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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Marriages, by Henry James
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Marriages
+
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 1, 2015  [eBook #2436]
+[This file was first posted on February 23, 2000]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARRIAGES***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1922 Macmillan and Co. “Daisy Miller, Pandora, The
+Patagonia and Other Tales” edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org.  Proofing by Elizabeth Manzelli and Vanessa Mosher.
+
+                          [Picture: Book cover]
+
+
+
+
+
+                              THE MARRIAGES
+                              by Henry James
+
+
+I
+
+
+“WON’T you stay a little longer?” the hostess asked while she held the
+girl’s hand and smiled.  “It’s too early for every one to go—it’s too
+absurd.”  Mrs. Churchley inclined her head to one side and looked
+gracious; she flourished about her face, in a vaguely protecting
+sheltering way, an enormous fan of red feathers.  Everything in her
+composition, for Adela Chart, was enormous.  She had big eyes, big teeth,
+big shoulders, big hands, big rings and bracelets, big jewels of every
+sort and many of them.  The train of her crimson dress was longer than
+any other; her house was huge; her drawing-room, especially now that the
+company had left it, looked vast, and it offered to the girl’s eyes a
+collection of the largest sofas and chairs, pictures, mirrors, clocks,
+that she had ever beheld.  Was Mrs. Churchley’s fortune also large, to
+account for so many immensities?  Of this Adela could know nothing, but
+it struck her, while she smiled sweetly back at their entertainer, that
+she had better try to find out.  Mrs. Churchley had at least a high-hung
+carriage drawn by the tallest horses, and in the Row she was to be seen
+perched on a mighty hunter.  She was high and extensive herself, though
+not exactly fat; her bones were big, her limbs were long, and her loud
+hurrying voice resembled the bell of a steamboat.  While she spoke to his
+daughter she had the air of hiding from Colonel Chart, a little shyly,
+behind the wide ostrich fan.  But Colonel Chart was not a man to be
+either ignored or eluded.
+
+“Of course every one’s going on to something else,” he said.  “I believe
+there are a lot of things to-night.”
+
+“And where are _you_ going?” Mrs. Churchley asked, dropping her fan and
+turning her bright hard eyes on the Colonel.
+
+“Oh I don’t do that sort of thing!”—he used a tone of familiar resentment
+that fell with a certain effect on his daughter’s ear.  She saw in it
+that he thought Mrs. Churchley might have done him a little more justice.
+But what made the honest soul suppose her a person to look to for a
+perception of fine shades?  Indeed the shade was one it might have been a
+little difficult to seize—the difference between “going on” and coming to
+a dinner of twenty people.  The pair were in mourning; the second year
+had maintained it for Adela, but the Colonel hadn’t objected to dining
+with Mrs. Churchley, any more than he had objected at Easter to going
+down to the Millwards’, where he had met her and where the girl had her
+reasons for believing him to have known he should meet her.  Adela wasn’t
+clear about the occasion of their original meeting, to which a certain
+mystery attached.  In Mrs. Churchley’s exclamation now there was the
+fullest concurrence in Colonel Chart’s idea; she didn’t say “Ah yes, dear
+friend, I understand!” but this was the note of sympathy she plainly
+wished to sound.  It immediately made Adela say to her “Surely you must
+be going on somewhere yourself.”
+
+“Yes, you must have a lot of places,” the Colonel concurred, while his
+view of her shining raiment had an invidious directness.  Adela could
+read the tacit implication: “You’re not in sorrow, in desolation.”
+
+Mrs. Churchley turned away from her at this and just waited before
+answering.  The red fan was up again, and this time it sheltered her from
+Adela.  “I’ll give everything up—for _you_,” were the words that issued
+from behind it.  “_Do_ stay a little.  I always think this is such a nice
+hour.  One can really talk,” Mrs. Churchley went on.  The Colonel
+laughed; he said it wasn’t fair.  But their hostess pressed his daughter.
+“Do sit down; it’s the only time to have any talk.”  The girl saw her
+father sit down, but she wandered away, turning her back and pretending
+to look at a picture.  She was so far from agreeing with Mrs. Churchley
+that it was an hour she particularly disliked.  She was conscious of the
+queerness, the shyness, in London, of the gregarious flight of guests
+after a dinner, the general _sauve qui peut_ and panic fear of being left
+with the host and hostess.  But personally she always felt the contagion,
+always conformed to the rush.  Besides, she knew herself turn red now,
+flushed with a conviction that had come over her and that she wished not
+to show.
+
+Her father sat down on one of the big sofas with Mrs. Churchley;
+fortunately he was also a person with a presence that could hold its own.
+Adela didn’t care to sit and watch them while they made love, as she
+crudely imaged it, and she cared still less to join in their strange
+commerce.  She wandered further away, went into another of the bright
+“handsome,” rather nude rooms—they were like women dressed for a
+ball—where the displaced chairs, at awkward angles to each other, seemed
+to retain the attitudes of bored talkers.  Her heart beat as she had
+seldom known it, but she continued to make a pretence of looking at the
+pictures on the walls and the ornaments on the tables, while she hoped
+that, as she preferred it, it would be also the course her father would
+like best.  She hoped “awfully,” as she would have said, that he wouldn’t
+think her rude.  She was a person of courage, and he was a kind, an
+intensely good-natured man; nevertheless she went in some fear of him.
+At home it had always been a religion with them to be nice to the people
+he liked.  How, in the old days, her mother, her incomparable mother, so
+clever, so unerring, so perfect, how in the precious days her mother had
+practised that art!  Oh her mother, her irrecoverable mother!  One of the
+pictures she was looking at swam before her eyes.  Mrs. Churchley, in the
+natural course, would have begun immediately to climb staircases.  Adela
+could see the high bony shoulders and the long crimson tail and the
+universal coruscating nod wriggle their horribly practical way through
+the rest of the night.  Therefore she _must_ have had her reasons for
+detaining them.  There were mothers who thought every one wanted to marry
+their eldest son, and the girl sought to be clear as to whether she
+herself belonged to the class of daughters who thought every one wanted
+to marry their father.  Her companions left her alone; and though she
+didn’t want to be near them it angered her that Mrs. Churchley didn’t
+call her.  That proved she was conscious of the situation.  She would
+have called her, only Colonel Chart had perhaps dreadfully murmured
+“Don’t, love, don’t.”  This proved he also was conscious.  The time was
+really not long—ten minutes at the most elapsed—when he cried out gaily,
+pleasantly, as if with a small jocular reproach, “I say, Adela, we must
+release this dear lady!”  He spoke of course as if it had been Adela’s
+fault that they lingered.  When they took leave she gave Mrs. Churchley,
+without intention and without defiance, but from the simple sincerity of
+her pain, a longer look into the eyes than she had ever given her before.
+Mrs. Churchley’s onyx pupils reflected the question as distant dark
+windows reflect the sunset; they seemed to say: “Yes, I _am_, if that’s
+what you want to know!”
+
+What made the case worse, what made the girl more sure, was the silence
+preserved by her companion in the brougham on their way home.  They
+rolled along in the June darkness from Prince’s Gate to Seymour Street,
+each looking out of a window in conscious prudence; watching but not
+seeing the hurry of the London night, the flash of lamps, the quick roll
+on the wood of hansoms and other broughams.  Adela had expected her
+father would say something about Mrs. Churchley; but when he said nothing
+it affected her, very oddly, still more as if he had spoken.  In Seymour
+Street he asked the footman if Mr. Godfrey had come in, to which the
+servant replied that he had come in early and gone straight to his room.
+Adela had gathered as much, without saying so, from a lighted window on
+the second floor; but she contributed no remark to the question.  At the
+foot of the stairs her father halted as if he had something on his mind;
+but what it amounted to seemed only the dry “Good-night” with which he
+presently ascended.  It was the first time since her mother’s death that
+he had bidden her good-night without kissing her.  They were a kissing
+family, and after that dire event the habit had taken a fresh spring.
+She had left behind her such a general passion of regret that in kissing
+each other they felt themselves a little to be kissing her.  Now, as,
+standing in the hall, with the stiff watching footman—she could have said
+to him angrily “Go away!”—planted near her, she looked with unspeakable
+pain at her father’s back while he mounted, the effect was of his having
+withheld from another and a still more slighted cheek the touch of his
+lips.
+
+He was going to his room, and after a moment she heard his door close.
+Then she said to the servant “Shut up the house”—she tried to do
+everything her mother had done, to be a little of what she had been,
+conscious only of falling woefully short—and took her own way upstairs.
+After she had reached her room she waited, listening, shaken by the
+apprehension that she should hear her father come out again and go up to
+Godfrey.  He would go up to tell him, to have it over without delay,
+precisely because it would be so difficult.  She asked herself indeed why
+he should tell Godfrey when he hadn’t taken the occasion—their drive home
+being an occasion—to tell herself.  However, she wanted no announcing, no
+telling; there was such a horrible clearness in her mind that what she
+now waited for was only to be sure her father wouldn’t proceed as she had
+imagined.  At the end of the minutes she saw this particular danger was
+over, upon which she came out and made her own way to her brother.
+Exactly what she wanted to say to him first, if their parent counted on
+the boy’s greater indulgence, and before he could say anything, was:
+“Don’t forgive him; don’t, don’t!”
+
+He was to go up for an examination, poor lad, and during these weeks his
+lamp burned till the small hours.  It was for the Foreign Office, and
+there was to be some frightful number of competitors; but Adela had great
+hopes of him—she believed so in his talents and saw with pity how hard he
+worked.  This would have made her spare him, not trouble his night, his
+scanty rest, if anything less dreadful had been at stake.  It was a
+blessing however that one could count on his coolness, young as he
+was—his bright good-looking discretion, the thing that already made him
+half a man of the world.  Moreover he was the one who would care most.
+If Basil was the eldest son—he had as a matter of course gone into the
+army and was in India, on the staff, by good luck, of a
+governor-general—it was exactly this that would make him comparatively
+indifferent.  His life was elsewhere, and his father and he had been in a
+measure military comrades, so that he would be deterred by a certain
+delicacy from protesting; he wouldn’t have liked any such protest in an
+affair of _his_.  Beatrice and Muriel would care, but they were too young
+to speak, and this was just why her own responsibility was so great.
+
+Godfrey was in working-gear—shirt and trousers and slippers and a
+beautiful silk jacket.  His room felt hot, though a window was open to
+the summer night; the lamp on the table shed its studious light over a
+formidable heap of text-books and papers, the bed moreover showing how he
+had flung himself down to think out a problem.  As soon as she got in she
+began.  “Father’s going to marry Mrs. Churchley, you know.”
+
+She saw his poor pink face turn pale.  “How do you know?”
+
+“I’ve seen with my eyes.  We’ve been dining there—we’ve just come home.
+He’s in love with her.  She’s in love with _him_.  They’ll arrange it.”
+
+“Oh I say!” Godfrey exclaimed, incredulous.
+
+“He will, he will, he will!” cried the girl; and with it she burst into
+tears.
+
+Godfrey, who had a cigarette in his hand, lighted it at one of the
+candles on the mantelpiece as if he were embarrassed.  As Adela, who had
+dropped into his armchair, continued to sob, he said after a moment: “He
+oughtn’t to—he oughtn’t to.”
+
+“Oh think of mamma—think of mamma!” she wailed almost louder than was
+safe.
+
+“Yes, he ought to think of mamma.”  With which Godfrey looked at the tip
+of his cigarette.
+
+“To such a woman as that—after _her_!”
+
+“Dear old mamma!” said Godfrey while he smoked.
+
+Adela rose again, drying her eyes.  “It’s like an insult to her; it’s as
+if he denied her.”  Now that she spoke of it she felt herself rise to a
+height.  “He rubs out at a stroke all the years of their happiness.”
+
+“They were awfully happy,” Godfrey agreed.
+
+“Think what she was—think how no one else will ever again be like her!”
+the girl went on.
+
+“I suppose he’s not very happy now,” her brother vaguely contributed.
+
+“Of course he isn’t, any more than you and I are; and it’s dreadful of
+him to want to be.”
+
+“Well, don’t make yourself miserable till you’re sure,” the young man
+said.
+
+But Adela showed him confidently that she _was_ sure, from the way the
+pair had behaved together and from her father’s attitude on the drive
+home.  If Godfrey had been there he would have seen everything; it
+couldn’t be explained, but he would have felt.  When he asked at what
+moment the girl had first had her suspicion she replied that it had all
+come at once, that evening; or that at least she had had no conscious
+fear till then.  There had been signs for two or three weeks, but she
+hadn’t understood them—ever since the day Mrs. Churchley had dined in
+Seymour Street.  Adela had on that occasion thought it odd her father
+should have wished to invite her, given the quiet way they were living;
+she was a person they knew so little.  He had said something about her
+having been very civil to him, and that evening, already, she had guessed
+that he must have frequented their portentous guest herself more than
+there had been signs of.  To-night it had come to her clearly that he
+would have called on her every day since the time of her dining with
+them; every afternoon about the hour he was ostensibly at his club.  Mrs.
+Churchley _was_ his club—she was for all the world just like one.  At
+this Godfrey laughed; he wanted to know what his sister knew about clubs.
+She was slightly disappointed in his laugh, even wounded by it, but she
+knew perfectly what she meant: she meant that Mrs. Churchley was public
+and florid, promiscuous and mannish.
+
+“Oh I daresay she’s all right,” he said as if he wanted to get on with
+his work.  He looked at the clock on the mantel-shelf; he would have to
+put in another hour.
+
+“All right to come and take darling mamma’s place—to sit where _she_ used
+to sit, to lay her horrible hands on _her_ things?”  Adela was
+appalled—all the more that she hadn’t expected it—at her brother’s
+apparent acceptance of such a prospect.
+
+He coloured; there was something in her passionate piety that scorched
+him.  She glared at him with tragic eyes—he might have profaned an altar.
+“Oh I mean that nothing will come of it.”
+
+“Not if we do our duty,” said Adela.  And then as he looked as if he
+hadn’t an idea of what that could be: “You must speak to him—tell him how
+we feel; that we shall never forgive him, that we can’t endure it.”
+
+“He’ll think I’m cheeky,” her brother returned, looking down at his
+papers with his back to her and his hands in his pockets.
+
+“Cheeky to plead for _her_ memory?”
+
+“He’ll say it’s none of my business.”
+
+“Then you believe he’ll do it?” cried the girl.
+
+“Not a bit.  Go to bed!”
+
+“_I’ll_ speak to him”—she had turned as pale as a young priestess.
+
+“Don’t cry out till you’re hurt; wait till he speaks to _you_.”
+
+“He won’t, he won’t!” she declared.  “He’ll do it without telling us.”
+
+Her brother had faced round to her again; he started a little at this,
+and again, at one of the candles, lighted his cigarette, which had gone
+out.  She looked at him a moment; then he said something that surprised
+her.  “Is Mrs. Churchley very rich?”
+
+“I haven’t the least idea.  What on earth has that to do with it?”
+
+Godfrey puffed his cigarette.  “Does she live as if she were?”
+
+“She has a lot of hideous showy things.”
+
+“Well, we must keep our eyes open,” he concluded.  “And now you _must_
+let me get on.”  He kissed his visitor as if to make up for dismissing
+her, or for his failure to take fire; and she held him a moment, burying
+her head on his shoulder.
+
+A wave of emotion surged through her, and again she quavered out: “Ah why
+did she leave us?  Why did she leave us?”
+
+“Yes, why indeed?” the young man sighed, disengaging himself with a
+movement of oppression.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+ADELA was so far right as that by the end of the week, though she
+remained certain, her father had still not made the announcement she
+dreaded.  What convinced her was the sense of her changed relations with
+him—of there being between them something unexpressed, something she was
+aware of as she would have been of an open wound.  When she spoke of this
+to Godfrey he said the change was of her own making—also that she was
+cruelly unjust to the governor.  She suffered even more from her
+brother’s unexpected perversity; she had had so different a theory about
+him that her disappointment was almost an humiliation and she needed all
+her fortitude to pitch her faith lower.  She wondered what had happened
+to him and why he so failed her.  She would have trusted him to feel
+right about anything, above all about such a question.  Their worship of
+their mother’s memory, their recognition of her sacred place in their
+past, her exquisite influence in their father’s life, his fortune, his
+career, in the whole history of the family and welfare of the
+house—accomplished clever gentle good beautiful and capable as she had
+been, a woman whose quiet distinction was universally admired, so that on
+her death one of the Princesses, the most august of her friends, had
+written Adela such a note about her as princesses were understood very
+seldom to write: their hushed tenderness over all this was like a
+religion, and was also an attributive honour, to fall away from which was
+a form of treachery.  This wasn’t the way people usually felt in London,
+she knew; but strenuous ardent observant girl as she was, with secrecies
+of sentiment and dim originalities of attitude, she had already made up
+her mind that London was no treasure-house of delicacies.  Remembrance
+there was hammered thin—to be faithful was to make society gape.  The
+patient dead were sacrificed; they had no shrines, for people were
+literally ashamed of mourning.  When they had hustled all sensibility out
+of their lives they invented the fiction that they felt too much to
+utter.  Adela said nothing to her sisters; this reticence was part of the
+virtue it was her idea to practise for them.  _She_ was to be their
+mother, a direct deputy and representative.  Before the vision of that
+other woman parading in such a character she felt capable of ingenuities,
+of deep diplomacies.  The essence of these indeed was just tremulously to
+watch her father.  Five days after they had dined together at Mrs.
+Churchley’s he asked her if she had been to see that lady.
+
+“No indeed, why should I?” Adela knew that he knew she hadn’t been, since
+Mrs. Churchley would have told him.
+
+“Don’t you call on people after you dine with them?” said Colonel Chart.
+
+“Yes, in the course of time.  I don’t rush off within the week.”
+
+Her father looked at her, and his eyes were colder than she had ever seen
+them, which was probably, she reflected, just the way hers appeared to
+himself.  “Then you’ll please rush off to-morrow.  She’s to dine with us
+on the 12th, and I shall expect your sisters to come down.”
+
+Adela stared.  “To a dinner-party?”
+
+“It’s not to be a dinner-party.  I want them to know Mrs. Churchley.”
+
+“Is there to be nobody else?”
+
+“Godfrey of course.  A family party,” he said with an assurance before
+which she turned cold.
+
+The girl asked her brother that evening if _that_ wasn’t tantamount to an
+announcement.  He looked at her queerly and then said: “_I’ve_ been to
+see her.”
+
+“What on earth did you do that for?”
+
+“Father told me he wished it.”
+
+“Then he _has_ told you?”
+
+“Told me what?” Godfrey asked while her heart sank with the sense of his
+making difficulties for her.
+
+“That they’re engaged, of course.  What else can all this mean?”
+
+“He didn’t tell me that, but I like her.”
+
+“_Like_ her!” the girl shrieked.
+
+“She’s very kind, very good.”
+
+“To thrust herself upon us when we hate her?  Is that what you call kind?
+Is that what you call decent?”
+
+“Oh _I_ don’t hate her”—and he turned away as if she bored him.
+
+She called the next day on Mrs. Churchley, designing to break out
+somehow, to plead, to appeal—“Oh spare us! have mercy on us! let him
+alone! go away!”  But that wasn’t easy when they were face to face.  Mrs.
+Churchley had every intention of getting, as she would have said—she was
+perpetually using the expression—into touch; but her good intentions were
+as depressing as a tailor’s misfits.  She could never understand that
+they had no place for her vulgar charity, that their life was filled with
+a fragrance of perfection for which she had no sense fine enough.  She
+was as undomestic as a shop-front and as out of tune as a parrot.  She
+would either make them live in the streets or bring the streets into
+their life—it was the same thing.  She had evidently never read a book,
+and she used intonations that Adela had never heard, as if she had been
+an Australian or an American.  She understood everything in a vulgar
+sense; speaking of Godfrey’s visit to her and praising him according to
+her idea, saying horrid things about him—that he was awfully
+good-looking, a perfect gentleman, the kind she liked.  How could her
+father, who was after all in everything else such a dear, listen to a
+woman, or endure her, who thought she pleased him when she called the son
+of his dead wife a perfect gentleman?  What would he have been, pray?
+Much she knew about what any of them were! When she told Adela she wanted
+her to like her the girl thought for an instant her opportunity had
+come—the chance to plead with her and beg her off.  But she presented
+such an impenetrable surface that it would have been like giving a
+message to a varnished door.  She wasn’t a woman, said Adela; she was an
+address.
+
+When she dined in Seymour Street the “children,” as the girl called the
+others, including Godfrey, liked her.  Beatrice and Muriel stared shyly
+and silently at the wonders of her apparel (she was brutally
+over-dressed) without of course guessing the danger that tainted the air.
+They supposed her in their innocence to be amusing, and they didn’t know,
+any more than she did herself, how she patronised them.  When she was
+upstairs with them after dinner Adela could see her look round the room
+at the things she meant to alter—their mother’s things, not a bit like
+her own and not good enough for her.  After a quarter of an hour of this
+our young lady felt sure she was deciding that Seymour Street wouldn’t do
+at all, the dear old home that had done for their mother those twenty
+years.  Was she plotting to transport them all to her horrible Prince’s
+Gate?  Of one thing at any rate Adela was certain: her father, at that
+moment alone in the dining-room with Godfrey, pretending to drink another
+glass of wine to make time, was coming to the point, was telling the
+news.  When they reappeared they both, to her eyes, looked unnatural: the
+news had been told.
+
+She had it from Godfrey before Mrs. Churchley left the house, when, after
+a brief interval, he followed her out of the drawing-room on her taking
+her sisters to bed.  She was waiting for him at the door of her room.
+Her father was then alone with his _fiancée_—the word was grotesque to
+Adela; it was already as if the place were her home.
+
+“What did you say to him?” our young woman asked when her brother had
+told her.
+
+“I said nothing.”  Then he added, colouring—the expression of her face
+was such—“There was nothing to say.”
+
+“Is that how it strikes you?”—and she stared at the lamp.
+
+“He asked me to speak to her,” Godfrey went on.
+
+“In what hideous sense?”
+
+“To tell her I was glad.”
+
+“And did you?” Adela panted.
+
+“I don’t know.  I said something.  She kissed me.”
+
+“Oh how _could_ you?” shuddered the girl, who covered her face with her
+hands.
+
+“He says she’s very rich,” her brother returned.
+
+“Is that why you kissed her?”
+
+“I didn’t kiss her.  Good-night.”  And the young man, turning his back,
+went out.
+
+When he had gone Adela locked herself in as with the fear she should be
+overtaken or invaded, and during a sleepless feverish memorable night she
+took counsel of her uncompromising spirit.  She saw things as they were,
+in all the indignity of life.  The levity, the mockery, the infidelity,
+the ugliness, lay as plain as a map before her; it was a world of gross
+practical jokes, a world _pour rire_; but she cried about it all the
+same.  The morning dawned early, or rather it seemed to her there had
+been no night, nothing but a sickly creeping day.  But by the time she
+heard the house stirring again she had determined what to do.  When she
+came down to the breakfast-room her father was already in his place with
+newspapers and letters; and she expected the first words he would utter
+to be a rebuke to her for having disappeared the night before without
+taking leave of Mrs. Churchley.  Then she saw he wished to be intensely
+kind, to make every allowance, to conciliate and console her.  He knew
+she had heard from Godfrey, and he got up and kissed her.  He told her as
+quickly as possible, to have it over, stammering a little, with an “I’ve
+a piece of news for you that will probably shock you,” yet looking even
+exaggeratedly grave and rather pompous, to inspire the respect he didn’t
+deserve.  When he kissed her she melted, she burst into tears.  He held
+her against him, kissing her again and again, saying tenderly “Yes, yes,
+I know, I know.”  But he didn’t know else he couldn’t have done it.
+Beatrice and Muriel came in, frightened when they saw her crying, and
+still more scared when she turned to them with words and an air that were
+terrible in their comfortable little lives: “Papa’s going to be married;
+he’s going to marry Mrs. Churchley!”  After staring a moment and seeing
+their father look as strange, on his side, as Adela, though in a
+different way, the children also began to cry, so that when the servants
+arrived with tea and boiled eggs these functionaries were greatly
+embarrassed with their burden, not knowing whether to come in or hang
+back.  They all scraped together a decorum, and as soon as the things had
+been put on table the Colonel banished the men with a glance.  Then he
+made a little affectionate speech to Beatrice and Muriel, in which he
+described Mrs. Churchley as the kindest, the most delightful of women,
+only wanting to make them happy, only wanting to make _him_ happy, and
+convinced that he would be if they were and that they would be if he was.
+
+“What do such words mean?” Adela asked herself.  She declared privately
+that they meant nothing, but she was silent, and every one was silent, on
+account of the advent of Miss Flynn the governess, before whom Colonel
+Chart preferred not to discuss the situation.  Adela recognised on the
+spot that if things were to go as he wished his children would
+practically never again be alone with him.  He would spend all his time
+with Mrs. Churchley till they were married, and then Mrs. Churchley would
+spend all her time with him.  Adela was ashamed of him, and that was
+horrible—all the more that every one else would be, all his other
+friends, every one who had known her mother.  But the public dishonour to
+that high memory shouldn’t be enacted; he shouldn’t do as he wished.
+
+After breakfast her father remarked to her that it would give him
+pleasure if in a day or two she would take her sisters to see their
+friend, and she replied that he should be obeyed.  He held her hand a
+moment, looking at her with an argument in his eyes which presently
+hardened into sternness.  He wanted to know that she forgave him, but
+also wanted to assure her that he expected her to mind what she did, to
+go straight.  She turned away her eyes; she was indeed ashamed of him.
