“Oh yes,” replied Elfride with an effort.
Happening to catch a glimpse of her face as she was speaking, and noticing that her attempt at heartiness was a miserable failure, he appeared to have misgivings.
“You, Miss Swancourt, would not, under such circumstances, have preferred the nicknacks?”
“No, I don’t think I should, indeed,” she stammered.
“I’ll put it to you,” said the inflexible Knight. “Which will you have of these two things of about equal value—the well-chosen little library of the best music you spoke of—bound in morocco, walnut case, lock and key—or a pair of the very prettiest earrings in Bond Street windows?”
“Of course the music,” Elfride replied with forced earnestness.
“You are quite certain?” he said emphatically.
“Quite,” she faltered; “if I could for certain buy the earrings afterwards.”
Knight, somewhat blamably, keenly enjoyed sparring with the palpitating mobile creature, whose excitable nature made any such thing a species of cruelty.
He looked at her rather oddly, and said, “Fie!”
“Forgive me,” she said, laughing a little, a little frightened, and blushing very deeply.
“Ah, Miss Elfie, why didn’t you say at first, as any firm woman would have said, I am as bad as she, and shall choose the same?”
“I don’t know,” said Elfride woefully, and with a distressful smile.
“I thought you were exceptionally musical?”
“So I am, I think. But the test is so severe—quite painful.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Music doesn’t do any real good, or rather—”
“That is a thing to say, Miss Swancourt! Why, what—”
“You don’t understand! you don’t understand!”
“Why, what conceivable use is there in jimcrack jewellery?”
“No, no, no, no!” she cried petulantly; “I didn’t mean what you think. I like the music best, only I like—”
“Earrings better—own it!” he said in a teasing tone. “Well, I think I should have had the moral courage to own it at once, without pretending to an elevation I could not reach.”
Like the French soldiery, Elfride was not brave when on the defensive. So it was almost with tears in her eyes that she answered desperately:
“My meaning is, that I like earrings best just now, because I lost one of my prettiest pair last year, and papa said he would not buy any more, or allow me to myself, because I was careless; and now I wish I had some like them—that’s what my meaning is—indeed it is, Mr. Knight.”
“I am afraid I have been very harsh and rude,” said Knight, with a look of regret at seeing how disturbed she was. “But seriously, if women only knew how they ruin their good looks by such appurtenances, I am sure they would never want them.”
“They were lovely, and became me so!”
“Not if they were like the ordinary hideous things women stuff their ears with nowadays—like the governor of a steam-engine, or a pair of scales, or gold gibbets and chains, and artists’ palettes, and compensation pendulums, and Heaven knows what besides.”
“No; they were not one of those things. So pretty—like this,” she said with eager animation. And she drew with the point of her parasol an enlarged view of one of the lamented darlings, to a scale that would have suited a giantess half-a-mile high.
“Yes, very pretty—very,” said Knight dryly. “How did you come to lose such a precious pair of articles?”
“I only lost one—nobody ever loses both at the same time.”
She made this remark with embarrassment, and a nervous movement of the fingers. Seeing that the loss occurred whilst Stephen Smith was attempting to kiss her for the first time on the cliff, her confusion was hardly to be wondered at. The question had been awkward, and received no direct answer.
Knight seemed not to notice her manner.
“Oh, nobody ever loses both—I see. And certainly the fact that it was a case of loss takes away all odour of vanity from your choice.”
“As I never know whether you are in earnest, I don’t now,” she said, looking up inquiringly at the hairy face of the oracle. And coming gallantly to her own rescue, “If I really seem vain, it is that I am only vain in my ways—not in my heart. The worst women are those vain in their hearts, and not in their ways.”
“An adroit distinction. Well, they are certainly the more objectionable of the two,” said Knight.
“Is vanity a mortal or a venial sin? You know what life is: tell me.”
“I am very far from knowing what life is. A just conception of life is too large a thing to grasp during the short interval of passing through it.”
“Will the fact of a woman being fond of jewellery be likely to make her life, in its higher sense, a failure?”
“Nobody’s life is altogether a failure.”
“Well, you know what I mean, even though my words are badly selected and commonplace,” she said impatiently. “Because I utter commonplace words, you must not suppose I think only commonplace thoughts. My poor stock of words are like a limited number of rough moulds I have to cast all my materials in, good and bad; and the novelty or delicacy of the substance is often lost in the coarse triteness of the form.”
“Very well; I’ll believe that ingenious representation. As to the subject in hand—lives which are failures—you need not trouble yourself. Anybody’s life may be just as romantic and strange and interesting if he or she fails as if he or she succeed. All the difference is, that the last chapter is wanting in the story. If a man of power tries to do a great deed, and just falls short of it by an accident not his fault, up to that time his history had as much in it as that of
