II

If he went in, however, with something of his more or less inevitable

scowl, there were really, at the moment, two rather valid reasons for

screened observation; the first of these being that the whole place

seemed to reflect as never before the lustre of Mrs. Worthingham’s own

polished and prosperous little person--to smile, it struck him, with her

smile, to twinkle not only with the gleam of her lovely teeth, but with

that of all her rings and brooches and bangles and other gewgaws,

to curl and spasmodically cluster as in emulation of her charming

complicated yellow tresses, to surround the most animated of

pink-and-white, of ruffled and ribboned, of frilled and festooned

Dresden china shepherdesses with exactly the right system of rococo

curves and convolutions and other flourishes, a perfect bower of painted

and gilded and moulded conceits. The second ground of this immediate

impression of scenic extravagance, almost as if the curtain rose for him

to the first act of some small and expensively mounted comic opera,

was that she hadn’t, after all, awaited him in fond singleness, but

had again just a trifle inconsiderately exposed him to the drawback of

having to reckon, for whatever design he might amiably entertain, with

the presence of a third and quite superfluous person, a small black

insignificant but none the less oppressive stranger. It was odd how,

on the instant, the little lady engaged with her did affect him as

comparatively black--very much as if that had absolutely, in such a

medium, to be the graceless appearance of any item not positively of

some fresh shade of a light colour or of some pretty pretension to a

charming twist. Any witness of their meeting, his hostess should surely

have felt, would have been a false note in the whole rosy glow; but

what note so false as that of the dingy little presence that she might

actually, by a refinement of her perhaps always too visible study of

effect, have provided as a positive contrast or foil? whose name and

intervention, moreover, she appeared to be no more moved to mention and

account for than she might have been to “present”--whether as stretched

at her feet or erect upon disciplined haunches--some shaggy old

domesticated terrier or poodle.

Extraordinarily, after he had been in the room five minutes--a space of

time during which his fellow-visitor had neither budged nor uttered a

sound--he had made Mrs. Worthingham out as all at once perfectly pleased

to see him, completely aware of what he had most in mind, and singularly

serene in face of his sense of their impediment. It was as if for all

the world she didn’t take it for one, the immobility, to say nothing of

the seeming equanimity, of their tactless companion; at whom meanwhile

indeed our friend himself, after his first ruffled perception, no more

adventured a look than if advised by his constitutional kindness that

to notice her in any degree would perforce be ungraciously to glower.

He talked after a fashion with the woman as to whose power to please and

amuse and serve him, as to whose really quite organised and indicated

fitness for lighting up his autumn afternoon of life his conviction had

lately strained itself so clear; but he was all the while carrying on

an intenser exchange with his own spirit and trying to read into

the charming creature’s behaviour, as he could only call it, some

confirmation of his theory that she also had her inward flutter and

anxiously counted on him. He found support, happily for the conviction

just named, in the idea, at no moment as yet really repugnant to him,

the idea bound up in fact with the finer essence of her appeal, that she

had her own vision too of her quality and her price, and that the

last appearance she would have liked to bristle with was that of being

forewarned and eager.

He had, if he came to think of it, scarce definitely warned her, and he

probably wouldn’t have taken to her so consciously in the first instance

without an appreciative sense that, as she was a little person of twenty

superficial graces, so she was also a little person with her secret

pride. She might just have planted her mangy lion--not to say her

muzzled house-dog--there in his path as a symbol that she wasn’t cheap

and easy; which would be a thing he couldn’t possibly wish his future

wife to have shown herself in advance, even if to him alone. That she

could make him put himself such questions was precisely part of the

attaching play of her iridescent surface, the shimmering interfusion

of her various aspects; that of her youth with her independence--her

pecuniary perhaps in particular, that of her vivacity with her beauty,

that of her facility above all with her odd novelty; the high modernity,

as people appeared to have come to call it, that made her so much

more “knowing” in some directions than even he, man of the world as he

certainly was, could pretend to be, though all on a basis of the most

unconscious and instinctive and luxurious assumption. She was “up” to

everything, aware of everything--if one counted from a short enough time

back (from week before last, say, and as if quantities of history had

burst upon the world within the fortnight); she was likewise surprised

at nothing, and in that direction one might reckon as far ahead as the

rest of her lifetime, or at any rate as the rest of his, which was all

that would concern him: it was as if the suitability of the future

to her personal and rather pampered tastes was what she most took for

granted, so that he could see her, for all her Dresden-china shoes and

her flutter of wondrous befrilled contemporary skirts, skip by the side

of the coming age as over the floor of a ball-room, keeping step with

its monstrous stride and prepared for every figure of the dance. Her

outlook took form to him suddenly as a great square sunny window that

hung in assured fashion over the immensity of life. There rose toward it

as from a vast swarming _plaza_ a high tide of emotion and sound; yet it

was at the same time as if even while he looked her light gemmed hand,

flashing on him in addition to those other things the perfect polish of

the prettiest pink finger-nails in the world, had touched a spring, the

most ingenious of ecent devices for instant ease, which dropped half

across the scene a soft-coloured mechanical blind, a fluttered, fringed

awning of charmingly toned silk, such as would make a bath of cool shade

for the favoured friend leaning with her there--that is for the happy

couple itself--on the balcony. The great view would be the prospect and

privilege of the very state he coveted--since didn’t he covet it?--the

state of being so securely at her side; while the wash of privacy, as

one might count it, the broad fine brush dipped into clear umber and

passed, full and wet, straight across the strong scheme of colour, would

represent the security itself, all the uplifted inner elegance, the

condition, so ideal, of being shut out from nothing and yet of having,

so gaily and breezily aloft, none of the burden or worry of anything.

