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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Eugene Pickering, by Henry James
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere 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
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Eugene Pickering
+
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: May 8, 2005  [eBook #2534]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EUGENE PICKERING***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1887 Macmillan and Co. edition of "The Madonna of
+the Future et al." by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk.  Proofed
+by Vanessa M. Mosher, Faith Matievich and Jonesey.
+
+
+
+
+
+EUGENE PICKERING
+by Henry James
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+It was at Homburg, several years ago, before the gaming had been
+suppressed.  The evening was very warm, and all the world was gathered on
+the terrace of the Kursaal and the esplanade below it to listen to the
+excellent orchestra; or half the world, rather, for the crowd was equally
+dense in the gaming-rooms around the tables.  Everywhere the crowd was
+great.  The night was perfect, the season was at its height, the open
+windows of the Kursaal sent long shafts of unnatural light into the dusky
+woods, and now and then, in the intervals of the music, one might almost
+hear the clink of the napoleons and the metallic call of the croupiers
+rise above the watching silence of the saloons.  I had been strolling
+with a friend, and we at last prepared to sit down.  Chairs, however,
+were scarce.  I had captured one, but it seemed no easy matter to find a
+mate for it.  I was on the point of giving up in despair, and proposing
+an adjournment to the silken ottomans of the Kursaal, when I observed a
+young man lounging back on one of the objects of my quest, with his feet
+supported on the rounds of another.  This was more than his share of
+luxury, and I promptly approached him.  He evidently belonged to the race
+which has the credit of knowing best, at home and abroad, how to make
+itself comfortable; but something in his appearance suggested that his
+present attitude was the result of inadvertence rather than of egotism.
+He was staring at the conductor of the orchestra and listening intently
+to the music.  His hands were locked round his long legs, and his mouth
+was half open, with rather a foolish air.  "There are so few chairs," I
+said, "that I must beg you to surrender this second one."  He started,
+stared, blushed, pushed the chair away with awkward alacrity, and
+murmured something about not having noticed that he had it.
+
+"What an odd-looking youth!" said my companion, who had watched me, as I
+seated myself beside her.
+
+"Yes, he is odd-looking; but what is odder still is that I have seen him
+before, that his face is familiar to me, and yet that I can't place him."
+The orchestra was playing the Prayer from Der Freischutz, but Weber's
+lovely music only deepened the blank of memory.  Who the deuce was he?
+where, when, how, had I known him?  It seemed extraordinary that a face
+should be at once so familiar and so strange.  We had our backs turned to
+him, so that I could not look at him again.  When the music ceased we
+left our places, and I went to consign my friend to her mamma on the
+terrace.  In passing, I saw that my young man had departed; I concluded
+that he only strikingly resembled some one I knew.  But who in the world
+was it he resembled?  The ladies went off to their lodgings, which were
+near by, and I turned into the gaming-rooms and hovered about the circle
+at roulette.  Gradually I filtered through to the inner edge, near the
+table, and, looking round, saw my puzzling friend stationed opposite to
+me.  He was watching the game, with his hands in his pockets; but
+singularly enough, now that I observed him at my leisure, the look of
+familiarity quite faded from his face.  What had made us call his
+appearance odd was his great length and leanness of limb, his long, white
+neck, his blue, prominent eyes, and his ingenuous, unconscious absorption
+in the scene before him.  He was not handsome, certainly, but he looked
+peculiarly amiable and if his overt wonderment savoured a trifle of
+rurality, it was an agreeable contrast to the hard, inexpressive masks
+about him.  He was the verdant offshoot, I said to myself, of some
+ancient, rigid stem; he had been brought up in the quietest of homes, and
+he was having his first glimpse of life.  I was curious to see whether he
+would put anything on the table; he evidently felt the temptation, but he
+seemed paralysed by chronic embarrassment.  He stood gazing at the
+chinking complexity of losses and gains, shaking his loose gold in his
+pocket, and every now and then passing his hand nervously over his eyes.
+
+Most of the spectators were too attentive to the play to have many
+thoughts for each other; but before long I noticed a lady who evidently
+had an eye for her neighbours as well as for the table.  She was seated
+about half-way between my friend and me, and I presently observed that
+she was trying to catch his eye.  Though at Homburg, as people said, "one
+could never be sure," I yet doubted whether this lady were one of those
+whose especial vocation it was to catch a gentleman's eye.  She was
+youthful rather than elderly, and pretty rather than plain; indeed, a few
+minutes later, when I saw her smile, I thought her wonderfully pretty.
+She had a charming gray eye and a good deal of yellow hair disposed in
+picturesque disorder; and though her features were meagre and her
+complexion faded, she gave one a sense of sentimental, artificial
+gracefulness.  She was dressed in white muslin very much puffed and
+filled, but a trifle the worse for wear, relieved here and there by a
+pale blue ribbon.  I used to flatter myself on guessing at people's
+nationality by their faces, and, as a rule, I guessed aright.  This
+faded, crumpled, vaporous beauty, I conceived, was a German--such a
+German, somehow, as I had seen imagined in literature.  Was she not a
+friend of poets, a correspondent of philosophers, a muse, a priestess of
+aesthetics--something in the way of a Bettina, a Rahel?  My conjectures,
+however, were speedily merged in wonderment as to what my diffident
+friend was making of her.  She caught his eye at last, and raising an
+ungloved hand, covered altogether with blue-gemmed rings--turquoises,
+sapphires, and lapis--she beckoned him to come to her.  The gesture was
+executed with a sort of practised coolness, and accompanied with an
+appealing smile.  He stared a moment, rather blankly, unable to suppose
+that the invitation was addressed to him; then, as it was immediately
+repeated with a good deal of intensity, he blushed to the roots of his
+hair, wavered awkwardly, and at last made his way to the lady's chair.  By
+the time he reached it he was crimson, and wiping his forehead with his
+pocket-handkerchief.  She tilted back, looked up at him with the same
+smile, laid two fingers on his sleeve, and said something,
+interrogatively, to which he replied by a shake of the head.  She was
+asking him, evidently, if he had ever played, and he was saying no.  Old
+players have a fancy that when luck has turned her back on them they can
+put her into good-humour again by having their stakes placed by a novice.
+Our young man's physiognomy had seemed to his new acquaintance to express
+the perfection of inexperience, and, like a practical woman, she had
+determined to make him serve her turn.  Unlike most of her neighbours,
+she had no little pile of gold before her, but she drew from her pocket a
+double napoleon, put it into his hand, and bade him place it on a number
+of his own choosing.  He was evidently filled with a sort of delightful
+trouble; he enjoyed the adventure, but he shrank from the hazard.  I
+would have staked the coin on its being his companion's last; for
+although she still smiled intently as she watched his hesitation, there
+was anything but indifference in her pale, pretty face.  Suddenly, in
+desperation, he reached over and laid the piece on the table.  My
+attention was diverted at this moment by my having to make way for a lady
+with a great many flounces, before me, to give up her chair to a rustling
+friend to whom she had promised it; when I again looked across at the
+lady in white muslin, she was drawing in a very goodly pile of gold with
+her little blue-gemmed claw.  Good luck and bad, at the Homburg tables,
+were equally undemonstrative, and this happy adventuress rewarded her
+young friend for the sacrifice of his innocence with a single, rapid,
+upward smile.  He had innocence enough left, however, to look round the
+table with a gleeful, conscious laugh, in the midst of which his eyes
+encountered my own.  Then suddenly the familiar look which had vanished
+from his face flickered up unmistakably; it was the boyish laugh of a
+boyhood's friend.  Stupid fellow that I was, I had been looking at Eugene
+Pickering!
+
+Though I lingered on for some time longer he failed to recognise me.
+Recognition, I think, had kindled a smile in my own face; but, less
+fortunate than he, I suppose my smile had ceased to be boyish.  Now that
+luck had faced about again, his companion played for herself--played and
+won, hand over hand.  At last she seemed disposed to rest on her gains,
+and proceeded to bury them in the folds of her muslin.  Pickering had
+staked nothing for himself, but as he saw her prepare to withdraw he
+offered her a double napoleon and begged her to place it.  She shook her
+head with great decision, and seemed to bid him put it up again; but he,
+still blushing a good deal, pressed her with awkward ardour, and she at
+last took it from him, looked at him a moment fixedly, and laid it on a
+number.  A moment later the croupier was raking it in.  She gave the
+young man a little nod which seemed to say, "I told you so;" he glanced
+round the table again and laughed; she left her chair, and he made a way
+for her through the crowd.  Before going home I took a turn on the
+terrace and looked down on the esplanade.  The lamps were out, but the
+warm starlight vaguely illumined a dozen figures scattered in couples.
+One of these figures, I thought, was a lady in a white dress.
+
+I had no intention of letting Pickering go without reminding him of our
+old acquaintance.  He had been a very singular boy, and I was curious to
+see what had become of his singularity.  I looked for him the next
+morning at two or three of the hotels, and at last I discovered his
+whereabouts.  But he was out, the waiter said; he had gone to walk an
+hour before.  I went my way, confident that I should meet him in the
+evening.  It was the rule with the Homburg world to spend its evenings at
+the Kursaal, and Pickering, apparently, had already discovered a good
+reason for not being an exception.  One of the charms of Homburg is the
+fact that of a hot day you may walk about for a whole afternoon in
+unbroken shade.  The umbrageous gardens of the Kursaal mingle with the
+charming Hardtwald, which in turn melts away into the wooded slopes of
+the Taunus Mountains.  To the Hardtwald I bent my steps, and strolled for
+an hour through mossy glades and the still, perpendicular gloom of the
+fir-woods.  Suddenly, on the grassy margin of a by-path, I came upon a
+young man stretched at his length in the sun-checkered shade, and kicking
+his heels towards a patch of blue sky.  My step was so noiseless on the
+turf that, before he saw me, I had time to recognise Pickering again.  He
+looked as if he had been lounging there for some time; his hair was
+tossed about as if he had been sleeping; on the grass near him, beside
+his hat and stick, lay a sealed letter.  When he perceived me he jerked
+himself forward, and I stood looking at him without introducing
+myself--purposely, to give him a chance to recognise me.  He put on his
+glasses, being awkwardly near-sighted, and stared up at me with an air of
+general trustfulness, but without a sign of knowing me.  So at last I
+introduced myself.  Then he jumped up and grasped my hands, and stared
+and blushed and laughed, and began a dozen random questions, ending with
+a demand as to how in the world I had known him.
+
+"Why, you are not changed so utterly," I said; "and after all, it's but
+fifteen years since you used to do my Latin exercises for me."
+
+"Not changed, eh?" he answered, still smiling, and yet speaking with a
+sort of ingenuous dismay.
+
+Then I remembered that poor Pickering had been, in those Latin days, a
+victim of juvenile irony.  He used to bring a bottle of medicine to
+school and take a dose in a glass of water before lunch; and every day at
+two o'clock, half an hour before the rest of us were liberated, an old
+nurse with bushy eyebrows came and fetched him away in a carriage.  His
+extremely fair complexion, his nurse, and his bottle of medicine, which
+suggested a vague analogy with the sleeping-potion in the tragedy, caused
+him to be called Juliet.  Certainly Romeo's sweetheart hardly suffered
+more; she was not, at least, a standing joke in Verona.  Remembering
+these things, I hastened to say to Pickering that I hoped he was still
+the same good fellow who used to do my Latin for me.  "We were capital
+friends, you know," I went on, "then and afterwards."
