Chapter 4 - Page 2

might doubtless have overdone
the idea that there was a general licence for such a man; but if
this had happened it would have been through one's feeling that
there could be none for such a woman.

I recognised her superiority when I asked her about the aunt of the
disappointed young lady: it sounded like a sentence from an
English-French or other phrase-book. She triumphed in what she
told me and she may have triumphed still more in what she withheld.
My friend of the other evening, Miss Anvoy, had but lately come to
England; Lady Coxon, the aunt, had been established here for years
in consequence of her marriage with the late Sir Gregory of that
name. She had a house in the Regent's Park, a Bath-chair and a
fernery; and above all she had sympathy. Mrs. Saltram had made her
acquaintance through mutual friends. This vagueness caused me to
feel how much I was out of it and how large an independent circle
Mrs. Saltram had at her command. I should have been glad to know
more about the disappointed young lady, but I felt I should know
most by not depriving her of her advantage, as she might have
mysterious means of depriving me of my knowledge. For the present,
moreover, this experience was stayed, Lady Coxon having in fact
gone abroad accompanied by her niece. The niece, besides being
immensely clever, was an heiress, Mrs. Saltram said; the only
daughter and the light of the eyes of some great American merchant,
a man, over there, of endless indulgences and dollars. She had
pretty clothes and pretty manners, and she had, what was prettier
still, the great thing of all. The great thing of all for Mrs.
Saltram was always sympathy, and she spoke as if during the absence
of these ladies she mightn't know where to turn for it. A few
months later indeed, when they had come back, her tone perceptibly
changed: she alluded to them, on my leading her up to it, rather
as to persons in her debt for favours received. What had happened
I didn't know, but I saw it would take only a little more or a
little less to make her speak of them as thankless subjects of
social countenance--people for whom she had vainly tried to do
something. I confess I saw how it wouldn't be in a mere week or
two that I should rid myself of the image of Ruth Anvoy, in whose
very name, when I learnt it, I found something secretly to like. I
should probably neither see her nor hear of her again: the
knight's widow (he had been mayor of Clockborough) would pass away
and the heiress would return to her inheritance. I gathered with
surprise that she had not communicated to his wife the story of her
attempt to hear Mr..Saltram, and I founded this reticence on the
easy supposition that Mrs. Saltram had fatigued by overpressure the
spring of