III

Half-an-hour later, however, she still had this young lady before her in

extended perspective and as a satisfaction, if not as an embarrassment,

to come; thanks to the fact that Mrs. Bradham had forty persons, or

something like it, though all casually turning up, at tea, and that she

herself had perhaps never been so struck with the activity of the

charming girl's response to the considerations familiar alike to all of

them as Gussy's ideas about her. Gussy's ideas about her, as about

everything in the world, could on occasion do more to fill the air of

any scene over which Gussy presided than no matter what vociferation of

any massed crowd surrounding that lady: exactly which truth might have

been notable now to Rosanna in the light of Cissy's occasional clear

smile at her, always as yet from a distance, during lapses of intervals

and across shifting barriers of the more or less eminent and brilliant.

Mrs. Bradham's great idea--notoriously the most disinterested Gussy had

been known, through a career rich in announced intentions and glorious

designs, to entertain with any coherence--was that by placing and

keeping on exhibition, under her eye, the loveliest flower of girlhood a

splendid and confident society could have wished to wear on its bosom

she should at once signally enhance the dignity of the social part

played by herself and steep the precious object in a medium in which the

care of precious objects was supremely understood. "When she does so

much for me what in the world mustn't I do for _her?_" Cecilia Foy had

put that to Rosanna again and again with perfect lucidity, making her

sense of fair play shine out of it and her cultivation of that ideal

form perhaps not the least of the complications under which our elder

young woman, earnest in everything, endeavoured to stick to the just

view of her. Cissy had from the first appealed to her with restrictions,

but that was the way in which for poor brooding Rosanna every one

appealed; only there was in the present case the difference that whereas

in most cases the appeal, or rather her view of it, found itself somehow

smothered in the attendant wrong possibilities, the interest of this

bright victim of Mrs. Bradham's furtherance worked clearer, on the

whole, with the closer, with the closest, relation, never starting the

questions one might entertain about her except to dispose of them, even

if when they had been disposed of she mostly started them again.

Not often had so big a one at all events been started for Rosanna as

when she saw the girl earn her keep, as they had so often called it

together, by multiplying herself for everyone else about the place

instead of remaining as single and possessable as her anxious friend had

come over to invite her to be. Present to this observer to the last

point indeed, and yet as nothing new, was the impression of that

insolence of ease on Gussy's part which was never so great as when her

sense for any relation was least fine and least true. She was naturally

never so the vulgar rich woman able to afford herself all luxuries as

when I she was most stupid about the right enjoyment of these and most

brutally systematic, as Rosanna's inward voice phrased the matter, for

some inferior and desecrating use of them. Mrs. Bradham would deeply

have resented--as deeply as a woman might who had no depth--any

imputation on her view of what would be fine and great for her young

friend, but Rosanna's envy and admiration of possibilities, to say

nothing of actualities, to which this view was quite blind, kept the

girl before her at times as a sacrificed, truly an even prostituted

creature; who yet also, it had to be added, could often alienate

sympathy by strange, by perverse concurrences. However, Rosanna thought,

Cissy wasn't in concurrence now, but was quite otherwise preoccupied

than with what their hostess could either give her or take from her. She

was happy--this our young woman perfectly perceived, to her own very

great increase of interest; so happy that, as had been repeatedly

noticeable before, she multiplied herself through the very agitation of

it, appearing to be, for particular things they had to say to her,

particular conversational grabs and snatches, all of the most violent,

they kept attempting and mostly achieving, at the service of everyone at

once, and thereby as obliging, as humane a beauty, after the fashion of

the old term, as could have charmed the sight. What Rosanna most noted

withal, and not for the first time either, every observation she had

hitherto made seeming now but intensified, what she most noted was the

huge general familiarity, the pitch of intimacy unmodulated, as if

exactly the same tie, from person to person, bound the whole company

together and nobody had anything to say to anyone that wasn't equally in

question for all.

