London + 

XXXII + 

And then⁠—well, life plays strange tricks. In a week or two London had swallowed me up. How many times, I wonder, had I tried in fancy to picture Mrs. Monnerie’s town house. How romantic an edifice fancy had made of it. Impressive in its own fashion, it fell far short of these ignorant dreams. It was No. 2 of about forty, set side by side, their pillared porticoes fronting a prodigious square. Its only “garden,” chiefly the resort of cats, children, nursemaids, an old whiskered gentleman in a bath chair, and sparrows, was visible to every passerby through a spearheaded palisade of railings. Broad paving-stones skirted its areas, and over each descent of steps hung a bellpull. + 

On cloudless days the sun filled this square like a tank with a dry glare and heat in which even my salamanderish body sometimes gasped like a fish out of water. When rain fell out of the low, grey skies, and the scaling plane-trees hissed and the sparrows chirped, my spirits seemed to sink into my shoes. And fair or foul, London soot and dust were enemies alike to my eyes, my fingers, and my nose. + 

Even my beloved cloud-burdened northwest wind was never quite free of smuts and grit; and when blew the east! But it must be remembered how ignorant and local I was. In my long carriage journey to Mrs. Monnerie’s through those miles and miles of grimed, huddling houses, those shops and hoardings and steeples, I had realized for the first time that its capital is not a part of England, only a sprawling human growth in it; and though I soon learned to respect it as that, I could never see without a sigh some skimpy weed struggling for life in its bricked-up crevices. It was nearly all dead, except for human beings, and that could not be said of Lyndsey, or even of Beechwood Hill. + 

Maybe my imagination had already been prejudiced by a coloured drawing which Mr. Wagginhorne had sent me once for a Valentine when I was a child. It hangs up now in that child’s nursery for a memento that I have been nearly dead. In the midst of it on a hill, in gold and faded carmine, encircled with great five-pointed blue stars, and with green, grooved valleys radiating from its castellated towers, is a city⁠—Hierusalem. A city surmounted by a narrow wreathing pennon on which, inscribed in silver, are the words: “Who heareth the Voice of My Spirit? And how shall they who deceive themselves resort unto Me?” + 

Scattered far and near about this central piece, and connected with it by thin lines like wandering paths radiating from its gates across mountain, valley, and forest, lie, like round web-like smudges, if seen at a distance, the other chief cities of the world, Rome, Venice, Constantinople, Paris, and the rest. London sprawls low in the left-hand corner. The strongest glass cannot exhaust the skill and ingenuity of the maker of this drawing (an artist who, Mr. Wagginhorne told me, was mad, poor thing⁠—a man in a frenzy distemper⁠—his very words). For when you peer close into this London, it takes the shape of a tusked, black, hairy boar, sprawling with hoofs outspread, fast asleep. And between them, and even actually diapering the carcass of the creature, is a perfect labyrinth of life⁠—a high crowned king and queen, honey-hiving bees, an old man with a beard as if in a swoon, robbers with swords, travellers with beasts and torches, inns, a cluster of sharp-coloured butterflies (of the same proportion) fluttering over what looks like a clot of dung, a winding river, ships, trees, tombs, wasted unburied bodies, a child issuing from an egg, a phoenix taking flight: and so on. There is no end to this poor man’s devices. The longer you look, the more strange things you discover. Yet at distance of a pace or two, his pig appears to fade into nothing but a cloudy-coloured cobweb⁠—one of the many around his bright-dyed Hierusalem. + 

Now I cannot help wondering if this peculiar picture may not already have tinged a young mind with a curious horror of London; even though my aversion may have needed no artificial aid. + 

Still I must not be ungrateful. These were vague impressions; and as an actual fact, Mrs. Monnerie had transported me into the very midst of the world of rank and fashion. Her No. 2 was now my home. The spaciousness, the unnatural solitude, the servants who never so much as glanced at me until after my back was turned, the hushed opulency, the formality! It was impossible to be just my everyday Miss M. My feet never found themselves twirling me round before their mistress was aware of it. I all but gave up gossiping with myself as I went about my little self-services. + 

Parochial creature that I was⁠—I missed Mrs. Bowater’s “homeliness.” To have things out of proportion to my body was an old story. To that, needless to say, I was perfectly accustomed. But here things were at first out of all proportion to my taste and habits, a very different thing. It is, in fact, extremely difficult in retrospect to get side by side again with those new experiences⁠—with a self that was at one moment intoxicated and engrossed, and the next humiliated and desperately ill at ease, at the novelty of her surroundings. + 

I had a maid, too, Fleming, with a pointed face and greenish eyes, who, unlike Mrs. Bowater, did not snort, but sniffed at things. Whether I retired for the night or rose in the morning, it was always to the accompaniment of a half-audible sniff. And I was never perfectly certain whether that sniff was one of the mind, or of the body, or of both. I found it hard to learn to do little enough for myself. Fleming despised me⁠—at least so I felt⁠—even for emptying my washbasin, or folding my nightgown. Worse, I was never sure of being alone: she stole about so softly on her duties. And then the “company.” + 

Not that the last black days at Beechwood were not even blacker for the change. At first I tried to think them quietly over, to ravel out my mistakes, and to get straight with my past. But I couldn’t in all that splendour. I had to spend much more time in bewaring of faux pas, and in growing accustomed to being a kind of tame, petted animal⁠—tame even to itself, I mean. So Mrs. Bowater’s went floating off into the past like a dingy little house on the edge of a muddy river. Amid that old horror and anxiety, even my dear Pollie’s wedding day had slipped by unheeded. How often my thoughts went back to her now. If only she could have been my Fleming. + 

I tried to make amends for my forgetfulness⁠—even to the extent of pocketing my pride, and commissioning Fleming to purchase for me (out of the little stock of money left me by Fanny) a cradle, as a wedding present for Pollie, and a chest of tools for her husband. Oddly enough, she did not sniff at this request. Her green eyes almost sparkled. At the very word, wedding, she seemed to revive into a new woman. And Pollie completely forgave me:⁠— + 

“Dear Miss M.⁠—We was mother and all very sorry and grieved you couldn’t come though it passed off very satisfactory. As for forgetting please don’t mention the word, Lyndsey have never been the same since the old house was empty. It all passed off very satisfactory though with such torrents of rain there was a great pool in the churchyard which made everybody in high spirits. And William and I can’t thank you enough for those beautiful gifts you have sent us. Will have been a carpenter since he was a boy but there’s things there miss he says he never heard on in his born days but will be extreamly useful when he comes to know what for. And Mother says it was just like your good kind heart to think of what you sent me. You can’t think how handsome it looks in the new-papered room and I’m sure I hope if I may say so it may be quite as useful as Will’s tools, and its being pretty late to marry it isn’t as if I was a slip of a girl. And of course I have mother. Though if any does come you may be sure it will be a Sunday treat being too fine for ordinary. + 

“Please God miss I hope you are keeping well and happy in your new suroundings and that dream will come true. It was a dreadful moment that day by the shops but I’m thankful all came well. If you ever writes to Mrs. B. I trust you will mention me to her kindly not being much of a letter writer. If you could have heard the things she said of you your ears would burn miss you were such a treasure and to judge from her appearance she must have seen her troubles. And being a married woman helps to see into things though thank God I’m well and happy and William hopes to keep me so. + 

“Well I must close now trusting that you are in the best of health. Your old Pollie. + 

“Miss Fenne have been very poorly of late so I’ve heard though not yet took to her bed⁠—more peculiar than ever about Church and suchlike. Adam Waggett being W’s oldest friend though not my choice was to have been Best Man but he’s in service in London and couldn’t come.” + 

But if I pined for Pollie’s company, how can I express what the absence of Mrs. Bowater meant to me? Even when I had grown used to my new quarters, I would sometimes wake myself calling her name in a dream. She had been almost unendurably kind to me that last May morning in Wanderslore, when she had come to fetch me from yet another long adieu⁠—to Mr. Anon. After he had gone, she and I had sat on for a while in that fresh spring beauty, a sober and miserable pair. Miserable on my side for miserable reasons. Then, if ever, had been the moment wherein to clear my breast and be in spirit as well as heart at one with her. Yet part for honesty and part for shame, I had remained silent. I could only comfort myself with remembering that we should soon meet again, and that the future might be kinder. Well, sometimes the future is kinder, but it is never the same thing as the past. + 

“They may perhaps talk about that unfortunate⁠ ⁠… about that poor young Mr. Crimble, miss,” was one of my landlady’s last remarks, as she sat staring rigidly at the great, empty house. “We all take good care to spread about each other’s horrors; and what else is a newspaper for? If so; well, I shouldn’t ask it, I suppose. But I’ve been thinking maybe my Fanny wasn’t everything to blame. We’ve had it out together, she and I, though only by letter. She was frightened of me as much as anything, though goodness knows I tried to bring her up a God-fearing child. She had no one, as she thought, to go to⁠—and him a weak creature for all his obstinacy and, as you might say, penned in by his mother and his cloth. They say the Cartholics don’t marry, and there’s nothing much to be wondered at in that. Poor young fellow, he won’t bear much thinking on, even when he’s gone out of mind. I’m fearing now that what’s come about may make her wilder and harder. Help her all you can, if only in your thoughts, miss: she sets more store by you than you might guess.” + 

“Indeed, indeed, I will,” I said. + 

“You see, miss,” Mrs. Bowater monotoned on, “I’m nothing much better than an aunt for Fanny, with no children of my own for guidance; and him there helpless with his broken leg in Buenos Aires.” The long, bonneted face moved round towards me. “Do you feel any smouldering affections for the young gentleman that’s just gone?” + 

This was an unexpected twist to our talk, but, in some little confusion, I met it as candidly as I could. + 

“I am fonder of Fanny⁠—and, of course, of you, Mrs. Bowater; oh, far, far. But⁠—I don’t quite know how to express it⁠—I am, as you might say, in my own mind with him. I think he knows a little what I am, in myself I mean. And besides, oh, well, it isn’t a miserable thing to feel that just one’s company makes anybody happy.” + 

Mrs. Bowater considered this reply for some little time. + 

“He didn’t look any too happy just now, to judge from his back view,” she remarked oracularly. “And when I was.⁠ ⁠… But there, miss, I’m thinking only of your comfort, and I’m not quite as comfortable as might be over that there Mrs. Monnerie. Generous she may be, though not noticing it much perhaps from a purse with no bottom to it, judging from what I’ve seen. God bless you, one way or the other. And perhaps you’ll sometimes remember the bits of Sundays we’ve shared up there⁠—you and the old Dragon.” + 

A smile and a tear battled for the dark eye that looked down on me. Indeed, seldom after came a Sunday evening with its clanking bells and empty, London hush, but it brought back to me with a pang my hymns and talks with “the old Dragon.” Not that anyone I ever saw at Mrs. Monnerie’s appeared to work so hard as to need a day of rest. There was merely a peculiar empty sensation on Sundays of there being nothing “to do.” + 

A flight of stone steps and a pillared porch led up to her great ornamental door. Beyond was a hall compared with which the marbles of Brunswick House were mere mosaic. An alabaster fountain, its jet springing lightly from a gilded torch held by a crouching faun, cooled, and discreetly murmured a ceaseless Hush! in the air. On either hand, a wide, shallow staircase ascended to an enormous gilded drawing-room, with its chairs and pictures; and to the library. The dining-room stood opposite the portico. When Mrs. Monnerie and I were alone, we usually shared a smaller room with her parrot, Chakka; her little Chinese dog, Cherry⁠—whose whimper had a most uncomfortable resemblance to the wild and homesick cry of my seagulls at Lyme Regis⁠—and her collections of the world’s smaller rarities. It is only, I suppose, one more proof of how volatile a creature I used to be that I took an intense interest in the contents of these cabinets for a few days, and then found them nothing but a vexation. No doubt this was because of an uneasy suspicion that Mrs. Monnerie had also collected me. + 

She could be extremely tactful in her private designs, yet she “showed me off” in a fashion that might have turned a far less giddy head than her protégée’s, and perhaps cannot have been in the best of taste. + 

So sure had she been of me that, when I arrived, a room on the first floor of No. 2 had already been prepared for my reception. A wonderful piece of fantasticalness⁠—like a miniature fairy palace, but without a vestige of any real make-believe in it. It was panelled and screened with carvings in wood, inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl⁠—dwarfs and apes and misshapen gods and goddesses leering and gaping out at one from amidst leafy branches, flowers, and fruits, and birds, and butterflies. The faintest sniff of that Indian wood⁠—whatever it was⁠—recalls to this day that nightmare scenery. Its hangings were of a silk so rich that they might have stood on edge on the floor. These screens and tapestries guarded a privacy that rarely, alas, contained a Miss M. worth being in private with. + 

The one piece of chagrin exhibited by Mrs. Monnerie in those early days of our acquaintance was at my insistence on bringing at least a few of my familiar sticks of furniture and chattels with me from Mrs. Bowater’s. Their plain Sheraton design, she thought, was barbarously out of keeping with the rest. It was; but I had my way. + 

Not the least precious of these old possessions, though dismal for its memories, was the broken money chest which Fanny had pushed in under the yew in the garden at Wanderslore. Tacked up in canvas, its hinges and lock repaired, it had been sent on to me a week or two after my farewells to Beechwood, by Mr. Anon. Inside it I found the nightgown I had buried in the rabbit’s hole, Fanny’s letter from under its stone, my Sense and Sensibility, and last, pinned on to a scrap of kingfisher coloured silk, a pair of earrings made out of two old gold coins. Apart from a few withered flowers, they are the only thing I possess that came from Wanderslore. Long afterwards, I showed these earrings to Sir W. P. He told me they were quarter Rose Nobles of Edward III’s reign, and only a quarter of a quarter of an ounce in weight. They weigh pretty heavy for me now, however. + 

My arrangement with Mrs. Monnerie had been that, however long I might stay with her, I should still be in the nature of a visitor; that No. 2, in fact, should be my town house, and Mrs. Bowater’s my country. But I was soon to realize that she intended Mrs. Bowater to have a very small share in me. She pretended to be jealous of me, to love me for my own sweet sake; and even while I knew it was mere pretence, it left its flattery on my mind; and for the first time in my life I feigned to be even smaller than I was; would mince my speeches, affect to be clever, even ogle the old lady, until it might be supposed we were a pair of queerly-assorted characters in a charade. + 

Nevertheless, I had had the obstinacy to insist that I should be at liberty to stay with Mrs. Bowater whenever I wished to do so; and I was free to invite any friend to visit me I chose. “And especially, my dear, anyone an eighth as exquisite,” Mrs. Monnerie had kindly put it. It may seem a little strange that all these obligations should have been on her side. But Mrs. Monnerie’s whims were far more vigorous than most people’s principles. The dews of her loving kindness descended on me in a shower, and it was some little time before I began to feel a chill. + 

Not the least remarkable feature of No. 2 was its back view. The window of my room came down almost to the floor. It “commanded” an immense zinc cistern⁠—George, by name⁠—a Virginia Creeper groping along a brick wall, similar cisterns smalling into the distance, other brick walls and scores of back windows. Once, after contemplating this odd landscape for some little time, it occurred to me to speculate what the back view from the House of Life was like; but I failed to conceive the smallest notion of it. I rarely drew my curtains, and, oddly enough, when I did so, was usually in a vacant or dismal mood. My lights were electric. One simply twisted a tiny ivory button. At first their clear and coloured globes, set like tiny tulips in a candelabra, charmed my fancy. But, such is custom, I soon wearied of them, and pined for the slim, living flame of candles⁠—even for my coarse old night-light swimming in its grease in a chipped blue and white saucer. + 

XXXIII + 

Mrs. Monnerie had rifled her collections for my use⁠—pygmy Venetian glass, a silver-gilt breakfast and tea service, pygmy porcelain. There were absurd little mechanical knickknacks⁠—piping birds, a maddening little operatic clock of which I at last managed to break the mainspring, a musical chair, and so on. My bath was of jade; my table a long one of ebony inlaid with ivory, with puffing cherub faces at each corner representing the four winds. My own few possessions, I must confess, looked not only worn but provincial by comparison. But I never surprised myself actually talking to any of Mrs. Monnerie’s exquisite novelties as to my other dumb, old, wooden friends. She delighted in them far more than I. + 

I suppose, really to enjoy such pomp and luxury, one should be positively born in the purple; and then, I suppose, one must be careful that the dye does not go to the bone. Whether or not, I have long since come to the conclusion that I am vulgar by nature⁠—like my mother tongue. And at times, in spite of my relief at being free of the blackness that had craped in my last days at Beechwood, I often found myself hungering for my Bowater parlour⁠—even for its smell. Another thing I learned gradually at No. 2 was that I had been desperately old-fashioned; and that is, to some extent, to belong to the dead. + 

Mrs. Monnerie’s chief desire, no doubt, was to give her new knickknack a suitable setting. But it may also have reminded her childlessness⁠—for she, too, like Mrs. Bowater, was “nothing much better than an aunt”⁠—of her childhood. Of course I affected as much pleasure in it as I could, and was really grateful. But she greatly disliked being thanked for anything, and would blandly shut her eyes at the least manifestation of gratitude. “Humour me, humour me, humour me,” she once petulantly nodded at me; “there are at least a hundred prayers in the Prayer Book, my pet, to one thanksgiving, and that’s human nature all over.” It was what my frame must have cost that scandalized me. When, one day, after rhapsodizing (not without a shudder) over a cape and hat, which she had given me, composed solely of the shimmering emerald feathers of the hummingbird, I rather tactlessly reminded her of my £110 a year, and of my determination to live within it, her eyelids pinched me a glance as if I had explained in public that I had been bitten by a flea. + 

Yet as time went on, a peculiar affection sprang up in me for this crowded and lonely old woman. It has survived sore trials. She was by turns generous and mean, honeyed and cantankerous, impulsive and scheming. Like Mrs. Bowater, she disapproved of the world in general, and yet with how different a result. A restless, darting mind lay hidden behind the great mask of her countenance, with its heavy-lidded eyes and tower of hair. She loved to sit indolently peering, musing, and gossiping, twiddling the while perhaps some little antique toy in her capacious lap. I can boast, at any rate, that I was a spellbound listener, and devoured her peculiar wandering, satirical talk as if it had been manna from heaven. + 

It was the old, old story. Talking to me was the next most private thing to talking to herself; and I think she enjoyed for a while the company of so queer a confessor. Once, I remember, she confided to me the whole story of a girlish love affair, at least forty years old. I could hardly believe my eyes as I watched her; she looked so freshened and demure and spirited. It was as if she were her own twenties just dressed up. But she had a dry and acrid tongue, and spared nothing and nobody. To her and to Mrs. Bowater I owe nearly all my stock of worldly wisdom. And now I shall never have time, I suppose, to sort it out. + 

Mr. Monnerie, as Fleming confided in me one day⁠—and the aristocracy was this extremely reticent and contemptuous creature’s favourite topic of conversation⁠—Mr. Monnerie had been a banker, and had made a late and dazzling marriage; for Mrs. Monnerie’s blood was as blue as Caddis Bay on a cloudless morning. I asked Fleming if she had ever seen “Lord B.,” and what kind of man he was. She never had; but remarked obscurely that he must have lived mainly on porridge, he had sown so many wild oats. + 

This information reminded me of an old rhyme I had once learned as a child, and used to shout about the house:⁠— + 

“Come all you young men, with your wicked ways; + 

Sow your wild, wild oats in your youthful days; + 

That we may live happy when we grow old⁠— + 

Happy, and happy, when we grow old: + 

The day is far spent, the night’s coming on; + 

So give us your arm, and we’ll joggle along⁠—joggle + 

and joggle and joggle along.” + 

Fleming herself, I learned, had come from Ash, and was therefore, I suppose, of an Anglo-Saxon family, though she was far from stupid and rather elegant in shape. Because, I suppose, I did not like her, I was rather aggrieved she had been born in Kent. Mr. and Mrs. Monnerie, she told me, had had no children. The fair young man, Percy Maudlen, with the tired smile and beautiful shoes, who came to tea or luncheon at No. 2 at least once a week, was Mrs. Monnerie’s only nephew by blood; and the still fairer Susan Monnerie, who used to float into my room ever and anon like a Zephyr, was the only one Mrs. Monnerie cared to see of her three nieces by marriage. And yet the other two, when they were invited to luncheon, were far more docile and considerate in the opinions and sentiments they expressed. That seemed so curious to me: there was no doubt that Mrs. Monnerie belonged to the aristocracy, and yet there always appeared to be quarrels going on in the family⁠—apart, of course, from births, deaths, and marriages, which seemed of little consequence. She enjoyed relatives in every county in England and Scotland; while I had not one, now, so far as I knew, not even in Kent. + 

Marvell, the butler⁠—he had formerly been Mr. Monnerie’s valet⁠—was another familiar object of my speculations. His rather solemn, clean-shaven countenance and steady grey eyes suggested a severe critic of mankind. Yet he seemed bent only on giving pleasure and smoothing things over, and stooped my dish of sliced cherries or apricots over my shoulder with a gesture that was in itself the cream of flattery. It astonished me to hear that he had a grown-up son in India; and though I never met Mrs. Marvell, I felt a prodigious respect for her. + 

I would look up and see him standing so smooth and benevolent behind Mrs. Monnerie’s chair that he reminded me of my bishop, and I doubt if ever she crisply uttered his delightful name but it recalled the pleasant chime of a poem which my mother had taught me: “The Nymph Complaining of the Death of Her Fawn.” I should have liked to have a long talk with Mr. Marvell⁠—any time of the day when he wasn’t a butler, I mean⁠—but the opportunity never came. + 

One day, when he had left us to ourselves, I ventured to quote a stanza of this poem to Mrs. Monnerie:⁠— + 

“With sweetest milk and sugar first + 

I it at my own fingers nursed; + 

And as it grew, so every day + 

It waxed more white and sweet than they⁠— + 

It had so sweet a breath! and oft + 

I blushed to see its foot more soft + 

And white⁠—shall I say?⁠—than my hand, + 

Nay, any lady’s in the land.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Charming, charming, Poppet,” she cooed, much amused, pushing in a nut for Chakka. “Many shades whiter than your wrinkled old claw, you old wretch. Another sagacious old bird, my dear, though past blushing, I fear, at any lady’s hand.” + 

Nothing would content her but that I must recite my bon mot again when her nephew Percy dandled in to tea that afternoon. He sneered down on me with his pale eyes, and with finger and thumb exposed yet another inch of his silk sock, but made no comment. + 

“Manners, my dear Percy, maketh man,” said his aunt. “Congratulate Miss M.” + 

If Percy Maudlen had had no manners at all, I think I should at that moment have seen the pink tip of his tongue; for if ever any human being detested my small person it was he. For very good reasons, probably, though I never troubled to inquire into them, I disliked him, too, beyond expression. He was, of course, a superior young man with a great many similar ancestors looking out of his face, yet he resembled a weasel. But Susan Monnerie⁠—the very moment I saw her I loved her; just as one loves a field of buttercups or a bush of may. For some little time she seemed to regard me as I suppose a linnet regards a young cuckoo that has been hatched out in her nest (though, of course, a squab cuckoo is of much the same size as its foster-mother). But she gradually grew accustomed to me, and even realized at last that I was something a little more⁠—and also perhaps less⁠—human than either Chakka or Cherry or a Dresden china shepherdess. + 

I would look at her just for pleasure’s sake. Her hair was of the colour of undyed silk, with darker strands in it; her skin pale; and she had an odd little stutter in her light young voice when she was excited. I would often compare her with Fanny. What curious differences there were between them. She was graceful, but as if she had been taught to be. Unlike Fanny, she was not so fascinatingly just a beautiful body⁠—with that sometimes awful Someone looking out of its windows. There was a lovely delicacy in her, as if, absurd though it may sound, every bit of her had been selected, actually picked out, from the finest materials. Perhaps it was her food and drink that had helped to make her so; for I don’t think Miss Stebbings’s diet was more than wholesome, or that following the sea in early life makes a man rich enough to afford many dainties for his children. Anyhow, there was nothing man-made in Fanny; and if there are women-shaped mermaids I know what looks will be seen in their faces. + 

However that may be, a keen, roving spirit dwelt in Susan’s clear, blue eyes. I never discovered in her any malice or vanity, and this, I think, frequently irritated Mrs. Monnerie. Susan, too, used to ask me perfectly sane and ordinary questions; and I cannot describe what a flattery it was. I had always supposed that men and women were intended to talk openly to one another in this world; but it was an uncommonly rare luxury for me at Mrs. Monnerie’s. I could talk freely enough to Susan, and told her a good deal about my early days, though I kept my life at Beechwood Hill more or less to myself. + 

And that reminds me that Mrs. Bowater proved to have been a good prophet. It was one day at luncheon. Mrs. Monnerie happened to cast a glance at the Morning Post newspaper which lay open on a chair near by, showing in tall type at the top of the column, “Sudden Death of Sir Jasper Goodge.” Sir Jasper Goodge, whose family history, it seemed, was an open book to her, reminded her whimsically of another tragedy. She put back her head and, surveying me blandly as I sat up beside her, inquired if I had known at all intimately that unfortunate young man, Mr. Crimble. + 

“I remember him bobbing and sidling at me that delightful afternoon when⁠—what do you think of it, Susan?⁠—Poppet and I discovered in each other an unfashionable taste for the truth! A bazaar in aid of the Pollacke Blanket Fund, or something of the kind.” + 

The recollection seemed to have amused her so much that for the moment I held my breath and ignored her question. + 

“But why was Mr. Crimble unfortunate?” inquired Susan, attempting to make Cherry beg for a breadcrumb. I glanced in consternation at Marvell, who at the moment was bringing the coffee things into the room. But he appeared to be uninterested in Mr. Crimble. + 

“Mr. Crimble was unfortunate, my dear,” said Mrs. Monnerie complacently, “because he cut his throat.” + 

“Ach! how horrible. How can you say such things! Get down, you little silly! Please, Aunt Alice, there must be something pleasanter to talk about than that? Everybody knows about the hideous old Sir Jasper Goodge; so it doesn’t much matter what one says of him. But.⁠ ⁠…” In spite of her command the little dog still gloated on her fingers. + 

“There may be things pleasanter, my dear Susan,” returned Mrs. Monnerie complacently, “but there are few so illuminating. In Greek tragedy, I used to be told, all such horrors have the effect of what is called a purgation. Did Mr. Crimble seem that kind of young man, my dear? And why was he so impetuous?” + 

“I think, Mrs. Monnerie,” said I, “he was in trouble.” + 

“H’m,” said she. “He had a very sallow look, I remember. So he discussed his troubles? But not with you, my fairy?” + 

“Surely, Aunt Alice,” exclaimed Susan hotly, “it isn’t quite fair or nice to bring back such ghastly memories. Why,” she touched my hand with the tips of her light fingers, “she is quite cold already.” + 

“Poppet’s hands are always cold,” replied her aunt imperturbably. “And I suspect that she and I know more about this wicked world than has brought shadows to your young brow. We’ll return to Mr. Crimble, my dear, when Susan is butterflying elsewhere. She is so shockingly easily shocked.” + 

But it was Susan herself who returned to the subject. She came into my room where I sat reading⁠—a collection of the tiniest little books in the most sumptuous gilt morocco had been yet another of Mrs. Monnerie’s kindnesses⁠—and she stood for a moment musing out through my silk window blinds at the vast zinc tank on the roof. + 

“Was that true?” she said at last. “Did you really know someone who killed himself? Who was he? What was he like?” + 

“He was a young man⁠—in his twenty-ninth year,” I replied automatically, “dark, short, with gold spectacles, a clergyman. He was the curate at St. Peter’s⁠—Beechwood, you know.” I was speaking in a low voice, as if I might be overheard. + 

It was extraordinary how swiftly Mr. Crimble had faded into a vanishing shadow. From the very instant of his death the world had begun to adjust itself to his absence. And now nothing but a memory⁠—a black, sad memory. + 

But Susan’s voice interrupted these faint musings. “A clergyman!” she was repeating. “But why⁠—why did he⁠—do that?” + 

“They said, melancholia. I suppose it was just impossible⁠—or seemed impossible⁠—for him to go on living.” + 

“But what made him melancholy? How awful. And how can Aunt Alice have said it like that?” + 

“But surely,” argued I, in my old contradictory fashion, and spying about for a path of evasion, “it’s better to call things by their proper names. What is the body, after all? Not that I mean one has any right to⁠—to not die in one’s own bed.” + 

“And do you really think like that?⁠—the body of no importance? You? Why, Miss M., Aunt Alice calls you her ‘pocket Venus,’ and she means it, too, in her own sly way.” + 

“It’s very kind of her,” said I, breathing more freely. “Someone I know always calls me Midgetina, or Miss Midge, anything of that sort. I don’t mean, Miss Monnerie, that it doesn’t matter what we are called. Why, if that were so, there wouldn’t be any Society at all, would there? We should all be⁠—well⁠—anonymous.” Deep inside I felt myself smile. “Not that that makes much difference to good poetry.” + 

Susan sighed. “How zigzaggedly you talk. What has poetry to do with Mr. Crimble?⁠—that was his name, wasn’t it?” + 

“Well, it hasn’t very much,” I confessed. “He hadn’t the time for it.” + 

Susan seated herself on a cushion on the floor⁠—and with how sharp a stab reminded me of Fanny and the old, carefree days of Wuthering Heights. + 

Surely⁠—in spite of Fanny⁠—life had definitely taken a tinge of Miss Brontë’s imagination since then. But it was only the languor of Susan’s movements, and that because she seemed a little tired, rather than merely indolent. And if from Fanny’s eyes had now stooped a serpent and now a blinded angel; from these clear blue ones looked only a human being like myself. Even as I write that “like myself,” I ponder. But let it stay. + 

“So you really did know him?” Susan persisted. “And it doesn’t seem a nightmare even to think of him? And who, I say, made it impossible for him to go on living?” So intense was her absorption in these questions that when they ceased her hands tightened round her knees, and her small mouth remained ajar. + 

“You said ‘what’ just now,” I prevaricated, looking up at her. + 

At this her blue eyes opened so wide I broke into a little laugh. + 

“No, no, no, Miss Monnerie,” I hastened to explain, “not me. It isn’t my story, though I was in it⁠—and to blame. But please, if you would be so kind, don’t mention it again to Mrs. Monnerie, and don’t think about it any more.” + 

“Not think about it! You must. Besides, thoughts sometimes think themselves. I always supposed that things like that only happened to quite⁠—to different people, you know. Was he?” + 

“Different?” I couldn’t follow her. “He was the curate of St. Peter’s⁠—a friend of the Pollackes.” + 

“Oh, yes, the Pollackes,” said she; and having glanced at me again, said no more. + 

The smallest confidence, I find, is a shortcut to friendship. And after this little conversation there was no ice to break between Susan Monnerie and myself, and she often championed me in my little difficulties⁠—even if only by her silence. + 

XXXIV + 

Miss Monnerie’s visits were less punctual though more frequent than Percy Maudlen’s. “And where is the toadlet?” I heard him drawl one afternoon as I was being carried downstairs by the light-footed Fleming, on the padded tray which Mrs. Monnerie had had made for the purpose. + 

“The toadlet, my dear Percy, is about to take a little gentle exercise with me in the garden, and you shall accompany us. If you were the kind of fairytale hero I used to read of in my nursery, you would discover the charm, and live happy ever after. But I see nothing of the heroic in you, and little of the hereafter. Miss M. is a feast of mercies.” + 

“H’m. Providence packs his mercies into precious small quarters at times,” he yawned. + 

“Which suggests an uncivil speculation,” replied his aunt, “on the size of your hat.” + 

“But candidly, Aunt Alice,” he retorted, “is your little attachée quite all there⁠—I mean, all of her that there is? Personally I wouldn’t touch her, if I could help it, with a pair of tongs.⁠ ⁠… A nasty trick!” + 

Then, “Hah!” cried Mrs. Monnerie in a large, pleasant voice, “here is Miss M. Percy has been exposing a wounded heart, precious one. He is hurt because you look at him as if there were positively nothing more of him than what is there to see.” + 

“Not at all, Aunt Alice,” Percy drawled, with a jerk of his cane. “It was for precisely the opposite reason. Who knows you ain’t a witch, Miss M.? Distilled? Heavens, Aunt Alice! you are not bringing Cherry too?” + 

Yes, Cherry was coming too, with his globular eye and sneering nose. And so poor Percy, with a cold little smile on his fine pale features, had to accommodate himself to Mrs. Monnerie’s leisurely pace, and she to mine, while Cherry disdainfully shuffled in our rear. We were a singular quartette, though there were only two or three small children in the palisaded garden to enjoy the spectacle; and they, after a few polite and muffled giggles, returned to their dolls. + 

It was a stifling afternoon. As I trod the yellow gravel the quivering atmosphere all but blinded me with its reflected glare. The only sounds to be heard were the clang of a milkman’s handcart, and the pirouettes of a distant piano. + 

“And what,” Mrs. Monnerie suddenly inquired, looking down on me, with mauve-tinted cheek, from under her beribanded, long-handled parasol, “what is Miss M. thinking about?” + 

As a matter of fact I was walking at that moment in imagination with Mrs. Bowater at Lyme Regis, but I seized the opportunity of hastening round from between aunt and nephew so that I could screen myself from the sun in Mrs. Monnerie’s ample shadow, and inquired why London gardeners were so much attached to geraniums, lobelias, calceolarias, and ice-plants? Mightn’t one just as well paint the border, Mrs. Monnerie, red, yellow, and blue? Then it would last⁠—rain, snow, anything. + 

“Now I’ll wager, Percy, you hadn’t noticed that,” said Mrs. Monnerie in triumph. + 

“I make it a practice,” he replied, “never to notice the obvious. It is merely a kind of least common denominator, as I believe you call ’em, and,” he wafted away a yawn with his glove, “I take no interest in vulgar fractions.” + 

I took a little look at him out of the corner of my eye, and wished that as a child I had paid more heed to my arithmetic lessons. “Look, Mrs. Monnerie,” I cried piteously, “poor Cherry’s tongue is dangling right out of his head. He looks so hot and tired.” + 

She swept me a radiant, if contorted, gleam. “Percy, would you take pity on poor dear Cherry? Twice round, I think, will be as much as I can comfortably manage.” + 

So Percy had to take poor dear Cherry into his arms, just like a baby; and the quartette to all appearance became a trio. + 

But my existence at No. 2 was not always so monotonous as that. Mrs. Monnerie, in spite of her age, her ebony cane, and a tendency to breathlessness, was extremely active and alert. If life is a fountain, she preferred to be one of the larger bubbles as near as possible to its summit. She almost succeeded in making me a minute replica of herself. We shared the same manicurist, milliner, modiste, and coiffeur. And since it was not always practicable for Mahometta to be carried off to these delectable mountains, they were persuaded to attend upon her, and that as punctually as the fawn-faced man, Mr. Godde, who came to wind the clocks. + 

Whole mornings were spent in conclave in Mrs. Monnerie’s boudoir⁠—Susan sometimes of our company. Julius Caesar, so my little Roman history told me, had hesitated over the crossing of one Rubicon. Mrs. Monnerie and I confabulated over the fording of a dozen of its tributaries a day. A specialist⁠—a singularly bald man in a long black coat⁠—was called in. He eyed me this way, he eyed me that⁠—with far more deference than I imagine Mr. Pellew can have paid me at my christening. He assured Mrs. Monnerie of his confirmed belief that the mode of the moment was not of the smallest consequence so far as I was concerned. “The hard, small hat,” he smiled; “the tight-fitting sleeve!” And yet, to judge by the clothes he did recommend, I must have been beginning to look a pretty dowd at Mrs. Bowater’s. + 

“But even if Madam prefers to dress in a style of her own choice,” he explained, “the difference, if she will understand, must still be in the fashion.” + 

But he himself⁠—though Mrs. Monnerie, I discovered after he was gone, had not even noticed that he was bald⁠—he himself interested me far more than his excellent advice; and not least when he drew some papers out of a pocketbook, and happened to let fall on the carpet the photograph of a fat little boy with an immense mop of curls. So men⁠—quite elderly, practical men, can blush, I thought to myself; for Dr. Phelps had rather flushed than blushed; and my father used only to get red. + 

Since nothing, perhaps, could make me more exceptional in appearance than I had been made by Providence, I fell in with all Mrs. Monnerie’s fancies, and wore what she pleased⁠—pushing out of mind as well as I could all thought of bills. I did more than that. I really began to enjoy dressing myself up as if I were my own doll, and when alone I would sit sometimes in a luxurious trance, like a lily in a pot. Yet I did not entirely abandon my old little Bowater habit of indoor exercise. When I was alone in my room I would sometimes skip. And on one of Fleming’s afternoons “out” I even furbished up what I could remember of my four kinds of Kentish hopscotch, with a slab of jade for dump. But in the very midst of such recreations I would surprise myself lost in a kind of vacancy. Apart from its humans and its furniture, No. 2 was an empty house. + 

I do not mean that Mrs. Monnerie was concerned only with externals. Sir William Forbes-Smith advised that a little white meat should enrich my usual diet of milk and fruit, and that I should have sea-salt baths. The latter were more enjoyable than the former, though both, no doubt, helped to bring back the strength sapped out of me by the West End. + 

My cheekbones gradually rounded their angles; a livelier colour came to lip and skin, and I began to be as self-conscious as a genuine beauty. One twilight, I remember, I had slipped across from out of my bath for a pinch of the “crystals” which Mrs. Monnerie had presented me with that afternoon; for my nose, also, was accustoming itself to an artificial life. An immense cheval looking-glass stood there, and at one and the same instant I saw not only my own slim, naked, hastening figure reflected in its placid deeps, but, behind me, that of Fleming, shadowily engrossed. With a shock I came to a standstill, helplessly meeting her peculiar stare. Only seven yards or so of dusky air divided us. Caught back by this unexpected encounter, for one immeasurable moment I stood thus, as if she and I were mere shapes in a picture, and reality but a thought. + 

Then suddenly she recovered herself, and with a murmur of apology was gone. Huddled up in my towel, I sat motionless, shrunken for a while almost to nothing in the dense sense of shame that had swept over me. Then suddenly I flung myself on my knees, and prayed⁠—though what about and to whom I cannot say. After which I went back and bathed myself again. + 

The extravagances of Youth! No doubt, the worst pang was that though vaguely I knew that my most secret solitude had been for a while destroyed, that long intercepted glance of half-derisive admiration had filled me with something sweeter than distress. If only I knew what common-sized people really feel like in similar circumstances. Biographies tell me little; and can one trust what is said in novels? The only practical result of this encounter was that I emptied all Mrs. Monnerie’s priceless crystals forthwith into my bath, and vowed never, never again to desert plain water. So, for one evening, my room smelt like a garden in Damascus. + 

As for Fleming, she never, of course, referred to this incident, but our small talk was even smaller than before. If, indeed, to Percy, “toadlet” was the aptest tag for me; for Fleming, I fancy, “stuck-up” sufficed. Instinct told her that she was only by courtesy a lady’s-maid. + 

Less for her own sake than for mine, Mrs. Monnerie and I scoured London for amusement, even though she was irritated a little by my preference for the kind which may be called instructive. The truth is, that in all this smooth idleness and luxury a hunger for knowledge had seized on me; as if (cat to grass) my mind were in search of an antidote. + 

Mrs. Monnerie had little difficulty in securing “private views.” She must have known everybody that is anybody⁠—as I once read of a Countess in a book. And I suppose there is not a very large number of this kind of person. Whenever our social engagements permitted, we visited the show places, galleries, and museums. Unlike the rest of London, I gazed at Amenhotep’s Mummy in the late dusk of a summer evening; and we had much to say to one another; though but one whiff of the huge round library gave me a violent headache. When the streets had to be faced, Fleming came with us in the carriage, and I was disguised to look as much like a child as possible⁠—a process that made me feel at least twenty years older. The Tower of London, the Zoo, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s⁠—each in turn fell an early prey to my hunger for learning and experience. As for the Thames; the very sight of it seemed to wash my small knowledge of English history clear as crystal. + 

Mrs. Monnerie yawned her way on⁠—though my comments on these marvels of human enterprise occasionally amused her. I made amends, too, by accompanying her to less well-advertised showplaces, and patiently sat with her while she fondled unset and antique gems in a jeweller’s, or inspected the china, miniatures, and embroideries in private collections. If the mere look of the books in the British Museum gave me a headache, it is curious that the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Works did not. And yet I don’t know; life itself had initiated me into this freemasonry. I surveyed the guillotine without a shudder, and eyed Mr. Hare and Charles Peace with far less discomposure than General Tom Thumb, or even Robert Burns in the respectable gallery above. My one misfortune was that I could look at no murderer without instantly recomposing the imaginary scene of his crime within my mind. And as after a while Mrs. Monnerie decided to rest on a chair set for her by the polite attendant under the scaffold, and we had the Chamber nearly to ourselves, I wandered on alone, and perhaps supped rather too full of horrors for one evening. + 

Mrs. Monnerie would often question me. “Well, what do you think of that, Mammetinka?” or, “Now, then, my inexhaustible little Miss Aristotle, discourse on that.” + 

And like a bullfinch I piped up in response to the best of my ability. My answers, I fear, were usually evasive. For I had begun to see that she was making experiments on my mind and senses, as well as on my manners and body. She was a “fancier.” And one day I ogled up at her with the pert remark that she now possessed a pocket barometer which would do its very utmost to remain at 31°, if that was possible without being “Very Dry.” + 

She received this little joke with extraordinary good humour. “When I come down in the world, my dear,” she said, “and these horrid anarchists are doing their best to send us all sky-high first, we’ll visit the Courts of Europe together, like Count Boruwlaski. Do you think you could bring yourself to support your old friend in her declining years in a declining age?” + 

I smiled and touched her glove. “Where thou goest, I will go,” I replied; and then could have bitten off my tongue in remorse. “Pah,” gasped a secret voice, “so that’s going the same way too, is it?” + 

Yet heaven knows I was not a Puritan⁠—and never shall be. I just adored things bright and beautiful. Music, too, in moderation, was my delight; and Susan Monnerie with her small, sweet voice would sometimes sing to me in one room while⁠—in an almost unbearable homesickness⁠—I listened in another. Concerts in general, however, left every muscle of my body as stiff with rheumatism as it was after my visit to Mr. Moss’s farmhouse. The unexpected blare of a brass band simply froze my spine; and a really fine performance on the piano was sheer torture. Once, indeed, when Mrs. Monnerie’s carriage was one of a mellay clustered together while the Queen drove by, in the appalling clamour of the Lancers’ trombones and kettledrums, I fell prostrate in a kind of fit. So it was my silly nerves that cheated me of my one and only chance to huzza a Crowned Head not, if I may say so without disrespect, so very many sizes larger than my own. + 

Alas, Mrs. Monnerie was an enthusiast for all the pleasures of the senses. I verily believe that it was only my vanity which prevented me from becoming as inordinately fat as Sir William Forbes-Smith’s white meat threatened to make me. + 

Brightest novelty of all was my first visit to a theatre⁠—the London night, the glare and clamour of the streets, the packed white rows of faces, the sea-like noise of talk, the glitter, shimmer, dazzle⁠—it filled my veins with quicksilver; my heart seemed to be throbbing in my breast as fast as Mrs. Monnerie’s watch. Fortunately she had remembered to take our seats on the farther side from the brass and drums of the orchestra. I restrained my shivers; the lights went out; and in the congregated gloom softly stole up the curtain on the ballet. + 

Perched up there in the velvet obscurity of our box, I surveyed a woodland scene, ruins, distant mountains, a rocky stream on which an enormous moon shone, and actually moved in the theatrical heavens. And when an exquisite figure floated, pale, gauzy, and a-tiptoe, into those artificial solitudes, drenched with filmy light; with a far cry of “Fanny!” my heart suddenly stood still; and all the old stubborn infatuation flooded heavily back upon me once more. + 

Susan sat ghostlike, serenely smiling. Percy’s narrow jaws were working on their hinges like those of a rabbit I had seen through my grandfather’s spyglass nibbling a root of dandelion. Mrs. Monnerie reclined in her chair, hands on lap, with pursed-up mouth and weary eyes. There was nobody to confide in, then. But when from either side of the brightening stage flocked in winged creatures with lackadaisical arms and waxlike smilings, whose paint and powder caught back my mind rather than my feelings, my first light-of-foot was hovering beneath us close to the flaring footlights; and she was now no more Fanny than the circle of illuminated parchment over her head was the enchanting moon. What a complicated world it was with all these layers! The experience filled me with a hundred disquieting desires, and yet again, chiefest of them was that which made sensitive the stumps where, if I turned into a bird, my wings would grow, and which bade me “escape.” + 

“She’s getting devilish old and creaky on her pins,” yawned Percy, when the curtain had descended, and I had sighingly shrunk back into my own tasselled nook from the noise and emptiness of actuality. + 

“No,” said Mrs. Monnerie, “it is you, Percy, who are getting old. You were born blasé. You’ll be positively yawning your head off at the last trump.” + 

“Dear Aunt Alice,” said Percy, squinting through his opera-glasses, “nothing of the kind. I shall be helping you to find the mislaid knucklebones. Besides, it’s better to be born⁠—” + 

But the rest of his sentence⁠—and I listened to him only because I hated him⁠—passed unheeded, for all my attention had been drawn to Susan. The hand beside me had suddenly clutched at her silk skirt, and a flush, gay as the Queen’s Union Jacks in Bond Street, had mounted into her clear, pale cheek, as with averted chin she sat looking down upon someone in the stalls. At sight of her blushing, a richer fondness for her lightened my mind. I followed her eye to its goal, and gazed enthralled, now up, now down, stringing all kinds of little beads of thoughts together; until, perhaps conscious that she was being watched, she turned and caught me. Flamed up her cheeks yet hotter; and now mine too; for my spirits had suddenly sunk into my shoes at the remembrance of Wanderslore and my “ghostly, gloating little dwarfish creature.” Then once more darkness stole over the vast, quieting house, and the curtain reascended upon Romance. + 

XXXV + 

Instead of its being a month as had been arranged, it was over six weeks before I was deposited again with my elegant dressing-case⁠—a mere flying visitor⁠—on Mrs. Bowater’s doorstep. A waft of cooked air floated out into the June sunshine through the letter-box. Then, in the open door, just as of old, flushed and hot in her black clothes, there stood my old friend, indescribably the same, indescribably different. She knelt down on her own doormat, and we exchanged loving greetings. Once more I trod beneath the wreathing, guardian horns, circumnavigated the age-stained eight-day clock, and so into my parlour. + 

Nothing was changed. There stood the shepherdess ogling the shepherd; there hung Mr. Bowater; there dangled the chandelier; there angled the same half-dozen flies. Not a leg, caster, or antimacassar was out of place. Yet how steadfastly I had to keep my back turned on my landlady lest she should witness my discomfiture. Faded, dingy, crowded, shrunken⁠—it seemed unbelievable, as I glanced around me, that here I could have lived and breathed so many months, and been so ridiculously miserable, so tragically happy. All that bygone happiness and wretchedness seemed, for the moment, mere waste and folly. And not only that⁠—“common.” I climbed Mr. Bates’s clumsy staircase, put down my dressing-case, and slowly removing my gloves, faced dimly the curtained window. Beyond it lay the distant hills, misty in the morning sunbeams, the familiar meadows all but chin-high with buttercups. + 

“Oh, Mrs. Bowater,” I turned at last, “here I am. You and the quiet sky⁠—I wish I had never gone away. What is the use of being one’s self, if one is always changing?” + 

“There comes a time, miss, when we don’t change; only the outer walls crumble away morsel by morsel, so to speak. But that’s not for you yet. Still, that’s the reason. Me and the old sticks are just what we were, at least to the eye; and you⁠—well, there!⁠—the house has been like a cage with the bird gone.” + 

She stood looking at me with one long finger stretching bonily out on the black and crimson tablecloth, a shining sea of loving kindness in her eyes. “I can see they have taken good care of you and all, preened the pretty feathers. Why, you are a bit plumper in figure, miss; only the voice a little different, perhaps.” The last words were uttered almost beneath her breath. + 

“My voice, Mrs. Bowater; oh, they cannot have altered that.” + 

“Indeed they have, miss; neater-twisted, as you might say; but not scarcely to be noticed by any but a very old friend. Maybe you are a little tired with your long drive and those two solemnities on the box. I remember the same thing⁠—the change of voice⁠—when Fanny came back from her first term at Miss Stebbings’.” + 

“How is she?” I inquired in even tones. “She has never written to me. Not a word.” + 

But, strange to say, as Mrs. Bowater explained, and not without a symptom of triumph, that’s just what Fanny had done. Her letter was awaiting me on the mantelpiece, tucked in behind a plush-framed photograph. + 

“Now, let me see,” she went on, “there’s hot water in your basin, miss⁠—I heard the carriage on the hill; a pair of slippers to ease your feet, in case in the hurry of packing they’d been forgot; and your strawberries and cream are out there icing themselves on the tray. So we shan’t be no time, though disturbing news has come from Mr. Bowater, his leg not mending as it might have been foreseen⁠—but that can wait.” + 

An unfamiliar Miss M. brushed her hair in front of me in the familiar looking-glass. It was not that her Monnerie raiment was particularly flattering, or she, indeed, pleasanter to look at⁠—rather the contrary: and I gazed long and earnestly into the glass. But art has furtive and bewitching fingers. While in my homemade clothes I had looked just myself, in these I looked like one or other of my guardian angels, or perhaps, as an unprejudiced Fleming would have expressed it⁠—the perfect lady. How gradual must have been the change in me to have passed thus unnoticed. But I didn’t want to think. I felt dulled and dispirited. Even Mrs. Bowater had not been so entranced to see me as I had anticipated. It was tiresome to be disappointed. I rummaged in a bottom drawer, got out an old gown, made a grimace at myself in my mind, and sat down to Fanny’s letter. But then again, what are externals? Who was this cool-tempered Miss M. who was now scanning the once heartrending handwriting? + 

“Dear Midgetina⁠—When this will reach you, I don’t know. But somehow I cannot, or rather I can, imagine you the cynosure of the complete peerage, and prefer that my poor little letter should not uprear its modest head in the midst of all that Granjer. You may not agree⁠—but if a few weeks of a High Life that may possibly continue into infinity has made no difference to you, then Fanny is not among the prophets. + 

“We have not met since⁠—we parted. But did you ever know a ‘dead past’ bury itself with such ingratiating rapidity? Have you in your sublime passion for Nature ever watched a Sexton Beetle? But, mind you, I have helped. The further all that slips away, the less I can see I was to blame for it. What’s in your blood needs little help from outside. Cynical it may sound; but imagine the situation if I had married him! What could existence have been but a Nightmare-Life-in-Death? (Vide S. T. Coleridge). Now the Dream continues⁠—for us both. + 

“Oh, yes, I can see your little face needling up at this. But you must remember, dear Midgetina, that you will never, never be able to see things in a truly human perspective. Few people, of course, try to. You do. But though your view may be delicate as gossamer and clear as a glass marble, it can’t be full-size. Boil a thing down, it isn’t the same. What remains has the virtues of an essence, but not the volume of its origin. This sounds horribly school-booky; but I am quite convinced you are too concentrated. And I being what I am, only the full volume can be my salvation. Enough. The text is as good as the sermon⁠—far better, in fact. + 

“Now I am going to be still more callous. My own little private worries have come right⁠—been made to. I’m tit for tat, that is, and wiser for it beyond words. Some day, when Society has taught you all its lessons, I will explain further. Anyhow, first I send you back £3 of what I owe you. And thank you. Next I want you to find out from Mrs. Mummery (as mother calls her⁠—or did), if among her distinguished acquaintance she knows anyone with one or two, or at most three, small and adorable children who need an excellent governess. Things have made it undesirable for me to stay on here much longer. It shall be I who give notice, or, shall we say, terminate the engagement. + 

“Be an angel, then. First, wake up. Candidly, to think me better than I am is more grossly unfair than if I thought you taller than you are. Next, sweet cynosure, find me a sinecure. Don’t trouble about salary. (You wouldn’t, you positive acorn of quixoticism, not if I owed you half a million.) But remember: Wanted by the end of August at latest, a Lady, wealthy, amiable, with two Cherubic Doves in family, boys preferred. The simple, naked fact being that after this last bout of life’s fitful fever, I pine for a nap. + 

“Of course mother can see this letter if she wishes to, and you don’t mind. But personally I should prefer to have the bird actually fluttering in my hand before she contemplates it in the bush. + 

“I said pine just now. Do you ever find a word suddenly so crammed with meaning that at any moment it threatens to explode? Well, Midgetina, them’s my sentiments. Penitent I shall never be, until I take the veil. But I have once or twice lately awoke in a kind of glassy darkness⁠—beyond all moonshine⁠—alone. Then, if I hadn’t been born just thick-ribbed, unmeltable ice⁠—well.⁠ ⁠… Vulgar, vulgar Fanny! + 

“Fare thee well, Midgetina. ‘One cried, “God bless us,” and “Amen,” the other.’ Prostituted though he may have been for scholastic purposes, W. S. knew something of Life. + 

What was the alluring and horrifying charm for me of Fanny’s letters? This one set my mind, as always, wandering off into a maze. There was a sour taste in it, and yet⁠—it was all really and truly Fanny. I could see her unhappy eyes glittering through the mask. She saw herself⁠—perhaps more plainly than one should. “Vulgar Fanny.” As for its effect on me; it was as if I had fallen into a bed of nettles, and she herself, picking me up, had scoffed, “Poor little Midgekin,” and supplied the dock. Her cynicism was its own antidote, I suppose. The selfishness, the vanity, and impenetrable hardness⁠—even love had never been so blind as to ignore all that, and now what love remained for her had the sharpest of sharp eyes. + 

And yet, though my little Bowater parlour looked cheap and dingy after the splendours of No. 2, Fanny somehow survived every odious comparison. She was very intelligent, I whispered to myself. Mrs. Monnerie would certainly approve of that. And I prickled at the thought. And I⁠—I was too “concentrated.” In spite of my plumping “figure,” I could never, never be full-size. If only Fanny had meant that as a compliment, or even as a kind of explanation to go on with. No, she had meant it for the truth. And it must be far easier for a leopard to change his spots than his inside. The accusation set all the machinery of my mind emptily whirring. + 

My glance fell on my Paris frock, left in a shimmering slovenly ring on the floor. It wandered off to Fanny’s postal order, spread over my lap like an expensive antimacassar. She had worked for that money; while I had never been anything more useful than “an angel.” In fancy I saw her blooming in a house as sumptuous as Mrs. Monnerie’s. Bloom indeed! I hated the thought, yet realized, too, that it was safer⁠—even if for the time being not so profitable⁠—to be life-size. And, as if out of the listening air, a cold dart pierced me through. Suppose my Messrs. Harris and Harris and Harris might not be such honest trustees as Miss Fenne had vouched for. Suppose they decamped with my £110 per annum!⁠—I caught a horrifying glimpse of the wolf that was always sniffing at Fanny’s door. + 

Mrs. Bowater brought in my luncheon, and⁠—as I insisted⁠—her own, too. The ice from Mr. Tidy, the fishmonger’s, had given a slightly marine flavour to the cream, and I had to keep my face averted as much as possible from the scorched red chop sprawling and oozing on her plate. How could she bring herself to eat it? We are such stuff as dreams are made on, said Hamlet. So then was Mrs. Bowater. What a mystery then was this mutton fat! But chop or no chop, it was a happy meal. + 

Having waved my extremely “Fannyish” letter at her, I rapidly dammed that current of her thoughts by explaining that I had changed my clothes not (as a gleam from her eye had seemed to suspect) because I was afraid of spoiling my London finery, but in order to be really at home. For the first time I surprised her muttering a grace over the bone on her plate. Then she removed the tray, accepted a strawberry, folded her hands in her lap, and we began to talk. She asked a hundred and one questions concerning my health and happiness, but never once mentioned Mrs. Monnerie; and at last, after a small pause, filled by us both with the same thought, she remarked that “that young Mr. Anon was nothing if not persistent.” + 

Since I had gone, not a week had passed, she told me, but he had come rapping at the door after dusk to inquire after me. “Though why he should scowl like a pitchpot to hear that you are enjoying the lap of luxury⁠—” The angular shoulders achieved a shrug at least as Parisian as my discarded gown. + 

“Why doesn’t he write to me, then? Twice in ten weeks!” + 

“Well it’s six, miss, I’ve counted, though seemingly sixty. But that being the question, he is there to answer it, at any time this evening, or at six tomorrow morning, if London ways haven’t cured you of early-rising.” + 

So we went off together, Mrs. Bowater and I, in the cool of the evening about half an hour after sunset⁠—she, alas, a little ruffled because I had refused to change back again into my Monnerie finery. “But Mrs. Bowater, imagine such a thing in a real wild garden!” I protested, but without mollifying her, and without further explaining⁠—how could I do that?⁠—that the gown which Miss Sentimentality (or Miss Coquette) was actually wearing was that in which she had first met Mr. Anon. + 

XXXVI + 

I trod close in Mrs. Bowater’s track as she convoyed me through a sea of greenery breaking here and there to my waist and even above my hat. Summer had been busy in Wanderslore. Honeysuckle and acid-sweet brier were in bloom; sleeping bindweed and pimpernel. The air was liquidly sweet with uncountable odours. And the fading skies dyed bright the frowning front of the house, about which the new-come swifts shrieked in their play over my wilderness. Mr. Anon looked peculiar, standing alone there. + 

Having bidden him a gracious good evening, Mrs. Bowater after a long, ruminating glance at us, decided that she would “take a stroll through the grounds.” We watched her black figure trail slowly away up the overgrown terraces towards the house. Then he turned. His clear, dwelling eyes, with that darker line encircling the grey-black iris, fixed themselves on me, his mouth tight-shut. + 

“Well,” he said at last, almost wearily. “It has been a long waiting.” + 

I was unprepared for this sighing. “It has indeed,” I replied. “But it is exceedingly pleasant to see Beechwood Hill again. I wrote; but you did not answer my letter, at least not the last.” + 

My voice dropped away; every one of the fine little speeches I had thought to make, forgotten. + 

“And now you are here.” + 

“Yes,” I said quickly, a little timid of any silence between us, “and that’s pleasant too. You can have no notion what a stiff, glaring garden it is up there⁠—geraniums and gravel, you know, and windows, windows, windows. They are wonderfully kind to me⁠—but I don’t much love it.” + 

“Then why stay?” he smiled. “Still, you are, at least, safely out of her clutches.” + 

“Clutches!” I hated the way we were talking. “Thank you very much. You forget you are speaking of one of my friends. Besides, I can take care of myself.” He made no answer. + 

“You are so gloomy,” I continued. “So⁠—oh, I don’t know⁠—about everything. It’s because you are always cooped up in one place, I suppose. One must take the world⁠—a little⁠—as it is, you know. Why don’t you go away; travel; see things? Oh, if I were a man.” + 

His eyes watched my lips. Everything seemed to have turned sour. To have waited and dreamed; to have actually changed my clothes and come scuttling out in a silly longing excitement⁠—for this. Why, I felt more lonely and helpless under Wanderslore’s evening sky than ever I had been in my cedarwood privacy in No. 2. + 

“I mean it, I mean it,” I broke out suddenly. “You domineer over me. You pamper me up with silly stories⁠—‘trailing clouds of glory,’ I suppose. They are not true. It’s everyone for himself in this world, I can tell you; and in future, please understand, I intend to be my own mistress. Simply because in a little private difficulty I asked you to help me⁠—” + 

He turned irresolutely. “They have dipped you pretty deep in the dye-pot.” + 

“And what, may I ask, do you mean by that?” + 

“I mean,” and he faced me, “that I am precisely what your friend, Miss Bowater, called me. What more is there to say?” + 

“And pray, am I responsible for everything my friends say? And to have dragged up that wretched fiasco after we had talked it out to the very dregs! Oh, how I have been longing and longing to come home. And this is what you make of it.” + 

He turned his face towards the west, and its vast light irradiated his sharp-boned features, the sloping forehead beneath the straight, black hair. Fume as I might, resentment fainted away in me. + 

“You don’t seem to understand,” I went on; “it’s the waste⁠—the waste of it all. Why do you make it so that I can’t talk naturally to you, as friends talk? If I am alone in the world, so are you. Surely we can tell the truth to one another. I am utterly wretched.” + 

“There is only one truth that matters: you do not love me. Why should you? But that’s the barrier. And the charm of it is that not only the Gods, but the miserable Humans, if only they knew it, would enjoy the sport.” + 

“Love! I detest the very sound of the word. What has it ever meant to me, I should like to know, in this⁠—this cage?” + 

