In the course of time a sudden “stroke” of the guardian’s had thrown his personal affairs into a state of confusion from which—after his widely lamented death—it became evident that it would not be possible to extricate his ward’s inheritance. No one deplored this more sincerely than his widow, who saw in it one more proof of her husband’s life having been sacrificed to the innumerable duties imposed on him, and who could hardly—but for the counsels of religion—have brought herself to pardon the young girl for her indirect share in hastening his end. Sophy did not resent this point of view. She was really much sorrier for her guardian’s death than for the loss of her insignificant fortune. The latter had represented only the means of holding her in bondage, and its disappearance was the occasion of her immediate plunge into the wide bright sea of life surrounding the island-of her captivity. She had first landed—thanks to the intervention of the ladies who had directed her education—in a Fifth Avenue school-room where, for a few months, she acted as a buffer between three autocratic infants and their bodyguard of nurses and teachers. The too-pressing attentions of their father’s valet had caused her to fly this sheltered spot, against the express advice of her educational superiors, who implied that, in their own case, refinement and self-respect had always sufficed to keep the most ungovernable passions at bay. The experience of the guardian’s widow having been precisely similar, and the deplorable precedent of Laura’s career being present to all their minds, none of these ladies felt any obligation to intervene farther in Sophy’s affairs; and she was accordingly left to her own resources.
A schoolmate from the Rocky Mountains, who was taking her father and mother to Europe, had suggested Sophy’s accompanying them, and “going round” with her while her progenitors, in the care of the courier, nursed their ailments at a fashionable bath. Darrow gathered that the “going round” with Mamie Hoke was a varied and diverting process; but this relatively brilliant phase of Sophy’s career was cut short by the elopement of the inconsiderate Mamie with a “matinee idol” who had followed her from New York, and by the precipitate return of her parents to negotiate for the repurchase of their child.
It was then—after an interval of repose with compassionate but impecunious American friends in Paris—that Miss Viner had been drawn into the turbid current of Mrs. Murrett’s career. The impecunious compatriots had found Mrs. Murrett for her, and it was partly on their account (because they were such dears, and so unconscious, poor confiding things, of what they were letting her in for) that Sophy had stuck it out so long in the dreadful house in Chelsea. The Farlows, she explained to Darrow, were the best friends she had ever had (and the only ones who had ever “been decent” about Laura, whom they had seen once, and intensely admired); but even after twenty years of Paris they were the most incorrigibly inexperienced angels, and quite persuaded that Mrs. Murrett was a woman of great intellectual eminence, and the house at Chelsea “the last of the salons”—Darrow knew what she meant? And she hadn’t liked to undeceive them, knowing that to do so would be virtually to throw herself back on their hands, and feeling, moreover, after her previous experiences, the urgent need of gaining, at any cost, a name for stability; besides which—she threw it off with a slight laugh—no other chance, in all these years, had happened to come to her.
She had brushed in this outline of her career with light rapid strokes, and in a tone of fatalism oddly untinged by bitterness. Darrow perceived that she classified people according to their greater or less “luck” in life, but she appeared to harbour no resentment against the undefined power which dispensed the gift in such unequal measure. Things came one’s way or they didn’t; and meanwhile one could only look on, and make the most of small compensations, such as watching “the show” at Mrs. Murrett’s, and talking over the Lady Ulricas and other footlight figures. And at any moment, of course, a turn of the kaleidoscope might suddenly toss a bright spangle into the grey pattern of one’s days.
This light-hearted philosophy was not without charm to a young man accustomed to more traditional views. George Darrow had had a fairly varied experience of feminine types, but the women he had frequented had either been pronouncedly “ladies” or they had not. Grateful to both for ministering to the more complex masculine nature, and disposed to assume that they had been evolved, if not designed, to that end, he had instinctively kept the two groups apart in his mind, avoiding that intermediate society which attempts to conciliate both theories of life. “Bohemianism” seemed to him a cheaper convention than the other two, and he liked, above all, people who went as far as they could in their own line—liked his “ladies” and their rivals to be equally unashamed of showing for exactly what they were. He had not indeed—the fact of Lady Ulrica was there to remind him—been without his experience of a third type; but that experience had left him with a contemptuous distaste for the woman who uses the privileges of one class to shelter the customs of another.
As to young girls, he had never thought much about them since his early love for the girl who had become Mrs. Leath. That episode seemed, as he looked back on it, to bear no more relation to reality than a pale decorative design to the confused richness of a summer landscape. He no longer understood the violent impulses and dreamy pauses of his own young heart, or the inscrutable abandonments and reluctances of hers. He had known a moment of anguish at losing her—the mad plunge of youthful instincts against the barrier of fate; but the first wave of stronger sensation had swept away all but the outline of their story, and the memory of Anna Summers had made the image of the young girl sacred, but the class uninteresting.
Such generalisations belonged, however, to an earlier stage of his experience. The more he saw of life the more incalculable he found it; and he had learned to yield to his impressions without feeling the youthful need of relating them to others. It was the girl in the opposite seat who had roused in him the dormant habit of comparison. She was distinguished from the daughters of wealth by her avowed acquaintance with the real business of living, a familiarity as different as possible from their theoretical proficiency; yet it seemed to Darrow that her experience had made her free without hardness and self-assured without assertiveness.
The rush into Amiens, and the flash of the station lights into their compartment, broke Miss Viner’s sleep, and without changing her position she lifted her lids and looked at Darrow. There was neither surprise nor bewilderment in the look. She seemed instantly conscious, not so much of where she was, as of the fact that she was with him; and that fact seemed enough to reassure her. She did not even turn her head to look out; her eyes continued to rest on him with a vague smile which appeared to light her face from within, while her lips kept their sleepy droop.