Cynthia’s Love Affairs
Date: 1892-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Romance; Women’s Issues; Social Life and Customs
Description: In this sequence of stories, written early in Barry Pain’s career, Cynthia recounts her experiences with the opposite sex, beginning when she was a child with a recipe for licorice-water. She is self-aware and straight-forward (not a stereotypical Victorian “lady”), and touches of humor and pathos season her tales. ~ ~ ~ ~ Barry Eric Odell Pain (28 Sep. 1864 – 05 May 1928) was an English journalist, poet, humorist and writer. During his lifetime, he was perhaps best known as a writer of parody and lightly humorous stories, but now is also noted for his tales touched with fantasy, horror, and t
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+90” or less, and in the USA

CYNTHIA’S
LOVE AFFAIRS

BARRY PAIN

MobileRead Edition
2022

In this sequence of stories, written early in Barry Pain’s career, Cynthia recounts her experiences with the opposite sex, beginning when she was a child with a recipe for licorice-water.
She is self-aware and straight-forward (not a stereotypical Victorian “lady”), and touches of humor and pathos season her tales.

Barry Eric Odell Pain (28 Sep. 1864 – 05 May 1928) was an English journalist, poet, humorist and writer. During his lifetime, he was perhaps best known as a writer of parody and lightly humorous stories, but now is also noted for his tales touched with fantasy, horror, and the supernatural. He also wrote stories of mystery and suspense. His humor has been characterized by some modern critics as “a surreal forerunner to Monty Python.”

These stories by Barry Pain (1864–1928), illustrated by Gordon Browne (1858–1932) and William Douglas Almond (1868–1916), first appeared in The English Illustrated Magazine Dec. 1893 – May 1894. This ebook is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+90” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

1. —Henry Silvester
2. —The Twins
3. —The Experiment
4. —The Real One
5. —The Thousand and the Boy
6. —Too Late

CYNTHIA’S LOVE AFFAIRS

No  1.

—Henry Silvester

I had been lunching with my married sister, Alice; and, as usual, she had made me rather angry. At last, in order to clear up one of her misapprehensions about me, I said:

“My dear Alice, I know that I am unmarried, but I cannot see why on that account I am less a woman than you are. I fully believe and hold that all cats are feminine, all dogs masculine, and that cows in the road, if they stare at one, are ipso facto bulls. Could anything less than a woman do that? I take a fashion paper, look better at dinner than at breakfast, like chocolate, shy things with a wrist action, and ignore all questions of physiology. What more do you want? I utterly refuse to consider myself undeveloped, defective, microcephalous, or anything of the kind, and it’s of no use to ask me to do it. I’m quite a real woman.”

Alice sighed. She and the vicar, her husband, both sigh a good deal.

“Ah, Cynthia, how you misunderstand me! I never intended to imply anything of the kind; I only meant that womanliness was made perfect by love—by marriage.”

I observed that you could have a very nice fire without burning the house down. This distressed her.

“I do wish,” she said, “that you would not speak of marriage as a—a disaster. Every affair of the heart ought to end in marriage.”

“You take,” I answered, “a very large size in generalisations. I suppose you mean that if any man and woman love each other, they ought to marry if they are free to marry. Sometimes they are not free; sometimes there’s not enough money; sometimes the love’s one-sided; very often it is temporary—the result of inexperience. Besides, no affair of the heart ought to end in marriage; it ought to go on after marriage. That’s a quibble, of course. However, it doesn’t matter; you’re all wrong, because you’ve only had your one little engagement and marriage to judge by. I’ve never been married, but as for affairs of the heart—”

“Well!” she said, a little eagerly. I put her off.

Yet for a woman of thirty-two, who has played her last card, and found the game go against her, there is a certain amount of consolation in reminiscences. I have had affairs of the heart—although it was not always my heart; my first reminiscence takes me back to my childhood.

•   •   •   •   •

In order to make liquorice-water, to serve as a casual beverage, it is, I should say, above all things necessary that one should be very young. I was very young when I made it. The method is as follows. Take any bottle that is partially filled with medicine prescribed for someone else; empty out the medicine, and rinse the bottle once, hastily and perfunctorily. Procure for the sum of one penny from the village grocer or chemist a piece of black, hard, stick-liquorice. Take it home, and wrap it up securely in the daily paper that your uncle has not yet seen and is certain to want after luncheon. Place the parcel thus formed on the dining-room table—or on any polished table where dents show easily—and then smite it patiently for some time with the handle of the poker. When the liquorice is broken in small pieces, place it in the bottle, fill up with water, cork, and shake vehemently. The water will gradually assume the colour of a sepia drawing-copy. When this tint is secured, add as much brown sugar as you can take without any risk of its being missed. The mixture will then be ready and not at all nice to drink, but if you are very young, you can carry it with you when you go for long walks, and sip it occasionally by way of refreshment. If, owing to the previous career of the bottle, the mixture has a flavour of carbolic or rhubarb, too strong to be conquered or ignored, sell it to the uncle as a remedy for sore-throats at a profit of three hundred per cent on the original outlay.

Whenever I was a visitor at the house of my bachelor uncle in the country, I used to amuse myself with this awful manufacture. I did so, partly because there were so many conveniences for it. The servants at my father’s house did not like me at all; when I asked them for a disused medicine bottle, they either told me that there was not one or gave me a bottle without a cork. Of course, you can make a sort of substitute cork out of a wad of clean notepaper, but it is an untidy-looking mockery. Now at my uncle’s house the servants were always too glad to get me medicine bottles or anything else that I wanted. Besides in the country I always went much longer walks than when I was living in London; on a long walk a child naturally wants to feel adventurous, quite new, and traveller-like; and it is much easier to do this if you are carrying supplies with you. On the strength of three mixed biscuits and a bottle of liquorice-water I have felt like a Polar Expedition. Lastly, I used to make this curious mixture at my uncle’s house because there were no other children in the house, and—until I happened upon Henry Silvester—there was not much else to do. By the way, it was chiefly through the liquorice-water that I overcame Harry’s very natural dislike to me.

I had paid many visits to my uncle before I ever met Harry at all. He had just gone to a private school and took his holidays at fixed intervals. I, on the other hand, generally took my holidays when the decease of one of my governess’s near relations necessitated her temporary absence. As far as I remember, her near relations deceased freely, but at quite irregular intervals. It was some time before my holidays coincided with Harry’s, but the time came at last. My governess’s uncle (who had been more like a father to her than anything else) happened to pass away at the end of August. So she went off to one of those suburbs where one’s governess’s relations mostly leave their families unprovided for; and I, accompanied by a maid, went on a visit to my uncle. The Silvesters and my uncle were great friends, and consequently I saw a good deal of Harry.

I saw him, for the first time, in church One morning. He struck me as being singularly well-behaved for a boy. Just before the sermon he started up and walked out, with his handkerchief to his nose. I know now—which I did not know then—that his nose was not really bleeding. His dislike to me, which was not occasioned by any fault of mine, happened in this way. I must mention that Harry at that time had, exclusive of flannel things, three suits—a best suit, which he wore on Sundays and when he came down in the evening; a second-best suit; and a shockingly bad suit, which he wore whenever he got the chance. Now on those occasions when I arrived unexpectedly—as I often did—at the Silvesters’ house, Harry was always wearing the shockingly bad suit; and he was always compelled to change it, in my honour, for the second-best suit. He hated the trouble, and, naturally, hated me for being the cause of it. I always dressed very well, and the contrast made the shockingly bad suit impossible.

However, one day Harry and I met in the chemist’s shop. He was buying some rat-poison, and I asked him what he wanted it for. He said, rather mysteriously: “Oh—nothing in particular.” I bought my liquorice, and he asked me if I was going to eat it. I told him that I was not, and I described to him the manufacture of liquorice-water as we walked out of the shop and up the village street together. “That isn’t a bad idea,” he said, reflectively, “I’ll make some of that and take it with me when I go back next term, and I promise never to tell anyone how to make it.”

I had not asked or even desired any such promise. But I accepted it with gravity, and it certainly marked an advance in the intimacy between us.

“And look here, Cynthia,” he added, “I don’t mind telling you now about that rat-poison. I was getting it for our gardener, and what he really wants it for is to poison rats.”

His motive for giving the explanation was quite chivalrous, but the explanation itself was so appallingly and maddeningly obvious that, from sheer regard for our self-respect, we had to change the subject at once.

“Don’t let’s go in yet, Harry,” I said. “If you go up to your house with me, your aunts will make you change your things, and that must be a bore.”

“It is a bore,” he said seriously. “I always thought you were rather stuck-up and liked chaps to wear their swaggerest clothes.”

