Georginas Reasons | Page 2

the impression had not
been transitory. The acquaintance ripened, thanks to a zealous
cultivation (on his part) of occasions which Providence, it must be
confessed, placed at his disposal none too liberally; so that now
Georgina took up all his thoughts and a considerable part of his time.
He was in love with her, beyond a doubt; but he could not flatter
himself that she was in love with him, though she appeared willing
(what was so strange) to quarrel with her family about him. He did n't

see how she could really care for him,--she seemed marked out by
nature for so much greater a fortune; and he used to say to her, "Ah,
you don't--there's no use talking, you don't--really care for me at all!"
To which she answered, "Really? You are very particular. It seems to
me it's real enough if I let you touch one of my fingertips! "That was
one of her ways of being insolent Another was simply her manner of
looking at him, or at other people (when they spoke to her), with her
hard, divine blue eye,--looking quietly, amusedly, with the air of
considering (wholly from her own point of view) what they might have
said, and then turning her head or her back, while, without taking the
trouble to answer them, she broke into a short, liquid, irrelevant laugh.
This may seem to contradict what I said just now about her taking the
young lieutenant in the navy seriously. What I mean is that she
appeared to take him more seriously than she took anything else. She
said to him once, "At any rate you have the merit of not being a
shop-keeper;" and it was by this epithet she was pleased to designate
most of the young men who at that time flourished in the best society of
New York. Even if she had rather a free way of expressing general
indifference, a young lady is supposed to be serious enough when she
consents to marry you. For the rest, as regards a certain haughtiness
that might be observed in Geoigina Gressie, my story will probably
throw sufficient light upon it She remarked to Benyon once that it was
none of his business why she liked him, but that, to please herself, she
did n't mind telling him she thought the great Napoleon, before he was
celebrated, before he had command of the army of Italy, must have
looked something like him; and she sketched in a few words the sort of
figure she imagined the incipient Bonaparte to have been,--short, lean,
pale, poor, intellectual, and with a tremendous future under his hat
Benyon asked himself whether he had a tremendous future, and what in
the world Geoigina expected of him in the coming years. He was
flattered at the comparison, he was ambitious enough not to be
frightened at it, and he guessed that she perceived a certain analogy
between herself and the Empress Josephine. She would make a very
good empress. That was true; Georgina was remarkably imperial. This
may not at first seem to make it more clear why she should take into
her favor an aspirant who, on the face of the matter, was not original,
and whose Corsica was a flat New England seaport; but it afterward

became plain that he owed his brief happiness--it was very brief--to her
father's opposition; her father's and her mother's, and even her uncles'
and her aunts'. In those days, in New York, the different members of a
family took an interest in its alliances, and the house of Gressie looked
askance at an engagement between the most beautiful of its daughters
and a young man who was not in a paying business. Georgina declared
that they were meddlesome and vulgar,--she could sacrifice her own
people, in that way, without a scruple,--and Benyon's position
improved from the moment that Mr. Gressie--ill-advised Mr.
Gressie--ordered the girl to have nothing to do with him. Georgina was
imperial in this--that she wouldn't put up with an order. When, in the
house in Twelfth Street, it began to be talked about that she had better
be sent to Europe with some eligible friend, Mrs. Portico, for instance,
who was always planning to go, and who wanted as a companion some
young mind, fresh from manuals and extracts, to serve as a fountain of
history and geography,--when this scheme for getting Georgina out of
the way began to be aired, she immediately said to Raymond Benyon,
"Oh, yes, I 'll marry you!" She said it in such an off-hand way that,
deeply as he desired her, he was almost tempted to answer, "But, my
dear, have you really thought about it?"
This little drama went on, in New York, in the ancient days, when
Twelfth Street