They walked through the gallery of the Luxembourg, and, except that Mrs. Headway directed her beautiful gold face-à-main to everything at once and to nothing long enough, talked, as usual, rather too loud and bestowed too much attention on the bad copies and strange copyists that formed a circle round several indifferent pictures, she was an agreeable companion and a grateful recipient of “tips.” She was quick to understand, and Waterville was sure that before she left the gallery she had made herself mistress of a new subject and was quite prepared to compare the French school critically with the London exhibitions of the following year. As he had remarked more than once with Littlemore, she did alternate in the rummest stripes. Her conversation, her personality, were full of little joints and seams, all of them very visible, where the old and the new had been pieced and white-threaded together. When they had passed through the different rooms of the palace Mrs. Headway proposed that instead of returning directly they should take a stroll in the adjoining gardens, which she wished very much to see and was sure she should like. She had quite seized the difference between the old Paris and the new, and felt the force of the romantic associations of the Latin quarter as perfectly as if she had enjoyed all the benefits of modern culture. The autumn sun was warm in the alleys and terraces of the Luxembourg; the masses of foliage above them, clipped and squared, rusty with ruddy patches, shed a thick lacework over the white sky, which was streaked with the palest blue. The beds of flowers near the palace were of the vividest yellow and red, and the sunlight rested on the smooth grey walls of those parts of its basement that looked south; in front of which, on the long green benches, a row of brown-cheeked nurses, in white caps and white aprons, sat yielding sustenance to as many bundles of white drapery. There were other white caps wandering in the broad paths, attended by little brown French children; the small straw-seated chairs were piled and stacked in some places and disseminated in others. An old lady in black, with white hair fastened over each of her temples by a large black comb, sat on the edge of a stone bench (too high for her delicate length) motionless, staring straight before her and holding a large door-key; under a tree a priest was reading—you could see his lips move at a distance; a young soldier, dwarfish and red-legged, strolled past with his hands in his pockets, which were very much distended. Waterville sat down with Mrs. Headway on the straw-bottomed chairs and she presently said: “I like this—it’s even better than the pictures in the gallery. It’s more of a picture.”
“Everything in France is a picture—even things that are ugly,” Waterville replied. “Everything makes a subject.”
“Well, I like France!” she summed up with a small incongruous sigh. Then suddenly, from an impulse more conceivably allied to such a sound, she added: “He asked me to go and see her, but I told him I wouldn’t. She may come and see me if she likes.” This was so abrupt that Waterville was slightly confounded; then he saw she had returned by a short cut to Sir Arthur Demesne and his honourable mother. Waterville liked to know about other people’s affairs, yet didn’t like this taste to be imputed to him; and therefore, though much desiring to see how the old lady, as he called her, would treat his companion, he was rather displeased with the latter for being so confidential. He had never assumed he was so intimate with her as that. Mrs. Headway, however, had a manner of taking intimacy for granted—a manner Sir Arthur’s mother at least wouldn’t be sure to like. He showed for a little no certainty of what she was talking about, but she scarcely explained. She only went on through untraceable transitions. “The least she can do is to come. I’ve been very kind to her son. That’s not a reason for my going to her—it’s a reason for her coming to me. Besides, if she doesn’t like what I’ve done she can leave me alone. I want to get into European society, but I want to do so in my own way. I don’t want to run after people; I want them to run after me. I guess they will, some day!” Waterville listened to this with his eyes on the ground; he felt himself turn very red. There was something in such crudities on the part of the ostensibly refined that shocked and mortified him, and Littlemore had been right in speaking of her lack of the nuance. She was terribly distinct; her motives, her impulses, her desires glared like the lighted signs of cafés-concerts. She needed to keep on view, to hand about, like a woman with things to sell on an hotel-terrace, her precious intellectual wares. Vehement thought, with Mrs. Headway, was inevitably speech, though speech was not always thought, and now she had suddenly become vehement. “If she does once come—then, ah then, I shall be too perfect with her; I shan’t let her go! But she must take the first step. I confess I hope she’ll be nice.”
“Perhaps she won’t,” said Waterville perversely.
“Well, I don’t care if she ain’t. He has never told me anything about her; never a word about any of his own belongings. If I wished I might believe he’s ashamed of them.”
“I don’t think it’s that.”
“I know it ain’t. I know what it is. It’s just regular European refinement. He doesn’t want to show off; he’s too much of a gentleman. He doesn’t want to dazzle me—he wants me to like him for himself. Well, I do like him,” she added in a moment. “But I shall like him still better if he brings his mother. They shall know that in America.”
“Do you think it will make an impression in America?” Waterville amusedly asked.
“It will show I’m visited by the British aristocracy. They won’t love that.”
“Surely they grudge you no innocent pleasure,” the young man laughed.