She sighed; she recognized the truth of all he said; but she loathed the fact she was compelled by her reason to acknowledge.
“‘When she’s convinced against her will
She’s of the same opinion still,’”
quoted Framlingham. “Come, my dear, let’s go and have a game of tennis.”
Katherine Massarene, whose future was a subject of lively speculation to many, was now twenty-one years old; she looked much more than that then, and twenty years hence will probably look no older. At five years of age, notwithstanding her poor mother’s tears and prayers, she had been sent to the care of a gentlewoman in England, who lived at Eastbourne and received only half a dozen children to educate, with two of her own. The lady had been recommended to William Massarene by the English minister at Washington; and the influence of that gentleman had been exercised in persuading her to consent to receive against her rules a little ignorant obscure brat from Dakota.
“Make her happy and keep her well, ma’am, for she’s all we’ve got,” wrote her poor mother.
“Make her English, ma’am, and fit to hold her head with the highest, for she’ll mean gold,” wrote her father.
The lady disliked excessively accepting a charge which was alien to her habits and might injure the tone of her house; but she was under obligations to the English minister, and reluctantly consented to take into her home this one little girl who had great astonished unwinking eyes like an owl’s, and who said to her with a dreadful nasal accent: “Don’t grin when I speak, or I’ll hit yer.”
For twelve years she remained under this lady’s care, being trained in all exercises of the mind and body, and becoming a calm cold high-bred girl who looked as if she had a thousand years behind her of old nobility and gracious memories. Of her parents she saw nothing, and only heard that they were extremely rich. But the orthography of her mother’s letters, and the style of her father’s few lines, always made her uneasy, and the recollections of life in Dakota were not as absolutely obliterated as her parents desired. But of those she never spoke; she divined what was expected of her. Those recollections became increasingly painful as with increasing perception she could construe them by induction.
When in her eighteenth year her parents came for the first time to England, she could only see in them strangers, and strangers who, alas! had nothing of that attraction which bridges the distance between age and youth. If what she felt on meeting them was an agony of disappointment and a sense of shame, more acute because it was shut close in her own breast, they were themselves not less chagrined. When they first saw her, her parents both thought that she did not give them great results for the vast sums they had spent on her, and that really they would have turned her out smarter if they had had her brought up in New York. The art of gilding gold and painting lilies is at its perihelion in the empire city. He especially was disappointed in her at first; he had expected her to make more show, to have more color, to be more swagger, as the slang words ran; this tall, proud, slender young woman, who wore generally black or grey in the day, and white in the evening, and put on no jewelry of any kind, seemed to him to give him poor value for the many thousand of dollars he had spent on her. He had intended her to be ultra fashionable, ultra chic, always in the swim, always in the first flight; on race-courses, on yacht decks, on the box seat of drags, at aristocratic river clubs, at exclusive and crowded little suppers after theatres.