“Scarcely a streak of gilding on the bars,” he sneered miserably. “Still we are sharing the same language now.” + 

The same language. Self-pitying tears pricked into my eyes; I turned my head away. And in the silence, stealthily, out of a dark woody hollow nearer the house, as if at an incantation, broke a low, sinister, protracted rattle, like the croaking of a toad. I knew that sound; it came straight out of Lyndsey⁠—called me back. + 

“S-sh!” I whispered, caught up with delight. “A nightjar! Listen. Let’s go and look.” + 

I held out my hand. His sent a shiver down my spine. It was clammy cold, as if he had just come out of the sea. Thrusting our way between the denser clumps of weeds, we pushed on cautiously until we actually stood under the creature’s enormous oak. So elusive and deceitful was the throbbing croon of sound that it was impossible to detect on which naked branch in the black leafiness the bird sat churring. The wafted fragrances, the placid dusky air, and far, far above, the delicate, shallowing deepening of the faint-starred blue⁠—how I longed to sip but one drop of drowsy mandragora and forget this fretting, inconstant self. + 

We stood, listening; and an old story I had read somewhere floated back into memory. “Once, did you ever hear it?” I whispered close to him, “there was a ghost came to a house near Cirencester. I read of it in a book. And when it was asked, ‘Are you a good spirit or a bad?’ it made no answer, but vanished, the book said⁠—I remember the very words⁠—‘with a curious perfume and most melodious twang.’ With a curious perfume,” I repeated, “and most melodious twang. There now, would you like me to go like that? Oh, if I were a moth, I would flit in there and ask that old Death-thing to catch me. Even if I cannot love you, you are part of all this. You feed my very self. Mayn’t that be enough?” + 

His grip tightened round my fingers; the entrancing, toneless dulcimer thrummed on. + 

I leaned nearer, as if to raise the shadowed lids above the brooding eyes. “What can I give you⁠—only to be your peace? I do assure you it is yours. But I haven’t the secret of knowing what half the world means. Look at me. Is it not all a mystery? Oh, I know it, even though they jeer and laugh at me. I beseech you be merciful, and keep me what I am.” + 

So I pleaded and argued, scarcely heeding the words I said. Yet I realize now that it was only my mind that wrestled with him there. It was what came after that took the heart out of me. There came a clap of wings, and the bird swooped out of its secrecy into the air above us, a moment showed his white-splashed, cinder-coloured feathers in the dusk, seemed to tumble as if broken-winged upon the air, squawked, and was gone. The interruption only hastened me on. + 

“Still, still listen,” I implored: “if Time would but cease a while and let me breathe.” + 

“There, there,” he muttered. “I was unkind. A filthy jealousy.” + 

“But think! There may never come another hour like this. Know, know now, that you have made me happy. I can never be so alone again. I share my secretest thoughts⁠—my imagination, with you; isn’t that a kind of love? I assure you that it is. Once I heard my mother talking, and sometimes I have wondered myself, if I am quite like⁠—oh, you know what they say: a freak of Nature. Tell me; if by some enchantment I were really and indeed come from those snow mountains of yours, and that sea, would you recognize me? Would you? No, no; it’s only a story⁠—why, even all this green and loveliness is only skin deep. If the Old World were just to shrug its shoulders, Mr. Anon, we should all, big and little, be clean gone.” + 

My words seemed merely to be like drops of water dripping upon a sponge. “Wake!” I tugged at his hand. “Look!” Kneeling down sidelong, I stooped my cheek up at him from a cool, green mat of grass, amid which a glowworm burned: “Is this a⁠—a Stranger’s face?” + 

He came no nearer; surveyed me with a long, quiet smile of infinitely sorrowful indulgence. “A Stranger’s? How else could it be, if I love you?” + 

Intoxicated in that earthy fragrance, washed about with the colours of the motionless flowers, it seemed I was merely talking to someone who could assure me that I was still in life, still myself. A strand of my hair had fallen loose, and smiling, its gold pin between my lips, I looped it back. “Oh, but you see⁠—haven’t I told you?⁠—I can’t love you. Perhaps; I don’t know.⁠ ⁠… What shall I do? What shall I say? Now suppose,” I went on, “I like myself that much,” and I held my thumb and finger just ajar, “then I like you, think of you, hope for you, why, that!”⁠—and I swept my hand clean across the empty zenith. “Now do you understand?” + 

“Oh, my dear, my dear,” he said, and smiled into my eyes. + 

I laughed out in triumph at the success of my device. And he laughed too, as if in a conspiracy with me⁠—and with Misery, I could see, sitting like an old hag at the door from which the sound came. And out of the distance the nightjar set again to its churring. + 

“Then I have made you a little⁠—a little less unhappy?” I asked him, and hid my face in my hands in a desolate peace and solitude. + 

He knelt beside me, held out his hand as if to touch me, withdrew it again. All presence of him distanced and vanished away in that small darkness. I prayed not to think any more, not to be exiled again into⁠—how can I explain my meaning except by saying⁠—Myself? Would some further world have withdrawn its veils and have let me in then and forever if that lightless quiet could have continued a little longer? Is it the experience of every human being seemingly to trespass at times so close upon the confines of existence as that? + 

It was his own harsh voice that broke the spell. + 

“Wake, wake!” it called in my ear. “The woman is looking for you. We must go.” + 

My hands slipped from my face. A slow, sobbing breath drew itself into my body. And there beneath evening’s vacancy of twilight showed the transfigured scene of the garden, and, near me, the anxious, suffering face of this stranger, faintly greened by the light of the worm. + 

“Wake!” he bade me, rapping softly with his bony finger on my hand. I stared at him out of a dream. + 

XXXVII + 

Time and circumstance have strangely divided me from the Miss M. of those days. I look back on her, not with shame, but with a shrug of my shoulders, a sort of incredulous tolerance⁠—almost as if she too were a stranger. Perhaps a few years hence I shall be looking back with an equal detachment on the Miss M. seated here at this moment with her books and her pen in the solitude of her thoughts, vainly endeavouring to fret out and spin together mere memories that nobody will ever have the patience to read. Shall I then be able to tell myself what I want now, give words to the vague desires that still haunt me? Shall I still be waiting on for some unconceived eventuality? + 

There is, too, another small riddle of a different kind, which I cannot answer. In memory and imagination, as I steadily gaze out of this familiar room recalling the past, I am that very self in that distant garden of Wanderslore. But even as I look, I am not only within myself there, but also outside of myself. I seem, I mean, actually to be contemplating, as if with my own eyes, those two queer, silent figures returning through the drowsying, moth-haunted flowers and grasses to the black, vigilant woman awaiting them beside the garden house. “Alas, you poor, blind thing,” I seem, like a ghost, to warn the one small creature, “have a care; seize your happiness; it is vanishing!” + 

All that I write, then, is an attempt only to tell, not to explain. I realize that sometimes I was pretending things, yet did not know that I was pretending; that often I acted with no more conscience or consciousness, maybe, than has a carrion crow that picks out the eyes of a lamb, or a flower that draws in its petals at noon. Yet I know⁠—know absolutely, that I was, and am, responsible not only for myself, but for everything. For my whole world. And I cannot explain this either. At times, as if to free myself, I had to stare at what appalled me. I am sure, for instance, that Mrs. Monnerie never dreamed that her mention of Mr. Crimble sent me off in fancy at the first opportunity to that woeful outhouse in his mother’s garden to look in on him there⁠—again. But I did so look at him, and was a little more at peace with him after that. Why, then, cannot I be at peace with one who loved me? + 

Maybe if I could have foreseen how I was to come to Wanderslore again, I should have been a less selfish, showy, and capricious companion to him that June evening. But I was soon lapped back into my life in London; and thought only of Mr. Anon, as I am apt to think of God: namely, when I needed his presence and his help. As a matter of fact, I had small time to think. Even the doubts and misgivings that occasionally woke me in the night melted like dreams in the morning. Every morrow blotted out its yesterday⁠—as faded flowers are flung away out of a vase. + 

In that vortex of visits and visitors, that endless vista of amusements and eating and drinking⁠—some hidden spring of life in me began to fail. What a little self-conscious affected donkey I became, shrilly hee-hawing away; the centre of a simpering throng plying me with flattery. What airs I put on. + 

If this Life of mine had been a Biography, the author of it would have had the satisfaction of copying out from a pygmy blue morocco diary the names of all the celebrated and distinguished people I met at No. 2. A few of them underlined in red! The amusing thing is that, like my father, I was still a Radical at heart and preferred low life⁠—fleabane and chickweed⁠—to the fine flowers of culture; which only means, of course, that in this I am a snob inside out. Nevertheless, the attention I had shunned I now began to covet, and, like a famous artist or dancer, would go sulky to bed, if I had been left to blush at being unseen. I forced myself to be more and more fastidious: and tried to admire as little as possible. I would even imitate and affect languid pretentiousnesses and effronteries; and learned to be downright rude to people in a cultivated way. As for small talk, I soon accumulated a repertory of that, and could use the fashionable slang and current “conversations” like a native. All this intensely amused Mrs. Monnerie. For, of course, the more like the general run of these high livers I was, the more conspicuous I became. + 

The truth is, the Lioness’s head was in peril of being turned, and, like a blind kitten in a bucket of water, I came very near to being drowned in the social cream-bowl. For what little I gained in public by all this silly vanity I paid a heavy price when alone. I began to be fretful and utterly useless to myself⁠—just lived on from excitement to excitement. And Fleming soon had better reasons for detesting me than merely because I was horribly undersized. + 

Perhaps I am exaggerating; but the truth is I find it extremely difficult to keep patience with Mrs. Monnerie’s pampered protégée. She was weak and stupid. Yet learning had not lost its charm. My mind persisted in being hungry, however much satiated were my senses and fine feelings. I even infected Susan with my enthusiasm for indigestible knowledge. For since Mrs. Monnerie had begun to find my passion for shells, fossils, flints, butterflies, and stuffed animals a little wearisome, it was her niece who now accompanied me to my many Meccas in her stead. By a happy chance we often met on these pilgrimages the dark, straight-nosed young man whom I had looked down upon at my first ballet, and who also apparently was a fanatic. + 

However deeply engrossed in mementoes of the Dark or Stone Ages he might be, he never failed to see us the moment we entered his echoing gallery. He would lift his eyebrows; his monocle would drop out; and he would come sauntering over to meet us, looking as fresh as apples cold with dew. I liked Captain Valentine. So much so that I sent an almost rapturous description of him to Mr. Anon. + 

He did not seem in the least to mind being seen in my company. We had our little private jokes together. We both enjoyed the company of Susan. He was so crisp and easy and quick-witted, and yet⁠—to my unpractised eye⁠—looked delightfully domesticatable. Even the crustiest old caretaker, at a word and a smile from Captain Valentine, would allow me to seat myself on the glass cases. So I could gloat on their contents at leisure. And certainly of the three of us I was by far the most diligent student. + 

Long hours, too, of the none too many which will make up my life would melt away like snow in Mrs. Monnerie’s library. A button specially fixed for me in the wainscot would summon a manservant. Having ranged round the lofty walls, I would point up at what books I wanted. They would be strewn around me on the floor⁠—gilded and leathery volumes, some of them almost of my own height, and many times my weight. I would open the lid, turn the great pages, and carefully sprawling on my elbows between them, would pore for hours together on their coloured pictures of birds and flowers, gems and glass, ruins, palaces, mountains⁠—hunting, cockfighting, fashions, fine ladies, and foreign marvels. And I dipped into novels so like the unpleasanter parts of my own life that they might just as well have been autobiographies. + 

The secret charm of all this was that I was alone; and while I was reading I ceased to worry. I just drugged my mind with books. I would go rooting and rummaging in Mrs. Monnerie’s library, like a little pig after truffles. There was hardly a subject I left untasted⁠—old plays, and street ballads; Johnson’s enormous dictionary, that extraordinary book on Melancholy with its borage and hellebore and the hatted young man in love; Bel and the Dragon, the Newgate Calendar. I even nibbled at Debrett⁠—and clean through all its “M’s.” The more I read, the more ignorant I seemed to become; and quite apart from this smattering jumble of knowledge, I pushed my way through memoirs and romances at the very sight of which my poor godmother would have fainted dead off. + 

They may have been harmful; but I certainly can’t say that I regret having read them⁠—which may be part of the harm. You could tell the really bad ones almost at a sniff. They had bad smells, like a beetle cupboard or a scented old man. I read on of witchcraft and devils, yet hated the cloud they cast over me⁠—like some horrible treacle in the mind. But as for the authors who just reasoned about Time and God and Miracles, and so on, I poked about in them willingly enough; but my imagination went off the other way⁠—with my heart in its pocket. Possibly without knowing it. But I do know this: that never to my dying day shall I learn what a common-sized person with a pen or a pencil, can not make shocking, or be shocked at. It seemed to me that to some of these authors the whole universe was nothing better than a squid, and a very much scandalized young woman would attempt to replace their works on the shelves. + 

When in good faith I occasionally ventured to share (or possibly to show off) some curious scrap of information with Mrs. Monnerie, I thought her eyes would goggle out of her head. It was perhaps my old mole habit that prevented me from dividing things up into the mentionable and unmentionable. Possibly I carried this habit to excess; and yet, of course, remained the slave of my own small pruderies. Still, I don’t think it was either Mrs. Monnerie’s or Percy’s pruderies that I had to be careful about. To make him laugh was one of the most hateful of my experiences at No. 2. + 

I have read somewhere that the human instincts are “unlike Apollyon, since they always degrade themselves by their disguises. They dress themselves up as apes and mandrills; he as a ringed, supple, self-flattering, seductive serpent.” Possibly that has something to do with it. Or is it that my instincts are also on a petty scale? I don’t know. I hate and fear pain even more than most people, and have fought pretty hard in the cause of self-preservation. On the other hand, I haven’t the faintest wish in the world to “perpetuate my species.” Not that I might not have been happy in a husband and in my children. I suppose that kind of thing comes on one just as naturally as breathing. Nevertheless, I suspect I was born to be an old maid. Calling up spirits from the vasty deep has always seemed to me to be a far more dreadful mystery than Death. It is not, indeed, the ghosts of the dead and the past which I think should oppress the people I see around me, but those of the children to come. I thank God from the bottom of my heart for the happiness and misery of having been alive, but my small mind reels when I brood on what the gift of it implies. + 

Well, well, well; of one burden at least I can absolve Mrs. Monnerie⁠—that of making me so sententious. Somehow or other, but ever more sluggishly, those few crowded summer months of my twentieth year wore away. It is more of a mercy than a curse, I suppose, that Time never stands still. + 

Meanwhile two events occurred which, for the time being, sobered and alarmed me. A few days before I had actually planned to pay a second visit to Mrs. Bowater’s, the almost incredible news reached me that she was sailing for South America. It would hardly have surprised me more to hear that she was sailing for Sirius. She came to bid me goodbye. It was Mr. Bowater, she told me. She had been too confident of the “good nursing.” Far from mending in this world, his leg threatened “to carry him off into the next.” At these tidings Shame thrust out a very ugly head at me from her retreat. I had utterly forgotten the anxiety my poor old friend was in. + 

She put on her spectacles with trembling fingers, and pushed her husband’s letter across to me. The handwriting was bold and thick, yet I fancied it looked a little weak in the loops:⁠— + 

“Dear Emily⁠—The leg’s giving me the devil in this hole of a place. It looks as if I shouldn’t get through with it. I should be greatly obliged if you would come out to me. They’ll give you all the necessary information at the shipping office. Ask for Pullen. My love to Fanny. What’s she looking like now? I should like to see her before I go; but better say nothing about it. You’ve got about a month or three weeks, I should think; if that. + 

“Easy enough in appearance,” was Mrs. Bowater’s comment, as she folded up this stained and flimsy letter again, and stuffed it into her purse, “but it’s past even Mr. Bowater to control what can be read between the lines.” + 

She looked at me dumbly; the skin seemed to hang more loosely on her face. In vain I tried to think of a comforting speech. The tune of “Eternal Father,” one of the hymns we used to sing on windy winter Sunday evenings together, had begun droning in my head. The thought, too, was worrying me, though I did not put it into words, that Mr. Bowater, far rather than in Buenos Aires, would have preferred to find his last resting-place in Nero Deep or the Virgin’s Trough⁠—those enormous pits of blue in the oceans which I myself had so often gloated on in his Atlas. We were old friends now, he and I. He was Fanny’s father. The very ferocity of his look had become a secret understanding between us. And now⁠—at this very moment perhaps⁠—he was dying. The jaunty “devil” in his letter, I am afraid, affected me far more than Mrs. Bowater’s troubled face or even her courage. + 

Without a moment’s hesitation she had made up her mind to face the Atlantic’s thousands of miles of wind and water to join the husband she had told me had long been “worse than” dead. The very tone in which she uttered the word “steamer,” was even more lugubrious than the enormous, mocking hoot of a vessel that had once alarmed me out of the sea one still evening at Lyme Regis. It was a horrifying prospect, yet she just quietly said, “steamer,” and looked at me over her spectacles. + 

While she was away, the little house on Beechwood Hill, “bought, thank God, with my own money,” was to be shut up, but it was mine if I cared to return to it, and would ask a neighbour of hers, Mrs. Chantry, for the key. It would be Fanny’s if anything “happened” to herself. So dismal was all this that Mrs. Bowater seemed already lost to me, and I twice an orphan. We talked on together in low, cautious voices. After a single sharp, cold glance at my visitor, Fleming had left us to ourselves over an enormous silver teapot. I grew so nervous at last, watching Mrs. Bowater’s slow glances of disapproval at her surroundings; her hot, tired face; and listening to her long drawn sighs, that again and again I lost the thread of what she was saying, and could answer Yes, or No, only by instinct. + 

What with an antiquated timetable, a mislaid railway ticket, and an impudent bus-conductor, her journey had been a trying experience. I discovered, too, that Mrs. Bowater disliked the West End. She had first knocked at No. 4 by mistake. Its butler had known nothing whatever at all about any Miss M., and Mrs. Bowater had been too considerate to specify my dimensions. She had then shared a few hot moments in the porch of No. 2 with a more fashionable visitor⁠—to neither’s satisfaction. A manservant had admitted her to Mrs. Monnerie’s marble halls and “barefaced” statuary, and had apparently thought the large parcel she carried in her arms should have been delivered in the area. + 

She bore no resentment, though I myself felt a little uneasy. Life was like that, she seemed to imply, and she had been no party to it. There was no doubt a better world where things would be different⁠—it was extraordinary what a number of conflicting sentiments she could convey in a pause or a shut of her mouth. Black and erect, she sat glooming over that alien teapot, sipping Mrs. Monnerie’s colourless China tea, firmly declining to grimace at its insipidity, until she had told me all there was to tell. + 

At last, having gathered herself together, she exhorted me to write to that young Mr. Anon. “I see a fidelity one might almost say doglike, miss, on that face, apart, as I have reasons for supposing, from a sufficiency in his pocket. Though, the Lord knows, you are young yet and seemingly in no need of a home.” + 

Parcel, reticule, umbrella⁠—she bent over me with closed eyes, and muttered shamefacedly that she had remembered me in her will, “and may God bless you, miss, I’m sure.” + 

I clutched the gloved hand in a sudden helpless paroxysm of grief and foreboding. “Oh, Mrs. Bowater, you forgive⁠—” I choked, and still no words would come. + 

She was gone, past recall; and all the love and gratitude and remorse I had longed to express flooded up in me. Yet, stuck up there in my chair, my chief apprehension had been that Fleming might come in again, and cast yet another veiled, sneering glance at my visitor. + 

Peering between the gilded balusters, I watched my old friend droop away stiffly down the mild, lustrous staircase, bow to the man who opened the door for her, and emerge into the sunny emptiness. + 

Maybe the thought had drifted across her mind that I had indeed been dipped in the dye-pot. But now⁠—these many years afterwards⁠—there is no more risk of misunderstanding. It is eight o’clock; the light is fading. Chizzel Hill glows green. I hear her feebling step on the stairs. She will peer at me over spectacles that now always straddle her nose. I must put my pen and papers away; and I, too, have made my will. + 

