My visitor, for a moment, screwed her parasol into my carpet."He grows bigger every day.""So do you!" I laughed as she went off.
That girl at Wimbledon, on the Thursday afternoon, more than justified my apprehensions.I recognised fully now the cause of the agitation she had produced in me from the first--the faint foreknowledge that there was something very stiff I should have to do for her.I felt more than ever committed to my fate as, standing before her in the big drawing-room where they had tactfully left us to ourselves, I tried with a smile to string together the pearls of lucidity which, from her chair, she successively tossed me.Pale and bright, in her monotonous mourning, she was an image of intelligent purpose, of the passion of duty; but I asked myself whether any girl had ever had so charming an instinct as that which permitted her to laugh out, as for the joy of her difficulty, into the priggish old room.This remarkable young woman could be earnest without being solemn, and at moments when I ought doubtless to have cursed her obstinacy Ifound myself watching the unstudied play of her eyebrows or the recurrence of a singularly intense whiteness produced by the parting of her lips.These aberrations, I hasten to add, didn't prevent my learning soon enough why she had wished to see me.Her reason for this was as distinct as her beauty: it was to make me explain what I had meant, on the occasion of our first meeting, by Mr.Saltram's want of dignity.It wasn't that she couldn't imagine, but she desired it there from my lips.What she really desired of course was to know whether there was worse about him than what she had found out for herself.She hadn't been a month so much in the house with him without discovering that he wasn't a man of monumental bronze.He was like a jelly minus its mould, he had to be embanked; and that was precisely the source of her interest in him and the ground of her project.She put her project boldly before me: there it stood in its preposterous beauty.She was as willing to take the humorous view of it as I could be: the only difference was that for her the humorous view of a thing wasn't necessarily prohibitive, wasn't paralysing.
Moreover she professed that she couldn't discuss with me the primary question--the moral obligation: that was in her own breast.There were things she couldn't go into--injunctions, impressions she had received.They were a part of the closest intimacy of her intercourse with her aunt, they were absolutely clear to her; and on questions of delicacy, the interpretation of a fidelity, of a promise, one had always in the last resort to make up one's mind for one's self.It was the idea of the application to the particular case, such a splendid one at last, that troubled her, and she admitted that it stirred very deep things.She didn't pretend that such a responsibility was a simple matter; if it HADbeen she wouldn't have attempted to saddle me with any portion of it.The Mulvilles were sympathy itself, but were they absolutely candid? Could they indeed be, in their position--would it even have been to be desired? Yes, she had sent for me to ask no less than that of me--whether there was anything dreadful kept back.
