III

Forty minutes later he was taking his way back from the queer

miscarriage of his adventure; taking it, with no conscious positive

felicity, through the very spaces that had witnessed shortly before the

considerable serenity of his assurance. He had said to himself then, or

had as good as said it, that, since he might do perfectly as he liked,

it couldn’t fail for him that he must soon retrace those steps, humming,

to all intents, the first bars of a wedding-march; so beautifully had it

cleared up that he was “going to like” letting Mrs. Worthingham accept

him. He was to have hummed no wedding-march, as it seemed to be turning

out--he had none, up to now, to hum; and yet, extraordinarily, it wasn’t

in the least because she had refused him. Why then hadn’t he liked as

much as he had intended to like it putting the pleasant act, the act of

not refusing him, in her power? Could it all have come from the awkward

minute of his failure to decide sharply, on Cornelia’s departure,

whether or no he would attend her to the door? He hadn’t decided at

all--what the deuce had been in him?--but had danced to and fro in the

room, thinking better of each impulse and then thinking worse. He had

hesitated like an ass erect on absurd hind legs between two bundles

of hay; the upshot of which must have been his giving the falsest

impression. In what way that was to be for an instant considered had

their common past committed him to crapy Cornelia? He repudiated with a

whack on the gravel any ghost of an obligation.

What he could get rid of with scanter success, unfortunately, was the

peculiar sharpness of his sense that, though mystified by his visible

flurry--and yet not mystified enough for a sympathetic question

either--his hostess had been, on the whole, even more frankly diverted:

which was precisely an example of that newest, freshest, finest freedom

in her, the air and the candour of assuming, not “heartlessly,” not

viciously, not even very consciously, but with a bright pampered

confidence which would probably end by affecting one’s nerves as the

most impertinent stroke in the world, that every blest thing coming up

for her in any connection was somehow matter for her general recreation.

There she was again with the innocent egotism, the gilded and

overflowing anarchism, really, of her doubtless quite unwitting but none

the less rabid modern note. Her grace of ease was perfect, but it was

all grace of ease, not a single shred of it grace of uncertainty or

of difficulty--which meant, when you came to see, that, for its happy

working, not a grain of provision was left by it to mere manners. This

was clearly going to be the music of the future--that if people were but

rich enough and furnished enough and fed enough, exercised and sanitated

and manicured and generally advised and advertised and made “knowing”

enough, _avertis_ enough, as the term appeared to be nowadays in Paris,

all they had to do for civility was to take the amused ironic view of

those who might be less initiated. In _his_ time, when he was young or

even when he was only but a little less middle-aged, the best manners

had been the best kindness, and the best kindness had mostly been some

art of not insisting on one’s luxurious differences, of concealing

rather, for common humanity, if not for common decency, a part at least

of the intensity or the ferocity with which one might be “in the know.”

Oh, the “know”--Mrs. Worthingham was in it, all instinctively,

inevitably, and as a matter of course, up to her eyes; which didn’t,

however, the least little bit prevent her being as ignorant as a fish of

everything that really and intimately and fundamentally concerned _him_,

poor dear old White-Mason. She didn’t, in the first place, so much as

know who he was--by which he meant know who and what it was to _be_

a White-Mason, even a poor and a dear and old one, “anyway.” That

indeed--he did her perfect justice--was of the very essence of the

newness and freshness and beautiful, brave, social irresponsibility by

which she had originally dazzled him: just exactly that circumstance of

her having no instinct for any old quality or quantity or identity, a

single historic or social value, as he might say, of the New York of his

already almost legendary past; and that additional one of his, on his

side, having, so far as this went, cultivated blankness, cultivated

positive prudence, as to her own personal background--the vagueness,

at the best, with which all honest gentlefolk, the New Yorkers of his

approved stock and conservative generation, were content, as for the

most part they were indubitably wise, to surround the origins and

antecedents and queer unimaginable early influences of persons swimming

into their ken from those parts of the country that quite necessarily

and naturally figured to their view as “Godforsaken” and generally

impossible.

The few scattered surviving representatives of a society once

“good”--_rari nantes in gurgite vasto_--were liable, at the pass things

had come to, to meet, and even amid old shades once sacred, or what was

left of such, every form of social impossibility, and, more irresistibly

still, to find these apparitions often carry themselves (often at

least in the case of the women) with a wondrous wild gallantry, equally

imperturbable and inimitable, the sort of thing that reached its maximum

in Mrs. Worthingham. Beyond that who ever wanted to look up their

annals, to reconstruct their steps and stages, to dot their i’s in fine,

or to “go behind” anything that was theirs? One wouldn’t do that for

the world--a rudimentary discretion forbade it; and yet this check from

elementary undiscussable taste quite consorted with a due respect for

them, or at any rate with a due respect for oneself in connection with

them; as was just exemplified in what would be his own, what would be

poor dear old White-Mason’s, insurmountable aversion to having, on any

pretext, the doubtless very queer spectre of the late Mr. Worthingham

presented to him. No question had he asked, or would he ever ask, should

his life--that is should the success of his courtship--even intimately

depend on it, either about that obscure agent of his mistress’s actual

affluence or about the happy head-spring itself, and the apparently

copious tributaries, of the golden stream.

