One evening, a week later, Valentine came quietly into my room. I had
not seen him in the interval, and was immediately struck, though it
was semi-dusk, by the expression on his face. It was white and
smiling, and the eyes more brightly inscrutable than ever.
A storm had just crashed across the town, and left everything dripping
in a liquid fog. Looking down, one could see the house-fronts,
submerged in the running pavements, become the very “baseless fabrics
of a vision.” The hansom-drivers, bent over their glazed roofs, rode
each with a shadowy phantom of himself reversed, like an oilskin Jack
of Spades. No pedestrian but, like Hamlet, had his “fellow in the
cellarage” keeping pace with him. The solid ground seemed melted, and
the unsubstantial workings of the world revealed. To souls hemmed in
by bricks, there are more commonplace, less depressing sights than a
wet London viewed from a third story.
There was a box in my window, with some marguerites in it, the sickly
pledges of a rather jocund spring. Valentine, joining me as I leaned
out, handled a half-broken stem very tenderly.
“It has been beaten down, _like poor Nanny_, by the storm,” he said.
“We must tie it to a stick.”
I did not answer for a minute. Then very deliberately I drew in my
head and sat down. Again like my shadow, in this city of shadows,
Valentine did the same. For some five minutes we must have remained
opposite one another without speaking. Then sudden and grim I set my
lips, and asked the question he seemed to invite.
“Are you the stick?”
He nodded, with a smile, which I could hardly see now, on his face.
“You speak figuratively, of course,” I said, “in talking of _tying_
her to you?”
“No,” he said. “I talk of the real bond.”
“Of matrimony?”
“Certainly.”
With a naughty word, I jumped to my feet, strode the round of the
room, sat down flop on the table, put my hands in my pockets, tried to
whistle, laughed, and burst out—“I suppose you intend this, in a
manner, for a confidence? I suppose you are taking straight up the
tale of a week ago? Well, _I_ haven’t lost the impression of that
moment, or gone mad in the interval. Do you want me to sympathize with
_your_ insanity, or to argue you out of it—which?”
He did not answer. Indeed, the offensiveness of my tone was not
winning.
“I am perfectly aware,” I went on, “that the melodramatic unities
demand an espousal with the interesting spirit we have called back to
life. They have a way, at the same time, of ignoring Aunt Mims. You
will, I am sure, forgive me if I say that it is the figure of that
good lady which sticks last in _my_ memory.”
Still he did not answer.
“I will put my point,” I continued, growing a little angry—“I will
put my point, as you seem to ask it, with all the delicacy I can. You
drew an analogy between—between some one and that broken cabbage
yonder. The sentiment is unexceptionable; only in France they consider
those things weeds.”
“Do they?” he said coolly. “We don’t.”
“No; because we must justify ourselves for exalting ’em out of their
proper sphere. They’ll not cease to smell rank, though, however you
give ’em the middle place in your greenhouse.”