“I dare say not,” retorted Laura, “considering that you expect other people’s maids to do more for you than your own maid would do, if you had one.”
Juliet sighed, and shrugged her graceful shoulders.
“It is all very horrid and very sordid,” she said, “and I wish I were dead.”
“I don’t go so far as that,” replied Laura, “but I wish with all my heart you were married, and that mother and I could live in peace.”
All this meant that the handsome Miss Baldwin was seven and twenty, and that although she had drunk the cup of praise from men and women, not one eligible man with place and fortune to offer had offered himself. Eligible men had admired and had praised and had flattered, and had ridden away, like the knight of old, and had married some other girl; a girl with money generally, an American girl sometimes. Juliet Baldwin hated the very name of Columbus.
For want of some one better to flirt with, Juliet had flirted with Harrington Dalbrook. He was her junior by two years, and on his first visit to the Mount had succumbed to her beauty, and to the charm of manners which somewhat exaggerated the progressive spirit of the smart world. Miss Baldwin was amused by her conquest, though she had no idea of allowing her acquaintance with her brother’s friend to travel beyond the strictest limits of that state of things which our neighbours call “flirtage.” But “flirtage” nowadays is somewhat comprehensive; and with Juliet it went so far as to allow her admirer to gratify her with offerings of gloves and flowers for her ball-dresses, when she was staying with friends in Belgravia, and the young man was taking a holiday in London.
It may be that the fascinations of this young lady had something to do with Harrington’s failure to pass his Divinity examination, and with his subsequent renunciation of the Church of England for the wider faith of the naturalist and the metaphysician. He told his family that he had got beyond Christianity as it was understood by Churchmen, and set forth in the Thirty-nine Articles. He had gone from the river to the sea, as he explained it, from the narrow banked-in river of orthodoxy to the wide ocean of the new faith—faith in humanity—faith in a universal brotherhood—faith in one’s self as superior to anything else in the universe, past or present. In this enlightened attitude he had grasped at Theodore’s offer,—all the more eagerly, perhaps, because he had lately heard Juliet Baldwin’s emphatic declaration apropos to nothing particular—that she would never marry a parson, and that the existence of a parson’s wife in town or country seemed to her of all lives the most odious.
Would she take more kindly to a lawyer, he asked himself with a sinking heart. Would a country practice, life in an old-fashioned house in an old-fashioned market-town, satisfy her ambition? He feared not. If he wanted that radiant creature for his wife, he must exchange country for town, Dorchester for Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and a house in Chester Street, or at least Gloucester Place. She had been used to Belgravia; but she might perhaps tolerate the neighbourhood of Portman Square, the unaristocratic sound of Baker Street, the convenience of Atlas omnibuses, until he should be able to start his brougham.
Led on by this guiding star he told himself that what he had to do was to become learned in the law, particularly in the science, art, and mystery of conveyancing, which branch of a family practice he believed to be at once dignified and lucrative. He had to make himself master of his profession, to make his experiments upon the inferior clay of Dorsetshire—upon farmers and small gentry,—and then to persuade his father to buy him a London practice, an aristocratic London practice, such as should not call a blush to the cheek of a fashionable wife. He had met solicitors’ wives who gave themselves all the airs of great ladies, and who talked as if the Bench and the Bar were set in motion and kept going by their husbands. Such a wife would Juliet be could he be so blessed as to win her.
The mild “flirtage,” involving much tribute from the glover and the florist, the bookseller and the photographer, had been going on for nearly three years, and Harrington was tremendously in earnest. His sisters had encouraged him in his infatuation, thinking that it would be rather a nice thing to have a baronet as a family connection, and with a sneaking admiration for Sir Henry Baldwin’s club-house manners, and slangy vocabulary, which had to be translated to them in the first instance by Harrington. They liked to be intimate with Miss Baldwin of the Mount, liked to see her smart little pony-cart waiting for an hour in front of the door in Cornhill, while the young lady prattled about her conquests, her frocks, and her parties, over the afternoon tea-table. True that she never talked about anybody but herself, except when she depreciated a rival belle; but the background of her talk was the smart world, and that was a world of which Janet and her sister loved to hear, albeit “plain-living and high-thinking” was their motto.