From all which marked anomalies, at any rate, what was the moral to

draw? He dropped into a Park chair again with that question, he lost

himself in the wonder of why he had come away with his homage so very

much unpaid. Yet it didn’t seem at all, actually, as if he could say

or conclude, as if he could do anything but keep on worrying--just in

conformity with his being a person who, whether or no familiar with the

need to make his conduct square with his conscience and his taste, was

never wholly exempt from that of making his taste and his conscience

square with his conduct. To this latter occupation he further abandoned

himself, and it didn’t release him from his second brooding session

till the sweet spring sunset had begun to gather and he had more or less

cleared up, in the deepening dusk, the effective relation between the

various parts of his ridiculously agitating experience. There were vital

facts he seemed thus to catch, to seize, with a nervous hand, and the

twilight helping, by their vaguely whisked tails; unquiet truths that

swarmed out after the fashion of creatures bold only at eventide,

creatures that hovered and circled, that verily brushed his nose, in

spite of their shyness. Yes, he had practically just sat on with his

“mistress”--heaven save the mark!--as if not to come to the point; as

if it had absolutely come up that there would be something rather vulgar

and awful in doing so. The whole stretch of his stay after Cornelia’s

withdrawal had been consumed by his almost ostentatiously treating

himself to the opportunity of which he was to make nothing. It was as

if he had sat and watched himself--that came back to him: Shall I now or

sha’n’t I? Will I now or won’t I? “Say within the next three minutes,

say by a quarter past six, or by twenty minutes past, at the

furthest--always if nothing more comes up to prevent.”

What had already come up to prevent was, in the strangest and drollest,

or at least in the most preposterous, way in the world, that not

Cornelia’s presence, but her very absence, with its distraction of his

thoughts, the thoughts that lumbered after her, had made the difference;

and without his being the least able to tell why and how. He put it

to himself after a fashion by the image that, this distraction once

created, his working round to his hostess again, his reverting to the

matter of his errand, began suddenly to represent a return from so far.

That was simply all--or rather a little less than all; for something

else had contributed. “I never dreamed you knew her,” and “I never

dreamed _you_ did,” were inevitably what had been exchanged between

them--supplemented by Mrs. Worthingham’s mere scrap of an explanation:

“Oh yes--to the small extent you see. Two years ago in Switzerland

when I was at a high place for an ‘aftercure,’ during twenty days of

incessant rain, she was the only person in an hotel full of roaring,

gorging, smoking Germans with whom I could have a word of talk. She

and I were the only speakers of English, and were thrown together like

castaways on a desert island and in a raging storm. She was ill besides,

and she had no maid, and mine looked after her, and she was very

grateful--writing to me later on and saying she should certainly come to

see me if she ever returned to New York. She has returned, you see--and

there she was, poor little creature!” Such was Mrs. Worthingham’s

tribute--to which even his asking her if Miss Rasch had ever happened

to speak of him caused her practically to add nothing. Visibly she had

never thought again of any one Miss Rasch had spoken of or anything Miss

Rasch had said; right as she was, naturally, about her being a

little clever queer creature. This was perfectly true, and yet it

was probably--by being _all_ she could dream of about her--what had

paralysed his proper gallantry. Its effect had been not in what it

simply stated, but in what, under his secretly disintegrating criticism,

it almost luridly symbolised.

He had quitted his seat in the Louis Quinze drawing-room without having,

as he would have described it, done anything but give the lady of the

scene a superior chance not to betray a defeated hope--not, that is,

to fail of the famous “pride” mostly supposed to prop even the most

infatuated women at such junctures; by which chance, to do her justice,

she had thoroughly seemed to profit. But he finally rose from his later

station with a feeling of better success. He had by a happy turn of his

hand got hold of the most precious, the least obscure of the flitting,

circling things that brushed his ears. What he wanted--as justifying for

him a little further consideration--was there before him from the moment

he could put it that Mrs. Worthingham had no data. He almost hugged that

word,--it suddenly came to mean so much to him. No data, he felt, for a

conception of the sort of thing the New York of “his time” had been in

his personal life--the New York so unexpectedly, so vividly and, as he

might say, so perversely called back to all his senses by its identity

with that of poor Cornelia’s time: since even she had had a time, small

show as it was likely to make now, and his time and hers had been the

same. Cornelia figured to him while he walked away as, by contrast and

opposition, a massive little bundle of data; his impatience to go to see

her sharpened as he thought of this: so certainly should he find out

that wherever he might touch her, with a gentle though firm pressure, he

would, as the fond visitor of old houses taps and fingers a disfeatured,

overpapered wall with the conviction of a wainscot-edge beneath,

recognise some small extrusion of history.