The Confounding of Camelia

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“You know you often want to please people—to make every one like you;—even I have fancied it—forgive me, won’t you, at the price of a little falseness. When one feels as I do, the least flaw cuts into one like a knife.” With Camelia’s triumph there now mingled a bitter distaste; she could hardly bring herself to look into his honest, adoring eyes; the quickness of her breath and wavering of her glance were, again, quite spontaneous, and that she knew them to be effective, deepened her humiliation.

“To see you laugh at mother—and then praise her—I thought it; and I can’t tell you how it pained me. You forgive me?”

Her self-disgust now seemed to lend her a certain sense of atoning self-respect. “How good you are!” she said, looking at him very gravely, and this recognition of his goodness restoring still more fully that sick self-respect, she was able to smile at him, to think that she must not exaggerate the little contretemps, and to ask herself whether she might not fall in love with Sir Arthur—simply and naturally. Dear man! The words were almost on her lips—her eyes at least caressed him with the implication.

He looked embarrassed, but very happy. “No—no! Please don’t say that! How divinely kind you are. I have been insufferable. It is noble of you to understand—. Can’t we get away from all these people—if only for a moment. Let us go into the garden—it is very warm.” She would rather not have gone into the garden, but she could not refuse him, she felt that to some extent she would like to justify his faith in her, and to shake from her that snake-like imputation of baseness. She glanced at Perior as she went out; he was talking most affably with Lady Henge, and did not look at her. His lack of faith stung perhaps more than Sir Arthur’s faith. It was unmerited too, more unmerited than Sir Arthur’s trust, so she told herself, stepping down from the terrace on to the gravel-path, and the sense of unmerited scorn sharpened that wish to justify herself—as far as might be—to the kinder judge.

“No, Sir Arthur, you are good,” she went on, pausing before him, her hands clasped behind her after a little-girl fashion habitual with her; “and I am horrid—it’s quite true—but not as horrid as you thought me. I do like to please people. I am often pettily, impulsively false; it’s quite, quite true. I do like your mother’s piece, but probably not as much as I implied to her by my praise—not as much as greater things: and Mr. Perior’s silence made me angry too; but I probably was a little insincere, and that every one is the same is no excuse for me. I don’t want to be like every one, and you don’t want me to be, do you? But if I had not liked it, you would not have wished me to express myself with the bludgeon-like directness of our rugged friend, would you?” Camelia asked the question with real anxiety, conscious though she was that she had thought the composition quite as ridiculous as Perior had declared it. After all, his ugly sincerity justified her kindly fibbing; and as for the laughing, she was sorry she had laughed, since Sir Arthur had seen her. His erectness of moral vision would so distort that unintentional meanness that she could not be asked to confess it; but her partial confession, all the same, left her confused by the stinging of small, uncomfortable compunctions. These, however, did not show themselves in her eyes, nor in the pure lines of her face. Her silvered garments and exquisite whiteness gave her in the moonlight an angelic look that might well humble modest manhood before her. Sir Arthur had never felt himself so near to the girl he loved, nor his love so well justified.

“No, I don’t think it’s necessary to give a person the truth like a box on the ear,” he said, and he would have taken her hands, but Camelia again put them behind her back, and stood smiling at him.

“Poor old Perior,” he added, and they walked slowly for a little way down the path. “You can understand it, though, can’t you? He thought you were fibbing, and that made him give mother the ruthless coup de dent.”

This was very true, and so Camelia knew, knowing, too, that she had been fibbing. “But that didn’t justify the coup de dent,” she declared, “and why should he think I was fibbing?” The bit of audacity was so inevitable that she hardly felt a qualm over its enunciation. On Perior’s loyalty she relied as she relied on the ground beneath her feet.

“Well, he knows that you are clever, and that your taste has not been distorted—as mother’s has—by fancied talent.” Sir Arthur was all candid confidence.

“He was very nasty,” said Camelia, “and I shall tell him so. And now that I have made my little confession, and that you have absolved me—for I am absolved, am I not?—shall we go in?” Camelia drew back from the proposal she saw looming in the moonlight; there was time, ample time, for that, now that she was sure of him, quite sure. A warm little thrill of pleasure went over her at the thought that it was she who was not ready, was not sure, though she had never liked him more.