I
It now became the aim of Angelica’s life to satisfy Eddie. She felt that his standard was the right one, however painfully high it might be, and that he was genuinely concerned with helping her to attain it. And she felt that, in spite of his youthfulness and his somewhat grandiloquent air, he was a remarkable and an admirable man.
The more she saw of him, the more she admired him. She was a shrewd enough observer, yet she never detected in him a single lapse from his own rigid principles. What he set out to do, he did; what he determined to be, he was. She had not knowledge or experience enough to see that he was ignorant, crude, and childlike; she could see only his force, his strength of will, the earnestness of his ambition, and his complete ingenuousness.
He went directly to Polly. He told her that Angelica was ambitious, and that he wished to help her.
"So any evenings that you don’t need her," he said, "she can come to me and study. I’ll look out some books for her."
Polly smiled and agreed.
"It’s another of poor Eddie’s Utopian schemes," she said to her mother-in-law. "I don’t know what he expects to accomplish with the girl."
"I only hope she won’t accomplish anything!" said Mrs. Russell. "She’s very pretty, and Eddie’s so susceptible. Of course, he thinks it’s a sin to think of a girl as a girl, but still——”
They didn’t at all like this educational project, but Mrs. Russell was too careless and Polly too sensible to interfere. Besides which, it didn’t look really alarming. Eddie was not the sort—it would have been impossible to Eddie—to contemplate illicit relations with Angelica, and with his extreme propriety he was certainly not likely to consider marrying her. It was simply an annoyance to have her thus exalted. They were irritated and somewhat contemptuous, but they said nothing. They took care never to discuss Eddie in her presence.
It was a recognized fact that she and Eddie were allies. They were oddly alike in many ways. They had the same sort of careless austerity; neither of them cared whether a chair were comfortable or not, the soup hot or cold, the weather propitious; they disdained fatigue, were ready to work all day and all night to achieve an object, and had a fierce and driving ambition for power and distinction. But Angelica was coarser and stronger, while Eddie was more sensitive and very much more scrupulous. He was ruled by ideas, she was ruled by her vigorous impulses.