Here Lady Sellingworth suddenly smiled. The adjective “respectable” certainly did not fit the Bond Street young man. He looked slightly exotic! That, no doubt, had set Sir Seymour against him. He was not of the usual type of club man. He “intrigued” her terribly. As the Duchess of Wellingborough would have phrased it, she was “crazy” to know him. She even said to herself that she did not care whether he was on the shady side of the line or not. Abruptly a strong democratic feeling took possession of her. In the affections, in the passions, differences of rank did not count.
Rupert Louth had married a Crouch!
Lady Sellingworth looked at his note which was still in her hand, and memories of the disdainful young beauty “queening it”—that really was the only appropriate expression—“queening it” with vulgar gentility among the simple mannered, well-bred people to whom Louth belonged rose up in her mind. How terrible were those definite airs of being a lady! How truly unspeakable were those august condescensions of the undeniable Crouch!
When Lady Sellingworth mused on them her sense of the equality before God of all human creatures decidedly weakened.
She wrote a brief letter to Louth declining to “speak up” to the great dressmaker. “Little Bertha” must manage without her aid. She made this quite clear, but she wrote very charmingly, and sent her love at the end to little Bertha. That done, almost violently she dismissed Louth and his wife from her mind and became democratic again!
Putting Louth and little Bertha aside, when it came to the affections and the passions what could one be but just a human being? Rank did not count when the heart was awake. She felt intensely human just then. And she continued to feel so. Life was quickened for her by the presence in London of a stranger whom nobody knew. This might be a humiliating fact. But how many facts connected with human beings if sternly considered are humiliating!
And nobody knew of her fact.
Every morning at this time she woke up with the hope of a little adventure during the day. When she went out she was alive to the possibility of a new encounter with the unknown man. And she met him several times, walking about town, sometimes alone, sometimes with the old lady, and once with another man, a thin sallow individual who looked like a Frenchman. And each time he sent her a glance which seemed almost to implore her to know him.
But how could she know him? She never met him in society. Evidently he knew no one whom she knew. She began to be intensely irritated by her leaping desire which was constantly thwarted. That this man was in love with her and longing to know her she now firmly believed. She wished to know him. She wished it more than she wished for anything else in the world just then. But the gulf of conventionality yawned between them, and there seemed no likelihood of its ever being bridged. Sometimes she condemned the man for not being adventurous, for not taking his courage in both hands and speaking to her without an introduction. At other times she told herself that his not doing this proved him to be a gentleman, in spite of what Sir Seymour Portman had thought him. In defiance of his longing to know her he would not insult her.
But if he only knew how she was pining for the insult!