This, she knew, was the air and the sound, the common state, of

intimacy, and again and again, in taking it in, she had remained unsure

of whether it left her more hopelessly jealous or more rudely

independent. She would have liked to be intimate--with someone or other,

not indeed with every member of a crowd; but the faculty, as appeared,

hadn't been given her (for with whom had she ever exercised it? not even

with Cissy, she felt now,) and it was ground on which she knew alternate

languor and relief. The fact, however, that so much as all this could be

present to her while she encountered greetings, accepted tea, and failed

of felicity before forms of address for the most part so hilarious, or

at least so ingenious, as to remind her further that she might never

expect to be funny either--that fact might have shown her as hugging a

treasure of consciousness rather than as seeking a soil for its

interment. What they all took for granted!--this again and again had

been before her; and never so as when Gussy Bradham after a little

became possessed of her to the extent of their sharing a settee in one

of the great porches on the lawny margin of which, before sundry

over-archings in other and quite contradictious architectural interests

began to spread, a dozen dispersed couples and trios revolved and

lingered in sight. How was he, the young man at the other house, going

to like these enormous assumptions?--that of a sudden oddly came to her;

so far indeed as it was odd that Gussy should suggest such questions.

She suggested questions in her own way at all times; Rosanna indeed

mostly saw her in a sort of immodest glare of such, the chief being

doubtless the wonder, never assuaged, of how any circle of the supposed

amenities could go on "putting up" with her. The present was as a fact

perhaps the first time our young woman had seen her in the light of a

danger to herself. If society, or what they called such, had to reckon

with her and accepted the charge, that was society's own affair--it

appeared on the whole to understand its interest; but why should she,

Rosanna Gaw, recognise a complication she had done nothing ever to

provoke? It was literally as if the reckoning sat there between them and

all the terms they had ever made with felt differences, intensities of

separation and opposition, had now been superseded by the need for fresh

ones--forms of contact and exchange, forms of pretended intercourse, to

be improvised in presence of new truths.

So it was at any rate that Rosanna's imagination worked while she asked

herself if there mightn't be something in an idea she had more than once

austerely harboured--the possibility that Mrs. Bradham could on occasion

be afraid of her. If this lady's great note was that of an astounding

assurance based on approved impunity, how, certainly, should a plain

dull shy spinster, with an entire incapacity for boldness and a perfect

horror, in general, of intermeddling, have broken the spell?--especially

as there was no other person in the world, not one, whom she could have

dreamed of wishing to put in fear. Deep was the discomfort for Miss Gaw

of losing with her entertainer the commonest advantage she perhaps knew,

that of her habit of escape from the relation of dislike, let alone of

hostility, through some active denial for the time of any relation at

all. What was there in Gussy that rendered impossible to Rosanna's sense

this very vulgarest of luxuries? She gave her always the impression of

looking at her with an exaggeration of ease, a guarded penetration, that

consciously betrayed itself; though how could one know, after all, that

this wasn't the horrid nature of her look for everyone?--which would

have been publicly denounced if people hadn't been too much involved

with her to be candid. With her wondrous bloom of life and health and

her hard confidence that had nothing to do with sympathy, Gussy might

have presented it as a matter of some pusillanimity, her present critic

at the same time felt, that one should but detect the displeasing in

such an exhibition of bright activity. The only way not to stand off

from her, no doubt, was to be of her "bossed" party and crew, or in

other words to be like everyone else; and perhaps one might on that

condition have enjoyed as a work of nature or even of art, an example of

all-efficient force, her braveries of aspect and attitude, resources of

resistance to time and thought, things not of beauty, for some

unyielding reason, and quite as little of dignity, but things of

assertion and application in an extraordinary degree, things of a

straight cold radiance and of an emphasis that was like the stamp of

hard flat feet. Even if she was to be envied it would be across such

gulfs; as it was indeed one couldn't so much as envy her the prodigy of

her "figure," which had been at eighteen, as one had heard, that of a

woman of forty and was now at forty, one saw, that of a girl of

eighteen: such a state of the person wasn't human, to the younger

woman's sombre sense, but might have been that of some shining humming

insect, a thing of the long-constricted waist, the minimised yet

caparisoned head, the fixed disproportionate eye and tough transparent

wing, gossamer guaranteed. With all of which, however, she had pushed

through every partition and was in the centre of her guest's innermost

preserve before she had been heard coming.

"It's too lovely that you should have got him to do what he ought--that

dreadful old man! But I don't know if you feel how interesting it's all

going to be; in fact if you know yourself how wonderful it is that he

has already--Mr. Fielder has, I mean--such a tremendous friend in

Cissy."

