FullReads

V

What he actually took up from a little old Twelfth-Street table that piously preserved the plain mahogany circle, with never a curl nor a crook nor a hint of a brazen flourish, what he paused there a moment for commerce with, his back presented to crapy Cornelia, who sat taking that view of him, during this opportunity, very protrusively and frankly and fondly, was one of the wasted mementos just mentioned, over which he both uttered and suppressed a small comprehensive cry. He stood there another minute to look at it, and when he turned about still kept it in his hand, only holding it now a litde behind him. “You must have come back to stay–with all your beautiful things. What else does it mean?”

“‘Beautiful’?” his old friend commented with her brow all wrinkled and her lips thrust out in expressive dispraise. They might at that rate have been scarce more beautiful than she herself. “Oh, don’t talk so–after Mrs. Worthingham’s! They’re wonderful, if you will: such things, such things! But one’s own poor relics and odds and ends are one’s own at least; and one has–yes–come back to them. They’re all I have in the world to come back to. They were stored, and what I was paying–!” Miss Rasch wofully added.

He had possession of the small old picture; he hovered there; he put his eyes again to it intently; then again held it a little behind him as if it might have been snatched away or the very feel of it, pressed against him, was good to his palm. “Mrs. Worthingham’s things? You think them beautiful?”

Cornelia did now, if ever, show an odd face. “Why certainly prodigious, or whatever. Isn’t that conceded?”

“No doubt every horror, at the pass we’ve come to, is conceded. That’s just what I complain of.”

“Do you complain?”–she drew it out as for surprise: she couldn’t have imagined such a thing.

“To me her things are awful. They’re the newest of the new.”

“Ah, but the old forms!”

“Those are the most blatant. I mean the swaggering reproductions.”

“Oh but,” she pleaded, “we can’t all be really old.”

“No, we can’t, Cornelia. But you can–!” said White-Mason with the frankest appreciation.

She looked up at him from where she sat as he could imagine her looking up at the curate at Bognor. “Thank you, sir! If that’s all you want—-!”

“It is” he said, “all I want–or almost.”

“Then no wonder such a creature as that,” she lightly moralised, “won’t suit you!”

He bent upon her, for all the weight of his question, his smoothest stare. “You hold she certainly won’t suit me?”

“Why, what can I tell about it? Haven’t you by this time found out?”

“No, but I think I’m finding.” With which he began again to explore.

Miss Rasch immensely wondered. “You mean you don’t expect to come to an understanding with her?” And then as even to this straight challenge he made at first no answer: “Do you mean you give it up?”

He waited some instants more, but not meeting her eyes–only looking again about the room. “What do you think of my chance?”

“Oh,” his companion cried, “what has what I think to do with it? How can I think anything but that she must like you?”

“Yes–of course. But how much?”

“Then don’t you really know?” Cornelia asked.

He kept up his walk, oddly preoccupied and still not looking at her. “Do you, my dear?”

She waited a little. “If you haven’t really put it to her I don’t suppose she knows.”

This at last arrested him again. “My dear Cornelia, she doesn’t know—-!”

He had paused as for the desperate tone, or at least the large emphasis of it, so that she took him up. “The more reason then to help her to find it out.”

“I mean,” he explained, “that she doesn’t know anything.”

“Anything?”

“Anything else, I mean–even if she does know that.”

Cornelia considered of it. “But what else need she–in particular–know? Isn’t that the principal thing?”