+
+She waited three days and then conveyed her sisters to the _repaire_, as
+she would have been ready to term it, of the lioness.  That queen of
+beasts was surrounded with callers, as Adela knew she would be; it was
+her “day” and the occasion the girl preferred.  Before this she had spent
+all her time with her companions, talking to them about their mother,
+playing on their memory of her, making them cry and making them laugh,
+reminding them of blest hours of their early childhood, telling them
+anecdotes of her own.  None the less she confided to them that she
+believed there was no harm at all in Mrs. Churchley, and that when the
+time should come she would probably take them out immensely.  She saw
+with smothered irritation that they enjoyed their visit at Prince’s Gate;
+they had never been at anything so “grown-up,” nor seen so many smart
+bonnets and brilliant complexions.  Moreover they were considered with
+interest, quite as if, being minor elements, yet perceptible ones, of
+Mrs. Churchley’s new life, they had been described in advance and were
+the heroines of the occasion.  There were so many ladies present that
+this personage didn’t talk to them much; she only called them her
+“chicks” and asked them to hand about tea-cups and bread and butter.  All
+of which was highly agreeable and indeed intensely exciting to Beatrice
+and Muriel, who had little round red spots in _their_ cheeks when they
+came away.  Adela quivered with the sense that her mother’s children were
+now Mrs. Churchley’s “chicks” and a part of the furniture of Mrs.
+Churchley’s dreadful consciousness.
+
+It was one thing to have made up her mind, however; it was another thing
+to make her attempt.  It was when she learned from Godfrey that the day
+was fixed, the 20th of July, only six weeks removed, that she felt the
+importance of prompt action.  She learned everything from Godfrey now,
+having decided it would be hypocrisy to question her father.  Even her
+silence was hypocritical, but she couldn’t weep and wail.  Her father
+showed extreme tact; taking no notice of her detachment, treating it as a
+moment of _bouderie_ he was bound to allow her and that would pout itself
+away.  She debated much as to whether she should take Godfrey into her
+confidence; she would have done so without hesitation if he hadn’t
+disappointed her.  He was so little what she might have expected, and so
+perversely preoccupied that she could explain it only by the high
+pressure at which he was living, his anxiety about his “exam.”  He was in
+a fidget, in a fever, putting on a spurt to come in first; sceptical
+moreover about his success and cynical about everything else.  He
+appeared to agree to the general axiom that they didn’t want a strange
+woman thrust into their life, but he found Mrs. Churchley “very jolly as
+a person to know.”  He had been to see her by himself—he had been to see
+her three times.  He in fact gave it out that he would make the most of
+her now; he should probably be so little in Seymour Street after these
+days.  What Adela at last determined to give him was her assurance that
+the marriage would never take place.  When he asked what she meant and
+who was to prevent it she replied that the interesting couple would
+abandon the idea of themselves, or that Mrs. Churchley at least would
+after a week or two back out of it.
+
+“That will be really horrid then,” Godfrey pronounced.  “The only
+respectable thing, at the point they’ve come to, is to put it through.
+Charming for poor Dad to have the air of being ‘chucked’!”
+
+This made her hesitate two days more, but she found answers more valid
+than any objections.  The many-voiced answer to everything—it was like
+the autumn wind round the house—was the affront that fell back on her
+mother.  Her mother was dead but it killed her again.  So one morning at
+eleven o’clock, when she knew her father was writing letters, she went
+out quietly and, stopping the first hansom she met, drove to Prince’s
+Gate.  Mrs. Churchley was at home, and she was shown into the
+drawing-room with the request that she would wait five minutes.  She
+waited without the sense of breaking down at the last, and the impulse to
+run away, which were what she had expected to have.  In the cab and at
+the door her heart had beat terribly, but now suddenly, with the game
+really to play, she found herself lucid and calm.  It was a joy to her to
+feel later that this was the way Mrs. Churchley found her: not confused,
+not stammering nor prevaricating, only a little amazed at her own
+courage, conscious of the immense responsibility of her step and
+wonderfully older than her years.  Her hostess sounded her at first with
+suspicious eyes, but eventually, to Adela’s surprise, burst into tears.
+At this the girl herself cried, and with the secret happiness of
+believing they were saved.  Mrs. Churchley said she would think over what
+she had been told, and she promised her young friend, freely enough and
+very firmly, not to betray the secret of the latter’s step to the
+Colonel.  They were saved—they were saved: the words sung themselves in
+the girl’s soul as she came downstairs.  When the door opened for her she
+saw her brother on the step, and they looked at each other in surprise,
+each finding it on the part of the other an odd hour for Prince’s Gate.
+Godfrey remarked that Mrs. Churchley would have enough of the family, and
+Adela answered that she would perhaps have too much.  None the less the
+young man went in while his sister took her way home.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+SHE saw nothing of him for nearly a week; he had more and more his own
+times and hours, adjusted to his tremendous responsibilities, and he
+spent whole days at his crammer’s.  When she knocked at his door late in
+the evening he was regularly not in his room.  It was known in the house
+how much he was worried; he was horribly nervous about his ordeal.  It
+was to begin on the 23rd of June, and his father was as worried as
+himself.  The wedding had been arranged in relation to this; they wished
+poor Godfrey’s fate settled first, though they felt the nuptials would be
+darkened if it shouldn’t be settled right.
+
+Ten days after that performance of her private undertaking Adela began to
+sniff, as it were, a difference in the general air; but as yet she was
+afraid to exult.  It wasn’t in truth a difference for the better, so that
+there might be still a great tension.  Her father, since the announcement
+of his intended marriage, had been visibly pleased with himself, but that
+pleasure now appeared to have undergone a check.  She had the impression
+known to the passengers on a great steamer when, in the middle of the
+night, they feel the engines stop.  As this impression may easily sharpen
+to the sense that something serious has happened, so the girl asked
+herself what had actually occurred.  She had expected something serious;
+but it was as if she couldn’t keep still in her cabin—she wanted to go up
+and see.  On the 20th, just before breakfast, her maid brought her a
+message from her brother.  Mr. Godfrey would be obliged if she would
+speak to him in his room.  She went straight up to him, dreading to find
+him ill, broken down on the eve of his formidable week.  This was not the
+case however—he rather seemed already at work, to have been at work since
+dawn.  But he was very white and his eyes had a strange and new
+expression.  Her beautiful young brother looked older; he looked haggard
+and hard.  He met her there as if he had been waiting for her, and he
+said at once: “Please tell me this, Adela—what was the purpose of your
+visit the other morning to Mrs. Churchley, the day I met you at her
+door?”
+
+She stared—she cast about.  “The purpose?  What’s the matter?  Why do you
+ask?”
+
+“They’ve put it off—they’ve put it off a month.”
+
+“Ah thank God!” said Adela.
+
+“Why the devil do you thank God?” Godfrey asked with a strange
+impatience.
+
+She gave a strained intense smile.  “You know I think it all wrong.”
+
+He stood looking at her up and down.  “What did you do there?  How did
+you interfere?”
+
+“Who told you I interfered?” she returned with a deep flush.
+
+“You said something—you did something.  I knew you had done it when I saw
+you come out.”
+
+“What I did was my own business.”
+
+“Damn your own business!” cried the young man.
+
+She had never in her life been so spoken to, and in advance, had she been
+given the choice, would have said that she’d rather die than be so
+handled by Godfrey.  But her spirit was high, and for a moment she was as
+angry as if she had been cut with a whip.  She escaped the blow but felt
+the insult.  “And _your_ business then?” she asked.  “I wondered what
+that was when I saw _you_.”
+
+He stood a moment longer scowling at her; then with the exclamation
+“You’ve made a pretty mess!” he turned away from her and sat down to his
+books.
+
+They had put it off, as he said; her father was dry and stiff and
+official about it.  “I suppose I had better let you know we’ve thought it
+best to postpone our marriage till the end of the summer—Mrs. Churchley
+has so many arrangements to make”: he was not more expansive than that.
+She neither knew nor greatly cared whether she but vainly imagined or
+correctly observed him to watch her obliquely for some measure of her
+receipt of these words.  She flattered herself that, thanks to Godfrey’s
+forewarning, cruel as the form of it had been, she was able to repress
+any crude sign of elation.  She had a perfectly good conscience, for she
+could now judge what odious elements Mrs. Churchley, whom she had not
+seen since the morning in Prince’s Gate, had already introduced into
+their dealings.  She gathered without difficulty that her father hadn’t
+concurred in the postponement, for he was more restless than before, more
+absent and distinctly irritable.  There was naturally still the question
+of how much of this condition was to be attributed to his solicitude
+about Godfrey.  That young man took occasion to say a horrible thing to
+his sister: “If I don’t pass it will be your fault.”  These were dreadful
+days for the girl, and she asked herself how she could have borne them if
+the hovering spirit of her mother hadn’t been at her side.  Fortunately
+she always felt it there, sustaining, commending, sanctifying.  Suddenly
+her father announced to her that he wished her to go immediately, with
+her sisters, down to Brinton, where there was always part of a household
+and where for a few weeks they would manage well enough.  The only
+explanation he gave of this desire was that he wanted them out of the
+way.  “Out of the way of what?” she queried, since there were to be for
+the time no preparations in Seymour Street.  She was willing to take it
+for out of the way of his nerves.
+
+She never needed urging however to go to Brinton, the dearest old house
+in the world, where the happiest days of her young life had been spent
+and the silent nearness of her mother always seemed greatest.  She was
+happy again, with Beatrice and Muriel and Miss Flynn, with the air of
+summer and the haunted rooms and her mother’s garden and the talking oaks
+and the nightingales.  She wrote briefly to her father, giving him, as he
+had requested, an account of things; and he wrote back that since she was
+so contented—she didn’t recognise having told him that—she had better not
+return to town at all.  The fag-end of the London season would be
+unimportant to her, and he was getting on very well.  He mentioned that
+Godfrey had passed his tests, but, as she knew, there would be a tiresome
+wait before news of results.  The poor chap was going abroad for a month
+with young Sherard—he had earned a little rest and a little fun.  He went
+abroad without a word to Adela, but in his beautiful little hand he took
+a chaffing leave of Beatrice.  The child showed her sister the letter, of
+which she was very proud and which contained no message for any one else.
+This was the worst bitterness of the whole crisis for that somebody—its
+placing in so strange a light the creature in the world whom, after her
+mother, she had loved best.
+
+Colonel Chart had said he would “run down” while his children were at
+Brinton, but they heard no more about it.  He only wrote two or three
+times to Miss Flynn on matters in regard to which Adela was surprised he
+shouldn’t have communicated with herself.  Muriel accomplished an upright
+little letter to Mrs. Churchley—her eldest sister neither fostered nor
+discouraged the performance—to which Mrs. Churchley replied, after a
+fortnight, in a meagre and, as Adela thought, illiterate fashion, making
+no allusion to the approach of any closer tie.  Evidently the situation
+had changed; the question of the marriage was dropped, at any rate for
+the time.  This idea gave our young woman a singular and almost
+intoxicating sense of power; she felt as if she were riding a great wave
+of confidence.  She had decided and acted—the greatest could do no more
+than that.  The grand thing was to see one’s results, and what else was
+she doing?  These results were in big rich conspicuous lives; the stage
+was large on which she moved her figures.  Such a vision was exciting,
+and as they had the use of a couple of ponies at Brinton she worked off
+her excitement by a long gallop.  A day or two after this however came
+news of which the effect was to rekindle it.  Godfrey had come back, the
+list had been published, he had passed first.  These happy tidings
+proceeded from the young man himself; he announced them by a telegram to
+Beatrice, who had never in her life before received such a missive and
+was proportionately inflated.  Adela reflected that she herself ought to
+have felt snubbed, but she was too happy.  They were free again, they
+were themselves, the nightmare of the previous weeks was blown away, the
+unity and dignity of her father’s life restored, and, to round off her
+sense of success, Godfrey had achieved his first step toward high
+distinction.  She wrote him the next day as frankly and affectionately as
+if there had been no estrangement between them, and besides telling him
+how she rejoiced in his triumph begged him in charity to let them know
+exactly how the case stood with regard to Mrs. Churchley.
+
+Late in the summer afternoon she walked through the park to the village
+with her letter, posted it and came back.  Suddenly, at one of the turns
+of the avenue, half-way to the house, she saw a young man hover there as
+if awaiting her—a young man who proved to be Godfrey on his pedestrian
+progress over from the station.  He had seen her as he took his short
+cut, and if he had come down to Brinton it wasn’t apparently to avoid
+her.  There was nevertheless none of the joy of his triumph in his face
+as he came a very few steps to meet her; and although, stiffly enough, he
+let her kiss him and say “I’m so glad—I’m so glad!” she felt this
+tolerance as not quite the mere calm of the rising diplomatist.  He
+turned toward the house with her and walked on a short distance while she
+uttered the hope that he had come to stay some days.
+
+“Only till to-morrow morning.  They’re sending me straight to Madrid.  I
+came down to say good-bye; there’s a fellow bringing my bags.”
+
+“To Madrid?  How awfully nice!  And it’s awfully nice of you to have
+come,” she said as she passed her hand into his arm.
+
+The movement made him stop, and, stopping, he turned on her in a flash a
+face of something more than, suspicion—of passionate reprobation.  “What
+I really came for—you might as well know without more delay—is to ask you
+a question.”
+
+“A question?”—she echoed it with a beating heart.
+
+They stood there under the old trees in the lingering light, and, young
+and fine and fair as they both were, formed a complete superficial
+harmony with the peaceful English scene.  A near view, however, would
+have shown that Godfrey Chart hadn’t taken so much trouble only to skim
+the surface.  He looked deep into his sister’s eyes.  “What was it you
+said that morning to Mrs. Churchley?”
+
+She fixed them on the ground a moment, but at last met his own again.
+“If she has told you, why do you ask?”
+
+“She has told me nothing.  I’ve seen for myself.”
+
+“What have you seen?”
+
+“She has broken it off.  Everything’s over.  Father’s in the depths.”
+
+“In the depths?” the girl quavered.
+
+“Did you think it would make him jolly?” he went on.
+
+She had to choose what to say.  “He’ll get over it.  He’ll he glad.”
+
+“That remains to be seen.  You interfered, you invented something, you
+got round her.  I insist on knowing what you did.”
+
+Adela felt that if it was a question of obstinacy there was something
+within her she could count on; in spite of which, while she stood looking
+down again a moment, she said to herself “I could be dumb and dogged if I
+chose, but I scorn to be.”  She wasn’t ashamed of what she had done, but
+she wanted to be clear.  “Are you absolutely certain it’s broken off?”
+
+“He is, and she is; so that’s as good.”
+
+“What reason has she given?”
+
+“None at all—or half a dozen; it’s the same thing.  She has changed her
+mind—she mistook her feelings—she can’t part with her independence.
+Moreover he has too many children.”
+
+“Did he tell you this?” the girl asked.
+
+“Mrs. Churchley told me.  She has gone abroad for a year.”
+
+“And she didn’t tell you what I said to her?”
+
+Godfrey showed an impatience.  “Why should I take this trouble if she
+had?”
+
+“You might have taken it to make me suffer,” said Adela.  “That appears
+to be what you want to do.”
+
+“No, I leave that to you—it’s the good turn you’ve done me!” cried the
+young man with hot tears in his eyes.
+
+She stared, aghast with the perception that there was some dreadful thing
+she didn’t know; but he walked on, dropping the question angrily and
+turning his back to her as if he couldn’t trust himself.  She read his
+disgust in his averted, face, in the way he squared his shoulders and
+smote the ground with his stick, and she hurried after him and presently
+overtook him.  She kept by him for a moment in silence; then she broke
+out: “What do you mean?  What in the world have I done to you?”
+
+“She would have helped me.  She was all ready to help me,” Godfrey
+portentously said.
+
+“Helped you in what?”  She wondered what he meant; if he had made debts
+that he was afraid to confess to his father and—of all horrible
+things—had been looking to Mrs. Churchley to pay.  She turned red with
+the mere apprehension of this and, on the heels of her guess, exulted
+again at having perhaps averted such a shame.
+
+“Can’t you just see I’m in trouble?  Where are your eyes, your senses,
+your sympathy, that you talk so much about?  Haven’t you seen these six
+months that I’ve a curst worry in my life?”
+
+She seized his arm, made him stop, stood looking up at him like a
+frightened little girl.  “What’s the matter, Godfrey?—what _is_ the
+matter?”
+
+“You’ve gone against me so—I could strangle you!” he growled.  This image
+added nothing to her dread; her dread was that he had done some wrong,
+was stained with some guilt.  She uttered it to him with clasped hands,
+begging him to tell her the worst; but, still more passionately, he cut
+her short with his own cry: “In God’s name, satisfy me!  What infernal
+thing did you do?”
+
+“It wasn’t infernal—it was right.  I told her mamma had been wretched,”
+said Adela.
+
+“Wretched?  You told her such a lie?”
+
+“It was the only way, and she believed me.”
+
+“Wretched how?—wretched when?—wretched where?” the young man stammered.
+
+“I told her papa had made her so, and that _she_ ought to know it.  I
+told her the question troubled me unspeakably, but that I had made up my
+mind it was my duty to initiate her.”  Adela paused, the light of bravado
+in her face, as if, though struck while the words came with the
+monstrosity of what she had done, she was incapable of abating a jot of
+it.  “I notified her that he had faults and peculiarities that made
+mamma’s life a long worry—a martyrdom that she hid wonderfully from the
+world, but that we saw and that I had often pitied.  I told her what they
+were, these faults and peculiarities; I put the dots on the i’s.  I said
+it wasn’t fair to let another person marry him without a warning.  I
+warned her; I satisfied my conscience.  She could do as she liked.  My
+responsibility was over.”
+
+Godfrey gazed at her; he listened with parted lips, incredulous and
+appalled.  “You invented such a tissue of falsities and calumnies, and
+you talk about your conscience?  You stand there in your senses and
+proclaim your crime?”
+
+“I’d have committed any crime that would have rescued us.”
+
+“You insult and blacken and ruin your own father?” Godfrey kept on.
+
+“He’ll never know it; she took a vow she wouldn’t tell him.”
+
+“Ah I’ll he damned if _I_ won’t tell him!” he rang out.
+
+Adela felt sick at this, but she flamed up to resent the treachery, as it
+struck her, of such a menace.  “I did right—I did right!” she vehemently
+declared “I went down on my knees to pray for guidance, and I saved
+mamma’s memory from outrage.  But if I hadn’t, if I hadn’t”—she faltered
+an instant—“I’m not worse than you, and I’m not so bad, for you’ve done
+something that you’re ashamed to tell me.”
+
+He had taken out his watch; he looked at it with quick intensity, as if
+not hearing nor heeding her.  Then, his calculating eyes raised, he fixed
+her long enough to exclaim with unsurpassable horror and contempt: “You
+raving maniac!”  He turned away from her; he bounded down the avenue in
+the direction from which they had come, and, while she watched him,
+strode away, across the grass, toward the short cut to the station.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+HIS bags, by the time she got home, had been brought to the house, but
+Beatrice and Muriel, immediately informed of this, waited for their
+brother in vain.  Their sister said nothing to them of her having seen
+him, and she accepted after a little, with a calmness that surprised
+herself, the idea that he had returned to town to denounce her.  She
+believed this would make no difference now—she had done what she had
+done.  She had somehow a stiff faith in Mrs. Churchley.  Once that so
+considerable mass had received its impetus it wouldn’t, it couldn’t pull
+up.  It represented a heavy-footed person, incapable of further agility.
+Adela recognised too how well it might have come over her that there were
+too many children.  Lastly the girl fortified herself with the reflexion,
+grotesque in the conditions and conducing to prove her sense of humour
+not high, that her father was after all not a man to be played with.  It
+seemed to her at any rate that if she _had_ baffled his unholy purpose
+she could bear anything—bear imprisonment and bread and water, bear
+lashes and torture, bear even his lifelong reproach.  What she could bear
+least was the wonder of the inconvenience she had inflicted on Godfrey.
+She had time to turn this over, very vainly, for a succession of
+days—days more numerous than she had expected, which passed without
+bringing her from London any summons to come up and take her punishment.
+She sounded the possible, she compared the degrees of the probable;
+feeling however that as a cloistered girl she was poorly equipped for
+speculation.  She tried to imagine the calamitous things young men might
+do, and could only feel that such things would naturally be connected
+either with borrowed money or with bad women.  She became conscious that
+after all she knew almost nothing about either of those interests.  The
+worst woman she knew was Mrs. Churchley herself.  Meanwhile there was no
+reverberation from Seymour Street—only a sultry silence.
+
+At Brinton she spent hours in her mother’s garden, where she had grown
+up, where she considered that she was training for old age, since she
+meant not to depend on whist.  She loved the place as, had she been a
+good Catholic, she would have loved the smell of her parish church; and
+indeed there was in her passion for flowers something of the respect of a
+religion.  They seemed to her the only things in the world that really
+respected themselves, unless one made an exception for Nutkins, who had
+been in command all through her mother’s time, with whom she had had a
+real friendship and who had been affected by their pure example.  He was
+the person left in the world with whom on the whole she could speak most
+intimately of the dead.  They never had to name her together—they only
+said “she”; and Nutkins freely conceded that she had taught him
+everything he knew.  When Beatrice and Muriel said “she” they referred to
+Mrs. Churchley.  Adela had reason to believe she should never marry, and
+that some day she should have about a thousand a year.  This made her see
+in the far future a little garden of her own, under a hill, full of rare
+and exquisite things, where she would spend most of her old age on her
+knees with an apron and stout gloves, with a pair of shears and a trowel,
+steeped in the comfort of being thought mad.
+
+One morning ten days after her scene with Godfrey, on coming back into
+the house shortly before lunch, she was met by Miss Flynn with the
+notification that a lady in the drawing-room had been waiting for her for
+some minutes.  “A lady” suggested immediately Mrs. Churchley.  It came
+over Adela that the form in which her penalty was to descend would be a
+personal explanation with that misdirected woman.  The lady had given no
+name, and Miss Flynn hadn’t seen Mrs. Churchley; nevertheless the
+governess was certain Adela’s surmise was wrong.
+
+“Is she big and dreadful?” the girl asked.
+
+Miss Flynn, who was circumspection itself, took her time.  “She’s
+dreadful, but she’s not big.”  She added that she wasn’t sure she ought
+to let Adela go in alone; but this young lady took herself throughout for
+a heroine, and it wasn’t in a heroine to shrink from any encounter.
+Wasn’t she every instant in transcendent contact with her mother?  The
+visitor might have no connexion whatever with the drama of her father’s
+frustrated marriage; but everything to-day for Adela was part of that.
+
+Miss Flynn’s description had prepared her for a considerable shock, but
+she wasn’t agitated by her first glimpse of the person who awaited her.
+A youngish well-dressed woman stood there, and silence was between them
+while they looked at each other.  Before either had spoken however Adela
+began to see what Miss Flynn had intended.  In the light of the
+drawing-room window the lady was five-and-thirty years of age and had
+vivid yellow hair.  She also had a blue cloth suit with brass buttons, a
+stick-up collar like a gentleman’s, a necktie arranged in a sailor’s
+knot, a golden pin in the shape of a little lawn-tennis racket, and
+pearl-grey gloves with big black stitchings.  Adela’s second impression
+was that she was an actress, and her third that no such person had ever
+before crossed that threshold.
+
+“I’ll tell you what I’ve come for,” said the apparition.  “I’ve come to
+ask you to intercede.”  She wasn’t an actress; an actress would have had
+a nicer voice.
+
+“To intercede?”  Adela was too bewildered to ask her to sit down.
+
+“With your father, you know.  He doesn’t know, but he’ll have to.”  Her
+“have” sounded like “’ave.”  She explained, with many more such sounds,
+that she was Mrs. Godfrey, that they had been married seven mortal
+months.  If Godfrey was going abroad she must go with him, and the only
+way she could go with him would be for his father to do something.  He
+was afraid of his father—that was clear; he was afraid even to tell him.
+What she had come down for was to see some other member of the family
+face to face—“fice to fice,” Mrs. Godfrey called it—and try if he
+couldn’t be approached by another side.  If no one else would act then
+she would just have to act herself.  The Colonel would have to do
+something—that was the only way out of it.
+
+What really happened Adela never quite understood; what seemed to be
+happening was that the room went round and round.  Through the blur of
+perception accompanying this effect the sharp stabs of her visitor’s
+revelation came to her like the words heard by a patient “going off”
+under ether.  She afterwards denied passionately even to herself that she
+had done anything so abject as to faint; but there was a lapse in her
+consciousness on the score of Miss Flynn’s intervention.  This
+intervention had evidently been active, for when they talked the matter
+over, later in the day, with bated breath and infinite dissimulation for
+the school-room quarter, the governess had more lurid truths, and still
+more, to impart than to receive.  She was at any rate under the
+impression that she had athletically contended, in the drawing-room, with
+the yellow hair—this after removing Adela from the scene and before
+inducing Mrs. Godfrey to withdraw.  Miss Flynn had never known a more
+thrilling day, for all the rest of it too was pervaded with agitations
+and conversations, precautions and alarms.  It was given out to Beatrice
+and Muriel that their sister had been taken suddenly ill, and the
+governess ministered to her in her room.  Indeed Adela had never found
+herself less at ease, for this time she had received a blow that she
+couldn’t return.  There was nothing to do but to take it, to endure the
+humiliation of her wound.
