Her footman helped us down the steps, not by any means that we required it but for what does one pay a footman I would like to ask? And we drove away to a little place which I cannot call a café. I would as readily lunch at a ribbon-counter as in a café. But this was a little place where Pelleas and I often had our tea, a place that was all of old rugs and old brasses in front, and in secret was set with tête-à-tête tables having each one rose and one shaded candle. The linen was what a café would call lace and the china may have been china or it may have been garlands and love-knots. From where I sat I could see shelves filled with home-made jam, labeled, like library-books, and looking far more attractive than some peoples’ libraries. We ordered tea and chicken-broth and toast and a salad and, because we had both been forbidden, a sweet. I am bound to say that neither of us ate the sweet but we pretended not to notice.
We talked about the old days—this is no sign of old age but rather of a good memory; and presently I was reminded of what Pelleas had assured me that morning about love.
“Where did you go to school?” Miss Willie had been asking me.
“At Miss Mink’s and Miss Burdick’s,” I answered, “and I was counting up the other day that if either of them is alive now she is about one hundred and five years old and in the newspapers on her birthday.”
“Miss Mink and Miss Burdick alive now,” Miss Willie repeated. “No, indeed. They would rather die than be alive now. They would call it proof of ill-breeding not to die at threescore and ten each according to rule. I went to Miss Trelawney’s. I had an old aunt who had brought me up to say ‘Ma’am?’ when I failed to understand; but if I said ‘Ma’am?’ in school, Miss Trelawney made me learn twenty lines of Dante; and if I didn’t say it at home I was not allowed to have dessert. Between the two I loved poetry and had a good digestion and my education extended no farther.”
“That is quite far enough,” I said. “I don’t know a better preparation for life than love of poetry and a good digestion.”
If I could have but one—and yet why should I take sides and prejudice anybody? Still, Pelleas had a frightful dyspepsia one winter and it would have taken forty poets armed to the teeth—but I really refuse to prejudice anybody.
Then I told Miss Willie how at Miss Mink’s and Miss Burdick’s I had had my first note from a boy; I slept with it under my pillow and I forgot it and the maid carried it to Miss Mink, and I blush to recall that I appeared before that lady with the defense that according to poetry my note was worth more than her entire curriculum, and triumphantly referred her to “Summum Bonum.” She sent me home, I recall. And then Miss Willie told how having successfully evaded chapel one winter evening at Miss Trelawney’s she had waked in the night with the certainty that she had lost her soul in consequence and, unable to rid herself of the conviction, she had risen and gone barefoot through the icy halls to the chapel and there had been horrified to find old Miss Trelawney kneeling with a man’s photograph in her hands.
“Isn’t it strange, Etarre,” said Miss Willie, “how the little mysteries and surprises of loving some one are everywhere, from one’s first note from a boy to the Miss Trelawneys whom every one knows?”
Sometimes I think that it is almost impudent to wonder about one’s friends when one is certain beyond wondering that they all have secret places in their hearts filled with delight and tears. But remembering what Pelleas had said that morning I did wonder about Miss Willie, since I knew that for all her air of spiced cordial she was lonely; and yet mentally I placed Miss Willie beside old Nichola and Hobart Eddy, intending to use all three as instances to crush the argument of Pelleas. Surely of all the world, I decided, those three loved nobody.