XXXVIII + 

Mrs. Bowater’s departure from England⁠—and it seemed as if its very map in my mind had become dismally empty⁠—was not my only anxiety. My solicitors had hitherto been prompt; their remittances almost monotonously identical in amount. But my quarterly allowance on Midsummer Day, had been followed by a letter a week or two after her goodbye. It seemed to be in excellent English, and yet it was all but unintelligible to me. Every rereading of it⁠—the paper had apparently been dipped in water and dried⁠—increased its obscurity and my alarm. I knew nothing about money matters, and the encyclopaedia I consulted only made me more dejected and confused. I remembered with remorse my poor father’s last troubles. To answer the Harrises was impossible, and further study of their letter soon became unnecessary, for I had learned it by heart. + 

The one thing certain was that Fanny’s wolf had begun scratching at my door: that my income was in imminent danger. I had long since squandered the greater part of what remained out of my savings (after Fanny had helped herself) on presents and fal-lals; merely, I am afraid, to show Mrs. Monnerie that I, too, could be extravagant. How much I owed her I could not even conjecture, and had not dared to inquire. To ask her counsel was equally impossible. She was almost as remote from me in this respect as Mrs. Bowater, now in the centre of the Atlantic. As for Fanny, I had returned her postal orders and had heard no more. + 

For days and days gloom hung over me like a thundercloud. Wherever I went I was followed by the spectres of the Harrises. Then, for a time, as do all things, foreboding and anxiety gradually faded off. I plunged back into the cream-bowl with the deliberate intention of drowning trouble. + 

Meanwhile, I had not forgotten Fanny’s “sinecure.” One mackerel-skied afternoon, Mrs. Monnerie and I and Susan were returning across the Park from an “At Home”⁠—“to meet Miss M.” A small child of the house had richly entertained the company by howling with terror at sight of me, until he had been removed by his nurse. I bear him no grudge; he made a peg on which to hang Fanny’s proposal. + 

“And what can Miss Bowater do? What are her qualifications?” Mrs. Monnerie inquired pleasantly. + 

“She is⁠—dark and⁠—pale,” I replied, staring a little giddily out of the carriage at the sheep munching their way over the London grass. + 

“Dark and pale?” mused Mrs. Monnerie. “Well, that goes nearer the bone, perhaps, than medals and certificates and that sort of thing. Still, a rather Jane Eyreish kind of governess, eh, Susan?” + 

Unfortunately I was acquainted with only one of the Miss Brontës, and that not Charlotte. + 

“Miss Bowater is immensely clever, Mrs. Monnerie,” I hurried on, “and extremely popular with⁠—with the other mistresses, and that sort of thing. She’s not a bit what you might guess from what you might suppose.” + 

“Which means, I gather,” commented Mrs. Monnerie affably, “that Miss Bowater is the typical landlady’s daughter. A perfect angel in⁠—or out of⁠—the house, eh, Miss Innocent?” + 

“No,” said I, “I don’t think Miss Bowater is an angel. She is so interesting, so herselfish, you know. She simply couldn’t be happy at Miss Stebbings’s⁠—the school where she’s teaching now. It’s not salary, Mrs. Monnerie, she is thinking of⁠—just two nice children and their mother, that’s all.” + 

This vindication of Fanny left me uncomfortably hot; I continued to gaze fixedly into the green distances of the park. + 

Yet all was well. Mrs. Monnerie appeared to be satisfied with my testimonial. “You shall give me her address, little Binbin; and we’ll have a look at the young lady,” she decided. + 

Yet I was none too happy at my success. Those familiar old friends of mine⁠—motives⁠—began worrying me. Would the change be really good for Fanny? Would it⁠—and I had better confess that this troubled me the most⁠—would it be really good for me? I wanted to help her; I wanted also to show her off. And what a joy it would be if she should change into the Fanny of my dreams. On the other hand, supposing she didn’t. On the whole, I rather dreaded the thought of her appearance at No. 2. + 

Susan followed me into my room. “Who is this Miss Bowater?” she inquired, “besides, I mean, being your landlady’s daughter, and that kind of thing?” + 

But my further little confidences failed to satisfy her. + 

“But why is she so not an angel, then? Clever and lovely⁠—it’s a rather unusual combination, you know. And yet”⁠—she reflectively smiled at me, all candour and gentleness⁠—“well not unique.” + 

I ran away as fast as ever I could with so endearing a compliment⁠—and tossed it back again over my shoulder: “You don’t mean, Susan, that you are not clever?” + 

“I do, my dear; indeed I do. I am so stupid that unless things are as plain and open as the nose on my face, I feel like suffocating. I’m dreadfully out of the fashion⁠—a horrible discredit to my sex. As for Miss Bowater, I was merely being odious, that was all. To be quite honest and hateful⁠—I didn’t like the sound of her. And Aunt Alice is so easily carried away by any new scent. If a thing’s a novelty, or just good to look at, or what they call a work of art⁠—why, the hunt’s up. There wouldn’t have been any use for the Serpent in her Eden. Mere things, of course, don’t matter much: except that they rather lumber up one’s rooms; and I prefer not to live in a museum. It’s when it comes to persons. Still, it isn’t as if Miss Bowater was coming here.” + 

I remained silent, thinking this speech over. Had it, I speculated, “come to” being a “person” in my own case? + 

“Did you meet any other interesting people there?” Miss Monnerie went on, as if casually, turning off and on the while the little cluster of coloured electric globes that was on my table. “I mean besides Miss Bowater and that poor, dreadful⁠—you know?” + 

“No,” I said bluntly, “not many.” + 

“You don’t mind my asking these questions? And just in exchange, you solemn thing, I’ll tell you a secret. It will be like shutting it up in the delightfullest, delicatest little rosebud of a box!” In that instant’s pause, it was as if a dream had passed swiftly, entrancingly, across the grave, smiling face. + 

“Look!” she said, stooping low, and laying her slim left hand, palm downwards, across my table. I did look; and the first thing I noticed was how like herself that hand was, and how much less vigorous and formidable than Fanny’s. And then I caught her meaning. + 

“Oh, Susan,” I cried in a woeful voice, gazing at the smouldering stones ringing that long slim third finger, “wherever I turn, I hear that.” + 

“Hear what?” + 

“Why, of love, I mean.” + 

“But why, why?” the narrow brows lifted in faint distress, “I am going to be ever so happy.” + 

“Ah, yes, I know, I know. But why can’t you be happy alone?” + 

She looked at me, and a faint red dusked the delicate cheek. “Not so happy. Not me, I mean.” + 

“You do love him, then?” the words jerked out. + 

“Why, you strange thing, how curiously you speak to me. Of course I love him. I am going to marry him.” + 

“But how do you know?” I persisted. “Does it mean more to you⁠—well⁠—than the secret of everything? I mean, what comes when one is almost nothing? Does it make you more yourself? or just break you in two? or melt you away?⁠—oh, like a mist that is gone, and to every petal and blade of grass its drop of burning water?” + 

A shade of dismay, almost of fear⁠—the look a timid animal gives when startled⁠—stole into her eyes. “You ask such odd questions! How can I answer them? I know this⁠—I would rather die than not. Is that what you mean?” + 

“Oh,” my voice fainted away⁠—disappointment, darkness, ennui; “only that!” + 

“But what do you mean? What are you saying? Have you been told all this? It disturbs me; your face is like⁠—” + 

“Yes! what is it like?” I cried in distress, myself sinking back into myself, as if hiding in a lair. + 

“I can’t say,” she faltered. “I didn’t know.⁠ ⁠…” + 

We talked on. But though I tried to blur over and withdraw what I had said, she remained dissatisfied. A thin edge of formality had for the moment pushed in between us. + 

That night I addressed a belated letter to Wanderslore, reproaching Mr. Anon for not writing to me, telling him of Mrs. Bowater’s voyage, and begging him to assure the garden-house and the fading summer flowers that they had not been deserted in my dreams. + 

At a quarter to twelve one morning, soon after this, I was sitting with Mrs. Monnerie on a stool beneath Chakka’s cage, and Susan was just about to leave us⁠—was actually smoothing on the thumb of her glove; when Marvell announced that a Miss Bowater had called. I turned cold all over and held my breath. + 

“Ah,” whispered Mrs. Monnerie, “your future Mrs. Rochester, my pet.” + 

Every thought scuttled out of my head; my needle jerked and pricked my thumb. I gazed at the door. Never had I seen anything so untransparent. Then it opened; and⁠—there was Fanny. She was in dark gray⁠—a gown I had never seen before. A tight little hat was set demurely on her hair. In that first moment, she had not noticed me, and I could steal a long, steady look at the still, light, vigilant eyes, drinking in at one steady draught their new surroundings. Her features wore the thinnest, unfamiliar mask, like a flower seen in an artificial light. What wonder I had loved her. My hands went numb, and a sudden fatigue came over me. + 

Then her quiet, travelling glance descended and hovered in secret colloquy with mine. She dropped me a little smiling, formal nod, moistened her lips, and composed herself for Mrs. Monnerie. And it was then I became conscious that Susan had quietly slipped out of the room. + 

It was a peculiar experience to listen to the catechism that followed. From the absorption of her attitude, the large, sidelong head, the motionless hands, it was clear that Mrs. Monnerie found a good deal to interest her in the dark, attentive figure that stood before her. If Fanny had been Joan of Arc, she could not have had a more single-minded reception. Yet I was enjoying a duel: a duel not of wits, but of intuitions, between the sagacious, sardonic, watchful old lady, soaked in knowledge of humanity but, as far as I could discover, with extraordinarily small respect for it, and⁠—Fanny. And it seemed to me that Fanny easily held her own; just by being herself, without revealing herself. Face, figure, voice; that was all. I could not take my eyes away. If only, I thought, my own ghost would keep as quiet and hidden as that in the presence of others. + 

Perhaps I exaggerate. Love, living or dying, even if it is not blind, cannot, I suppose, focus objects very precisely. It sees only itself or disillusionment. Whether or not, the duel was interrupted. In the full light of the window, Fanny turned softly at the opening of the door. Marvell was announcing another caller. At his name my heart leapt up like William Wordsworth’s at the rainbow. It was Sir Walter Pollacke. + 

“This is your visitor, Poppet,” Mrs. Monnerie waggishly assured me, “you shall have half an hour’s tête-à-tête.” + 

XXXIX + 

So it was with a deep sigh⁠—half of regret at being called away, and all of joy at the thought of seeing my old friend again⁠—that I followed Marvell’s coattails over the threshold. With a silly, animal-like affection I brushed purposely against Fanny’s skirts as I passed her by; and even smirked in a kind of secret triumph at Percy Maudlen, who happened to be idling on the staircase as I hastened from room to room. + 

The door of the library closed gently behind me, as if with a breath of peace. I paused⁠—looked across. Sir Walter was standing at the further end of its high, daylit, solemn spaciousness. He was deep in contemplation of a white marble bust that graced the lofty chimneypiece⁠—so rapt, indeed, that until I had walked up into the full stream of sunshine from a nearer window and had announced my approach with a cough, he did not notice my entrance. Then he flicked round with an exclamation of welcome. + 

“My dear, dear young lady,” he cried, beaming down on me from between his peaked collar-tips, over his little black bow, the gold rim of his large eyeglasses pressed to his lip, “a far⁠—far more refreshing sight! Would you believe it, it was the pleasing little hobby of that oiled and curled monstrosity up there⁠—Heliogabalus⁠—to smother his guests in roses⁠—literally, smother them? Now,” and he looked at me quizzically as if through a microscope, “the one question is how have you survived what I imagine must have been a similar ordeal? Not quite at the last gasp, I hope? Comparatively happy? It’s all we can hope for, my dear, in this world.” + 

I nodded, hungrily viewing him, meeting as best I could the bright blue eyes, and realizing all in a moment the dark inward of my mind. + 

Those other eyes began thinking as well as looking. “Well, well, that’s right. And now we must have a little quiet talk before his Eminence reappears. So our old friend Mrs. Bowater has gone husband-hunting? Gallant soul: she came to see me.” + 

Squatted up on a crimson leather stool, I must have looked the picture of astonishment. + 

“Yes,” he assured me, “there are divinities that shape our ends; and Mrs. Bowater is one of them. If anything can hasten her husband’s recovery⁠—But never mind that. She has left me in charge. And here I am. The question is, can we have too many trustees, guardians? Perhaps not. Look at the Koh-i-Noor, now.” + 

I much preferred to continue to look at Sir Walter, even though, from the moment I had entered the room, at least five or six voices had begun arguing in my mind. And here, as if positively in answer to them, was his very word⁠—trustee. I pounced on it like a wasp on a plum. It was a piece of temerity that saved me from⁠—well, as I sit thinking things over in quiet and leisure in my old Stonecote, the house of my childhood, I don’t know what it hasn’t saved me from. + 

“Too many trustees, Sir Walter?” I breathed. “I suppose, not⁠—if they are honest.” + 

“But bless me, my dear young lady,” his face seemed to be shining like the sun’s in mist; “whose heresies are these? Have they given you a French maid?” + 

“Fleming; oh, no,” I replied, laughing out, “she’s a Woman of Kent, all but. What I was really thinking is, that I would, if I may⁠—and please forgive me⁠—very much like to show you a letter. I simply can’t make head or tail of it. But it’s dreadfully⁠—suggestive.” + 

“My dear, I came in certain hope of being shown nothing less vital than your heart,” he retorted gallantly. + 

So off I went⁠—with my visitor all encouraging smiles as he opened the door for me⁠—to fetch my lawyer’s bombshell. + 

Glasses on tip of his small, hawklike nose, Sir Walter’s glittering eyes seemed to master this obscure document at one swoop. + 

“H’m,” he said cautiously, and once more communed with the bust of Heliogabalus. “Now what did you think of it all? Was it worth six and eightpence, do you think?” + 

“I couldn’t think. It frightened me. ‘The Shares,’ you know. Whose Shares? Of what? I’m terribly, terribly ignorant.” + 

“Ah,” he echoed, “the Shares⁠—as the blackbird said to the Cherry Tree. And there was nobody, you thought, to discuss the letter with? You didn’t answer it?” + 

“Nobody,” said I, with a shake of my head, and smoothing my silk skirts over my knees. + 

“Why, of course not,” he sparkled. “You see how admirably things work out. Miss Fenne, Mr. Pellew, Mrs. Bowater, my wife, Tom o’ Bedlam, Hypnos, Mrs. Monnerie, Mr. Bowater, Mrs. Bowater, the Harrises, me. ’Pon my word, you’d think it was a plot. Now, supposing I keep this letter⁠—could you trust it with me for a while?⁠—and supposing I see these gentlemen, and make a few inquiries; and that in the meantime⁠—we⁠—we bottle the Cherries? But first, I must have a little more information. Your father, my dear. Let’s just unbosom ourselves of all this horrible old money-grubbing, and see exactly how we stand.” + 

I needed no second invitation, and poured out helter-skelter all (how very little, in my girlish folly) that I knew about my father’s affairs, and of how I had been “left.” + 

“And Miss Fenne, now?” he peered out, as if at my godmother herself. “Why didn’t she send word to France? Where is this providential step-grandfather, Monsieur Pierre de Ronvel, all this time? Not dead too?” + 

Shamefully I had to confess that I did not know; had not even inquired. “It is my miserable ingratitude. I just blow hot and cold; that is my nature.” + 

“Well, well, it may be so.” He smiled at me, as if out of the distance, with the serenest kindliness. “But you and I are going to share the temperate zone⁠—a cool, steady, trade wind.” + 

“If only,” I smiled, taking him up on this familiar ground, “if only I could keep clear of the Tropics⁠—and that Sargasso Sea!” + 

At this little sally he gleamed at me as goldenly as the spade guinea that dangled on his waistcoat. Then he rose and surveyed one by one a row of silent, sumptuous tomes in their glazed retreat: “The Sargasso Sea; h’m, h’m, h’m; and one might suppose,” he cast a comprehensive glance at the taciturn shelves around and above us, “one might suppose the tuppenny box would afford some of these a more sociable haven.” + 

But this was Greek to me. “Mrs. Monnerie is generous?” he went on, “indulgent? Groundsel, seed, sugar, and a Fleming. Yet perhaps the door might be pushed just an inch or two farther open, eh? What I’m meaning, my dear, is, will you perhaps wait in patience a little? And if anything should go amiss, will you make me a promise to send just a wisp of a word and a penny stamp to an old friend who will be doing his best? The first lawyer, you know, was a waif that was adopted by a tortoise and a fox. Now I’m going to be a mole⁠—with its fur on the bias, as Miss Rossetti happened to notice⁠—and burrow. So you see, all will come well!” + 

I must have been sitting very straight and awkward on my stool, and not heeding what my face was telling. + 

“Is there anything else distressing you, my dear?” he asked anxiously, almost timidly. + 

“Only myself,” I muttered. “There doesn’t seem to be any end to it all. I grope on and on, and⁠—the kindness only makes it worse. Can there be a riddle, Sir Walter, that hasn’t any answer? I remember reading in a book that was given me that Man ‘comes into the world like morning mushrooms.’ Don’t you think that’s true; even, I mean, of⁠—everybody?” + 

But his views on this subject were not to be shared with me for many a long day. Our half-hour was over; and there stood Mrs. Monnerie, mushroom-shaped, it is true, but suggesting nothing of the evanescent, as she looked in on us from the mahogany doorway. + 

“How d’ye do, Sir Walter,” she greeted him. “If it hadn’t been for an exceedingly interesting young creature disguised, I understand, as a Miss Bowater, I should have had the happiness of seeing you earlier. And how is our Peri looking, do you think?” + 

“How is our Peri looking?” he repeated musingly, poising himself, and eyeing me, on his flat, gleaming boots; “why, Mrs. Monnerie, as I suppose a Peri should be looking⁠—into Paradise.” + 

“Then, my Peri,” said Mrs. Monnerie blandly, “ask Sir Walter to be a complete angel, and stay to luncheon.” + 

Mrs. Monnerie, I remember, was in an unusually vivacious humour at that meal; and devoured immense quantities of salmon mayonnaise. One might have supposed that Fanny’s influence had added a slim crescent of silvery light to her habitual earthshine. None the less, when our guest was gone, she seemed to subside into a shallow dejection; and I into a much deeper. We sat on together in an uneasy silence, she pushing out her lips, restlessly prodding Cherry with her foot, and occasionally uttering some inarticulate sound that was certainly not intended as conversation. + 

I think Mrs. Monnerie was in secret a more remarkable woman than she affected to be. However thronged a room might be, you could never be unaware that she was in it. And in the gentle syllabub of polite conversation her silence was like that of an ancient rock with the whispering of the wavelets on the sands at its base. I remember once seeing a comic picture of an old lady with a large feather in her bonnet placidly sitting on a campstool beneath a pollard willow on one side of a stream, while a furious, frothing bull stood snorting and rampaging on the other. I think the old lady in the picture was meant to be Britannia; but, whoever or whatever the bull might represent, Mrs. Monnerie reminded me of her. She sat more heavily, more passively, in her chair than anyone I have ever seen. + 

Of course⁠—quite apart from intelligence⁠—there must be many, many layers in society, and I cannot say at all how far Mrs. Monnerie was from the topmost. But I am sure she was able to look down on a good many of them; while I was born always to be “looking up.” I was looking up at Mrs. Monnerie now from my stool. Widespread in her chair, she had closed her eyes, and to judge from her face, she was dreaming. It looked more faded than usual. The puckers gave it a prunish look. Queer, contorting expressions were floating across her features. Her soul seemed gently to rock in them, like an empty boat at night on a dark river. In the pride of my youth⁠—and a little uneasy over my confidences with Sir Walter⁠—I examined my patroness with a slight stirring of dismay. + 

“Oh, no, no! never to grow old, not me,” a voice was saying in me. Yet, after all, I reminded myself, I was looking only at Mrs. Monnerie’s outer case. But then, after all, was it only that? “The Resurrection of the body.” One may see day at a little hole; says an old proverb⁠—I hope a Kentish proverb. And from Mrs. Monnerie, my thoughts drifted away to Fanny. She would grow old too. Should we know one another then? Should we understand, and remember what it was to be young? We had had our secrets. + 

I came out of these reflections to find Mrs. Monnerie’s sleepy eyes fixed full upon me; and herself marvellously cheered up by her nap. She had thought very well of Miss Bowater, she told me. So well that she not only very soon found her a charming engagement as a morning governess to the two little girls of a rich fashionable widow⁠—just Fanny’s “sinecure”⁠—but invited her to stay at No. 2 as a “companion” to herself, until a more permanent post offered itself. + 