+
+At first she declined to take it—having, as might appear, the much more
+attractive resource of regarding her visitant as a mere masquerading
+person, an impudent impostor.  On the face of the matter moreover it
+wasn’t fair to believe till one heard; and to hear in such a case was to
+hear Godfrey himself.  Whatever she had tried to imagine about him she
+hadn’t arrived at anything so belittling as an idiotic secret marriage
+with a dyed and painted hag.  Adela repeated this last word as if it gave
+her comfort; and indeed where everything was so bad fifteen years of
+seniority made the case little worse.  Miss Flynn was portentous, for
+Miss Flynn had had it out with the wretch.  She had cross-questioned her
+and had not broken her down.  This was the most uplifted hour of Miss
+Flynn’s life; for whereas she usually had to content herself with being
+humbly and gloomily in the right she could now be magnanimously and
+showily so.  Her only perplexity was as to what she ought to do—write to
+Colonel Chart or go up to town to see him.  She bloomed with
+alternatives—she resembled some dull garden-path which under a copious
+downpour has begun to flaunt with colour.  Toward evening Adela was
+obliged to recognise that her brother’s worry, of which he had spoken to
+her, had appeared bad enough to consist even of a low wife, and to
+remember that, so far from its being inconceivable a young man in his
+position should clandestinely take one, she had been present, years
+before, during her mother’s lifetime, when Lady Molesley declared gaily,
+over a cup of tea, that this was precisely what she expected of her
+eldest son.  The next morning it was the worst possibilities that seemed
+clearest; the only thing left with a tatter of dusky comfort being the
+ambiguity of Godfrey’s charge that her own action had “done” for him.
+That was a matter by itself, and she racked her brains for a connecting
+link between Mrs. Churchley and Mrs. Godfrey.  At last she made up her
+mind that they were related by blood; very likely, though differing in
+fortune, they were cousins or even sisters.  But even then what did the
+wretched boy mean?
+
+Arrested by the unnatural fascination of opportunity, Miss Flynn received
+before lunch a telegram from Colonel Chart—an order for dinner and a
+vehicle; he and Godfrey were to arrive at six o’clock.  Adela had plenty
+of occupation for the interval, since she was pitying her father when she
+wasn’t rejoicing that her mother had gone too soon to know.  She
+flattered herself she made out the providential reason of that cruelty
+now.  She found time however still to wonder for what purpose, given the
+situation, Godfrey was to be brought down.  She wasn’t unconscious indeed
+that she had little general knowledge of what usually was done with young
+men in that predicament.  One talked about the situation, but the
+situation was an abyss.  She felt this still more when she found, on her
+father’s arrival, that nothing apparently was to happen as she had taken
+for granted it would.  There was an inviolable hush over the whole
+affair, but no tragedy, no publicity, nothing ugly.  The tragedy had been
+in town—the faces of the two men spoke of it in spite of their other
+perfunctory aspects; and at present there was only a family dinner, with
+Beatrice and Muriel and the governess—with almost a company tone too, the
+result of the desire to avoid publicity.  Adela admired her father; she
+knew what he was feeling if Mrs. Godfrey had been at him, and yet she saw
+him positively gallant.  He was mildly austere, or rather even—what was
+it?—august; just as, coldly equivocal, he never looked at his son, so
+that at moments he struck her as almost sick with sadness.  Godfrey was
+equally inscrutable and therefore wholly different from what he had been
+as he stood before her in the park.  If he was to start on his career
+(with such a wife!—wouldn’t she utterly blight it?) he was already
+professional enough to know how to wear a mask.
+
+Before they rose from table she felt herself wholly bewildered, so little
+were such large causes traceable in their effects.  She had nerved
+herself for a great ordeal, but the air was as sweet as an anodyne.  It
+was perfectly plain to her that her father was deadly sore—as pathetic as
+a person betrayed.  He was broken, but he showed no resentment; there was
+a weight on his heart, but he had lightened it by dressing as
+immaculately as usual for dinner.  She asked herself what immensity of a
+row there could have been in town to have left his anger so spent.  He
+went through everything, even to sitting with his son after dinner.  When
+they came out together he invited Beatrice and Muriel to the
+billiard-room, and as Miss Flynn discreetly withdrew Adela was left alone
+with Godfrey, who was completely changed and not now in the least of a
+rage.  He was broken too, but not so pathetic as his father.  He was only
+very correct and apologetic he said to his sister: “I’m awfully sorry
+_you_ were annoyed—it was something I never dreamed of.”
+
+She couldn’t think immediately what he meant; then she grasped the
+reference to her extraordinary invader.  She was uncertain, however, what
+tone to take; perhaps his father had arranged with him that they were to
+make the best of it.  But she spoke her own despair in the way she
+murmured “Oh Godfrey, Godfrey, is it true?”
+
+“I’ve been the most unutterable donkey—you can say what you like to me.
+You can’t say anything worse than I’ve said to myself.”
+
+“My brother, my brother!”—his words made her wail it out.  He hushed her
+with a movement and she asked: “What has father said?”
+
+He looked very high over her head.  “He’ll give her six hundred a year.”
+
+“Ah the angel!”—it was too splendid.
+
+“On condition”—Godfrey scarce blinked—“she never comes near me.  She has
+solemnly promised, and she’ll probably leave me alone to get the money.
+If she doesn’t—in diplomacy—I’m lost.”  He had been turning his eyes
+vaguely about, this way and that, to avoid meeting hers; but after
+another instant he gave up the effort and she had the miserable
+confession of his glance.  “I’ve been living in hell.”
+
+“My brother, my brother!” she yearningly repeated.
+
+“I’m not an idiot; yet for her I’ve behaved like one.  Don’t ask me—you
+mustn’t know.  It was all done in a day, and since then fancy my
+condition; fancy my work in such a torment; fancy my coming through at
+all.”
+
+“Thank God you passed!” she cried.  “You were wonderful!”
+
+“I’d have shot myself if I hadn’t been.  I had an awful day yesterday
+with the governor; it was late at night before it was over.  I leave
+England next week.  He brought me down here for it to look well—so that
+the children shan’t know.”
+
+“_He’s_ wonderful too!” Adela murmured.
+
+“Wonderful too!” Godfrey echoed.
+
+“Did _she_ tell him?” the girl went on.
+
+“She came straight to Seymour Street from here.  She saw him alone first;
+then he called me in.  _That_ luxury lasted about an hour.”
+
+“Poor, poor father!” Adela moaned at this; on which her brother remained
+silent.  Then after he had alluded to it as the scene he had lived in
+terror of all through his cramming, and she had sighed forth again her
+pity and admiration for such a mixture of anxieties and such a triumph of
+talent, she pursued: “Have you told him?”
+
+“Told him what?”
+
+“What you said you would—what _I_ did.”
+
+Godfrey turned away as if at present he had very little interest in that
+inferior tribulation.  “I was angry with you, but I cooled off.  I held
+my tongue.”
+
+She clasped her hands.  “You thought of mamma!”
+
+“Oh don’t speak of mamma!” he cried as in rueful tenderness.
+
+It was indeed not a happy moment, and she murmured: “No; if you _had_
+thought of her—!”
+
+This made Godfrey face her again with a small flare in his eyes.  “Oh
+_then_ it didn’t prevent.  I thought that woman really good.  I believed
+in her.”
+
+“Is she _very_ bad?”
+
+“I shall never mention her to you again,” he returned with dignity.
+
+“You may believe _I_ won’t speak of her!  So father doesn’t know?” the
+girl added.
+
+“Doesn’t know what?”
+
+“That I said what I did to Mrs. Churchley.”
+
+He had a momentary pause.  “I don’t think so, but you must find out for
+yourself.”
+
+“I shall find out,” said Adela.  “But what had Mrs. Churchley to do with
+it?”
+
+“With _my_ misery?  I told her.  I had to tell some one.”
+
+“Why didn’t you tell me?”
+
+He appeared—though but after an instant—to know exactly why.  “Oh you
+take things so beastly hard—you make such rows.”  Adela covered her face
+with her hands and he went on: “What I wanted was comfort—not to be
+lashed up.  I thought I should go mad.  I wanted Mrs. Churchley to break
+it to father, to intercede for me and help him to meet it.  She was
+awfully kind to me, she listened and she understood; she could fancy how
+it had happened.  Without her I shouldn’t have pulled through.  She liked
+me, you know,” he further explained, and as if it were quite worth
+mentioning—all the more that it was pleasant to him.  “She said she’d do
+what she could for me.  She was full of sympathy and resource.  I really
+leaned on her.  But when _you_ cut in of course it spoiled everything.
+That’s why I was so furious with you.  She couldn’t do anything then.”
+
+Adela dropped her hands, staring; she felt she had walked in darkness.
+“So that he had to meet it alone?”
+
+“_Dame_!” said Godfrey, who had got up his French tremendously.
+
+Muriel came to the door to say papa wished the two others to join them,
+and the next day Godfrey returned to town.  His father remained at
+Brinton, without an intermission, the rest of the summer and the whole of
+the autumn, and Adela had a chance to find out, as she had said, whether
+he knew she had interfered.  But in spite of her chance she never found
+out.  He knew Mrs. Churchley had thrown him over and he knew his daughter
+rejoiced in it, but he appeared not to have divined the relation between
+the two facts.  It was strange that one of the matters he was clearest
+about—Adela’s secret triumph—should have been just the thing which from
+this time on justified less and less such a confidence.  She was too
+sorry for him to be consistently glad.  She watched his attempts to wind
+himself up on the subject of shorthorns and drainage, and she favoured to
+the utmost of her ability his intermittent disposition to make a figure
+in orchids.  She wondered whether they mightn’t have a few people at
+Brinton; but when she mentioned the idea he asked what in the world there
+would be to attract them.  It was a confoundedly stupid house, he
+remarked—with all respect to _her_ cleverness.  Beatrice and Muriel were
+mystified; the prospect of going out immensely had faded so utterly away.
+They were apparently not to go out at all.  Colonel Chart was aimless and
+bored; he paced up and down and went back to smoking, which was bad for
+him, and looked drearily out of windows as if on the bare chance that
+something might arrive.  Did he expect Mrs. Churchley to arrive, did he
+expect her to relent on finding she couldn’t live without him?  It was
+Adela’s belief that she gave no sign.  But the girl thought it really
+remarkable of her not to have betrayed her ingenious young visitor.
+Adela’s judgement of human nature was perhaps harsh, but she believed
+that most women, given the various facts, wouldn’t have been so
+forbearing.  This lady’s conception of the point of honour placed her
+there in a finer and purer light than had at all originally promised to
+shine about her.
+
+She meanwhile herself could well judge how heavy her father found the
+burden of Godfrey’s folly and how he was incommoded at having to pay the
+horrible woman six hundred a year.  Doubtless he was having dreadful
+letters from her; doubtless she threatened them all with hideous
+exposure.  If the matter should be bruited Godfrey’s prospects would
+collapse on the spot.  He thought Madrid very charming and curious, but
+Mrs. Godfrey was in England, so that his father had to face the music.
+Adela took a dolorous comfort in her mother’s being out of that—it would
+have killed her; but this didn’t blind her to the fact that the comfort
+for her father would perhaps have been greater if he had had some one to
+talk to about his trouble.  He never dreamed of doing so to her, and she
+felt she couldn’t ask him.  In the family life he wanted utter silence
+about it.  Early in the winter he went abroad for ten weeks, leaving her
+with her sisters in the country, where it was not to be denied that at
+this time existence had very little savour.  She half expected her
+sister-in-law would again descend on her; but the fear wasn’t justified,
+and the quietude of the awful creature seemed really to vibrate with the
+ring of gold-pieces.  There were sure to be extras.  Adela winced at the
+extras.  Colonel Chart went to Paris and to Monte Carlo and then to
+Madrid to see his boy.  His daughter had the vision of his perhaps
+meeting Mrs. Churchley somewhere, since, if she had gone for a year, she
+would still be on the Continent.  If he should meet her perhaps the
+affair would come on again: she caught herself musing over this.  But he
+brought back no such appearance, and, seeing him after an interval, she
+was struck afresh with his jilted and wasted air.  She didn’t like it—she
+resented it.  A little more and she would have said that that was no way
+to treat so faithful a man.
+
+They all went up to town in March, and on one of the first days of April
+she saw Mrs. Churchley in the Park.  She herself remained apparently
+invisible to that lady—she herself and Beatrice and Muriel, who sat with
+her in their mother’s old bottle-green landau.  Mrs. Churchley, perched
+higher than ever, rode by without a recognition; but this didn’t prevent
+Adela’s going to her before the month was over.  As on her great previous
+occasion she went in the morning, and she again had the good fortune to
+be admitted.  This time, however, her visit was shorter, and a week after
+making it—the week was a desolation—she addressed to her brother at
+Madrid a letter containing these words: “I could endure it no longer—I
+confessed and retracted; I explained to her as well as I could the
+falsity of what I said to her ten months ago and the benighted purity of
+my motives for saying it.  I besought her to regard it as unsaid, to
+forgive me, not to despise me too much, to take pity on poor _perfect_
+papa and come back to him.  She was more good-natured than you might have
+expected—indeed she laughed extravagantly.  She had never believed me—it
+was too absurd; she had only, at the time, disliked me.  She found me
+utterly false—she was very frank with me about this—and she told papa she
+really thought me horrid.  She said she could never live with such a
+girl, and as I would certainly never marry I must be sent away—in short
+she quite loathed me.  Papa defended me, he refused to sacrifice me, and
+this led practically to their rupture.  Papa gave her up, as it were, for
+_me_.  Fancy the angel, and fancy what I must try to be to him for the
+rest of his life!  Mrs. Churchley can never come back—she’s going to
+marry Lord Dovedale.”
+
+
+
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Marriages, by Henry James
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
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+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Marriages
+
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 1, 2015  [eBook #2436]
+[This file was first posted on February 23, 2000]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARRIAGES***
+</pre>
+<p>Transcribed from the 1922 Macmillan and Co. &ldquo;Daisy
+Miller, Pandora, The Patagonia and Other Tales&rdquo; edition by
+David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org.&nbsp; Proofing by Elizabeth
+Manzelli and Vanessa Mosher.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/coverb.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Book cover"
+title=
+"Book cover"
+ src="images/covers.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<h1>THE MARRIAGES<br />
+by Henry James</h1>
+<h2>I</h2>
+<p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">Won&rsquo;t</span> you stay a
+little longer?&rdquo; the hostess asked while she held the
+girl&rsquo;s hand and smiled.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s too early
+for every one to go&mdash;it&rsquo;s too absurd.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Mrs. Churchley inclined her head to one side and looked gracious;
+she flourished about her face, in a vaguely protecting sheltering
+way, an enormous fan of red feathers.&nbsp; Everything in her
+composition, for Adela Chart, was enormous.&nbsp; She had big
+eyes, big teeth, big shoulders, big hands, big rings and
+bracelets, big jewels of every sort and many of them.&nbsp; The
+train of her crimson dress was longer than any other; her house
+was huge; her drawing-room, especially now that the company had
+left it, looked vast, and it offered to the girl&rsquo;s eyes a
+collection of the largest sofas and chairs, pictures, mirrors,
+clocks, that she had ever beheld.&nbsp; Was Mrs.
+Churchley&rsquo;s fortune also large, to account for so many
+immensities?&nbsp; Of this Adela could know nothing, but it
+struck her, while she smiled sweetly back at their entertainer,
+that she had better try to find out.&nbsp; Mrs. Churchley had at
+least a high-hung carriage drawn by the tallest horses, and in
+the Row she was to be seen perched on a mighty hunter.&nbsp; She
+was high and extensive herself, though not exactly fat; her bones
+were big, her limbs were long, and her loud hurrying voice
+resembled the bell of a steamboat.&nbsp; While she spoke to his
+daughter she had the air of hiding from Colonel Chart, a little
+shyly, behind the wide ostrich fan.&nbsp; But Colonel Chart was
+not a man to be either ignored or eluded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course every one&rsquo;s going on to something
+else,&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; &ldquo;I believe there are a lot of
+things to-night.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And where are <i>you</i> going?&rdquo; Mrs. Churchley
+asked, dropping her fan and turning her bright hard eyes on the
+Colonel.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh I don&rsquo;t do that sort of thing!&rdquo;&mdash;he
+used a tone of familiar resentment that fell with a certain
+effect on his daughter&rsquo;s ear.&nbsp; She saw in it that he
+thought Mrs. Churchley might have done him a little more
+justice.&nbsp; But what made the honest soul suppose her a person
+to look to for a perception of fine shades?&nbsp; Indeed the
+shade was one it might have been a little difficult to
+seize&mdash;the difference between &ldquo;going on&rdquo; and
+coming to a dinner of twenty people.&nbsp; The pair were in
+mourning; the second year had maintained it for Adela, but the
+Colonel hadn&rsquo;t objected to dining with Mrs. Churchley, any
+more than he had objected at Easter to going down to the
+Millwards&rsquo;, where he had met her and where the girl had her
+reasons for believing him to have known he should meet her.&nbsp;
+Adela wasn&rsquo;t clear about the occasion of their original
+meeting, to which a certain mystery attached.&nbsp; In Mrs.
+Churchley&rsquo;s exclamation now there was the fullest
+concurrence in Colonel Chart&rsquo;s idea; she didn&rsquo;t say
+&ldquo;Ah yes, dear friend, I understand!&rdquo; but this was the
+note of sympathy she plainly wished to sound.&nbsp; It
+immediately made Adela say to her &ldquo;Surely you must be going
+on somewhere yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, you must have a lot of places,&rdquo; the Colonel
+concurred, while his view of her shining raiment had an invidious
+directness.&nbsp; Adela could read the tacit implication:
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re not in sorrow, in desolation.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mrs. Churchley turned away from her at this and just waited
+before answering.&nbsp; The red fan was up again, and this time
+it sheltered her from Adela.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll give
+everything up&mdash;for <i>you</i>,&rdquo; were the words that
+issued from behind it.&nbsp; &ldquo;<i>Do</i> stay a
+little.&nbsp; I always think this is such a nice hour.&nbsp; One
+can really talk,&rdquo; Mrs. Churchley went on.&nbsp; The Colonel
+laughed; he said it wasn&rsquo;t fair.&nbsp; But their hostess
+pressed his daughter.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do sit down; it&rsquo;s the
+only time to have any talk.&rdquo;&nbsp; The girl saw her father
+sit down, but she wandered away, turning her back and pretending
+to look at a picture.&nbsp; She was so far from agreeing with
+Mrs. Churchley that it was an hour she particularly
+disliked.&nbsp; She was conscious of the queerness, the shyness,
+in London, of the gregarious flight of guests after a dinner, the
+general <i>sauve qui peut</i> and panic fear of being left with
+the host and hostess.&nbsp; But personally she always felt the
+contagion, always conformed to the rush.&nbsp; Besides, she knew
+herself turn red now, flushed with a conviction that had come
+over her and that she wished not to show.</p>
+<p>Her father sat down on one of the big sofas with Mrs.
+Churchley; fortunately he was also a person with a presence that
+could hold its own.&nbsp; Adela didn&rsquo;t care to sit and
+watch them while they made love, as she crudely imaged it, and
+she cared still less to join in their strange commerce.&nbsp; She
+wandered further away, went into another of the bright
+&ldquo;handsome,&rdquo; rather nude rooms&mdash;they were like
+women dressed for a ball&mdash;where the displaced chairs, at
+awkward angles to each other, seemed to retain the attitudes of
+bored talkers.&nbsp; Her heart beat as she had seldom known it,
+but she continued to make a pretence of looking at the pictures
+on the walls and the ornaments on the tables, while she hoped
+that, as she preferred it, it would be also the course her father
+would like best.&nbsp; She hoped &ldquo;awfully,&rdquo; as she
+would have said, that he wouldn&rsquo;t think her rude.&nbsp; She
+was a person of courage, and he was a kind, an intensely
+good-natured man; nevertheless she went in some fear of
+him.&nbsp; At home it had always been a religion with them to be
+nice to the people he liked.&nbsp; How, in the old days, her
+mother, her incomparable mother, so clever, so unerring, so
+perfect, how in the precious days her mother had practised that
+art!&nbsp; Oh her mother, her irrecoverable mother!&nbsp; One of
+the pictures she was looking at swam before her eyes.&nbsp; Mrs.
+Churchley, in the natural course, would have begun immediately to
+climb staircases.&nbsp; Adela could see the high bony shoulders
+and the long crimson tail and the universal coruscating nod
+wriggle their horribly practical way through the rest of the
+night.&nbsp; Therefore she <i>must</i> have had her reasons for
+detaining them.&nbsp; There were mothers who thought every one
+wanted to marry their eldest son, and the girl sought to be clear
+as to whether she herself belonged to the class of daughters who
+thought every one wanted to marry their father.&nbsp; Her
+companions left her alone; and though she didn&rsquo;t want to be
+near them it angered her that Mrs. Churchley didn&rsquo;t call
+her.&nbsp; That proved she was conscious of the situation.&nbsp;
+She would have called her, only Colonel Chart had perhaps
+dreadfully murmured &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t, love,
+don&rsquo;t.&rdquo;&nbsp; This proved he also was
+conscious.&nbsp; The time was really not long&mdash;ten minutes
+at the most elapsed&mdash;when he cried out gaily, pleasantly, as
+if with a small jocular reproach, &ldquo;I say, Adela, we must
+release this dear lady!&rdquo;&nbsp; He spoke of course as if it
+had been Adela&rsquo;s fault that they lingered.&nbsp; When they
+took leave she gave Mrs. Churchley, without intention and without
+defiance, but from the simple sincerity of her pain, a longer
+look into the eyes than she had ever given her before.&nbsp; Mrs.
+Churchley&rsquo;s onyx pupils reflected the question as distant
+dark windows reflect the sunset; they seemed to say: &ldquo;Yes,
+I <i>am</i>, if that&rsquo;s what you want to know!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>What made the case worse, what made the girl more sure, was
+the silence preserved by her companion in the brougham on their
+way home.&nbsp; They rolled along in the June darkness from
+Prince&rsquo;s Gate to Seymour Street, each looking out of a
+window in conscious prudence; watching but not seeing the hurry
+of the London night, the flash of lamps, the quick roll on the
+wood of hansoms and other broughams.&nbsp; Adela had expected her
+father would say something about Mrs. Churchley; but when he said
+nothing it affected her, very oddly, still more as if he had
+spoken.&nbsp; In Seymour Street he asked the footman if Mr.
+Godfrey had come in, to which the servant replied that he had
+come in early and gone straight to his room.&nbsp; Adela had
+gathered as much, without saying so, from a lighted window on the
+second floor; but she contributed no remark to the
+question.&nbsp; At the foot of the stairs her father halted as if
+he had something on his mind; but what it amounted to seemed only
+the dry &ldquo;Good-night&rdquo; with which he presently
+ascended.&nbsp; It was the first time since her mother&rsquo;s
+death that he had bidden her good-night without kissing
+her.&nbsp; They were a kissing family, and after that dire event
+the habit had taken a fresh spring.&nbsp; She had left behind her
+such a general passion of regret that in kissing each other they
+felt themselves a little to be kissing her.&nbsp; Now, as,
+standing in the hall, with the stiff watching footman&mdash;she
+could have said to him angrily &ldquo;Go
+away!&rdquo;&mdash;planted near her, she looked with unspeakable
+pain at her father&rsquo;s back while he mounted, the effect was
+of his having withheld from another and a still more slighted
+cheek the touch of his lips.</p>
+<p>He was going to his room, and after a moment she heard his
+door close.&nbsp; Then she said to the servant &ldquo;Shut up the
+house&rdquo;&mdash;she tried to do everything her mother had
+done, to be a little of what she had been, conscious only of
+falling woefully short&mdash;and took her own way upstairs.&nbsp;
+After she had reached her room she waited, listening, shaken by
+the apprehension that she should hear her father come out again
+and go up to Godfrey.&nbsp; He would go up to tell him, to have
+it over without delay, precisely because it would be so
+difficult.&nbsp; She asked herself indeed why he should tell
+Godfrey when he hadn&rsquo;t taken the occasion&mdash;their drive
+home being an occasion&mdash;to tell herself.&nbsp; However, she
+wanted no announcing, no telling; there was such a horrible
+clearness in her mind that what she now waited for was only to be
+sure her father wouldn&rsquo;t proceed as she had imagined.&nbsp;
+At the end of the minutes she saw this particular danger was
+over, upon which she came out and made her own way to her
+brother.&nbsp; Exactly what she wanted to say to him first, if
+their parent counted on the boy&rsquo;s greater indulgence, and
+before he could say anything, was: &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t forgive
+him; don&rsquo;t, don&rsquo;t!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was to go up for an examination, poor lad, and during these
+weeks his lamp burned till the small hours.&nbsp; It was for the
+Foreign Office, and there was to be some frightful number of
+competitors; but Adela had great hopes of him&mdash;she believed
+so in his talents and saw with pity how hard he worked.&nbsp;
+This would have made her spare him, not trouble his night, his
+scanty rest, if anything less dreadful had been at stake.&nbsp;
+It was a blessing however that one could count on his coolness,
+young as he was&mdash;his bright good-looking discretion, the
+thing that already made him half a man of the world.&nbsp;
+Moreover he was the one who would care most.&nbsp; If Basil was
+the eldest son&mdash;he had as a matter of course gone into the
+army and was in India, on the staff, by good luck, of a
+governor-general&mdash;it was exactly this that would make him
+comparatively indifferent.&nbsp; His life was elsewhere, and his
+father and he had been in a measure military comrades, so that he
+would be deterred by a certain delicacy from protesting; he
+wouldn&rsquo;t have liked any such protest in an affair of
+<i>his</i>.&nbsp; Beatrice and Muriel would care, but they were
+too young to speak, and this was just why her own responsibility
+was so great.</p>
+<p>Godfrey was in working-gear&mdash;shirt and trousers and
+slippers and a beautiful silk jacket.&nbsp; His room felt hot,
+though a window was open to the summer night; the lamp on the
+table shed its studious light over a formidable heap of
+text-books and papers, the bed moreover showing how he had flung
+himself down to think out a problem.&nbsp; As soon as she got in
+she began.&nbsp; &ldquo;Father&rsquo;s going to marry Mrs.
