“My daughter Irene,” said Mrs. Carstyle (she made it rhyme with
_tureen_), “has had no social advantages; but if Mr. Carstyle had
chosen--” she paused significantly and looked at the shabby sofa on
the opposite side of the fire-place as though it had been Mr. Carstyle.
Vibart was glad that it was not.
Mrs. Carstyle was one of the women who make refinement vulgar. She
invariably spoke of her husband as _Mr. Carstyle_ and, though she had
but one daughter, was always careful to designate the young lady by
name. At luncheon she had talked a great deal of elevating influences
and ideals, and had fluctuated between apologies for the overdone mutton
and affected surprise that the bewildered maid-servant should have
forgotten to serve the coffee and liqueurs _as usual_.
Vibart was almost sorry that he had come. Miss Carstyle was still
beautiful--almost as beautiful as when, two days earlier, against the
leafy background of a June garden-party, he had seen her for the first
time--but her mother’s expositions and elucidations cheapened her beauty
as sign-posts vulgarize a woodland solitude. Mrs. Carstyle’s eye was
perpetually plying between her daughter and Vibart, like an empty cab in
quest of a fare. Miss Carstyle, the young man decided, was the kind
of girl whose surroundings rub off on her; or was it rather that Mrs.
Carstyle’s idiosyncrasies were of a nature to color every one within
reach? Vibart, looking across the table as this consolatory alternative
occurred to him, was sure that they had not colored Mr. Carstyle; but
that, perhaps, was only because they had bleached him instead. Mr.
Carstyle was quite colorless; it would have been impossible to guess his
native tint. His wife’s qualities, if they had affected him at all, had
acted negatively. He did not apologize for the mutton, and he wandered
off after luncheon without pretending to wait for the diurnal coffee
and liqueurs; while the few remarks that he had contributed to the
conversation during the meal had not been in the direction of abstract
conceptions of life. As he strayed away, with his vague oblique step,
and the stoop that suggested the habit of dodging missiles, Vibart,
who was still in the age of formulas, found himself wondering what life
could be worth to a man who had evidently resigned himself to travelling
with his back to the wind; so that Mrs. Carstyle’s allusion to her
daughter’s lack of advantages (imparted while Irene searched the house
for an undiscoverable cigarette) had an appositeness unintended by the
speaker.
“If Mr. Carstyle had chosen,” that lady repeated, “we might have had
our city home” (she never used so small a word as town) “and Ireen could
have mixed in the society to which I myself was accustomed at her age.”
Her sigh pointed unmistakably to a past when young men had come to
luncheon to see _her_.
The sigh led Vibart to look at her, and the look led him to the
unwelcome conclusion that Irene “took after” her mother. It was
certainly not from the sapless paternal stock that the girl had drawn
her warm bloom: Mrs. Carstyle had contributed the high lights to the
picture.
Mrs. Carstyle caught his look and appropriated it with the complacency
of a vicarious beauty. She was quite aware of the value of her
appearance as guaranteeing Irene’s development into a fine woman.
“But perhaps,” she continued, taking up the thread of her explanation,
“you have heard of Mr. Carstyle’s extraordinary hallucination. Mr.
Carstyle knows that I call it so--as I tell him, it is the most
charitable view to take.”
She looked coldly at the threadbare sofa and indulgently at the young
man who filled a corner of it.
“You may think it odd, Mr. Vibart, that I should take you into my
confidence in this way after so short an acquaintance, but somehow
I can’t help regarding you as a friend already. I believe in those
intuitive sympathies, don’t you? They have never misled me--” her lids
drooped retrospectively--“and besides, I always tell Mr. Carstyle that
on this point I will have no false pretences. Where truth is concerned
I am inexorable, and I consider it my duty to let our friends know
that our restricted way of living is due entirely to choice--to
Mr. Carstyle’s choice. When I married Mr. Carstyle it was with the
expectation of living in New York and of keeping my carriage; and there
is no reason for our not doing so--there is no reason, Mr. Vibart, why
my daughter Ireen should have been denied the intellectual advantages
of foreign travel. I wish that to be understood. It is owing to her
father’s deliberate choice that Ireen and I have been imprisoned in the
narrow limits of Millbrook society. For myself I do not complain. If Mr.
Carstyle chooses to place others before his wife it is not for his wife
to repine. His course may be noble--Quixotic; I do not allow myself to
pronounce judgment on it, though others have thought that in sacrificing
his own family to strangers he was violating the most sacred obligations
of domestic life. This is the opinion of my pastor and of other valued
friends; but, as I have always told them, for myself I make no claims.
Where my daughter Ireen is concerned it is different--”
It was a relief to Vibart when, at this point, Mrs. Carstyle’s discharge
of her duty was cut short by her daughter’s reappearance. Irene had been
unable to find a cigarette for Mr. Vibart, and her mother, with beaming
irrelevance, suggested that in that case she had better show him the
garden.
The Carstyle house stood but a few yards back from the brick-paved
Millbrook street, and the garden was a very small place, unless
measured, as Mrs. Carstyle probably intended that it should be, by the
extent of her daughter’s charms. These were so considerable that Vibart
walked back and forward half a dozen times between the porch and the
gate, before he discovered the limitations of the Carstyle domain. It
was not till Irene had accused him of being sarcastic and had confided
in him that “the girls” were furious with her for letting him talk to
her so long at his aunt’s garden-party, that he awoke to the exiguity
of his surroundings; and then it was with a touch of irritation that he
noticed Mr. Carstyle’s inconspicuous profile bent above a newspaper in
one of the lower windows. Vibart had an idea that Mr. Carstyle, while
ostensibly reading the paper, had kept count of the number of times
that his daughter had led her companion up and down between the
syringa-bushes; and for some undefinable reason he resented Mr.
Carstyle’s unperturbed observation more than his wife’s zealous
self-effacement. To a man who is trying to please a pretty girl there
are moments when the proximity of an impartial spectator is more
disconcerting than the most obvious connivance; and something about Mr.
Carstyle’s expression conveyed his good-humored indifference to Irene’s
processes.
When the garden-gate closed behind Vibart he had become aware that
his preoccupation with the Carstyles had shifted its centre from
the daughter to the father; but he was accustomed to such emotional
surprises, and skilled in seizing any compensations they might offer.