“Here is a rose for you. May it give you kind thoughts of me.” Camelia fastened one of the rejected buds in the lady’s portly bosom, and when she was gone, Lady Paton, leaving the room with her, she added, “Mary, is the piano tuned?”
Mary went to the Steinway. “Lady Henge is a composer, as you know.” She turned a face sparkling with mischief to Perior, who maintained his silence beside the mantelpiece.
“You have heard her? Yes? Well, you shall hear her again. That’s enough, Mary,” she added, lightly; “we hear that the piano needs tuning.”
Now Mary had a certain little pride in the neat execution of Beethoven’s Sonatas, that many hours of faithful practice had seemed to justify, and while Camelia stood back to admire her flower arrangement, both Perior and Mrs. Fox-Darriel noticed the flush that swept over Mary’s face.
CHAPTER VIII
BY the time Sir Arthur and Lady Henge arrived, Camelia had fulfilled her prophecy and become a popular person. Under the blighting indifference of her first appearance Clievesbury had naturally retaliated with severity, but that the first impression had been erroneous the most severe owned—after Camelia had called on them. Camelia found the process of winning the whole neighborhood great fun, and its success gave her a delicious sense of efficiency. She cared nothing, absolutely nothing, for her neighbors, but once she determined to be cared for by them she found the facility of the task highly flattering to self-esteem.
She drove from place to place, sweet, modest, adaptable. She dispensed pretty compliments with a grace that disarmed the grimmest suspicion. She showed a pretty interest in every one. Indeed why should they not like her? Camelia thought she really deserved liking; and though she laughed at herself a little for the complimentary conclusion, her kindness struck her as rather nice. It was motiveless, was it not? almost motiveless, a game that it pleased her to play. Certainly she did not care to appear before Lady Henge on a background of unpopularity; the background must harmonize, become her; she would see to that. At the bottom of her heart Camelia cared very little for Lady Henge’s approval or disapproval; Lady Henge was part of the game; but Camelia had determined that the game required Lady Henge, like everybody else, to find her charming; the game required Arthur Henge to propose—then she might accept him; but she must make quite secure the possibility of refusing him. So Camelia aimed steadily at one result, and was not at all sure of her own decision once the result was reached, and this indecision gave her a happy sense of freedom.
She must capture Sir Arthur; this visit was definite, the last test; but once captured, Camelia wondered if she would care to keep. Theoretically she owned to a hard common-sense ambition that would make rejection doubtful; but when the moment for decision finally arrived, Camelia felt that this trait in her character might fail her; she did not really believe in it, though she paraded it, flaunted it. Every one might think her a hard-headed, hard-hearted little worldling—as far as practice went they were right, no doubt, in all honesty she must own that she gave them no occasion to think anything else; but she reserved a warm corner of unrevealed ideals—ideals she never herself looked at, where a purring self-content sat cosily.
Lady Henge and her son arrived on a Monday. Lady Henge was nervous, though her massive personality concealed the tremor, and unhappy—for she felt Arthur’s fate to be a foregone conclusion. She was not a clever but an immensely conscientious woman. She lived up to all her principles, and she took only the highest view of everything. Her son’s love for the pretty Miss Paton, who meddled frivolously with politics (Lady Henge meddled ponderously), and made collections of Japanese pictures, had thrown her into a dismal perturbation. She could not like Miss Paton; her cleverness was not disinterested; her sense of duty was less than dubious, she lived for pleasure, for admiration; she was no fit wife for a Henge.
The most imperative of the Henges’ stately requirements was that solemn sense of duty which Lady Henge embodied so conclusively.