Clementina gave one of her non-committal grunts. She did indeed remember it. But for that night the three of them would not have been sitting together over coffee at Valence.
“Tommy’s so sentimental,” Etta remarked.
“Since when have you been calling him ‘Tommy’?” asked Clementina.
“We fixed that up this afternoon,” he said, cheerfully. ‘Mr. Burgrave’ suggests an afternoon party where one carts tea and food about—not a chummy motor tour.”
“We agreed to adopt each other as cousins,” said Etta.
“We were kind of lonely, you know,” laughed Tommy. “We happen to have no cousins of our own, and, besides, you deserted us to-day, and we felt like two abandoned babes in the car.”
“I don’t think you were much to be pitied,” said Clementina.
In pursuance of her scheme of self-annihilation she had several times sent them out on jaunts together, while she herself went for a grim walk in the dust and heat. This afternoon Etta had returned radiant. She had had the time of her life, and Tommy was the dearest thing that ever happened. Etta was addicted to the hyperbole of her generation. At dinner Tommy had admitted the general amenity of their excursion to Valence Crest—and now came the avowal of the establishment of their cousinly and intimate relations. The scheme was succeeding admirably. How could it fail? Throw together two bright, impressionable and innocent young humans of opposite sexes, and of the same social position, link them by a common tie, let them spend hours in each other’s company, withdraw the ordinary restrictions that limit the intercourse of such beings in everyday society, bathe them in sunshine and drench their souls with beauty, and you have the Garden of Eden over again, the Serpent being replaced by his chubby and winged successor. The result is almost inevitable. But you can withdraw with certainty the qualifying adverb, when one of the potentially high contracting parties has been suffering from heart-scratch, and has announced her intention of becoming a hospital nurse.
I am quite aware that in the eyes of the world Clementina’s conduct was outrageous. Etta was the only child of a wealthy admiral; Tommy, a penniless painter. Admiral Concannon had confidently entrusted his daughter to her care and had not the least idea of what was going on. When the disastrous story should reach his ears, he would foam righteously at the mouth, and use, with perfect justification, the most esoteric of quarter-deck language. I do not attempt to defend Clementina. All the same, you must remember that in Tommy Burgrave she was giving to Etta as a free gift her most priceless possession. Tommy in her eyes was the real Prince Charming—at present, as often happens in fairy tales, under a cloud, but destined in real life, as in the fairy tales, to come, by a speedy wave of the magic wand, into his principality. As to the waving of the magic wand, she had her own ideas. She was quite prepared to weather the admiral’s storm.
“There was never anything so sudden but the fight of two rams,” is Rosalind’s startling description of the courtship between Oliver and Celia. These lovers, however, were Elizabethans who did things in a large, splendid and unhesitating way. The case with Tommy and Etta, who were moderns, governed by all kinds of subtleties and delicacies, three centuries’ growth, was not quite so instantaneous. The ordinary modern youth and maiden, of such clean upbringing, walk along together, hand in hand in perfect innocence, for a long time, never realising that they are in love with one another till something happens. The maiden may be sent into the country by an infuriated mother. Hence revelation with anguish. The indiscreet jesting of a friend, a tragedy causing both to come hard against the bed-rock facts of life, may shatter the guileless shell of their love. I know of two young things who came by the knowledge through bumping their heads together beneath a table while searching for a fallen penny. A shock, a jar is all that is needed. But with Tommy and Etta nothing yet had happened. They walked along together sweetly imagining themselves to be fancy-free. If the truth were known it would be found that the main subject of their conversation was Clementina.