“She didn’t strike me as affected,” Waterville demurred, feeling a vague impulse to view her in becoming lights.
“Oh no; she’s only—as she says—fearfully changed.”
They were in their places before the play went on again, and they both gave another glance at Mrs. Headway’s box. She now was leaning back behind the slow movements of her fan and evidently watching Littlemore as if she had waited to see him come in. Sir Arthur Demesne sat beside her, rather gloomily resting a round pink chin upon a high stiff collar; neither of them seemed to speak.
“Are you sure she makes him happy?” Waterville asked.
“Yes—that’s the way those people show it.”
“But does she go about alone with him at that rate? Where’s her husband?”
“I suppose she has divorced him.”
“And does she want to marry the Baronet?” Waterville went on as if his companion was omniscient.
It amused Littlemore for the moment to appear so. “He wants to marryher, I guess.”
“And be divorced like the others?”
“Oh no; this time she has got what she wants,” said Littlemore as the curtain rose.
He suffered three days to elapse before he called at the Hôtel Meurice, which she had designated, and we may occupy this interval in adding a few words to the story we have taken from his lips. George Littlemore’s residence in the Far West had been of the usual tentative sort—he had gone there to replenish a pocket depleted by youthful extravagance. His first attempts had failed; the days had pretty well passed when a fortune was to be picked up even by a young man who might be supposed to have inherited from an honourable father, lately removed, some of those fine abilities, mainly dedicated to the importation of tea, to which the elder Mr. Littlemore wasindebted for the power of leaving his son markedly at ease. Littlemore had dissipated his patrimony and was not quick to discover his talents, which, restricted chiefly to an unlimited faculty for smoking and horse-breaking, appeared to lie in the direction of none of the professions called liberal. He had been sent to Harvard to have them cultivated, but here they had taken such a form that repression had been found more necessary than stimulus—repression embodied in an occasional sojourn in one of the lovely villages of the Connecticut Valley. Rustication saved him perhaps in the sense that it detached him; it undermined his ambitions, which had been foolish. At the age of thirty he had mastered none of the useful arts, unless we include in the number the great art of indifference. But he was roused from too consistent an application of it by a stroke of good luck. To oblige a luckless friend, even in more pressing need of cash than himself, he had purchased for a moderate sum—the proceeds of a successful game of poker—a share in a silver-mine which the disposer of it, with unusual candour, admitted to be destitute of metal. Littlemore looked into his mine and recognised the truth of the contention, which, however, was demolished some two years later by a sudden revival of curiosity on the part of one of the other shareholders. This gentleman, convinced that a silver-mine without silver is as rare as an effect without a cause, discovered the sparkle of the precious element deep down in the reasons of things. The discovery was agreeable to Littlemore, and was the beginning of a fortune which, through several dull years and in many rough places, he had repeatedly despaired of, and which a man whose purpose had never been very keen, nor his aim very high, didn’t perhaps altogether deserve.
It was before he saw himself successful that hehad made the acquaintance of the lady now established at the Hôtel Meurice. To-day he owned the largest share in his mine, which had remained perversely productive and enabled him to buy, among other things, in Montana, a cattle-ranch of higher type than the dry acres near San Pablo. Ranches and mines encourage security, and the consciousness of not having to watch the sources of his income too anxiously—a tax on ideal detachment which spoils the idea—now added itself to his usual coolness. It was not that this same coolness hadn’t been considerably tried. To take only one—the principal—instance: he had lost his wife after only a twelvemonth of marriage, some three years before the date at which we meet him. He had been turned thirty-eight when he distinguished and wooed and won an ardent girl of twenty-three, who, like himself, had consulted all the probabilities in expecting a succession of happy years. She had left him a small daughter, now entrusted to the care of his only sister, the wife of an English squire and mistress of a dull park in Hampshire. This lady, Mrs. Dolphin by name, had captivated her landowner during a journey in which Mr. Dolphin had promised himself to examine the institutions of the United States. The institution on which he had reported most favourably was the pretty girls of the larger towns, and he had returned to New York a year or two later to marry Miss Littlemore, who, unlike her brother, had not wasted her patrimony. Her sister-in-law, married several years later and coming to Europe on this occasion, had died in London—where she had flattered herself the doctors were infallible—a week after the birth of her little girl; and poor Littlemore, though relinquishing his child for the moment, had lingered on the scene of his deep disconcertment to be within call of the Hampshire nursery. He was a presence toattract admiring attention, especially since his hair and moustache had turned to so fine a silver. Tall and clean-limbed, with a good figure and a bad carriage, he looked capable but indolent, and was exposed to imputations of credit and renown, those attaching to John Gilpin, of which he was far from being either conscious or desirous. His eye was at once keen and quiet, his smile dim and dilatory, but perfectly sincere. His principal occupation to-day was doing nothing, and he did it with a beautiful consistency. This exercise excited real envy on the part of Rupert Waterville, who was ten years younger and who had too many ambitions and anxieties—none of them very important, but making collectively a considerable incubus—to be able to wait for inspiration. He thought of it as the last social grace, he hoped some day to arrive at it; it made a man so independent—he had his resources within his own breast. Littlemore could sit for a whole evening without utterance or movement, smoking cigars and looking absently at his finger-nails. As every one knew him for a good fellow who had made his fortune this free and even surface offered by him to contact couldn’t be attributed to stupidity or moroseness. It seemed to imply a fund of reminiscence, an experience of life that had left him hundreds of things to think about. Waterville felt that if he himself could make a good use of these present years and keep a sharp lookout for experience he too at forty-four might have time to look at his finger-nails. He cultivated the conceit that such contemplations—not of course in their literal but in their symbolic intensity—were a sign of a man of the world. Waterville, reckoning possibly without an ungrateful Department of State, also nursed the fond fancy that he had embraced the diplomatic career. He was the junior of the two secretaries who render thepersonnelof the United States Legation in London exceptionally numerous, and was at present enjoying his annual leave of absence. It became a diplomatist to be inscrutable, and though he had by no means, as a whole, taken Littlemore for his model—there were much better ones in the diplomatic body accredited to the Court of Saint James’s—he thought the right effect of fine ease suggested when of an evening, in Paris, after one had been asked what one would like to do, one replied that one would like to do nothing, and simply sat for an interminable time in front of the Grand Café on the Boulevard de la Madeleine (one was very fond of cafés) ordering a succession ofdemi-tasses. It was seldom Littlemore cared even to go to the theatre, and the visit to the Comédie Française, which we have described, had been undertaken at Waterville’s instance. He had seenLe Demi-Mondea few nights before and had been told thatL’Aventurièrewould show him a particular treatment of the same subject—the justice to be meted out to compromised women who attempt to thrust themselves into honourable families. It seemed to him that in both of these cases the ladies had deserved their fate, but he wished it might have been brought about by a little less lying on the part of the representatives of honour. Littlemore and he, without being intimate, were very good friends and spent much of their time together. As it turned out Littlemore was grateful for the chance that had led him to a view of this new incarnation of Nancy Beck.
