My hope had been that she herself would be able to supply these little particulars. With a blank face, I shook my head: "We just talked of things in general."
"I see," she said, and glanced at me, as if over her spectacles. Her next question was even less manageable. "Was the young fellow a gentleman?"
Alas! she had fastened on a flaw in my education. This was a problem absolutely new to me. I thought of my father, of Mr Waggett, Dr Grose, Dr Phelps, the old farmer in the railway train, of Sir Walter Pollacke, my bishop, Heathcliff, Mr Bowater, Mr Clodd, even Henry—or rather all these male phantoms went whisking across the back of my mind, calling up every other two-legged creature of the same gender within sight or hearing. Meanwhile, Mrs Bowater stood like Patience on her Brussels carpet, or rather like Thomas de Torquemada, watching these intellectual contortions.
"Well, really, do you know, Mrs Bowater," I was forced to acknowledge at last, with a sigh and a smile, "I simply can't say. I didn't think of it. That seems rather on his side, doesn't it? But to be quite, quite candid, perhaps not a gentleman; not exactly, I mean."
"Which is no more than I supposed," was her comment, "and if not—and any kind of not, miss—what was he, then? And if not, why, you can never go there again!"
"Indeed, but I must," I said, as if to myself.
"With your small knowledge of the world," she retorted unmovedly, "you must, if you please, be guided by those with more. Who isn't a gentleman couldn't be desirable company if chanced on like a stranger in a young lady's lonely rambles. And how tall did you say? And what's more," she continued, not pausing for an answer, and gathering momentum on her way, "if he is a gentleman, I'd better come along with you, miss, and see for myself."
A rebellious and horrified glance followed her retreating figure out of the room. So this was the reward for being open and above-board. What a ridiculous figure I should cut, tippeting along behind my landlady. What would my stranger think of me? What would she think of him? Was he a "gentleman"? To decide whether or not the Spirit of Man is an evil spirit had been an easy problem by comparison. Gentle man—why, of course, self muttered in shame to self convicted of yet another mean little snobbery. He had been almost absurdly gentle—had treated me as if I were an angel rather than a young woman.
But the nettlerash produced by Mrs Bowater's bigotry was not to be so easily allayed as all that. It had invited yet another kind of THEM in. An old, green, rotting board hung over the wicket gate that led up the stony path into Wanderslore—"Trespassers will be prosecuted." Why couldn't one put boards up in the Wanderslore of one's mind? My landlady had never inquired if Lady Pollacke was a gentlewoman. How mechanical things were in their unexpectedness. That morning I had gone out to free myself from the Crimble tangle, merely to return with a few more knots in the skein.
A dead calm descended on me. I was adrift in the Sargasso Sea—in the Doldrums, and had dropped my sextant overboard. Even a long stare at the master-mariner on the wall gave me no help. Yet I must confess that these foolish reflections made me happy. I would share them with Fanny—perhaps with the "gentleman" himself, some day. I leaned over the side of my small vessel, more deeply interested in the voyage than I had been since Pollie had carried me out of my girlhood into the Waggetts' wagonette. And as I sat there, simmering over these novelties, a voice, clear as a cockcrow, exclaimed in my mind, "If father hadn't died, I'd have had nothing of all this." My hands clenched damp in my lap at this monstrosity. But I kept my wits and managed to face it. "If father hadn't died," I answered myself, "you don't know what would have happened. And if you think that, because I am happy now, anything could make me not wish him back, it's a lie." But I remained a little less comfortable in mind.