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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Chaperon, by Henry James
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Chaperon
+
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 15, 2015  [eBook #2718]
+[This file was first posted on July 3, 2000]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHAPERON***
+
+
+Transcribed from 1893 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org.  Proofed by Nina Hall, Mohua Sen, Bridie, Francine
+Smith and David.
+
+
+
+
+THE CHAPERON.
+
+
+I.
+
+
+AN old lady, in a high drawing-room, had had her chair moved close to the
+fire, where she sat knitting and warming her knees.  She was dressed in
+deep mourning; her face had a faded nobleness, tempered, however, by the
+somewhat illiberal compression assumed by her lips in obedience to
+something that was passing in her mind.  She was far from the lamp, but
+though her eyes were fixed upon her active needles she was not looking at
+them.  What she really saw was quite another train of affairs.  The room
+was spacious and dim; the thick London fog had oozed into it even through
+its superior defences.  It was full of dusky, massive, valuable things.
+The old lady sat motionless save for the regularity of her clicking
+needles, which seemed as personal to her and as expressive as prolonged
+fingers.  If she was thinking something out, she was thinking it
+thoroughly.
+
+When she looked up, on the entrance of a girl of twenty, it might have
+been guessed that the appearance of this young lady was not an
+interruption of her meditation, but rather a contribution to it.  The
+young lady, who was charming to behold, was also in deep mourning, which
+had a freshness, if mourning can be fresh, an air of having been lately
+put on.  She went straight to the bell beside the chimney-piece and
+pulled it, while in her other hand she held a sealed and directed letter.
+Her companion glanced in silence at the letter; then she looked still
+harder at her work.  The girl hovered near the fireplace, without
+speaking, and after a due, a dignified interval the butler appeared in
+response to the bell.  The time had been sufficient to make the silence
+between the ladies seem long.  The younger one asked the butler to see
+that her letter should be posted; and after he had gone out she moved
+vaguely about the room, as if to give her grandmother—for such was the
+elder personage—a chance to begin a colloquy of which she herself
+preferred not to strike the first note.  As equally with herself her
+companion was on the face of it capable of holding out, the tension,
+though it was already late in the evening, might have lasted long.  But
+the old lady after a little appeared to recognise, a trifle ungraciously,
+the girl’s superior resources.
+
+“Have you written to your mother?”
+
+“Yes, but only a few lines, to tell her I shall come and see her in the
+morning.”
+
+“Is that all you’ve got to say?” asked the grandmother.
+
+“I don’t quite know what you want me to say.”
+
+“I want you to say that you’ve made up your mind.”
+
+“Yes, I’ve done that, granny.”
+
+“You intend to respect your father’s wishes?”
+
+“It depends upon what you mean by respecting them.  I do justice to the
+feelings by which they were dictated.”
+
+“What do you mean by justice?” the old lady retorted.
+
+The girl was silent a moment; then she said: “You’ll see my idea of it.”
+
+“I see it already!  You’ll go and live with her.”
+
+“I shall talk the situation over with her to-morrow and tell her that I
+think that will be best.”
+
+“Best for her, no doubt!”
+
+“What’s best for her is best for me.”
+
+“And for your brother and sister?”  As the girl made no reply to this her
+grandmother went on: “What’s best for them is that you should acknowledge
+some responsibility in regard to them and, considering how young they
+are, try and do something for them.”
+
+“They must do as I’ve done—they must act for themselves.  They have their
+means now, and they’re free.”
+
+“Free?  They’re mere children.”
+
+“Let me remind you that Eric is older than I.”
+
+“He doesn’t like his mother,” said the old lady, as if that were an
+answer.
+
+“I never said he did.  And she adores him.”
+
+“Oh, your mother’s adorations!”
+
+“Don’t abuse her now,” the girl rejoined, after a pause.
+
+The old lady forbore to abuse her, but she made up for it the next moment
+by saying: “It will be dreadful for Edith.”
+
+“What will be dreadful?”
+
+“Your desertion of her.”
+
+“The desertion’s on her side.”
+
+“Her consideration for her father does her honour.”
+
+“Of course I’m a brute, _n’en parlons plus_,” said the girl.  “We must go
+our respective ways,” she added, in a tone of extreme wisdom and
+philosophy.
+
+Her grandmother straightened out her knitting and began to roll it up.
+“Be so good as to ring for my maid,” she said, after a minute.  The young
+lady rang, and there was another wait and another conscious hush.  Before
+the maid came her mistress remarked: “Of course then you’ll not come to
+_me_, you know.”
+
+“What do you mean by ‘coming’ to you?”
+
+“I can’t receive you on that footing.”
+
+“She’ll not come _with_ me, if you mean that.”
+
+“I don’t mean that,” said the old lady, getting up as her maid came in.
+This attendant took her work from her, gave her an arm and helped her out
+of the room, while Rose Tramore, standing before the fire and looking
+into it, faced the idea that her grandmother’s door would now under all
+circumstances be closed to her.  She lost no time however in brooding
+over this anomaly: it only added energy to her determination to act.  All
+she could do to-night was to go to bed, for she felt utterly weary.  She
+had been living, in imagination, in a prospective struggle, and it had
+left her as exhausted as a real fight.  Moreover this was the culmination
+of a crisis, of weeks of suspense, of a long, hard strain.  Her father
+had been laid in his grave five days before, and that morning his will
+had been read.  In the afternoon she had got Edith off to St. Leonard’s
+with their aunt Julia, and then she had had a wretched talk with Eric.
+Lastly, she had made up her mind to act in opposition to the formidable
+will, to a clause which embodied if not exactly a provision, a
+recommendation singularly emphatic.  She went to bed and slept the sleep
+of the just.
+
+“Oh, my dear, how charming!  I must take another house!”  It was in these
+words that her mother responded to the announcement Rose had just
+formally made and with which she had vaguely expected to produce a
+certain dignity of effect.  In the way of emotion there was apparently no
+effect at all, and the girl was wise enough to know that this was not
+simply on account of the general line of non-allusion taken by the
+extremely pretty woman before her, who looked like her elder sister.
+Mrs. Tramore had never manifested, to her daughter, the slightest
+consciousness that her position was peculiar; but the recollection of
+something more than that fine policy was required to explain such a
+failure, to appreciate Rose’s sacrifice.  It was simply a fresh reminder
+that she had never appreciated anything, that she was nothing but a
+tinted and stippled surface.  Her situation was peculiar indeed.  She had
+been the heroine of a scandal which had grown dim only because, in the
+eyes of the London world, it paled in the lurid light of the
+contemporaneous.  That attention had been fixed on it for several days,
+fifteen years before; there had been a high relish of the vivid evidence
+as to his wife’s misconduct with which, in the divorce-court, Charles
+Tramore had judged well to regale a cynical public.  The case was
+pronounced awfully bad, and he obtained his decree.  The folly of the
+wife had been inconceivable, in spite of other examples: she had quitted
+her children, she had followed the “other fellow” abroad.  The other
+fellow hadn’t married her, not having had time: he had lost his life in
+the Mediterranean by the capsizing of a boat, before the prohibitory term
+had expired.
+
+Mrs. Tramore had striven to extract from this accident something of the
+austerity of widowhood; but her mourning only made her deviation more
+public, she was a widow whose husband was awkwardly alive.  She had not
+prowled about the Continent on the classic lines; she had come back to
+London to take her chance.  But London would give her no chance, would
+have nothing to say to her; as many persons had remarked, you could never
+tell how London would behave.  It would not receive Mrs. Tramore again on
+any terms, and when she was spoken of, which now was not often, it was
+inveterately said of her that she went nowhere.  Apparently she had not
+the qualities for which London compounds; though in the cases in which it
+does compound you may often wonder what these qualities are.  She had not
+at any rate been successful: her lover was dead, her husband was liked
+and her children were pitied, for in payment for a topic London will
+parenthetically pity.  It was thought interesting and magnanimous that
+Charles Tramore had not married again.  The disadvantage to his children
+of the miserable story was thus left uncorrected, and this, rather oddly,
+was counted as _his_ sacrifice.  His mother, whose arrangements were
+elaborate, looked after them a great deal, and they enjoyed a mixture of
+laxity and discipline under the roof of their aunt, Miss Tramore, who was
+independent, having, for reasons that the two ladies had exhaustively
+discussed, determined to lead her own life.  She had set up a home at St.
+Leonard’s, and that contracted shore had played a considerable part in
+the upbringing of the little Tramores.  They knew about their mother, as
+the phrase was, but they didn’t know her; which was naturally deemed more
+pathetic for them than for her.  She had a house in Chester Square and an
+income and a victoria—it served all purposes, as she never went out in
+the evening—and flowers on her window-sills, and a remarkable appearance
+of youth.  The income was supposed to be in part the result of a bequest
+from the man for whose sake she had committed the error of her life, and
+in the appearance of youth there was a slightly impertinent implication
+that it was a sort of afterglow of the same connection.
+
+Her children, as they grew older, fortunately showed signs of some
+individuality of disposition.  Edith, the second girl, clung to her aunt
+Julia; Eric, the son, clung frantically to polo; while Rose, the elder
+daughter, appeared to cling mainly to herself.  Collectively, of course,
+they clung to their father, whose attitude in the family group, however,
+was casual and intermittent.  He was charming and vague; he was like a
+clever actor who often didn’t come to rehearsal.  Fortune, which but for
+that one stroke had been generous to him, had provided him with deputies
+and trouble-takers, as well as with whimsical opinions, and a reputation
+for excellent taste, and whist at his club, and perpetual cigars on
+morocco sofas, and a beautiful absence of purpose.  Nature had thrown in
+a remarkably fine hand, which he sometimes passed over his children’s
+heads when they were glossy from the nursery brush.  On Rose’s eighteenth
+birthday he said to her that she might go to see her mother, on condition
+that her visits should be limited to an hour each time and to four in the
+year.  She was to go alone; the other children were not included in the
+arrangement.  This was the result of a visit that he himself had paid his
+repudiated wife at her urgent request, their only encounter during the
+fifteen years.  The girl knew as much as this from her aunt Julia, who
+was full of tell-tale secrecies.  She availed herself eagerly of the
+license, and in course of the period that elapsed before her father’s
+death she spent with Mrs. Tramore exactly eight hours by the watch.  Her
+father, who was as inconsistent and disappointing as he was amiable,
+spoke to her of her mother only once afterwards.  This occasion had been
+the sequel of her first visit, and he had made no use of it to ask what
+she thought of the personality in Chester Square or how she liked it.  He
+had only said “Did she take you out?” and when Rose answered “Yes, she
+put me straight into a carriage and drove me up and down Bond Street,”
+had rejoined sharply “See that that never occurs again.”  It never did,
+but once was enough, every one they knew having happened to be in Bond
+Street at that particular hour.
+
+After this the periodical interview took place in private, in Mrs.
+Tramore’s beautiful little wasted drawing-room.  Rose knew that, rare as
+these occasions were, her mother would not have kept her “all to herself”
+had there been anybody she could have shown her to.  But in the poor
+lady’s social void there was no one; she had after all her own
+correctness and she consistently preferred isolation to inferior
+contacts.  So her daughter was subjected only to the maternal; it was not
+necessary to be definite in qualifying that.  The girl had by this time a
+collection of ideas, gathered by impenetrable processes; she had tasted,
+in the ostracism of her ambiguous parent, of the acrid fruit of the tree
+of knowledge.  She not only had an approximate vision of what every one
+had done, but she had a private judgment for each case.  She had a
+particular vision of her father, which did not interfere with his being
+dear to her, but which was directly concerned in her resolution, after
+his death, to do the special thing he had expressed the wish she should
+not do.  In the general estimate her grandmother and her grandmother’s
+money had their place, and the strong probability that any enjoyment of
+the latter commodity would now be withheld from her.  It included Edith’s
+marked inclination to receive the law, and doubtless eventually a more
+substantial memento, from Miss Tramore, and opened the question whether
+her own course might not contribute to make her sister’s appear
+heartless.  The answer to this question however would depend on the
+success that might attend her own, which would very possibly be small.
+Eric’s attitude was eminently simple; he didn’t care to know people who
+didn’t know _his_ people.  If his mother should ever get back into
+society perhaps he would take her up.  Rose Tramore had decided to do
+what she could to bring this consummation about; and strangely enough—so
+mixed were her superstitions and her heresies—a large part of her motive
+lay in the value she attached to such a consecration.
+
+Of her mother intrinsically she thought very little now, and if her eyes
+were fixed on a special achievement it was much more for the sake of that
+achievement and to satisfy a latent energy that was in her than because
+her heart was wrung by this sufferer.  Her heart had not been wrung at
+all, though she had quite held it out for the experience.  Her purpose
+was a pious game, but it was still essentially a game.  Among the ideas I
+have mentioned she had her idea of triumph.  She had caught the
+inevitable note, the pitch, on her very first visit to Chester Square.
+She had arrived there in intense excitement, and her excitement was left
+on her hands in a manner that reminded her of a difficult air she had
+once heard sung at the opera when no one applauded the performer.  That
+flatness had made her sick, and so did this, in another way.  A part of
+her agitation proceeded from the fact that her aunt Julia had told her,
+in the manner of a burst of confidence, something she was not to repeat,
+that she was in appearance the very image of the lady in Chester Square.
+The motive that prompted this declaration was between aunt Julia and her
+conscience; but it was a great emotion to the girl to find her
+entertainer so beautiful.  She was tall and exquisitely slim; she had
+hair more exactly to Rose Tramore’s taste than any other she had ever
+seen, even to every detail in the way it was dressed, and a complexion
+and a figure of the kind that are always spoken of as “lovely.”  Her eyes
+were irresistible, and so were her clothes, though the clothes were
+perhaps a little more precisely the right thing than the eyes.  Her
+appearance was marked to her daughter’s sense by the highest distinction;
+though it may be mentioned that this had never been the opinion of all
+the world.  It was a revelation to Rose that she herself might look a
+little like that.  She knew however that aunt Julia had not seen her
+deposed sister-in-law for a long time, and she had a general impression
+that Mrs. Tramore was to-day a more complete production—for instance as
+regarded her air of youth—than she had ever been.  There was no
+excitement on her side—that was all her visitor’s; there was no
+emotion—that was excluded by the plan, to say nothing of conditions more
+primal.  Rose had from the first a glimpse of her mother’s plan.  It was
+to mention nothing and imply nothing, neither to acknowledge, to explain
+nor to extenuate.  She would leave everything to her child; with her
+child she was secure.  She only wanted to get back into society; she
+would leave even that to her child, whom she treated not as a high-strung
+and heroic daughter, a creature of exaltation, of devotion, but as a new,
+charming, clever, useful friend, a little younger than herself.  Already
+on that first day she had talked about dressmakers.  Of course, poor
+thing, it was to be remembered that in her circumstances there were not
+many things she _could_ talk about.  “She wants to go out again; that’s
+the only thing in the wide world she wants,” Rose had promptly,
+compendiously said to herself.  There had been a sequel to this
+observation, uttered, in intense engrossment, in her own room half an
+hour before she had, on the important evening, made known her decision to
+her grandmother: “Then I’ll _take_ her out!”
+
+“She’ll drag you down, she’ll drag you down!” Julia Tramore permitted
+herself to remark to her niece, the next day, in a tone of feverish
+prophecy.
+
+As the girl’s own theory was that all the dragging there might be would
+be upward, and moreover administered by herself, she could look at her
+aunt with a cold and inscrutable eye.
+
+“Very well, then, I shall be out of your sight, from the pinnacle you
+occupy, and I sha’n’t trouble you.”
+
+“Do you reproach me for my disinterested exertions, for the way I’ve
+toiled over you, the way I’ve lived for you?” Miss Tramore demanded.
+
+“Don’t reproach _me_ for being kind to my mother and I won’t reproach you
+for anything.”
+
+“She’ll keep you out of everything—she’ll make you miss everything,” Miss
+Tramore continued.
+
+“Then she’ll make me miss a great deal that’s odious,” said the girl.
+
+“You’re too young for such extravagances,” her aunt declared.
+
+“And yet Edith, who is younger than I, seems to be too old for them: how
+do you arrange that?  My mother’s society will make me older,” Rose
+replied.
+
+“Don’t speak to me of your mother; you _have_ no mother.”
+
+“Then if I’m an orphan I must settle things for myself.”
+
+“Do you justify her, do you approve of her?” cried Miss Tramore, who was
+inferior to her niece in capacity for retort and whose limitations made
+the girl appear pert.
+
+Rose looked at her a moment in silence; then she said, turning away: “I
+think she’s charming.”
+
+“And do you propose to become charming in the same manner?”
+
+“Her manner is perfect; it would be an excellent model.  But I can’t
+discuss my mother with you.”
+
+“You’ll have to discuss her with some other people!” Miss Tramore
+proclaimed, going out of the room.
+
+Rose wondered whether this were a general or a particular vaticination.
+There was something her aunt might have meant by it, but her aunt rarely
+meant the best thing she might have meant.  Miss Tramore had come up from
+St. Leonard’s in response to a telegram from her own parent, for an
+occasion like the present brought with it, for a few hours, a certain
+relaxation of their dissent.  “Do what you can to stop her,” the old lady
+had said; but her daughter found that the most she could do was not much.
+They both had a baffled sense that Rose had thought the question out a
+good deal further than they; and this was particularly irritating to Mrs.
+Tramore, as consciously the cleverer of the two.  A question thought out
+as far as _she_ could think it had always appeared to her to have
+performed its human uses; she had never encountered a ghost emerging from
+that extinction.  Their great contention was that Rose would cut herself
+off; and certainly if she wasn’t afraid of that she wasn’t afraid of
+anything.  Julia Tramore could only tell her mother how little the girl
+was afraid.  She was already prepared to leave the house, taking with her
+the possessions, or her share of them, that had accumulated there during
+her father’s illness.  There had been a going and coming of her maid, a
+thumping about of boxes, an ordering of four-wheelers; it appeared to old
+Mrs. Tramore that something of the objectionableness, the indecency, of
+her granddaughter’s prospective connection had already gathered about the
+place.  It was a violation of the decorum of bereavement which was still
+fresh there, and from the indignant gloom of the mistress of the house
+you might have inferred not so much that the daughter was about to depart
+as that the mother was about to arrive.  There had been no conversation
+on the dreadful subject at luncheon; for at luncheon at Mrs. Tramore’s
+(her son never came to it) there were always, even after funerals and
+other miseries, stray guests of both sexes whose policy it was to be
+cheerful and superficial.  Rose had sat down as if nothing had
+happened—nothing worse, that is, than her father’s death; but no one had
+spoken of anything that any one else was thinking of.
+
+Before she left the house a servant brought her a message from her
+grandmother—the old lady desired to see her in the drawing-room.  She had
+on her bonnet, and she went down as if she were about to step into her
+cab.  Mrs. Tramore sat there with her eternal knitting, from which she
+forebore even to raise her eyes as, after a silence that seemed to
+express the fulness of her reprobation, while Rose stood motionless, she
+began: “I wonder if you really understand what you’re doing.”
+
+“I think so.  I’m not so stupid.”
+
+“I never thought you were; but I don’t know what to make of you now.
+You’re giving up everything.”
+
+The girl was tempted to inquire whether her grandmother called herself
+“everything”; but she checked this question, answering instead that she
+knew she was giving up much.
+
+“You’re taking a step of which you will feel the effect to the end of
+your days,” Mrs. Tramore went on.
+
+“In a good conscience, I heartily hope,” said Rose.
+
+“Your father’s conscience was good enough for his mother; it ought to be
+good enough for his daughter.”
+
+Rose sat down—she could afford to—as if she wished to be very attentive
+and were still accessible to argument.  But this demonstration only
+ushered in, after a moment, the surprising words “I don’t think papa had
+any conscience.”
+
+“What in the name of all that’s unnatural do you mean?” Mrs. Tramore
+cried, over her glasses.  “The dearest and best creature that ever
+lived!”
+
+“He was kind, he had charming impulses, he was delightful.  But he never
+reflected.”
+
+Mrs. Tramore stared, as if at a language she had never heard, a farrago,
+a _galimatias_.  Her life was made up of items, but she had never had to
+deal, intellectually, with a fine shade.  Then while her needles, which
+had paused an instant, began to fly again, she rejoined: “Do you know
+what you are, my dear?  You’re a dreadful little prig.  Where do you pick
+up such talk?”
+
+“Of course I don’t mean to judge between them,” Rose pursued.  “I can
+only judge between my mother and myself.  Papa couldn’t judge for me.”
+And with this she got up.
+
+“One would think you were horrid.  I never thought so before.”
+
+“Thank you for that.”
+
+“You’re embarking on a struggle with society,” continued Mrs. Tramore,
+indulging in an unusual flight of oratory.  “Society will put you in your
+place.”
+
+“Hasn’t it too many other things to do?” asked the girl.
+
+This question had an ingenuity which led her grandmother to meet it with
+a merely provisional and somewhat sketchy answer.  “Your ignorance would
+be melancholy if your behaviour were not so insane.”
+
+“Oh, no; I know perfectly what she’ll do!” Rose replied, almost gaily.
+“She’ll drag me down.”
+
+“She won’t even do that,” the old lady declared contradictiously.
+“She’ll keep you forever in the same dull hole.”
+
+“I shall come and see _you_, granny, when I want something more lively.”
+
+“You may come if you like, but you’ll come no further than the door.  If
+you leave this house now you don’t enter it again.”
+
+Rose hesitated a moment.  “Do you really mean that?”
+
+“You may judge whether I choose such a time to joke.”
+
+“Good-bye, then,” said the girl.
+
+“Good-bye.”
+
+Rose quitted the room successfully enough; but on the other side of the
+door, on the landing, she sank into a chair and buried her face in her
+hands.  She had burst into tears, and she sobbed there for a moment,
+trying hard to recover herself, so as to go downstairs without showing
+any traces of emotion, passing before the servants and again perhaps
+before aunt Julia.  Mrs. Tramore was too old to cry; she could only drop
+her knitting and, for a long time, sit with her head bowed and her eyes
+closed.
+
+Rose had reckoned justly with her aunt Julia; there were no footmen, but
+this vigilant virgin was posted at the foot of the stairs.  She offered
+no challenge however; she only said: “There’s some one in the parlour who
+wants to see you.”  The girl demanded a name, but Miss Tramore only
+mouthed inaudibly and winked and waved.  Rose instantly reflected that
+there was only one man in the world her aunt would look such deep things
+about.  “Captain Jay?” her own eyes asked, while Miss Tramore’s were
+those of a conspirator: they were, for a moment, the only embarrassed
+eyes Rose had encountered that day.  They contributed to make aunt
+Julia’s further response evasive, after her niece inquired if she had
+communicated in advance with this visitor.  Miss Tramore merely said that
+he had been upstairs with her mother—hadn’t she mentioned it?—and had
+been waiting for her.  She thought herself acute in not putting the
+question of the girl’s seeing him before her as a favour to him or to
+herself; she presented it as a duty, and wound up with the proposition:
+“It’s not fair to him, it’s not kind, not to let him speak to you before
+you go.”
+
+“What does he want to say?” Rose demanded.
+
+“Go in and find out.”
+
+She really knew, for she had found out before; but after standing
+uncertain an instant she went in.  “The parlour” was the name that had
+always been borne by a spacious sitting-room downstairs, an apartment
+occupied by her father during his frequent phases of residence in Hill
+Street—episodes increasingly frequent after his house in the country had,
+in consequence, as Rose perfectly knew, of his spending too much money,
+been disposed of at a sacrifice which he always characterised as horrid.
+He had been left with the place in Hertfordshire and his mother with the
+London house, on the general understanding that they would change about;
+but during the last years the community had grown more rigid, mainly at
+his mother’s expense.  The parlour was full of his memory and his habits
+and his things—his books and pictures and _bibelots_, objects that
+belonged now to Eric.  Rose had sat in it for hours since his death; it
+was the place in which she could still be nearest to him.  But she felt
+far from him as Captain Jay rose erect on her opening the door.  This was
+a very different presence.  He had not liked Captain Jay.  She herself
+had, but not enough to make a great complication of her father’s
+coldness.  This afternoon however she foresaw complications.  At the very
+outset for instance she was not pleased with his having arranged such a
+surprise for her with her grandmother and her aunt.  It was probably aunt
+Julia who had sent for him; her grandmother wouldn’t have done it.  It
+placed him immediately on their side, and Rose was almost as disappointed
+at this as if she had not known it was quite where he would naturally be.
+He had never paid her a special visit, but if that was what he wished to
+do why shouldn’t he have waited till she should be under her mother’s
+roof?  She knew the reason, but she had an angry prospect of enjoyment in
+making him express it.  She liked him enough, after all, if it were
+measured by the idea of what she could make him do.
+
+In Bertram Jay the elements were surprisingly mingled; you would have
+gone astray, in reading him, if you had counted on finding the
+complements of some of his qualities.  He would not however have struck
+you in the least as incomplete, for in every case in which you didn’t
+find the complement you would have found the contradiction.  He was in
+the Royal Engineers, and was tall, lean and high-shouldered.  He looked
+every inch a soldier, yet there were people who considered that he had
+missed his vocation in not becoming a parson.  He took a public interest
+in the spiritual life of the army.  Other persons still, on closer
+observation, would have felt that his most appropriate field was neither
+the army nor the church, but simply the world—the social, successful,
+worldly world.  If he had a sword in one hand and a Bible in the other he
+had a Court Guide concealed somewhere about his person.  His profile was
+hard and handsome, his eyes were both cold and kind, his dark straight
+hair was imperturbably smooth and prematurely streaked with grey.  There
+was nothing in existence that he didn’t take seriously.  He had a
+first-rate power of work and an ambition as minutely organised as a
+German plan of invasion.  His only real recreation was to go to church,
+but he went to parties when he had time.  If he was in love with Rose
+Tramore this was distracting to him only in the same sense as his
+religion, and it was included in that department of his extremely
+sub-divided life.  His religion indeed was of an encroaching, annexing
+sort.  Seen from in front he looked diffident and blank, but he was
+capable of exposing himself in a way (to speak only of the paths of
+peace) wholly inconsistent with shyness.  He had a passion for instance
+for open-air speaking, but was not thought on the whole to excel in it
+unless he could help himself out with a hymn.  In conversation he kept
+his eyes on you with a kind of colourless candour, as if he had not
+understood what you were saying and, in a fashion that made many people
+turn red, waited before answering.  This was only because he was
+considering their remarks in more relations than they had intended.  He
+had in his face no expression whatever save the one just mentioned, and
+was, in his profession, already very distinguished.
+
+He had seen Rose Tramore for the first time on a Sunday of the previous
+March, at a house in the country at which she was staying with her
+father, and five weeks later he had made her, by letter, an offer of
+marriage.  She showed her father the letter of course, and he told her
+that it would give him great pleasure that she should send Captain Jay
+about his business.  “My dear child,” he said, “we must really have some
+one who will be better fun than that.”  Rose had declined the honour,
+very considerately and kindly, but not simply because her father wished
+it.  She didn’t herself wish to detach this flower from the stem, though
+when the young man wrote again, to express the hope that he _might_
+hope—so long was he willing to wait—and ask if he might not still
+sometimes see her, she answered even more indulgently than at first.  She
+had shown her father her former letter, but she didn’t show him this one;
+she only told him what it contained, submitting to him also that of her
+correspondent.  Captain Jay moreover wrote to Mr. Tramore, who replied
+sociably, but so vaguely that he almost neglected the subject under
+discussion—a communication that made poor Bertram ponder long.  He could
+never get to the bottom of the superficial, and all the proprieties and
+conventions of life were profound to him.  Fortunately for him old Mrs.
+Tramore liked him, he was satisfactory to her long-sightedness; so that a
+relation was established under cover of which he still occasionally
+presented himself in Hill Street—presented himself nominally to the
+mistress of the house.  He had had scruples about the veracity of his
+visits, but he had disposed of them; he had scruples about so many things
+that he had had to invent a general way, to dig a central drain.  Julia
+Tramore happened to meet him when she came up to town, and she took a
+view of him more benevolent than her usual estimate of people encouraged
+by her mother.  The fear of agreeing with that lady was a motive, but
+there was a stronger one, in this particular case, in the fear of
+agreeing with her niece, who had rejected him.  His situation might be
+held to have improved when Mr. Tramore was taken so gravely ill that with
+regard to his recovery those about him left their eyes to speak for their
+lips; and in the light of the poor gentleman’s recent death it was
+doubtless better than it had ever been.
+
+He was only a quarter of an hour with the girl, but this gave him time to
+take the measure of it.  After he had spoken to her about her
+bereavement, very much as an especially mild missionary might have spoken
+to a beautiful Polynesian, he let her know that he had learned from her
+companions the very strong step she was about to take.  This led to their
+spending together ten minutes which, to her mind, threw more light on his
+character than anything that had ever passed between them.  She had
+always felt with him as if she were standing on an edge, looking down
+into something decidedly deep.  To-day the impression of the
+perpendicular shaft was there, but it was rather an abyss of confusion
+and disorder than the large bright space in which she had figured
+everything as ranged and pigeon-holed, presenting the appearance of the
+labelled shelves and drawers at a chemist’s.  He discussed without an
+invitation to discuss, he appealed without a right to appeal.  He was
+nothing but a suitor tolerated after dismissal, but he took strangely for
+granted a participation in her affairs.  He assumed all sorts of things
+that made her draw back.  He implied that there was everything now to
+assist them in arriving at an agreement, since she had never informed him
+that he was positively objectionable; but that this symmetry would be
+spoiled if she should not be willing to take a little longer to think of
+certain consequences.  She was greatly disconcerted when she saw what
+consequences he meant and at his reminding her of them.  What on earth
+was the use of a lover if he was to speak only like one’s grandmother and
+one’s aunt?  He struck her as much in love with her and as particularly
+careful at the same time as to what he might say.  He never mentioned her
+mother; he only alluded, indirectly but earnestly, to the “step.”  He
+disapproved of it altogether, took an unexpectedly prudent, politic view
+of it.  He evidently also believed that she would be dragged down; in
+other words that she would not be asked out.  It was his idea that her
+mother would contaminate her, so that he should find himself interested
+in a young person discredited and virtually unmarriageable.  All this was
+more obvious to him than the consideration that a daughter should be
+merciful.  Where was his religion if he understood mercy so little, and
+where were his talent and his courage if he were so miserably afraid of
+trumpery social penalties?  Rose’s heart sank when she reflected that a
+man supposed to be first-rate hadn’t guessed that rather than not do what
+she could for her mother she would give up all the Engineers in the
+world.  She became aware that she probably would have been moved to place
+her hand in his on the spot if he had come to her saying “Your idea is
+the right one; put it through at every cost.”  She couldn’t discuss this
+with him, though he impressed her as having too much at stake for her to
+treat him with mere disdain.  She sickened at the revelation that a
+gentleman could see so much in mere vulgarities of opinion, and though
+she uttered as few words as possible, conversing only in sad smiles and
+headshakes and in intercepted movements toward the door, she happened, in
+some unguarded lapse from her reticence, to use the expression that she
+was disappointed in him.  He caught at it and, seeming to drop his
+field-glass, pressed upon her with nearer, tenderer eyes.
+
+“Can I be so happy as to believe, then, that you had thought of me with
+some confidence, with some faith?”
+
+“If you didn’t suppose so, what is the sense of this visit?” Rose asked.
+
+“One can be faithful without reciprocity,” said the young man.  “I regard
+you in a light which makes me want to protect you even if I have nothing
+to gain by it.”
+
+“Yet you speak as if you thought you might keep me for yourself.”
+
+“For _yourself_.  I don’t want you to suffer.”
+
+“Nor to suffer yourself by my doing so,” said Rose, looking down.
+
+“Ah, if you would only marry me next month!” he broke out inconsequently.
+
+“And give up going to mamma?” Rose waited to see if he would say “What
+need that matter?  Can’t your mother come to us?”  But he said nothing of
+the sort; he only answered—
+
+“She surely would be sorry to interfere with the exercise of any other
+affection which I might have the bliss of believing that you are now
+free, in however small a degree, to entertain.”
+
+Rose knew that her mother wouldn’t be sorry at all; but she contented
+herself with rejoining, her hand on the door: “Good-bye.  I sha’n’t
+suffer.  I’m not afraid.”
