Up to this she had allowed herself only one luxury, a deep, and quiet, and romantic love, the love for her kind-hearted old grandmother. That need not even now be put away, could not, indeed, be put away, but it might and must be dissimulated. Or, anyway, it might and must remain undemonstrative, for to show much affection to her grandmother would be to enhance the pain of the old woman at the parting.
Hence she steeled herself, and prepared for the separation with seeming indifference, which only made the desolation seem to Mrs. Grace more complete, more like death, and freed it from the torture of struggling with a living and cruel force.
When Edith Grace saw Oscar Leigh, and arranged to go as companion to his mother, although she shrank naturally from his objectionable manner and unhappy appearance, she was better pleased than if he had belonged to the ordinary mould of man. His deformities made him seem a being proper to a new condition of life, a condition of life in which his very unusualness would enable her to preserve and even increase the feeling of reserve, and being apart from the world, cultivated by her with such success at Miss Graham's and at home. He was so much out of the common, he need not be taken into account at all. His unhandsome appearance would be no more to her than the unhandsomeness of this street in which she, who dreamed of parks and palaces, and the Alhambra of Granada, lived. No doubt to look at him was to feel unpleasant, but the endurance of unpleasant sights was not very much harder, if so hard, as doing without pleasing sights, and she had taught herself to abstain from longing after gratifying the eyes. The system of self-denial which she had imposed upon herself with so much success needed only a little extension to cover endurance of the undesirable. She was strong, fortified at every point. This system of hers was the whole secret of getting through life scatheless. It afforded an armour nothing could pierce. It made her superior to fate--absolutely superior to fate.
She had built for herself a tower of strength. She lived in a virgin fortress.
In thinking over at Miss Graham's the possible suitors a young lady who lodged in Grimsby Street might have, she had allowed as likely a City clerk, or a prosperous hairdresser, or a man who contracted for the supply of suppers, or a man who beat carpets, or a baker in a white cap, or the son and heir of a tailor. With such, she had some kind of acquaintance, either personal or by strong hearsay. Often in amused reverie, she passed these candidates for the hand of an imaginary young lady before her view. The young men were invariably in their Sunday best when they came a-wooing. There was a dandified air, an air of coxcombry, about them which amused her. They were, of course, dandies only after their kind; not like Lord Byron in his Childe Harold days, or the dandy officers for whom the great Duke of Wellington prayed so devoutly. They wore gloves of a sort, and flowers in their button-holes. They carried canes in genteel imitation of the beaux of old. Their hair was arranged with much precision and nicety. Their figures were good. They were stalwart and valorous, not, indeed, in the grand way, but as of their kind. They made displays, as displays may be made in reasonable conduct, of their physical graces and alertness. They carried themselves with the heroic air, without the inartistic stiffness of soldiers of the rank and file. Their features were well proportioned and agreeable, and they wore smiles of bland confidence and alluring archness. They looked their approbation of this imaginary young lady, but their good manners, their awe, never allowed them to do anything more than strut like harmless peacocks before the object of their admiration.
When the girl was alone and in good spirits, she often laughed aloud at these phantom suitors of this imaginary young lady lodger in Grimsby Street. She did not look on them with the pity of disdain. She regarded them as actors in a play. She summoned them for her amusement and dismissed them without emotion, without even thanks for the entertainment which they had afforded her.
On stepping out of the world of dreams into the world of reality what had happened?
This man, this deformed, odious little man, whose bread she was to eat for hire and whose money she was to take for services under his roof, had paid her attentions! forced his hateful attentions upon her! attempted to kiss her after an acquaintance of a few hours!
Good Heavens! Had she, Edith Grace, lived to see that day? Had it come to this with her? Had she fallen so low? Had she suffered such degradation and lived?
It was not the young lady lodger in Grimsby Street of her imagination, who had been compelled to listen to the ridiculous suits of the clerk, and the caterer, and the carpet-beater, and the baker, and the tailor of her fancy, but she herself, Edith Grace, who had had love offered to her by this miserable creature who was her master also!