“You and I want more company,” she assured me; “otherwise the flint will use up all the tinder, or vice versa, my dear. A pretty creature and no fool. She sings a little, too, she tells me. So we shall have music wherever she goes.” + 

That afternoon both flint and tinder⁠—whichever of us was which⁠—were kept very busy. Mrs. Monnerie fell into one of her long monologues, broken only by Chakka’s griding on his bars, and Cherry’s whimpering in his dreams. It was another kind of “white meat” for me: and though, no doubt, I was incapable of digesting all Mrs. Monnerie’s views on life, society, and the world at large, I realized that if in the course of time it might be my fate to wither and wizen away, I should still have my own company and plenty of internal entertainment. I actually saw myself a little bent-up, old, midget woman creeping down some stone steps out of a porch, with a fanlight, under a street lamp. It curdled my blood, that picture. And yet, I thought, what must be, must be. I will endure to be a little, bent-up, old, midget woman, creeping down stone steps out of a porch with a fanlight. And I even nodded up at the street lamp. + 

In response to a high-spirited scrawl from Fanny, I sent her all that was left of my savings to purchase “those horrible little etceteras that just feather down the scales, Midgetina. It would be saintlike of you, and you won’t miss it there.” It was a desperate wrench to me to see the last of my money disappear. I knew no more than the Man in the Moon where the next was to come from. + 

I counted the days to Fanny’s coming; and dressed myself for the occasion in the most expensive gold and blue afternoon gown I possessed. It must have been with a queer, mixed motive in my head. I sat waiting for her, while beyond the gloom-hung window raged a London thunderstorm, with dense torrents of rain. My little silver clock struck three, and she entered my room like a black swan, tossing from her small, velveted head, as she did so, a few beads of rain. From top to toe in deadest black. She must have noticed my glance of wonderment. + 

“When you want to make a favourable impression on your social superiors, Midgetina, the meeker you look the better,” she said. + 

But this was not the only reason for her black. Only a day or two before, she told me, a letter had come from her mother.⁠ ⁠… “My father is dead.” The words dropped out as if they were quite accustomed to one another’s company. But those which followed⁠—“blood-poisoning,” “mortification,” hung up in my mind⁠—in that interminable gallery⁠—a hideous picture. I could only sit and stare at the motionless figure outlined against the sepulchral window. + 

“It is awful, awful, Fanny!” I managed to whisper at last. “It never stops. One after another they all go. Think how he must have longed to be home. And now to be buried⁠—out there⁠—nothing but strangers.” + 

A vacancy came over my mind in which I seemed to see the dead Mr. Bowater of my photograph rising like Lazarus in his grave-cloths out of his foreign tomb, and looking incredulously around him. + 

“And your mother, Fanny! Out there, too⁠—those miles and miles of sea away!” + 

Fanny made no movement, though I fancied that her eyes wandered uneasily towards the door. “I quite agree, Midgetina; it’s awful!” she said. “But really and truly, it’s worse for me. I think I am like my father in some ways. Mother never really understood him. You can’t talk a man different; and for that matter holding your tongue at him is not much good either. You must just lie in wait for him with⁠—well, with your charms, I suppose.” + 

The word sounded like a sneer. “Still, I don’t mean to say that it was all pure filial bliss for me when he was at home, until, at least, I grew up. Then he and I quarrelled too; but that’s pleasure itself by comparison with listening to other people at it. He did his best to spoil me, I suppose. He wanted to make a lady of me.” She turned and smiled out of the window; her underlip quivering and casting a faint shadow on the smooth skin beneath. “So here I am; though I fear you can’t make ladies of quite the correct consistency out of dressmaker’s clothes and a smatter of Latin. The salt will out. But there,” she flung a little gesture with her glove, “as I say, here I am.” + 

And as if for welcome, a gleam of lightning danced at the window, illumining us there, and a crackling peal of thunder rolled hollowly off over the rooftops of the square. We listened until the sound had emptied itself into quiet; and only the rain in the gutters gurgled and babbled. + 

“Do you know,” she went on, with a faraway challenging thrill in her low, mournful voice, “I don’t think I have a solitary relation left in the world now⁠—except mother. ‘They are all gone into a world of light’⁠—though I’ve now and then suspected that a few of the disreputable ones have been buried alive. There’s nothing very dreadful in that. Life consists, of course, in shedding various kinds of skin⁠—and tanning the remainder.” + 

Fanny, then, was unaware that Mrs. Bowater was not her real mother. And I think she never guessed it. + 

“Nor have I,” I said, “not one.” As I looked at it there, it seemed a fact more curious than tragic. Besides, in the brooding darkness of that room it was Fanny and I who were strange, external beings, not the memoried phantoms of my mother and father. We had still to go on, to live things out. “So you see, Fanny,” I continued, after a pause, “I do know what it means⁠—a little; and we must try more than ever to be really one another’s friend, mustn’t we? I mean, if you think I can be.” + 

“Why, I owe you pounds and pounds,” cried Fanny gaily, pushing back her handkerchief into her bodice. “Here we are⁠—not quite in the same box, perhaps; still strangers and pilgrims. Of course we must help one another.⁠ ⁠… Just think of this house! The servants! The folly of it, and all for Madame Monnerie⁠—though I wouldn’t mind being in her shoes, even for one season. Socialism, my dear, is all a question of shoes. And this is Poppetkin’s little boudoir? A pygmy palace, my dear, and if only the lightning would last a little longer I might get a real glimpse of that elfin little exquisite over there in her beautiful blue brocade. But then; it will be roses all the way with you, Miss M. You are independent, and valued for yourself alone.” + 

“How different people are, Fanny. You always think first of the use of a thing, and I, stupidly, just of it⁠—itself.” + 

“Do we?” she said indifferently, and rose from her chair. “Anyhow I’m here to be of use. And who,” she remarked, with a little yawn, as she came to a pause again beside the streaming window. “Who was that prim, colourless girl with the pale blue eyes? Engaged to be married.” + 

“But Fanny, she had her gloves on that morning, I remember it as clearly as⁠—as I always remember everything where you are: how could you possibly tell that Susan Monnerie was engaged?” + 

It was quite a simple problem, Fanny tranquilly assured me: “The ring bulged under the suede.” + 

Her scornfulness piqued me a little. “Anyhow,” I retorted, “Susan’s eyes are not pale blue. They are almost cornflower⁠—chicory colour; like the root of a candle-flame.” + 

“Please, Midgetina,” Fanny begged me, “don’t let me canker your new adoration. Perhaps you preened your pretty feathers in them when they were fixed on the demigod. ‘Susan’! I thought all the Susans perished in the ’sixties, or had fled down the area. And who is he?” But she did not follow up her question. All things come to him who waits, she had rambled on inconsequently, if he waits long enough; and no doubt God would temper the wind to the shorn orphan even if she did look a perfect frump in mourning. + 

“You know you could never look a frump,” I replied indignantly, “even if you hadn’t a rag on.” + 

Fanny shrugged her dainty shoulders. “Alas!” she said. + 

But her “orphan” had brought me back with a guilty shock to what, no doubt, was an extremely fantastic panorama of Buenos Aires; and that swiftly back again to Mr. Crimble. For an instant or two I looked away. Perhaps it was my caution that betrayed me. + 

“It’s no use, Midgetina,” she sang across at me from her window. “Whether it’s because the chemical reactions of your pat little brain are more intense than ordinary people’s, or because you and I are en rapport, I can’t say. But there’s one thing we must agree upon at once: never, never again to mention his name⁠—at least in this house. The Crimble chapter is closed.” + 

Closed indeed. But so sharp were her tones I hadn’t the courage to warn her that even Susan had read most of it. Fanny came near, and, stooping as Susan had stooped, began fidgeting with the button of my electric chandelier. The little lamps shone wanly in our faces in the cloud-darkened room. + 

“You see, my dear,” she said playfully, “you think me all mockery and heartlessness. And no doubt you are right. But I want ease and security: just like that⁠—as if I were writing an essay⁠—‘ease and security.’ I don’t care a dash about affection⁠—at least without the aforesaid e and s. I intend to please Mrs. Monnerie, and she is going to be grateful to me. Don’t think I am being ‘candid.’ I should have no objection to saying just the same thing to Mrs. Monnerie herself: she’d enjoy it. Wait, you precious inchy image⁠—wait until you need a sup of fatted calf’s-foot jelly, not because you are sick of husks, but because you are deadly poor. Then you will understand. These sumptuosities! Wait till they haven’t a ha’penny in their pockets, real or moral, for their next meal. They only look at things⁠—if that; they can’t know what they are. Even to be decently charitable one must have been a beggar⁠—and cursed the philanthropists. Oh, I know: and Fanny’s race is for Success.” + 

“But surely, Fanny, a thing is its looks, if only you look long enough. And I should just like to hear you talking if you were in my place. Besides, what is the use of success⁠—in the end, I mean? You should see some of the actresses and singers and authors and that kind of thing Mrs. Monnerie knows? You wouldn’t have realized the actresses were even beautiful unless you had been told so. Why, you couldn’t even say the World is a success, except in the country. What is truly the use of it, then?” I had grown so eager in my argument that I had got up from my chair. + 

“The use, you poor thing?” laughed Fanny; “why, only as a kind of face-cream to one’s natural pride.” + 

The day was lightening now; but at that the whole darkness of my own situation drew close about me. Success, indeed. What was I? Nothing but a halfpennyless, tame pet in No. 2. What salve could restore to me my natural pride? + 

XL + 

In happier circumstances, the next morning’s post might have reassured me. Two letters straddled my breakfast tray, for I always had this meal in my own room. One of them was from Wanderslore⁠—a long, crooked, roundabout letter, that seemed to taunt, upbraid, and entreat me, turn and turn about. It ended with a proposal of marriage. + 

In most of the novels I have read, the heroine simply basks in such a proposal, even though scarcely her fingertips are warmed by its rays. For my part, this letter, far from making me happy or even complacent, produced nothing but a feeling of fretfulness and shame. Thrusting it back into its envelope, I listened a while as if an eavesdropper might have overheard my silent reading of it⁠—as if I must hide. Then, with eyes fixed on my small coffeepot, I sank into a low, empty reverie. + 

The world had not been so tender to my feelings as to refrain from introducing me to General Tom Thumb and Miss Mercy Lavinia Bump Warren. + 

“A pair of them! how quaint! how romantic! how touching!” I saw myself⁠—gossamer veil, dwarfed orange-blossom, and gypsophila bouquet, all complete. Perhaps Mr. Pellew⁠—perhaps even Miss Fenne’s bishop, would officiate. Possibly Percy would be persuaded to “give me away.” And what a gay little sniggling note in the Morning Post. + 

I came out of these sardonic thoughts with cold hands and a sneer on my lips, and the thought that I had seen quite as conspicuously paired human mates even though their size was beyond reproach. Thank goodness, when I read my letter again, slightly better feelings prevailed. After all, the merest cinder of love would have made my darkness light. I shouldn’t have cared for a thousand “touching’s” then. I was still myself, a lightheaded, lighthearted, young woman, for all my troubles and follies. If I had loved him, the rest of the world⁠—much truer and sweeter within than it looks from without⁠—would have vanished like a puff of smoke. But not even love’s ashes were in my heart, except, perhaps, those in which Fanny had scrawled her name. + 

I beat about, bruising wings and breast, hating life, hating the friend who had suddenly slammed-to another door in my gilded cage. “You can never, never go back to Wanderslore now,” muttered my romantic heart. Friends we could have remained⁠—only the closer for adversity. Now all that was over; and two human beings who might have been a refuge and reconciliation to one another, amused⁠—as well as amusing⁠—observers of the world at large, had been by this one piece of foolish excess divided forever. I simply couldn’t bear to look ridiculous in my own eyes. + 

My other letter was from Sir W. P. He had seen the Harrises. Those foxy tortoises had advanced a ridiculous £1 19s. 7d. of my September allowance⁠—the price of a pair of Monnerie bedroom slippers! It was enclosed⁠—and Sir Walter begged me not to worry. Might he be my bank? Would I be so kind as to break it as soon as ever I wished? Meanwhile he would be making further inquires into my affairs. + 

Perhaps because Sir W. P. was a business man, he was less persuasive with his pen than with his tongue. I thought he was merely humouring me, fell into a violent rage, and tore up not only his letter, but⁠—noodle that I was⁠—the Harris Order too⁠—into the tiniest pieces, and heaped them up, like a soufflé, on my tray. Mr. Anon’s I locked up in my old money-box, with the nightgown and the Miss Austen. Both letters wore like acid into my mind. From that day on⁠—except for a few half-stifled or excited hours⁠—they were never out of remembrance. + 

Even the most valuable and expensive pet may become a vexation if it is continually showing ill-temper and fractiousness. Mrs. Monnerie merely puckered her lips or shrugged her shoulders at my outbursts of vanity and insolence. But drops of water will wear away a stone. From being Court Favourite I gradually sank to being Court Fool. In sheer ennui and desperation I waggled my bells and brandished my bladder. A cat may look at a Queen, but it should, I am sure, make faces only at her Ladies-in-waiting. + 

Fanny inherited yet another sinecure; and it was not envy on my side that helped her to shine in it, though I had my fits of jealousy. She was determined to please; and when Fanny made up her mind, circumstances seemed just to fawn at her feet. Life became a continuous game of chess, the moves of which at times kept me awake and brooding in a far from wholesome fashion in my bed. Pawn of pawns, and one at the point of being sacrificed, I could only squint at the board. Indeed, I deliberately shut my eyes to my own insignificance, strutted about, sulked, sharpened my tongue like a serpent, and became a perfect pest to myself when alone. Yet I knew in my heart that those whom I hoped to wound merely laughed at me behind my back, that I was once more proving to the world that the smaller one is the greater is one’s vanity. + 

In the midst of this nightmare, by a curious coincidence rose like a jack-in-the-box from out of my past the queerest of phantoms⁠—and proved himself real. + 

I was sullenly stewing in my thoughts in the library one morning over a book which to this day I never weary of reading; Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne. It was the nearest I could get to the country. The whim took me to try and become a little better acquainted with “William Markwick, Esq., F.L.S.,” who had himself seen the Sphinx stellatarum inserting its proboscis into the nectary of a flower while “keeping constantly on the wing.” There seemed to be something in common, just then, between myself and the Sphinx. + 

I pressed my wainscot bell. After an unusual delay in a drastically regulated household, the door behind me gently opened. I began simpering directions over my shoulder in the Percy way with servants⁠—and presently realized that all was not quite as it should be. I turned to look, and saw thrust in at the doorway an apparently bodiless, protuberant head, with black, buttony eyes on either side a long, long nose. Then the remainder of this figure squeezed reluctantly in. It was Adam Waggett. + 

Guy Fawkes himself, caught lantern in hand among his powder barrels, must have looked like Adam Waggett at this moment. For a while I could only return his stare from the midst of a vortex of memories. When at last I found my tongue and inquired peremptorily how he came there, and what he was doing in the house, he broke into a long, gurgling, strangulated guffaw of laughter. I was already in a sour temper⁠—in spite of the sweetness of Selborne. As a boy he had been my acute aversion; and here he was a grown man and as doltish and ludicrous as when he had roared at me in the moonlight from outside the kitchen window at Stonecote. His stupidity and disrespect made me almost inarticulate with rage. + 

Maybe the foolish creature, feeling as strange as a cat in a new house, was only expressing his joy and affection at sight of a familiar face. But I had no time to consider motives. In a fever of apprehension that his noise might be overheard, my one thought now was to bring him to his senses. I shook my fists at him! and stamped my foot on the Turkey carpet⁠—as if in snow. He watched me in a stupefaction of admiration, but at length his face solemnified, and he realized that my angry gestures were not intended for his amusement. + 

His mouth stood open, he shook his head, and, unless my eyes deceived me, set back his immense ears. + 

“Beg pardon, miss, I’m sure,” he stuttered, “it was the sc-hock, and you inside the book there, and the old times like; and even though they was telling me that there was such a⁠—such a young lady in the house.⁠ ⁠… But I won’t utter a word, miss, not me. Only,” he stared round at the closed door and lowered his voice to an even huskier whisper, “except to tell you that Pollie’s doing very nicely, and whenever I sees her⁠—well, miss, that thunderstorm and the old cow!” + 

At this his features gathered together for another outburst, which I succeeded in stifling only by warning him that so long as he remained at Mrs. Monnerie’s he must completely forget the old cow and the thunderstorm, and never address me in company, or even glance in my direction if we happened to be together in the same room. + 

“Mrs. Monnerie would be extremely angry, Adam, to hear you laughing in the library; and I am anxious that you should be a credit to Lyndsey in your new situation.” + 

“But you rang, miss⁠—at least the library did,” he replied, now thoroughly contrite, “and Mr. Marvell said, ‘You go along, there, Waggett, second door right, first staircase,’ so I come.” + 

“Yes,” I said, “but it was a mistake. A mistake, you understand. Now go away; and remember!” + 

A few minutes afterwards, Marvell himself discreetly entered the room; merely, as it would appear, to adjust the angles of a copy of the Spectator that lay on the table. + 

“It’s very close this morning,” I remarked, with as much dignity as I could muster. + 

“It is indeed, miss,” said Marvell, stooping sedately to examine my bell-push. He rose and brushed his fingers. + 

“They say, miss, the electricity gets into the wires, when thunder’s in the air. A wonderful invention, but not, as I am told, entirely independent of changes in the weather. I hope, miss, you haven’t been disturbed.⁠ ⁠…” + 

When Susan, even paler and quieter than usual, presently looked into the library, she found its occupant still on the floor and brooding over the browns and greys, the roses and ochres, of a complete congregation of Sphingidae. She stooped over me, sprawling in so ungainly a fashion across my book. + 

“Moths, this morning? What a very learned person you will become.” Her voice was a little flat, yet tender; but I was still in the sulks, and made no answer. + 

“I suppose,” she began again, as if listlessly, and straying over to the window, “I suppose it is very pleasant for you, seeing so much of your friend, Miss Bowater?” + 

Caution whispered a warning, and I tried to wriggle out of an answer by remarking that Fanny’s mother was the kindest woman in the whole world. + 

“Where is she now?” + 

“In Buenos Aires.” + 

“Really? How curious family traits are. The very moment I saw Miss Bowater I was quite certain that she was intended for an adventurous life; and didn’t you say that her father was an officer in the merchant service? What is he like?” + 

“Mr. Bowater? He died⁠—out there, only a week or two ago.” + 

“How very, very sad,” breathed Susan. “And for Miss Bowater. I never even guessed from her manner that she was in trouble of that kind. And that, I suppose, shows a sort of courage. You were perfectly right; she is lovely and clever. The face a little hard, don’t you think, but very clever. She seems to be prepared for what Aunt Alice is going to say long before she says it. And I, you know, sometimes don’t notice even the sting till⁠—till the buzzing is over.” She paused. “And you were able to make a real friend of her?” + 

Susan had not the patience to wait until I could sort out an answer to this question. “I don’t want to be intrusive,” she went on hurriedly, “to⁠—to ask horrid questions; but is it true, you dear thing, that you may some day be leaving us?” + 

“Leaving you?” I echoed, my thoughts crouching together like chicks under a hen. + 

The reply came softly and reluctantly in that great cistern of air. + 

“Why, I understood⁠—to be married.” + 

I leant heavily on my hands, seeing not the plumes and colours of the Sphinxes that swam up at me from the page, but, as if in a mist between them and me, the softly smiling face of Fanny. At last I managed to overcome the slight physical sickness that had swept over me. “Susan”; I said, “if a friend betrayed the very soul out of your body, what would you do? where would you go?” + 

“Betray! I, my dear?” and she broke into a confused explanation. + 

It was a remark of Percy’s she had been referring to, a silly, trivial remark, not, she was sure, intended maliciously. Why, everyone teased everyone. Didn’t she know it? And especially about the things that were most personal, “and, well, sacred.” It was nothing. Just that; and she should not have repeated it. + 

“Tell me exactly, please,” said I. + 

“Well, Aunt Alice was talking of marriage; and Miss Bowater smiled. And Aunt Alice⁠—you know her mocking way⁠—asked how, at her age⁠—Miss Bowater’s⁠—she had learned to look at the same time both charming and cynical. ‘Don’t forget, my dear,’ they were her very words, ‘that the cynicism wears the longer.’ But Miss Bowater laughed, and changed the subject by asking if she could do anything for your headache. It was the afternoon, you remember, when you were lying down. That was all.” + 