His delay in going to see her was nevertheless calculated; there were more reasons for it than we need at once go into. When he did go, however, Mrs. Headway was at home and he was scarce surprised to find Sir Arthur Demesne in her sitting-room. There was something in the air that spoke of the already ample stretch of this gentleman’s visit. Littlemore thought probable that, given the circumstances, he would now bring it to a close; he must have learned from their hostess that this welcomed compatriot was an old and familiar friend. He might of course have definite rights—he had every appearance of it, but the more they were rooted the more gracefully he could afford to waive them. Littlemore made these reflexions while the friend in possession faced him without sign of departure. Mrs. Headway was very gracious—she had ever the manner of having known you a hundred years; she scolded Littlemore extravagantly for not having been to see her sooner, but this was only a form of the gracious. By daylight she looked a little faded, but there was a spirit in her that rivalled the day. She had the best rooms in the hotel and an air of extreme opulence and prosperity; her courier sat outside, in the antechamber, and she evidently knew how to live. She attempted to include Sir Arthur in the conversation, but though the young man remained in his place he failed tograsp the offered perch. He followed but as from the steep bank of the stream, where yet he was evidently not at his ease. The conversation therefore remained superficial—a quality that of old had by no means belonged to Mrs. Headway’s interviews with her friends. The Englishman hovered with a distant air which Littlemore at first, with a good deal of private amusement, simply attributed to jealousy.
But after a time Mrs. Headway spoke to the point. “My dear Sir Arthur, I wish very much you’d go.”
The member of Parliament got up and took his hat. “I thought I should oblige you by staying.”
“To defend me against Mr. Littlemore? I’ve known him since I was a baby—I know the worst he can do.” She fixed her charming smile on her retreating visitor and added with much unexpectedness: “I want to talk to him about my past!”
“That’s just what I want to hear,” said Sir Arthur, with his hand on the door.
“We’re going to talk American; you wouldn’t understand us! He speaks in the English style,” she explained in her little sufficient way as the Baronet, who announced that at all events he would come back in the evening, let himself out.
“He doesn’t know about your past?” Littlemore inquired, trying not to make the question sound impertinent.
“Oh yes; I’ve told him everything; but he doesn’t understand. One has to hold an Englishman by the head, you know, and kind of force it down. He has never heard of a woman being—” But here Mrs. Headway checked herself, while Littlemore filled out the blank. “What are you laughing at? It doesn’t matter,” she went on; “there are more things in the world than those people have heard of. However, I like them very much; at least I likehim. He’s such a regular gentleman; do you know what Imean? Only, as he stays too long and he ain’t amusing, I’m very glad to see you for a change.”
“Do you mean I’m not a regular gentleman?” Littlemore asked.
“No indeed; you used to be out there. I think you were the only one—and I hope you are still. That’s why I recognised you the other night—I might have cut you, you know.”
“You can still, if you like. It’s not too late.”
“Oh no, that’s not what I want. I want you to help me.”
“To help you?”
Mrs. Headway fixed her eyes for a moment on the door. “Do you suppose that man is there still?”
“The member of Parliament?”
“No, I mean Max. Max is my courier,” said Mrs. Headway with some impressiveness.
“I haven’t the least idea. I’ll see if you like.”
“No—in that case I should have to give him an order, and I don’t know what in the world to ask him to do. He sits there for hours; with my simple habits I afford him no employment. I’m afraid I’ve no grand imagination.”
“The burden of grandeur!” said Littlemore.
“Oh yes, I’m very grand for clothes and things. But on the whole I like it. I’m only afraid he’ll hear. I talk so very loud. That’s another thing I’m trying to get over.”
“Why do you want to be different?”
“Well, because everything else is so,” Mrs. Headway bravely pleaded. “Did you hear that I had lost my husband?” she went on abruptly.
“Do you mean—a—Mr.—?” and Littlemore paused with an effect that didn’t seem to come home to her.
“I mean Mr. Headway,” she said with dignity.“I’ve been through a good deal since you saw me last: marriage and death and trouble and all sorts of things.”
“You had been through a good deal of marriage before that,” her old friend ventured to observe.
She rested her eyes on him with extravagant intensity and without a change of colour. “Not so much, not so much!—”
“Not so much as might have been thought?”
“Not so much as was reported. I forget whether I was married when I saw you last.”
“It was one of the reports,” said Littlemore. “But I never saw Mr. Beck.”
“You didn’t lose much; he was too mean to live. I’ve done certain things in my life that I’ve never understood; no wonder others can’t do much with them. But that’s all over! Are you sure Max doesn’t hear?” she asked quickly.
“Not at all sure. But if you suspect him of listening at the keyhole I’d send him away.”
“I don’t think he does that. I’m always rushing to the door.”
“Then he doesn’t hear. I had no idea you had so many secrets. When I parted with you Mr. Headway was in the future.”
“Well, now he’s in the past. He was a pleasant man—I can understand my doing that. But he only lived a year. He had neuralgia of the heart; he left me very well off.” She mentioned these various facts as if they were quite of the same order.
“I’m glad to hearthat. You used to have expensive tastes.”
“I’ve plenty of money,” said Mrs. Headway. “Mr. Headway had property at Denver, which has increased immensely in value. After his death I tried New York. But I don’t take much stock in New York.” Littlemore’s hostess spoke these last words in a tone that reeked of some strong experience. “Imean to live in Europe. I guess I can do with Europe,” she stated; and the manner of it had the touch of prophecy, as the other proposition had had the echo of history.
Littlemore was much struck with all this; he was greatly enlivened by Mrs. Headway. “Then you’re travelling with that young man?” he pursued, with the coolness of a person who wishes to make his entertainment go as far as possible.
She folded her arms as she leaned back in her chair. “Look here, Mr. Littlemore; I’m about as sweet-tempered as I used to be in America, but I know a great deal more. Of course I ain’t travelling with that young man. He’s only a good friend.”
“He isn’t a good lover?” Littlemore ventured.
“Do people travel—publicly—with their lovers? I don’t want you to laugh at me—I want you to help me.” Her appeal might, in its almost childish frankness, have penetrated; she recognised his wisdom. “As I tell you, I’ve taken a great fancy to this grand old Europe; I feel as if I should never go back. But I want to see something of the life. I think it would suit me—if I could get started a little. George Littlemore,” she added in a moment—“I may as well bereal, for I ain’t at all ashamed. I want to get into society. That’s what I’m after!”
He settled himself in his chair with the feeling of a man who, knowing that he will have to pull, seeks to obtain a certain leverage. It was in a tone of light jocosity, almost of encouragement, however, that he repeated: “Into society? It seems to me you’re in it already, with the big people over here for your adorers.”
“That’s just what I want to know—if theyarebig,” she promptly said. “Is a Baronet much?”
