When Ghost Meets Ghost

by William De Morgan

"Stop one minute, Philippa...."

"Well—what?"

"Apart from the blindness—poor fellow!—is there anything about this young man to object to? There's nothing about his family. Why!—his father's Hamilton Torrens, that was George's great friend at Christ Church. And his mother was an Abercrombie...."

"I can't go into that now." Her ladyship cuts Adrian's family very short. Consider her memories of bygones! No wonder she became acutely alive to her duties as a hostess. She had created a precedent in this matter, though really her husband scarcely knew anything about her affaire de coeur with Adrian's father thirty years ago. It was not a hanging matter, but she could not object to the young man's family after such a definite attitude towards his father.

Here ends the second short colloquy, which was the one that caused the Earl to be so more than usually absent that evening. It had the opposite effect on her ladyship, who felt better after it; braced up again to company-manners after the first one. Gwen, as mentioned before, was dazzling; superb; what is apt to be called a cynosure, owing to something Milton said. Nevertheless, the Shrewd Observer, who happened in this case to be Aunt Constance, noticed that at intervals the young lady let her right-hand neighbour talk, and died away into preoccupation, with a vital undercurrent of rippled lip and thoughtful eye. Another of her shrewd observations was that when the Hon. Percival, referring to Mr. Torrens, still an absentee by choice, said:—"I tried again to persuade him to come down at feeding-time, but it was no go," Gwen came suddenly out of one dream of this sort to say from her end of the table, miles off:—"He really prefers dining by himself, I know," and went in again.

It was this that Aunt Constance referred to in conversation with Mr. Pellew, at about half-past ten o'clock in that same shrubbery walk. They had cultivated each other's absence carefully in the drawing-room, and had convinced themselves that neither was necessary to the other. That clause having been carried nem. con., they were entitled to five minutes' chat, without prejudice. Neither remembered, perhaps, the convert to temperance who decided that passing a public-house door à contre-coeur entitled him to half-a-pint.

"How did you get on with little Di Accrington?" the lady had said. And the gentleman had answered:—"First-rate. Talked to her about your partner all the time. How did you hit it off with him?" A sympathetic laugh over the response: "Capitally—he talked about her, of course!" quite undid the fiction woven with so much pains indoors, and also as it were lighted a little collateral fire they might warm their fingers at, or burn them. However, a parade of their well-worn seniority, their old experience of life, would keep them safe from that. Only it wouldn't do to neglect it.

Mr. Pellew recognised the obligation first. "Offly amusin'!—young people," said he, claiming, as the countryman of Shakespeare, his share of insight into Romeo and Juliet.

"Same old story, over and over again!" said Aunt Constance. They posed as types of elderliness that had no personal concern in love-affairs, and could afford to smile at juvenile flirtations. Mr. Pellew felt interested in Miss Dickenson's bygone romances, implied in the slight shade of sentiment in her voice—wondered in fact how the doose this woman had missed her market; this was the expression his internal soliloquy used. She for her part was on the whole glad that an intensely Platonic friendship didn't admit of catechism, as she was better pleased to leave the customers in that market to the uninformed imagination of others, than to be compelled to draw upon her own.

The fact was that, in spite of its thinness and slightness, this Platonic friendship with a mature bachelor whose past—while she acquitted him of atrocities—she felt was safest kept out of sight, had already gone quite as near to becoming a love-affair as anything her memory could discover among her own rather barren antecedents. So there was a certain sort of affectation in Aunt Constance's suggestion of familiarity with Romeo and Juliet. She wished, without telling lies, to convey the idea that the spinsterhood four very married sisters did not scruple to taunt her with, was either of her own choosing or due to some tragic event of early life. She did not relish the opposite pole of human experience to her companion's. Of course, he was a bachelor nominally unattached—she appreciated that—just as she was a spinster very actually unattached. But all men of his type she had understood were alike; only some—this one certainly—were much better than others. Honestly she was quite unconscious of any personal reason for assigning to him a first-class record.