Chapter 12

I was soon called back to Folkestone; but Mrs. Meldrum and her
young friend had already left England, finding to that end every
convenience on the spot and not having had to come up to town. My
thoughts however were so painfully engaged there that I should in
any case have had little attention for them: the event occurred
that was to bring my series of visits to a close. When this high
tide had ebbed I returned to America and to my interrupted work,
which had opened out on such a scale that, with a deep plunge into
a great chance, I was three good years in rising again to the
surface. There are nymphs and naiads moreover in the American
depths: they may have had something to do with the duration of my
dive. I mention them to account for a grave misdemeanor--the fact
that after the first year I rudely neglected Mrs. Meldrum. She had
written to me from Florence after my mother's death and had
mentioned in a postscript that in our young lady's calculations the
lowest figures were now Italian counts. This was a good omen, and
if in subsequent letters there was no news of a sequel I was
content to accept small things and to believe that grave tidings,
should there be any, would come to me in due course. The gravity
of what might happen to a featherweight became indeed with time and
distance less appreciable, and I was not without an impression that
Mrs. Meldrum, whose sense of proportion was not the least of her
merits, had no idea of boring the world with the ups and downs of
her pensioner. The poor girl grew dusky and dim, a small fitful
memory, a regret tempered by the comfortable consciousness of how
kind Mrs. Meldrum would always be to her. I was professionally
more preoccupied than I had ever been, and I had swarms of pretty
faces in my eyes and a chorus of loud tones in my ears. Geoffrey
Dawling had on his return to England written me two or three
letters: his last information had been that he was going into the
figures of rural illiteracy. I was delighted to receive it and had
no doubt that if he should go into figures they would, as they are
said to be able to prove anything, prove at least that my advice
was sound and that he had wasted time enough. This quickened on my
part another hope, a hope suggested by some roundabout rumour--I
forget how it reached me--that he was engaged to a girl down in
Hampshire. He turned out not to be, but I felt sure that if only
he went into figures deep enough he would become, among the girls
down in Hampshire or elsewhere, one of those numerous prizes of
battle whose defences are practically not on the scale of their
provocations. I nursed in short the thought that it was probably
open to him to develop as one of the types about whom, as the years
go on,