device, her venerable graciousness a mask of unbounded contempt for all human beings whatever. She was a terrible old woman with those straight, white wolfish eye-brows. How blind I had been! Those eyebrows alone ought to have been enough to give her away. Yet they were as beautifully smooth as her voice when she admitted: “That protection naturally is only partial. There is the danger of her own self, poor girl. She requires guidance.”
I marvelled at the villainy of my tone as I spoke, but it was only assumed.
“I don’t think she has done badly for herself, so far,” I forced myself to say. “I suppose you know that she began life by herding the village goats.”
In the course of that phrase I noticed her wince just the least bit. Oh, yes, she winced; but at the end of it she smiled easily.
“No, I didn’t know. So she told you her story! Oh, well, I suppose you are very good friends. A goatherd— really? In the fairy tale I believe the girl that marries the prince is—what is it?—a
The implication of scorn in her tranquil manner was immense. It seemed to condemn all those that were not born in the Blunt connection. It was the perfect pride of Republican aristocracy, which has no gradations and knows no limit, and, as if created by the grace of God, thinks it ennobles everything it touches: people, ideas, even passing tastes!
“How many of them,” pursued Mrs. Blunt, “have had the good fortune, the leisure to develop their intelligence and their beauty in aesthetic conditions as this charming woman had? Not one in a million. Perhaps not one in an age.”
“The heiress of Henry Allegre,” I murmured.
“Precisely. But John wouldn’t be marrying the heiress of Henry Allegre.”
It was the first time that the frank word, the clear idea, came into the conversation and it made me feel ill with a sort of enraged faintness.
“No,” I said. “It would be Mme. de Lastaola then.”
“Mme. la Comtesse de Lastaola as soon as she likes after the success of this war.”
“And you believe in its success?”
“Do you?”
“Not for a moment,” I declared, and was surprised to see her look pleased.
She was an aristocrat to the tips of her fingers; she really didn’t care for anybody. She had passed through the Empire, she had lived through a siege, had rubbed shoulders with the Commune, had seen everything, no doubt, of what men are capable in the pursuit of their desires or in the extremity of their distress, for love, for money, and even for honour; and in her precarious connection with the very highest spheres she had kept her own honourability unscathed while she had lost all her prejudices. She was above all that. Perhaps “the world” was the only thing that could have the slightest checking influence; but when I ventured to say something about the view it might take of such an alliance she looked at me for a moment with visible surprise.
“My dear Monsieur George, I have lived in the great world all my life. It’s the best that there is, but that’s only because there is nothing merely decent anywhere. It will accept anything, forgive anything, forget anything in a few days. And after all who will he be marrying? A charming, clever, rich and altogether uncommon woman. What did the world hear of her? Nothing. The little it saw of her was in the Bois for a few hours every year, riding by the side of a man of unique distinction and of exclusive tastes, devoted to the cult of aesthetic impressions; a man of whom, as far as aspect, manner, and behaviour goes, she might have been the daughter. I have seen her myself. I went on purpose. I was immensely struck. I was even moved. Yes. She might have been—except for that something radiant in her that marked her apart from all the other daughters of men. The few remarkable personalities that count in society and who were admitted into Henry Allegre’s Pavilion treated her with punctilious reserve. I know that, I have made enquiries. I know she sat there amongst them like a marvellous child, and for the rest what can they say about her? That when abandoned to herself by the death of Allegre she has made a mistake? I think that any woman ought to be allowed one mistake in her life. The worst they can say of her is that she discovered it, that she had sent away a man in love directly she found out that his love was not worth having; that she had told him to go and look for his crown, and that, after dismissing him she had remained generously faithful to his cause, in her person and fortune. And this, you will allow, is rather uncommon upon the whole.”
“You make her out very magnificent,” I murmured, looking down upon the floor.
“Isn’t she?” exclaimed the aristocratic Mrs. Blunt, with an almost youthful ingenuousness, and in those black eyes which looked at me so calmly there was a flash of the Southern beauty, still naive and romantic, as if altogether untouched by experience. “I don’t think there is a single grain of vulgarity in all her enchanting person. Neither is there in my son. I suppose you won’t deny that he is uncommon.” She paused.
“Absolutely,” I said in a perfectly conventional tone, I was now on my mettle that she should not discover what there was humanly common in my nature. She took my answer at her own valuation and was satisfied.
“They can’t fail to understand each other on the very highest level of idealistic perceptions. Can you imagine my John thrown away on some enamoured white goose out of a stuffy old salon? Why, she couldn’t even begin to understand what he feels or what he needs.”
“Yes,” I said impenetrably, “he is not easy to understand.”
“I have reason to think,” she said with a suppressed smile, “that he has a certain power over women. Of course I don’t know anything about his intimate life but a whisper or two have reached me, like that, floating in the air, and I could hardly suppose that he would find an exceptional resistance in that quarter of all others. But I should like to know the exact degree.”
I disregarded an annoying tendency to feel dizzy that came over me and was very careful in managing my voice.
“May I ask, Madame, why you are telling me all this?”
“For two reasons,” she condescended graciously. “First of all because Mr. Mills told me that you were much more mature than one would expect. In fact you look much younger than I was prepared for.”