“So they’re apt to think. But I know very little about it.”
“Ain’t you in society yourself?”
“I? Never in the world! Where did you get that idea? I care no more about society than about Max’s buttons.”
Mrs. Headway’s countenance assumed for a moment a look of extreme disappointment, and Littlemore could see that, having heard of his silver-mine and his cattle-ranch, and knowing that he was living in Europe, she had hoped to find him eminent in the world of fashion. But she speedily took heart. “I don’t believe a word of it. You know you’re a real gentleman—you can’t help yourself.”
“I may be a gentleman, but I’ve none of the habits of one.” Littlemore had a pause and then added: “I guess I’ve sat too much on back piazzas.”
She flushed quickly; she instantly understood—understood even more than he had meant to say. But she wished to make use of him, and it was of more importance that she should appear forgiving—especially as she had the happy consciousness of being so—than that she should punish a cruel speech. She would be wise, however, to recognise everything. “That makes no difference—a gentleman’s always a gentleman.”
“Ah, not the way a lady’s always a lady!” he laughed.
“Well, talking of ladies, it’s unnatural that, through your sister, you shouldn’t know something about European society,” said Mrs. Headway.
At the mention of his sister, made with a studied lightness of reference which he caught as it passed, Littlemore was unable to repress a start. “What in the world have you to do with my sister?” he would have liked to say. The introduction of this relative was disagreeable to him; she belonged quite to another order of ideas, and it was out of the question Mrs. Headway should ever make heracquaintance—if this was what, as the latter would have said, she was “after.” But he took advantage of a side issue. “What do you mean by European society? One can’t talk about that. It’s an empty phrase.”
“Well, I mean English society; I mean the society your sister lives in; that’s what I mean,” said his hostess, who was quite prepared to be definite. “I mean the people I saw in London last May—the people I saw at the opera and in the park, the people who go to the Queen’s drawing-rooms. When I was in London I stayed at that hotel on the corner of Piccadilly—the one looking straight down Saint James’s Street—and I spent hours together at the window there looking at the people in the carriages. I had a carriage of my own, and when I wasn’t at my window I was riding all around. I was all alone; I saw every one, but I knew no one—I had no one to tell me. I didn’t know Sir Arthur then—I only met him a month ago at Homburg. He followed me to Paris—that’s how he came to be my guest.” Serenely, prosaically, without a breath of the inflation of vanity, she made this last assertion: it was as if she were used to being followed or as if a gentleman one met at Homburg would inevitably follow. In the same tone she went on: “I attracted a good deal of attention in London—I could easily see that.”
“You’ll do that wherever you go,” Littlemore said—insufficiently enough, as he felt.
“I don’t want to attract so much; I think it’s vulgar.” She spoke as if she liked to use the word. She was evidently open to new sources of pleasure.
“Every one was looking at you the other night at the theatre,” Littlemore continued. “How can you hope to escape notice?”
“I don’t want to escape notice. People have always looked at me and I guess they always will. But there are different ways of being looked at, and Iknow the way I want. I mean to have it too!” Mrs. Headway prettily shrilled. Yes, she was full of purpose.
He sat there face to face with her and for some time said nothing. He had a mixture of feelings, and the memory of other places, other hours, was stealing over him. There had been of old a very considerable absence of interposing surfaces between these two—he had known her as one knew people only amid the civilisation of big tornadoes and back piazzas. He had liked her extremely in a place where it would have been ridiculous to be difficult to please. But his sense of this fact was somehow connected with other and such now alien facts; his liking for Nancy Beck was an emotion of which the sole setting was a back piazza. She presented herself here on a new basis—she appeared to want to be classified afresh. Littlemore said to himself that this was too much trouble; he had taken her at the great time in that way—he couldn’t begin at this late hour to take her in another way. He asked himself if she were going to be a real bore. It wasn’t easy to suppose her bent on ravage, but she might become tiresome if she were too disposed to be different. It made him rather afraid when she began to talk about European society, about his sister, to pronounce things vulgar. Littlemore was naturally merciful and decently just; but there was in his composition an element of the indolent, the sceptical, perhaps even the brutal, which made him decidedly prefer the simplicity of their former terms of intercourse. He had no particular need to see a woman rise again, as the mystic process was called; he didn’t believe in women’s rising again. He believed in their not going down, thought it perfectly possible and eminently desirable; but held it was much better for society that the divisions, the categories, the differingvalues, should be kept clear. He didn’t believe in bridging the chasms, in muddling the kinds. In general he didn’t pretend to say what was good for society—society seemed to him rather in a bad way; but he had a conviction on this particular point. Nancy Beck going in for the great prizes, that spectacle might be entertaining for a simple spectator; but it would be a nuisance, an embarrassment, from the moment anything more than detached “fun” should represent his share. He had no wish to be “mean,” but it might be well to show her he wasn’t to be humbugged.
“Oh if there’s anything you want you’ll have it,” he said in answer to her last remark. “You’ve always had what you want.”
“Well, I want something new this time. Does your sister reside in London?”
“My dear lady, what do you know about my sister?” Littlemore asked. “She’s not a woman you’d care in the least for.”
His old friend had a marked pause. “You don’t really respect me!” she then abruptly and rather gaily cried. It had one of her “Texan” effects of drollery; so that, yes, evidently, if he wished to preserve the simplicity of their former intercourse she was willing to humour him.
“Ah, my dear Mrs. Beck—!” he vaguely protested, using her former name quite by accident. At San Pablo he—and apparently she—had never thought whether he respected her or not. That never came up.
“That’s a proof of it—calling me by that hateful name! Don’t you believe I’m married? I haven’t been fortunate in my names,” she pensively added.
“You make it very awkward when you say such mad things. My sister lives most of the year in the country; she’s very simple, rather dull, perhapsa trifle narrow-minded. You’re very clever, very lively, and as large and loose and free as all creation. That’s why I think you wouldn’t like her.”
“You ought to be ashamed to run down your sister!” Mrs. Headway made prompt answer. “You told me once—at San Pablo—that she was the nicest woman you knew. I made a note of that, you see. And you told me she was just my age. So that makes it rather inglorious for you if you won’t introduce me!” With which she gave a laugh that perhaps a little heralded danger. “I’m not in the least afraid of her being dull. It’s all right, it’s just refined and nice, to be dull. I’m ever so much too exciting.”
“You are indeed, ever so much! But nothing is more easy than to know my sister,” said Littlemore, who knew perfectly that what he said was untrue. And then as a diversion from this delicate topic he brought out: “Are you going to marry Sir Arthur?”
“Don’t you think I’ve been married about enough?”
“Possibly; but this is a new line, it would be different. An Englishman—that’s a new sensation.”
“If Ishouldmarry it would be a European,” she said judiciously.
“Your chance is very good—they’re all marrying Americans.”
“He would have to be some one fine, the man I should marry now. I have a good deal to make up, you know. That’s what I want to learn about Sir Arthur. All this time you haven’t told me.”