+
+“You don’t know how terrible, how cruel, the world can be.”
+
+“Yes, I do know.  I know everything!”
+
+The declaration sprang from her lips in a tone which made him look at her
+as he had never looked before, as if he saw something new in her face, as
+if he had never yet known her.  He hadn’t displeased her so much but that
+she would like to give him that impression, and since she felt that she
+was doing so she lingered an instant for the purpose.  It enabled her to
+see, further, that he turned red; then to become aware that a carriage
+had stopped at the door.  Captain Jay’s eyes, from where he stood, fell
+upon this arrival, and the nature of their glance made Rose step forward
+to look.  Her mother sat there, brilliant, conspicuous, in the eternal
+victoria, and the footman was already sounding the knocker.  It had been
+no part of the arrangement that she should come to fetch her; it had been
+out of the question—a stroke in such bad taste as would have put Rose in
+the wrong.  The girl had never dreamed of it, but somehow, suddenly,
+perversely, she was glad of it now; she even hoped that her grandmother
+and her aunt were looking out upstairs.
+
+“My mother has come for me.  Good-bye,” she repeated; but this time her
+visitor had got between her and the door.
+
+“Listen to me before you go.  I will give you a life’s devotion,” the
+young man pleaded.  He really barred the way.
+
+She wondered whether her grandmother had told him that if her flight were
+not prevented she would forfeit money.  Then, vividly, it came over her
+that this would be what he was occupied with.  “I shall never think of
+you—let me go!” she cried, with passion.
+
+Captain Jay opened the door, but Rose didn’t see his face, and in a
+moment she was out of the house.  Aunt Julia, who was sure to have been
+hovering, had taken flight before the profanity of the knock.
+
+“Heavens, dear, where did you get your mourning?” the lady in the
+victoria asked of her daughter as they drove away.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+LADY MARESFIELD had given her boy a push in his plump back and had said
+to him, “Go and speak to her now; it’s your chance.”  She had for a long
+time wanted this scion to make himself audible to Rose Tramore, but the
+opportunity was not easy to come by.  The case was complicated.  Lady
+Maresfield had four daughters, of whom only one was married.  It so
+happened moreover that this one, Mrs. Vaughan-Vesey, the only person in
+the world her mother was afraid of, was the most to be reckoned with.
+The Honourable Guy was in appearance all his mother’s child, though he
+was really a simpler soul.  He was large and pink; large, that is, as to
+everything but the eyes, which were diminishing points, and pink as to
+everything but the hair, which was comparable, faintly, to the hue of the
+richer rose.  He had also, it must be conceded, very small neat teeth,
+which made his smile look like a young lady’s.  He had no wish to
+resemble any such person, but he was perpetually smiling, and he smiled
+more than ever as he approached Rose Tramore, who, looking altogether, to
+his mind, as a pretty girl should, and wearing a soft white opera-cloak
+over a softer black dress, leaned alone against the wall of the vestibule
+at Covent Garden while, a few paces off, an old gentleman engaged her
+mother in conversation.  Madame Patti had been singing, and they were all
+waiting for their carriages.  To their ears at present came a
+vociferation of names and a rattle of wheels.  The air, through banging
+doors, entered in damp, warm gusts, heavy with the stale, slightly sweet
+taste of the London season when the London season is overripe and
+spoiling.
+
+Guy Mangler had only three minutes to reëstablish an interrupted
+acquaintance with our young lady.  He reminded her that he had danced
+with her the year before, and he mentioned that he knew her brother.  His
+mother had lately been to see old Mrs. Tramore, but this he did not
+mention, not being aware of it.  That visit had produced, on Lady
+Maresfield’s part, a private crisis, engendered ideas.  One of them was
+that the grandmother in Hill Street had really forgiven the wilful girl
+much more than she admitted.  Another was that there would still be some
+money for Rose when the others should come into theirs.  Still another
+was that the others would come into theirs at no distant date; the old
+lady was so visibly going to pieces.  There were several more besides, as
+for instance that Rose had already fifteen hundred a year from her
+father.  The figure had been betrayed in Hill Street; it was part of the
+proof of Mrs. Tramore’s decrepitude.  Then there was an equal amount that
+her mother had to dispose of and on which the girl could absolutely
+count, though of course it might involve much waiting, as the mother, a
+person of gross insensibility, evidently wouldn’t die of
+cold-shouldering.  Equally definite, to do it justice, was the conception
+that Rose was in truth remarkably good looking, and that what she had
+undertaken to do showed, and would show even should it fail, cleverness
+of the right sort.  Cleverness of the right sort was exactly the quality
+that Lady Maresfield prefigured as indispensable in a young lady to whom
+she should marry her second son, over whose own deficiencies she flung
+the veil of a maternal theory that _his_ cleverness was of a sort that
+was wrong.  Those who knew him less well were content to wish that he
+might not conceal it for such a scruple.  This enumeration of his
+mother’s views does not exhaust the list, and it was in obedience to one
+too profound to be uttered even by the historian that, after a very brief
+delay, she decided to move across the crowded lobby.  Her daughter Bessie
+was the only one with her; Maggie was dining with the Vaughan-Veseys, and
+Fanny was not of an age.  Mrs. Tramore the younger showed only an
+admirable back—her face was to her old gentleman—and Bessie had drifted
+to some other people; so that it was comparatively easy for Lady
+Maresfield to say to Rose, in a moment: “My dear child, are you never
+coming to see us?”
+
+“We shall be delighted to come if you’ll ask us,” Rose smiled.
+
+Lady Maresfield had been prepared for the plural number, and she was a
+woman whom it took many plurals to disconcert.  “I’m sure Guy is longing
+for another dance with you,” she rejoined, with the most unblinking
+irrelevance.
+
+“I’m afraid we’re not dancing again quite yet,” said Rose, glancing at
+her mother’s exposed shoulders, but speaking as if they were muffled in
+crape.
+
+Lady Maresfield leaned her head on one side and seemed almost wistful.
+“Not even at my sister’s ball?  She’s to have something next week.
+She’ll write to you.”
+
+Rose Tramore, on the spot, looking bright but vague, turned three or four
+things over in her mind.  She remembered that the sister of her
+interlocutress was the proverbially rich Mrs. Bray, a bankeress or a
+breweress or a builderess, who had so big a house that she couldn’t fill
+it unless she opened her doors, or her mouth, very wide.  Rose had learnt
+more about London society during these lonely months with her mother than
+she had ever picked up in Hill Street.  The younger Mrs. Tramore was a
+mine of _commérages_, and she had no need to go out to bring home the
+latest intelligence.  At any rate Mrs. Bray might serve as the end of a
+wedge.  “Oh, I dare say we might think of that,” Rose said.  “It would be
+very kind of your sister.”
+
+“Guy’ll think of it, won’t you, Guy?” asked Lady Maresfield.
+
+“Rather!” Guy responded, with an intonation as fine as if he had learnt
+it at a music hall; while at the same moment the name of his mother’s
+carriage was bawled through the place.  Mrs. Tramore had parted with her
+old gentleman; she turned again to her daughter.  Nothing occurred but
+what always occurred, which was exactly this absence of everything—a
+universal lapse.  She didn’t exist, even for a second, to any recognising
+eye.  The people who looked at her—of course there were plenty of
+those—were only the people who didn’t exist for hers.  Lady Maresfield
+surged away on her son’s arm.
+
+It was this noble matron herself who wrote, the next day, inclosing a
+card of invitation from Mrs. Bray and expressing the hope that Rose would
+come and dine and let her ladyship take her.  She should have only one of
+her own girls; Gwendolen Vesey was to take the other.  Rose handed both
+the note and the card in silence to her mother; the latter exhibited only
+the name of Miss Tramore.  “You had much better go, dear,” her mother
+said; in answer to which Miss Tramore slowly tore up the documents,
+looking with clear, meditative eyes out of the window.  Her mother always
+said “You had better go”—there had been other incidents—and Rose had
+never even once taken account of the observation.  She would make no
+first advances, only plenty of second ones, and, condoning no
+discrimination, would treat no omission as venial.  She would keep all
+concessions till afterwards; then she would make them one by one.
+Fighting society was quite as hard as her grandmother had said it would
+be; but there was a tension in it which made the dreariness vibrate—the
+dreariness of such a winter as she had just passed.  Her companion had
+cried at the end of it, and she had cried all through; only her tears had
+been private, while her mother’s had fallen once for all, at luncheon on
+the bleak Easter Monday—produced by the way a silent survey of the deadly
+square brought home to her that every creature but themselves was out of
+town and having tremendous fun.  Rose felt that it was useless to attempt
+to explain simply by her mourning this severity of solitude; for if
+people didn’t go to parties (at least a few didn’t) for six months after
+their father died, this was the very time other people took for coming to
+see them.  It was not too much to say that during this first winter of
+Rose’s period with her mother she had no communication whatever with the
+world.  It had the effect of making her take to reading the new American
+books: she wanted to see how girls got on by themselves.  She had never
+read so much before, and there was a legitimate indifference in it when
+topics failed with her mother.  They often failed after the first days,
+and then, while she bent over instructive volumes, this lady, dressed as
+if for an impending function, sat on the sofa and watched her.  Rose was
+not embarrassed by such an appearance, for she could reflect that, a
+little before, her companion had not even a girl who had taken refuge in
+queer researches to look at.  She was moreover used to her mother’s
+attitude by this time.  She had her own description of it: it was the
+attitude of waiting for the carriage.  If they didn’t go out it was not
+that Mrs. Tramore was not ready in time, and Rose had even an alarmed
+prevision of their some day always arriving first.  Mrs. Tramore’s
+conversation at such moments was abrupt, inconsequent and personal.  She
+sat on the edge of sofas and chairs and glanced occasionally at the fit
+of her gloves (she was perpetually gloved, and the fit was a thing it was
+melancholy to see wasted), as people do who are expecting guests to
+dinner.  Rose used almost to fancy herself at times a perfunctory husband
+on the other side of the fire.
+
+What she was not yet used to—there was still a charm in it—was her
+mother’s extraordinary tact.  During the years they lived together they
+never had a discussion; a circumstance all the more remarkable since if
+the girl had a reason for sparing her companion (that of being sorry for
+her) Mrs. Tramore had none for sparing her child.  She only showed in
+doing so a happy instinct—the happiest thing about her.  She took in
+perfection a course which represented everything and covered everything;
+she utterly abjured all authority.  She testified to her abjuration in
+hourly ingenious, touching ways.  In this manner nothing had to be talked
+over, which was a mercy all round.  The tears on Easter Monday were
+merely a nervous gust, to help show she was not a Christmas doll from the
+Burlington Arcade; and there was no lifting up of the repentant Magdalen,
+no uttered remorse for the former abandonment of children.  Of the way
+she could treat her children her demeanour to this one was an example; it
+was an uninterrupted appeal to her eldest daughter for direction.  She
+took the law from Rose in every circumstance, and if you had noticed
+these ladies without knowing their history you would have wondered what
+tie was fine enough to make maturity so respectful to youth.  No mother
+was ever so filial as Mrs. Tramore, and there had never been such a
+difference of position between sisters.  Not that the elder one fawned,
+which would have been fearful; she only renounced—whatever she had to
+renounce.  If the amount was not much she at any rate made no scene over
+it.  Her hand was so light that Rose said of her secretly, in vague
+glances at the past, “No wonder people liked her!”  She never
+characterised the old element of interference with her mother’s
+respectability more definitely than as “people.”  They were people, it
+was true, for whom gentleness must have been everything and who didn’t
+demand a variety of interests.  The desire to “go out” was the one
+passion that even a closer acquaintance with her parent revealed to Rose
+Tramore.  She marvelled at its strength, in the light of the poor lady’s
+history: there was comedy enough in this unquenchable flame on the part
+of a woman who had known such misery.  She had drunk deep of every
+dishonour, but the bitter cup had left her with a taste for lighted
+candles, for squeezing up staircases and hooking herself to the human
+elbow.  Rose had a vision of the future years in which this taste would
+grow with restored exercise—of her mother, in a long-tailed dress,
+jogging on and on and on, jogging further and further from her sins,
+through a century of the “Morning Post” and down the fashionable avenue
+of time.  She herself would then be very old—she herself would be dead.
+Mrs. Tramore would cover a span of life for which such an allowance of
+sin was small.  The girl could laugh indeed now at that theory of her
+being dragged down.  If one thing were more present to her than another
+it was the very desolation of their propriety.  As she glanced at her
+companion, it sometimes seemed to her that if she had been a bad woman
+she would have been worse than that.  There were compensations for being
+“cut” which Mrs. Tramore too much neglected.
+
+The lonely old lady in Hill Street—Rose thought of her that way now—was
+the one person to whom she was ready to say that she would come to her on
+any terms.  She wrote this to her three times over, and she knocked still
+oftener at her door.  But the old lady answered no letters; if Rose had
+remained in Hill Street it would have been her own function to answer
+them; and at the door, the butler, whom the girl had known for ten years,
+considered her, when he told her his mistress was not at home, quite as
+he might have considered a young person who had come about a place and of
+whose eligibility he took a negative view.  That was Rose’s one pang,
+that she probably appeared rather heartless.  Her aunt Julia had gone to
+Florence with Edith for the winter, on purpose to make her appear more
+so; for Miss Tramore was still the person most scandalised by her
+secession.  Edith and she, doubtless, often talked over in Florence the
+destitution of the aged victim in Hill Street.  Eric never came to see
+his sister, because, being full both of family and of personal feeling,
+he thought she really ought to have stayed with his grandmother.  If she
+had had such an appurtenance all to herself she might have done what she
+liked with it; but he couldn’t forgive such a want of consideration for
+anything of his.  There were moments when Rose would have been ready to
+take her hand from the plough and insist upon reintegration, if only the
+fierce voice of the old house had allowed people to look her up.  But she
+read, ever so clearly, that her grandmother had made this a question of
+loyalty to seventy years of virtue.  Mrs. Tramore’s forlornness didn’t
+prevent her drawing-room from being a very public place, in which Rose
+could hear certain words reverberate: “Leave her alone; it’s the only way
+to see how long she’ll hold out.”  The old woman’s visitors were people
+who didn’t wish to quarrel, and the girl was conscious that if they had
+not let her alone—that is if they had come to her from her
+grandmother—she might perhaps not have held out.  She had no friends
+quite of her own; she had not been brought up to have them, and it would
+not have been easy in a house which two such persons as her father and
+his mother divided between them.  Her father disapproved of crude
+intimacies, and all the intimacies of youth were crude.  He had married
+at five-and-twenty and could testify to such a truth.  Rose felt that she
+shared even Captain Jay with her grandmother; she had seen what _he_ was
+worth.  Moreover, she had spoken to him at that last moment in Hill
+Street in a way which, taken with her former refusal, made it impossible
+that he should come near her again.  She hoped he went to see his
+protectress: he could be a kind of substitute and administer comfort.
+
+It so happened, however, that the day after she threw Lady Maresfield’s
+invitation into the wastepaper basket she received a visit from a certain
+Mrs. Donovan, whom she had occasionally seen in Hill Street.  She vaguely
+knew this lady for a busybody, but she was in a situation which even
+busybodies might alleviate.  Mrs. Donovan was poor, but honest—so
+scrupulously honest that she was perpetually returning visits she had
+never received.  She was always clad in weather-beaten sealskin, and had
+an odd air of being prepared for the worst, which was borne out by her
+denying that she was Irish.  She was of the English Donovans.
+
+“Dear child, won’t you go out with me?” she asked.
+
+Rose looked at her a moment and then rang the bell.  She spoke of
+something else, without answering the question, and when the servant came
+she said: “Please tell Mrs. Tramore that Mrs. Donovan has come to see
+her.”
+
+“Oh, that’ll be delightful; only you mustn’t tell your grandmother!” the
+visitor exclaimed.
+
+“Tell her what?”
+
+“That I come to see your mamma.”
+
+“You don’t,” said Rose.
+
+“Sure I hoped you’d introduce me!” cried Mrs. Donovan, compromising
+herself in her embarrassment.
+
+“It’s not necessary; you knew her once.”
+
+“Indeed and I’ve known every one once,” the visitor confessed.
+
+Mrs. Tramore, when she came in, was charming and exactly right; she
+greeted Mrs. Donovan as if she had met her the week before last, giving
+her daughter such a new illustration of her tact that Rose again had the
+idea that it was no wonder “people” had liked her.  The girl grudged Mrs.
+Donovan so fresh a morsel as a description of her mother at home,
+rejoicing that she would be inconvenienced by having to keep the story
+out of Hill Street.  Her mother went away before Mrs. Donovan departed,
+and Rose was touched by guessing her reason—the thought that since even
+this circuitous personage had been moved to come, the two might, if left
+together, invent some remedy.  Rose waited to see what Mrs. Donovan had
+in fact invented.
+
+“You won’t come out with me then?”
+
+“Come out with you?”
+
+“My daughters are married.  You know I’m a lone woman.  It would be an
+immense pleasure to me to have so charming a creature as yourself to
+present to the world.”
+
+“I go out with my mother,” said Rose, after a moment.
+
+“Yes, but sometimes when she’s not inclined?”
+
+“She goes everywhere she wants to go,” Rose continued, uttering the
+biggest fib of her life and only regretting it should be wasted on Mrs.
+Donovan.
+
+“Ah, but do you go everywhere _you_ want?” the lady asked sociably.
+
+“One goes even to places one hates.  Every one does that.”
+
+“Oh, what I go through!” this social martyr cried.  Then she laid a
+persuasive hand on the girl’s arm.  “Let me show you at a few places
+first, and then we’ll see.  I’ll bring them all here.”
+
+“I don’t think I understand you,” replied Rose, though in Mrs. Donovan’s
+words she perfectly saw her own theory of the case reflected.  For a
+quarter of a minute she asked herself whether she might not, after all,
+do so much evil that good might come.  Mrs. Donovan would take her out
+the next day, and be thankful enough to annex such an attraction as a
+pretty girl.  Various consequences would ensue and the long delay would
+be shortened; her mother’s drawing-room would resound with the clatter of
+teacups.
+
+“Mrs. Bray’s having some big thing next week; come with me there and I’ll
+show you what I mane,” Mrs. Donovan pleaded.
+
+“I see what you mane,” Rose answered, brushing away her temptation and
+getting up.  “I’m much obliged to you.”
+
+“You know you’re wrong, my dear,” said her interlocutress, with angry
+little eyes.
+
+“I’m not going to Mrs. Bray’s.”
+
+“I’ll get you a kyard; it’ll only cost me a penny stamp.”
+
+“I’ve got one,” said the girl, smiling.
+
+“Do you mean a penny stamp?”  Mrs. Donovan, especially at departure,
+always observed all the forms of amity.  “You can’t do it alone, my
+darling,” she declared.
+
+“Shall they call you a cab?” Rose asked.
+
+“I’ll pick one up.  I choose my horse.  You know you require your start,”
+her visitor went on.
+
+“Excuse my mother,” was Rose’s only reply.
+
+“Don’t mention it.  Come to me when you need me.  You’ll find me in the
+Red Book.”
+
+“It’s awfully kind of you.”
+
+Mrs. Donovan lingered a moment on the threshold.  “Who will you _have_
+now, my child?” she appealed.
+
+“I won’t have any one!”  Rose turned away, blushing for her.  “She came
+on speculation,” she said afterwards to Mrs. Tramore.
+
+Her mother looked at her a moment in silence.  “You can do it if you
+like, you know.”
+
+Rose made no direct answer to this observation; she remarked instead:
+“See what our quiet life allows us to escape.”
+
+“We don’t escape it.  She has been here an hour.”
+
+“Once in twenty years!  We might meet her three times a day.”
+
+“Oh, I’d take her with the rest!” sighed Mrs. Tramore; while her daughter
+recognised that what her companion wanted to do was just what Mrs.
+Donovan was doing.  Mrs. Donovan’s life was her ideal.
+
+On a Sunday, ten days later, Rose went to see one of her old governesses,
+of whom she had lost sight for some time and who had written to her that
+she was in London, unoccupied and ill.  This was just the sort of
+relation into which she could throw herself now with inordinate zeal; the
+idea of it, however, not preventing a foretaste of the queer expression
+in the excellent lady’s face when she should mention with whom she was
+living.  While she smiled at this picture she threw in another joke,
+asking herself if Miss Hack could be held in any degree to constitute the
+nucleus of a circle.  She would come to see her, in any event—come the
+more the further she was dragged down.  Sunday was always a difficult day
+with the two ladies—the afternoons made it so apparent that they were not
+frequented.  Her mother, it is true, was comprised in the habits of two
+or three old gentlemen—she had for a long time avoided male friends of
+less than seventy—who disliked each other enough to make the room, when
+they were there at once, crack with pressure.  Rose sat for a long time
+with Miss Hack, doing conscientious justice to the conception that there
+could be troubles in the world worse than her own; and when she came back
+her mother was alone, but with a story to tell of a long visit from Mr.
+Guy Mangler, who had waited and waited for her return.  “He’s in love
+with you; he’s coming again on Tuesday,” Mrs. Tramore announced.
+
+“Did he say so?”
+
+“That he’s coming back on Tuesday?”
+
+“No, that he’s in love with me.”
+
+“He didn’t need, when he stayed two hours.”
+
+“With you?  It’s you he’s in love with, mamma!”
+
+“That will do as well,” laughed Mrs. Tramore.  “For all the use we shall
+make of him!” she added in a moment.
+
+“We shall make great use of him.  His mother sent him.”
+
+“Oh, she’ll never come!”
+
+“Then _he_ sha’n’t,” said Rose.  Yet he was admitted on the Tuesday, and
+after she had given him his tea Mrs. Tramore left the young people alone.
+Rose wished she hadn’t—she herself had another view.  At any rate she
+disliked her mother’s view, which she had easily guessed.  Mr. Mangler
+did nothing but say how charming he thought his hostess of the Sunday,
+and what a tremendously jolly visit he had had.  He didn’t remark in so
+many words “I had no idea your mother was such a good sort”; but this was
+the spirit of his simple discourse.  Rose liked it at first—a little of
+it gratified her; then she thought there was too much of it for good
+taste.  She had to reflect that one does what one can and that Mr.
+Mangler probably thought he was delicate.  He wished to convey that he
+desired to make up to her for the injustice of society.  Why shouldn’t
+her mother receive gracefully, she asked (not audibly) and who had ever
+said she didn’t?  Mr. Mangler had a great deal to say about the
+disappointment of his own parent over Miss Tramore’s not having come to
+dine with them the night of his aunt’s ball.
+
+“Lady Maresfield knows why I didn’t come,” Rose answered at last.
+
+“Ah, now, but _I_ don’t, you know; can’t you tell _me_?” asked the young
+man.
+
+“It doesn’t matter, if your mother’s clear about it.”
+
+“Oh, but why make such an awful mystery of it, when I’m dying to know?”
+
+He talked about this, he chaffed her about it for the rest of his visit:
+he had at last found a topic after his own heart.  If her mother
+considered that he might be the emblem of their redemption he was an
+engine of the most primitive construction.  He stayed and stayed; he
+struck Rose as on the point of bringing out something for which he had
+not quite, as he would have said, the cheek.  Sometimes she thought he
+was going to begin: “By the way, my mother told me to propose to you.”
+At other moments he seemed charged with the admission: “I say, of course
+I really know what you’re trying to do for her,” nodding at the door:
+“therefore hadn’t we better speak of it frankly, so that I can help you
+with my mother, and more particularly with my sister Gwendolen, who’s the
+difficult one?  The fact is, you see, they won’t do anything for nothing.
+If you’ll accept me they’ll call, but they won’t call without something
+‘down.’”  Mr. Mangler departed without their speaking frankly, and Rose
+Tramore had a hot hour during which she almost entertained, vindictively,
+the project of “accepting” the limpid youth until after she should have
+got her mother into circulation.  The cream of the vision was that she
+might break with him later.  She could read that this was what her mother
+would have liked, but the next time he came the door was closed to him,
+and the next and the next.
+
+In August there was nothing to do but to go abroad, with the sense on
+Rose’s part that the battle was still all to fight; for a round of
+country visits was not in prospect, and English watering-places
+constituted one of the few subjects on which the girl had heard her
+mother express herself with disgust.  Continental autumns had been indeed
+for years, one of the various forms of Mrs. Tramore’s atonement, but Rose
+could only infer that such fruit as they had borne was bitter.  The stony
+stare of Belgravia could be practised at Homburg; and somehow it was
+inveterately only gentlemen who sat next to her at the _table d’hôte_ at
+Cadenabbia.  Gentlemen had never been of any use to Mrs. Tramore for
+getting back into society; they had only helped her effectually to get
+out of it.  She once dropped, to her daughter, in a moralising mood, the
+remark that it was astonishing how many of them one could know without
+its doing one any good.  Fifty of them—even very clever ones—represented
+a value inferior to that of one stupid woman.  Rose wondered at the
+offhand way in which her mother could talk of fifty clever men; it seemed
+to her that the whole world couldn’t contain such a number.  She had a
+sombre sense that mankind must be dull and mean.  These cogitations took
+place in a cold hotel, in an eternal Swiss rain, and they had a flat echo
+in the transalpine valleys, as the lonely ladies went vaguely down to the
+Italian lakes and cities.  Rose guided their course, at moments, with a
+kind of aimless ferocity; she moved abruptly, feeling vulgar and hating
+their life, though destitute of any definite vision of another life that
+would have been open to her.  She had set herself a task and she clung to
+it; but she appeared to herself despicably idle.  She had succeeded in
+not going to Homburg waters, where London was trying to wash away some of
+its stains; that would be too staring an advertisement of their
+situation.  The main difference in situations to her now was the
+difference of being more or less pitied, at the best an intolerable
+danger; so that the places she preferred were the unsuspicious ones.  She
+wanted to triumph with contempt, not with submission.
+
+One morning in September, coming with her mother out of the marble church
+at Milan, she perceived that a gentleman who had just passed her on his
+way into the cathedral and whose face she had not noticed, had quickly
+raised his hat, with a suppressed ejaculation.  She involuntarily glanced
+back; the gentleman had paused, again uncovering, and Captain Jay stood
+saluting her in the Italian sunshine.  “Oh, good-morning!” she said, and
+walked on, pursuing her course; her mother was a little in front.  She
+overtook her in a moment, with an unreasonable sense, like a gust of cold
+air, that men were worse than ever, for Captain Jay had apparently moved
+into the church.  Her mother turned as they met, and suddenly, as she
+looked back, an expression of peculiar sweetness came into this lady’s
+eyes.  It made Rose’s take the same direction and rest a second time on
+Captain Jay, who was planted just where he had stood a minute before.  He
+immediately came forward, asking Rose with great gravity if he might
+speak to her a moment, while Mrs. Tramore went her way again.  He had the
+expression of a man who wished to say something very important; yet his
+next words were simple enough and consisted of the remark that he had not
+seen her for a year.
+
+“Is it really so much as that?” asked Rose.
+
+“Very nearly.  I would have looked you up, but in the first place I have
+been very little in London, and in the second I believed it wouldn’t have
+done any good.”
+
+“You should have put that first,” said the girl.  “It wouldn’t have done
+any good.”
+
+He was silent over this a moment, in his customary deciphering way; but
+the view he took of it did not prevent him from inquiring, as she slowly
+followed her mother, if he mightn’t walk with her now.  She answered with
+a laugh that it wouldn’t do any good but that he might do as he liked.
+He replied without the slightest manifestation of levity that it would do
+more good than if he didn’t, and they strolled together, with Mrs.
+Tramore well before them, across the big, amusing piazza, where the front
+of the cathedral makes a sort of builded light.  He asked a question or
+two and he explained his own presence: having a month’s holiday, the
+first clear time for several years, he had just popped over the Alps.  He
+inquired if Rose had recent news of the old lady in Hill Street, and it
+was the only tortuous thing she had ever heard him say.
+
+“I have had no communication of any kind from her since I parted with you
+under her roof.  Hasn’t she mentioned that?” said Rose.
+
+“I haven’t seen her.”
+
+“I thought you were such great friends.”
+
+Bertram Jay hesitated a moment.  “Well, not so much now.”
+
+“What has she done to you?” Rose demanded.
+
+He fidgeted a little, as if he were thinking of something that made him
+unconscious of her question; then, with mild violence, he brought out the
+inquiry: “Miss Tramore, are you happy?”
+
+She was startled by the words, for she on her side had been
+reflecting—reflecting that he had broken with her grandmother and that
+this pointed to a reason.  It suggested at least that he wouldn’t now be
+so much like a mouthpiece for that cold ancestral tone.  She turned off
+his question—said it never was a fair one, as you gave yourself away
+however you answered it.  When he repeated “You give yourself away?” as
+if he didn’t understand, she remembered that he had not read the funny
+American books.  This brought them to a silence, for she had enlightened
+him only by another laugh, and he was evidently preparing another
+question, which he wished carefully to disconnect from the former.
+Presently, just as they were coming near Mrs. Tramore, it arrived in the
+words “Is this lady your mother?”  On Rose’s assenting, with the addition
+that she was travelling with her, he said: “Will you be so kind as to
+introduce me to her?”  They were so close to Mrs. Tramore that she
+probably heard, but she floated away with a single stroke of her paddle
+and an inattentive poise of her head.  It was a striking exhibition of
+the famous tact, for Rose delayed to answer, which was exactly what might
+have made her mother wish to turn; and indeed when at last the girl spoke
+she only said to her companion: “Why do you ask me that?”
+
+“Because I desire the pleasure of making her acquaintance.”
+
+Rose had stopped, and in the middle of the square they stood looking at
+each other.  “Do you remember what you said to me the last time I saw
+you?”
+
+“Oh, don’t speak of that!”
+
+“It’s better to speak of it now than to speak of it later.”
+
+Bertram Jay looked round him, as if to see whether any one would hear;
+but the bright foreignness gave him a sense of safety, and he
+unexpectedly exclaimed: “Miss Tramore, I love you more than ever!”
+
+“Then you ought to have come to see us,” declared the girl, quickly
+walking on.
+
+“You treated me the last time as if I were positively offensive to you.”
+
+“So I did, but you know my reason.”
+
+“Because I protested against the course you were taking?  I did, I did!”
+the young man rang out, as if he still, a little, stuck to that.
+
+His tone made Rose say gaily: “Perhaps you do so yet?”
+
+“I can’t tell till I’ve seen more of your circumstances,” he replied with
+eminent honesty.
+
+The girl stared; her light laugh filled the air.  “And it’s in order to
+see more of them and judge that you wish to make my mother’s
+acquaintance?”
+
+He coloured at this and he evaded; then he broke out with a confused
+“Miss Tramore, let me stay with you a little!” which made her stop again.
+
+“Your company will do us great honour, but there must be a rigid
+condition attached to our acceptance of it.”
+
+“Kindly mention it,” said Captain Jay, staring at the façade of the
+cathedral.
+
+“You don’t take us on trial.”
+
+“On trial?”
+
+“You don’t make an observation to me—not a single one, ever, ever!—on the
+matter that, in Hill Street, we had our last words about.”
+
+Captain Jay appeared to be counting the thousand pinnacles of the church.
+“I think you really must be right,” he remarked at last.
+
+“There you are!” cried Rose Tramore, and walked rapidly away.
+
+He caught up with her, he laid his hand upon her arm to stay her.  “If
+you’re going to Venice, let me go to Venice with you!”
+
+“You don’t even understand my condition.”
+
+“I’m sure you’re right, then: you must be right about everything.”
+
+“That’s not in the least true, and I don’t care a fig whether you’re sure
+or not.  Please let me go.”
+
+He had barred her way, he kept her longer.  “I’ll go and speak to your
+mother myself!”
+
+Even in the midst of another emotion she was amused at the air of
+audacity accompanying this declaration.  Poor Captain Jay might have been
+on the point of marching up to a battery.  She looked at him a moment;
+then she said: “You’ll be disappointed!”
+
+“Disappointed?”
+
+“She’s much more proper than grandmamma, because she’s much more
+amiable.”
+
+“Dear Miss Tramore—dear Miss Tramore!” the young man murmured helplessly.
+
+“You’ll see for yourself.  Only there’s another condition,” Rose went on.