+
+"Yes, we were very good friends," he said, "and that makes it the
+stranger I shouldn't have known you.  For you know, as a boy, I never had
+many friends, nor as a man either.  You see," he added, passing his hand
+over his eyes, "I am rather dazed, rather bewildered at finding myself
+for the first time--alone."  And he jerked back his shoulders nervously,
+and threw up his head, as if to settle himself in an unwonted position.  I
+wondered whether the old nurse with the bushy eyebrows had remained
+attached to his person up to a recent period, and discovered presently
+that, virtually at least, she had.  We had the whole summer day before
+us, and we sat down on the grass together and overhauled our old
+memories.  It was as if we had stumbled upon an ancient cupboard in some
+dusky corner, and rummaged out a heap of childish playthings--tin
+soldiers and torn story-books, jack-knives and Chinese puzzles.  This is
+what we remembered between us.
+
+He had made but a short stay at school--not because he was tormented, for
+he thought it so fine to be at school at all that he held his tongue at
+home about the sufferings incurred through the medicine-bottle, but
+because his father thought he was learning bad manners.  This he imparted
+to me in confidence at the time, and I remember how it increased my
+oppressive awe of Mr. Pickering, who had appeared to me in glimpses as a
+sort of high priest of the proprieties.  Mr. Pickering was a widower--a
+fact which seemed to produce in him a sort of preternatural concentration
+of parental dignity.  He was a majestic man, with a hooked nose, a keen
+dark eye, very large whiskers, and notions of his own as to how a boy--or
+his boy, at any rate--should be brought up.  First and foremost, he was
+to be a "gentleman"; which seemed to mean, chiefly, that he was always to
+wear a muffler and gloves, and be sent to bed, after a supper of bread
+and milk, at eight o'clock.  School-life, on experiment, seemed hostile
+to these observances, and Eugene was taken home again, to be moulded into
+urbanity beneath the parental eye.  A tutor was provided for him, and a
+single select companion was prescribed.  The choice, mysteriously, fell
+on me, born as I was under quite another star; my parents were appealed
+to, and I was allowed for a few months to have my lessons with Eugene.
+The tutor, I think, must have been rather a snob, for Eugene was treated
+like a prince, while I got all the questions and the raps with the ruler.
+And yet I remember never being jealous of my happier comrade, and
+striking up, for the time, one of those friendships of childhood.  He had
+a watch and a pony and a great store of picture-books, but my envy of
+these luxuries was tempered by a vague compassion which left me free to
+be generous.  I could go out to play alone, I could button my jacket
+myself, and sit up till I was sleepy.  Poor Pickering could never take a
+step without asking leave, or spend half an hour in the garden without a
+formal report of it when he came in.  My parents, who had no desire to
+see me inoculated with importunate virtues, sent me back to school at the
+end of six months.  After that I never saw Eugene.  His father went to
+live in the country, to protect the lad's morals, and Eugene faded, in
+reminiscence, into a pale image of the depressing effects of education.  I
+think I vaguely supposed that he would melt into thin air, and indeed
+began gradually to doubt of his existence, and to regard him as one of
+the foolish things one ceased to believe in as one grew older.  It seemed
+natural that I should have no more news of him.  Our present meeting was
+my first assurance that he had really survived all that muffling and
+coddling.
+
+I observed him now with a good deal of interest, for he was a rare
+phenomenon--the fruit of a system persistently and uninterruptedly
+applied.  He struck me, in a fashion, as certain young monks I had seen
+in Italy; he had the same candid, unsophisticated cloister face.  His
+education had been really almost monastic.  It had found him evidently a
+very compliant, yielding subject; his gentle affectionate spirit was not
+one of those that need to be broken.  It had bequeathed him, now that he
+stood on the threshold of the great world, an extraordinary freshness of
+impression and alertness of desire, and I confess that, as I looked at
+him and met his transparent blue eye, I trembled for the unwarned
+innocence of such a soul.  I became aware, gradually, that the world had
+already wrought a certain work upon him and roused him to a restless,
+troubled self-consciousness.  Everything about him pointed to an
+experience from which he had been debarred; his whole organism trembled
+with a dawning sense of unsuspected possibilities of feeling.  This
+appealing tremor was indeed outwardly visible.  He kept shifting himself
+about on the grass, thrusting his hands through his hair, wiping a light
+perspiration from his forehead, breaking out to say something and rushing
+off to something else.  Our sudden meeting had greatly excited him, and I
+saw that I was likely to profit by a certain overflow of sentimental
+fermentation.  I could do so with a good conscience, for all this
+trepidation filled me with a great friendliness.
+
+"It's nearly fifteen years, as you say," he began, "since you used to
+call me 'butter-fingers' for always missing the ball.  That's a long time
+to give an account of, and yet they have been, for me, such eventless,
+monotonous years, that I could almost tell their history in ten words.
+You, I suppose, have had all kinds of adventures and travelled over half
+the world.  I remember you had a turn for deeds of daring; I used to
+think you a little Captain Cook in roundabouts, for climbing the garden
+fence to get the ball when I had let it fly over.  I climbed no fences
+then or since.  You remember my father, I suppose, and the great care he
+took of me?  I lost him some five months ago.  From those boyish days up
+to his death we were always together.  I don't think that in fifteen
+years we spent half a dozen hours apart.  We lived in the country, winter
+and summer, seeing but three or four people.  I had a succession of
+tutors, and a library to browse about in; I assure you I am a tremendous
+scholar.  It was a dull life for a growing boy, and a duller life for a
+young man grown, but I never knew it.  I was perfectly happy."  He spoke
+of his father at some length, and with a respect which I privately
+declined to emulate.  Mr. Pickering had been, to my sense, a frigid
+egotist, unable to conceive of any larger vocation for his son than to
+strive to reproduce so irreproachable a model.  "I know I have been
+strangely brought up," said my friend, "and that the result is something
+grotesque; but my education, piece by piece, in detail, became one of my
+father's personal habits, as it were.  He took a fancy to it at first
+through his intense affection for my mother and the sort of worship he
+paid her memory.  She died at my birth, and as I grew up, it seems that I
+bore an extraordinary likeness to her.  Besides, my father had a great
+many theories; he prided himself on his conservative opinions; he thought
+the usual American _laisser-aller_ in education was a very vulgar
+practice, and that children were not to grow up like dusty thorns by the
+wayside."  "So you see," Pickering went on, smiling and blushing, and yet
+with something of the irony of vain regret, "I am a regular garden plant.
+I have been watched and watered and pruned, and if there is any virtue in
+tending I ought to take the prize at a flower show.  Some three years ago
+my father's health broke down, and he was kept very much within doors.
+So, although I was a man grown, I lived altogether at home.  If I was out
+of his sight for a quarter of an hour he sent some one after me.  He had
+severe attacks of neuralgia, and he used to sit at his window, basking in
+the sun.  He kept an opera-glass at hand, and when I was out in the
+garden he used to watch me with it.  A few days before his death I was
+twenty-seven years old, and the most innocent youth, I suppose, on the
+continent.  After he died I missed him greatly," Pickering continued,
+evidently with no intention of making an epigram.  "I stayed at home, in
+a sort of dull stupor.  It seemed as if life offered itself to me for the
+first time, and yet as if I didn't know how to take hold of it."
+
+He uttered all this with a frank eagerness which increased as he talked,
+and there was a singular contrast between the meagre experience he
+described and a certain radiant intelligence which I seemed to perceive
+in his glance and tone.  Evidently he was a clever fellow, and his
+natural faculties were excellent.  I imagined he had read a great deal,
+and recovered, in some degree, in restless intellectual conjecture, the
+freedom he was condemned to ignore in practice.  Opportunity was now
+offering a meaning to the empty forms with which his imagination was
+stored, but it appeared to him dimly, through the veil of his personal
+diffidence.
+
+"I have not sailed round the world, as you suppose," I said, "but I
+confess I envy you the novelties you are going to behold.  Coming to
+Homburg you have plunged _in medias res_."
+
+He glanced at me to see if my remark contained an allusion, and hesitated
+a moment.  "Yes, I know it.  I came to Bremen in the steamer with a very
+friendly German, who undertook to initiate me into the glories and
+mysteries of the Fatherland.  At this season, he said, I must begin with
+Homburg.  I landed but a fortnight ago, and here I am."  Again he
+hesitated, as if he were going to add something about the scene at the
+Kursaal but suddenly, nervously, he took up the letter which was lying
+beside him, looked hard at the seal with a troubled frown, and then flung
+it back on the grass with a sigh.
+
+"How long do you expect to be in Europe?" I asked.
+
+"Six months I supposed when I came.  But not so long--now!"  And he let
+his eyes wander to the letter again.
+
+"And where shall you go--what shall you do?"
+
+"Everywhere, everything, I should have said yesterday.  But now it is
+different."
+
+I glanced at the letter--interrogatively, and he gravely picked it up and
+put it into his pocket.  We talked for a while longer, but I saw that he
+had suddenly become preoccupied; that he was apparently weighing an
+impulse to break some last barrier of reserve.  At last he suddenly laid
+his hand on my arm, looked at me a moment appealingly, and cried, "Upon
+my word, I should like to tell you everything!"
+
+"Tell me everything, by all means," I answered, smiling. "I desire
+nothing better than to lie here in the shade and hear everything."
+
+"Ah, but the question is, will you understand it?  No matter; you think
+me a queer fellow already.  It's not easy, either, to tell you what I
+feel--not easy for so queer a fellow as I to tell you in how many ways he
+is queer!"  He got up and walked away a moment, passing his hand over his
+eyes, then came back rapidly and flung himself on the grass again.  "I
+said just now I always supposed I was happy; it's true; but now that my
+eyes are open, I see I was only stultified.  I was like a poodle-dog that
+is led about by a blue ribbon, and scoured and combed and fed on slops.
+It was not life; life is learning to know one's self, and in that sense I
+have lived more in the past six weeks than in all the years that preceded
+them.  I am filled with this feverish sense of liberation; it keeps
+rising to my head like the fumes of strong wine.  I find I am an active,
+sentient, intelligent creature, with desires, with passions, with
+possible convictions--even with what I never dreamed of, a possible will
+of my own!  I find there is a world to know, a life to lead, men and
+women to form a thousand relations with.  It all lies there like a great
+surging sea, where we must plunge and dive and feel the breeze and breast
+the waves.  I stand shivering here on the brink, staring, longing,
+wondering, charmed by the smell of the brine and yet afraid of the water.
+The world beckons and smiles and calls, but a nameless influence from the
+past, that I can neither wholly obey nor wholly resist, seems to hold me
+back.  I am full of impulses, but, somehow, I am not full of strength.
+Life seems inspiring at certain moments, but it seems terrible and
+unsafe; and I ask myself why I should wantonly measure myself with
+merciless forces, when I have learned so well how to stand aside and let
+them pass.  Why shouldn't I turn my back upon it all and go home to--what
+awaits me?--to that sightless, soundless country life, and long days
+spent among old books?  But if a man _is_ weak, he doesn't want to assent
+beforehand to his weakness; he wants to taste whatever sweetness there
+may be in paying for the knowledge.  So it is that it comes back--this
+irresistible impulse to take my plunge--to let myself swing, to go where
+liberty leads me."  He paused a moment, fixing me with his excited eyes,
+and perhaps perceived in my own an irrepressible smile at his perplexity.
+"'Swing ahead, in Heaven's name,' you want to say, 'and much good may it
+do you.'  I don't know whether you are laughing at my scruples or at what
+possibly strikes you as my depravity.  I doubt," he went on gravely,
+"whether I have an inclination toward wrong-doing; if I have, I am sure I
+shall not prosper in it.  I honestly believe I may safely take out a
+license to amuse myself.  But it isn't that I think of, any more than I
+dream of, playing with suffering.  Pleasure and pain are empty words to
+me; what I long for is knowledge--some other knowledge than comes to us
+in formal, colourless, impersonal precept.  You would understand all this
+better if you could breathe for an hour the musty in-door atmosphere in
+which I have always lived.  To break a window and let in light and air--I
+feel as if at last I must _act_!"