“I’ve nothing in the world to tell—I’ve never heard of him. Hasn’t he told you himself?”
“Nothing at all; he’s very modest. He doesn’t brag nor ‘blow’ nor make himself out anything great. That’s what I like him for: I think it’s in such good taste. I do love good taste!” said Mrs.Headway. “But all this time,” she added, “you haven’t told me you’d help me.”
“How can I help you? I’m no one here, you know—I’ve no power.”
“You can help me by not preventing me. I want you to promise not to prevent me.” She continued to give him her charming conscious eyes, which seemed to look far into his own.
“Good Lord, how could I prevent you?”
“Well, I’m not quite sure of how. But you might try.”
“Oh I’m too lazy and too stupid,” Littlemore said.
“Yes,” she replied, musing as she still looked at him. “I think you’re too stupid. But I think you’re also too kind,” she added more graciously. She was almost irresistible when she said such a thing as that.
They talked for a quarter of an hour longer, and at last—as if she had had scruples—she spoke to him of his own marriage, of the death of his wife, matters to which she alluded more felicitously (as he thought) than to some other points. “If you’ve a little girl you ought to be very happy; that’s what I should like to have. Lord, I should make her a nice woman! Not like me—in another style!” When he rose to leave her she made a great point of his coming again—she was to be some weeks longer in Paris. And he must bring Mr. Waterville.
“Your English friend won’t like that—our coming very often,” Littlemore reminded her as he stood with his hand on the door.
But she met this without difficulty. “I don’t know what he has to do with it.”
“Neither do I. Only he must be in love with you.”
“That doesn’t give him any right. Mercy, if I hadhad to put myself out for all the men that have been in love with me!”
“Of course you’d have had a terrible life. Even doing as you please you’ve had rather an agitated one,” Littlemore pursued. “But your young Englishman’s sentiments appear to give him the right to sit there, after one comes in, looking blighted and bored. That might become very tiresome.”
“The moment he becomes tiresome I send him away. You can trust me for that.”
“Oh it doesn’t matter after all.” Our friend was perfectly conscious that nothing would suit him less than to have undisturbed possession of Mrs. Headway.
She came out with him into the antechamber. Mr. Max, the courier, was fortunately not there. She lingered a little; she appeared to have more to say. “On the contrary he likes you to come,” she then continued; “he wants to study my friends.”
“To study them?”
“He wants to find out about me, and he thinks they may tell him something. Some day he’ll ask you right out ‘What sort of a woman is she anyway?’”
“Hasn’t he found out yet?”
“He doesn’t understand me,” said Mrs. Headway, surveying the front of her dress. “He has never seen any one like me.”
“I should imagine not!”
“So he’ll just try to find out from you.”
“Well then heshallfind out,” Littlemore returned. “I’ll just tell him you’re the most charming woman in Europe.”
“That ain’t a description! Besides, he knows it. He wants to know if I’m respectable.”
“Why should he fuss about it?” Littlemore asked—not at once.
She grew a little pale; she seemed to be watching his lips. “Well, mind you tell him all right,” she went on, with her wonderful gay glare, the strain of which yet brought none of her colour back.
“Respectable? I’ll tell him you’re adorable!”
She stood a moment longer. “Ah, you’re no use!” she rather harshly wailed. And she suddenly turned away and passed back into her sitting-room, with the heavy rustle of her far-trailing skirts.
“Elle ne doute de rien!” Littlemore said to himself as he walked away from the hotel; and he repeated the phrase in talking about her to Waterville. “She wants to be right,” he added; “but she’ll never really succeed. She has begun too late, she’ll never get on the true middle of the note. However, she won’t know when she’s wrong, so it doesn’t signify!” And he more or less explained what he meant by this discrimination. She’d remain in certain essentials incurable. She had no delicacy; no discretion; no shading; she was a woman who suddenly said to you, “You don’t really respect me!” As if that were a thing for a woman to say!
“It depends upon what she meant by it.” Waterville could always imagine alternatives.
“The more she meant by it the less she ought to say it!” Littlemore declared.
But he returned to the Hôtel Meurice and on the next occasion took this companion with him. The secretary of legation, who had not often been in close quarters with pretty women whose respectability, or whose lack of it, was so frankly discussable, was prepared to find the well-known Texan belle a portentous type. He was afraid there might be danger in her, but on the whole he felt armed. The object of his devotion at present was his country, or at least the Department of State; he had no intention ofbeing diverted from that allegiance. Besides, he had his ideal of the attractive woman—a person pitched in a very much lower key than this shining, smiling, rustling, chattering daughter of the Territories. The woman he should care for would have repose, a sense of the private in life, and the implied, even the withheld, in talk; would sometimes let one alone. Mrs. Headway was personal, familiar, intimate, perpetually appealing or accusing, demanding explanations and pledges, saying things one had to answer. All this was accompanied with a hundred smiles and radiations and other natural graces, but the general effect was distinctly fatiguing. She had certainly a great deal of charm, an immense desire to please, and a wonderful collection of dresses and trinkets; but she was eager and clamorous, and it was hard for other people to be put to serve her appetite. If she wanted to get into society there was no reason why those of her visitors who had the luck to be themselves independent, to be themselves placed, and to be themselves by the same token critical, should wish to see her there; for it was this absence of common social encumbrances made her drawing-room attractive. There was no doubt whatever that she was several women in one, and she ought to content herself with that sort of numerical triumph. Littlemore said to Waterville that it was stupid of her to wish to scale the heights; she ought to know how much more she was in her element scouring the plain. She appeared vaguely to irritate him; even her fluttering attempts at self-culture—she had become a great judge of books and pictures and plays, and pronounced off-hand—constituted a vague invocation, an appeal for sympathy onerous to a man who disliked the trouble of revising old decisions consecrated by a certain amount of reminiscence that might be called tender. She exerted, however, effectively enough one of thearts of solicitation—she often startled and surprised. Even Waterville felt a touch of the unexpected, though not indeed an excess of it, to belong to his conception of the woman who should have an ideal repose. Of course there were two kinds of surprises, and only one of them thoroughly pleasant, though Mrs. Headway dealt impartially in both. She had the sudden delights, the odd exclamations, the queer curiosities of a person who has grown up in a country where everything is new and many things ugly, and who, with a natural turn for the arts and amenities of life, makes a tardy acquaintance with some of the finer usages, the higher pleasures. She was provincial; it was easy to see how she embodied that term; it took no great cleverness. But what was Parisian enough—if to be Parisian was the measure of success—was the way she picked up ideas and took a hint from every circumstance. “Only give me time and I guess I’ll come out all right,” she said to Littlemore, who watched her progress with a mixture of admiration and regret. She delighted to speak of herself as a poor little barbarian grubbing up crumbs of knowledge, and this habit borrowed beautiful relief from her delicate face, her so highly developed dress and the free felicity of her manners.
