Chapter 4 - Page 2

blushingly, he
put the direct question to Mrs. Bundy, and this led tolerably
straight to another question, which, on his spirit, sat equally heavy
(they were indeed but different phases of the same), and which the
good woman answered with expression when she ejaculated: "Think it a
liberty for you to run down for a few hours? If she do, my dear sir,
just send her to me to talk to!" As regards happiness indeed she
warned Baron against imposing too high a standard on a young thing
who had been through so much, and before he knew it he found himself,
without the responsibility of choice, in submissive receipt of Mrs.
Bundy's version of this experience. It was an interesting picture,
though it had its infirmities, one of them congenital and consisting
of the fact that it had sprung essentially from the virginal brain of
Miss Teagle. Amplified, edited, embellished by the richer genius of
Mrs. Bundy, who had incorporated with it and now liberally introduced
copious interleavings of Miss Teagle's own romance, it gave Peter
Baron much food for meditation, at the same time that it only half
relieved his curiosity about the causes of the charming woman's
underlying strangeness. He sounded this note experimentally in Mrs.
Bundy's ear, but it was easy to see that it didn't reverberate in her
fancy. She had no idea of the picture it would have been natural for
him to desire that Mrs. Ryves should present to him, and she was
therefore unable to estimate the points in respect to which his
actual impression was irritating. She had indeed no adequate
conception of the intellectual requirements of a young man in love.
She couldn't tell him why their faultless friend was so isolated, so
unrelated, so nervously, shrinkingly proud. On the other hand she
could tell him (he knew it already) that she had passed many years of
her life in the acquisition of accomplishments at a seat of learning
no less remote than Boulogne, and that Miss Teagle had been
intimately acquainted with the late Mr. Everard Ryves, who was a
"most rising" young man in the city, not making any year less than
his clear twelve hundred. "Now that he isn't there to make them, his
mourning widow can't live as she had then, can she?" Mrs. Bundy
asked.

Baron was not prepared to say that she could, but he thought of
another way she might live as he sat, the next day, in the train
which rattled him down to Dover. The place, as he approached it,
seemed bright and breezy to him; his roamings had been neither far
enough nor frequent enough to make the cockneyfied coast insipid.
Mrs. Bundy had of course given him the address he needed, and on
emerging from the station he was on the point of asking what
direction he should take. His