+
+“Another?” he cried, with discouragement and alarm.
+
+“You must understand thoroughly, before you throw in your lot with us
+even for a few days, what our position really is.”
+
+“Is it very bad?” asked Bertram Jay artlessly.
+
+“No one has anything to do with us, no one speaks to us, no one looks at
+us.”
+
+“Really?” stared the young man.
+
+“We’ve no social existence, we’re utterly despised.”
+
+“Oh, Miss Tramore!” Captain Jay interposed.  He added quickly, vaguely,
+and with a want of presence of mind of which he as quickly felt ashamed:
+“Do none of your family—?”  The question collapsed; the brilliant girl
+was looking at him.
+
+“We’re extraordinarily happy,” she threw out.
+
+“Now that’s all I wanted to know!” he exclaimed, with a kind of
+exaggerated cheery reproach, walking on with her briskly to overtake her
+mother.
+
+He was not dining at their inn, but he insisted on coming that evening to
+their _table d’hôte_.  He sat next Mrs. Tramore, and in the evening he
+accompanied them gallantly to the opera, at a third-rate theatre where
+they were almost the only ladies in the boxes.  The next day they went
+together by rail to the Charterhouse of Pavia, and while he strolled with
+the girl, as they waited for the homeward train, he said to her candidly:
+“Your mother’s remarkably pretty.”  She remembered the words and the
+feeling they gave her: they were the first note of new era.  The feeling
+was somewhat that of an anxious, gratified matron who has “presented” her
+child and is thinking of the matrimonial market.  Men might be of no use,
+as Mrs. Tramore said, yet it was from this moment Rose dated the rosy
+dawn of her confidence that her _protégée_ would go off; and when later,
+in crowded assemblies, the phrase, or something like it behind a hat or a
+fan, fell repeatedly on her anxious ear, “Your mother _is_ in beauty!” or
+“I’ve never seen her look better!” she had a faint vision of the yellow
+sunshine and the afternoon shadows on the dusty Italian platform.
+
+Mrs. Tramore’s behaviour at this period was a revelation of her native
+understanding of delicate situations.  She needed no account of this one
+from her daughter—it was one of the things for which she had a scent; and
+there was a kind of loyalty to the rules of a game in the silent
+sweetness with which she smoothed the path of Bertram Jay.  It was clear
+that she was in her element in fostering the exercise of the affections,
+and if she ever spoke without thinking twice it is probable that she
+would have exclaimed, with some gaiety, “Oh, I know all about _love_!”
+Rose could see that she thought their companion would be a help, in spite
+of his being no dispenser of patronage.  The key to the gates of fashion
+had not been placed in his hand, and no one had ever heard of the ladies
+of his family, who lived in some vague hollow of the Yorkshire moors; but
+none the less he might administer a muscular push.  Yes indeed, men in
+general were broken reeds, but Captain Jay was peculiarly representative.
+Respectability was the woman’s maximum, as honour was the man’s, but this
+distinguished young soldier inspired more than one kind of confidence.
+Rose had a great deal of attention for the use to which his
+respectability was put; and there mingled with this attention some
+amusement and much compassion.  She saw that after a couple of days he
+decidedly liked her mother, and that he was yet not in the least aware of
+it.  He took for granted that he believed in her but little;
+notwithstanding which he would have trusted her with anything except Rose
+herself.  His trusting her with Rose would come very soon.  He never
+spoke to her daughter about her qualities of character, but two or three
+of them (and indeed these were all the poor lady had, and they made the
+best show) were what he had in mind in praising her appearance.  When he
+remarked: “What attention Mrs. Tramore seems to attract everywhere!” he
+meant: “What a beautifully simple nature it is!” and when he said:
+“There’s something extraordinarily harmonious in the colours she wears,”
+it signified: “Upon my word, I never saw such a sweet temper in my life!”
+She lost one of her boxes at Verona, and made the prettiest joke of it to
+Captain Jay.  When Rose saw this she said to herself, “Next season we
+shall have only to choose.”  Rose knew what was in the box.
+
+By the time they reached Venice (they had stopped at half a dozen little
+old romantic cities in the most frolicsome æsthetic way) she liked their
+companion better than she had ever liked him before.  She did him the
+justice to recognise that if he was not quite honest with himself he was
+at least wholly honest with _her_.  She reckoned up everything he had
+been since he joined them, and put upon it all an interpretation so
+favourable to his devotion that, catching herself in the act of glossing
+over one or two episodes that had not struck her at the time as
+disinterested she exclaimed, beneath her breath, “Look out—you’re falling
+in love!”  But if he liked correctness wasn’t he quite right?  Could any
+one possibly like it more than _she_ did?  And if he had protested
+against her throwing in her lot with her mother, this was not because of
+the benefit conferred but because of the injury received.  He exaggerated
+that injury, but this was the privilege of a lover perfectly willing to
+be selfish on behalf of his mistress.  He might have wanted her
+grandmother’s money for her, but if he had given her up on first
+discovering that she was throwing away her chance of it (oh, this was
+_her_ doing too!) he had given up her grandmother as much: not keeping
+well with the old woman, as some men would have done; not waiting to see
+how the perverse experiment would turn out and appeasing her, if it
+should promise tolerably, with a view to future operations.  He had had a
+simple-minded, evangelical, lurid view of what the girl he loved would
+find herself in for.  She could see this now—she could see it from his
+present bewilderment and mystification, and she liked him and pitied him,
+with the kindest smile, for the original _naïveté_ as well as for the
+actual meekness.  No wonder he hadn’t known what she was in for, since he
+now didn’t even know what he was in for himself.  Were there not moments
+when he thought his companions almost unnaturally good, almost
+suspiciously safe?  He had lost all power to verify that sketch of their
+isolation and _déclassement_ to which she had treated him on the great
+square at Milan.  The last thing he noticed was that they were neglected,
+and he had never, for himself, had such an impression of society.
+
+It could scarcely be enhanced even by the apparition of a large, fair,
+hot, red-haired young man, carrying a lady’s fan in his hand, who
+suddenly stood before their little party as, on the third evening after
+their arrival in Venice, it partook of ices at one of the tables before
+the celebrated Café Florian.  The lamplit Venetian dusk appeared to have
+revealed them to this gentleman as he sat with other friends at a
+neighbouring table, and he had sprung up, with unsophisticated glee, to
+shake hands with Mrs. Tramore and her daughter.  Rose recalled him to her
+mother, who looked at first as though she didn’t remember him but
+presently bestowed a sufficiently gracious smile on Mr. Guy Mangler.  He
+gave with youthful candour the history of his movements and indicated the
+whereabouts of his family: he was with his mother and sisters; they had
+met the Bob Veseys, who had taken Lord Whiteroy’s yacht and were going to
+Constantinople.  His mother and the girls, poor things, were at the Grand
+Hotel, but he was on the yacht with the Veseys, where they had Lord
+Whiteroy’s cook.  Wasn’t the food in Venice filthy, and wouldn’t they
+come and look at the yacht?  She wasn’t very fast, but she was awfully
+jolly.  His mother might have come if she would, but she wouldn’t at
+first, and now, when she wanted to, there were other people, who
+naturally wouldn’t turn out for her.  Mr. Mangler sat down; he alluded
+with artless resentment to the way, in July, the door of his friends had
+been closed to him.  He was going to Constantinople, but he didn’t
+care—if _they_ were going anywhere; meanwhile his mother hoped awfully
+they would look her up.
+
+Lady Maresfield, if she had given her son any such message, which Rose
+disbelieved, entertained her hope in a manner compatible with her sitting
+for half an hour, surrounded by her little retinue, without glancing in
+the direction of Mrs. Tramore.  The girl, however, was aware that this
+was not a good enough instance of their humiliation; inasmuch as it was
+rather she who, on the occasion of their last contact, had held off from
+Lady Maresfield.  She was a little ashamed now of not having answered the
+note in which this affable personage ignored her mother.  She couldn’t
+help perceiving indeed a dim movement on the part of some of the other
+members of the group; she made out an attitude of observation in the
+high-plumed head of Mrs. Vaughan-Vesey.  Mrs. Vesey, perhaps, might have
+been looking at Captain Jay, for as this gentleman walked back to the
+hotel with our young lady (they were at the “Britannia,” and young
+Mangler, who clung to them, went in front with Mrs. Tramore) he revealed
+to Rose that he had some acquaintance with Lady Maresfield’s eldest
+daughter, though he didn’t know and didn’t particularly want to know, her
+ladyship.  He expressed himself with more acerbity than she had ever
+heard him use (Christian charity so generally governed his speech) about
+the young donkey who had been prattling to them.  They separated at the
+door of the hotel.  Mrs. Tramore had got rid of Mr. Mangler, and Bertram
+Jay was in other quarters.
+
+“If you know Mrs. Vesey, why didn’t you go and speak to her?  I’m sure
+she saw you,” Rose said.
+
+Captain Jay replied even more circumspectly than usual.  “Because I
+didn’t want to leave you.”
+
+“Well, you can go now; you’re free,” Rose rejoined.
+
+“Thank you.  I shall never go again.”
+
+“That won’t be civil,” said Rose.
+
+“I don’t care to be civil.  I don’t like her.”
+
+“Why don’t you like her?”
+
+“You ask too many questions.”
+
+“I know I do,” the girl acknowledged.
+
+Captain Jay had already shaken hands with her, but at this he put out his
+hand again.  “She’s too worldly,” he murmured, while he held Rose
+Tramore’s a moment.
+
+“Ah, you dear!” Rose exclaimed almost audibly as, with her mother, she
+turned away.
+
+The next morning, upon the Grand Canal, the gondola of our three friends
+encountered a stately barge which, though it contained several persons,
+seemed pervaded mainly by one majestic presence.  During the instant the
+gondolas were passing each other it was impossible either for Rose
+Tramore or for her companions not to become conscious that this
+distinguished identity had markedly inclined itself—a circumstance
+commemorated the next moment, almost within earshot of the other boat, by
+the most spontaneous cry that had issued for many a day from the lips of
+Mrs. Tramore.  “Fancy, my dear, Lady Maresfield has bowed to us!”
+
+“We ought to have returned it,” Rose answered; but she looked at Bertram
+Jay, who was opposite to her.  He blushed, and she blushed, and during
+this moment was born a deeper understanding than had yet existed between
+these associated spirits.  It had something to do with their going
+together that afternoon, without her mother, to look at certain
+out-of-the-way pictures as to which Ruskin had inspired her with a desire
+to see sincerely.  Mrs. Tramore expressed the wish to stay at home, and
+the motive of this wish—a finer shade than any that even Ruskin had ever
+found a phrase for—was not translated into misrepresenting words by
+either the mother or the daughter.  At San Giovanni in Bragora the girl
+and her companion came upon Mrs. Vaughan-Vesey, who, with one of her
+sisters, was also endeavouring to do the earnest thing.  She did it to
+Rose, she did it to Captain Jay, as well as to Gianbellini; she was a
+handsome, long-necked, aquiline person, of a different type from the rest
+of her family, and she did it remarkably well.  She secured our
+friends—it was her own expression—for luncheon, on the morrow, on the
+yacht, and she made it public to Rose that she would come that afternoon
+to invite her mother.  When the girl returned to the hotel, Mrs. Tramore
+mentioned, before Captain Jay, who had come up to their sitting-room,
+that Lady Maresfield had called.  “She stayed a long time—at least it
+seemed long!” laughed Mrs. Tramore.
+
+The poor lady could laugh freely now; yet there was some grimness in a
+colloquy that she had with her daughter after Bertram Jay had departed.
+Before this happened Mrs. Vesey’s card, scrawled over in pencil and
+referring to the morrow’s luncheon, was brought up to Mrs. Tramore.
+
+“They mean it all as a bribe,” said the principal recipient of these
+civilities.
+
+“As a bribe?” Rose repeated.
+
+“She wants to marry you to that boy; they’ve seen Captain Jay and they’re
+frightened.”
+
+“Well, dear mamma, I can’t take Mr. Mangler for a husband.”
+
+“Of course not.  But oughtn’t we to go to the luncheon?”
+
+“Certainly we’ll go to the luncheon,” Rose said; and when the affair took
+place, on the morrow, she could feel for the first time that she was
+taking her mother out.  This appearance was somehow brought home to every
+one else, and it was really the agent of her success.  For it is of the
+essence of this simple history that, in the first place, that success
+dated from Mrs. Vesey’s Venetian _déjeuner_, and in the second reposed,
+by a subtle social logic, on the very anomaly that had made it dubious.
+There is always a chance in things, and Rose Tramore’s chance was in the
+fact that Gwendolen Vesey was, as some one had said, awfully modern, an
+immense improvement on the exploded science of her mother, and capable of
+seeing what a “draw” there would be in the comedy, if properly brought
+out, of the reversed positions of Mrs. Tramore and Mrs. Tramore’s
+diplomatic daughter.  With a first-rate managerial eye she perceived that
+people would flock into any room—and all the more into one of hers—to see
+Rose bring in her dreadful mother.  She treated the cream of English
+society to this thrilling spectacle later in the autumn, when she once
+more “secured” both the performers for a week at Brimble.  It made a hit
+on the spot, the very first evening—the girl was felt to play her part so
+well.  The rumour of the performance spread; every one wanted to see it.
+It was an entertainment of which, that winter in the country, and the
+next season in town, persons of taste desired to give their friends the
+freshness.  The thing was to make the Tramores come late, after every one
+had arrived.  They were engaged for a fixed hour, like the American
+imitator and the Patagonian contralto.  Mrs. Vesey had been the first to
+say the girl was awfully original, but that became the general view.
+
+Gwendolen Vesey had with her mother one of the few quarrels in which Lady
+Maresfield had really stood up to such an antagonist (the elder woman had
+to recognise in general in whose veins it was that the blood of the
+Manglers flowed) on account of this very circumstance of her attaching
+more importance to Miss Tramore’s originality (“Her originality be
+hanged!” her ladyship had gone so far as unintelligently to exclaim) than
+to the prospects of the unfortunate Guy.  Mrs. Vesey actually lost sight
+of these pressing problems in her admiration of the way the mother and
+the daughter, or rather the daughter and the mother (it was slightly
+confusing) “drew.”  It was Lady Maresfield’s version of the case that the
+brazen girl (she was shockingly coarse) had treated poor Guy abominably.
+At any rate it was made known, just after Easter, that Miss Tramore was
+to be married to Captain Jay.  The marriage was not to take place till
+the summer; but Rose felt that before this the field would practically be
+won.  There had been some bad moments, there had been several warm
+corners and a certain number of cold shoulders and closed doors and stony
+stares; but the breach was effectually made—the rest was only a question
+of time.  Mrs. Tramore could be trusted to keep what she had gained, and
+it was the dowagers, the old dragons with prominent fangs and glittering
+scales, whom the trick had already mainly caught.  By this time there
+were several houses into which the liberated lady had crept alone.  Her
+daughter had been expected with her, but they couldn’t turn her out
+because the girl had stayed behind, and she was fast acquiring a new
+identity, that of a parental connection with the heroine of such a
+romantic story.  She was at least the next best thing to her daughter,
+and Rose foresaw the day when she would be valued principally as a
+memento of one of the prettiest episodes in the annals of London.  At a
+big official party, in June, Rose had the joy of introducing Eric to his
+mother.  She was a little sorry it was an official party—there were some
+other such queer people there; but Eric called, observing the shade, the
+next day but one.
+
+No observer, probably, would have been acute enough to fix exactly the
+moment at which the girl ceased to take out her mother and began to be
+taken out by her.  A later phase was more distinguishable—that at which
+Rose forbore to inflict on her companion a duality that might become
+oppressive.  She began to economise her force, she went only when the
+particular effect was required.  Her marriage was delayed by the period
+of mourning consequent upon the death of her grandmother, who, the
+younger Mrs. Tramore averred, was killed by the rumour of her own new
+birth.  She was the only one of the dragons who had not been tamed.
+Julia Tramore knew the truth about this—she was determined such things
+should not kill _her_.  She would live to do something—she hardly knew
+what.  The provisions of her mother’s will were published in the
+“Illustrated News”; from which it appeared that everything that was not
+to go to Eric and to Julia was to go to the fortunate Edith.  Miss
+Tramore makes no secret of her own intentions as regards this favourite.
+
+Edith is not pretty, but Lady Maresfield is waiting for her; she is
+determined Gwendolen Vesey shall not get hold of her.  Mrs. Vesey however
+takes no interest in her at all.  She is whimsical, as befits a woman of
+her fashion; but there are two persons she is still very fond of, the
+delightful Bertram Jays.  The fondness of this pair, it must be added, is
+not wholly expended in return.  They are extremely united, but their life
+is more domestic than might have been expected from the preliminary
+signs.  It owes a portion of its concentration to the fact that Mrs.
+Tramore has now so many places to go to that she has almost no time to
+come to her daughter’s.  She is, under her son-in-law’s roof, a brilliant
+but a rare apparition, and the other day he remarked upon the
+circumstance to his wife.
+
+“If it hadn’t been for you,” she replied, smiling, “she might have had
+her regular place at our fireside.”
+
+“Good heavens, how did I prevent it?” cried Captain Jay, with all the
+consciousness of virtue.
+
+“You ordered it otherwise, you goose!”  And she says, in the same spirit,
+whenever her husband commends her (which he does, sometimes,
+extravagantly) for the way she launched her mother: “Nonsense, my
+dear—practically it was _you_!”
+
+
+
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Chaperon, by Henry James
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Chaperon
+
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 15, 2015  [eBook #2718]
+[This file was first posted on July 3, 2000]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHAPERON***
+</pre>
+<p>Transcribed from 1893 Macmillan and Co. edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org.&nbsp; Proofed by Nina Hall, Mohua
+Sen, Bridie, Francine Smith and David.</p>
+<h2>THE CHAPERON.</h2>
+<h3>I.</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">An</span> old lady, in a high
+drawing-room, had had her chair moved close to the fire, where
+she sat knitting and warming her knees.&nbsp; She was dressed in
+deep mourning; her face had a faded nobleness, tempered, however,
+by the somewhat illiberal compression assumed by her lips in
+obedience to something that was passing in her mind.&nbsp; She
+was far from the lamp, but though her eyes were fixed upon her
+active needles she was not looking at them.&nbsp; What she really
+saw was quite another train of affairs.&nbsp; The room was
+spacious and dim; the thick London fog had oozed into it even
+through its superior defences.&nbsp; It was full of dusky,
+massive, valuable things.&nbsp; The old lady sat motionless save
+for the regularity of her clicking needles, which seemed as
+personal to her and as expressive as prolonged fingers.&nbsp; If
+she was thinking something out, she was thinking it
+thoroughly.</p>
+<p>When she looked up, on the entrance of a girl of twenty, it
+might have been guessed that the appearance of this young lady
+was not an interruption of her meditation, but rather a
+contribution to it.&nbsp; The young lady, who was charming to
+behold, was also in deep mourning, which had a freshness, if
+mourning can be fresh, an air of having been lately put on.&nbsp;
+She went straight to the bell beside the chimney-piece and pulled
+it, while in her other hand she held a sealed and directed
+letter.&nbsp; Her companion glanced in silence at the letter;
+then she looked still harder at her work.&nbsp; The girl hovered
+near the fireplace, without speaking, and after a due, a
+dignified interval the butler appeared in response to the
+bell.&nbsp; The time had been sufficient to make the silence
+between the ladies seem long.&nbsp; The younger one asked the
+butler to see that her letter should be posted; and after he had
+gone out she moved vaguely about the room, as if to give her
+grandmother&mdash;for such was the elder personage&mdash;a chance
+to begin a colloquy of which she herself preferred not to strike
+the first note.&nbsp; As equally with herself her companion was
+on the face of it capable of holding out, the tension, though it
+was already late in the evening, might have lasted long.&nbsp;
+But the old lady after a little appeared to recognise, a trifle
+ungraciously, the girl&rsquo;s superior resources.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Have you written to your mother?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, but only a few lines, to tell her I shall come and
+see her in the morning.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is that all you&rsquo;ve got to say?&rdquo; asked the
+grandmother.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t quite know what you want me to
+say.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I want you to say that you&rsquo;ve made up your
+mind.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, I&rsquo;ve done that, granny.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You intend to respect your father&rsquo;s
+wishes?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It depends upon what you mean by respecting them.&nbsp;
+I do justice to the feelings by which they were
+dictated.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you mean by justice?&rdquo; the old lady
+retorted.</p>
+<p>The girl was silent a moment; then she said:
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll see my idea of it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I see it already!&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll go and live with
+her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shall talk the situation over with her to-morrow and
+tell her that I think that will be best.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Best for her, no doubt!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What&rsquo;s best for her is best for me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And for your brother and sister?&rdquo;&nbsp; As the
+girl made no reply to this her grandmother went on:
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s best for them is that you should acknowledge
+some responsibility in regard to them and, considering how young
+they are, try and do something for them.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They must do as I&rsquo;ve done&mdash;they must act for
+themselves.&nbsp; They have their means now, and they&rsquo;re
+free.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Free?&nbsp; They&rsquo;re mere children.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Let me remind you that Eric is older than I.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He doesn&rsquo;t like his mother,&rdquo; said the old
+lady, as if that were an answer.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I never said he did.&nbsp; And she adores
+him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, your mother&rsquo;s adorations!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t abuse her now,&rdquo; the girl rejoined,
+after a pause.</p>
+<p>The old lady forbore to abuse her, but she made up for it the
+next moment by saying: &ldquo;It will be dreadful for
+Edith.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What will be dreadful?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your desertion of her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The desertion&rsquo;s on her side.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Her consideration for her father does her
+honour.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course I&rsquo;m a brute, <i>n&rsquo;en parlons
+plus</i>,&rdquo; said the girl.&nbsp; &ldquo;We must go our
+respective ways,&rdquo; she added, in a tone of extreme wisdom
+and philosophy.</p>
+<p>Her grandmother straightened out her knitting and began to
+roll it up.&nbsp; &ldquo;Be so good as to ring for my
+maid,&rdquo; she said, after a minute.&nbsp; The young lady rang,
+and there was another wait and another conscious hush.&nbsp;
+Before the maid came her mistress remarked: &ldquo;Of course then
+you&rsquo;ll not come to <i>me</i>, you know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What do you mean by &lsquo;coming&rsquo; to
+you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t receive you on that footing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;ll not come <i>with</i> me, if you mean
+that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t mean that,&rdquo; said the old lady,
+getting up as her maid came in.&nbsp; This attendant took her
+work from her, gave her an arm and helped her out of the room,
+while Rose Tramore, standing before the fire and looking into it,
+faced the idea that her grandmother&rsquo;s door would now under
+all circumstances be closed to her.&nbsp; She lost no time
+however in brooding over this anomaly: it only added energy to
+her determination to act.&nbsp; All she could do to-night was to
+go to bed, for she felt utterly weary.&nbsp; She had been living,
+in imagination, in a prospective struggle, and it had left her as
+exhausted as a real fight.&nbsp; Moreover this was the
+culmination of a crisis, of weeks of suspense, of a long, hard
+strain.&nbsp; Her father had been laid in his grave five days
+before, and that morning his will had been read.&nbsp; In the
+afternoon she had got Edith off to St. Leonard&rsquo;s with their
+aunt Julia, and then she had had a wretched talk with Eric.&nbsp;
+Lastly, she had made up her mind to act in opposition to the
+formidable will, to a clause which embodied if not exactly a
+provision, a recommendation singularly emphatic.&nbsp; She went
+to bed and slept the sleep of the just.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, my dear, how charming!&nbsp; I must take another
+house!&rdquo;&nbsp; It was in these words that her mother
+responded to the announcement Rose had just formally made and
+with which she had vaguely expected to produce a certain dignity
+of effect.&nbsp; In the way of emotion there was apparently no
+effect at all, and the girl was wise enough to know that this was
+not simply on account of the general line of non-allusion taken
+by the extremely pretty woman before her, who looked like her
+elder sister.&nbsp; Mrs. Tramore had never manifested, to her
+daughter, the slightest consciousness that her position was
+peculiar; but the recollection of something more than that fine
+policy was required to explain such a failure, to appreciate
+Rose&rsquo;s sacrifice.&nbsp; It was simply a fresh reminder that
+she had never appreciated anything, that she was nothing but a
+tinted and stippled surface.&nbsp; Her situation was peculiar
+indeed.&nbsp; She had been the heroine of a scandal which had
+grown dim only because, in the eyes of the London world, it paled
+in the lurid light of the contemporaneous.&nbsp; That attention
+had been fixed on it for several days, fifteen years before;
+there had been a high relish of the vivid evidence as to his
+wife&rsquo;s misconduct with which, in the divorce-court, Charles
+Tramore had judged well to regale a cynical public.&nbsp; The
+case was pronounced awfully bad, and he obtained his
+decree.&nbsp; The folly of the wife had been inconceivable, in
+spite of other examples: she had quitted her children, she had
+followed the &ldquo;other fellow&rdquo; abroad.&nbsp; The other
+fellow hadn&rsquo;t married her, not having had time: he had lost
+his life in the Mediterranean by the capsizing of a boat, before
+the prohibitory term had expired.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Tramore had striven to extract from this accident
+something of the austerity of widowhood; but her mourning only
+made her deviation more public, she was a widow whose husband was
+awkwardly alive.&nbsp; She had not prowled about the Continent on
+the classic lines; she had come back to London to take her
+chance.&nbsp; But London would give her no chance, would have
+nothing to say to her; as many persons had remarked, you could
+never tell how London would behave.&nbsp; It would not receive
+Mrs. Tramore again on any terms, and when she was spoken of,
+which now was not often, it was inveterately said of her that she
+went nowhere.&nbsp; Apparently she had not the qualities for
+which London compounds; though in the cases in which it does
+compound you may often wonder what these qualities are.&nbsp; She
+had not at any rate been successful: her lover was dead, her
+husband was liked and her children were pitied, for in payment
+for a topic London will parenthetically pity.&nbsp; It was
+thought interesting and magnanimous that Charles Tramore had not
+married again.&nbsp; The disadvantage to his children of the
+miserable story was thus left uncorrected, and this, rather
+oddly, was counted as <i>his</i> sacrifice.&nbsp; His mother,
+whose arrangements were elaborate, looked after them a great
+deal, and they enjoyed a mixture of laxity and discipline under
+the roof of their aunt, Miss Tramore, who was independent,
+having, for reasons that the two ladies had exhaustively
+discussed, determined to lead her own life.&nbsp; She had set up
+a home at St. Leonard&rsquo;s, and that contracted shore had
+played a considerable part in the upbringing of the little
+Tramores.&nbsp; They knew about their mother, as the phrase was,
+but they didn&rsquo;t know her; which was naturally deemed more
+pathetic for them than for her.&nbsp; She had a house in Chester
+Square and an income and a victoria&mdash;it served all purposes,
+as she never went out in the evening&mdash;and flowers on her
+window-sills, and a remarkable appearance of youth.&nbsp; The
+income was supposed to be in part the result of a bequest from
+the man for whose sake she had committed the error of her life,
+and in the appearance of youth there was a slightly impertinent
+implication that it was a sort of afterglow of the same
+connection.</p>
+<p>Her children, as they grew older, fortunately showed signs of
+some individuality of disposition.&nbsp; Edith, the second girl,
+clung to her aunt Julia; Eric, the son, clung frantically to
+polo; while Rose, the elder daughter, appeared to cling mainly to
+herself.&nbsp; Collectively, of course, they clung to their
+father, whose attitude in the family group, however, was casual
+and intermittent.&nbsp; He was charming and vague; he was like a
+clever actor who often didn&rsquo;t come to rehearsal.&nbsp;
+Fortune, which but for that one stroke had been generous to him,
+had provided him with deputies and trouble-takers, as well as
+with whimsical opinions, and a reputation for excellent taste,
+and whist at his club, and perpetual cigars on morocco sofas, and
+a beautiful absence of purpose.&nbsp; Nature had thrown in a
+remarkably fine hand, which he sometimes passed over his
+children&rsquo;s heads when they were glossy from the nursery
+brush.&nbsp; On Rose&rsquo;s eighteenth birthday he said to her
+that she might go to see her mother, on condition that her visits
+should be limited to an hour each time and to four in the
+year.&nbsp; She was to go alone; the other children were not
+included in the arrangement.&nbsp; This was the result of a visit
+that he himself had paid his repudiated wife at her urgent
+request, their only encounter during the fifteen years.&nbsp; The
+girl knew as much as this from her aunt Julia, who was full of
+tell-tale secrecies.&nbsp; She availed herself eagerly of the
+license, and in course of the period that elapsed before her
+father&rsquo;s death she spent with Mrs. Tramore exactly eight
+hours by the watch.&nbsp; Her father, who was as inconsistent and
+disappointing as he was amiable, spoke to her of her mother only
+once afterwards.&nbsp; This occasion had been the sequel of her
+first visit, and he had made no use of it to ask what she thought
+of the personality in Chester Square or how she liked it.&nbsp;
+He had only said &ldquo;Did she take you out?&rdquo; and when
+Rose answered &ldquo;Yes, she put me straight into a carriage and
+drove me up and down Bond Street,&rdquo; had rejoined sharply
+&ldquo;See that that never occurs again.&rdquo;&nbsp; It never
+did, but once was enough, every one they knew having happened to
+be in Bond Street at that particular hour.</p>
+<p>After this the periodical interview took place in private, in
+Mrs. Tramore&rsquo;s beautiful little wasted drawing-room.&nbsp;
+Rose knew that, rare as these occasions were, her mother would
+not have kept her &ldquo;all to herself&rdquo; had there been
+anybody she could have shown her to.&nbsp; But in the poor
+lady&rsquo;s social void there was no one; she had after all her
+own correctness and she consistently preferred isolation to
+inferior contacts.&nbsp; So her daughter was subjected only to
+the maternal; it was not necessary to be definite in qualifying
+that.&nbsp; The girl had by this time a collection of ideas,
+gathered by impenetrable processes; she had tasted, in the
+ostracism of her ambiguous parent, of the acrid fruit of the tree
+of knowledge.&nbsp; She not only had an approximate vision of
+what every one had done, but she had a private judgment for each
+case.&nbsp; She had a particular vision of her father, which did
+not interfere with his being dear to her, but which was directly
+concerned in her resolution, after his death, to do the special
+thing he had expressed the wish she should not do.&nbsp; In the
+general estimate her grandmother and her grandmother&rsquo;s
+money had their place, and the strong probability that any
+enjoyment of the latter commodity would now be withheld from
+her.&nbsp; It included Edith&rsquo;s marked inclination to
+receive the law, and doubtless eventually a more substantial
+memento, from Miss Tramore, and opened the question whether her
+own course might not contribute to make her sister&rsquo;s appear
+heartless.&nbsp; The answer to this question however would depend
+on the success that might attend her own, which would very
+possibly be small.&nbsp; Eric&rsquo;s attitude was eminently
+simple; he didn&rsquo;t care to know people who didn&rsquo;t know
+<i>his</i> people.&nbsp; If his mother should ever get back into
+society perhaps he would take her up.&nbsp; Rose Tramore had
+decided to do what she could to bring this consummation about;
+and strangely enough&mdash;so mixed were her superstitions and
+her heresies&mdash;a large part of her motive lay in the value
+she attached to such a consecration.</p>
+<p>Of her mother intrinsically she thought very little now, and
+if her eyes were fixed on a special achievement it was much more
+for the sake of that achievement and to satisfy a latent energy
+that was in her than because her heart was wrung by this
+sufferer.&nbsp; Her heart had not been wrung at all, though she
+had quite held it out for the experience.&nbsp; Her purpose was a
+pious game, but it was still essentially a game.&nbsp; Among the
+ideas I have mentioned she had her idea of triumph.&nbsp; She had
+caught the inevitable note, the pitch, on her very first visit to
+Chester Square.&nbsp; She had arrived there in intense
+excitement, and her excitement was left on her hands in a manner
+that reminded her of a difficult air she had once heard sung at
+the opera when no one applauded the performer.&nbsp; That
+flatness had made her sick, and so did this, in another
+way.&nbsp; A part of her agitation proceeded from the fact that
+her aunt Julia had told her, in the manner of a burst of
+confidence, something she was not to repeat, that she was in
+appearance the very image of the lady in Chester Square.&nbsp;
+The motive that prompted this declaration was between aunt Julia
+and her conscience; but it was a great emotion to the girl to
+find her entertainer so beautiful.&nbsp; She was tall and
+exquisitely slim; she had hair more exactly to Rose
+Tramore&rsquo;s taste than any other she had ever seen, even to
+every detail in the way it was dressed, and a complexion and a
+figure of the kind that are always spoken of as
+&ldquo;lovely.&rdquo;&nbsp; Her eyes were irresistible, and so
+were her clothes, though the clothes were perhaps a little more
+precisely the right thing than the eyes.&nbsp; Her appearance was
+marked to her daughter&rsquo;s sense by the highest distinction;
