“Elle ne doute de rien!” Littlemore said to himself as he walked away
from the hotel; and he repeated the phrase in talking about her to
Waterville. “She wants to be right,” he added; “but she’ll never really
succeed. She has begun too late, she’ll never get on the true middle of
the note. However, she won’t know when she’s wrong, so it doesn’t
signify!” And he more or less explained what he meant by this
discrimination. She’d remain in certain essentials incurable. She had
no delicacy; no discretion; no shading; she was a woman who suddenly said
to you, “You don’t really respect me!” As if that were a thing for a
woman to say!
“It depends upon what she meant by it.” Waterville could always imagine
alternatives.
“The more she meant by it the less she ought to say it!” Littlemore
declared.
But he returned to the Hôtel Meurice and on the next occasion took this
companion with him. The secretary of legation, who had not often been in
close quarters with pretty women whose respectability, or whose lack of
it, was so frankly discussable, was prepared to find the well-known Texan
belle a portentous type. He was afraid there might be danger in her, but
on the whole he felt armed. The object of his devotion at present was
his country, or at least the Department of State; he had no intention of
being diverted from that allegiance. Besides, he had his ideal of the
attractive woman—a person pitched in a very much lower key than this
shining, smiling, rustling, chattering daughter of the Territories. The
woman he should care for would have repose, a sense of the private in
life, and the implied, even the withheld, in talk; would sometimes let
one alone. Mrs. Headway was personal, familiar, intimate, perpetually
appealing or accusing, demanding explanations and pledges, saying things
one had to answer. All this was accompanied with a hundred smiles and
radiations and other natural graces, but the general effect was
distinctly fatiguing. She had certainly a great deal of charm, an
immense desire to please, and a wonderful collection of dresses and
trinkets; but she was eager and clamorous, and it was hard for other
people to be put to serve her appetite. If she wanted to get into
society there was no reason why those of her visitors who had the luck to
be themselves independent, to be themselves placed, and to be themselves
by the same token critical, should wish to see her there; for it was this
absence of common social encumbrances made her drawing-room attractive.
There was no doubt whatever that she was several women in one, and she
ought to content herself with that sort of numerical triumph. Littlemore
said to Waterville that it was stupid of her to wish to scale the
heights; she ought to know how much more she was in her element scouring
the plain. She appeared vaguely to irritate him; even her fluttering
attempts at self-culture—she had become a great judge of books and
pictures and plays, and pronounced off-hand—constituted a vague
invocation, an appeal for sympathy onerous to a man who disliked the
trouble of revising old decisions consecrated by a certain amount of
reminiscence that might be called tender. She exerted, however,
effectively enough one of the arts of solicitation—she often startled and
surprised. Even Waterville felt a touch of the unexpected, though not
indeed an excess of it, to belong to his conception of the woman who
should have an ideal repose. Of course there were two kinds of
surprises, and only one of them thoroughly pleasant, though Mrs. Headway
dealt impartially in both. She had the sudden delights, the odd
exclamations, the queer curiosities of a person who has grown up in a
country where everything is new and many things ugly, and who, with a
natural turn for the arts and amenities of life, makes a tardy
acquaintance with some of the finer usages, the higher pleasures. She
was provincial; it was easy to see how she embodied that term; it took no
great cleverness. But what was Parisian enough—if to be Parisian was the
measure of success—was the way she picked up ideas and took a hint from
every circumstance. “Only give me time and I guess I’ll come out all
right,” she said to Littlemore, who watched her progress with a mixture
of admiration and regret. She delighted to speak of herself as a poor
little barbarian grubbing up crumbs of knowledge, and this habit borrowed
beautiful relief from her delicate face, her so highly developed dress
and the free felicity of her manners.
One of her surprises was, that after that first visit she said no more to
Littlemore about Mrs. Dolphin. He did her perhaps the grossest
injustice, but he had quite expected her to bring up this lady whenever
they met. “If she’ll only leave Agnes alone she may do what she will,”
he said to Waterville, expressing his satisfaction. “My sister would
never look at her, and it would be very awkward to have to tell her so.”
She counted on aid; she made him feel this simply by the way she looked
at him; but for the moment she demanded no definite service. She held
her tongue but waited, and her patience itself was a deeper admonition.
