The Sea Lady

by H. G. Wells

What happened in America, even if one does not consult contemporary American papers, is still very difficult to determine. There appear to have been the daughter of a millionaire and something like an engagement in the story. According to the New York Yell, one of the smartest, crispest, and altogether most representative papers in America, there was also the daughter of some one else, whom the Yell interviewed, or professed to interview, under the heading:

AN ARISTOCRATIC BRITISHER
TRIFLES WITH
A PURE AMERICAN GIRL
INTERVIEW WITH THE VICTIM
OF HIS
HEARTLESS LEVITY

But this some one else was, I am inclined to think in spite of her excellently executed portrait, merely a brilliant stroke of modern journalism, the Yell having got wind of the sudden retreat of Chatteris and inventing a reason in preference to discovering one. Wensleydale tells me the true impetus to bolt was the merest trifle. The daughter of the millionaire, being a bright and spirited girl, had undergone interviewing on the subject of her approaching marriage, on marriage in general, on social questions of various sorts, and on the relations of the British and American peoples, and he seems to have found the thing in his morning paper. It took him suddenly and he lost his head. And once he started, he seems to have lacked the power of mind to turn about and come back. The affair was a mess, the family paid some more of his bills and shirked others, and Chatteris turned up in London again after a time, with somewhat diminished glory and a series of letters on Imperial Affairs, each headed with the quotation: “What do they know of England who only England know?”

Of course people of England learnt nothing of the real circumstances of the case, but it was fairly obvious that he had gone to America and come back empty-handed.

And that was how, in the course of some years, he came to Adeline Glendower, of whose special gifts as his helper and inspiration you have already heard from Mrs. Bunting. When he became engaged to her, the family, which had long craved to forgive him—Lady Poynting Mallow as a matter of fact had done so—brightened wonderfully. And after considerable obscure activities he declared himself a philanthropic Liberal with open spaces in his platform, and in a position, and ready as a beginning, to try the quality of the conservative South.

He was away making certain decisive arrangements, in Paris and elsewhere, at the time of the landing of the Sea Lady. Before the matter was finally settled it was necessary that something should be said to a certain great public character, and then he was to return and tell Adeline. And every one was expecting him daily, including, it is now indisputable, the Sea Lady.

III

The meeting of Miss Glendower and her affianced lover on his return from Paris was one of those scenes in this story for which I have scarcely an inkling of the true details. He came to Folkestone and stopped at the Métropole, the Bunting house being full and the Métropole being the nearest hotel to Sandgate; and he walked down in the afternoon and asked for Adeline, which was pretty rather than correct. I gather that they met in the drawing-room, and as Chatteris closed the door behind him, I imagine there was something in the nature of a caress.

I must confess I envy the freedom of the novelist who can take you behind such a locked door as this and give you all that such persons say and do. But with the strongest will in the world to blend the little scraps of fact I have into a continuous sequence of events, I falter at this occasion. After all, I never saw Adeline at all until after all these things were over, and what is she now? A rather tall, a rather restless and active woman, very keen and obvious in public affairs—with something gone out of her. Melville once saw a gleam of that, but for the most part Melville never liked her; she had a wider grasp of things than he, and he was a little afraid of her; she was in some inexplicable way neither a pretty woman nor a “dear lady” nor a grande dame nor totally insignificant, and a heretic therefore in Melville’s scheme of things. He gives me small material for that earlier Adeline. “She posed,” he says; she was “political,” and she was always reading Mrs. Humphry Ward.