"You will find it scarcely believable when I tell you that I went there, for most of that time, just as much to see the mother as the daughter! I simply can't remember hoping, when I rang the bell, that Mrs. Richmond would be out or lying down, and that I must 'pretend to be amused' with Fay—a joke, by the way, not easily released by any of us in that pleasant house! Mrs. Richmond was quite right in trusting to her affections, as good people often are right; and she herself said once, 'One very seldom places confidence in the wrong people.'
"No, this unfinished romance would never have happened if, several months before I met her, Fay Richmond had not been engaged to marry the Marchese Vitiali. It would not have happened because Mrs. Richmond was a sensible and practical woman, and because I was quite an ineligible young man, having no money, and, as she once remarked, only the most erratic prospects.
"'And for a woman to marry a man who lives by his pen is as dangerous an adventure as to marry a man who lives by his sword,' she ponderously added in the course of this same conversation; which of course held no strictly personal quality in it, but had sprung, one afternoon early in our friendship, from her coming down and finding Fay and me in a happy mood together.
"'One of the pleasant things that have happened,' she said embracingly as she came in, 'since this girl was clever enough to get herself engaged, is that now we can have ineligible young men about the house—can't we, Fay?'
"Even I could see that she wouldn't have answered but for the silence of two people.
"'Yes, it's fun to have friends,' Fay said, almost shortly. And for the first time in that house I felt a twinge of embarrassment. Something, a faint idea, brushed me in the face, vaguely. It's exaggerating a vagary into a phrase to say that I could almost feel it leave a faint red mark, like a flush. But it's quite poignant, even now.
"Yes, I suppose I have brought in her engagement as a sort of casual incident instead of as the real fact of her life. But, don't you see, that is exactly how it seemed to strike one, entering that house at a mid-way hour, so to say? Why, as I see it now, I think it was weeks before I actually realised the fact of her engagement! Her fiancé was nearly always there, of course; but not acutely so as her fiancé! He wasn't momentously present, I mean.... And I don't think that it was entirely an excessive good breeding or a lack of point of view which so blurred the outlines of his position in the house. The Richmonds seemed, rather, to have peculiarly enveloped him, his whole foreignness, his demonstrativeness, and his dark good looks. So that it wasn't, perhaps, unnatural that some time passed before I realised anything other in the handsome young Italian than a charming and cultured—one might almost be pardoned for adding, decorative—addition to an already luxurious household. Accepting him as part of the family he seemed to just grow, in his capacity of lover, into my consciousness; as, I guessed, he must have grown with time into Fay's life—that rich and eligible young Roman! He, born with all the good things of life, having entered it with a letter of introduction, as it were, from the god who awards the silver spoons, had managed to happen on yet one more! And, with it all, he was still so very likeable....
"There seemed, through all those earlier months, to be a grim sort of silence sustained by the mother and daughter about Vitiali. It grew queerly on one, this silence, after I had accepted him as part of the Richmond household; and I impudently put myself to inquiring into it. Not, of course, that I often saw Mrs. Richmond and Fay, or either of them, alone, for as I've said he was nearly always about the house, had just left or was just arriving.... I chose to think it a little strange that so ardent a fiancé, as undoubtedly he was, should be treated so utterly as part of the family—strange, or if you like, more than flattering for a foreigner in an English house! And, happening on what I've already described as that grim sort of silence about him, I found a more subtle reason to account for it than this whole-hearted acceptance of him into the family as a lover and a gentleman. Its very quality of grimness, which seems a little absurd in this context, gave one the key to Mrs. Richmond's queerly and almost insensibly working conscience, and—as I stretched the limits of my conceit—to Fay's dim understanding of it and its cause. Surely you can see the pathos of a situation in which a mother and a daughter, very really loving one another, seldom referred to an approaching marriage because they both vaguely saw in it a contradiction to their mutual understanding? It couldn't have been more definite than that, else my tale would run differently.
"I can see Mrs. Richmond, now, fumbling in her generous mind, through that time for a real and deep content at her daughter's marriage with the Marchese Vitiali, whom she liked so much. She, who would indignantly have denied that she could ever force or more than mildly persuade her daughter to a choice of a husband, must have felt a plaintive discomfort in doubting if her genuine desire for Fay to accept him had not influenced a daughter, who placed her mother's happiness beside her own, over just that fraction which helps indecision into assent.
"That Fay's concession of herself was not more abandoned than an assent I came to see through the window which an intimate household, unused to secreting its intimacies except by way of good breeding, almost forces upon the privileged third person. It didn't vividly strike one, as such a fact vividly should, that Fay was in love with her fiancé; not, I mean, that admirable sort of "in love" of young people, however undemonstrative, which makes the third person, on leaving its happy presence, want to clutch at the heart of the first pretty woman he sees so that he too can share of the beauty of a beautiful world.... But the opposite, the flatness of a forced emotion, certainly didn't strike me; love was there, I suppose, but of that pale kind which so often doesn't outlast, even in the purest mind, its consequence of marriage. The third person didn't have the acute feeling that he had blundered, ever so little, on them in a room; or that, once there, he should quickly leave them. There was a "grown-up" atmosphere about her in Vitiali's presence which, I once realised, was quite lacking when he wasn't there; which was terribly seldom.... Of course, when I did come on them together, as happened sometimes when I called in the afternoon and Mrs. Richmond was 'lying down,' I generally found a way to retire quite early—but entirely because of that other party to the approaching marriage, the charming Vitiali, whose eyes made no secret of a fact which, after all, there's no reason to conceal from a celibate woman.