One evening, at a large ball, he had been dancing and talking with a singularly bright and intelligent girl, who had pleased him by herself expressing her consciousness of this state of social transition of theirs, and ascribing the true reasons for it. They sat out several dances together, he enjoying her talk as that of a clever child, she with her woman’s vanity pleased to be monopolizing the most distinguished man in the room, and also glad of his mental appreciation of her. He half lay in a low chair beside her, looking at her with smiling eyes and smiling lips, amused. She was a little excited, just enough to give extra brilliance to her words and acts. She was not speaking to him alone: she was aware of the audience of guests, all of whom, she felt, were noticing her, and some catching parts of the conversation. He, who read her soul as if it were transparent, became more and more amused as she proceeded, and by an occasional movement helped her out with the impression he saw she wished to give her friends, namely, that he was more or less entranced by her. The thought of taking her to Paris and introducing her to its society, of watching her intense capacities of social pleasure expanding there in their natural atmosphere, occurred to him and pleased him. He had arrived at that spiritual state when much of our pleasure is in watching the pleasure of other people.
“Well,” he said at last, “and do you not find yourself lonely here, with all these wonderful ideas of yours, Miss Shepherd? All the other Melbourne young ladies do not, surely, participate in them?”
She was not quite sure for a moment whether he was mocking at her or not; but, looking at his face, decided in the negative.
“Yes,” she said, “I am lonely—rather. The other girls want to see things. They want to go to Europe—London, Paris, and all that. But they say it’s such a bother, and they’ve no memory. They don’t know what they want: they only know that they don’t want what they’ve got.—But I—,” she added, turning to him, and catching her lower lip lightly with her pretty visible teeth, one hand on her knee closing slightly.
“But you?”
“I want to—live!”
A pause.
“Ah,” he said, “that means that some day you will want to die.”
“I daresay! But I shall have lived first!—This Melbourne is just waking up. I wish, O I wish I had not come into it till it was awake!”
“You would like to go to Paris, then?”