+
+"Act, by all means, now and always, when you have a chance," I answered.
+"But don't take things too hard, now or ever.  Your long confinement
+makes you think the world better worth knowing than you are likely to
+find it.  A man with as good a head and heart as yours has a very ample
+world within himself, and I am no believer in art for art, nor in what's
+called 'life' for life's sake.  Nevertheless, take your plunge, and come
+and tell me whether you have found the pearl of wisdom."  He frowned a
+little, as if he thought my sympathy a trifle meagre.  I shook him by the
+hand and laughed.  "The pearl of wisdom," I cried, "is love; honest love
+in the most convenient concentration of experience!  I advise you to fall
+in love."  He gave me no smile in response, but drew from his pocket the
+letter of which I have spoken, held it up, and shook it solemnly.  "What
+is it?" I asked.
+
+"It is my sentence!"
+
+"Not of death, I hope!"
+
+"Of marriage."
+
+"With whom?"
+
+"With a person I don't love."
+
+This was serious.  I stopped smiling, and begged him to explain.
+
+"It is the singular part of my story," he said at last.  "It will remind
+you of an old-fashioned romance.  Such as I sit here, talking in this
+wild way, and tossing off provocations to destiny, my destiny is settled
+and sealed.  I am engaged, I am given in marriage.  It's a bequest of the
+past--the past I had no hand in!  The marriage was arranged by my father,
+years ago, when I was a boy.  The young girl's father was his particular
+friend; he was also a widower, and was bringing up his daughter, on his
+side, in the same severe seclusion in which I was spending my days.  To
+this day I am unacquainted with the origin of the bond of union between
+our respective progenitors.  Mr. Vernor was largely engaged in business,
+and I imagine that once upon a time he found himself in a financial
+strait and was helped through it by my father's coming forward with a
+heavy loan, on which, in his situation, he could offer no security but
+his word.  Of this my father was quite capable.  He was a man of dogmas,
+and he was sure to have a rule of life--as clear as if it had been
+written out in his beautiful copper-plate hand--adapted to the conduct of
+a gentleman toward a friend in pecuniary embarrassment.  What is more, he
+was sure to adhere to it.  Mr. Vernor, I believe, got on his feet, paid
+his debt, and vowed my father an eternal gratitude.  His little daughter
+was the apple of his eye, and he pledged himself to bring her up to be
+the wife of his benefactor's son.  So our fate was fixed, parentally, and
+we have been educated for each other.  I have not seen my betrothed since
+she was a very plain-faced little girl in a sticky pinafore, hugging a
+one-armed doll--of the male sex, I believe--as big as herself.  Mr.
+Vernor is in what is called the Eastern trade, and has been living these
+many years at Smyrna.  Isabel has grown up there in a white-walled
+garden, in an orange grove, between her father and her governess.  She is
+a good deal my junior; six months ago she was seventeen; when she is
+eighteen we are to marry."
+
+He related all this calmly enough, without the accent of complaint, drily
+rather and doggedly, as if he were weary of thinking of it.  "It's a
+romance, indeed, for these dull days," I said, "and I heartily
+congratulate you.  It's not every young man who finds, on reaching the
+marrying age, a wife kept in a box of rose-leaves for him.  A thousand to
+one Miss Vernor is charming; I wonder you don't post off to Smyrna."
+
+"You are joking," he answered, with a wounded air, "and I am terribly
+serious.  Let me tell you the rest.  I never suspected this superior
+conspiracy till something less than a year ago.  My father, wishing to
+provide against his death, informed me of it very solemnly.  I was
+neither elated nor depressed; I received it, as I remember, with a sort
+of emotion which varied only in degree from that with which I could have
+hailed the announcement that he had ordered me a set of new shirts.  I
+supposed that was the way that all marriages were made; I had heard of
+their being made in heaven, and what was my father but a divinity?  Novels
+and poems, indeed, talked about falling in love; but novels and poems
+were one thing and life was another.  A short time afterwards he
+introduced me to a photograph of my predestined, who has a pretty, but an
+extremely inanimate, face.  After this his health failed rapidly.  One
+night I was sitting, as I habitually sat for hours, in his dimly-lighted
+room, near his bed, to which he had been confined for a week.  He had not
+spoken for some time, and I supposed he was asleep; but happening to look
+at him I saw his eyes wide open, and fixed on me strangely.  He was
+smiling benignantly, intensely, and in a moment he beckoned to me.  Then,
+on my going to him--'I feel that I shall not last long,' he said; 'but I
+am willing to die when I think how comfortably I have arranged your
+future.'  He was talking of death, and anything but grief at that moment
+was doubtless impious and monstrous; but there came into my heart for the
+first time a throbbing sense of being over-governed.  I said nothing, and
+he thought my silence was all sorrow.  'I shall not live to see you
+married,' he went on, 'but since the foundation is laid, that little
+signifies; it would be a selfish pleasure, and I have never thought of
+myself but in you.  To foresee your future, in its main outline, to know
+to a certainty that you will be safely domiciled here, with a wife
+approved by my judgment, cultivating the moral fruit of which I have sown
+the seed--this will content me.  But, my son, I wish to clear this bright
+vision from the shadow of a doubt.  I believe in your docility; I believe
+I may trust the salutary force of your respect for my memory.  But I must
+remember that when I am removed you will stand here alone, face to face
+with a hundred nameless temptations to perversity.  The fumes of
+unrighteous pride may rise into your brain and tempt you, in the interest
+of a vulgar theory which it will call your independence, to shatter the
+edifice I have so laboriously constructed.  So I must ask you for a
+promise--the solemn promise you owe my condition.'  And he grasped my
+hand.  'You will follow the path I have marked; you will be faithful to
+the young girl whom an influence as devoted as that which has governed
+your own young life has moulded into everything amiable; you will marry
+Isabel Vernor.'  This was pretty 'steep,' as we used to say at school.  I
+was frightened; I drew away my hand and asked to be trusted without any
+such terrible vow.  My reluctance startled my father into a suspicion
+that the vulgar theory of independence had already been whispering to me.
+He sat up in his bed and looked at me with eyes which seemed to foresee a
+lifetime of odious ingratitude.  I felt the reproach; I feel it now.  I
+promised!  And even now I don't regret my promise nor complain of my
+father's tenacity.  I feel, somehow, as if the seeds of ultimate repose
+had been sown in those unsuspecting years--as if after many days I might
+gather the mellow fruit.  But after many days!  I will keep my promise, I
+will obey; but I want to _live_ first!"
+
+"My dear fellow, you are living now.  All this passionate consciousness
+of your situation is a very ardent life.  I wish I could say as much for
+my own."
+
+"I want to forget my situation.  I want to spend three months without
+thinking of the past or the future, grasping whatever the present offers
+me.  Yesterday I thought I was in a fair way to sail with the tide.  But
+this morning comes this memento!"  And he held up his letter again.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"A letter from Smyrna."
+
+"I see you have not yet broken the seal."
+
+"No; nor do I mean to, for the present.  It contains bad news."
+
+"What do you call bad news?"
+
+"News that I am expected in Smyrna in three weeks.  News that Mr. Vernor
+disapproves of my roving about the world.  News that his daughter is
+standing expectant at the altar."
+
+"Is not this pure conjecture?"
+
+"Conjecture, possibly, but safe conjecture.  As soon as I looked at the
+letter something smote me at the heart.  Look at the device on the seal,
+and I am sure you will find it's _Tarry not_!"  And he flung the letter
+on the grass.
+
+"Upon my word, you had better open it," I said.
+
+"If I were to open it and read my summons, do you know what I should do?
+I should march home and ask the Oberkellner how one gets to Smyrna, pack
+my trunk, take my ticket, and not stop till I arrived.  I know I should;
+it would be the fascination of habit.  The only way, therefore, to wander
+to my rope's end is to leave the letter unread."
+
+"In your place," I said, "curiosity would make me open it."
+
+He shook his head.  "I have no curiosity!  For a long time now the idea
+of my marriage has ceased to be a novelty, and I have contemplated it
+mentally in every possible light.  I fear nothing from that side, but I
+do fear something from conscience.  I want my hands tied.  Will you do me
+a favour?  Pick up the letter, put it into your pocket, and keep it till
+I ask you for it.  When I do, you may know that I am at my rope's end."
+
+I took the letter, smiling.  "And how long is your rope to be?  The
+Homburg season doesn't last for ever."
+
+"Does it last a month?  Let that be my season!  A month hence you will
+give it back to me."
+
+"To-morrow if you say so.  Meanwhile, let it rest in peace!"  And I
+consigned it to the most sacred interstice of my pocket-book.  To say
+that I was disposed to humour the poor fellow would seem to be saying
+that I thought his request fantastic.  It was his situation, by no fault
+of his own, that was fantastic, and he was only trying to be natural.  He
+watched me put away the letter, and when it had disappeared gave a soft
+sigh of relief.  The sigh was natural, and yet it set me thinking.  His
+general recoil from an immediate responsibility imposed by others might
+be wholesome enough; but if there was an old grievance on one side, was
+there not possibly a new-born delusion on the other?  It would be unkind
+to withhold a reflection that might serve as a warning; so I told him,
+abruptly, that I had been an undiscovered spectator, the night before, of
+his exploits at roulette.
+
+He blushed deeply, but he met my eyes with the same clear good-humour.
+
+"Ah, then, you saw that wonderful lady?"
+
+"Wonderful she was indeed.  I saw her afterwards, too, sitting on the
+terrace in the starlight.  I imagine she was not alone."
+
+"No, indeed, I was with her--for nearly an hour.  Then I walked home with
+her."
+
+"Ah!  And did you go in?"
+
+"No, she said it was too late to ask me; though she remarked that in a
+general way she did not stand upon ceremony."
+
+"She did herself injustice.  When it came to losing your money for you,
+she made you insist."
+
+"Ah, you noticed that too?" cried Pickering, still quite unconfused.  "I
+felt as if the whole table were staring at me; but her manner was so
+gracious and reassuring that I supposed she was doing nothing unusual.
+She confessed, however, afterwards, that she is very eccentric.  The
+world began to call her so, she said, before she ever dreamed of it, and
+at last finding that she had the reputation, in spite of herself, she
+resolved to enjoy its privileges.  Now, she does what she chooses."
+
+"In other words, she is a lady with no reputation to lose!"
+
+Pickering seemed puzzled; he smiled a little. "Is not that what you say
+of bad women?"
+
+"Of some--of those who are found out."
+
+"Well," he said, still smiling, "I have not yet found out Madame
+Blumenthal."
+
+"If that's her name, I suppose she's German."
+
+"Yes; but she speaks English so well that you wouldn't know it.  She is
+very clever.  Her husband is dead."
+
+I laughed involuntarily at the conjunction of these facts, and
+Pickering's clear glance seemed to question my mirth.  "You have been so
+bluntly frank with me," I said, "that I too must be frank.  Tell me, if
+you can, whether this clever Madame Blumenthal, whose husband is dead,
+has given a point to your desire for a suspension of communication with
+Smyrna."
+
+He seemed to ponder my question, unshrinkingly.  "I think not," he said,
+at last.  "I have had the desire for three months; I have known Madame
+Blumenthal for less than twenty-four hours."
