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know what she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with—and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.”
“Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father—in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s—I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him—if you are to listen?”
“I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace—“it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!”
“On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked.
“I dare say the Duchess is!”
“But do you see the Duchess producing money—with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!”—Lady Sandgate piled them up.
Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many—it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.”
“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”
“Kitty goes free.”
“She has her creditor’s release?”
“For every shilling.”
“And if he only fails?”
“Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”
“Poor father indeed!”—Lady Sandgate richly sighed it
It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes—but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”
“To the point, you mean”—for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder—“of really sacrificing you?”
The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I should be sacrificed if I married him?”
Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “Could you marry him?”
Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?”
“For himself even—if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”
Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”
“Yes—but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”
“No—but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”
“Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?”
This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only wants me—which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”
To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed—for the general immaculate connection.”
The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we haven’t had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”
“Yes, you’ve been beatific!”—Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman—a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears—to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern.
IV
Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance and broke into easy words. “So awfully kind of you—in the midst of the great doings I noticed—to have found a beautiful minute for me.”
“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”
It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels on purpose—with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed—and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially quiet face—quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process—kept in range from under her redundant black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere ground-glass rims, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean jaw was underhung and his lower lip protruded; a lapse of regularity made evident by a suppression of beard and moustache as complete as that practised by Mr. Bender—though without the appearance consequent in the latter’s case, that of the flagrantly vain appeal in the countenance for some other exhibition of a history, of a process of production, than this so superficial one. With the interested and interesting girl sufficiently under our attention while we thus try to evoke her, we may even make out some wonder in her as to why the so perceptibly protrusive lower lip of this acquaintance of an hour or two should positively have contributed to his being handsome instead of much more logically interfering with it. We might in fact in such a case even have followed her into another and no less refined a speculation—the question of whether the surest seat of his good looks mightn’t after all be his high, fair, if somewhat narrow, forehead, crowned with short crisp brown hair and which, after a fashion of its own, predominated without overhanging. He spoke after they had stood just face to face almost long enough for awkwardness. “I haven’t forgotten one item of your kindness to me on that rather bleak occasion.”
“Bleak do you call it?” she laughed. “Why I found it, rather, tropical—‘lush.’ My neighbour on the other side wanted to talk to me of the White City.”
“Then you made it doubtless bleak for him, let us say. I couldn’t let you alone, I remember, about this—it was like a shipwrecked signal to a sail on the horizon.” “This” obviously meant for the young man exactly what surrounded him; he had begun, like Mr. Bender, to be conscious of a thick solicitation of the eye—and much more than he, doubtless, of a tug at the imagination; and he broke—characteristically, you would have been sure—into a great free gaiety of recognition.
“Oh,