One of her surprises was, that after that first visit she said no more to Littlemore about Mrs. Dolphin. He did her perhaps the grossest injustice, but he had quite expected her to bring up this lady whenever they met. “If she’ll only leave Agnes alone she may do what she will,” he said to Waterville, expressing his satisfaction. “My sister would never look at her, and it would be very awkward to have to tell her so.” She counted on aid; she made him feel this simply by the way she looked at him; but for the moment she demanded no definite service. She held her tongue but waited, and her patience itself was a deeperadmonition. In the way of society, it had to be noted, her privileges were meagre, Sir Arthur Demesne and her two compatriots being, so far as the latter could discover, her only visitors. She might have had other friends, but she held her head very high and liked better to see no one than not to see the best company. She went in, clearly, for producing the effect of being by no means so neglected as fastidious. There were plenty of Americans in Paris, but in this direction she failed to extend her acquaintance; the nice people wouldn’t come to her, and nothing would have induced her to receive the others. She had a perfect and inexorable view of those she wished to avoid. Littlemore expected her every day to ask why he didn’t bring some of his friends—as to which he had his answer ready. It was rather a poor one, for it consisted but of the “academic” assurance that he wished to keep her for himself. She would be sure to retort that this was “too thin,” as indeed it was; yet the days went by without her calling him to account. The little American colony in Paris abounded in amiable women, but there were none to whom Littlemore could make up his mind to say that it would be a favour to him they should call on Mrs. Headway. He shouldn’t like them the better for doing so, and he wished to like those of whom he might ask a favour. Except, therefore, that he occasionally spoke of her as a full-blown flower of the West, still very pretty, but of not at all orthodox salon scent, who had formerly been a great chum of his, she remained unknown in the circles of the Avenue Gabriel and the streets that encircle the Arch of Triumph. To ask the men to go see her without asking the ladies would only accentuate the fact that he didn’t ask the ladies; so he asked no one at all. Besides, it was true—just a little—that he wished to keep her to himself, and he was fatuous enoughto believe she really cared more for him than for any outsider. Of course, however, he would never dream of marrying her, whereas her Englishman apparently was capable of that quaintness. She hated her old past; she often made that point, talking of this “dark backward” as if it were an appendage of the same order as a thieving cook or a noisy bedroom or even an inconvenient protrusion of drapery. Therefore, as Littlemore was part of the very air of the previous it might have been supposed she would hate him too and wish to banish him, with all the images he recalled, from her sight. But she made an exception in his favour, and if she disliked their early relations as a chapter of her own history she seemed still to like them as a chapter of his. He felt how she clung to him, how she believed he could make a great and blest difference for her and in the long run would. It was to the long run that she appeared little by little to have attuned herself.
She succeeded perfectly in maintaining harmony between Sir Arthur Demesne and her American visitors, who spent much less time in her drawing-room. She had easily persuaded him that there were no grounds for jealousy and that they had no wish, as she said, to crowd him out; for it was ridiculous to be jealous of two persons at once, and Rupert Waterville, after he had learned the way to her favour and her fireside, presented himself as often as his original introducer. The two indeed usually came together and they ended by relieving their competitor of a part of the weight of his problem. This amiable and earnest but slightly fatuous young man, who had not yet made up his mind, was sometimes rather oppressed with the magnitude of the undertaking, and when alone with Mrs. Headway occasionally found the tension of his thoughts quite painful. He was very slim and straight and looked taller than his height;he had the prettiest silkiest hair, which waved away from a large white forehead, and he was endowed with a nose of the so-called Roman model. He looked, in spite of these attributes, younger than his years, partly on account of the delicacy of his complexion and the almost child-like candour of his round blue eyes. He was diffident and self-conscious; there were certain letters he couldn’t pronounce. At the same time he carried himself as one brought up to fill a considerable place in the world, with whom confidence had become a duty and correctness a habit, and who, though he might occasionally be a little awkward about small things, would be sure to acquit himself honourably in great ones. He was very simple and believed himself very serious; he had the blood of a score of Warwickshire squires in his veins, mingled in the last instance with the somewhat paler fluid still animating the long-necked daughter of a banker who, after promising himself high glories as a father-in-law, had by the turn of events been reduced to looking for them in Sir Baldwin Demesne. The boy who was the only fruit of that gentleman’s marriage had come into his title at five years of age; his mother, who was somehow parentally felt to have a second time broken faith with expectation by not having better guarded the neck of her husband, broken in the hunting-field, watched over him with a tenderness that burned as steadily as a candle shaded by a transparent hand. She never admitted even to herself that he was not the cleverest of men; but it took all her own cleverness, which was much greater, to maintain this appearance. Fortunately he wasn’t wild, so that he would never marry an actress or a governess, like two or three of the young men who had been at Eton with him. With this ground of nervousness the less Lady Demesne awaited with a proud patience his appointment to some high office.He represented in Parliament the Conservative instincts and vote of a red-roofed market town, and, sending regularly to his bookseller for the new publications on economical subjects, was determined his political development should have a massive statistical basis. He was not conceited; he was only misinformed—misinformed, I mean, about himself. He thought himself essential to the propriety of things—not as an individual, but as an institution. This conviction indeed was too sacred to betray itself by vulgar assumptions. If he was a little man in a big place he never strutted nor talked loud; he merely felt it as a luxury that he had a large social circumference. It was like sleeping in a big bed; practically one didn’t toss about the more, but one felt a greater freshness.
He had never seen anything like Mrs. Headway; he hardly knew by what standard to measure her. She was not at all the English lady—not one of those with whom he had been accustomed to converse; yet it was impossible not to make out in her a temper and a tone. He might have been sure she was provincial, but as he was much under her charm he compromised by pronouncing her only foreign. It was of course provincial to be foreign; but this was after all a peculiarity which she shared with a great many nice people. He wasn’t wild, and his mother had flattered herself that in this all-important matter he wouldn’t be perverse; yet it was far from regular that he should have taken a fancy to an American widow, five years older than himself, who knew no one and who sometimes didn’t appear to understand exactly who he was. Though he believed in no alternative to the dignity of the British consciousness, it was precisely her foreignness that pleased him; she seemed as little as possible of his own race and creed; there wasn’t a touch of Warwickshire in her composition. She waslike an Hungarian or a Pole, with the difference that he could almost make out her speech. The unfortunate young man was engulfed even while not admitting that he had done more than estimate his distance to the brink. He would love wisely—one might even so love agreeably. He had intelligently arranged his life; he had determined to marry at thirty-two. A long line of ancestors was watching him; he hardly knew what they would think of Mrs. Headway. He hardly knew what he thought himself; the only thing he was absolutely sure of was that she made the time pass as it passed in no other pursuit. That, indeed, rather worried him; he was by no means sure anything so precious should be so little accounted for. There was nothing so to account but the fragments of Mrs. Headway’s conversation, the peculiarities of her accent, the sallies of her wit, the audacities of her fancy, the odd echoes of her past. Of course he knew she had had a past; she wasn’t a young girl, she was a widow—and widows were essentially the expression of an accomplished fact. He was not jealous of her antecedents, but he would have liked a little to piece them together, and it was here the difficulty occurred. The subject was illumined with fitful flashes, but never placed itself before him as a general picture. He asked her various questions, but her answers were so startling that, like sudden luminous points, they seemed to intensify the darkness round their edges. She had apparently spent her life in a remote province of a barbarous country, but it didn’t follow from this that she herself had been low. She had been a lily among thistles, and there was something romantic possibly in the interest taken by a man of his position in a woman of hers. It pleased Sir Arthur to believe he was romantic; that had been the case with several of his ancestors, who supplied a precedent without whichhe would scarce perhaps have ventured to trust himself. He was the victim of perplexities from which a single spark of direct perception would have saved him. He took everything in the literal sense; a grain of humour or of imagination would have saved him, but such things were never so far from him as when he had begun to stray helplessly in the realm of wonder. He sat there vaguely waiting for something to happen and not committing himself by rash declarations. If he was in love it was in his own way, reflectively, inexpressibly, obstinately. He was waiting for the formula which would justify his conduct and Mrs. Headway’s peculiarities. He hardly knew where it would come from; you might have thought from his manner that he would discover it in one of the elaborateentreésthat were served to the pair when she consented to dine with him at Bignon’s or the Café Anglais; or in one of the luxurious band-boxes that arrived from the Rue de la Paix and from which she often lifted the lid in the presence of her admirer. There were moments when he got weary of waiting in vain, and at these moments the arrival of her American friends—he often asked himself why she had so few—seemed to lift the mystery from his shoulders and give him a chance to rest. This apology for a plan she herself might yet scarce contribute to, since she couldn’t know how much ground it was expected to cover. She talked about her past because she thought it the best thing to do; she had a shrewd conviction that it was somehow better made use of and confessed to, even in a manner presented or paraded, than caused to stretch behind her as a mere nameless desert. She could at least a little irrigate and plant the waste. She had to have some geography, though the beautiful blank rose-coloured map-spaces of unexplored countries were what she would have preferred. She had noobjection to telling fibs, but now that she was taking a new departure wished to indulge only in such as were imperative. She would have been delighted might she have squeezed through with none at all. A few, verily, were indispensable, and we needn’t attempt to scan too critically the more or less adventurous excursions into poetry and fable with which she entertained and mystified Sir Arthur. She knew of course that as a product of fashionable circles she was nowhere, but she might have great success as a child of nature.
Rupert Waterville, in the midst of intercourse in which every one perhaps had a good many mental reserves, never forgot that he was in a representative position, that he was official and responsible; and he asked himself more than once how far he was sure it was right, as they said in Boston, to countenance Mrs. Headway’s claim to the character even of the American lady thrown to the surface by the late inordinate spread of excavation. In his own way as puzzled as poor Sir Arthur, he indeed flattered himself he was as particular as any Englishman could be. Suppose that after all this free association the well-known Texan belle should come over to London and ask at the Legation to be presented to the Queen? It would be so awkward to refuse her—of course they would have to refuse her—that he was very careful to make no tacit promises. She might construe anything as a tacit promise—he knew how the smallest gestures of diplomatists were studied and interpreted. It was his effort, therefore, to be really diplomatic in his relations with this attractive but dangerous woman. The party of four used often to dine together—Sir Arthur pushed his confidence so far—and on these occasions their fair friend, availing herself of one of the privileges of afemme du mondeeven at the most expensive restaurant, used to wipe her glasses with her napkin. One evening when after polishing agoblet she held it up to the light, giving it, with her head on one side, the least glimmer of a wink, he noted as he watched her that she looked like a highly modern bacchante. He observed at this moment that the Baronet was gazing at her too, and wondered if the same idea had come to him. He often wondered what the Baronet thought; he had devoted first and last a good deal of attention to the psychology of the English “great land-owning” consciousness. Littlemore, alone, at this moment, was characteristically detached; he never appeared to watch Mrs. Headway, though she so often watched him. Waterville asked himself among other things why Sir Arthur hadn’t brought his own friends to see her, for Paris during the several weeks that now elapsed abounded in English visitors. He guessed at her having asked him and his having refused; he would have liked particularly to know if she had asked him. He explained his curiosity to Littlemore, who, however, took very little interest in it. Littlemore expressed nevertheless the conviction that shewouldhave asked him; she never would be deterred by false delicacy.
“She has been very delicate withyou,” Waterville returned to this. “She hasn’t been at all pressing of late.”
“It’s only because she has given me up. She thinks I’m a brute.”
“I wonder what she thinks of me,” Waterville pensively said.
“Oh, she counts upon you to introduce her to the American Minister at the Court of Saint James’s,” Littlemore opined without mercy. “It’s lucky for you our representative here’s absent.”
“Well, the Minister has settled two or three difficult questions and I suppose can settle this one. I shall do nothing but by the orders of my chief.” He was very fond of alluding to his chief.
“She does me injustice,” Littlemore added in a moment. “I’ve spoken to several people about her.”
“Oh, but what have you told them?”
“That she lives at the Hôtel Meurice and wants to know nice people.”
“They’re flattered, I suppose, at your thinking them nice, but they don’t go,” said Waterville.
“I spoke of her to Mrs. Bagshaw, and Mrs. Bagshaw has promised to go.”
“Ah,” Waterville murmured; “you don’t call Mrs. Bagshaw nice! Mrs. Headway won’t take up with Mrs. Bagshaw.”
“Well, then, that’s exactly what she wants—to be able to cut some one!”
Waterville had a theory that Sir Arthur was keeping Mrs. Headway as a surprise—he meant perhaps to produce her during the next London season. He presently, however, learned as much about the matter as he could have desired to know. He had once offered to accompany his beautiful compatriot to the Museum of the Luxembourg and tell her a little about the modern French school. She had not examined this collection, in spite of her resolve to see everything remarkable—she carried her “Murray” in her lap even when she went to see the great tailor in the Rue de la Paix, to whom, as she said, she had given no end of points—for she usually went to such places with Sir Arthur, who was indifferent to the modern painters of France. “He says there are much better men in England. I must wait for the Royal Academy next year. He seems to think one can wait for anything, but I’m not so good at waiting as he. I can’t afford to wait—I’ve waited long enough.” So much as this Mrs. Headway said on the occasion of her arranging with Rupert Waterville that they should some day visit the Luxembourg together. Shealluded to the Englishman as if he were her husband or her brother, her natural protector and companion.