“No, I don’t, I should hate any boy who was particular about his clothes.”

“But you’re wearing your swaggerest things yourself.”

“I’m not though. This isn’t my best frock or anything like it.”

“Besides,” he added, with an air of impartiality, “it’s more right for girls to care about such things, because some girls are pretty.”

“Do you think so?”

“I didn’t use to, I do now,” he said with, emphasis. For three moments we walked in embarrassed silence, staring down at our toes.

Then at his suggestion we went down a lane to the left, to see if we could cross Polney Brook by the stepping-stones. There was also a bridge across the brook, but we felt that bridges were safe, easy, unromantic, and generally contemptible. When we reached the stepping-stones we found that some of them were two or three inches under water—there was a flood on at the time—and the tops of the others were wet and slippery.

“The only way to do it,” Harry observed, “would be to cross barefoot.”

“Then I don’t think I will, if you don’t mind very much,” I said, hesitatingly.

“You’d much better not,” said Harry. “But I’ll have a shot at it myself, because I should like to say I did it. You just wait here.”

He took off his boots, stockings, and straw hat, and gave them into my charge; he crossed the brook, and then recrossed it back to me. He was very splashed, rather hot, and bright-eyed.

I thought that he was intrepid and looked quite a splendid boy. He took me to several other places. He knew of a cushat’s nest, and we went to look at it. We never found it; perhaps the cushat had heard that we were coming.

In church on the following Sunday Harry sat immediately in front of me. I watched him as he came up the aisle. He looked thoughtful, dignified, and religious; and he was wearing his best suit. At the very commencement of the service I noticed that he held his prayer-book very much to the right instead of straight before him; another glance showed me why he had done it. On a slip of notepaper inside the book was written in a large round hand the following unpunctuated message:—

“I have made mine with double as much lickerice as you do and if you would like to taste it afterwards give a cough.”

The worst of an artificial cough in the hands—perhaps I should say, in the mouth—of a beginner is that it may come out with a hideous and unnatural loudness, when the cougher only intends it to be a mere whisper. My cough on this occasion surprised and horrified me. It seemed to ring through the church like the crack of a pistol. I felt that all the human eyes within a radius of twelve pews were staring the stare of pained surprise full at me, When I looked up I saw that Harry’s back was shaking gently. But no sound came. He told me afterwards that he had learnt at school the secret of noiseless laughter; it consists in closing the nostrils firmly with one hand, and shutting the mouth. As Harry remarked, “You may blow up, but you simply can’t laugh out loud.”

I saw a good deal of Harry during the next week. There were several cases of stuffed birds in his father’s study, and Harry showed me two or three of the birds there which he himself had killed with his catapult. By this time I must have found great favour in his eyes, for he said to me one day, “Look here, Cynthia, I’m going out tomorrow with my catty, and you can come too and see me shoot. There isn’t any other girl I’d take out when I’d got my catty with me.”

I remember that day well, and I remember the catapult—its double elastic, the scrap of dirty kid-glove where the shot was placed, and the forked wood that had been partially baked early in its career in order to make it tough and hard. I thought I was going to enjoy myself in a peculiarly exciting and thrilling way. Just at first I did so, but that was because Harry did not happen to hit anything. At last he took a shot at a robin, and hit it without killing it. The poor thing fell and fluttered. Now I had not imagined that it was going to be at all like that; the stuffed birds in the glass case had looked quite happy. Harry ran towards the bird, and I put my hands over my eyes. When he came back I was crying.

“It’s all right, Cynnie,” he said, “I’ve killed it; it doesn’t feel any more.”

The emotions are, unfortunately, not provided with an instantaneous break. I could never stop a fit of crying in less than half its own length. Harry looked at me with anxious, troubled eyes.

He produced one or two scraps of natural history, inspired by tact and a desire to console. The robin, I was given to understand, was a cruel, voracious, and spiteful bird. If it had been a wild beast, instead of a bird, it would have been wilder and beastlier than other wild beasts. It was because of its red breast that people made so much of it, and because it came into Christmas cards.

This did console me to some extent, but I was still crying a little.

Then Harry did a very heroic action.

He drew from his pocket a knife of his which contained many more implements than he could ever by any possible chance want to use. He opened the large blade, and, before I could stop him, he had cut his catapult to chips—his much-loved catapult that he had made himself, that caused him to be envied in his form at school, that constituted his chief treasure.

“There, Cynnie,” he said, “I’ve smashed it up and I won’t go cattying any more, so you needn’t keep on now—need you?”

I did not answer in words, but I acted on a sudden spontaneous and unmaidenly impulse; I kissed him.

I do not think he minded it much, but he was evidently not prepared for it, and it caused him a momentary fit of great shyness. He stared straight in front of him, and made an unnecessary remark about the weather.

One day Harry and I had gone up to the Lily Pond, which was a long walk. As usual, there were no lilies near the bank, and there was no boat to take us to the white buds in the centre of the pond. I made some remark, I suppose, on the irritating character of the situation.

“Look here,” said Harry, “would you like to have some of those lilies?”

“Of course I should.”

“Very well, then, you just run across the field down into the road, and wait for me there. I may be some little time.”

“All right,” I said obediently. I mostly acted under Harry’s directions.

In about twenty minutes Harry came to me with a good bunch of water-lilies. “How did you get them?” I asked. Then I noticed his hair, which was much deranged and exceedingly damp. “Why, you must have been in the water!”

“Yes; I swam out for them.” His eyes were triumphant.

“Was it hard?”

“Oh, no; of course you have to know how to swim. I don’t say that I’d have done it for just anybody.”

“How did you dry yourself?”

“Partly, I didn’t, and partly I happened to have two handkerchiefs. I forgot to take the old one out of my pocket when I put a fresh one in this morning. They came in pretty handy.”

I believe it was this which finally decided me to give Harry a small silver pig to wear as an ornament on his watch-chain. It seemed to impress him; indeed, I should have been very disappointed it it had not impressed him; for it cost three-and-six, and although I borrowed half-a-crown from my uncle the other shilling was my own actual valuable money.

I was to leave for home at the end of the week. On the day before I went I called at the Silvesters’ to say good-bye; they had all been very kind to me. Harry was dignified almost to frigidity, but as he shook hands with me he pressed upon me a scrap of paper and a look of warning. As I walked home I read the paper; it bade me be in the home-close at eight o’clock that night, and take all possible precautions against discovery. I do not suppose that discovery would have mattered in the least, but every boy has a sort of longing to feel criminal, I suppose.

So at eight o’clock I went through the orchard into the home-close, and met Harry there,

“Well?” I said.

“I say, it’s awfully good of you to have come.”

“I didn’t mind—I rather wanted to.”

“Look here, Cynnie, I wish you weren’t going away.”

“I wish I wasn’t, too.”

“Why?” There was a pause, and I did not answer. “Do you remember that day when I smashed up my catty, and you—”

“Y—yes.”

He looked at me very hard, and I lifted my eyes to look at him once. Then we took each other’s meaning, and he kissed me.

We said good-bye at last. But before that happened I knew that I was very pretty indeed, because he had told me so. And we were to be married—as soon as we were grown up. And he had mentioned that there was no possible pitch of destitution which could cause him to part from the silver pig that he wore on his watch-chain. And I had learnt from experience that it hurts you rather to cut a small piece of your hair off with a pocketknife.

So I went back through the orchard, feeling very happy and very sorry, with my boots very wet, owing to the long grass.

•   •   •   •   •

The thing faded out, of course, with time, as such things do. My uncle left that neighbourhood, and I saw no more of Harry Silvester. I learnt long afterwards that he had gone into the tea-trade, married, and was living at Clapham; and I still fail to understand how the Harry Silvester that I knew could in his manhood do such things. However, we most of us outlive our romantic side—sooner or later.

Sometimes I almost wish that this affair had not faded out, but it left room for further experiences.

No  2.

—The Twins

Never have a sister seven years older than yourself. I had, and so I know. Such sisters are patronising, but that is not the worst of them; they get somehow a kind of authority over you and lead you into doing things against which your better sense rebels. Now, Alice is a very good kind of sister as regards her heart and general groundwork, but she is seven years older than am, though she is by no means so proud of it as she was; and the stateliness of her position seemed at one time to be increased by her impending marriage with the vicar. He was then only a curate, but looked more. His Christian name, by the way, is Jimmy. Partly through Jimmy, and partly through Jimmy’s episcopal people, Alice let herself get mixed up in a charitable subscription dance. That was bad enough, but she would not be content until she had brought me into it. I was only just out, but I struggled a good deal before gave way. However, you cannot fight against Alice, and I said I would go. I did go. I arrived late at some festive and forsaken hall in the neighbourhood of Olympia. It had that air of isolated gaiety about it which always seems to me to be worse than death. It was gay for that night only. There had been serious meetings there, and I felt that the harmonium had been removed, but had left an atmosphere of financially-unsound sects behind it. I am proud to say that I hardly knew any one there.