Rosanna waited, facing her, noting her extraordinary perfections of

neatness, of elegance, of arrangement, of which it couldn't be said

whether they most handed over to you, as on some polished salver, the

clear truth of her essential commonness or transposed it into an element

that could please, that could even fascinate, as a supreme attestation

of care. "Take her as an advertisement of all the latest knowledges of

how to 'treat' every inch of the human surface and where to 'get' every

scrap of the personal envelope, so far as she is enveloped, and she does

achieve an effect sublime in itself and thereby absolute in a wavering

world"--with so much even as that was Miss Gaw aware of helping to fill

for her own use the interval before she spoke. "No," she said, "I know

nothing of what any of you may suppose yourselves to know." After which,

however, with a sudden inspiration, a quick shift of thought as though

catching an alarm, "I haven't seen Mr. Fielder for a very long time,

haven't seen him at all yet here," she added; "but though I hoped

immensely he would come, and am awfully glad he has, what I want for him

is to have the very best time he possibly can; a much better one than I

shall myself at all know how to help him to."

"Why, aren't you helping him to the greatest time he can have ever had

if you've waked up his uncle to a sense of decency?" Gussy demanded with

her brightest promptness. "You needn't think, Rosanna," she proceeded

with a well-nigh fantastic development of that ease, "you needn't think

you're going to be able to dodge the least little consequence of your

having been so wonderful. He's just going to owe you everything, and to

follow that feeling up; so I don't see why you shouldn't want to let

him--it would be so mean of him not to!--or be deprived of the credit of

so good a turn. When I do things"--Gussy always had every account of

herself ready--"I want to have them recognised; I like to make them pay,

without the least shame, in the way of glory gained. However, it's

between yourselves," her delicacy conceded, "and how can one

judge--except just to envy you such a lovely relation? All I want is

that you should feel that here we are if you do want help. He should

have here the best there is, and should have it, don't you think? before

he tumbles from ignorance into any mistake--mistakes have such a way of

sticking. So don't be unselfish about him, don't sacrifice him to the

fear of using your advantage: what are such advantages as you enjoy

meant for--all of them, I mean--but to be used up to the limit? You'll

see at any rate what Cissy says--she has great ideas about him. I mean,"

said Mrs. Bradham with a qualification in which the expression of

Rosanna's still gaze suddenly seemed reflected, "I mean that it's so

interesting she should have all the clues."

Rosanna still gazed; she might even after a little have struck a watcher

as held in spite of herself by some heavy spell. It was an old

sense--she had already often had it: when once Gussy had got her head

up, got away and away as Davey called it, she might appear to do what

she would with her victim; appear, that is, to Gussy herself--the

appearance never corresponded for Miss Gaw to an admission of her own.

Behind the appearance, at all events, things on one side and the other

piled themselves up, and Rosanna certainly knew what they were on her

side. Nevertheless it was as a vocal note too faintly quavered through

some loud orchestral sound that she heard herself echo: "The clues----?"

"Why, it's so funny there should be such a lot--and all gathered about

here!" To this attestation of how everything in the world, for that

matter, was gathered right there Rosanna felt herself superficially

yield; and even before she knew what was coming--for something clearly

was--she was strangely conscious of a choice somehow involved in her

attitude and dependent on her mind, and this too as at almost the

acutest moment of her life. What it came to, with the presentiment of

forces at play such as she had really never yet had to count with, was

the question, all for herself, of whether she should be patently lying

in the profession of a readiness to hand the subject of her interest

over unreservedly to all waiting, all so remarkably gathering contacts

and chances, or whether the act wouldn't partake of the very finest

strain of her past sincerity. She was to remember the moment later on as

if she had really by her definition, by her selection, "behaved"--fairly

feeling the breath of her young man's experience on her cheek before

knowing with the least particularity what it would most be, and deciding

then and there to swallow down every fear of any cost of anything to

herself. She felt extraordinary in the presence of symptoms, symptoms of

life, of death, of danger, of delight, of what did she know? But this it

was exactly that cast derision, by contrast, on such poor obscurities as

her feelings, and settled it for her that when she had professed a few

minutes back that she hoped they would all, for his possible pleasure in

it, catch him up and, so far as they might, make him theirs, she wasn't

to have spoken with false frankness. Queer enough at the same time, and

a wondrous sign of her state of sensibility, that she should see

symptoms glimmer from so very far off. What was this one that was

already in the air before Mrs. Bradham had so much as answered her

question?

Well, the next moment at any rate she knew, and more extraordinary then

than anything was the spread of her apprehension, off somehow to the

incalculable, under Gussy's mention of a name. What did this show most

of all, however, but how little the intensity of her private association

with the name had even yet died out, or at least how vividly it could

revive in a connection by which everything in her was quickened?

