Greville Fane | Page 6

she had
nothing at stake in the matter. She had a shrewd perception that form,
in prose at least, never recommended any one to the public we were
condemned to address, and therefore she lost nothing (putting her
private humiliation aside) by not having any. She made no pretence of
producing works of art, but had comfortable tea-drinking hours in
which she freely confessed herself a common pastrycook, dealing in
such tarts and puddings as would bring customers to the shop. She put
in plenty of sugar and of cochineal, or whatever it is that gives these
articles a rich and attractive colour. She had a serene superiority to

observation and opportunity which constituted an inexpugnable
strength and would enable her to go on indefinitely. It is only real
success that wanes, it is only solid things that melt. Greville Fane's
ignorance of life was a resource still more unfailing than the most
approved receipt. On her saying once that the day would come when
she should have written herself out I answered: "Ah, you look into
fairyland, and the fairies love you, and THEY never change. Fairyland
is always there; it always was from the beginning of time, and it always
will be to the end. They've given you the key and you can always open
the door. With me it's different; I try, in my clumsy way, to be in some
direct relation to life." "Oh, bother your direct relation to life!" she used
to reply, for she was always annoyed by the phrase--which would not in
the least prevent her from using it when she wished to try for style.
With no more prejudices than an old sausage-mill, she would give forth
again with patient punctuality any poor verbal scrap that had been
dropped into her. I cheered her with saying that the dark day, at the end,
would be for the like of ME; inasmuch as, going in our small way by
experience and observation, we depended not on a revelation, but on a
little tiresome process. Observation depended on opportunity, and
where should we be when opportunity failed?
One day she told me that as the novelist's life was so delightful and
during the good years at least such a comfortable support (she had these
staggering optimisms) she meant to train up her boy to follow it. She
took the ingenious view that it was a profession like another and that
therefore everything was to be gained by beginning young and serving
an apprenticeship. Moreover the education would be less expensive
than any other special course, inasmuch as she could administer it
herself. She didn't profess to keep a school, but she could at least teach
her own child. It was not that she was so very clever, but (she
confessed to me as if she were afraid I would laugh at her) that HE was.
I didn't laugh at her for that, for I thought the boy sharp--I had seen him
at sundry times. He was well grown and good-looking and unabashed,
and both he and his sister made me wonder about their defunct papa,
concerning whom the little I knew was that he had been a clergyman. I
explained them to myself by suppositions and imputations possibly
unjust to the departed; so little were they- -superficially at least--the
children of their mother. There used to be, on an easel in her

drawing-room, an enlarged photograph of her husband, done by some
horrible posthumous "process" and draped, as to its florid frame, with a
silken scarf, which testified to the candour of Greville Fane's bad taste.
It made him look like an unsuccessful tragedian; but it was not a thing
to trust. He may have been a successful comedian. Of the two children
the girl was the elder, and struck me in all her younger years as
singularly colourless. She was only very long, like an undecipherable
letter. It was not till Mrs. Stormer came back from a protracted
residence abroad that Ethel (which was this young lady's name) began
to produce the effect, which was afterwards remarkable in her, of a
certain kind of high resolution. She made one apprehend that she meant
to do something for herself. She was long-necked and near-sighted and
striking, and I thought I had never seen sweet seventeen in a form so
hard and high and dry. She was cold and affected and ambitious, and
she carried an eyeglass with a long handle, which she put up whenever
she wanted not to see. She had come out, as the phrase is, immensely;
and yet I felt as if she were surrounded with a spiked iron railing. What
she meant to do for herself was to marry, and it was the only thing, I
think, that she meant to do