+though it may be mentioned that this had never been the opinion
+of all the world.&nbsp; It was a revelation to Rose that she
+herself might look a little like that.&nbsp; She knew however
+that aunt Julia had not seen her deposed sister-in-law for a long
+time, and she had a general impression that Mrs. Tramore was
+to-day a more complete production&mdash;for instance as regarded
+her air of youth&mdash;than she had ever been.&nbsp; There was no
+excitement on her side&mdash;that was all her visitor&rsquo;s;
+there was no emotion&mdash;that was excluded by the plan, to say
+nothing of conditions more primal.&nbsp; Rose had from the first
+a glimpse of her mother&rsquo;s plan.&nbsp; It was to mention
+nothing and imply nothing, neither to acknowledge, to explain nor
+to extenuate.&nbsp; She would leave everything to her child; with
+her child she was secure.&nbsp; She only wanted to get back into
+society; she would leave even that to her child, whom she treated
+not as a high-strung and heroic daughter, a creature of
+exaltation, of devotion, but as a new, charming, clever, useful
+friend, a little younger than herself.&nbsp; Already on that
+first day she had talked about dressmakers.&nbsp; Of course, poor
+thing, it was to be remembered that in her circumstances there
+were not many things she <i>could</i> talk about.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;She wants to go out again; that&rsquo;s the only thing in
+the wide world she wants,&rdquo; Rose had promptly, compendiously
+said to herself.&nbsp; There had been a sequel to this
+observation, uttered, in intense engrossment, in her own room
+half an hour before she had, on the important evening, made known
+her decision to her grandmother: &ldquo;Then I&rsquo;ll
+<i>take</i> her out!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;ll drag you down, she&rsquo;ll drag you
+down!&rdquo; Julia Tramore permitted herself to remark to her
+niece, the next day, in a tone of feverish prophecy.</p>
+<p>As the girl&rsquo;s own theory was that all the dragging there
+might be would be upward, and moreover administered by herself,
+she could look at her aunt with a cold and inscrutable eye.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Very well, then, I shall be out of your sight, from the
+pinnacle you occupy, and I sha&rsquo;n&rsquo;t trouble
+you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you reproach me for my disinterested exertions, for
+the way I&rsquo;ve toiled over you, the way I&rsquo;ve lived for
+you?&rdquo; Miss Tramore demanded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t reproach <i>me</i> for being kind to my
+mother and I won&rsquo;t reproach you for anything.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;ll keep you out of
+everything&mdash;she&rsquo;ll make you miss everything,&rdquo;
+Miss Tramore continued.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then she&rsquo;ll make me miss a great deal
+that&rsquo;s odious,&rdquo; said the girl.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re too young for such extravagances,&rdquo;
+her aunt declared.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And yet Edith, who is younger than I, seems to be too
+old for them: how do you arrange that?&nbsp; My mother&rsquo;s
+society will make me older,&rdquo; Rose replied.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t speak to me of your mother; you <i>have</i>
+no mother.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then if I&rsquo;m an orphan I must settle things for
+myself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you justify her, do you approve of her?&rdquo; cried
+Miss Tramore, who was inferior to her niece in capacity for
+retort and whose limitations made the girl appear pert.</p>
+<p>Rose looked at her a moment in silence; then she said, turning
+away: &ldquo;I think she&rsquo;s charming.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And do you propose to become charming in the same
+manner?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Her manner is perfect; it would be an excellent
+model.&nbsp; But I can&rsquo;t discuss my mother with
+you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll have to discuss her with some other
+people!&rdquo; Miss Tramore proclaimed, going out of the
+room.</p>
+<p>Rose wondered whether this were a general or a particular
+vaticination.&nbsp; There was something her aunt might have meant
+by it, but her aunt rarely meant the best thing she might have
+meant.&nbsp; Miss Tramore had come up from St. Leonard&rsquo;s in
+response to a telegram from her own parent, for an occasion like
+the present brought with it, for a few hours, a certain
+relaxation of their dissent.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do what you can to stop
+her,&rdquo; the old lady had said; but her daughter found that
+the most she could do was not much.&nbsp; They both had a baffled
+sense that Rose had thought the question out a good deal further
+than they; and this was particularly irritating to Mrs. Tramore,
+as consciously the cleverer of the two.&nbsp; A question thought
+out as far as <i>she</i> could think it had always appeared to
+her to have performed its human uses; she had never encountered a
+ghost emerging from that extinction.&nbsp; Their great contention
+was that Rose would cut herself off; and certainly if she
+wasn&rsquo;t afraid of that she wasn&rsquo;t afraid of
+anything.&nbsp; Julia Tramore could only tell her mother how
+little the girl was afraid.&nbsp; She was already prepared to
+leave the house, taking with her the possessions, or her share of
+them, that had accumulated there during her father&rsquo;s
+illness.&nbsp; There had been a going and coming of her maid, a
+thumping about of boxes, an ordering of four-wheelers; it
+appeared to old Mrs. Tramore that something of the
+objectionableness, the indecency, of her granddaughter&rsquo;s
+prospective connection had already gathered about the
+place.&nbsp; It was a violation of the decorum of bereavement
+which was still fresh there, and from the indignant gloom of the
+mistress of the house you might have inferred not so much that
+the daughter was about to depart as that the mother was about to
+arrive.&nbsp; There had been no conversation on the dreadful
+subject at luncheon; for at luncheon at Mrs. Tramore&rsquo;s (her
+son never came to it) there were always, even after funerals and
+other miseries, stray guests of both sexes whose policy it was to
+be cheerful and superficial.&nbsp; Rose had sat down as if
+nothing had happened&mdash;nothing worse, that is, than her
+father&rsquo;s death; but no one had spoken of anything that any
+one else was thinking of.</p>
+<p>Before she left the house a servant brought her a message from
+her grandmother&mdash;the old lady desired to see her in the
+drawing-room.&nbsp; She had on her bonnet, and she went down as
+if she were about to step into her cab.&nbsp; Mrs. Tramore sat
+there with her eternal knitting, from which she forebore even to
+raise her eyes as, after a silence that seemed to express the
+fulness of her reprobation, while Rose stood motionless, she
+began: &ldquo;I wonder if you really understand what you&rsquo;re
+doing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I think so.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m not so stupid.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I never thought you were; but I don&rsquo;t know what
+to make of you now.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re giving up
+everything.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The girl was tempted to inquire whether her grandmother called
+herself &ldquo;everything&rdquo;; but she checked this question,
+answering instead that she knew she was giving up much.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re taking a step of which you will feel the
+effect to the end of your days,&rdquo; Mrs. Tramore went on.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;In a good conscience, I heartily hope,&rdquo; said
+Rose.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your father&rsquo;s conscience was good enough for his
+mother; it ought to be good enough for his daughter.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Rose sat down&mdash;she could afford to&mdash;as if she wished
+to be very attentive and were still accessible to argument.&nbsp;
+But this demonstration only ushered in, after a moment, the
+surprising words &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think papa had any
+conscience.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What in the name of all that&rsquo;s unnatural do you
+mean?&rdquo; Mrs. Tramore cried, over her glasses.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;The dearest and best creature that ever lived!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He was kind, he had charming impulses, he was
+delightful.&nbsp; But he never reflected.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mrs. Tramore stared, as if at a language she had never heard,
+a farrago, a <i>galimatias</i>.&nbsp; Her life was made up of
+items, but she had never had to deal, intellectually, with a fine
+shade.&nbsp; Then while her needles, which had paused an instant,
+began to fly again, she rejoined: &ldquo;Do you know what you
+are, my dear?&nbsp; You&rsquo;re a dreadful little prig.&nbsp;
+Where do you pick up such talk?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course I don&rsquo;t mean to judge between
+them,&rdquo; Rose pursued.&nbsp; &ldquo;I can only judge between
+my mother and myself.&nbsp; Papa couldn&rsquo;t judge for
+me.&rdquo;&nbsp; And with this she got up.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One would think you were horrid.&nbsp; I never thought
+so before.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you for that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re embarking on a struggle with
+society,&rdquo; continued Mrs. Tramore, indulging in an unusual
+flight of oratory.&nbsp; &ldquo;Society will put you in your
+place.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hasn&rsquo;t it too many other things to do?&rdquo;
+asked the girl.</p>
+<p>This question had an ingenuity which led her grandmother to
+meet it with a merely provisional and somewhat sketchy
+answer.&nbsp; &ldquo;Your ignorance would be melancholy if your
+behaviour were not so insane.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, no; I know perfectly what she&rsquo;ll do!&rdquo;
+Rose replied, almost gaily.&nbsp; &ldquo;She&rsquo;ll drag me
+down.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She won&rsquo;t even do that,&rdquo; the old lady
+declared contradictiously.&nbsp; &ldquo;She&rsquo;ll keep you
+forever in the same dull hole.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I shall come and see <i>you</i>, granny, when I want
+something more lively.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You may come if you like, but you&rsquo;ll come no
+further than the door.&nbsp; If you leave this house now you
+don&rsquo;t enter it again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Rose hesitated a moment.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do you really mean
+that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You may judge whether I choose such a time to
+joke.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good-bye, then,&rdquo; said the girl.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good-bye.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Rose quitted the room successfully enough; but on the other
+side of the door, on the landing, she sank into a chair and
+buried her face in her hands.&nbsp; She had burst into tears, and
+she sobbed there for a moment, trying hard to recover herself, so
+as to go downstairs without showing any traces of emotion,
+passing before the servants and again perhaps before aunt
+Julia.&nbsp; Mrs. Tramore was too old to cry; she could only drop
+her knitting and, for a long time, sit with her head bowed and
+her eyes closed.</p>
+<p>Rose had reckoned justly with her aunt Julia; there were no
+footmen, but this vigilant virgin was posted at the foot of the
+stairs.&nbsp; She offered no challenge however; she only said:
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s some one in the parlour who wants to see
+you.&rdquo;&nbsp; The girl demanded a name, but Miss Tramore only
+mouthed inaudibly and winked and waved.&nbsp; Rose instantly
+reflected that there was only one man in the world her aunt would
+look such deep things about.&nbsp; &ldquo;Captain Jay?&rdquo; her
+own eyes asked, while Miss Tramore&rsquo;s were those of a
+conspirator: they were, for a moment, the only embarrassed eyes
+Rose had encountered that day.&nbsp; They contributed to make
+aunt Julia&rsquo;s further response evasive, after her niece
+inquired if she had communicated in advance with this
+visitor.&nbsp; Miss Tramore merely said that he had been upstairs
+with her mother&mdash;hadn&rsquo;t she mentioned it?&mdash;and
+had been waiting for her.&nbsp; She thought herself acute in not
+putting the question of the girl&rsquo;s seeing him before her as
+a favour to him or to herself; she presented it as a duty, and
+wound up with the proposition: &ldquo;It&rsquo;s not fair to him,
+it&rsquo;s not kind, not to let him speak to you before you
+go.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What does he want to say?&rdquo; Rose demanded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Go in and find out.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She really knew, for she had found out before; but after
+standing uncertain an instant she went in.&nbsp; &ldquo;The
+parlour&rdquo; was the name that had always been borne by a
+spacious sitting-room downstairs, an apartment occupied by her
+father during his frequent phases of residence in Hill
+Street&mdash;episodes increasingly frequent after his house in
+the country had, in consequence, as Rose perfectly knew, of his
+spending too much money, been disposed of at a sacrifice which he
+always characterised as horrid.&nbsp; He had been left with the
+place in Hertfordshire and his mother with the London house, on
+the general understanding that they would change about; but
+during the last years the community had grown more rigid, mainly
+at his mother&rsquo;s expense.&nbsp; The parlour was full of his
+memory and his habits and his things&mdash;his books and pictures
+and <i>bibelots</i>, objects that belonged now to Eric.&nbsp;
+Rose had sat in it for hours since his death; it was the place in
+which she could still be nearest to him.&nbsp; But she felt far
+from him as Captain Jay rose erect on her opening the door.&nbsp;
+This was a very different presence.&nbsp; He had not liked
+Captain Jay.&nbsp; She herself had, but not enough to make a
+great complication of her father&rsquo;s coldness.&nbsp; This
+afternoon however she foresaw complications.&nbsp; At the very
+outset for instance she was not pleased with his having arranged
+such a surprise for her with her grandmother and her aunt.&nbsp;
+It was probably aunt Julia who had sent for him; her grandmother
+wouldn&rsquo;t have done it.&nbsp; It placed him immediately on
+their side, and Rose was almost as disappointed at this as if she
+had not known it was quite where he would naturally be.&nbsp; He
+had never paid her a special visit, but if that was what he
+wished to do why shouldn&rsquo;t he have waited till she should
+be under her mother&rsquo;s roof?&nbsp; She knew the reason, but
+she had an angry prospect of enjoyment in making him express
+it.&nbsp; She liked him enough, after all, if it were measured by
+the idea of what she could make him do.</p>
+<p>In Bertram Jay the elements were surprisingly mingled; you
+would have gone astray, in reading him, if you had counted on
+finding the complements of some of his qualities.&nbsp; He would
+not however have struck you in the least as incomplete, for in
+every case in which you didn&rsquo;t find the complement you
+would have found the contradiction.&nbsp; He was in the Royal
+Engineers, and was tall, lean and high-shouldered.&nbsp; He
+looked every inch a soldier, yet there were people who considered
+that he had missed his vocation in not becoming a parson.&nbsp;
+He took a public interest in the spiritual life of the
+army.&nbsp; Other persons still, on closer observation, would
+have felt that his most appropriate field was neither the army
+nor the church, but simply the world&mdash;the social,
+successful, worldly world.&nbsp; If he had a sword in one hand
+and a Bible in the other he had a Court Guide concealed somewhere
+about his person.&nbsp; His profile was hard and handsome, his
+eyes were both cold and kind, his dark straight hair was
+imperturbably smooth and prematurely streaked with grey.&nbsp;
+There was nothing in existence that he didn&rsquo;t take
+seriously.&nbsp; He had a first-rate power of work and an
+ambition as minutely organised as a German plan of
+invasion.&nbsp; His only real recreation was to go to church, but
+he went to parties when he had time.&nbsp; If he was in love with
+Rose Tramore this was distracting to him only in the same sense
+as his religion, and it was included in that department of his
+extremely sub-divided life.&nbsp; His religion indeed was of an
+encroaching, annexing sort.&nbsp; Seen from in front he looked
+diffident and blank, but he was capable of exposing himself in a
+way (to speak only of the paths of peace) wholly inconsistent
+with shyness.&nbsp; He had a passion for instance for open-air
+speaking, but was not thought on the whole to excel in it unless
+he could help himself out with a hymn.&nbsp; In conversation he
+kept his eyes on you with a kind of colourless candour, as if he
+had not understood what you were saying and, in a fashion that
+made many people turn red, waited before answering.&nbsp; This
+was only because he was considering their remarks in more
+relations than they had intended.&nbsp; He had in his face no
+expression whatever save the one just mentioned, and was, in his
+profession, already very distinguished.</p>
+<p>He had seen Rose Tramore for the first time on a Sunday of the
+previous March, at a house in the country at which she was
+staying with her father, and five weeks later he had made her, by
+letter, an offer of marriage.&nbsp; She showed her father the
+letter of course, and he told her that it would give him great
+pleasure that she should send Captain Jay about his
+business.&nbsp; &ldquo;My dear child,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;we
+must really have some one who will be better fun than
+that.&rdquo;&nbsp; Rose had declined the honour, very
+considerately and kindly, but not simply because her father
+wished it.&nbsp; She didn&rsquo;t herself wish to detach this
+flower from the stem, though when the young man wrote again, to
+express the hope that he <i>might</i> hope&mdash;so long was he
+willing to wait&mdash;and ask if he might not still sometimes see
+her, she answered even more indulgently than at first.&nbsp; She
+had shown her father her former letter, but she didn&rsquo;t show
+him this one; she only told him what it contained, submitting to
+him also that of her correspondent.&nbsp; Captain Jay moreover
+wrote to Mr. Tramore, who replied sociably, but so vaguely that
+he almost neglected the subject under discussion&mdash;a
+communication that made poor Bertram ponder long.&nbsp; He could
+never get to the bottom of the superficial, and all the
+proprieties and conventions of life were profound to him.&nbsp;
+Fortunately for him old Mrs. Tramore liked him, he was
+satisfactory to her long-sightedness; so that a relation was
+established under cover of which he still occasionally presented
+himself in Hill Street&mdash;presented himself nominally to the
+mistress of the house.&nbsp; He had had scruples about the
+veracity of his visits, but he had disposed of them; he had
+scruples about so many things that he had had to invent a general
+way, to dig a central drain.&nbsp; Julia Tramore happened to meet
+him when she came up to town, and she took a view of him more
+benevolent than her usual estimate of people encouraged by her
+mother.&nbsp; The fear of agreeing with that lady was a motive,
+but there was a stronger one, in this particular case, in the
+fear of agreeing with her niece, who had rejected him.&nbsp; His
+situation might be held to have improved when Mr. Tramore was
+taken so gravely ill that with regard to his recovery those about
+him left their eyes to speak for their lips; and in the light of
+the poor gentleman&rsquo;s recent death it was doubtless better
+than it had ever been.</p>
+<p>He was only a quarter of an hour with the girl, but this gave
+him time to take the measure of it.&nbsp; After he had spoken to
+her about her bereavement, very much as an especially mild
+missionary might have spoken to a beautiful Polynesian, he let
+her know that he had learned from her companions the very strong
+step she was about to take.&nbsp; This led to their spending
+together ten minutes which, to her mind, threw more light on his
+character than anything that had ever passed between them.&nbsp;
+She had always felt with him as if she were standing on an edge,
+looking down into something decidedly deep.&nbsp; To-day the
+impression of the perpendicular shaft was there, but it was
+rather an abyss of confusion and disorder than the large bright
+space in which she had figured everything as ranged and
+pigeon-holed, presenting the appearance of the labelled shelves
+and drawers at a chemist&rsquo;s.&nbsp; He discussed without an
+invitation to discuss, he appealed without a right to
+appeal.&nbsp; He was nothing but a suitor tolerated after
+dismissal, but he took strangely for granted a participation in
+her affairs.&nbsp; He assumed all sorts of things that made her
+draw back.&nbsp; He implied that there was everything now to
+assist them in arriving at an agreement, since she had never
+informed him that he was positively objectionable; but that this
+symmetry would be spoiled if she should not be willing to take a
+little longer to think of certain consequences.&nbsp; She was
+greatly disconcerted when she saw what consequences he meant and
+at his reminding her of them.&nbsp; What on earth was the use of
+a lover if he was to speak only like one&rsquo;s grandmother and
+one&rsquo;s aunt?&nbsp; He struck her as much in love with her
+and as particularly careful at the same time as to what he might
+say.&nbsp; He never mentioned her mother; he only alluded,
+indirectly but earnestly, to the &ldquo;step.&rdquo;&nbsp; He
+disapproved of it altogether, took an unexpectedly prudent,
+politic view of it.&nbsp; He evidently also believed that she
+would be dragged down; in other words that she would not be asked
+out.&nbsp; It was his idea that her mother would contaminate her,
+so that he should find himself interested in a young person
+discredited and virtually unmarriageable.&nbsp; All this was more
+obvious to him than the consideration that a daughter should be
+merciful.&nbsp; Where was his religion if he understood mercy so
+little, and where were his talent and his courage if he were so
+miserably afraid of trumpery social penalties?&nbsp; Rose&rsquo;s
+heart sank when she reflected that a man supposed to be
+first-rate hadn&rsquo;t guessed that rather than not do what she
+could for her mother she would give up all the Engineers in the
+world.&nbsp; She became aware that she probably would have been
+moved to place her hand in his on the spot if he had come to her
+saying &ldquo;Your idea is the right one; put it through at every
+cost.&rdquo;&nbsp; She couldn&rsquo;t discuss this with him,
+though he impressed her as having too much at stake for her to
+treat him with mere disdain.&nbsp; She sickened at the revelation
+that a gentleman could see so much in mere vulgarities of
+opinion, and though she uttered as few words as possible,
+conversing only in sad smiles and headshakes and in intercepted
+movements toward the door, she happened, in some unguarded lapse
+from her reticence, to use the expression that she was
+disappointed in him.&nbsp; He caught at it and, seeming to drop
+his field-glass, pressed upon her with nearer, tenderer eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Can I be so happy as to believe, then, that you had
+thought of me with some confidence, with some faith?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you didn&rsquo;t suppose so, what is the sense of
+this visit?&rdquo; Rose asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One can be faithful without reciprocity,&rdquo; said
+the young man.&nbsp; &ldquo;I regard you in a light which makes
+me want to protect you even if I have nothing to gain by
+it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yet you speak as if you thought you might keep me for
+yourself.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;For <i>yourself</i>.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t want you to
+suffer.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Nor to suffer yourself by my doing so,&rdquo; said
+Rose, looking down.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, if you would only marry me next month!&rdquo; he
+broke out inconsequently.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;And give up going to mamma?&rdquo; Rose waited to see
+if he would say &ldquo;What need that matter?&nbsp; Can&rsquo;t
+your mother come to us?&rdquo;&nbsp; But he said nothing of the
+sort; he only answered&mdash;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She surely would be sorry to interfere with the
+exercise of any other affection which I might have the bliss of
+believing that you are now free, in however small a degree, to
+entertain.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Rose knew that her mother wouldn&rsquo;t be sorry at all; but
+she contented herself with rejoining, her hand on the door:
+&ldquo;Good-bye.&nbsp; I sha&rsquo;n&rsquo;t suffer.&nbsp;
+I&rsquo;m not afraid.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t know how terrible, how cruel, the world
+can be.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, I do know.&nbsp; I know everything!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The declaration sprang from her lips in a tone which made him
+look at her as he had never looked before, as if he saw something
+new in her face, as if he had never yet known her.&nbsp; He
+hadn&rsquo;t displeased her so much but that she would like to
+give him that impression, and since she felt that she was doing
+so she lingered an instant for the purpose.&nbsp; It enabled her
+to see, further, that he turned red; then to become aware that a
+carriage had stopped at the door.&nbsp; Captain Jay&rsquo;s eyes,
+from where he stood, fell upon this arrival, and the nature of
+their glance made Rose step forward to look.&nbsp; Her mother sat
+there, brilliant, conspicuous, in the eternal victoria, and the
+footman was already sounding the knocker.&nbsp; It had been no
+part of the arrangement that she should come to fetch her; it had
+been out of the question&mdash;a stroke in such bad taste as
+would have put Rose in the wrong.&nbsp; The girl had never
+dreamed of it, but somehow, suddenly, perversely, she was glad of
+it now; she even hoped that her grandmother and her aunt were
+looking out upstairs.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My mother has come for me.&nbsp; Good-bye,&rdquo; she
+repeated; but this time her visitor had got between her and the
+door.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Listen to me before you go.&nbsp; I will give you a
+life&rsquo;s devotion,&rdquo; the young man pleaded.&nbsp; He
+really barred the way.</p>
+<p>She wondered whether her grandmother had told him that if her
+flight were not prevented she would forfeit money.&nbsp; Then,
+vividly, it came over her that this would be what he was occupied
+with.&nbsp; &ldquo;I shall never think of you&mdash;let me
+go!&rdquo; she cried, with passion.</p>
+<p>Captain Jay opened the door, but Rose didn&rsquo;t see his
+face, and in a moment she was out of the house.&nbsp; Aunt Julia,
+who was sure to have been hovering, had taken flight before the
+profanity of the knock.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Heavens, dear, where did you get your mourning?&rdquo;
+the lady in the victoria asked of her daughter as they drove
+away.</p>
+<h3>II.</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">Lady Maresfield</span> had given her boy a
+push in his plump back and had said to him, &ldquo;Go and speak
+to her now; it&rsquo;s your chance.&rdquo;&nbsp; She had for a
+long time wanted this scion to make himself audible to Rose
+Tramore, but the opportunity was not easy to come by.&nbsp; The
+case was complicated.&nbsp; Lady Maresfield had four daughters,
+of whom only one was married.&nbsp; It so happened moreover that
+this one, Mrs. Vaughan-Vesey, the only person in the world her
+mother was afraid of, was the most to be reckoned with.&nbsp; The
+Honourable Guy was in appearance all his mother&rsquo;s child,
+though he was really a simpler soul.&nbsp; He was large and pink;
+large, that is, as to everything but the eyes, which were
+diminishing points, and pink as to everything but the hair, which
+was comparable, faintly, to the hue of the richer rose.&nbsp; He
+had also, it must be conceded, very small neat teeth, which made
+his smile look like a young lady&rsquo;s.&nbsp; He had no wish to
+resemble any such person, but he was perpetually smiling, and he
+smiled more than ever as he approached Rose Tramore, who, looking
+altogether, to his mind, as a pretty girl should, and wearing a
+soft white opera-cloak over a softer black dress, leaned alone
+against the wall of the vestibule at Covent Garden while, a few
+paces off, an old gentleman engaged her mother in
+conversation.&nbsp; Madame Patti had been singing, and they were
+all waiting for their carriages.&nbsp; To their ears at present
+came a vociferation of names and a rattle of wheels.&nbsp; The
+air, through banging doors, entered in damp, warm gusts, heavy
+with the stale, slightly sweet taste of the London season when
+the London season is overripe and spoiling.</p>
+<p>Guy Mangler had only three minutes to re&euml;stablish an
+interrupted acquaintance with our young lady.&nbsp; He reminded
+her that he had danced with her the year before, and he mentioned
+that he knew her brother.&nbsp; His mother had lately been to see
+old Mrs. Tramore, but this he did not mention, not being aware of
+it.&nbsp; That visit had produced, on Lady Maresfield&rsquo;s
+part, a private crisis, engendered ideas.&nbsp; One of them was
+that the grandmother in Hill Street had really forgiven the
+wilful girl much more than she admitted.&nbsp; Another was that
+there would still be some money for Rose when the others should
+come into theirs.&nbsp; Still another was that the others would
+come into theirs at no distant date; the old lady was so visibly
+going to pieces.&nbsp; There were several more besides, as for
+instance that Rose had already fifteen hundred a year from her
+father.&nbsp; The figure had been betrayed in Hill Street; it was
+part of the proof of Mrs. Tramore&rsquo;s decrepitude.&nbsp; Then
+there was an equal amount that her mother had to dispose of and
+on which the girl could absolutely count, though of course it
+might involve much waiting, as the mother, a person of gross
+insensibility, evidently wouldn&rsquo;t die of
+cold-shouldering.&nbsp; Equally definite, to do it justice, was
+the conception that Rose was in truth remarkably good looking,
+and that what she had undertaken to do showed, and would show
+even should it fail, cleverness of the right sort.&nbsp;
+Cleverness of the right sort was exactly the quality that Lady
+Maresfield prefigured as indispensable in a young lady to whom
+she should marry her second son, over whose own deficiencies she
+flung the veil of a maternal theory that <i>his</i> cleverness
+was of a sort that was wrong.&nbsp; Those who knew him less well
+were content to wish that he might not conceal it for such a
+scruple.&nbsp; This enumeration of his mother&rsquo;s views does
+not exhaust the list, and it was in obedience to one too profound
+to be uttered even by the historian that, after a very brief
+delay, she decided to move across the crowded lobby.&nbsp; Her
+daughter Bessie was the only one with her; Maggie was dining with
+the Vaughan-Veseys, and Fanny was not of an age.&nbsp; Mrs.
+Tramore the younger showed only an admirable back&mdash;her face
+was to her old gentleman&mdash;and Bessie had drifted to some
+other people; so that it was comparatively easy for Lady
+Maresfield to say to Rose, in a moment: &ldquo;My dear child, are
+you never coming to see us?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We shall be delighted to come if you&rsquo;ll ask
+us,&rdquo; Rose smiled.</p>
+<p>Lady Maresfield had been prepared for the plural number, and
+she was a woman whom it took many plurals to disconcert.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sure Guy is longing for another dance with
+you,&rdquo; she rejoined, with the most unblinking
+irrelevance.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid we&rsquo;re not dancing again quite
+yet,&rdquo; said Rose, glancing at her mother&rsquo;s exposed
+shoulders, but speaking as if they were muffled in crape.</p>
+<p>Lady Maresfield leaned her head on one side and seemed almost
+wistful.&nbsp; &ldquo;Not even at my sister&rsquo;s ball?&nbsp;
+She&rsquo;s to have something next week.&nbsp; She&rsquo;ll write
+to you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Rose Tramore, on the spot, looking bright but vague, turned
+three or four things over in her mind.&nbsp; She remembered that
+the sister of her interlocutress was the proverbially rich Mrs.
+Bray, a bankeress or a breweress or a builderess, who had so big
+a house that she couldn&rsquo;t fill it unless she opened her
+doors, or her mouth, very wide.&nbsp; Rose had learnt more about
+London society during these lonely months with her mother than
+she had ever picked up in Hill Street.&nbsp; The younger Mrs.
+Tramore was a mine of <i>comm&eacute;rages</i>, and she had no
+need to go out to bring home the latest intelligence.&nbsp; At
+any rate Mrs. Bray might serve as the end of a wedge.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Oh, I dare say we might think of that,&rdquo; Rose
+said.&nbsp; &ldquo;It would be very kind of your
+sister.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Guy&rsquo;ll think of it, won&rsquo;t you, Guy?&rdquo;
+asked Lady Maresfield.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Rather!&rdquo; Guy responded, with an intonation as
+fine as if he had learnt it at a music hall; while at the same
+moment the name of his mother&rsquo;s carriage was bawled through
+the place.&nbsp; Mrs. Tramore had parted with her old gentleman;
+she turned again to her daughter.&nbsp; Nothing occurred but what
+always occurred, which was exactly this absence of
+everything&mdash;a universal lapse.&nbsp; She didn&rsquo;t exist,
+even for a second, to any recognising eye.&nbsp; The people who
+looked at her&mdash;of course there were plenty of
+those&mdash;were only the people who didn&rsquo;t exist for
+hers.&nbsp; Lady Maresfield surged away on her son&rsquo;s
+arm.</p>
+<p>It was this noble matron herself who wrote, the next day,
+inclosing a card of invitation from Mrs. Bray and expressing the
+hope that Rose would come and dine and let her ladyship take
+her.&nbsp; She should have only one of her own girls; Gwendolen
+Vesey was to take the other.&nbsp; Rose handed both the note and
+the card in silence to her mother; the latter exhibited only the
+name of Miss Tramore.&nbsp; &ldquo;You had much better go,
+dear,&rdquo; her mother said; in answer to which Miss Tramore
+slowly tore up the documents, looking with clear, meditative eyes
+out of the window.&nbsp; Her mother always said &ldquo;You had
+better go&rdquo;&mdash;there had been other incidents&mdash;and
+Rose had never even once taken account of the observation.&nbsp;
+She would make no first advances, only plenty of second ones,
+and, condoning no discrimination, would treat no omission as
+venial.&nbsp; She would keep all concessions till afterwards;
+then she would make them one by one.&nbsp; Fighting society was
+quite as hard as her grandmother had said it would be; but there
+was a tension in it which made the dreariness vibrate&mdash;the
+dreariness of such a winter as she had just passed.&nbsp; Her
+companion had cried at the end of it, and she had cried all
+through; only her tears had been private, while her
+mother&rsquo;s had fallen once for all, at luncheon on the bleak
+Easter Monday&mdash;produced by the way a silent survey of the
+deadly square brought home to her that every creature but
+themselves was out of town and having tremendous fun.&nbsp; Rose
+felt that it was useless to attempt to explain simply by her
+mourning this severity of solitude; for if people didn&rsquo;t go
+to parties (at least a few didn&rsquo;t) for six months after
+their father died, this was the very time other people took for
+coming to see them.&nbsp; It was not too much to say that during
+this first winter of Rose&rsquo;s period with her mother she had
+no communication whatever with the world.&nbsp; It had the effect
+of making her take to reading the new American books: she wanted
+to see how girls got on by themselves.&nbsp; She had never read
+so much before, and there was a legitimate indifference in it
+when topics failed with her mother.&nbsp; They often failed after
+the first days, and then, while she bent over instructive
+volumes, this lady, dressed as if for an impending function, sat
+on the sofa and watched her.&nbsp; Rose was not embarrassed by
+such an appearance, for she could reflect that, a little before,
+her companion had not even a girl who had taken refuge in queer
+researches to look at.&nbsp; She was moreover used to her
+mother&rsquo;s attitude by this time.&nbsp; She had her own
+description of it: it was the attitude of waiting for the
+carriage.&nbsp; If they didn&rsquo;t go out it was not that Mrs.
