointment, not bad enough to give him the consolation of theold playhouse adage that the worst dress-rehearsals make the bestfirst nights.

The morrow, which was a Wednesday, was the dreadful day; thetheatre had been closed on the Monday and the Tuesday.Every one, on the Wednesday, did his best to let every one elsealone, and every one signally failed in the attempt. Theday, till seven o’clock, was understood to be consecratedto rest, but every one except Violet Grey turned up at thetheatre. Wayworth looked at Mr. Loder, and Mr. Loder lookedin another direction, which was as near as they came toconversation. Wayworth was in a fidget, unable to eat orsleep or sit still, at times almost in terror. He keptquiet by keeping, as usual, in motion; he tried to walk away fromhis nervousness. He walked in the afternoon toward NottingHill, but he succeeded in not breaking the vow he had taken notto meddle with his actress. She was like an acrobat poisedon a slippery ball—if he should touch her she would toppleover. He passed her door three times and he thought of herthree hundred. This was the hour at which he most regrettedthat Mrs. Alsager had not come back—for he had called ather house only to learn that she was still at Torquay. Thiswas probably queer, and it was probably queerer still that shehadn’t written to him; but even of these things hewasn’t sure, for in losing, as he had now completely lost,his judgment of his play, he seemed to himself to have lost hisjudgment of everything. When he went home, however, hefound a telegram from the lady of GrosvenorPlace—“Shall be able to come—reach town byseven.” At half-past eight o’clock, through alittle aperture in the curtain of the “Renaissance,”he saw her in her box with a cluster of friends—completelybeautiful and beneficent. The house wasmagnificent—too good for his play, he felt; too good forany play. Everything now seemed too good—the scenery,the furniture, the dresses, the very programmes. He seizedupon the idea that this was probably what was the matter with therepresentative of Nona—she was only too good. He hadcompletely arranged with this young lady the plan of theirrelations during the evening; and though they had alteredeverything else that they had arranged they had promised eachother not to alter this. It was wonderful the number ofthings they had promised each other. He would start her, hewould see her off—then he would quit the theatre and stayaway till just before the end. She besought him to stayaway—it would make her infinitely easier. He saw thatshe was exquisitely dressed—she had made one or two changesfor the better since the night before, and that seemed somethingdefinite to turn over and over in his mind as he rumbled foggilyhome in the four-wheeler in which, a few steps from thestage-door, he had taken refuge as soon as he knew that thecurtain was up. He lived a couple of miles off, and he hadchosen a four-wheeler to drag out the time.

When he got home his fire was out, his room was cold, and helay down on his sofa in his overcoat. He had sent hislandlady to the dress-circle, on purpose; she would overflow withwords and mistakes. The house seemed a black void, just asthe streets had done—every one was, formidably, at hisplay. He was quieter at last than he had been for afortnight, and he felt too weak even to wonder how the thing wasgoing. He believed afterwards that he had slept an hour;but even if he had he felt it to be still too early to return tothe theatre. He sat down by his lamp and tried toread—to read a little compendious life of a great Englishstatesman, out of a “series.” It struck him asbrilliantly clever, and he asked himself whether that perhapswere not rather the sort of thing he ought to have taken up: notthe statesmanship, but the art of brief biography. Suddenlyhe became aware that he must hurry if he was to reach the theatreat all—it was a quarter to eleven o’clock. Hescrambled out and, this time, found a hansom—he had latelyspent enough money in cabs to add to his hope that the profits ofhis new profession would be great. His anxiety, hissuspense flamed up again, and as he rattled eastward—hewent fast now—he was almost sick with alternations.As he passed into the theatre the first man—someunderling—who met him, cried to him, breathlessly:

“You’re wanted, sir—you’rewanted!” He thought his tone very ominous—hedevoured the man’s eyes with his own, for a betrayal: didhe mean that he was wanted for execution? Some one elsepressed him, almost pushed him, forward; he was already on thestage. Then he became conscious of a sound more or lesscontinuous, but seemingly faint and far, which he took at firstfor the voice of the actors heard through their canvas walls, thebeautiful built-in room of the last act. But the actorswere in the wing, they surrounded him; the curtain was down andthey were coming off from before it. They had been called,and he was called—they all greeted him with“Go on—go on!” He was terrified—hecouldn’t go on—he didn’t believe in theapplause, which seemed to him only audible enough to soundhalf-hearted.

“Has it gone?—has it gone?” he gaspedto the people round him; and he heard them say“Rather—rather!” perfunctorily, mendaciouslytoo, as it struck him, and even with mocking laughter, thelaughter of defeat and despair. Suddenly, though all thismust have taken but a moment, Loder burst upon him from somewherewith a “For God’s sake don’t keep them, orthey’ll stop!” “But I can’tgo on for that!” Wayworth cried, in anguish;the sound seemed to him already to have ceased. Loder hadhold of him and was shoving him; he resisted and looked roundfrantically for Violet Grey, who perhaps would tell him thetruth. There was by this time a crowd in the wing, all withstrange grimacing painted faces, but Violet was not among themand her very absence frightened him. He uttered her namewith an accent that he afterwards regretted—it gave them,as he thought, both away; and while Loder hustled him before thecurtain he heard some one say “She took her call anddisappeared.” She had had a call, then—this waswhat was most present to the young man as he stood for an instantin the glare of the footlights, looking blindly at the greatvaguely-peopled horseshoe and greeted with plaudits which nowseemed to him at once louder than he deserved and feebler than hedesired. They sank to rest quickly, but he felt it to belong before he could back away, before he could, in his turn,seize the manager by the arm and cry huskily—“Has itreally gone—really?”

Mr. Loder looked at him hard and replied after an instant:“The play’s all right!”

Wayworth hung upon his lips. “Then what’sall wrong?”

“We must do something to Miss Grey.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“She isn’t in it!”

“Do you mean she has failed?”

“Yes, damn it—she has failed.”

Wayworth stared. “Then how can the play be allright?”

“Oh, we’ll save it—we’ll saveit.”

“Where’s Miss Grey—where isshe?” the young man asked.

Loder caught his arm as he was turning away again to look forhis heroine. “Never mind her now—she knowsit!”

Wayworth was approached at the same moment by a gentleman heknew as one of Mrs. Alsager’s friends—he hadperceived him in that lady’s box. Mrs. Alsager waswaiting there for the successful author; she desired veryearnestly that he would come round and speak to her.Wayworth assured himself first that Violet had left thetheatre—one of the actresses could tell him that she hadseen her throw on a cloak, without changing her dress, and hadlearnt afterwards that she had, the next moment, flung herself,after flinging her aunt, into a cab. He had wished toinvite half a dozen persons, of whom Miss Grey and her elderlyrelative were two, to come home to supper with him; but she hadrefused to make any engagement beforehand (it would be sodreadful to have to keep it if she shouldn’t have made ahit), and this attitude had blighted the pleasant plan, whichfell to the ground. He had called her morbid, but she wasimmovable. Mrs. Alsager’s messenger let him know thathe was expected to supper in Grosvenor Place, and half an hourafterwards he was seated there among complimentary people andflowers and popping corks, eating the first orderly meal he hadpartaken of for a week. Mrs. Alsager had carried him off inher brougham—the other people who were coming got intothings of their own. He stopped her short as soon as shebegan to tell him how tremendously every one had been struck bythe piece; he nailed her down to the question of VioletGrey. Had she spoilt the play, had she jeopardised orcompromised it—had she been utterly bad, had she been goodin any degree?

“Certainly the performance would have seemed better ifshe had been better,” Mrs. Alsager confessed.

“And the play would have seemed better if theperformance had been better,” Wayworth said, gloomily, fromthe corner of the brougham.

“She does what she can, and she has talent, and shelooked lovely. But she doesn’t see NonaVincent. She doesn’t see the type—shedoesn’t see the individual—she doesn’t see thewoman you meant. She’s out of it—she gives youa different person.”

“Oh, the woman I meant!” the young man exclaimed,looking at the London lamps as he rolled by them. “Iwish to God she had known you!” he added, as thecarriage stopped. After they had passed into the house hesaid to his companion:

“You see she won’t pull methrough.”

“Forgive her—be kind to her!” Mrs. Alsagerpleaded.

“I shall only thank her. The play may go to thedogs.”

“If it does—if it does,” Mrs. Alsager began,with her pure eyes on him.

“Well, what if it does?”

She couldn’t tell him, for the rest of her guests camein together; she only had time to say: “Itsha’n’t go to the dogs!”

He came away before the others, restless with the desire to goto Notting Hill even that night, late as it was, haunted with thesense that Violet Grey had measured her fall. When he gotinto the street, however, he allowed second thoughts to counselanother course; the effect of knocking her up at twoo’clock in the morning would hardly be to soothe her.He looked at six newspapers the next day and found in them nevera good word for her. They were well enough about the piece,but they were unanimous as to the disappointment caused by theyoung actress whose former efforts had excited such hopes and onwhom, on this occasion, such pressing responsibilitiesrested. They asked in chorus what was the matter with her,and they declared in chorus that the play, which was not withoutpromise, was handicapped (they all used the same word) by the oddwant of correspondence between the heroine and herinterpreter. Wayworth drove early to Notting Hill, but hedidn’t take the newspapers with him; Violet Grey could betrusted to have sent out for them by the peep of dawn and to havefed her anguish full. She declined to see him—sheonly sent down word by her aunt that she was extremely unwell andshould be unable to act that night unless she were suffered tospend the day unmolested and in bed. Wayworth sat for anhour with the old lady, who understood everything and to whom hecould speak frankly. She gave him a touching picture of herniece’s condition, which was all the more vivid for thesimple words in which it was expressed: “She feels sheisn’t right, you know—she feels she isn’tright!”

“Tell her it doesn’t matter—it doesn’tmatter a straw!” said Wayworth.

“And she’s so proud—you know how proud sheis!” the old lady went on.

“Tell her I’m more than satisfied, that I accepther gratefully as she is.”

“She says she injures your play, that she ruinsit,” said his interlocutress.

“She’ll improve, immensely—she’ll growinto the part,” the young man continued.

“She’d improve if she knew how—but she saysshe doesn’t. She has given all she has got, and shedoesn’t know what’s wanted.”

“What’s wanted is simply that she should gostraight on and trust me.”

“How can she trust you when she feels she’s losingyou?”

“Losing me?” Wayworth cried.

“You’ll never forgive her if your play is takenoff!”

“It will run six months,” said the author of thepiece.

The old lady laid her hand on his arm. “What willyou do for her if it does?”

He looked at Violet Grey’s aunt a moment.“Do you say your niece is very proud?”

“Too proud for her dreadful profession.”

“Then she wouldn’t wish you to ask me that,”Wayworth answered, getting up.

When he reached home he was very tired, and for a person towhom it was open to consider that he had scored a success hespent a remarkably dismal day. All his restlessness hadgone, and fatigue and depression possessed him. He sankinto his old chair by the fire and sat there for hours with hiseyes closed. His landlady came in to bring his luncheon andmend the fire, but he feigned to be asleep, so as not to bespoken to. It is to be supposed that sleep at last overtookhim, for about the hour that dusk began to gather he had anextraordinary impression, a visit that, it would seem, could havebelonged to no waking consciousness. Nona Vincent, in faceand form, the living heroine of his play, rose before him in hislittle silent room, sat down with him at his dingyfireside. She was not Violet Grey, she was not Mrs.Alsager, she was not any woman he had seen upon earth, nor was itany masquerade of friendship or of penitence. Yet she wasmore familiar to him than the women he had known best, and shewas ineffably beautiful and consoling. She filled the poorroom with her presence, the effect of which was as soothing assome odour of incense. She was as quiet as an affectionatesister, and there was no surprise in her being there.Nothing more real had ever befallen him, and nothing, somehow,more reassuring. He felt her hand rest upon his own, andall his senses seemed to open to her message. She struckhim, in the strangest way, both as his creation and as hisinspirer, and she gave him the happiest consciousness ofsuccess. If she was so charming, in the red firelight, inher vague, clear-coloured garments, it was because he had madeher so, and yet if the weight seemed lifted from his spirit itwas because she drew it away. When she bent her deep eyesupon him they seemed to speak of safety and freedom and to make agreen garden of the future. From time to time she smiledand said: “I live—I live—I live.”How long she stayed he couldn’t have told, but when hislandlady blundered in with the lamp Nona Vincent was no longerthere. He rubbed his eyes, but no dream had ever been sointense; and as he slowly got out of his chair it was with a deepstill joy—the joy of the artist—in the thought of howright he had been, how exactly like herself he had madeher. She had come to show him that. At the end offive minutes, however, he felt sufficiently mystified to call hislandlady back—he wanted to ask her a question. Whenthe good woman reappeared the question hung fire an instant; thenit shaped itself as the inquiry:

“Has any lady been here?”

“No, sir—no lady at all.”

The woman seemed slightly scandalised. “Not MissVincent?”

“Miss Vincent, sir?”

“The young lady of my play, don’t youknow?”

“Oh, sir, you mean Miss Violet Grey!”

“No I don’t, at all. I think I mean Mrs.Alsager.”

“There has been no Mrs. Alsager, sir.”

“Nor anybody at all like her?”

The woman looked at him as if she wondered what had suddenlytaken him. Then she asked in an injured tone: “Whyshouldn’t I have told you if you’d ’ad callers,sir?”

“I thought you might have thought I wasasleep.”

“Indeed you were, sir, when I came in with thelamp—and well you’d earned it, Mr.Wayworth!”

The landlady came back an hour later to bring him a telegram;it was just as he had begun to dress to dine at his club and godown to the theatre.

“See me to-night in front, and don’t come near metill it’s over.”

It was in these words that Violet communicated her wishes forthe evening. He obeyed them to the letter; he watched herfrom the depths of a box. He was in no position to say howshe might have struck him the night before, but what he sawduring these charmed hours filled him with admiration andgratitude. She was in it, this time; she had pulledherself together, she had taken possession, she was felicitous atevery turn. Fresh from his revelation of Nona he was in aposition to judge, and as he judged he exulted. He wasthrilled and carried away, and he was moreover intensely curiousto know what had happened to her, by what unfathomable art shehad managed in a few hours to effect such a change of base.It was as if she had had a revelation of Nona, soconvincing a clearness had been breathed upon the picture.He kept himself quiet in the entr’actes—hewould speak to her only at the end; but before the play was halfover the manager burst into his box.

“It’s prodigious, what she’s up to!”cried Mr. Loder, almost more bewildered than gratified.“She has gone in for a new reading—a blessedsomersault in the air!”

“Is it quite different?” Wayworth asked, sharinghis mystification.

“Different? Hyperion to a satyr! It’sdevilish good, my boy!”

“It’s devilish good,” said Wayworth,“and it’s in a different key altogether from the keyof her rehearsal.”

“I’ll run you six months!” the managerdeclared; and he rushed round again to the actress, leavingWayworth with a sense that she had already pulled himthrough. She had with the audience an immense personalsuccess.

When he went behind, at the end, he had to wait for her; sheonly showed herself when she was ready to leave thetheatre. Her aunt had been in her dressing-room with her,and the two ladies appeared together. The girl passed himquickly, motioning him to say nothing till they should have gotout of the place. He saw that she was immensely excited,lifted altogether above her common artistic level. The oldlady said to him: “You must come home to supper with us: ithas been all arranged.” They had a brougham, with alittle third seat, and he got into it with them. It was along time before the actress would speak. She leaned backin her corner, giving no sign but still heaving a little, like asubsiding sea, and with all her triumph in the eyes that shonethrough the darkness. The old lady was hushed to awe, or atleast to discretion, and Wayworth was happy enough to wait.He had really to wait till they had alighted at Notting Hill,where the elder of his companions went to see that supper hadbeen attended to.

“I was better—I was better,” said VioletGrey, throwing off her cloak in the little drawing-room.

