Chapter 3

This conversation occurred the night before I went back to town. I
settled on the morrow to take a late train, so that I had still my
morning to spend at Folkestone, where during the greater part of it
I was out with my mother. Every one in the place was as usual out
with some one else, and even had I been free to go and take leave
of her I should have been sure that Flora Saunt would not be at
home. Just where she was I presently discovered: she was at the
far end of the cliff, the point at which it overhangs the pretty
view of Sandgate and Hythe. Her back, however, was turned to this
attraction; it rested with the aid of her elbows, thrust slightly
behind her so that her scanty little shoulders were raised toward
her ears, on the high rail that inclosed the down. Two gentlemen
stood before her whose faces we couldn't see but who even as
observed from the rear were visibly absorbed in the charming
figure-piece submitted to them. I was freshly struck with the fact
that this meagre and defective little person, with the cock of her
hat and the flutter of her crape, with her eternal idleness, her
eternal happiness, her absence of moods and mysteries and the
pretty presentation of her feet, which especially now in the
supported slope of her posture occupied with their imperceptibility
so much of the foreground--I was reminded anew, I say, how our
young lady dazzled by some art that the enumeration of her merits
didn't explain and that the mention of her lapses didn't affect.
Where she was amiss nothing counted, and where she was right
everything did. I say she was wanting in mystery, but that after
all was her secret. This happened to be my first chance of
introducing her to my mother, who had not much left in life but the
quiet look from under the hood of her chair at the things which,
when she should have quitted those she loved, she could still trust
to make the world good for them. I wondered an instant how much
she might be moved to trust Flora Saunt, and then while the chair
stood still and she waited I went over and asked the girl to come
and speak to her. In this way I saw that if one of Flora's
attendants was the inevitable young Hammond Synge, master of
ceremonies of her regular court, always offering the use of a
telescope and accepting that of a cigar, the other was a personage
I had not yet encountered, a small pale youth in showy
knickerbockers, whose eyebrows and nose and the glued points of
whose little moustache were extraordinarily uplifted and sustained.
I remember taking him at first for a foreigner and for something of
a pretender: I scarce know why unless because of the motive I felt
in the stare he fixed on me when I asked Miss Saunt to come away.
He struck me a little as a young