“I am not surprised to find you feeling like this,” she said. “It is quite the effect that I imagined London would produce upon you. I have no right to say so, perhaps, but it seemed to me from the start that it was being badly managed—I mean the way you were sent here by yourself, and given nothing to do except follow about where Lord Lingfield led. It is not what I should have done—but the truth is that Emanuel knows nothing at all about the characters and temperaments of human beings. If men agree with him, he thinks they are good men, and if they disagree with him, they are bad men—or at least not worth thinking about at all.”
“I had quite resolved not to commit myself to his System,” Christian informed her, “even before I made up my mind to—to take other steps.”
His closing euphemism seemed to attract her attention. “What is it you intend to do?” she asked of him, softly. She sat upright again, with an air of friendly curiosity.
In the face of this query, he discovered that his intentions were by no means so clear to himself as they had been. “It is still rather in the air,” he said vaguely. “But we talk always of myself! Tell me, instead, about yourself! It is an infinitely more pleasing subject. You are here in London for only three months? And you are alone here?”
She smiled in an indefinite fashion, and leaned back in her chair. “Ought I to have a chaperon? I dare say. But there is no room for her here. The flat accommodates just one solitary elderly lady and here you behold her. Oh, I am a hundred years old, I assure you!”
He could only wave his hand at her in genial deprecation. “Oh, who is younger than you?” he murmured.
She sighed. “By the almanac I am four-and-twenty,” she went on, with a new note of gentle melancholy. “But by my own feelings, I seem to have been left over from the reign of William the Fourth. And really, it is not my own feelings alone—when I go out, I observe that very old men take me down to dinner, and talk to me precisely as if I were a contemporary of theirs.”
“When we were together at Caermere,” interposed Christian, “you confessed to me that you were not happy—and it was my great delight to pledge myself that if ever there was anything I could do—”
“Oh, there is nothing at all,” she interrupted him to declare. “My case will not come up. It has all been settled. The accounts, or settlements—or whatever you call them—have been made up, and my share of my husband’s share of his father’s interest in his father’s estate has been ascertained. I have six hundred a year for life. It is a mild and decorous competence. I do not complain. It will keep a genteel roof over my head here in London, or a small house and a pony-trap in the country. It will run to a month at a pension in the cheaper parts of Switzerland, or perhaps even to a lodging and a bath-chair at Brighton, when it is not quite the season. Oh, I shall get on very well indeed—at all events,” she added with a touch of bitterness, “much better than I deserve to do.”
Christian lifted his brows in protesting inquiry. “You always speak in that tone of yourself! It pains me to hear you. I cannot think of any one who deserves the kindness and friendly good offices of fortune more than you.”