They come in such odd places. Why should she sigh because I have a contented nature? Ought she not rather to rejoice? But the extremely religious people I have known have all sighed an immense deal. Well, I won't probe into that now, though I rather long to.
'I suppose it's because it has been a fine day,' I said, foolishly going on explaining to a person already satisfied.
My step-mother looked up sharply. 'But it has not been fine at all, Rose-Marie,' she said. 'The sun has not appeared once all day.'
'What?' said I, for a moment genuinely surprised. I couldn't help being happy, and I don't believe really happy people are ever in the least aware that the sun is not shining. 'Oh well,' I hurried on, 'perhaps not an Italian blue sky, but still mild, and very sweet, and November always smells of violets, and that's another thing to be pleased about.'
'Violets?' echoed my step-mother, who dislikes all talk about things one can neither eat nor warm oneself with nor read about in the Bible. 'Do you not miss Mr. Anstruther,' she asked, getting off such flabbinesses as quickly as she could, 'with whom you were so constantly talking?'
Of course I jumped. But I said 'yes,' quite naturally, I think.
It was then that she pulled me down by the feet to earth.
'He has a great future before him,' she said. 'A young man so clever, so good-looking, and so well-connected may rise to anything. Martens tells me he has the most brilliant prospects. He will be a great ornament to the English diplomatic service. Martens says his father's hopes are all centred on this only son. And as he has very little money and much will be required, Roger,'—she said it indeed—'is to marry as soon as possible, some one who will help him in every way, some one as wealthy as she is well-born.'
I murmured something suitable; I think a commendation of the plan as prudent.
'No one could help liking Roger,' she went on—Roger, do you like being Rogered?—' and my only fear is, and Martens fears it too, that he will entangle himself with some undesirable girl. Then he is ruined. There would be no hope for him.'
'But why-' I began; then suffocated a moment behind a towel. 'But why,' I said again, gasping, 'should he?'
'Well, let us hope he will not. I fear, though, he is soft. Still, he has steered safely through a year often dangerous to young men. It is true his father could not have sent him to a safer place than my house. You so sensible-' oh Roger!
'Besides being arrived at an age when serious and practical thoughts replace the foolish sentimentalness of earlier years,'—oh Roger, I'm twenty-five, and not a single one of my foolish sentimentalnesses has been replaced by anything at all. Do you think there is hope for me? Do you think it is very bad to feel exactly the same, just exactly as calf-like now as I did at fifteen?—'so that under my roof,' went on my step-mother, 'he has been perfectly safe. It would have been truly deplorable if his year in Germany had saddled him with a German wife from a circle beneath his own, a girl who had caught his passing fancy by youth and prettiness, and who would have spent the rest of her life dragging him down, an ever-present punishment with a faded face.'
She is eloquent, isn't she? Eloquent with the directness that instinctively finds out one's weak spots and aims straight at them. 'Luckily,' she concluded, 'there are no pretty faces in Jena just now.'
Then I held a towel up before my own, before my ignominious face, excluded by a most excellent critic from the category pretty, and felt as though I would hide it for ever in stacks of mending, in tubs of soup, in everything domestic and drudging and appropriate. But some of the words you rained down on me on Tuesday night between all those kisses came throbbing through my head, throbbing with great throbs through my whole body—Roger, did I hear wrong, or were they not 'Lovely—lovely—lovely'? And always kisses between, and always again that 'Lovely—lovely—lovely'? Where am I getting to? Perhaps I had better stop.
R.-M.
IV
Jena, Nov. 12th.
Dearest of Living Creatures, the joy your dear, dear letters gave me! You should have seen me seize the postman. His very fingers seemed rosy-tipped as he gave me the precious things. Two of them—two love-letters all at once. I could hardly bear to open them, and put an end to the wonderful moment. The first one, from Frankfurt, was so sweet—oh, so unutterably sweet—that I did sit gloating over the unbroken envelope of the other for at least five minutes, luxuriating, purring. I found out exactly where your hand must have been, by the simple process of getting a pen and pretending to write the address where you had written it, and then spent another five minutes most profitably kissing the place. Perhaps I ought not to tell you this, but there shall be no so-called maidenly simperings between you and me, no pretences, no affectations. If it was silly to kiss that blessed envelope, and silly to tell you that I did, why then I was silly, and there's an end of it.
Do you know that my mother's maiden name was Watson? Well, it was. I feel bound to tell you this, for it seems to add to my ineligibleness, and my duty plainly is to take you all round that and expatiate on it from every point of view. What has the grandson of Lord Grasmere—you never told me of Lord G. before, by the way—to do with the granddaughter of Watson? I don't even rightly know what Watson was. He was always for me an obscure and rather awful figure, shrouded in mystery. Of course Papa could tell me about him, but as he never has, and my mother rarely mentioned him, I fancy he was not anything I should be proud of. Do not, then, require of me that I shall tear the veil from Watson.
And of course your mother was handsome. How dare you doubt it? Look in the glass and be grateful to her. You know, though you may only have come within the spell of what you so sweetly call my darling brown eyes during the last few weeks, I fell a victim to your darling blue ones in the first five minutes. And how great was my joy when I discovered that your soul so exactly matched your outside. Your mother had blue eyes, too, and was very tall, and had an extraordinarily thoughtful face. Look, I tell you, in the glass, and you'll see she had; for I refuse to believe that your father, a man who talks port wine and tomatoes the whole of the first meal he has with his only son after a year's separation, is the parent you are like. Heavens, how I shake when I think of what will happen when you tell him about me. 'Sir,' he'll say, in a voice of thunder—or don't angry English parents call their sons 'sir' any more? Anyhow, they still do in books—'Sir, you are far too young to marry. Young men of twenty-five do not do such things. The lady, I conclude, will provide the income?
Roger, rushing to the point: She hasn't a pfenning.
Incensed Parent: Pfenning, sir? What, am I to understand she's a German?
Roger, dreadfully frightened: Please.
I.P., forcing himself to be calm: Who is this young person?
Roger: Fräulein Schmidt, of Jena.
I.P., now of a horrible calmness: And who, pray, is Fräulein Schmidt, of Jena?
Roger, pale but brave: The daughter of old Schmidt, in whose house I boarded. Her mother was English. She was a Watson.
I.P.: Sir, oblige me by going to the—
Roger goes.
Seriously, I think something of the sort will happen. I don't see how it can help giving your father a dreadful shock; and suppose he gets ill, and his blood