“And Mr. Maudlen?” + 

The fair cheek reddened. “Oh, Percy made a joke⁠—about you. Just one of his usual horrid jokes. My dear”⁠—she came and knelt down beside me and laid her gentle hand on my shoulder; “don’t look so⁠—so awful. It’s only how things go.” + 

I drew the hand down. It smelled as fresh and sweet as jessamine. + 

“Don’t bother about me, Susan,” I said coldly. “Just leave me to my moths. I could show you scorpions and hornets ten times more dangerous than a mere Death’s Head. You don’t suppose I care? Why, as you say, even God has His little joke with some of us. I’m quite used to it.” + 

“Don’t, don’t,” she implored me. “You are overtired, you poor little thing. You go on reading and reading. Why, your teeth are chattering.” + 

A faint brazen reverberation from out of the distance increased in intensity and died away. It was Adam performing on the gong. Susan had tried to be kind to me, to treat me as if I were a normal fellow-being. I pressed the cool fingers to my lips. + 

“There, Susan,” I said, with cheerful mockery, “except for my father and mother, I do believe you are the first life-size or any-size person I have ever kissed. A midget’s gratitude!” + 

Ever so slightly the fingers constricted beneath my touch. No doubt there was a sensation of the spidery in my embrace. + 

XLI + 

But a devil of defiance had entered into me. With a face as snakily sweet as I could make it, I made my daintiest bow to Mrs. Monnerie’s guests⁠—to Lord Chiltern, a tall, stiffish man, who blinked at our introduction almost as solemnly and distastefully as had Mrs. Bowater’s Henry, and to Lady Diana Templeton. A glance at this lady reminded me spitefully of an old suspicion of mine that Mrs. Monnerie usually invited her duller friends to luncheon and the clever to dinner. Not that she failed to enjoy the dull ones, but it was in a different way. + 

A long, gilded Queen Anne mirror hung opposite my high chair, so that whenever I glanced across I caught sight not only of myself with cheeks like carnations above my puffed blue gown, but also of Adam Waggett. Ever and again his red hand was thrust over my shoulder⁠—the hand that had held the wren. And I was so sick at heart⁠—on yet another wren’s behalf⁠—that I could hardly repress a shudder. Poor Adam; whenever I think of him it is of a good, yet weak and silly man. He has found his Eden, so I have heard, in New Zealand now, and I hope he has forgiven my little share in his life. + 

Throughout that dull luncheon my tongue went mincing on and on⁠—in sheer desperation lest anyone should detect the state of mind I was in. With pale eyes Percy sniggered over his soup. Susan was silent and self-conscious. Captain Valentine frowned and nibbled his small moustache. Lady Diana Templeton smiled like a mauve-pink snapdragon, and Mrs. Monnerie led me on. It was my last little success. Luncheon over, I was helped down from my chair, and allowed “to run away.” + 

What was it Lord Chiltern was saying? I paused on the threshold: “An exquisite little performance. But isn’t it a little selfish to hide her light under your admirable bushel, Mrs. Monnerie? The stage, now?” + 

“The stage!” exclaimed Mrs. Monnerie in consternation. “The child’s as proud as Lucifer. She would faint at the very suggestion. You have heard her deliciously sharp little tongue, but her tantrums! Still, she’s a friendly and docile little creature, and I am very well satisfied with her.” + 

“And not merely that”; paced on the rather official voice. “I was noticing that something in the eyes. Almost disconcertingly absent yet penetrating. She thinks. She comes and goes in them. I noticed the same peculiarity in poor Willie Arbuthnot’s. And this little creature is scarcely more than a child.” + 

“I think it is perfectly sad, Lord Chiltern,” broke in a reedy, vibrating voice. “In some circumstances it would be tragic. It’s a mercy she does not realize⁠ ⁠… habit, you know.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Listeners seldom hear such good things of themselves. Why, then, was it so furious an eavesdropper that hastened away with a face and gesture worthy of a Sarah Siddons! + 

No: my box remained locked. Yet, thought I, as I examined its contents, any dexterous finger could have opened that tiny lock⁠—with a hairpin. And how else could my secret have been discovered? Fleming or Fanny⁠—or both of them: it maddened me to think of them in collusion. I would take no more risks. I tore Mr. Anon’s letter into fragments, and these again into bits yet smaller, until they were almost like chaff. These I collected together and put into an envelope, which I addressed in sprawling capitals to Miss Fanny Bowater, at No. 2. + 

Then for a sombre half-hour I communed intensely at the window with my Tank. It was hot and taciturn company⁠—not a breath of air stirred my silk window-blind⁠—yet it managed to convey a few home truths, and even to increase the light a little in which I could look at the “bushel.” There were “mercies,” I suppose. Out of the distance rolled the vague reverberation of the enormous city. I watched the sparrows, and they me. When the time came for my afternoon walk, I put on my hat, with eyes fixed on my letter, and, finally⁠—left it behind me. + 

Was it for discretion’s sake, or in shame? I cannot say, but I remember that during my slow descent to the empty hall I kept my eyes fixed with peculiar malignity on the milk-white figure of a Venus (not life-size, thank Heaven), who had been surprised apparently in the very act of entering the water for a bathe. Why I singled her out for contempt I cannot say; for she certainly looked a good deal more natural and modest than many of the fine ladies who heedlessly passed her by. It was merely my old problem of the Social Layers over again. And my mind was in such a state of humiliation and discomfort that I hadn’t the energy even to smile at a marble goddess. + 

Fanny was awaiting me on my return. A strand of hair was looped demurely and old-fashionedly round each small ear; her clear, unpowdered skin had the faint sheen of a rose. She stood, still and shimmering, in the height of pleasant spirits, yet, I thought, watchful and furtive through it all. She had come, she said, to congratulate me on my “latest conquest.” + 

Mrs. Monnerie, she told me, had been pleased with my entertainment of the late First Commissioner of⁠—was it Good Works? But I must beware. “Once a coquette, Midgetina, soon quite heartless,” she twitted me. + 

To which I called sourly, as I stood drying my hands, that pretty compliments must be judged by where they come from. + 

“Come from, indeed,” laughed Fanny. “He’s a positive Peer of the Realm, and baths, my dear, every morning in the Fount of Honours. You wouldn’t be so flippant if⁠ ⁠… hallo! what’s this? A letter⁠—addressed to me! Where on earth did this come from?” + 

Heels to head, a sudden heat swept over me. “Oh,” said I hollowly, “that’s nothing, Fanny. Only a little joke. And now you are here⁠—But surely,” I hurried on, “you don’t really like that starched-up creature?” + 

But Fanny was holding up my envelope between both her thumbs and forefingers, and steadily smiling at me, over its margin. “A joke, Midgetina; and one of your very own. How exciting. And how bulgy. May I open it? I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” + 

“Please, Fanny, I have changed my mind. Let me have it. I don’t feel like jokes now.” + 

“But honestly, I do. Some jokes have such a deliciously serious side. Besides, as you have just come in, why didn’t this go out with you?” To which I replied stubbornly that it was not her letter; that I had thought better of it; and that she had no right to question me if I didn’t want to answer. + 

“I see.” Her voice had glided steadily up the scale of suavity. “It’s a bit more of the dead past, is it? And you don’t like the⁠—the fragrance. But surely, if we are really talking about rights⁠—and, according to my experience, there are none too many of them knocking about in this world⁠—surely I have the right to ask what pulpy mysteries are enclosed in an envelope addressed to me in what appears to be a feigned ca⁠—calligraphy? Look. I am putting the thing on the floor so that we shall be on⁠—well⁠—fairly equal terms. Even your sensitive Sukie could not be more considerate than that, could she? All I want to know is, what’s inside that envelope? If you refuse to say, well and good. I shall retire to my maidenly couch and feed on the blackest suppositions.” + 

It was a cul-de-sac; and the only thing to do was to turn back boldly and get out of it. + 

“Well, Fanny; I have told you that I thought better of sending it. But I am not ashamed. Even if I am wrong, I suppose you are at liberty to have your little jokes too, and so is Percy Maudlen. It’s a letter, torn up; that’s all.” + 

“A letter⁠—so I guessed. Who from?” + 

I gazed at her silently. + 

“Yes?” + 

“It’s hateful of you, Fanny.⁠ ⁠… From the hunchback.” + 

Her astonishment, surely, could not have been pretence. “And what the devil, you dear, stammering little midgelet, has your miserable little hunchback to do with me? Why send his scrawls to me⁠—and in bits?” + 

“Because,” said I, “I thought you had been making fun of him and me to⁠—the others.” + 

The light hands lifted themselves; the dark head tilted a little back and askew. “What a roundabout route,” she sighed. But her face was false to the smooth, scornful accents. “So you suspected me of spying on you? I see. And gentle Susan Monnerie was kind enough to smear a little poison on the fangs. Well, Midgetina love, I tell you this. It’s safer sometimes to lose your reputation than your temper. But there’s a limit⁠—” + 

“Hush,” I whispered, for I had sharper ears than Fanny even when rage had not deafened her own. I pounced on the envelope⁠—but only just in time. + 

“It’s Mr. Percy, miss,” announced Fleming, “and may he come in?” + 

“Hallo!” said that young man, lounging greyly into view, “a bad penny, Miss M. I happened to be passing Buszard’s just now, and there was the very thing! Miss Bowater says you have a sweet tooth, and they really are rather neat.” He had brought me the daintiest little box of French doll bonbons. I glared at it; I glared at him⁠—hardly in the mood for any more of his little jokes⁠—not even one tied up with pale-blue ribbon. + 

“There’s another thing,” he went on. “Susan told us that your birthday was coming along⁠—August 25th, isn’t it? And I have proposed a Grand Birthday Party, sort of general rag. Miss M. in the Chair. Don’t you think it’s a ripping idea of mine, Miss Bowater?” + 

“Most ripping,” said Fanny, meeting his long, slow, sneaking glance with a slight and seemingly involuntary lift of her narrow shoulder. A long look I could not share passed between them; I might have been a toy on the floor. + 

“But you don’t look positively in the pink,” he turned to me. “Now, does she? Late hours, eh? You look crumpled, doesn’t she? Cherry, too: we must have in another Vet.” The laugh died on his long lips. His eyes roved stealthily from point to point of the basking afternoon room, then once more sluggishly refastened on Fanny. I sat motionless, watching his every turn and twist, and repeating rapidly to myself, “Go away, my friend; go away, go away.” Some nerve in him must have taken the message at last, or he found Fanny’s silence uneasy. He squinnied a glinting, curious look at me, and as jauntily as self-consciousness permitted, took his departure. + 

The door shut. His presence fainted out into a phantasm, and that into nothing at all. And for sole evidence of him basked on my table, beneath a thread of sunlight, his blue-ribboned box. + 

“Isn’t he a ninny?” sighed Fanny. “And yet, my dear: there⁠—but for the grace of God⁠—goes Mr. Fanny Bowater.” + 

Her anger had evaporated. There stood my familiar Fanny again, slim as a mast, her light eyes coldly shining, her bearing, even the set of her foot showing already a faint gilding of Mrs. Monnerie. She laughed⁠—looking straight across at me, as if with a challenge. + 

“Yes, my dear, it’s quite true. I’m not a bit cross now. Milk and Honey. So you see even a fool may be a lightning conductor. I forgive,” she pouted a kiss from the tips of her fingers, “I forget.” + 

And then she was gone too, and I alone. What an easy, consoling thing⁠—not to care. But though Fanny might forgive, she must have found it unamusing to forget. The next evening’s post brought me an exquisitely written little fable, signed “F. B.,” and entitled Asteroida and the Yellow Dwarf. I couldn’t enjoy it very much; though no doubt it must have been exceedingly entertaining when read aloud. + 

Still Fanny did not care. While I myself was like those railway lines under the green bank I had seen on my journey to Lyme Regis. A day’s neglect, a night’s dews, and I was stained thick with rust. A dull and heedless wretchedness took possession of me. The one thought that kept recurring in every instant of solitude, and most sharply in those instants which pounced on me in the midst of strangers, was, how to escape. + 

I put away the envelope and its contents into my box again. And late that night, when I was secure from interruption, I wrote to Wanderslore. Nibbling a pen is no novelty to me, but never in all my life have I spent so blank and hideous an hour merely in the effort to say No to one simple question so that it should sound almost as pleasant as Yes, and far more unselfish. “Throw the stone,” indeed; when my only desire was to heal the wound it might make. + 

Thank goodness my letter was kinder than I felt. My candelabra burned stilly on. Cold, in the blues, I stood in my dressing-gown and spectacling my eyes with my hands, looked out of the chill glass into the London night. Only one high garret window shone out in the dark face of the houses.⁠ ⁠… Who, where, was Willie Arbuthnot with the peculiar eyes? Had Lord Chiltern a tank on his roof⁠—his backyard? What a fool I had been to abandon myself and come here. If they only knew how I despised them. And the whole house asleep. So much I despised them that not until I was dressing the following morning did I stoop into my Indian mirror to see if I could discover what Lord Chiltern had meant. + 

During the next few weeks Mrs. Monnerie⁠—with ample provocation⁠—almost yawned at sight of me. In a bitter instant of rebellion our eyes met. She detected the “ill-wish” in mine, and was so much taken aback by it that I should hardly have recognized the set face that glared at me as hers at all. Well, the fancier had wearied of her fancy⁠—that was all. If I had been just an ordinary visitor, she would soon have washed her hands of me. But I was notorious, and not so easily exchanged as bronchitic Cherry had been for her new Pekinese, Plum. + 

Possibly, too, the kind of aversion she now felt against me was a closer bond than even virtuosity or affection. She would sit with a sullen stare under her heavy eyelids watching me grow more and more heated and clumsy over my scrap of embroidery or my game of Patience. Meanwhile Chakka would crack his nut, and with stagnant eye sidle thievishly up and down the bars of his cage; while Plum gobbled up dainties or snored on his crimson cushion. We three. + 

Usually I was left pretty much alone; and what plans Mrs. Monnerie was turning over to dispose of me were known only to herself. What to do; where to hide; how to “make myself small” during those torpid August days, I hardly knew. My one desire was to keep out of sight. One afternoon, I remember, after brooding for some hours under a dusty lilac bush in the Square garden, I strayed off⁠—my eyes idly glancing from straw to hairpin to dead match in the dust⁠—down a narrow deserted side street that led to a Mews. A string of washing hung in the sunlight from the windows. Skirting a small public house, from which the smell of beer and spirits vapoured into the sunshine, I presently found myself in a black-green churchyard among tombstones. + 

A clear shadow slanted across the porch, the door of the church stood open, and after pausing for a moment on its flagstones, I went in. It was empty. Stone faces gazed sightlessly from its walls. Two red sanctuary lamps hung like faint rubies in the distant chancel. I dragged out a cushion and sat down under the font. The thin, cloudy fragrance that hung in the gloom of the coloured windows stole in through my nostrils, drugged my senses. Propping my chin on my hands, I looked up through the air into the dark roof. A pendulum ticked slowly from on high. Quiet began to steal over me⁠—long centuries of solitude had filled this vacancy as with a dream. + 

It was as if some self within me were listening to the unknown⁠—but to whom? I could not answer; I might as well have been born a pagan. Was this church merely the house of a God? There were gods and temples all over the world. Was it a house of the God? Or only of “their” God? In a sense I knew it was also my God’s, but how much more happily confident of His secret presence I had been in wild-grown Wanderslore. Did this mean that I was actually so much alone in my world as to be different from all other human beings? + 

A fluttering panic swept through my mind at the muffled thumping of the invisible pendulum. I had forgotten that time never ceased to be wasting. And the past stretched its panorama before my eyes: No. 2; the public house with the solitary thinking man I had seen, pot in hand, staring into the sawdust; and this empty, cavernous silence. Then back and back⁠—Lyme Regis, Mrs. Bowater’s⁠—and Fanny, Lyndsey, my mother and father, the garden. No sylphs of the air, no trancing music out of the waters now! It was as if the past were surrounded with a great wall; and the future clear and hard as glass. You might explore the past in memory: you couldn’t scale its invisible walls. + 

And there was Mr. Crimble⁠—an immeasurable distance away; yet he had still the strange power to arrest me, to look out on me in my path. Must the future be all of its piece? I stopped thinking again, and my eyes wandered over my silk skirt and shoes. + 

My ghost! there was no doubt I was an exceedingly small human being. It may sound absurd, but I had never vividly realized it before. And how solemnly sitting there⁠—like a spider in wait for flies. “For goodness’ sake, Miss M.,” I said to myself, “cheer up. You are being deadly dull company⁠—always half afraid. They daren’t really do anything to you, you know. Face it out.” And even while I was muttering, I was reading the words cut into a worn tombstone at my feet: “Jenetta Parker”⁠—only two-and-twenty, a year older than I. Yet she had lain here for two whole centuries and more. And beneath her name I spelled out her epitaph:⁠— + 

“Ah, Stranger, breathe a sigh: + 

For, where I lie, + 

Is but a handful of bright Beauty cast: + 

It was; and now is past.” + 

I repeated the words mechanically again and again; and, as if in obedience to her whisper, a much more niggardly handful of none too bright a beauty did breathe a sigh and a prayer⁠—part pity, part melancholy, and all happiness and relief. I kissed my hand to Jenetta; crossed myself and bowed to the altar⁠—dulled gems of light the glass⁠—and emerged into the graveyard. A lamp had been lit. An old man was shuffling along behind me; he had come to lock up the church. For an instant I debated whether or not to scuttle off down the green-bladed cobbles of the Mews and⁠—trust my luck. No: the sight of a Punch and Judy man gobbling some food out of a newspaper at the further corner scared me out of that little enterprise. Dusk was settling; and I edged back as fast as I could to No. 2. + 

But it did me good⁠—that visit. It was as if I had been looking back and up at my own small skull on a high shelf in some tranquil and dingy old laboratory⁠—a few bottles, a spider’s web, and an occasional glint of moonlight. How very brief the animation for so protracted a peace. + 

XLII + 

Susan’s visits to her aunt were now less frequent. Percy’s multiplied. Duty seemed to have become a pleasure to him. Mrs. Monnerie’s gaze would rest on him with a drowsy vigilance which it was almost impossible to distinguish from mere vacancy of mind. He was fortunate in being her only nephew; unfortunate in being himself, and the son of a sister to whom Mrs. Monnerie seemed very little attached. Still, he appeared to be doing his best to cultivate his aunt’s graces, would meander “in attendance” round and round the Square’s square garden, while Fanny’s arm had now almost supplanted Mrs. Monnerie’s ebony cane. When Mrs. Monnerie was too much fatigued for this mild exercise, or otherwise engaged, there was still my health to consider. At least Fanny seemed to think so. But since Percy’s conversation had small attractions for me, it was far rather he who enjoyed the experience; while I sat and stared at nothing under a tree. + 

At less than nothing⁠—for I was staring, as usual, chiefly at myself. I seemed to have lost the secret of daydreaming. And if the quantity of aversion that looked out of my eyes had matched its quality, those piebald plane-trees and poisonous laburnums would have been scorched as if with fire. I shall never forget those interminable August days, besieged by the roar and glare and soot and splendour and stare of London. All but friendless, absolutely penniless, I had nothing but bits of clothes for bribes to keep Fleming from mutiny. I shrank from making her an open enemy; though I knew, as time went on, that she disrelished me more and more. She would even keep her nose averted from my clothes. + 

As for Fanny, to judge from her animation when Susan and Captain Valentine broke in upon us, I doubt if anybody less complacent than Percy would not have realized that she was often bored. She would look at him with head on one side, as if she had been painted like that forever and ever in a picture. She could idly hide behind her beauty, and Percy might as well have gone hunting Echo or a rainbow. She could make corrosive remarks in so seducing a voice that the poor creature hardly knew where the smart came from. He would exclaim, “Oh, I say, Miss Bowater!” and gape like a goldfish. Solely, perhaps, to have someone to discuss herself with, Fanny so far forgave and forgot my shortcomings as to pay me an occasional visit, and had yawned how hideously expensive she found it to live with the rich. But the only promise of help I could make was beyond any possibility of performance. I promised, none the less, for my one dread was that she should guess what straits I was in for money. + 