+
+"Very true.  But when you found this letter of yours on your place at
+breakfast, did you seem for a moment to see Madame Blumenthal sitting
+opposite?"
+
+"Opposite?"
+
+"Opposite, my dear fellow, or anywhere in the neighbourhood.  In a word,
+does she interest you?"
+
+"Very much!" he cried, joyously.
+
+"Amen!" I answered, jumping up with a laugh.  "And now, if we are to see
+the world in a month, there is no time to lose.  Let us begin with the
+Hardtwald."
+
+Pickering rose, and we strolled away into the forest, talking of lighter
+things.  At last we reached the edge of the wood, sat down on a fallen
+log, and looked out across an interval of meadow at the long wooded waves
+of the Taunus.  What my friend was thinking of I can't say; I was
+meditating on his queer biography, and letting my wonderment wander away
+to Smyrna.  Suddenly I remembered that he possessed a portrait of the
+young girl who was waiting for him there in a white-walled garden.  I
+asked him if he had it with him.  He said nothing, but gravely took out
+his pocket-book and drew forth a small photograph.  It represented, as
+the poet says, a simple maiden in her flower--a slight young girl, with a
+certain childish roundness of contour.  There was no ease in her posture;
+she was standing, stiffly and shyly, for her likeness; she wore a short-
+waisted white dress; her arms hung at her sides and her hands were
+clasped in front; her head was bent downward a little, and her dark eyes
+fixed.  But her awkwardness was as pretty as that of some angular seraph
+in a mediaeval carving, and in her timid gaze there seemed to lurk the
+questioning gleam of childhood.  "What is this for?" her charming eyes
+appeared to ask; "why have I been dressed up for this ceremony in a white
+frock and amber beads?"
+
+"Gracious powers!" I said to myself; "what an enchanting thing is
+innocence!"
+
+"That portrait was taken a year and a half ago," said Pickering, as if
+with an effort to be perfectly just.  "By this time, I suppose, she looks
+a little wiser."
+
+"Not much, I hope," I said, as I gave it back.  "She is very sweet!"
+
+"Yes, poor girl, she is very sweet--no doubt!"  And he put the thing away
+without looking at it.
+
+We were silent for some moments.  At last, abruptly--"My dear fellow," I
+said, "I should take some satisfaction in seeing you immediately leave
+Homburg."
+
+"Immediately?"
+
+"To-day--as soon as you can get ready."
+
+He looked at me, surprised, and little by little he blushed.  "There is
+something I have not told you," he said; "something that your saying that
+Madame Blumenthal has no reputation to lose has made me half afraid to
+tell you."
+
+"I think I can guess it.  Madame Blumenthal has asked you to come and
+play her game for her again."
+
+"Not at all!" cried Pickering, with a smile of triumph.  "She says that
+she means to play no more for the present.  She has asked me to come and
+take tea with her this evening."
+
+"Ah, then," I said, very gravely, "of course you can't leave Homburg."
+
+He answered nothing, but looked askance at me, as if he were expecting me
+to laugh.  "Urge it strongly," he said in a moment.  "Say it's my
+duty--that I _must_."
+
+I didn't quite understand him, but, feathering the shaft with a harmless
+expletive, I told him that unless he followed my advice I would never
+speak to him again.
+
+He got up, stood before me, and struck the ground with his stick.  "Good!"
+he cried; "I wanted an occasion to break a rule--to leap a barrier.  Here
+it is.  I stay!"
+
+I made him a mock bow for his energy.  "That's very fine," I said; "but
+now, to put you in a proper mood for Madame Blumenthal's tea, we will go
+and listen to the band play Schubert under the lindens."  And we walked
+back through the woods.
+
+I went to see Pickering the next day, at his inn, and on knocking, as
+directed, at his door, was surprised to hear the sound of a loud voice
+within.  My knock remained unnoticed, so I presently introduced myself.  I
+found no company, but I discovered my friend walking up and down the room
+and apparently declaiming to himself from a little volume bound in white
+vellum.  He greeted me heartily, threw his book on the table, and said
+that he was taking a German lesson.
+
+"And who is your teacher?" I asked, glancing at the book.
+
+He rather avoided meeting my eye, as he answered, after an instant's
+delay, "Madame Blumenthal."
+
+"Indeed!  Has she written a grammar?"
+
+"It's not a grammar; it's a tragedy."  And he handed me the book.
+
+I opened it, and beheld, in delicate type, with a very large margin, an
+_Historisches Trauerspiel_ in five acts, entitled "Cleopatra."  There
+were a great many marginal corrections and annotations, apparently from
+the author's hand; the speeches were very long, and there was an
+inordinate number of soliloquies by the heroine.  One of them, I
+remember, towards the end of the play, began in this fashion--
+
+"What, after all, is life but sensation, and sensation but
+deception?--reality that pales before the light of one's dreams as
+Octavia's dull beauty fades beside mine?  But let me believe in some
+intenser bliss, and seek it in the arms of death!"
+
+"It seems decidedly passionate," I said.  "Has the tragedy ever been
+acted?"
+
+"Never in public; but Madame Blumenthal tells me that she had it played
+at her own house in Berlin, and that she herself undertook the part of
+the heroine."
+
+Pickering's unworldly life had not been of a sort to sharpen his
+perception of the ridiculous, but it seemed to me an unmistakable sign of
+his being under the charm, that this information was very soberly
+offered.  He was preoccupied, he was irresponsive to my experimental
+observations on vulgar topics--the hot weather, the inn, the advent of
+Adelina Patti.  At last, uttering his thoughts, he announced that Madame
+Blumenthal had proved to be an extraordinarily interesting woman.  He
+seemed to have quite forgotten our long talk in the Hartwaldt, and
+betrayed no sense of this being a confession that he had taken his plunge
+and was floating with the current.  He only remembered that I had spoken
+slightingly of the lady, and he now hinted that it behoved me to amend my
+opinion.  I had received the day before so strong an impression of a sort
+of spiritual fastidiousness in my friend's nature, that on hearing now
+the striking of a new hour, as it were, in his consciousness, and
+observing how the echoes of the past were immediately quenched in its
+music, I said to myself that it had certainly taken a delicate hand to
+wind up that fine machine.  No doubt Madame Blumenthal was a clever
+woman.  It is a good German custom at Homburg to spend the hour preceding
+dinner in listening to the orchestra in the Kurgarten; Mozart and
+Beethoven, for organisms in which the interfusion of soul and sense is
+peculiarly mysterious, are a vigorous stimulus to the appetite.  Pickering
+and I conformed, as we had done the day before, to the fashion, and when
+we were seated under the trees, he began to expatiate on his friend's
+merits.
+
+"I don't know whether she is eccentric or not," he said; "to me every one
+seems eccentric, and it's not for me, yet a while, to measure people by
+my narrow precedents.  I never saw a gaming table in my life before, and
+supposed that a gambler was of necessity some dusky villain with an evil
+eye.  In Germany, says Madame Blumenthal, people play at roulette as they
+play at billiards, and her own venerable mother originally taught her the
+rules of the game.  It is a recognised source of subsistence for decent
+people with small means.  But I confess Madame Blumenthal might do worse
+things than play at roulette, and yet make them harmonious and beautiful.
+I have never been in the habit of thinking positive beauty the most
+excellent thing in a woman.  I have always said to myself that if my
+heart were ever to be captured it would be by a sort of general grace--a
+sweetness of motion and tone--on which one could count for soothing
+impressions, as one counts on a musical instrument that is perfectly in
+tune.  Madame Blumenthal has it--this grace that soothes and satisfies;
+and it seems the more perfect that it keeps order and harmony in a
+character really passionately ardent and active.  With her eager nature
+and her innumerable accomplishments nothing would be easier than that she
+should seem restless and aggressive.  You will know her, and I leave you
+to judge whether she does seem so!  She has every gift, and culture has
+done everything for each.  What goes on in her mind I of course can't
+say; what reaches the observer--the admirer--is simply a sort of fragrant
+emanation of intelligence and sympathy."
+
+"Madame Blumenthal," I said, smiling, "might be the loveliest woman in
+the world, and you the object of her choicest favours, and yet what I
+should most envy you would be, not your peerless friend, but your
+beautiful imagination."
+
+"That's a polite way of calling me a fool," said Pickering.  "You are a
+sceptic, a cynic, a satirist!  I hope I shall be a long time coming to
+that."
+
+"You will make the journey fast if you travel by express trains.  But
+pray tell me, have you ventured to intimate to Madame Blumenthal your
+high opinion of her?"
+
+"I don't know what I may have said.  She listens even better than she
+talks, and I think it possible I may have made her listen to a great deal
+of nonsense.  For after the first few words I exchanged with her I was
+conscious of an extraordinary evaporation of all my old diffidence.  I
+have, in truth, I suppose," he added in a moment, "owing to my peculiar
+circumstances, a great accumulated fund of unuttered things of all sorts
+to get rid of.  Last evening, sitting there before that charming woman,
+they came swarming to my lips.  Very likely I poured them all out.  I
+have a sense of having enshrouded myself in a sort of mist of talk, and
+of seeing her lovely eyes shining through it opposite to me, like fog-
+lamps at sea."  And here, if I remember rightly, Pickering broke off into
+an ardent parenthesis, and declared that Madame Blumenthal's eyes had
+something in them that he had never seen in any others.  "It was a jumble
+of crudities and inanities," he went on; "they must have seemed to her
+great rubbish; but I felt the wiser and the stronger, somehow, for having
+fired off all my guns--they could hurt nobody now if they hit--and I
+imagine I might have gone far without finding another woman in whom such
+an exhibition would have provoked so little of mere cold amusement."
+
+"Madame Blumenthal, on the contrary," I surmised, "entered into your
+situation with warmth."
+
+"Exactly so--the greatest!  She has felt and suffered, and now she
+understands!"
+
+"She told you, I imagine, that she understood you as if she had made you,
+and she offered to be your guide, philosopher, and friend."
+
+"She spoke to me," Pickering answered, after a pause, "as I had never
+been spoken to before, and she offered me, formally, all the offices of a
+woman's friendship."
+
+"Which you as formally accepted?"
+
+"To you the scene sounds absurd, I suppose, but allow me to say I don't
+care!"  Pickering spoke with an air of genial defiance which was the most
+inoffensive thing in the world.  "I was very much moved; I was, in fact,
+very much excited.  I tried to say something, but I couldn't; I had had
+plenty to say before, but now I stammered and bungled, and at last I
+bolted out of the room."
+
+"Meanwhile she had dropped her tragedy into your pocket!"
+
+"Not at all.  I had seen it on the table before she came in.  Afterwards
+she kindly offered to read German aloud with me, for the accent, two or
+three times a week.  'What shall we begin with?' she asked.  'With this!'
+I said, and held up the book.  And she let me take it to look it over."
+
+I was neither a cynic nor a satirist, but even if I had been, I might
+have been disarmed by Pickering's assurance, before we parted, that
+Madame Blumenthal wished to know me and expected him to introduce me.
