Not knowing your own mind, though generally referred to as an intellectual weakness and sometimes as a moral fault, is none the less now and then a pleasant state to live in for a while. There is a richness of possibility about it, a variety of prospects open, a choice of roads each in its own fashion attractive. Besides, you can always tell yourself that it is prudent to look all round the question and consider all alternatives. The pleasure, like most pleasures, is greater when it comes once in a way to a person unaccustomed to it. Janie Iver had been brought up to know her own mind; it was the eleventh commandment in the Iver household. Iver entertained the intellectual, his wife the moral objection to shilly-shallying; their daughter's training, while conducted with all kindness, had been eminently sensible, and early days had offered few temptations to stray from the path of the obviously desirable. The case was different now; riches brought a change, the world revealed its resources, life was spreading out its diverse wares. Janie was much puzzled as to what she ought to do, more as to what she wanted to do, most of all as to what she would in the end do—unless indeed the fact that she was puzzled continued to rank as the greatest puzzle of all.
Naturally the puzzles were personified—or the persons made into puzzles. Men became lives to her, as well as individuals—the Tristram, the Duplay, the
Broadley life; her opinion of the life complicated her feeling toward the person. The Tristram life attracted her strongly, the life of the great lady; Harry had his fascination too; but she did not think that she and Harry would be very happy together, woman and man. She was loth to let him go, with all that he meant; perhaps she would have been secretly relieved if fate had taken him away from her. The Duplay life promised another sort of joy: the Major's experience was world-wide, his knowledge various, his conversation full of hints of the unexplored; she would be broadening her life if she identified it with his. Yet the Major was an approximate forty (on one side or the other), in a few years would seem rather old, and was not even now capable of raising a very strong sentiment; there too she would be taking rather the life than the man. Lastly there was that quiet Broadley life, to be transformed in some degree, doubtless, by her wealth, but likely to remain in essentials the peaceful homely existence which she knew very well. It had little to set against the rival prospects; yet there was a feeling that in either of the other two existences she would miss something; and that something seemed to be Bob Broadley himself.
She found herself thinking, in terms superficially repugnant to convention, that she would like to pay long visits to the other men, but have Bob to come home to when she was inclined for rest and tranquillity. Her perplexity was not strange in itself, but it was strange and new to her; imbued with the parental views about shilly-shallying, she was angry with herself and inclined to be ashamed. The excuse she had made to Mina Zabriska did not acquit her in her own eyes. Yet she was also interested, excited, and pleasantly awake to the importance which her indecision gave her.
Judged from the outside, she was not open to blame in her attitude toward Harry; he was not in love with her, and hardly pretended to be. She met him fairly on a friendly footing of business; he was the sinner in that, while what she offered was undoubtedly hers, what he proposed to give in return was only precariously his.
Nor had Duplay any cause of complaint in being kept waiting; he would be held exceedingly lucky not to be sent to the right-about instantly. But with Bob Broadley the matter was different. On the subtle question of what exactly constitutes "encouragement" (it is the technical term) in these cases it is not perhaps necessary to enter; but false hopes might, no doubt, arise from her visits to Mingham, from her habit of riding up the road by the river about the time when Bob would be likely to be riding down it, or of sauntering by the Pool on the days when he drove his gig into Blentmouth on business—all this being beyond and outside legitimate meetings at Fairholme itself. Unless she meant to marry him she might indeed raise hopes that were false.
Yes, but it did not seem as though she did. Bob was humble. She had tyrannized over him even before the Ivers grew so very rich. (They had begun in a small villa at Blentmouth—Miss Swinkerton lived there now.) It was natural that she should tyrannize still. He saw that she liked to meet him; grateful for friendship, he was incredulous of more. His disposition may plead in excuse for her; whatever she did, she would not disappoint a confident hope.
But she was always so glad to see him, and when she was with him, he was no perplexity, he was only her dear old friend. Well, and one thing besides—a man whom it was rather amusing to try to get a compliment out of, to try to torment into a manifestation of
devotion; it was all there; Janie liked to lure it to the surface sometimes. But Bob was not even visibly miserable; he was always equable, even jolly, with so much to say about his horses and his farm that sentiment did not always secure its fair share of the interview. Janie, not being sentimental either, liked all this even while it affronted her vanity.