“Can you really think, my dear boy,” she said with a cruel, slighting little laugh, “that I shall marry you for the mere sake of going, as the wife of the sixth son of a six-hundredth-time-removed cousin of the emperor, in the défiler-cour at Berlin? I can assure you that such a prospect would not attract me for a moment. I have no desire to figure in the Salle once in ten years, and make jam and knit stockings like a true German fürstin all the rest of my life. ‘Kuche, kirche, kinder,’ was not said by your Imperial relative of me. If you accept my conditions I will become your wife, but if you do not there are many others who will. I like you very much, Wuffie, but I can live extremely well without you, my dear boy.”
He strove to keep his eyes away from her face. He looked at the trees, at the clouds, at the sea, then at the ground again. He knew that he was being led to his own undoing, to his disgrace in his own eyes, to the abandonment of self-respect and independence and manhood; he knew that he would become Vanderlin’s pensioner and her slave, that he would fall in his own sight to a lower place than was held by one of the croupiers raking in gold at the tables yonder. He tried to keep his eyes from her face. He had had a pious mother; he prayed for strength.
“Look at me, Wuffie!” she said imperiously.
The delicate scent of the perfumed muff was wafted to his nostrils like a puff of incense from the altars of the Venusberg. He lifted his eyes and saw hers, with their challenge, their mockery, their malice, their command. He was lost.
A few minutes later Boo, who had been playing near, ran down the alley at a headlong pace toward them, and lifted her rosebud mouth to be kissed.
“You are going to be my new pappy, Wuffie!” she said, in her sweetest and most innocent manner. “I’ve had two; but they’re both dead, and I shall like you the best of the three, because you’re so pretty, Wuffie.”
And she sprang up into his arms, and laughed and beat him about the eyes with a bunch of violets, and so dazzled and blinded him that he had no time to ask himself—who had been the two of whom she spoke?
Jack had a letter a month later which astonished and annoyed him. He read it sitting in a favorite nook in one of the embrasures of the hall windows at Faldon, with dogs between his knees, at his feet, under his arms, and behind his back; young frolicsome foolish dogs, big and little, who were the object of Ossian’s deepest scorn.
The letter was from Boo, and dated from a fashionable hotel in the Rue Castiglione.
“Mammy says you are to come over,” the note began abruptly. “She’s writing to your gardjens. She is going to marry Wuffie. Wuffie is nicer than anybody as was before. He has such a beautiful white coat, and is all chaines, and orders, and swords that clatter, that is when he puts ’em on; when they’re off he don’t look more nor any other man; but she means to make him give up soldiering. She says you are to come over. You won’t carry her traine ’cos people as are widders don’t have traines when they marry, and besides you’re too old. But that don’t matter. I shall have a beautiful frock and Wuffie has gived me a tuckoiss belt. Don’t fret about your dress. They’ll dress you here. It’s on the third. Mammy sends you one hundred thousand kisses; me too. Au revoir. Auf weidersehn.”