‘I should be very glad to have Vanessa,’ said Bella. ‘I think she’s the nicest—or, at any rate, the least nasty,’ she added hastily.
Mrs. Porkman was a woman gifted with dim and uncultured aspirations after the beautiful. She had filled her drawing-room with heterogeneous bric-a-brac, including every variety of bad art, from Cleopatra’s needle in Cornish serpentine to the latest monstrosity in Bohemian glass, and she had called her two eldest daughters Stella and Vanessa, having read of two young women of that name once in a book. She had forgotten all about the book, and the young women, but the names had lingered in her memory. She had her eldest daughter christened Stella, and in due time there appeared a Vanessa to complete the pair, and to take to Stella’s cast-off frocks.
Bella thought it would not be altogether inconvenient—nay, it would be very convenient—to have Vanessa Porkman for her companion. With Vanessa riding on her left side, Captain Standish might ride on her right, without giving occasion for scandal. She was not at all afraid of Vanessa being scandalized by anything she saw or heard. The second Miss Porkman was so far in advance of her age, that she had in a manner anticipated all the feminine fastness of the nineteenth century. The skating rink, the ladies’ club of the future, contained nothing calculated to shock Vanessa.
Miss Porkman accepted Mrs. Piper’s invitation gladly. She owned with a charming candour that she was always glad to get away from home. She was quite open-minded in her contempt for her own family, and never even pretended to think them refined or well-bred. ‘Papa is simply dreadful,’ she would declare frankly. ‘I quite wonder how any of us put up with him. I suppose it is only because he is the family banker. If he wasn’t, we should put him in the gardener’s barrow and wheel him down to the edge of the river, and topple him comfortably in, and get rid of him as quietly as the gentle Hindoos do of their parents when they’ve lived long enough.’
Miss Porkman came. She was a florid young woman, with bold brown eyes, an affectation of short sight, an eye-glass, and an insatiable thirst for masculine society. Contemplated from an abstract ethnological point of view, she was a remarkably interesting example of the depth of deterioration to which the womanly character can descend among the well-to-do classes; but she was an excruciating young woman to live with.
In her mind the business of a woman’s life was flirtation. To be admired, to agitate the hearts of men, to lure the luckless Strephon from his legitimate Chloe, these things, in Miss Porkman’s mind, constituted woman’s mission. She was not strong-minded, she was no eager reformer, she didn’t care twopence about universal suffrage; but she wanted to be the Cleopatra of her small world, to have Cæsar, and Pompey, and Antonius, and the young Augustus, and every man of them subjugated and adoring. She had unlimited confidence in her own good looks, and a scornful pity for plain women, with whom nobody cared to flirt.
The fair Vanessa had tried her hardest to entangle Captain Standish in those flowery chains which she kept in stock for all eligible victims, but the captain had not allowed himself to be bound. She had seen with disgust that he was a constant guest at the Park, and that he lavished upon Bella those attentions which she had herself unsuccessfully invited. To flirt with a married woman was in Miss Porkman’s eyes not so much immoral as it was cowardly. She would have excused the immorality, but she could not forgive the cowardice. Here was evidently a man who feared to trust himself within the range of her charms, lest he should be caught unawares and meshed in the matrimonial net, and who amused himself with a vapid flirtation in a quarter where he felt himself ignobly safe.
‘He can’t care for such a little waxen image as Mrs. Piper,’ said Miss Porkman, contemplating her Juno-like figure in her cheval-glass, ‘but he doesn’t want to marry into the commercial classes, and he’s afraid to trust himself with me.’
Vanessa came to Little Yafford Park, resolved to leave it a conqueror. She brought her prettiest dresses. She brought her horse, and she believed herself invincible on horseback. If Captain Standish was as much at the Park as report said he was, Vanessa felt sure of victory.
She was not disappointed. Captain Standish came every day, and rode every day on the moor with Bella and Miss Porkman. He taught Bella how to manage the black, and he was sufficiently attentive to Vanessa to keep that young lady in perpetual good humour with herself and him.