Miss Quisanté leant forward suddenly and held up a short forefinger.
"My dear, you'd be very unhappy," she said. Then she leant back again and received in complete stillness May's meditative gaze.
"In a good many ways perhaps I should," said May at last with a sigh, and her brow puckered with wrinkles. "Yes, I suppose so," she sighed again.
"But I know what it is. You've let yourself get interested in Sandro; you've let him lay hold of you." May nodded. "And it would seem rather dull now to lose him?" Again May nodded, laughing a little. Aunt Maria understood her feelings very well, it seemed. "I should be dull too if I lost him." The old lady folded her hands in her lap. "There is that about Sandro," she said with a touch of pride in her voice. "I don't like him; well, you've gathered that perhaps; but if anything happened to him, I should feel I might as well lie down and die. Of course I've got nobody else belonging to me; you're not like that." Again the forefinger was raised in admonition, and Miss Quisanté gave a piece of practical advice. "Marry a nice man of your own sort, my dear, and when you're safely married, be as much interested in Sandro as you like."
May was not quite sure of the morality of this counsel; it seemed possible that Aunt Maria shared the vagueness about right and wrong which she quarrelled with in her nephew. She laughed as she said,
"But then Mr. Quisanté would marry some other woman, and she mightn't like it. And my nice husband mightn't like it."
It was possible to discuss the matter far more frankly with Miss Quisanté than with anybody else, yet the talk with her was only the first of several in which May tried to glean what would be thought of such a step as marrying Alexander Quisanté. Almost everywhere she found, not only the lack of encouragement which Aunt Maria had shown, but an amazement hardly distinguishable from horror and an utter failure to understand her point of view; her care to conceal any personal interest in the discussions she found means to bring about gained her very candid expressions of opinion about Quisanté, and she became aware that her world would regard her as something like a lunatic if it awoke one morning to read of her engagement to the man.
Yet side by side with this feeling there was a great and a growing expectancy with regard to him in his public aspect. He began to be a figure, somebody of whom account would have to be taken; Dick Benyon's infatuation was less often mentioned, his sagacity more often praised. May was struck again with the sharp line drawn between the man himself, and what he was to do, with the way in which everybody proposed to invite him to his house, but nobody contemplated admitting him to his heart. The inhumanity made her angry again, but she was alone in perceiving it; and she was half-aware that her perception of it would be far keener than Quisanté's own. In fact it was very doubtful if he asked any more of the world than what the world was prepared to give him. But that, said May, was not because he lacked the power and the desire of love, but because his affections were withered by neglect or rusty from disuse. She knew well that they were there and would expand under the influence of sympathy. If people grew human towards him, he would respond in kind; in hitting on this idea she commended herself for a sagacity in questions of emotion not less than that which Dick Benyon had shown in matters of the intellect. Dick had discovered Quisanté, as he thought; May told herself that he had discovered only half of Quisanté, and that the other half had been left for her to explore, and to reveal to the world. The effect of her various conversations was rather to confirm her in her inclination towards Quisanté than to frighten her out of it.
There was one talk which she could not escape and had to face with what resolution she might. Weston Marchmont was not content with the brief dismissal which had reached him from Ashwood, and he was amazed beyond understanding at the hint of its cause which Dick Benyon had given him. He had no doubt some reason to think himself ill-used, but he was not inclined to press that side of the case. It was not his own failure so much as the threatened success of such a rival that staggered and horrified him. Few are wide-minded enough to feel a friendship quite untouched and unimpaired when their friend takes into equal intimacy a third person for whom they themselves entertain aversion or contempt; at the best they see in such conduct an unexpected failure of discernment; very often they detect in it evidence of a startling coarseness of feeling, an insensibility, and a grossness of taste difficult to tolerate in one to whom they have given their affection. Marchmont felt that, if May Gaston wronged him, she was wronging far more herself, and most of all his ideal of her. He could not believe such a thing of her without her own plain assurance, and would not suffer it until every effort to redeem and rescue her was exhausted.
"You don't mean," he said at last openly and bluntly to Dick Benyon, "that you think it's possible she'll marry him?"