“He told you this—chose you for his confidante. How odd!”
“Rather bad form, wasn’t it? I fear I had been too—what young Theobald calls—coming on. I thought he liked me, and I encouraged him, and he rewards me by confiding his attachment to that creature.”
“And she has refused to marry him. Why?” asked Eve, very pale.
“Who knows? Mere airs and graces, I dare say. She thinks she has all London at her feet, and that she can pick and choose. How I wish I were on the stage! I can sing pretty well, can’t I, Eve? And I have often been told that I am like Ellen Terry.”
In her angry excitement, Sophy saw a vision of herself as the queen of a theatre, all the town rushing to see her act, as they went to see this Venetian peasant. Surely a young lady with good blood in her veins must be better than a girl bred in a hovel. Sophy did not pause to consider that it was the rough freshness, the primitive vigour of the peasant which constituted Signora Vivanti’s chief claim to notice.
Sophy had exercised no small amount of self-control in restraining her tears during the homeward drive; but once safe in the sanctuary of her bedroom she let loose the flood of her emotions, with its cross-currents of anger and sorrow, disappointed ambition, and disappointed love. Yes, love. Considering Mr. Sefton, in the first instance, only from the social point of view, with the mercenary feelings engendered by a youth of poverty, she had allowed herself to be beguiled by his attentions, and had entered at the golden gate of that fool’s paradise which first love creates for its victim—a world of fevered dreams, where nothing is but what is not. Walking in the enchanted groves of that paradise, she had seen Wilfred Sefton in the light that never was on land or sea—the light that beautifies all waking dreams—and she had interpreted every speech of his after her own fashion. Words lightly spoken took the deepest meaning—not his meaning, but hers. She told herself again and again that, if he had not actually asked her to be his wife, he had spoken words which a man only speaks to the woman whose life is to be interwoven with his own.
Eve came to her sister’s door and insisted upon being admitted.
“Oh, what streaming eyes! Sophy, dearest, I am so sorry you have allowed yourself to care for him. I warned you, dear; I warned you.”
“Yes,” retorted Sophy, irritated beyond measure at a form of speech which is always irritating, “but you didn’t warn me of anything like the truth. You didn’t tell me that he was passionately, ridiculously, degradingly in love with that Venetian girl.”
“My dearest, how could I warn you of what I did not know?”