“Well, I don’t know. Plenty of English mothers have them, of course. Only they’re not so frank about them. All the same, you know, you mustn’t count upon us. We couldn’t do much in that line. My mother, for instance, would never think of such a thing, and if Alix came back to us she’d be like one of my sisters; trained, if you like, to a profession. Marriage would only be by chance; for her, as for them.”
“Dieu! You are a strange people!” said madame Vervier. “To leave to chance what is of the most vital importance in a woman’s life! No; you are not serious. You live dans le brouillard. Life must be less difficult a thing with you since it is possible to face it so lightly. I should not, it is evident, care to leave Alix among you unless it were in the hope of marriage. I could myself have her trained to a profession. If I gave her up again, it would be because I hoped for something better. I am not féministe. I think a professional life deplorable for a woman. A necessity in many cases, no doubt; but a deplorable necessity. An artist’s life is happier; but I hope that my Alix may find the happiest life; the life of a woman married well. So, if she returns to England, it is for the sake of the chances, and you, I believe, will help to make them for her. To begin with, you will see that she accepts Lady Mary Hamble’s next invitation.”
“Confound her impudence!” Giles was saying to himself, but he was saying it tenderly. He was enjoying her impudence; it was part of the comedy that, for all her pitiful, her tragic aspects, she offered him. “I see that I am to be counted upon as a sort of père de famille for Alix,” he observed, and though genial his tone was certainly ironic.
“Précisément,” smiled madame Vervier. “You will not, I know, be a dog in the manger and grudge to others what you do not want for yourself.”
“Ah, but that’s a very different thing from asking Old Dog Tray to go trotting about to find her a husband,” Giles objected. “I don’t see myself as a matchmaker, you know; I can’t promise to do anything at all in that line for Alix.”
“You were not asked to be Old Dog Tray. You were asked to be le Prince Charmant,” madame Vervier returned, a hint of the caustic in her kindness. “And I do not now ask you to trot. I ask you only, if an occasion offers, to see that she does not miss it. She has not the heredity of the English girl. She will not know how to make, or take, occasions for herself.”
“I think you are being rather nasty about the English girl,” Giles now commented. He and madame Vervier were on strangely intimate terms and could deal out friendly irony to one another. “The English young man counts for something after all. What we hope for, we romantic English, is that he will make the occasion.”
“Oh, no. Not nasty; not at all nasty. I admire them, your English girls; I admire their enterprise,” smiled madame Vervier. “Young men do not know how to make occasions, and since the English mother feels it beneath her dignity to make them, it is left for the girl to combine the rôle of mother and daughter. It is a difference of mœurs, that is all, and I wish Alix to have the advantage of your mœurs while keeping the immunities of her own. The question that now remains is: Does she return to you? She does not expect to. You will have gathered that she feels very keenly your brother’s silence in regard to his visits to us in Paris.”
Again it was a case of her surpassing detachment. She went to the heart of the matter as if it had been, merely, a question of his brother. Yet the strange thing was that, though so detached, she did not affect one as callous.
“Yes. She feels it very keenly,” said Giles. “She can’t, of course, understand the grounds of his shrinking. She was sure that when you knew you would feel as she did and would not think of letting her come back.”