And out of that most unpromising occasion there arose an affair of the heart.

•   •   •   •   •

I had forgotten all about that most dear little boy, Harry Silvester. Absence makes the heart grow tender all right, but not towards the absent. And that rule applies any time between the ages of five and fifty. My engagement with Harry was by this time a forgotten childish absurdity.

Well, in the ordinary course, I danced with a young man with a very thoughtful eye and a short black moustache. He was quite good-looking and seemed to know Jimmy very well. So I supposed he was all right, and probably he was. He could not dance in any real sense of the word, so we went on to the staircase and talked. Never did I meet a man who talked so little and made his silence serve him so well; he made you feel that you were dull and uninteresting, but not that he was conversationally barren—which, I believe, was the real state of the case. And he could make a platitude into an epigram by his judicious silence; he would look straight before him with his searching, serious gaze, and then tell you after a pause that time flew, or that honesty was the best policy, or something of that sort. And it never occurred to you that he was remembering an inapposite proverb; it always seemed as if his intellect had flashed like a searchlight down to the very depths of truth’s well—that he had seen this precious aphorism there, dived for it, and brought it up rather exhausted. Of course, it was all manner, but then manner means a good deal. There are many wits in London who would do better if they paid a boy to say their good things for them, simply because they have not got the necessary manner. His good looks always seemed to me like a plagiarism from one of Lytton’s novels, but his conversational plagiarisms always looked rather good; he had the sense to direct his best manner upon his weakest point. I fancy that he often went to subscription dances for the pleasure of looking as if he did not often go there. I talked to Jimmy about this man afterwards.

“Jimmy,” I said “who’s Mr. Charles Elkinthorpe?”

“He’s a twin.”

“More.”

“He’s also a barrister. That’s about all I know. I believe that he’s considered to be rather slow.”

This was an amusing criticism, coming from Jimmy. There is not, as far as I am aware, anything much slower than the good and conscientious Jimmy himself.

“Money?”

“I don’t know,” he replied rather coldly. He takes everything seriously, and he was pained by the mercenary character of the question.

“Then you ought to know. It all began with that dance that you and Alice forced me into. Now mamma likes him, and he is coming to the house, and anything may happen. If I marry him, and am reduced to a thirty-pound house in the Wandsworth neighbourhood, and learn how to make one’s home look beautiful at a small cost, you’re responsible, and let it be a warning to you. What’s the other twin?”

“William Elkinthorpe is his name. I don’t know him; he’s away in Devonshire.”

“Which would you sooner be, Jimmy, a barrister, or away in Devonshire? Don’t stop to think about it, because it isn’t the kind of thing that stands thinking about. Thanks awfully for your information, and now you may run away and play.”

“I don’t want,” said Jimmy seriously, “to say anything presumptuous, but within a few weeks I shall be your brother-in-law, and so, perhaps—”

“Yes, Jimmy, quite so. You’re an angel. Now presume as much as you like.”

“Well, aren’t you too young to be thinking about marriage—especially in this rather flippant way?”

“Certainly, but don’t be too sure that I was thinking about it. It’s just possible that I mayn’t marry him so very much after all; he may refuse me—anything may happen. Oh, Jimmy, don’t you ever want to be purely perfectly asinine for one moment? How do you get along without it?”

He smiled faintly, hoped he could see a joke, sighed deeply, and went off to look for Alice.

It must be apparent to any one (not being Jimmy) from this conversation, that I considered Elkinthorpe to be quite beyond the range of possibilities, and had absolutely no heart-interest in him. If I had had any such interest, should I have asked Jimmy directly, in so many words, to tell me about the man? Of course not; I am a woman. And should I have been contented with the few barren details that Jimmy supplied? Of course not. I should have been much more indirect, and Jimmy would have found himself being much more explicit. When I become unable to make the Jimmies of this world tell me what I want to know believe they are volunteering the information of their own free will, and rather fear that they are boring me—all simultaneously—I will give up being a woman and set to at something else.

But, on the other hand, I had already surmised that Charles Elkinthorpe had a very distinct heart-interest in me. He had taken advantage of mamma’s fatal habit of liking any one who wants to be liked, and came with clockwork regularity on her days. He dined with us once; he himself played the host, also, after a bachelor manner, and took us to the theatre and to supper at the Savoy afterwards. His pace never improved, but on the other hand he did not make mistakes—that is one of the advantages of going slowly.

Then one night I accidentally overheard part of a conversation between mamma and Alice that was not intended for me. However, I told them that I had overheard them. They were in the back drawing-room and did not observe that I had just come into the front.

I heard my dear, white-haired, fluffy mamma say:

“Oh, no, Alice! I don’t think it. He comes here very often, I know; but he talks to me or to you all the time—so far as he can be said to talk at all.”

“Yes, of course,” Alice answered, “but he looks only at her. I can tell you that Jimmy has noticed it.”

“And he really is such a nice young man in many ways. It would be too regrettable.”

“She is so young!” said Alice sadly.

“And so, so fair!” I observed out loud. I thought it time to interfere. “I should like myself, you good people, when you’ve quite finished with me.” Then we all laughed. But I went into Alice’s bedroom that night, to give her a portion of my mind.

“I say, stranger,” I remarked nasally, “I heard what you were saying this afternoon, and if you’ll excuse me I reckon I’d prefer to engineer this—”

Alice stamped her foot. “Cynthia, you positively shall not quote that vulgar and disgusting story.”

“Very well, then,” I said, dropping the twang which went with the story. “But let me tell you one thing. If you want to stop me from getting engaged to Charles Elkinthorpe, don’t try to prevent it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that—just plain that.”

“Cynthia, you would not accept this man merely because I thought him in this respect undesirable, and considered you too young to think of such things?”

“My dear child,” I said, “I can see Jimmy has been talking to you. You’ve long since reduced yourself to an agency for the circulation of Jimmy’s opinions. Still you are by nature reasonable. So let me tell you that I would do anything to assert my independence—even sacrifice it altogether.”

I left her rather mystified because, in order to put my case strongly, I may have said a shade more than I meant. But Alice really had made a mistake. It was her opposition that first made it occur to me that Charles Elkinthorpe’s romance might really become romantic. Up to this time he had been definitely outside the range of possibilities; now he came within the range. I remembered that he was tall and good-looking; I am proud to say that I did not forget that he was dull. Alice’s opposition provided him with the only halo that he possessed; it was a very small one. Engaged people always back other engagements, from a desire to have the happiness to themselves; married people always encourage engagements, from a desire to make the other foxes cut their brushes off.

A less episcopal branch of Jimmy’s people had a reception one night and Charles Elkinthorpe was present; I found him looking like a lost sheep, with his thoughtful eyes fixed on the doorway. He came straight towards me when I entered. I dodged him and talked to other people. In the supper-room I let him find me: he came up bleating and complaining.

“Please don’t apologise,” I said. “There was no compulsion on you to talk to me, and if you didn’t want to do it you were quite right to leave it alone.”

He became almost fluent in his protestations that he had only come there in order to talk to me, and that ever since my arrival he had done nothing but watch for an opportunity. “May I say,” he added, with an air of reverent interest, “that you seem rather tired of this?”

“Well, I wouldn’t make it generally known, Mr. Elkinthorpe, if I were you. Because, you see, I don’t. And also I amn’t. But I am bad-tempered, and I am bad-tempered because I am so hungry.”

He apologised and vanished. He was back again very soon. He was quicker in action than in speech. “There are some little tables on the balcony overlooking the garden, and much cooler than this. If you wouldn’t mind, I have got some supper for you there.”

“Thank you so much. How long will it have to stop out there? I didn’t think soup improved by going round the balcony, like Madeira and the Cape, you know. But you understand these things better than I do. Please bring it in as soon as it’s been there long enough.”

He was too sad to speak; his hair seemed to become untidy, his tie worked round to the left, and all the life died out of him. How I could pity him and be nice to him; I had been trying to get him into a state which would make that possible for me without any loss of self-respect. So I said that, after all, it was rather a good idea; and we went out on to the balcony.

Charles Elkinthorpe was invariable. He always wanted to talk to me, and he always did his best to obtain a romantic seclusion for the purpose. But, when he had managed all that, he never did talk. It was so on this occasion; he hovered about me, would not have anything to eat, and had not got anything to say. At last, when we seemed to be drowned thirty feet deep in a destroying ocean of silence, he made a struggle, a last desperate effort, and came to the surface for a moment. He breathed a platitude with reference to the nature of aspic, and then sank again like lead. He sat gazing thoughtfully into the night. His manner no longer imposed on me.