It is all very well to accuse Percy Maudlen of goldfishiness. What kind of fish was I? During the few months of my life at Mrs. Monnerie’s⁠—until, that is, Fanny’s arrival⁠—she had transported her “Queen Bee,” as she sometimes called me, to every conceivable social function and ceremony, except a deathbed and a funeral. Why had I not played my cards a little more skilfully? Had not Messrs. de la Rue designed a pack as if expressly for me, and for my own particular little game of Patience? If perhaps I had shown more sense and less sensibility; and had not been, as I suppose, in spite of all my airs and flauntings, such an inward young woman, what altitudes I might have scaled. Mrs. Monnerie, indeed, had once made me a promise to present me at Court in the coming May. It is true that this was a distinction that had been enjoyed by many of my predecessors in my own particular “line”⁠—but I don’t think my patroness would have dished me up in a pie. + 

That being so, my proud bosom might at this very moment be heaving beneath a locket adorned with the royal monogram in seed pearls, and inscribed, “To the Least of her Subjects from the Greatest of Queens.” Why, I might have been the most talked-of and photographed débutante of the season. But I must beware of sour grapes. “There was once a Diogenes whom the gods shut up in a tub.”⁠—Poor Mr. Wagginhorne, he had been, after all, comparatively frugal with his azaleas. + 

In all seriousness I profited far too little by Mrs. Monnerie’s generosities, by my “chances,” while I was with her. I just grew hostile, and so half-blind. Many of her friends, of course, were merely wealthy or fashionable, but others were just natural human beings. As Fanny had discovered, she not only delighted in people that were pleasant to look at. She enjoyed also what, I suppose, is almost as rare, intelligence. + 

The society “Beauties,” now? To be quite candid, and I hope without the least tinge of jealousy, I think they liked the look of me⁠—well, no better than I liked the look of excessively handsome men. These exotics of either sex reminded me of petunias⁠—the headachy kind, that are neither red nor blue, but a mixture. I always felt when I looked at them that they knew they were making me dizzy. Yet, as a matter of fact, I could hardly see their beauty for their clothes. It must, of course, be extremely difficult to endure pure admiration. True, I never remember even the most tactful person examining me for the first time without showing some little symptom of discomposure. But that’s a very different thing. + 

There was, however, another kind of beauty which I loved with all my heart. It is difficult to express what I mean, but to see a woman whose face seemed to be the picture of a dream of herself, or a man whose face was absolutely the showing of his own mind⁠—I never wearied of that. Or, at any rate, I do not now; in looking back. + 

So much for outsides. Humanity, our old cook, Mrs. Ballard, used to say, is very like a veal and ham pie: its least digestible part is usually the crust. I am only an amateur veal and ham pieist; and the fact remains that I experienced just as much difficulty with what are called “clever” people. They were like Adam Waggett in his Sunday clothes⁠—a little too much of something to be quite all there. I firmly believe that what one means is the best thing to say, and the very last thing, however unaffected, most of these clever people said was seemingly what they meant. Their conversation rarely had more than an intellectual interest. You asked for a penny, and they gave you what only looked like a threepenny bit. + 

Perhaps this is nothing but prejudice, but I have certainly always got on very much better with stupid people. Chiefly, perhaps, because I could share experiences with them; and the latest thoughts did not matter so much. Clever men’s⁠—and women’s⁠—experiences all seem to be in their heads; and when I have seen a rich man clamber through the eye of a needle, as poor Mr. Crimble used to say, I shall keep my eyes open for a clever one attempting the same feat. It had been one of my absurd little amusements at Mrs. Bowater’s to imagine myself in strange places⁠—keeping company with a dishevelled comet in the cold wilds of space, or walking about in the furnaces of the Sun, like Shadrach and Abednego. Not so now. Yet if I had had the patience, and the far better sense, to fix my attention on anyone I disliked at Mrs. Monnerie’s so as to enter in; no doubt I should so much have enlarged my inward self as to make it a match at last even for poor Mr. Daniel Lambert. + 

On the other hand, I sometimes met people at No. 2, or when I was taken out by Mrs. Monnerie, whose faces looked as if they had been on an almost unbelievably long journey⁠—and one not merely through this world, though that helps. I did try to explore those eyes, and mouths, and wrinkles; and solitudes, stranger than any comet’s, I would find myself in at times. Alas, they paid me extremely little attention; though I wonder they did not see in my eyes how hungry I was for it. They were as mysterious as what is called genius. And what would I not give to have set eyes on Sir Isaac Newton, or Nelson, or John Keats⁠—all three of them comparatively little men. + 

However absurdly pranked up with conceit I might be, I knew in my heart that outwardly, at any rate, I was nothing much better than a curio. To care for me was therefore a really difficult feat. And apart from there being very little time for anything at Mrs. Monnerie’s, I never caught anyone making the attempt. When the novelty of me had worn off, I used to amuse myself by listening to Mrs. Monnerie’s friends talking to one another⁠—discussing plays and pictures and music and so on⁠—anything that was new, and, of course, each other. Often on these occasions I hardly knew whether I was on my head or my heels. + 

Books had always been to me just a part of my life; and music very nearly my death. However much I forgot of it, I wove what I could remember of my small reading round myself, so to speak; and I am sure it made the cocoon more comfortable. As often as not these talkers argued about books as if their authors had made them⁠—certainly not “out of their power and love”⁠—but merely for their readers to pick to pieces; and about “beauty,” too, as if it were something you could eat with a spoon. As for poetry, one might have guessed from what they said that it meant no more than⁠—well, its “meaning.” As if a butterfly were a chrysalis. I have sometimes all but laughed out. It was so contrary to my own little old-fashioned notions. Certainly it was not my mother’s way. + 

But there, what presumption this all is. I had never been to school, never been out of Kent, had never “done” anything, nor “been” anything, except⁠—and that half-heartedly⁠—myself. No wonder I was censorious. + 

If I could have foreseen how interminably difficult a task it would prove to tack these memoirs together, I am sure I should have profited a little more by the roarings of my fellow lions. As a matter of fact I used merely to watch them sipping their tea, and devouring their cake amid a languishing circle of admirers, and to wonder if they found the cage as tedious as I did. If they noticed me at all, they were usually polite enough; but⁠—like the Beauties⁠—inclined to be absent and restless in my company. So the odds were against me. I had one advantage over them, however, for when I was no longer a novelty, I could occasionally slip in, unperceived, behind an immense marquetry bureau. There in the dust I could sit at peace, comparing its back with its front, and could enjoy at leisure the conversation beyond. + 

Nevertheless, there was one old gentleman, with whom I really made friends. He was a bachelor, and was not only the author of numbers of books, but when he was a little boy had been presented by Charles Dickens himself with a copy of David Copperfield, and had actually sat on the young novelist’s knee. No matter who it was he might be talking to, he used to snap his fingers at me in the most exciting fashion whenever we saw each other in the distance, and we often shared a quiet little talk together (I standing on a highish chair, perhaps, and he squatting beside me, his hands on his knees) in some corner of Mrs. Monnerie’s enormous drawing-room, well out of the mob. + 

I once ventured to ask him how to write. + 

His face grew very solemn. “Lord have mercy upon me,” he said, “to write, my dear young lady. Well, there is only one recipe I have ever heard of: Take a quart or more of lifeblood; mix it with a bottle of ink, and a teaspoonful of tears; and ask God to forgive the blots.” Then he laughed at me, and polished his eyeglasses with his silk pocket handkerchief. + 

I surveyed this grisly mixture without flinching, and laughed too, and said, tapping his arm with my fan: “But, dear Mr. ⸻, would you have me die of anaemia?” + 

And he said I was a dear, valuable creature, and, when next “Black Pudding Day” tempted us, we would collaborate. + 

Having heard his views, I was tempted to push on, and inquired as flatteringly as possible of a young portrait painter how he mixed his paints: “So as to get exactly the colours you want, you know?” + 

He gently rubbed one long-fingered hand over the other until there fell a lull in the conversation around us. “What I mix my paints with, Miss M.? Why⁠—merely with brains,” he replied. My old novelist had forgotten the brains. But I discovered in some book or other long afterwards that a still more celebrated artist had said that too; so I suppose the mot is traditional. + 

And last, how to “act”: for some mysterious reason I never asked any theatrical celebrity, male or female, how to do that? + 

More or less intelligent questions, I am afraid, are not the only shortcut to good, or even to polite, conversation. And I was such a dunce that I never really learned what topics are respectable, and whatnot. In consequence, I often amused Mrs. Monnerie’s friends without knowing why. They would exchange a kind of little ogling glance, or with a silvery peal of laughter like bells, cry, “How naive!” + 

How I detested the word. Naive⁠—it was simply my ill-bred earnestness. Still, I made one valuable discovery: that you could safely laugh or even titter at things which it was extremely bad manners to be serious about. What you could be serious about, without letting skeletons out of the cupboard⁠—that was the riddle. I had been brought up too privately ever to be able to answer it. + 

How engrossing it all would have been if only the Harrises could have trebled my income, and if Fanny had not known me so well. There was even a joy in the ladies who shook their lorgnettes at me as if I were deaf, or looked at me with their noses, as one might say, as if I were a bad or unsavoury joke. On my part, I could never succeed in forgetting that, in spite of appearances, they must be of flesh and blood, and therefore the prey of them, and of the World, and the Devil. So I used to amuse myself by imagining how they would look in their bones, or in rags, or in heaven, or as when they were children. Or again, by an effort of fancy I would reduce them, clothes and all, to my proportions; or even a little less. And though these little inward exercises made me absentminded, it made them ever so much more interesting and entertaining. + 

How I managed not to expire in what, for a country mouse, was extremely like living in a bottle of champagne, I don’t know. And if my silly little preferences suggest cynicism⁠—well, I may be smug enough, but I don’t, and won’t, believe I am a cynic. Remember I was young. Besides I love human beings, especially when they are very human, and I have even tried to forgive Miss M. her Miss M-ishness. How can I be a cynic if I have tried to do that? It is a far more difficult task than to make allowances for the poor, wretched, immortal waxwork creatures in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, or even for the gentleman naturalist who shot and stuffed Kent’s last golden oriole. + 

Nor have I ever, for more than a moment, shared with Lemuel Gulliver his none too nice disgust at the people of Brobdingnag, even at kindhearted Glumdalclitch. Am I not myself⁠—not one of the quarrelsome “Fair Folks of the Woods”⁠—but a Yahoo? Gulliver, of course, was purposely made unaccustomed to the gigantic; while I was born and bred, though not to such an extreme, in its midst. And habit is second nature, or, as an old Lyndsey proverb goes, “There’s nowt like eels for eeliness.” + 

I am, none the less, ever so thankful that neither my ears, nose, nor eyes, positively magnify, so to speak. I may be a little more sensitive to noises and smells than some people are, but that again is probably only because I was brought up so fresh and quiet and privately. I am far more backward than can be excused, and in some things abominably slow-witted. Whether or not my feelings are pretty much of the usual size, I cannot say. What is more to the point is that in some of my happiest moments my inward self seems to be as remote from my body as the Moon is from Greenland; and, at others⁠—even though that body weighs me down to the earth like a stone⁠—it is as if memory and consciousness stretched away into the ages, far, far beyond my green and dwindling Barrow on Chizzel Hill, and had shaken to the solitary night-cry of Creation, “Let there be Light.” + 

But enough and to spare of all this egotism. I must get back to my story. + 

XLIII + 

The fact is, Miss M.’s connection with good society was rapidly drawing to a close. My smoky little candle had long since begun to gutter and sputter and enwreathe itself in a winding sheet. It went out at last in a blaze of light. For once in his life Percy had conceived a notion of which his aunt cordially approved⁠—my Birthday Banquet. Heart and soul, all my follies and misdemeanours forgotten, she entered into this new device to give her Snippety, her Moppet, her Pusskinetta, her little Binbin, her Fairy, her Petite Sereine, an exquisite setting. + 

Invitations were sent out to the elect on inch-square cards embossed with my family crest and motto⁠—a giant, head and shoulders, brandishing a club, and Non Omnis Moriar. She not only postponed her annual departure from town, but, as did the great man in the parable, compelled her friends to come in. She exhausted her ingenuity on the menu. The great, on this occasion, were to feast on the tiny. A copy of it lies beside me now, though, unfortunately, I did not examine it when I sat down to dinner. Last, but not least, Percy’s pastrycooks, Messrs. Buszard, designed a seven-tiered birthday-cake, surrounded on its lowermost plateau by one-and-twenty sugar-figures, about a quarter life-size, and each of them bearing on high a silver torch. + 

Their names were inscribed on their sugar pediments: Lady Morgan (the Windsor Fairy); Queen Elizabeth’s Mrs. Tomysen; the Empress Julia’s Andromeda; the great little, little great Miss Billing of Tilbury; Anne Rouse and poor Ann Colling; the Sicilian Mlle. Caroline Crachami (who went to the anatomists); Nannette Stocker (thirty-three inches, thirty-three lbs. avoirdupois at thirty-three); the blessed and tender Anastasia Boruwlaski; Gaganini; the gentle Miss Selby of Bath; Alethea (the Guernsey Nymph); Madame Teresa (the Corsican Fairy); Mrs. Jeykll Skinner; the appalling Nono; Mrs. Anne Gibson (née Shepherd); and the rest. + 

It was a joke, none the worse, maybe, for being old; and Peter the Great must have turned in his grave in envy of Mrs. Monnerie’s ingenuity. + 

It may scarcely be believed, but I had become so hardened to such little waggeries that under the genial eye of Mrs. Monnerie I made the circuit of this cake with a smile; and even scolded her for omitting the redoubtable Mrs. Bellamy with her life-size family of nine. I criticized the images too, as not to be compared, even as sugar, with the alabaster William of Windsor and Blanche, in the Tower. + 

The truth is, when real revulsions of body and soul come, they come in a gush, all at once. Fleming, on the Night, was actually putting the last touches to my coiffure when suddenly, with a wicked curse, I turned from the great glass and announced my decision. Tiny tortoiseshell comb uplifted, she stood in the clear lustrousness looking in at my reflection, queer thoughts darting about in her eyes. At first she supposed it was but another fit of petulance. Then her hatred and disgust of me all but overcame her. + 

She quietly argued. I insisted. But she was mortally afraid of Mrs. Monnerie, and rather than deliver my message to her, sought out Susan. Poor Susan. She, too, was afraid: and it was her face rather than her love that won me over at last. Then she had to rush away to make what excuse she could for my unpunctuality. It thus came about that Mrs. Monnerie’s guests had already sat down to table, and were one and all being extremely amused by some story she was entertaining them with, when Marvell threw open the great mahogany doors for me, and I made my solitary entry. + 

In primrose silk, à la Pompadour, a wreath of tight-shut pimpernels in my hair⁠—it is just possible that Mrs. Monnerie suspected I had chosen to come in late like this merely for effect. But that would have been an even feebler exhibition of vanity than I was capable of. All her guests were known to me, even though only one of them was of my choosing; for Mrs. Bowater was in the Argentine, Sir Walter in France, Miss Fenne on her deathbed, Mr. Pellew in retreat, and Mr. Crimble in his grave. Fanny was my all. + 

She was sitting four or five chairs away from me on my left, between Percy (who had on his right hand a beautiful long-faced girl in turquoise green) and Captain Valentine. Further down, and on the other side of the table, sat Lady Maudlen⁠—a seal-like lady, who, according to Fanny, disapproved of me on religious grounds⁠—while I was on Mrs. Monnerie’s left, and next to Lord Chiltern. Alas, even my old friend the “Black Pudding” was too far distant to do more than twinkle “Courage!” at me, when our eyes met. + 

Recollections of that disastrous evening are clouded. So evil with dreams my nights had been that I hardly knew whether I was awake or asleep. But I recall the long perspective of the table, the beards, the busts, the pearls, the camellias and gardenias, the cornucopias, and that glistening Folly Castle, my Birthday Cake. Marvell is behind me, and Adam Waggett is ducketing in the luminous distance. The clatter of many tongues beats on my ear. Mrs. Monnerie murmurs and gently rocks. The great silver dishes dip and withdraw. Corks pop, and the fumes of meat and wine cloud into the air. In memory it is as if I myself were far away, as if I had read of the scene in a book. + 

But two moments stand vividly out of its unreality⁠—and each of them to my shame. A small, wreathed, silver-gilt dish was placed before me. Automatically I thrust my spoon into its jelly, and pecked at the flavourless morsels. Sheer nervousness had deprived me of my sense of taste. But there was something in Mrs. Monnerie’s sly silence, and Lord Chiltern’s solemn monocle, and Percy’s snigger, that set me speculating. + 

“Angelic Tomtitiska!” sighed Mrs. Monnerie, “I wager when she returns to Paradise, she will sit in a corner and forget to tune her harp.” + 

There was no shade of vexation in her voice, only amiable amusement; but those sitting near had overheard her little pleasantry, and smilingly watched me as, casting my eye down the menu⁠—Consommé aux Nids d’Hirondelles, Filets de Blanchailles à la Diable, Ailes de Caille aux petits pois Minnie Stratton, Sauterelles aux Caroubes Saint Jean, it was caught at last by a pretty gilt flourishing around the words, Suprême de Langues de Rossignols. This, then, was the dainty jest, the clou du repas. The faint gold words shimmered back at me. In an instant I was a child again at Lyndsey, lulling to sleep on my pillow amid the echoing songs of the nightingales that used to nest in its pleasant lanes. I sat flaming, my tongue clotted with disgust. I simply couldn’t swallow; and didn’t. But never mind. + 

This was my first mishap. Though her own appetite was capricious, ranging from an almost incredible voracity to a scrap of dry toast, nothing vexed Mrs. Monnerie so much as to see my poor, squeamish stomach revolting at the sight of meat. She drew up a naked shoulder against me, and the feast proceeded with its chief guest in the shade. Once I could soon have regained my composure. Now I languished, careless even of the expression on my face. Not even the little mincing smile Fanny always reserved for me in company could restore me, and it was at her whisper that Percy stole down and filled my acorn glass with a translucent green liquid which he had himself secured from the sideboard. I watched the slow, green flow of it from the lip of the decanter without a thought in my head. Lord Chiltern endeavoured to restore my drooping spirits. I had outrageously misjudged him. He was not one of Mrs. Monnerie’s stupid friends, and he really did his utmost to be kind to me. If he should ever read these words, may he be sure that Miss M. is grateful. But his kindness fell on stony ground. And when, at length, he rose to propose my health, I crouched beneath him shameful, haggard, and woebegone. + 

It was as minute a speech as was she whom it flattered, and far more graceful. Nothing, of course, would satisfy its audience when the toast had been honoured, but that Miss M. should reply. One single, desperate glance I cast at Mrs. Monnerie. She sat immovable as the Sphinx. There was no help for it. Knees knocking together, utterly tongue-tied, I stood up in my chair, and surveyed the two converging rows of smiling, curious faces. Despair gave me counsel. I stooped, raised my glass, and half in dread, half in bravado, tossed down its burning contents at a gulp. + 

The green syrup coursed along vein and artery like molten lead. A horrifying transparency began to spread over my mind. It seemed it had become in that instant empty and radiant as a dome of glass. All sounds hushed away. Things near faded into an infinite distance. Every face, glossed with light as if varnished, became lifeless, brutal, and inhuman, the grotesque caricature of a shadowy countenance that hung somewhere remote in memory, yet was invisible and irrevocable. In this dead moment⁠—the whole blazing scene like a nowhere of the imagination⁠—my wandering eyes met Fanny’s. She was softly languishing up at Captain Valentine, her fingers toying with a rose. And it seemed as though her once loved spirit cried homelessly out at me from space, as if for refuge and recognition; and a long-hidden flood broke bounds in my heart. All else forgotten, and obeying mechanically the force of long habit, I stepped up from my chair on to the table, and staggered towards her, upsetting, as I went, a shallow glass of bubbling wine. It reeked up in the air around me. + 

“Fanny, Fanny,” I called to her out of my swoon, “Ah, Fanny. Holy Dying, Holy Dying! Sauve qui peut!” With empty, shocking face, she started back, appalled, like a wounded snake. + 

“Oh!” she cried in horror into the sleep that was now mounting my body like a cloud, “oh!” Her hand swept out blindly in my direction as if to fend me off. At best my balance was insecure; and though the velvet petals of her rose scarcely grazed my cheek, the insane glaze of my mind was already darkening, I toppled and fell in a heap beside her plate. + 