The mother and daughter left alone together, naturally turned to a point more interesting than the claims of Constance to rank. “Do you really think, mamma,” said Tasie—“do you really, really think,—it is silly to be always discussing these sort of questions—but do you believe that Constance Waring actually—means anything?”
“You should say does George Gaunt mean anything? The girl never comes first in such a question,” said Mrs Durant, with that ingrained contempt for girls which often appears in elderly women. Tasie was so (traditionally) young, besides having a heart of sixteen in her bosom, that her sympathies were all with the girl.
“I don’t think in this case, mamma,” she said. “Constance is so much more a person of the world than any of us. I don’t mean to say she is worldly. Oh no! but having been in society, and so much out.”
“I should like to know in what kind of society she has been,” said Mrs Durant, who took gloomy views. “I don’t want to say a word against Lady Markham; but society, Tasie, the kind of society to which your father and I have been accustomed, looks rather coldly upon a wife living apart from her husband. Oh, I don’t mean to say Lady Markham was to blame. Probably she is a most excellent person; but the presumption is that at least, you know, there were—faults on both sides.”
“I am sure I can’t give an opinion,” cried Tasie, “for, of course, I don’t know anything about it. But George Gaunt has nothing but his pay; and Constance couldn’t be in love with him, could she? Oh no! I don’t know anything about it; but I can’t think a girl like Constance——”
“A girl in a false position,” said the chaplain’s wife, “is often glad to marry any one, just for a settled place in the world.”
“Oh, but not Constance, mamma! I am sure she is just amusing herself.”
“Tasie! you speak as if she were the man,” exclaimed Mrs Durant, in a tone of reproof.
CHAPTER XX.
The subjects of these consultations were at the moment in the full course of a sonata, and oblivious of everything else in the world but themselves, their music, and their concerns generally. A fortnight had passed of continual intercourse, of much music, of that propinquity which is said to originate more matches than any higher influence. Nothing can be more curious than the pleasure which young persons, and even persons who are no longer young, find perennially in this condition of suppressed love-making, this preoccupation of all thoughts and plans in the series of continually recurring meetings, the confidences, the divinations, the endless talk which is never exhausted, and in which the most artificial beings in the world probably reveal more of themselves than they themselves know—when the edge of emotion is always being touched, and very often, by one of the pair at least overpassed, in either a comic or a tragic way. It is not necessary that there should be any real charm in either party, and what is still more extraordinary, it is possible enough that one may be a person of genius, and the other not far removed from a fool; that one may be simple as a rustic, and the other a man or woman of the world. No rule, in short, holds in those extraordinary yet most common and everyday conjunctions. There is an amount of amusement, excitement, variety, to be found in them which is in no other kind of diversion. This is the great reason, no doubt, why flirtation never fails. It is dangerous, which helps the effect. For those sinners who go into it voluntarily for the sake of amusement, it has all the attractions of romance and the drama combined. If they are intellectual, it is a study of human character; in all cases, it is an interest which quickens the colour and the current of life: who can tell why or how? It is not the disastrous love-makings that end in misery and sin, of which we speak. It is those which are practised in society every day, which sometimes end in a heart-break indeed, but often in nothing at all.