George Meredith
Sandra Belloni (originally Emilia in England). Complete
It mattered nothing. He kissed her, and the vision of the critical world faded to a blank. Whatever she was, he was her prime luminary, so he determined to think that he cast light upon a precious, an unrivalled land.
“You are my own, are you not, Emilia?”
“Yes; I am,” she answered.
“That water seems to say ‘for ever,’” he murmured; and Emilia’s fingers pressed upon his.
Of marriage there was no further word. Her heart was evidently quite at ease; and that it should be so without chaining him to a date, was Wilfrid’s peculiar desire. He could pledge himself to eternity, but shrank from being bound to eleven o’clock on the morrow morning.
So, now, the soft Summer hours flew like white doves from off the mounting moon, and the lovers turned to go, all being still: even the noise of the waters still to their ears, as life that is muffled in sleep. They saw the cedar grey-edged under the moon: and Night, that clung like a bat beneath its ancient open palms. The bordering sward about the falls shone silvery. In its shadow was a swan. These scenes are but beckoning hands to the hearts of lovers, waving them on to that Eden which they claim: but when the hour has fled, they know it; and by the palpitating light in it they know that it holds the best of them.
CHAPTER XXI
At this season Mr. Pericles reappeared. He had been, he said, through “Paris, Turin, Milano, Veniss, and by Trieste over the Summering to Vienna on a tour for a voice.” And in no part of the Continent, his vehement declaration assured the ladies, had he found a single one. It was one universal croak—ahi! And Mr. Pericles could, affirm that Purgatory would have no pains for him after the torments he had recently endured. “Zey are frogs if zey are not geese,” said Mr. Pericles. “I give up. Opera is dead. Hein? for a time;” and he smiled almost graciously, adding: “Where is she?” For Emilia was not present.
The ladies now perceived a greatness of mind in the Greek’s devotion to music, and in his non-mercenary travels to assist managers of Opera by discovering genius. His scheme for Emilia fired them with delight. They were about to lay down all the material arrangements at once, but Mrs. Chump, who had heard that there was a new man in the house, now entered the room, prepared to conquer him. As thus, after a short form of introduction: “D’ye do, sir! and ye’re Mr. Paricles. Oh! but ye’re a Sultan, they say. Not in morr’ls, sir. And vary pleasant to wander on the Cont’nent with a lot o’ lacqueys at your heels. It’s what a bachelor can do. But I ask ye, sir, is ut fair, ye think, to the poor garls that has to stop at home?”
Hereat the ladies of Brookfield, thus miserably indicated, drew upon their self-command that sprang from the high sense of martyrdom.
Mr. Pericles did not reply to Mrs. Chump at all. He turned to Adela, saying aloud: “What is zis person?”
It might have pleased them to hear any slight put publicly on Mrs. Chump in the first resistance to the woman, but in the present stage their pride defended her. “Our friend,” was the reply with which Arabella rebuked his rudeness; and her sister approved her. “We can avoid showing that we are weak in our own opinion, whatsoever degrades us,” they had said during a consultation. Simultaneously they felt that Mr. Pericles being simply a millionaire and not In Society, being also a middle-class foreigner (a Greek whose fathers ran with naked heels and long lank hair on the shores of the Aegean), before such a man they might venture to identify this their guest with themselves an undoubted duty, in any case, but not always to be done; at least, not with grace and personal satisfaction. Therefore, the “our friend” dispersed a common gratulatory glow. Very small points, my masters; but how are coral-islands built?
Mrs. Chump fanned her cheek, in complete ignorance of the offence and defence. Chump, deceased, in amorous mood, had praised her management of the fan once, when breath was in him: “‘Martha,’ says he, winkin’ a sort of ‘mavourneen’ at me, ye know—‘Martha! with a fan in your hand, if ye’re not a black-eyed beauty of a Spaniard, ye little devil of Seville!’ says he.” This she had occasionally confided to the ladies. The marital eulogy had touched her, and she was not a woman of coldly-flowing blood, she had an excuse for the constant employment of the fan.
“And well, Mr. Paricles! have ye got nothin’ to tell us about foreign countesses and their slips? Because, we can listen, sir, garls or not. Sure, if they understand ye, ye teach ‘em nothin’; and if they don’t understand ye, where’s the harm done? D’ye see, sir? It’s clear in favour of talkin’.”
Mr. Pericles administered consolation to his moustache by twisting it into long waxy points. “I do not know; I do not know,” he put her away with, from time to time. In the end Mrs. Chump leaned over to Arabella. “Don’t have ‘m, my dear,” she murmured.