“I wonder,” I said, “if I could ask you what you were thinking about.”

He turned on me suddenly. “Of you, of course; I never think about anything else.”

This was much more direct than I had wanted. So I pretended that I had not heard him, and said that it was a lovely night, that I could make out the Great Bear distinctly, and that I would say good-night, because Alice and mamma would be wanting to get away. I had left him three seconds after his too direct statement, without encouraging him or too greatly discouraging him. I believe I could write a book on “The Lover: his Treatment in Sickness and in Health.” The best critics, you see, are those that have failed.

He went on being devoted whenever he got a chance, and confined himself strictly to indirect statements. He could not have done better for himself. And he did not see me too often—which was also in his favour. Slowly his halo grew bigger, and thicker, and brighter.

Then he made a fatal mistake. He brought his twin brother to see us.

There was no difference between those twins. They were alike in face and mental equipment. Both had thoughtful eyes, and both had nothing to say. I was sorry for the poor dumb barrister, but that settled the matter definitely. I could not go through life married to a réplica, and no one could have told which was the original. They were too absurdly alike; they looked as if they ought to have been placed on a mantelpiece, one at each end.

So I said to Alice, “Get mamma to ask that handsome set of Elkinthorpes to dinner soon. One or more of them wants to propose to me, and I want to give him an opportunity. And I should refuse either.”

As it happened, Charles Elkinthorpe sent his proposal by post. I never refused a man with more delicate kindness.

•   •   •   •   •

Alice told me the other day that between the ages of seventeen and eighteen I used to be slightly slangy and vulgar. That is, I believe, rather true. A great sorrow is good for the manner, and so far I had not taken one.

No  3.

—The Experiment

Alice and Jimmy, after their marriage, saw very much less of me. They went away to live in the country, where they had no society and the advantage of paying one third more than London prices for such country produce as the people there thought not good enough to send to the London markets. They called this the idyllic life. The really important point was that their manner of life, whether idyllic or not, prevented them from exercising a friendly and unnecessary supervision over my particular affairs.

Neither of them would have discovered any danger in Hubert Pedley. He was twenty-five years older than I was. He had a plain, strong, clean-shaven face. His expression was grave, particularly grave when he was speaking of any humorous subject. He was said to be an expert in the reading of ciphers, and had written a book on the subject, but he never mentioned it to me. His favourite author was Gibbon, but he never quoted him. He was rather matter-of-fact than romantic; he generally seemed somewhat hopeless about everything, but his despair was rather a gentle amusement to him than a suffering. He did not seem to be at all the kind of man that one would marry, and although he was possessed of considerable independent means, I do not think that up to the time when I first met him he had ever had any inclination to spend a portion of his income on the maintenance of a wife.

The first time he took me down to dinner he struck me as being brusque, unusual, and interesting. I do not mean to say that he began to be interesting at once, but then I do not like that kind; when a man talks about the hereafter on the staircase I am always a little nervous about the point that he will have reached by dessert. It was some time afterwards when I came to think over Mr. Pedley that I discovered that he had really managed to advance surprisingly towards intimacy on the first occasion of our meeting; and I thought it rather clever of him not to have let me see it at the time.

However, it was not until we had known each other for some weeks, during which we frequently met, that he told me about his curious collection. The general talk had turned on blue-and-white, and it had been obvious that he knew rather more about it than any one there. I said as much to him.

“Yes,” he said, “I did make it obvious. At the same time I know next to nothing about it. I never collected that; my other collection takes so much time.”

“And what is it?”

“Surely, I must have told you. The thing has been the passion of my life. I collect men and women.”

I was by this time used to hearing Hubert Pedley say with perfect gravity things which he did not mean seriously. So I said sympathetically that very few of the men or women I knew would look nice stuffed.

“I don’t kill them,” he answered.

“Then don’t you think it unkind to keep them in captivity?”

“Ah, then I have not told you. I have divided,” he went on blandly, “the whole human race into three hundred genera, according to their important characteristics. In many cases a genus has a certain number of sub-genera. Well, I have had a cabinet made, a tremendous affair, containing three hundred drawers; it covers nearly the whole of one wall of my study at Ardley”-Ardley was his country place—“and in the drawers of my cabinet I keep my specimens. That is to say, when I meet any one often enough to get any knowledge of him or her, I either get a photograph or, where that is not possible, a card with his or her name written on it, and put it into one of the three hundred drawers. I have got one specimen of each kind now, and of some of the commoner kinds I have got dozens.”

“Yes? My last photograph doesn’t even begin to think about doing me justice. Pity, isn’t it, Mr. Pedley?”

“Well,” he answered, meditatively, “I should have been very glad, of course, if you could have made a concession to the whim of a collector. All collectors are mad, you know, Miss Ames, and humane people generally humour their delusions. However, there would have been all the trouble of adding an extra drawer to the cabinet; I should not have grudged that, but still it would undoubtedly be too much to ask from you.”

“That will do,” I said, “you could not have done better than that. So I am the three-hundred-and-oneth kind of human being, am I? I don’t want anything nicer than that said to me. I promise you my photograph for the collection.”

“You are too kind. I cannot thank you enough.”

“Then tell me—have you got many photographs?”

“Very many. In most cases I get a photograph.”

“And how on earth do you do it?”

He did not blush or appear in the least disconcerted. He answered quite calmly: “If you want the exact truth, I generally get the photograph by implying that its original is the three-hundred-and-oneth kind.”

Then I got angry. “If you think for a minute, I am quite sure that you will see that you are being abominably rude?”

“Certainly,” he answered impassively, “the exact truth—like all other desirable things—is always impossible, Mais que voulez-vous? I could not offer you anything that was not desirable, and—”

At this moment a candle-shade above us caught fire, and fell blazing just on the top of my head. It had hardly touched it, before Mr. Pedley had caught it up in one hand, stepped quickly to the fireplace, and dropped it in the grate. My hair was not even singed. We were in the boudoir, which opens into the drawing room; and although the doors were open and there were several people in the drawing-room, no one noticed the incident.

He came back to me, and went on with his sentence, quite placidly—“and, besides, your conclusion is too hasty. You see—”

“Mr. Pedley,” I said rapidly—I was more excited than he was—“pardon me, but you must have burnt your hand.”

“Not at all, not at all. To return to—”

A sudden impulse come over me. In a second I had caught his right hand in mine, and held it up. What I saw was not pretty; but I could have kissed it. “I thought so,” I said, rising; “if Mrs Carning is idiot enough to have that kind of shade, I suppose that she keeps the remedies on the premises. Now don’t protest. There isn’t going to be any fuss. But you may want that hand again one of these days.” I pressed the electric bell by the side of the fireplace. We slipped out into the hall, and intercepted the servant there, who got us what we required. The remedies for a burn are not romantic, but I don’t think I noticed that fact at the time.

“What can I do to thank you properly?” I asked.

“The thing’s too trivial. You speak as if I had saved your life at the risk of my own.”

“You saved my hair, which is my personal appearance, which is quite as much. And I said that you were rude, and you were not. Oh, I could cry!”

“If you did that, I should have saved your personal appearance to no purpose. Don’t spoil my sublime act of heroism for me; I am going to have it represented in stained glass, either for St. Paul’s or the Abbey—they must toss for it, since both deserve it, and I can only afford one. Casabianca is nothing to it. Don’t, please, make it ineffective.”

“There is just one thing that I can do.”

“You can make my excuses to Mrs. Carning, and—oh, yes—you’ll see, I’m sure, that she isn’t made to feel bad about it.”

“Mrs. Carning married my own first cousin’s best friend,” I replied, “and if that does not give me a right to stop her from indirect arson and murder for the future, I don’t know what does. That was not what I meant. I can, and will, go to Baker Street tomorrow and get myself photographed in one hundred and fifty different positions, and send you one of each; and please put one in all the cabinet drawers that have got really abusive labels on them.”

“I could not do that. My collection is scientific, and science must be accurate—though complete accuracy is frequently misleading.”

“I suppose the simplest way to get at truth is to make a paradox.”

“But mine was a well-used paradox, and therefore more commonplace than the commonplace. The tuning of an organ is generally quoted as an instance of the necessity for inaccuracy. But don’t let me talk like the Child’s Guide to General Knowledge. I should be thanking you in advance for the photograph. I only want one.” He paused, looked at me intently, and added: “And even that is not quite what I want.”

“What would you like best?”

“To keep you in captivity,” he answered. “Good-night, Miss Ames.”

