Celia laughed, but the laugh ended with a sigh. She had made up her mind that if ever she married, her husband must be rich enough to be above the petty struggles of household economy, the cheese-parings of a limited income. He must be able to keep at least a pony carriage, and the pony carriage must be perfect in all its appointments. A footman Celia might forego, but she must have the neatest of parlour-maids. She did not aspire to get her gowns from Wörth: but she must not be circumscribed as to collars and cuffs, and must be able to employ the best dressmaker in Exeter or Plymouth.
But here was a young man who must wait for years before he could marry; or must drag some poor young woman down into the dismal swamp of genteel poverty. Celia felt honestly sorry for him. Of all the men she had ever met he seemed to her the most manly, the brightest, the bravest—perhaps altogether the best. If not exactly handsome, there was that in his marked features and vivid expression which Celia thought more attractive than absolute regularity of line, or splendour of colour.
Mrs. Clare had been absent all the morning, engaged in small domestic duties which she considered important, but which Celia described sweepingly as ‘muddling.’ She appeared by-and-by at luncheon—a meal which the Vicar never ate—and entertained her guest with a dissertation on the tiresomeness of servants, and the various difficulties of housekeeping, until Edward—who honoured the family circle with his society while he refreshed his exhausted muse with cold roast beef and pickles—ruthlessly cut short his mother’s sermonising, and entered upon a critical discussion with George Gerard as to the relative merits of Browning and Swinburne.
Celia was surprised to discover how widely the young surgeon had read. She had expected to find him ignorant of almost everything outside his own particular domain.
‘How can you find time for light literature?’ she asked.
‘Light literature is my only relaxation.’
‘You go to the theatres now and then, I suppose?’
‘I like to go when there is something good to be seen,’ answered Gerard, flushing at the recollection of the time when he had gone three nights a week to feast his eyes upon La Chicot’s florid loveliness.
He felt ashamed of an infatuation which at the time had seemed to him as noble as the Greek’s worship of abstract beauty.
By the time luncheon was finished the rain had ceased, and the gray, wintry sky, though sunless, looked no longer threatening.