A few days after the Baroness Münster had presented herself to her
American kinsfolk she came, with her brother, and took up her abode in
that small white house adjacent to Mr. Wentworth’s own dwelling of
which mention has already been made. It was on going with his daughters
to return her visit that Mr. Wentworth placed this comfortable cottage
at her service; the offer being the result of a domestic colloquy,
diffused through the ensuing twenty-four hours, in the course of which
the two foreign visitors were discussed and analyzed with a great deal
of earnestness and subtlety. The discussion went forward, as I say, in
the family circle; but that circle on the evening following Madame
Münster’s return to town, as on many other occasions, included Robert
Acton and his pretty sister. If you had been present, it would probably
not have seemed to you that the advent of these brilliant strangers was
treated as an exhilarating occurrence, a pleasure the more in this
tranquil household, a prospective source of entertainment. This was not
Mr. Wentworth’s way of treating any human occurrence. The sudden
irruption into the well-ordered consciousness of the Wentworths of an
element not allowed for in its scheme of usual obligations required a
readjustment of that sense of responsibility which constituted its
principal furniture. To consider an event, crudely and baldly, in the
light of the pleasure it might bring them was an intellectual exercise
with which Felix Young’s American cousins were almost wholly
unacquainted, and which they scarcely supposed to be largely pursued in
any section of human society. The arrival of Felix and his sister was a
satisfaction, but it was a singularly joyless and inelastic
satisfaction. It was an extension of duty, of the exercise of the more
recondite virtues; but neither Mr. Wentworth, nor Charlotte, nor Mr.
Brand, who, among these excellent people, was a great promoter of
reflection and aspiration, frankly adverted to it as an extension of
enjoyment. This function was ultimately assumed by Gertrude Wentworth,
who was a peculiar girl, but the full compass of whose peculiarities
had not been exhibited before they very ingeniously found their pretext
in the presence of these possibly too agreeable foreigners. Gertrude,
however, had to struggle with a great accumulation of obstructions,
both of the subjective, as the metaphysicians say, and of the
objective, order; and indeed it is no small part of the purpose of this
little history to set forth her struggle. What seemed paramount in this
abrupt enlargement of Mr. Wentworth’s sympathies and those of his
daughters was an extension of the field of possible mistakes; and the
doctrine, as it may almost be called, of the oppressive gravity of
mistakes was one of the most cherished traditions of the Wentworth
family.
“I don’t believe she wants to come and stay in this house,” said
Gertrude; Madame Münster, from this time forward, receiving no other
designation than the personal pronoun. Charlotte and Gertrude acquired
considerable facility in addressing her, directly, as “Eugenia;” but in
speaking of her to each other they rarely called her anything but
“she.”
“Doesn’t she think it good enough for her?” cried little Lizzie Acton,
who was always asking unpractical questions that required, in
strictness, no answer, and to which indeed she expected no other answer
than such as she herself invariably furnished in a small,
innocently-satirical laugh.
“She certainly expressed a willingness to come,” said Mr. Wentworth.
“That was only politeness,” Gertrude rejoined.
“Yes, she is very polite—very polite,” said Mr. Wentworth.
“She is too polite,” his son declared, in a softly growling tone which
was habitual to him, but which was an indication of nothing worse than
a vaguely humorous intention. “It is very embarrassing.”
“That is more than can be said of you, sir,” said Lizzie Acton, with
her little laugh.
“Well, I don’t mean to encourage her,” Clifford went on.
“I’m sure I don’t care if you do!” cried Lizzie.
“She will not think of you, Clifford,” said Gertrude, gravely.
“I hope not!” Clifford exclaimed.
“She will think of Robert,” Gertrude continued, in the same tone.
Robert Acton began to blush; but there was no occasion for it, for
everyone was looking at Gertrude—everyone, at least, save Lizzie, who,
with her pretty head on one side, contemplated her brother.