At first I thought that he was merely echoing my own phrase, without any second thought. After he had gone I felt sure that he had meant something, and in consequence I was much perturbed. I felt as if he had almost proposed to me, and might go on with it.

I met him frequently after this, and always in a crowd. It was some time before we were alone together again. The tête-à-tête is hard to procure without the comments of the censorious. I procured one at last by one of the most satisfactory processes—accidental elimination of the chaperone. I felt sure that he meant to propose to me, and I did not know whether I could bring myself to accept a man old enough to be my father, merely because I was immensely interested in him. I was certain that I should know when the time came, and I wanted to put myself out of my misery.

“I have frequently,” he said, “in talking to you, commented on prevalent customs.”

“Yes,” I answered; “you have given me an impression that things in general are all wrong, that they can’t be put right, and that it doesn’t matter, but is on the contrary rather funny.”

“Well,” he said, “in this case I have a remedy to propose. I think that the present method of getting married—which I propose to remedy—is distinctly disgraceful.”

“Why?”

“In the first place it is not gradual enough. It must be a shock for a woman to suddenly transfer herself from the dead chill of an ordinary social meeting to the—the intimacies of a betrothal. There should be a preliminary step, something which might be called the experiment, something less than an engagement and rather more than disengagement, as things stand at present the engagement is generally public, and if it is broken off one of the parties to it is generally much abused. The experiment would be essentially private; it would not bind either party, and either party would in con sequence be free to break it off at will and without being called a jilt. All it would imply would be that the parties to it would see if an engagement were possible; it would not mean that they loved each other, but that they had thought it worth while to see if they could love each other, to test that question by frequent meetings and so on. If, for instance, an old man, or at least a middle-aged man, finds that he loves a young girl—”

At this point my heart suddenly turned into a man beating carpets, and I wanted to run away.

“The man could not perhaps, unless he felt very sure, ask for an engagement; he might ask for the first step—the experiment. Are you agreeing with me?”

“Theoretically,” I said, in rather a husky voice.

“I want to keep you in captivity,” he said slowly. “Will you consent to the experiment? You can free yourself at once if the experiment breaks down by just telling me so. Will you?”

At this moment a door opened and a servant came in. I turned to Mr. Pedley,

“Yes,” I said.

The experiment did not last for long.

I knew almost at once that I had made a mistake, but I waited on with a wild hope that the thing might come right. I used all my logic on the thing that logic never alters. Once I happened to catch his eye looking at me across a room full of people. I got up and went out. I could not stand it.

On the next day I got the following note from him:

My dear Cynthia,

“Since you are too kind to tell me I must tell you—that the experiment has broken down. Most things do. But I shall not. We revert to our original terms. Never try to force yourself in things of that kind.

Yours ever,

Hubert Pedley.”

However, he went back to Ardley, and I have not met him since, on the original terms or any others. He never comes to London now. I hear that he has taken up with the study of heraldry.

No  4.

—The Real One

Other people’s tragedies have so often been comedies to me, that I do not much want to write about my own tragedy. Perhaps, after all, my tragedy was only a comedy. I did not—needless to say—kill myself; I did not break my heart. Well, one cannot do that without giving one’s self away; and women are not over eager to give themselves away. It seems as if everything in the world must stop, but as a matter of fact nothing does stop; you come down next morning; you eat breakfast and luncheon and dinner. It was all a maddening mistake, and you had better forget it, and you try to think of some way to make yourself forget it or to make it not matter so much. That is probably comedy.

And after a time you do forget it, and it does not matter so much. Perhaps just that is tragic—to be brought low and to be lifted up, and to be unable to prevent either. The necessity for thinking other wise at one time made me read more philosophy than I could understand. I do not do that any more. This is the story that I tell—reluctantly.

•   •   •   •   •

We were stopping with the Marshes for the New Year. The house was full—crowded. Agnes Marsh had been a friend of mine since I was a baby, and I had been particularly pleased to accept this invitation because I was to meet the man whom she had promised to marry, Gaston Travers. How smilingly we always commence upon the things that are going to hurt us most in the end.

I arrived in the afternoon. Some of the men turned up at tea-time, practically asleep, of course, with the open air exercise that they had just gone through. Gaston Travers did not appear. I did not see him until a few seconds before he took me in to dinner. My first impression was that Agnes must have had a good deal of pluck. He was not a handsome man, though he had points; but he was evidently a very strong man, and he looked rather cruel. I had understood from a semi-dormant male in the afternoon that Travers was emphatically a sportsman, and I was beginning to wonder if I knew anything about any thing that he could possibly know any thing about, when he turned towards me and began to talk.

Briefly, he talked about me, and either by intuition, or by a few seconds’ observation, or by Agnes, or by some other information received—as the police call it—he had managed to know a good deal about me. Now much as I like talking about me, I have been sufficiently educated to know that it cannot be done for many consecutive minutes. So I had the conversation turned on to him. He told me very little; all of it was totally unexpected; if it was said with any intention at all it was said with the intention of removing any preconceived notion that I might have formed of him. I called to mind that a semi-dormant young man, with no final g’s and no motive to lie, had gaped out to me the fact that Gaston Travers was a good sportsman, and I was much puzzled.

Whether I would or no, Gaston Travers interested me, and I hoped—almost unconsciously—that he would talk to me again in the drawing-room. He did not speak one word to me afterwards until he said good night, which he did hesitatingly, as if he was not quite sure whether he had ever seen me before or not. Yet he had talked to me—and me alone—all through dinner. I wonder if he meant that to be clever, or if it just came so naturally, to him. Any woman would know that it was really very effective.

Agnes came to my room that night on purpose to talk about Gaston Travers. She put her small toes up on the brass fender, and her small head back on the silk cushions; she was perfectly comfortable, and wearing a loose tea-gown; and she was very much in love. She came to talk, and she did most of the talking; if she showed any sign of finishing the description of her betrothed, I put in one gentle enticing question, and made her talk more. But I hardly knew why I did it.

What did I learn? He was said to have a violent temper, but Agnes did not believe it. It was true that he was fairly good at most forms of sport; he had told Agnes that this had been a necessity, in order that he might be allowed to talk about things which were not sport. She knew she was going to marry an enigma, and it was half the charm. He was never bored—seemed to be interested in everything and everybody—more especially everybody. She had made him take me in to dinner, because he liked women who—something complimentary. She said one queer thing: “If Gaston had been born in another class—not ours—the class that makes odious public love in Kew Gardens and on Hampstead Heath, I wonder what he would have done?”

I said, “Very much as others did of his class, but with more success.”

Agnes looked inquiringly at me.

“I mean, of course,” I went on, “that he would have married Agnes Marsh, while the other men would only have wanted to marry Agnes Marsh.”

She rose and made a mock curtsey.

“I mean it—even if he had been born in another class he would have had fine judgement.”

“I am not afraid of his judgement; I am horribly afraid of his impulses. Good night, darling Cynnie. It’s quite too late.”

Agnes Marsh is very pretty, and she has money, and yet she is far from being a fool.

When Agnes had gone I thought a good deal; I decided to make mamma have a recalling telegram for us on the morrow; no, there was nothing wrong, but I had a hideous feeling that I was on the verge of things which I did not want to happen. It was long before I slept.

I was very late down to breakfast, only one person was later, and that was Gaston Travers. He took up our conversation just where we had left it at the end of dinner the night before, apparently quite unconscious that a period had intervened during which he had seemed to be unaware of my existence. He talked ardently. He appeared to wish me to think that he was much interested in me. The least things in his behaviour showed it. As we sat there Agnes came in, and said something by way of badinage.

It was quite harmless, but it was a small mistake. As soon as she had said it she knew that it was a mistake, and I knew it, and Gaston Travers knew it. And he was not a man that liked small mistakes; he preferred the larger kind.

That day I, being an idiot, postponed the idea of a telegraphic recall. The reason which I gave myself was that there was a dance coming on which I was anxious not to miss. In the evening I saw very little of Gaston Travers. He took old Lady Felmersham in to dinner; she is a wicked, malicious old woman, and it was both silly and rude of Gaston to neglect her as fully and deliberately as he did.

In the drawing-room, before the men came in, Lady Felmersham fastened herself on to me.

“Pity now, isn’t it—Agnes going to marry a deaf-mute? Now don’t you think he ought to go into a home and see if something can’t be done? Speaks, does he? Ah, I hadn’t noticed it. I suppose I’m wrong, as usual. But still, it is a pity that he doesn’t speak English. And, of course, he wouldn’t expect everybody to speak Hindustani as fluently as you must have done last night.”

Gaston Travers is certainly very dark; and I was very angry.

