Glasses | Page 4

young lady who, as we drew
nearer, rushed up to Mrs. Meldrum with arms flourished for an embrace.
My immediate impression of her had been that she was dressed in
mourning, but during the few moments she stood talking with our
friend I made more discoveries. The figure from the neck down was
meagre, the stature insignificant, but the desire to please towered high,
as well as the air of infallibly knowing how and of never, never missing
it. This was a little person whom I would have made a high bid for a
good chance to paint. The head, the features, the colour, the whole
facial oval and radiance had a wonderful purity; the deep grey eyes--the
most agreeable, I thought, that I had ever seen--brushed with a kind of
winglike grace every object they encountered. Their possessor was just
back from Boulogne, where she had spent a week with dear Mrs.
Floyd-Taylor: this accounted for the effusiveness of her reunion with
dear Mrs. Meldrum. Her black garments were of the freshest and
daintiest; she suggested a pink-and-white wreath at a showy funeral.
She confounded us for three minutes with her presence; she was a
beauty of the great conscious public responsible order. The young men,
her companions, gazed at her and grinned: I could see there were very
few moments of the day at which young men, these or others, would
not be so occupied. The people who approached took leave of their
manners; every one seemed to linger and gape. When she brought her
face close to Mrs. Meldrum's--and she appeared to be always bringing
it close to somebody's--it was a marvel that objects so dissimilar should
express the same general identity, the unmistakable character of the
English gentlewoman. Mrs. Meldrum sustained the comparison with
her usual courage, but I wondered why she didn't introduce me: I
should have had no objection to the bringing of such a face close to
mine. However, by the time the young lady moved on with her escort
she herself bequeathed me a sense that some such
RAPPROCHEMENT might still occur. Was this by reason of the

general frequency of encounters at Folkestone, or by reason of a subtle
acknowledgment that she contrived to make of the rights, on the part of
others, that such beauty as hers created? I was in a position to answer
that question after Mrs. Meldrum had answered a few of mine.
CHAPTER II

Flora Saunt, the only daughter of an old soldier, had lost both her
parents, her mother within a few months. Mrs. Meldrum had known
them, disapproved of them, considerably avoided them: she had
watched the girl, off and on, from her early childhood. Flora, just
twenty, was extraordinarily alone in the world--so alone that she had no
natural chaperon, no one to stay with but a mercenary stranger, Mrs.
Hammond Synge, the sister-in-law of one of the young men I had just
seen. She had lots of friends, but none of them nice: she kept picking
up impossible people. The Floyd-Taylors, with whom she had been at
Boulogne, were simply horrid. The Hammond Synges were perhaps not
so vulgar, but they had no conscience in their dealings with her.
"She knows what I think of them," said Mrs. Meldrum, "and indeed she
knows what I think of most things."
"She shares that privilege with most of your friends!" I replied
laughing.
"No doubt; but possibly to some of my friends it makes a little
difference. That girl doesn't care a button. She knows best of all what I
think of Flora Saunt."
"And what may your opinion be?"
"Why, that she's not worth troubling about-- an idiot too abysmal."
"Doesn't she care for that?"
"Just enough, as you saw, to hug me till I cry out. She's too pleased
with herself for anything else to matter."

"Surely, my dear friend," I rejoined, "she has a good deal to be pleased
with!"
"So every one tells her, and so you would have told her if I had given
you the chance. However, that doesn't signify either, for her vanity is
beyond all making or mending. She believes in herself, and she's
welcome, after all, poor dear, having only herself to look to. I've
seldom met a young woman more completely free to be silly. She has a
clear course--she'll make a showy finish."
"Well," I replied, "as she probably will reduce many persons to the
same degraded state, her partaking of it won't stand out so much."
"If you mean that the world's full of twaddlers I quite agree with you!"
cried Mrs. Meldrum, trumpeting her laugh half across the Channel.
I had after this to consider a little what she would call my mother's son,
but I didn't let it prevent me from