“She was a charming girl,” I said, “seven-and-twenty years ago, when St. Leonard fell in love with her. She had those dark, dreamy eyes so suggestive of veiled mysteries; and her lips must have looked bewitching when they pouted. I expect they often did. They do so still; but the pout of a woman of forty-six no longer fascinates. To a pretty girl of nineteen a spice of temper, an illogical unreasonableness, are added attractions: the scratch of a blue-eyed kitten only tempts us to tease her the more. Young Hubert St. Leonard—he had curly brown hair, with a pretty trick of blushing, and was going to conquer the world—found her fretfulness, her very selfishness adorable: and told her so, kneeling before her, gazing into her bewildering eyes—only he called it her waywardness, her imperiousness; begged her for his sake to be more capricious. Told her how beautiful she looked when displeased. So, no doubt, she did—at nineteen.”
“He didn’t tell you all that, did he?” demanded Robina.
“Not a word,” I reassured her, “except that she was acknowledged by all authorities to have been the most beautiful girl in Tunbridge Wells, and that her father had been ruined by a rascally solicitor. No, I was merely, to use the phrase of the French police courts, ‘reconstructing the crime.’”
“It may be all wrong,” grumbled Robina.
“It may be,” I agreed. “But why? Does it strike you as improbable?”
We were sitting in the porch, waiting for Dick to come by the white path across the field.
“No,” answered Robina. “It all sounds very probable. I wish it didn’t.”
“You must remember,” I continued, “that I am an old playgoer. I have sat out so many of this world’s dramas. It is as easy to reconstruct them backwards as forwards. We are witnessing the last act of the St. Leonard drama: that unsatisfactory last act that merely fills out time after the play is ended! The intermediate acts were probably more exciting, containing ‘passionate scenes’ played with much earnestness; chiefly for the amusement of the servants. But the first act, with the Kentish lanes and woods for a back-cloth, must have been charming. Here was the devout lover she had heard of, dreamed of. It is delightful to be regarded as perfection—not absolute perfection, for that might put a strain upon us to live up to, but as so near perfection that to be more perfect would just spoil it. The spots upon us, that unappreciative friends and relations would magnify into blemishes, seen in their true light: artistic shading relieving a faultlessness that might otherwise prove too glaring. Dear Hubert found her excellent just as she was in every detail. It would have been a crime against Love for her to seek to change herself.”
“Well, then, it was his fault,” argued Robina. “If he was silly enough to like her faults, and encourage her in them—”
“What could he have done,” I asked, “even if he had seen them? A lover does not point out his mistress’s shortcomings to her.”