Greville Fane

(1892)

Coming in to dress for dinner, I found a telegram: "Mrs. Stormer
dying; can you give us half a column for to-morrow evening? Let her
off easy, but not too easy." I was late; I was in a hurry; I had
very little time to think, but at a venture I dispatched a reply:
"Will do what I can." It was not till I had dressed and was rolling
away to dinner that, in the hansom, I bethought myself of the
difficulty of the condition attached. The difficulty was not of
course in letting her off easy but in qualifying that indulgence. "I
simply won't qualify it," I said to myself. I didn't admire her, but
I liked her, and I had known her so long that I almost felt heartless
in sitting down at such an hour to a feast of indifference. I must
have seemed abstracted, for the early years of my acquaintance with
her came back to me. I spoke of her to the lady I had taken down,
hut the lady I had taken down had never heard of Greville Fane. I
tried my other neighbour, who pronounced her books "too vile." I had
never thought them very good, but I should let her off easier than
that.

I came away early, for the express purpose of driving to ask about
her. The journey took time, for she lived in the north-west
district, in the neighbourhood of Primrose Hill. My apprehension
that I should be too late was justified in a fuller sense than I had
attached to it--I had only feared that the house would be shut up.
There were lights in the windows, and the temperate tinkle of my bell
brought a servant immediately to the door, but poor Mrs. Stormer had
passed into a state in which the resonance of no earthly knocker was
to be feared. A lady, in the hall, hovering behind the servant, came
forward when she heard my voice. I recognised Lady Luard, but she
had mistaken me for the doctor.

"Excuse my appearing at such an hour," I said; "it was the first
possible moment after I heard."

"It's all over," Lady Luard replied. "Dearest mamma!"

She stood there under the lamp with her eyes on me; she was very
tall, very stiff, very cold, and always looked as if these things,
and some others beside, in her dress, her manner and even her name,
were an implication that she was very admirable. I had never been
able to follow the argument, but that is a detail. I expressed
briefly and frankly what I felt, while the little mottled maidservant
flattened herself against the wall of the narrow passage and tried to
look detached without looking indifferent. It was not a moment to
make a visit, and I was on the point of retreating when Lady Luard
arrested me with a queer, casual, drawling "Would you--a--would you,
perhaps, be WRITING