“I don’t think it is a foregone conclusion. More things than years go to the formation of character, Miss O’Shaughnessy, and if you will allow me to say so, you seem to me very young for your age.”
“I always was,” sighed Pixie sadly. “They’ve said that all my life. Some people always are young, and some are old. There was a girl at school, middle-aged at thirteen, poor creature, and had been from her birth. My sister Bridgie will never be more than seventeen if she lives to a hundred, and I mean myself to stick at twenty. It doesn’t mean trying to look younger than you are, or being ashamed of your age, and silly, and frivolous: it’s just keeping your heart young!”
The man, who was young in years and old in heart, looked down at the girl with a very sad smile. She spoke as if it were such an easy thing to do: he knew by bitter experience that under such circumstances as his own it was of all tasks the most difficult. To stand aside during the best years; to see the tide of life rush by, and have no part in the great enterprise; and then to regain his powers when youth had passed, and the keen savour of youth had died down into a dull indifference; to be dependent for love on the careless affection of a lad,—how was it possible for a man to keep his heart warm in such circumstances as these?
“Life has been kind to you,” he answered dryly, and Pixie flung him a quick retort—
“I have been kind to it! If I’d chosen I might have found it hard enough. We were always poor. I never remember a time when I hadn’t to pretend and make up, because it was impossible to get what I wanted. Then I was sent to school, and I hated going, and my father died when I was away, and they told me the news with not a soul belonging to me anywhere near, and I loved my father far more than other girls love theirs! ... Then we left Knock. ... If you’d lived in a castle, and gone to a villa in a street, with a parlour in front and a dining-room behind looking out on the kitchen wall, you wouldn’t talk about life being kind—!
“I was in France for years being educated, and not able to repine because it was a friend and she’d taken me cheaply. Perhaps you’d say that was luck, and an advantage, and it was, but all the same it’s hard on a young thing to have to enjoy herself in a foreign language, and spend the holidays with a maiden lady and a snuffy old Père, because there wasn’t enough money to come home. Yes,” concluded Pixie, with a smirk of satisfaction, “I’ve had my trials, and now I’m to be crossed in love, and have my young lover rent from me. ... You couldn’t have the audacity to call life easy after that!”
Stephen tried valiantly to look sympathetic, but it was useless; he was obliged to smile, and Pixie smiled with him, adding cheerily—
“Anyway, it’s living! ... And I do love it when things happen. It’s so dreadfully interesting to be alive.”
The man who was old before his time looked down upon the girl with a wistful glance. Small as she was, insignificant as she had appeared at first sight, he had never seen any one more intensely, vitally alive. Her tiny feet skimmed the ground, her tiny head reared itself jauntily on the slender neck, the brilliance of her smile, the embracing kindliness of her glance more than compensated for the plainness of her features. Like most people who made the acquaintance of Pixie O’Shaughnessy, Stephen Glynn was already beginning to fall under her spell and marvel at the blindness of his first impression. She was not plain; she was not insignificant; she was, on the contrary, unusually fascinating and attractive!
“But she does not love him,” Stephen repeated to himself. “She does not know what love means. When she does—when she has grown into a woman, and understands—what a wife, what a companion she will make!”