II

He waited a moment, and if she had not immediately after her words

sighed "Oh dear, oh dear!" in quite another, that is a much more

serious, key, the appearance would perhaps have been that for once in a

blue moon she had put into his mind a thought he couldn't have. He

couldn't have the thought that it was of the least importance she should

guard herself in the way she mentioned; and it was in the air, the very

next thing, that she couldn't so idiotically have strayed as to mean to

impute it. He quickly enough made the point that what he preferred was

her not founding her interest in Gray so very abjectly on another man's

authority--given the uncanny fact of the other man's having cast upon

her a charm which time and even his death had done so little to abate.

Yes, the late Northover had clearly had something about him that it

worried a fellow to have her perpetually rake up. _There_ she was in

peril of jealousy--his jealousy of the queer Northover ghost; unless

indeed it was she herself who was queerest, ridden as her spirit seemed

by sexagenarian charms! He could look after her with Gray--they were at

one about Gray; what would truly alienate them, should she persist,

would be his own exposure to comparison with the memory of a rococo

Briton he had no arms to combat. Which extravagance of fancy had of

course after a minute sufficiently testified to the clearance of their

common air that invariably sprang from their feeling themselves again

together and finding once more what this came to--all under sublime

palpability of proof. The renewed consciousness did perhaps nothing for

their difficulties as such, but it did everything for the interest, the

amusement, the immediate inspiration of their facing them: there was in

that such an element of their facing each other and knowing, each time

as if they had not known it before, that this had absolute beauty. It

had unmistakably never had more than now, even when their freedom in it

had rapidly led them, under Cissy's wonderment, to a consideration of

whether a happy relation with their friend (he was already thus her

friend too, without her ever having seen him!) mightn't have to count

with some inevitable claim, some natural sentiment, asserted and enjoyed

on Rosanna's part, not to speak of the effect on Graham himself of that

young woman's at once taking such an interest in him and coming in for

such a fortune.

"In addition to which who shall pretend to deny," the girl earnestly

asked, "that Rosanna has in herself the most extraordinary charm?"

"Oh you think she has extraordinary charm?"

"Of course I do--and so do you: don't be absurd! She's simply superb,"

Cissy expounded, "in her own original way, which no other woman over

here--except me a little perhaps!--has so much as a suspicion of

anything to compare with; and which, for all we know, constitutes a

luxury entirely at Graham's service." Cissy required but a single other

look at it all to go on: "I shouldn't in the least wonder if they were

already engaged."

"I don't think there's a chance of it," Haughty said, "and I hold that

if any such fear is your only difficulty you may be quite at your ease.

Not only do I so see it," he went on, "but I know _why_ I do."

Cissy just waited. "You consider that because she refused Horton Vint

she'll decline marriage altogether?"

"I think that throws a light," this gentleman smiled--"though it isn't

_all_ my ground. She turned me down, two years ago, as utterly as I

shall ever have been turned in my life--and if I chose so to look at it

the experience would do for me beautifully as that of an humiliation

served up to a man in as good form as he need desire. That it was, that

it still is when I live it through again; that it will probably remain,

for my comfort--in the sense that I'm likely never to have a worse. I've

had my dose," he figured, "of that particular black draught, and I've

got the bottle there empty on the shelf."

"And yet you signify that you're all the same glad----?" Cissy didn't

for the instant wholly follow.

"Well, it _all_ came to me then; and that it did all come is what I have

the advantage of now--I mean, you see, in being able to reassure you as

I do. I had some wonderful minutes with her--it didn't take long,"

Haughty laughed. "We saw in those few minutes, being both so horribly

intelligent; and what I recognised has remained with me. What she did is

her own affair--and that she could so perfectly make it such, without

leaving me a glimmer of doubt, is what I have, as I tell you, to blink

at forever. I may ask myself if you like," he pursued, "why I should

'mind' so much if I saw even at the moment that she wasn't at any rate

going to take someone else--and if you do I shall reply that I didn't

need that to make it bad. It was bad enough just in itself. My point is,

however," Horton concluded, "that I can give you at least the benefit of

my feeling utterly sure that Gray will have no chance. She's in the

dreadful position--and more than ever of course now--of not being able

to believe she can be loved for herself."

"You mean because _you_ couldn't make her believe it?" asked Cissy after

taking this in.