“You were perfection. You’ll be like thatevery night, won’t you?”

She smiled at him. “Every night? There canscarcely be a miracle every day.”

“What do you mean by a miracle?”

“I’ve had a revelation.”

Wayward stared. “At what hour?”

“The right hour—this afternoon. Just in timeto save me—and to save you.”

“At five o’clock? Do you mean you had avisit?”

“She came to me—she stayed two hours.”

“Two hours? Nona Vincent?”

“Mrs. Alsager.” Violet Grey smiled moredeeply. “It’s the same thing.”

“And how did Mrs. Alsager save you?”

“By letting me look at her. By letting me hear herspeak. By letting me know her.”

“And what did she say to you?”

“Kind things—encouraging, intelligentthings.”

“Ah, the dear woman!” Wayworth cried.

“You ought to like her—she likes you.She was just what I wanted,” the actress added.

“Do you mean she talked to you about Nona?”

“She said you thought she was like her. Sheis—she’s exquisite.”

“She’s exquisite,” Wayworth repeated.“Do you mean she tried to coach you?”

“Oh, no—she only said she would be so glad if itwould help me to see her. And I felt it did help me.I don’t know what took place—she only sat there, andshe held my hand and smiled at me, and she had tact and grace,and she had goodness and beauty, and she soothed my nerves andlighted up my imagination. Somehow she seemed togive it all to me. I took it—I took it.I kept her before me, I drank her in. For the first time,in the whole study of the part, I had my model—I could makemy copy. All my courage came back to me, and other thingscame that I hadn’t felt before. She wasdifferent—she was delightful; as I’ve said, she was arevelation. She kissed me when she went away—and youmay guess if I kissed her. We were awfullyaffectionate, but it’s you she likes!” saidViolet Grey.

Wayworth had never been more interested in his life, and hehad rarely been more mystified. “Did she wear vague,clear-coloured garments?” he asked, after a moment.

Violet Grey stared, laughed, then bade him go in tosupper. “You know how she dresses!”

He was very well pleased at supper, but he was silent and alittle solemn. He said he would go to see Mrs. Alsager thenext day. He did so, but he was told at her door that shehad returned to Torquay. She remained there all winter, allspring, and the next time he saw her his play had run two hundrednights and he had married Violet Grey. His plays sometimessucceed, but his wife is not in them now, nor in anyothers. At these representations Mrs. Alsager continuesfrequently to be present.

p. 181THECHAPERON.

I.

An old lady, in a highdrawing-room, had had her chair moved close to the fire, whereshe sat knitting and warming her knees. She was dressed indeep mourning; her face had a faded nobleness, tempered, however,by the somewhat illiberal compression assumed by her lips inobedience to something that was passing in her mind. Shewas far from the lamp, but though her eyes were fixed upon heractive needles she was not looking at them. What she reallysaw was quite another train of affairs. The room wasspacious and dim; the thick London fog had oozed into it eventhrough its superior defences. It was full of dusky,massive, valuable things. The old lady sat motionless savefor the regularity of her clicking needles, which seemed aspersonal to her and as expressive as prolonged fingers. Ifshe was thinking something out, she was thinking itthoroughly.

When she looked up, on the entrance of a girl of twenty, itmight have been guessed that the appearance of this young ladywas not an interruption of her meditation, but rather acontribution to it. The young lady, who was charming tobehold, was also in deep mourning, which had a freshness, ifmourning can be fresh, an air of having been lately put on.She went straight to the bell beside the chimney-piece and pulledit, while in her other hand she held a sealed and directedletter. Her companion glanced in silence at the letter;then she looked still harder at her work. The girl hoverednear the fireplace, without speaking, and after a due, adignified interval the butler appeared in response to thebell. The time had been sufficient to make the silencebetween the ladies seem long. The younger one asked thebutler to see that her letter should be posted; and after he hadgone out she moved vaguely about the room, as if to give hergrandmother—for such was the elder personage—a chanceto begin a colloquy of which she herself preferred not to strikethe first note. As equally with herself her companion wason the face of it capable of holding out, the tension, though itwas already late in the evening, might have lasted long.But the old lady after a little appeared to recognise, a trifleungraciously, the girl’s superior resources.

“Have you written to your mother?”

“Yes, but only a few lines, to tell her I shall come andsee her in the morning.”

“Is that all you’ve got to say?” asked thegrandmother.

“I don’t quite know what you want me tosay.”

“I want you to say that you’ve made up yourmind.”

“Yes, I’ve done that, granny.”

“You intend to respect your father’swishes?”

“It depends upon what you mean by respecting them.I do justice to the feelings by which they weredictated.”

“What do you mean by justice?” the old ladyretorted.

The girl was silent a moment; then she said:“You’ll see my idea of it.”

“I see it already! You’ll go and live withher.”

“I shall talk the situation over with her to-morrow andtell her that I think that will be best.”

“Best for her, no doubt!”

“What’s best for her is best for me.”

“And for your brother and sister?” As thegirl made no reply to this her grandmother went on:“What’s best for them is that you should acknowledgesome responsibility in regard to them and, considering how youngthey are, try and do something for them.”

“They must do as I’ve done—they must act forthemselves. They have their means now, and they’refree.”

“Free? They’re mere children.”

“Let me remind you that Eric is older than I.”

“He doesn’t like his mother,” said the oldlady, as if that were an answer.

“I never said he did. And she adoreshim.”

“Oh, your mother’s adorations!”

“Don’t abuse her now,” the girl rejoined,after a pause.

The old lady forbore to abuse her, but she made up for it thenext moment by saying: “It will be dreadful forEdith.”

“What will be dreadful?”

“Your desertion of her.”

“The desertion’s on her side.”

“Her consideration for her father does herhonour.”

“Of course I’m a brute, n’en parlonsplus,” said the girl. “We must go ourrespective ways,” she added, in a tone of extreme wisdomand philosophy.

Her grandmother straightened out her knitting and began toroll it up. “Be so good as to ring for mymaid,” she said, after a minute. The young lady rang,and there was another wait and another conscious hush.Before the maid came her mistress remarked: “Of course thenyou’ll not come to me, you know.”

“What do you mean by ‘coming’ toyou?”

“I can’t receive you on that footing.”

“She’ll not come with me, if you meanthat.”

“I don’t mean that,” said the old lady,getting up as her maid came in. This attendant took herwork from her, gave her an arm and helped her out of the room,while Rose Tramore, standing before the fire and looking into it,faced the idea that her grandmother’s door would now underall circumstances be closed to her. She lost no timehowever in brooding over this anomaly: it only added energy toher determination to act. All she could do to-night was togo to bed, for she felt utterly weary. She had been living,in imagination, in a prospective struggle, and it had left her asexhausted as a real fight. Moreover this was theculmination of a crisis, of weeks of suspense, of a long, hardstrain. Her father had been laid in his grave five daysbefore, and that morning his will had been read. In theafternoon she had got Edith off to St. Leonard’s with theiraunt Julia, and then she had had a wretched talk with Eric.Lastly, she had made up her mind to act in opposition to theformidable will, to a clause which embodied if not exactly aprovision, a recommendation singularly emphatic. She wentto bed and slept the sleep of the just.

“Oh, my dear, how charming! I must take anotherhouse!” It was in these words that her motherresponded to the announcement Rose had just formally made andwith which she had vaguely expected to produce a certain dignityof effect. In the way of emotion there was apparently noeffect at all, and the girl was wise enough to know that this wasnot simply on account of the general line of non-allusion takenby the extremely pretty woman before her, who looked like herelder sister. Mrs. Tramore had never manifested, to herdaughter, the slightest consciousness that her position waspeculiar; but the recollection of something more than that finepolicy was required to explain such a failure, to appreciateRose’s sacrifice. It was simply a fresh reminder thatshe had never appreciated anything, that she was nothing but atinted and stippled surface. Her situation was peculiarindeed. She had been the heroine of a scandal which hadgrown dim only because, in the eyes of the London world, it paledin the lurid light of the contemporaneous. That attentionhad been fixed on it for several days, fifteen years before;there had been a high relish of the vivid evidence as to hiswife’s misconduct with which, in the divorce-court, CharlesTramore had judged well to regale a cynical public. Thecase was pronounced awfully bad, and he obtained hisdecree. The folly of the wife had been inconceivable, inspite of other examples: she had quitted her children, she hadfollowed the “other fellow” abroad. The otherfellow hadn’t married her, not having had time: he had losthis life in the Mediterranean by the capsizing of a boat, beforethe prohibitory term had expired.

Mrs. Tramore had striven to extract from this accidentsomething of the austerity of widowhood; but her mourning onlymade her deviation more public, she was a widow whose husband wasawkwardly alive. She had not prowled about the Continent onthe classic lines; she had come back to London to take herchance. But London would give her no chance, would havenothing to say to her; as many persons had remarked, you couldnever tell how London would behave. It would not receiveMrs. Tramore again on any terms, and when she was spoken of,which now was not often, it was inveterately said of her that shewent nowhere. Apparently she had not the qualities forwhich London compounds; though in the cases in which it doescompound you may often wonder what these qualities are. Shehad not at any rate been successful: her lover was dead, herhusband was liked and her children were pitied, for in paymentfor a topic London will parenthetically pity. It wasthought interesting and magnanimous that Charles Tramore had notmarried again. The disadvantage to his children of themiserable story was thus left uncorrected, and this, ratheroddly, was counted as his sacrifice. His mother,whose arrangements were elaborate, looked after them a greatdeal, and they enjoyed a mixture of laxity and discipline underthe roof of their aunt, Miss Tramore, who was independent,having, for reasons that the two ladies had exhaustivelydiscussed, determined to lead her own life. She had set upa home at St. Leonard’s, and that contracted shore hadplayed a considerable part in the upbringing of the littleTramores. They knew about their mother, as the phrase was,but they didn’t know her; which was naturally deemed morepathetic for them than for her. She had a house in ChesterSquare and an income and a victoria—it served all purposes,as she never went out in the evening—and flowers on herwindow-sills, and a remarkable appearance of youth. Theincome was supposed to be in part the result of a bequest fromthe man for whose sake she had committed the error of her life,and in the appearance of youth there was a slightly impertinentimplication that it was a sort of afterglow of the sameconnection.

Her children, as they grew older, fortunately showed signs ofsome individuality of disposition. Edith, the second girl,clung to her aunt Julia; Eric, the son, clung frantically topolo; while Rose, the elder daughter, appeared to cling mainly toherself. Collectively, of course, they clung to theirfather, whose attitude in the family group, however, was casualand intermittent. He was charming and vague; he was like aclever actor who often didn’t come to rehearsal.Fortune, which but for that one stroke had been generous to him,had provided him with deputies and trouble-takers, as well aswith whimsical opinions, and a reputation for excellent taste,and whist at his club, and perpetual cigars on morocco sofas, anda beautiful absence of purpose. Nature had thrown in aremarkably fine hand, which he sometimes passed over hischildren’s heads when they were glossy from the nurserybrush. On Rose’s eighteenth birthday he said to herthat she might go to see her mother, on condition that her visitsshould be limited to an hour each time and to four in theyear. She was to go alone; the other children were notincluded in the arrangement. This was the result of a visitthat he himself had paid his repudiated wife at her urgentrequest, their only encounter during the fifteen years. Thegirl knew as much as this from her aunt Julia, who was full oftell-tale secrecies. She availed herself eagerly of thelicense, and in course of the period that elapsed before herfather’s death she spent with Mrs. Tramore exactly eighthours by the watch. Her father, who was as inconsistent anddisappointing as he was amiable, spoke to her of her mother onlyonce afterwards. This occasion had been the sequel of herfirst visit, and he had made no use of it to ask what she thoughtof the personality in Chester Square or how she liked it.He had only said “Did she take you out?” and whenRose answered “Yes, she put me straight into a carriage anddrove me up and down Bond Street,” had rejoined sharply“See that that never occurs again.” It neverdid, but once was enough, every one they knew having happened tobe in Bond Street at that particular hour.

After this the periodical interview took place in private, inMrs. Tramore’s beautiful little wasted drawing-room.Rose knew that, rare as these occasions were, her mother wouldnot have kept her “all to herself” had there beenanybody she could have shown her to. But in the poorlady’s social void there was no one; she had after all herown correctness and she consistently preferred isolation toinferior contacts. So her daughter was subjected only tothe maternal; it was not necessary to be definite in qualifyingthat. The girl had by this time a collection of ideas,gathered by impenetrable processes; she had tasted, in theostracism of her ambiguous parent, of the acrid fruit of the treeof knowledge. She not only had an approximate vision ofwhat every one had done, but she had a private judgment for eachcase. She had a particular vision of her father, which didnot interfere with his being dear to her, but which was directlyconcerned in her resolution, after his death, to do the specialthing he had expressed the wish she should not do. In thegeneral estimate her grandmother and her grandmother’smoney had their place, and the strong probability that anyenjoyment of the latter commodity would now be withheld fromher. It included Edith’s marked inclination toreceive the law, and doubtless eventually a more substantialmemento, from Miss Tramore, and opened the question whether herown course might not contribute to make her sister’s appearheartless. The answer to this question however would dependon the success that might attend her own, which would verypossibly be small. Eric’s attitude was eminentlysimple; he didn’t care to know people who didn’t knowhis people. If his mother should ever get back intosociety perhaps he would take her up. Rose Tramore haddecided to do what she could to bring this consummation about;and strangely enough—so mixed were her superstitions andher heresies—a large part of her motive lay in the valueshe attached to such a consecration.

Of her mother intrinsically she thought very little now, andif her eyes were fixed on a special achievement it was much morefor the sake of that achievement and to satisfy a latent energythat was in her than because her heart was wrung by thissufferer. Her heart had not been wrung at all, though shehad quite held it out for the experience. Her purpose was apious game, but it was still essentially a game. Among theideas I have mentioned she had her idea of triumph. She hadcaught the inevitable note, the pitch, on her very first visit toChester Square. She had arrived there in intenseexcitement, and her excitement was left on her hands in a mannerthat reminded her of a difficult air she had once heard sung atthe opera when no one applauded the performer. Thatflatness had made her sick, and so did this, in anotherway. A part of her agitation proceeded from the fact thather aunt Julia had told her, in the manner of a burst ofconfidence, something she was not to repeat, that she was inappearance the very image of the lady in Chester Square.The motive that prompted this declaration was between aunt Juliaand her conscience; but it was a great emotion to the girl tofind her entertainer so beautiful. She was tall andexquisitely slim; she had hair more exactly to RoseTramore’s taste than any other she had ever seen, even toevery detail in the way it was dressed, and a complexion and afigure of the kind that are always spoken of as“lovely.” Her eyes were irresistible, and sowere her clothes, though the clothes were perhaps a little moreprecisely the right thing than the eyes. Her appearance wasmarked to her daughter’s sense by the highest distinction;though it may be mentioned that this had never been the opinionof all the world. It was a revelation to Rose that sheherself might look a little like that. She knew howeverthat aunt Julia had not seen her deposed sister-in-law for a longtime, and she had a general impression that Mrs. Tramore wasto-day a more complete production—for instance as regardedher air of youth—than she had ever been. There was noexcitement on her side—that was all her visitor’s;there was no emotion—that was excluded by the plan, to saynothing of conditions more primal. Rose had from the firsta glimpse of her mother’s plan. It was to mentionnothing and imply nothing, neither to acknowledge, to explain norto extenuate. She would leave everything to her child; withher child she was secure. She only wanted to get back intosociety; she would leave even that to her child, whom she treatednot as a high-strung and heroic daughter, a creature ofexaltation, of devotion, but as a new, charming, clever, usefulfriend, a little younger than herself. Already on thatfirst day she had talked about dressmakers. Of course, poorthing, it was to be remembered that in her circumstances therewere not many things she could talk about.“She wants to go out again; that’s the only thing inthe wide world she wants,” Rose had promptly, compendiouslysaid to herself. There had been a sequel to thisobservation, uttered, in intense engrossment, in her own roomhalf an hour before she had, on the important evening, made knownher decision to her grandmother: “Then I’lltake her out!”