+Churchley, you know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She saw his poor pink face turn pale.&nbsp; &ldquo;How do you
+know?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve seen with my eyes.&nbsp; We&rsquo;ve been
+dining there&mdash;we&rsquo;ve just come home.&nbsp; He&rsquo;s
+in love with her.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s in love with
+<i>him</i>.&nbsp; They&rsquo;ll arrange it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh I say!&rdquo; Godfrey exclaimed, incredulous.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He will, he will, he will!&rdquo; cried the girl; and
+with it she burst into tears.</p>
+<p>Godfrey, who had a cigarette in his hand, lighted it at one of
+the candles on the mantelpiece as if he were embarrassed.&nbsp;
+As Adela, who had dropped into his armchair, continued to sob, he
+said after a moment: &ldquo;He oughtn&rsquo;t to&mdash;he
+oughtn&rsquo;t to.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh think of mamma&mdash;think of mamma!&rdquo; she
+wailed almost louder than was safe.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, he ought to think of mamma.&rdquo;&nbsp; With
+which Godfrey looked at the tip of his cigarette.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To such a woman as that&mdash;after
+<i>her</i>!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dear old mamma!&rdquo; said Godfrey while he
+smoked.</p>
+<p>Adela rose again, drying her eyes.&nbsp; &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+like an insult to her; it&rsquo;s as if he denied
+her.&rdquo;&nbsp; Now that she spoke of it she felt herself rise
+to a height.&nbsp; &ldquo;He rubs out at a stroke all the years
+of their happiness.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They were awfully happy,&rdquo; Godfrey agreed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Think what she was&mdash;think how no one else will
+ever again be like her!&rdquo; the girl went on.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I suppose he&rsquo;s not very happy now,&rdquo; her
+brother vaguely contributed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course he isn&rsquo;t, any more than you and I are;
+and it&rsquo;s dreadful of him to want to be.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, don&rsquo;t make yourself miserable till
+you&rsquo;re sure,&rdquo; the young man said.</p>
+<p>But Adela showed him confidently that she <i>was</i> sure,
+from the way the pair had behaved together and from her
+father&rsquo;s attitude on the drive home.&nbsp; If Godfrey had
+been there he would have seen everything; it couldn&rsquo;t be
+explained, but he would have felt.&nbsp; When he asked at what
+moment the girl had first had her suspicion she replied that it
+had all come at once, that evening; or that at least she had had
+no conscious fear till then.&nbsp; There had been signs for two
+or three weeks, but she hadn&rsquo;t understood them&mdash;ever
+since the day Mrs. Churchley had dined in Seymour Street.&nbsp;
+Adela had on that occasion thought it odd her father should have
+wished to invite her, given the quiet way they were living; she
+was a person they knew so little.&nbsp; He had said something
+about her having been very civil to him, and that evening,
+already, she had guessed that he must have frequented their
+portentous guest herself more than there had been signs of.&nbsp;
+To-night it had come to her clearly that he would have called on
+her every day since the time of her dining with them; every
+afternoon about the hour he was ostensibly at his club.&nbsp;
+Mrs. Churchley <i>was</i> his club&mdash;she was for all the
+world just like one.&nbsp; At this Godfrey laughed; he wanted to
+know what his sister knew about clubs.&nbsp; She was slightly
+disappointed in his laugh, even wounded by it, but she knew
+perfectly what she meant: she meant that Mrs. Churchley was
+public and florid, promiscuous and mannish.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh I daresay she&rsquo;s all right,&rdquo; he said as
+if he wanted to get on with his work.&nbsp; He looked at the
+clock on the mantel-shelf; he would have to put in another
+hour.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All right to come and take darling mamma&rsquo;s
+place&mdash;to sit where <i>she</i> used to sit, to lay her
+horrible hands on <i>her</i> things?&rdquo;&nbsp; Adela was
+appalled&mdash;all the more that she hadn&rsquo;t expected
+it&mdash;at her brother&rsquo;s apparent acceptance of such a
+prospect.</p>
+<p>He coloured; there was something in her passionate piety that
+scorched him.&nbsp; She glared at him with tragic eyes&mdash;he
+might have profaned an altar.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh I mean that nothing
+will come of it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not if we do our duty,&rdquo; said Adela.&nbsp; And
+then as he looked as if he hadn&rsquo;t an idea of what that
+could be: &ldquo;You must speak to him&mdash;tell him how we
+feel; that we shall never forgive him, that we can&rsquo;t endure
+it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll think I&rsquo;m cheeky,&rdquo; her brother
+returned, looking down at his papers with his back to her and his
+hands in his pockets.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Cheeky to plead for <i>her</i> memory?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll say it&rsquo;s none of my
+business.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then you believe he&rsquo;ll do it?&rdquo; cried the
+girl.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not a bit.&nbsp; Go to bed!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>I&rsquo;ll</i> speak to him&rdquo;&mdash;she had
+turned as pale as a young priestess.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t cry out till you&rsquo;re hurt; wait till
+he speaks to <i>you</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He won&rsquo;t, he won&rsquo;t!&rdquo; she
+declared.&nbsp; &ldquo;He&rsquo;ll do it without telling
+us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her brother had faced round to her again; he started a little
+at this, and again, at one of the candles, lighted his cigarette,
+which had gone out.&nbsp; She looked at him a moment; then he
+said something that surprised her.&nbsp; &ldquo;Is Mrs. Churchley
+very rich?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t the least idea.&nbsp; What on earth has
+that to do with it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Godfrey puffed his cigarette.&nbsp; &ldquo;Does she live as if
+she were?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She has a lot of hideous showy things.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, we must keep our eyes open,&rdquo; he
+concluded.&nbsp; &ldquo;And now you <i>must</i> let me get
+on.&rdquo;&nbsp; He kissed his visitor as if to make up for
+dismissing her, or for his failure to take fire; and she held him
+a moment, burying her head on his shoulder.</p>
+<p>A wave of emotion surged through her, and again she quavered
+out: &ldquo;Ah why did she leave us?&nbsp; Why did she leave
+us?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, why indeed?&rdquo; the young man sighed,
+disengaging himself with a movement of oppression.</p>
+<h2>II</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Adela</span> was so far right as that by
+the end of the week, though she remained certain, her father had
+still not made the announcement she dreaded.&nbsp; What convinced
+her was the sense of her changed relations with him&mdash;of
+there being between them something unexpressed, something she was
+aware of as she would have been of an open wound.&nbsp; When she
+spoke of this to Godfrey he said the change was of her own
+making&mdash;also that she was cruelly unjust to the
+governor.&nbsp; She suffered even more from her brother&rsquo;s
+unexpected perversity; she had had so different a theory about
+him that her disappointment was almost an humiliation and she
+needed all her fortitude to pitch her faith lower.&nbsp; She
+wondered what had happened to him and why he so failed her.&nbsp;
+She would have trusted him to feel right about anything, above
+all about such a question.&nbsp; Their worship of their
+mother&rsquo;s memory, their recognition of her sacred place in
+their past, her exquisite influence in their father&rsquo;s life,
+his fortune, his career, in the whole history of the family and
+welfare of the house&mdash;accomplished clever gentle good
+beautiful and capable as she had been, a woman whose quiet
+distinction was universally admired, so that on her death one of
+the Princesses, the most august of her friends, had written Adela
+such a note about her as princesses were understood very seldom
+to write: their hushed tenderness over all this was like a
+religion, and was also an attributive honour, to fall away from
+which was a form of treachery.&nbsp; This wasn&rsquo;t the way
+people usually felt in London, she knew; but strenuous ardent
+observant girl as she was, with secrecies of sentiment and dim
+originalities of attitude, she had already made up her mind that
+London was no treasure-house of delicacies.&nbsp; Remembrance
+there was hammered thin&mdash;to be faithful was to make society
+gape.&nbsp; The patient dead were sacrificed; they had no
+shrines, for people were literally ashamed of mourning.&nbsp;
+When they had hustled all sensibility out of their lives they
+invented the fiction that they felt too much to utter.&nbsp;
+Adela said nothing to her sisters; this reticence was part of the
+virtue it was her idea to practise for them.&nbsp; <i>She</i> was
+to be their mother, a direct deputy and representative.&nbsp;
+Before the vision of that other woman parading in such a
+character she felt capable of ingenuities, of deep
+diplomacies.&nbsp; The essence of these indeed was just
+tremulously to watch her father.&nbsp; Five days after they had
+dined together at Mrs. Churchley&rsquo;s he asked her if she had
+been to see that lady.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No indeed, why should I?&rdquo; Adela knew that he knew
+she hadn&rsquo;t been, since Mrs. Churchley would have told
+him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you call on people after you dine with
+them?&rdquo; said Colonel Chart.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, in the course of time.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t rush
+off within the week.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Her father looked at her, and his eyes were colder than she
+had ever seen them, which was probably, she reflected, just the
+way hers appeared to himself.&nbsp; &ldquo;Then you&rsquo;ll
+please rush off to-morrow.&nbsp; She&rsquo;s to dine with us on
+the 12th, and I shall expect your sisters to come
+down.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Adela stared.&nbsp; &ldquo;To a dinner-party?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not to be a dinner-party.&nbsp; I want them
+to know Mrs. Churchley.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is there to be nobody else?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Godfrey of course.&nbsp; A family party,&rdquo; he said
+with an assurance before which she turned cold.</p>
+<p>The girl asked her brother that evening if <i>that</i>
+wasn&rsquo;t tantamount to an announcement.&nbsp; He looked at
+her queerly and then said: &ldquo;<i>I&rsquo;ve</i> been to see
+her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What on earth did you do that for?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Father told me he wished it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then he <i>has</i> told you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Told me what?&rdquo; Godfrey asked while her heart sank
+with the sense of his making difficulties for her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That they&rsquo;re engaged, of course.&nbsp; What else
+can all this mean?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He didn&rsquo;t tell me that, but I like
+her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Like</i> her!&rdquo; the girl shrieked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;s very kind, very good.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To thrust herself upon us when we hate her?&nbsp; Is
+that what you call kind?&nbsp; Is that what you call
+decent?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh <i>I</i> don&rsquo;t hate her&rdquo;&mdash;and he
+turned away as if she bored him.</p>
+<p>She called the next day on Mrs. Churchley, designing to break
+out somehow, to plead, to appeal&mdash;&ldquo;Oh spare us! have
+mercy on us! let him alone! go away!&rdquo;&nbsp; But that
+wasn&rsquo;t easy when they were face to face.&nbsp; Mrs.
+Churchley had every intention of getting, as she would have
+said&mdash;she was perpetually using the expression&mdash;into
+touch; but her good intentions were as depressing as a
+tailor&rsquo;s misfits.&nbsp; She could never understand that
+they had no place for her vulgar charity, that their life was
+filled with a fragrance of perfection for which she had no sense
+fine enough.&nbsp; She was as undomestic as a shop-front and as
+out of tune as a parrot.&nbsp; She would either make them live in
+the streets or bring the streets into their life&mdash;it was the
+same thing.&nbsp; She had evidently never read a book, and she
+used intonations that Adela had never heard, as if she had been
+an Australian or an American.&nbsp; She understood everything in
+a vulgar sense; speaking of Godfrey&rsquo;s visit to her and
+praising him according to her idea, saying horrid things about
+him&mdash;that he was awfully good-looking, a perfect gentleman,
+the kind she liked.&nbsp; How could her father, who was after all
+in everything else such a dear, listen to a woman, or endure her,
+who thought she pleased him when she called the son of his dead
+wife a perfect gentleman?&nbsp; What would he have been,
+pray?&nbsp; Much she knew about what any of them were! When she
+told Adela she wanted her to like her the girl thought for an
+instant her opportunity had come&mdash;the chance to plead with
+her and beg her off.&nbsp; But she presented such an impenetrable
+surface that it would have been like giving a message to a
+varnished door.&nbsp; She wasn&rsquo;t a woman, said Adela; she
+was an address.</p>
+<p>When she dined in Seymour Street the &ldquo;children,&rdquo;
+as the girl called the others, including Godfrey, liked
+her.&nbsp; Beatrice and Muriel stared shyly and silently at the
+wonders of her apparel (she was brutally over-dressed) without of
+course guessing the danger that tainted the air.&nbsp; They
+supposed her in their innocence to be amusing, and they
+didn&rsquo;t know, any more than she did herself, how she
+patronised them.&nbsp; When she was upstairs with them after
+dinner Adela could see her look round the room at the things she
+meant to alter&mdash;their mother&rsquo;s things, not a bit like
+her own and not good enough for her.&nbsp; After a quarter of an
+hour of this our young lady felt sure she was deciding that
+Seymour Street wouldn&rsquo;t do at all, the dear old home that
+had done for their mother those twenty years.&nbsp; Was she
+plotting to transport them all to her horrible Prince&rsquo;s
+Gate?&nbsp; Of one thing at any rate Adela was certain: her
+father, at that moment alone in the dining-room with Godfrey,
+pretending to drink another glass of wine to make time, was
+coming to the point, was telling the news.&nbsp; When they
+reappeared they both, to her eyes, looked unnatural: the news had
+been told.</p>
+<p>She had it from Godfrey before Mrs. Churchley left the house,
+when, after a brief interval, he followed her out of the
+drawing-room on her taking her sisters to bed.&nbsp; She was
+waiting for him at the door of her room.&nbsp; Her father was
+then alone with his <i>fianc&eacute;e</i>&mdash;the word was
+grotesque to Adela; it was already as if the place were her
+home.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What did you say to him?&rdquo; our young woman asked
+when her brother had told her.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I said nothing.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then he added,
+colouring&mdash;the expression of her face was
+such&mdash;&ldquo;There was nothing to say.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is that how it strikes you?&rdquo;&mdash;and she stared
+at the lamp.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He asked me to speak to her,&rdquo; Godfrey went
+on.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In what hideous sense?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To tell her I was glad.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And did you?&rdquo; Adela panted.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know.&nbsp; I said something.&nbsp; She
+kissed me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh how <i>could</i> you?&rdquo; shuddered the girl, who
+covered her face with her hands.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He says she&rsquo;s very rich,&rdquo; her brother
+returned.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is that why you kissed her?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t kiss her.&nbsp; Good-night.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And the young man, turning his back, went out.</p>
+<p>When he had gone Adela locked herself in as with the fear she
+should be overtaken or invaded, and during a sleepless feverish
+memorable night she took counsel of her uncompromising
+spirit.&nbsp; She saw things as they were, in all the indignity
+of life.&nbsp; The levity, the mockery, the infidelity, the
+ugliness, lay as plain as a map before her; it was a world of
+gross practical jokes, a world <i>pour rire</i>; but she cried
+about it all the same.&nbsp; The morning dawned early, or rather
+it seemed to her there had been no night, nothing but a sickly
+creeping day.&nbsp; But by the time she heard the house stirring
+again she had determined what to do.&nbsp; When she came down to
+the breakfast-room her father was already in his place with
+newspapers and letters; and she expected the first words he would
+utter to be a rebuke to her for having disappeared the night
+before without taking leave of Mrs. Churchley.&nbsp; Then she saw
+he wished to be intensely kind, to make every allowance, to
+conciliate and console her.&nbsp; He knew she had heard from
+Godfrey, and he got up and kissed her.&nbsp; He told her as
+quickly as possible, to have it over, stammering a little, with
+an &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve a piece of news for you that will probably
+shock you,&rdquo; yet looking even exaggeratedly grave and rather
+pompous, to inspire the respect he didn&rsquo;t deserve.&nbsp;
+When he kissed her she melted, she burst into tears.&nbsp; He
+held her against him, kissing her again and again, saying
+tenderly &ldquo;Yes, yes, I know, I know.&rdquo;&nbsp; But he
+didn&rsquo;t know else he couldn&rsquo;t have done it.&nbsp;
+Beatrice and Muriel came in, frightened when they saw her crying,
+and still more scared when she turned to them with words and an
+air that were terrible in their comfortable little lives:
+&ldquo;Papa&rsquo;s going to be married; he&rsquo;s going to
+marry Mrs. Churchley!&rdquo;&nbsp; After staring a moment and
+seeing their father look as strange, on his side, as Adela,
+though in a different way, the children also began to cry, so
+that when the servants arrived with tea and boiled eggs these
+functionaries were greatly embarrassed with their burden, not
+knowing whether to come in or hang back.&nbsp; They all scraped
+together a decorum, and as soon as the things had been put on
+table the Colonel banished the men with a glance.&nbsp; Then he
+made a little affectionate speech to Beatrice and Muriel, in
+which he described Mrs. Churchley as the kindest, the most
+delightful of women, only wanting to make them happy, only
+wanting to make <i>him</i> happy, and convinced that he would be
+if they were and that they would be if he was.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do such words mean?&rdquo; Adela asked
+herself.&nbsp; She declared privately that they meant nothing,
+but she was silent, and every one was silent, on account of the
+advent of Miss Flynn the governess, before whom Colonel Chart
+preferred not to discuss the situation.&nbsp; Adela recognised on
+the spot that if things were to go as he wished his children
+would practically never again be alone with him.&nbsp; He would
+spend all his time with Mrs. Churchley till they were married,
+and then Mrs. Churchley would spend all her time with him.&nbsp;
+Adela was ashamed of him, and that was horrible&mdash;all the
+more that every one else would be, all his other friends, every
+one who had known her mother.&nbsp; But the public dishonour to
+that high memory shouldn&rsquo;t be enacted; he shouldn&rsquo;t
+do as he wished.</p>
+<p>After breakfast her father remarked to her that it would give
+him pleasure if in a day or two she would take her sisters to see
+their friend, and she replied that he should be obeyed.&nbsp; He
+held her hand a moment, looking at her with an argument in his
+eyes which presently hardened into sternness.&nbsp; He wanted to
+know that she forgave him, but also wanted to assure her that he
+expected her to mind what she did, to go straight.&nbsp; She
+turned away her eyes; she was indeed ashamed of him.</p>
+<p>She waited three days and then conveyed her sisters to the
+<i>repaire</i>, as she would have been ready to term it, of the
+lioness.&nbsp; That queen of beasts was surrounded with callers,
+as Adela knew she would be; it was her &ldquo;day&rdquo; and the
+occasion the girl preferred.&nbsp; Before this she had spent all
+her time with her companions, talking to them about their mother,
+playing on their memory of her, making them cry and making them
+laugh, reminding them of blest hours of their early childhood,
+telling them anecdotes of her own.&nbsp; None the less she
+confided to them that she believed there was no harm at all in
+Mrs. Churchley, and that when the time should come she would
+probably take them out immensely.&nbsp; She saw with smothered
+irritation that they enjoyed their visit at Prince&rsquo;s Gate;
+they had never been at anything so &ldquo;grown-up,&rdquo; nor
+seen so many smart bonnets and brilliant complexions.&nbsp;
+Moreover they were considered with interest, quite as if, being
+minor elements, yet perceptible ones, of Mrs. Churchley&rsquo;s
+new life, they had been described in advance and were the
+heroines of the occasion.&nbsp; There were so many ladies present
+that this personage didn&rsquo;t talk to them much; she only
+called them her &ldquo;chicks&rdquo; and asked them to hand about
+tea-cups and bread and butter.&nbsp; All of which was highly
+agreeable and indeed intensely exciting to Beatrice and Muriel,
+who had little round red spots in <i>their</i> cheeks when they
+came away.&nbsp; Adela quivered with the sense that her
+mother&rsquo;s children were now Mrs. Churchley&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;chicks&rdquo; and a part of the furniture of Mrs.
+Churchley&rsquo;s dreadful consciousness.</p>
+<p>It was one thing to have made up her mind, however; it was
+another thing to make her attempt.&nbsp; It was when she learned
+from Godfrey that the day was fixed, the 20th of July, only six
+weeks removed, that she felt the importance of prompt
+action.&nbsp; She learned everything from Godfrey now, having
+decided it would be hypocrisy to question her father.&nbsp; Even
+her silence was hypocritical, but she couldn&rsquo;t weep and
+wail.&nbsp; Her father showed extreme tact; taking no notice of
+her detachment, treating it as a moment of <i>bouderie</i> he was
+bound to allow her and that would pout itself away.&nbsp; She
+debated much as to whether she should take Godfrey into her
+confidence; she would have done so without hesitation if he
+hadn&rsquo;t disappointed her.&nbsp; He was so little what she
+might have expected, and so perversely preoccupied that she could
+explain it only by the high pressure at which he was living, his
+anxiety about his &ldquo;exam.&rdquo;&nbsp; He was in a fidget,
+in a fever, putting on a spurt to come in first; sceptical
+moreover about his success and cynical about everything
+else.&nbsp; He appeared to agree to the general axiom that they
+didn&rsquo;t want a strange woman thrust into their life, but he
+found Mrs. Churchley &ldquo;very jolly as a person to
+know.&rdquo;&nbsp; He had been to see her by himself&mdash;he had
+been to see her three times.&nbsp; He in fact gave it out that he
+would make the most of her now; he should probably be so little
+in Seymour Street after these days.&nbsp; What Adela at last
+determined to give him was her assurance that the marriage would
+never take place.&nbsp; When he asked what she meant and who was
+to prevent it she replied that the interesting couple would
+abandon the idea of themselves, or that Mrs. Churchley at least
+would after a week or two back out of it.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That will be really horrid then,&rdquo; Godfrey
+pronounced.&nbsp; &ldquo;The only respectable thing, at the point
+they&rsquo;ve come to, is to put it through.&nbsp; Charming for
+poor Dad to have the air of being
+&lsquo;chucked&rsquo;!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This made her hesitate two days more, but she found answers
+more valid than any objections.&nbsp; The many-voiced answer to
+everything&mdash;it was like the autumn wind round the
+house&mdash;was the affront that fell back on her mother.&nbsp;
+Her mother was dead but it killed her again.&nbsp; So one morning
+at eleven o&rsquo;clock, when she knew her father was writing
+letters, she went out quietly and, stopping the first hansom she
+met, drove to Prince&rsquo;s Gate.&nbsp; Mrs. Churchley was at
+home, and she was shown into the drawing-room with the request
+that she would wait five minutes.&nbsp; She waited without the
+sense of breaking down at the last, and the impulse to run away,
+which were what she had expected to have.&nbsp; In the cab and at
+the door her heart had beat terribly, but now suddenly, with the
+game really to play, she found herself lucid and calm.&nbsp; It
+was a joy to her to feel later that this was the way Mrs.
+Churchley found her: not confused, not stammering nor
+prevaricating, only a little amazed at her own courage, conscious
+of the immense responsibility of her step and wonderfully older
+than her years.&nbsp; Her hostess sounded her at first with
+suspicious eyes, but eventually, to Adela&rsquo;s surprise, burst
+into tears.&nbsp; At this the girl herself cried, and with the
+secret happiness of believing they were saved.&nbsp; Mrs.
