complete freedom, why should she perpetually apply so
different a standard to her behavior in practice? Why, she
reflected, should there be this perpetual disparity between
the thought and the action, between the life of
solitude and the life of society, this astonishing precipice
on one side of which the soul was active and in
broad daylight, on the other side of which it was contemplative
and dark as night? Was it not possible to step
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from one to the other, erect, and without essential change?
Was this not the chance he offered her—the rare and
wonderful chance of friendship? At any rate, she told
Denham, with a sigh in which he heard both impatience
and relief, that she agreed; she thought him right; she
would accept his terms of friendship.
“Now,” she said, “let’s go and have tea.”
In fact, these principles having been laid down, a great
lightness of spirit showed itself in both of them. They
were both convinced that something of profound importance
had been settled, and could now give their attention
to their tea and the Gardens. They wandered in and
out of glass-houses, saw lilies swimming in tanks, breathed
in the scent of thousands of carnations, and compared
their respective tastes in the matter of trees and lakes.
While talking exclusively of what they saw, so that any
one might have overheard them, they felt that the compact
between them was made firmer and deeper by the
number of people who passed them and suspected nothing
of the kind. The question of Ralph’s cottage and future
was not mentioned again.
CHAPTER XXVI
Although the old coaches, with their gay panels and the
guard’s horn, and the humors of the box and the vicissitudes
of the road, have long moldered into dust so far as
they were matter, and are preserved in the printed pages
of our novelists so far as they partook of the spirit, a
journey to London by express train can still be a very
pleasant and romantic adventure. Cassandra Otway, at the
age of twenty-two, could imagine few things more pleasant.
Satiated with months of green fields as she was, the
first row of artisans’ villas on the outskirts of London
seemed to have something serious about it, which positively
increased the importance of every person in the
railway carriage, and even, to her impressionable mind,
quickened the speed of the train and gave a note of stern
authority to the shriek of the engine-whistle. They were
bound for London; they must have precedence of all traffic
not similarly destined. A different demeanor was necessary
directly one stepped out upon Liverpool Street
platform, and became one of those preoccupied and hasty
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citizens for whose needs innumerable taxi-cabs, motor-
omnibuses, and underground railways were in waiting.
She did her best to look dignified and preoccupied too,
but as the cab carried her away, with a determination
which alarmed her a little, she became more and more
forgetful of her station as a citizen of London, and turned
her head from one window to another, picking up eagerly
a building on this side or a street scene on that to feed
her intense curiosity. And yet, while the drive lasted no
one was real, nothing was ordinary; the crowds, the Government
buildings, the tide of men and women washing
the base of the great glass windows, were all generalized,
and affected her as if she saw them on the stage.
All these feelings were sustained and partly inspired by
the fact that her journey took her straight to the center
of her most romantic world. A thousand times in the midst
of her pastoral landscape her thoughts took this precise
road, were admitted to the house in Chelsea, and went
directly upstairs to Katharine’s room, where, invisible
themselves, they had the better chance of feasting upon
the privacy of the room’s adorable and mysterious mis
tress. Cassandra adored her cousin; the adoration might
have been foolish, but was saved from that excess and
lent an engaging charm by the volatile nature of
Cassandra’s temperament. She had adored a great many
things and people in the course of twenty-two years; she
had been alternately the pride and the desperation of her
teachers. She had worshipped architecture and music,
natural history and humanity, literature and art, but always
at the height of her enthusiasm, which was accompanied
by a brilliant degree of accomplishment, she
changed her mind and bought, surreptitiously, another
grammar. The terrible results which governesses had predicted
from such mental dissipation were certainly apparent
now that Cassandra was twenty-two, and had never
passed an examination, and daily showed herself less and
less capable of passing one. The more serious prediction
that she could never possibly earn her living was also
verified. But from all these short strands of different accomplishments
Cassandra wove for herself an attitude, a
cast of mind, which, if useless, was found by some people
to have the not despicable virtues of vivacity and fresh
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ness. Katharine, for example, thought her a most charming
companion. The cousins seemed to assemble between
them a great range of qualities which are never found
united in one person and seldom in half a dozen people.
Where Katharine was simple, Cassandra was complex;
where Katharine was solid and direct, Cassandra was vague
and evasive. In short, they represented very well the manly
and the womanly sides of the feminine nature, and, for
foundation, there was the profound unity of common blood
between them. If Cassandra adored Katharine she was
incapable of adoring any one without refreshing her spirit
with frequent draughts of raillery and criticism, and
Katharine enjoyed her laughter at least as much as her
respect.
Respect was certainly uppermost in Cassandra’s mind
at the present moment. Katharine’s engagement had appealed
to her imagination as the first engagement in a
circle of contemporaries is apt to appeal to the imaginations
of the others; it was solemn, beautiful, and mysterious;
it gave both parties the important air of those who
have been initiated into some rite which is still con
cealed from the rest of the group. For Katharine’s sake
Cassandra thought William a most distinguished and interesting
character, and welcomed first his conversation
and then his manuscript as the marks of a friendship
which it flattered and delighted her to inspire.
Katharine was still out when she arrived at Cheyne Walk.
