“Oh, of course not, my dear Aubrey; she is very unusual looking,” Mrs. Pomfrey again conceded. “And she is tall and her mother is short. Old Colonel Pickering, too, was tall, I remember. I saw him once or twice when they were living at Cheltenham the year before he died! a bleached, dull, oppressed old man, a much better type than the wife; she ruled him, I heard, with a rod of iron. One may be sure that she doesn’t rule Miss Leila. She is a young lady with a will of her own, unless I am much mistaken in her.”
"A will of her own; yes, yes"—Aubrey eagerly, pathetically to Mrs. Pomfrey’s ear, gathered up the ambiguous fragments—“and great firmness of will; great decision of character; and the serenity, you know, the sweet dignity that go with it, that so often go with it. You have noticed her serenity, her dignity. And she is very silent—a great contrast to her mother. I often wonder what brought them here. It’s very fortunate for all of us; but Mrs. Pickering is, as you say, so civic, yes, so commonplace, that I don’t understand what she can find in this quiet place to please her. She certainly doesn’t care about her garden. Those beds about The Cottage are very distressing; they distress Miss Pickering.”
“It’s quite clear to me why they came,” said Mrs. Pomfrey. “They can’t afford London, and, I suppose, know nobody there if they could; and there is more chance of a pretty girl like Miss Leila marrying well here than there is in Cheltenham. She doesn’t hunt, it’s true; but the hunting makes a difference, and there is a good deal going on in one way and another. Mrs. Pickering hoped to capture Arthur Barton; she made that very evident. But he has never looked at another woman since his wife died, and never will, I imagine; at all events, he didn’t look at Miss Leila.”
Aubrey’s eyes, dwelling on her, expressed reprobation and almost horror. “She tried to marry her daughter to Barton! That lovely child and Barton! What a terrible woman!”
“Miss Pickering must be a good twenty-five, my dear Aubrey, and I was married at eighteen. No; I don’t like Mrs. Pickering, but I can see nothing reprehensible in her determination to settle her daughter well in life.”
“But Barton! He is fifty! He must be fifty! He must be older than I am; yes, very considerably older than I am.”
“Well?” said Mrs. Pomfrey, and there was a mingled reluctance and grimness in her smile, “and do you think of yourself as unmarriageable?”
He ran his hand several times over his head and through his hair. He was still flushed, but suddenly he became pale, swallowing quickly several times.
“Do you know—you have said something—you have made me think something—put something before me. Yes; I must tell you, I must tell you,” he said, thrusting his hands into his pockets and fixing his eyes on the wall above Mrs. Pomfrey’s head. “I love her; I love Miss Pickering. You may think it absurd. I know I’m a dull old bachelor; everything of that sort; but there it is. Ever since I saw her, a year ago, when they first came. I never dreamed of anything else. A dull old bachelor, nothing to offer, and twice her age. But I can’t help wondering—it’s only a wonder—whether there might just be a chance for me—if you don’t think my age, and all that, makes it impossible. What I mean,” Aubrey finished, with a sort of quiet desperation, “is—could she love me? It would have to be love with a girl like Miss Pickering. Am I a man that a girl like that could love?”
Tears now were in his eyes as he brought them back to Mrs. Pomfrey’s, and seated upon the sofa, the pink foxgloves in the Chinese bowl beside her, she looked back at him very gravely. She was so grave that for some moments she was silent. Then, before speaking, she took out her spectacles and polished them and put them on. She saw him quite well without them. It was as if in emphasis of the gravity of the moment. And, in the first place, she did not answer his question.