It remained in my mind, that little thing that Dacres had taken the trouble to tell my daughter; I thought about it a good deal. It seemed to me the most serious and convincing circumstances that had yet offered itself to my consideration. Dacres was no longer content to bring solace and support to the more appealing figure of the situation; he must set to work, bless him! to improve the situation itself. He must try to induce Miss Farnham, by telling her everything he could remember to my credit, to think as well of her mother as possible, in spite of the strange and secret blows which that mother might be supposed to sit up at night to deliver to her. Cecily thought very well of me already; indeed, with private reservations as to my manners and — no, NOT my morals, I believe I exceeded her expectations of what a perfectly new and untrained mother would be likely to prove. It was my theory that she found me all she could understand me to be. The maternal virtues of the outside were certainly mine; I put them on with care every morning and wore them with patience all day. Dacres, I assured myself, must have allowed his preconception to lead him absurdly by the nose not to see that the girl was satisfied, that my impatience, my impotence, did not at all make her miserable. Evidently, however, he had created our relations differently; evidently he had set himself to their amelioration. There was portent in it; things seemed to be closing in. I bit off a quarter of an inch of wooden pen-handle in considering whether or not I should mention it in my letter to John, and decided that it would be better just perhaps to drop a hint. Though I could not expect John to receive it with any sort of perturbation. Men are different; he would probably think Tottenham well enough able to look after himself.

I had embarked on my letter, there at the end of a corner-table of the saloon, when I saw Dacres saunter through. He wore a very conscious and elaborately purposeless air; and it jumped with my mood that he had nothing less than the crisis of his life in his pocket, and was looking for me. As he advanced towards me between the long tables doubt left me and alarm assailed me. ‘I’m glad to find you in a quiet corner,’ said he, seating himself, and confirmed my worst anticipations.

‘I’m writing to John,’ I said, and again applied myself to my pen-handle. It is a trick Cecily has since done her best in vain to cure me of.

‘I am going to interrupt you,’ he said. ‘I have not had an opportunity of talking to you for some time.’

‘I like that!’ I exclaimed derisively.

‘And I want to tell you that I am very much charmed with Cecily.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I am not going to gratify you by saying anything against her.’

‘You don’t deserve her, you know.’

‘I won’t dispute that. But, if you don’t mind — I’m not sure that I’ll stand being abused, dear boy.’

‘I quite see it isn’t any use. Though one spoke with the tongues of men and of angels —’

‘And had not charity,’ I continued for him. ‘Precisely. I won’t go on, but your quotation is very apt.’

‘I so bow down before her simplicity. It makes a wide and beautiful margin for the rest of her character. She is a girl Ruskin would have loved.’

‘I wonder,’ said I. ‘He did seem fond of the simple type, didn’t he?’

‘Her mind is so clear, so transparent. The motive spring of everything she says and does is so direct. Don’t you find you can most completely depend upon her?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said; ‘certainly. I nearly always know what she is going to say before she says it, and under given circumstances I can tell precisely what she will do.’

‘I fancy her sense of duty is very beautifully developed.’

‘It is,’ I said. ‘There is hardly a day when I do not come in contact with it.’

‘Well, that is surely a good thing. And I find that calm poise of hers very restful.’

‘I would not have believed that so many virtues could reside in one young lady,’ I said, taking refuge in flippancy, ‘and to think that she should be my daughter!’

‘As I believe you know, that seems to me rather a cruel stroke of destiny, Mrs. Farnham.’

‘Oh yes, I know! You have a constructive imagination, Dacres. You don’t seem to see that the girl is protected by her limitations, like a tortoise. She lives within them quite secure and happy and content. How determined you are to be sorry for her!’

Mr. Tottenham looked at the end of this lively exchange as though he sought for a polite way of conveying to me that I rather was the limited person. He looked as if he wished he could say things. The first of them would be, I saw, that he had quite a different conception of Cecily, that it was illuminated by many trifles, nuances of feeling and expression, which he had noticed in his talks with her whenever they had skirted the subject of her adoption by her mother. He knew her, he was longing to say, better than I did; when it would have been natural to reply that one could not hope to compete in such a direction with an intelligent young man, and we should at once have been upon delicate and difficult ground. So it was as well perhaps that he kept silence until he said, as he had come prepared to say, ‘Well, I want to put that beyond a doubt — her happiness — if I’m good enough. I want her, please, and I only hope that she will be half as willing to come as you are likely to be to let her go.’

It was a shock when it came, plump, like that; and I was horrified to feel how completely every other consideration was lost for the instant in the immense relief that it prefigured. To be my whole complete self again, without the feeling that a fraction of me was masquerading about in Cecily! To be freed at once, or almost, from an exacting condition and an impossible ideal! ‘Oh!’ I exclaimed, and my eyes positively filled. ‘You ARE good, Dacres, but I couldn’t let you do that.’

His undisguised stare brought me back to a sense of the proportion of things. I saw that in the combination of influences that had brought Mr. Tottenham to the point of proposing to marry my daughter consideration for me, if it had a place, would be fantastic. Inwardly I laughed at the egotism of raw nerves that had conjured it up, even for an instant, as a reason for gratitude. The situation was not so peculiar, not so interesting, as that. But I answered his stare with a smile; what I had said might very well stand.

&l............