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The Coxon Fund
by
I thought my young lady looked rich–I scarcely knew why; and I hoped she had put her hand in her pocket. I soon made her out, however, not at all a fine fanatic–she was but a generous, irresponsible enquirer. She had come to England to see her aunt, and it was at her aunt’s she had met the dreary lady we had all so much on our mind. I saw she’d help to pass the time when she observed that it was a pity this lady wasn’t intrinsically more interesting. That was refreshing, for it was an article of faith in Mrs. Saltram’s circle–at least among those who scorned to know her horrid husband–that she was attractive on her merits. She was in truth a most ordinary person, as Saltram himself would have been if he hadn’t been a prodigy. The question of vulgarity had no application to him, but it was a measure his wife kept challenging you to apply. I hasten to add that the consequences of your doing so were no sufficient reason for his having left her to starve. “He doesn’t seem to have much force of character,” said my young lady; at which I laughed out so loud that my departing friends looked back at me over their shoulders as if I were making a joke of their discomfiture. My joke probably cost Saltram a subscription or two, but it helped me on with my interlocutress. “She says he drinks like a fish,” she sociably continued, “and yet she allows that his mind’s wonderfully clear.” It was amusing to converse with a pretty girl who could talk of the clearness of Saltram’s mind. I expected next to hear she had been assured he was awfully clever. I tried to tell her–I had it almost on my conscience–what was the proper way to regard him; an effort attended perhaps more than ever on this occasion with the usual effect of my feeling that I wasn’t after all very sure of it. She had come to-night out of high curiosity–she had wanted to learn this proper way for herself. She had read some of his papers and hadn’t understood them; but it was at home, at her aunt’s, that her curiosity had been kindled–kindled mainly by his wife’s remarkable stories of his want of virtue. “I suppose they ought to have kept me away,” my companion dropped, “and I suppose they’d have done so if I hadn’t somehow got an idea that he’s fascinating. In fact Mrs. Saltram herself says he is.”
“So you came to see where the fascination resides? Well, you’ve seen!”
My young lady raised fine eyebrows. “Do you mean in his bad faith?”
“In the extraordinary effects of it; his possession, that is, of some quality or other that condemns us in advance to forgive him the humiliation, as I may call it, to which he has subjected us.”
“The humiliation?”
“Why mine, for instance, as one of his guarantors, before you as the purchaser of a ticket.”
She let her charming gay eyes rest on me. “You don’t look humiliated a bit, and if you did I should let you off, disappointed as I am; for the mysterious quality you speak of is just the quality I came to see.”
“Oh, you can’t ‘see’ it!” I cried.
“How then do you get at it?”
“You don’t! You mustn’t suppose he’s good-looking,” I added.
“Why his wife says he’s lovely!”
My hilarity may have struck her as excessive, but I confess it broke out afresh. Had she acted only in obedience to this singular plea, so characteristic, on Mrs. Saltram’s part, of what was irritating in the narrowness of that lady’s point of view? “Mrs. Saltram,” I explained, “undervalues him where he’s strongest, so that, to make up for it perhaps, she overpraises him where he’s weak. He’s not, assuredly, superficially attractive; he’s middle- aged, fat, featureless save for his great eyes.”