In the way of society, it had to be noted, her privileges were meagre,
Sir Arthur Demesne and her two compatriots being, so far as the latter
could discover, her only visitors. She might have had other friends, but
she held her head very high and liked better to see no one than not to
see the best company. She went in, clearly, for producing the effect of
being by no means so neglected as fastidious. There were plenty of
Americans in Paris, but in this direction she failed to extend her
acquaintance; the nice people wouldn’t come to her, and nothing would
have induced her to receive the others. She had a perfect and inexorable
view of those she wished to avoid. Littlemore expected her every day to
ask why he didn’t bring some of his friends—as to which he had his answer
ready. It was rather a poor one, for it consisted but of the “academic”
assurance that he wished to keep her for himself. She would be sure to
retort that this was “too thin,” as indeed it was; yet the days went by
without her calling him to account. The little American colony in Paris
abounded in amiable women, but there were none to whom Littlemore could
make up his mind to say that it would be a favour to him they should call
on Mrs. Headway. He shouldn’t like them the better for doing so, and he
wished to like those of whom he might ask a favour. Except, therefore,
that he occasionally spoke of her as a full-blown flower of the West,
still very pretty, but of not at all orthodox salon scent, who had
formerly been a great chum of his, she remained unknown in the circles of
the Avenue Gabriel and the streets that encircle the Arch of Triumph. To
ask the men to go see her without asking the ladies would only accentuate
the fact that he didn’t ask the ladies; so he asked no one at all.
Besides, it was true—just a little—that he wished to keep her to himself,
and he was fatuous enough to believe she really cared more for him than
for any outsider. Of course, however, he would never dream of marrying
her, whereas her Englishman apparently was capable of that quaintness.
She hated her old past; she often made that point, talking of this “dark
backward” as if it were an appendage of the same order as a thieving cook
or a noisy bedroom or even an inconvenient protrusion of drapery.
Therefore, as Littlemore was part of the very air of the previous it
might have been supposed she would hate him too and wish to banish him,
with all the images he recalled, from her sight. But she made an
exception in his favour, and if she disliked their early relations as a
chapter of her own history she seemed still to like them as a chapter of
his. He felt how she clung to him, how she believed he could make a
great and blest difference for her and in the long run would. It was to
the long run that she appeared little by little to have attuned herself.
She succeeded perfectly in maintaining harmony between Sir Arthur Demesne
and her American visitors, who spent much less time in her drawing-room.
She had easily persuaded him that there were no grounds for jealousy and
that they had no wish, as she said, to crowd him out; for it was
ridiculous to be jealous of two persons at once, and Rupert Waterville,
after he had learned the way to her favour and her fireside, presented
himself as often as his original introducer. The two indeed usually came
together and they ended by relieving their competitor of a part of the
weight of his problem. This amiable and earnest but slightly fatuous
young man, who had not yet made up his mind, was sometimes rather
oppressed with the magnitude of the undertaking, and when alone with Mrs.
Headway occasionally found the tension of his thoughts quite painful. He
was very slim and straight and looked taller than his height; he had the
prettiest silkiest hair, which waved away from a large white forehead,
and he was endowed with a nose of the so-called Roman model. He looked,
in spite of these attributes, younger than his years, partly on account
of the delicacy of his complexion and the almost child-like candour of
his round blue eyes. He was diffident and self-conscious; there were
certain letters he couldn’t pronounce. At the same time he carried
himself as one brought up to fill a considerable place in the world, with
whom confidence had become a duty and correctness a habit, and who,
though he might occasionally be a little awkward about small things,
would be sure to acquit himself honourably in great ones. He was very
simple and believed himself very serious; he had the blood of a score of
Warwickshire squires in his veins, mingled in the last instance with the
somewhat paler fluid still animating the long-necked daughter of a banker
who, after promising himself high glories as a father-in-law, had by the
turn of events been reduced to looking for them in Sir Baldwin Demesne.
The boy who was the only fruit of that gentleman’s marriage had come into
his title at five years of age; his mother, who was somehow parentally
felt to have a second time broken faith with expectation by not having
better guarded the neck of her husband, broken in the hunting-field,
watched over him with a tenderness that burned as steadily as a candle
shaded by a transparent hand. She never admitted even to herself that he
was not the cleverest of men; but it took all her own cleverness, which
was much greater, to maintain this appearance. Fortunately he wasn’t
wild, so that he would never marry an actress or a governess, like two or
three of the young men who had been at Eton with him. With this ground
of nervousness the less Lady Demesne awaited with a proud patience his
appointment to some high office. He represented in Parliament the
Conservative instincts and vote of a red-roofed market town, and, sending
regularly to his bookseller for the new publications on economical
subjects, was determined his political development should have a massive
statistical basis. He was not conceited; he was only
misinformed—misinformed, I mean, about himself. He thought himself
essential to the propriety of things—not as an individual, but as an
institution. This conviction indeed was too sacred to betray itself by
vulgar assumptions. If he was a little man in a big place he never
strutted nor talked loud; he merely felt it as a luxury that he had a
large social circumference. It was like sleeping in a big bed;
practically one didn’t toss about the more, but one felt a greater
freshness.
He had never seen anything like Mrs. Headway; he hardly knew by what
standard to measure her. She was not at all the English lady—not one of
those with whom he had been accustomed to converse; yet it was impossible
not to make out in her a temper and a tone. He might have been sure she
was provincial, but as he was much under her charm he compromised by
pronouncing her only foreign. It was of course provincial to be foreign;
but this was after all a peculiarity which she shared with a great many
nice people. He wasn’t wild, and his mother had flattered herself that
in this all-important matter he wouldn’t be perverse; yet it was far from
regular that he should have taken a fancy to an American widow, five
years older than himself, who knew no one and who sometimes didn’t appear
to understand exactly who he was. Though he believed in no alternative
to the dignity of the British consciousness, it was precisely her
foreignness that pleased him; she seemed as little as possible of his own
race and creed; there wasn’t a touch of Warwickshire in her composition.
She was like an Hungarian or a Pole, with the difference that he could
almost make out her speech. The unfortunate young man was engulfed even
while not admitting that he had done more than estimate his distance to
the brink. He would love wisely—one might even so love agreeably. He
had intelligently arranged his life; he had determined to marry at
thirty-two. A long line of ancestors was watching him; he hardly knew
what they would think of Mrs. Headway. He hardly knew what he thought
himself; the only thing he was absolutely sure of was that she made the
time pass as it passed in no other pursuit. That, indeed, rather worried
him; he was by no means sure anything so precious should be so little
accounted for. There was nothing so to account but the fragments of Mrs.
Headway’s conversation, the peculiarities of her accent, the sallies of
her wit, the audacities of her fancy, the odd echoes of her past. Of
course he knew she had had a past; she wasn’t a young girl, she was a
widow—and widows were essentially the expression of an accomplished fact.
He was not jealous of her antecedents, but he would have liked a little
to piece them together, and it was here the difficulty occurred. The
subject was illumined with fitful flashes, but never placed itself before
him as a general picture. He asked her various questions, but her
answers were so startling that, like sudden luminous points, they seemed
to intensify the darkness round their edges. She had apparently spent
her life in a remote province of a barbarous country, but it didn’t
follow from this that she herself had been low. She had been a lily
among thistles, and there was something romantic possibly in the interest
taken by a man of his position in a woman of hers. It pleased Sir Arthur
to believe he was romantic; that had been the case with several of his
ancestors, who supplied a precedent without which he would scarce perhaps
have ventured to trust himself. He was the victim of perplexities from
which a single spark of direct perception would have saved him. He took
everything in the literal sense; a grain of humour or of imagination
would have saved him, but such things were never so far from him as when
he had begun to stray helplessly in the realm of wonder. He sat there
vaguely waiting for something to happen and not committing himself by
rash declarations. If he was in love it was in his own way,
reflectively, inexpressibly, obstinately. He was waiting for the formula
which would justify his conduct and Mrs. Headway’s peculiarities. He
hardly knew where it would come from; you might have thought from his
manner that he would discover it in one of the elaborate _entreés_ that
were served to the pair when she consented to dine with him at Bignon’s
or the Café Anglais; or in one of the luxurious band-boxes that arrived
from the Rue de la Paix and from which she often lifted the lid in the
presence of her admirer. There were moments when he got weary of waiting
in vain, and at these moments the arrival of her American friends—he
often asked himself why she had so few—seemed to lift the mystery from
his shoulders and give him a chance to rest. This apology for a plan she
herself might yet scarce contribute to, since she couldn’t know how much
ground it was expected to cover. She talked about her past because she
thought it the best thing to do; she had a shrewd conviction that it was
somehow better made use of and confessed to, even in a manner presented
or paraded, than caused to stretch behind her as a mere nameless desert.
She could at least a little irrigate and plant the waste. She had to
have some geography, though the beautiful blank rose-coloured map-spaces
of unexplored countries were what she would have preferred. She had no
objection to telling fibs, but now that she was taking a new departure
wished to indulge only in such as were imperative. She would have been
delighted might she have squeezed through with none at all. A few,
verily, were indispensable, and we needn’t attempt to scan too critically
the more or less adventurous excursions into poetry and fable with which
she entertained and mystified Sir Arthur. She knew of course that as a
product of fashionable circles she was nowhere, but she might have great
success as a child of nature.