“You mean—?” quoth Arabella.
“Here’s the driest stick that aver stood without sap.”
Arabella flushed when she took the implication that she was looking on the man as a husband. Adela heard the remarks, and flushed likewise. Mrs. Chump eyed them both. “It’s for the money o’ the man,” she soliloquized aloud, as her fashion was. Adela jumped up, and with an easy sprightly posture of her fair, commonly studious person, and natural run of notes “Oh!” she cried, “I begin to feel what it is to be like a live fish on the fire, frying, frying, frying! and if he can keep his Christian sentiments under this infliction, what a wonderful hero he must be! What a hot day!”
She moved swiftly to the door, and flung it open. A sight met her eyes at which she lost her self-possession. She started back, uttering a soft cry.
“Ah! aha! oh!” went the bitter ironic drawl of Mr. Pericles, whose sharp glance had caught the scene as well.
Emilia came forward with a face like sunset. Diplomacy, under the form of Wilfrid Pole, kicked its heels behind, and said a word or two in a tone of false cheerfulness.
“Oh! so!” Mr. Pericles frowned, while Emilia held her hand out to him. “Yeas! You are quite well? H’m! You are burnt like a bean—hein? I shall ask you what you have been doing, by and by.”
Happily for decency, Mrs. Chump had not participated in the fact presented by ocular demonstration. She turned about comfortably to greet Wilfrid, uttering the inspired remark: “Ye look red from a sly kiss!”
“For one?” said he, sharpening his blunted wits on this dull instrument.
The ladies talked down their talk. Then Wilfrid and Mr. Pericles interchanged quasi bows.
“Oh, if he doesn’t show his upper teeth like an angry cat, or a leopard I’ve seen!” cried Mrs. Chump in Adela’s ear, designating Mr. Pericles. “Does he know Mr. Wilfrud’s in the British army, and a new lieuten’t, gazetted and all?”
Mr. Pericles certainly did not look pleasantly upon Wilfrid: Emilia received his unconcealed wrath and spite.
“Go and sing a note!” he said.
“At the piano?” Emilia quietly asked.
“At piano, harp, what you will—it is ze voice I want.”
Emilia pitched her note high from a full chest and with glad bright eyes, which her fair critics thought just one degree brazen, after the revelation in the doorway.
Mr. Pericles listened; wearing an aching expression, as if he were sending one eye to look up into his brain for a judgement disputed in that sovereign seat.
Still she held on, and then gave a tremulous, rich, contralto note.
“Oh! the human voice!” cried Adela, overcome by the transition of tones.
“Like going from the nightingale to the nightjar,” said Arabella.
Mrs. Chump remarked: “Ye’ll not find a more susceptible woman to musuc than me.”
Wilfrid looked away. Pride coursed through his veins in a torrent.
When the voice was still, Mr. Pericles remained in a pondering posture.
“You go to play fool with zat voice in Milano, you are flogged,” he cried terribly, shaking his forefinger.
Wilfrid faced round in wrath, but Mr. Pericles would not meet his challenge, continuing: “You hear? you hear?—so!” and Mr. Pericles brought the palms of his hands in collision.
“Marcy, man!” Mrs. Chump leaped from her chair; “d’ye mean that those horrud forr’ners’ll smack a full-grown young woman?—Don’t go to ‘m, my dear. Now, take my ‘dvice, little Belloni, and don’t go. It isn’t the sting o’ the smack, ye know—”
“Shall I sing anything to you?” Emilia addressed Mr. Pericles. The latter shrugged to express indifference. Nevertheless she sang. She had never sung better. Mr. Pericles clutched his chin in one hand, elbow on knee. The ladies sighed to think of the loss of homage occasioned by the fact of so few being present to hear her. Wilfrid knew himself the fountain of it all, and stood fountain-like, in a shower of secret adulation: a really happy fellow. This: that his beloved should be the centre of eyes, and pronounced exquisite by general approbation, besides subjecting him to a personal spell: this was what he wanted. It was mournful to think that Circumstance had not at the same time created the girl of noble birth, or with an instinct for spiritual elegance. But the world is imperfect.
Presently he became aware that she was understood to be singing pointedly to him: upon which he dismissed the council of his sensations, and began to diplomatize cleverly. Leaning over to Adela, he whispered:
“Pericles wants her to go to Italy. My belief is, that she won’t.”
“And why?” returned Adela, archly reproachful.
