At a little distance from Miss Allan, on a seat shaded and made semiprivate by a thick clump of palm trees, Arthur and Susan were reading each other’s letters. The big slashing manuscripts of hockey-playing young women in Wiltshire lay on Arthur’s knee, while Susan deciphered tight little legal hands which rarely filled more than a page, and always conveyed the same impression of jocular and breezy goodwill.
“I do hope Mr. Hutchinson will like me, Arthur,” she said, looking up.
“Who’s your loving Flo?” asked Arthur.
“Flo Graves—the girl I told you about, who was engaged to that dreadful Mr. Vincent,” said Susan. “Is Mr. Hutchinson married?” she asked.
Already her mind was busy with benevolent plans for her friends, or rather with one magnificent plan—which was simple too—they were all to get married—at once—directly she got back. Marriage, marriage that was the right thing, the only thing, the solution required by everyone she knew, and a great part of her meditations was spent in tracing every instance of discomfort, loneliness, ill-health, unsatisfied ambition, restlessness, eccentricity, taking things up and dropping them again, public speaking, and philanthropic activity on the part of men and particularly on the part of women to the fact that they wanted to marry, were trying to marry, and had not succeeded in getting married. If, as she was bound to own, these symptoms sometimes persisted after marriage, she could only ascribe them to the unhappy law of nature which decreed that there was only one Arthur Venning, and only one Susan who could marry him. Her theory, of course, had the merit of being fully supported by her own case. She had been vaguely uncomfortable at home for two or three years now, and a voyage like this with her selfish old aunt, who paid her fare but treated her as servant and companion in one, was typical of the kind of thing people expected of her. Directly she became engaged, Mrs. Paley behaved with instinctive respect, positively protested when Susan as usual knelt down to lace her shoes, and appeared really grateful for an hour of Susan’s company where she had been used to exact two or three as her right. She therefore foresaw a life of far greater comfort than she had been used to, and the change had already produced a great increase of warmth in her feelings towards other people.
It was close on twenty years now since Mrs. Paley had been able to lace her own shoes or even to see them, the disappearance of her feet having coincided more or less accurately with the death of her husband, a man of business, soon after which event Mrs. Paley began to grow stout. She was a selfish, independent old woman, possessed of a considerable income, which she spent upon the upkeep of a house that needed seven servants and a charwoman in Lancaster Gate, and another with a garden and carriage-horses in Surrey. Susan’s engagement relieved her of the one great anxiety of her life—that her son Christopher should “entangle himself” with his cousin. Now that this familiar source of interest was removed, she felt a little low and inclined to see more in Susan than she used to. She had decided to give her a very handsome wedding present, a cheque for two hundred, two hundred and fifty, or possibly, conceivably—it depended upon the under-gardener and Huths’ bill for doing up the drawing-room—three hundred pounds sterling.
She was thinking of this very question, revolving the figures, as she sat in her wheeled chair with a table spread with cards by her side. The Patience had somehow got into a muddle, and she did not like to call for Susan to help her, as Susan seemed to be busy with Arthur.
“She’s every right to expect a handsome present from me, of course,” she thought, looking vaguely at the leopard on its hind legs, “and I’ve no doubt she does! Money goes a long way with everyone. The young are very selfish. If I were to die, nobody would miss me but Dakyns, and she’ll be consoled by the will! However, I’ve got no reason to complain. … I can still enjoy myself. I’m not a burden to any-one. … I like a great many things a good deal, in spite of my legs.”
Being slightly depressed, however, she went on to think of the only people she had known who had not seemed to her at all selfish or fond of money, who had seemed to her somehow rather finer than the general run; people she willingly acknowledged, who were finer than she was. There were only two of them. One was her brother, who had been drowned before her eyes, the other was a girl, her greatest friend, who had died in giving birth to her first child. These things had happened some fifty years ago.
“They ought not to have died,” she thought. “However, they did—and we selfish old creatures go on.” The tears came to her eyes; she felt a genuine regret for them, a kind of respect for their youth and beauty, and a kind of shame for herself; but the tears did not fall; and she opened one of those innumerable novels which she used to pronounce good or bad, or pretty middling, or really wonderful. “I can’t think how people come to imagine such things,” she would say, taking off her spectacles and looking up with the old faded eyes, that were becoming ringed with white.
Just behind the stuffed leopard Mr. Elliot was playing chess with Mr. Pepper. He