+Churchley said she would think over what she had been told, and
+she promised her young friend, freely enough and very firmly, not
+to betray the secret of the latter&rsquo;s step to the
+Colonel.&nbsp; They were saved&mdash;they were saved: the words
+sung themselves in the girl&rsquo;s soul as she came
+downstairs.&nbsp; When the door opened for her she saw her
+brother on the step, and they looked at each other in surprise,
+each finding it on the part of the other an odd hour for
+Prince&rsquo;s Gate.&nbsp; Godfrey remarked that Mrs. Churchley
+would have enough of the family, and Adela answered that she
+would perhaps have too much.&nbsp; None the less the young man
+went in while his sister took her way home.</p>
+<h2>III</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">She</span> saw nothing of him for nearly a
+week; he had more and more his own times and hours, adjusted to
+his tremendous responsibilities, and he spent whole days at his
+crammer&rsquo;s.&nbsp; When she knocked at his door late in the
+evening he was regularly not in his room.&nbsp; It was known in
+the house how much he was worried; he was horribly nervous about
+his ordeal.&nbsp; It was to begin on the 23rd of June, and his
+father was as worried as himself.&nbsp; The wedding had been
+arranged in relation to this; they wished poor Godfrey&rsquo;s
+fate settled first, though they felt the nuptials would be
+darkened if it shouldn&rsquo;t be settled right.</p>
+<p>Ten days after that performance of her private undertaking
+Adela began to sniff, as it were, a difference in the general
+air; but as yet she was afraid to exult.&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t in
+truth a difference for the better, so that there might be still a
+great tension.&nbsp; Her father, since the announcement of his
+intended marriage, had been visibly pleased with himself, but
+that pleasure now appeared to have undergone a check.&nbsp; She
+had the impression known to the passengers on a great steamer
+when, in the middle of the night, they feel the engines
+stop.&nbsp; As this impression may easily sharpen to the sense
+that something serious has happened, so the girl asked herself
+what had actually occurred.&nbsp; She had expected something
+serious; but it was as if she couldn&rsquo;t keep still in her
+cabin&mdash;she wanted to go up and see.&nbsp; On the 20th, just
+before breakfast, her maid brought her a message from her
+brother.&nbsp; Mr. Godfrey would be obliged if she would speak to
+him in his room.&nbsp; She went straight up to him, dreading to
+find him ill, broken down on the eve of his formidable
+week.&nbsp; This was not the case however&mdash;he rather seemed
+already at work, to have been at work since dawn.&nbsp; But he
+was very white and his eyes had a strange and new
+expression.&nbsp; Her beautiful young brother looked older; he
+looked haggard and hard.&nbsp; He met her there as if he had been
+waiting for her, and he said at once: &ldquo;Please tell me this,
+Adela&mdash;what was the purpose of your visit the other morning
+to Mrs. Churchley, the day I met you at her door?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She stared&mdash;she cast about.&nbsp; &ldquo;The
+purpose?&nbsp; What&rsquo;s the matter?&nbsp; Why do you
+ask?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They&rsquo;ve put it off&mdash;they&rsquo;ve put it off
+a month.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah thank God!&rdquo; said Adela.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why the devil do you thank God?&rdquo; Godfrey asked
+with a strange impatience.</p>
+<p>She gave a strained intense smile.&nbsp; &ldquo;You know I
+think it all wrong.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He stood looking at her up and down.&nbsp; &ldquo;What did you
+do there?&nbsp; How did you interfere?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who told you I interfered?&rdquo; she returned with a
+deep flush.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You said something&mdash;you did something.&nbsp; I
+knew you had done it when I saw you come out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What I did was my own business.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Damn your own business!&rdquo; cried the young man.</p>
+<p>She had never in her life been so spoken to, and in advance,
+had she been given the choice, would have said that she&rsquo;d
+rather die than be so handled by Godfrey.&nbsp; But her spirit
+was high, and for a moment she was as angry as if she had been
+cut with a whip.&nbsp; She escaped the blow but felt the
+insult.&nbsp; &ldquo;And <i>your</i> business then?&rdquo; she
+asked.&nbsp; &ldquo;I wondered what that was when I saw
+<i>you</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He stood a moment longer scowling at her; then with the
+exclamation &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve made a pretty mess!&rdquo; he
+turned away from her and sat down to his books.</p>
+<p>They had put it off, as he said; her father was dry and stiff
+and official about it.&nbsp; &ldquo;I suppose I had better let
+you know we&rsquo;ve thought it best to postpone our marriage
+till the end of the summer&mdash;Mrs. Churchley has so many
+arrangements to make&rdquo;: he was not more expansive than
+that.&nbsp; She neither knew nor greatly cared whether she but
+vainly imagined or correctly observed him to watch her obliquely
+for some measure of her receipt of these words.&nbsp; She
+flattered herself that, thanks to Godfrey&rsquo;s forewarning,
+cruel as the form of it had been, she was able to repress any
+crude sign of elation.&nbsp; She had a perfectly good conscience,
+for she could now judge what odious elements Mrs. Churchley, whom
+she had not seen since the morning in Prince&rsquo;s Gate, had
+already introduced into their dealings.&nbsp; She gathered
+without difficulty that her father hadn&rsquo;t concurred in the
+postponement, for he was more restless than before, more absent
+and distinctly irritable.&nbsp; There was naturally still the
+question of how much of this condition was to be attributed to
+his solicitude about Godfrey.&nbsp; That young man took occasion
+to say a horrible thing to his sister: &ldquo;If I don&rsquo;t
+pass it will be your fault.&rdquo;&nbsp; These were dreadful days
+for the girl, and she asked herself how she could have borne them
+if the hovering spirit of her mother hadn&rsquo;t been at her
+side.&nbsp; Fortunately she always felt it there, sustaining,
+commending, sanctifying.&nbsp; Suddenly her father announced to
+her that he wished her to go immediately, with her sisters, down
+to Brinton, where there was always part of a household and where
+for a few weeks they would manage well enough.&nbsp; The only
+explanation he gave of this desire was that he wanted them out of
+the way.&nbsp; &ldquo;Out of the way of what?&rdquo; she queried,
+since there were to be for the time no preparations in Seymour
+Street.&nbsp; She was willing to take it for out of the way of
+his nerves.</p>
+<p>She never needed urging however to go to Brinton, the dearest
+old house in the world, where the happiest days of her young life
+had been spent and the silent nearness of her mother always
+seemed greatest.&nbsp; She was happy again, with Beatrice and
+Muriel and Miss Flynn, with the air of summer and the haunted
+rooms and her mother&rsquo;s garden and the talking oaks and the
+nightingales.&nbsp; She wrote briefly to her father, giving him,
+as he had requested, an account of things; and he wrote back that
+since she was so contented&mdash;she didn&rsquo;t recognise
+having told him that&mdash;she had better not return to town at
+all.&nbsp; The fag-end of the London season would be unimportant
+to her, and he was getting on very well.&nbsp; He mentioned that
+Godfrey had passed his tests, but, as she knew, there would be a
+tiresome wait before news of results.&nbsp; The poor chap was
+going abroad for a month with young Sherard&mdash;he had earned a
+little rest and a little fun.&nbsp; He went abroad without a word
+to Adela, but in his beautiful little hand he took a chaffing
+leave of Beatrice.&nbsp; The child showed her sister the letter,
+of which she was very proud and which contained no message for
+any one else.&nbsp; This was the worst bitterness of the whole
+crisis for that somebody&mdash;its placing in so strange a light
+the creature in the world whom, after her mother, she had loved
+best.</p>
+<p>Colonel Chart had said he would &ldquo;run down&rdquo; while
+his children were at Brinton, but they heard no more about
+it.&nbsp; He only wrote two or three times to Miss Flynn on
+matters in regard to which Adela was surprised he shouldn&rsquo;t
+have communicated with herself.&nbsp; Muriel accomplished an
+upright little letter to Mrs. Churchley&mdash;her eldest sister
+neither fostered nor discouraged the performance&mdash;to which
+Mrs. Churchley replied, after a fortnight, in a meagre and, as
+Adela thought, illiterate fashion, making no allusion to the
+approach of any closer tie.&nbsp; Evidently the situation had
+changed; the question of the marriage was dropped, at any rate
+for the time.&nbsp; This idea gave our young woman a singular and
+almost intoxicating sense of power; she felt as if she were
+riding a great wave of confidence.&nbsp; She had decided and
+acted&mdash;the greatest could do no more than that.&nbsp; The
+grand thing was to see one&rsquo;s results, and what else was she
+doing?&nbsp; These results were in big rich conspicuous lives;
+the stage was large on which she moved her figures.&nbsp; Such a
+vision was exciting, and as they had the use of a couple of
+ponies at Brinton she worked off her excitement by a long
+gallop.&nbsp; A day or two after this however came news of which
+the effect was to rekindle it.&nbsp; Godfrey had come back, the
+list had been published, he had passed first.&nbsp; These happy
+tidings proceeded from the young man himself; he announced them
+by a telegram to Beatrice, who had never in her life before
+received such a missive and was proportionately inflated.&nbsp;
+Adela reflected that she herself ought to have felt snubbed, but
+she was too happy.&nbsp; They were free again, they were
+themselves, the nightmare of the previous weeks was blown away,
+the unity and dignity of her father&rsquo;s life restored, and,
+to round off her sense of success, Godfrey had achieved his first
+step toward high distinction.&nbsp; She wrote him the next day as
+frankly and affectionately as if there had been no estrangement
+between them, and besides telling him how she rejoiced in his
+triumph begged him in charity to let them know exactly how the
+case stood with regard to Mrs. Churchley.</p>
+<p>Late in the summer afternoon she walked through the park to
+the village with her letter, posted it and came back.&nbsp;
+Suddenly, at one of the turns of the avenue, half-way to the
+house, she saw a young man hover there as if awaiting her&mdash;a
+young man who proved to be Godfrey on his pedestrian progress
+over from the station.&nbsp; He had seen her as he took his short
+cut, and if he had come down to Brinton it wasn&rsquo;t
+apparently to avoid her.&nbsp; There was nevertheless none of the
+joy of his triumph in his face as he came a very few steps to
+meet her; and although, stiffly enough, he let her kiss him and
+say &ldquo;I&rsquo;m so glad&mdash;I&rsquo;m so glad!&rdquo; she
+felt this tolerance as not quite the mere calm of the rising
+diplomatist.&nbsp; He turned toward the house with her and walked
+on a short distance while she uttered the hope that he had come
+to stay some days.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Only till to-morrow morning.&nbsp; They&rsquo;re
+sending me straight to Madrid.&nbsp; I came down to say good-bye;
+there&rsquo;s a fellow bringing my bags.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To Madrid?&nbsp; How awfully nice!&nbsp; And it&rsquo;s
+awfully nice of you to have come,&rdquo; she said as she passed
+her hand into his arm.</p>
+<p>The movement made him stop, and, stopping, he turned on her in
+a flash a face of something more than, suspicion&mdash;of
+passionate reprobation.&nbsp; &ldquo;What I really came
+for&mdash;you might as well know without more delay&mdash;is to
+ask you a question.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;A question?&rdquo;&mdash;she echoed it with a beating
+heart.</p>
+<p>They stood there under the old trees in the lingering light,
+and, young and fine and fair as they both were, formed a complete
+superficial harmony with the peaceful English scene.&nbsp; A near
+view, however, would have shown that Godfrey Chart hadn&rsquo;t
+taken so much trouble only to skim the surface.&nbsp; He looked
+deep into his sister&rsquo;s eyes.&nbsp; &ldquo;What was it you
+said that morning to Mrs. Churchley?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She fixed them on the ground a moment, but at last met his own
+again.&nbsp; &ldquo;If she has told you, why do you
+ask?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She has told me nothing.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve seen for
+myself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What have you seen?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She has broken it off.&nbsp; Everything&rsquo;s
+over.&nbsp; Father&rsquo;s in the depths.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In the depths?&rdquo; the girl quavered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did you think it would make him jolly?&rdquo; he went
+on.</p>
+<p>She had to choose what to say.&nbsp; &ldquo;He&rsquo;ll get
+over it.&nbsp; He&rsquo;ll he glad.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That remains to be seen.&nbsp; You interfered, you
+invented something, you got round her.&nbsp; I insist on knowing
+what you did.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Adela felt that if it was a question of obstinacy there was
+something within her she could count on; in spite of which, while
+she stood looking down again a moment, she said to herself
+&ldquo;I could be dumb and dogged if I chose, but I scorn to
+be.&rdquo;&nbsp; She wasn&rsquo;t ashamed of what she had done,
+but she wanted to be clear.&nbsp; &ldquo;Are you absolutely
+certain it&rsquo;s broken off?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He is, and she is; so that&rsquo;s as good.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What reason has she given?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;None at all&mdash;or half a dozen; it&rsquo;s the same
+thing.&nbsp; She has changed her mind&mdash;she mistook her
+feelings&mdash;she can&rsquo;t part with her independence.&nbsp;
+Moreover he has too many children.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did he tell you this?&rdquo; the girl asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mrs. Churchley told me.&nbsp; She has gone abroad for a
+year.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And she didn&rsquo;t tell you what I said to
+her?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Godfrey showed an impatience.&nbsp; &ldquo;Why should I take
+this trouble if she had?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You might have taken it to make me suffer,&rdquo; said
+Adela.&nbsp; &ldquo;That appears to be what you want to
+do.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, I leave that to you&mdash;it&rsquo;s the good turn
+you&rsquo;ve done me!&rdquo; cried the young man with hot tears
+in his eyes.</p>
+<p>She stared, aghast with the perception that there was some
+dreadful thing she didn&rsquo;t know; but he walked on, dropping
+the question angrily and turning his back to her as if he
+couldn&rsquo;t trust himself.&nbsp; She read his disgust in his
+averted, face, in the way he squared his shoulders and smote the
+ground with his stick, and she hurried after him and presently
+overtook him.&nbsp; She kept by him for a moment in silence; then
+she broke out: &ldquo;What do you mean?&nbsp; What in the world
+have I done to you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She would have helped me.&nbsp; She was all ready to
+help me,&rdquo; Godfrey portentously said.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Helped you in what?&rdquo;&nbsp; She wondered what he
+meant; if he had made debts that he was afraid to confess to his
+father and&mdash;of all horrible things&mdash;had been looking to
+Mrs. Churchley to pay.&nbsp; She turned red with the mere
+apprehension of this and, on the heels of her guess, exulted
+again at having perhaps averted such a shame.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Can&rsquo;t you just see I&rsquo;m in trouble?&nbsp;
+Where are your eyes, your senses, your sympathy, that you talk so
+much about?&nbsp; Haven&rsquo;t you seen these six months that
+I&rsquo;ve a curst worry in my life?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She seized his arm, made him stop, stood looking up at him
+like a frightened little girl.&nbsp; &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the
+matter, Godfrey?&mdash;what <i>is</i> the matter?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve gone against me so&mdash;I could strangle
+you!&rdquo; he growled.&nbsp; This image added nothing to her
+dread; her dread was that he had done some wrong, was stained
+with some guilt.&nbsp; She uttered it to him with clasped hands,
+begging him to tell her the worst; but, still more passionately,
+he cut her short with his own cry: &ldquo;In God&rsquo;s name,
+satisfy me!&nbsp; What infernal thing did you do?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It wasn&rsquo;t infernal&mdash;it was right.&nbsp; I
+told her mamma had been wretched,&rdquo; said Adela.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wretched?&nbsp; You told her such a lie?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It was the only way, and she believed me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wretched how?&mdash;wretched when?&mdash;wretched
+where?&rdquo; the young man stammered.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I told her papa had made her so, and that <i>she</i>
+ought to know it.&nbsp; I told her the question troubled me
+unspeakably, but that I had made up my mind it was my duty to
+initiate her.&rdquo;&nbsp; Adela paused, the light of bravado in
+her face, as if, though struck while the words came with the
+monstrosity of what she had done, she was incapable of abating a
+jot of it.&nbsp; &ldquo;I notified her that he had faults and
+peculiarities that made mamma&rsquo;s life a long worry&mdash;a
+martyrdom that she hid wonderfully from the world, but that we
+saw and that I had often pitied.&nbsp; I told her what they were,
+these faults and peculiarities; I put the dots on the
+i&rsquo;s.&nbsp; I said it wasn&rsquo;t fair to let another
+person marry him without a warning.&nbsp; I warned her; I
+satisfied my conscience.&nbsp; She could do as she liked.&nbsp;
+My responsibility was over.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Godfrey gazed at her; he listened with parted lips,
+incredulous and appalled.&nbsp; &ldquo;You invented such a tissue
+of falsities and calumnies, and you talk about your
+conscience?&nbsp; You stand there in your senses and proclaim
+your crime?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;d have committed any crime that would have
+rescued us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You insult and blacken and ruin your own father?&rdquo;
+Godfrey kept on.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll never know it; she took a vow she
+wouldn&rsquo;t tell him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah I&rsquo;ll he damned if <i>I</i> won&rsquo;t tell
+him!&rdquo; he rang out.</p>
+<p>Adela felt sick at this, but she flamed up to resent the
+treachery, as it struck her, of such a menace.&nbsp; &ldquo;I did
+right&mdash;I did right!&rdquo; she vehemently declared &ldquo;I
+went down on my knees to pray for guidance, and I saved
+mamma&rsquo;s memory from outrage.&nbsp; But if I hadn&rsquo;t,
+if I hadn&rsquo;t&rdquo;&mdash;she faltered an
+instant&mdash;&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not worse than you, and I&rsquo;m
+not so bad, for you&rsquo;ve done something that you&rsquo;re
+ashamed to tell me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He had taken out his watch; he looked at it with quick
+intensity, as if not hearing nor heeding her.&nbsp; Then, his
+calculating eyes raised, he fixed her long enough to exclaim with
+unsurpassable horror and contempt: &ldquo;You raving
+maniac!&rdquo;&nbsp; He turned away from her; he bounded down the
+avenue in the direction from which they had come, and, while she
+watched him, strode away, across the grass, toward the short cut
+to the station.</p>
+<h2>IV</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">His</span> bags, by the time she got home,
+had been brought to the house, but Beatrice and Muriel,
+immediately informed of this, waited for their brother in
+vain.&nbsp; Their sister said nothing to them of her having seen
+him, and she accepted after a little, with a calmness that
+surprised herself, the idea that he had returned to town to
+denounce her.&nbsp; She believed this would make no difference
+now&mdash;she had done what she had done.&nbsp; She had somehow a
+stiff faith in Mrs. Churchley.&nbsp; Once that so considerable
+mass had received its impetus it wouldn&rsquo;t, it
+couldn&rsquo;t pull up.&nbsp; It represented a heavy-footed
+person, incapable of further agility.&nbsp; Adela recognised too
+how well it might have come over her that there were too many
+children.&nbsp; Lastly the girl fortified herself with the
+reflexion, grotesque in the conditions and conducing to prove her
+sense of humour not high, that her father was after all not a man
+to be played with.&nbsp; It seemed to her at any rate that if she
+<i>had</i> baffled his unholy purpose she could bear
+anything&mdash;bear imprisonment and bread and water, bear lashes
+and torture, bear even his lifelong reproach.&nbsp; What she
+could bear least was the wonder of the inconvenience she had
+inflicted on Godfrey.&nbsp; She had time to turn this over, very
+vainly, for a succession of days&mdash;days more numerous than
+she had expected, which passed without bringing her from London
+any summons to come up and take her punishment.&nbsp; She sounded
+the possible, she compared the degrees of the probable; feeling
+however that as a cloistered girl she was poorly equipped for
+speculation.&nbsp; She tried to imagine the calamitous things
+young men might do, and could only feel that such things would
+naturally be connected either with borrowed money or with bad
+women.&nbsp; She became conscious that after all she knew almost
+nothing about either of those interests.&nbsp; The worst woman
+she knew was Mrs. Churchley herself.&nbsp; Meanwhile there was no
+reverberation from Seymour Street&mdash;only a sultry
+silence.</p>
+<p>At Brinton she spent hours in her mother&rsquo;s garden, where
+she had grown up, where she considered that she was training for
+old age, since she meant not to depend on whist.&nbsp; She loved
+the place as, had she been a good Catholic, she would have loved
+the smell of her parish church; and indeed there was in her
+passion for flowers something of the respect of a religion.&nbsp;
+They seemed to her the only things in the world that really
+respected themselves, unless one made an exception for Nutkins,
+who had been in command all through her mother&rsquo;s time, with
+whom she had had a real friendship and who had been affected by
+their pure example.&nbsp; He was the person left in the world
+with whom on the whole she could speak most intimately of the
+dead.&nbsp; They never had to name her together&mdash;they only
+said &ldquo;she&rdquo;; and Nutkins freely conceded that she had
+taught him everything he knew.&nbsp; When Beatrice and Muriel
+said &ldquo;she&rdquo; they referred to Mrs. Churchley.&nbsp;
+Adela had reason to believe she should never marry, and that some
+day she should have about a thousand a year.&nbsp; This made her
+see in the far future a little garden of her own, under a hill,
+full of rare and exquisite things, where she would spend most of
+her old age on her knees with an apron and stout gloves, with a
+pair of shears and a trowel, steeped in the comfort of being
+thought mad.</p>
+<p>One morning ten days after her scene with Godfrey, on coming
+back into the house shortly before lunch, she was met by Miss
+Flynn with the notification that a lady in the drawing-room had
+been waiting for her for some minutes.&nbsp; &ldquo;A lady&rdquo;
+suggested immediately Mrs. Churchley.&nbsp; It came over Adela
+that the form in which her penalty was to descend would be a
+personal explanation with that misdirected woman.&nbsp; The lady
+had given no name, and Miss Flynn hadn&rsquo;t seen Mrs.
+Churchley; nevertheless the governess was certain Adela&rsquo;s
+surmise was wrong.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is she big and dreadful?&rdquo; the girl asked.</p>
+<p>Miss Flynn, who was circumspection itself, took her
+time.&nbsp; &ldquo;She&rsquo;s dreadful, but she&rsquo;s not
+big.&rdquo;&nbsp; She added that she wasn&rsquo;t sure she ought
+to let Adela go in alone; but this young lady took herself
+throughout for a heroine, and it wasn&rsquo;t in a heroine to
+shrink from any encounter.&nbsp; Wasn&rsquo;t she every instant
+in transcendent contact with her mother?&nbsp; The visitor might
+have no connexion whatever with the drama of her father&rsquo;s
+frustrated marriage; but everything to-day for Adela was part of
+that.</p>
+<p>Miss Flynn&rsquo;s description had prepared her for a
+considerable shock, but she wasn&rsquo;t agitated by her first
+glimpse of the person who awaited her.&nbsp; A youngish
+well-dressed woman stood there, and silence was between them
+while they looked at each other.&nbsp; Before either had spoken
+however Adela began to see what Miss Flynn had intended.&nbsp; In
+the light of the drawing-room window the lady was five-and-thirty
+years of age and had vivid yellow hair.&nbsp; She also had a blue
+cloth suit with brass buttons, a stick-up collar like a
+gentleman&rsquo;s, a necktie arranged in a sailor&rsquo;s knot, a
+golden pin in the shape of a little lawn-tennis racket, and
+pearl-grey gloves with big black stitchings.&nbsp; Adela&rsquo;s
+second impression was that she was an actress, and her third that
+no such person had ever before crossed that threshold.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell you what I&rsquo;ve come for,&rdquo;
+said the apparition.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve come to ask you to
+intercede.&rdquo;&nbsp; She wasn&rsquo;t an actress; an actress
+would have had a nicer voice.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;To intercede?&rdquo;&nbsp; Adela was too bewildered to
+ask her to sit down.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;With your father, you know.&nbsp; He doesn&rsquo;t
+know, but he&rsquo;ll have to.&rdquo;&nbsp; Her
+&ldquo;have&rdquo; sounded like &ldquo;&rsquo;ave.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+She explained, with many more such sounds, that she was Mrs.
+Godfrey, that they had been married seven mortal months.&nbsp; If
+Godfrey was going abroad she must go with him, and the only way
+she could go with him would be for his father to do
+something.&nbsp; He was afraid of his father&mdash;that was
+clear; he was afraid even to tell him.&nbsp; What she had come
+down for was to see some other member of the family face to
+face&mdash;&ldquo;fice to fice,&rdquo; Mrs. Godfrey called
+it&mdash;and try if he couldn&rsquo;t be approached by another
+side.&nbsp; If no one else would act then she would just have to
+act herself.&nbsp; The Colonel would have to do
+something&mdash;that was the only way out of it.</p>
+<p>What really happened Adela never quite understood; what seemed
+to be happening was that the room went round and round.&nbsp;
+Through the blur of perception accompanying this effect the sharp
+stabs of her visitor&rsquo;s revelation came to her like the
+words heard by a patient &ldquo;going off&rdquo; under
+ether.&nbsp; She afterwards denied passionately even to herself
+that she had done anything so abject as to faint; but there was a
+lapse in her consciousness on the score of Miss Flynn&rsquo;s
+intervention.&nbsp; This intervention had evidently been active,
+for when they talked the matter over, later in the day, with
+bated breath and infinite dissimulation for the school-room
+quarter, the governess had more lurid truths, and still more, to
+impart than to receive.&nbsp; She was at any rate under the
+impression that she had athletically contended, in the
+drawing-room, with the yellow hair&mdash;this after removing
+Adela from the scene and before inducing Mrs. Godfrey to
+withdraw.&nbsp; Miss Flynn had never known a more thrilling day,
+for all the rest of it too was pervaded with agitations and
+conversations, precautions and alarms.&nbsp; It was given out to
+Beatrice and Muriel that their sister had been taken suddenly
+ill, and the governess ministered to her in her room.&nbsp;
+Indeed Adela had never found herself less at ease, for this time
+she had received a blow that she couldn&rsquo;t return.&nbsp;
+There was nothing to do but to take it, to endure the humiliation
+of her wound.</p>
+<p>At first she declined to take it&mdash;having, as might
+appear, the much more attractive resource of regarding her
+visitant as a mere masquerading person, an impudent
+impostor.&nbsp; On the face of the matter moreover it
+wasn&rsquo;t fair to believe till one heard; and to hear in such
+a case was to hear Godfrey himself.&nbsp; Whatever she had tried
+to imagine about him she hadn&rsquo;t arrived at anything so
+belittling as an idiotic secret marriage with a dyed and painted
+hag.&nbsp; Adela repeated this last word as if it gave her
+comfort; and indeed where everything was so bad fifteen years of
+seniority made the case little worse.&nbsp; Miss Flynn was
+portentous, for Miss Flynn had had it out with the wretch.&nbsp;
+She had cross-questioned her and had not broken her down.&nbsp;
+This was the most uplifted hour of Miss Flynn&rsquo;s life; for
+whereas she usually had to content herself with being humbly and
+gloomily in the right she could now be magnanimously and showily
+so.&nbsp; Her only perplexity was as to what she ought to
+do&mdash;write to Colonel Chart or go up to town to see
+him.&nbsp; She bloomed with alternatives&mdash;she resembled some
+dull garden-path which under a copious downpour has begun to
+flaunt with colour.&nbsp; Toward evening Adela was obliged to
+recognise that her brother&rsquo;s worry, of which he had spoken
+to her, had appeared bad enough to consist even of a low wife,
+and to remember that, so far from its being inconceivable a young
+man in his position should clandestinely take one, she had been
+present, years before, during her mother&rsquo;s lifetime, when
+Lady Molesley declared gaily, over a cup of tea, that this was
+precisely what she expected of her eldest son.&nbsp; The next
+morning it was the worst possibilities that seemed clearest; the
+only thing left with a tatter of dusky comfort being the
+ambiguity of Godfrey&rsquo;s charge that her own action had
+&ldquo;done&rdquo; for him.&nbsp; That was a matter by itself,
+and she racked her brains for a connecting link between Mrs.