“Why do you attribute motives, Gertrude?” asked Mr. Wentworth.
“I don’t attribute motives, father,” said Gertrude. “I only say she
will think of Robert; and she will!”
“Gertrude judges by herself!” Acton exclaimed, laughing. “Don’t you,
Gertrude? Of course the Baroness will think of me. She will think of me
from morning till night.”
“She will be very comfortable here,” said Charlotte, with something of
a housewife’s pride. “She can have the large northeast room. And the
French bedstead,” Charlotte added, with a constant sense of the lady’s
foreignness.
“She will not like it,” said Gertrude; “not even if you pin little
tidies all over the chairs.”
“Why not, dear?” asked Charlotte, perceiving a touch of irony here, but
not resenting it.
Gertrude had left her chair; she was walking about the room; her stiff
silk dress, which she had put on in honor of the Baroness, made a sound
upon the carpet. “I don’t know,” she replied. “She will want something
more—more private.”
“If she wants to be private she can stay in her room,” Lizzie Acton
remarked.
Gertrude paused in her walk, looking at her. “That would not be
pleasant,” she answered. “She wants privacy and pleasure together.”
Robert Acton began to laugh again. “My dear cousin, what a picture!”
Charlotte had fixed her serious eyes upon her sister; she wondered
whence she had suddenly derived these strange notions. Mr. Wentworth
also observed his younger daughter.
“I don’t know what her manner of life may have been,” he said; “but she
certainly never can have enjoyed a more refined and salubrious home.”
Gertrude stood there looking at them all. “She is the wife of a
Prince,” she said.
“We are all princes here,” said Mr. Wentworth; “and I don’t know of any
palace in this neighborhood that is to let.”
“Cousin William,” Robert Acton interposed, “do you want to do something
handsome? Make them a present, for three months, of the little house
over the way.”
“You are very generous with other people’s things!” cried his sister.
“Robert is very generous with his own things,” Mr. Wentworth observed
dispassionately, and looking, in cold meditation, at his kinsman.
“Gertrude,” Lizzie went on, “I had an idea you were so fond of your new
cousin.”
“Which new cousin?” asked Gertrude.
“I don’t mean the Baroness!” the young girl rejoined, with her laugh.
“I thought you expected to see so much of him.”
“Of Felix? I hope to see a great deal of him,” said Gertrude, simply.
“Then why do you want to keep him out of the house?”
Gertrude looked at Lizzie Acton, and then looked away.
“Should you want me to live in the house with you, Lizzie?” asked
Clifford.
“I hope you never will. I hate you!” Such was this young lady’s reply.
“Father,” said Gertrude, stopping before Mr. Wentworth and smiling,
with a smile the sweeter, as her smile always was, for its rarity; “do
let them live in the little house over the way. It will be lovely!”
Robert Acton had been watching her. “Gertrude is right,” he said.
“Gertrude is the cleverest girl in the world. If I might take the
liberty, I should strongly recommend their living there.”
“There is nothing there so pretty as the northeast room,” Charlotte
urged.
“She will make it pretty. Leave her alone!” Acton exclaimed.
Gertrude, at his compliment, had blushed and looked at him: it was as
if someone less familiar had complimented her. “I am sure she will make
it pretty. It will be very interesting. It will be a place to go to. It
will be a foreign house.”
“Are we very sure that we need a foreign house?” Mr. Wentworth
inquired. “Do you think it desirable to establish a foreign house—in
this quiet place?”
“You speak,” said Acton, laughing, “as if it were a question of the
poor Baroness opening a wine-shop or a gaming-table.”
“It would be too lovely!” Gertrude declared again, laying her hand on
the back of her father’s chair.
“That she should open a gaming-table?” Charlotte asked, with great
gravity.
Gertrude looked at her a moment, and then, “Yes, Charlotte,” she said,
simply.
