And at this she lifted up her voice and wept.
This did not forward matters: it was in vain that I begged her to be more composed and to tell me a plain, consecutive tale of her misadventures; but she continued instead to pour forth the most extraordinary mixture of the correct school miss and the poor untutored little piece of womanhood in a false position—of engrafted pedantry and incoherent nature.
‘I am certain it must have been judicial blindness,’ she sobbed. ‘I can’t think how I didn’t see it, but I didn’t; and he isn’t, is he? And then a curtain rose . . . O, what a moment was that! But I knew at once that you were; you had but to appear from your carriage, and I knew it, O, she must be a fortunate young lady! And I have no fear with you, none—a perfect confidence.’
‘Madam,’ said I, ‘a gentleman.’
‘That’s what I mean—a gentleman,’ she exclaimed. ‘And he—and that—he isn’t. O, how shall I dare meet father!’ And disclosing to me her tear-stained face, and opening her arms with a tragic gesture: ‘And I am quite disgraced before all the young ladies, my school-companions!’ she added.
‘O, not so bad as that!’ I cried. ‘Come, come, you exaggerate, my dear Miss—? Excuse me if I am too familiar: I have not yet heard your name.’
‘My name is Dorothy Greensleeves, sir: why should I conceal it? I fear it will only serve to point an adage to future generations, and I had meant so differently! There was no young female in the county more emulous to be thought well of than I. And what a fall was there! O, dear me, what a wicked, piggish donkey of a girl I have made of myself, to be sure! And there is no hope! O, Mr.—’
And at that she paused and asked my name.
I am not writing my eulogium for the Academy; I will admit it was unpardonably imbecile, but I told it her. If you had been there—and seen her, ravishingly pretty and little, a baby in years and mind—and heard her talking like a book, with so much of schoolroom propriety in her manner, with such an innocent despair in the matter—you would probably have told her yours. She repeated it after me.
‘I shall pray for you all my life,’ she said. ‘Every night, when I retire to rest, the last thing I shall do is to remember you by name.’