“Poor woman!” she whispered to herself again. “Poor woman!”
Horace got up and opened the door for her. He was very much relieved, but he felt a pang of compunction at the same time. He had been a fool to tell Edith; it seemed to upset her; the facts of life--love’s tragedies--ought to be kept from good women. Then he went back to his paper.
VII
Like many people who believe in an over-ruling Providence, Miss Lestrange never left anything to it. On the contrary, when her plans succeeded, she remarked triumphantly that it was the will of heaven; and when they failed, she said nothing about it, and tried again. It is usually supposed that plans which play the part of Providence fail very easily, but this is not really so; it is only the result of the plan that fails--carefully combined arrangements made with due knowledge of the forces of life seldom fail. What fails is what we expected to win from such combinations. You plant, water, and gain your increase, and what you thought were the golden apples of the Hesperides taste like dust.
This is what happened to Miss Lestrange. She gave a whole-hearted devotion to Leslie; she kept him away from what she honestly believed to be adverse influences; she cared for the delicate little boy until he became as strong as the average youth; she made her home his home; people always referred to him as “your dear boy.”
This was the palace of her dreams, but the monarch had abdicated, and the palace without its King is a Court in mourning.
Leslie was vaguely dissatisfied; he had worshiped his Aunt Etta with an ignorant devotion all his life; he had given her the love of a child and the warm-hearted loyalty of a boy. Now he was grown up. He was nineteen, and he would probably never be quite as old again--in any case, he would never feel such unbroken confidence in his own judgment--and what did his aunt appear? A small, faded, old-fashioned woman, who said “No” to his wishes.
There is a time in every boy’s life when he looks very narrowly at his own parents; very often they are the barriers at the gates of his imaginary Paradise, and he regards them as barriers; but if there is solid stuff in the youth, the tie is strong enough to hold. His parents are, of course, wrong, their opinions are worthless, their ideas are effete and purely mirth-inspiring. But they are his parents. They are people who love him with a strange love; they are ignorant people, but he forgives them, and one day discovers that he himself belongs to this inferior branch of humanity, and is giving his life up for his sons, who regard him in his turn with affectionate depreciation.
Leslie loved his father with a deep natural love, which time turned into an irritated need. He had come to the conclusion that women were all very well, but that feminine relations were a jealous bore, and that--you must see life.
So he saw life. Saw it immaturely and unwisely--or rather he may have been said not to see it, but with the rush of youth’s music in his ears he ran blindfold, and Life mocked him to her heart’s content, and gave him pebbles for diamonds and dross for gold, till she blunted alike his discrimination and his growth.