“Gertrude is growing pert,” Clifford Wentworth observed, with his
humorous young growl. “That comes of associating with foreigners.”
Mr. Wentworth looked up at his daughter, who was standing beside him;
he drew her gently forward. “You must be careful,” he said. “You must
keep watch. Indeed, we must all be careful. This is a great change; we
are to be exposed to peculiar influences. I don’t say they are bad. I
don’t judge them in advance. But they may perhaps make it necessary
that we should exercise a great deal of wisdom and self-control. It
will be a different tone.”
Gertrude was silent a moment, in deference to her father’s speech; then
she spoke in a manner that was not in the least an answer to it. “I
want to see how they will live. I am sure they will have different
hours. She will do all kinds of little things differently. When we go
over there it will be like going to Europe. She will have a boudoir.
She will invite us to dinner—very late. She will breakfast in her
room.”
Charlotte gazed at her sister again. Gertrude’s imagination seemed to
her to be fairly running riot. She had always known that Gertrude had a
great deal of imagination—she had been very proud of it. But at the
same time she had always felt that it was a dangerous and irresponsible
faculty; and now, to her sense, for the moment, it seemed to threaten
to make her sister a strange person who should come in suddenly, as
from a journey, talking of the peculiar and possibly unpleasant things
she had observed. Charlotte’s imagination took no journeys whatever;
she kept it, as it were, in her pocket, with the other furniture of
this receptacle—a thimble, a little box of peppermint, and a morsel of
court-plaster. “I don’t believe she would have any dinner—or any
breakfast,” said Miss Wentworth. “I don’t believe she knows how to do
anything herself. I should have to get her ever so many servants, and
she wouldn’t like them.”
“She has a maid,” said Gertrude; “a French maid. She mentioned her.”
“I wonder if the maid has a little fluted cap and red slippers,” said
Lizzie Acton. “There was a French maid in that play that Robert took me
to see. She had pink stockings; she was very wicked.”
“She was a _soubrette_,” Gertrude announced, who had never seen a play
in her life. “They call that a soubrette. It will be a great chance to
learn French.” Charlotte gave a little soft, helpless groan. She had a
vision of a wicked, theatrical person, clad in pink stockings and red
shoes, and speaking, with confounding volubility, an incomprehensible
tongue, flitting through the sacred penetralia of that large, clean
house. “That is one reason in favor of their coming here,” Gertrude
went on. “But we can make Eugenia speak French to us, and Felix. I mean
to begin—the next time.”
Mr. Wentworth had kept her standing near him, and he gave her his
earnest, thin, unresponsive glance again. “I want you to make me a
promise, Gertrude,” he said.
“What is it?” she asked, smiling.
“Not to get excited. Not to allow these—these occurrences to be an
occasion for excitement.”
She looked down at him a moment, and then she shook her head. “I don’t
think I can promise that, father. I am excited already.”
Mr. Wentworth was silent a while; they all were silent, as if in
recognition of something audacious and portentous.
“I think they had better go to the other house,” said Charlotte,
quietly.
“I shall keep them in the other house,” Mr. Wentworth subjoined, more
pregnantly.
Gertrude turned away; then she looked across at Robert Acton. Her
cousin Robert was a great friend of hers; she often looked at him this
way instead of saying things. Her glance on this occasion, however,
struck him as a substitute for a larger volume of diffident utterance
than usual, inviting him to observe, among other things, the
inefficiency of her father’s design—if design it was—for diminishing,
in the interest of quiet nerves, their occasions of contact with their
foreign relatives. But Acton immediately complimented Mr. Wentworth
upon his liberality. “That’s a very nice thing to do,” he said, “giving
them the little house. You will have treated them handsomely, and,
whatever happens, you will be glad of it.” Mr. Wentworth was liberal,
and he knew he was liberal. It gave him pleasure to know it, to feel
it, to see it recorded; and this pleasure is the only palpable form of
self-indulgence with which the narrator of these incidents will be able
to charge him.