“She’ll drag you down, she’ll drag youdown!” Julia Tramore permitted herself to remark to herniece, the next day, in a tone of feverish prophecy.

As the girl’s own theory was that all the dragging theremight be would be upward, and moreover administered by herself,she could look at her aunt with a cold and inscrutable eye.

“Very well, then, I shall be out of your sight, from thepinnacle you occupy, and I sha’n’t troubleyou.”

“Do you reproach me for my disinterested exertions, forthe way I’ve toiled over you, the way I’ve lived foryou?” Miss Tramore demanded.

“Don’t reproach me for being kind to mymother and I won’t reproach you for anything.”

“She’ll keep you out ofeverything—she’ll make you miss everything,”Miss Tramore continued.

“Then she’ll make me miss a great dealthat’s odious,” said the girl.

“You’re too young for such extravagances,”her aunt declared.

“And yet Edith, who is younger than I, seems to be tooold for them: how do you arrange that? My mother’ssociety will make me older,” Rose replied.

“Don’t speak to me of your mother; you haveno mother.”

“Then if I’m an orphan I must settle things formyself.”

“Do you justify her, do you approve of her?” criedMiss Tramore, who was inferior to her niece in capacity forretort and whose limitations made the girl appear pert.

Rose looked at her a moment in silence; then she said, turningaway: “I think she’s charming.”

“And do you propose to become charming in the samemanner?”

“Her manner is perfect; it would be an excellentmodel. But I can’t discuss my mother withyou.”

“You’ll have to discuss her with some otherpeople!” Miss Tramore proclaimed, going out of theroom.

Rose wondered whether this were a general or a particularvaticination. There was something her aunt might have meantby it, but her aunt rarely meant the best thing she might havemeant. Miss Tramore had come up from St. Leonard’s inresponse to a telegram from her own parent, for an occasion likethe present brought with it, for a few hours, a certainrelaxation of their dissent. “Do what you can to stopher,” the old lady had said; but her daughter found thatthe most she could do was not much. They both had a baffledsense that Rose had thought the question out a good deal furtherthan they; and this was particularly irritating to Mrs. Tramore,as consciously the cleverer of the two. A question thoughtout as far as she could think it had always appeared toher to have performed its human uses; she had never encountered aghost emerging from that extinction. Their great contentionwas that Rose would cut herself off; and certainly if shewasn’t afraid of that she wasn’t afraid ofanything. Julia Tramore could only tell her mother howlittle the girl was afraid. She was already prepared toleave the house, taking with her the possessions, or her share ofthem, that had accumulated there during her father’sillness. There had been a going and coming of her maid, athumping about of boxes, an ordering of four-wheelers; itappeared to old Mrs. Tramore that something of theobjectionableness, the indecency, of her granddaughter’sprospective connection had already gathered about theplace. It was a violation of the decorum of bereavementwhich was still fresh there, and from the indignant gloom of themistress of the house you might have inferred not so much thatthe daughter was about to depart as that the mother was about toarrive. There had been no conversation on the dreadfulsubject at luncheon; for at luncheon at Mrs. Tramore’s (herson never came to it) there were always, even after funerals andother miseries, stray guests of both sexes whose policy it was tobe cheerful and superficial. Rose had sat down as ifnothing had happened—nothing worse, that is, than herfather’s death; but no one had spoken of anything that anyone else was thinking of.

Before she left the house a servant brought her a message fromher grandmother—the old lady desired to see her in thedrawing-room. She had on her bonnet, and she went down asif she were about to step into her cab. Mrs. Tramore satthere with her eternal knitting, from which she forebore even toraise her eyes as, after a silence that seemed to express thefulness of her reprobation, while Rose stood motionless, shebegan: “I wonder if you really understand what you’redoing.”

“I think so. I’m not so stupid.”

“I never thought you were; but I don’t know whatto make of you now. You’re giving upeverything.”

The girl was tempted to inquire whether her grandmother calledherself “everything”; but she checked this question,answering instead that she knew she was giving up much.

“You’re taking a step of which you will feel theeffect to the end of your days,” Mrs. Tramore went on.

“In a good conscience, I heartily hope,” saidRose.

“Your father’s conscience was good enough for hismother; it ought to be good enough for his daughter.”

Rose sat down—she could afford to—as if she wishedto be very attentive and were still accessible to argument.But this demonstration only ushered in, after a moment, thesurprising words “I don’t think papa had anyconscience.”

“What in the name of all that’s unnatural do youmean?” Mrs. Tramore cried, over her glasses.“The dearest and best creature that ever lived!”

“He was kind, he had charming impulses, he wasdelightful. But he never reflected.”

Mrs. Tramore stared, as if at a language she had never heard,a farrago, a galimatias. Her life was made up ofitems, but she had never had to deal, intellectually, with a fineshade. Then while her needles, which had paused an instant,began to fly again, she rejoined: “Do you know what youare, my dear? You’re a dreadful little prig.Where do you pick up such talk?”

“Of course I don’t mean to judge betweenthem,” Rose pursued. “I can only judge betweenmy mother and myself. Papa couldn’t judge forme.” And with this she got up.

“One would think you were horrid. I never thoughtso before.”

“Thank you for that.”

“You’re embarking on a struggle withsociety,” continued Mrs. Tramore, indulging in an unusualflight of oratory. “Society will put you in yourplace.”

“Hasn’t it too many other things to do?”asked the girl.

This question had an ingenuity which led her grandmother tomeet it with a merely provisional and somewhat sketchyanswer. “Your ignorance would be melancholy if yourbehaviour were not so insane.”

“Oh, no; I know perfectly what she’ll do!”Rose replied, almost gaily. “She’ll drag medown.”

“She won’t even do that,” the old ladydeclared contradictiously. “She’ll keep youforever in the same dull hole.”

“I shall come and see you, granny, when I wantsomething more lively.”

“You may come if you like, but you’ll come nofurther than the door. If you leave this house now youdon’t enter it again.”

Rose hesitated a moment. “Do you really meanthat?”

“You may judge whether I choose such a time tojoke.”

“Good-bye, then,” said the girl.

“Good-bye.”

Rose quitted the room successfully enough; but on the otherside of the door, on the landing, she sank into a chair andburied her face in her hands. She had burst into tears, andshe sobbed there for a moment, trying hard to recover herself, soas to go downstairs without showing any traces of emotion,passing before the servants and again perhaps before auntJulia. Mrs. Tramore was too old to cry; she could only dropher knitting and, for a long time, sit with her head bowed andher eyes closed.

Rose had reckoned justly with her aunt Julia; there were nofootmen, but this vigilant virgin was posted at the foot of thestairs. She offered no challenge however; she only said:“There’s some one in the parlour who wants to seeyou.” The girl demanded a name, but Miss Tramore onlymouthed inaudibly and winked and waved. Rose instantlyreflected that there was only one man in the world her aunt wouldlook such deep things about. “Captain Jay?” herown eyes asked, while Miss Tramore’s were those of aconspirator: they were, for a moment, the only embarrassed eyesRose had encountered that day. They contributed to makeaunt Julia’s further response evasive, after her nieceinquired if she had communicated in advance with thisvisitor. Miss Tramore merely said that he had been upstairswith her mother—hadn’t she mentioned it?—andhad been waiting for her. She thought herself acute in notputting the question of the girl’s seeing him before her asa favour to him or to herself; she presented it as a duty, andwound up with the proposition: “It’s not fair to him,it’s not kind, not to let him speak to you before yougo.”

“What does he want to say?” Rose demanded.

“Go in and find out.”

She really knew, for she had found out before; but afterstanding uncertain an instant she went in. “Theparlour” was the name that had always been borne by aspacious sitting-room downstairs, an apartment occupied by herfather during his frequent phases of residence in HillStreet—episodes increasingly frequent after his house inthe country had, in consequence, as Rose perfectly knew, of hisspending too much money, been disposed of at a sacrifice which healways characterised as horrid. He had been left with theplace in Hertfordshire and his mother with the London house, onthe general understanding that they would change about; butduring the last years the community had grown more rigid, mainlyat his mother’s expense. The parlour was full of hismemory and his habits and his things—his books and picturesand bibelots, objects that belonged now to Eric.Rose had sat in it for hours since his death; it was the place inwhich she could still be nearest to him. But she felt farfrom him as Captain Jay rose erect on her opening the door.This was a very different presence. He had not likedCaptain Jay. She herself had, but not enough to make agreat complication of her father’s coldness. Thisafternoon however she foresaw complications. At the veryoutset for instance she was not pleased with his having arrangedsuch a surprise for her with her grandmother and her aunt.It was probably aunt Julia who had sent for him; her grandmotherwouldn’t have done it. It placed him immediately ontheir side, and Rose was almost as disappointed at this as if shehad not known it was quite where he would naturally be. Hehad never paid her a special visit, but if that was what hewished to do why shouldn’t he have waited till she shouldbe under her mother’s roof? She knew the reason, butshe had an angry prospect of enjoyment in making him expressit. She liked him enough, after all, if it were measured bythe idea of what she could make him do.

In Bertram Jay the elements were surprisingly mingled; youwould have gone astray, in reading him, if you had counted onfinding the complements of some of his qualities. He wouldnot however have struck you in the least as incomplete, for inevery case in which you didn’t find the complement youwould have found the contradiction. He was in the RoyalEngineers, and was tall, lean and high-shouldered. Helooked every inch a soldier, yet there were people who consideredthat he had missed his vocation in not becoming a parson.He took a public interest in the spiritual life of thearmy. Other persons still, on closer observation, wouldhave felt that his most appropriate field was neither the armynor the church, but simply the world—the social,successful, worldly world. If he had a sword in one handand a Bible in the other he had a Court Guide concealed somewhereabout his person. His profile was hard and handsome, hiseyes were both cold and kind, his dark straight hair wasimperturbably smooth and prematurely streaked with grey.There was nothing in existence that he didn’t takeseriously. He had a first-rate power of work and anambition as minutely organised as a German plan ofinvasion. His only real recreation was to go to church, buthe went to parties when he had time. If he was in love withRose Tramore this was distracting to him only in the same senseas his religion, and it was included in that department of hisextremely sub-divided life. His religion indeed was of anencroaching, annexing sort. Seen from in front he lookeddiffident and blank, but he was capable of exposing himself in away (to speak only of the paths of peace) wholly inconsistentwith shyness. He had a passion for instance for open-airspeaking, but was not thought on the whole to excel in it unlesshe could help himself out with a hymn. In conversation hekept his eyes on you with a kind of colourless candour, as if hehad not understood what you were saying and, in a fashion thatmade many people turn red, waited before answering. Thiswas only because he was considering their remarks in morerelations than they had intended. He had in his face noexpression whatever save the one just mentioned, and was, in hisprofession, already very distinguished.

He had seen Rose Tramore for the first time on a Sunday of theprevious March, at a house in the country at which she wasstaying with her father, and five weeks later he had made her, byletter, an offer of marriage. She showed her father theletter of course, and he told her that it would give him greatpleasure that she should send Captain Jay about hisbusiness. “My dear child,” he said, “wemust really have some one who will be better fun thanthat.” Rose had declined the honour, veryconsiderately and kindly, but not simply because her fatherwished it. She didn’t herself wish to detach thisflower from the stem, though when the young man wrote again, toexpress the hope that he might hope—so long was hewilling to wait—and ask if he might not still sometimes seeher, she answered even more indulgently than at first. Shehad shown her father her former letter, but she didn’t showhim this one; she only told him what it contained, submitting tohim also that of her correspondent. Captain Jay moreoverwrote to Mr. Tramore, who replied sociably, but so vaguely thathe almost neglected the subject under discussion—acommunication that made poor Bertram ponder long. He couldnever get to the bottom of the superficial, and all theproprieties and conventions of life were profound to him.Fortunately for him old Mrs. Tramore liked him, he wassatisfactory to her long-sightedness; so that a relation wasestablished under cover of which he still occasionally presentedhimself in Hill Street—presented himself nominally to themistress of the house. He had had scruples about theveracity of his visits, but he had disposed of them; he hadscruples about so many things that he had had to invent a generalway, to dig a central drain. Julia Tramore happened to meethim when she came up to town, and she took a view of him morebenevolent than her usual estimate of people encouraged by hermother. The fear of agreeing with that lady was a motive,but there was a stronger one, in this particular case, in thefear of agreeing with her niece, who had rejected him. Hissituation might be held to have improved when Mr. Tramore wastaken so gravely ill that with regard to his recovery those abouthim left their eyes to speak for their lips; and in the light ofthe poor gentleman’s recent death it was doubtless betterthan it had ever been.

He was only a quarter of an hour with the girl, but this gavehim time to take the measure of it. After he had spoken toher about her bereavement, very much as an especially mildmissionary might have spoken to a beautiful Polynesian, he lether know that he had learned from her companions the very strongstep she was about to take. This led to their spendingtogether ten minutes which, to her mind, threw more light on hischaracter than anything that had ever passed between them.She had always felt with him as if she were standing on an edge,looking down into something decidedly deep. To-day theimpression of the perpendicular shaft was there, but it wasrather an abyss of confusion and disorder than the large brightspace in which she had figured everything as ranged andpigeon-holed, presenting the appearance of the labelled shelvesand drawers at a chemist’s. He discussed without aninvitation to discuss, he appealed without a right toappeal. He was nothing but a suitor tolerated afterdismissal, but he took strangely for granted a participation inher affairs. He assumed all sorts of things that made herdraw back. He implied that there was everything now toassist them in arriving at an agreement, since she had neverinformed him that he was positively objectionable; but that thissymmetry would be spoiled if she should not be willing to take alittle longer to think of certain consequences. She wasgreatly disconcerted when she saw what consequences he meant andat his reminding her of them. What on earth was the use ofa lover if he was to speak only like one’s grandmother andone’s aunt? He struck her as much in love with herand as particularly careful at the same time as to what he mightsay. He never mentioned her mother; he only alluded,indirectly but earnestly, to the “step.” Hedisapproved of it altogether, took an unexpectedly prudent,politic view of it. He evidently also believed that shewould be dragged down; in other words that she would not be askedout. It was his idea that her mother would contaminate her,so that he should find himself interested in a young persondiscredited and virtually unmarriageable. All this was moreobvious to him than the consideration that a daughter should bemerciful. Where was his religion if he understood mercy solittle, and where were his talent and his courage if he were somiserably afraid of trumpery social penalties? Rose’sheart sank when she reflected that a man supposed to befirst-rate hadn’t guessed that rather than not do what shecould for her mother she would give up all the Engineers in theworld. She became aware that she probably would have beenmoved to place her hand in his on the spot if he had come to hersaying “Your idea is the right one; put it through at everycost.” She couldn’t discuss this with him,though he impressed her as having too much at stake for her totreat him with mere disdain. She sickened at the revelationthat a gentleman could see so much in mere vulgarities ofopinion, and though she uttered as few words as possible,conversing only in sad smiles and headshakes and in interceptedmovements toward the door, she happened, in some unguarded lapsefrom her reticence, to use the expression that she wasdisappointed in him. He caught at it and, seeming to drophis field-glass, pressed upon her with nearer, tenderer eyes.

“Can I be so happy as to believe, then, that you hadthought of me with some confidence, with some faith?”

“If you didn’t suppose so, what is the sense ofthis visit?” Rose asked.

“One can be faithful without reciprocity,” saidthe young man. “I regard you in a light which makesme want to protect you even if I have nothing to gain byit.”

“Yet you speak as if you thought you might keep me foryourself.”

“For yourself. I don’t want you tosuffer.”

“Nor to suffer yourself by my doing so,” saidRose, looking down.

“Ah, if you would only marry me next month!” hebroke out inconsequently.

“And give up going to mamma?” Rose waited to seeif he would say “What need that matter? Can’tyour mother come to us?” But he said nothing of thesort; he only answered—

“She surely would be sorry to interfere with theexercise of any other affection which I might have the bliss ofbelieving that you are now free, in however small a degree, toentertain.”

Rose knew that her mother wouldn’t be sorry at all; butshe contented herself with rejoining, her hand on the door:“Good-bye. I sha’n’t suffer.I’m not afraid.”

“You don’t know how terrible, how cruel, the worldcan be.”

“Yes, I do know. I know everything!”

The declaration sprang from her lips in a tone which made himlook at her as he had never looked before, as if he saw somethingnew in her face, as if he had never yet known her. Hehadn’t displeased her so much but that she would like togive him that impression, and since she felt that she was doingso she lingered an instant for the purpose. It enabled herto see, further, that he turned red; then to become aware that acarriage had stopped at the door. Captain Jay’s eyes,from where he stood, fell upon this arrival, and the nature oftheir glance made Rose step forward to look. Her mother satthere, brilliant, conspicuous, in the eternal victoria, and thefootman was already sounding the knocker. It had been nopart of the arrangement that she should come to fetch her; it hadbeen out of the question—a stroke in such bad taste aswould have put Rose in the wrong. The girl had neverdreamed of it, but somehow, suddenly, perversely, she was glad ofit now; she even hoped that her grandmother and her aunt werelooking out upstairs.

“My mother has come for me. Good-bye,” sherepeated; but this time her visitor had got between her and thedoor.

“Listen to me before you go. I will give you alife’s devotion,” the young man pleaded. Hereally barred the way.

She wondered whether her grandmother had told him that if herflight were not prevented she would forfeit money. Then,vividly, it came over her that this would be what he was occupiedwith. “I shall never think of you—let mego!” she cried, with passion.

Captain Jay opened the door, but Rose didn’t see hisface, and in a moment she was out of the house. Aunt Julia,who was sure to have been hovering, had taken flight before theprofanity of the knock.

“Heavens, dear, where did you get your mourning?”the lady in the victoria asked of her daughter as they droveaway.

II.

Lady Maresfield had given her boy apush in his plump back and had said to him, “Go and speakto her now; it’s your chance.” She had for along time wanted this scion to make himself audible to RoseTramore, but the opportunity was not easy to come by. Thecase was complicated. Lady Maresfield had four daughters,of whom only one was married. It so happened moreover thatthis one, Mrs. Vaughan-Vesey, the only person in the world hermother was afraid of, was the most to be reckoned with. TheHonourable Guy was in appearance all his mother’s child,though he was really a simpler soul. He was large and pink;large, that is, as to everything but the eyes, which werediminishing points, and pink as to everything but the hair, whichwas comparable, faintly, to the hue of the richer rose. Hehad also, it must be conceded, very small neat teeth, which madehis smile look like a young lady’s. He had no wish toresemble any such person, but he was perpetually smiling, and hesmiled more than ever as he approached Rose Tramore, who, lookingaltogether, to his mind, as a pretty girl should, and wearing asoft white opera-cloak over a softer black dress, leaned aloneagainst the wall of the vestibule at Covent Garden while, a fewpaces off, an old gentleman engaged her mother inconversation. Madame Patti had been singing, and they wereall waiting for their carriages. To their ears at presentcame a vociferation of names and a rattle of wheels. Theair, through banging doors, entered in damp, warm gusts, heavywith the stale, slightly sweet taste of the London season whenthe London season is overripe and spoiling.

Guy Mangler had only three minutes to reëstablish aninterrupted acquaintance with our young lady. He remindedher that he had danced with her the year before, and he mentionedthat he knew her brother. His mother had lately been to seeold Mrs. Tramore, but this he did not mention, not being aware ofit. That visit had produced, on Lady Maresfield’spart, a private crisis, engendered ideas. One of them wasthat the grandmother in Hill Street had really forgiven thewilful girl much more than she admitted. Another was thatthere would still be some money for Rose when the others shouldcome into theirs. Still another was that the others wouldcome into theirs at no distant date; the old lady was so visiblygoing to pieces. There were several more besides, as forinstance that Rose had already fifteen hundred a year from herfather. The figure had been betrayed in Hill Street; it waspart of the proof of Mrs. Tramore’s decrepitude. Thenthere was an equal amount that her mother had to dispose of andon which the girl could absolutely count, though of course itmight involve much waiting, as the mother, a person of grossinsensibility, evidently wouldn’t die ofcold-shouldering. Equally definite, to do it justice, wasthe conception that Rose was in truth remarkably good looking,and that what she had undertaken to do showed, and would showeven should it fail, cleverness of the right sort.Cleverness of the right sort was exactly the quality that LadyMaresfield prefigured as indispensable in a young lady to whomshe should marry her second son, over whose own deficiencies sheflung the veil of a maternal theory that his clevernesswas of a sort that was wrong. Those who knew him less wellwere content to wish that he might not conceal it for such ascruple. This enumeration of his mother’s views doesnot exhaust the list, and it was in obedience to one too profoundto be uttered even by the historian that, after a very briefdelay, she decided to move across the crowded lobby. Herdaughter Bessie was the only one with her; Maggie was dining withthe Vaughan-Veseys, and Fanny was not of an age. Mrs.Tramore the younger showed only an admirable back—her facewas to her old gentleman—and Bessie had drifted to someother people; so that it was comparatively easy for LadyMaresfield to say to Rose, in a moment: “My dear child, areyou never coming to see us?”

“We shall be delighted to come if you’ll askus,” Rose smiled.

Lady Maresfield had been prepared for the plural number, andshe was a woman whom it took many plurals to disconcert.“I’m sure Guy is longing for another dance withyou,” she rejoined, with the most unblinkingirrelevance.

“I’m afraid we’re not dancing again quiteyet,” said Rose, glancing at her mother’s exposedshoulders, but speaking as if they were muffled in crape.

Lady Maresfield leaned her head on one side and seemed almostwistful. “Not even at my sister’s ball?She’s to have something next week. She’ll writeto you.”

Rose Tramore, on the spot, looking bright but vague, turnedthree or four things over in her mind. She remembered thatthe sister of her interlocutress was the proverbially rich Mrs.Bray, a bankeress or a breweress or a builderess, who had so biga house that she couldn’t fill it unless she opened herdoors, or her mouth, very wide. Rose had learnt more aboutLondon society during these lonely months with her mother thanshe had ever picked up in Hill Street. The younger Mrs.Tramore was a mine of commérages, and she had noneed to go out to bring home the latest intelligence. Atany rate Mrs. Bray might serve as the end of a wedge.“Oh, I dare say we might think of that,” Rosesaid. “It would be very kind of yoursister.”

“Guy’ll think of it, won’t you, Guy?”asked Lady Maresfield.

“Rather!” Guy responded, with an intonation asfine as if he had learnt it at a music hall; while at the samemoment the name of his mother’s carriage was bawled throughthe place. Mrs. Tramore had parted with her old gentleman;she turned again to her daughter. Nothing occurred but whatalways occurred, which was exactly this absence ofeverything—a universal lapse. She didn’t exist,even for a second, to any recognising eye. The people wholooked at her—of course there were plenty ofthose—were only the people who didn’t exist forhers. Lady Maresfield surged away on her son’sarm.

It was this noble matron herself who wrote, the next day,inclosing a card of invitation from Mrs. Bray and expressing thehope that Rose would come and dine and let her ladyship takeher. She should have only one of her own girls; GwendolenVesey was to take the other. Rose handed both the note andthe card in silence to her mother; the latter exhibited only thename of Miss Tramore. “You had much better go,dear,” her mother said; in answer to which Miss Tramoreslowly tore up the documents, looking with clear, meditative eyesout of the window. Her mother always said “You hadbetter go”—there had been other incidents—andRose had never even once taken account of the observation.She would make no first advances, only plenty of second ones,and, condoning no discrimination, would treat no omission asvenial. She would keep all concessions till afterwards;then she would make them one by one. Fighting society wasquite as hard as her grandmother had said it would be; but therewas a tension in it which made the dreariness vibrate—thedreariness of such a winter as she had just passed. Hercompanion had cried at the end of it, and she had cried allthrough; only her tears had been private, while hermother’s had fallen once for all, at luncheon on the bleakEaster Monday—produced by the way a silent survey of thedeadly square brought home to her that every creature butthemselves was out of town and having tremendous fun. Rosefelt that it was useless to attempt to explain simply by hermourning this severity of solitude; for if people didn’t goto parties (at least a few didn’t) for six months aftertheir father died, this was the very time other people took forcoming to see them. It was not too much to say that duringthis first winter of Rose’s period with her mother she hadno communication whatever with the world. It had the effectof making her take to reading the new American books: she wantedto see how girls got on by themselves. She had never readso much before, and there was a legitimate indifference in itwhen topics failed with her mother. They often failed afterthe first days, and then, while she bent over instructivevolumes, this lady, dressed as if for an impending function, saton the sofa and watched her. Rose was not embarrassed bysuch an appearance, for she could reflect that, a little before,her companion had not even a girl who had taken refuge in queerresearches to look at. She was moreover used to hermother’s attitude by this time. She had her owndescription of it: it was the attitude of waiting for thecarriage. If they didn’t go out it was not that Mrs.Tramore was not ready in time, and Rose had even an alarmedprevision of their some day always arriving first. Mrs.Tramore’s conversation at such moments was abrupt,inconsequent and personal. She sat on the edge of sofas andchairs and glanced occasionally at the fit of her gloves (she wasperpetually gloved, and the fit was a thing it was melancholy tosee wasted), as people do who are expecting guests todinner. Rose used almost to fancy herself at times aperfunctory husband on the other side of the fire.

What she was not yet used to—there was still a charm init—was her mother’s extraordinary tact. Duringthe years they lived together they never had a discussion; acircumstance all the more remarkable since if the girl had areason for sparing her companion (that of being sorry for her)Mrs. Tramore had none for sparing her child. She onlyshowed in doing so a happy instinct—the happiest thingabout her. She took in perfection a course whichrepresented everything and covered everything; she utterlyabjured all authority. She testified to her abjuration inhourly ingenious, touching ways. In this manner nothing hadto be talked over, which was a mercy all round. The tearson Easter Monday were merely a nervous gust, to help show she wasnot a Christmas doll from the Burlington Arcade; and there was nolifting up of the repentant Magdalen, no uttered remorse for theformer abandonment of children. Of the way she could treather children her demeanour to this one was an example; it was anuninterrupted appeal to her eldest daughter for direction.She took the law from Rose in every circumstance, and if you hadnoticed these ladies without knowing their history you would havewondered what tie was fine enough to make maturity so respectfulto youth. No mother was ever so filial as Mrs. Tramore, andthere had never been such a difference of position betweensisters. Not that the elder one fawned, which would havebeen fearful; she only renounced—whatever she had torenounce. If the amount was not much she at any rate madeno scene over it. Her hand was so light that Rose said ofher secretly, in vague glances at the past, “No wonderpeople liked her!” She never characterised the oldelement of interference with her mother’s respectabilitymore definitely than as “people.” They werepeople, it was true, for whom gentleness must have beeneverything and who didn’t demand a variety ofinterests. The desire to “go out” was the onepassion that even a closer acquaintance with her parent revealedto Rose Tramore. She marvelled at its strength, in thelight of the poor lady’s history: there was comedy enoughin this unquenchable flame on the part of a woman who had knownsuch misery. She had drunk deep of every dishonour, but thebitter cup had left her with a taste for lighted candles, forsqueezing up staircases and hooking herself to the humanelbow. Rose had a vision of the future years in which thistaste would grow with restored exercise—of her mother, in along-tailed dress, jogging on and on and on, jogging further andfurther from her sins, through a century of the “MorningPost” and down the fashionable avenue of time. Sheherself would then be very old—she herself would bedead. Mrs. Tramore would cover a span of life for whichsuch an allowance of sin was small. The girl could laughindeed now at that theory of her being dragged down. If onething were more present to her than another it was the verydesolation of their propriety. As she glanced at hercompanion, it sometimes seemed to her that if she had been a badwoman she would have been worse than that. There werecompensations for being “cut” which Mrs. Tramore toomuch neglected.

The lonely old lady in Hill Street—Rose thought of herthat way now—was the one person to whom she was ready tosay that she would come to her on any terms. She wrote thisto her three times over, and she knocked still oftener at herdoor. But the old lady answered no letters; if Rose hadremained in Hill Street it would have been her own function toanswer them; and at the door, the butler, whom the girl had knownfor ten years, considered her, when he told her his mistress wasnot at home, quite as he might have considered a young person whohad come about a place and of whose eligibility he took anegative view. That was Rose’s one pang, that sheprobably appeared rather heartless. Her aunt Julia had goneto Florence with Edith for the winter, on purpose to make herappear more so; for Miss Tramore was still the person mostscandalised by her secession. Edith and she, doubtless,often talked over in Florence the destitution of the aged victimin Hill Street. Eric never came to see his sister, because,being full both of family and of personal feeling, he thought shereally ought to have stayed with his grandmother. If shehad had such an appurtenance all to herself she might have donewhat she liked with it; but he couldn’t forgive such a wantof consideration for anything of his. There were momentswhen Rose would have been ready to take her hand from the ploughand insist upon reintegration, if only the fierce voice of theold house had allowed people to look her up. But she read,ever so clearly, that her grandmother had made this a question ofloyalty to seventy years of virtue. Mrs. Tramore’sforlornness didn’t prevent her drawing-room from being avery public place, in which Rose could hear certain wordsreverberate: “Leave her alone; it’s the only way tosee how long she’ll hold out.” The oldwoman’s visitors were people who didn’t wish toquarrel, and the girl was conscious that if they had not let heralone—that is if they had come to her from hergrandmother—she might perhaps not have held out. Shehad no friends quite of her own; she had not been brought up tohave them, and it would not have been easy in a house which twosuch persons as her father and his mother divided betweenthem. Her father disapproved of crude intimacies, and allthe intimacies of youth were crude. He had married atfive-and-twenty and could testify to such a truth. Rosefelt that she shared even Captain Jay with her grandmother; shehad seen what he was worth. Moreover, she had spokento him at that last moment in Hill Street in a way which, takenwith her former refusal, made it impossible that he should comenear her again. She hoped he went to see his protectress:he could be a kind of substitute and administer comfort.

It so happened, however, that the day after she threw LadyMaresfield’s invitation into the wastepaper basket shereceived a visit from a certain Mrs. Donovan, whom she hadoccasionally seen in Hill Street. She vaguely knew thislady for a busybody, but she was in a situation which evenbusybodies might alleviate. Mrs. Donovan was poor, buthonest—so scrupulously honest that she was perpetuallyreturning visits she had never received. She was alwaysclad in weather-beaten sealskin, and had an odd air of beingprepared for the worst, which was borne out by her denying thatshe was Irish. She was of the English Donovans.

“Dear child, won’t you go out with me?” sheasked.

Rose looked at her a moment and then rang the bell. Shespoke of something else, without answering the question, and whenthe servant came she said: “Please tell Mrs. Tramore thatMrs. Donovan has come to see her.”

“Oh, that’ll be delightful; only you mustn’ttell your grandmother!” the visitor exclaimed.

“Tell her what?”

“That I come to see your mamma.”

“You don’t,” said Rose.

“Sure I hoped you’d introduce me!” criedMrs. Donovan, compromising herself in her embarrassment.

“It’s not necessary; you knew her once.”

“Indeed and I’ve known every one once,” thevisitor confessed.

Mrs. Tramore, when she came in, was charming and exactlyright; she greeted Mrs. Donovan as if she had met her the weekbefore last, giving her daughter such a new illustration of hertact that Rose again had the idea that it was no wonder“people” had liked her. The girl grudged Mrs.Donovan so fresh a morsel as a description of her mother at home,rejoicing that she would be inconvenienced by having to keep thestory out of Hill Street. Her mother went away before Mrs.Donovan departed, and Rose was touched by guessing herreason—the thought that since even this circuitouspersonage had been moved to come, the two might, if lefttogether, invent some remedy. Rose waited to see what Mrs.Donovan had in fact invented.

“You won’t come out with me then?”

“Come out with you?”

“My daughters are married. You know I’m alone woman. It would be an immense pleasure to me to haveso charming a creature as yourself to present to theworld.”

“I go out with my mother,” said Rose, after amoment.

“Yes, but sometimes when she’s notinclined?”

“She goes everywhere she wants to go,” Rosecontinued, uttering the biggest fib of her life and onlyregretting it should be wasted on Mrs. Donovan.

“Ah, but do you go everywhere you want?”the lady asked sociably.

“One goes even to places one hates. Every one doesthat.”

“Oh, what I go through!” this social martyrcried. Then she laid a persuasive hand on the girl’sarm. “Let me show you at a few places first, and thenwe’ll see. I’ll bring them all here.”

“I don’t think I understand you,” repliedRose, though in Mrs. Donovan’s words she perfectly saw herown theory of the case reflected. For a quarter of a minuteshe asked herself whether she might not, after all, do so muchevil that good might come. Mrs. Donovan would take her outthe next day, and be thankful enough to annex such an attractionas a pretty girl. Various consequences would ensue and thelong delay would be shortened; her mother’s drawing-roomwould resound with the clatter of teacups.

“Mrs. Bray’s having some big thing next week; comewith me there and I’ll show you what I mane,” Mrs.Donovan pleaded.

“I see what you mane,” Rose answered, brushingaway her temptation and getting up. “I’m muchobliged to you.”

“You know you’re wrong, my dear,” said herinterlocutress, with angry little eyes.

“I’m not going to Mrs. Bray’s.”

“I’ll get you a kyard; it’ll only cost me apenny stamp.”

“I’ve got one,” said the girl, smiling.

“Do you mean a penny stamp?” Mrs. Donovan,especially at departure, always observed all the forms ofamity. “You can’t do it alone, mydarling,” she declared.

“Shall they call you a cab?” Rose asked.

“I’ll pick one up. I choose my horse.You know you require your start,” her visitor went on.

“Excuse my mother,” was Rose’s onlyreply.

“Don’t mention it. Come to me when you needme. You’ll find me in the Red Book.”

“It’s awfully kind of you.”

Mrs. Donovan lingered a moment on the threshold.“Who will you have now, my child?” sheappealed.

“I won’t have any one!” Rose turnedaway, blushing for her. “She came onspeculation,” she said afterwards to Mrs. Tramore.

Her mother looked at her a moment in silence. “Youcan do it if you like, you know.”

Rose made no direct answer to this observation; she remarkedinstead: “See what our quiet life allows us toescape.”

“We don’t escape it. She has been here anhour.”

“Once in twenty years! We might meet her threetimes a day.”

“Oh, I’d take her with the rest!” sighedMrs. Tramore; while her daughter recognised that what hercompanion wanted to do was just what Mrs. Donovan wasdoing. Mrs. Donovan’s life was her ideal.

On a Sunday, ten days later, Rose went to see one of her oldgovernesses, of whom she had lost sight for some time and who hadwritten to her that she was in London, unoccupied and ill.This was just the sort of relation into which she could throwherself now with inordinate zeal; the idea of it, however, notpreventing a foretaste of the queer expression in the excellentlady’s face when she should mention with whom she wasliving. While she smiled at this picture she threw inanother joke, asking herself if Miss Hack could be held in anydegree to constitute the nucleus of a circle. She wouldcome to see her, in any event—come the more the further shewas dragged down. Sunday was always a difficult day withthe two ladies—the afternoons made it so apparent that theywere not frequented. Her mother, it is true, was comprisedin the habits of two or three old gentlemen—she had for along time avoided male friends of less than seventy—whodisliked each other enough to make the room, when they were thereat once, crack with pressure. Rose sat for a long time withMiss Hack, doing conscientious justice to the conception thatthere could be troubles in the world worse than her own; and whenshe came back her mother was alone, but with a story to tell of along visit from Mr. Guy Mangler, who had waited and waited forher return. “He’s in love with you; he’scoming again on Tuesday,” Mrs. Tramore announced.

“Did he say so?”

“That he’s coming back on Tuesday?”

“No, that he’s in love with me.”

“He didn’t need, when he stayed twohours.”

“With you? It’s you he’s in love with,mamma!”

“That will do as well,” laughed Mrs.Tramore. “For all the use we shall make ofhim!” she added in a moment.

“We shall make great use of him. His mother senthim.”

“Oh, she’ll never come!”

“Then he sha’n’t,” saidRose. Yet he was admitted on the Tuesday, and after she hadgiven him his tea Mrs. Tramore left the young people alone.Rose wished she hadn’t—she herself had anotherview. At any rate she disliked her mother’s view,which she had easily guessed. Mr. Mangler did nothing butsay how charming he thought his hostess of the Sunday, and what atremendously jolly visit he had had. He didn’t remarkin so many words “I had no idea your mother was such a goodsort”; but this was the spirit of his simplediscourse. Rose liked it at first—a little of itgratified her; then she thought there was too much of it for goodtaste. She had to reflect that one does what one can andthat Mr. Mangler probably thought he was delicate. Hewished to convey that he desired to make up to her for theinjustice of society. Why shouldn’t her motherreceive gracefully, she asked (not audibly) and who had ever saidshe didn’t? Mr. Mangler had a great deal to say aboutthe disappointment of his own parent over Miss Tramore’snot having come to dine with them the night of his aunt’sball.

“Lady Maresfield knows why I didn’t come,”Rose answered at last.

“Ah, now, but I don’t, you know;can’t you tell me?” asked the young man.

“It doesn’t matter, if your mother’s clearabout it.”

“Oh, but why make such an awful mystery of it, whenI’m dying to know?”

He talked about this, he chaffed her about it for the rest ofhis visit: he had at last found a topic after his ownheart. If her mother considered that he might be the emblemof their redemption he was an engine of the most primitiveconstruction. He stayed and stayed; he struck Rose as onthe point of bringing out something for which he had not quite,as he would have said, the cheek. Sometimes she thought hewas going to begin: “By the way, my mother told me topropose to you.” At other moments he seemed chargedwith the admission: “I say, of course I really know whatyou’re trying to do for her,” nodding at the door:“therefore hadn’t we better speak of it frankly, sothat I can help you with my mother, and more particularly with mysister Gwendolen, who’s the difficult one? The factis, you see, they won’t do anything for nothing. Ifyou’ll accept me they’ll call, but they won’tcall without something ‘down.’” Mr.Mangler departed without their speaking frankly, and Rose Tramorehad a hot hour during which she almost entertained, vindictively,the project of “accepting” the limpid youth untilafter she should have got her mother into circulation. Thecream of the vision was that she might break with himlater. She could read that this was what her mother wouldhave liked, but the next time he came the door was closed to him,and the next and the next.

In August there was nothing to do but to go abroad, with thesense on Rose’s part that the battle was still all tofight; for a round of country visits was not in prospect, andEnglish watering-places constituted one of the few subjects onwhich the girl had heard her mother express herself withdisgust. Continental autumns had been indeed for years, oneof the various forms of Mrs. Tramore’s atonement, but Rosecould only infer that such fruit as they had borne wasbitter. The stony stare of Belgravia could be practised atHomburg; and somehow it was inveterately only gentlemen who satnext to her at the table d’hôte atCadenabbia. Gentlemen had never been of any use to Mrs.Tramore for getting back into society; they had only helped hereffectually to get out of it. She once dropped, to herdaughter, in a moralising mood, the remark that it wasastonishing how many of them one could know without its doing oneany good. Fifty of them—even very cleverones—represented a value inferior to that of one stupidwoman. Rose wondered at the offhand way in which her mothercould talk of fifty clever men; it seemed to her that the wholeworld couldn’t contain such a number. She had asombre sense that mankind must be dull and mean. Thesecogitations took place in a cold hotel, in an eternal Swiss rain,and they had a flat echo in the transalpine valleys, as thelonely ladies went vaguely down to the Italian lakes andcities. Rose guided their course, at moments, with a kindof aimless ferocity; she moved abruptly, feeling vulgar andhating their life, though destitute of any definite vision ofanother life that would have been open to her. She had setherself a task and she clung to it; but she appeared to herselfdespicably idle. She had succeeded in not going to Homburgwaters, where London was trying to wash away some of its stains;that would be too staring an advertisement of theirsituation. The main difference in situations to her now wasthe difference of being more or less pitied, at the best anintolerable danger; so that the places she preferred were theunsuspicious ones. She wanted to triumph with contempt, notwith submission.

One morning in September, coming with her mother out of themarble church at Milan, she perceived that a gentleman who hadjust passed her on his way into the cathedral and whose face shehad not noticed, had quickly raised his hat, with a suppressedejaculation. She involuntarily glanced back; the gentlemanhad paused, again uncovering, and Captain Jay stood saluting herin the Italian sunshine. “Oh, good-morning!”she said, and walked on, pursuing her course; her mother was alittle in front. She overtook her in a moment, with anunreasonable sense, like a gust of cold air, that men were worsethan ever, for Captain Jay had apparently moved into thechurch. Her mother turned as they met, and suddenly, as shelooked back, an expression of peculiar sweetness came into thislady’s eyes. It made Rose’s take the samedirection and rest a second time on Captain Jay, who was plantedjust where he had stood a minute before. He immediatelycame forward, asking Rose with great gravity if he might speak toher a moment, while Mrs. Tramore went her way again. He hadthe expression of a man who wished to say something veryimportant; yet his next words were simple enough and consisted ofthe remark that he had not seen her for a year.

“Is it really so much as that?” asked Rose.

“Very nearly. I would have looked you up, but inthe first place I have been very little in London, and in thesecond I believed it wouldn’t have done anygood.”

“You should have put that first,” said thegirl. “It wouldn’t have done anygood.”

He was silent over this a moment, in his customary decipheringway; but the view he took of it did not prevent him frominquiring, as she slowly followed her mother, if hemightn’t walk with her now. She answered with a laughthat it wouldn’t do any good but that he might do as heliked. He replied without the slightest manifestation oflevity that it would do more good than if he didn’t, andthey strolled together, with Mrs. Tramore well before them,across the big, amusing piazza, where the front of the cathedralmakes a sort of builded light. He asked a question or twoand he explained his own presence: having a month’sholiday, the first clear time for several years, he had justpopped over the Alps. He inquired if Rose had recent newsof the old lady in Hill Street, and it was the only tortuousthing she had ever heard him say.

“I have had no communication of any kind from her sinceI parted with you under her roof. Hasn’t shementioned that?” said Rose.

“I haven’t seen her.”

“I thought you were such great friends.”

Bertram Jay hesitated a moment. “Well, not so muchnow.”

“What has she done to you?” Rose demanded.

He fidgeted a little, as if he were thinking of something thatmade him unconscious of her question; then, with mild violence,he brought out the inquiry: “Miss Tramore, are youhappy?”

She was startled by the words, for she on her side had beenreflecting—reflecting that he had broken with hergrandmother and that this pointed to a reason. It suggestedat least that he wouldn’t now be so much like a mouthpiecefor that cold ancestral tone. She turned off hisquestion—said it never was a fair one, as you gave yourselfaway however you answered it. When he repeated “Yougive yourself away?” as if he didn’t understand, sheremembered that he had not read the funny American books.This brought them to a silence, for she had enlightened him onlyby another laugh, and he was evidently preparing anotherquestion, which he wished carefully to disconnect from theformer. Presently, just as they were coming near Mrs.Tramore, it arrived in the words “Is this lady yourmother?” On Rose’s assenting, with the additionthat she was travelling with her, he said: “Will you be sokind as to introduce me to her?” They were so closeto Mrs. Tramore that she probably heard, but she floated awaywith a single stroke of her paddle and an inattentive poise ofher head. It was a striking exhibition of the famous tact,for Rose delayed to answer, which was exactly what might havemade her mother wish to turn; and indeed when at last the girlspoke she only said to her companion: “Why do you ask methat?”

“Because I desire the pleasure of making heracquaintance.”

Rose had stopped, and in the middle of the square they stoodlooking at each other. “Do you remember what you saidto me the last time I saw you?”

“Oh, don’t speak of that!”

“It’s better to speak of it now than to speak ofit later.”

Bertram Jay looked round him, as if to see whether any onewould hear; but the bright foreignness gave him a sense ofsafety, and he unexpectedly exclaimed: “Miss Tramore, Ilove you more than ever!”

“Then you ought to have come to see us,” declaredthe girl, quickly walking on.

“You treated me the last time as if I were positivelyoffensive to you.”

“So I did, but you know my reason.”

“Because I protested against the course you weretaking? I did, I did!” the young man rang out, as ifhe still, a little, stuck to that.

His tone made Rose say gaily: “Perhaps you do soyet?”

“I can’t tell till I’ve seen more of yourcircumstances,” he replied with eminent honesty.

The girl stared; her light laugh filled the air.“And it’s in order to see more of them and judge thatyou wish to make my mother’s acquaintance?”

He coloured at this and he evaded; then he broke out with aconfused “Miss Tramore, let me stay with you alittle!” which made her stop again.

“Your company will do us great honour, but there must bea rigid condition attached to our acceptance of it.”

“Kindly mention it,” said Captain Jay, staring atthe façade of the cathedral.

“You don’t take us on trial.”

“On trial?”

“You don’t make an observation to me—not asingle one, ever, ever!—on the matter that, in Hill Street,we had our last words about.”

Captain Jay appeared to be counting the thousand pinnacles ofthe church. “I think you really must be right,”he remarked at last.

“There you are!” cried Rose Tramore, and walkedrapidly away.

He caught up with her, he laid his hand upon her arm to stayher. “If you’re going to Venice, let me go toVenice with you!”

“You don’t even understand mycondition.”

“I’m sure you’re right, then: you must beright about everything.”

“That’s not in the least true, and I don’tcare a fig whether you’re sure or not. Please let mego.”

He had barred her way, he kept her longer.“I’ll go and speak to your mother myself!”

Even in the midst of another emotion she was amused at the airof audacity accompanying this declaration. Poor Captain Jaymight have been on the point of marching up to a battery.She looked at him a moment; then she said: “You’ll bedisappointed!”

“Disappointed?”

“She’s much more proper than grandmamma, becauseshe’s much more amiable.”

“Dear Miss Tramore—dear Miss Tramore!” theyoung man murmured helplessly.

“You’ll see for yourself. Only there’sanother condition,” Rose went on.

“Another?” he cried, with discouragement andalarm.

“You must understand thoroughly, before you throw inyour lot with us even for a few days, what our position reallyis.”

“Is it very bad?” asked Bertram Jay artlessly.

“No one has anything to do with us, no one speaks to us,no one looks at us.”

“Really?” stared the young man.

“We’ve no social existence, we’re utterlydespised.”

“Oh, Miss Tramore!” Captain Jay interposed.He added quickly, vaguely, and with a want of presence of mind ofwhich he as quickly felt ashamed: “Do none of yourfamily—?” The question collapsed; the brilliantgirl was looking at him.

“We’re extraordinarily happy,” she threwout.

“Now that’s all I wanted to know!” heexclaimed, with a kind of exaggerated cheery reproach, walking onwith her briskly to overtake her mother.

