The Confounding of Camelia

By Anne Douglas Sedgwick Author of “The Dull Miss Archinard,” Etc.
New York Charles Scribner’s Sons 1899

Copyright, 1899, by Charles Scribner’s Sons MANHATTAN PRESS 474 W. BROADWAY NEW YORK

TO “CHARLIE” AND “JIMMIE”


WHEN Camelia came down into the country after her second London season, descended lightly upon the home of her forefathers, her coming unannounced, and as much a matter of caprice as had been her long absence, a slowly growing opinion, an opinion that had begun to form itself during Camelia’s most irresponsible girlhood, became clearly defined, a judgment fixed and apparently irrevocable. The Patons had always been good, quiet people; absolutely undistinguished, were it not that the superlative quality of their tranquil excellence gave a certain distinction. There were no black sheep in their annals, and a black sheep gives, by contrast, a brilliancy lacking to unaccented bucolic groupings, strikes a note of interest at any rate; but none of the Paton sheep were even gray. They fed in pleasant, plenteous pastures, for it was a wealthy, though not noticeably wealthy family, and perhaps a rather sheep-like dulness, an unimaginative contentment not conducive to adventurous strayings, accounted for the spotless fleeces.
Their cupboards had never held a skeleton—nor so much as the bone of one. The family portraits, none even pretending to be Sir Joshuas or Vandycks, only presented a respectable number of generations, so that the mellow perspective of old ancestry, remarkable at least for a lengthy retrogression into antiquity, made no background to their commonplace. Sir Charles, Camelia’s father, was the first Paton weighted with an individuality that entailed nonconformity, and since Sir Charles’s individuality had confused all anticipations, further developments of the wild streak could not be unexpected. Many of the quiet, conservative people, who had known Camelia, her father and mother, and Patons of an earlier epoch, pronounced with emphasis that Camelia was spoiled; there was a tenderness in the term, an implication of might-have-beens; and other people, more bitter and perhaps more sensitive, remarked that not her head-turning London successes, of which big echoes had rolled down to Clievesbury, but the inherent, the no doubt inherited defects of Miss Paton’s character were responsible for her noticeable variation from family traditions. Did not that portion of Blankshire, which lay about the dim old village of Clievesbury, send up to the capital every year its native offerings of maidenhood? A London season had never induced in these well-balanced young ladies the merry arrogance so provokingly apparent in Miss Paton. Old Mrs. Jedsley it was, the last rector’s widow, who most openly denounced Camelia, and that, despite her long friendship for the Patons; denounced her frivolity, her insincerity, her egotism, and her wonderful gowns—their simplicity did not deceive Mrs. Jedsley’s keen eye; the price of one would keep the parish in flannel for a year she declared, and, no doubt, include the school feast. Mrs. Jedsley prided herself on her impartial faculty for seeing disagreeable truths clearly and for announcing them unflinchingly. Her fondness for Lady Paton—“poor Lady Paton”—could not blind or silence her. Poor Lady Paton was more than ever effaced, Mrs. Jedsley said; one might have thought that Sir Charles had required as much submission as a woman’s life could well yield, but the daughter had called forth further capabilities.