“A three days’ visit at most, over there, is all I should have found
possible,” Madame Münster remarked to her brother, after they had taken
possession of the little white house. “It would have been too
_intime_—decidedly too _intime_. Breakfast, dinner, and tea _en
famille_—it would have been the end of the world if I could have
reached the third day.” And she made the same observation to her maid
Augustine, an intelligent person, who enjoyed a liberal share of her
confidence. Felix declared that he would willingly spend his life in
the bosom of the Wentworth family; that they were the kindest,
simplest, most amiable people in the world, and that he had taken a
prodigious fancy to them all. The Baroness quite agreed with him that
they were simple and kind; they were thoroughly nice people, and she
liked them extremely. The girls were perfect ladies; it was impossible
to be more of a lady than Charlotte Wentworth, in spite of her little
village air. “But as for thinking them the best company in the world,”
said the Baroness, “that is another thing; and as for wishing to live
_porte à porte_ with them, I should as soon think of wishing myself
back in the convent again, to wear a bombazine apron and sleep in a
dormitory.” And yet the Baroness was in high good humor; she had been
very much pleased. With her lively perception and her refined
imagination, she was capable of enjoying anything that was
characteristic, anything that was good of its kind. The Wentworth
household seemed to her very perfect in its kind—wonderfully peaceful
and unspotted; pervaded by a sort of dove-colored freshness that had
all the quietude and benevolence of what she deemed to be Quakerism,
and yet seemed to be founded upon a degree of material abundance for
which, in certain matters of detail, one might have looked in vain at
the frugal little court of Silberstadt-Schreckenstein. She perceived
immediately that her American relatives thought and talked very little
about money; and this of itself made an impression upon Eugenia’s
imagination. She perceived at the same time that if Charlotte or
Gertrude should ask their father for a very considerable sum he would
at once place it in their hands; and this made a still greater
impression. The greatest impression of all, perhaps, was made by
another rapid induction. The Baroness had an immediate conviction that
Robert Acton would put his hand into his pocket every day in the week
if that rattle-pated little sister of his should bid him. The men in
this country, said the Baroness, are evidently very obliging. Her
declaration that she was looking for rest and retirement had been by no
means wholly untrue; nothing that the Baroness said was wholly untrue.
It is but fair to add, perhaps, that nothing that she said was wholly
true. She wrote to a friend in Germany that it was a return to nature;
it was like drinking new milk, and she was very fond of new milk. She
said to herself, of course, that it would be a little dull; but there
can be no better proof of her good spirits than the fact that she
thought she should not mind its being a little dull. It seemed to her,
when from the piazza of her eleemosynary cottage she looked out over
the soundless fields, the stony pastures, the clear-faced ponds, the
rugged little orchards, that she had never been in the midst of so
peculiarly intense a stillness; it was almost a delicate sensual
pleasure. It was all very good, very innocent and safe, and out of it
something good must come. Augustine, indeed, who had an unbounded faith
in her mistress’s wisdom and far-sightedness, was a great deal
perplexed and depressed. She was always ready to take her cue when she
understood it; but she liked to understand it, and on this occasion
comprehension failed. What, indeed, was the Baroness doing _dans cette
galère_? what fish did she expect to land out of these very stagnant
waters? The game was evidently a deep one. Augustine could trust her;
but the sense of walking in the dark betrayed itself in the physiognomy
of this spare, sober, sallow, middle-aged person, who had nothing in
common with Gertrude Wentworth’s conception of a soubrette, by the most
ironical scowl that had ever rested upon the unpretending tokens of the
peace and plenty of the Wentworths. Fortunately, Augustine could quench
skepticism in action. She quite agreed with her mistress—or rather she
quite out-stripped her mistress—in thinking that the little white house
was pitifully bare. _“Il faudra,”_ said Augustine, _“lui faire un peu
de toilette.”_ And she began to hang up _portières_ in the doorways; to
place wax candles, procured after some research, in unexpected
situations; to dispose anomalous draperies over the arms of sofas and
the backs of chairs. The Baroness had brought with her to the New World
a copious provision of the element of costume; and the two Miss
Wentworths, when they came over to see her, were somewhat bewildered by
the obtrusive distribution of her wardrobe. There were India shawls
suspended, curtain-wise, in the parlor door, and curious fabrics,
corresponding to Gertrude’s metaphysical vision of an opera-cloak,
tumbled about in the sitting-places. There were pink silk blinds in the
windows, by which the room was strangely bedimmed; and along the
chimney-piece was disposed a remarkable band of velvet, covered with
coarse, dirty-looking lace. “I have been making myself a little
comfortable,” said the Baroness, much to the confusion of Charlotte,
who had been on the point of proposing to come and help her put her
superfluous draperies away. But what Charlotte mistook for an almost
culpably delayed subsidence Gertrude very presently perceived to be the
most ingenious, the most interesting, the most romantic intention.
