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Mrs. Medwin
by
“I’d really go away with a fiver, my dear, if you’d only tell me how you do it. It’s no use saying only, as you’ve always said, that ‘people are very kind to you.’ What the devil are they kind to you FOR?”
“Well, one reason is precisely that no particular inconvenience has hitherto been supposed to attach to me. I’m just what I am,” said Mamie Cutter; “nothing less and nothing more. It’s awkward to have to explain to you, which moreover I really needn’t in the least. I’m clever and amusing and charming.” She was uneasy and even frightened, but she kept her temper and met him with a grace of her own. “I don’t think you ought to ask me more questions than I ask you.”
“Ah my dear,” said the odd young man, “I’VE no mysteries. Why in the world, since it was what you came out for and have devoted so much of your time to, haven’t you pulled it off? Why haven’t you married?”
“Why haven’t YOU?” she retorted. “Do you think that if I had it would have been better for you?–that my husband would for a moment have put up with you? Do you mind my asking you if you’ll kindly go NOW?” she went on after a glance at the clock. “I’m expecting a friend, whom I must see alone, on a matter of great importance–“
“And my being seen with you may compromise your respectability or undermine your nerve?” He sprawled imperturbably in his place, crossing again, in another sense, his long black legs and showing, above his low shoes, an absurd reach of parti-coloured sock. “I take your point well enough, but mayn’t you be after all quite wrong? If you can’t do anything for me couldn’t you at least do something with me? If it comes to that, I’m clever and amusing and charming too! I’ve been such an ass that you don’t appreciate me. But people like me–I assure you they do. They usually don’t know what an ass I’ve been; they only see the surface, which”–and he stretched himself afresh as she looked him up and down–“you CAN imagine them, can’t you, rather taken with? I’M ‘what I am’ too; nothing less and nothing more. That’s true of us as a family, you see. We ARE a crew!” He delivered himself serenely. His voice was soft and flat, his pleasant eyes, his simple tones tending to the solemn, achieved at moments that effect of quaintness which is, in certain connexions, socially so known and enjoyed. “English people have quite a weakness for me–more than any others. I get on with them beautifully. I’ve always been with them abroad. They think me,” the young man explained, “diabolically American.”
“You!” Such stupidity drew from her a sigh of compassion.
Her companion apparently quite understood it. “Are you homesick, Mamie?” he asked, with wondering irrelevance.
The manner of the question made her, for some reason, in spite of her preoccupations, break into a laugh. A shade of indulgence, a sense of other things, came back to her. “You are funny, Scott!”
“Well,” remarked Scott, “that’s just what I claim. But ARE you so homesick?” he spaciously inquired, not as to a practical end, but from an easy play of intelligence.
“I’m just dying of it!” said Mamie Cutter.
“Why so am I!” Her visitor had a sweetness of concurrence.
“We’re the only decent people,” Miss Cutter declared. “And I know. You don’t–you can’t; and I can’t explain. Come in,” she continued with a return of her impatience and an increase of her decision, “at seven sharp.”
She had quitted her seat some time before, and now, to get him into motion, hovered before him while, still motionless, he looked up at her. Something intimate, in the silence, appeared to pass between them–a community of fatigue and failure and, after all, of intelligence. There was a final cynical humour in it. It determined him, in any case, at last, and he slowly rose, taking in again as he stood there the testimony of the room. He might have been counting the photographs, but he looked at the flowers with detachment. “Who’s coming?”