“I wonder if she knows how that sounds?” Waterville again throbbingly brooded. “I don’t believe she would do it if she knew how it sounds.” And he also drew the moral that when one was a well-known Texan belle there was no end to the things one had to learn: so marked was the difference between being well-known and being well-bred. Clever as she was, Mrs. Headway was right in saying she couldn’t afford to wait. She must learn, she must live quickly. She wrote to Waterville one day to propose that they should go to the Museum on the morrow; Sir Arthur’s mother was in Paris, on her way to Cannes, where she was to spend the winter. She was only passing through, but she would be there three days, and he would naturally give himself up to her. She appeared to have the properest ideas as to what a gentleman would propose to do for his mother. She herself, therefore, should be free, and she named the hour at which she should expect him to call for her. He was punctual to the appointment, and they drove across the river in a large high-hung barouche in which she constantly rolled about Paris. With Mr. Max on the box—the courier sported enormous whiskers—this vehicle had an appearance of great respectability, though Sir Arthur assured her (what she repeated to her other friends) that in London next year they would do the thing much better for her. It struck her other friends, of course, that this backer was prepared to go very far; which on the whole was what Waterville would have expected of him. Littlemore simply remarked that at San Pablo she drove herself about in a ramshackle buggy with muddy wheels and a mule very often in the shafts. Waterville throbbed afresh as he asked himself if the mother of a Tory M.P. would really consent to know her. Shemust of course be aware that it was a woman who was keeping her son in Paris at a season when English gentlemen were most naturally employed in shooting partridges.
“She’s staying at the Hôtel du Rhin, and I’ve made him feel that he mustn’t leave her while she’s here,” Mrs. Headway said as they drove up the narrow Rue de Seine. “Her name’s Lady Demesne, but her full title’s the Honourable Lady Demesne, as she’s a Baron’s daughter. Her father used to be a banker, but he did something or other for the Government—the Tories, you know they call them—and so he was raised to the peerage. So you see onecanbe raised! She has a lady with her as a companion.” Waterville’s neighbour gave him this information with a seriousness that made him smile; he tried to measure the degree to which it wouldn’t have occurred to her that he didn’t know how a Baron’s daughter was addressed. In that she was truly provincial; she had a way of exaggerating the value of her intellectual acquisitions and of assuming that others had shared her darkness. He noted, too, that she had ended by suppressing poor Sir Arthur’s name altogether and designating him only by a sort of conjugal pronoun. She had been so much and so easily married that she was full of these misleading references to gentlemen.
They walked through the gallery of the Luxembourg, and, except that Mrs. Headway directed her beautiful goldface-à-mainto everything at once and to nothing long enough, talked, as usual, rather too loud and bestowed too much attention on the bad copies and strange copyists that formed a circle round several indifferent pictures, she was an agreeable companion and a grateful recipient of “tips.” She was quick to understand, and Waterville was sure that before she left the gallery she had made herself mistress of a new subject and was quite prepared to compare the French school critically with the London exhibitions of the following year. As he had remarked more than once with Littlemore, she did alternate in the rummest stripes. Her conversation, her personality, were full of little joints and seams, all of them very visible, where the old and the new had been pieced and white-threaded together. When they had passed through the different rooms of the palace Mrs. Headway proposed that instead of returning directly they should take a stroll in the adjoining gardens, which she wished very much to see and was sure she should like. She had quite seized the difference between the old Paris and the new, and felt the force of the romantic associations of the Latin quarter as perfectly as if she had enjoyed all the benefits of modern culture. The autumn sun was warm in the alleys and terracesof the Luxembourg; the masses of foliage above them, clipped and squared, rusty with ruddy patches, shed a thick lacework over the white sky, which was streaked with the palest blue. The beds of flowers near the palace were of the vividest yellow and red, and the sunlight rested on the smooth grey walls of those parts of its basement that looked south; in front of which, on the long green benches, a row of brown-cheeked nurses, in white caps and white aprons, sat yielding sustenance to as many bundles of white drapery. There were other white caps wandering in the broad paths, attended by little brown French children; the small straw-seated chairs were piled and stacked in some places and disseminated in others. An old lady in black, with white hair fastened over each of her temples by a large black comb, sat on the edge of a stone bench (too high for her delicate length) motionless, staring straight before her and holding a large door-key; under a tree a priest was reading—you could see his lips move at a distance; a young soldier, dwarfish and red-legged, strolled past with his hands in his pockets, which were very much distended. Waterville sat down with Mrs. Headway on the straw-bottomed chairs and she presently said: “I like this—it’s even better than the pictures in the gallery. It’s more of a picture.”
“Everything in France is a picture—even things that are ugly,” Waterville replied. “Everything makes a subject.”
“Well, I like France!” she summed up with a small incongruous sigh. Then suddenly, from an impulse more conceivably allied to such a sound, she added: “He asked me to go and see her, but I told him I wouldn’t. She may come and see me if she likes.” This was so abrupt that Waterville was slightly confounded; then he saw she had returned by a short cut to Sir Arthur Demesne and hishonourable mother. Waterville liked to know about other people’s affairs, yet didn’t like this taste to be imputed to him; and therefore, though much desiring to see how the old lady, as he called her, would treat his companion, he was rather displeased with the latter for being so confidential. He had never assumed he was so intimate with her as that. Mrs. Headway, however, had a manner of taking intimacy for granted—a manner Sir Arthur’s mother at least wouldn’t be sure to like. He showed for a little no certainty of what she was talking about, but she scarcely explained. She only went on through untraceable transitions. “The least she can do is to come. I’ve been very kind to her son. That’s not a reason for my going to her—it’s a reason for her coming to me. Besides, if she doesn’t like what I’ve done she can leave me alone. I want to get into European society, but I want to do so in my own way. I don’t want to run after people; I want them to run after me. I guess they will, some day!” Waterville listened to this with his eyes on the ground; he felt himself turn very red. There was something in such crudities on the part of the ostensibly refined that shocked and mortified him, and Littlemore had been right in speaking of her lack of thenuance. She was terribly distinct; her motives, her impulses, her desires glared like the lighted signs of cafés-concerts. She needed to keep on view, to hand about, like a woman with things to sell on an hotel-terrace, her precious intellectual wares. Vehement thought, with Mrs. Headway, was inevitably speech, though speech was not always thought, and now she had suddenly become vehement. “If she does once come—then, ah then, I shall be too perfect with her; I shan’t let her go! But she must take the first step. I confess I hope she’ll be nice.”
“Perhaps she won’t,” said Waterville perversely.
“Well, I don’t care if she ain’t. He has never told me anything about her; never a word about any of his own belongings. If I wished I might believe he’s ashamed of them.”
“I don’t think it’s that.”
“I know it ain’t. I know what it is. It’s just regular European refinement. He doesn’t want to show off; he’s too much of a gentleman. He doesn’t want to dazzle me—he wants me to like him for himself. Well, I do like him,” she added in a moment. “But I shall like him still better if he brings his mother. They shall know that in America.”
“Do you think it will make an impression in America?” Waterville amusedly asked.
“It will show I’m visited by the British aristocracy. They won’t love that.”
“Surely they grudge you no innocent pleasure,” the young man laughed.
