"I had nothing from Fay about the preliminaries, as I came to be curious about them. She never spoke of yesterday, very seldom of to-morrow; all her words and laughter were for the present moment, when you were with her and were held captive by the deliciously sincere brown eyes, which could mock so faintly—and, if she chose to play with you, act so plaintively! Perhaps it is because I, even then, had put her on a velvet cushion in a glass case, to admire and enjoy her especially, but she certainly did seem a figure quite apart from her own generation of just-emerged débutantes—usually a tiresome barley-water stage for a girl, when she hasn't yet quite dropped her girlish giggle for her woman's smile. I never thought of her in relation to the other maidenly things one met in drawing-rooms round about, even when she was herself there as one of them, and by a quaint mixture of shyness and self-possession made one mentally describe her by an unusual epithet for a girl—she looked gracious! But then that was suitable, for parties and such-like were different to these nowadays. It was much less difficult then than it is now to tell a lady from a demi-mondaine; girls hadn't yet learnt, or pretended they hadn't, to be sophisticated before getting married. One played more ping-pong in those days.
"So it was entirely from Mrs. Richmond that I learnt of Vitiali's approach, and of her own motherly share in it, and was able to piece together my theory of the good lady's vague discomfort at it all. He had appeared in London about two years before to take up the vaguest post at the Embassy here, but with just a little more than the usual social advantages of the ordinary attaché. Mothers' hearts could not but beat a little frenziedly in the presence of his fortune and his very agreeable person; and his title, however Italian, held a long and honoured tradition. Mrs. Richmond was quite a dear in her self-directed sarcasm, and there was a real tenderness in her reference to the parti which her daughter had won—because, after all, the prize had melted before Fay into the most graceful of begging suitors; had so wantonly fallen in love, her mother explained, that only the severest exercise in breeding had restrained her from feeling superior to more commonplace mothers. From the first he had lain, so to speak, on the door-mat, quite pitifully. Fay, who had just 'come out' had quite definitely refused his first proposal—any Englishman would have run to join the salmon in the Hebrides after that girlish refusal! But not so Carlo, who loved without false pride, like the Venetian suitor he was; he ran no further than that door-mat, and there he stayed; looking not in the least ridiculous in a position which tarnishes the dignity of most spoiled young men, but rather grew in it, to one watching kindly more than ever acceptable. Indeed both liking and approving him, Mrs. Richmond had watched his suit kindly and carefully from the first and had favoured it as well as she could; and more than ever after his rebuff, for Vitiali was emerging so admirably from the dangerous test that, so she affirmed, she had never in her life learnt so much as then about the best way in which a young man can win a young woman.
"'And, after all, it's not every day that you will be loved so well and so eligibly,' she had told Fay; and I gather that the rumbling voice must have held a certain weight of impatience in it that day. Because, beside the initial one, there were so many advantages which the tiresome girl didn't seem to see; such, for instance, as the very important one that the southern climate was good for her delicate health,—a cause for great anxiety ever since a very severe attack of bronchial pneumonia in her sixteenth year; in fact, just because of that, they would anyway have to spend a considerable part of every year in the south.... Not of course that any advantage of any kind could or should sway a definite dislike into anything more amiable—but where, incomparably instead of dislike, there was a genuine fondness which the slightest touch of time's finger might throw into love, it was irritating to see a girl's whim assert itself so contrarily!
"And who, in the end, but Fay herself had proved it to be a whim, when, some eight months after he had first declared his suit, Carlo had found himself accepted as whole-heartedly, Mrs. Richmond affirmed, as once he had been refused? Although, of course, Fay was of a very undemonstrative nature—which perhaps was just as well in a mate of this Italian gallant, who was himself quite demonstrative enough for one household!
"But there was to be no hurry about the affair, Mrs. Richmond had decided from the first; and I could imagine her bustling that decision about her mind, as a sort of anodyne for she didn't quite know what. They had been engaged already six months, and she, watching her only child's happiness very, very carefully, had gained from her care not less than certainty about the felicity of Fay's choice. There was in Carlo no note that jarred, as there often is even in the best of men; besides, he could so perfectly accommodate one's every mood, and yet lose not a fraction of his dignity in such complaisance; for, having so absolutely thrown himself at Fay's feet, she hadn't really been able to help allowing him to stay there—'as who wouldn't?' Mrs. Richmond demanded comfortably.
"No, there was to be no hurrying. Carlo had been persuaded by her determination—Mrs. Richmond rather stressed her influence here—and the marriage would not take place for another six months from then; for she preferred that Fay should have reached a decent one-and-twenty before setting out on the conquest of Italy.
"'But she is an odd girl, with a terrible capacity for loyalty—I suppose that's the word,' she added. 'With more loyalty than a human being can comfortably hold, I sometimes imagine.' A note of self-deprecatory anxiety in her voice conflicted oddly in one's ears with the 'happy-ever-after' tone of her previous sentences; and to help her out of her ensuing silence, I ventured that surely it was just Fay's loyalty (if that was the word), which even a stranger could feel, that made her so unusually, well, attractive for her years.
"'Of course, of course....' Mrs. Richmond assented heavily; then turned in her chair directly round on me. 'But, my dear man, don't you see that when it's carried to excess it can make a very treacherous quality? When, let's say, it becomes a leading principle in life for a girl who, after all, needs only a working amount of it, all sorts of troublesome things might happen—I mean, of course, that it's just conceivable as a theory in a foolish moment such as this.... Poor Howard! to be burdened by a mother with her child's virtues for lack of any real faults! It's a sweet thought, that way.
"'You see,' she said wistfully, 'people sometimes break after the strain of too much loyalty—I've adopted that word now. They don't take things easily enough, until, one day, they suddenly break and take things too easily! I've seen it happen, a dear sweet woman.... I'm talking so intimately to you because I expect you to understand, and not be too brilliantly conclusive to yourself about it. Of course you know that I am not talking directly of Fay, for it's absurd to suppose that there ever could be a strain on her loyalty about anything, but about my own theories. I've got lately into the habit, from so much watching, of doing her introspection for her, just as I still like doing her hair for her sometimes—for it's a shame that a mere maid should have all the fun, isn't it?'
"But, after all, it was not to run so smoothly for dear Mrs. Richmond; her half-articulate anxiety—I can't really call it self-reproach—seemed to have held a parallel justification in its subject. Fay, knowing nothing of her good mother's shouldering of her burden, had done her own introspection as well as she could by herself; and came, as girls will, upon its results inconveniently as the marriage grew nearer—instead of having thought of it all before as her mother had done for her!