“Well, we’ve been spoiling her a little, perhaps. I mean, we men, of course. But, I really don’t think that I’m chiefly to blame. You won’t allow Captain Gambier to be in fault, I know.”
“Why not?” said Adela.
“Well, if you will, then he is the principal offender.”
Adela acted disbelief; but, unprepared for her brother’s perfectly feminine audacity of dissimulation, she thought: “He can’t be in earnest about the girl,” and was led to fancy that Gambier might, and to determine to see whether it was so.
By this manoeuvre, Wilfrid prepared for himself a defender when the charge was brought against him.
Mr. Pericles was thunderstruck on hearing Emilia refuse to go to Italy. A scene of tragic denunciation on the one hand, and stubborn decision on the other, ensued.
“I shall not mind zis” (he spoke of Love and the awakening of the female heart) “not when you are trained. It is good, zen, and you have fire from it. But, now! little fool, I say, it is too airly—too airly! How shall you learn—eh? with your brain upon a man? And your voice, little fool, a thing of caprice, zat comes and goes as he will, not you will. Hein? like a barrel-organ, which he turns ze handle.—Mon Dieu! Why did I leave her?” Mr. Pericles struck his brow with his wrist, clutching at the long thin slice of hair that did greasy duty for the departed crop on his poll. “Did I not know it was a woman? And so you are, what you say, in lofe.”
Emilia replied: “I have not said so,” with exasperating coolness.
“You have your eye on a man. And I know him, zat man! When he is tired of you—whiff, away you go, a puff of smoke! And you zat I should make a Queen of Opera! A Queen? You shall have more rule zan twenty Queens—forty! See” (Mr. Pericles made his hand go like an aspen-leaf from his uplifted wrist); “So you shall set ze hearts of sossands! To dream of you, to adore you! and flowers, flowers everywhere, on your head, at your feet. You choose your lofer from ze world. A husband, if it is your taste. Bose, if you please. Zen, I say, you shall, you shall lofe a man. Let him tease and sting—ah! it will be magnifique: Aha! ze voice will sharpen, go deep; yeas! to be a tale of blood. Lofe till you could stab yourself:—Brava! But now? Little fool, I say!”
Emilia believed that she was verily forfeiting an empire. Her face wore a soft look of delight. This renunciation of a splendid destiny for Wilfrid’s sake, seemed to make her worthier of him, and as Mr. Pericles unrolled the list of her rejected treasures, her bosom heaved without a regret.
“Ha!” Mr. Pericles flung away from her: “go and be a little gutter-girl!”
The musical connoisseur drew on his own disappointment alone for eloquence. Had he been thinking of her, he might have touched cunningly on her love for Italy. Music was the passion of the man; and a millionaire’s passion is something that can make a stir. He knew that in Emilia he had discovered a pearl of song rarely to be found, and his object was to polish and perfect her at all cost: perhaps, as a secondary and far removed consideration, to point to her as a thing belonging to him, for which Emperors might envy him. The thought of losing her drove him into fits of rage. He took the ladies one by one, and treated them each to a horrible scene of gesticulation and outraged English. H accused their brother of conduct which they were obliged to throw (by a process of their own) into the region of Fine Shades, before they dared venture to comprehend him. Gross facts in relationship with the voice, this grievous “machine, not man,”—as they said—stated to them, harshly, impetuously. The ladies felt that he had bored their ears with hot iron pins. Adela tried laughter as a defence from his suggestion against Wilfrid, but had shortly afterwards to fly from the fearful anatomist. She served her brother thoroughly in the Council of Three; so that Mr. Pericles was led by them to trust that there had; been mere fooling in his absence, and that the emotions he looked to as the triumphant reserve in Emilia’s bosom, to be aroused at some crisis when she was before the world, slumbered still. She, on her part, contrasting her own burning sensations with this quaint, innocent devotion to Art and passion for music, felt in a manner guilty; and whenever he stormed with additional violence, she became suppliant, and seemed to bend and have regrets. Mr. Pericles would then say, with mollified irritability: “You will come to Italy to-morrow?—Ze day after?—not at all?” The last was given with a roar, for lack of her immediate response. Emilia would find a tear on her eyelids at times. Surround herself as she might with her illusions, she had no resting-place in Wilfrid’s heart, and knew it. She knew it as the young know that they are to die on a future day, without feeling the sadness of it, but with a dimly prevalent idea that this life is therefore incomplete. And again her blood, as with a wave of rich emotion, washed out the blank spot. She thought: “What can he want but my love?” And thus she satisfied her own hungry questioning by seeming to supply an answer to his.