+Among the foolish things which, according to his own account, he had
+uttered, were some generous words in my praise, to which she had civilly
+replied.  I confess I was curious to see her, but I begged that the
+introduction should not be immediate, for I wished to let Pickering work
+out his destiny alone.  For some days I saw little of him, though we met
+at the Kursaal and strolled occasionally in the park.  I watched, in
+spite of my desire to let him alone, for the signs and portents of the
+world's action upon him--of that portion of the world, in especial, of
+which Madame Blumenthal had constituted herself the agent.  He seemed
+very happy, and gave me in a dozen ways an impression of increased self-
+confidence and maturity.  His mind was admirably active, and always,
+after a quarter of an hour's talk with him, I asked myself what
+experience could really do, that innocence had not done, to make it
+bright and fine.  I was struck with his deep enjoyment of the whole
+spectacle of foreign life--its novelty, its picturesqueness, its light
+and shade--and with the infinite freedom with which he felt he could go
+and come and rove and linger and observe it all.  It was an expansion, an
+awakening, a coming to moral manhood.  Each time I met him he spoke a
+little less of Madame Blumenthal; but he let me know generally that he
+saw her often, and continued to admire her.  I was forced to admit to
+myself, in spite of preconceptions, that if she were really the ruling
+star of this happy season, she must be a very superior woman.  Pickering
+had the air of an ingenuous young philosopher sitting at the feet of an
+austere muse, and not of a sentimental spendthrift dangling about some
+supreme incarnation of levity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+Madame Blumenthal seemed, for the time, to have abjured the Kursaal, and
+I never caught a glimpse of her.  Her young friend, apparently, was an
+interesting study, and the studious mind prefers seclusion.
+
+She reappeared, however, at last, one evening at the opera, where from my
+chair I perceived her in a box, looking extremely pretty.  Adelina Patti
+was singing, and after the rising of the curtain I was occupied with the
+stage; but on looking round when it fell for the _entr'acte_, I saw that
+the authoress of "Cleopatra" had been joined by her young admirer.  He
+was sitting a little behind her, leaning forward, looking over her
+shoulder and listening, while she, slowly moving her fan to and fro and
+letting her eye wander over the house, was apparently talking of this
+person and that.  No doubt she was saying sharp things; but Pickering was
+not laughing; his eyes were following her covert indications; his mouth
+was half open, as it always was when he was interested; he looked
+intensely serious.  I was glad that, having her back to him, she was
+unable to see how he looked.  It seemed the proper moment to present
+myself and make her my bow; but just as I was about to leave my place a
+gentleman, whom in a moment I perceived to be an old acquaintance, came
+to occupy the next chair.  Recognition and mutual greetings followed, and
+I was forced to postpone my visit to Madame Blumenthal.  I was not sorry,
+for it very soon occurred to me that Niedermeyer would be just the man to
+give me a fair prose version of Pickering's lyric tributes to his friend.
+He was an Austrian by birth, and had formerly lived about Europe a great
+deal in a series of small diplomatic posts.  England especially he had
+often visited, and he spoke the language almost without accent.  I had
+once spent three rainy days with him in the house of an English friend in
+the country.  He was a sharp observer, and a good deal of a gossip; he
+knew a little something about every one, and about some people
+everything.  His knowledge on social matters generally had the quality of
+all German science; it was copious, minute, exhaustive.
+
+"Do tell me," I said, as we stood looking round the house, "who and what
+is the lady in white, with the young man sitting behind her."
+
+"Who?" he answered, dropping his glass.  "Madame Blumenthal!  What!  It
+would take long to say.  Be introduced; it's easily done; you will find
+her charming.  Then, after a week, you will tell me what she is."
+
+"Perhaps I should not.  My friend there has known her a week, and I don't
+think he is yet able to give a coherent account of her."
+
+He raised his glass again, and after looking a while, "I am afraid your
+friend is a little--what do you call it?--a little 'soft.'  Poor fellow!
+he's not the first.  I have never known this lady that she has not had
+some eligible youth hovering about in some such attitude as that,
+undergoing the softening process.  She looks wonderfully well, from here.
+It's extraordinary how those women last!"
+
+"You don't mean, I take it, when you talk about 'those women,' that
+Madame Blumenthal is not embalmed, for duration, in a certain infusion of
+respectability?"
+
+"Yes and no.  The atmosphere that surrounds her is entirely of her own
+making.  There is no reason in her antecedents that people should drop
+their voice when they speak of her.  But some women are never at their
+ease till they have given some damnable twist or other to their position
+before the world.  The attitude of upright virtue is unbecoming, like
+sitting too straight in a fauteuil.  Don't ask me for opinions, however;
+content yourself with a few facts and with an anecdote.  Madame
+Blumenthal is Prussian, and very well born.  I remember her mother, an
+old Westphalian Grafin, with principles marshalled out like Frederick the
+Great's grenadiers.  She was poor, however, and her principles were an
+insufficient dowry for Anastasia, who was married very young to a vicious
+Jew, twice her own age.  He was supposed to have money, but I am afraid
+he had less than was nominated in the bond, or else that his pretty young
+wife spent it very fast.  She has been a widow these six or eight years,
+and has lived, I imagine, in rather a hand-to-mouth fashion.  I suppose
+she is some six or eight and thirty years of age.  In winter one hears of
+her in Berlin, giving little suppers to the artistic rabble there; in
+summer one often sees her across the green table at Ems and Wiesbaden.
+She's very clever, and her cleverness has spoiled her.  A year after her
+marriage she published a novel, with her views on matrimony, in the
+George Sand manner--beating the drum to Madame Sand's trumpet.  No doubt
+she was very unhappy; Blumenthal was an old beast.  Since then she has
+published a lot of literature--novels and poems and pamphlets on every
+conceivable theme, from the conversion of Lola Montez to the Hegelian
+philosophy.  Her talk is much better than her writing.  Her
+_conjugophobia_--I can't call it by any other name--made people think
+lightly of her at a time when her rebellion against marriage was probably
+only theoretic.  She had a taste for spinning fine phrases, she drove her
+shuttle, and when she came to the end of her yarn she found that society
+had turned its back.  She tossed her head, declared that at last she
+could breathe the sacred air of freedom, and formally announced that she
+had embraced an 'intellectual' life.  This meant unlimited _camaraderie_
+with scribblers and daubers, Hegelian philosophers and Hungarian
+pianists.  But she has been admired also by a great many really clever
+men; there was a time, in fact, when she turned a head as well set on its
+shoulders as this one!"  And Niedermeyer tapped his forehead.  "She has a
+great charm, and, literally, I know no harm of her.  Yet for all that, I
+am not going to speak to her; I am not going near her box.  I am going to
+leave her to say, if she does me the honour to observe the omission, that
+I too have gone over to the Philistines.  It's not that; it is that there
+is something sinister about the woman.  I am too old for it to frighten
+me, but I am good-natured enough for it to pain me.  Her quarrel with
+society has brought her no happiness, and her outward charm is only the
+mask of a dangerous discontent.  Her imagination is lodged where her
+heart should be!  So long as you amuse it, well and good; she's radiant.
+But the moment you let it flag, she is capable of dropping you without a
+pang.  If you land on your feet you are so much the wiser, simply; but
+there have been two or three, I believe, who have almost broken their
+necks in the fall."
+
+"You are reversing your promise," I said, "and giving me an opinion, but
+not an anecdote."
+
+"This is my anecdote.  A year ago a friend of mine made her acquaintance
+in Berlin, and though he was no longer a young man, and had never been
+what is called a susceptible one, he took a great fancy to Madame
+Blumenthal.  He's a major in the Prussian artillery--grizzled, grave, a
+trifle severe, a man every way firm in the faith of his fathers.  It's a
+proof of Anastasia's charm that such a man should have got into the habit
+of going to see her every day of his life.  But the major was in love, or
+next door to it!  Every day that he called he found her scribbling away
+at a little ormolu table on a lot of half-sheets of note-paper.  She used
+to bid him sit down and hold his tongue for a quarter of an hour, till
+she had finished her chapter; she was writing a novel, and it was
+promised to a publisher.  Clorinda, she confided to him, was the name of
+the injured heroine.  The major, I imagine, had never read a work of
+fiction in his life, but he knew by hearsay that Madame Blumenthal's
+literature, when put forth in pink covers, was subversive of several
+respectable institutions.  Besides, he didn't believe in women knowing
+how to write at all, and it irritated him to see this inky goddess
+correcting proof-sheets under his nose--irritated him the more that, as I
+say, he was in love with her and that he ventured to believe she had a
+kindness for his years and his honours.  And yet she was not such a woman
+as he could easily ask to marry him.  The result of all this was that he
+fell into the way of railing at her intellectual pursuits and saying he
+should like to run his sword through her pile of papers.  A woman was
+clever enough when she could guess her husband's wishes, and learned
+enough when she could read him the newspapers.  At last, one day, Madame
+Blumenthal flung down her pen and announced in triumph that she had
+finished her novel.  Clorinda had expired in the arms of--some one else
+than her husband.  The major, by way of congratulating her, declared that
+her novel was immoral rubbish, and that her love of vicious paradoxes was
+only a peculiarly depraved form of coquetry.  He added, however, that he
+loved her in spite of her follies, and that if she would formally abjure
+them he would as formally offer her his hand.  They say that women like
+to be snubbed by military men.  I don't know, I'm sure; I don't know how
+much pleasure, on this occasion, was mingled with Anastasia's wrath.  But
+her wrath was very quiet, and the major assured me it made her look
+uncommonly pretty.  'I have told you before,' she says, 'that I write
+from an inner need.  I write to unburden my heart, to satisfy my
+conscience.  You call my poor efforts coquetry, vanity, the desire to
+produce a sensation.  I can prove to you that it is the quiet labour
+itself I care for, and not the world's more or less flattering attention
+to it!'  And seizing the history of Clorinda she thrust it into the fire.
+The major stands staring, and the first thing he knows she is sweeping
+him a great curtsey and bidding him farewell for ever.  Left alone and
+recovering his wits, he fishes out Clorinda from the embers, and then
+proceeds to thump vigorously at the lady's door.  But it never opened,
+and from that day to the day three months ago when he told me the tale,
+he had not beheld her again."
+
+"By Jove, it's a striking story," I said.  "But the question is, what
+does it prove?"
+
+"Several things.  First (what I was careful not to tell my friend), that
+Madame Blumenthal cared for him a trifle more than he supposed; second,
+that he cares for her more than ever; third, that the performance was a
+master-stroke, and that her allowing him to force an interview upon her
+again is only a question of time."
+
+"And last?" I asked.
+
+"This is another anecdote.  The other day, Unter den Linden, I saw on a
+bookseller's counter a little pink-covered romance--'Sophronia,' by
+Madame Blumenthal.  Glancing through it, I observed an extraordinary
+abuse of asterisks; every two or three pages the narrative was adorned
+with a portentous blank, crossed with a row of stars."
+
+"Well, but poor Clorinda?" I objected, as Niedermeyer paused.
+
+"Sophronia, my dear fellow, is simply Clorinda renamed by the baptism of
+fire.  The fair author came back, of course, and found Clorinda tumbled
+upon the floor, a good deal scorched, but, on the whole, more frightened
+than hurt.  She picks her up, brushes her off, and sends her to the
+printer.  Wherever the flames had burnt a hole she swings a
+constellation!  But if the major is prepared to drop a penitent tear over
+the ashes of Clorinda, I shall not whisper to him that the urn is empty."
+
+Even Adelina Patti's singing, for the next half-hour, but half availed to
+divert me from my quickened curiosity to behold Madame Blumenthal face to
+face.  As soon as the curtain had fallen again I repaired to her box and
+was ushered in by Pickering with zealous hospitality.  His glowing smile
+seemed to say to me, "Ay, look for yourself, and adore!"  Nothing could
+have been more gracious than the lady's greeting, and I found, somewhat
+to my surprise, that her prettiness lost nothing on a nearer view.  Her
+eyes indeed were the finest I have ever seen--the softest, the deepest,
+the most intensely responsive.  In spite of something faded and jaded in
+her physiognomy, her movements, her smile, and the tone of her voice,
+especially when she laughed, had an almost girlish frankness and
+spontaneity.  She looked at you very hard with her radiant gray eyes, and
+she indulged while she talked in a superabundance of restless, rather
+affected little gestures, as if to make you take her meaning in a certain
+very particular and superfine sense.  I wondered whether after a while
+this might not fatigue one's attention; then meeting her charming eyes, I
+said, Not for a long time.  She was very clever, and, as Pickering had
+said, she spoke English admirably.  I told her, as I took my seat beside
+her, of the fine things I had heard about her from my friend, and she
+listened, letting me go on some time, and exaggerate a little, with her
+fine eyes fixed full upon me.  "Really?" she suddenly said, turning short
+round upon Pickering, who stood behind us, and looking at him in the same
+way.  "Is that the way you talk about me?"
