“Oh,” he answered, a trifle uneasily, “a multitude of circumstances. Pretty nearly every conventional barrier the world has invented, existed between him and her. She was a frightful swell, for one thing.”
“A frightful swell—?” The Duchessa raised her eyebrows.
“Yes,” said Peter, “at a vertiginous height above him—horribly 'aloft and lone' in the social hierarchy.” He tried to smile.
“What could that matter?” the Duchessa objected simply. “Mr. Wildmay is a gentleman.”
“How do you know he is?” Peter asked, thinking to create a diversion.
“Of course, he is. He must be. No one but a gentleman could have had such an experience, could have written such a book. And besides, he's a friend of yours. Of course he's a gentleman,” returned the adroit Duchessa.
“But there are degrees of gentleness, I believe,” said Peter. “She was at the topmost top. He—well, at all events, he knew his place. He had too much humour, too just a sense of proportion, to contemplate offering her his hand.”
“A gentleman can offer his hand to any woman—under royalty,” said the Duchessa.
“He can, to be sure—and he can also see it declined with thanks,” Peter answered. “But it wasn't merely her rank. She was horribly rich, besides. And then—and then—! There were ten thousand other impediments. But the chief of them all, I daresay, was Wildmay's fear lest an avowal of his attachment should lead to his exile from her presence—and he naturally did not wish to be exiled.”
“Faint heart!” the Duchessa said. “He ought to have told her. The case was peculiar, was unique. Ordinary rules could n't apply to it. And how could he be sure, after all, that she would n't have despised the conventional barriers, as you call them? Every man gets the wife he deserves—and certainly he had gone a long way towards deserving her. She could n't have felt quite indifferent to him—if he had told her; quite indifferent to the man who had drawn that magnificent Pauline from his vision of her. No woman could be entirely proof against a compliment like that. And I insist that it was her right to know. He should simply have told her the story of his book and of her part in it. She would have inferred the rest. He needn't have mentioned love—the word.”