The ladies of Brookfield by no means encouraged Emilia to refuse the generous offer of Mr. Pericles. They thought, too, that she might—might she? Oh! certainly she might go to Italy under his protection. “Would you let one of your blood?” asked Wilfrid brutally. With some cunning he led them to admit that Emilia’s parents should rightly be consulted in such a case.
One day Mr. Pericles said to the ladies: “I shall give a fete: a party monstre. In ze air: on grass. I beg you to invite friends of yours.”
Before the excogitation of this splendid resolve, he had been observed to wear for some period a conspiratorial aspect. When it was delivered, and Arabella had undertaken the management of the “party monstre”—(which was to be on Besworth Lawn, and, as it was not their own party, could be conducted with a sort of quasi-contemptuous superiority to incongruous gatherings)—this being settled, the forehead of Mr. Pericles cleared and he ceased to persecute Emilia.
“I am not one that is wopped,” he said significantly; nodding to his English hearers, as if this piece of shrewd acquaintance with the expressive mysteries of their language placed them upon equal terms.
It was really ‘a providential thing’ (as devout people phrase it) that Laura Tinley and Mabel Copley should call shortly after this, and invite the ladies to a proposed picnic of theirs on Besworth Lawn. On Besworth Lawn, of all places! and they used the word ‘picnic.’
“A word suggestive of gnawed drumstick and ginger-beer bottles.” Adela quoted some scapegoat of her acquaintance, as her way was when she wished to be pungent without incurring the cold sisterly eye of reproof for a vulgarism.
Both Laura and Mabel, when they heard of the mighty entertainment fixed for Besworth Lawn by Mr. Pericles, looked down. They were invited, and looked up. There was the usual amount of fencing with the combative Laura, who gave ground at all points, and as she was separating, said (so sweetly!) “Of course you have heard of the arrest of your—what does one call him?—friend?—or a French word?”
“You mean?” quoth Arabella.
“That poor, neatly brushed, nice creature whom you patronized—who played the organ!” she jerked to Arabella’s dubious eyes.
“And he?” Arabella smiled, complacently.
“Then perhaps you may know that all is arranged for him?” said Laura, interpreting by the look more than the word, after a habit of women.
“Indeed, to tell you the truth, I know nothing,” said Arabella.
“Really?” Laura turned sharply to Cornelia, who met her eyes and did not exhibit one weak dimple.
The story was, that Mr. Chips, the Bookseller of Hillford, objected to the departure of Mr. Barrett, until Mr. Barrett had paid the bill of Mr. Chips: and had signified his objection in the form of a writ. “When, if you know anything of law,” said Laura, “you will see why he remains. For, a writ once served, you are a prisoner. That is, I believe, if it’s above twenty pounds. And Mr. Chips’ bill against Mr. Barrett was, I have heard, twenty-three pounds and odd shillings. Could anything be more preposterous? And Mr. Chips deserves to lose his money!”
Ah! to soar out of such a set as this, of which Laura Tinley is a sample, are not some trifling acts of inhumanity and practices in the art of ‘cutting’ permissible? So the ladies had often asked of the Unseen in their onward course, if they did not pointedly put the question now. Surely they had no desire to give pain, but the nature that endowed them with a delicate taste, inspired them to defend it. They listened gravely to Laura, who related that not only English books, but foreign (repeated and emphasized), had been supplied by Mr. Chips to Mr. Barrett.
They were in the library, and Laura’s eyes rested on certain yellow and blue covers of books certainly not designed for the reading of Mr. Pole.
“I think you must be wrong as to Mr. Barrett’s position,” said Adela.
“No, dear; not at all,” Laura was quick to reply. “Unless you know anything. He has stated that he awaits money remittances. He has, in fact, overrun the constable, and my brother Albert says, the constable is very likely to overrun ham, in consequence. Only a joke! But an organist with, at the highest computation—poor absurd thing!—fifty-five pounds per annum: additional for singing lessons, it is true,—but an organist with a bookseller’s bill of twenty-three pounds! Consider!”
“Foreign books, too!” interjected Adela.
“Not so particularly improving to his morals, either!” added Laura.
“You are severe upon the greater part of the human race,” said Arabella.
“So are the preachers, dear,” returned Laura.
“The men of our religion justify you?” asked Arabella.
“Let me see;—where were we?” Laura retreated in an affected mystification.