He was not dining at their inn, but he insisted on coming thatevening to their table d’hôte. He satnext Mrs. Tramore, and in the evening he accompanied themgallantly to the opera, at a third-rate theatre where they werealmost the only ladies in the boxes. The next day they wenttogether by rail to the Charterhouse of Pavia, and while hestrolled with the girl, as they waited for the homeward train, hesaid to her candidly: “Your mother’s remarkablypretty.” She remembered the words and the feelingthey gave her: they were the first note of new era. Thefeeling was somewhat that of an anxious, gratified matron who has“presented” her child and is thinking of thematrimonial market. Men might be of no use, as Mrs. Tramoresaid, yet it was from this moment Rose dated the rosy dawn of herconfidence that her protégée would go off;and when later, in crowded assemblies, the phrase, or somethinglike it behind a hat or a fan, fell repeatedly on her anxiousear, “Your mother is in beauty!” or“I’ve never seen her look better!” she had afaint vision of the yellow sunshine and the afternoon shadows onthe dusty Italian platform.

Mrs. Tramore’s behaviour at this period was a revelationof her native understanding of delicate situations. Sheneeded no account of this one from her daughter—it was oneof the things for which she had a scent; and there was a kind ofloyalty to the rules of a game in the silent sweetness with whichshe smoothed the path of Bertram Jay. It was clear that shewas in her element in fostering the exercise of the affections,and if she ever spoke without thinking twice it is probable thatshe would have exclaimed, with some gaiety, “Oh, I know allabout love!” Rose could see that she thoughttheir companion would be a help, in spite of his being nodispenser of patronage. The key to the gates of fashion hadnot been placed in his hand, and no one had ever heard of theladies of his family, who lived in some vague hollow of theYorkshire moors; but none the less he might administer a muscularpush. Yes indeed, men in general were broken reeds, butCaptain Jay was peculiarly representative. Respectabilitywas the woman’s maximum, as honour was the man’s, butthis distinguished young soldier inspired more than one kind ofconfidence. Rose had a great deal of attention for the useto which his respectability was put; and there mingled with thisattention some amusement and much compassion. She saw thatafter a couple of days he decidedly liked her mother, and that hewas yet not in the least aware of it. He took for grantedthat he believed in her but little; notwithstanding which hewould have trusted her with anything except Rose herself.His trusting her with Rose would come very soon. He neverspoke to her daughter about her qualities of character, but twoor three of them (and indeed these were all the poor lady had,and they made the best show) were what he had in mind in praisingher appearance. When he remarked: “What attentionMrs. Tramore seems to attract everywhere!” he meant:“What a beautifully simple nature it is!” and when hesaid: “There’s something extraordinarily harmoniousin the colours she wears,” it signified: “Upon myword, I never saw such a sweet temper in my life!”She lost one of her boxes at Verona, and made the prettiest jokeof it to Captain Jay. When Rose saw this she said toherself, “Next season we shall have only tochoose.” Rose knew what was in the box.

By the time they reached Venice (they had stopped at half adozen little old romantic cities in the most frolicsomeæsthetic way) she liked their companion better than she hadever liked him before. She did him the justice to recognisethat if he was not quite honest with himself he was at leastwholly honest with her. She reckoned up everythinghe had been since he joined them, and put upon it all aninterpretation so favourable to his devotion that, catchingherself in the act of glossing over one or two episodes that hadnot struck her at the time as disinterested she exclaimed,beneath her breath, “Look out—you’re falling inlove!” But if he liked correctness wasn’t hequite right? Could any one possibly like it more thanshe did? And if he had protested against herthrowing in her lot with her mother, this was not because of thebenefit conferred but because of the injury received. Heexaggerated that injury, but this was the privilege of a loverperfectly willing to be selfish on behalf of his mistress.He might have wanted her grandmother’s money for her, butif he had given her up on first discovering that she was throwingaway her chance of it (oh, this was her doing too!) he hadgiven up her grandmother as much: not keeping well with the oldwoman, as some men would have done; not waiting to see how theperverse experiment would turn out and appeasing her, if itshould promise tolerably, with a view to future operations.He had had a simple-minded, evangelical, lurid view of what thegirl he loved would find herself in for. She could see thisnow—she could see it from his present bewilderment andmystification, and she liked him and pitied him, with the kindestsmile, for the original naïveté as well as forthe actual meekness. No wonder he hadn’t known whatshe was in for, since he now didn’t even know what he wasin for himself. Were there not moments when he thought hiscompanions almost unnaturally good, almost suspiciouslysafe? He had lost all power to verify that sketch of theirisolation and déclassement to which she had treatedhim on the great square at Milan. The last thing he noticedwas that they were neglected, and he had never, for himself, hadsuch an impression of society.

It could scarcely be enhanced even by the apparition of alarge, fair, hot, red-haired young man, carrying a lady’sfan in his hand, who suddenly stood before their little party as,on the third evening after their arrival in Venice, it partook ofices at one of the tables before the celebrated CaféFlorian. The lamplit Venetian dusk appeared to haverevealed them to this gentleman as he sat with other friends at aneighbouring table, and he had sprung up, with unsophisticatedglee, to shake hands with Mrs. Tramore and her daughter.Rose recalled him to her mother, who looked at first as thoughshe didn’t remember him but presently bestowed asufficiently gracious smile on Mr. Guy Mangler. He gavewith youthful candour the history of his movements and indicatedthe whereabouts of his family: he was with his mother andsisters; they had met the Bob Veseys, who had taken LordWhiteroy’s yacht and were going to Constantinople.His mother and the girls, poor things, were at the Grand Hotel,but he was on the yacht with the Veseys, where they had LordWhiteroy’s cook. Wasn’t the food in Venicefilthy, and wouldn’t they come and look at the yacht?She wasn’t very fast, but she was awfully jolly. Hismother might have come if she would, but she wouldn’t atfirst, and now, when she wanted to, there were other people, whonaturally wouldn’t turn out for her. Mr. Mangler satdown; he alluded with artless resentment to the way, in July, thedoor of his friends had been closed to him. He was going toConstantinople, but he didn’t care—if theywere going anywhere; meanwhile his mother hoped awfully theywould look her up.

Lady Maresfield, if she had given her son any such message,which Rose disbelieved, entertained her hope in a mannercompatible with her sitting for half an hour, surrounded by herlittle retinue, without glancing in the direction of Mrs.Tramore. The girl, however, was aware that this was not agood enough instance of their humiliation; inasmuch as it wasrather she who, on the occasion of their last contact, had heldoff from Lady Maresfield. She was a little ashamed now ofnot having answered the note in which this affable personageignored her mother. She couldn’t help perceivingindeed a dim movement on the part of some of the other members ofthe group; she made out an attitude of observation in thehigh-plumed head of Mrs. Vaughan-Vesey. Mrs. Vesey,perhaps, might have been looking at Captain Jay, for as thisgentleman walked back to the hotel with our young lady (they wereat the “Britannia,” and young Mangler, who clung tothem, went in front with Mrs. Tramore) he revealed to Rose thathe had some acquaintance with Lady Maresfield’s eldestdaughter, though he didn’t know and didn’tparticularly want to know, her ladyship. He expressedhimself with more acerbity than she had ever heard him use(Christian charity so generally governed his speech) about theyoung donkey who had been prattling to them. They separatedat the door of the hotel. Mrs. Tramore had got rid of Mr.Mangler, and Bertram Jay was in other quarters.

“If you know Mrs. Vesey, why didn’t you go andspeak to her? I’m sure she saw you,” Rosesaid.

Captain Jay replied even more circumspectly than usual.“Because I didn’t want to leave you.”

“Well, you can go now; you’re free,” Roserejoined.

“Thank you. I shall never go again.”

“That won’t be civil,” said Rose.

“I don’t care to be civil. I don’tlike her.”

“Why don’t you like her?”

“You ask too many questions.”

“I know I do,” the girl acknowledged.

Captain Jay had already shaken hands with her, but at this heput out his hand again. “She’s tooworldly,” he murmured, while he held Rose Tramore’s amoment.

“Ah, you dear!” Rose exclaimed almost audibly as,with her mother, she turned away.

The next morning, upon the Grand Canal, the gondola of ourthree friends encountered a stately barge which, though itcontained several persons, seemed pervaded mainly by one majesticpresence. During the instant the gondolas were passing eachother it was impossible either for Rose Tramore or for hercompanions not to become conscious that this distinguishedidentity had markedly inclined itself—a circumstancecommemorated the next moment, almost within earshot of the otherboat, by the most spontaneous cry that had issued for many a dayfrom the lips of Mrs. Tramore. “Fancy, my dear, LadyMaresfield has bowed to us!”

“We ought to have returned it,” Rose answered; butshe looked at Bertram Jay, who was opposite to her. Heblushed, and she blushed, and during this moment was born adeeper understanding than had yet existed between theseassociated spirits. It had something to do with their goingtogether that afternoon, without her mother, to look at certainout-of-the-way pictures as to which Ruskin had inspired her witha desire to see sincerely. Mrs. Tramore expressed the wishto stay at home, and the motive of this wish—a finer shadethan any that even Ruskin had ever found a phrase for—wasnot translated into misrepresenting words by either the mother orthe daughter. At San Giovanni in Bragora the girl and hercompanion came upon Mrs. Vaughan-Vesey, who, with one of hersisters, was also endeavouring to do the earnest thing. Shedid it to Rose, she did it to Captain Jay, as well as toGianbellini; she was a handsome, long-necked, aquiline person, ofa different type from the rest of her family, and she did itremarkably well. She secured our friends—it was herown expression—for luncheon, on the morrow, on the yacht,and she made it public to Rose that she would come that afternoonto invite her mother. When the girl returned to the hotel,Mrs. Tramore mentioned, before Captain Jay, who had come up totheir sitting-room, that Lady Maresfield had called.“She stayed a long time—at least it seemedlong!” laughed Mrs. Tramore.

The poor lady could laugh freely now; yet there was somegrimness in a colloquy that she had with her daughter afterBertram Jay had departed. Before this happened Mrs.Vesey’s card, scrawled over in pencil and referring to themorrow’s luncheon, was brought up to Mrs. Tramore.

“They mean it all as a bribe,” said the principalrecipient of these civilities.

“As a bribe?” Rose repeated.

“She wants to marry you to that boy; they’ve seenCaptain Jay and they’re frightened.”

“Well, dear mamma, I can’t take Mr. Mangler for ahusband.”

“Of course not. But oughtn’t we to go to theluncheon?”

“Certainly we’ll go to the luncheon,” Rosesaid; and when the affair took place, on the morrow, she couldfeel for the first time that she was taking her mother out.This appearance was somehow brought home to every one else, andit was really the agent of her success. For it is of theessence of this simple history that, in the first place, thatsuccess dated from Mrs. Vesey’s Venetiandéjeuner, and in the second reposed, by a subtlesocial logic, on the very anomaly that had made it dubious.There is always a chance in things, and Rose Tramore’schance was in the fact that Gwendolen Vesey was, as some one hadsaid, awfully modern, an immense improvement on the explodedscience of her mother, and capable of seeing what a“draw” there would be in the comedy, if properlybrought out, of the reversed positions of Mrs. Tramore and Mrs.Tramore’s diplomatic daughter. With a first-ratemanagerial eye she perceived that people would flock into anyroom—and all the more into one of hers—to see Rosebring in her dreadful mother. She treated the cream ofEnglish society to this thrilling spectacle later in the autumn,when she once more “secured” both the performers fora week at Brimble. It made a hit on the spot, the veryfirst evening—the girl was felt to play her part sowell. The rumour of the performance spread; every onewanted to see it. It was an entertainment of which, thatwinter in the country, and the next season in town, persons oftaste desired to give their friends the freshness. Thething was to make the Tramores come late, after every one hadarrived. They were engaged for a fixed hour, like theAmerican imitator and the Patagonian contralto. Mrs. Veseyhad been the first to say the girl was awfully original, but thatbecame the general view.

Gwendolen Vesey had with her mother one of the few quarrels inwhich Lady Maresfield had really stood up to such an antagonist(the elder woman had to recognise in general in whose veins itwas that the blood of the Manglers flowed) on account of thisvery circumstance of her attaching more importance to MissTramore’s originality (“Her originality behanged!” her ladyship had gone so far as unintelligently toexclaim) than to the prospects of the unfortunate Guy. Mrs.Vesey actually lost sight of these pressing problems in heradmiration of the way the mother and the daughter, or rather thedaughter and the mother (it was slightly confusing)“drew.” It was Lady Maresfield’s versionof the case that the brazen girl (she was shockingly coarse) hadtreated poor Guy abominably. At any rate it was made known,just after Easter, that Miss Tramore was to be married to CaptainJay. The marriage was not to take place till the summer;but Rose felt that before this the field would practically bewon. There had been some bad moments, there had beenseveral warm corners and a certain number of cold shoulders andclosed doors and stony stares; but the breach was effectuallymade—the rest was only a question of time. Mrs.Tramore could be trusted to keep what she had gained, and it wasthe dowagers, the old dragons with prominent fangs and glitteringscales, whom the trick had already mainly caught. By thistime there were several houses into which the liberated lady hadcrept alone. Her daughter had been expected with her, butthey couldn’t turn her out because the girl had stayedbehind, and she was fast acquiring a new identity, that of aparental connection with the heroine of such a romanticstory. She was at least the next best thing to herdaughter, and Rose foresaw the day when she would be valuedprincipally as a memento of one of the prettiest episodes in theannals of London. At a big official party, in June, Rosehad the joy of introducing Eric to his mother. She was alittle sorry it was an official party—there were some othersuch queer people there; but Eric called, observing the shade,the next day but one.

No observer, probably, would have been acute enough to fixexactly the moment at which the girl ceased to take out hermother and began to be taken out by her. A later phase wasmore distinguishable—that at which Rose forbore to inflicton her companion a duality that might become oppressive.She began to economise her force, she went only when theparticular effect was required. Her marriage was delayed bythe period of mourning consequent upon the death of hergrandmother, who, the younger Mrs. Tramore averred, was killed bythe rumour of her own new birth. She was the only one ofthe dragons who had not been tamed. Julia Tramore knew thetruth about this—she was determined such things should notkill her. She would live to do something—shehardly knew what. The provisions of her mother’s willwere published in the “Illustrated News”; from whichit appeared that everything that was not to go to Eric and toJulia was to go to the fortunate Edith. Miss Tramore makesno secret of her own intentions as regards this favourite.

Edith is not pretty, but Lady Maresfield is waiting for her;she is determined Gwendolen Vesey shall not get hold ofher. Mrs. Vesey however takes no interest in her atall. She is whimsical, as befits a woman of her fashion;but there are two persons she is still very fond of, thedelightful Bertram Jays. The fondness of this pair, it mustbe added, is not wholly expended in return. They areextremely united, but their life is more domestic than might havebeen expected from the preliminary signs. It owes a portionof its concentration to the fact that Mrs. Tramore has now somany places to go to that she has almost no time to come to herdaughter’s. She is, under her son-in-law’sroof, a brilliant but a rare apparition, and the other day heremarked upon the circumstance to his wife.

“If it hadn’t been for you,” she replied,smiling, “she might have had her regular place at ourfireside.”

“Good heavens, how did I prevent it?” criedCaptain Jay, with all the consciousness of virtue.

“You ordered it otherwise, you goose!” Andshe says, in the same spirit, whenever her husband commends her(which he does, sometimes, extravagantly) for the way shelaunched her mother: “Nonsense, my dear—practicallyit was you!”

p.249GREVILLE FANE.

