Miss N. Your company is sometimes very pleasant—when you please. Sometimes, as last night, for instance, when you particularly lively.
Clive. Last night, after moving heaven and earth to get an invitation to Madame de Brie—I say, heaven and earth, that is a French phrase—I arrive there; I find Miss Newcome engaged for almost every dance, waltzing with M. de Klingenspohr, galloping with Count de Capri, galloping and waltzing with the most noble the Marquis of Farintosh. She will scarce speak to me during the evening; and when I wait till midnight, her grandmamma whisks her home, and I am left alone for my pains. Lady Kew is in one of her high moods, and the only words she condescends to say to me are, “Oh, I thought you had returned to London,” with which she turns her venerable back upon me.
Miss N. A fortnight ago you said you were going to London. You said the copies you were about here would not take you another week, and that was three weeks since.
Clive. It were best I had gone.
Miss N. If you think so, I cannot but think so.
Clive. Why do I stay and hover about you, and follow you know—I follow you? Can I live on a smile vouchsafed twice a week, and no brighter than you give to all the world? What I do I get, but to hear your beauty praised, and to see you, night after night, happy and smiling and triumphant, the partner of other men? Does it add zest to your triumph, to think that I behold it? I believe you would like a crowd of us to pursue you.
Miss N. To pursue me; and if they find me alone, by chance to compliment me with such speeches as you make? That would be pleasure indeed! Answer me here in return, Clive. Have I ever disguised from any of my friends the regard I have for you? Why should I? Have not I taken your part when you were maligned? In former days, when—when Lord Kew asked me, as he had a right to do then—I said it was as a brother I held you; and always would. If I have been wrong, it has been for two or three times in seeing you at all—or seeing you thus; in letting you speak to me as you do—injure me as you do. Do you think I have not hard enough words said to me about you, but that you must attack me too in turn? Last night only, because you were at the ball,—it was very, very wrong of me to tell you I was going there,—as we went home, Lady Kew—Go, sir. I never thought you would have seen in me this humiliation.
Clive. Is it possible that I should have made Ethel Newcome shed tears? Oh, dry them, dry them. Forgive me, Ethel, forgive me! I have no right to jealousy, or to reproach you—I know that. If others admire you, surely I ought to know that they—they do but as I do: I should be proud, not angry, that they admire my Ethel—my sister, if you can be no more.
Ethel. I will be that always, whatever harsh things you think or say of me. There, sir, I am not going to be so foolish as to cry again. Have you been studying very hard? Are your pictures good at the Exhibition? I like you with your mustachios best, and order you not to cut them off again. The young men here wear them. I hardly knew Charles Beardmore when he arrived from Berlin the other day, like a sapper and miner. His little sisters cried out, and were quite frightened by his apparition. Why are you not in diplomacy? That day, at Brighton, when Lord Farintosh asked whether you were in the army, I thought to myself, why is he not?
Clive. A man in the army may pretend to anything, n’est-ce pas? He wears a lovely uniform. He may be a General, a K.C.B., a Viscount, an Earl. He may be valiant in arms, and wanting a leg, like the lover in the song. It is peace-time, you say? so much the worse career for a soldier. My father would not have me, he said, for ever dangling in barracks, or smoking in country billiard-rooms. I have no taste for law: and as for diplomacy, I have no relations in the Cabinet, and no uncles in the House of Peers. Could my uncle, who is in Parliament, help me much, do you think? or would he, if he could?—or Barnes, his noble son and heir, after him?