+Churchley and Mrs. Godfrey.&nbsp; At last she made up her mind
+that they were related by blood; very likely, though differing in
+fortune, they were cousins or even sisters.&nbsp; But even then
+what did the wretched boy mean?</p>
+<p>Arrested by the unnatural fascination of opportunity, Miss
+Flynn received before lunch a telegram from Colonel
+Chart&mdash;an order for dinner and a vehicle; he and Godfrey
+were to arrive at six o&rsquo;clock.&nbsp; Adela had plenty of
+occupation for the interval, since she was pitying her father
+when she wasn&rsquo;t rejoicing that her mother had gone too soon
+to know.&nbsp; She flattered herself she made out the
+providential reason of that cruelty now.&nbsp; She found time
+however still to wonder for what purpose, given the situation,
+Godfrey was to be brought down.&nbsp; She wasn&rsquo;t
+unconscious indeed that she had little general knowledge of what
+usually was done with young men in that predicament.&nbsp; One
+talked about the situation, but the situation was an abyss.&nbsp;
+She felt this still more when she found, on her father&rsquo;s
+arrival, that nothing apparently was to happen as she had taken
+for granted it would.&nbsp; There was an inviolable hush over the
+whole affair, but no tragedy, no publicity, nothing ugly.&nbsp;
+The tragedy had been in town&mdash;the faces of the two men spoke
+of it in spite of their other perfunctory aspects; and at present
+there was only a family dinner, with Beatrice and Muriel and the
+governess&mdash;with almost a company tone too, the result of the
+desire to avoid publicity.&nbsp; Adela admired her father; she
+knew what he was feeling if Mrs. Godfrey had been at him, and yet
+she saw him positively gallant.&nbsp; He was mildly austere, or
+rather even&mdash;what was it?&mdash;august; just as, coldly
+equivocal, he never looked at his son, so that at moments he
+struck her as almost sick with sadness.&nbsp; Godfrey was equally
+inscrutable and therefore wholly different from what he had been
+as he stood before her in the park.&nbsp; If he was to start on
+his career (with such a wife!&mdash;wouldn&rsquo;t she utterly
+blight it?) he was already professional enough to know how to
+wear a mask.</p>
+<p>Before they rose from table she felt herself wholly
+bewildered, so little were such large causes traceable in their
+effects.&nbsp; She had nerved herself for a great ordeal, but the
+air was as sweet as an anodyne.&nbsp; It was perfectly plain to
+her that her father was deadly sore&mdash;as pathetic as a person
+betrayed.&nbsp; He was broken, but he showed no resentment; there
+was a weight on his heart, but he had lightened it by dressing as
+immaculately as usual for dinner.&nbsp; She asked herself what
+immensity of a row there could have been in town to have left his
+anger so spent.&nbsp; He went through everything, even to sitting
+with his son after dinner.&nbsp; When they came out together he
+invited Beatrice and Muriel to the billiard-room, and as Miss
+Flynn discreetly withdrew Adela was left alone with Godfrey, who
+was completely changed and not now in the least of a rage.&nbsp;
+He was broken too, but not so pathetic as his father.&nbsp; He
+was only very correct and apologetic he said to his sister:
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m awfully sorry <i>you</i> were annoyed&mdash;it
+was something I never dreamed of.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She couldn&rsquo;t think immediately what he meant; then she
+grasped the reference to her extraordinary invader.&nbsp; She was
+uncertain, however, what tone to take; perhaps his father had
+arranged with him that they were to make the best of it.&nbsp;
+But she spoke her own despair in the way she murmured &ldquo;Oh
+Godfrey, Godfrey, is it true?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been the most unutterable donkey&mdash;you
+can say what you like to me.&nbsp; You can&rsquo;t say anything
+worse than I&rsquo;ve said to myself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My brother, my brother!&rdquo;&mdash;his words made her
+wail it out.&nbsp; He hushed her with a movement and she asked:
+&ldquo;What has father said?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He looked very high over her head.&nbsp; &ldquo;He&rsquo;ll
+give her six hundred a year.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah the angel!&rdquo;&mdash;it was too splendid.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;On condition&rdquo;&mdash;Godfrey scarce
+blinked&mdash;&ldquo;she never comes near me.&nbsp; She has
+solemnly promised, and she&rsquo;ll probably leave me alone to
+get the money.&nbsp; If she doesn&rsquo;t&mdash;in
+diplomacy&mdash;I&rsquo;m lost.&rdquo;&nbsp; He had been turning
+his eyes vaguely about, this way and that, to avoid meeting hers;
+but after another instant he gave up the effort and she had the
+miserable confession of his glance.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been
+living in hell.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My brother, my brother!&rdquo; she yearningly
+repeated.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not an idiot; yet for her I&rsquo;ve behaved
+like one.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t ask me&mdash;you mustn&rsquo;t
+know.&nbsp; It was all done in a day, and since then fancy my
+condition; fancy my work in such a torment; fancy my coming
+through at all.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank God you passed!&rdquo; she cried.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;You were wonderful!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;d have shot myself if I hadn&rsquo;t
+been.&nbsp; I had an awful day yesterday with the governor; it
+was late at night before it was over.&nbsp; I leave England next
+week.&nbsp; He brought me down here for it to look well&mdash;so
+that the children shan&rsquo;t know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>He&rsquo;s</i> wonderful too!&rdquo; Adela
+murmured.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Wonderful too!&rdquo; Godfrey echoed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did <i>she</i> tell him?&rdquo; the girl went on.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She came straight to Seymour Street from here.&nbsp;
+She saw him alone first; then he called me in.&nbsp; <i>That</i>
+luxury lasted about an hour.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Poor, poor father!&rdquo; Adela moaned at this; on
+which her brother remained silent.&nbsp; Then after he had
+alluded to it as the scene he had lived in terror of all through
+his cramming, and she had sighed forth again her pity and
+admiration for such a mixture of anxieties and such a triumph of
+talent, she pursued: &ldquo;Have you told him?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Told him what?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What you said you would&mdash;what <i>I</i>
+did.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Godfrey turned away as if at present he had very little
+interest in that inferior tribulation.&nbsp; &ldquo;I was angry
+with you, but I cooled off.&nbsp; I held my tongue.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She clasped her hands.&nbsp; &ldquo;You thought of
+mamma!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh don&rsquo;t speak of mamma!&rdquo; he cried as in
+rueful tenderness.</p>
+<p>It was indeed not a happy moment, and she murmured: &ldquo;No;
+if you <i>had</i> thought of her&mdash;!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This made Godfrey face her again with a small flare in his
+eyes.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh <i>then</i> it didn&rsquo;t prevent.&nbsp;
+I thought that woman really good.&nbsp; I believed in
+her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is she <i>very</i> bad?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shall never mention her to you again,&rdquo; he
+returned with dignity.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You may believe <i>I</i> won&rsquo;t speak of
+her!&nbsp; So father doesn&rsquo;t know?&rdquo; the girl
+added.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Doesn&rsquo;t know what?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That I said what I did to Mrs. Churchley.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He had a momentary pause.&nbsp; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think so,
+but you must find out for yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shall find out,&rdquo; said Adela.&nbsp; &ldquo;But
+what had Mrs. Churchley to do with it?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;With <i>my</i> misery?&nbsp; I told her.&nbsp; I had to
+tell some one.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why didn&rsquo;t you tell me?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He appeared&mdash;though but after an instant&mdash;to know
+exactly why.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh you take things so beastly
+hard&mdash;you make such rows.&rdquo;&nbsp; Adela covered her
+face with her hands and he went on: &ldquo;What I wanted was
+comfort&mdash;not to be lashed up.&nbsp; I thought I should go
+mad.&nbsp; I wanted Mrs. Churchley to break it to father, to
+intercede for me and help him to meet it.&nbsp; She was awfully
+kind to me, she listened and she understood; she could fancy how
+it had happened.&nbsp; Without her I shouldn&rsquo;t have pulled
+through.&nbsp; She liked me, you know,&rdquo; he further
+explained, and as if it were quite worth mentioning&mdash;all the
+more that it was pleasant to him.&nbsp; &ldquo;She said
+she&rsquo;d do what she could for me.&nbsp; She was full of
+sympathy and resource.&nbsp; I really leaned on her.&nbsp; But
+when <i>you</i> cut in of course it spoiled everything.&nbsp;
+That&rsquo;s why I was so furious with you.&nbsp; She
+couldn&rsquo;t do anything then.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Adela dropped her hands, staring; she felt she had walked in
+darkness.&nbsp; &ldquo;So that he had to meet it
+alone?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Dame</i>!&rdquo; said Godfrey, who had got up his
+French tremendously.</p>
+<p>Muriel came to the door to say papa wished the two others to
+join them, and the next day Godfrey returned to town.&nbsp; His
+father remained at Brinton, without an intermission, the rest of
+the summer and the whole of the autumn, and Adela had a chance to
+find out, as she had said, whether he knew she had
+interfered.&nbsp; But in spite of her chance she never found
+out.&nbsp; He knew Mrs. Churchley had thrown him over and he knew
+his daughter rejoiced in it, but he appeared not to have divined
+the relation between the two facts.&nbsp; It was strange that one
+of the matters he was clearest about&mdash;Adela&rsquo;s secret
+triumph&mdash;should have been just the thing which from this
+time on justified less and less such a confidence.&nbsp; She was
+too sorry for him to be consistently glad.&nbsp; She watched his
+attempts to wind himself up on the subject of shorthorns and
+drainage, and she favoured to the utmost of her ability his
+intermittent disposition to make a figure in orchids.&nbsp; She
+wondered whether they mightn&rsquo;t have a few people at
+Brinton; but when she mentioned the idea he asked what in the
+world there would be to attract them.&nbsp; It was a confoundedly
+stupid house, he remarked&mdash;with all respect to <i>her</i>
+cleverness.&nbsp; Beatrice and Muriel were mystified; the
+prospect of going out immensely had faded so utterly away.&nbsp;
+They were apparently not to go out at all.&nbsp; Colonel Chart
+was aimless and bored; he paced up and down and went back to
+smoking, which was bad for him, and looked drearily out of
+windows as if on the bare chance that something might
+arrive.&nbsp; Did he expect Mrs. Churchley to arrive, did he
+expect her to relent on finding she couldn&rsquo;t live without
+him?&nbsp; It was Adela&rsquo;s belief that she gave no
+sign.&nbsp; But the girl thought it really remarkable of her not
+to have betrayed her ingenious young visitor.&nbsp; Adela&rsquo;s
+judgement of human nature was perhaps harsh, but she believed
+that most women, given the various facts, wouldn&rsquo;t have
+been so forbearing.&nbsp; This lady&rsquo;s conception of the
+point of honour placed her there in a finer and purer light than
+had at all originally promised to shine about her.</p>
+<p>She meanwhile herself could well judge how heavy her father
+found the burden of Godfrey&rsquo;s folly and how he was
+incommoded at having to pay the horrible woman six hundred a
+year.&nbsp; Doubtless he was having dreadful letters from her;
+doubtless she threatened them all with hideous exposure.&nbsp; If
+the matter should be bruited Godfrey&rsquo;s prospects would
+collapse on the spot.&nbsp; He thought Madrid very charming and
+curious, but Mrs. Godfrey was in England, so that his father had
+to face the music.&nbsp; Adela took a dolorous comfort in her
+mother&rsquo;s being out of that&mdash;it would have killed her;
+but this didn&rsquo;t blind her to the fact that the comfort for
+her father would perhaps have been greater if he had had some one
+to talk to about his trouble.&nbsp; He never dreamed of doing so
+to her, and she felt she couldn&rsquo;t ask him.&nbsp; In the
+family life he wanted utter silence about it.&nbsp; Early in the
+winter he went abroad for ten weeks, leaving her with her sisters
+in the country, where it was not to be denied that at this time
+existence had very little savour.&nbsp; She half expected her
+sister-in-law would again descend on her; but the fear
+wasn&rsquo;t justified, and the quietude of the awful creature
+seemed really to vibrate with the ring of gold-pieces.&nbsp;
+There were sure to be extras.&nbsp; Adela winced at the
+extras.&nbsp; Colonel Chart went to Paris and to Monte Carlo and
+then to Madrid to see his boy.&nbsp; His daughter had the vision
+of his perhaps meeting Mrs. Churchley somewhere, since, if she
+had gone for a year, she would still be on the Continent.&nbsp;
+If he should meet her perhaps the affair would come on again: she
+caught herself musing over this.&nbsp; But he brought back no
+such appearance, and, seeing him after an interval, she was
+struck afresh with his jilted and wasted air.&nbsp; She
+didn&rsquo;t like it&mdash;she resented it.&nbsp; A little more
+and she would have said that that was no way to treat so faithful
+a man.</p>
+<p>They all went up to town in March, and on one of the first
+days of April she saw Mrs. Churchley in the Park.&nbsp; She
+herself remained apparently invisible to that lady&mdash;she
+herself and Beatrice and Muriel, who sat with her in their
+mother&rsquo;s old bottle-green landau.&nbsp; Mrs. Churchley,
+perched higher than ever, rode by without a recognition; but this
+didn&rsquo;t prevent Adela&rsquo;s going to her before the month
+was over.&nbsp; As on her great previous occasion she went in the
+morning, and she again had the good fortune to be admitted.&nbsp;
+This time, however, her visit was shorter, and a week after
+making it&mdash;the week was a desolation&mdash;she addressed to
+her brother at Madrid a letter containing these words: &ldquo;I
+could endure it no longer&mdash;I confessed and retracted; I
+explained to her as well as I could the falsity of what I said to
+her ten months ago and the benighted purity of my motives for
+saying it.&nbsp; I besought her to regard it as unsaid, to
+forgive me, not to despise me too much, to take pity on poor
+<i>perfect</i> papa and come back to him.&nbsp; She was more
+good-natured than you might have expected&mdash;indeed she
+laughed extravagantly.&nbsp; She had never believed me&mdash;it
+was too absurd; she had only, at the time, disliked me.&nbsp; She
+found me utterly false&mdash;she was very frank with me about
+this&mdash;and she told papa she really thought me horrid.&nbsp;
+She said she could never live with such a girl, and as I would
+certainly never marry I must be sent away&mdash;in short she
+quite loathed me.&nbsp; Papa defended me, he refused to sacrifice
+me, and this led practically to their rupture.&nbsp; Papa gave
+her up, as it were, for <i>me</i>.&nbsp; Fancy the angel, and
+fancy what I must try to be to him for the rest of his
+life!&nbsp; Mrs. Churchley can never come back&mdash;she&rsquo;s
+going to marry Lord Dovedale.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MARRIAGES***</p>
+<pre>
+
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+from the 1922 Macmillan and Co. edition.  Proofed by Elizabeth
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+
+
+The Marriages
+
+by Henry James
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+
+"Won't you stay a little longer?" the hostess asked while she held
+the girl's hand and smiled.  "It's too early for every one to go--
+it's too absurd."  Mrs. Churchley inclined her head to one side and
+looked gracious; she flourished about her face, in a vaguely
+protecting sheltering way, an enormous fan of red feathers.
+Everything in her composition, for Adela Chart, was enormous.  She
+had big eyes, big teeth, big shoulders, big hands, big rings and
+bracelets, big jewels of every sort and many of them.  The train of
+her crimson dress was longer than any other; her house was huge; her
+drawing-room, especially now that the company had left it, looked
+vast, and it offered to the girl's eyes a collection of the largest
+sofas and chairs, pictures, mirrors, clocks, that she had ever
+beheld.  Was Mrs. Churchley's fortune also large, to account for so
+many immensities?  Of this Adela could know nothing, but it struck
+her, while she smiled sweetly back at their entertainer, that she had
+better try to find out.  Mrs. Churchley had at least a high-hung
+carriage drawn by the tallest horses, and in the Row she was to be
+seen perched on a mighty hunter.  She was high and extensive herself,
+though not exactly fat; her bones were big, her limbs were long, and
+her loud hurrying voice resembled the bell of a steamboat.  While she
+spoke to his daughter she had the air of hiding from Colonel Chart, a
+little shyly, behind the wide ostrich fan.  But Colonel Chart was not
+a man to be either ignored or eluded.
+
+"Of course every one's going on to something else," he said.  "I
+believe there are a lot of things to-night."
+
+"And where are YOU going?" Mrs. Churchley asked, dropping her fan and
+turning her bright hard eyes on the Colonel.
+
+"Oh I don't do that sort of thing!"--he used a tone of familiar
+resentment that fell with a certain effect on his daughter's ear.
+She saw in it that he thought Mrs. Churchley might have done him a
+little more justice.  But what made the honest soul suppose her a
+person to look to for a perception of fine shades?  Indeed the shade
+was one it might have been a little difficult to seize--the
+difference between "going on" and coming to a dinner of twenty
+people.  The pair were in mourning; the second year had maintained it
+for Adela, but the Colonel hadn't objected to dining with Mrs.
+Churchley, any more than he had objected at Easter to going down to
+the Millwards', where he had met her and where the girl had her
+reasons for believing him to have known he should meet her.  Adela
+wasn't clear about the occasion of their original meeting, to which a
+certain mystery attached.  In Mrs. Churchley's exclamation now there
+was the fullest concurrence in Colonel Chart's idea; she didn't say
+"Ah yes, dear friend, I understand!" but this was the note of
+sympathy she plainly wished to sound.  It immediately made Adela say
+to her "Surely you must be going on somewhere yourself."
+
+"Yes, you must have a lot of places," the Colonel concurred, while
+his view of her shining raiment had an invidious directness.  Adela
+could read the tacit implication:  "You're not in sorrow, in
+desolation."
+
+Mrs. Churchley turned away from her at this and just waited before
+answering.  The red fan was up again, and this time it sheltered her
+from Adela.  "I'll give everything up--for YOU," were the words that
+issued from behind it.  "DO stay a little.  I always think this is
+such a nice hour.  One can really talk," Mrs. Churchley went on.  The
+Colonel laughed; he said it wasn't fair.  But their hostess pressed
+his daughter.  "Do sit down; it's the only time to have any talk."
+The girl saw her father sit down, but she wandered away, turning her
+back and pretending to look at a picture.  She was so far from
+agreeing with Mrs. Churchley that it was an hour she particularly
+disliked.  She was conscious of the queerness, the shyness, in
+London, of the gregarious flight of guests after a dinner, the
+general sauve qui peut and panic fear of being left with the host and
+hostess.  But personally she always felt the contagion, always
+conformed to the rush.  Besides, she knew herself turn red now,
+flushed with a conviction that had come over her and that she wished
+not to show.
+
+Her father sat down on one of the big sofas with Mrs. Churchley;
+fortunately he was also a person with a presence that could hold its
+own.  Adela didn't care to sit and watch them while they made love,
+as she crudely imaged it, and she cared still less to join in their
+strange commerce.  She wandered further away, went into another of
+the bright "handsome," rather nude rooms--they were like women
+dressed for a ball--where the displaced chairs, at awkward angles to
+each other, seemed to retain the attitudes of bored talkers.  Her
+heart beat as she had seldom known it, but she continued to make a
+pretence of looking at the pictures on the walls and the ornaments on
+the tables, while she hoped that, as she preferred it, it would be
+also the course her father would like best.  She hoped "awfully," as
+she would have said, that he wouldn't think her rude.  She was a
+person of courage, and he was a kind, an intensely good-natured man;
+nevertheless she went in some fear of him.  At home it had always
+been a religion with them to be nice to the people he liked.  How, in
+the old days, her mother, her incomparable mother, so clever, so
+unerring, so perfect, how in the precious days her mother had
+practised that art!  Oh her mother, her irrecoverable mother!  One of
+the pictures she was looking at swam before her eyes.  Mrs.
+Churchley, in the natural course, would have begun immediately to
+climb staircases.  Adela could see the high bony shoulders and the
+long crimson tail and the universal coruscating nod wriggle their
+horribly practical way through the rest of the night.  Therefore she
+MUST have had her reasons for detaining them.  There were mothers who
+thought every one wanted to marry their eldest son, and the girl
+sought to be clear as to whether she herself belonged to the class of
+daughters who thought every one wanted to marry their father.  Her
+companions left her alone; and though she didn't want to be near them
+it angered her that Mrs. Churchley didn't call her.  That proved she
+was conscious of the situation.  She would have called her, only
+Colonel Chart had perhaps dreadfully murmured "Don't, love, don't."
+This proved he also was conscious.  The time was really not long--ten
+minutes at the most elapsed--when he cried out gaily, pleasantly, as
+if with a small jocular reproach, "I say, Adela, we must release this
+dear lady!"  He spoke of course as if it had been Adela's fault that
+they lingered.  When they took leave she gave Mrs. Churchley, without
+intention and without defiance, but from the simple sincerity of her
+pain, a longer look into the eyes than she had ever given her before.
+Mrs. Churchley's onyx pupils reflected the question as distant dark
+windows reflect the sunset; they seemed to say:  "Yes, I AM, if
+that's what you want to know!"
+
+What made the case worse, what made the girl more sure, was the
+silence preserved by her companion in the brougham on their way home.
+They rolled along in the June darkness from Prince's Gate to Seymour
+Street, each looking out of a window in conscious prudence; watching
+but not seeing the hurry of the London night, the flash of lamps, the
+quick roll on the wood of hansoms and other broughams.  Adela had
+expected her father would say something about Mrs. Churchley; but
+when he said nothing it affected her, very oddly, still more as if he
+had spoken.  In Seymour Street he asked the footman if Mr.  Godfrey
+had come in, to which the servant replied that he had come in early
+and gone straight to his room.  Adela had gathered as much, without
+saying so, from a lighted window on the second floor; but she
+contributed no remark to the question.  At the foot of the stairs her
+father halted as if he had something on his mind; but what it
+amounted to seemed only the dry "Good-night" with which he presently
+ascended.  It was the first time since her mother's death that he had
+bidden her good-night without kissing her.  They were a kissing
+family, and after that dire event the habit had taken a fresh spring.
+She had left behind her such a general passion of regret that in
+kissing each other they felt themselves a little to be kissing her.
+Now, as, standing in the hall, with the stiff watching footman--she
+could have said to him angrily "Go away!"--planted near her, she
+looked with unspeakable pain at her father's back while he mounted,
+the effect was of his having withheld from another and a still more
+slighted cheek the touch of his lips.
+
+He was going to his room, and after a moment she heard his door
+close.  Then she said to the servant "Shut up the house"--she tried
+to do everything her mother had done, to be a little of what she had
+been, conscious only of falling woefully short--and took her own way
+upstairs.  After she had reached her room she waited, listening,
+shaken by the apprehension that she should hear her father come out
+again and go up to Godfrey.  He would go up to tell him, to have it
+over without delay, precisely because it would be so difficult.  She
+asked herself indeed why he should tell Godfrey when he hadn't taken
+the occasion--their drive home being an occasion--to tell herself.
+However, she wanted no announcing, no telling; there was such a
+horrible clearness in her mind that what she now waited for was only
+to be sure her father wouldn't proceed as she had imagined.  At the
+end of the minutes she saw this particular danger was over, upon
+which she came out and made her own way to her brother.  Exactly what
+she wanted to say to him first, if their parent counted on the boy's
+greater indulgence, and before he could say anything, was:  "Don't
+forgive him; don't, don't!"
+
+He was to go up for an examination, poor lad, and during these weeks
+his lamp burned till the small hours.  It was for the Foreign Office,
+and there was to be some frightful number of competitors; but Adela
+had great hopes of him--she believed so in his talents and saw with
+pity how hard he worked.  This would have made her spare him, not
+trouble his night, his scanty rest, if anything less dreadful had
+been at stake.  It was a blessing however that one could count on his
+coolness, young as he was--his bright good-looking discretion, the
+thing that already made him half a man of the world.  Moreover he was
+the one who would care most.  If Basil was the eldest son--he had as
+a matter of course gone into the army and was in India, on the staff,
+by good luck, of a governor-general--it was exactly this that would
+make him comparatively indifferent.  His life was elsewhere, and his
+father and he had been in a measure military comrades, so that he
+would be deterred by a certain delicacy from protesting; he wouldn't
+have liked any such protest in an affair of HIS.  Beatrice and Muriel
+would care, but they were too young to speak, and this was just why
+her own responsibility was so great.
+
+Godfrey was in working-gear--shirt and trousers and slippers and a
+beautiful silk jacket.  His room felt hot, though a window was open
+to the summer night; the lamp on the table shed its studious light
+over a formidable heap of text-books and papers, the bed moreover
+showing how he had flung himself down to think out a problem.  As
+soon as she got in she began.  "Father's going to marry Mrs.
+Churchley, you know."
+
+She saw his poor pink face turn pale.  "How do you know?"
+
+"I've seen with my eyes.  We've been dining there--we've just come
+home.  He's in love with her.  She's in love with HIM.  They'll
+arrange it."
+
+"Oh I say!" Godfrey exclaimed, incredulous.
+
+"He will, he will, he will!" cried the girl; and with it she burst
+into tears.
+
+Godfrey, who had a cigarette in his hand, lighted it at one of the
+candles on the mantelpiece as if he were embarrassed.  As Adela, who
+had dropped into his armchair, continued to sob, he said after a
+moment:  "He oughtn't to--he oughtn't to."
+
+"Oh think of mamma--think of mamma!" she wailed almost louder than
+was safe.
+
+"Yes, he ought to think of mamma."  With which Godfrey looked at the
+tip of his cigarette.
+
+"To such a woman as that--after HER!"
+
+"Dear old mamma!" said Godfrey while he smoked.
+
+Adela rose again, drying her eyes.  "It's like an insult to her; it's
+as if he denied her."  Now that she spoke of it she felt herself rise
+to a height.  "He rubs out at a stroke all the years of their
+happiness."
+
+"They were awfully happy," Godfrey agreed.
+
+"Think what she was--think how no one else will ever again be like
+her!" the girl went on.
+
+"I suppose he's not very happy now," her brother vaguely contributed.
+
+"Of course he isn't, any more than you and I are; and it's dreadful
+of him to want to be."
+
+"Well, don't make yourself miserable till you're sure," the young man
+said.
+
+But Adela showed him confidently that she WAS sure, from the way the
+pair had behaved together and from her father's attitude on the drive
+home.  If Godfrey had been there he would have seen everything; it
+couldn't be explained, but he would have felt.  When he asked at what
+moment the girl had first had her suspicion she replied that it had
+all come at once, that evening; or that at least she had had no
+conscious fear till then.  There had been signs for two or three
+weeks, but she hadn't understood them--ever since the day Mrs.
