“Well, what about you, Miss La Chêne?” he asked, in all innocence.
There was a terrific silence.
“N-no, thank you, Mr. Ryder,” she finally managed.
The wisdom of the past is very clearly demonstrated in the story of Cinderella. You will remember that that long-suffering girl maintained a canny silence regarding her succès fou at the court balls until the prince had made a frank declaration of his honorable intentions. Otherwise her life between balls, with those stepsisters and that stepmother, would have been unendurable—as Miss La Chêne’s life was now. Naturally Mrs. Robinson and Mrs. Milner did not like to see their adored and only brother making an idiot of himself about a girl who was just a little nobody, and naturally they firmly believed it was all the girl’s fault. They didn’t actually say anything, but they managed remarkably well with implications.
Miss La Chêne could not defend herself. Never before in her brief life had she shown herself deficient in spirit or in proper pride, but now a terrible humility had come over her. She thought Mandeville Ryder was so marvelous that he couldn’t possibly be interested in her. She thought he hadn’t really meant it when he said she was the prettiest girl in the world, and the sweetest. She thought he hadn’t really looked at her like that. How was it possible, when the most beautiful and charming and brilliant girls were all competing for his favor? No—he had only been kind to her, because it was his dear, splendid way to be kind to every one.
And, after all, his kindness had brought her nothing but misery. It seemed to her sometimes that she couldn’t bear the slights and the innuendoes of Mrs. Milner and Mrs. Robinson another moment; and yet she couldn’t quite make up her mind to go back to some cheap little boarding house, to wait there until she could find another position, possibly worse than this—and never, never to see Mandeville Ryder any more. She generally cried after she got into bed at night.
As for young Mandeville, he generally sat out on the veranda alone, smoking, and meditating in a very miserable way. Miss La Chêne as a dancing partner, gay and sparkling and lovely, had charmed him, but Miss La Chêne subdued and obviously unhappy touched him to the heart. What was the matter with her?
A week went by, and then the household was thrown into turmoil by a dramatic and tremendous reconciliation between Mrs. Robinson and her husband. Mrs. Robinson enjoyed it very much, Mr. Robinson not quite so much. Indeed, he had a pretty sheepish look when his wife sat beside him on the sofa, weeping, with her head on his shoulder, and announced to the assembled family:
“Lucian and I are going to make a fresh start, and all the miserable, miserable past is to be as if it had never been!”
That evening Elaine sang Tosti’s “Good-by” for them: