“Now, Mary, imaginative efforts are bad for you; don’t indulge them.”
“I hoped—I only wanted——”
“Yes, of course, you want me to be happy; and very nice it is of you too. Be patient, Mary; you shall congratulate me some day. I haven’t decided when that shall be. I haven’t really quite decided how I shall be happy—there are so many ways—the choice of a superlative is perplexing. When I choose you need not come to me, I promise you.” Camelia rose, stretching her arms above her head, and smiling very kindly at her cousin.
Her own words made her feel comfortable. Still smiling, she put her arm around Mary’s neck and kissed her. “I shall tell you immediately. Now run to bed, dear, for you look pale.” When Mary was gone, Camelia finished undressing, and got into bed in a frame of mind much reassured as to her own intrinsic merit.
CHAPTER IX
THE little moonlit episode had very thoroughly mended the rift within the lute. Camelia’s seeming frankness of confessional confidence more than atoned for every doubting qualm. Sir Arthur evidently put doubts and distresses behind him. He allowed himself to be wholly in love. He wondered resentfully at himself for the mixed impulses he had known, since all were now merged in one fixed determination.
The country influences of green trees and summer sky seemed to have breathed a heretofore unrealized gentleness into his fair one. Her playful sallies, her little audacities, delighted him now unreservedly, for under the tantalizing shifting and shimmering of surface moods, the translucent depths of a loyal and lovely nature, were at last fully revealed to him.
Camelia felt the resultant ardor hovering during all their constant companionship, but she evaded it. The conquest had been so easy, was so complete, that fitness seemed to require a compensatory dallying. The atmosphere of adoration, submissive in its certainty of ultimate success, felt as flatteringly around her as the warm sweetness of a summer breeze. Conquest was delightful, so was dallying, so was her own indecision; that was the most delightful part of all. She felt, too, in the loving warmth that encompassed her, a consolation, a refuge from cold and rugged depreciation.
Perior had not reappeared since the musical mêlée, and, while enjoying the sunny harbor where she rocked so peacefully, Camelia was conscious that thoughts about that rough, that unsympathetic sea outside preoccupied her amidst the kinder waters. Her gaiety was therefore a little forced, absent-minded, in a sense a mask; her gentler mood was the result of inner cogitations, so involved at times as to give to her manner a dreamy sweetness. Her moral snubbing, though she rejected it as undeserved, subdued her.
Lady Henge’s vanity was of no petty or immovable order. Far from antagonizing, Perior’s judgment had aroused in her an anxious self-doubt, an anxious respect for her candid critic. Despite Camelia’s sympathy—for Camelia stuck to her colors, entrenched herself behind a staunch fidelity to a false position, listened with absorption to frequent renderings of the “Thalassa,” thoughtfully discussed its iconoclastic merits, the high value of its full flavored modernity, and felt a certain ethical elevation from these painful sacrifices to the only constancy permitted her—despite this steady sympathy, Lady Henge perversely longed for a further expression of unsympathetic opinion from the ruthless Perior. And one morning she told Camelia that she had written to him, had asked him to fulfil his promise, to bring some music of his choosing that might, with his aid, be useful to her.