“You had reached the enlightened belief that books written by any but English hands were necessarily destructive of men’s innocence,” said Arabella; and her sisters thrilled at the neatness of the stroke, for the moment, while they forgot the ignoble object it transfixed. Laura was sufficiently foiled by it to be unable to return to the Chips-Barrett theme. Throughout the interview Cornelia had maintained a triumphant posture, superior to Arabella’s skill in fencing, seeing that it exposed no weak point of the defence by making an attack, and concealed especially the confession implied by a relish for the conflict. Her sisters considerately left her to recover herself, after this mighty exercise of silence.
CHAPTER XXII
Cornelia sat with a clenched hand. “You are rich and he is poor,” was the keynote of her thoughts, repeated from minute to minute. “And it is gold gives you the right in the world’s eye to despise him!” she apostrophized the vanished Laura, clothing gold with all the baseness of that person. Now, when one really hates gold, one is at war with one’s fellows. The tide sets that way. There is no compromise: to hate it is to try to stem the flood. It happens that this is one of the temptations of the sentimentalist, who should reflect, but does not, that the fine feelers by which the iniquities of gold are so keenly discerned, are a growth due to it, nevertheless. Those ‘fine feelers,’ or antennae of the senses, come of sweet ease; that is synonymous with gold in our island-latitude. The sentimentalists are represented by them among the civilized species. It is they that sensitively touch and reject, touch and select; whereby the laws of the polite world are ultimately regulated, and civilization continually advanced, sometimes ridiculously. The sentimentalists are ahead of us, not by weight of brain, but through delicacy of nerve, and, like all creatures in the front, they are open to be victims. I pray you to observe again the shrinking life that afflicts the adventurous horns of the snail, for example. Such are the sentimentalists to us—the fat body of mankind. We owe them much, and though they scorn us, let us pity them.
Especially when they are young they deserve pity, for they suffer cruelly. I for my part prefer to see boys and girls led into the ways of life by nature; but I admit that in many cases, in most cases, our good mother has not (occupied as her hands must be) made them perfectly presentable; by which fact I am warned to have tolerance for the finer beings who labour under these excessive sensual subtleties. I perceive their uses. And they are right good comedy; for which I may say that I almost love them. Man is the laughing animal: and at the end of an infinite search, the philosopher finds himself clinging to laughter as the best of human fruit, purely human, and sane, and comforting. So let us be cordially thankful to those who furnish matter for sound embracing laughter.
Cornelia detested gold—entirely on general grounds and for abstract reasons. Not a word of Mr. Barrett was shaped, even in fancy; but she interjected to herself, with meditative eye and mouth: “The saints were poor!” (the saints of whom he had read, translating from that old Latin book) “St. Francis! how divine was his life!” and so forth, until the figure of Mr. Penniless Barrett walked out in her imagination clad in saintly garments, superior not only to his creditor, Mr. Chips, but to all who bought or sold.
“I have been false,” she said; implying the “to him.” Seeing him on that radiant height above her, she thought “How could I have fallen so!” It was impossible for her mind to recover the delusion which had prompted her signing herself to bondage—pledging her hand to a man she did not love. Could it have been that she was guilty of the immense folly, simply to escape from that piece of coarse earth, Mrs. Chump? Cornelia smiled sadly, saying: “Oh, no! I should not have committed a wickedness for so miserable an object.” Despairing for a solution of the puzzle, she cried out, “I was mad!”, and with a gasp of horror saw herself madly signing her name to perdition.
“I was mad!” is a comfortable cloak to our sins in the past. Mournful to think that we have been bereft of reason; but the fit is over, and we are not in Bedlam!
Cornelia next wrestled with the pride of Mr. Barrett. Why had he not come to her once after reading the line pencilled in the book? Was it that he would make her his debtor in everything? He could have reproached her justly; why had he held aloof? She thirsted to be scourged by him, to hang her head ashamed under his glance, and hug the bitter pain he dealt her. Revolving how the worst man on earth would have behaved to a girl partially in his power (hands had been permitted to be pressed, and the gateways of the eyes had stood open: all but vows had been interchanged), she came to regard Mr. Barrett as the best man on the earth. That she alone saw it, did not depreciate the value of her knowledge. A goal gloriously illumined blazed on her from the distance. “Too late!” she put a curb on the hot courses in her brain, and they being checked, turned all at once to tears and came in a flood. How indignant would the fair sentimentalist have been at a whisper of her caring for the thing before it was too late!
Cornelia now daily trod the red pathways under the firs, and really imagined herself to be surprised, even vexed, when she met Mr. Barrett there at last. Emilia was by his side, near a drooping birch. She beckoned to Cornelia, whose North Pole armour was doing its best to keep down a thumping heart.