+Tramore was not ready in time, and Rose had even an alarmed
+prevision of their some day always arriving first.&nbsp; Mrs.
+Tramore&rsquo;s conversation at such moments was abrupt,
+inconsequent and personal.&nbsp; She sat on the edge of sofas and
+chairs and glanced occasionally at the fit of her gloves (she was
+perpetually gloved, and the fit was a thing it was melancholy to
+see wasted), as people do who are expecting guests to
+dinner.&nbsp; Rose used almost to fancy herself at times a
+perfunctory husband on the other side of the fire.</p>
+<p>What she was not yet used to&mdash;there was still a charm in
+it&mdash;was her mother&rsquo;s extraordinary tact.&nbsp; During
+the years they lived together they never had a discussion; a
+circumstance all the more remarkable since if the girl had a
+reason for sparing her companion (that of being sorry for her)
+Mrs. Tramore had none for sparing her child.&nbsp; She only
+showed in doing so a happy instinct&mdash;the happiest thing
+about her.&nbsp; She took in perfection a course which
+represented everything and covered everything; she utterly
+abjured all authority.&nbsp; She testified to her abjuration in
+hourly ingenious, touching ways.&nbsp; In this manner nothing had
+to be talked over, which was a mercy all round.&nbsp; The tears
+on Easter Monday were merely a nervous gust, to help show she was
+not a Christmas doll from the Burlington Arcade; and there was no
+lifting up of the repentant Magdalen, no uttered remorse for the
+former abandonment of children.&nbsp; Of the way she could treat
+her children her demeanour to this one was an example; it was an
+uninterrupted appeal to her eldest daughter for direction.&nbsp;
+She took the law from Rose in every circumstance, and if you had
+noticed these ladies without knowing their history you would have
+wondered what tie was fine enough to make maturity so respectful
+to youth.&nbsp; No mother was ever so filial as Mrs. Tramore, and
+there had never been such a difference of position between
+sisters.&nbsp; Not that the elder one fawned, which would have
+been fearful; she only renounced&mdash;whatever she had to
+renounce.&nbsp; If the amount was not much she at any rate made
+no scene over it.&nbsp; Her hand was so light that Rose said of
+her secretly, in vague glances at the past, &ldquo;No wonder
+people liked her!&rdquo;&nbsp; She never characterised the old
+element of interference with her mother&rsquo;s respectability
+more definitely than as &ldquo;people.&rdquo;&nbsp; They were
+people, it was true, for whom gentleness must have been
+everything and who didn&rsquo;t demand a variety of
+interests.&nbsp; The desire to &ldquo;go out&rdquo; was the one
+passion that even a closer acquaintance with her parent revealed
+to Rose Tramore.&nbsp; She marvelled at its strength, in the
+light of the poor lady&rsquo;s history: there was comedy enough
+in this unquenchable flame on the part of a woman who had known
+such misery.&nbsp; She had drunk deep of every dishonour, but the
+bitter cup had left her with a taste for lighted candles, for
+squeezing up staircases and hooking herself to the human
+elbow.&nbsp; Rose had a vision of the future years in which this
+taste would grow with restored exercise&mdash;of her mother, in a
+long-tailed dress, jogging on and on and on, jogging further and
+further from her sins, through a century of the &ldquo;Morning
+Post&rdquo; and down the fashionable avenue of time.&nbsp; She
+herself would then be very old&mdash;she herself would be
+dead.&nbsp; Mrs. Tramore would cover a span of life for which
+such an allowance of sin was small.&nbsp; The girl could laugh
+indeed now at that theory of her being dragged down.&nbsp; If one
+thing were more present to her than another it was the very
+desolation of their propriety.&nbsp; As she glanced at her
+companion, it sometimes seemed to her that if she had been a bad
+woman she would have been worse than that.&nbsp; There were
+compensations for being &ldquo;cut&rdquo; which Mrs. Tramore too
+much neglected.</p>
+<p>The lonely old lady in Hill Street&mdash;Rose thought of her
+that way now&mdash;was the one person to whom she was ready to
+say that she would come to her on any terms.&nbsp; She wrote this
+to her three times over, and she knocked still oftener at her
+door.&nbsp; But the old lady answered no letters; if Rose had
+remained in Hill Street it would have been her own function to
+answer them; and at the door, the butler, whom the girl had known
+for ten years, considered her, when he told her his mistress was
+not at home, quite as he might have considered a young person who
+had come about a place and of whose eligibility he took a
+negative view.&nbsp; That was Rose&rsquo;s one pang, that she
+probably appeared rather heartless.&nbsp; Her aunt Julia had gone
+to Florence with Edith for the winter, on purpose to make her
+appear more so; for Miss Tramore was still the person most
+scandalised by her secession.&nbsp; Edith and she, doubtless,
+often talked over in Florence the destitution of the aged victim
+in Hill Street.&nbsp; Eric never came to see his sister, because,
+being full both of family and of personal feeling, he thought she
+really ought to have stayed with his grandmother.&nbsp; If she
+had had such an appurtenance all to herself she might have done
+what she liked with it; but he couldn&rsquo;t forgive such a want
+of consideration for anything of his.&nbsp; There were moments
+when Rose would have been ready to take her hand from the plough
+and insist upon reintegration, if only the fierce voice of the
+old house had allowed people to look her up.&nbsp; But she read,
+ever so clearly, that her grandmother had made this a question of
+loyalty to seventy years of virtue.&nbsp; Mrs. Tramore&rsquo;s
+forlornness didn&rsquo;t prevent her drawing-room from being a
+very public place, in which Rose could hear certain words
+reverberate: &ldquo;Leave her alone; it&rsquo;s the only way to
+see how long she&rsquo;ll hold out.&rdquo;&nbsp; The old
+woman&rsquo;s visitors were people who didn&rsquo;t wish to
+quarrel, and the girl was conscious that if they had not let her
+alone&mdash;that is if they had come to her from her
+grandmother&mdash;she might perhaps not have held out.&nbsp; She
+had no friends quite of her own; she had not been brought up to
+have them, and it would not have been easy in a house which two
+such persons as her father and his mother divided between
+them.&nbsp; Her father disapproved of crude intimacies, and all
+the intimacies of youth were crude.&nbsp; He had married at
+five-and-twenty and could testify to such a truth.&nbsp; Rose
+felt that she shared even Captain Jay with her grandmother; she
+had seen what <i>he</i> was worth.&nbsp; Moreover, she had spoken
+to him at that last moment in Hill Street in a way which, taken
+with her former refusal, made it impossible that he should come
+near her again.&nbsp; She hoped he went to see his protectress:
+he could be a kind of substitute and administer comfort.</p>
+<p>It so happened, however, that the day after she threw Lady
+Maresfield&rsquo;s invitation into the wastepaper basket she
+received a visit from a certain Mrs. Donovan, whom she had
+occasionally seen in Hill Street.&nbsp; She vaguely knew this
+lady for a busybody, but she was in a situation which even
+busybodies might alleviate.&nbsp; Mrs. Donovan was poor, but
+honest&mdash;so scrupulously honest that she was perpetually
+returning visits she had never received.&nbsp; She was always
+clad in weather-beaten sealskin, and had an odd air of being
+prepared for the worst, which was borne out by her denying that
+she was Irish.&nbsp; She was of the English Donovans.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dear child, won&rsquo;t you go out with me?&rdquo; she
+asked.</p>
+<p>Rose looked at her a moment and then rang the bell.&nbsp; She
+spoke of something else, without answering the question, and when
+the servant came she said: &ldquo;Please tell Mrs. Tramore that
+Mrs. Donovan has come to see her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, that&rsquo;ll be delightful; only you mustn&rsquo;t
+tell your grandmother!&rdquo; the visitor exclaimed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tell her what?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That I come to see your mamma.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said Rose.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Sure I hoped you&rsquo;d introduce me!&rdquo; cried
+Mrs. Donovan, compromising herself in her embarrassment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not necessary; you knew her once.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Indeed and I&rsquo;ve known every one once,&rdquo; the
+visitor confessed.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Tramore, when she came in, was charming and exactly
+right; she greeted Mrs. Donovan as if she had met her the week
+before last, giving her daughter such a new illustration of her
+tact that Rose again had the idea that it was no wonder
+&ldquo;people&rdquo; had liked her.&nbsp; The girl grudged Mrs.
+Donovan so fresh a morsel as a description of her mother at home,
+rejoicing that she would be inconvenienced by having to keep the
+story out of Hill Street.&nbsp; Her mother went away before Mrs.
+Donovan departed, and Rose was touched by guessing her
+reason&mdash;the thought that since even this circuitous
+personage had been moved to come, the two might, if left
+together, invent some remedy.&nbsp; Rose waited to see what Mrs.
+Donovan had in fact invented.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You won&rsquo;t come out with me then?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Come out with you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;My daughters are married.&nbsp; You know I&rsquo;m a
+lone woman.&nbsp; It would be an immense pleasure to me to have
+so charming a creature as yourself to present to the
+world.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I go out with my mother,&rdquo; said Rose, after a
+moment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes, but sometimes when she&rsquo;s not
+inclined?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She goes everywhere she wants to go,&rdquo; Rose
+continued, uttering the biggest fib of her life and only
+regretting it should be wasted on Mrs. Donovan.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, but do you go everywhere <i>you</i> want?&rdquo;
+the lady asked sociably.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;One goes even to places one hates.&nbsp; Every one does
+that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, what I go through!&rdquo; this social martyr
+cried.&nbsp; Then she laid a persuasive hand on the girl&rsquo;s
+arm.&nbsp; &ldquo;Let me show you at a few places first, and then
+we&rsquo;ll see.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll bring them all here.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think I understand you,&rdquo; replied
+Rose, though in Mrs. Donovan&rsquo;s words she perfectly saw her
+own theory of the case reflected.&nbsp; For a quarter of a minute
+she asked herself whether she might not, after all, do so much
+evil that good might come.&nbsp; Mrs. Donovan would take her out
+the next day, and be thankful enough to annex such an attraction
+as a pretty girl.&nbsp; Various consequences would ensue and the
+long delay would be shortened; her mother&rsquo;s drawing-room
+would resound with the clatter of teacups.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Mrs. Bray&rsquo;s having some big thing next week; come
+with me there and I&rsquo;ll show you what I mane,&rdquo; Mrs.
+Donovan pleaded.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I see what you mane,&rdquo; Rose answered, brushing
+away her temptation and getting up.&nbsp; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m much
+obliged to you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You know you&rsquo;re wrong, my dear,&rdquo; said her
+interlocutress, with angry little eyes.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not going to Mrs. Bray&rsquo;s.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll get you a kyard; it&rsquo;ll only cost me a
+penny stamp.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got one,&rdquo; said the girl, smiling.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you mean a penny stamp?&rdquo;&nbsp; Mrs. Donovan,
+especially at departure, always observed all the forms of
+amity.&nbsp; &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t do it alone, my
+darling,&rdquo; she declared.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Shall they call you a cab?&rdquo; Rose asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll pick one up.&nbsp; I choose my horse.&nbsp;
+You know you require your start,&rdquo; her visitor went on.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Excuse my mother,&rdquo; was Rose&rsquo;s only
+reply.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t mention it.&nbsp; Come to me when you need
+me.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ll find me in the Red Book.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s awfully kind of you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Mrs. Donovan lingered a moment on the threshold.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Who will you <i>have</i> now, my child?&rdquo; she
+appealed.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I won&rsquo;t have any one!&rdquo;&nbsp; Rose turned
+away, blushing for her.&nbsp; &ldquo;She came on
+speculation,&rdquo; she said afterwards to Mrs. Tramore.</p>
+<p>Her mother looked at her a moment in silence.&nbsp; &ldquo;You
+can do it if you like, you know.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Rose made no direct answer to this observation; she remarked
+instead: &ldquo;See what our quiet life allows us to
+escape.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We don&rsquo;t escape it.&nbsp; She has been here an
+hour.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Once in twenty years!&nbsp; We might meet her three
+times a day.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;d take her with the rest!&rdquo; sighed
+Mrs. Tramore; while her daughter recognised that what her
+companion wanted to do was just what Mrs. Donovan was
+doing.&nbsp; Mrs. Donovan&rsquo;s life was her ideal.</p>
+<p>On a Sunday, ten days later, Rose went to see one of her old
+governesses, of whom she had lost sight for some time and who had
+written to her that she was in London, unoccupied and ill.&nbsp;
+This was just the sort of relation into which she could throw
+herself now with inordinate zeal; the idea of it, however, not
+preventing a foretaste of the queer expression in the excellent
+lady&rsquo;s face when she should mention with whom she was
+living.&nbsp; While she smiled at this picture she threw in
+another joke, asking herself if Miss Hack could be held in any
+degree to constitute the nucleus of a circle.&nbsp; She would
+come to see her, in any event&mdash;come the more the further she
+was dragged down.&nbsp; Sunday was always a difficult day with
+the two ladies&mdash;the afternoons made it so apparent that they
+were not frequented.&nbsp; Her mother, it is true, was comprised
+in the habits of two or three old gentlemen&mdash;she had for a
+long time avoided male friends of less than seventy&mdash;who
+disliked each other enough to make the room, when they were there
+at once, crack with pressure.&nbsp; Rose sat for a long time with
+Miss Hack, doing conscientious justice to the conception that
+there could be troubles in the world worse than her own; and when
+she came back her mother was alone, but with a story to tell of a
+long visit from Mr. Guy Mangler, who had waited and waited for
+her return.&nbsp; &ldquo;He&rsquo;s in love with you; he&rsquo;s
+coming again on Tuesday,&rdquo; Mrs. Tramore announced.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Did he say so?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That he&rsquo;s coming back on Tuesday?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No, that he&rsquo;s in love with me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;He didn&rsquo;t need, when he stayed two
+hours.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;With you?&nbsp; It&rsquo;s you he&rsquo;s in love with,
+mamma!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That will do as well,&rdquo; laughed Mrs.
+Tramore.&nbsp; &ldquo;For all the use we shall make of
+him!&rdquo; she added in a moment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We shall make great use of him.&nbsp; His mother sent
+him.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, she&rsquo;ll never come!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then <i>he</i> sha&rsquo;n&rsquo;t,&rdquo; said
+Rose.&nbsp; Yet he was admitted on the Tuesday, and after she had
+given him his tea Mrs. Tramore left the young people alone.&nbsp;
+Rose wished she hadn&rsquo;t&mdash;she herself had another
+view.&nbsp; At any rate she disliked her mother&rsquo;s view,
+which she had easily guessed.&nbsp; Mr. Mangler did nothing but
+say how charming he thought his hostess of the Sunday, and what a
+tremendously jolly visit he had had.&nbsp; He didn&rsquo;t remark
+in so many words &ldquo;I had no idea your mother was such a good
+sort&rdquo;; but this was the spirit of his simple
+discourse.&nbsp; Rose liked it at first&mdash;a little of it
+gratified her; then she thought there was too much of it for good
+taste.&nbsp; She had to reflect that one does what one can and
+that Mr. Mangler probably thought he was delicate.&nbsp; He
+wished to convey that he desired to make up to her for the
+injustice of society.&nbsp; Why shouldn&rsquo;t her mother
+receive gracefully, she asked (not audibly) and who had ever said
+she didn&rsquo;t?&nbsp; Mr. Mangler had a great deal to say about
+the disappointment of his own parent over Miss Tramore&rsquo;s
+not having come to dine with them the night of his aunt&rsquo;s
+ball.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Lady Maresfield knows why I didn&rsquo;t come,&rdquo;
+Rose answered at last.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, now, but <i>I</i> don&rsquo;t, you know;
+can&rsquo;t you tell <i>me</i>?&rdquo; asked the young man.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It doesn&rsquo;t matter, if your mother&rsquo;s clear
+about it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, but why make such an awful mystery of it, when
+I&rsquo;m dying to know?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He talked about this, he chaffed her about it for the rest of
+his visit: he had at last found a topic after his own
+heart.&nbsp; If her mother considered that he might be the emblem
+of their redemption he was an engine of the most primitive
+construction.&nbsp; He stayed and stayed; he struck Rose as on
+the point of bringing out something for which he had not quite,
+as he would have said, the cheek.&nbsp; Sometimes she thought he
+was going to begin: &ldquo;By the way, my mother told me to
+propose to you.&rdquo;&nbsp; At other moments he seemed charged
+with the admission: &ldquo;I say, of course I really know what
+you&rsquo;re trying to do for her,&rdquo; nodding at the door:
+&ldquo;therefore hadn&rsquo;t we better speak of it frankly, so
+that I can help you with my mother, and more particularly with my
+sister Gwendolen, who&rsquo;s the difficult one?&nbsp; The fact
+is, you see, they won&rsquo;t do anything for nothing.&nbsp; If
+you&rsquo;ll accept me they&rsquo;ll call, but they won&rsquo;t
+call without something &lsquo;down.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; Mr.
+Mangler departed without their speaking frankly, and Rose Tramore
+had a hot hour during which she almost entertained, vindictively,
+the project of &ldquo;accepting&rdquo; the limpid youth until
+after she should have got her mother into circulation.&nbsp; The
+cream of the vision was that she might break with him
+later.&nbsp; She could read that this was what her mother would
+have liked, but the next time he came the door was closed to him,
+and the next and the next.</p>
+<p>In August there was nothing to do but to go abroad, with the
+sense on Rose&rsquo;s part that the battle was still all to
+fight; for a round of country visits was not in prospect, and
+English watering-places constituted one of the few subjects on
+which the girl had heard her mother express herself with
+disgust.&nbsp; Continental autumns had been indeed for years, one
+of the various forms of Mrs. Tramore&rsquo;s atonement, but Rose
+could only infer that such fruit as they had borne was
+bitter.&nbsp; The stony stare of Belgravia could be practised at
+Homburg; and somehow it was inveterately only gentlemen who sat
+next to her at the <i>table d&rsquo;h&ocirc;te</i> at
+Cadenabbia.&nbsp; Gentlemen had never been of any use to Mrs.
+Tramore for getting back into society; they had only helped her
+effectually to get out of it.&nbsp; She once dropped, to her
+daughter, in a moralising mood, the remark that it was
+astonishing how many of them one could know without its doing one
+any good.&nbsp; Fifty of them&mdash;even very clever
+ones&mdash;represented a value inferior to that of one stupid
+woman.&nbsp; Rose wondered at the offhand way in which her mother
+could talk of fifty clever men; it seemed to her that the whole
+world couldn&rsquo;t contain such a number.&nbsp; She had a
+sombre sense that mankind must be dull and mean.&nbsp; These
+cogitations took place in a cold hotel, in an eternal Swiss rain,
+and they had a flat echo in the transalpine valleys, as the
+lonely ladies went vaguely down to the Italian lakes and
+cities.&nbsp; Rose guided their course, at moments, with a kind
+of aimless ferocity; she moved abruptly, feeling vulgar and
+hating their life, though destitute of any definite vision of
+another life that would have been open to her.&nbsp; She had set
+herself a task and she clung to it; but she appeared to herself
+despicably idle.&nbsp; She had succeeded in not going to Homburg
+waters, where London was trying to wash away some of its stains;
+that would be too staring an advertisement of their
+situation.&nbsp; The main difference in situations to her now was
+the difference of being more or less pitied, at the best an
+intolerable danger; so that the places she preferred were the
+unsuspicious ones.&nbsp; She wanted to triumph with contempt, not
+with submission.</p>
+<p>One morning in September, coming with her mother out of the
+marble church at Milan, she perceived that a gentleman who had
+just passed her on his way into the cathedral and whose face she
+had not noticed, had quickly raised his hat, with a suppressed
+ejaculation.&nbsp; She involuntarily glanced back; the gentleman
+had paused, again uncovering, and Captain Jay stood saluting her
+in the Italian sunshine.&nbsp; &ldquo;Oh, good-morning!&rdquo;
+she said, and walked on, pursuing her course; her mother was a
+little in front.&nbsp; She overtook her in a moment, with an
+unreasonable sense, like a gust of cold air, that men were worse
+than ever, for Captain Jay had apparently moved into the
+church.&nbsp; Her mother turned as they met, and suddenly, as she
+looked back, an expression of peculiar sweetness came into this
+lady&rsquo;s eyes.&nbsp; It made Rose&rsquo;s take the same
+direction and rest a second time on Captain Jay, who was planted
+just where he had stood a minute before.&nbsp; He immediately
+came forward, asking Rose with great gravity if he might speak to
+her a moment, while Mrs. Tramore went her way again.&nbsp; He had
+the expression of a man who wished to say something very
+important; yet his next words were simple enough and consisted of
+the remark that he had not seen her for a year.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is it really so much as that?&rdquo; asked Rose.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Very nearly.&nbsp; I would have looked you up, but in
+the first place I have been very little in London, and in the
+second I believed it wouldn&rsquo;t have done any
+good.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You should have put that first,&rdquo; said the
+girl.&nbsp; &ldquo;It wouldn&rsquo;t have done any
+good.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He was silent over this a moment, in his customary deciphering
+way; but the view he took of it did not prevent him from
+inquiring, as she slowly followed her mother, if he
+mightn&rsquo;t walk with her now.&nbsp; She answered with a laugh
+that it wouldn&rsquo;t do any good but that he might do as he
+liked.&nbsp; He replied without the slightest manifestation of
+levity that it would do more good than if he didn&rsquo;t, and
+they strolled together, with Mrs. Tramore well before them,
+across the big, amusing piazza, where the front of the cathedral
+makes a sort of builded light.&nbsp; He asked a question or two
+and he explained his own presence: having a month&rsquo;s
+holiday, the first clear time for several years, he had just
+popped over the Alps.&nbsp; He inquired if Rose had recent news
+of the old lady in Hill Street, and it was the only tortuous
+thing she had ever heard him say.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I have had no communication of any kind from her since
+I parted with you under her roof.&nbsp; Hasn&rsquo;t she
+mentioned that?&rdquo; said Rose.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t seen her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I thought you were such great friends.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Bertram Jay hesitated a moment.&nbsp; &ldquo;Well, not so much
+now.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;What has she done to you?&rdquo; Rose demanded.</p>
+<p>He fidgeted a little, as if he were thinking of something that
+made him unconscious of her question; then, with mild violence,
+he brought out the inquiry: &ldquo;Miss Tramore, are you
+happy?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>She was startled by the words, for she on her side had been
+reflecting&mdash;reflecting that he had broken with her
+grandmother and that this pointed to a reason.&nbsp; It suggested
+at least that he wouldn&rsquo;t now be so much like a mouthpiece
+for that cold ancestral tone.&nbsp; She turned off his
+question&mdash;said it never was a fair one, as you gave yourself
+away however you answered it.&nbsp; When he repeated &ldquo;You
+give yourself away?&rdquo; as if he didn&rsquo;t understand, she
+remembered that he had not read the funny American books.&nbsp;
+This brought them to a silence, for she had enlightened him only
+by another laugh, and he was evidently preparing another
+question, which he wished carefully to disconnect from the
+former.&nbsp; Presently, just as they were coming near Mrs.
+Tramore, it arrived in the words &ldquo;Is this lady your
+mother?&rdquo;&nbsp; On Rose&rsquo;s assenting, with the addition
+that she was travelling with her, he said: &ldquo;Will you be so
+kind as to introduce me to her?&rdquo;&nbsp; They were so close
+to Mrs. Tramore that she probably heard, but she floated away
+with a single stroke of her paddle and an inattentive poise of
+her head.&nbsp; It was a striking exhibition of the famous tact,
+for Rose delayed to answer, which was exactly what might have
+made her mother wish to turn; and indeed when at last the girl
+spoke she only said to her companion: &ldquo;Why do you ask me
+that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Because I desire the pleasure of making her
+acquaintance.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Rose had stopped, and in the middle of the square they stood
+looking at each other.&nbsp; &ldquo;Do you remember what you said
+to me the last time I saw you?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, don&rsquo;t speak of that!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It&rsquo;s better to speak of it now than to speak of
+it later.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Bertram Jay looked round him, as if to see whether any one
+would hear; but the bright foreignness gave him a sense of
+safety, and he unexpectedly exclaimed: &ldquo;Miss Tramore, I
+love you more than ever!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then you ought to have come to see us,&rdquo; declared
+the girl, quickly walking on.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You treated me the last time as if I were positively
+offensive to you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;So I did, but you know my reason.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Because I protested against the course you were
+taking?&nbsp; I did, I did!&rdquo; the young man rang out, as if
+he still, a little, stuck to that.</p>
+<p>His tone made Rose say gaily: &ldquo;Perhaps you do so
+yet?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t tell till I&rsquo;ve seen more of your
+circumstances,&rdquo; he replied with eminent honesty.</p>
+<p>The girl stared; her light laugh filled the air.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;And it&rsquo;s in order to see more of them and judge that
+you wish to make my mother&rsquo;s acquaintance?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He coloured at this and he evaded; then he broke out with a
+confused &ldquo;Miss Tramore, let me stay with you a
+little!&rdquo; which made her stop again.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Your company will do us great honour, but there must be
+a rigid condition attached to our acceptance of it.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Kindly mention it,&rdquo; said Captain Jay, staring at
+the fa&ccedil;ade of the cathedral.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t take us on trial.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;On trial?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t make an observation to me&mdash;not a
+single one, ever, ever!&mdash;on the matter that, in Hill Street,
+we had our last words about.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Captain Jay appeared to be counting the thousand pinnacles of
+the church.&nbsp; &ldquo;I think you really must be right,&rdquo;
+he remarked at last.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;There you are!&rdquo; cried Rose Tramore, and walked
+rapidly away.</p>
+<p>He caught up with her, he laid his hand upon her arm to stay
+her.&nbsp; &ldquo;If you&rsquo;re going to Venice, let me go to
+Venice with you!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t even understand my
+condition.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sure you&rsquo;re right, then: you must be
+right about everything.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s not in the least true, and I don&rsquo;t
+care a fig whether you&rsquo;re sure or not.&nbsp; Please let me
+go.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He had barred her way, he kept her longer.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll go and speak to your mother myself!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Even in the midst of another emotion she was amused at the air
+of audacity accompanying this declaration.&nbsp; Poor Captain Jay
+might have been on the point of marching up to a battery.&nbsp;
+She looked at him a moment; then she said: &ldquo;You&rsquo;ll be
+disappointed!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Disappointed?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She&rsquo;s much more proper than grandmamma, because
+she&rsquo;s much more amiable.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Dear Miss Tramore&mdash;dear Miss Tramore!&rdquo; the
+young man murmured helplessly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll see for yourself.&nbsp; Only there&rsquo;s
+another condition,&rdquo; Rose went on.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Another?&rdquo; he cried, with discouragement and
+alarm.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You must understand thoroughly, before you throw in
+your lot with us even for a few days, what our position really
+is.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Is it very bad?&rdquo; asked Bertram Jay artlessly.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No one has anything to do with us, no one speaks to us,
+no one looks at us.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Really?&rdquo; stared the young man.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;ve no social existence, we&rsquo;re utterly
+despised.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, Miss Tramore!&rdquo; Captain Jay interposed.&nbsp;
+He added quickly, vaguely, and with a want of presence of mind of
+which he as quickly felt ashamed: &ldquo;Do none of your
+family&mdash;?&rdquo;&nbsp; The question collapsed; the brilliant
+girl was looking at him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We&rsquo;re extraordinarily happy,&rdquo; she threw
+out.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Now that&rsquo;s all I wanted to know!&rdquo; he
+exclaimed, with a kind of exaggerated cheery reproach, walking on
+with her briskly to overtake her mother.</p>
+<p>He was not dining at their inn, but he insisted on coming that
+evening to their <i>table d&rsquo;h&ocirc;te</i>.&nbsp; He sat
+next Mrs. Tramore, and in the evening he accompanied them
+gallantly to the opera, at a third-rate theatre where they were
+almost the only ladies in the boxes.&nbsp; The next day they went
+together by rail to the Charterhouse of Pavia, and while he
+strolled with the girl, as they waited for the homeward train, he
+said to her candidly: &ldquo;Your mother&rsquo;s remarkably
+pretty.&rdquo;&nbsp; She remembered the words and the feeling
+they gave her: they were the first note of new era.&nbsp; The
+feeling was somewhat that of an anxious, gratified matron who has
+&ldquo;presented&rdquo; her child and is thinking of the
+matrimonial market.&nbsp; Men might be of no use, as Mrs. Tramore
+said, yet it was from this moment Rose dated the rosy dawn of her
+confidence that her <i>prot&eacute;g&eacute;e</i> would go off;
+and when later, in crowded assemblies, the phrase, or something
+like it behind a hat or a fan, fell repeatedly on her anxious
+ear, &ldquo;Your mother <i>is</i> in beauty!&rdquo; or
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve never seen her look better!&rdquo; she had a
+faint vision of the yellow sunshine and the afternoon shadows on
+the dusty Italian platform.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Tramore&rsquo;s behaviour at this period was a revelation
+of her native understanding of delicate situations.&nbsp; She
+needed no account of this one from her daughter&mdash;it was one
+of the things for which she had a scent; and there was a kind of
+loyalty to the rules of a game in the silent sweetness with which
+she smoothed the path of Bertram Jay.&nbsp; It was clear that she
+was in her element in fostering the exercise of the affections,
+and if she ever spoke without thinking twice it is probable that
+she would have exclaimed, with some gaiety, &ldquo;Oh, I know all
+about <i>love</i>!&rdquo;&nbsp; Rose could see that she thought
+their companion would be a help, in spite of his being no
+dispenser of patronage.&nbsp; The key to the gates of fashion had
+not been placed in his hand, and no one had ever heard of the
+ladies of his family, who lived in some vague hollow of the
+Yorkshire moors; but none the less he might administer a muscular
+push.&nbsp; Yes indeed, men in general were broken reeds, but
+Captain Jay was peculiarly representative.&nbsp; Respectability
+was the woman&rsquo;s maximum, as honour was the man&rsquo;s, but
+this distinguished young soldier inspired more than one kind of
+confidence.&nbsp; Rose had a great deal of attention for the use
+to which his respectability was put; and there mingled with this
+attention some amusement and much compassion.&nbsp; She saw that
+after a couple of days he decidedly liked her mother, and that he
+was yet not in the least aware of it.&nbsp; He took for granted
+that he believed in her but little; notwithstanding which he
+would have trusted her with anything except Rose herself.&nbsp;
+His trusting her with Rose would come very soon.&nbsp; He never
+spoke to her daughter about her qualities of character, but two
+or three of them (and indeed these were all the poor lady had,
+and they made the best show) were what he had in mind in praising
+her appearance.&nbsp; When he remarked: &ldquo;What attention
+Mrs. Tramore seems to attract everywhere!&rdquo; he meant:
+&ldquo;What a beautifully simple nature it is!&rdquo; and when he
+said: &ldquo;There&rsquo;s something extraordinarily harmonious
+in the colours she wears,&rdquo; it signified: &ldquo;Upon my
+word, I never saw such a sweet temper in my life!&rdquo;&nbsp;
+She lost one of her boxes at Verona, and made the prettiest joke
+of it to Captain Jay.&nbsp; When Rose saw this she said to
+herself, &ldquo;Next season we shall have only to
+choose.&rdquo;&nbsp; Rose knew what was in the box.</p>
+<p>By the time they reached Venice (they had stopped at half a
+dozen little old romantic cities in the most frolicsome
+&aelig;sthetic way) she liked their companion better than she had
+ever liked him before.&nbsp; She did him the justice to recognise
+that if he was not quite honest with himself he was at least
+wholly honest with <i>her</i>.&nbsp; She reckoned up everything
+he had been since he joined them, and put upon it all an
+interpretation so favourable to his devotion that, catching
+herself in the act of glossing over one or two episodes that had
+not struck her at the time as disinterested she exclaimed,
+beneath her breath, &ldquo;Look out&mdash;you&rsquo;re falling in
+love!&rdquo;&nbsp; But if he liked correctness wasn&rsquo;t he
+quite right?&nbsp; Could any one possibly like it more than
+<i>she</i> did?&nbsp; And if he had protested against her
+throwing in her lot with her mother, this was not because of the
+benefit conferred but because of the injury received.&nbsp; He
+exaggerated that injury, but this was the privilege of a lover
+perfectly willing to be selfish on behalf of his mistress.&nbsp;
+He might have wanted her grandmother&rsquo;s money for her, but
+if he had given her up on first discovering that she was throwing
+away her chance of it (oh, this was <i>her</i> doing too!) he had
+given up her grandmother as much: not keeping well with the old
+woman, as some men would have done; not waiting to see how the
+perverse experiment would turn out and appeasing her, if it
+should promise tolerably, with a view to future operations.&nbsp;
+He had had a simple-minded, evangelical, lurid view of what the
+girl he loved would find herself in for.&nbsp; She could see this
+now&mdash;she could see it from his present bewilderment and
+mystification, and she liked him and pitied him, with the kindest
+smile, for the original <i>na&iuml;vet&eacute;</i> as well as for
+the actual meekness.&nbsp; No wonder he hadn&rsquo;t known what
+she was in for, since he now didn&rsquo;t even know what he was
+in for himself.&nbsp; Were there not moments when he thought his
+companions almost unnaturally good, almost suspiciously
+safe?&nbsp; He had lost all power to verify that sketch of their
+isolation and <i>d&eacute;classement</i> to which she had treated
+him on the great square at Milan.&nbsp; The last thing he noticed
+was that they were neglected, and he had never, for himself, had
+such an impression of society.</p>
+<p>It could scarcely be enhanced even by the apparition of a
+large, fair, hot, red-haired young man, carrying a lady&rsquo;s
+fan in his hand, who suddenly stood before their little party as,
+on the third evening after their arrival in Venice, it partook of
+ices at one of the tables before the celebrated Caf&eacute;
+Florian.&nbsp; The lamplit Venetian dusk appeared to have
+revealed them to this gentleman as he sat with other friends at a
+neighbouring table, and he had sprung up, with unsophisticated
+glee, to shake hands with Mrs. Tramore and her daughter.&nbsp;
+Rose recalled him to her mother, who looked at first as though
+she didn&rsquo;t remember him but presently bestowed a
+sufficiently gracious smile on Mr. Guy Mangler.&nbsp; He gave
+with youthful candour the history of his movements and indicated
+the whereabouts of his family: he was with his mother and
+sisters; they had met the Bob Veseys, who had taken Lord
+Whiteroy&rsquo;s yacht and were going to Constantinople.&nbsp;
+His mother and the girls, poor things, were at the Grand Hotel,
+but he was on the yacht with the Veseys, where they had Lord
+Whiteroy&rsquo;s cook.&nbsp; Wasn&rsquo;t the food in Venice
+filthy, and wouldn&rsquo;t they come and look at the yacht?&nbsp;
+She wasn&rsquo;t very fast, but she was awfully jolly.&nbsp; His
+mother might have come if she would, but she wouldn&rsquo;t at
+first, and now, when she wanted to, there were other people, who
+naturally wouldn&rsquo;t turn out for her.&nbsp; Mr. Mangler sat
+down; he alluded with artless resentment to the way, in July, the
+door of his friends had been closed to him.&nbsp; He was going to
+Constantinople, but he didn&rsquo;t care&mdash;if <i>they</i>
+were going anywhere; meanwhile his mother hoped awfully they
+would look her up.</p>
+<p>Lady Maresfield, if she had given her son any such message,
+which Rose disbelieved, entertained her hope in a manner
+compatible with her sitting for half an hour, surrounded by her
+little retinue, without glancing in the direction of Mrs.
