Part 8

“Mrs. Deering is a person that wins your heart at once; she has that appealing quality. You can see that she’s cowed by her husband, though he means to be kind to her; and yet you may be sure she gets round him, and has her own way all the time. I know it was her idea to have him go home and leave them here, and of course she made him think it was his. She saw that as long as he was here, and anxious to get back to his ‘stock,’ there was no hope of giving Miss Gage the sort of chance she came for, and so she determined to manage it. At the same time, you can see that she is true as steel, and would abhor anything like deceit worse than the pest.”

“I see; and that is why you dislike Miss Gage?”

“Dislike her? No, I don’t dislike her; but she is disappointing. If she were a plain girl her plain-mindedness would be all right; it would be amusing; she would turn it to account and make it seem humorous. But it doesn’t seem to go with her beauty; it takes away from that—I don’t know how to express it exactly.”

“You mean that she has no charm.”

“No; I don’t mean that at all. She has a great deal of charm of a certain kind, but it’s a very peculiar kind. After all, the truth is the truth, Basil, isn’t it?”

“It is sometimes, my dear,” I assented.

“And the truth has its charm, even when it’s too blunt.”

“Ah, I’m not so sure of that.”

“Yes—yes, it has. You mustn’t say so, Basil, or I shall lose all my faith in you. If I couldn’t trust you, I don’t know what I should do.”

“What are you after now, Isabel?”

“I am not after anything. I want you to go round to all the hotels and see if there is not some young man you know at one of them. There surely must be.”

“Would one young man be enough?”

“If he were attentive enough, he would be. One young man is as good as a thousand if the girl is the right kind.”

“But you have just been implying that Miss Gage is cold and selfish and greedy. Shall I go round exploring hotel registers for a victim to such a divinity as that?”

“No; you needn’t go till I have had a talk with her. I am not sure she is worth it; I am not sure that I want to do a single thing for her.”

VII

THE next day, after another forenoon’s shopping with her friends, Mrs. March announced: “Well, now, it has all come out, Basil, and I wonder you didn’t get the secret at once from your Mr. Deering. Have you been supposing that Miss Gage was a poor girl whom the Deerings had done the favour of bringing with them?”

“Why, what of it?” I asked provisionally.

“She is very well off. Her father is not only the president, as they call it, of the village, but he’s the president of the bank.”

“Yes; I told you that Deering told me so—”

“But he is very queer. He has kept her very close from the other young people, and Mrs. Deering is the only girl friend she’s ever had, and she’s grown up without having been anywhere without him. They had to plead with him to let her come with them—or Mrs. Deering had,—but when he once consented, he consented handsomely. He gave her a lot of money, and told them he wanted her to have the best time that money could buy; and of course you can understand how such a man would think that money would buy a good time anywhere. But the Deerings didn’t know how to go about it. She confessed as much when we were talking the girl over. I could see that she stood in awe of her somehow from the beginning, and that she felt more than the usual responsibility for her. That was the reason she was so eager to get her husband off home; as long as he was with them she would have to work everything through him, and that would be double labour, because he is so hopelessly villaginous, don’t you know, that he never could rise to the conception of anything else. He took them to a cheap, second-class hotel, and he was afraid to go with them anywhere because he never was sure that it was the right thing to do; and he was too proud to ask, and they had to keep prodding him all the time.”

“That’s delightful!”

“Oh, I dare say you think so; but if you knew how it wounded a woman’s self-respect you would feel differently; or you wouldn’t, rather. But now, thank goodness; they’ve got him off their hands, and they can begin to breathe freely. That is, Mrs. Deering could, if she hadn’t her heart in her mouth all the time, wondering what she can do for the girl, and bullying herself with the notion that she is to blame if she doesn’t have a good time. You can understand just how it was with them always. Mrs. Deering is one of those meek little things that a great, splendid, lonely creature like Miss Gage would take to in a small place, and perfectly crush under the weight of her confidence; and she would want to make her husband live up to her ideal of the girl, and would be miserable because he wouldn’t or couldn’t.”

“I believe the good Deering didn’t even think her handsome.”

“That’s it. And he thought anything that was good enough for his wife was good enough for Miss Gage, and he’d be stubborn about doing things on her account, even to please his wife.”

“Such conduct is imaginable of the good Deering. I don’t think he liked her.”

“Nor she him. Mrs. Deering helplessly hinted as much. She said he didn’t like to have her worrying so much about Miss Gage’s not having a good time, and she couldn’t make him feel as she did about it, and she was half glad for his own sake that he had to go home.”

“Did she say that?”