“What for? I’m horribly pressed. Won’t it do another time?”
“_It_ won’t,” he answered. “It’s its way. But go on, if your need is
greater than mine.”
“That’s shabby,” I thought; and yielded with the worst grace possible.
He retaliated by meeting me all sweetness at the door, and conducting
me into the parlour.
It was an impossible room—I may say it at once—quite the typical
tawdry boudoir of an ex-coryphée. She was not there, I was relieved
to find, in person; but her multiplied presentment simpered and
abashed one from a dozen places on walls and mantelpiece. “Claudine”
(she might have been a hair-wash, and enjoyed the same sort of
popularity) posed, for all the blind purposes of vanity, in the tights
and kid boots of a past generation. Looking from queer old
daguerreotypes, in skirts like curtailed crinolines; ogling from
wreaths, her calves, crossed to display their strength, in disfiguring
proportion with the thin bosom above, she seemed to make an outrage of
the dear ungainly sanctities which appeal to us, in pegtops and
voluminous skirts, from the back parts of our albums. There are
certain people who, with the best intention in the world to be held
sweet, are unsavoury; and Aunt Mim was one of them. All the more
wonder that such fruit could be born of her stock.
For she was certainly attractive, was the girl—pure and pretty and
unaffected. I had to own it grudgingly to myself, as I bowed to her,
and turned interrogatively to my friend.
He had gone to the back of her chair, where she sat away from the open
window. There was some discarded work in her lap, and in her eyes some
look of a vague sadness and bewilderment.
“Nanny,” he said softly, “this, Mr. Verender, is my great friend—my
counsel out of Court. Will you just do this for me—make him yours,
too? Will you try to explain to him, while I go away, what you find it
so hard to explain to me—your sense of the something that keeps us
apart?”