+Tramore.&nbsp; The girl, however, was aware that this was not a
+good enough instance of their humiliation; inasmuch as it was
+rather she who, on the occasion of their last contact, had held
+off from Lady Maresfield.&nbsp; She was a little ashamed now of
+not having answered the note in which this affable personage
+ignored her mother.&nbsp; She couldn&rsquo;t help perceiving
+indeed a dim movement on the part of some of the other members of
+the group; she made out an attitude of observation in the
+high-plumed head of Mrs. Vaughan-Vesey.&nbsp; Mrs. Vesey,
+perhaps, might have been looking at Captain Jay, for as this
+gentleman walked back to the hotel with our young lady (they were
+at the &ldquo;Britannia,&rdquo; and young Mangler, who clung to
+them, went in front with Mrs. Tramore) he revealed to Rose that
+he had some acquaintance with Lady Maresfield&rsquo;s eldest
+daughter, though he didn&rsquo;t know and didn&rsquo;t
+particularly want to know, her ladyship.&nbsp; He expressed
+himself with more acerbity than she had ever heard him use
+(Christian charity so generally governed his speech) about the
+young donkey who had been prattling to them.&nbsp; They separated
+at the door of the hotel.&nbsp; Mrs. Tramore had got rid of Mr.
+Mangler, and Bertram Jay was in other quarters.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If you know Mrs. Vesey, why didn&rsquo;t you go and
+speak to her?&nbsp; I&rsquo;m sure she saw you,&rdquo; Rose
+said.</p>
+<p>Captain Jay replied even more circumspectly than usual.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Because I didn&rsquo;t want to leave you.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, you can go now; you&rsquo;re free,&rdquo; Rose
+rejoined.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Thank you.&nbsp; I shall never go again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;That won&rsquo;t be civil,&rdquo; said Rose.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t care to be civil.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t
+like her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you like her?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You ask too many questions.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I know I do,&rdquo; the girl acknowledged.</p>
+<p>Captain Jay had already shaken hands with her, but at this he
+put out his hand again.&nbsp; &ldquo;She&rsquo;s too
+worldly,&rdquo; he murmured, while he held Rose Tramore&rsquo;s a
+moment.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Ah, you dear!&rdquo; Rose exclaimed almost audibly as,
+with her mother, she turned away.</p>
+<p>The next morning, upon the Grand Canal, the gondola of our
+three friends encountered a stately barge which, though it
+contained several persons, seemed pervaded mainly by one majestic
+presence.&nbsp; During the instant the gondolas were passing each
+other it was impossible either for Rose Tramore or for her
+companions not to become conscious that this distinguished
+identity had markedly inclined itself&mdash;a circumstance
+commemorated the next moment, almost within earshot of the other
+boat, by the most spontaneous cry that had issued for many a day
+from the lips of Mrs. Tramore.&nbsp; &ldquo;Fancy, my dear, Lady
+Maresfield has bowed to us!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;We ought to have returned it,&rdquo; Rose answered; but
+she looked at Bertram Jay, who was opposite to her.&nbsp; He
+blushed, and she blushed, and during this moment was born a
+deeper understanding than had yet existed between these
+associated spirits.&nbsp; It had something to do with their going
+together that afternoon, without her mother, to look at certain
+out-of-the-way pictures as to which Ruskin had inspired her with
+a desire to see sincerely.&nbsp; Mrs. Tramore expressed the wish
+to stay at home, and the motive of this wish&mdash;a finer shade
+than any that even Ruskin had ever found a phrase for&mdash;was
+not translated into misrepresenting words by either the mother or
+the daughter.&nbsp; At San Giovanni in Bragora the girl and her
+companion came upon Mrs. Vaughan-Vesey, who, with one of her
+sisters, was also endeavouring to do the earnest thing.&nbsp; She
+did it to Rose, she did it to Captain Jay, as well as to
+Gianbellini; she was a handsome, long-necked, aquiline person, of
+a different type from the rest of her family, and she did it
+remarkably well.&nbsp; She secured our friends&mdash;it was her
+own expression&mdash;for luncheon, on the morrow, on the yacht,
+and she made it public to Rose that she would come that afternoon
+to invite her mother.&nbsp; When the girl returned to the hotel,
+Mrs. Tramore mentioned, before Captain Jay, who had come up to
+their sitting-room, that Lady Maresfield had called.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;She stayed a long time&mdash;at least it seemed
+long!&rdquo; laughed Mrs. Tramore.</p>
+<p>The poor lady could laugh freely now; yet there was some
+grimness in a colloquy that she had with her daughter after
+Bertram Jay had departed.&nbsp; Before this happened Mrs.
+Vesey&rsquo;s card, scrawled over in pencil and referring to the
+morrow&rsquo;s luncheon, was brought up to Mrs. Tramore.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;They mean it all as a bribe,&rdquo; said the principal
+recipient of these civilities.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As a bribe?&rdquo; Rose repeated.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;She wants to marry you to that boy; they&rsquo;ve seen
+Captain Jay and they&rsquo;re frightened.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Well, dear mamma, I can&rsquo;t take Mr. Mangler for a
+husband.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Of course not.&nbsp; But oughtn&rsquo;t we to go to the
+luncheon?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Certainly we&rsquo;ll go to the luncheon,&rdquo; Rose
+said; and when the affair took place, on the morrow, she could
+feel for the first time that she was taking her mother out.&nbsp;
+This appearance was somehow brought home to every one else, and
+it was really the agent of her success.&nbsp; For it is of the
+essence of this simple history that, in the first place, that
+success dated from Mrs. Vesey&rsquo;s Venetian
+<i>d&eacute;jeuner</i>, and in the second reposed, by a subtle
+social logic, on the very anomaly that had made it dubious.&nbsp;
+There is always a chance in things, and Rose Tramore&rsquo;s
+chance was in the fact that Gwendolen Vesey was, as some one had
+said, awfully modern, an immense improvement on the exploded
+science of her mother, and capable of seeing what a
+&ldquo;draw&rdquo; there would be in the comedy, if properly
+brought out, of the reversed positions of Mrs. Tramore and Mrs.
+Tramore&rsquo;s diplomatic daughter.&nbsp; With a first-rate
+managerial eye she perceived that people would flock into any
+room&mdash;and all the more into one of hers&mdash;to see Rose
+bring in her dreadful mother.&nbsp; She treated the cream of
+English society to this thrilling spectacle later in the autumn,
+when she once more &ldquo;secured&rdquo; both the performers for
+a week at Brimble.&nbsp; It made a hit on the spot, the very
+first evening&mdash;the girl was felt to play her part so
+well.&nbsp; The rumour of the performance spread; every one
+wanted to see it.&nbsp; It was an entertainment of which, that
+winter in the country, and the next season in town, persons of
+taste desired to give their friends the freshness.&nbsp; The
+thing was to make the Tramores come late, after every one had
+arrived.&nbsp; They were engaged for a fixed hour, like the
+American imitator and the Patagonian contralto.&nbsp; Mrs. Vesey
+had been the first to say the girl was awfully original, but that
+became the general view.</p>
+<p>Gwendolen Vesey had with her mother one of the few quarrels in
+which Lady Maresfield had really stood up to such an antagonist
+(the elder woman had to recognise in general in whose veins it
+was that the blood of the Manglers flowed) on account of this
+very circumstance of her attaching more importance to Miss
+Tramore&rsquo;s originality (&ldquo;Her originality be
+hanged!&rdquo; her ladyship had gone so far as unintelligently to
+exclaim) than to the prospects of the unfortunate Guy.&nbsp; Mrs.
+Vesey actually lost sight of these pressing problems in her
+admiration of the way the mother and the daughter, or rather the
+daughter and the mother (it was slightly confusing)
+&ldquo;drew.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was Lady Maresfield&rsquo;s version
+of the case that the brazen girl (she was shockingly coarse) had
+treated poor Guy abominably.&nbsp; At any rate it was made known,
+just after Easter, that Miss Tramore was to be married to Captain
+Jay.&nbsp; The marriage was not to take place till the summer;
+but Rose felt that before this the field would practically be
+won.&nbsp; There had been some bad moments, there had been
+several warm corners and a certain number of cold shoulders and
+closed doors and stony stares; but the breach was effectually
+made&mdash;the rest was only a question of time.&nbsp; Mrs.
+Tramore could be trusted to keep what she had gained, and it was
+the dowagers, the old dragons with prominent fangs and glittering
+scales, whom the trick had already mainly caught.&nbsp; By this
+time there were several houses into which the liberated lady had
+crept alone.&nbsp; Her daughter had been expected with her, but
+they couldn&rsquo;t turn her out because the girl had stayed
+behind, and she was fast acquiring a new identity, that of a
+parental connection with the heroine of such a romantic
+story.&nbsp; She was at least the next best thing to her
+daughter, and Rose foresaw the day when she would be valued
+principally as a memento of one of the prettiest episodes in the
+annals of London.&nbsp; At a big official party, in June, Rose
+had the joy of introducing Eric to his mother.&nbsp; She was a
+little sorry it was an official party&mdash;there were some other
+such queer people there; but Eric called, observing the shade,
+the next day but one.</p>
+<p>No observer, probably, would have been acute enough to fix
+exactly the moment at which the girl ceased to take out her
+mother and began to be taken out by her.&nbsp; A later phase was
+more distinguishable&mdash;that at which Rose forbore to inflict
+on her companion a duality that might become oppressive.&nbsp;
+She began to economise her force, she went only when the
+particular effect was required.&nbsp; Her marriage was delayed by
+the period of mourning consequent upon the death of her
+grandmother, who, the younger Mrs. Tramore averred, was killed by
+the rumour of her own new birth.&nbsp; She was the only one of
+the dragons who had not been tamed.&nbsp; Julia Tramore knew the
+truth about this&mdash;she was determined such things should not
+kill <i>her</i>.&nbsp; She would live to do something&mdash;she
+hardly knew what.&nbsp; The provisions of her mother&rsquo;s will
+were published in the &ldquo;Illustrated News&rdquo;; from which
+it appeared that everything that was not to go to Eric and to
+Julia was to go to the fortunate Edith.&nbsp; Miss Tramore makes
+no secret of her own intentions as regards this favourite.</p>
+<p>Edith is not pretty, but Lady Maresfield is waiting for her;
+she is determined Gwendolen Vesey shall not get hold of
+her.&nbsp; Mrs. Vesey however takes no interest in her at
+all.&nbsp; She is whimsical, as befits a woman of her fashion;
+but there are two persons she is still very fond of, the
+delightful Bertram Jays.&nbsp; The fondness of this pair, it must
+be added, is not wholly expended in return.&nbsp; They are
+extremely united, but their life is more domestic than might have
+been expected from the preliminary signs.&nbsp; It owes a portion
+of its concentration to the fact that Mrs. Tramore has now so
+many places to go to that she has almost no time to come to her
+daughter&rsquo;s.&nbsp; She is, under her son-in-law&rsquo;s
+roof, a brilliant but a rare apparition, and the other day he
+remarked upon the circumstance to his wife.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;If it hadn&rsquo;t been for you,&rdquo; she replied,
+smiling, &ldquo;she might have had her regular place at our
+fireside.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good heavens, how did I prevent it?&rdquo; cried
+Captain Jay, with all the consciousness of virtue.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You ordered it otherwise, you goose!&rdquo;&nbsp; And
+she says, in the same spirit, whenever her husband commends her
+(which he does, sometimes, extravagantly) for the way she
+launched her mother: &ldquo;Nonsense, my dear&mdash;practically
+it was <i>you</i>!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHAPERON***</p>
+<pre>
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+**The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Chaperon, by Henry James**
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+
+
+This etext was scanned by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk,
+from the 1893 Macmillan and Co. edition.  Proofing was by Nina
+Hall, Mohua Sen, Bridie, Francine Smith and David.
+
+
+
+
+
+The Chaperon
+
+by Henry James
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+
+An old lady, in a high drawing-room, had had her chair moved close to
+the fire, where she sat knitting and warming her knees.  She was
+dressed in deep mourning; her face had a faded nobleness, tempered,
+however, by the somewhat illiberal compression assumed by her lips in
+obedience to something that was passing in her mind.  She was far
+from the lamp, but though her eyes were fixed upon her active needles
+she was not looking at them.  What she really saw was quite another
+train of affairs.  The room was spacious and dim; the thick London
+fog had oozed into it even through its superior defences.  It was
+full of dusky, massive, valuable things.  The old lady sat motionless
+save for the regularity of her clicking needles, which seemed as
+personal to her and as expressive as prolonged fingers.  If she was
+thinking something out, she was thinking it thoroughly.
+
+When she looked up, on the entrance of a girl of twenty, it might
+have been guessed that the appearance of this young lady was not an
+interruption of her meditation, but rather a contribution to it.  The
+young lady, who was charming to behold, was also in deep mourning,
+which had a freshness, if mourning can be fresh, an air of having
+been lately put on.  She went straight to the bell beside the
+chimney-piece and pulled it, while in her other hand she held a
+sealed and directed letter.  Her companion glanced in silence at the
+letter; then she looked still harder at her work.  The girl hovered
+near the fireplace, without speaking, and after a due, a dignified
+interval the butler appeared in response to the bell.  The time had
+been sufficient to make the silence between the ladies seem long.
+The younger one asked the butler to see that her letter should be
+posted; and after he had gone out she moved vaguely about the room,
+as if to give her grandmother--for such was the elder personage--a
+chance to begin a colloquy of which she herself preferred not to
+strike the first note.  As equally with herself her companion was on
+the face of it capable of holding out, the tension, though it was
+already late in the evening, might have lasted long.  But the old
+lady after a little appeared to recognise, a trifle ungraciously, the
+girl's superior resources.
+
+"Have you written to your mother?"
+
+"Yes, but only a few lines, to tell her I shall come and see her in
+the morning."
+
+"Is that all you've got to say?" asked the grandmother.
+
+"I don't quite know what you want me to say."
+
+"I want you to say that you've made up your mind."
+
+"Yes, I've done that, granny."
+
+"You intend to respect your father's wishes?"
+
+"It depends upon what you mean by respecting them.  I do justice to
+the feelings by which they were dictated."
+
+"What do you mean by justice?" the old lady retorted.
+
+The girl was silent a moment; then she said:  "You'll see my idea of
+it."
+
+"I see it already!  You'll go and live with her."
+
+"I shall talk the situation over with her to-morrow and tell her that
+I think that will be best."
+
+"Best for her, no doubt!"
+
+"What's best for her is best for me."
+
+"And for your brother and sister?"  As the girl made no reply to this
+her grandmother went on:  "What's best for them is that you should
+acknowledge some responsibility in regard to them and, considering
+how young they are, try and do something for them."
+
+"They must do as I've done--they must act for themselves.  They have
+their means now, and they're free."
+
+"Free?  They're mere children."
+
+"Let me remind you that Eric is older than I."
+
+"He doesn't like his mother," said the old lady, as if that were an
+answer.
+
+"I never said he did.  And she adores him."
+
+"Oh, your mother's adorations!"
+
+"Don't abuse her now," the girl rejoined, after a pause.
+
+The old lady forbore to abuse her, but she made up for it the next
+moment by saying:  "It will be dreadful for Edith."
+
+"What will be dreadful?"
+
+"Your desertion of her."
+
+"The desertion's on her side."
+
+"Her consideration for her father does her honour."
+
+"Of course I'm a brute, n'en parlons plus," said the girl.  "We must
+go our respective ways," she added, in a tone of extreme wisdom and
+philosophy.
+
+Her grandmother straightened out her knitting and began to roll it
+up.  "Be so good as to ring for my maid," she said, after a minute.
+The young lady rang, and there was another wait and another conscious
+hush.  Before the maid came her mistress remarked:  "Of course then
+you'll not come to ME, you know."
+
+"What do you mean by 'coming' to you?"
+
+"I can't receive you on that footing."
+
+"She'll not come WITH me, if you mean that."
+
+"I don't mean that," said the old lady, getting up as her maid came
+in.  This attendant took her work from her, gave her an arm and
+helped her out of the room, while Rose Tramore, standing before the
+fire and looking into it, faced the idea that her grandmother's door
+would now under all circumstances be closed to her.  She lost no time
+however in brooding over this anomaly:  it only added energy to her
+determination to act.  All she could do to-night was to go to bed,
+for she felt utterly weary.  She had been living, in imagination, in
+a prospective struggle, and it had left her as exhausted as a real
+fight.  Moreover this was the culmination of a crisis, of weeks of
+suspense, of a long, hard strain.  Her father had been laid in his
+grave five days before, and that morning his will had been read.  In
+the afternoon she had got Edith off to St. Leonard's with their aunt
+Julia, and then she had had a wretched talk with Eric.  Lastly, she
+had made up her mind to act in opposition to the formidable will, to
+a clause which embodied if not exactly a provision, a recommendation
+singularly emphatic.  She went to bed and slept the sleep of the
+just.
+
+"Oh, my dear, how charming!  I must take another house!"  It was in
+these words that her mother responded to the announcement Rose had
+just formally made and with which she had vaguely expected to produce
+a certain dignity of effect.  In the way of emotion there was
+apparently no effect at all, and the girl was wise enough to know
+that this was not simply on account of the general line of non-
+allusion taken by the extremely pretty woman before her, who looked
+like her elder sister.  Mrs. Tramore had never manifested, to her
+daughter, the slightest consciousness that her position was peculiar;
+but the recollection of something more than that fine policy was
+required to explain such a failure, to appreciate Rose's sacrifice.
+It was simply a fresh reminder that she had never appreciated
+anything, that she was nothing but a tinted and stippled surface.
+Her situation was peculiar indeed.  She had been the heroine of a
+scandal which had grown dim only because, in the eyes of the London
+world, it paled in the lurid light of the contemporaneous.  That
+attention had been fixed on it for several days, fifteen years
+before; there had been a high relish of the vivid evidence as to his
+wife's misconduct with which, in the divorce-court, Charles Tramore
+had judged well to regale a cynical public.  The case was pronounced
+awfully bad, and he obtained his decree.  The folly of the wife had
+been inconceivable, in spite of other examples:  she had quitted her
+children, she had followed the "other fellow" abroad.  The other
+fellow hadn't married her, not having had time:  he had lost his life
+in the Mediterranean by the capsizing of a boat, before the
+prohibitory term had expired.
+
+Mrs. Tramore had striven to extract from this accident something of
+the austerity of widowhood; but her mourning only made her deviation
+more public, she was a widow whose husband was awkwardly alive.  She
+had not prowled about the Continent on the classic lines; she had
+come back to London to take her chance.  But London would give her no
+chance, would have nothing to say to her; as many persons had
+remarked, you could never tell how London would behave.  It would not
+receive Mrs. Tramore again on any terms, and when she was spoken of,
+which now was not often, it was inveterately said of her that she
+went nowhere.  Apparently she had not the qualities for which London
+compounds; though in the cases in which it does compound you may
+often wonder what these qualities are.  She had not at any rate been
+successful:  her lover was dead, her husband was liked and her
+children were pitied, for in payment for a topic London will
+parenthetically pity.  It was thought interesting and magnanimous
+that Charles Tramore had not married again.  The disadvantage to his
+children of the miserable story was thus left uncorrected, and this,
+rather oddly, was counted as HIS sacrifice.  His mother, whose
+arrangements were elaborate, looked after them a great deal, and they
+enjoyed a mixture of laxity and discipline under the roof of their
+aunt, Miss Tramore, who was independent, having, for reasons that the
+two ladies had exhaustively discussed, determined to lead her own
+life.  She had set up a home at St. Leonard's, and that contracted
+shore had played a considerable part in the upbringing of the little
+Tramores.  They knew about their mother, as the phrase was, but they
+didn't know her; which was naturally deemed more pathetic for them
+than for her.  She had a house in Chester Square and an income and a
+victoria--it served all purposes, as she never went out in the
+evening--and flowers on her window-sills, and a remarkable appearance
+of youth.  The income was supposed to be in part the result of a
+bequest from the man for whose sake she had committed the error of
+her life, and in the appearance of youth there was a slightly
+impertinent implication that it was a sort of afterglow of the same
+connection.
+
+Her children, as they grew older, fortunately showed signs of some
+individuality of disposition.  Edith, the second girl, clung to her
+aunt Julia; Eric, the son, clung frantically to polo; while Rose, the
+elder daughter, appeared to cling mainly to herself.  Collectively,
+of course, they clung to their father, whose attitude in the family
+group, however, was casual and intermittent.  He was charming and
+vague; he was like a clever actor who often didn't come to rehearsal.
+Fortune, which but for that one stroke had been generous to him, had
+provided him with deputies and trouble-takers, as well as with
+whimsical opinions, and a reputation for excellent taste, and whist
+at his club, and perpetual cigars on morocco sofas, and a beautiful
+absence of purpose.  Nature had thrown in a remarkably fine hand,
+which he sometimes passed over his children's heads when they were
+glossy from the nursery brush.  On Rose's eighteenth birthday he said
+to her that she might go to see her mother, on condition that her
+visits should be limited to an hour each time and to four in the
+year.  She was to go alone; the other children were not included in
+the arrangement.  This was the result of a visit that he himself had
+paid his repudiated wife at her urgent request, their only encounter
+during the fifteen years.  The girl knew as much as this from her
+aunt Julia, who was full of tell-tale secrecies.  She availed herself
+eagerly of the license, and in course of the period that elapsed
+before her father's death she spent with Mrs. Tramore exactly eight
+hours by the watch.  Her father, who was as inconsistent and
+disappointing as he was amiable, spoke to her of her mother only once
+afterwards.  This occasion had been the sequel of her first visit,
+and he had made no use of it to ask what she thought of the
+personality in Chester Square or how she liked it.  He had only said
+"Did she take you out?" and when Rose answered "Yes, she put me
+straight into a carriage and drove me up and down Bond Street," had
+rejoined sharply "See that that never occurs again."  It never did,
+but once was enough, every one they knew having happened to be in
+Bond Street at that particular hour.
+
+After this the periodical interview took place in private, in Mrs.
+Tramore's beautiful little wasted drawing-room.  Rose knew that, rare
+as these occasions were, her mother would not have kept her "all to
+herself" had there been anybody she could have shown her to.  But in
+the poor lady's social void there was no one; she had after all her
+own correctness and she consistently preferred isolation to inferior
+contacts.  So her daughter was subjected only to the maternal; it was
+not necessary to be definite in qualifying that.  The girl had by
+this time a collection of ideas, gathered by impenetrable processes;
+she had tasted, in the ostracism of her ambiguous parent, of the
+acrid fruit of the tree of knowledge.  She not only had an
+approximate vision of what every one had done, but she had a private
+judgment for each case.  She had a particular vision of her father,
+which did not interfere with his being dear to her, but which was
+directly concerned in her resolution, after his death, to do the
+special thing he had expressed the wish she should not do.  In the
+general estimate her grandmother and her grandmother's money had
+their place, and the strong probability that any enjoyment of the
+latter commodity would now be withheld from her.  It included Edith's
+marked inclination to receive the law, and doubtless eventually a
+more substantial memento, from Miss Tramore, and opened the question
+whether her own course might not contribute to make her sister's
+appear heartless.  The answer to this question however would depend
+on the success that might attend her own, which would very possibly
+be small.  Eric's attitude was eminently simple; he didn't care to
+know people who didn't know HIS people.  If his mother should ever
+get back into society perhaps he would take her up.  Rose Tramore had
+decided to do what she could to bring this consummation about; and
+strangely enough--so mixed were her superstitions and her heresies--a
+large part of her motive lay in the value she attached to such a
+consecration.
+
+Of her mother intrinsically she thought very little now, and if her
+eyes were fixed on a special achievement it was much more for the
+sake of that achievement and to satisfy a latent energy that was in
+her than because her heart was wrung by this sufferer.  Her heart had
+not been wrung at all, though she had quite held it out for the
+experience.  Her purpose was a pious game, but it was still
+essentially a game.  Among the ideas I have mentioned she had her
+idea of triumph.  She had caught the inevitable note, the pitch, on
+her very first visit to Chester Square.  She had arrived there in
+intense excitement, and her excitement was left on her hands in a
+manner that reminded her of a difficult air she had once heard sung
+at the opera when no one applauded the performer.  That flatness had
+made her sick, and so did this, in another way.  A part of her
+agitation proceeded from the fact that her aunt Julia had told her,
+in the manner of a burst of confidence, something she was not to
+repeat, that she was in appearance the very image of the lady in
+Chester Square.  The motive that prompted this declaration was
+between aunt Julia and her conscience; but it was a great emotion to
+the girl to find her entertainer so beautiful.  She was tall and
+exquisitely slim; she had hair more exactly to Rose Tramore's taste
+than any other she had ever seen, even to every detail in the way it
+was dressed, and a complexion and a figure of the kind that are
+always spoken of as "lovely."  Her eyes were irresistible, and so
+were her clothes, though the clothes were perhaps a little more
+precisely the right thing than the eyes.  Her appearance was marked
+to her daughter's sense by the highest distinction; though it may be
+mentioned that this had never been the opinion of all the world.  It
+was a revelation to Rose that she herself might look a little like
+that.  She knew however that aunt Julia had not seen her deposed
+sister-in-law for a long time, and she had a general impression that
+Mrs. Tramore was to-day a more complete production--for instance as
+regarded her air of youth--than she had ever been.  There was no
+excitement on her side--that was all her visitor's; there was no
+emotion--that was excluded by the plan, to say nothing of conditions
+more primal.  Rose had from the first a glimpse of her mother's plan.
+It was to mention nothing and imply nothing, neither to acknowledge,
+to explain nor to extenuate.  She would leave everything to her
+child; with her child she was secure.  She only wanted to get back
+into society; she would leave even that to her child, whom she
+treated not as a high-strung and heroic daughter, a creature of
+exaltation, of devotion, but as a new, charming, clever, useful
+friend, a little younger than herself.  Already on that first day she
+had talked about dressmakers.  Of course, poor thing, it was to be
+remembered that in her circumstances there were not many things she
+COULD talk about.  "She wants to go out again; that's the only thing
+in the wide world she wants," Rose had promptly, compendiously said
+to herself.  There had been a sequel to this observation, uttered, in
+intense engrossment, in her own room half an hour before she had, on
+the important evening, made known her decision to her grandmother:
+"Then I'll TAKE her out!"
+
+"She'll drag you down, she'll drag you down!" Julia Tramore permitted
+herself to remark to her niece, the next day, in a tone of feverish
+prophecy.
+
+As the girl's own theory was that all the dragging there might be
+would be upward, and moreover administered by herself, she could look
+at her aunt with a cold and inscrutable eye.
+
+"Very well, then, I shall be out of your sight, from the pinnacle you
+occupy, and I sha'n't trouble you."
+
+"Do you reproach me for my disinterested exertions, for the way I've
+toiled over you, the way I've lived for you?" Miss Tramore demanded.
+
+"Don't reproach ME for being kind to my mother and I won't reproach
+you for anything."
+
+"She'll keep you out of everything--she'll make you miss everything,"
+Miss Tramore continued.
+
+"Then she'll make me miss a great deal that's odious," said the girl.
+
+"You're too young for such extravagances," her aunt declared.
+
+"And yet Edith, who is younger than I, seems to be too old for them:
+how do you arrange that?  My mother's society will make me older,"
+Rose replied.
+
+"Don't speak to me of your mother; you HAVE no mother."
+
+"Then if I'm an orphan I must settle things for myself."
+
+"Do you justify her, do you approve of her?" cried Miss Tramore, who
+was inferior to her niece in capacity for retort and whose
+limitations made the girl appear pert.
+
+Rose looked at her a moment in silence; then she said, turning away:
+"I think she's charming."
+
+"And do you propose to become charming in the same manner?"
+
+"Her manner is perfect; it would be an excellent model.  But I can't
+discuss my mother with you."
+
+"You'll have to discuss her with some other people!" Miss Tramore
+proclaimed, going out of the room.