Thus, as I say, for our friend, the place itself, while his vivid

impression lasted, portentously opened and spread, and what was before

him took, to his vision, though indeed at so other a crisis, the form

of the “glimmering square” of the poet; yet, for a still more remarkable

fact, with an incongruous object usurping at a given instant the

privilege of the frame and seeming, even as he looked, to block the

view.

The incongruous object was a woman’s head, crowned with a little

sparsely feathered black hat, an ornament quite unlike those the women

mostly noticed by White-Mason were now “wearing,” and that grew and

grew, that came nearer and nearer, while it met his eyes, after the

manner of images in the kinematograph. It had presently loomed so large

that he saw nothing else--not only among the things at a considerable

distance, the things Mrs. Worthingham would eventually, yet

unmistakably, introduce him to, but among those of this lady’s various

attributes and appurtenances as to which he had been in the very act of

cultivating his consciousness. It was in the course of another minute

the most extraordinary thing in the world: everything had altered,

dropped, darkened, disappeared; his imagination had spread its wings

only to feel them flop all grotesquely at its sides as he recognised in

his hostess’s quiet companion, the oppressive alien who hadn’t indeed

interfered with his fanciful flight, though she had prevented his

immediate declaration and brought about the thud, not to say the felt

violent shock, of his fall to earth, the perfectly plain identity of

Cornelia Rasch. It was she who had remained there at attention; it was

she their companion hadn’t introduced; it was she he had forborne to

face with his fear of incivility. He stared at her--everything else

went.

“Why it has been _you_ all this time?”

Miss Rasch fairly turned pale. “I was waiting to see if you’d know me.”

“Ah, my dear Cornelia”--he came straight out with it--“rather!”

“Well, it isn’t,” she returned with a quick change to red now, “from

having taken much time to look at me!”

She smiled, she even laughed, but he could see how she had felt his

unconsciousness, poor thing; the acquaintance, quite the friend of his

youth, as she had been, the associate of his childhood, of his early

manhood, of his middle age in fact, up to a few years back, not more

than ten at the most; the associate too of so many of his associates and

of almost all of his relations, those of the other time, those who had

mainly gone for ever; the person in short whose noted disappearance,

though it might have seemed final, had been only of recent seasons. She

was present again now, all unexpectedly--he had heard of her having

at last, left alone after successive deaths and with scant resources,

sought economic salvation in Europe, the promised land of American

thrift--she was present as this almost ancient and this oddly

unassertive little rotund figure whom one seemed no more obliged to

address than if she had been a black satin ottoman “treated” with

buttons and gimp; a class of object as to which the policy of blindness

was imperative. He felt the need of some explanatory plea, and before he

could think had uttered one at Mrs. Worthingham’s expense. “Why, you see

we weren’t introduced----!”

“No--but I didn’t suppose I should have to be named to you.”

“Well, my dear woman, you haven’t--do me that justice!” He could at

least make this point. “I felt all the while--!” However, it would have

taken him long to say what he had been feeling; and he was aware now of

the pretty projected light of Mrs. Worthingham’s wonder. She looked as

if, out for a walk with her, he had put her to the inconvenience of his

stopping to speak to a strange woman in the street.

“I never supposed you knew her!”--it was to him his hostess excused

herself.

This made Miss Rasch spring up, distinctly flushed, distinctly strange

to behold, but not vulgarly nettled--Cornelia was incapable of that;

only rather funnily bridling and laughing, only showing that this was

all she had waited for, only saying just the right thing, the thing

she could make so clearly a jest. “Of course if you _had_ you’d have

presented him.”

Mrs. Worthingham looked while answering at White-Mason. “I didn’t want

you to go--which you see you do as soon as he speaks to you. But I never

dreamed----!”

“That there was anything between us? Ah, there are no end of things!”

He, on his side, though addressing the younger and prettier woman,

looked at his fellow-guest; to whom he even continued: “When did you get

back? May I come and see you the very first thing?”

Cornelia gasped and wriggled--she practically giggled; she had

lost every atom of her little old, her little young, though always

unaccountable prettiness, which used to peep so, on the bare chance of

a shot, from behind indefensible features, that it almost made watching

her a form of sport. He had heard vaguely of her, it came back to

him (for there had been no letters; their later acquaintance, thank

goodness, hadn’t involved that) as experimenting, for economy, and then

as settling, to the same rather dismal end, somewhere in England, “at

one of those intensely English places, St. Leonards, Cheltenham, Bognor,

Dawlish--which, awfully, _was_ it?”--and she now affected him for all

the world as some small squirming, exclaiming, genteelly conversing old

maid of a type vaguely associated with the three-volume novels he used

to feed on (besides his so often encountering it in “real life,”) during

a far-away stay of his own at Brighton. Odder than any element of his

ex-gossip’s identity itself, however, was the fact that she somehow,

with it all, rejoiced his sight. Indeed the supreme oddity was that

the manner of her reply to his request for leave to call should have

absolutely charmed his attention. She didn’t look at him; she only, from

under her frumpy, crapy, curiously exotic hat, and with her good little

near-sighted insinuating glare, expressed to Mrs. Worthingham, while she

answered him, wonderful arch things, the overdone things of a shy woman.

“Yes, you may call--but only when this dear lovely lady has done with

you!” The moment after which she had gone.