What, if you’re not thinking of an utterly improper person, do your speeches to me signify? Who IS the beggarly sneak?” he went on as her response failed.
Her response, when it came, was cold but distinct. “He has every disposition to make the best of you. He only wants in fact to be kind to you.”
“Then he MUST be an ass! And how in the world can you consider it to improve him for me,” her father pursued, “that he’s also destitute and impossible? There are boobies and boobies even — the right and the wrong — and you appear to have carefully picked out one of the wrong. Your aunt knows THEM, by good fortune; I perfectly trust, as I tell you, her judgement for them; and you may take it from me once for all that I won’t hear of any one of whom SHE won’t.” Which led up to his last word. “If you should really defy us both — !”
“Well, papa?”
“Well, my sweet child, I think that — reduced to insignificance as you may fondly believe me — I should still not be quite without some way of making you regret it.”
She had a pause, a grave one, but not, as appeared, that she might measure this danger. “If I shouldn’t do it, you know, it wouldn’t be because I’m afraid of you.”
“Oh if you don’t do it,” he retorted, “you may be as bold as you like!”
“Then you can do nothing at all for me?”
He showed her, this time unmistakeably — it was before her there on the landing, at the top of the tortuous stairs and in the midst of the strange smell that seemed to cling to them — how vain her appeal remained. “I’ve never pretended to do more than my duty; I’ve given you the best and the clearest advice.” And then came up the spring that moved him. “If it only displeases you, you can go to Marian to be consoled.” What he couldn’t forgive was her dividing with Marian her scant share of the provision their mother had been able to leave them. She should have divided it with HIM.
Chapter II
She had gone to Mrs. Lowder on her mother’s death — gone with an effort the strain and pain of which made her at present, as she recalled them, reflect on the long way she had travelled since then. There had been nothing else to do — not a penny in the other house, nothing but unpaid bills that had gathered thick while its mistress lay mortally ill, and the admonition that there was nothing she must attempt to raise money on, since everything belonged to the “estate.” How the estate would turn out at best presented itself as a mystery altogether gruesome; it had proved in fact since then a residuum a trifle less scant than, with her sister, she had for some weeks feared; but the girl had had at the beginning rather a wounded sense of its being watched on behalf of Marian and her children. What on earth was it supposed that SHE wanted to do to it? She wanted in truth only to give up — to abandon her own interest, which she doubtless would already have done hadn’t the point been subject to Aunt Maud’s sharp intervention. Aunt Maud’s intervention was all sharp now, and the other point, the great one, was that it was to be, in this light, either all put up with or all declined. Yet at the winter’s end, nevertheless, she could scarce have said what stand she conceived she had taken. It wouldn’t be the first time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other people’s interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to them — it seemed really the way to live — the version that met their convenience.
The tall rich heavy house at Lancaster Gate, on the other side of the Park and the long South Kensington stretches, had figured to her, through childhood, through girlhood, as the remotest limit of her vague young world. It was further off and more occasional than anything else in the comparatively compact circle in which she revolved, and seemed, by a rigour early marked, to be reached through long, straight, discouraging vistas, perfect telescopes of streets, and which kept lengthening and straightening, whereas almost everything else in life was either at the worst roundabout Cromwell Road or at the furthest in the nearer parts of Kensington Gardens. Mrs. Lowder was her only “real” aunt, not the wife of an uncle, and had been thereby, both in ancient days and when the greater trouble came, the person, of all persons, properly to make some sign; in accord with which our young woman’s feeling was founded on the impression, quite cherished for years, that the signs made across the interval just mentioned had never been really in the note of the situation. The main office of this relative for the young Croys — apart from giving them their fixed measure of social greatness — had struck them as being to form them to a conception of what they were not to expect. When Kate came to think matters over with wider knowledge, she failed quite to see how Aunt Maud could have been different — she had rather perceived by this time how many other things might have been; yet she also made out that if they had all consciously lived under a liability to the chill breath of ultima Thule they couldn’t either, on the facts, very well have done less. What in the event appeared established was that if Mrs. Lowder had disliked them she yet hadn’t disliked them so much as they supposed. It had at any rate been for the purpose of showing how she struggled with her aversion that she sometimes came to see them, that she at regular periods invited them to her house and in short, as it now looked, kept them along on the terms that would best give her sister the perennial luxury of a grievance. This sister, poor Mrs. Croy, the girl knew, had always judged her resentfully, and had brought them up, Marian, the boys and herself, to the idea of a particular attitude, for signs of the practice of which they watched each other with awe. The attitude was to make plain to Aunt Maud, with the same regularity as her invitations, that they sufficed — thanks awfully — to themselves. But the ground of it, Kate lived to discern, was that this was only because SHE didn’t suffice to them. The little she offered was to be accepted under protest, yet not really because it was excessive. It wounded them — there was the rub! — because it fell short.
The number of new things our young lady looked out on from the high south window that hung over the Park — this number was so great (though some of the things were only old ones altered and, as the phrase was of other matters, done up) that life at present turned to her view from week to week more and more the face of a striking and distinguished stranger. She had reached a great age — for it quite seemed to her that at twenty-five it was late to reconsider, and her most general sense was a shade of regret that she hadn’t known earlier. The world was different — whether for worse or for better — from her rudimentary readings, and it gave her the feeling of a wasted past. If she had only known sooner she might have arranged herself more to meet it. She made at all events discoveries every day, some of which were about herself and others about other persons. Two of these — one under each head — more particularly engaged, in alternation, her anxiety. She saw as she had never seen before how material things spoke to her. She saw, and she blushed to see, that if in contrast with some of its old aspects life now affected her as a dress successfully “done up,” this was exactly by reason of the trimmings and lace, was a matter of ribbons and silk and velvet. She had a dire accessibility to pleasure from such sources. She liked the charming quarters her aunt had assigned her — liked them literally more than she had in all her other days liked anything; and nothing could have been more uneasy than her suspicion of her relative’s view of this truth. Her relative was prodigious — she had never done her relative justice. These larger conditions all tasted of her, from morning till night; but she was a person in respect to whom the growth of acquaintance could only — strange as it might seem — keep your heart in your mouth.
The girl’s second great discovery was that, so far from having been for Mrs. Lowder a subject of superficial consideration, the blighted home in Lexham Gardens had haunted her nights and her days. Kate had spent, all winter, hours of observation that were not less pointed for being spent alone; recent events, which her mourning explained, assured her a measure of isolation, and it was in the isolation above all that her neighbour’s influence