Coming in to dress for dinner, Ifound a telegram: “Mrs. Stormer dying; can you give us halfa column for to-morrow evening? Let her off easy, but nottoo easy.” I was late; I was in a hurry; I had verylittle time to think, but at a venture I dispatched a reply:“Will do what I can.” It was not till I haddressed and was rolling away to dinner that, in the hansom, Ibethought myself of the difficulty of the conditionattached. The difficulty was not of course in letting heroff easy but in qualifying that indulgence. “I simplywon’t qualify it,” I said to myself. Ididn’t admire her, but I liked her, and I had known her solong that I almost felt heartless in sitting down at such an hourto a feast of indifference. I must have seemed abstracted,for the early years of my acquaintance with her came back tome. I spoke of her to the lady I had taken down, but thelady I had taken down had never heard of Greville Fane. Itried my other neighbour, who pronounced her books “toovile.” I had never thought them very good, but Ishould let her off easier than that.

I came away early, for the express purpose of driving to askabout her. The journey took time, for she lived in thenorth-west district, in the neighbourhood of Primrose Hill.My apprehension that I should be too late was justified in afuller sense than I had attached to it—I had only fearedthat the house would be shut up. There were lights in thewindows, and the temperate tinkle of my bell brought a servantimmediately to the door, but poor Mrs. Stormer had passed into astate in which the resonance of no earthly knocker was to befeared. A lady, in the hall, hovering behind the servant,came forward when she heard my voice. I recognised LadyLuard, but she had mistaken me for the doctor.

“Excuse my appearing at such an hour,” I said;“it was the first possible moment after I heard.”

“It’s all over,” Lady Luard replied.“Dearest mamma!”

She stood there under the lamp with her eyes on me; she wasvery tall, very stiff, very cold, and always looked as if thesethings, and some others beside, in her dress, her manner and evenher name, were an implication that she was very admirable.I had never been able to follow the argument, but that is adetail. I expressed briefly and frankly what I felt, whilethe little mottled maidservant flattened herself against the wallof the narrow passage and tried to look detached without lookingindifferent. It was not a moment to make a visit, and I wason the point of retreating when Lady Luard arrested me with aqueer, casual, drawling “Would you—a—would you,perhaps, be writing something?” I felt for theinstant like an interviewer, which I was not. But I pleadedguilty to this intention, on which she rejoined: “I’mso very glad—but I think my brother would like to seeyou.” I detested her brother, but it wasn’t anoccasion to act this out; so I suffered myself to be inducted, tomy surprise, into a small back room which I immediatelyrecognised as the scene, during the later years, of Mrs.Stormer’s imperturbable industry. Her table wasthere, the battered and blotted accessory to innumerable literarylapses, with its contracted space for the arms (she wrote onlyfrom the elbow down) and the confusion of scrappy, scribbledsheets which had already become literary remains. Leolinwas also there, smoking a cigarette before the fire and lookingimpudent even in his grief, sincere as it well might havebeen.

To meet him, to greet him, I had to make a sharp effort; forthe air that he wore to me as he stood before me was quite thatof his mother’s murderer. She lay silent for everupstairs—as dead as an unsuccessful book, and hisswaggering erectness was a kind of symbol of his having killedher. I wondered if he had already, with his sister, beencalculating what they could get for the poor papers on the table;but I had not long to wait to learn, for in reply to the scantywords of sympathy I addressed him he puffed out:“It’s miserable, miserable, yes; but she has leftthree books complete.” His words had the oddesteffect; they converted the cramped little room into a seat oftrade and made the “book” wonderfully feasible.He would certainly get all that could be got for the three.Lady Luard explained to me that her husband had been with thembut had had to go down to the House. To her brother sheexplained that I was going to write something, and to me againshe made it clear that she hoped I would “do mammajustice.” She added that she didn’t think thishad ever been done. She said to her brother:“Don’t you think there are some things he oughtthoroughly to understand?” and on his instantly exclaiming“Oh, thoroughly—thoroughly!” she went on,rather austerely: “I mean about mamma’sbirth.”

“Yes, and her connections,” Leolin added.

I professed every willingness, and for five minutes Ilistened, but it would be too much to say that Iunderstood. I don’t even now, but it is notimportant. My vision was of other matters than those theyput before me, and while they desired there should be no mistakeabout their ancestors I became more and more lucid aboutthemselves. I got away as soon as possible, and walked homethrough the great dusky, empty London—the best of allconditions for thought. By the time I reached my door mylittle article was practically composed—ready to betransferred on the morrow from the polished plate of fancy.I believe it attracted some notice, was thought“graceful” and was said to be by some one else.I had to be pointed without being lively, and it took sometact. But what I said was much less interesting than what Ithought—especially during the half-hour I spent in myarmchair by the fire, smoking the cigar I always light beforegoing to bed. I went to sleep there, I believe; but Icontinued to moralise about Greville Fane. I am reluctantto lose that retrospect altogether, and this is a dim littlememory of it, a document not to “serve.” Thedear woman had written a hundred stories, but none so curious asher own.

When first I knew her she had published half-a-dozen fictions,and I believe I had also perpetrated a novel. She was morethan a dozen years older than I, but she was a person who alwaysacknowledged her relativity. It was not so very long ago,but in London, amid the big waves of the present, even a nearhorizon gets hidden. I met her at some dinner and took herdown, rather flattered at offering my arm to a celebrity.She didn’t look like one, with her matronly, mild,inanimate face, but I supposed her greatness would come out inher conversation. I gave it all the opportunities I could,but I was not disappointed when I found her only a dull, kindwoman. This was why I liked her—she rested me so fromliterature. To myself literature was an irritation, atorment; but Greville Fane slumbered in the intellectual part ofit like a Creole in a hammock. She was not a woman ofgenius, but her faculty was so special, so much a gift out ofhand, that I have often wondered why she fell below thatdistinction. This was doubtless because the transaction, inher case, had remained incomplete; genius always pays for thegift, feels the debt, and she was placidly unconscious ofobligation. She could invent stories by the yard, but shecouldn’t write a page of English. She went down toher grave without suspecting that though she had contributedvolumes to the diversion of her contemporaries she had notcontributed a sentence to the language. This had notprevented bushels of criticism from being heaped upon her head;she was worth a couple of columns any day to the weekly papers,in which it was shown that her pictures of life were dreadful buther style really charming. She asked me to come and seeher, and I went. She lived then in Montpellier Square;which helped me to see how dissociated her imagination was fromher character.

An industrious widow, devoted to her daily stint, to meetingthe butcher and baker and making a home for her son and daughter,from the moment she took her pen in her hand she became acreature of passion. She thought the English noveldeplorably wanting in that element, and the task she had cut outfor herself was to supply the deficiency. Passion in highlife was the general formula of this work, for her imaginationwas at home only in the most exalted circles. She adored,in truth, the aristocracy, and they constituted for her theromance of the world or, what is more to the point, the primematerial of fiction. Their beauty and luxury, their lovesand revenges, their temptations and surrenders, theirimmoralities and diamonds were as familiar to her as the blots onher writing-table. She was not a belated producer of theold fashionable novel, she had a cleverness and a modernness ofher own, she had freshened up the fly-blown tinsel. Sheturned off plots by the hundred and—so far as her flyingquill could convey her—was perpetually going abroad.Her types, her illustrations, her tone were nothing if notcosmopolitan. She recognised nothing less provincial thanEuropean society, and her fine folk knew each other and made loveto each other from Doncaster to Bucharest. She had an ideathat she resembled Balzac, and her favourite historicalcharacters were Lucien de Rubempré and the Vidame dePamiers. I must add that when I once asked her who thelatter personage was she was unable to tell me. She wasvery brave and healthy and cheerful, very abundant and innocentand wicked. She was clever and vulgar and snobbish, andnever so intensely British as when she was particularlyforeign.

This combination of qualities had brought her early success,and I remember having heard with wonder and envy of what she“got,” in those days, for a novel. Therevelation gave me a pang: it was such a proof that, practising atotally different style, I should never make my fortune.And yet when, as I knew her better she told me her real tariffand I saw how rumour had quadrupled it, I liked her enough to besorry. After a while I discovered too that if she got lessit was not that I was to get any more. My failurenever had what Mrs. Stormer would have called the banality ofbeing relative—it was always admirably absolute. Shelived at ease however in those days—ease is exactly theword, though she produced three novels a year. She scornedme when I spoke of difficulty—it was the only thing thatmade her angry. If I hinted that a work of art required atremendous licking into shape she thought it a pretension and apose. She never recognised the “torment ofform”; the furthest she went was to introduce into one ofher books (in satire her hand was heavy) a young poet who wasalways talking about it. I couldn’t quite understandher irritation on this score, for she had nothing at stake in thematter. She had a shrewd perception that form, in prose atleast, never recommended any one to the public we were condemnedto address, and therefore she lost nothing (putting her privatehumiliation aside) by not having any. She made no pretenceof producing works of art, but had comfortable tea-drinking hoursin which she freely confessed herself a common pastrycook,dealing in such tarts and puddings as would bring customers tothe shop. She put in plenty of sugar and of cochineal, orwhatever it is that gives these articles a rich and attractivecolour. She had a serene superiority to observation andopportunity which constituted an inexpugnable strength and wouldenable her to go on indefinitely. It is only real successthat wanes, it is only solid things that melt. GrevilleFane’s ignorance of life was a resource still moreunfailing than the most approved receipt. On her sayingonce that the day would come when she should have written herselfout I answered: “Ah, you look into fairyland, and thefairies love you, and they never change. Fairylandis always there; it always was from the beginning of time, and italways will be to the end. They’ve given you the keyand you can always open the door. With me it’sdifferent; I try, in my clumsy way, to be in some direct relationto life.” “Oh, bother your direct relation tolife!” she used to reply, for she was always annoyed by thephrase—which would not in the least prevent her from usingit when she wished to try for style. With no moreprejudices than an old sausage-mill, she would give forth againwith patient punctuality any poor verbal scrap that had beendropped into her. I cheered her with saying that the darkday, at the end, would be for the like of me; inasmuch as,going in our small way by experience and observation, we dependednot on a revelation, but on a little tiresome process.Observation depended on opportunity, and where should we be whenopportunity failed?

One day she told me that as the novelist’s life was sodelightful and during the good years at least such a comfortablesupport (she had these staggering optimisms) she meant to trainup her boy to follow it. She took the ingenious view thatit was a profession like another and that therefore everythingwas to be gained by beginning young and serving anapprenticeship. Moreover the education would be lessexpensive than any other special course, inasmuch as she couldadminister it herself. She didn’t profess to keep aschool, but she could at least teach her own child. It wasnot that she was so very clever, but (she confessed to me as ifshe were afraid I would laugh at her) that he was. Ididn’t laugh at her for that, for I thought the boysharp—I had seen him at sundry times. He was wellgrown and good-looking and unabashed, and both he and his sistermade me wonder about their defunct papa, concerning whom thelittle I knew was that he had been a clergyman. I explainedthem to myself by suppositions and imputations possibly unjust tothe departed; so little were they—superficially atleast—the children of their mother. There used to be,on an easel in her drawing-room, an enlarged photograph of herhusband, done by some horrible posthumous “process”and draped, as to its florid frame, with a silken scarf, whichtestified to the candour of Greville Fane’s badtaste. It made him look like an unsuccessful tragedian; butit was not a thing to trust. He may have been a successfulcomedian. Of the two children the girl was the elder, andstruck me in all her younger years as singularlycolourless. She was only very long, like an undecipherableletter. It was not till Mrs. Stormer came back from aprotracted residence abroad that Ethel (which was this younglady’s name) began to produce the effect, which wasafterwards remarkable in her, of a certain kind of highresolution. She made one apprehend that she meant to dosomething for herself. She was long-necked and near-sightedand striking, and I thought I had never seen sweet seventeen in aform so hard and high and dry. She was cold and affectedand ambitious, and she carried an eyeglass with a long handle,which she put up whenever she wanted not to see. She hadcome out, as the phrase is, immensely; and yet I felt as if shewere surrounded with a spiked iron railing. What she meantto do for herself was to marry, and it was the only thing, Ithink, that she meant to do for any one else; yet who would beinspired to clamber over that bristling barrier? Whatflower of tenderness or of intimacy would such an adventurerconceive as his reward?

This was for Sir Baldwin Luard to say; but he naturally neverconfided to me the secret. He was a joyless, jokeless youngman, with the air of having other secrets as well, and adetermination to get on politically that was indicated by hisnever having been known to commit himself—as regards anyproposition whatever—beyond an exclamatory“Oh!” His wife and he must have conversedmainly in prim ejaculations, but they understood sufficientlythat they were kindred spirits. I remember being angry withGreville Fane when she announced these nuptials to me asmagnificent; I remember asking her what splendour there was inthe union of the daughter of a woman of genius with anirredeemable mediocrity. “Oh! he’s awfullyclever,” she said; but she blushed for the maternalfib. What she meant was that though Sir Baldwin’sestates were not vast (he had a dreary house in South Kensingtonand a still drearier “Hall” somewhere in Essex, whichwas let), the connection was a “smarter” one than achild of hers could have aspired to form. In spite of thesocial bravery of her novels she took a very humble and dingyview of herself, so that of all her productions “mydaughter Lady Luard” was quite the one she was proudestof. That personage thought her mother very vulgar and wasdistressed and perplexed by the occasional license of her pen,but had a complicated attitude in regard to this indirectconnection with literature. So far as it was lucrative herladyship approved of it, and could compound with the inferiorityof the pursuit by doing practical justice to some of itsadvantages. I had reason to know (my reason was simply thatpoor Mrs. Stormer told me) that she suffered the inky fingers topress an occasional bank-note into her palm. On the otherhand she deplored the “peculiar style” to whichGreville Fane had devoted herself, and wondered where an authorwho had the convenience of so lady-like a daughter could havepicked up such views about the best society. “Shemight know better, with Leolin and me,” Lady Luard had beenknown to remark; but it appeared that some of GrevilleFane’s superstitions were incurable. She didn’tlive in Lady Luard’s society, and the best was not goodenough for her—she must make it still better.

I could see that this necessity grew upon her during the yearsshe spent abroad, when I had glimpses of her in the shiftingsojourns that lay in the path of my annual ramble. Shebetook herself from Germany to Switzerland and from Switzerlandto Italy; she favoured cheap places and set up her desk in thesmaller capitals. I took a look at her whenever I could,and I always asked how Leolin was getting on. She gave mebeautiful accounts of him, and whenever it was possible the boywas produced for my edification. I had entered from thefirst into the joke of his career—I pretended to regard himas a consecrated child. It had been a joke for Mrs. Stormerat first, but the boy himself had been shrewd enough to make thematter serious. If his mother accepted the principle thatthe intending novelist cannot begin too early to see life, Leolinwas not interested in hanging back from the application ofit. He was eager to qualify himself, and took to cigarettesat ten, on the highest literary grounds. His poor mothergazed at him with extravagant envy and, like Desdemona, wishedheaven had made her such a man. She explained to memore than once that in her profession she had found her sex adreadful drawback. She loved the story of Madame GeorgeSand’s early rebellion against this hindrance, and believedthat if she had worn trousers she could have written as well asthat lady. Leolin had for the career at least thequalification of trousers, and as he grew older he recognised itsimportance by laying in an immense assortment. He grew upin gorgeous apparel, which was his way of interpreting hismother’s system. Whenever I met her I found her stillunder the impression that she was carrying this system out andthat Leolin’s training was bearing fruit. She wasgiving him experience, she was giving him impressions, she wasputting a gagnepain into his hand. It was anothername for spoiling him with the best conscience in theworld. The queerest pictures come back to me of this periodof the good lady’s life and of the extraordinarilyvirtuous, muddled, bewildering tenor of it. She had an ideathat she was seeing foreign manners as well as her petticoatswould allow; but, in reality she was not seeing anything, leastof all fortunately how much she was laughed at. She droveher whimsical pen at Dresden and at Florence, and produced in allplaces and at all times the same romantic and ridiculousfictions. She carried about her box of properties andfished out promptly the familiar, tarnished old puppets.She believed in them when others couldn’t, and as they werelike nothing that was to be seen under the sun it was impossibleto prove by comparison that they were wrong. Youcan’t compare birds and fishes; you could only feel that,as Greville Fane’s characters had the fine plumage of theformer species, human beings must be of the latter.

