You'll Continually Be Needing To Refer To Me For
Data, Don't You Know, On Which To Base Your Conclusions.
How can
you tell whether you're in love with me or not if- (No, I am not
shouting at all; it's your guilty conscience; I'm whispering.) How
can you tell whether you're in love with me, I repeat, unless you
keep me under constant examination?"
"That seems sensible, though I dare say it is full of sophistry; but
I have made up my mind to go into the country and paint while
Salemina and Francesca are on the Continent. One cannot think in
this whirl. A winter season in Washington followed by a summer
season in London, - one wants a breath of fresh air before beginning
another winter season somewhere else. Be a little patient, please.
I long for the calm that steals over me when I am absorbed in my
brushes and my oils."
"Work is all very well," said Mr. Beresford with determination, "but
I know your habits. You have a little way of taking your brush, and
with one savage sweep painting out a figure from your canvas. Now
if I am on the canvas of your heart, - I say 'if' tentatively and
modestly, as becomes me, - I've no intention of allowing you to paint
me out; therefore I wish to remain in the foreground, where I can
say 'Strike, but hear me,' if I discover any hostile tendencies in
your eye. But I am thankful for small favours (the 'no' you do not
quite dare say, for instance), and I'll talk it over with you to-
morrow, if the British gentry will give me an opportunity, and if
you'll deign to give me a moment alone in any other place than the
Royal Academy."
"I was alone with you to-day for a whole hour at least."
"Yes, first at the London and Westminster Bank, second in Trafalgar
Square, and third on the top of a 'bus, none of them congenial spots
to a man in my humour. Penelope, you are not dull, but you don't
seem to understand that I am head over-"
"What are you two people quarrelling about?" cried Salemina. "Come,
Penelope, get your wrap. Mrs. Beresford, isn't she charming in her
new Liberty gown? If that New York wit had seen her, he couldn't
have said, 'If that is Liberty, give me Death!' Yes, Francesca, you
must wear something over your shoulders. Whistle for two four-
wheelers, Dawson, please."
Part Second - In the country.
Chapter XV. Penelope dreams.
West Belvern, Holly House
August 189-.
I am here alone. Salemina has taken her little cloth bag and her
notebook and gone to inspect the educational and industrial methods
of Germany. If she can discover anything that they are not already
doing better in Boston, she will take it back with her, but her
state of mind regarding the outcome of the trip might be described
as one of incredulity tinged with hope. Francesca has accompanied
Salemina. Not that the inspection of systems is much in her line,
but she prefers it to a solitude a deux with me when I am in a
working mood, and she comforts herself with the anticipation that
the German army is very attractive. Willie Beresford has gone with
his mother to Aix-les-Bains, like the dutiful son that he is. They
say that a good son makes a good- But that subject is dismissed to
the background for the present, for we are in a state of armed
neutrality. He has agreed to wait until the autumn for a final
answer, and I have promised to furnish one by that time. Meanwhile,
we are to continue our acquaintance by post, which is a concession I
would never have allowed if I had had my wits about me.
After paying my last week's bill in Dovermarle Street, including
fees to several servants whom I knew by sight, and several others
whose acquaintance I made for the first time at the moment of
departure, I glanced at my ebbing letter of credit and felt a season
of economy setting in upon me with unusual severity; accordingly, I
made an experiment of coming third-class to Belvern. I handed the
guard a shilling, and he gave me a seat riding backwards in a
carriage with seven other women, all very frumpish, but highly
respectable. As he could not possibly have done any worse for me, I
take it that he considered the shilling a graceful tribute to his
personal charms, but as having no other bearing whatever. The seven
women stared at me throughout the journey. When one is really of
the same blood, and when one does not open one's lips or wave the
stars and stripes in any possible manner, how do they detect the
American? These women looked at me as if I were a highly
interesting anthropoidal ape. It was not because of my attire, for
I was carefully dressed down to a third-class level; yet when I
removed my plain Knox hat and leaned my head back against my
travelling-pillow, an electrical shudder of intense excitement ran
through the entire compartment. When I stooped to tie my shoe
another current was set in motion, and when I took Charles Reade's
White Lies from my portmanteau they glanced at one another as if to
say, 'Would that we could see in what language the book is written!'
As a travelling mystery I reached my highest point at Oxford, for
there I purchased a small basket of plums from a boy who handed them
in at the window of the carriage. After eating a few, I offered the
rest to a dowdy elderly woman on my left who was munching dry
biscuits from a paper bag. 'What next?' was the facial expression
of the entire company. My neighbour accepted the plums, but hid
them in her bag; plainly thinking them poisoned, and believing me to
be a foreign conspirator, conspiring against England through the
medium of her inoffensive person.
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