So it befell that by the time Miss Eva Farley was rhapsodizing over the Rhine castles in twenty-page letters, boring Ardea a little, if the truth must be told, the Dabneys had settled down to their quiet life in the French capital. Ardea was anxious to do something with her music under a Parisian master—and was doing it. The Major found melancholy pleasure in reviewing at large the city of his son's long exile; and Miss Euphrasia came and went with one or the other of her cousins, as the exigencies of chaperonage or companionship constrained her.
In such moderate pleasuring the French summer began for the Major and his charges; so it continued, and so it ended; and late in September they began to talk about going home.
"We really mean it this time," wrote Ardea in a letter to Martha Gordon. "I confess we are all a little homesick for America, and Paradise, and dear old Deer Trace Manor. The Farleys are settled for the remainder of the year or longer in a fine old palazzo on the Bay of Naples, and we have a very pressing invitation to go and help them inhabit it. But thus far we have not been tempted beyond our strength. Major Grandpa is talking more and more pointedly about the Morgan mares, and is growing a habit of comparison-drawing in which America profits at the expense of Europe; so I suppose by the time you are reading this we shall have made our sailing arrangements. Nevertheless, the Naples invitation is dying hard. Eva seems to have set her heart on having us for the winter."
Ardea's figure of speech was no figure. The palazzo-sharing invitation did die hard; and when Miss Farley's letters failed, Mr. Vincent Farley made a journey to Paris for the express purpose of persuading the Dabneys to reconsider. Miss Euphrasia was neutral. The Major was homesick for a sight of his native Southland, but for Ardea's sake he generously concealed the symptoms—or thought he did. So the decision was finally left to Ardea.
She said no, and adhered to it, partly because she knew her grandfather was pining for Paradise, and partly on her own account. Ardea at twenty was a young woman who might have made King Solomon pause with suspended pen when he was writing that saying about his inability to find one woman among a thousand. She was not beautiful beyond compare, as the Southern young woman is so likely to be under the pencil of her loyal limners. She had the Dabney nose, which was not quite classical, and the Courtenay mouth, well-lined and expressive, rather than too suggestive, of feminine softness. But her eyes were beautiful, and her luxuriant masses of copper-gold hair fitted her shapely head like a glorious aureole; also, she had that indefinable adorableness called charm, and the sweet, direct, childlike frankness of speech which is its characteristic.
This was the external Ardea, known of men, and of those women who were large-minded enough not to envy her. But the inner Ardea was a being apart—high-seated, alone, self-sufficient in the sense that it saw too clearly to be hoodwinked, infinitely reasonable, with vision unclouded either by passion or the conventions. This inner Ardea knew Vincent Farley better than he knew himself: the small mind, the mask of outward correctness, the coldness of heart, the utter lack of the heroic soul-strength which, even in a brutal man, may sometimes draw and conquer and merge within itself the woman-soul that, yielding, still yields open-eyed and undeceived.
He was the most moderate of lovers, as such a man must needs be, but his anxiety to second the wishes of his father and sister was not to be misunderstood by the clear-eyed inner Ardea, whose intuition served her as a sixth sense. She knew that sometime he would ask her to marry him; and in that region where her answer should lie she found only a vast indecision. He was not her ideal, but the all-seeing inner self told her that she would never find the ideal. There comes to every woman, sooner or later, the conviction that if she would marry she must take men as they are, weighing the good against the evil, choosing as she may the man whose vices may be condoned or whose virtues are great enough to overshadow them. Ardea knew that Vincent Farley was not great in either field; but the little virtues were not to be despised. If he were not, in the best sense of the word, well-bred, he had at least been well nurtured, well schooled in the conventions. Ardea sighed. It was in her to be something more than the conventional wife, yet she saw no reason to believe that she would ever be called on to be anything else. By which it will be apparent that the sacred flame of love had not yet been kindled in her maiden heart.
As for Vincent Farley, the real man, Ardea's appraisal of him was not greatly at fault. He was tall, like his father, but there the resemblance paused. The promoter's shifty blue eyes were always at the point of lighting up with enthusiasm; the son's, of precisely the same hue, were cold and calmly calculating. The human polyhedron has as many facets as a curiously-cut gem, and Vincent Farley's gift lay in the ability always to present the same side to the same person. His attitude toward Ardea had always been a pose; but it was a pose maintained so faithfully that it had become one of the facets of the polyhedron. Such men do not love, as a woman defines love; they merely have the mating instinct. And even lust finds a cold hearth in such hearts, though on occasion it will rake the embers together and make shift to blow them into some brief, fierce flame. At times, Farley's thought of Ardea was libertine; but oftener she figured as the woman who would grace the home of affluence, giving it charm and tone. Also, he had an affection for the Dabney manorial acres, and especially for that portion of them overlying the coal measures.
The pose-facet was at the precisely effective angle when he came to Paris as his sister's messenger and pictured, with what warmth there was in him, the delights in the prospect of a Neapolitan winter. But Ardea, shrinking from a six months' guesting with any one, said no, and told her grandfather she was ready to go home.
The start was from Havre, and Vincent, with time on his hands, was her companion on the railway journey, her courrier du place in the embarkation, and her faithful shadow up to the instant when the warning cry for the shore-goers rang through the ship. It was scarcely a moment for sentimental passages, and under the most favoring conditions, Vincent Farley was something less than sentimental. Yet he found time to declare himself in conventional fashion, modestly asking only for the right to hope.