"Haughty" Vint, just lately conversed with by Cissy in New York, it

appeared, and now coming on to the Bradhams from one day to another, had

fed the girl with information, it also, and more wonderfully,

transpired--information about Gray's young past, all surprisingly

founded on close contacts, the most interesting, between the pair, as

well as the least suspected ever by Rosanna: to such an effect that the

transmitted trickle of it had after a moment swelled from Gussy's lips

into a stream by which our friend's consciousness was flooded. "Clues"

these connections might well be called when every touch could now set up

a vibration. It hummed away at once like a pressed button--if she had

been really and in the least meanly afraid of complications she might

now have sat staring at one that would do for oddity, for the oddity of

that relation of her own with Cissy's source of anecdote which could so

have come and gone and yet thrown no light for her on anything but

itself; little enough, by what she had tried to make of it at the time,

though that might have been. It had meanwhile scarce revived for her

otherwise, even if reviving now, as we have said, to intensity, that

Horton Vint's invitation to her some three years before to bestow her

hand upon him in marriage had been attended by impressions as singular

perhaps as had ever marked a like case in an equal absence of outward

show. The connection with him remaining for her had simply been that no

young man--in the clear American social air--had probably ever

approached a young woman on such ground with so utter a lack of

ostensible warrant and had yet at the same time so saved the situation

for himself, or for what he might have called his dignity, and even

hers; to the positive point of his having left her with the mystery, in

all the world, that she could still most pull out from old dim

confusions to wonder about, and wonder all in vain, when she had

nothing better to do. Everything was over between them save the fact

that they hadn't quarrelled, hadn't indeed so much as discussed; but

here withal was association, association unquenched--from the moment a

fresh breath, as just now, could blow upon it. He had had the

appearance--it was unmistakeable--of absolutely believing she might

accept him if he but put it to her lucidly enough and let her look at

him straight enough; and the extraordinary thing was that, for all her

sense of this at the hour, she hadn't imputed to him a real fatuity.

It had remained with her that, given certain other facts, no incident of

that order could well have had so little to confess by any of its

aspects to the taint of vulgarity. She had seen it, she believed, as he

meant it, meant it with entire conviction: he had intended a tribute, of

a high order, to her intelligence, which he had counted on, or at least

faced with the opportunity, to recognise him as a greater value, taken

all round, appraised by the _whole_ suitability, than she was likely

ever again to find offered. He was of course to take or to leave, and

she saw him stand there in that light as he had then stood, not

pleading, not pressing, not pretending to anything but the wish and the

capacity to serve, only holding out her chance, appealing to her

judgment, inviting her inspection, meeting it without either a shade of

ambiguity or, so far as she could see, any vanity beyond the facts. It

had all been wonderful enough, and not least so that, although

absolutely untouched and untempted, perfectly lucid on her own side and

perfectly inaccessible, she had in a manner admired him, in a manner

almost enjoyed him, in the act of denying him hope. Extraordinary in

especial had it been that he was probably right, right about his value,

right about his rectitude, of conscious intention at least, right even

as to his general calculation of effect, an effect probably producible

on most women; right finally in judging that should he strike at all

this would be the one way. It was only less extraordinary that no

faintest shade of regret, no lightest play of rueful imagination, no

subordinate stir of pity or wonder, had attended her memory of having

left him to the mere cold comfort of reflection. It was his truth that

had fallen short, not his error; the soundness, as it were, of his

claim--so far as his fine intelligence, matching her own, that is, could

make it sound--had had nothing to do with its propriety. She had refused

him, none the less, without disliking him, at the same time that she was

at no moment afterwards conscious of having cared whether he had

suffered. She had been too unaware of the question even to remark that

she seemed indifferent; though with a vague impression--so far as that

went--that suffering was not in his chords. His acceptance of his check

she could but call inscrutably splendid--inscrutably perhaps because she

couldn't quite feel that it had left nothing between them. Something

there was, something there had to be, if only the marvel, so to say, of

her present, her permanent, backward vision of the force with which they

had touched and separated. It stuck to her somehow that they had touched

still more than if they had loved, held each other still closer than if

they had embraced: to such and so strange a tune had they been briefly

intimate. Would any man ever look at her so for passion as Mr. Vint had

looked for reason? and should her own eyes ever again so visit a man's

depths and gaze about in them unashamed to a tune to match that

adventure? Literally what they had said was comparatively

unimportant--once he had made his errand clear; whereby the rest might

all have been but his silent exhibition of his personality, so to name

it, his honour, his assumption, his situation, his life, and that

failure on her own part to yield an inch which had but the more let him

see how straight these things broke upon her. For all the straightness,

it was true, the fact that might most have affected, not to say

concerned, her had remained the least expressed. It wasn't for her now

to know what difference it could have made that he was in relation with

Gray Fielder; incontestably, however, _their_ relation, or their missing

of one, hers and Haughty's, flushed anew in the sudden light.

