“Did so right, Miss Massarene, did so right,” he said warmly to her, soon after her arrival. “Mustn’t say so, you know, as I’m one of Her Majesty’s servants, but I’m always deuced glad when any royalty gets a facer. Those people, you know, are like preserved meats in a tin case which has had all the air pumped out of it. They never get a chance of hearing the truth, nor of knowing what they look like to people who aren’t snobs. Almost everybody is a snob, you see. I should like to write a new ‘Book of Snobs.’ The species has grown a good deal since Thackeray’s days. It has developed like orchids or prize vegetables.”
Framlingham, although an unpoetic-looking occupant of a marble palace in rose-gardens of the gorgeous East, was a person of delicate perceptions, high intelligence, and cultured mind. He took a great liking to this young woman, who quarreled with a lot which all the world envied her, and he pressed her to remain with his family when the year had passed; and she obtained permission to do so. Her mother was yearning for her return, but her father would willingly never have seen her face again. He was not a man who forgave.
She was thinking of the scene with her father as she sat on the marble steps in the governor’s gardens, in the deep shade of a magnolia grove, absently listening to the chatter of the monkeys overhead. She felt that she had been in the right. She burned with shame whenever she remembered the eyes of the great gentleman luring upon her as he said, “I’ll dine with your father, if you ask me.”
And her father had not seen the meaning in those words; or had seen it, but would willingly have purchased the honor even at that price!
She felt as if she could never go back to that life in England, at Monte Carlo, at Homburg. If only they would allow her to make her own career here in this ancient and romantic land as a teacher, as a nurse, as an artist, as anything. If only they would not oblige her to return to the yoke of that inane humiliating tedious routine which they thought honor and the world called pleasure!
She had by that day’s mail received from her mother some cuttings from a society journal, descriptive of the glories of Harrenden House and Vale Royal, and containing an account of the dinner-party which the Grand Duchess had ordered and honored. These brilliant paragraphs had filled her with pain and disgust.
“We are getting on fast, my dear child,” wrote her mother, “and it’s time as you came back, for people are always asking after you, and I’d like to see you well married, and I’m sure you look more of a lady than many of them.”
She knew very well what kind of marriage she would alone be allowed to make; marriage which would give her some high place in return for an abyss of debt filled up, which would purchase for her entry into some great family who would receive her for sake of what she would bring to clear off mortgages, and save the sale of timber, and enable some titled fool to go on keeping his racing-stud.
“Never! never!” she said to herself; her father might disinherit her if he pleased, but he should never make her marry so.
The same temper was in her which had made her say as a small child: “If you grin when I speak I’ll hit yer.” The temper was softened by courtesy, by culture, by self-control, by polished habit; but it was there, proud, imperious and indomitable.