XIX
March 10. For the remainder of my visit, it seemed as if your prophecy of friendship were to be fulfilled. From the moment of my confidence to you, all the reserves that had been raised by my slighting of your invitations disappeared, perhaps because the secret I had shared with you served to make my past conduct less unreasonable; still more, I believe, because of the faith in you it evidenced in me. Certain I am that in the following week I felt able to be my true self when with you, for the first time since we were boy and girl together. The difference was so marked that you commented on the change.
“Do you remember,” you asked me, “our conversation in Mr. Whitely’s study, when I spoke of how little people really knew one another? Here we have been meeting for over three years, and yet I find that I haven’t in the least known you.”
It is a pleasure to me to recall that whole conversation, for it was by far the most intimate that we ever had,—so personal that I think I should but have had to question to learn what I long to know. In response to my slight assistance, to the sympathy I had shown, you opened for the moment your heart; willing, apparently, that I should fathom your true nature.
We had gone to dinner at the Grangers’ merely to please Mrs. Blodgett, for we mutually agreed that in the country formal dinners were a weariness of the flesh; and I presume that with you, as with me, this general objection of ours was greatly strengthened when we found Mrs. Polhemus among the guests. It is always painful to me to be near her, and her dislike of you is obvious enough to make me sure that her presence is equally disagreeable to you. It is a strange warp and woof life weaves, that I owe to one for whom we both feel such repulsion the most sympathetic, the tenderest conversation I have ever had with you.
I was talking with Miss Granger, and thus did not hear the beginning of my mother’s girds at you; but Agnes, who sat on my left, told me later that, as usual, Mrs. Polhemus set out to bait you by remarks superficially inoffensive, but covertly planned to embarrass or sting. The first thing which attracted my notice was her voice distinctly raised, as if she wished the whole table to listen, and in fact loud enough to make Miss Granger stop in the middle of a sentence and draw our attention to the speaker.
“—sound very well,” Mrs. Polhemus was saying, “and are to be expected from any one who strives to be thought romantically sentimental.”
“I did not know,” you replied in a low voice, “that a ‘romantically sentimental’ nature was needed to produce belief in honesty.”
“It is easy enough to talk the high morals of honesty,” retorted your assailant, “and I suppose, Miss Walton, that for you it is not difficult to live up to your conversational ideals. But we unfortunate earthly creatures, who cannot achieve so rarefied a life, dare not make a parade of our ethical natures. The saintly woman is an enormously difficult rôle to play since miracles went out of style.”