"Oh I'm so glad he has good friends here then--with such a clever one as

Mr. Vint we can certainly be easy about him." So much Rosanna heard

herself at last say, and it would doubtless have quite served for assent

to Gussy's revelation without the further support given her by the

simultaneous convergence upon them of various members of the party, who

exactly struck our young woman as having guessed, by the sight of

hostess and momentous guest withdrawn together, that the topic of the

moment was there to be plucked from their hands. Rosanna was now on her

feet--she couldn't sit longer and just take things; and she was to ask

herself afterwards with what cold stare of denial she mightn't have

appeared quite unprecedentedly to face the inquiring rout under the

sense that now certainly, if she didn't take care, she should have

nothing left of her own. It wasn't that they weren't, all laughter and

shimmer, all senseless sound and expensive futility, the easiest people

in the world to share with, and several the very prettiest and

pleasantest, of the vaguest insistence after all, the most absurdly

small awareness of what they were eager about; but that of the three or

four things then taking place at once the brush across her heart of

Gray's possible immediate question, "Have you brought me over then to

live with _these_----?" had most in common with alarm. It positively

helped her indeed withal that she found herself, the next thing,

greeting with more sincerity of expression than she had, by her

consciousness, yet used Mrs. Bradham's final leap to action in the form

of "I want him to dinner of course right off!" She said it with the big

brave laugh that represented her main mercy for the general public view

of her native eagerness, an eagerness appraised, not to say proclaimed,

by herself as a passion for the service of society, and in connection

with which it was mostly agreed that she never so drove her flock before

her as when paying this theoretic tribute to grace of manner. Before

Rosanna could ejaculate, moved though she was to do so, the question had

been taken up by the extremely pretty person who was known to her

friends, and known even to Rosanna, as Minnie Undle and who at once put

in a plea for Mr. Fielder's presence that evening, her own having been

secured for it. Before such a rate of procedure as this evocation

implied even Gussy appeared to recoil, but with a prompt proviso in

favour of the gentleman's figuring rather on the morrow, when Mrs.

Undle, since she seemed so impatient, might again be of the party. Mrs.

Undle agreed on the spot, though by this time Rosanna's challenge had

ceased to hang fire. "But do you really consider that you _know_ him so

much as that?"--she let Gussy have it straight, even if at the

disadvantage that there were now as ever plenty of people to react, to

the last hilarity, at the idea that acquaintance enjoyed on either side

was needfully imputable to these participations. "That's just why--if we

don't know him!" Mrs. Undle further contributed; while Gussy declined

recognition of the relevance of any word of Miss Gaw's. She declined it

indeed in her own way, by a yet stiffer illustration of her general

resilience; an "Of course I mean, dear, that I look to you to bring

him!" expressing sufficiently her system.

"Then you really expect him when his uncle's dying----?" sprang in all

honesty from Rosanna's lips; to be taken up on the instant, however, by

a voice that was not Gussy's and that rang clear before Gussy could

speak.