+
+He blushed to his eyes, and I repented.  She suddenly began to laugh; it
+was then I observed how sweet her voice was in laughter.  We talked after
+this of various matters, and in a little while I complimented her on her
+excellent English, and asked if she had learnt it in England.
+
+"Heaven forbid!" she cried.  "I have never been there and wish never to
+go.  I should never get on with the--" I wondered what she was going to
+say; the fogs, the smoke, or whist with sixpenny stakes?--"I should never
+get on," she said, "with the aristocracy!  I am a fierce democrat--I am
+not ashamed of it.  I hold opinions which would make my ancestors turn in
+their graves.  I was born in the lap of feudalism.  I am a daughter of
+the crusaders.  But I am a revolutionist!  I have a passion for
+freedom--my idea of happiness is to die on a great barricade!  It's to
+your great country I should like to go.  I should like to see the
+wonderful spectacle of a great people free to do everything it chooses,
+and yet never doing anything wrong!"
+
+I replied, modestly, that, after all, both our freedom and our good
+conduct had their limits, and she turned quickly about and shook her fan
+with a dramatic gesture at Pickering.  "No matter, no matter!" she cried;
+"I should like to see the country which produced that wonderful young
+man.  I think of it as a sort of Arcadia--a land of the golden age.  He's
+so delightfully innocent!  In this stupid old Germany, if a young man is
+innocent he's a fool; he has no brains; he's not a bit interesting.  But
+Mr. Pickering says the freshest things, and after I have laughed five
+minutes at their freshness it suddenly occurs to me that they are very
+wise, and I think them over for a week."  "True!" she went on, nodding at
+him.  "I call them inspired solecisms, and I treasure them up.  Remember
+that when I next laugh at you!"
+
+Glancing at Pickering, I was prompted to believe that he was in a state
+of beatific exaltation which weighed Madame Blumenthal's smiles and
+frowns in an equal balance.  They were equally hers; they were links
+alike in the golden chain.  He looked at me with eyes that seemed to say,
+"Did you ever hear such wit?  Did you ever see such grace?"  It seemed to
+me that he was but vaguely conscious of the meaning of her words; her
+gestures, her voice and glance, made an absorbing harmony.  There is
+something painful in the spectacle of absolute enthralment, even to an
+excellent cause.  I gave no response to Pickering's challenge, but made
+some remark upon the charm of Adelina Patti's singing.  Madame
+Blumenthal, as became a "revolutionist," was obliged to confess that she
+could see no charm in it; it was meagre, it was trivial, it lacked soul.
+"You must know that in music, too," she said, "I think for myself!"  And
+she began with a great many flourishes of her fan to explain what it was
+she thought.  Remarkable things, doubtless; but I cannot answer for it,
+for in the midst of the explanation the curtain rose again.  "You can't
+be a great artist without a great passion!"  Madame Blumenthal was
+affirming.  Before I had time to assent Madame Patti's voice rose
+wheeling like a skylark, and rained down its silver notes.  "Ah, give me
+that art," I whispered, "and I will leave you your passion!"  And I
+departed for my own place in the orchestra.  I wondered afterwards
+whether the speech had seemed rude, and inferred that it had not on
+receiving a friendly nod from the lady, in the lobby, as the theatre was
+emptying itself.  She was on Pickering's arm, and he was taking her to
+her carriage.  Distances are short in Homburg, but the night was rainy,
+and Madame Blumenthal exhibited a very pretty satin-shod foot as a reason
+why, though but a penniless widow, she should not walk home.  Pickering
+left us together a moment while he went to hail the vehicle, and my
+companion seized the opportunity, as she said, to beg me to be so very
+kind as to come and see her.  It was for a particular reason!  It was
+reason enough for me, of course, I answered, that she had given me leave.
+She looked at me a moment with that extraordinary gaze of hers which
+seemed so absolutely audacious in its candour, and rejoined that I paid
+more compliments than our young friend there, but that she was sure I was
+not half so sincere.  "But it's about him I want to talk," she said.  "I
+want to ask you many things; I want you to tell me all about him.  He
+interests me; but you see my sympathies are so intense, my imagination is
+so lively, that I don't trust my own impressions.  They have misled me
+more than once!"  And she gave a little tragic shudder.
+
+I promised to come and compare notes with her, and we bade her farewell
+at her carriage door.  Pickering and I remained a while, walking up and
+down the long glazed gallery of the Kursaal.  I had not taken many steps
+before I became aware that I was beside a man in the very extremity of
+love.  "Isn't she wonderful?" he asked, with an implicit confidence in my
+sympathy which it cost me some ingenuity to elude.  If he were really in
+love, well and good!  For although, now that I had seen her, I stood
+ready to confess to large possibilities of fascination on Madame
+Blumenthal's part, and even to certain possibilities of sincerity of
+which my appreciation was vague, yet it seemed to me less ominous that he
+should be simply smitten than that his admiration should pique itself on
+being discriminating.  It was on his fundamental simplicity that I
+counted for a happy termination of his experiment, and the former of
+these alternatives seemed to me the simpler.  I resolved to hold my
+tongue and let him run his course.  He had a great deal to say about his
+happiness, about the days passing like hours, the hours like minutes, and
+about Madame Blumenthal being a "revelation."  "She was nothing
+to-night," he said; "nothing to what she sometimes is in the way of
+brilliancy--in the way of repartee.  If you could only hear her when she
+tells her adventures!"
+
+"Adventures?" I inquired.  "Has she had adventures?"
+
+"Of the most wonderful sort!" cried Pickering, with rapture. "She hasn't
+vegetated, like me!  She has lived in the tumult of life.  When I listen
+to her reminiscences, it's like hearing the opening tumult of one of
+Beethoven's symphonies as it loses itself in a triumphant harmony of
+beauty and faith!"
+
+I could only lift my eyebrows, but I desired to know before we separated
+what he had done with that troublesome conscience of his.  "I suppose you
+know, my dear fellow," I said, "that you are simply in love.  That's what
+they happen to call your state of mind."
+
+He replied with a brightening eye, as if he were delighted to hear it--"So
+Madame Blumenthal told me only this morning!"  And seeing, I suppose,
+that I was slightly puzzled, "I went to drive with her," he continued;
+"we drove to Konigstein, to see the old castle.  We scrambled up into the
+heart of the ruin and sat for an hour in one of the crumbling old courts.
+Something in the solemn stillness of the place unloosed my tongue; and
+while she sat on an ivied stone, on the edge of the plunging wall, I
+stood there and made a speech.  She listened to me, looking at me,
+breaking off little bits of stone and letting them drop down into the
+valley.  At last she got up and nodded at me two or three times silently,
+with a smile, as if she were applauding me for a solo on the violin.  'You
+are in love,' she said.  'It's a perfect case!'  And for some time she
+said nothing more.  But before we left the place she told me that she
+owed me an answer to my speech.  She thanked me heartily, but she was
+afraid that if she took me at my word she would be taking advantage of my
+inexperience.  I had known few women; I was too easily pleased; I thought
+her better than she really was.  She had great faults; I must know her
+longer and find them out; I must compare her with other women--women
+younger, simpler, more innocent, more ignorant; and then if I still did
+her the honour to think well of her, she would listen to me again.  I
+told her that I was not afraid of preferring any woman in the world to
+her, and then she repeated, 'Happy man, happy man! you are in love, you
+are in love!'"
+
+I called upon Madame Blumenthal a couple of days later, in some agitation
+of thought.  It has been proved that there are, here and there, in the
+world, such people as sincere impostors; certain characters who cultivate
+fictitious emotions in perfect good faith.  Even if this clever lady
+enjoyed poor Pickering's bedazzlement, it was conceivable that, taking
+vanity and charity together, she should care more for his welfare than
+for her own entertainment; and her offer to abide by the result of
+hazardous comparison with other women was a finer stroke than her
+reputation had led me to expect.  She received me in a shabby little
+sitting-room littered with uncut books and newspapers, many of which I
+saw at a glance were French.  One side of it was occupied by an open
+piano, surmounted by a jar full of white roses.  They perfumed the air;
+they seemed to me to exhale the pure aroma of Pickering's devotion.
+Buried in an arm-chair, the object of this devotion was reading the
+_Revue des Deux Mondes_.  The purpose of my visit was not to admire
+Madame Blumenthal on my own account, but to ascertain how far I might
+safely leave her to work her will upon my friend.  She had impugned my
+sincerity the evening of the opera, and I was careful on this occasion to
+abstain from compliments, and not to place her on her guard against my
+penetration.  It is needless to narrate our interview in detail; indeed,
+to tell the perfect truth, I was punished for my rash attempt to surprise
+her by a temporary eclipse of my own perspicacity.  She sat there so
+questioning, so perceptive, so genial, so generous, and so pretty withal,
+that I was quite ready at the end of half an hour to subscribe to the
+most comprehensive of Pickering's rhapsodies.  She was certainly a
+wonderful woman.  I have never liked to linger, in memory, on that half-
+hour.  The result of it was to prove that there were many more things in
+the composition of a woman who, as Niedermeyer said, had lodged her
+imagination in the place of her heart than were dreamt of in my
+philosophy.  Yet, as I sat there stroking my hat and balancing the
+account between nature and art in my affable hostess, I felt like a very
+competent philosopher.  She had said she wished me to tell her everything
+about our friend, and she questioned me as to his family, his fortune,
+his antecedents, and his character.  All this was natural in a woman who
+had received a passionate declaration of love, and it was expressed with
+an air of charmed solicitude, a radiant confidence that there was really
+no mistake about his being a most distinguished young man, and that if I
+chose to be explicit, I might deepen her conviction to disinterested
+ecstasy, which might have almost provoked me to invent a good opinion, if
+I had not had one ready made.  I told her that she really knew Pickering
+better than I did, and that until we met at Homburg I had not seen him
+since he was a boy.
+
+"But he talks to you freely," she answered; "I know you are his
+confidant.  He has told me certainly a great many things, but I always
+feel as if he were keeping something back; as if he were holding
+something behind him, and showing me only one hand at once.  He seems
+often to be hovering on the edge of a secret.  I have had several
+friendships in my life--thank Heaven! but I have had none more dear to me
+than this one.  Yet in the midst of it I have the painful sense of my
+friend being half afraid of me; of his thinking me terrible, strange,
+perhaps a trifle out of my wits.  Poor me!  If he only knew what a plain
+good soul I am, and how I only want to know him and befriend him!"
