Chapter Three: The Maiden
On a January afternoon, the afternoon of her twentieth birthday, Mary Flower stood by the drawing-room windows of a house in King's Gate, staring out across the Knightsbridge road to where in soot and snow the trees of Hyde Park were etched upon a gray expanse of sky. The house was very still, for it was the time when old Lady Flower took her daily nap, to the routine of which she attributed the vitality that enabled her at seventy to sustain the exertion of arranging an advantageous marriage for her granddaughter. To-day lunch had been protracted to celebrate with various dishes Mary's birthday, and to-night a dinner-party was to be followed by a musical reception. The house, seeming to conspire with her ladyship's snores, achieved a stillness that was even more perceptible than usual.
Mary's meditations were neither so profound nor so romantic as any passer-by that looked up and glimpsed the form of that beautiful young woman in her glass world might have imagined. Mostly they were directed to her new evening gown, a polonaise snatched it might almost be said prematurely by Lady Flower from the most fashionable of Parisian costumiers. Mary dreamed of its passementerie of beads and ruching of Honiton lace, and then with heightened color of the amount of bare arm it must reveal. She supposed that her grandmother was right and that she should display as much of the upper part of her arm without risk of censorious comment, but....
Mary wished that Daisy Harland had come up from the country yesterday instead of waiting until to-night to wish her best friend many happy returns of the day. Daisy's opinion would have been so valuable. Daisy was so advanced, so unconventional, and yet always so right. But then Grandmamma, too, was always right, and Grandmamma had deliberately chosen the dress. Mary gave up bothering about the problem, which was no problem at all really, because she must obviously take Grandmamma's advice as long as Grandmamma was alive to give it. And if Grandmamma should die? Why, then, in this great house she, Mary Flower, should be all alone! No wonder Grandmamma was anxious for her to be safely married. Marriage? That was indeed something to talk about with her friend. If only the frost would hold so that Daisy might be resigned to stay in London for a while and spend hours in discussing marriage. Not of course as the topic had been discussed at school, where nobody knew anything for certain and the horridest girls vied with one another in dreadful propoundings. No, not like that, but seriously, almost religiously—if one could compare two things so far asunder as religion and marriage.
Mary contemplated the prospect of marriage with several of the men who visited the house in King's Gate. None of them considered thus made her feel at all anxious to be married; rather did each one present himself to her fancy like an unknown bottle of medicine, the efficacy of which was guaranteed but of the niceness or nastiness of which there was nothing to be learned from its external appearance. It was not that Mary had never imagined herself in love. Like most schoolgirls she had cherished impossible loyalties and sentimental passions; but the figures upon which these had been bestowed were like the figures in a picture book or the remote incarnations that are begotten by music. Love was an aspiration to a life beyond the present, a kind of yearning upon immortality; it was never a practical guide to the humdrum, the yet so intricate humdrum, of existence; it had nothing at all to do with marriage.
Lady Flower was responsible for this attitude of her granddaughter. By living so much in Paris, by allowing the French half of her character to recover from years of discouragement by her husband, and by brooding over her son's mésalliance—it was typical of the sentimental English that they should have to borrow the right word from France—the old lady felt herself more and more definitely inclined to the mariage de convenance. She never let pass an opportunity to impress upon Mary its superiority.
"Love, my dear child," she would tell her, "is an invention of the poets to excuse their own weaknesses."
This afternoon, as Mary stared out across the wintry park, love did seem a long way off from King's Gate, and marriage, for all it was such a mystery, did seem comparatively near.
"Though suppose nobody ever does propose to me?" Mary thought. She turned round for reassurance from the large gilded mirror over the mantelpiece, and wished that she had never seen herself in a glass before, so that she could arrive at a decision about her beauty. Was she beautiful? If with six other girls she stood before a mirror for the first time, so that she did not know which was herself, should she think herself beautiful? But she should know which was herself, because she should recognize the other girls, and the stranger in the middle would be herself.
"Oh, am I or am I not beautiful?" she asked aloud of her reflection, standing motionless in that frozen, reflected room where nothing was alive except the swift pendulum of the ormulu clock on the wall behind her. "Am I or am I not beautiful?" she repeated with a sigh, as she took her place once more by the window and gazed out at the black and white trees in the Park, beneath whose filigree of boughs people were wandering in couples upon the powdered grass, walking so slowly that they must be happy, Mary thought. She was filled with envy of those shadows beyond the railings, who could upon this cold January afternoon pace up and down with such unhurried steps. They surely must be lovers, who could find delight in this chill and somber air, who could stroll arm in arm about this landscape that was sinking beneath the weight of a leaden sky. There opposite, two shadows were actually sitting upon a bench, sitting as close as birds sit upon a perch at dusk. They must love each other very deeply and very dearly, to endure the cold, very deeply and very dearly to stay there away from the firelight. Beautiful firelight, Mary thought; and she watched for a while its diminished reflection lambent within the milky windowpanes.