It was in vain that Mildred warned her against the danger of such an alliance.
“Consider what a wretched match it would be for you, Pamela,” she said. “Think how different from your sister Rosalind’s marriage.”
“Different! I should hope so, indeed! Can you imagine, Aunt Mildred, that I would marry such a man as Sir Henry Mountford, a man who has hardly a thought outside his stable and his gunroom? Do you know that he spends quite a quarter of every day in the saddle-room, allowing for the wet days, on which he almost lives there? I asked him once why he didn’t have his lunch sent over to the stables, instead of keeping us waiting a quarter of an hour, and coming in at last smelling like a saddler’s shop.”
“He is a gentleman, notwithstanding, Pamela, and Rosalind seems to get on very well with him.”
“‘As the husband is the wife is,’ don’t you know, aunt. You and Uncle George suit each other because you are both intellectual. I should be miserable if I married a man who had done nothing to distinguish himself from the common herd.”
“Perhaps. But do you think you could be very happy married to an accomplished idler who would live upon your fortune—who would have everything to gain, from the most sordid point of view, by marrying you, and of whose fidelity you could never be sure?”
“But I should be sure of him. My instinct would tell me if he were really in love with me. You must think me very silly, Aunt Mildred, if you think I could be deceived in such a matter as that.”
In spite of Pamela’s confidence in her own instinct, or, in other words, in her own wisdom, Mildred was full of anxiety about her, and was very eager to place her charge beyond the reach of César Castellani’s daily visits and musical talent. She felt responsible to her husband for his niece’s peace of mind; doubly responsible in that Pamela’s interest had been subordinated to her own comfort and well-being.
She had other reasons for wishing to escape from Mr. Castellani’s society. That instinctive aversion she had felt at sight of the unknown face in the church was not altogether a sentiment of the past, a prejudice overcome and forgotten. There were occasions when she shrank from the Italian’s gentle touch, a delicate white hand hovering for a moment above her own as he offered her a book or a newspaper; there were times when his low sympathetic voice was a horror to her; there were times when she told herself that her self-respect as a wife hardly permitted of her breathing the same air that he breathed.