“What is life, indeed, without curtains?” she secretly asked herself;
and she appeared to herself to have been leading hitherto an existence
singularly garish and totally devoid of festoons.
Felix was not a young man who troubled himself greatly about
anything—least of all about the conditions of enjoyment. His faculty of
enjoyment was so large, so unconsciously eager, that it may be said of
it that it had a permanent advance upon embarrassment and sorrow. His
sentient faculty was intrinsically joyous, and novelty and change were
in themselves a delight to him. As they had come to him with a great
deal of frequency, his life had been more agreeable than appeared.
Never was a nature more perfectly fortunate. It was not a restless,
apprehensive, ambitious spirit, running a race with the tyranny of
fate, but a temper so unsuspicious as to put Adversity off her guard,
dodging and evading her with the easy, natural motion of a wind-shifted
flower. Felix extracted entertainment from all things, and all his
faculties—his imagination, his intelligence, his affections, his
senses—had a hand in the game. It seemed to him that Eugenia and he had
been very well treated; there was something absolutely touching in that
combination of paternal liberality and social considerateness which
marked Mr. Wentworth’s deportment. It was most uncommonly kind of him,
for instance, to have given them a house. Felix was positively amused
at having a house of his own; for the little white cottage among the
apple trees—the chalet, as Madame Münster always called it—was much
more sensibly his own than any domiciliary _quatrième_, looking upon a
court, with the rent overdue. Felix had spent a good deal of his life
in looking into courts, with a perhaps slightly tattered pair of elbows
resting upon the ledge of a high-perched window, and the thin smoke of
a cigarette rising into an atmosphere in which street-cries died away
and the vibration of chimes from ancient belfries became sensible. He
had never known anything so infinitely rural as these New England
fields; and he took a great fancy to all their pastoral roughnesses. He
had never had a greater sense of luxurious security; and at the risk of
making him seem a rather sordid adventurer I must declare that he found
an irresistible charm in the fact that he might dine every day at his
uncle’s. The charm was irresistible, however, because his fancy flung a
rosy light over this homely privilege. He appreciated highly the fare
that was set before him. There was a kind of fresh-looking abundance
about it which made him think that people must have lived so in the
mythological era, when they spread their tables upon the grass,
replenished them from cornucopias, and had no particular need of
kitchen stoves. But the great thing that Felix enjoyed was having found
a family—sitting in the midst of gentle, generous people whom he might
call by their first names. He had never known anything more charming
than the attention they paid to what he said. It was like a large sheet
of clean, fine-grained drawing-paper, all ready to be washed over with
effective splashes of water-color. He had never had any cousins, and he
had never before found himself in contact so unrestricted with young
unmarried ladies. He was extremely fond of the society of ladies, and
it was new to him that it might be enjoyed in just this manner. At
first he hardly knew what to make of his state of mind. It seemed to
him that he was in love, indiscriminately, with three girls at once. He
saw that Lizzie Acton was more brilliantly pretty than Charlotte and
Gertrude; but this was scarcely a superiority. His pleasure came from
something they had in common—a part of which was, indeed, that physical
delicacy which seemed to make it proper that they should always dress