After greeting her uncle and aunt and receiving, as usual,
a present of two sovereigns for “cab fares and dissipation”
from Uncle Trevor, whose favorite niece she was,
she changed her dress and wandered into Katharine’s room
to await her. What a great looking-glass Katharine had,
she thought, and how mature all the arrangements upon
the dressing-table were compared to what she was used
to at home. Glancing round, she thought that the bills
stuck upon a skewer and stood for ornament upon the
mantelpiece were astonishingly like Katharine, There
wasn’t a photograph of William anywhere to be seen. The
room, with its combination of luxury and bareness, its
silk dressing-gowns and crimson slippers, its shabby carpet
and bare walls, had a powerful air of Katharine herself;
she stood in the middle of the room and enjoyed the
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sensation; and then, with a desire to finger what her
cousin was in the habit of fingering, Cassandra began to
take down the books which stood in a row upon the shelf
above the bed. In most houses this shelf is the ledge
upon which the last relics of religious belief lodge themselves
as if, late at night, in the heart of privacy, people,
skeptical by day, find solace in sipping one draught of
the old charm for such sorrows or perplexities as may
steal from their hiding-places in the dark. But there was
no hymn-book here. By their battered covers and enigmatical
contents, Cassandra judged them to be old schoolbooks
belonging to Uncle Trevor, and piously, though
eccentrically, preserved by his daughter. There was no
end, she thought, to the unexpectedness of Katharine.
She had once had a passion for geometry herself, and,
curled upon Katharine’s quilt, she became absorbed in
trying to remember how far she had forgotten what she
once knew. Katharine, coming in a little later, found her
deep in this characteristic pursuit.
“My dear,” Cassandra exclaimed, shaking the book at
her cousin, “my whole life’s changed from this moment! I
must write the man’s name down at once, or I shall forget—”
Whose name, what book, which life was changed
Katharine proceeded to ascertain. She began to lay aside
her clothes hurriedly, for she was very late.
“May I sit and watch you?” Cassandra asked, shutting
up her book. “I got ready on purpose.”
“Oh, you’re ready, are you?” said Katharine, half turning
in the midst of her operations, and looking at
Cassandra, who sat, clasping her knees, on the edge of
the bed.
“There are people dining here,” she said, taking in the
effect of Cassandra from a new point of view. After an
interval, the distinction, the irregular charm, of the small
face with its long tapering nose and its bright oval eyes
were very notable. The hair rose up off the forehead rather
stiffly, and, given a more careful treatment by hairdressers
and dressmakers, the light angular figure might possess
a likeness to a French lady of distinction in the eighteenth
century.
“Who’s coming to dinner?” Cassandra asked, anticipat
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ing further possibilities of rapture.
“There’s William, and, I believe, Aunt Eleanor and Uncle
Aubrey.”
“I’m so glad William is coming. Did he tell you that he
sent me his manuscript? I think it’s wonderful—I think
he’s almost good enough for you, Katharine.”
“You shall sit next to him and tell him what you think
of him.”
“I shan’t dare do that,” Cassandra asserted.
“Why? You’re not afraid of him, are you?”
“A little—because he’s connected with you.”
Katharine smiled.
“But then, with your well-known fidelity, considering that
you’re staying here at least a fortnight, you won’t have
any illusions left about me by the time you go. I give you
a week, Cassandra. I shall see my power fading day by day.
Now it’s at the climax; but to-morrow it’ll have begun to
fade. What am I to wear, I wonder? Find me a blue dress,
Cassandra, over there in the long wardrobe.”
She spoke disconnectedly, handling brush and comb, and
pulling out the little drawers in her dressing-table and
leaving them open. Cassandra, sitting on the bed behind
her, saw the reflection of her cousin’s face in the looking-
glass. The face in the looking-glass was serious and intent,
apparently occupied with other things besides the
straightness of the parting which, however, was being driven
as straight as a Roman road through the dark hair. Cassandra
was impressed again by Katharine’s maturity; and, as she
enveloped herself in the blue dress which filled almost the
whole of the long looking-glass with blue light and made
it the frame of a picture, holding not only the slightly
moving effigy of the beautiful woman, but shapes and colors
of objects reflected from the background, Cassandra
thought that no sight had ever been quite so romantic. It
was all in keeping with the room and the house, and the
city round them; for her ears had not yet ceased to notice
the hum of distant wheels.
They went downstairs rather late, in spite of Katharine’s
extreme speed in getting ready. To Cassandra’s ears the
buzz of voices inside the drawing-room was like the tuning
up of the instruments of the orchestra. It seemed to
her that there were numbers of people in the room, and
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that they were strangers, and that they were beautiful
and dressed with the greatest distinction, although they
proved to be mostly her relations, and the distinction of
their clothing was confined, in the eyes of an impartial
observer, to the white waistcoat which Rodney wore. But
they all rose simultaneously, which was by itself impressive,
and they all exclaimed, and shook hands, and she
was introduced to Mr. Peyton, and the door sprang open,
and dinner was announced, and they filed off, William
Rodney offering her his slightly bent black arm, as she
had secretly hoped he would. In short, had the scene
been looked at only through her eyes, it must have been
described as one of magical brilliancy. The pattern of the
soup-plates, the stiff folds of the napkins, which rose by
the side of each plate in the shape of arum lilies, the
long sticks of bread tied with pink ribbon, the silver dishes
and the sea-colored champagne glasses, with the flakes
of gold congealed in their stems—all these details, together
with a curiously pervasive smell of kid gloves, contributed
to her exhilaration, which must be repressed,
however, because she was grown up, and the world held
no more for her to marvel at.
The world held no more for her to marvel at, it is true;
but it held other people; and each other person possessed
in Cassandra’s mind some fragment of what privately
she called “reality.” It was a gift that they would
impart if you asked them for it, and thus no dinner-party
could possibly be dull, and little Mr. Peyton on her right
and William Rodney on her left were in equal measure
endowed with the quality which seemed to her so unmistakable
and so precious that the way people neglected to
demand it was a constant source of surprise to her. She
scarcely knew, indeed, whether she was talking to Mr.
Peyton or to William Rodney. But to one who, by degrees,