"No--not that, for I didn't so much as try. I didn't--and it was awfully

superior of me, you know--approach her at all on that basis. That," said

Horton, "is where it cuts. The basis was that of my own capacity

only--my capacity to serve her, in every particular, with every aptitude

I possess in the world, and which I could see she _saw_ I possess (it

was given me somehow to send that home to her!) without a hair's breadth

overlooked. I shouldn't have minded her taking me so for impossible,

blackly impossible, if she had done it under an illusion; but she really

believed in me as a general value, quite a first-rate value--_that_ I

stood there and didn't doubt. And yet she practically said 'You ass!'"

His encircling arm gained, for response to this, however, but the

vibration of her headshake--without so much as any shudder at the pain

he so vividly imaged. "She practically said that she was already _then_

in love with Mr. Graham, and you wouldn't have had a better chance had

a passion of your own stuck out of you. If I thought she didn't admire

you," Cissy said, "I shouldn't be able to do with her at all--it would

be too stupid of her; putting aside her not accepting you, I mean--for a

woman can't accept _every_ man she admires. I suppose you don't at

present object," she continued, "to her admiring Mr. Graham enough to

account for anything; especially as it accounts so for her having just

acted on his behalf with such extraordinary success. Doesn't that make

it out for him," she asked, "that he's admired by twenty millions _plus_

the amount that her reconciliation of him with his uncle just in time to

save it, without an hour to spare, will represent for his pocket? We

don't know what that lucky amount may be----"

"No, but we more or less _shall_"--Horton took her straight up. "Of

course, without exaggeration, that will be interesting--even though it

will be but a question, I'm quite certain, of comparatively small

things. Old Betterman--there are people who practically know, and I've

talked with them--isn't going to foot up to any faint likeness of what

Gaw does. That, however, has nothing to do with it: all that is

relevant--since I quite allow that, speculation for speculation, our

association in this sort represents finer fun than it has yet succeeded

in doing in other sorts--all that's relevant is that when you've seen

Gray you mayn't be in such a hurry to figure him as a provoker of

insatiable passions. Your insidious Northover has, as you say, worked

you up, but wait a little to see if the reality corresponds."

"He showed me a photograph, my insidious Northover," Cissy promptly

recalled; "he was _naïf_ enough, poor dear, for that. In fact he made

me a present of several, including one of himself; I owe him as well two

or three other mementos, all of which I've cherished."

"What was he up to anyway, the old corrupter of your youth?"--Horton

seemed really to wonder. "Unless it was that you simply reduced him to

infatuated babble."

"Well, there are the photographs and things to show," she answered

unembarrassed--"though I haven't them with me here; they're put away in

New York. His portrait's extremely good-looking."

"Do you mean Mr. Northover's own?"

"Oh _his_ is of course quite beautiful. But I mean Mr. Fielder's--at his

then lovely age. I remember it," said Cissy, "as a nice, nice face."

Haughty on his side indulged in the act of memory, concluding after an

instant to a head-shake. "He isn't at all remarkable for looks; but

putting his nice face at its best, granting that he _has_ a high degree

of that advantage, do you see Rosanna so carried away by it as to cast

everything to the winds for him?"

Cissy weighed the question. "We've seen surely what she has been carried

away enough to do."

"She has had other reasons--independent of headlong passion. And

remember," he further argued--"if you impute to her a high degree of

that sort of sensibility--how perfectly proof she was to _my_ physical

attractions, which I declare to you without scruple leave the very

brightest you may discover in Gray completely in the shade."

Again his companion considered. "Of course you're dazzlingly handsome;

but are you, my dear, after all--I mean in appearance--so very

_interesting?_"

The inquiry was so sincere that it could be met but in the same spirit.

"Didn't you then find me so from the first minute you ever looked at

me?"

"We're not talking of me," she returned, "but of people who happen to

have been subjects less predestined and victims less abject. What," she

then at once went on, "_is_ Gray's appearance 'anyway'? Is he black, to

begin with, or white, or betwixt and between? Is he little or big or

neither one thing or t'other? Is he fat or thin or of 'medium weight'?

There are always such lots to be told about people, and never a creature

in all the wide world to tell. Even Mr. Northover, when I come to think

of it, never mentioned is size.

"Well, you _wouldn't_ mention it," Horton amiably argued. The appeal, he

showed withal, stirred him to certain recoveries. "And I should call him

black--black as to his straight thick hair, which I see rather

distinctively 'slick' and soigné--the hair of a good little boy who

never played at things that got it tumbled. No, he's only very middling

tall; in fact so very middling," Haughty made out, "that it probably

comes to his being rather short. But he has neither a hump nor a limp,

no marked physical deformity of any sort; has in fact a kind of futile

fidgetty quickness which suggests the little man, and the nervous and

the active and the ready; the ready, I mean, for anything in the way of

interest and talk--given that the matter isn't too big for him. The

'active,' I say, though at the same time," he noted, "I ask myself what

the deuce the activity will have been _about._"

The girl took in these impressions to the effect of desiring still more

of them. "Doesn't he happen then to have eyes and things?"

"Oh yes"--Horton bethought himself--"lots and lots of eyes, though not

perhaps so many of other things. Good eyes, fine eyes, in fact I think

anything whatever you may require in the way of eyes."

"Then clearly they're not 'black': I never require black ones," she

said, "in any conceivable connection: his eyes--blue-grey, or grey-blue,

whichever you may call it, and far and away the most charming kind when

one doesn't happen to be looking into your glorious green ones--his

satisfactory eyes are what will more than anything else have done the

business. They'll have done it so," she went on, "that if he isn't red

in the face, which I defy him to be, his features don't particularly

matter--though there's not the least reason either why he should have

mean or common ones. In fact he hasn't them in the photograph, and what

are photographs, the wretched things, but the very truth of life?"

"He's not red in the face," Haughty was able to state--"I think of him

rather as of a pale, very pale, clean brown; and entirely unaddicted,"

he felt sure, "to flushing or blushing. What I do sort of remember in

the feature way is that his teeth though good, fortunately, as they're

shown a good deal, are rather too small and square; for a man's, that

is, so that they make his smile a trifle----"

"A trifle irresistible of course," Cissy broke in--"through their being,

in their charming form, of the happy Latin model; extremely like my own,

be so good as to notice for once in your life, and not like the usual

Anglo-Saxon fangs. You're simply describing, you know," she added,

"about as gorgeous a being as one could wish to see."

"It's not I who am describing him--it's you, love; and ever so

delightfully." With which, in consistency with that, he himself put a

question. "What does it come to, by the way, in the sense of a

moustache? Does he, or _doesn't_ he after all, wear one? It's odd I

shouldn't remember, but what does the photograph say?"

"It seems odd indeed _I_ shouldn't"--Cissy had a moment's brooding. She

gave herself out as ashamed. "Fancy my not remembering if the photograph

is _moustachue!_"

"It can't be then _very_" Horton contributed--the point was really so

interesting.

"No," Cissy tried to settle, "the photograph can't be so very

moustachue."

"His moustaches, I mean, if he wears 'em, can't be so very prodigious;

or one could scarcely have helped noticing, could one?"

"Certainly no one can ever have failed to notice yours--and therefore

Gray's, if he has any, must indeed be very inferior. And yet he can't be

shaved like a sneak-thief--or like all the world here," she developed;

"for I won't have him with nothing at all any more than I'll have him

with anything prodigious, as you say; which is worse than nothing. When

I say I won't have him with nothing," she explained, "I mean I won't

have him subject to the so universally and stupidly applied American law

that every man's face without exception shall be scraped as clean, as

_glabre_, as a fish's--which it makes so many of them so much resemble.

I won't have him so," she said, "because I won't have him so idiotically

gregarious and without that sense of differences in things, and of their

relations and suitabilities, which such exhibitions make one so ache

for. If he's gregarious to that sort of tune we must renounce our

idea--that is you must drop yours--of my working myself up to snatch him

from the arms of Rosanna. I must believe in him, for that, I must see

him at least in my own way," she pursued; "believing in myself, or even

believing in you, is a comparative detail. I won't have him bristle with

horrid demagogic notes. I shouldn't be able to act a scrap on that

basis."

It was as if what she said had for him the interest at once of the most

intimate and the most enlarged application; it was in fact as if she

alone in all the world could touch him in such fine ways--could amuse

him, could verily instruct him, to anything like such a tune. "It seems

peculiarly a question of bristles if it all depends on his moustache.

Our suspense as to that, however, needn't so much ravage us," Haughty

added, "when we remember that Davey, who, you tell me, will by this time

have seen him, can settle the question for us as soon as we meet at

dinner. It will by the same stroke then settle that of the witchcraft

which has according to your theory so bedevilled poor dear Rosanna's

sensibility--leading it such a dance, I mean, and giving such an empire

to certain special items of our friend's 'personality,' that the

connection was practically immediate with his brilliant status."