FullReads

I overtook her presently and repeated her words. “Your reparation–your expiation? What on earth are you talking about?”

“You know perfectly what I mean–it’s too magnanimous of you to pretend you don’t.”

“Well, at any rate,” I said, “I don’t see what good it does me, or what it makes up to me for, that you should abuse your daughter.”

“Oh I don’t care; I shall save him!” she cried as we went, and with an extravagance, as I felt, of sincerity. At the same moment two ladies, apparently English, came toward us–scattered groups had been sitting there and the inmates of the hotel were moving to and fro–and I observed the immediate charming transition, the fruit of such years of social practice, by which, as they greeted us, her tension and her impatience dropped to recognition and pleasure. They stopped to speak to her and she enquired with sweet propriety as to the “continued improvement” of their sister. I strolled on and she presently rejoined me; after which she had a peremptory note. “Come away from this–come down into the garden.” We descended to that blander scene, strolled through it and paused on the border of the lake.

V

The charm of the evening had deepened, the stillness was like a solemn expression on a beautiful face and the whole air of the place divine. In the fading light my nephew’s boat was too far out to be perceived. I looked for it a little and then, as I gave it up, remarked that from such an excursion as that, on such a lake and at such an hour, a young man and a young woman of common sensibility could only come back doubly pledged to each other.

To this observation Mrs. Pallant’s answer was, superficially at least, irrelevant; she said after a pause: “With you, my dear man, one has certainly to dot one’s ‘i’s.’ Haven’t you discovered, and didn’t I tell you at Homburg, that we’re miserably poor?”

“Isn’t ‘miserably’ rather too much–living as you are at an expensive hotel?”

Well, she promptly met this. “They take us en pension, for ever so little a day. I’ve been knocking about Europe long enough to learn all sorts of horrid arts. Besides, don’t speak of hotels; we’ve spent half our life in them and Linda told me only last night that she hoped never to put her foot into one again. She feels that when she comes to such a place as this she ought, if things were decently right, to find a villa of her own.”

“Then her companion there’s perfectly competent to give her one. Don’t think I’ve the least desire to push them into each other’s arms–I only ask to wash my hands of them. But I should like to know why you want, as you said just now, to save him. When you speak as if your daughter were a monster I take it you’re not serious.”

She was facing me in the rich short twilight, and to describe herself as immeasurably more serious perhaps than she had ever been in her life she had only to look at me without protestation. “It’s Linda’s standard. God knows I myself could get on! She’s ambitious, luxurious, determined to have what she wants–more ‘on the make’ than any one I’ve ever seen. Of course it’s open to you to tell me it’s my own fault, that I was so before her and have made her so. But does that make me like it any better?”

“Dear Mrs. Pallant, you’re wonderful, you’re terrible,” I could only stammer, lost in the desert of my thoughts.

“Oh yes, you’ve made up your mind about me; you see me in a certain way and don’t like the trouble of changing. Votre siege est fait. But you’ll HAVE to change–if you’ve any generosity!” Her eyes shone in the summer dusk and the beauty of her youth came back to her.

“Is this a part of the reparation, of the expiation?” I demanded. “I don’t see what you ever did to Archie.”