Greville Fane | Page 8

an idea that she was seeing foreign
manners as well as her petticoats would allow; but, in reality she was
not seeing anything, least of all fortunately how much she was laughed
at. She drove her whimsical pen at Dresden and at Florence, and
produced in all places and at all times the same romantic and ridiculous
fictions. She carried about her box of properties and fished out
promptly the familiar, tarnished old puppets. She believed in them
when others couldn't, and as they were like nothing that was to be seen
under the sun it was impossible to prove by comparison that they were
wrong. You can't compare birds and fishes; you could only feel that, as
Greville Fane's characters had the fine plumage of the former species,
human beings must be of the latter.
It would have been droll if it had not been so exemplary to see her
tracing the loves of the duchesses beside the innocent cribs of her
children. The immoral and the maternal lived together in her diligent
days on the most comfortable terms, and she stopped curling the
mustaches of her Guardsmen to pat the heads of her babes. She was
haunted by solemn spinsters who came to tea from continental pensions,
and by unsophisticated Americans who told her she was just loved in
THEIR country. "I had rather be just paid there," she usually replied;
for this tribute of transatlantic opinion was the only thing that galled
her. The Americans went away thinking her coarse; though as the
author of so many beautiful love-stories she was disappointing to most
of these pilgrims, who had not expected to find a shy, stout, ruddy lady
in a cap like a crumbled pyramid. She wrote about the affections and
the impossibility of controlling them, but she talked of the price of
pension and the convenience of an English chemist. She devoted much

thought and many thousands of francs to the education of her daughter,
who spent three years at a very superior school at Dresden, receiving
wonderful instruction in sciences, arts and tongues, and who, taking a
different line from Leolin, was to be brought up wholly as a femme du
monde. The girl was musical and philological; she made a specialty of
languages and learned enough about them to be inspired with a great
contempt for her mother's artless accents. Greville Fane's French and
Italian were droll; the imitative faculty had been denied her, and she
had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big
mistakes into small opportunities. She knew it, but she didn't care;
correctness was the virtue in the world that, like her heroes and
heroines, she valued least. Ethel, who had perceived in her pages some
remarkable lapses, undertook at one time to revise her proofs; but I
remember her telling me a year after the girl had left school that this
function had been very briefly exercised. "She can't read me," said Mrs.
Stormer; "I offend her taste. She tells me that at Dresden--at school--I
was never allowed." The good lady seemed surprised at this, having the
best conscience in the world about her lucubrations. She had never
meant to fly in the face of anything, and considered that she grovelled
before the Rhadamanthus of the English literary tribunal, the celebrated
and awful Young Person. I assured her, as a joke, that she was
frightfully indecent (she hadn't in fact that reality any more than any
other) my purpose being solely to prevent her from guessing that her
daughter had dropped her not because she was immoral but because she
was vulgar. I used to figure her children closeted together and asking
each other while they exchanged a gaze of dismay: "Why should she
BE so--and so FEARFULLY so--when she has the advantage of our
society? Shouldn't WE have taught her better?" Then I imagined their
recognising with a blush and a shrug that she was unteachable,
irreformable. Indeed she was, poor lady; but it is never fair to read by
the light of taste things that were not written by it. Greville Fane had, in
the topsy-turvy, a serene good faith that ought to have been safe from
allusion, like a stutter or a faux pas.
She didn't make her son ashamed of the profession to which he was
destined, however; she only made him ashamed of the way she herself
exercised it. But he bore his humiliation much better than his sister, for
he was ready to take for granted that he should one day restore the

balance. He was a canny and far-seeing youth, with appetites and
aspirations, and he had not a scruple in his composition. His mother's
theory of the happy knack he could pick up deprived him of the
wholesome discipline required to