As for Fanny, to judge from her animation when Susan and Captain Valentine broke in upon us, I doubt if anybody less complacent than Percy would not have realized that she was often bored. She would look at him with head on one side, as if she had been painted like that for ever and ever in a picture. She could idly hide behind her beauty, and Percy might as well have gone hunting Echo or a rainbow. She could make corrosive remarks in so seducing a voice that the poor creature hardly knew where the smart came from. He would exclaim, "Oh, I say, Miss Bowater!" and gape like a goldfish. Solely, perhaps, to have some one to discuss herself with, Fanny so far forgave and forgot my shortcomings as to pay me an occasional visit, and had yawned how hideously expensive she found it to live with the rich. But the only promise of help I could make was beyond any possibility of performance. I promised, none the less, for my one dread was that she should guess what straits I was in for money.
It is all very well to accuse Percy Maudlen of goldfishiness. What kind of fish was I? During the few months of my life at Mrs Monnerie's—until, that is, Fanny's arrival—she had transported her "Queen Bee," as she sometimes called me, to every conceivable social function and ceremony, except a deathbed and a funeral. Why had I not played my cards a little more skilfully? Had not Messrs de la Rue designed a pack as if expressly for me, and for my own particular little game of Patience? If perhaps I had shown more sense and less sensibility; and had not been, as I suppose, in spite of all my airs and flauntings, such an inward young woman, what altitudes I might have scaled. Mrs Monnerie, indeed, had once made me a promise to present me at Court in the coming May. It is true that this was a distinction that had been enjoyed by many of my predecessors in my own particular "line"—but I don't think my patroness would have dished me up in a Pie.
That being so, my proud bosom might at this very moment be heaving beneath a locket adorned with the royal monogram in seed pearls, and inscribed, "To the Least of her Subjects from the Greatest of Queens." Why, I might have been the most talked-of and photographed débutante of the season. But I must beware of sour grapes. "There was once a Diogenes whom the gods shut up in a tub."—Poor Mr Wagginhorne, he had been, after all, comparatively frugal with his azaleas.
In all seriousness I profited far too little by Mrs Monnerie's generosities, by my "chances," while I was with her. I just grew hostile, and so half-blind. Many of her friends, of course, were merely wealthy or fashionable, but others were just natural human beings. As Fanny had discovered, she not only delighted in people that were pleasant to look at. She enjoyed also what, I suppose, is almost as rare, intelligence.
The society "Beauties," now? To be quite candid, and I hope without the least tinge of jealousy, I think they liked the look of me—well, no better than I liked the look of excessively handsome men. These exotics of either sex reminded me of petunias—the headachy kind, that are neither red nor blue, but a mixture. I always felt when I looked at them that they knew they were making me dizzy. Yet, as a matter of fact, I could hardly see their beauty for their clothes. It must, of course, be extremely difficult to endure pure admiration. True, I never remember even the most tactful person examining me for the first time without showing some little symptom of discomposure. But that's a very different thing.
There was, however, another kind of beauty which I loved with all my heart. It is difficult to express what I mean, but to see a woman whose face seemed to be the picture of a dream of herself, or a man whose face was absolutely the showing of his own mind—I never wearied of that. Or, at any rate, I do not now; in looking back.
So much for outsides. Humanity, our old cook, Mrs Ballard, used to say, is very like a veal and ham pie: its least digestible part is usually the crust. I am only an amateur veal and ham Pieist; and the fact remains that I experienced just as much difficulty with what are called "clever" people. They were like Adam Waggett in his Sunday clothes—a little too much of something to be quite all there. I firmly believe that what one means is the best thing to say, and the very last thing, however unaffected, most of these clever people said was seemingly what they meant. Their conversation rarely had more than an intellectual interest. You asked for a penny, and they gave you what only looked like a threepenny bit.
Perhaps this is nothing but prejudice, but I have certainly always got on very much better with stupid people. Chiefly, perhaps, because I could share experiences with them; and the latest thoughts did not matter so much. Clever men's—and women's—experiences all seem to be in their heads; and when I have seen a rich man clamber through the eye of a needle, as poor Mr Crimble used to say, I shall keep my eyes open for a clever one attempting the same feat. It had been one of my absurd little amusements at Mrs Bowater's to imagine myself in strange places—keeping company with a dishevelled Comet in the cold wilds of space, or walking about in the furnaces of the Sun, like Shadrach and Abednego. Not so now. Yet if I had had the patience, and the far better sense, to fix my attention on any one I disliked at Mrs Monnerie's so as to enter in; no doubt I should so much have enlarged my inward self as to make it a match at last even for poor Mr Daniel Lambert.
On the other hand, I sometimes met people at No. 2, or when I was taken out by Mrs Monnerie, whose faces looked as if they had been on an almost unbelievably long journey—and one not merely through this world, though that helps. I did try to explore those eyes, and mouths, and wrinkles; and solitudes, stranger than any comet's, I would find myself in at times. Alas, they paid me extremely little attention; though I wonder they did not see in my eyes how hungry I was for it. They were as mysterious as what is called genius. And what would I not give to have set eyes on Sir Isaac Newton, or Nelson, or John Keats—all three of them comparatively little men.
However absurdly pranked up with conceit I might be, I knew in my heart that outwardly, at any rate, I was nothing much better than a curio. To care for me was therefore a really difficult feat. And apart from there being very little time for anything at Mrs Monnerie's, I never caught any one making the attempt. When the novelty of me had worn off, I used to amuse myself by listening to Mrs Monnerie's friends talking to one another—discussing plays and pictures and music and so on—anything that was new, and, of course, each other. Often on these occasions I hardly knew whether I was on my head or my heels.