That evening, in the gardens of the Kursaal, he renewed acquaintance
with Angela Vivian. Her mother came, as usual, to sit and listen to the
music, accompanied by Blanche Evers, who was in turn attended by Captain
Lovelock. This little party found privacy in the crowd; they seated
themselves in a quiet corner in an angle of one of the barriers of the
terrace, while the movement of the brilliant Baden world went on around
them. Gordon Wright engaged in conversation with Mrs. Vivian, while
Bernard enjoyed an interview with her daughter. This young lady
continued to ignore the fact of their previous meeting, and our hero
said to himself that all he wished was to know what she preferred--he
would rigidly conform to it. He conformed to her present programme; he
had ventured to pronounce the word Siena the evening before, but he
was careful not to pronounce it again. She had her reasons for her own
reserve; he wondered what they were, and it gave him a certain pleasure
to wonder. He enjoyed the consciousness of their having a secret
together, and it became a kind of entertaining suspense to see how long
she would continue to keep it. For himself, he was in no hurry to let
the daylight in; the little incident at Siena had been, in itself, a
charming affair; but Miss Vivian’s present attitude gave it a sort of
mystic consecration. He thought she carried it off very well--the theory
that she had not seen him before; last evening she had been slightly
confused, but now she was as self-possessed as if the line she had taken
were a matter of conscience. Why should it be a matter of conscience?
Was she in love with Gordon Wright, and did she wish, in consequence,
to forget--and wish him not to suspect--that she had ever received an
expression of admiration from another man? This was not likely; it was
not likely, at least, that Miss Vivian wished to pass for a prodigy of
innocence; for if to be admired is to pay a tribute to corruption, it
was perfectly obvious that so handsome a girl must have tasted of the
tree of knowledge. As for her being in love with Gordon Wright, that of
course was another affair, and Bernard did not pretend, as yet, to have
an opinion on this point, beyond hoping very much that she might be.
He was not wrong in the impression of her good looks that he had carried
away from the short interview at Siena. She had a charmingly chiselled
face, with a free, pure outline, a clear, fair complexion, and the eyes
and hair of a dusky beauty. Her features had a firmness which
suggested tranquillity, and yet her expression was light and quick, a
combination--or a contradiction--which gave an original stamp to her
beauty. Bernard remembered that he had thought it a trifle “bold”; but
he now perceived that this had been but a vulgar misreading of her dark,
direct, observant eye. The eye was a charming one; Bernard discovered in
it, little by little, all sorts of things; and Miss Vivian was, for the
present, simply a handsome, intelligent, smiling girl. He gave her an
opportunity to make an allusion to Siena; he said to her that his friend
told him that she and her mother had been spending the winter in Italy.
“Oh yes,” said Angela Vivian; “we were in the far south; we were five
months at Sorrento.”
“And nowhere else?”
“We spent a few days in Rome. We usually prefer the quiet places; that
is my mother’s taste.”
“It was not your mother’s taste, then,” said Bernard, “that brought you
to Baden?”
She looked at him a moment.
“You mean that Baden is not quiet?”
Longueville glanced about at the moving, murmuring crowd, at the lighted
windows of the Conversation-house, at the great orchestra perched up in
its pagoda.
“This is not my idea of absolute tranquillity.”
“Nor mine, either,” said Miss Vivian. “I am not fond of absolute
tranquillity.”
“How do you arrange it, then, with your mother?”
Again she looked at him a moment, with her clever, slightly mocking
smile.
“As you see. By making her come where I wish.”
“You have a strong will,” said Bernard. “I see that.”
“No. I have simply a weak mother. But I make sacrifices too, sometimes.”
“What do you call sacrifices?”
“Well, spending the winter at Sorrento.”
Bernard began to laugh, and then he told her she must have had a very
happy life--“to call a winter at Sorrento a sacrifice.”
“It depends upon what one gives up,” said Miss Vivian.
“What did you give up?”
She touched him with her mocking smile again.
“That is not a very civil question, asked in that way.”
“You mean that I seem to doubt your abnegation?”
“You seem to insinuate that I had nothing to renounce. I gave up--I
gave up--” and she looked about her, considering a little--“I gave up
society.”
“I am glad you remember what it was,” said Bernard. “If I have seemed
uncivil, let me make it up. When a woman speaks of giving up society,
what she means is giving up admiration. You can never have given up
that--you can never have escaped from it. You must have found it even at
Sorrento.”
“It may have been there, but I never found it. It was very
respectful--it never expressed itself.”
“That is the deepest kind,” said Bernard.
“I prefer the shallower varieties,” the young girl answered.
“Well,” said Bernard, “you must remember that although shallow
admiration expresses itself, all the admiration that expresses itself is
not shallow.”
Miss Vivian hesitated a moment.
“Some of it is impertinent,” she said, looking straight at him, rather
gravely.
Bernard hesitated about as long.
“When it is impertinent it is shallow. That comes to the same thing.”
The young girl frowned a little.
“I am not sure that I understand--I am rather stupid. But you see how
right I am in my taste for such places as this. I have to come here to
hear such ingenious remarks.”
“You should add that my coming, as well, has something to do with it.”
“Everything!” said Miss Vivian.
“Everything? Does no one else make ingenious remarks? Does n’t my friend
Wright?”
“Mr. Wright says excellent things, but I should not exactly call them
ingenious remarks.”
“It is not what Wright says; it ‘s what he does. That ‘s the charm!”
said Bernard.
His companion was silent for a moment. “That ‘s not usually a charm;
good conduct is not thought pleasing.”
“It surely is not thought the reverse!” Bernard exclaimed.
“It does n’t rank--in the opinion of most people--among the things that
make men agreeable.”
“It depends upon what you call agreeable.”
“Exactly so,” said Miss Vivian. “It all depends on that.”
“But the agreeable,” Bernard went on--“it is n’t after all, fortunately,
such a subtle idea! The world certainly is agreed to think that virtue
is a beautiful thing.”
Miss Vivian dropped her eyes a moment, and then, looking up,
“Is it a charm?” she asked.
“For me there is no charm without it,” Bernard declared.
“I am afraid that for me there is,” said the young girl.
Bernard was puzzled--he who was not often puzzled. His companion
struck him as altogether too clever to be likely to indulge in a silly
affectation of cynicism. And yet, without this, how could one account
for her sneering at virtue?
“You talk as if you had sounded the depths of vice!” he said, laughing.
“What do you know about other than virtuous charms?”
“I know, of course, nothing about vice; but I have known virtue when it
was very tiresome.”
“Ah, then it was a poor affair. It was poor virtue. The best virtue is
never tiresome.”
Miss Vivian looked at him a little, with her fine discriminating eye.
“What a dreadful thing to have to think any virtue poor!”
This was a touching reflection, and it might have gone further had not
the conversation been interrupted by Mrs. Vivian’s appealing to her
daughter to aid a defective recollection of a story about a Spanish
family they had met at Biarritz, with which she had undertaken to
entertain Gordon Wright. After this, the little circle was joined by
a party of American friends who were spending a week at Baden, and the
conversation became general.