+Churchley had dined in Seymour Street.  Adela had on that occasion
+thought it odd her father should have wished to invite her, given the
+quiet way they were living; she was a person they knew so little.  He
+had said something about her having been very civil to him, and that
+evening, already, she had guessed that he must have frequented their
+portentous guest herself more than there had been signs of.  To-night
+it had come to her clearly that he would have called on her every day
+since the time of her dining with them; every afternoon about the
+hour he was ostensibly at his club.  Mrs. Churchley WAS his club--she
+was for all the world just like one.  At this Godfrey laughed; he
+wanted to know what his sister knew about clubs.  She was slightly
+disappointed in his laugh, even wounded by it, but she knew perfectly
+what she meant:  she meant that Mrs. Churchley was public and florid,
+promiscuous and mannish.
+
+"Oh I daresay she's all right," he said as if he wanted to get on
+with his work.  He looked at the clock on the mantel-shelf; he would
+have to put in another hour.
+
+"All right to come and take darling mamma's place--to sit where SHE
+used to sit, to lay her horrible hands on HER things?"  Adela was
+appalled--all the more that she hadn't expected it--at her brother's
+apparent acceptance of such a prospect.
+
+He coloured; there was something in her passionate piety that
+scorched him.  She glared at him with tragic eyes--he might have
+profaned an altar.  "Oh I mean that nothing will come of it."
+
+"Not if we do our duty," said Adela.  And then as he looked as if he
+hadn't an idea of what that could be:  "You must speak to him--tell
+him how we feel; that we shall never forgive him, that we can't
+endure it."
+
+"He'll think I'm cheeky," her brother returned, looking down at his
+papers with his back to her and his hands in his pockets.
+
+"Cheeky to plead for HER memory?"
+
+"He'll say it's none of my business."
+
+"Then you believe he'll do it?" cried the girl.
+
+"Not a bit.  Go to bed!"
+
+"I'LL speak to him"--she had turned as pale as a young priestess.
+
+"Don't cry out till you're hurt; wait till he speaks to YOU."
+
+"He won't, he won't!" she declared.  "He'll do it without telling
+us."
+
+Her brother had faced round to her again; he started a little at
+this, and again, at one of the candles, lighted his cigarette, which
+had gone out.  She looked at him a moment; then he said something
+that surprised her.  "Is Mrs. Churchley very rich?"
+
+"I haven't the least idea.  What on earth has that to do with it?"
+
+Godfrey puffed his cigarette.  "Does she live as if she were?"
+
+"She has a lot of hideous showy things."
+
+"Well, we must keep our eyes open," he concluded.  "And now you must
+let me get on."  He kissed his visitor as if to make up for
+dismissing her, or for his failure to take fire; and she held him a
+moment, burying her head on his shoulder.
+
+A wave of emotion surged through her, and again she quavered out:
+"Ah why did she leave us?  Why did she leave us?"
+
+"Yes, why indeed?" the young man sighed, disengaging himself with a
+movement of oppression.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+
+Adela was so far right as that by the end of the week, though she
+remained certain, her father had still not made the announcement she
+dreaded.  What convinced her was the sense of her changed relations
+with him--of there being between them something unexpressed,
+something she was aware of as she would have been of an open wound.
+When she spoke of this to Godfrey he said the change was of her own
+making--also that she was cruelly unjust to the governor.  She
+suffered even more from her brother's unexpected perversity; she had
+had so different a theory about him that her disappointment was
+almost an humiliation and she needed all her fortitude to pitch her
+faith lower.  She wondered what had happened to him and why he so
+failed her.  She would have trusted him to feel right about anything,
+above all about such a question.  Their worship of their mother's
+memory, their recognition of her sacred place in their past, her
+exquisite influence in their father's life, his fortune, his career,
+in the whole history of the family and welfare of the house--
+accomplished clever gentle good beautiful and capable as she had
+been, a woman whose quiet distinction was universally admired, so
+that on her death one of the Princesses, the most august of her
+friends, had written Adela such a note about her as princesses were
+understood very seldom to write:  their hushed tenderness over all
+this was like a religion, and was also an attributive honour, to fall
+away from which was a form of treachery.  This wasn't the way people
+usually felt in London, she knew; but strenuous ardent observant girl
+as she was, with secrecies of sentiment and dim originalities of
+attitude, she had already made up her mind that London was no
+treasure-house of delicacies.  Remembrance there was hammered thin--
+to be faithful was to make society gape.  The patient dead were
+sacrificed; they had no shrines, for people were literally ashamed of
+mourning.  When they had hustled all sensibility out of their lives
+they invented the fiction that they felt too much to utter.  Adela
+said nothing to her sisters; this reticence was part of the virtue it
+was her idea to practise for them.  SHE was to be their mother, a
+direct deputy and representative.  Before the vision of that other
+woman parading in such a character she felt capable of ingenuities,
+of deep diplomacies.  The essence of these indeed was just
+tremulously to watch her father.  Five days after they had dined
+together at Mrs. Churchley's he asked her if she had been to see that
+lady.
+
+"No indeed, why should I?" Adela knew that he knew she hadn't been,
+since Mrs. Churchley would have told him.
+
+"Don't you call on people after you dine with them?" said Colonel
+Chart.
+
+"Yes, in the course of time.  I don't rush off within the week."
+
+Her father looked at her, and his eyes were colder than she had ever
+seen them, which was probably, she reflected, just the way hers
+appeared to himself.  "Then you'll please rush off to-morrow.  She's
+to dine with us on the 12th, and I shall expect your sisters to come
+down."
+
+Adela stared.  "To a dinner-party?"
+
+"It's not to be a dinner-party.  I want them to know Mrs. Churchley."
+
+"Is there to be nobody else?"
+
+"Godfrey of course.  A family party," he said with an assurance
+before which she turned cold.
+
+The girl asked her brother that evening if THAT wasn't tantamount to
+an announcement.  He looked at her queerly and then said:  "I'VE been
+to see her."
+
+"What on earth did you do that for?"
+
+"Father told me he wished it."
+
+"Then he HAS told you?"
+
+"Told me what?" Godfrey asked while her heart sank with the sense of
+his making difficulties for her.
+
+"That they're engaged, of course.  What else can all this mean?"
+
+"He didn't tell me that, but I like her."
+
+"LIKE her!" the girl shrieked.
+
+"She's very kind, very good."
+
+"To thrust herself upon us when we hate her?  Is that what you call
+kind?  Is that what you call decent?"
+
+"Oh _I_ don't hate her"--and he turned away as if she bored him.
+
+She called the next day on Mrs. Churchley, designing to break out
+somehow, to plead, to appeal--"Oh spare us! have mercy on us! let him
+alone! go away!"  But that wasn't easy when they were face to face.
+Mrs. Churchley had every intention of getting, as she would have
+said--she was perpetually using the expression--into touch; but her
+good intentions were as depressing as a tailor's misfits.  She could
+never understand that they had no place for her vulgar charity, that
+their life was filled with a fragrance of perfection for which she
+had no sense fine enough.  She was as undomestic as a shop-front and
+as out of tune as a parrot.  She would either make them live in the
+streets or bring the streets into their life--it was the same thing.
+She had evidently never read a book, and she used intonations that
+Adela had never heard, as if she had been an Australian or an
+American.  She understood everything in a vulgar sense; speaking of
+Godfrey's visit to her and praising him according to her idea, saying
+horrid things about him--that he was awfully good-looking, a perfect
+gentleman, the kind she liked.  How could her father, who was after
+all in everything else such a dear, listen to a woman, or endure her,
+who thought she pleased him when she called the son of his dead wife
+a perfect gentleman?  What would he have been, pray?  Much she knew
+about what any of them were! When she told Adela she wanted her to
+like her the girl thought for an instant her opportunity had come--
+the chance to plead with her and beg her off.  But she presented such
+an impenetrable surface that it would have been like giving a message
+to a varnished door.  She wasn't a woman, said Adela; she was an
+address.
+
+When she dined in Seymour Street the "children," as the girl called
+the others, including Godfrey, liked her.  Beatrice and Muriel stared
+shyly and silently at the wonders of her apparel (she was brutally
+over-dressed) without of course guessing the danger that tainted the
+air.  They supposed her in their innocence to be amusing, and they
+didn't know, any more than she did herself, how she patronised them.
+When she was upstairs with them after dinner Adela could see her look
+round the room at the things she meant to alter--their mother's
+things, not a bit like her own and not good enough for her.  After a
+quarter of an hour of this our young lady felt sure she was deciding
+that Seymour Street wouldn't do at all, the dear old home that had
+done for their mother those twenty years.  Was she plotting to
+transport them all to her horrible Prince's Gate?  Of one thing at
+any rate Adela was certain:  her father, at that moment alone in the
+dining-room with Godfrey, pretending to drink another glass of wine
+to make time, was coming to the point, was telling the news.  When
+they reappeared they both, to her eyes, looked unnatural:  the news
+had been told.
+
+She had it from Godfrey before Mrs. Churchley left the house, when,
+after a brief interval, he followed her out of the drawing-room on
+her taking her sisters to bed.  She was waiting for him at the door
+of her room.  Her father was then alone with his fiancee--the word
+was grotesque to Adela; it was already as if the place were her home.
+
+"What did you say to him?" our young woman asked when her brother had
+told her.
+
+"I said nothing."  Then he added, colouring--the expression of her
+face was such--"There was nothing to say."
+
+"Is that how it strikes you?"--and she stared at the lamp.
+
+"He asked me to speak to her," Godfrey went on.
+
+"In what hideous sense?"
+
+"To tell her I was glad."
+
+"And did you?" Adela panted.
+
+"I don't know.  I said something.  She kissed me."
+
+"Oh how COULD you?" shuddered the girl, who covered her face with her
+hands.
+
+"He says she's very rich," her brother returned.
+
+"Is that why you kissed her?"
+
+"I didn't kiss her.  Good-night."  And the young man, turning his
+back, went out.
+
+When he had gone Adela locked herself in as with the fear she should
+be overtaken or invaded, and during a sleepless feverish memorable
+night she took counsel of her uncompromising spirit.  She saw things
+as they were, in all the indignity of life.  The levity, the mockery,
+the infidelity, the ugliness, lay as plain as a map before her; it
+was a world of gross practical jokes, a world pour rire; but she
+cried about it all the same.  The morning dawned early, or rather it
+seemed to her there had been no night, nothing but a sickly creeping
+day.  But by the time she heard the house stirring again she had
+determined what to do.  When she came down to the breakfast-room her
+father was already in his place with newspapers and letters; and she
+expected the first words he would utter to be a rebuke to her for
+having disappeared the night before without taking leave of Mrs.
+Churchley.  Then she saw he wished to be intensely kind, to make
+every allowance, to conciliate and console her.  He knew she had
+heard from Godfrey, and he got up and kissed her.  He told her as
+quickly as possible, to have it over, stammering a little, with an
+"I've a piece of news for you that will probably shock you," yet
+looking even exaggeratedly grave and rather pompous, to inspire the
+respect he didn't deserve.  When he kissed her she melted, she burst
+into tears.  He held her against him, kissing her again and again,
+saying tenderly "Yes, yes, I know, I know."  But he didn't know else
+he couldn't have done it.  Beatrice and Muriel came in, frightened
+when they saw her crying, and still more scared when she turned to
+them with words and an air that were terrible in their comfortable
+little lives:  "Papa's going to be married; he's going to marry Mrs.
+Churchley!"  After staring a moment and seeing their father look as
+strange, on his side, as Adela, though in a different way, the
+children also began to cry, so that when the servants arrived with
+tea and boiled eggs these functionaries were greatly embarrassed with
+their burden, not knowing whether to come in or hang back.  They all
+scraped together a decorum, and as soon as the things had been put on
+table the Colonel banished the men with a glance.  Then he made a
+little affectionate speech to Beatrice and Muriel, in which he
+described Mrs. Churchley as the kindest, the most delightful of
+women, only wanting to make them happy, only wanting to make HIM
+happy, and convinced that he would be if they were and that they
+would be if he was.
+
+"What do such words mean?" Adela asked herself.  She declared
+privately that they meant nothing, but she was silent, and every one
+was silent, on account of the advent of Miss Flynn the governess,
+before whom Colonel Chart preferred not to discuss the situation.
+Adela recognised on the spot that if things were to go as he wished
+his children would practically never again be alone with him.  He
+would spend all his time with Mrs. Churchley till they were married,
+and then Mrs. Churchley would spend all her time with him.  Adela was
+ashamed of him, and that was horrible--all the more that every one
+else would be, all his other friends, every one who had known her
+mother.  But the public dishonour to that high memory shouldn't be
+enacted; he shouldn't do as he wished.
+
+After breakfast her father remarked to her that it would give him
+pleasure if in a day or two she would take her sisters to see their
+friend, and she replied that he should be obeyed.  He held her hand a
+moment, looking at her with an argument in his eyes which presently
+hardened into sternness.  He wanted to know that she forgave him, but
+also wanted to assure her that he expected her to mind what she did,
+to go straight.  She turned away her eyes; she was indeed ashamed of
+him.
+
+She waited three days and then conveyed her sisters to the repaire,
+as she would have been ready to term it, of the lioness.  That queen
+of beasts was surrounded with callers, as Adela knew she would be; it
+was her "day" and the occasion the girl preferred.  Before this she
+had spent all her time with her companions, talking to them about
+their mother, playing on their memory of her, making them cry and
+making them laugh, reminding them of blest hours of their early
+childhood, telling them anecdotes of her own.  None the less she
+confided to them that she believed there was no harm at all in Mrs.
+Churchley, and that when the time should come she would probably take
+them out immensely.  She saw with smothered irritation that they
+enjoyed their visit at Prince's Gate; they had never been at anything
+so "grown-up," nor seen so many smart bonnets and brilliant
+complexions.  Moreover they were considered with interest, quite as
+if, being minor elements, yet perceptible ones, of Mrs. Churchley's
+new life, they had been described in advance and were the heroines of
+the occasion.  There were so many ladies present that this personage
+didn't talk to them much; she only called them her "chicks" and asked
+them to hand about tea-cups and bread and butter.  All of which was
+highly agreeable and indeed intensely exciting to Beatrice and
+Muriel, who had little round red spots in THEIR cheeks when they came
+away.  Adela quivered with the sense that her mother's children were
+now Mrs. Churchley's "chicks" and a part of the furniture of Mrs.
+Churchley's dreadful consciousness.
+
+It was one thing to have made up her mind, however; it was another
+thing to make her attempt.  It was when she learned from Godfrey that
+the day was fixed, the 20th of July, only six weeks removed, that she
+felt the importance of prompt action.  She learned everything from
+Godfrey now, having decided it would be hypocrisy to question her
+father.  Even her silence was hypocritical, but she couldn't weep and
+wail.  Her father showed extreme tact; taking no notice of her
+detachment, treating it as a moment of bouderie he was bound to allow
+her and that would pout itself away.  She debated much as to whether
+she should take Godfrey into her confidence; she would have done so
+without hesitation if he hadn't disappointed her.  He was so little
+what she might have expected, and so perversely preoccupied that she
+could explain it only by the high pressure at which he was living,
+his anxiety about his "exam."  He was in a fidget, in a fever,
+putting on a spurt to come in first; sceptical moreover about his
+success and cynical about everything else.  He appeared to agree to
+the general axiom that they didn't want a strange woman thrust into
+their life, but he found Mrs. Churchley "very jolly as a person to
+know."  He had been to see her by himself--he had been to see her
+three times.  He in fact gave it out that he would make the most of
+her now; he should probably be so little in Seymour Street after
+these days.  What Adela at last determined to give him was her
+assurance that the marriage would never take place.  When he asked
+what she meant and who was to prevent it she replied that the
+interesting couple would abandon the idea of themselves, or that Mrs.
+Churchley at least would after a week or two back out of it.
+
+"That will be really horrid then," Godfrey pronounced.  "The only
+respectable thing, at the point they've come to, is to put it
+through.  Charming for poor Dad to have the air of being 'chucked'!"
+
+This made her hesitate two days more, but she found answers more
+valid than any objections.  The many-voiced answer to everything--it
+was like the autumn wind round the house--was the affront that fell
+back on her mother.  Her mother was dead but it killed her again.  So
+one morning at eleven o'clock, when she knew her father was writing
+letters, she went out quietly and, stopping the first hansom she met,
+drove to Prince's Gate.  Mrs. Churchley was at home, and she was
+shown into the drawing-room with the request that she would wait five
+minutes.  She waited without the sense of breaking down at the last,
+and the impulse to run away, which were what she had expected to
+have.  In the cab and at the door her heart had beat terribly, but
+now suddenly, with the game really to play, she found herself lucid
+and calm.  It was a joy to her to feel later that this was the way
+Mrs. Churchley found her:  not confused, not stammering nor
+prevaricating, only a little amazed at her own courage, conscious of
+the immense responsibility of her step and wonderfully older than her
+years.  Her hostess sounded her at first with suspicious eyes, but
+eventually, to Adela's surprise, burst into tears.  At this the girl
+herself cried, and with the secret happiness of believing they were
+saved.  Mrs. Churchley said she would think over what she had been
+told, and she promised her young friend, freely enough and very
+firmly, not to betray the secret of the latter's step to the Colonel.
+They were saved--they were saved:  the words sung themselves in the
+girl's soul as she came downstairs.  When the door opened for her she
+saw her brother on the step, and they looked at each other in
+surprise, each finding it on the part of the other an odd hour for
+Prince's Gate.  Godfrey remarked that Mrs. Churchley would have
+enough of the family, and Adela answered that she would perhaps have
+too much.  None the less the young man went in while his sister took
+her way home.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+
+She saw nothing of him for nearly a week; he had more and more his
+own times and hours, adjusted to his tremendous responsibilities, and
+he spent whole days at his crammer's.  When she knocked at his door
+late in the evening he was regularly not in his room.  It was known
+in the house how much he was worried; he was horribly nervous about
+his ordeal.  It was to begin on the 23rd of June, and his father was
+as worried as himself.  The wedding had been arranged in relation to
+this; they wished poor Godfrey's fate settled first, though they felt
+the nuptials would be darkened if it shouldn't be settled right.
+
+Ten days after that performance of her private undertaking Adela
+began to sniff, as it were, a difference in the general air; but as
+yet she was afraid to exult.  It wasn't in truth a difference for the
+better, so that there might be still a great tension.  Her father,
+since the announcement of his intended marriage, had been visibly
+pleased with himself, but that pleasure now appeared to have
+undergone a check.  She had the impression known to the passengers on
+a great steamer when, in the middle of the night, they feel the
+engines stop.  As this impression may easily sharpen to the sense
+that something serious has happened, so the girl asked herself what
+had actually occurred.  She had expected something serious; but it
+was as if she couldn't keep still in her cabin--she wanted to go up
+and see.  On the 20th, just before breakfast, her maid brought her a
+message from her brother.  Mr.  Godfrey would be obliged if she would
+speak to him in his room.  She went straight up to him, dreading to
+find him ill, broken down on the eve of his formidable week.  This
+was not the case however--he rather seemed already at work, to have
+been at work since dawn.  But he was very white and his eyes had a
+strange and new expression.  Her beautiful young brother looked
+older; he looked haggard and hard.  He met her there as if he had
+been waiting for her, and he said at once:  "Please tell me this,
+Adela--what was the purpose of your visit the other morning to Mrs.
+Churchley, the day I met you at her door?"
+
+She stared--she cast about.  "The purpose?  What's the matter?  Why
+do you ask?"
+
+"They've put it off--they've put it off a month."
+
+"Ah thank God!" said Adela.
+
+"Why the devil do you thank God?" Godfrey asked with a strange
+impatience.
+
+She gave a strained intense smile.  "You know I think it all wrong."
+
+He stood looking at her up and down.  "What did you do there?  How
+did you interfere?"
+
+"Who told you I interfered?" she returned with a deep flush.
+
+"You said something--you did something.  I knew you had done it when
+I saw you come out."
+
+"What I did was my own business."
+
+"Damn your own business!" cried the young man.
+
+She had never in her life been so spoken to, and in advance, had she
+been given the choice, would have said that she'd rather die than be
+so handled by Godfrey.  But her spirit was high, and for a moment she
+was as angry as if she had been cut with a whip.  She escaped the
+blow but felt the insult.  "And YOUR business then?" she asked.  "I
+wondered what that was when I saw YOU."
+
+He stood a moment longer scowling at her; then with the exclamation
+"You've made a pretty mess!" he turned away from her and sat down to
+his books.
+
+They had put it off, as he said; her father was dry and stiff and
+official about it.  "I suppose I had better let you know we've
+thought it best to postpone our marriage till the end of the summer--
+Mrs. Churchley has so many arrangements to make":  he was not more
+expansive than that.  She neither knew nor greatly cared whether she
+but vainly imagined or correctly observed him to watch her obliquely
+for some measure of her receipt of these words.  She flattered
+herself that, thanks to Godfrey's forewarning, cruel as the form of
+it had been, she was able to repress any crude sign of elation.  She
+had a perfectly good conscience, for she could now judge what odious
+elements Mrs. Churchley, whom she had not seen since the morning in
+Prince's Gate, had already introduced into their dealings.  She
+gathered without difficulty that her father hadn't concurred in the
+postponement, for he was more restless than before, more absent and
+distinctly irritable.  There was naturally still the question of how
+much of this condition was to be attributed to his solicitude about
+Godfrey.  That young man took occasion to say a horrible thing to his
+sister:  "If I don't pass it will be your fault."  These were
+dreadful days for the girl, and she asked herself how she could have
+borne them if the hovering spirit of her mother hadn't been at her
+side.  Fortunately she always felt it there, sustaining, commending,
+sanctifying.  Suddenly her father announced to her that he wished her
+to go immediately, with her sisters, down to Brinton, where there was
+always part of a household and where for a few weeks they would
+manage well enough.  The only explanation he gave of this desire was
+that he wanted them out of the way.  Out of the way of what?" she
+queried, since there were to be for the time no preparations in
+Seymour Street.  She was willing to take it for out of the way of his
+nerves.
+
+She never needed urging however to go to Brinton, the dearest old
+house in the world, where the happiest days of her young life had
+been spent and the silent nearness of her mother always seemed
+greatest.  She was happy again, with Beatrice and Muriel and Miss
+Flynn, with the air of summer and the haunted rooms and her mother's
+garden and the talking oaks and the nightingales.  She wrote briefly
+to her father, giving him, as he had requested, an account of things;
+and he wrote back that since she was so contented--she didn't
+recognise having told him that--she had better not return to town at
+all.  The fag-end of the London season would be unimportant to her,
+and he was getting on very well.  He mentioned that Godfrey had
+passed his tests, but, as she knew, there would be a tiresome wait
+before news of results.  The poor chap was going abroad for a month
+with young Sherard--he had earned a little rest and a little fun.  He
+went abroad without a word to Adela, but in his beautiful little hand
+he took a chaffing leave of Beatrice.  The child showed her sister
+the letter, of which she was very proud and which contained no
+message for any one else.  This was the worst bitterness of the whole
+crisis for that somebody--its placing in so strange a light the
+creature in the world whom, after her mother, she had loved best.
+
+Colonel Chart had said he would "run down" while his children were at
+Brinton, but they heard no more about it.  He only wrote two or three
+times to Miss Flynn on matters in regard to which Adela was surprised
+he shouldn't have communicated with herself.  Muriel accomplished an
+upright little letter to Mrs. Churchley--her eldest sister neither
+fostered nor discouraged the performance--to which Mrs. Churchley
+replied, after a fortnight, in a meagre and, as Adela thought,
+illiterate fashion, making no allusion to the approach of any closer
+tie.  Evidently the situation had changed; the question of the
+marriage was dropped, at any rate for the time.  This idea gave our
+young woman a singular and almost intoxicating sense of power; she
+felt as if she were riding a great wave of confidence.  She had
+decided and acted--the greatest could do no more than that.  The
+grand thing was to see one's results, and what else was she doing?
+These results were in big rich conspicuous lives; the stage was large
+on which she moved her figures.  Such a vision was exciting, and as
+they had the use of a couple of ponies at Brinton she worked off her
+excitement by a long gallop.  A day or two after this however came
+news of which the effect was to rekindle it.  Godfrey had come back,
+the list had been published, he had passed first.  These happy
+tidings proceeded from the young man himself; he announced them by a
+telegram to Beatrice, who had never in her life before received such
+a missive and was proportionately inflated.  Adela reflected that she
+herself ought to have felt snubbed, but she was too happy.  They were
+free again, they were themselves, the nightmare of the previous weeks
+was blown away, the unity and dignity of her father's life restored,
+and, to round off her sense of success, Godfrey had achieved his
+first step toward high distinction.  She wrote him the next day as
+frankly and affectionately as if there had been no estrangement
+between them, and besides telling him how she rejoiced in his triumph
+begged him in charity to let them know exactly how the case stood
+with regard to Mrs. Churchley.
+
+Late in the summer afternoon she walked through the park to the
+village with her letter, posted it and came back.  Suddenly, at one
+of the turns of the avenue, half-way to the house, she saw a young
+man hover there as if awaiting her--a young man who proved to be
+Godfrey on his pedestrian progress over from the station.  He had
+seen her as he took his short cut, and if he had come down to Brinton
+it wasn't apparently to avoid her.  There was nevertheless none of
+the joy of his triumph in his face as he came a very few steps to
+meet her; and although, stiffly enough, he let her kiss him and say
+"I'm so glad--I'm so glad!" she felt this tolerance as not quite the
+mere calm of the rising diplomatist.  He turned toward the house with
+her and walked on a short distance while she uttered the hope that he
+had come to stay some days.
+
+"Only till to-morrow morning.  They're sending me straight to Madrid.
+I came down to say good-bye; there's a fellow bringing my bags."
+
+"To Madrid?  How awfully nice!  And it's awfully nice of you to have
+come," she said as she passed her hand into his arm.
