FullReads

“Oh she has worked it all out; she has regarded the question in every light,” said Mrs. Pallant. “If she has made up her mind it’s because she sees what she can do.”

“Do you mean that she has talked it over with you?”

My friend’s wonderful face pitied my simplicity. “Lord! for what do you take us? We don’t talk things over to-day. We know each other’s point of view and only have to act. We observe the highest proprieties of speech. We never for a moment name anything ugly–we only just go at it. We can take definitions, which are awkward things, for granted.”

“But in this case,” I nevertheless urged, “the poor thing can’t possibly be aware of your point of view.”

“No,” she conceded–“that’s because I haven’t played fair. Of course she couldn’t expect I’d cheat. There ought to be honour among thieves. But it was open to her to do the same.”

“What do you mean by the same?”

“She might have fallen in love with a poor man. Then I should have been ‘done.'”

“A rich one’s better; he can do more,” I replied with conviction.

At this she appeared to have, in the oddest way, a momentary revulsion. “So you’d have reason to know if you had led the life that we have! Never to have had really enough–I mean to do just the few simple things we’ve wanted; never to have had the sinews of war, I suppose you’d call them, the funds for a campaign; to have felt every day and every hour the hard eternal pinch and found the question of dollars and cents–and so horridly few of them–mixed up with every experience, with every impulse: that DOES make one mercenary, does make money seem a good beyond all others; which it’s quite natural it should! And it’s why Linda’s of the opinion that a fortune’s always a fortune. She knows all about that of your nephew, how it’s invested, how it may be expected to increase, exactly on what sort of footing it would enable her to live. She has decided that it’s enough, and enough is as good as a feast. She thinks she could lead him by the nose, and I dare say she could. She’ll of course make him live in these countries; she hasn’t the slightest intention of casting her pearls–but basta!” said my friend. “I think she has views upon London, because in England he can hunt and shoot, and that will make him leave her more or less to herself.”

“I don’t know about his leaving her to herself, but it strikes me that he would like the rest of that matter very much,” I returned. “That’s not at all a bad programme even from Archie’s point of view.”

“It’s no use thinking of princes,” she pursued as if she hadn’t heard me. “They’re most of them more in want of money even than we. Therefore ‘greatness’ is out of the question–we really recognised that at an early stage. Your nephew’s exactly the sort of young man we’ve always built upon–if he wasn’t, so impossibly, your nephew. From head to foot he was made on purpose. Dear Linda was her mother’s own daughter when she recognised him on the spot! One’s enough of a prince to-day when one’s the right American: such a wonderful price is set on one’s not being the wrong! It does as well as anything and it’s a great simplification. If you don’t believe me go to London and see.” She had come with me out to the road. I had said I would walk back to Stresa and we stood there in the sweet dark warmth. As I took her hand, bidding her good-night, I couldn’t but exhale a compassion. “Poor Linda, poor Linda!”

“Oh she’ll live to do better,” said Mrs. Pallant.

“How can she do better–since you’ve described all she finds Archie as perfection?”

She knew quite what she meant. “Ah better for HIM!”