in thin materials and clear colors. But they were delicate in other
ways, and it was most agreeable to him to feel that these latter
delicacies were appreciable by contact, as it were. He had known,
fortunately, many virtuous gentlewomen, but it now appeared to him that
in his relations with them (especially when they were unmarried) he had
been looking at pictures under glass. He perceived at present what a
nuisance the glass had been—how it perverted and interfered, how it
caught the reflection of other objects and kept you walking from side
to side. He had no need to ask himself whether Charlotte and Gertrude,
and Lizzie Acton, were in the right light; they were always in the
right light. He liked everything about them: he was, for instance, not
at all above liking the fact that they had very slender feet and high
insteps. He liked their pretty noses; he liked their surprised eyes and
their hesitating, not at all positive way of speaking; he liked so much
knowing that he was perfectly at liberty to be alone for hours,
anywhere, with either of them; that preference for one to the other, as
a companion of solitude, remained a minor affair. Charlotte Wentworth’s
sweetly severe features were as agreeable as Lizzie Acton’s wonderfully
expressive blue eyes; and Gertrude’s air of being always ready to walk
about and listen was as charming as anything else, especially as she
walked very gracefully. After a while Felix began to distinguish; but
even then he would often wish, suddenly, that they were not all so sad.
Even Lizzie Acton, in spite of her fine little chatter and laughter,
appeared sad. Even Clifford Wentworth, who had extreme youth in his
favor, and kept a buggy with enormous wheels and a little sorrel mare
with the prettiest legs in the world—even this fortunate lad was apt to
have an averted, uncomfortable glance, and to edge away from you at
times, in the manner of a person with a bad conscience. The only person
in the circle with no sense of oppression of any kind was, to Felix’s
perception, Robert Acton.
It might perhaps have been feared that after the completion of those
graceful domiciliary embellishments which have been mentioned Madame
Münster would have found herself confronted with alarming possibilities
of _ennui_. But as yet she had not taken the alarm. The Baroness was a
restless soul, and she projected her restlessness, as it may be said,
into any situation that lay before her. Up to a certain point her
restlessness might be counted upon to entertain her. She was always
expecting something to happen, and, until it was disappointed,
expectancy itself was a delicate pleasure. What the Baroness expected
just now it would take some ingenuity to set forth; it is enough that
while she looked about her she found something to occupy her
imagination. She assured herself that she was enchanted with her new
relatives; she professed to herself that, like her brother, she felt it
a sacred satisfaction to have found a family. It is certain that she
enjoyed to the utmost the gentleness of her kinsfolk’s deference. She
had, first and last, received a great deal of admiration, and her
experience of well-turned compliments was very considerable; but she
knew that she had never been so real a power, never counted for so
much, as now when, for the first time, the standard of comparison of
her little circle was a prey to vagueness. The sense, indeed, that the
good people about her had, as regards her remarkable self, no standard
of comparison at all gave her a feeling of almost illimitable power. It
was true, as she said to herself, that if for this reason they would be
able to discover nothing against her, so they would perhaps neglect to
perceive some of her superior points; but she always wound up her
reflections by declaring that she would take care of that.
