“Poor auntie! I am a trial, I know. But you wouldn’t have me be a regular bounder and marry Helen for her father, now would you? Don’t answer; it’s bad enough not to be able to handle me without granting I’m right! I’ll stay on—if I can! Honest, Aunt Anne, I’m not sure I can,” Kit said.
“Certainly, you can; nonsense! Good-night, Kit! I’ll try to be grateful for the concession that keeps you under my roof,” said Miss Carrington, letting him out softly, as if she wanted to let sleeping dogs lie, and their kennels were near at hand.
Miss Carrington had reckoned, if not without her host, yet without her guest. Helen had been in the cupola star-gazing, or so it appeared. She came down the narrow stairs which led to the cupola of this house, built after the manner of ambitious houses erected immediately after the Civil War. She encountered Kit in the hall.
“Hallo, Kit!” she said, softly, lest Miss Carrington should hear, but in such an off-hand, nothing-happened manner that Kit had a fleeting wonderment whether he had been in bed and dreamed the afternoon’s adventure.
“Come in here.” Helen opened the door to her room and drew Kit inside. “No more occupied chambers, thank goodness, except the servants’, and I’m not going up there!” Kit thought, with a desperate sense upon him of an endless chain of bedroom interviews, and no small dread of this one.
“Nice little Kit-boy,” Helen began, carelessly. “I want to tell you, for your own sake, because I know you’re unsophisticated enough to worry over it, that this afternoon I was trying out a wager I had with myself. I won it, you’ll be pleased to hear; the real me! I was straight about asking you to fix up a marriage with me. I truly think, or rather I did think so then, that it would be a good, sensible, rather all-around nice arrangement. I don’t think so now, Kit, my dear! You were right and I wrong. I’m not your sort, and, please don’t mind one last bit of frankness: I’d simply die of you as steady diet! I’m like Becky Sharp: I don’t like bread and butter! But the rest of the racket was—what do you boys call it, chucking a bluff?—was chucking a bluff. I thought your decency was the real thing, but it is a foible of mine to study people, preferably on pins, like grubs. I don’t mind what I do with you, so I put you on a pin, and mighty well did you wriggle, true to the compass. Though I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t have kissed me if that nas—nice little girl hadn’t happened along! I’m not really a vamp, you know, Kits! It was a mean trick for your old chum to play on you, but you came out fine; a bit crude, not too clever, but a mighty nice kid, just as you always were! So don’t let any constraint creep in, Kit! It was a game and you won it—and so did I! I wanted to get this said before you slept; it’s an error to allow embarrassment to develop at breakfast; fearfully hard to get rid of it in daylight! Shake hands, Kit. I won’t squeeze yours! Only please tell me I did it well! I have every kind of vanity, but I’m especially vain of my acting!”
Kit conquered his natural impulse to speak the truth, to set straight anything distantly resembling a misstatement.
“You’ve got Bernhardt and them all beaten a mile, Helen,” he said. “Upon my honour, till you told me, I thought it wasn’t acting! Well as I’d known you, for so long, too, you fooled me! Go on the boards, Helen; it was great! But a trifle exhausting. I’m sleepy. Aren’t you? You’ve earned the right to rest. Good-night, Siddons-Rachel-Bernhardt! Good-night, Helen of Troy, whose face lighted fires enough, and still does!”
Kit left the room quickly. Helen went over to her mirror studying, yet hardly consciously seeing her face, now hard and not beautiful.
“Well, at least I’ve helped him to act like a man! He accepted the lie quite decently, played up better than I thought he would. It’s bye-bye, Kit! He’s still to be coveted. If I were sentimental, I’d say I was in love with him, but, since I’m not sentimental, I’ll say, instead, that I’m going to marry St. George—also his dragon—and be ridiculously rich and handsome and haughty.”