"There can't be the least question of it--even if we're dying ourselves,

or even if I am at least!" was what Rosanna heard; with Cissy Foy, of a

sudden supremely exhibited, giving the case at once all happy sense, all

bright quick harmony with their general immediate interest. She pressed

to Rosanna straight, as if nothing as yet had had time to pass between

them--which very little in fact had; with the result for our young woman

of feeling helped, by the lightest of turns, not to be awkward herself,

or really, what came to the same thing, not to be anything herself. It

was a fine perception she had had before--of how Cissy could on occasion

"do" for one, and this, all extraordinarily and in a sort of double

sense, by quenching one in her light at the very moment she offered it

for guidance. She quenched Gussy, she was the single person who could,

Gussy almost gruntingly consenting; she quenched Minnie Undle, she

cheapened every other presence, scattering lovely looks, multiplying

happy touches, grasping Rosanna for possession, yet at the same time, as

with her free hand, waving away every other connection: so that a minute

or two later--for it scarce seemed more--the pair were isolated, still

on the verandah somewhere, but intensely confronted and talking at ease,

or in a way that had to pass for ease, with its not mattering at all

whether their companions, dazzled and wafted off, had dispersed and

ceased to be, or whether they themselves had simply been floated to

where they wished on the great surge of the girl's grace. The girl's

grace was, after its manner, such a force that Miss Gaw had had

repeatedly, on past occasions, to doubt even while she recognised--for

_could_ a young creature you weren't quite sure of use a weapon of such

an edge only for good? The young creature seemed at any rate now as

never yet to give out its play for a thing to be counted on and trusted;

and with Gussy Bradham herself shown just there behind them as letting

it take everything straight out of _her_ hands, nobody else at all

daring to touch, what were you to do but verily feel distinguished by

its so wrapping you about? The only sharpness in what had happened was

that with Cissy's act of presence Mrs. Bradham had exercised her great

function of social appraiser by staring and then, as under conclusions

drawn from it, giving way. One might have found it redeemingly soft in

her that before this particular suggestion she could melt, or that in

other words Cissy appeared the single fact in all the world about which

she had anything to call imagination. She imagined her, she imagined her

_now_, and as dealing somehow with their massive friend; which

consciousness, on the latter's part, it must be said, played for the

moment through everything else.

Not indeed that there wasn't plenty for the girl to fill the fancy with;

since nothing could have been purer than the stream that she poured into

Rosanna's as from an upturned crystal urn while she repeated over,

holding her by the two hands, gazing at her in admiration: "I can _see_

how you care for him--I can see, I can see!" And she felt indeed, our

young woman, how the cover was by this light hand whisked off her

secret--Cissy made it somehow a secret in the act of laying it bare; and

that she blushed for the felt exposure as even Gussy had failed to make

her. Seeing which her companion but tilted the further vessel of

confidence. "It's too funny, it's too wonderful that I too should know

something. But I do, and I'll tell you how--not now, for I haven't time,

but as soon as ever I can; which will make you see. So what you must do

for all you're worth," said Cissy, "is to care now more than ever. You

must keep him from us, because we're not good enough and you _are_; you

must act in the sense of what you feel, and must feel exactly as you've

a right to--for, as I say, I know, I know!"

It was impossible, Rosanna seemed to see, that a generous young thing

should shine out in more beauty; so that what in the world might one

ever keep from her? Surpassingly strange the plea thus radiant on the

very brow of the danger! "You mean you know Mr. Fielder's history? from

your having met somebody----?"

"Oh that of course, yes; Gussy, whom I've told of my having met Mr.

Northover, will have told you. That's curious and charming," Cissy went

on, "and I want awfully we should talk of it. But it isn't what I mean

by what I know--and what you don't, my dear thing!"

Rosanna couldn't have told why, but she had begun to tremble, and also

to try not to show it. "What I don't know--about Gray Fielder? Why, of

course there's plenty!" she smiled.

Cissy still held her hands; but Cissy now was grave. "No, there isn't

plenty--save so far as what I mean is enough. And I haven't told it to

Gussy. It's too good for her," the girl added. "It's too good for anyone

but you."

Rosanna just waited, feeling herself perhaps grimace. "What, Cissy,

_are_ you talking about?"

"About what I heard from Mr. Northover when we met him, when we saw so

much of him, three years ago at Ragatz, where we had gone for Mamma and

where we went through the cure with him. He and I struck up a friendship

and he often spoke to me of his stepson--who wasn't there with him, was

at that time off somewhere in the mountains or in Italy, I forget, but

to whom I could see he was devoted. He and I hit it off beautifully

together--he seemed to me awfully charming and to like to tell me

things. So what I allude to is something he said to me."

"About me?" Rosanna gasped.

"Yes--I see now it was about you. But it's only to-day that I've guessed

that. Otherwise, otherwise----!" And as if under the weight of her great

disclosure Cissy faltered.

But she had now indeed made her friend desire it. "You mean that

otherwise you'd have told me before?"

"Yes indeed--and it's such a miracle I didn't. It's such a miracle,"

said Cissy, "that the person should all this time have been

you--or you have been the person. Of course I had no idea that all

_this_--everything that has taken place now, by what I understand--was

going so extraordinarily to happen. You see he never named Mr.