+
+Rose wondered whether this were a general or a particular
+vaticination.  There was something her aunt might have meant by it,
+but her aunt rarely meant the best thing she might have meant.  Miss
+Tramore had come up from St. Leonard's in response to a telegram from
+her own parent, for an occasion like the present brought with it, for
+a few hours, a certain relaxation of their dissent.  "Do what you can
+to stop her," the old lady had said; but her daughter found that the
+most she could do was not much.  They both had a baffled sense that
+Rose had thought the question out a good deal further than they; and
+this was particularly irritating to Mrs. Tramore, as consciously the
+cleverer of the two.  A question thought out as far as SHE could
+think it had always appeared to her to have performed its human uses;
+she had never encountered a ghost emerging from that extinction.
+Their great contention was that Rose would cut herself off; and
+certainly if she wasn't afraid of that she wasn't afraid of anything.
+Julia Tramore could only tell her mother how little the girl was
+afraid.  She was already prepared to leave the house, taking with her
+the possessions, or her share of them, that had accumulated there
+during her father's illness.  There had been a going and coming of
+her maid, a thumping about of boxes, an ordering of four-wheelers; it
+appeared to old Mrs. Tramore that something of the objectionableness,
+the indecency, of her granddaughter's prospective connection had
+already gathered about the place.  It was a violation of the decorum
+of bereavement which was still fresh there, and from the indignant
+gloom of the mistress of the house you might have inferred not so
+much that the daughter was about to depart as that the mother was
+about to arrive.  There had been no conversation on the dreadful
+subject at luncheon; for at luncheon at Mrs. Tramore's (her son never
+came to it) there were always, even after funerals and other
+miseries, stray guests of both sexes whose policy it was to be
+cheerful and superficial.  Rose had sat down as if nothing had
+happened--nothing worse, that is, than her father's death; but no one
+had spoken of anything that any one else was thinking of.
+
+Before she left the house a servant brought her a message from her
+grandmother--the old lady desired to see her in the drawing-room.
+She had on her bonnet, and she went down as if she were about to step
+into her cab.  Mrs. Tramore sat there with her eternal knitting, from
+which she forebore even to raise her eyes as, after a silence that
+seemed to express the fulness of her reprobation, while Rose stood
+motionless, she began:  "I wonder if you really understand what
+you're doing."
+
+"I think so.  I'm not so stupid."
+
+"I never thought you were; but I don't know what to make of you now.
+You're giving up everything."
+
+The girl was tempted to inquire whether her grandmother called
+herself "everything"; but she checked this question, answering
+instead that she knew she was giving up much.
+
+"You're taking a step of which you will feel the effect to the end of
+your days," Mrs. Tramore went on.
+
+"In a good conscience, I heartily hope," said Rose.
+
+"Your father's conscience was good enough for his mother; it ought to
+be good enough for his daughter."
+
+Rose sat down--she could afford to--as if she wished to be very
+attentive and were still accessible to argument.  But this
+demonstration only ushered in, after a moment, the surprising words
+"I don't think papa had any conscience."
+
+"What in the name of all that's unnatural do you mean?" Mrs. Tramore
+cried, over her glasses.  "The dearest and best creature that ever
+lived!"
+
+"He was kind, he had charming impulses, he was delightful.  But he
+never reflected."
+
+Mrs. Tramore stared, as if at a language she had never heard, a
+farrago, a galimatias.  Her life was made up of items, but she had
+never had to deal, intellectually, with a fine shade.  Then while her
+needles, which had paused an instant, began to fly again, she
+rejoined:  "Do you know what you are, my dear?  You're a dreadful
+little prig.  Where do you pick up such talk?"
+
+"Of course I don't mean to judge between them," Rose pursued.  "I can
+only judge between my mother and myself.  Papa couldn't judge for
+me."  And with this she got up.
+
+"One would think you were horrid.  I never thought so before."
+
+"Thank you for that."
+
+"You're embarking on a struggle with society," continued Mrs.
+Tramore, indulging in an unusual flight of oratory.  "Society will
+put you in your place."
+
+"Hasn't it too many other things to do?" asked the girl.
+
+This question had an ingenuity which led her grandmother to meet it
+with a merely provisional and somewhat sketchy answer.  "Your
+ignorance would be melancholy if your behaviour were not so insane."
+
+"Oh, no; I know perfectly what she'll do!" Rose replied, almost
+gaily.  "She'll drag me down."
+
+"She won't even do that," the old lady declared contradictiously.
+"She'll keep you forever in the same dull hole."
+
+"I shall come and see YOU, granny, when I want something more
+lively."
+
+"You may come if you like, but you'll come no further than the door.
+If you leave this house now you don't enter it again."
+
+Rose hesitated a moment.  "Do you really mean that?"
+
+"You may judge whether I choose such a time to joke."
+
+"Good-bye, then," said the girl.
+
+"Good-bye."
+
+Rose quitted the room successfully enough; but on the other side of
+the door, on the landing, she sank into a chair and buried her face
+in her hands.  She had burst into tears, and she sobbed there for a
+moment, trying hard to recover herself, so as to go downstairs
+without showing any traces of emotion, passing before the servants
+and again perhaps before aunt Julia.  Mrs. Tramore was too old to
+cry; she could only drop her knitting and, for a long time, sit with
+her head bowed and her eyes closed.
+
+Rose had reckoned justly with her aunt Julia; there were no footmen,
+but this vigilant virgin was posted at the foot of the stairs.  She
+offered no challenge however; she only said:  "There's some one in
+the parlour who wants to see you."  The girl demanded a name, but
+Miss Tramore only mouthed inaudibly and winked and waved.  Rose
+instantly reflected that there was only one man in the world her aunt
+would look such deep things about.  "Captain Jay?" her own eyes
+asked, while Miss Tramore's were those of a conspirator:  they were,
+for a moment, the only embarrassed eyes Rose had encountered that
+day.  They contributed to make aunt Julia's further response evasive,
+after her niece inquired if she had communicated in advance with this
+visitor.  Miss Tramore merely said that he had been upstairs with her
+mother--hadn't she mentioned it?--and had been waiting for her.  She
+thought herself acute in not putting the question of the girl's
+seeing him before her as a favour to him or to herself; she presented
+it as a duty, and wound up with the proposition:  "It's not fair to
+him, it's not kind, not to let him speak to you before you go."
+
+"What does he want to say?" Rose demanded.
+
+"Go in and find out."
+
+She really knew, for she had found out before; but after standing
+uncertain an instant she went in.  "The parlour" was the name that
+had always been borne by a spacious sitting-room downstairs, an
+apartment occupied by her father during his frequent phases of
+residence in Hill Street--episodes increasingly frequent after his
+house in the country had, in consequence, as Rose perfectly knew, of
+his spending too much money, been disposed of at a sacrifice which he
+always characterised as horrid.  He had been left with the place in
+Hertfordshire and his mother with the London house, on the general
+understanding that they would change about; but during the last years
+the community had grown more rigid, mainly at his mother's expense.
+The parlour was full of his memory and his habits and his things--his
+books and pictures and bibelots, objects that belonged now to Eric.
+Rose had sat in it for hours since his death; it was the place in
+which she could still be nearest to him.  But she felt far from him
+as Captain Jay rose erect on her opening the door.  This was a very
+different presence.  He had not liked Captain Jay.  She herself had,
+but not enough to make a great complication of her father's coldness.
+This afternoon however she foresaw complications.  At the very outset
+for instance she was not pleased with his having arranged such a
+surprise for her with her grandmother and her aunt.  It was probably
+aunt Julia who had sent for him; her grandmother wouldn't have done
+it.  It placed him immediately on their side, and Rose was almost as
+disappointed at this as if she had not known it was quite where he
+would naturally be.  He had never paid her a special visit, but if
+that was what he wished to do why shouldn't he have waited till she
+should be under her mother's roof?  She knew the reason, but she had
+an angry prospect of enjoyment in making him express it.  She liked
+him enough, after all, if it were measured by the idea of what she
+could make him do.
+
+In Bertram Jay the elements were surprisingly mingled; you would have
+gone astray, in reading him, if you had counted on finding the
+complements of some of his qualities.  He would not however have
+struck you in the least as incomplete, for in every case in which you
+didn't find the complement you would have found the contradiction.
+He was in the Royal Engineers, and was tall, lean and high-
+shouldered.  He looked every inch a soldier, yet there were people
+who considered that he had missed his vocation in not becoming a
+parson.  He took a public interest in the spiritual life of the army.
+Other persons still, on closer observation, would have felt that his
+most appropriate field was neither the army nor the church, but
+simply the world--the social, successful, worldly world.  If he had a
+sword in one hand and a Bible in the other he had a Court Guide
+concealed somewhere about his person.  His profile was hard and
+handsome, his eyes were both cold and kind, his dark straight hair
+was imperturbably smooth and prematurely streaked with grey.  There
+was nothing in existence that he didn't take seriously.  He had a
+first-rate power of work and an ambition as minutely organised as a
+German plan of invasion.  His only real recreation was to go to
+church, but he went to parties when he had time.  If he was in love
+with Rose Tramore this was distracting to him only in the same sense
+as his religion, and it was included in that department of his
+extremely sub-divided life.  His religion indeed was of an
+encroaching, annexing sort.  Seen from in front he looked diffident
+and blank, but he was capable of exposing himself in a way (to speak
+only of the paths of peace) wholly inconsistent with shyness.  He had
+a passion for instance for open-air speaking, but was not thought on
+the whole to excel in it unless he could help himself out with a
+hymn.  In conversation he kept his eyes on you with a kind of
+colourless candour, as if he had not understood what you were saying
+and, in a fashion that made many people turn red, waited before
+answering.  This was only because he was considering their remarks in
+more relations than they had intended.  He had in his face no
+expression whatever save the one just mentioned, and was, in his
+profession, already very distinguished.
+
+He had seen Rose Tramore for the first time on a Sunday of the
+previous March, at a house in the country at which she was staying
+with her father, and five weeks later he had made her, by letter, an
+offer of marriage.  She showed her father the letter of course, and
+he told her that it would give him great pleasure that she should
+send Captain Jay about his business.  "My dear child," he said, "we
+must really have some one who will be better fun than that."  Rose
+had declined the honour, very considerately and kindly, but not
+simply because her father wished it.  She didn't herself wish to
+detach this flower from the stem, though when the young man wrote
+again, to express the hope that he MIGHT hope--so long was he willing
+to wait--and ask if he might not still sometimes see her, she
+answered even more indulgently than at first.  She had shown her
+father her former letter, but she didn't show him this one; she only
+told him what it contained, submitting to him also that of her
+correspondent.  Captain Jay moreover wrote to Mr. Tramore, who
+replied sociably, but so vaguely that he almost neglected the subject
+under discussion--a communication that made poor Bertram ponder long.
+He could never get to the bottom of the superficial, and all the
+proprieties and conventions of life were profound to him.
+Fortunately for him old Mrs. Tramore liked him, he was satisfactory
+to her long-sightedness; so that a relation was established under
+cover of which he still occasionally presented himself in Hill
+Street--presented himself nominally to the mistress of the house.  He
+had had scruples about the veracity of his visits, but he had
+disposed of them; he had scruples about so many things that he had
+had to invent a general way, to dig a central drain.  Julia Tramore
+happened to meet him when she came up to town, and she took a view of
+him more benevolent than her usual estimate of people encouraged by
+her mother.  The fear of agreeing with that lady was a motive, but
+there was a stronger one, in this particular case, in the fear of
+agreeing with her niece, who had rejected him.  His situation might
+be held to have improved when Mr. Tramore was taken so gravely ill
+that with regard to his recovery those about him left their eyes to
+speak for their lips; and in the light of the poor gentleman's recent
+death it was doubtless better than it had ever been.
+
+He was only a quarter of an hour with the girl, but this gave him
+time to take the measure of it.  After he had spoken to her about her
+bereavement, very much as an especially mild missionary might have
+spoken to a beautiful Polynesian, he let her know that he had learned
+from her companions the very strong step she was about to take.  This
+led to their spending together ten minutes which, to her mind, threw
+more light on his character than anything that had ever passed
+between them.  She had always felt with him as if she were standing
+on an edge, looking down into something decidedly deep.  To-day the
+impression of the perpendicular shaft was there, but it was rather an
+abyss of confusion and disorder than the large bright space in which
+she had figured everything as ranged and pigeon-holed, presenting the
+appearance of the labelled shelves and drawers at a chemist's.  He
+discussed without an invitation to discuss, he appealed without a
+right to appeal.  He was nothing but a suitor tolerated after
+dismissal, but he took strangely for granted a participation in her
+affairs.  He assumed all sorts of things that made her draw back.  He
+implied that there was everything now to assist them in arriving at
+an agreement, since she had never informed him that he was positively
+objectionable; but that this symmetry would be spoiled if she should
+not be willing to take a little longer to think of certain
+consequences.  She was greatly disconcerted when she saw what
+consequences he meant and at his reminding her of them.  What on
+earth was the use of a lover if he was to speak only like one's
+grandmother and one's aunt?  He struck her as much in love with her
+and as particularly careful at the same time as to what he might say.
+He never mentioned her mother; he only alluded, indirectly but
+earnestly, to the "step."  He disapproved of it altogether, took an
+unexpectedly prudent, politic view of it.  He evidently also believed
+that she would be dragged down; in other words that she would not be
+asked out.  It was his idea that her mother would contaminate her, so
+that he should find himself interested in a young person discredited
+and virtually unmarriageable.  All this was more obvious to him than
+the consideration that a daughter should be merciful.  Where was his
+religion if he understood mercy so little, and where were his talent
+and his courage if he were so miserably afraid of trumpery social
+penalties?  Rose's heart sank when she reflected that a man supposed
+to be first-rate hadn't guessed that rather than not do what she
+could for her mother she would give up all the Engineers in the
+world.  She became aware that she probably would have been moved to
+place her hand in his on the spot if he had come to her saying "Your
+idea is the right one; put it through at every cost."  She couldn't
+discuss this with him, though he impressed her as having too much at
+stake for her to treat him with mere disdain.  She sickened at the
+revelation that a gentleman could see so much in mere vulgarities of
+opinion, and though she uttered as few words as possible, conversing
+only in sad smiles and headshakes and in intercepted movements toward
+the door, she happened, in some unguarded lapse from her reticence,
+to use the expression that she was disappointed in him.  He caught at
+it and, seeming to drop his field-glass, pressed upon her with
+nearer, tenderer eyes.
+
+"Can I be so happy as to believe, then, that you had thought of me
+with some confidence, with some faith?"
+
+"If you didn't suppose so, what is the sense of this visit?" Rose
+asked.
+
+"One can be faithful without reciprocity," said the young man.  "I
+regard you in a light which makes me want to protect you even if I
+have nothing to gain by it."
+
+"Yet you speak as if you thought you might keep me for yourself."
+
+"For YOURSELF.  I don't want you to suffer."
+
+"Nor to suffer yourself by my doing so," said Rose, looking down.
+
+"Ah, if you would only marry me next month!" he broke out
+inconsequently.
+
+"And give up going to mamma?" Rose waited to see if he would say
+"What need that matter?  Can't your mother come to us?"  But he said
+nothing of the sort; he only answered -
+
+"She surely would be sorry to interfere with the exercise of any
+other affection which I might have the bliss of believing that you
+are now free, in however small a degree, to entertain."
+
+Rose knew that her mother wouldn't be sorry at all; but she contented
+herself with rejoining, her hand on the door:  "Good-bye.  I sha'n't
+suffer.  I'm not afraid."
+
+"You don't know how terrible, how cruel, the world can be."
+
+"Yes, I do know.  I know everything!"
+
+The declaration sprang from her lips in a tone which made him look at
+her as he had never looked before, as if he saw something new in her
+face, as if he had never yet known her.  He hadn't displeased her so
+much but that she would like to give him that impression, and since
+she felt that she was doing so she lingered an instant for the
+purpose.  It enabled her to see, further, that he turned red; then to
+become aware that a carriage had stopped at the door.  Captain Jay's
+eyes, from where he stood, fell upon this arrival, and the nature of
+their glance made Rose step forward to look.  Her mother sat there,
+brilliant, conspicuous, in the eternal victoria, and the footman was
+already sounding the knocker.  It had been no part of the arrangement
+that she should come to fetch her; it had been out of the question--a
+stroke in such bad taste as would have put Rose in the wrong.  The
+girl had never dreamed of it, but somehow, suddenly, perversely, she
+was glad of it now; she even hoped that her grandmother and her aunt
+were looking out upstairs.
+
+"My mother has come for me.  Good-bye," she repeated; but this time
+her visitor had got between her and the door.
+
+"Listen to me before you go.  I will give you a life's devotion," the
+young man pleaded.  He really barred the way.
+
+She wondered whether her grandmother had told him that if her flight
+were not prevented she would forfeit money.  Then, vividly, it came
+over her that this would be what he was occupied with.  "I shall
+never think of you--let me go!" she cried, with passion.
+
+Captain Jay opened the door, but Rose didn't see his face, and in a
+moment she was out of the house.  Aunt Julia, who was sure to have
+been hovering, had taken flight before the profanity of the knock.
+
+"Heavens, dear, where did you get your mourning?" the lady in the
+victoria asked of her daughter as they drove away.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+
+Lady Maresfield had given her boy a push in his plump back and had
+said to him, "Go and speak to her now; it's your chance."  She had
+for a long time wanted this scion to make himself audible to Rose
+Tramore, but the opportunity was not easy to come by.  The case was
+complicated.  Lady Maresfield had four daughters, of whom only one
+was married.  It so happened moreover that this one, Mrs. Vaughan-
+Vesey, the only person in the world her mother was afraid of, was the
+most to be reckoned with.  The Honourable Guy was in appearance all
+his mother's child, though he was really a simpler soul.  He was
+large and pink; large, that is, as to everything but the eyes, which
+were diminishing points, and pink as to everything but the hair,
+which was comparable, faintly, to the hue of the richer rose.  He had
+also, it must be conceded, very small neat teeth, which made his
+smile look like a young lady's.  He had no wish to resemble any such
+person, but he was perpetually smiling, and he smiled more than ever
+as he approached Rose Tramore, who, looking altogether, to his mind,
+as a pretty girl should, and wearing a soft white opera-cloak over a
+softer black dress, leaned alone against the wall of the vestibule at
+Covent Garden while, a few paces off, an old gentleman engaged her
+mother in conversation.  Madame Patti had been singing, and they were
+all waiting for their carriages.  To their ears at present came a
+vociferation of names and a rattle of wheels.  The air, through
+banging doors, entered in damp, warm gusts, heavy with the stale,
+slightly sweet taste of the London season when the London season is
+overripe and spoiling.
+
+Guy Mangler had only three minutes to reestablish an interrupted
+acquaintance with our young lady.  He reminded her that he had danced
+with her the year before, and he mentioned that he knew her brother.
+His mother had lately been to see old Mrs. Tramore, but this he did
+not mention, not being aware of it.  That visit had produced, on Lady
+Maresfield's part, a private crisis, engendered ideas.  One of them
+was that the grandmother in Hill Street had really forgiven the
+wilful girl much more than she admitted.  Another was that there
+would still be some money for Rose when the others should come into
+theirs.  Still another was that the others would come into theirs at
+no distant date; the old lady was so visibly going to pieces.  There
+were several more besides, as for instance that Rose had already
+fifteen hundred a year from her father.  The figure had been betrayed
+in Hill Street; it was part of the proof of Mrs. Tramore's
+decrepitude.  Then there was an equal amount that her mother had to
+dispose of and on which the girl could absolutely count, though of
+course it might involve much waiting, as the mother, a person of
+gross insensibility, evidently wouldn't die of cold-shouldering.
+Equally definite, to do it justice, was the conception that Rose was
+in truth remarkably good looking, and that what she had undertaken to
+do showed, and would show even should it fail, cleverness of the
+right sort.  Cleverness of the right sort was exactly the quality
+that Lady Maresfield prefigured as indispensable in a young lady to
+whom she should marry her second son, over whose own deficiencies she
+flung the veil of a maternal theory that HIS cleverness was of a sort
+that was wrong.  Those who knew him less well were content to wish
+that he might not conceal it for such a scruple.  This enumeration of
+his mother's views does not exhaust the list, and it was in obedience
+to one too profound to be uttered even by the historian that, after a
+very brief delay, she decided to move across the crowded lobby.  Her
+daughter Bessie was the only one with her; Maggie was dining with the
+Vaughan-Veseys, and Fanny was not of an age.  Mrs. Tramore the
+younger showed only an admirable back--her face was to her old
+gentleman--and Bessie had drifted to some other people; so that it
+was comparatively easy for Lady Maresfield to say to Rose, in a
+moment:  "My dear child, are you never coming to see us?"
+
+"We shall be delighted to come if you'll ask us," Rose smiled.
+
+Lady Maresfield had been prepared for the plural number, and she was
+a woman whom it took many plurals to disconcert.  "I'm sure Guy is
+longing for another dance with you," she rejoined, with the most
+unblinking irrelevance.
+
+"I'm afraid we're not dancing again quite yet," said Rose, glancing
+at her mother's exposed shoulders, but speaking as if they were
+muffled in crape.
+
+Lady Maresfield leaned her head on one side and seemed almost
+wistful.  "Not even at my sister's ball?  She's to have something
+next week.  She'll write to you."
+
+Rose Tramore, on the spot, looking bright but vague, turned three or
+four things over in her mind.  She remembered that the sister of her
+interlocutress was the proverbially rich Mrs. Bray, a bankeress or a
+breweress or a builderess, who had so big a house that she couldn't
+fill it unless she opened her doors, or her mouth, very wide.  Rose
+had learnt more about London society during these lonely months with
+her mother than she had ever picked up in Hill Street.  The younger
+Mrs. Tramore was a mine of commerages, and she had no need to go out
+to bring home the latest intelligence.  At any rate Mrs. Bray might
+serve as the end of a wedge.  "Oh, I dare say we might think of
+that," Rose said.  "It would be very kind of your sister."
+
+"Guy'll think of it, won't you, Guy?" asked Lady Maresfield.
+
+"Rather!" Guy responded, with an intonation as fine as if he had
+learnt it at a music hall; while at the same moment the name of his
+mother's carriage was bawled through the place.  Mrs. Tramore had
+parted with her old gentleman; she turned again to her daughter.
+Nothing occurred but what always occurred, which was exactly this
+absence of everything--a universal lapse.  She didn't exist, even for
+a second, to any recognising eye.  The people who looked at her--of
+course there were plenty of those--were only the people who didn't
+exist for hers.  Lady Maresfield surged away on her son's arm.
+
+It was this noble matron herself who wrote, the next day, inclosing a
+card of invitation from Mrs. Bray and expressing the hope that Rose
+would come and dine and let her ladyship take her.  She should have
+only one of her own girls; Gwendolen Vesey was to take the other.
+Rose handed both the note and the card in silence to her mother; the
+latter exhibited only the name of Miss Tramore.  "You had much better
+go, dear," her mother said; in answer to which Miss Tramore slowly
+tore up the documents, looking with clear, meditative eyes out of the
+window.  Her mother always said "You had better go"--there had been
+other incidents--and Rose had never even once taken account of the
+observation.  She would make no first advances, only plenty of second
+ones, and, condoning no discrimination, would treat no omission as
+venial.  She would keep all concessions till afterwards; then she
+would make them one by one.  Fighting society was quite as hard as
+her grandmother had said it would be; but there was a tension in it
+which made the dreariness vibrate--the dreariness of such a winter as
+she had just passed.  Her companion had cried at the end of it, and
+she had cried all through; only her tears had been private, while her
+mother's had fallen once for all, at luncheon on the bleak Easter
+Monday--produced by the way a silent survey of the deadly square
+brought home to her that every creature but themselves was out of
+town and having tremendous fun.  Rose felt that it was useless to
+attempt to explain simply by her mourning this severity of solitude;
+for if people didn't go to parties (at least a few didn't) for six
+months after their father died, this was the very time other people
+took for coming to see them.  It was not too much to say that during
+this first winter of Rose's period with her mother she had no
+communication whatever with the world.  It had the effect of making
+her take to reading the new American books:  she wanted to see how
+girls got on by themselves.  She had never read so much before, and
+there was a legitimate indifference in it when topics failed with her
+mother.  They often failed after the first days, and then, while she
+bent over instructive volumes, this lady, dressed as if for an
+impending function, sat on the sofa and watched her.  Rose was not
+embarrassed by such an appearance, for she could reflect that, a
+little before, her companion had not even a girl who had taken refuge
+in queer researches to look at.  She was moreover used to her
+mother's attitude by this time.  She had her own description of it:
+it was the attitude of waiting for the carriage.  If they didn't go
+out it was not that Mrs. Tramore was not ready in time, and Rose had
+even an alarmed prevision of their some day always arriving first.
+Mrs. Tramore's conversation at such moments was abrupt, inconsequent
+and personal.  She sat on the edge of sofas and chairs and glanced
+occasionally at the fit of her gloves (she was perpetually gloved,
+and the fit was a thing it was melancholy to see wasted), as people
+do who are expecting guests to dinner.  Rose used almost to fancy
+herself at times a perfunctory husband on the other side of the fire.
+
+What she was not yet used to--there was still a charm in it--was her
+mother's extraordinary tact.  During the years they lived together
+they never had a discussion; a circumstance all the more remarkable
+since if the girl had a reason for sparing her companion (that of
+being sorry for her) Mrs. Tramore had none for sparing her child.
+She only showed in doing so a happy instinct--the happiest thing
+about her.  She took in perfection a course which represented
+everything and covered everything; she utterly abjured all authority.
+She testified to her abjuration in hourly ingenious, touching ways.
+In this manner nothing had to be talked over, which was a mercy all
+round.  The tears on Easter Monday were merely a nervous gust, to
+help show she was not a Christmas doll from the Burlington Arcade;
+and there was no lifting up of the repentant Magdalen, no uttered
+remorse for the former abandonment of children.  Of the way she could
+treat her children her demeanour to this one was an example; it was
+an uninterrupted appeal to her eldest daughter for direction.  She
+took the law from Rose in every circumstance, and if you had noticed
+these ladies without knowing their history you would have wondered
+what tie was fine enough to make maturity so respectful to youth.  No
+mother was ever so filial as Mrs. Tramore, and there had never been
+such a difference of position between sisters.  Not that the elder
+one fawned, which would have been fearful; she only renounced--
+whatever she had to renounce.  If the amount was not much she at any
+rate made no scene over it.  Her hand was so light that Rose said of
+her secretly, in vague glances at the past, "No wonder people liked
+her!"  She never characterised the old element of interference with
+her mother's respectability more definitely than as "people."  They
+were people, it was true, for whom gentleness must have been
+everything and who didn't demand a variety of interests.  The desire
+to "go out" was the one passion that even a closer acquaintance with
+her parent revealed to Rose Tramore.  She marvelled at its strength,
+in the light of the poor lady's history:  there was comedy enough in
+this unquenchable flame on the part of a woman who had known such
+misery.  She had drunk deep of every dishonour, but the bitter cup
+had left her with a taste for lighted candles, for squeezing up
+staircases and hooking herself to the human elbow.  Rose had a vision
+of the future years in which this taste would grow with restored
+exercise--of her mother, in a long-tailed dress, jogging on and on
+and on, jogging further and further from her sins, through a century
+of the "Morning Post" and down the fashionable avenue of time.  She
+herself would then be very old--she herself would be dead.  Mrs.
+Tramore would cover a span of life for which such an allowance of sin
+was small.  The girl could laugh indeed now at that theory of her
+being dragged down.  If one thing were more present to her than
+another it was the very desolation of their propriety.  As she
+glanced at her companion, it sometimes seemed to her that if she had
+been a bad woman she would have been worse than that.  There were
+compensations for being "cut" which Mrs. Tramore too much neglected.
+
+The lonely old lady in Hill Street--Rose thought of her that way now-
+-was the one person to whom she was ready to say that she would come
+to her on any terms.  She wrote this to her three times over, and she
+knocked still oftener at her door.  But the old lady answered no
+letters; if Rose had remained in Hill Street it would have been her
+own function to answer them; and at the door, the butler, whom the
+girl had known for ten years, considered her, when he told her his
+mistress was not at home, quite as he might have considered a young
+person who had come about a place and of whose eligibility he took a
+negative view.  That was Rose's one pang, that she probably appeared
+rather heartless.  Her aunt Julia had gone to Florence with Edith for
+the winter, on purpose to make her appear more so; for Miss Tramore
+was still the person most scandalised by her secession.  Edith and
+she, doubtless, often talked over in Florence the destitution of the
+aged victim in Hill Street.  Eric never came to see his sister,
+because, being full both of family and of personal feeling, he
+thought she really ought to have stayed with his grandmother.  If she
+had had such an appurtenance all to herself she might have done what
+she liked with it; but he couldn't forgive such a want of
+consideration for anything of his.  There were moments when Rose
+would have been ready to take her hand from the plough and insist
+upon reintegration, if only the fierce voice of the old house had
+allowed people to look her up.  But she read, ever so clearly, that
+her grandmother had made this a question of loyalty to seventy years
+of virtue.  Mrs. Tramore's forlornness didn't prevent her drawing-
+room from being a very public place, in which Rose could hear certain
+words reverberate:  "Leave her alone; it's the only way to see how
+long she'll hold out."  The old woman's visitors were people who
+didn't wish to quarrel, and the girl was conscious that if they had
+not let her alone--that is if they had come to her from her
+grandmother--she might perhaps not have held out.  She had no friends
+quite of her own; she had not been brought up to have them, and it
+would not have been easy in a house which two such persons as her
+father and his mother divided between them.  Her father disapproved
+of crude intimacies, and all the intimacies of youth were crude.  He
+had married at five-and-twenty and could testify to such a truth.
+Rose felt that she shared even Captain Jay with her grandmother; she
+had seen what HE was worth.  Moreover, she had spoken to him at that
+last moment in Hill Street in a way which, taken with her former
+refusal, made it impossible that he should come near her again.  She
+hoped he went to see his protectress:  he could be a kind of
+substitute and administer comfort.
+
+It so happened, however, that the day after she threw Lady
+Maresfield's invitation into the wastepaper basket she received a
+visit from a certain Mrs. Donovan, whom she had occasionally seen in
+Hill Street.  She vaguely knew this lady for a busybody, but she was
+in a situation which even busybodies might alleviate.  Mrs. Donovan
+was poor, but honest--so scrupulously honest that she was perpetually
+returning visits she had never received.  She was always clad in
+weather-beaten sealskin, and had an odd air of being prepared for the
+worst, which was borne out by her denying that she was Irish.  She
+was of the English Donovans.
+
+"Dear child, won't you go out with me?" she asked.
+
+Rose looked at her a moment and then rang the bell.  She spoke of
+something else, without answering the question, and when the servant
+came she said:  "Please tell Mrs. Tramore that Mrs. Donovan has come
+to see her."
+
+"Oh, that'll be delightful; only you mustn't tell your grandmother!"
+the visitor exclaimed.
+
+"Tell her what?"
+
+"That I come to see your mamma."
+
+"You don't," said Rose.
+
+"Sure I hoped you'd introduce me!" cried Mrs. Donovan, compromising
+herself in her embarrassment.
+
+"It's not necessary; you knew her once."
+
+"Indeed and I've known every one once," the visitor confessed.
+
+Mrs. Tramore, when she came in, was charming and exactly right; she
+greeted Mrs. Donovan as if she had met her the week before last,
+giving her daughter such a new illustration of her tact that Rose
+again had the idea that it was no wonder "people" had liked her.  The
+girl grudged Mrs. Donovan so fresh a morsel as a description of her
+mother at home, rejoicing that she would be inconvenienced by having
+to keep the story out of Hill Street.  Her mother went away before
+Mrs. Donovan departed, and Rose was touched by guessing her reason--
+the thought that since even this circuitous personage had been moved
+to come, the two might, if left together, invent some remedy.  Rose
+waited to see what Mrs. Donovan had in fact invented.
+
+"You won't come out with me then?"
+
+"Come out with you?"
+
+"My daughters are married.  You know I'm a lone woman.  It would be
+an immense pleasure to me to have so charming a creature as yourself
+to present to the world."
