Chapter 17

Gertrude, unaware of the extent to which she had already betrayed
her disappointment, believed that anxiety for her father's
health, which she alleged as the motive of her sudden departure,
was an excuse plausible enough to blind her friends to her
overpowering reluctance to speak to Agatha or endure her
presence; to her fierce shrinking from the sort of pity usually
accorded to a jilted woman; and, above all, to her dread of
meeting Trefusis. She had for some time past thought of him as an
upright and perfect man deeply interested in her. Yet,
comparatively liberal as her education had been, she had no idea
of any interest of man in woman existing apart from a desire to
marry. He had, in his serious moments, striven to make her
sensible of the baseness he saw in her worldliness, flattering
her by his apparent conviction--which she shared--that she was
capable of a higher life. Almost in the same breath, a strain of
gallantry which was incorrigible in him, and to which his humor
and his tenderness to women whom he liked gave variety and charm,
would supervene upon his seriousness with a rapidity which her
far less flexible temperament could not follow. Hence she,
thinking him still in earnest when he had swerved into florid
romance, had been dangerously misled. He had no conscientious
scruples in his love-making, because he was unaccustomed to
consider himself as likely to inspire love in women; and Gertrude
did not know that her beauty gave to an hour spent alone with her
a transient charm which few men of imagination and address could
resist. She, who had lived in the marriage market since she had
left school, looked upon love-making as the most serious business
of life. To him it was only a pleasant sort of trifling, enhanced
by a dash of sadness in the reflection that it meant so little.

Of the ceremonies attending her departure, the one that cost her
most was the kiss she felt bound to offer Agatha. She had been
jealous of her at college, where she had esteemed herself the
better bred of the two; but that opinion had hardly consoled her
for Agatha's superior quickness of wit, dexterity of hand,
audacity, aptness of resource, capacity for forming or following
intricate associations of ideas, and consequent power to dazzle
others. Her jealousy of these qualities was now barbed by the
knowledge that they were much nearer akin than her own to those
of Trefusis. It mattered little to her how she appeared to
herself in comparison with Agatha. But it mattered the whole
world (she thought) that she must appear to Trefusis so slow,
stiff, cold, and studied, and that she had no means to make him
understand that she was not really so. For she would not admit
the justice of impressions made by