It would have been droll if it had not been so exemplary tosee her tracing the loves of the duchesses beside the innocentcribs of her children. The immoral and the maternal livedtogether in her diligent days on the most comfortable terms, andshe stopped curling the mustaches of her Guardsmen to pat theheads of her babes. She was haunted by solemn spinsters whocame to tea from continental pensions, and byunsophisticated Americans who told her she was just loved intheir country. “I had rather be just paidthere,” she usually replied; for this tribute oftransatlantic opinion was the only thing that galled her.The Americans went away thinking her coarse; though as the authorof so many beautiful love-stories she was disappointing to mostof these pilgrims, who had not expected to find a shy, stout,ruddy lady in a cap like a crumbled pyramid. She wroteabout the affections and the impossibility of controlling them,but she talked of the price of pension and the convenienceof an English chemist. She devoted much thought and manythousands of francs to the education of her daughter, who spentthree years at a very superior school at Dresden, receivingwonderful instruction in sciences, arts and tongues, and who,taking a different line from Leolin, was to be brought up whollyas a femme du monde. The girl was musical andphilological; she made a specialty of languages and learnedenough about them to be inspired with a great contempt for hermother’s artless accents. Greville Fane’sFrench and Italian were droll; the imitative faculty had beendenied her, and she had an unequalled gift, especially pen inhand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.She knew it, but she didn’t care; correctness was thevirtue in the world that, like her heroes and heroines, shevalued least. Ethel, who had perceived in her pages someremarkable lapses, undertook at one time to revise her proofs;but I remember her telling me a year after the girl had leftschool that this function had been very briefly exercised.“She can’t read me,” said Mrs. Stormer;“I offend her taste. She tells me that atDresden—at school—I was never allowed.”The good lady seemed surprised at this, having the bestconscience in the world about her lucubrations. She hadnever meant to fly in the face of anything, and considered thatshe grovelled before the Rhadamanthus of the English literarytribunal, the celebrated and awful Young Person. I assuredher, as a joke, that she was frightfully indecent (shehadn’t in fact that reality any more than any other) mypurpose being solely to prevent her from guessing that herdaughter had dropped her not because she was immoral but becauseshe was vulgar. I used to figure her children closetedtogether and asking each other while they exchanged a gaze ofdismay: “Why should she be so—and sofearfully so—when she has the advantage of oursociety? Shouldn’t we have taught herbetter?” Then I imagined their recognising with ablush and a shrug that she was unteachable, irreformable.Indeed she was, poor lady; but it is never fair to read by thelight of taste things that were not written by it. GrevilleFane had, in the topsy-turvy, a serene good faith that ought tohave been safe from allusion, like a stutter or a fauxpas.

She didn’t make her son ashamed of the profession towhich he was destined, however; she only made him ashamed of theway she herself exercised it. But he bore his humiliationmuch better than his sister, for he was ready to take for grantedthat he should one day restore the balance. He was a cannyand far-seeing youth, with appetites and aspirations, and he hadnot a scruple in his composition. His mother’s theoryof the happy knack he could pick up deprived him of the wholesomediscipline required to prevent young idlers from becomingcads. He had, abroad, a casual tutor and a snatch or two ofa Swiss school, but no consecutive study, no prospect of auniversity or a degree. It may be imagined with what zeal,as the years went on, he entered into the pleasantry of therebeing no manual so important to him as the massive book oflife. It was an expensive volume to peruse, but Mrs.Stormer was willing to lay out a sum in what she would havecalled her premiers frais. Etheldisapproved—she thought this education far toounconventional for an English gentleman. Her voice was forEton and Oxford, or for any public school (she would haveresigned herself) with the army to follow. But Leolin neverwas afraid of his sister, and they visibly disliked, though theysometimes agreed to assist, each other. They could combineto work the oracle—to keep their mother at her desk.

When she came back to England, telling me she had got all thecontinent could give her, Leolin was a broad-shouldered,red-faced young man, with an immense wardrobe and anextraordinary assurance of manner. She was fondly obstinateabout her having taken the right course with him, and proud ofall that he knew and had seen. He was now quite ready tobegin, and a little while later she told me he hadbegun. He had written something tremendously clever, and itwas coming out in the Cheapside. I believe it cameout; I had no time to look for it; I never heard anything aboutit. I took for granted that if this contribution had passedthrough his mother’s hands it had practically become aspecimen of her own genius, and it was interesting to considerMrs. Stormer’s future in the light of her having to writeher son’s novels as well as her own. This was not theway she looked at it herself; she took the charming ground thathe would help her to write hers. She used to tell me thathe supplied passages of the greatest value to her ownwork—all sorts of technical things, about hunting andyachting and wine—that she couldn’t be expected toget very straight. It was all so much practice for him andso much alleviation for her. I was unable to identify thesepages, for I had long since ceased to “keep up” withGreville Fane; but I was quite able to believe that thewine-question had been put, by Leolin’s good offices, on abetter footing, for the dear lady used to mix her drinks (she wasperpetually serving the most splendid suppers) in the queerestfashion. I could see that he was willing enough to accept acommission to look after that department. It occurred to meindeed, when Mrs. Stormer settled in England again, that bymaking a shrewd use of both her children she might be able torejuvenate her style. Ethel had come back to gratify heryoung ambition, and if she couldn’t take her mother intosociety she would at least go into it herself. Silently,stiffly, almost grimly, this young lady held up her head,clenched her long teeth, squared her lean elbows and made her wayup the staircases she had elected. The only communicationshe ever made to me, the only effusion of confidence with whichshe ever honoured me, was when she said: “I don’twant to know the people mamma knows; I mean to knowothers.” I took due note of the remark, for I was notone of the “others.” I couldn’t tracetherefore the steps of her process; I could only admire it at adistance and congratulate her mother on the results. Theresults were that Ethel went to “big” parties and gotpeople to take her. Some of them were people she had metabroad, and others were people whom the people she had met abroadhad met. They ministered alike to Miss Ethel’sconvenience, and I wondered how she extracted so many favourswithout the expenditure of a smile. Her smile was thedimmest thing in the world, diluted lemonade, without sugar, andshe had arrived precociously at social wisdom, recognising thatif she was neither pretty enough nor rich enough nor cleverenough, she could at least in her muscular youth be rudeenough. Therefore if she was able to tell her mother whatreally took place in the mansions of the great, give her notes towork from, the quill could be driven at home to better purposeand precisely at a moment when it would have to be more activethan ever. But if she did tell, it would appear that poorMrs. Stormer didn’t believe. As regards many pointsthis was not a wonder; at any rate I heard nothing of GrevilleFane’s having developed a new manner. She had onlyone manner from start to finish, as Leolin would have said.

She was tired at last, but she mentioned to me that shecouldn’t afford to pause. She continued to speak ofLeolin’s work as the great hope of their future (she hadsaved no money) though the young man wore to my sense an aspectmore and more professional if you like, but less and lessliterary. At the end of a couple of years there wassomething monstrous in the impudence with which he played hispart in the comedy. When I wondered how she could playher part I had to perceive that her good faith wascomplete and that what kept it so was simply her extravagantfondness. She loved the young impostor with a simple,blind, benighted love, and of all the heroes of romance who hadpassed before her eyes he was by far the most brilliant.

He was at any rate the most real—she could touch him,pay for him, suffer for him, worship him. He made her thinkof her princes and dukes, and when she wished to fix thesefigures in her mind’s eye she thought of her boy. Shehad often told me she was carried away by her own creations, andshe was certainly carried away by Leolin. He vivified, bypotentialities at least, the whole question of youth andpassion. She held, not unjustly, that the sincere novelistshould feel the whole flood of life; she acknowledged with regretthat she had not had time to feel it herself, and it was a joy toher that the deficiency might be supplied by the sight of the wayit was rushing through this magnificent young man. Sheexhorted him, I suppose, to let it rush; she wrung her ownflaccid little sponge into the torrent. I knew not whatpassed between them in her hours of tuition, but I gathered thatshe mainly impressed on him that the great thing was to live,because that gave you material. He asked nothing better; hecollected material, and the formula served as a universalpretext. You had only to look at him to see that, with hisrings and breastpins, his cross-barred jackets, his earlyembonpoint, his eyes that looked like imitation jewels,his various indications of a dense, full-blown temperament, hisidea of life was singularly vulgar; but he was not so far wrongas that his response to his mother’s expectations was notin a high degree practical. If she had imposed a professionon him from his tenderest years it was exactly a profession thathe followed. The two were not quite the same, inasmuch ashis was simply to live at her expense; but at least shecouldn’t say that he hadn’t taken a line. Ifshe insisted on believing in him he offered himself to thesacrifice. My impression is that her secret dream was thathe should have a liaison with a countess, and he persuadedher without difficulty that he had one. I don’t knowwhat countesses are capable of, but I have a clear notion of whatLeolin was.

He didn’t persuade his sister, who despisedhim—she wished to work her mother in her own way, and Iasked myself why the girl’s judgment of him didn’tmake me like her better. It was because it didn’tsave her after all from a mute agreement with him to gohalves. There were moments when I couldn’t helplooking hard into his atrocious young eyes, challenging him toconfess his fantastic fraud and give it up. Not a littletacit conversation passed between us in this way, but he hadalways the best of it. If I said: “Oh, come now, withme you needn’t keep it up; plead guilty, andI’ll let you off,” he wore the most ingenuous, themost candid expression, in the depths of which I could read:“Oh, yes, I know it exasperates you—that’s justwhy I do it.” He took the line of earnest inquiry,talked about Balzac and Flaubert, asked me if I thought Dickensdid exaggerate and Thackeray ought to be called apessimist. Once he came to see me, at his mother’ssuggestion he declared, on purpose to ask me how far, in myopinion, in the English novel, one really might venture to“go.” He was not resigned to the usualpruderies—he suffered under them already. He struckout the brilliant idea that nobody knew how far we might go, fornobody had ever tried. Did I think he might safelytry—would it injure his mother if he did? He wouldrather disgrace himself by his timidities than injure his mother,but certainly some one ought to try. Wouldn’tI try—couldn’t I be prevailed upon to look atit as a duty? Surely the ultimate point ought to befixed—he was worried, haunted by the question. Hepatronised me unblushingly, made me feel like a foolish amateur,a helpless novice, inquired into my habits of work and conveyedto me that I was utterly vieux jeu and had not had theadvantage of an early training. I had not been brought upfrom the germ, I knew nothing of life—didn’t go at iton his system. He had dipped into French feuilletonsand picked up plenty of phrases, and he made a much better showin talk than his poor mother, who never had time to read anythingand could only be vivid with her pen. If I didn’tkick him downstairs it was because he would have alighted on herat the bottom.

When she went to live at Primrose Hill I called upon her andfound her weary and wasted. It had waned a good deal, theelation caused the year before by Ethel’s marriage; thefoam on the cup had subsided and there was a bitterness in thedraught.

She had had to take a cheaper house and she had to work stillharder to pay even for that. Sir Baldwin was obliged to beclose; his charges were fearful, and the dream of her living withher daughter (a vision she had never mentioned to me) must berenounced. “I would have helped with things, and Icould have lived perfectly in one room,” she said; “Iwould have paid for everything, and—afterall—I’m some one, ain’t I? But Idon’t fit in, and Ethel tells me there are tiresome peopleshe must receive. I can help them from here, nodoubt, better than from there. She told me once, you know,what she thinks of my picture of life. ‘Mamma, yourpicture of life is preposterous!’ No doubt it is, butshe’s vexed with me for letting my prices go down; and Ihad to write three novels to pay for all her marriage costme. I did it very well—I mean the outfit and thewedding; but that’s why I’m here. At any rateshe doesn’t want a dingy old woman in her house. Ishould give it an atmosphere of literary glory, but literaryglory is only the eminence of nobodies. Besides, she doubtsmy glory—she knows I’m glorious only at Peckham andHackney. She doesn’t want her friends to ask ifI’ve never known nice people. She can’t tellthem I’ve never been in society. She tried to teachme better once, but I couldn’t learn. It would seemtoo as if Peckham and Hackney had had enough of me; for(don’t tell any one!) I’ve had to take less for mylast than I ever took for anything.” I asked her howlittle this had been, not from curiosity, but in order to upbraidher, more disinterestedly than Lady Luard had done, for suchconcessions. She answered “I’m ashamed to tellyou,” and then she began to cry.

I had never seen her break down, and I was proportionatelymoved; she sobbed, like a frightened child, over the extinctionof her vogue and the exhaustion of her vein. Her littleworkroom seemed indeed a barren place to grow flowers, and Iwondered, in the after years (for she continued to produce andpublish) by what desperate and heroic process she dragged themout of the soil. I remember asking her on that occasionwhat had become of Leolin, and how much longer she intended toallow him to amuse himself at her cost. She rejoined withspirit, wiping her eyes, that he was down at Brighton hard atwork—he was in the midst of a novel—and that hefelt life so, in all its misery and mystery, that it wascruel to speak of such experiences as a pleasure. “Hegoes beneath the surface,” she said, “and heforces himself to look at things from which he wouldrather turn away. Do you call that amusing yourself?You should see his face sometimes! And he does it for me asmuch as for himself. He tells me everything—he comeshome to me with his trouvailles. We are artiststogether, and to the artist all things are pure. I’veoften heard you say so yourself.” The novel thatLeolin was engaged in at Brighton was never published, but afriend of mine and of Mrs. Stormer’s who was staying therehappened to mention to me later that he had seen the youngapprentice to fiction driving, in a dogcart, a young lady with avery pink face. When I suggested that she was perhaps awoman of title with whom he was conscientiously flirting myinformant replied: “She is indeed, but do you know what hertitle is?” He pronounced it—it was familiar anddescriptive—but I won’t reproduce it here. Idon’t know whether Leolin mentioned it to his mother: shewould have needed all the purity of the artist to forgivehim. I hated so to come across him that in the very lastyears I went rarely to see her, though I knew that she had comepretty well to the end of her rope. I didn’t want herto tell me that she had fairly to give her books away—Ididn’t want to see her cry. She kept it up amazingly,and every few months, at my club, I saw three new volumes, ingreen, in crimson, in blue, on the book-table that groaned withlight literature. Once I met her at the Academysoirée, where you meet people you thought were dead, andshe vouchsafed the information, as if she owed it to me incandour, that Leolin had been obliged to recognise insuperabledifficulties in the question of form, he was sofastidious; so that she had now arrived at a definiteunderstanding with him (it was such a comfort) that shewould do the form if he would bring home the substance.That was now his position—he foraged for her in the greatworld at a salary. “He’s my‘devil,’ don’t you see? as if I were a greatlawyer: he gets up the case and I argue it.” Shementioned further that in addition to his salary he was paid bythe piece: he got so much for a striking character, so much for apretty name, so much for a plot, so much for an incident, and hadso much promised him if he would invent a new crime.

“He has invented one,” I said, “andhe’s paid every day of his life.”

“What is it?” she asked, looking hard at thepicture of the year; “Baby’s Tub,” near whichwe happened to be standing.

I hesitated a moment. “I myself will write alittle story about it, and then you’ll see.”

But she never saw; she had never seen anything, and she passedaway with her fine blindness unimpaired. Her son publishedevery scrap of scribbled paper that could be extracted from hertable-drawers, and his sister quarrelled with him mortally aboutthe proceeds, which showed that she only wanted a pretext, forthey cannot have been great. I don’t know what Leolinlives upon, unless it be on a queer lady many years older thanhimself, whom he lately married. The last time I met him hesaid to me with his infuriating smile: “Don’t youthink we can go a little further still—just alittle?” He really goes too far.

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