"Never mind the portrait, but I vow I will have you for my attendant at the Flora, that I will. Now, Mrs. Lear, you shall not protest, I always have my way when I set my heart on a thing, you know. I am going to dance in the Flora this year, 'tis a charming rural custom, and the gentry should help to preserve it. Besides, my name is Flora, so I am doubly bound. And this child shall be my maid; she will be a rare contrast to me, I being chestnut and she so foreign looking. It would be indiscreet if I were to dance with a gentleman—you know what the gossips are—but if I am partnered by an attendant maid 'twill be very different."
"Ma'am ..." from the scandalised Mrs. Lear, "if you are set on having a village girl ... there are many from good homes, respectable girls. Not that I've anything to say against this poor child, God knows, but her mother, ma'am.... I assure you 'tis impossible."
Miss Le Pettit, who guessed very well the sort of tale Mrs. Lear's delicacy spared her, laughed the matter off.
"It shall be as I say, Mrs. Lear, I can afford to be above these things. You shall dance with me, Loveday. You must have a white frock, of course, but I suppose you have a Sunday frock? Quite a simple thing, the simpler the better, and a white sash of satin riband. Don't forget. I shall expect to see you waiting for me at the Flora."
And Miss Le Pettit rose, having carried her freak of sensibility on long enough, and sweeping past Loveday with a dazzling smile, was accompanied to the front door by Mrs. Lear, and after standing poised for a moment against the sunny verdure beyond, took wing with a flutter of white taffetas and was gone.
Loveday was left with that most dangerous of all passions—the passion for an idea. Though she was ignorant of the fact, it was not Miss Le Pettit she adored, it was beauty; not silk underskirts that rustled in her ear, but the music of the spheres; a new ideal she saw not in the angelic visitant, but in herself. She, too, would be all white and dazzling, was accounted worthy to follow in the same steps, were it but in those of a dance. She made the common mistake of a lover—she imagined she was in love with another human being, while in reality she was in love with those feelings in herself which that other had evoked.
Never did aspiring saint of old, impelled by ecstasy, cling closer to a crucifix as the symbol of the loved one than did Loveday to that notion of the white garb which must be hers. It was, indeed, a symbol to her, the symbol of everything she had unwittingly craved and starved for, of everything she had, could not but feel she had, in herself which was lacked by those who jeered at her. And, though she knew it not, nor would have understood it, she was a symbol-lover, than which there is no form of lover more dangerous in life—or more endangered by the chances of it. For he who loves another human being gives his heart in fee, but he who loves an idea gives his soul.
CHAPTER IV: IN WHICH THE ONION-SELLER'S DAUGHTER FEELS HERSELF A GODDESS