+
+The movement made him stop, and, stopping, he turned on her in a
+flash a face of something more than, suspicion--of passionate
+reprobation.  "What I really came for--you might as well know without
+more delay--is to ask you a question."
+
+"A question?"--she echoed it with a beating heart.
+
+They stood there under the old trees in the lingering light, and,
+young and fine and fair as they both were, formed a complete
+superficial harmony with the peaceful English scene.  A near view,
+however, would have shown that Godfrey Chart hadn't taken so much
+trouble only to skim the surface.  He looked deep into his sister's
+eyes.  "What was it you said that morning to Mrs. Churchley?"
+
+She fixed them on the ground a moment, but at last met his own again.
+"If she has told you, why do you ask?"
+
+"She has told me nothing.  I've seen for myself."
+
+"What have you seen?"
+
+"She has broken it off.  Everything's over.  Father's in the depths."
+
+"In the depths?" the girl quavered.
+
+"Did you think it would make him jolly?" he went on.
+
+She had to choose what to say.  "He'll get over it.  He'll he glad."
+
+"That remains to be seen.  You interfered, you invented something,
+you got round her.  I insist on knowing what you did."
+
+Adela felt that if it was a question of obstinacy there was something
+within her she could count on; in spite of which, while she stood
+looking down again a moment, she said to herself "I could be dumb and
+dogged if I chose, but I scorn to be."  She wasn't ashamed of what
+she had done, but she wanted to be clear.  "Are you absolutely
+certain it's broken off?"
+
+"He is, and she is; so that's as good."
+
+"What reason has she given?"
+
+"None at all--or half a dozen; it's the same thing.  She has changed
+her mind--she mistook her feelings--she can't part with her
+independence.  Moreover he has too many children."
+
+"Did he tell you this?" the girl asked.
+
+"Mrs. Churchley told me.  She has gone abroad for a year."
+
+"And she didn't tell you what I said to her?"
+
+Godfrey showed an impatience.  "Why should I take this trouble if she
+had?"
+
+"You might have taken it to make me suffer," said Adela.  "That
+appears to be what you want to do."
+
+"No, I leave that to you--it's the good turn you've done me!" cried
+the young man with hot tears in his eyes.
+
+She stared, aghast with the perception that there was some dreadful
+thing she didn't know; but he walked on, dropping the question
+angrily and turning his back to her as if he couldn't trust himself.
+She read his disgust in his averted, face, in the way he squared his
+shoulders and smote the ground with his stick, and she hurried after
+him and presently overtook him.  She kept by him for a moment in
+silence; then she broke out:  "What do you mean?  What in the world
+have I done to you?"
+
+"She would have helped me.  She was all ready to help me," Godfrey
+portentously said.
+
+"Helped you in what?"  She wondered what he meant; if he had made
+debts that he was afraid to confess to his father and--of all
+horrible things--had been looking to Mrs. Churchley to pay.  She
+turned red with the mere apprehension of this and, on the heels of
+her guess, exulted again at having perhaps averted such a shame.
+
+"Can't you just see I'm in trouble?  Where are your eyes, your
+senses, your sympathy, that you talk so much about?  Haven't you seen
+these six months that I've a curst worry in my life?"
+
+She seized his arm, made him stop, stood looking up at him like a
+frightened little girl.  "What's the matter, Godfrey?--what IS the
+matter?"
+
+"You've gone against me so--I could strangle you!" he growled.  This
+image added nothing to her dread; her dread was that he had done some
+wrong, was stained with some guilt.  She uttered it to him with
+clasped hands, begging him to tell her the worst; but, still more
+passionately, he cut her short with his own cry:  "In God's name,
+satisfy me!  What infernal thing did you do?"
+
+"It wasn't infernal--it was right.  I told her mamma had been
+wretched," said Adela.
+
+"Wretched?  You told her such a lie?"
+
+"It was the only way, and she believed me."
+
+"Wretched how?--wretched when?--wretched where?" the young man
+stammered.
+
+"I told her papa had made her so, and that SHE ought to know it.  I
+told her the question troubled me unspeakably, but that I had made up
+my mind it was my duty to initiate her."  Adela paused, the light of
+bravado in her face, as if, though struck while the words came with
+the monstrosity of what she had done, she was incapable of abating a
+jot of it.  "I notified her that he had faults and peculiarities that
+made mamma's life a long worry--a martyrdom that she hid wonderfully
+from the world, but that we saw and that I had often pitied.  I told
+her what they were, these faults and peculiarities; I put the dots on
+the i's.  I said it wasn't fair to let another person marry him
+without a warning.  I warned her; I satisfied my conscience.  She
+could do as she liked.  My responsibility was over."
+
+Godfrey gazed at her; he listened with parted lips, incredulous and
+appalled.  "You invented such a tissue of falsities and calumnies,
+and you talk about your conscience?  You stand there in your senses
+and proclaim your crime?"
+
+"I'd have committed any crime that would have rescued us."
+
+"You insult and blacken and ruin your own father?" Godfrey kept on.
+
+"He'll never know it; she took a vow she wouldn't tell him."
+
+"Ah I'll he damned if _I_ won't tell him!" he rang out.
+
+Adela felt sick at this, but she flamed up to resent the treachery,
+as it struck her, of such a menace.  "I did right--I did right!" she
+vehemently declared "I went down on my knees to pray for guidance,
+and I saved mamma's memory from outrage.  But if I hadn't, if I
+hadn't"--she faltered an instant--"I'm not worse than you, and I'm
+not so bad, for you've done something that you're ashamed to tell
+me."
+
+He had taken out his watch; he looked at it with quick intensity, as
+if not hearing nor heeding her.  Then, his calculating eyes raised,
+he fixed her long enough to exclaim with unsurpassable horror and
+contempt:  "You raving maniac!"  He turned away from her; he bounded
+down the avenue in the direction from which they had come, and, while
+she watched him, strode away, across the grass, toward the short cut
+to the station.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+
+His bags, by the time she got home, had been brought to the house,
+but Beatrice and Muriel, immediately informed of this, waited for
+their brother in vain.  Their sister said nothing to them of her
+having seen him, and she accepted after a little, with a calmness
+that surprised herself, the idea that he had returned to town to
+denounce her.  She believed this would make no difference now--she
+had done what she had done.  She had somehow a stiff faith in Mrs.
+Churchley.  Once that so considerable mass had received its impetus
+it wouldn't, it couldn't pull up.  It represented a heavy-footed
+person, incapable of further agility.  Adela recognised too how well
+it might have come over her that there were too many children.
+Lastly the girl fortified herself with the reflexion, grotesque in
+the conditions and conducing to prove her sense of humour not high,
+that her father was after all not a man to be played with.  It seemed
+to her at any rate that if she HAD baffled his unholy purpose she
+could bear anything--bear imprisonment and bread and water, bear
+lashes and torture, bear even his lifelong reproach.  What she could
+bear least was the wonder of the inconvenience she had inflicted on
+Godfrey.  She had time to turn this over, very vainly, for a
+succession of days--days more numerous than she had expected, which
+passed without bringing her from London any summons to come up and
+take her punishment.  She sounded the possible, she compared the
+degrees of the probable; feeling however that as a cloistered girl
+she was poorly equipped for speculation.  She tried to imagine the
+calamitous things young men might do, and could only feel that such
+things would naturally be connected either with borrowed money or
+with bad women.  She became conscious that after all she knew almost
+nothing about either of those interests.  The worst woman she knew
+was Mrs. Churchley herself.  Meanwhile there was no reverberation
+from Seymour Street--only a sultry silence.
+
+At Brinton she spent hours in her mother's garden, where she had
+grown up, where she considered that she was training for old age,
+since she meant not to depend on whist.  She loved the place as, had
+she been a good Catholic, she would have loved the smell of her
+parish church; and indeed there was in her passion for flowers
+something of the respect of a religion.  They seemed to her the only
+things in the world that really respected themselves, unless one made
+an exception for Nutkins, who had been in command all through her
+mother's time, with whom she had had a real friendship and who had
+been affected by their pure example.  He was the person left in the
+world with whom on the whole she could speak most intimately of the
+dead.  They never had to name her together--they only said "she"; and
+Nutkins freely conceded that she had taught him everything he knew.
+When Beatrice and Muriel said "she" they referred to Mrs. Churchley.
+Adela had reason to believe she should never marry, and that some day
+she should have about a thousand a year.  This made her see in the
+far future a little garden of her own, under a hill, full of rare and
+exquisite things, where she would spend most of her old age on her
+knees with an apron and stout gloves, with a pair of shears and a
+trowel, steeped in the comfort of being thought mad.
+
+One morning ten days after her scene with Godfrey, on coming back
+into the house shortly before lunch, she was met by Miss Flynn with
+the notification that a lady in the drawing-room had been waiting for
+her for some minutes.  "A lady" suggested immediately Mrs. Churchley.
+It came over Adela that the form in which her penalty was to descend
+would be a personal explanation with that misdirected woman.  The
+lady had given no name, and Miss Flynn hadn't seen Mrs. Churchley;
+nevertheless the governess was certain Adela's surmise was wrong.
+
+"Is she big and dreadful?" the girl asked.
+
+Miss Flynn, who was circumspection itself, took her time.  "She's
+dreadful, but she's not big."  She added that she wasn't sure she
+ought to let Adela go in alone; but this young lady took herself
+throughout for a heroine, and it wasn't in a heroine to shrink from
+any encounter.  Wasn't she every instant in transcendent contact with
+her mother?  The visitor might have no connexion whatever with the
+drama of her father's frustrated marriage; but everything to-day for
+Adela was part of that.
+
+Miss Flynn's description had prepared her for a considerable shock,
+but she wasn't agitated by her first glimpse of the person who
+awaited her.  A youngish well-dressed woman stood there, and silence
+was between them while they looked at each other.  Before either had
+spoken however Adela began to see what Miss Flynn had intended.  In
+the light of the drawing-room window the lady was five-and-thirty
+years of age and had vivid yellow hair.  She also had a blue cloth
+suit with brass buttons, a stick-up collar like a gentleman's, a
+necktie arranged in a sailor's knot, a golden pin in the shape of a
+little lawn-tennis racket, and pearl-grey gloves with big black
+stitchings.  Adela's second impression was that she was an actress,
+and her third that no such person had ever before crossed that
+threshold.
+
+"I'll tell you what I've come for," said the apparition.  "I've come
+to ask you to intercede."  She wasn't an actress; an actress would
+have had a nicer voice.
+
+"To intercede?"  Adela was too bewildered to ask her to sit down.
+
+"With your father, you know.  He doesn't know, but he'll have to."
+Her "have" sounded like "'ave."  She explained, with many more such
+sounds, that she was Mrs. Godfrey, that they had been married seven
+mortal months.  If Godfrey was going abroad she must go with him, and
+the only way she could go with him would be for his father to do
+something.  He was afraid of his father--that was clear; he was
+afraid even to tell him.  What she had come down for was to see some
+other member of the family face to face--"fice to fice," Mrs. Godfrey
+called it--and try if he couldn't be approached by another side.  If
+no one else would act then she would just have to act herself.  The
+Colonel would have to do something--that was the only way out of it.
+
+What really happened Adela never quite understood; what seemed to be
+happening was that the room went round and round.  Through the blur
+of perception accompanying this effect the sharp stabs of her
+visitor's revelation came to her like the words heard by a patient
+"going off" under ether.  She afterwards denied passionately even to
+herself that she had done anything so abject as to faint; but there
+was a lapse in her consciousness on the score of Miss Flynn's
+intervention.  This intervention had evidently been active, for when
+they talked the matter over, later in the day, with bated breath and
+infinite dissimulation for the school-room quarter, the governess had
+more lurid truths, and still more, to impart than to receive.  She
+was at any rate under the impression that she had athletically
+contended, in the drawing-room, with the yellow hair--this after
+removing Adela from the scene and before inducing Mrs. Godfrey to
+withdraw.  Miss Flynn had never known a more thrilling day, for all
+the rest of it too was pervaded with agitations and conversations,
+precautions and alarms.  It was given out to Beatrice and Muriel that
+their sister had been taken suddenly ill, and the governess
+ministered to her in her room.  Indeed Adela had never found herself
+less at ease, for this time she had received a blow that she couldn't
+return.  There was nothing to do but to take it, to endure the
+humiliation of her wound.
+
+At first she declined to take it--having, as might appear, the much
+more attractive resource of regarding her visitant as a mere
+masquerading person, an impudent impostor.  On the face of the matter
+moreover it wasn't fair to believe till one heard; and to hear in
+such a case was to hear Godfrey himself.  Whatever she had tried to
+imagine about him she hadn't arrived at anything so belittling as an
+idiotic secret marriage with a dyed and painted hag.  Adela repeated
+this last word as if it gave her comfort; and indeed where everything
+was so bad fifteen years of seniority made the case little worse.
+Miss Flynn was portentous, for Miss Flynn had had it out with the
+wretch.  She had cross-questioned her and had not broken her down.
+This was the most uplifted hour of Miss Flynn's life; for whereas she
+usually had to content herself with being humbly and gloomily in the
+right she could now be magnanimously and showily so.  Her only
+perplexity was as to what she ought to do--write to Colonel Chart or
+go up to town to see him.  She bloomed with alternatives--she
+resembled some dull garden-path which under a copious downpour has
+begun to flaunt with colour.  Toward evening Adela was obliged to
+recognise that her brother's worry, of which he had spoken to her,
+had appeared bad enough to consist even of a low wife, and to
+remember that, so far from its being inconceivable a young man in his
+position should clandestinely take one, she had been present, years
+before, during her mother's lifetime, when Lady Molesley declared
+gaily, over a cup of tea, that this was precisely what she expected
+of her eldest son.  The next morning it was the worst possibilities
+that seemed clearest; the only thing left with a tatter of dusky
+comfort being the ambiguity of Godfrey's charge that her own action
+had "done" for him.  That was a matter by itself, and she racked her
+brains for a connecting link between Mrs. Churchley and Mrs. Godfrey.
+At last she made up her mind that they were related by blood; very
+likely, though differing in fortune, they were cousins or even
+sisters.  But even then what did the wretched boy mean?
+
+Arrested by the unnatural fascination of opportunity, Miss Flynn
+received before lunch a telegram from Colonel Chart--an order for
+dinner and a vehicle; he and Godfrey were to arrive at six o'clock.
+Adela had plenty of occupation for the interval, since she was
+pitying her father when she wasn't rejoicing that her mother had gone
+too soon to know.  She flattered herself she made out the
+providential reason of that cruelty now.  She found time however
+still to wonder for what purpose, given the situation, Godfrey was to
+he brought down.  She wasn't unconscious indeed that she had little
+general knowledge of what usually was done with young men in that
+predicament.  One talked about the situation, but the situation was
+an abyss.  She felt this still more when she found, on her father's
+arrival, that nothing apparently was to happen as she had taken for
+granted it would.  There was an inviolable hush over the whole
+affair, but no tragedy, no publicity, nothing ugly.  The tragedy had
+been in town--the faces of the two men spoke of it in spite of their
+other perfunctory aspects; and at present there was only a family
+dinner, with Beatrice and Muriel and the governess--with almost a
+company tone too, the result of the desire to avoid publicity.  Adela
+admired her father; she knew what he was feeling if Mrs. Godfrey had
+been at him, and yet she saw him positively gallant.  He was mildly
+austere, or rather even--what was it?--august; just as, coldly
+equivocal, he never looked at his son, so that at moments he struck
+her as almost sick with sadness.  Godfrey was equally inscrutable and
+therefore wholly different from what he had been as he stood before
+her in the park.  If he was to start on his career (with such a
+wife!--wouldn't she utterly blight it?) he was already professional
+enough to know how to wear a mask.
+
+Before they rose from table she felt herself wholly bewildered, so
+little were such large causes traceable in their effects.  She had
+nerved herself for a great ordeal, but the air was as sweet as an
+anodyne.  It was perfectly plain to her that her father was deadly
+sore--as pathetic as a person betrayed.  He was broken, but he showed
+no resentment; there was a weight on his heart, but he had lightened
+it by dressing as immaculately as usual for dinner.  She asked
+herself what immensity of a row there could have been in town to have
+left his anger so spent.  He went through everything, even to sitting
+with his son after dinner.  When they came out together he invited
+Beatrice and Muriel to the billiard-room, and as Miss Flynn
+discreetly withdrew Adela was left alone with Godfrey, who was
+completely changed and not now in the least of a rage.  He was broken
+too, but not so pathetic as his father.  He was only very correct and
+apologetic he said to his sister:  "I'm awfully sorry YOU were
+annoyed--it was something I never dreamed of."
+
+She couldn't think immediately what he meant; then she grasped the
+reference to her extraordinary invader.  She was uncertain, however,
+what tone to take; perhaps his father had arranged with him that they
+were to make the best of it.  But she spoke her own despair in the
+way she murmured "Oh Godfrey, Godfrey, is it true?"
+
+"I've been the most unutterable donkey--you can say what you like to
+me.  You can't say anything worse than I've said to myself."
+
+"My brother, my brother!"--his words made her wail it out.  He hushed
+her with a movement and she asked:  "What has father said?"
+
+He looked very high over her head.  "He'll give her six hundred a
+year."
+
+"Ah the angel!"--it was too splendid.
+
+"On condition"--Godfrey scarce blinked--"she never comes near me.
+She has solemnly promised, and she'll probably leave me alone to get
+the money.  If she doesn't--in diplomacy--I'm lost."  He had been
+turning his eyes vaguely about, this way and that, to avoid meeting
+hers; but after another instant he gave up the effort and she had the
+miserable confession of his glance.  "I've been living in hell."
+
+"My brother, my brother!" she yearningly repeated.
+
+"I'm not an idiot; yet for her I've behaved like one.  Don't ask me--
+you mustn't know.  It was all done in a day, and since then fancy my
+condition; fancy my work in such a torment; fancy my coming through
+at all."
+
+"Thank God you passed!" she cried.  "You were wonderful!"
+
+"I'd have shot myself if I hadn't been.  I had an awful day yesterday
+with the governor; it was late at night before it was over.  I leave
+England next week.  He brought me down here for it to look well--so
+that the children shan't know."
+
+"HE'S wonderful too!" Adela murmured.
+
+"Wonderful too!" Godfrey echoed.
+
+"Did SHE tell him?" the girl went on.
+
+"She came straight to Seymour Street from here.  She saw him alone
+first; then he called me in.  THAT luxury lasted about an hour."
+
+"Poor, poor father!" Adela moaned at this; on which her brother
+remained silent.  Then after he had alluded to it as the scene he had
+lived in terror of all through his cramming, and she had sighed forth
+again her pity and admiration for such a mixture of anxieties and
+such a triumph of talent, she pursued:  "Have you told him?"
+
+"Told him what?"
+
+"What you said you would--what _I_ did."
+
+Godfrey turned away as if at present he had very little interest in
+that inferior tribulation.  "I was angry with you, but I cooled off.
+I held my tongue."
+
+She clasped her hands.  "You thought of mamma!"
+
+"Oh don't speak of mamma!" he cried as in rueful tenderness.
+
+It was indeed not a happy moment, and she murmured:  "No; if you HAD
+thought of her--!"
+
+This made Godfrey face her again with a small flare in his eyes.  "Oh
+THEN it didn't prevent.  I thought that woman really good.  I
+believed in her."
+
+"Is she VERY bad?"
+
+"I shall never mention her to you again," he returned with dignity.
+
+"You may believe _I_ won't speak of her!  So father doesn't know?"
+the girl added.
+
+"Doesn't know what?"
+
+"That I said what I did to Mrs. Churchley."
+
+He had a momentary pause.  "I don't think so, but you must find out
+for yourself."
+
+"I shall find out," said Adela.  "But what had Mrs. Churchley to do
+with it?"
+
+"With MY misery?  I told her.  I had to tell some one."
+
+"Why didn't you tell me?"
+
+He appeared--though but after an instant--to know exactly why.  "Oh
+you take things so beastly hard--you make such rows."  Adela covered
+her face with her hands and he went on:  "What I wanted was comfort--
+not to be lashed up.  I thought I should go mad.  I wanted Mrs.
+Churchley to break it to father, to intercede for me and help him to
+meet it.  She was awfully kind to me, she listened and she
+understood; she could fancy how it had happened.  Without her I
+shouldn't have pulled through.  She liked me, you know," he further
+explained, and as if it were quite worth mentioning--all the more
+that it was pleasant to him.  "She said she'd do what she could for
+me.  She was full of sympathy and resource.  I really leaned on her.
+But when YOU cut in of course it spoiled everything.  That's why I
+was so furious with you.  She couldn't do anything then."
+
+Adela dropped her hands, staring; she felt she had walked in
+darkness.  "So that he had to meet it alone?"
+
+"Dame!" said Godfrey, who had got up his French tremendously.
+
+Muriel came to the door to say papa wished the two others to join
+them, and the next day Godfrey returned to town.  His father remained
+at Brinton, without an intermission, the rest of the summer and the
+whole of the autumn, and Adela had a chance to find out, as she had
+said, whether he knew she had interfered.  But in spite of her chance
+she never found out.  He knew Mrs. Churchley had thrown him over and
+he knew his daughter rejoiced in it, but he appeared not to have
+divined the relation between the two facts.  It was strange that one
+of the matters he was clearest about--Adela's secret triumph--should
+have been just the thing which from this time on justified less and
+less such a confidence.  She was too sorry for him to be consistently
+glad.  She watched his attempts to wind himself up on the subject of
+shorthorns and drainage, and she favoured to the utmost of her
+ability his intermittent disposition to make a figure in orchids.
+She wondered whether they mightn't have a few people at Brinton; but
+when she mentioned the idea he asked what in the world there would be
+to attract them.  It was a confoundedly stupid house, he remarked--
+with all respect to HER cleverness.  Beatrice and Muriel were
+mystified; the prospect of going out immensely had faded so utterly
+away.  They were apparently not to go out at all.  Colonel Chart was
+aimless and bored; he paced up and down and went back to smoking,
+which was bad for him, and looked drearily out of windows as if on
+the bare chance that something might arrive.  Did he expect Mrs.
+Churchley to arrive, did he expect her to relent on finding she
+couldn't live without him?  It was Adela's belief that she gave no
+sign.  But the girl thought it really remarkable of her not to have
+betrayed her ingenious young visitor.  Adela's judgement of human
+nature was perhaps harsh, but she believed that most women, given the
+various facts, wouldn't have been so forbearing.  This lady's
+conception of the point of honour placed her there in a finer and
+purer light than had at all originally promised to shine about her.
+
+She meanwhile herself could well judge how heavy her father found the
+burden of Godfrey's folly and how he was incommoded at having to pay
+the horrible woman six hundred a year.  Doubtless he was having
+dreadful letters from her; doubtless she threatened them all with
+hideous exposure.  If the matter should be bruited Godfrey's
+prospects would collapse on the spot.  He thought Madrid very
+charming and curious, but Mrs. Godfrey was in England, so that his
+father had to face the music.  Adela took a dolorous comfort in her
+mother's being out of that--it would have killed her; but this didn't
+blind her to the fact that the comfort for her father would perhaps
+have been greater if he had had some one to talk to about his
+trouble.  He never dreamed of doing so to her, and she felt she
+couldn't ask him.  In the family life he wanted utter silence about
+it.  Early in the winter he went abroad for ten weeks, leaving her
+with her sisters in the country, where it was not to be denied that
+at this time existence had very little savour.  She half expected her
+sister-in-law would again descend on her; but the fear wasn't
+justified, and the quietude of the awful creature seemed really to
+vibrate with the ring of gold-pieces.  There were sure to be extras.
+Adela winced at the extras.  Colonel Chart went to Paris and to Monte
+Carlo and then to Madrid to see his boy.  His daughter had the vision
+of his perhaps meeting Mrs. Churchley somewhere, since, if she had
+gone for a year, she would still be on the Continent.  If he should
+meet her perhaps the affair would come on again:  she caught herself
+musing over this.  But he brought back no such appearance, and,
+seeing him after an interval, she was struck afresh with his jilted
+and wasted air.  She didn't like it--she resented it.  A little more
+and she would have said that that was no way to treat so faithful a
+man.
+
+They all went up to town in March, and on one of the first days of
+April she saw Mrs. Churchley in the Park.  She herself remained
+apparently invisible to that lady--she herself and Beatrice and
+Muriel, who sat with her in their mother's old bottle-green landau.
+Mrs. Churchley, perched higher than ever, rode by without a
+recognition; but this didn't prevent Adela's going to her before the
+month was over.  As on her great previous occasion she went in the
+morning, and she again had the good fortune to be admitted.  This
+time, however, her visit was shorter, and a week after making it--the
+week was a desolation--she addressed to her brother at Madrid a
+letter containing these words:  "I could endure it no longer--I
+confessed and retracted; I explained to her as well as I could the
+falsity of what I said to her ten months ago and the benighted purity
+of my motives for saying it.  I besought her to regard it as unsaid,
+to forgive me, not to despise me too much, to take pity on poor
+PERFECT papa and come back to him.  She was more good-natured than
+you might have expected--indeed she laughed extravagantly.  She had
+never believed me--it was too absurd; she had only, at the time,
+disliked me.  She found me utterly false--she was very frank with me
+about this--and she told papa she really thought me horrid.  She said
+she could never live with such a girl, and as I would certainly never
+marry I must be sent away--in short she quite loathed me.  Papa
+defended me, he refused to sacrifice me, and this led practically to
+their rupture.  Papa gave her up, as it were, for ME.  Fancy the
+angel, and fancy what I must try to be to him for the rest of his
+life!  Mrs. Churchley can never come back--she's going to marry Lord
+Dovedale."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Marriages, by Henry James**
+
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