Silence, or three lines of indignation, would have been the only innocent answer to my letter. But Miss Snape thanked me. She let me know, by implication, that she was on intimate terms with a name good on a West-end bill. My answer was, that I should be alone on the following afternoon at five.
At the hour fixed, punctual to a moment, a brougham drew up at the corner of the street next to my chambers. The Honorable Miss Snape’s card was handed in. Presently, she entered, swimming into my room, richly yet simply dressed in the extreme of Parisian good taste. She was pale—or rather colorless. She had fair hair, fine teeth, and a fashionable voice. She threw herself gracefully into the chair I handed to her, and began by uncoiling a string of phrases, to the effect that her visit was merely to consult me on “unavoidable pecuniary difficulties.”
According to my mode, I allowed her to talk; putting in only an occasional word of question, that seemed rather a random observation than a significant query. At length, after walking round
and round the subject, like a timid horse in a field, round a groom with a sieve of oats, she came nearer and nearer the subject. When she had fairly approached the point, she stopped, as if courage had failed her. But she soon recovered, and observed—“I can not think why you should take the trouble to write so to me, a perfect stranger.” Another pause—“I wonder no one ever suspected me before.”
Here was a confession and a key to character. The cold gray eye, the thin compressed lips, which I had had time to observe, were true indexes to the “lady’s” inner heart:—selfish, calculating, utterly devoid of conscience; unable to conceive the existence of spontaneous kindness; utterly indifferent to any thing except discovery; and almost indifferent to that, because convinced that no serious consequences could affect a lady of her rank and influence.
“Madam,” I replied, “as long as you dealt with tradesmen accustomed to depend on aristocratic customers, your rank and position, and their large profits, protected you from suspicion; but you have made a mistake in descending from your vantage ground to make a poor shopman your innocent accomplice—a man who will be keenly alive to any thing that may injure his wife or children. His terrors—but for my interposition—would have ruined you. Tell me, how many of these things have you put afloat?”
She seemed a little taken aback by this speech; but was wonderfully firm. She passed her white, jeweled hand over her eyes, seemed calculating, and then whispered, with a confiding look of innocent helplessness, admirably assumed:
“About as many as amount to twelve hundred pounds.”
“And what means have you for meeting them?”
At this question, so plainly put, her face flushed. She half-rose from her chair, and exclaimed, in the true tone of aristocratic hauteur, “Really, sir, I do not know what right you have to ask me that question.”