A Cup of Cold Water - Page 2

of motives that justifies the subtlest casuistry of compassion.
Miss Talcott was too young to distinguish the intermediate tints of the
moral spectrum; and her judgments were further simplified by a peculiar
concreteness of mind. Her bringing-up had fostered this tendency and she
was surrounded by people who focussed life in the same way. To the girls
in Miss Talcott's set, the attentions of a clever man who had to work for
his living had the zest of a forbidden pleasure; but to marry such a man
would be as unpardonable as to have one's carriage seen at the door of a
cheap dress-maker. Poverty might make a man fascinating; but a settled
income was the best evidence of stability of character. If there were
anything in heredity, how could a nice girl trust a man whose parents had
been careless enough to leave him unprovided for?

Neither Miss Talcott nor any of her friends could be charged with
formulating these views; but they were implicit in the slope of every
white shoulder and in the ripple of every yard of imported tulle dappling
the foreground of Mrs. Gildermere's ball-room. The advantages of line and
colour in veiling the crudities of a creed are obvious to emotional minds;
and besides, Woburn was conscious that it was to the cheerful materialism
of their parents that the young girls he admired owed that fine
distinction of outline in which their skilfully-rippled hair and
skilfully-hung draperies cooeperated with the slimness and erectness that
came of participating in the most expensive sports, eating the most
expensive food and breathing the most expensive air. Since the process
which had produced them was so costly, how could they help being costly
themselves? Woburn was too logical to expect to give no more for a piece
of old Sevres than for a bit of kitchen crockery; he had no faith in
wonderful bargains, and believed that one got in life just what one was
willing to pay for. He had no mind to dispute the taste of those who
preferred the rustic simplicity of the earthen crock; but his own fancy
inclined to the piece of _pate tendre_ which must be kept in a glass case
and handled as delicately as a flower.

It was not merely by the external grace of these drawing-room ornaments
that Woburn's sensibilities were charmed. His imagination was touched by
the curious exoticism of view resulting from such conditions; He had
always enjoyed listening to Miss Talcott even more than looking at her.
Her ideas had the brilliant bloom and audacious irrelevance of those
tropical orchids which strike root in air. Miss Talcott's opinions had no
connection with the actual; her very materialism had the grace of
artificiality. Woburn had been enchanted once by seeing her helpless
before a smoking lamp: she had been