+
+These words were full of a plaintive magnanimity which made mistrust seem
+cruel.  How much better I might play providence over Pickering's
+experiments with life if I could engage the fine instincts of this
+charming woman on the providential side!  Pickering's secret was, of
+course, his engagement to Miss Vernor; it was natural enough that he
+should have been unable to bring himself to talk of it to Madame
+Blumenthal.  The simple sweetness of this young girl's face had not faded
+from my memory; I could not rid myself of the suspicion that in going
+further Pickering might fare much worse.  Madame Blumenthal's professions
+seemed a virtual promise to agree with me, and, after some hesitation, I
+said that my friend had, in fact, a substantial secret, and that perhaps
+I might do him a good turn by putting her in possession of it.  In as few
+words as possible I told her that Pickering stood pledged by filial piety
+to marry a young lady at Smyrna.  She listened intently to my story; when
+I had finished it there was a faint flush of excitement in each of her
+cheeks.  She broke out into a dozen exclamations of admiration and
+compassion.  "What a wonderful tale--what a romantic situation!  No
+wonder poor Mr. Pickering seemed restless and unsatisfied; no wonder he
+wished to put off the day of submission.  And the poor little girl at
+Smyrna, waiting there for the young Western prince like the heroine of an
+Eastern tale!  She would give the world to see her photograph; did I
+think Mr. Pickering would show it to her?  But never fear; she would ask
+nothing indiscreet!  Yes, it was a marvellous story, and if she had
+invented it herself, people would have said it was absurdly improbable."
+She left her seat and took several turns about the room, smiling to
+herself, and uttering little German cries of wonderment.  Suddenly she
+stopped before the piano and broke into a little laugh; the next moment
+she buried her face in the great bouquet of roses.  It was time I should
+go, but I was indisposed to leave her without obtaining some definite
+assurance that, as far as pity was concerned, she pitied the young girl
+at Smyrna more than the young man at Homburg.
+
+"Of course you know what I wished in telling you this," I said, rising.
+"She is evidently a charming creature, and the best thing he can do is to
+marry her.  I wished to interest you in that view of it."
+
+She had taken one of the roses from the vase and was arranging it in the
+front of her dress.  Suddenly, looking up, "Leave it to me, leave it to
+me!" she cried.  "I am interested!"  And with her little blue-gemmed hand
+she tapped her forehead.  "I am deeply interested!"
+
+And with this I had to content myself.  But more than once the next day I
+repented of my zeal, and wondered whether a providence with a white rose
+in her bosom might not turn out a trifle too human.  In the evening, at
+the Kursaal, I looked for Pickering, but he was not visible, and I
+reflected that my revelation had not as yet, at any rate, seemed to
+Madame Blumenthal a reason for prescribing a cooling-term to his passion.
+Very late, as I was turning away, I saw him arrive--with no small
+satisfaction, for I had determined to let him know immediately in what
+way I had attempted to serve him.  But he straightway passed his arm
+through my own and led me off towards the gardens.  I saw that he was too
+excited to allow me to speak first.
+
+"I have burnt my ships!" he cried, when we were out of earshot of the
+crowd.  "I have told her everything.  I have insisted that it's simple
+torture for me to wait with this idle view of loving her less.  It's well
+enough for her to ask it, but I feel strong enough now to override her
+reluctance.  I have cast off the millstone from round my neck.  I care
+for nothing, I know nothing, but that I love her with every pulse of my
+being--and that everything else has been a hideous dream, from which she
+may wake me into blissful morning with a single word!"
+
+I held him off at arm's-length and looked at him gravely.  "You have told
+her, you mean, of your engagement to Miss Vernor?"
+
+"The whole story!  I have given it up--I have thrown it to the winds.  I
+have broken utterly with the past.  It may rise in its grave and give me
+its curse, but it can't frighten me now.  I have a right to be happy, I
+have a right to be free, I have a right not to bury myself alive.  It was
+not _I_ who promised--I was not born then.  I myself, my soul, my mind,
+my option--all this is but a month old!  Ah," he went on, "if you knew
+the difference it makes--this having chosen and broken and spoken!  I am
+twice the man I was yesterday!  Yesterday I was afraid of her; there was
+a kind of mocking mystery of knowledge and cleverness about her, which
+oppressed me in the midst of my love.  But now I am afraid of nothing but
+of being too happy!"
+
+I stood silent, to let him spend his eloquence.  But he paused a moment,
+and took off his hat and fanned himself.  "Let me perfectly understand,"
+I said at last.  "You have asked Madame Blumenthal to be your wife?"
+
+"The wife of my intelligent choice!"
+
+"And does she consent?"
+
+"She asks three days to decide."
+
+"Call it four!  She has known your secret since this morning.  I am bound
+to let you know I told her."
+
+"So much the better!" cried Pickering, without apparent resentment or
+surprise.  "It's not a brilliant offer for such a woman, and in spite of
+what I have at stake, I feel that it would be brutal to press her."
+
+"What does she say to your breaking your promise?" I asked in a moment.
+
+Pickering was too much in love for false shame.  "She tells me that she
+loves me too much to find courage to condemn me.  She agrees with me that
+I have a right to be happy.  I ask no exemption from the common law.  What
+I claim is simply freedom to try to be!"
+
+Of course I was puzzled; it was not in that fashion that I had expected
+Madame Blumenthal to make use of my information.  But the matter now was
+quite out of my hands, and all I could do was to bid my companion not
+work himself into a fever over either fortune.
+
+The next day I had a visit from Niedermeyer, on whom, after our talk at
+the opera, I had left a card.  We gossiped a while, and at last he said
+suddenly, "By the way, I have a sequel to the history of Clorinda.  The
+major is at Homburg!"
+
+"Indeed!" said I.  "Since when?"
+
+"These three days."
+
+"And what is he doing?"
+
+"He seems," said Niedermeyer, with a laugh, "to be chiefly occupied in
+sending flowers to Madame Blumenthal.  That is, I went with him the
+morning of his arrival to choose a nosegay, and nothing would suit him
+but a small haystack of white roses.  I hope it was received."
+
+"I can assure you it was," I cried.  "I saw the lady fairly nestling her
+head in it.  But I advise the major not to build upon that.  He has a
+rival."
+
+"Do you mean the soft young man of the other night?"
+
+"Pickering is soft, if you will, but his softness seems to have served
+him.  He has offered her everything, and she has not yet refused it."  I
+had handed my visitor a cigar, and he was puffing it in silence.  At last
+he abruptly asked if I had been introduced to Madame Blumenthal, and, on
+my affirmative, inquired what I thought of her.  "I will not tell you," I
+said, "or you'll call _me_ soft."
+
+He knocked away his ashes, eyeing me askance.  "I have noticed your
+friend about," he said, "and even if you had not told me, I should have
+known he was in love.  After he has left his adored, his face wears for
+the rest of the day the expression with which he has risen from her feet,
+and more than once I have felt like touching his elbow, as you would that
+of a man who has inadvertently come into a drawing-room in his overshoes.
+You say he has offered our friend everything; but, my dear fellow, he has
+not everything to offer her.  He evidently is as amiable as the morning,
+but the lady has no taste for daylight."
+
+"I assure you Pickering is a very interesting fellow," I said.
+
+"Ah, there it is!  Has he not some story or other?  Isn't he an orphan,
+or a natural child, or consumptive, or contingent heir to great estates?
+She will read his little story to the end, and close the book very
+tenderly and smooth down the cover; and then, when he least expects it,
+she will toss it into the dusty limbo of her other romances.  She will
+let him dangle, but she will let him drop!"
+
+"Upon my word," I cried, with heat, "if she does, she will be a very
+unprincipled little creature!"
+
+Niedermeyer shrugged his shoulders.  "I never said she was a saint!"
+
+Shrewd as I felt Niedermeyer to be, I was not prepared to take his simple
+word for this event, and in the evening I received a communication which
+fortified my doubts.  It was a note from Pickering, and it ran as
+follows:--
+
+   "My Dear Friend--I have every hope of being happy, but I am to go to
+   Wiesbaden to learn my fate.  Madame Blumenthal goes thither this
+   afternoon to spend a few days, and she allows me to accompany her.
+   Give me your good wishes; you shall hear of the result.
+   E. P."
+
+One of the diversions of Homburg for new-comers is to dine in rotation at
+the different tables d'hote.  It so happened that, a couple of days
+later, Niedermeyer took pot-luck at my hotel, and secured a seat beside
+my own.  As we took our places I found a letter on my plate, and, as it
+was postmarked Wiesbaden, I lost no time in opening it.  It contained but
+three lines--
+
+   "I am happy--I am accepted--an hour ago.  I can hardly believe it's
+   your poor friend
+   E. P."
+
+I placed the note before Niedermeyer; not exactly in triumph, but with
+the alacrity of all felicitous confutation.  He looked at it much longer
+than was needful to read it, stroking down his beard gravely, and I felt
+it was not so easy to confute a pupil of the school of Metternich.  At
+last, folding the note and handing it back, "Has your friend mentioned
+Madame Blumenthal's errand at Wiesbaden?" he asked.
+
+"You look very wise.  I give it up!" said I.
+
+"She is gone there to make the major follow her.  He went by the next
+train."
+
+"And has the major, on his side, dropped you a line?"
+
+"He is not a letter-writer."
+
+"Well," said I, pocketing my letter, "with this document in my hand I am
+bound to reserve my judgment.  We will have a bottle of Johannisberg, and
+drink to the triumph of virtue."
+
+For a whole week more I heard nothing from Pickering--somewhat to my
+surprise, and, as the days went by, not a little to my discomposure.  I
+had expected that his bliss would continue to overflow in brief
+bulletins, and his silence was possibly an indication that it had been
+clouded.  At last I wrote to his hotel at Wiesbaden, but received no
+answer; whereupon, as my next resource, I repaired to his former lodging
+at Homburg, where I thought it possible he had left property which he
+would sooner or later send for.  There I learned that he had indeed just
+telegraphed from Cologne for his luggage.  To Cologne I immediately
+despatched a line of inquiry as to his prosperity and the cause of his
+silence.  The next day I received three words in answer--a simple
+uncommented request that I would come to him.  I lost no time, and
+reached him in the course of a few hours.  It was dark when I arrived,
+and the city was sheeted in a cold autumnal rain.  Pickering had
+stumbled, with an indifference which was itself a symptom of distress, on
+a certain musty old Mainzerhof, and I found him sitting over a
+smouldering fire in a vast dingy chamber which looked as if it had grown
+gray with watching the _ennui_ of ten generations of travellers.  Looking
+at him, as he rose on my entrance, I saw that he was in extreme
+tribulation.  He was pale and haggard; his face was five years older.
+Now, at least, in all conscience, he had tasted of the cup of life!  I
+was anxious to know what had turned it so suddenly to bitterness; but I
+spared him all importunate curiosity, and let him take his time.  I
+accepted tacitly his tacit confession of distress, and we made for a
+while a feeble effort to discuss the picturesqueness of Cologne.  At last
+he rose and stood a long time looking into the fire, while I slowly paced
+the length of the dusky room.
+
+"Well!" he said, as I came back; "I wanted knowledge, and I certainly
+know something I didn't a month ago."  And herewith, calmly and
+succinctly enough, as if dismay had worn itself out, he related the
+history of the foregoing days.  He touched lightly on details; he
+evidently never was to gush as freely again as he had done during the
+prosperity of his suit.  He had been accepted one evening, as explicitly
+as his imagination could desire, and had gone forth in his rapture and
+roamed about till nearly morning in the gardens of the
+Conversation-house, taking the stars and the perfumes of the summer night
+into his confidence.  "It is worth it all, almost," he said, "to have
+been wound up for an hour to that celestial pitch.  No man, I am sure,
+can ever know it but once."  The next morning he had repaired to Madame
+Blumenthal's lodging and had been met, to his amazement, by a naked
+refusal to see him.  He had strode about for a couple of hours--in
+another mood--and then had returned to the charge.  The servant handed
+him a three-cornered note; it contained these words: "Leave me alone to-
+day; I will give you ten minutes to-morrow evening."  Of the next thirty-
+six hours he could give no coherent account, but at the appointed time
+Madame Blumenthal had received him.  Almost before she spoke there had
+come to him a sense of the depth of his folly in supposing he knew her.
