Chapter 7 - Page 2

increase of acquaintance with Mrs.
Mulville--she might find herself flattening her nose against the
clear hard pane of an eternal question--that of the relative, that
of the opposed, importances of virtue and brains. She replied that
this was surely a subject on which one took everything for granted;
whereupon I admitted that I had perhaps expressed myself ill. What
I referred to was what I had referred to the night we met in Upper
Baker Street--the relative importance (relative to virtue) of other
gifts. She asked me if I called virtue a gift--a thing handed to
us in a parcel on our first birthday; and I declared that this very
enquiry proved to me the problem had already caught her by the
skirt. She would have help however, the same help I myself had
once had, in resisting its tendency to make one cross.

"What help do you mean?"

"That of the member for Clockborough."

She stared, smiled, then returned: "Why my idea has been to help
HIM!"

She HAD helped him--I had his own word for it that at Clockborough
her bedevilment of the voters had really put him in. She would do
so doubtless again and again, though I heard the very next month
that this fine faculty had undergone a temporary eclipse. News of
the catastrophe first came to me from Mrs. Saltram, and it was
afterwards confirmed at Wimbledon: poor Miss Anvoy was in trouble-
-great disasters in America had suddenly summoned her home. Her
father, in New York, had suffered reverses, lost so much money that
it was really vexatious as showing how much he had had. It was
Adelaide who told me she had gone off alone at less than a week's
notice.

"Alone? Gravener has permitted that?"

"What will you have? The House of Commons!"

I'm afraid I cursed the House of Commons: I was so much
interested. Of course he'd follow her as soon as he was free to
make her his wife; only she mightn't now be able to bring him
anything like the marriage-portion of which he had begun by having
the virtual promise. Mrs. Mulville let me know what was already
said: she was charming, this American girl, but really these
American fathers--! What was a man to do? Mr. Saltram, according
to Mrs. Mulville, was of opinion that a man was never to suffer his
relation to money to become a spiritual relation--he was to keep it
exclusively material. "Moi pas comprendre!" I commented on this;
in rejoinder to which Adelaide, with her beautiful sympathy,
explained that she supposed he simply meant that the thing was to
use it, don't you know? but not to think too much about it. "To
take it, but not to thank you for it?" I still more profanely
enquired. For a quarter of an hour afterwards she wouldn't look at
me, but this didn't prevent my asking her