“And Stella and I walked past the margin of the picture, and so on down the boardwalk to the other hotel, to look for our parents. And we agreed not to tell anyone that we had ever grown up, but just to let it be a secret between us two; and we were to stay in the picture forever, and grow up all over again, only we would arrange everything differently. And Stella was never to go driving on the twenty-seventh of April, so that we would be quite safe, and would live together for a long, long while.
“She wouldn’t promise, though, that when Peter Blagden asked to be introduced, she would refuse to meet him. She just giggled and shook her sunny head. She hadn’t any hat on. She was wearing the blue-and-white sailor-suit, of course.” …
IV
But a servant was lighting up the front-hall, and the glare of it came through the open door, and now the room was just like any other room.
“And you are Robert Townsend!” the marquise observed. “The one my mother doesn’t approve of as a visitor!”
Madame d’Arlanges said, with a certain lack of sequence: “And yet you are planning to do precisely what Peter Blagden did. He liked Stella, she amused him, and he thought her money would come in very handy; and so he, somehow, contrived to marry her in the end, because she was just a child, and you were a child, and he wasn’t. And he always lied to her about—about those business-trips—even from the very first. I knew, because I’m not a sentimental person. But, Bob, how can you stoop to mimic Peter Blagden! For you are doing precisely what he did; and for Rosalind, just as it was for Stella, it is almost irresistible, to have the chance of reforming a man who has notoriously been ‘talked about.’ Still, I see that for Stella’s sake you won’t lie as steadfastly to Rosalind as Peter did to Stella. It is none of my business of course; oh, I don’t meddle. I merely prophesy that you won’t.”
But those lights had made an astonishing difference. And so, “But why not?” said I. “It is the immemorial method of dealing with savages; and surely women can never expect to become quite civilised so long as chivalry demands that a man say to a woman only what he believes she wants to hear? Ah, no, my dear Lizzie; when a man tries to get into a woman’s favour, custom demands that he palliate the invasion with flatteries and veiled truths—or, more explicitly, with lies—just as any sensible explorer must come prepared to leave a trail of looking-glasses and valueless bright beads among the original owners of any unknown country. For he doesn’t know what obstacles he may encounter, and he has been taught, from infancy, to regard any woman as a baleful and unfathomable mystery—”
“She is never so—heaven help her!—if the man be sufficiently worthless.”
“I rejoice that we are so thoroughly at one. For upon my word, I believe this widespread belief in feminine inscrutability is the result of a conspiracy on the part of the weaker sex; and that every mother is somehow pledged to inculcate this belief into the immature masculine mind. Apparently the practice originated in the Middle Ages, for it never seemed to occur to anybody before then that a woman was particularly complex. Though, to be sure, Catullus now—”
“This is not a time for pedantry. I don’t in the least care what Catullus or anyone else observed concerning anything—”
“But I had not aspired, my dear Lizzie, to be even remotely pedantic. I was simply about to remark that Catullus, or Ariosto, or Coventry Patmore, or King Juba, or Posidonius, or Sir John Vanbrugh, or perhaps, Agathocles of Chios, or else Simonides the Younger, has conceded somewhere, that women are, in certain respects, dissimilar, as it were, to men.”
“I am merely urging you not to marry this silly little Rosalind, for the excellent reason that you did love my darling Stella even more than I, and that Rosalind is in love with you.”
“Do you really think so?” said I. “Why, then, actuated by the very finest considerations of decency and prudence and generosity, I shall, of course, espouse her the very next November that ever is.”
The marquise retorted: “No—because you are at bottom too fond of Rosalind Jemmett; and, besides, it isn’t really a question of your feeling toward her. In any event, I begin to like you too well, Bob, to let you kiss me any more.”
I declared that I detested paradox. Then I went home to supper.
V
But, for all this, I meditated for a long while upon what Lizzie had said. It was true that I was really fond of “proper” little Rosalind Jemmett; concerning myself I had no especial illusions; and, to my credit, I faced what I considered the real issue, squarely.
We were in Aunt Marcia’s parlour. Rosalind was an orphan, and lived in turn with her three aunts. She said the other two were less unendurable than Aunt Marcia, and I believed her. I consider, to begin with, that a person is not civilised who thumps upon the floor upstairs with a poker, simply because it happens to be eleven o’clock; and moreover, Aunt Marcia’s parlour—oh, it really was a “parlour,”—was entirely too like the first night of a charity bazaar, when nothing has been sold.
The room was not a particularly large one; but it contained exactly three hundred and seven articles of bijouterie, not estimating the
