This was a matter which he could discuss freely with Sir William and there could be no doubt what his advice would be. The means were the only difficult question, and those could be arranged if two men of experience put their heads together.
All this dismissed, he took out her letter and read it carefully. It did not move him. He thought her bursts of repentance as facile as her tempers. The fact was, and he often reproached her for it, she had too much imagination, and, to Greville, imagination was the last folly, almost the last crime. It meant the unpleasant faculty of seeing things as they are not, of exaggerating every emotion, of leaving the straight highway of fact for endless and perplexing aerial flights that ended in cloud-land and involved unpleasant drops to earth, and bruised every relation in life hopelessly. If she had but plodding good sense Emma would be irresistible. Alas, no!—she would not be Emma.
He tore the letter into small bits for the waste-paper basket, disposed of it, and entered into easy talk with an acquaintance. He would not go home. She needed a lesson and should have it.
As a matter of fact, he neither returned nor wrote for a week, and Emma was seriously frightened. The excuse was simple enough, a letter from Sir William announcing his return and asking Greville to attend to some business connected with his Welsh estates. It could have been done as well from Edgware Row, but for the need of administering a sound lesson, but Greville always pursued his settled way without flinching. Also, there was a dinner at the Middletons.
She was in a state of abject submission when he got back, pale with watching. Indeed, but for Romney’s upholding and the certainty which he gained for her that Greville was still in town, she would have been inclined to tear through the streets to find him anywhere, anyhow, and it took all Romney’s persuasion to induce her to wait quietly.
She sank into a chair pale and sighing, as he entreated her—a deep patient sigh. She was A Forsaken Lady in Dejection at the moment, with drooped head and hanging hands.
“Ah, Mr. Romney, this is the reward for a most tender and passionate love. You know how I have given my whole heart, my whole life; and no woman ever did this but met her reward in cruelty.”
“I thought,” says Romney, blundering, “that you owed him much kindness. Could you not, my dear, fix your mind on that rather than on anger which you yourself owned deserved t’other day, and which I am certain will soon pass?”
“Kindness!” she cried, the blood flowing crimson into lips and cheeks with a sudden return to energy. “Kindness? That’s the way a huckster would calculate it. Food, clothes, and lessons—lessons that I might sing and draw for his diversion. That’s his kindness! And I’ve given him in return beauty not thought despicable, and the love and tender devotion of a true heart. When he had an oppression on the chest, didn’t I poultice him and sit up near a week till I looked like a hag of thirty? Didn’t I cook his broths with my own hands and wouldn’t let my mother touch ’em; didn’t I run his errands and fetch and carry and sweep his room and—”
She flung up her arms with an inspired gesture as she poured on and became a denouncing goddess. Romney stared at her all unconscious of the words, seeing only the Juno look, the offended majesty of the noble attitude. What did it matter what she said so long as she could look like that? He snatched charcoal and paper, and began with swift lines to perpetuate the pose.