+"One has heard all one's days," he said, "of people removing the mask;
+it's one of the stock phrases of romance.  Well, there she stood with her
+mask in her hand.  Her face," he went on gravely, after a pause--"her
+face was horrible!" . . . "I give you ten minutes," she had said,
+pointing to the clock.  "Make your scene, tear your hair, brandish your
+dagger!"  And she had sat down and folded her arms.  "It's not a joke,"
+she cried, "it's dead earnest; let us have it over.  You are
+dismissed--have you nothing to say?"  He had stammered some frantic
+demand for an explanation; and she had risen and come near him, looking
+at him from head to feet, very pale, and evidently more excited than she
+wished him to see.  "I have done with you!" she said, with a smile; "you
+ought to have done with me!  It has all been delightful, but there are
+excellent reasons why it should come to an end." "You have been playing a
+part, then," he had gasped out; "you never cared for me?"  "Yes; till I
+knew you; till I saw how far you would go.  But now the story's finished;
+we have reached the _denoument_.  We will close the book and be good
+friends."  "To see how far I would go?" he had repeated.  "You led me on,
+meaning all the while to do _this_!"  "I led you on, if you will.  I
+received your visits, in season and out!  Sometimes they were very
+entertaining; sometimes they bored me fearfully.  But you were such a
+very curious case of--what shall I call it?--of sincerity, that I
+determined to take good and bad together.  I wanted to make you commit
+yourself unmistakably.  I should have preferred not to bring you to this
+place; but that too was necessary.  Of course I can't marry you; I can do
+better.  So can you, for that matter; thank your fate for it.  You have
+thought wonders of me for a month, but your good-humour wouldn't last.  I
+am too old and too wise; you are too young and too foolish.  It seems to
+me that I have been very good to you; I have entertained you to the top
+of your bent, and, except perhaps that I am a little brusque just now,
+you have nothing to complain of.  I would have let you down more gently
+if I could have taken another month to it; but circumstances have forced
+my hand.  Abuse me, curse me, if you like.  I will make every allowance!"
+Pickering listened to all this intently enough to perceive that, as if by
+some sudden natural cataclysm, the ground had broken away at his feet,
+and that he must recoil.  He turned away in dumb amazement.  "I don't
+know how I seemed to be taking it," he said, "but she seemed really to
+desire--I don't know why--something in the way of reproach and
+vituperation.  But I couldn't, in that way, have uttered a syllable.  I
+was sickened; I wanted to get away into the air--to shake her off and
+come to my senses.  'Have you nothing, nothing, nothing to say?' she
+cried, as if she were disappointed, while I stood with my hand on the
+door.  'Haven't I treated you to talk enough?' I believed I answered.
+'You will write to me then, when you get home?'  'I think not,' said I.
+'Six months hence, I fancy, you will come and see me!'  'Never!' said I.
+'That's a confession of stupidity,' she answered.  'It means that, even
+on reflection, you will never understand the philosophy of my conduct.'
+The word 'philosophy' seemed so strange that I verily believe I smiled.
+'I have given you all that you gave me,' she went on.  'Your passion was
+an affair of the head.'  'I only wish you had told me sooner that you
+considered it so!' I exclaimed.  And I went my way.  The next day I came
+down the Rhine.  I sat all day on the boat, not knowing where I was
+going, where to get off.  I was in a kind of ague of terror; it seemed to
+me I had seen something infernal.  At last I saw the cathedral towers
+here looming over the city.  They seemed to say something to me, and when
+the boat stopped, I came ashore.  I have been here a week.  I have not
+slept at night--and yet it has been a week of rest!"
+
+It seemed to me that he was in a fair way to recover, and that his own
+philosophy, if left to take its time, was adequate to the occasion.  After
+his story was once told I referred to his grievance but once--that
+evening, later, as we were about to separate for the night.  "Suffer me
+to say that there was some truth in _her_ account of your relations," I
+said.  "You were using her intellectually, and all the while, without
+your knowing it, she was using you.  It was diamond cut diamond.  Her
+needs were the more superficial, and she got tired of the game first."  He
+frowned and turned uneasily away, but without contradicting me.  I waited
+a few moments, to see if he would remember, before we parted, that he had
+a claim to make upon me.  But he seemed to have forgotten it.
+
+The next day we strolled about the picturesque old city, and of course,
+before long, went into the cathedral.  Pickering said little; he seemed
+intent upon his own thoughts.  He sat down beside a pillar near a chapel,
+in front of a gorgeous window, and, leaving him to his meditations, I
+wandered through the church.  When I came back I saw he had something to
+say.  But before he had spoken I laid my hand on his shoulder and looked
+at him with a significant smile.  He slowly bent his head and dropped his
+eyes, with a mixture of assent and humility.  I drew forth from where it
+had lain untouched for a month the letter he had given me to keep, placed
+it silently on his knee, and left him to deal with it alone.
+
+Half an hour later I returned to the same place, but he had gone, and one
+of the sacristans, hovering about and seeing me looking for Pickering,
+said he thought he had left the church.  I found him in his gloomy
+chamber at the inn, pacing slowly up and down.  I should doubtless have
+been at a loss to say just what effect I expected the letter from Smyrna
+to produce; but his actual aspect surprised me.  He was flushed, excited,
+a trifle irritated.
+
+"Evidently," I said, "you have read your letter."
+
+"It is proper I should tell you what is in it," he answered.  "When I
+gave it to you a month ago, I did my friends injustice."
+
+"You called it a 'summons,' I remember."
+
+"I was a great fool!  It's a release!"
+
+"From your engagement?"
+
+"From everything!  The letter, of course, is from Mr. Vernor.  He desires
+to let me know at the earliest moment that his daughter, informed for the
+first time a week before of what had been expected of her, positively
+refuses to be bound by the contract or to assent to my being bound.  She
+had been given a week to reflect, and had spent it in inconsolable tears.
+She had resisted every form of persuasion! from compulsion, writes Mr.
+Vernor, he naturally shrinks.  The young lady considers the arrangement
+'horrible.'  After accepting her duties cut and dried all her life, she
+pretends at last to have a taste of her own.  I confess I am surprised; I
+had been given to believe that she was stupidly submissive, and would
+remain so to the end of the chapter.  Not a bit of it.  She has insisted
+on my being formally dismissed, and her father intimates that in case of
+non-compliance she threatens him with an attack of brain fever.  Mr.
+Vernor condoles with me handsomely, and lets me know that the young
+lady's attitude has been a great shock to his nerves.  He adds that he
+will not aggravate such regret as I may do him the honour to entertain,
+by any allusions to his daughter's charms and to the magnitude of my
+loss, and he concludes with the hope that, for the comfort of all
+concerned, I may already have amused my fancy with other 'views.'  He
+reminds me in a postscript that, in spite of this painful occurrence, the
+son of his most valued friend will always be a welcome visitor at his
+house.  I am free, he observes; I have my life before me; he recommends
+an extensive course of travel.  Should my wanderings lead me to the East,
+he hopes that no false embarrassment will deter me from presenting myself
+at Smyrna.  He can promise me at least a friendly reception.  It's a very
+polite letter."
+
+Polite as the letter was, Pickering seemed to find no great exhilaration
+in having this famous burden so handsomely lifted from his spirit.  He
+began to brood over his liberation in a manner which you might have
+deemed proper to a renewed sense of bondage.  "Bad news," he had called
+his letter originally; and yet, now that its contents proved to be in
+flat contradiction to his foreboding, there was no impulsive voice to
+reverse the formula and declare the news was good.  The wings of impulse
+in the poor fellow had of late been terribly clipped.  It was an obvious
+reflection, of course, that if he had not been so stiffly certain of the
+matter a month before, and had gone through the form of breaking Mr.
+Vernor's seal, he might have escaped the purgatory of Madame Blumenthal's
+sub-acid blandishments.  But I left him to moralise in private; I had no
+desire, as the phrase is, to rub it in.  My thoughts, moreover, were
+following another train; I was saying to myself that if to those gentle
+graces of which her young visage had offered to my fancy the blooming
+promise, Miss Vernor added in this striking measure the capacity for
+magnanimous action, the amendment to my friend's career had been less
+happy than the rough draught.  Presently, turning about, I saw him
+looking at the young lady's photograph.  "Of course, now," he said, "I
+have no right to keep it!"  And before I could ask for another glimpse of
+it, he had thrust it into the fire.
+
+"I am sorry to be saying it just now," I observed after a while, "but I
+shouldn't wonder if Miss Vernor were a charming creature."
+
+"Go and find out," he answered, gloomily.  "The coast is clear.  My part
+is to forget her," he presently added.  "It ought not to be hard.  But
+don't you think," he went on suddenly, "that for a poor fellow who asked
+nothing of fortune but leave to sit down in a quiet corner, it has been
+rather a cruel pushing about?"
+
+Cruel indeed, I declared, and he certainly had the right to demand a
+clean page on the book of fate and a fresh start.  Mr. Vernor's advice
+was sound; he should amuse himself with a long journey.  If it would be
+any comfort to him, I would go with him on his way.  Pickering assented
+without enthusiasm; he had the embarrassed look of a man who, having gone
+to some cost to make a good appearance in a drawing-room, should find the
+door suddenly slammed in his face.  We started on our journey, however,
+and little by little his enthusiasm returned.  He was too capable of
+enjoying fine things to remain permanently irresponsive, and after a
+fortnight spent among pictures and monuments and antiquities, I felt that
+I was seeing him for the first time in his best and healthiest mood.  He
+had had a fever, and then he had had a chill; the pendulum had swung
+right and left in a manner rather trying to the machine; but now, at
+last, it was working back to an even, natural beat.  He recovered in a
+measure the generous eloquence with which he had fanned his flame at
+Homburg, and talked about things with something of the same passionate
+freshness.  One day when I was laid up at the inn at Bruges with a lame
+foot, he came home and treated me to a rhapsody about a certain
+meek-faced virgin of Hans Memling, which seemed to me sounder sense than
+his compliments to Madame Blumenthal.  He had his dull days and his
+sombre moods--hours of irresistible retrospect; but I let them come and
+go without remonstrance, because I fancied they always left him a trifle
+more alert and resolute.  One evening, however, he sat hanging his head
+in so doleful a fashion that I took the bull by the horns and told him he
+had by this time surely paid his debt to penitence, and that he owed it
+to himself to banish that woman for ever from his thoughts.
+
+He looked up, staring; and then with a deep blush--"That woman?" he said.
+"I was not thinking of Madame Blumenthal!"
+
+After this I gave another construction to his melancholy.  Taking him
+with his hopes and fears, at the end of six weeks of active observation
+and keen sensation, Pickering was as fine a fellow as need be.  We made
+our way down to Italy and spent a fortnight at Venice.  There something
+happened which I had been confidently expecting; I had said to myself
+that it was merely a question of time.  We had passed the day at
+Torcello, and came floating back in the glow of the sunset, with measured
+oar-strokes.  "I am well on the way," Pickering said; "I think I will
+go!"
+
+We had not spoken for an hour, and I naturally asked him, Where?  His
+answer was delayed by our getting into the Piazzetta.  I stepped ashore
+first and then turned to help him.  As he took my hand he met my eyes,
+consciously, and it came.  "To Smyrna!"
+
+A couple of days later he started.  I had risked the conjecture that Miss
+Vernor was a charming creature, and six months afterwards he wrote me
+that I was right.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EUGENE PICKERING***
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