+
+"I go out with my mother," said Rose, after a moment.
+
+"Yes, but sometimes when she's not inclined?"
+
+"She goes everywhere she wants to go," Rose continued, uttering the
+biggest fib of her life and only regretting it should be wasted on
+Mrs. Donovan.
+
+"Ah, but do you go everywhere YOU want?" the lady asked sociably.
+
+"One goes even to places one hates.  Every one does that."
+
+"Oh, what I go through!" this social martyr cried.  Then she laid a
+persuasive hand on the girl's arm.  "Let me show you at a few places
+first, and then we'll see.  I'll bring them all here."
+
+"I don't think I understand you," replied Rose, though in Mrs.
+Donovan's words she perfectly saw her own theory of the case
+reflected.  For a quarter of a minute she asked herself whether she
+might not, after all, do so much evil that good might come.  Mrs.
+Donovan would take her out the next day, and be thankful enough to
+annex such an attraction as a pretty girl.  Various consequences
+would ensue and the long delay would be shortened; her mother's
+drawing-room would resound with the clatter of teacups.
+
+"Mrs. Bray's having some big thing next week; come with me there and
+I'll show you what I mane," Mrs. Donovan pleaded.
+
+"I see what you mane," Rose answered, brushing away her temptation
+and getting up.  "I'm much obliged to you."
+
+"You know you're wrong, my dear," said her interlocutress, with angry
+little eyes.
+
+"I'm not going to Mrs. Bray's."
+
+"I'll get you a kyard; it'll only cost me a penny stamp."
+
+"I've got one," said the girl, smiling.
+
+"Do you mean a penny stamp?"  Mrs. Donovan, especially at departure,
+always observed all the forms of amity.  "You can't do it alone, my
+darling," she declared.
+
+"Shall they call you a cab?" Rose asked.
+
+"I'll pick one up.  I choose my horse.  You know you require your
+start," her visitor went on.
+
+"Excuse my mother," was Rose's only reply.
+
+"Don't mention it.  Come to me when you need me.  You'll find me in
+the Red Book."
+
+"It's awfully kind of you."
+
+Mrs. Donovan lingered a moment on the threshold.  "Who will you HAVE
+now, my child?" she appealed.
+
+"I won't have any one!"  Rose turned away, blushing for her.  "She
+came on speculation," she said afterwards to Mrs. Tramore.
+
+Her mother looked at her a moment in silence.  "You can do it if you
+like, you know."
+
+Rose made no direct answer to this observation; she remarked instead:
+"See what our quiet life allows us to escape."
+
+"We don't escape it.  She has been here an hour."
+
+"Once in twenty years!  We might meet her three times a day."
+
+"Oh, I'd take her with the rest!" sighed Mrs. Tramore; while her
+daughter recognised that what her companion wanted to do was just
+what Mrs. Donovan was doing.  Mrs. Donovan's life was her ideal.
+
+On a Sunday, ten days later, Rose went to see one of her old
+governesses, of whom she had lost sight for some time and who had
+written to her that she was in London, unoccupied and ill.  This was
+just the sort of relation into which she could throw herself now with
+inordinate zeal; the idea of it, however, not preventing a foretaste
+of the queer expression in the excellent lady's face when she should
+mention with whom she was living.  While she smiled at this picture
+she threw in another joke, asking herself if Miss Hack could be held
+in any degree to constitute the nucleus of a circle.  She would come
+to see her, in any event--come the more the further she was dragged
+down.  Sunday was always a difficult day with the two ladies--the
+afternoons made it so apparent that they were not frequented.  Her
+mother, it is true, was comprised in the habits of two or three old
+gentlemen--she had for a long time avoided male friends of less than
+seventy--who disliked each other enough to make the room, when they
+were there at once, crack with pressure.  Rose sat for a long time
+with Miss Hack, doing conscientious justice to the conception that
+there could be troubles in the world worse than her own; and when she
+came back her mother was alone, but with a story to tell of a long
+visit from Mr. Guy Mangler, who had waited and waited for her return.
+"He's in love with you; he's coming again on Tuesday," Mrs. Tramore
+announced.
+
+"Did he say so?"
+
+"That he's coming back on Tuesday?"
+
+"No, that he's in love with me."
+
+"He didn't need, when he stayed two hours."
+
+"With you?  It's you he's in love with, mamma!"
+
+"That will do as well," laughed Mrs. Tramore.  "For all the use we
+shall make of him!" she added in a moment.
+
+"We shall make great use of him.  His mother sent him."
+
+"Oh, she'll never come!"
+
+"Then HE sha'n't," said Rose.  Yet he was admitted on the Tuesday,
+and after she had given him his tea Mrs. Tramore left the young
+people alone.  Rose wished she hadn't--she herself had another view.
+At any rate she disliked her mother's view, which she had easily
+guessed.  Mr. Mangler did nothing but say how charming he thought his
+hostess of the Sunday, and what a tremendously jolly visit he had
+had.  He didn't remark in so many words "I had no idea your mother
+was such a good sort"; but this was the spirit of his simple
+discourse.  Rose liked it at first--a little of it gratified her;
+then she thought there was too much of it for good taste.  She had to
+reflect that one does what one can and that Mr. Mangler probably
+thought he was delicate.  He wished to convey that he desired to make
+up to her for the injustice of society.  Why shouldn't her mother
+receive gracefully, she asked (not audibly) and who had ever said she
+didn't?  Mr. Mangler had a great deal to say about the disappointment
+of his own parent over Miss Tramore's not having come to dine with
+them the night of his aunt's ball.
+
+"Lady Maresfield knows why I didn't come," Rose answered at last.
+
+"Ah, now, but _I_ don't, you know; can't you tell ME?" asked the
+young man.
+
+"It doesn't matter, if your mother's clear about it."
+
+"Oh, but why make such an awful mystery of it, when I'm dying to
+know?"
+
+He talked about this, he chaffed her about it for the rest of his
+visit:  he had at last found a topic after his own heart.  If her
+mother considered that he might be the emblem of their redemption he
+was an engine of the most primitive construction.  He stayed and
+stayed; he struck Rose as on the point of bringing out something for
+which he had not quite, as he would have said, the cheek.  Sometimes
+she thought he was going to begin:  "By the way, my mother told me to
+propose to you."  At other moments he seemed charged with the
+admission:  "I say, of course I really know what you're trying to do
+for her," nodding at the door:  "therefore hadn't we better speak of
+it frankly, so that I can help you with my mother, and more
+particularly with my sister Gwendolen, who's the difficult one?  The
+fact is, you see, they won't do anything for nothing.  If you'll
+accept me they'll call, but they won't call without something
+'down.'"  Mr. Mangler departed without their speaking frankly, and
+Rose Tramore had a hot hour during which she almost entertained,
+vindictively, the project of "accepting" the limpid youth until after
+she should have got her mother into circulation.  The cream of the
+vision was that she might break with him later.  She could read that
+this was what her mother would have liked, but the next time he came
+the door was closed to him, and the next and the next.
+
+In August there was nothing to do but to go abroad, with the sense on
+Rose's part that the battle was still all to fight; for a round of
+country visits was not in prospect, and English watering-places
+constituted one of the few subjects on which the girl had heard her
+mother express herself with disgust.  Continental autumns had been
+indeed for years, one of the various forms of Mrs. Tramore's
+atonement, but Rose could only infer that such fruit as they had
+borne was bitter.  The stony stare of Belgravia could be practised at
+Homburg; and somehow it was inveterately only gentlemen who sat next
+to her at the table d'hote at Cadenabbia.  Gentlemen had never been
+of any use to Mrs. Tramore for getting back into society; they had
+only helped her effectually to get out of it.  She once dropped, to
+her daughter, in a moralising mood, the remark that it was
+astonishing how many of them one could know without its doing one any
+good.  Fifty of them--even very clever ones--represented a value
+inferior to that of one stupid woman.  Rose wondered at the offhand
+way in which her mother could talk of fifty clever men; it seemed to
+her that the whole world couldn't contain such a number.  She had a
+sombre sense that mankind must be dull and mean.  These cogitations
+took place in a cold hotel, in an eternal Swiss rain, and they had a
+flat echo in the transalpine valleys, as the lonely ladies went
+vaguely down to the Italian lakes and cities.  Rose guided their
+course, at moments, with a kind of aimless ferocity; she moved
+abruptly, feeling vulgar and hating their life, though destitute of
+any definite vision of another life that would have been open to her.
+She had set herself a task and she clung to it; but she appeared to
+herself despicably idle.  She had succeeded in not going to Homburg
+waters, where London was trying to wash away some of its stains; that
+would be too staring an advertisement of their situation.  The main
+difference in situations to her now was the difference of being more
+or less pitied, at the best an intolerable danger; so that the places
+she preferred were the unsuspicious ones.  She wanted to triumph with
+contempt, not with submission.
+
+One morning in September, coming with her mother out of the marble
+church at Milan, she perceived that a gentleman who had just passed
+her on his way into the cathedral and whose face she had not noticed,
+had quickly raised his hat, with a suppressed ejaculation.  She
+involuntarily glanced back; the gentleman had paused, again
+uncovering, and Captain Jay stood saluting her in the Italian
+sunshine.  "Oh, good-morning!" she said, and walked on, pursuing her
+course; her mother was a little in front.  She overtook her in a
+moment, with an unreasonable sense, like a gust of cold air, that men
+were worse than ever, for Captain Jay had apparently moved into the
+church.  Her mother turned as they met, and suddenly, as she looked
+back, an expression of peculiar sweetness came into this lady's eyes.
+It made Rose's take the same direction and rest a second time on
+Captain Jay, who was planted just where he had stood a minute before.
+He immediately came forward, asking Rose with great gravity if he
+might speak to her a moment, while Mrs. Tramore went her way again.
+He had the expression of a man who wished to say something very
+important; yet his next words were simple enough and consisted of the
+remark that he had not seen her for a year.
+
+"Is it really so much as that?" asked Rose.
+
+"Very nearly.  I would have looked you up, but in the first place I
+have been very little in London, and in the second I believed it
+wouldn't have done any good."
+
+"You should have put that first," said the girl.  "It wouldn't have
+done any good."
+
+He was silent over this a moment, in his customary deciphering way;
+but the view he took of it did not prevent him from inquiring, as she
+slowly followed her mother, if he mightn't walk with her now.  She
+answered with a laugh that it wouldn't do any good but that he might
+do as he liked.  He replied without the slightest manifestation of
+levity that it would do more good than if he didn't, and they
+strolled together, with Mrs. Tramore well before them, across the
+big, amusing piazza, where the front of the cathedral makes a sort of
+builded light.  He asked a question or two and he explained his own
+presence:  having a month's holiday, the first clear time for several
+years, he had just popped over the Alps.  He inquired if Rose had
+recent news of the old lady in Hill Street, and it was the only
+tortuous thing she had ever heard him say.
+
+"I have had no communication of any kind from her since I parted with
+you under her roof.  Hasn't she mentioned that?" said Rose.
+
+"I haven't seen her."
+
+"I thought you were such great friends."
+
+Bertram Jay hesitated a moment.  "Well, not so much now."
+
+"What has she done to you?" Rose demanded.
+
+He fidgeted a little, as if he were thinking of something that made
+him unconscious of her question; then, with mild violence, he brought
+out the inquiry:  "Miss Tramore, are you happy?"
+
+She was startled by the words, for she on her side had been
+reflecting--reflecting that he had broken with her grandmother and
+that this pointed to a reason.  It suggested at least that he
+wouldn't now be so much like a mouthpiece for that cold ancestral
+tone.  She turned off his question--said it never was a fair one, as
+you gave yourself away however you answered it.  When he repeated
+"You give yourself away?" as if he didn't understand, she remembered
+that he had not read the funny American books.  This brought them to
+a silence, for she had enlightened him only by another laugh, and he
+was evidently preparing another question, which he wished carefully
+to disconnect from the former.  Presently, just as they were coming
+near Mrs. Tramore, it arrived in the words "Is this lady your
+mother?"  On Rose's assenting, with the addition that she was
+travelling with her, he said:  "Will you be so kind as to introduce
+me to her?"  They were so close to Mrs. Tramore that she probably
+heard, but she floated away with a single stroke of her paddle and an
+inattentive poise of her head.  It was a striking exhibition of the
+famous tact, for Rose delayed to answer, which was exactly what might
+have made her mother wish to turn; and indeed when at last the girl
+spoke she only said to her companion:  "Why do you ask me that?"
+
+"Because I desire the pleasure of making her acquaintance."
+
+Rose had stopped, and in the middle of the square they stood looking
+at each other.  "Do you remember what you said to me the last time I
+saw you?"
+
+"Oh, don't speak of that!"
+
+"It's better to speak of it now than to speak of it later."
+
+Bertram Jay looked round him, as if to see whether any one would
+hear; but the bright foreignness gave him a sense of safety, and he
+unexpectedly exclaimed:  "Miss Tramore, I love you more than ever!"
+
+"Then you ought to have come to see us," declared the girl, quickly
+walking on.
+
+"You treated me the last time as if I were positively offensive to
+you."
+
+"So I did, but you know my reason."
+
+"Because I protested against the course you were taking?  I did, I
+did!" the young man rang out, as if he still, a little, stuck to
+that.
+
+His tone made Rose say gaily:  "Perhaps you do so yet?"
+
+"I can't tell till I've seen more of your circumstances," he replied
+with eminent honesty.
+
+The girl stared; her light laugh filled the air.  "And it's in order
+to see more of them and judge that you wish to make my mother's
+acquaintance?"
+
+He coloured at this and he evaded; then he broke out with a confused
+"Miss Tramore, let me stay with you a little!" which made her stop
+again.
+
+"Your company will do us great honour, but there must be a rigid
+condition attached to our acceptance of it."
+
+"Kindly mention it," said Captain Jay, staring at the facade of the
+cathedral.
+
+"You don't take us on trial."
+
+"On trial?"
+
+"You don't make an observation to me--not a single one, ever, ever!--
+on the matter that, in Hill Street, we had our last words about."
+
+Captain Jay appeared to be counting the thousand pinnacles of the
+church.  "I think you really must be right," he remarked at last.
+
+"There you are!" cried Rose Tramore, and walked rapidly away.
+
+He caught up with her, he laid his hand upon her arm to stay her.
+"If you're going to Venice, let me go to Venice with you!"
+
+"You don't even understand my condition."
+
+"I'm sure you're right, then:  you must be right about everything."
+
+"That's not in the least true, and I don't care a fig whether you're
+sure or not.  Please let me go."
+
+He had barred her way, he kept her longer.  "I'll go and speak to
+your mother myself!"
+
+Even in the midst of another emotion she was amused at the air of
+audacity accompanying this declaration.  Poor Captain Jay might have
+been on the point of marching up to a battery.  She looked at him a
+moment; then she said:  "You'll be disappointed!"
+
+"Disappointed?"
+
+"She's much more proper than grandmamma, because she's much more
+amiable."
+
+"Dear Miss Tramore--dear Miss Tramore!" the young man murmured
+helplessly.
+
+"You'll see for yourself.  Only there's another condition," Rose went
+on.
+
+"Another?" he cried, with discouragement and alarm.
+
+"You must understand thoroughly, before you throw in your lot with us
+even for a few days, what our position really is."
+
+"Is it very bad?" asked Bertram Jay artlessly.
+
+"No one has anything to do with us, no one speaks to us, no one looks
+at us."
+
+"Really?" stared the young man.
+
+"We've no social existence, we're utterly despised."
+
+"Oh, Miss Tramore!" Captain Jay interposed.  He added quickly,
+vaguely, and with a want of presence of mind of which he as quickly
+felt ashamed:  "Do none of your family--?"  The question collapsed;
+the brilliant girl was looking at him.
+
+"We're extraordinarily happy," she threw out.
+
+"Now that's all I wanted to know!" he exclaimed, with a kind of
+exaggerated cheery reproach, walking on with her briskly to overtake
+her mother.
+
+He was not dining at their inn, but he insisted on coming that
+evening to their table d'hote.  He sat next Mrs. Tramore, and in the
+evening he accompanied them gallantly to the opera, at a third-rate
+theatre where they were almost the only ladies in the boxes.  The
+next day they went together by rail to the Charterhouse of Pavia, and
+while he strolled with the girl, as they waited for the homeward
+train, he said to her candidly:  "Your mother's remarkably pretty."
+She remembered the words and the feeling they gave her:  they were
+the first note of new era.  The feeling was somewhat that of an
+anxious, gratified matron who has "presented" her child and is
+thinking of the matrimonial market.  Men might be of no use, as Mrs.
+Tramore said, yet it was from this moment Rose dated the rosy dawn of
+her confidence that her protegee would go off; and when later, in
+crowded assemblies, the phrase, or something like it behind a hat or
+a fan, fell repeatedly on her anxious ear, "Your mother IS in
+beauty!" or "I've never seen her look better!" she had a faint vision
+of the yellow sunshine and the afternoon shadows on the dusty Italian
+platform.
+
+Mrs. Tramore's behaviour at this period was a revelation of her
+native understanding of delicate situations.  She needed no account
+of this one from her daughter--it was one of the things for which she
+had a scent; and there was a kind of loyalty to the rules of a game
+in the silent sweetness with which she smoothed the path of Bertram
+Jay.  It was clear that she was in her element in fostering the
+exercise of the affections, and if she ever spoke without thinking
+twice it is probable that she would have exclaimed, with some gaiety,
+"Oh, I know all about LOVE!"  Rose could see that she thought their
+companion would be a help, in spite of his being no dispenser of
+patronage.  The key to the gates of fashion had not been placed in
+his hand, and no one had ever heard of the ladies of his family, who
+lived in some vague hollow of the Yorkshire moors; but none the less
+he might administer a muscular push.  Yes indeed, men in general were
+broken reeds, but Captain Jay was peculiarly representative.
+Respectability was the woman's maximum, as honour was the man's, but
+this distinguished young soldier inspired more than one kind of
+confidence.  Rose had a great deal of attention for the use to which
+his respectability was put; and there mingled with this attention
+some amusement and much compassion.  She saw that after a couple of
+days he decidedly liked her mother, and that he was yet not in the
+least aware of it.  He took for granted that he believed in her but
+little; notwithstanding which he would have trusted her with anything
+except Rose herself.  His trusting her with Rose would come very
+soon.  He never spoke to her daughter about her qualities of
+character, but two or three of them (and indeed these were all the
+poor lady had, and they made the best show) were what he had in mind
+in praising her appearance.  When he remarked:  "What attention Mrs.
+Tramore seems to attract everywhere!" he meant:  "What a beautifully
+simple nature it is!" and when he said:  "There's something
+extraordinarily harmonious in the colours she wears," it signified:
+"Upon my word, I never saw such a sweet temper in my life!"  She lost
+one of her boxes at Verona, and made the prettiest joke of it to
+Captain Jay.  When Rose saw this she said to herself, "Next season we
+shall have only to choose."  Rose knew what was in the box.
+
+By the time they reached Venice (they had stopped at half a dozen
+little old romantic cities in the most frolicsome aesthetic way) she
+liked their companion better than she had ever liked him before.  She
+did him the justice to recognise that if he was not quite honest with
+himself he was at least wholly honest with HER.  She reckoned up
+everything he had been since he joined them, and put upon it all an
+interpretation so favourable to his devotion that, catching herself
+in the act of glossing over one or two episodes that had not struck
+her at the time as disinterested she exclaimed, beneath her breath,
+"Look out--you're falling in love!"  But if he liked correctness
+wasn't he quite right?  Could any one possibly like it more than SHE
+did?  And if he had protested against her throwing in her lot with
+her mother, this was not because of the benefit conferred but because
+of the injury received.  He exaggerated that injury, but this was the
+privilege of a lover perfectly willing to be selfish on behalf of his
+mistress.  He might have wanted her grandmother's money for her, but
+if he had given her up on first discovering that she was throwing
+away her chance of it (oh, this was HER doing too!) he had given up
+her grandmother as much:  not keeping well with the old woman, as
+some men would have done; not waiting to see how the perverse
+experiment would turn out and appeasing her, if it should promise
+tolerably, with a view to future operations.  He had had a simple-
+minded, evangelical, lurid view of what the girl he loved would find
+herself in for.  She could see this now--she could see it from his
+present bewilderment and mystification, and she liked him and pitied
+him, with the kindest smile, for the original naivete as well as for
+the actual meekness.  No wonder he hadn't known what she was in for,
+since he now didn't even know what he was in for himself.  Were there
+not moments when he thought his companions almost unnaturally good,
+almost suspiciously safe?  He had lost all power to verify that
+sketch of their isolation and declassement to which she had treated
+him on the great square at Milan.  The last thing he noticed was that
+they were neglected, and he had never, for himself, had such an
+impression of society.
+
+It could scarcely be enhanced even by the apparition of a large,
+fair, hot, red-haired young man, carrying a lady's fan in his hand,
+who suddenly stood before their little party as, on the third evening
+after their arrival in Venice, it partook of ices at one of the
+tables before the celebrated Cafe Florian.  The lamplit Venetian dusk
+appeared to have revealed them to this gentleman as he sat with other
+friends at a neighbouring table, and he had sprung up, with
+unsophisticated glee, to shake hands with Mrs. Tramore and her
+daughter.  Rose recalled him to her mother, who looked at first as
+though she didn't remember him but presently bestowed a sufficiently
+gracious smile on Mr. Guy Mangler.  He gave with youthful candour the
+history of his movements and indicated the whereabouts of his family:
+he was with his mother and sisters; they had met the Bob Veseys, who
+had taken Lord Whiteroy's yacht and were going to Constantinople.
+His mother and the girls, poor things, were at the Grand Hotel, but
+he was on the yacht with the Veseys, where they had Lord Whiteroy's
+cook.  Wasn't the food in Venice filthy, and wouldn't they come and
+look at the yacht?  She wasn't very fast, but she was awfully jolly.
+His mother might have come if she would, but she wouldn't at first,
+and now, when she wanted to, there were other people, who naturally
+wouldn't turn out for her.  Mr. Mangler sat down; he alluded with
+artless resentment to the way, in July, the door of his friends had
+been closed to him.  He was going to Constantinople, but he didn't
+care--if THEY were going anywhere; meanwhile his mother hoped awfully
+they would look her up.
+
+Lady Maresfield, if she had given her son any such message, which
+Rose disbelieved, entertained her hope in a manner compatible with
+her sitting for half an hour, surrounded by her little retinue,
+without glancing in the direction of Mrs. Tramore.  The girl,
+however, was aware that this was not a good enough instance of their
+humiliation; inasmuch as it was rather she who, on the occasion of
+their last contact, had held off from Lady Maresfield.  She was a
+little ashamed now of not having answered the note in which this
+affable personage ignored her mother.  She couldn't help perceiving
+indeed a dim movement on the part of some of the other members of the
+group; she made out an attitude of observation in the high-plumed
+head of Mrs. Vaughan-Vesey.  Mrs. Vesey, perhaps, might have been
+looking at Captain Jay, for as this gentleman walked back to the
+hotel with our young lady (they were at the "Britannia," and young
+Mangler, who clung to them, went in front with Mrs. Tramore) he
+revealed to Rose that he had some acquaintance with Lady Maresfield's
+eldest daughter, though he didn't know and didn't particularly want
+to know, her ladyship.  He expressed himself with more acerbity than
+she had ever heard him use (Christian charity so generally governed
+his speech) about the young donkey who had been prattling to them.
+They separated at the door of the hotel.  Mrs. Tramore had got rid of
+Mr. Mangler, and Bertram Jay was in other quarters.
+
+"If you know Mrs. Vesey, why didn't you go and speak to her?  I'm
+sure she saw you," Rose said.
+
+Captain Jay replied even more circumspectly than usual.  "Because I
+didn't want to leave you."
+
+"Well, you can go now; you're free," Rose rejoined.
+
+"Thank you.  I shall never go again."
+
+"That won't be civil," said Rose.
+
+"I don't care to be civil.  I don't like her."
+
+"Why don't you like her?"
+
+"You ask too many questions."
+
+"I know I do," the girl acknowledged.
+
+Captain Jay had already shaken hands with her, but at this he put out
+his hand again.  "She's too worldly," he murmured, while he held Rose
+Tramore's a moment.
+
+"Ah, you dear!" Rose exclaimed almost audibly as, with her mother,
+she turned away.
+
+The next morning, upon the Grand Canal, the gondola of our three
+friends encountered a stately barge which, though it contained
+several persons, seemed pervaded mainly by one majestic presence.
+During the instant the gondolas were passing each other it was
+impossible either for Rose Tramore or for her companions not to
+become conscious that this distinguished identity had markedly
+inclined itself--a circumstance commemorated the next moment, almost
+within earshot of the other boat, by the most spontaneous cry that
+had issued for many a day from the lips of Mrs. Tramore.  "Fancy, my
+dear, Lady Maresfield has bowed to us!"
+
+"We ought to have returned it," Rose answered; but she looked at
+Bertram Jay, who was opposite to her.  He blushed, and she blushed,
+and during this moment was born a deeper understanding than had yet
+existed between these associated spirits.  It had something to do
+with their going together that afternoon, without her mother, to look
+at certain out-of-the-way pictures as to which Ruskin had inspired
+her with a desire to see sincerely.  Mrs. Tramore expressed the wish
+to stay at home, and the motive of this wish--a finer shade than any
+that even Ruskin had ever found a phrase for--was not translated into
+misrepresenting words by either the mother or the daughter.  At San
+Giovanni in Bragora the girl and her companion came upon Mrs.
+Vaughan-Vesey, who, with one of her sisters, was also endeavouring to
+do the earnest thing.  She did it to Rose, she did it to Captain Jay,
+as well as to Gianbellini; she was a handsome, long-necked, aquiline
+person, of a different type from the rest of her family, and she did
+it remarkably well.  She secured our friends--it was her own
+expression--for luncheon, on the morrow, on the yacht, and she made
+it public to Rose that she would come that afternoon to invite her
+mother.  When the girl returned to the hotel, Mrs. Tramore mentioned,
+before Captain Jay, who had come up to their sitting-room, that Lady
+Maresfield had called.  "She stayed a long time--at least it seemed
+long!" laughed Mrs. Tramore.
+
+The poor lady could laugh freely now; yet there was some grimness in
+a colloquy that she had with her daughter after Bertram Jay had
+departed.  Before this happened Mrs. Vesey's card, scrawled over in
+pencil and referring to the morrow's luncheon, was brought up to Mrs.
+Tramore.
+
+"They mean it all as a bribe," said the principal recipient of these
+civilities.
+
+"As a bribe?" Rose repeated.
+
+"She wants to marry you to that boy; they've seen Captain Jay and
+they're frightened."
+
+"Well, dear mamma, I can't take Mr. Mangler for a husband."
+
+"Of course not.  But oughtn't we to go to the luncheon?"
+
+"Certainly we'll go to the luncheon," Rose said; and when the affair
+took place, on the morrow, she could feel for the first time that she
+was taking her mother out.  This appearance was somehow brought home
+to every one else, and it was really the agent of her success.  For
+it is of the essence of this simple history that, in the first place,
+that success dated from Mrs. Vesey's Venetian dejeuner, and in the
+second reposed, by a subtle social logic, on the very anomaly that
+had made it dubious.  There is always a chance in things, and Rose
+Tramore's chance was in the fact that Gwendolen Vesey was, as some
+one had said, awfully modern, an immense improvement on the exploded
+science of her mother, and capable of seeing what a "draw" there
+would be in the comedy, if properly brought out, of the reversed
+positions of Mrs. Tramore and Mrs. Tramore's diplomatic daughter.
+With a first-rate managerial eye she perceived that people would
+flock into any room--and all the more into one of hers--to see Rose
+bring in her dreadful mother.  She treated the cream of English
+society to this thrilling spectacle later in the autumn, when she
+once more "secured" both the performers for a week at Brimble.  It
+made a hit on the spot, the very first evening--the girl was felt to
+play her part so well.  The rumour of the performance spread; every
+one wanted to see it.  It was an entertainment of which, that winter
+in the country, and the next season in town, persons of taste desired
+to give their friends the freshness.  The thing was to make the
+Tramores come late, after every one had arrived.  They were engaged
+for a fixed hour, like the American imitator and the Patagonian
+contralto.  Mrs. Vesey had been the first to say the girl was awfully
+original, but that became the general view.
+
+Gwendolen Vesey had with her mother one of the few quarrels in which
+Lady Maresfield had really stood up to such an antagonist (the elder
+woman had to recognise in general in whose veins it was that the
+blood of the Manglers flowed) on account of this very circumstance of
+her attaching more importance to Miss Tramore's originality ("Her
+originality be hanged!" her ladyship had gone so far as
+unintelligently to exclaim) than to the prospects of the unfortunate
+Guy.  Mrs. Vesey actually lost sight of these pressing problems in
+her admiration of the way the mother and the daughter, or rather the
+daughter and the mother (it was slightly confusing) "drew."  It was
+Lady Maresfield's version of the case that the brazen girl (she was
+shockingly coarse) had treated poor Guy abominably.  At any rate it
+was made known, just after Easter, that Miss Tramore was to be
+married to Captain Jay.  The marriage was not to take place till the
+summer; but Rose felt that before this the field would practically be
+won.  There had been some bad moments, there had been several warm
+corners and a certain number of cold shoulders and closed doors and
+stony stares; but the breach was effectually made--the rest was only
+a question of time.  Mrs. Tramore could be trusted to keep what she
+had gained, and it was the dowagers, the old dragons with prominent
+fangs and glittering scales, whom the trick had already mainly
+caught.  By this time there were several houses into which the
+liberated lady had crept alone.  Her daughter had been expected with
+her, but they couldn't turn her out because the girl had stayed
+behind, and she was fast acquiring a new identity, that of a parental
+connection with the heroine of such a romantic story.  She was at
+least the next best thing to her daughter, and Rose foresaw the day
+when she would be valued principally as a memento of one of the
+prettiest episodes in the annals of London.  At a big official party,
+in June, Rose had the joy of introducing Eric to his mother.  She was
+a little sorry it was an official party--there were some other such
+queer people there; but Eric called, observing the shade, the next
+day but one.
+
+No observer, probably, would have been acute enough to fix exactly
+the moment at which the girl ceased to take out her mother and began
+to be taken out by her.  A later phase was more distinguishable--that
+at which Rose forbore to inflict on her companion a duality that
+might become oppressive.  She began to economise her force, she went
+only when the particular effect was required.  Her marriage was
+delayed by the period of mourning consequent upon the death of her
+grandmother, who, the younger Mrs. Tramore averred, was killed by the
+rumour of her own new birth.  She was the only one of the dragons who
+had not been tamed.  Julia Tramore knew the truth about this--she was
+determined such things should not kill HER.  She would live to do
+something--she hardly knew what.  The provisions of her mother's will
+were published in the "Illustrated News"; from which it appeared that
+everything that was not to go to Eric and to Julia was to go to the
+fortunate Edith.  Miss Tramore makes no secret of her own intentions
+as regards this favourite.
+
+Edith is not pretty, but Lady Maresfield is waiting for her; she is
+determined Gwendolen Vesey shall not get hold of her.  Mrs. Vesey
+however takes no interest in her at all.  She is whimsical, as befits
+a woman of her fashion; but there are two persons she is still very
+fond of, the delightful Bertram Jays.  The fondness of this pair, it
+must be added, is not wholly expended in return.  They are extremely
+united, but their life is more domestic than might have been expected
+from the preliminary signs.  It owes a portion of its concentration
+to the fact that Mrs. Tramore has now so many places to go to that
+she has almost no time to come to her daughter's.  She is, under her
+son-in-law's roof, a brilliant but a rare apparition, and the other
+day he remarked upon the circumstance to his wife.
+
+"If it hadn't been for you," she replied, smiling, "she might have
+had her regular place at our fireside."
+
+"Good heavens, how did I prevent it?" cried Captain Jay, with all the
+consciousness of virtue.
+
+"You ordered it otherwise, you goose!"  And she says, in the same
+spirit, whenever her husband commends her (which he does, sometimes,
+extravagantly) for the way she launched her mother:  "Nonsense, my
+dear--practically it was YOU!"
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Chaperon, by Henry James
+
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