“They grudged me common politeness—when I was in New York! Did you ever hear how they treated me when I came on from my own section?”
Waterville stared; this episode was quite new to him. His companion had turned toward him; her pretty head was tossed back like a flower in the wind; there was a flush in her cheek, a more questionable charm in her eye. “Ah, my dear New Yorkers, they’re incapable of rudeness!” he cried.
“You’re one of them, I see. But I don’t speak of the men. The men were well enough—though they did allow it.”
“Allow what, Mrs. Headway?” He was quite thrillingly in the dark.
She wouldn’t answer at once; her eyes, glittering a little, were fixed on memories still too vivid. “What did you hear about me over there? Don’t pretend you heard nothing.”
He had heard nothing at all; there had not been aword about Mrs. Headway in New York. He couldn’t pretend and he was obliged to tell her this. “But I’ve been away,” he added, “and in America I didn’t go out. There’s nothing to go out for in New York—only insipid boys and girls.”
“There are plenty of spicy old women, who settled I was a bad bold thing. They found out I was in the ‘gay’ line. They discovered I was known to the authorities. Iamvery well known all out West—I’m known from Chicago to San Francisco; if not personally, at least by reputation. I’m known to all classes. People can tell you out there. In New York they decided I wasn’t good enough. Not good enough for New York! What do you say to that?”—it rang out for derision. Whether she had struggled with her pride before making her avowal her confidant of this occasion never knew. The strange want of dignity, as he felt, in her grievance seemed to indicate that she had no pride, and yet there was a sore spot, really a deep wound, in her heart which, touched again, renewed its ache. “I took a house for the winter—one of the handsomest houses in the place—but I sat there all alone. They thought me ‘gay,’megay there on Fifty-Eighth Street without so much as a cat!”
Waterville was embarrassed; diplomatist as he was he hardly knew what line to take. He couldn’t see the need or the propriety of her overflow; though the incident appeared to have been most curious and he was glad to know the facts on the best authority. It was the first he did know of this remarkable woman’s having spent a winter in his native city—which was virtually a proof of her having come and gone in complete obscurity. It was vain for him to pretend he had been a good deal away, for he had been appointed to his post in London only six months before, and Mrs. Headway’s social failure ante-datedthat event. In the midst of these reflexions he had an inspiration. He attempted neither to question, to explain nor to apologise; he ventured simply to lay his hand for an instant on her own and to exclaim as gallantly as possible: “I wishIhad known!”
“I had plenty of men—but men don’t count. If they’re not a positive help they’re a hindrance, so that the more you have the worse it looks. The women simply turned their backs.”
“They were afraid of you—they were jealous,” the young man produced.
“It’s very good of you to try and patch it up; all I know is that not one of them crossed my threshold. No, you needn’t try and tone it down; I know perfectly how the case stands. In New York, if you please, I didn’t go.”
“So much the worse for New York!” cried Waterville, who, as he afterwards said to Littlemore, had got quite worked up.
“And now you know why I want to get into society over here?” She jumped up and stood before him; with a dry hard smile she looked down at him. Her smile itself was an answer to her question; it expressed a sharp vindictive passion. There was an abruptness in her movements which left her companion quite behind; but as he still sat there returning her glance he felt he at last in the light of that smile, the flash of that almost fierce demand, understood Mrs. Headway.
She turned away to walk to the gate of the garden, and he went with her, laughing vaguely and uneasily at her tragic tone. Of course she expected him to serve, all obligingly, all effectively, her rancour; but his female relations, his mother and his sisters, his innumerable cousins, had been a party to the slight she had suffered, and he reflected as he walked along that after all they had been right. They had beenright in not going to see a woman who could chatter that way about her social wrongs; whether she were respectable or not they had had the true assurance she’d be vulgar. European society might let her in, but European society had its limpness. New York, Waterville said to himself with a glow of civic pride, was quite capable of taking a higher stand in such a matter than London. They went some distance without speaking; at last he said, expressing honestly the thought at that moment uppermost in his mind: “I hate that phrase, ‘getting into society.’ I don’t think one ought to attribute to one’s self that sort of ambition. One ought to assume that one’sinthe confounded thing—that oneissociety—and to hold that if one has good manners one has, from the social point of view, achieved the great thing. ‘The best company’s where I am,’ any lady or gentleman should feel. The rest can take care of itself.”
For a moment she appeared not to understand, then she broke out: “Well, I suppose I haven’t good manners; at any rate I’m not satisfied! Of course I don’t talk right—I know that very well. But let me get where I want to first—then I’ll look after the details. If I once get there I shall be perfect!” she cried with a tremor of passion. They reached the gate of the garden and stood a moment outside, opposite the low arcade of the Odéon, lined with bookstalls, at which Waterville cast a slightly wistful glance, waiting for Mrs. Headway’s carriage, which had drawn up at a short distance. The whiskered Max had seated himself within and, on the tense elastic cushions, had fallen into a doze. The carriage got into motion without his waking; he came to his senses only as it stopped again. He started up staring and then without confusion proceeded to descend.
“I’ve learned it in Italy—they call it thesiesta,”he remarked with an agreeable smile, holding the door open to Mrs. Headway.
“Well, I should think you had and they might!” this lady replied, laughing amicably as she got into the vehicle, where Waterville placed himself beside her. It was not a surprise to him that she spoiled her courier; she naturally would spoil her courier. But civilisation begins at home, he brooded; and the incident threw an ironic light on her desire to get into society. It failed, however, to divert her thoughts from the subject she was discussing with her friend, for as Max ascended the box and the carriage went on its way she threw out another note of defiance. “If once I’m all right over here I guess I can make New York do something! You’ll see the way those women will squirm.”
Waterville was sure his mother and sisters wouldn’t squirm; but he felt afresh, as the carriage rolled back to the Hôtel Meurice, that now he understood Mrs. Headway. As they were about to enter the court of the hotel a closed carriage passed before them, and while a few moments later he helped his companion to alight he saw that Sir Arthur Demesne had stepped from the other vehicle. Sir Arthur perceived Mrs. Headway and instantly gave his hand to a lady seated in the coupé. This lady emerged with a certain slow impressiveness, and as she stood before the door of the hotel—a woman still young and fair, with a good deal of height, gentle, tranquil, plainly dressed, yet distinctly imposing—it came over our young friend that the Tory member had broughthisprincipal female relative to call on Nancy Beck. Mrs. Headway’s triumph had begun; the dowager Lady Demesne had taken the first step. Waterville wondered whether the ladies in New York, notified by some magnetic wave, were beginning to be convulsed. Mrs. Headway, quickly conscious of whathad happened, was neither too prompt to appropriate the visit nor too slow to acknowledge it. She just paused, smiling at Sir Arthur.
“I should like to introduce my mother—she wants very much to know you.” He approached Mrs. Headway; the lady had taken his arm. She was at once simple and circumspect; she had every resource of the English matron.