Picard sighed as he turned away. Men may rail as they will, but each has a secret image of his own that he esteems a pearl of exceptional price, an angel far above the common short-comings of humanity. Like the negro with his fetish, he takes it out sometimes to blame and scold, no less than plead with and adore, but he always puts it back reverently in its place, to nestle in the warmest and most sacred corner of his heart.
CHAPTER XIX.
A DRAWN BATTLE.
Mrs. Lascelles, retiring for the night, or rather morning, on her return from the Opera, found herself beset with troubles and perplexities of unusual gravity. Taking off her ornaments, and laying them one by one on the dressing-table, she reflected sadly on the relative positions of her two greatest friends, Jin Ross and Helen Hallaton. The longer she looked at the complication the less she liked it. For a woman to entertain two lovers, as a game-keeper hunts a brace of pointers, she considered natural enough. They should be made to range in different directions at her bidding, back each other without hesitation on her behalf, and, above all, come meekly to heel at the shortest notice when desired. This seemed only the normal condition of humanity, and, in her own case, she had hitherto found such amicable arrangements answer remarkably well. Sir Henry, indeed, proved wilder than any she had hitherto endeavoured to train; but Goldthred, again, if not the most sagacious, was by far the meekest and most docile she had ever taken in hand. For a moment, she laid down her brushes, smiled at her own comely face in the glass, and by some unaccountable association of ideas, found herself wishing this last admirer would show a little more self-assertion, more enterprise, altogether borrow a leaf or two out of the black books studied over-diligently by the former.
Then she reproached herself for giving a thought to her own concerns, while Helen Hallaton looked so pale and sad, resuming the thread of her regrets with the use of her hair-brushes, and cherishing a certain impulse of womanly indignation at the idea of two young ladies being in love with one man.
The proverb affirming that "What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander," cannot assuredly be of feminine invention. The code of our fair aggressors seems framed by a justice whose scales are not duly registered, and whose bandage does not entirely cover both eyes. "If I kill you," seems the ladies' verdict, "justifiable homicide, and it serves you right! But if you kill me, it's premeditated woman-slaughter, and penal servitude for life!"
How many of us are thus transported, without really deserving it, I refrain from speculating; but I am informed by convicts themselves that good conduct is powerless to obtain any remission of sentence, and that there is no such thing as a ticket-of-leave.
Before Mrs. Lascelles got into bed, she resolved to make a touching appeal to Jin's generosity directly after breakfast, and if need were, to back it with all the force of her own authority and moral influence.
"Moral influence!" the phrase carried with it a weight and dignity of which she herself felt conscious, even in bed; and must be overwhelming, she thought, to "dear Jin," who owed so much to their friendship, and who had not a bad disposition after all, though too reckless, and dreadfully wedded to her own opinion, right or wrong.