Charlotte and Gertrude were in some perplexity between their desire to
show all proper attention to Madame Münster and their fear of being
importunate. The little house in the orchard had hitherto been occupied
during the summer months by intimate friends of the family, or by poor
relations who found in Mr. Wentworth a landlord attentive to repairs
and oblivious of quarter-day. Under these circumstances the open door
of the small house and that of the large one, facing each other across
their homely gardens, levied no tax upon hourly visits. But the Misses
Wentworth received an impression that Eugenia was no friend to the
primitive custom of “dropping in;” she evidently had no idea of living
without a door-keeper. “One goes into your house as into an inn—except
that there are no servants rushing forward,” she said to Charlotte. And
she added that that was very charming. Gertrude explained to her sister
that she meant just the reverse; she didn’t like it at all. Charlotte
inquired why she should tell an untruth, and Gertrude answered that
there was probably some very good reason for it which they should
discover when they knew her better. “There can surely be no good reason
for telling an untruth,” said Charlotte. “I hope she does not think
so.”
They had of course desired, from the first, to do everything in the way
of helping her to arrange herself. It had seemed to Charlotte that
there would be a great many things to talk about; but the Baroness was
apparently inclined to talk about nothing.
“Write her a note, asking her leave to come and see her. I think that
is what she will like,” said Gertrude.
“Why should I give her the trouble of answering me?” Charlotte asked.
“She will have to write a note and send it over.”
“I don’t think she will take any trouble,” said Gertrude, profoundly.
“What then will she do?”
“That is what I am curious to see,” said Gertrude, leaving her sister
with an impression that her curiosity was morbid.
They went to see the Baroness without preliminary correspondence; and
in the little salon which she had already created, with its becoming
light and its festoons, they found Robert Acton.
Eugenia was intensely gracious, but she accused them of neglecting her
cruelly. “You see Mr. Acton has had to take pity upon me,” she said.
“My brother goes off sketching, for hours; I can never depend upon him.
So I was to send Mr. Acton to beg you to come and give me the benefit
of your wisdom.”
Gertrude looked at her sister. She wanted to say, “_That_ is what she
would have done.” Charlotte said that they hoped the Baroness would
always come and dine with them; it would give them so much pleasure;
and, in that case, she would spare herself the trouble of having a
cook.
“Ah, but I must have a cook!” cried the Baroness. “An old negress in a
yellow turban. I have set my heart upon that. I want to look out of my
window and see her sitting there on the grass, against the background
of those crooked, dusky little apple trees, pulling the husks off a
lapful of Indian corn. That will be local color, you know. There isn’t
much of it here—you don’t mind my saying that, do you?—so one must make
the most of what one can get. I shall be most happy to dine with you
whenever you will let me; but I want to be able to ask you sometimes.
And I want to be able to ask Mr. Acton,” added the Baroness.
“You must come and ask me at home,” said Acton. “You must come and see
me; you must dine with me first. I want to show you my place; I want to
introduce you to my mother.” He called again upon Madame Münster, two
days later. He was constantly at the other house; he used to walk
across the fields from his own place, and he appeared to have fewer
scruples than his cousins with regard to dropping in. On this occasion
he found that Mr. Brand had come to pay his respects to the charming
stranger; but after Acton’s arrival the young theologian said nothing.
He sat in his chair with his two hands clasped, fixing upon his hostess
a grave, fascinated stare. The Baroness talked to Robert Acton, but, as
she talked, she turned and smiled at Mr. Brand, who never took his eyes
off her. The two men walked away together; they were going to Mr.
Wentworth’s. Mr. Brand still said nothing; but after they had passed
into Mr. Wentworth’s garden he stopped and looked back for some time at
the little white house. Then, looking at his companion, with his head
bent a little to one side and his eyes somewhat contracted, “Now I
suppose that’s what is called conversation,” he said; “real
conversation.”
“It’s what I call a very clever woman,” said Acton, laughing.
“It is most interesting,” Mr. Brand continued. “I only wish she would
speak French; it would seem more in keeping. It must be quite the style
that we have heard about, that we have read about—the style of
conversation of Madame de Staël, of Madame Récamier.”
Acton also looked at Madame Münster’s residence among its hollyhocks
and apple trees. “What I should like to know,” he said, smiling, “is
just what has brought Madame Récamier to live in that place!”