Perhaps he was a dear. She didn't know. What had she against him? She didn't know. He was too old, that was one thing; but the next minute, after hearing something he had said or laughed at, she thought he wasn't old enough. Of course what she really had against him was that he had got over his wife's shocking death so quickly. Yet she admitted there was much in Lucy's explanation of this as a sheer instinctive gesture of self-defence. Besides, she couldn't keep it up as a grudge against him for ever; with every day it mattered less. And sometimes Miss Entwhistle even doubted whether it was this that mattered to her at all,—whether it was not rather some quite small things that she really objected to: a want of fastidiousness, for instance, a forgetfulness of the minor courtesies,—the objections, in a word, she told herself smiling, of an old maid. Lucy seemed not to mind his blunders in these directions in the least. She seemed positively, thought her aunt, to take a kind of pride in them, delighting in everything he said or did with the adoring tenderness of a young mother watching the pranks of her first-born. She laughed gaily; she let him caress her openly. She too, thought Miss Entwhistle, had become what she no doubt would say was single-minded. Well, perhaps all this was a spinster's way of feeling about a type not previously met with, and she had got—again she reproached herself—into an elderly groove. Jim's friends,—well, they had been different, but not necessarily better. Mr. Wemyss would call them, she was sure, a finicking lot.
When in October London began to fill again, and Jim's friends came to look her and Lucy up and showed a tendency, many of them, to keep on doing it, a new struggle was added to her others, the struggle to prevent their meeting Wemyss. He wouldn't, she was convinced, be able to hide his proprietorship in Lucy, and Lucy wouldn't ever get that look of tenderness out of her eyes when they rested on him. Questions as to who he was would naturally be asked, and one or other of Jim's friends would be sure to remember the affair of Mrs. Wemyss's death; indeed, that day she went to the British Museum and read the report of it she had been amazed that she hadn't seen it at the time. It took up so much of the paper that she was bound to have seen it if she had seen a paper at all. She could only suppose that as she was visiting friends just then, she chanced that day to have been in the act of leaving or arriving, and that if she bought a paper on the journey she had looked, as was sometimes her way in trains, not at it but out of the window.
She felt she hadn't the strength to support being questioned, and in her turn have to embark on the explanation and defence of Wemyss. There was too much of him, she felt, to be explained. He ought to be separated into sections, and taken gradually and bit by bit,—but far best not to produce him, to keep him from meeting her friends. She therefore arranged a day in the week when she would be at home, and discouraged every one from the waste of time of trying to call on her on other days. Then presently the afternoon became an evening once a week, when whoever liked could come in after dinner and talk and drink coffee, because the evening was safer; made safe by Wemyss's conviction—he hadn't concealed it—that the dinners of maiden ladies were notoriously both scanty and bad.
Lucy would have preferred never to see a soul except Wemyss, who was all she wanted, all she asked for in life; but she did see her aunt's point, that only by pinning their friends to a day and an hour could the risk of their overflowing into precious moments be avoided. This is how Miss Entwhistle put it to her, wondering as she said it at her own growing ability in artfulness.
She had an old friend living in Chesham Street, a widow full of that ripe wisdom that sometimes comes at the end to those who have survived marriage; and to her, when the autumn brought her back to London, Miss Entwhistle went occasionally in search of comfort.
'What in the whole world puts such a gulf between two affections and comprehensions as a new love?' she asked one day, freshly struck, because of something Lucy had said, by the distance she had travelled. Lucy was quite a tiny figure now, so far away from her had she moved; she couldn't even get her voice to carry to her, much less still hold on to her with her hands.
And the friend, made brief of speech by wisdom, said: 'Nothing.'
About Wemyss's financial position Miss Entwhistle could only judge from appearances, for it wouldn't have occurred to him that it might perhaps be her concern to know, and she preferred to wait till later, when the engagement could be talked about, to ask some old friend of Jim's to make the proper inquiries; but from the way he lived it seemed to be an easy one. He went freely in taxis, he hired cars with a reasonable frequency, he inhabited one of the substantial houses of Lancaster Gate, and also, of course, he had The Willows, the house on the river near Strorley where his wife had died. After all, what could be better than two houses, Miss Entwhistle thought, congratulating herself, as it were, on Lucy's behalf that this side of Wemyss was so satisfactory. Two houses, and no children; how much better than the other way about. And one day, feeling almost hopeful about Lucy's prospects, on the advantages of which she had insisted that her mind should dwell, she went round again to the widow in Chesham Street and said suddenly to her, who was accustomed to these completely irrelevant exclamatory inquiries from her friend, and who being wise was also incurious, 'What can be better than two houses?'
To which the widow, whose wisdom was more ripe than comforting, replied disappointingly: 'One.'
Later, when the marriage loomed very near, Miss Entwhistle, who found that she was more than ever in need of reassurance instead of being, as she had hoped to become, more reconciled, went again, in a kind of desperation this time, to the widow, seeking some word from her who was so wise that would restore her to tranquillity, that would dispel her absurd persistent doubts. 'After all,' she said almost entreatingly, 'what can be better than a devoted husband?'