“Ah, Lady Felmersham, you flatter us both. He only spoke English to me. But with you—well, every one knows that French is the language for compliments.”

“Well, I spent fifteen years in Paris, without speaking a word of English, and that gave me a sort of smattering; I would have tried to follow him, if, as you say, they used to talk French on his plantation, but he didn’t risk it. Where is the Swannee River?”

“Ah, here he comes! Mr. Travers, Lady Felmersham wants to know all about your plantation, or something or other of that kind.”

One does not embarrass Lady Felmersham; one might as well try to embarrass a cast-iron elephant. He sat down by her side, and chattered pleasantly enough; I heard allusions to forestry and the price of timber, and soon they were both laughing a good deal. Lady Felmersham, I must own, talks wittily when she pleases, and she knows her way out of most things.

But when Gaston took my hand to say good-night he did not say good-night. He said, in a low voice, “Thank you.”

I looked down. “And for what?”

“Surely,” he said, “the situation was obvious. But do not try to punish Lady Felmersham again. Still—thank you.”

When Agnes came to my room that night, it was deplorable, but I was quite deathly tired, and positively could not talk—had to go to bed at once. Then she kissed me—yes, kissed me just then—and said she was sorry, and seemed to be thinking, and went off to her own room. “Now then,” I thought to myself, “when will Lady Felmersham get an opportunity of talking to mamma? And when she gets it, what will she say?” I felt sure that she would pay me out, and I was rather afraid that I had put the weapon into her hand.

But nothing of the kind happened. This was explained by something that Gaston Travers said to me next day: “Would you like,” he inquired, “to see Lady Felmersham jump through hoops, fire a pistol at the word of command, and pick out any card that the audience may select? Oh yes, I assure you, she is now perfectly docile. And she will not bite—that is certain.”

“How was it done?”

“Oh, we happened to have a little chat about Paris together this morning. The conclusion of the matter was that if she did not do me a bad turn, I would not do her a worse. Only we did not put it quite so crudely.”

“I know that she is angry with me, but how could she do you a bad turn?”

I said that, but it was unpardonable; I knew of course more or less what the answer would be; Lady Felmersham had watched us both very closely, and would have connected our names in her own inimitably unpleasant way. He did not give me the answer directly, but came to it after some minutes’ confidential talk. We were alone in the smaller drawing room; the dressing-bell had rung and every one else had vanished, but we went on talking. Parler d’amour, c’est faire l’amour, I suppose. We were both of us standing by the mantelpiece, looking into the fire. A servant came into the room, looked slightly aggrieved by our presence there, and went out again.

Gaston glanced at the clock. “Can you dress in twelve minutes?” he said.

“No,” I said; “couldn’t we have the universe put back half an hour?”

“Personally,” he answered, “I can dress in five minutes. And yet I should like to have the universe put back very much more than half an hour.”

The hurry of dressing left me no time to think. That evening Gaston Travers gave half his attention to Lady Felmersham and the other half to Agnes. I avoided Agnes as much as possible. I justified everything with ease, but I was abjectly miserable. I had fits of anger with myself.

The dance was in the town hall at Selbridge; it was in aid of some hospital in which the Marshes were much interested. So we nearly all went, and were to keep together. I gave Gaston a couple of waltzes. He danced well, and they were horrible dances. I hated them. We had hardly begun the second before I stopped him; he took me out on to the staircase, and I sat down. I wanted to die. I wanted to get right away where no one could see me, and then die. I suppose that I must have looked queer, because he bent over me and asked me if I was ill.

He himself was very white, and his hands shook a little.

“No, thank you, Mr. Travers, not at all. But I am rather tired of this—and I am going back.” I remember that I was half hysterically amused at the sound of my own voice; it seemed so bright and metallic.

He looked round; we were alone on the staircase.

“It is of no use,” he said; “it is not my fault, and it is not your fault. But it is of no use to ignore it any longer. I do not care, I must speak. At least I do care, but I cannot help speaking. Cynthia! Cynthia!”

I rose hurriedly, half breathless. I think I put one hand on his arm. “Ah no!” I cried, “don’t! It’s speaking that makes things so real. Stop—let it end here. It must end here. Do you want to kill Agnes? I tell you that you love her—you love her best in the world. And you are right—you’ll know how much sweeter and gentler and better she is than all other women. She is good; and I’m bad and treacherous.”

“It is too late,” he protested; “I have already spoken. And you knew it—must have known it long before I spoke.”

“No,” I said. “I’ve been wicked, but I’m not going to be wicked any more. If—if you love me at all, say good-night and good-bye now. And—”

I held out my hand to him. “I may not take you downstairs? Good-night and good-bye, dear, then. If we had met sooner—but you are right, and it’s best not to talk about it. Good-bye.” He bent over my hand and kissed it.

I remember all the small details that followed. Mamma was not at the dance, and I wanted to return alone, so I told no one that I was going. None of the carriages were there, and I had a cab fetched from a hotel. It was a four-wheeler, with one of those candle-lamps in it. I put my gloves and fan down on the faded crimson cushions, and kicked off my slippers. The maidenhair in my dress was all black and wilted. I blew out the lamp to make it dark. Then I cried for a long time; in between my sobs the rattle of the cab seemed to be repeating words that he had said.

We left next morning.

•   •   •   •   •

Gaston married Agnes. He was killed by an accident in the hunting-field three months afterwards. Within a year of his death Agnes married again.

No  5.

—The Thousand
and the Boy

After a woman has once met the Real One, and met him to no purpose, she is in danger of several things. She is in danger of immediately accepting, on the rebound, some man with whom she is not in the least in love; she is in danger of a deep and self-sacrificing interest in the poor of the East-end, which interest—subsequently proving evanescent—fends to make the poor of the East-end somewhat cynical; she is in danger of showing her hand, a bitter humiliation that, however, most women are clever enough to avoid; lastly, she is in danger of a prolonged course of rather wild flirtation. It was the last of these dangers into which I fell. Of course a strong-minded woman would avoid all the dangers and preserve her even, normal condition. But I thank the goodness and the grace that on my birth have smiled and not made me a strong-minded woman. The merits of that kind are disputed; her hygienic boots are hideously obvious. Besides, the strong-minded woman is rarely placed in such a predicament; when she meets the Real One, she mostly marries him mercilessly, whether he likes it or not.

And so for two seasons I behaved rather badly. I went everywhere. I believed that I was enjoying it. On the night that I heard of Gaston Travers’s death I went to a dance, and danced until three the next morning. I exceeded—wildly and improbably exceeded—my dress-allowance. I looked well at Henley, and better at Ascot. I had myself photographed many times. I was painted by Vermont, and my portrait was on the line at the New. I attracted the attention of a most important personage. I became the subject of one or two personal paragraphs, and—Heaven forgive my vulgarity!—rather liked it than not. I refused old Lord Rappary on his own Berkeley Square staircase. His habit of universal acquiescence—which has made that wicked and kindly nobleman a byword—was illustrated on this occasion even. “No, my dear lady? You think not? Well, I won’t deny that you’re right. In fact, I’ll go so far as to affirm positively that you are right. I have the most perfect confidence in your judgement. We will continue to be friends—you shall be a sister to me.”

He was sixty-one years of age, and I own that I looked at him amusedly and questioningly.

“Sister, did I say?” he went on. “I accept your unspoken correction. I am always wrong, but no one could possibly be more glad to be put right. I will regard you as a mother—I mean, as a daughter. Never was at all strong on relationships. Merely wanted to take your hint about my advanced age and approaching decease, and so on.”

By all the rules of the game Lord Rappary ought to have come out of this interview feeling contemptible; but, in spite of his universal acquiescence, I fancy that he had made me feel worse than he did. I wished that I had not made that tacit allusion to his age. These people, who are not such fools as they appear, or as they are reputed to be, are a great nuisance; they cause one to make mistakes. At any rate I found myself arguing with myself, some few minutes later, that I had behaved like a lady; and it is horribly bad when one has to do that.

I did not refuse many men, in spite of my thousand flirtations. I rarely allowed it to go so far. I refused enough to enable me to keep in after life that most blessed possession—a good conceit of one’s self.

My unmarried sisters—you who more for the ways of luck than for the want of charm are unmarried, and are now likely to remain so!—is it not a consolation to you to recall your beautiful moment—the time when you held, say, a dozen men in the hollow of a pretty hand, and then threw them away? The world is probably saying that you have lost the game; you can bow your head and acquiesce cheerfully, for you know that at any rate you held winning cards if you had cared to play them.

There was the Hon. Patrick Delahay, since gone, I am sorry to say, completely to the bad. He expatiated to me, I remember, on the necessity for courage in courtship, with too soft a touch of the soft accent of his native land for any printer to reproduce. “A lover,” he told me, in a poetical moment, “should be like a deep-sea diver, ready to pluck even from the cannon’s mouth the fairest pearl of all, that it may wave at the end of his own dinner-table and point him upwards.” I did not care to let it go any further than that. The Hon. Patrick Delahay subsequently married his mother’s maid, which was bad. It was also inexplicable; at least he wrote me letters afterwards (one every three months, as a rule) to explain it, and in spite of that I confess that I never understood it or answered his letters. Shortly afterwards he did very much worse. He was a right man with wrong impulses; and he mostly acted on the impulses. When he went under—scandalously—he ceased writing to me. But I have now taken to writing to him; he has replied with an ashamed letter, thanking me and asking me not to write any more; but there was that in his letter which makes me go on. No one else writes to him now—no, not even the woman who was his mother’s maid.

There was young Reddamore, who is not only on ’Change, but never seems to be quite able to come off it. There was a politician, who was nothing if he was not polemical; an American, who was nothing if he was not rich; and an author, who was nothing any way. There was a barrister, who always gave me the impression that he was defending me on a capital charge. There were crowds, and it is no great loss that I have forgotten most of them.

I behaved, as I have said, rather badly. I went out—as mamma frequently pointed out to me—far too much. I came ultimately upon a time that frightened me. I began to get thinner and very pale. I could not sleep at nights, and took to chloral. My chloral was discovered and confiscated, and I was driven off to Sir Peter. We know him well, and doctors are privileged; but—even with these allowances—it struck me that he was abominably rude. The least impertinent thing he said was that I was dancing myself to death. He told me that I was to go north, be in bed by ten, and up at eight, take exercise—yes, sea-bathing would be excellent—and so on. There were more details, and there was a prescription. I can remember the curious twang in the taste of that tonic still.

We went north, and it is not necessary to give the name of the seaside resort. Jimmy and Alice came to see us for a few days. Jimmy told me that I was but a wreck of my former self—Jimmy is a kind friend to decayed phrases—and thought that it would exhilarate me if I were to take an active share in some mission work. I explained that I was already taking a tonic. Alice said, “Well, you have changed, Cynnie. No one would know us for sisters now.” I said, “No, dear; and I suppose that—being a clergyman’s wife—it wouldn’t be right for you to dye it. Still, there are only those streaks on the forehead, and I should hardly have noticed them. Now your back hair is just as it always was.” She took a great deal of trouble to explain to me that she was not in the least offended; and women rarely are fond of things in general when they have to do that. I was not exactly surprised when they abbreviated their stay. I did my best to be nice to them, but I own that they irritated me. Everybody irritated me just then, except mamma.

There is probably no spot on this globe where mamma cannot safely be calculated upon to meet, with enthusiasm, a friend of her youth. It was so at this watering- place. The very first time that I took her on the Spa she fell into the arms of a Mrs. Raymond. After that we met fresh batches of the Raymonds every day. They had come down in great numbers. “We’ve taken a street,” said Ainslie Raymond rather gloomily. He always seemed to regard the monstrous size of the family party as a kind of personal disgrace.

It must not be supposed that Ainslie was the head of the family; he was not even the eldest son. He looked as if he might be about eighteen, and he was still at an Army-crammer’s. He was a very good-looking boy; dressed immaculately, behaved naturally, and was from the first quite inclined to be friendly with me. He spoke with feeling on the subject of the Army and the Sandhurst examinations. “It isn’t that I’m thinking of my own case. I shall be through all right next time, though not particularly high up. It’s, the principle of the thing that I bar. What practical good’s Latin prose going to be to an officer? Besides, here’s a case. We sent up a regular crock last time; well, that crock got no less than three unseens that he had done before, risked three or four wild shots at other things—all of which came off—and passed easily. There’s too much luck about it.”

As the intimacy progressed he began to tell me a good deal about himself. He had a friend whom he spoke of as Bill; I noticed that whenever he told me a story about himself and Bill there was a probability that the story would either obviously stop half-way or would obviously be edited. From this I drew the conclusion that Bill could not be a very nice boy, and told Ainslie as much.

“Ah, but he is!” said Ainslie. “You couldn’t find a better fellow at heart than old Bill. The trouble is that Bill despises women.”

“How old is Bill?”

“He’s a month or two younger than myself, properly speaking; but then Bill’s been through a good deal in the time, you know. Of course it’s a pity. When a man gets to be fond of a woman, she acts as a kind of—er—a kind of steadier—that seems to—er—steady him.”

The feebleness and the implications showed me whither he was drifting; he was eighteen and I was perilously near twenty-eight; I was amused.

Then came a period of floral offerings. Undisguisedly, openly, and frequently he gave me flowers. They were always very expensive flowers. I am sure that price was his guide to selection, and that he habitually chose the dearest. I stopped him in this recklessness whenever I could. He was a restless boy, and always wanted to be doing something—walking somewhere to see something, or buying something, or going to the local theatre, or sailing about on the silly sea.

He wanted me to go for a sail with him.

I said that I would, if he would take the test of his family with him. He replied that you could not hire an Atlantic liner on that beach. He finally agreed to take a small selection of his sisters. It was, in the interests of romance, a particularly calm day. He told them, I remember, to their faces and in my presence, that he could respect them more if they would dress as I did. They grinned good-temperedly as they did at most things, but it was enough to have made some girls one’s enemies for life. We had a very good mutiny and a plot to maroon him, which we only gave up because there was absolutely nothing to maroon him on. It was rather an amusing morning.

The next day I had a fit of remorse, but I got over it. From my point of view I was not flirting with the boy at all; he was so much too young. I felt sure that every one else saw the thing as I saw it—except the boy, and surely I was not responsible for his want of judgement.

He began to want me to do improbable things and to make his references to his devotion to me more frequent and less veiled. Then I tried to discourage him, but that was not easy. Finally, I decided to give him his opportunity to make an idiot of himself and get it over. It was on the night before my departure, and as it was a very fine moonlight night, the whole party of us had gone down to the beach after dinner to witness the effect. I calmly told Ainslie to get me out of the crowd; he looked as pleased as I had expected, and took me further along the beach. There we stood looking at the moonlight on the water; I had picked up a handful of pebbles and began throwing them into the sea. I was waiting for him to begin. He began:

“You need not be afraid. I am not going to ask you to marry me. I know perfectly well that you do not—never did—never will—love me.”

“Do you want to reproach me?” I said. I felt somewhat at a loss. He was not going on the lines that I had anticipated.

“Reproach you? Why, of course not. Why should I? I’m very young, as you’re always telling me, but I’m not foolish enough to expect you to fall in love with me.”

“I like you very much, Ainslie; you’re a boy as you say, and I’m an old lady, as you imply; it never entered my head that you could regard the relation in any other way. Why take the trouble to tell me the very obvious fact that I am not in love with you?”

In the course of the above remark I am afraid I was rather inaccurate.

“Oh, it was only something Bill said about women who pretend to be in love with you when they aren’t, in order to draw you on and torture you, and laugh at you. Well, I wanted you to understand that I had not mistaken you for one of that kind. With you it’s all been straight sailing from the first. I wanted to make it clear that I had entered into it the way you meant me to enter into it. Of course I’m in love with you—everybody is. But I never have made the mistake of supposing that I had any right to—to expect anything.”

I dropped the rest of the pebbles from my hand, and looked away from him. Then I yielded to an impulse and gave him my hand. He bent over it and kissed it. I could have screamed with laughter, because he was so young and doleful, and because the whole thing was so hideously funny. But I could have also cried my heart out because I was so bitterly ashamed of myself. He took me back to the others, and I made a point of being humbly nice to him all the rest of the evening.

I sent him a little present—a gold cigar-cutter. It was not romantic, but I hope it was useful. I owed him something for floral offerings and a salutary lesson. I made up my mind not to behave badly any more.

No  6.

—Too Late

After that episode of the Boy I did a very common thing. I purchased Motley’s Dutch Republic, Gibbon’s Roman Empire, and Green’s Short History of the English People. I also read them, and, moreover, I read them before breakfast, chiefly because it is so unpleasant to read anything before breakfast. I was trying to persuade myself that it was an affair of culture. Of course, I know now that it was only another phase of an affair of the heart. It was part of the usual routine; you try to be saved by faith and love; in your disappointment you try to be saved by standard works. It is as well to realise the truth; in an affair of the heart you may be happy or desperate, romantic or prosaic, but you can never by any chance be original. And yet, I suppose, when your season-jaded Lady Clara falls in love with—well, with any one whom she cannot possibly marry—she believes, in spite of all her worldly wisdom, that just there lies the newest and truest thing on the face of the earth. After Gaston Travers I had taken a course of flirtation. When the Boy had in his innocent way made me see how unspeakably vulgar this was, I went in for a course of renunciation. I asked myself whether it were not possible to sink the question of one’s personal present in an interest in one’s national past. I am prepared to own that I was not original. I read history; I made out the genealogical tables of kings and queens, very neatly in red and black ink; I learned other people’s dates in order to forget my own failure. I renounced the affairs of the heart.

This was made the more easy for me, because I think that I was no longer very attractive. There are some people whom illness suits. They look their best when they are wan and reclining. Brutal health would ruin their individuality and make them less interesting. But illness did not suit me at all. Such beauty as I had went like smoke before the wind. I became thin and yellow, and angular. This made it the more easy for me to retire from the world. I hardly ever went out. Yet I dressed as well as I had ever done; that was intentional, because I had seen so many women in my position become careless and slovenly. I was not original, but I did not want to be too obvious.

This went on for some years. I turned from history to other studies. I went abroad for a year. While I was at Capri I took an inventory of myself. I decided definitely that I was a Shelved Woman. I reflected that the Shelved Woman, as I had known her, was not generally a nice person. She is, as a rule, too sensitive, easily offended, rather disagreeable, rather selfish. Further, she either continuously points to the fact that she is on the Shelf, which is bad, or makes continual and in effective efforts to get off the Shelf, which is worse. I decided to introduce a variation on the type. I made up my mind to be the Perfect Shelved Woman, simple, friendly, good-tempered, dignified. Now it is of no use to be as perfect as that unless you have some appreciative audience. So I made mamma see that what she really wanted was to go back to England, and take a house on the Thames for the summer.

It was a stereotyped river house, with a garden running down to the water’s edge, where the boat-house was. Sometimes in the mornings I would go out in the punt, and go down one of the backwaters. That used to be very pleasant. One could lie at full length on the cushions and read. I always loved reading in the open air. I read novels at this time; the summer seemed to demand them. In the mornings I generally had the place to myself. The river’s very like a railway carriage in one respect; it is public but one always resents intrusions. The graceful greedy swans always used to come and have a look at me. If there was a luncheon-basket in the punt they would stop in the neighbourhood. If not, they made contemptuous noises and disappeared in search of some more profitable person.

One day, just as I emerged from the backwater on my homeward voyage, I did a very silly thing. I dropped my punt-pole. I have no conception how I did it. There was some stream running, and the pole was gone before I could recover it. Within thirty yards of me was a happy, disgusting, tripper-laden steam-launch, and I proceeded to get out of its way as well as I could with the boat-hook. As I was doing this, another punt came up alongside of me. Its occupant had picked up my punt-pole; he handed it to me, raised his cap, and passed on. He was, I noticed, a big man with a clean shaven face. At first I put him down as an actor; but his voice, in the few words that he said, was too clumsy, and his manner of raising his cap had too much of the untutored masculine about it. Then I decided that he was a barrister. In either case, he was obviously from his build an athlete.

Just then the steam-launch passed. A gaudy youth, who had, I suppose, witnessed my accident, shouted out, “Take it ’ome, lyedy.” So I thought no more about the barrister and meditated on an extension of the muzzling orders.

About a week afterwards mamma managed to catch a cold and showed an inclination to get reckless with it. So I sent a servant for the local doctor, because in such matters mamma reverences doctors but despises me. The doctor arrived when I was out. On my return, I noticed that he drove a very good horse—the dog-cart was waiting for him. In the house I met the doctor himself, and he was of course the hypothetical actor, the imaginary barrister, the rescuer of my punt-pole, and, indirectly, of myself. I noticed now that he was much older than I had supposed when I saw him in his boating things. He had looked about twenty-eight; I now saw that he must be at least ten years older than that. We recognised each other. He was not, as a matter of fact, the resident doctor; he had, indeed, given up regular practise for some years; but he knew Dr. Griffen very well, and sometimes helped him when he was particularly busy. And—it was inevitable—he knew some friends of mamma’s very well. His name was Romer, and I recollected vaguely that I knew of a Dr. Romer as having done something or other recently. After he had gone, I happened to glance at the current number of a learned review that mamma likes to have in the house. Yes, that was where I had seen the name. He was the writer of an article in that number. Mamma had spoken of it. I tried to read it. I could not make it out exactly, but it seemed to be a description of some experiments involving the use of vivisection. I thought—being in the sentimental girl state on this subject—that he must be a brute. I afterwards saw him one day thrash his horse, and felt quite certain that he was a brute. Yet he looked a good-tempered man; he had kindly, rather humorous eyes.

He had an irritatingly lazy way of not defending himself. I had known him some few days when I took occasion to say to him pointedly that I didn’t approve of vivisection. “Don’t you?” he said. “Some people don’t, I know.” And then he changed the subject, as if it were a thing that didn’t matter. During the first month that I knew him I never succeeded in getting from him any defence of himself. In fact, he hardly ever spoke of himself at all; but he managed to leave you with the impression that he was right and you were wrong, and that he did not think your opinion of him mattered. Now, even to the Perfect Shelved Woman that is maddening. Even when you recognise the existence of the Shelf, and have come to prefer very much that men should not make love to you, you do not care to be absolutely disregarded. I gave Dr. Romer several chances to justify himself, and he never availed himself of any of them. I never was so angry with any one before.

I must own that in spite of all this he was not in the least patronising in his manner. He did not speak as if he had a right to speak; it was only that on some points he was silent as if he had a right to be silent. Among the visitors stopping at our house was my old godfather, Eustace Orman. He has spent most of his life in his club; consequently he knows a few people, and knows something about the real. I asked him if he knew Dr. Romer.

“Known him these last ten years.”

“He’s a very cruel man, isn’t he?”

“Obviously not. Why do you say so?”

“He’s a vivisectionist and he ill-treats his horses.”

“He may be a vivisectionist, and he may occasionally find it necessary to make a horse remember which is the man and which is the horse. But that’s nothing to do with it. Cruelty always shows itself in the eye or the mouth, or both. Does he look like a man who tortures animals?”

“Well, no.”

My godfather looked at me suspiciously.

“And what are you asking me this for, Cynthia?”

“Nothing.”

“Does he want to marry you?”

“On the contrary, he talks to me as if I were a child of ten. And I feel a little large for the part.”

On reflection, I decided that this last sentence was not in strict accord with my character of the Perfect Shelved Woman, as originally conceived; it was neither simple, nor friendly, nor dignified.

Dr. Romer was popular, I think, with almost everybody except myself. Yet he gave me very little to say against him. He talked to me at times, giving me the exactly right proportion of his attention. He neither sought nor avoided my society. When he talked to me, he talked with cheerful equanimity, never about himself but very often about me. His manner was not progressive; I met him very often for about three months, and at the end of that time, when he went away, I seemed to be no more intimate with him than I had been at the commencement.

Consequently, I was somewhat surprised when on the day after his departure I received from him by post a proposal of marriage. In that letter he, for the first time, explained himself a little.

The Perfect Shelved Woman would have sent back a few words of friendly but decided refusal at once. Once more I deviated from the ideal. I considered the proposal very seriously; and the more I considered it the less certain I became that I should refuse him at all. Women like strength—strength of any kind—in men. His reticence, which had at first seemed to be a sign of indifference and had made me angry, now appeared in quite a different light as a sign of strength. He had kept his own counsel, taken no one into his confidence, allowed no one even to guess. And his method of getting what he wanted seemed to me to be particularly straight; he had not been at all anxious to make his best points prominent; he had given me a chance of judging him for myself, as he ordinarily was. I was rather fascinated by his self-reliance.

I took no counsel of any one. I did not even tell mamma about it. After long thinking I wrote a letter asking him to let me give him my decision in a month’s time. I wrote that letter in the afternoon, and took it out to post myself. As I was walking down the village street I noticed a man in boating things coming towards me. As he came nearer I began to see in him a horrible likeness to Gaston Travers. The nearer he came the more vivid was the likeness. A strong likeness in the living to the dead whom you have known is always impressive. Imagine then what it was for me in this case. Imagine what things it made me remember vividly as if they had only happened a few minutes before.

I did not post that letter. I walked back and burnt it, and wrote another which was sufficiently in accord with the character of the Perfect Shelved Woman. I sometimes think that it was a pity that I did not meet Dr. Romer until it was too late.

•   •   •   •   •

So my married sister, Alice, regards me as a failure. Personally, I prefer my own failure to her success, but still I do not deny that it is a failure of a kind. It does not lead to the convent nor to suicide. One goes on living, gradually growing more uninteresting. I am about to return to the study of history.