'You prefer young men who take but do not grab,' suggested Trist.
'Mine,' replied the lady, with tolerant complacency, 'are not brilliant youths. Some of them may get in front of the crowd, but they will do so in a quiet and gentlemanly way, without elbowing or pushing too obviously, and without using other men's shoulders as levers to help themselves forward.'
She looked straight into the young fellow's face with her pleasantly keen smile, for he was the first and the foremost of her young men, and she was justly proud of him. He had passed beyond the dense mediocrity of the crowd, and stood alone in a place which he had won unaided. He was one of those who said too little—one of the silent ones whom she loved above the others who told her everything. In her cheery, careless way, with all her assumed worldliness, she did a vast deal of good amongst these unattached young men who were in the habit of dropping in during their spare evenings at the cosy little drawing-room on the second-floor of Suffolk Mansions.
There was usually some connecting-link, some vague and distant introduction between the young men and the cheerful, worldly, childless lady who chose to make all waifs and stragglers welcome. These were generally provincial men living in chambers and working out their apprenticeships under the different styles of their different professions. Articled clerks, medical students, art students, somethings in the City, and a journalist or so. She never invited them to come, and so they came when they wanted to, often to find her out, for she was a gay little soul, and then they came again. There was always a box of cigarettes on the mantelpiece, and the broad polished table was invariably littered with the latest magazines, books, and periodicals. Mrs. Wylie was always broad awake, and the Admiral usually fell asleep as soon as the conversation waxed personal.
In the matter of confidences Mrs. Wylie possessed real genius. She forgot things so conveniently, and never smiled when given to understand that some youthful heart was broken for the third time in one season. She never preached and rarely advised, but merely listened sympathetically. There were men who came to her and never mentioned themselves, sought no advice, made no confidences, and these she made most welcome, for she loved to study them, and wonder indefinitely over their projects, their ambitions, and their motives. Above all, she loved to watch Theo Trist. This young man was a mine of human interest to her, and with Brenda Gilholme she sought to discover its inmost depths. I believe there is a delicate instrument which betrays the presence of precious metals in the earth when brought into proximity with its surface. Mrs. Wylie had perhaps heard of such an instrument, but whether that be so or no, she deliberately used Brenda to detect the good that lay in Theo Trist. You will say that this was matchmaking pure and simple; but such it certainly could not be, for Mrs. Wylie knew full well that Brenda Gilholme and Theo Trist were people who knew their own minds, who would never be forced into anything by a third person. And treating the great question generally, she was of the comforting opinion that each individual is best left to manage his or her own affairs unaided. The matchmaker—the third person, in fact—has remarkably little to do with most marriages, though many of us are pleased to remember after the event that we had something to do with its earlier career.
If it was not match-making, Mrs. Wylie's conduct was, to say the least of it, unscrupulous; but then, my brothers, who amongst us knows a perfectly scrupulous woman? Not I, par Dieu. Charming, intelligent, fascinating, superior (ahem!), but scrupulous—no. I have not yet met her. Be it the shape of a hat or the heart of a lover, she will get it, taking it as a German clerk will take your business from you, by the means that are surest of success, without stopping to consider the silly question of an overstrained point of honour.
Trist was not, strictly speaking, merely one of Mrs. Wylie's young men. His mother was her first cousin, and she it was who had gone down to Windsor to bring home a little round-faced Eton boy to the house of sickness when Mrs. Trist's earthly pilgrimage was thought to be at an end. Since that day she had never quite lost sight of the boy, and years later she chaperoned Alice and Brenda Gilholme through an Oxford Commemoration at the undergraduate's request.
It was at her house, and through her instrumentality, that the friendship between these motherless young people was chiefly kept up. The respective fathers knew nothing of each other, and cared likewise. One was a Parliamentary monomaniac; the other a worn-out Indian Civil-servant, tottering on his last legs at Cheltenham. There had never been an interchange of pretty sentiments; such things were not in Mrs. Wylie's line of country at all. She had not wept silent tears over Brenda's bowed head, and promised to fill the place of that vague and shadowy mother whom the girl had never known. Tears of any description were unfamiliar to the comfortable, brave little lady. Some of us profess, and some there are who act without professing: of these latter was Mrs. Wylie. It is so easy to talk of filling that vacant place, and so utterly impossible to cast the faintest shadow upon the walls of the empty chamber.
With Trist it had been the same. Unquestioned he had come and gone, only to come again. Mrs. Wylie never sought to entice confidences by a kindly show of interest, and what he chose to tell (which was little enough) she listened to with small comment. If she had in any slight degree influenced his strangely-blended character, her influence had been all and entirely beneficial.
Such, briefly, was the social relationship existing between these three persons brought together upon the deck of the Hermione beneath the magic of an Arctic night. Amidst such vast and grandiose scenery the trim yacht looked petty and insignificant; but these three persons had no appearance of being out of place. They were of that adaptable material which appears to yield to its environments and takes the shape of the receptacle in which it finds itself. Yet is it, like certain boneless marine animals, independent of its surroundings, having a perfect shape of its own, into which it invariably returns when left alone.