II Glasses | ||
2. II
FLORA SAUNT, the only daughter of an old soldier, had lost both her parents, her mother within a few months. Mrs. Meldrum had known them, disapproved of them, considerably avoided them: she had watched the girl, off and on, from her early childhood. Flora, just twenty, was extraordinarily alone in the world--so alone that she had no natural chaperon, no one to stay with but a mercenary stranger, Mrs. Hammond Synge, the sister-in-law of one of the young men I had just seen. She had lots of friends, but none of them nice: she kept picking up impossible people. The Floyd-Taylors, with whom she had been at Boulogne, were simply horrid. The Hammond Synges were perhaps not so vulgar, but they had no conscience in their dealings with her.
"She knows what I think of them," said Mrs. Meldrum, "and indeed she knows what I think of most things."
"She shares that privilege with most of your friends!" I replied laughing.
"No doubt; but possibly to some of my friends
"And what may your opinion be?"
"Why, that she's not worth troubling about--an idiot too abysmal."
"Doesn't she care for that?"
"Just enough, as you saw, to hug me till I cry out. She's too pleased with herself for anything else to matter."
"Surely, my dear friend," I rejoined, "she has a good deal to be pleased with!"
"So every one tells her, and so you would have told her if I had given you the chance. However, that doesn't signify either, for her vanity is beyond all making or mending. She believes in herself, and she's welcome, after all, poor dear, having only herself to look to. I've seldom met a young woman more completely free to be silly. She has a clear course--she'll make a showy finish."
"Well," I replied, "as she probably will reduce many persons to the same degraded state, her partaking of it won't stand out so much."
"If you mean that the world's full of twaddlers I quite agree with you!" cried Mrs. Meldrum, trumpeting her laugh half across the Channel.
I had after this to consider a little what she would call my mother's son, but I didn't let it
"Couldn't you perhaps take her, independent, unencumbered as you are?" I asked of Mrs. Meldrum. "You're probably, with one exception, the sanest person she knows, and you at least wouldn't scandalously fleece her."
"How do you know what I wouldn't do?" my humorous friend demanded. "Of course I've thought how I can help her--it has kept me awake at night. But doing it's impossible; she'll take nothing from me. You know what she does--she hugs me and runs away. She has an instinct about me and feels that I've one about her. And then she dislikes me for another reason that I'm not quite clear about, but that I'm well aware of and that I shall find out some day. So far as her settling with me goes it would be impossible moreover here; she wants naturally enough a much wider field. She must live in London--her game
"I see that at this moment," I replied. "But what does it matter where or how, for the present, she lives? She'll marry infallibly, marry early, and everything then will change."
"Whom will she marry?" my companion gloomily asked.
"Any one she likes. She's so abnormally pretty that she can do anything. She'll fascinate some nabob or some prince."
"She'll fascinate him first and bore him afterwards. Moreover she's not so pretty as you make her out; she hasn't a scrap of a figure."
"No doubt, but one doesn't in the least miss it."
"Not now," said Mrs. Meldrum, "but one will when she's older and when everything will have to count."
"When she's older she'll count as a princess, so it won't matter."
"She has other drawbacks," my companion went on. "Those wonderful eyes are good for nothing but to roll about like sugar-balls--which
"Use them? Why, she does nothing else."
"To make fools of young men, but not to read or write, not to do any sort of work. She never opens a book, and her maid writes her notes. You'll say that those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Of course I know that if I didn't wear my goggles I shouldn't be good for much."
"Do you mean that Miss Saunt ought to sport such things?" I exclaimed with more horror than I meant to show.
"I don't prescribe for her; I don't know that they're what she requires."
"What's the matter with her eyes?" I asked after a moment.
"I don't exactly know; but I heard from her mother years ago that even as a child they had had for a while to put her into spectacles and that though she hated them and had been in a fury of disgust, she would always have to be extremely careful. I'm sure I hope she is!"
I echoed the hope, but I remember well the impression this made upon me--my immediate pang of resentment, a disgust almost equal to Flora's own. I felt as if a great rare sapphire had split in my hand.
II Glasses | ||