Betterman, or in fact, I think," the girl explained, "told me anything

about him. And he didn't name, either, Gray's friend--so that in spite

of the impression made on me you've never till to-day been identified."

Immense, as she went, Rosanna felt, the number of things she gave her

thus together to think about. What was coming she clearly needn't

fear--might indeed, deep within, happily hold her breath for; but the

very interest somehow made her rest an instant, as for refinement of

suspense, on the minor surprises. "The impression then has been so great

that you call him 'Gray'?"

The girl at this ceased holding hands; she folded her arms back together

across her slim young person--the frequent habit of it in her was of the

prettiest "quaint" effect; she laughed as if submitting to some just

correction of a freedom. "Oh, but my dear, _he_ did, the delightful

man--and isn't it borne in upon me that you do? Of course the impression

was great--and if Mr. Northover and I had met younger I don't know," her

laugh said, "what mightn't have happened. No, I never shall have had a

greater, a more intelligent admirer! As it was we remained true,

secretly true, for fond memory, to the end: at least I did, though ever

so secretly--you see I speak of it only now--and I want to believe so in

his impression. But how I torment you!" she suddenly said in another

tone.

Rosanna, nursing her patience, had a sad slow headshake. "I don't

understand."

"Of course you don't--and yet it's too beautiful. It was about

Gray--once when we talked of him, as I've told you we repeatedly did. It

was that he never would look at anyone else."

Our friend could but appear at least to cast about. "Anyone else than

whom?"

"Why than you," Cissy smiled. "The girl he had loved in boyhood. The

American girl who, years before, in Dresden, had done for him something

he could never forget."

"And what had she done?" stared Rosanna.

"Oh he didn't tell me _that!_ But if you don't take great care, as I

say," Cissy went on, "perhaps _he_ may--I mean Mr. Fielder himself may

when we close round him in the way that, in your place, as I assure you,

I would certainly do everything to prevent."

Rosanna looked about as with a sudden sense of weakness, the effect of

overstrain; it was absurd, but these last minutes might almost, with

their queer action, and as to the ground they covered, have been as many

formidable days. A fine verandah settee again close at hand offered her

support, and she dropped upon it, as for large retrieval of menaced

ease, with a need she herself alone could measure. The need was to

recover some sense of perspective, to be able to place her young

friend's somehow portentous assault off in such conditions, if only of

mere space and time, as would make for some greater convenience of

relation with it. It did at once help her--and really even for the tone

in which she smiled across: "So you're sure?"

Cissy hovered, shining, shifting, yet accepting the perspective as it

were--when in the world had she to fear _any?_--and positively painted

there in bright contradiction, her very grace again, after the odd

fashion in which it sometimes worked, seeming to deny her sincerity, and

her very candour seeming to deny her gravity. "Sure of what? Sure I'm

right about you?"

Rosanna took a minute to say--so many things worked in her; yet when one

of these came uppermost, pushing certain of the others back, she found

for putting it forward a tone grateful to her own ear. This tone

represented on her part too a substitute for sincerity, but that was

exactly what she wanted. "I don't care a fig for any anecdote about

myself--which moreover it would be very difficult for you to have right.

What I ask you if you're certain of is your being really not fit for

him. Are you absolutely," said Miss Gaw, "as bad as that?"

The girl, placed before her, looked at her now, with raised hands folded

together, as if she had been some seated idol, a great Buddha perched up

on a shrine. "Oh Rosanna, Rosanna----!" she admiringly, piously

breathed.

But it was not such treatment that could keep Miss Gaw from completing

her chosen sense. "I should be extremely sorry--so far as I claim any

influence on him--to interfere against his getting over here whatever

impressions he may; interfere by his taking you for more important, in

any way, than seems really called for."

"Taking _me?_" Cissy smiled.

"Taking any of you--the people, in general and in particular, who haunt

this house. We mustn't be afraid for him of his having the interest, or

even the mere amusement, of learning all that's to be learnt about us."

"Oh Rosanna, Rosanna"--the girl kept it up--"how you adore him; and how

you make me therefore, wretch that I am, fiendishly want to see him!"

But it might quite have glanced now from our friend's idol surface.

"You're the best of us, no doubt--very much; and I immensely hope you'll

like him, since you've been so extraordinarily prepared. It's to be

supposed too that he'll have some sense of his own."