“We are taking our last walk in the old wood,” said, Mr. Barrett, admirably collected. “That is, I must speak for myself.”
“You leave early?” Cornelia felt her throat rattle hideously.
“In two days, I expect—I hope,” said he.
“Why does he hope?” thought Cornelia, wounded, until a vision of the detaining Chips struck her with pity and remorse.
She turned to Emilia. “Our dear child is also going to leave us.”
“I?” cried Emilia, fierily out of languor.
“Does not your Italy claim you?”
“I am nothing to Italy any more. Have I not said so? I love England now.”
Cornelia smiled complacently. “Let us hope your heart is capacious enough to love both.”
“Then your theory is” (Mr. Barrett addressed Cornelia in the winning old style), “that the love of one thing enlarges the heart for another?”
“Should it not?” She admired his cruel self-possession pitiably, as she contrasted her own husky tones with it.
Emilia looked from one to the other, fancying that they must have her case somewhere in prospect, since none could be unconscious of the vehement struggle going on in her bosom; but they went farther and farther off from her comprehension, and seemed to speak of bloodless matters. “And yet he is her lover,” she thought. “When they meet they talk across a river, and he knows she is going to another man, and does not gripe her wrist and drag her away!” The sense that she had no kinship with such flesh shut her mouth faster than Wilfrid’s injunctions (which were ordinarily conveyed in too subtle a manner for her to feel their meaning enough to find them binding). Cornelia, for a mask to her emotions, gave Emilia a gentle, albeit high-worded lecture on the artist’s duty toward Art, quoting favourite passages from Mr. Barrett’s favourite Art-critic. And her fashion of dropping her voice as she declaimed the more dictatorial sentences (to imply, one might guess, by a show of personal humility that she would have you to know her preaching was vicarious; that she stood humbly in the pulpit, and was but a vessel for the delivery of the burden of the oracle), all this was beautiful to him who could see it. I cannot think it was wholesome for him; nor that Cornelia was unaware of a naughty wish to glitter temporarily in the eyes of the man who made her feel humble. The sorcery she sent through his blood communicated itself to hers. When she had done, Emilia, convincedly vanquished by big words, said, “I cannot talk,” and turned heavily from them without bestowing a smile upon either.
Cornelia believed that the girl would turn back as abruptly as she had retreated; and it was not until Emilia was out of sight that she remembered the impropriety of being alone with Mr. Barrett. The Pitfall of Sentiment yawned visible, but this lady’s strength had been too little tried for her to lack absolute faith in it. So, out of deep silences, the two leapt to speech and immediately subsided to the depths again: as on a sultry summer’s day fishes flash their tails in the sunlight and leave a solitary circle widening on the water.
Then Cornelia knew what was coming. In set phrase, and as one who performs a duty frigidly pleasant, he congratulated her on her rumored union. One hand was in his buttoned coat; the other hung elegantly loose: not a feature betrayed emotion. He might have spoken it in a ballroom. To Cornelia, who exulted in self-compression, after the Roman method, it was more dangerous than a tremulous tone.
“You know me too well to say this, Mr. Barrett.”
The words would come. She preserved her steadfast air, when they had escaped, to conceal her shame. Seeing thus much, he took it to mean that it was a time for plain-speaking. To what end, he did not ask.
“You have not to be told that I desire your happiness above all earthly things,” he said: and the lady shrank back, and made an effort to recover her footing. Had he not been so careful to obliterate any badge of the Squire of low degree, at his elbows, cuffs, collar, kneecap, and head-piece, she might have achieved it with better success. For cynicism (the younger brother of sentiment and inheritor of the family property) is always on the watch to deal fatal blows through such vital parts as the hat or the H’s, or indeed any sign of inferior estate. But Mr. Barrett was armed at all points by a consummate education and a most serviceable clothesbrush.
“You know how I love this neighbourhood!” said she.
“And I! above all that I have known!”
They left the pathway and walked on mosses—soft yellow beds, run over with grey lichen, and plots of emerald in the midst.
“You will not fall off with your reading?” he recommenced.
She answered “Yes,” meaning “No”; and corrected the error languidly, thinking one of the weighty monosyllables as good as the other: for what was reading to her now?
“It would be ten thousand pities if you were to do as so many women do, when… when they make these great changes,” he continued.
“Of what avail is the improvement of the mind?” she said, and followed his stumble over the “when,” and dropped on it.
“Of what avail! Is marriage to stop your intellectual growth?”
