BY the end of June, returning physical strength gave Hilda the wish to seek self-forgetful effort of some kind. She tried to busy herself with something—with anything—and experienced the odd sensation of a person upon whom duty has always pressed and crowded, in a futile search for duty. The stern, sweet helper eluded her, the unreality of manufactured, unnecessary activity appalled her. She regretted the strenuous days of labor that meant something. Taking herself to task for a weak submission to circumstance, she fitted up a large room at the top of the house with artistic apparatus; nice models were easily lured from the village; she told herself that art at least remained, and tried to absorb herself in her painting; but the savor of keen interest was gone; the pink cheeks and staring eyes of her village girl were annoying. Hilda felt more like crying than trying to select from and modify her buxom charms.
Mrs. Archinard had suddenly assumed an active r?le in life most confusing to her daughter. Even mamma did not need her. Mrs. Archinard drove out in the pony-cart to see people; she held quite a little c?terie of callers every afternoon. Mrs. Archinard’s little Causeries de Mardi, her society for little weekly dinners—only six chosen members—les élites—stirred Allersley to the quick with ?sthetic thrills and heart-burnings. Mrs. Archinard laughed prettily and lightly at her own feats, but Allersley was awestricken, and got down its Sainte-Beuve trembling, resolved on firm foundations.
Hilda was not one of les élites. “Just for us old people, trying to amuse ourselves,” Mrs. Archinard said, and at the Causeries Hilda was an anomalous and silent onlooker; indeed the Causeries were quite Sainte-Beuvian in their monologic form, Mrs. Archinard causant and Allersley attentive, but discreetly reticent, no one caring to risk a revelation of ignorance. The Captain carefully avoided both the élites and the mardis, and devoted himself to more commonplace individualities whose dinners were good, and then one wasn’t required to strain one’s temper by listening to fine talk.
Mary Apswith spent a week at the Manor, and one fresh sunny morning she came to see Hilda. She found her in the garden standing between the rows of sweet-peas, and filling with their fragrant loveliness the basket on her arm. Mary’s mind had been given over to a commotion of conjecture since Peter’s flying visit to her in London. He had told her much and yet not enough; though what he had told insured sympathy for Hilda. Mary was generous, and the sight of Hilda’s white sunlit face completed Peter’s work. She found that she had kissed Hilda—she, so undemonstrative—and standing with her arms around the girl’s slight shoulders, she said, looking at her with a grave smile, in which the slight touch of playfulness reminded poor Hilda of Peter—
“You will see me, won’t you?”
Hilda still held in her hands the last long sprays she had cut—palest pink and palest purple, “on tiptoe for a flight.”
“How kind of you to come,” she said.
“Kind of you to say so, since I come from the enemy’s camp. That reckless brother of mine!”
“Did he send you?” Hilda asked, fright in her eyes.
“Send me? Oh no, he didn’t send me; but after what he has told me, I came naturally of my own free will.” Hilda smiled faintly in reply to Mary’s smile.
“What has he told you?”
“Why, simply that he had been in love with you almost from the day he proposed to Katherine; indeed he implied an even remoter origin. Really Peter ought to be whipped! He almost deserves the sacking you are giving him!”
Hilda winced at the humorous tone.
“That he had made love to you most cruelly; that Katherine had come in upon the love scene; that she, too, was cruel—natural, though, wasn’t it? Peter is rather hard on Katherine. And, to sum up, that you had been badly treated by the world in general, by himself in particular, and that he was very desperate and you painfully perfect, and—oh, a great many things.”
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