Louisa Pallant | Page 8

fain do for you."
What she'd fain do for me she didn't tell me that day, but we took up
the subject again. I remarked that I failed to see why we should assume
that a girl like Linda--brilliant enough to make one of the greatest--
would fall so very easily into my nephew's arms. Might I enquire if her
mother had won a confession from her, if she had stammered out her
secret? Mrs. Pallant made me, on this, the point that they had no need
to tell each other such things--they hadn't lived together twenty years in
such intimacy for nothing. To which I returned that I had guessed as
much, but that there might be an exception for a great occasion like the
present. If Linda had shown nothing it was a sign that for HER the
occasion wasn't great; and I mentioned that Archie had spoken to me of
the young lady only to remark casually and rather patronisingly, after
his first encounter with her, that she was a regular little flower. (The
little flower was nearly three years older than himself.) Apart from this
he hadn't alluded to her and had taken up no allusion of mine. Mrs.
Pallant informed me again--for which I was prepared--that I was quite
too primitive; after which she said: "We needn't discuss the case if you
don't wish to, but I happen to know--how I obtained my knowledge
isn't important--that the moment Mr. Parker should propose to my

daughter she'd gobble him down. Surely it's a detail worth mentioning
to you."
I sought to defer then to her judgement. "Very good. I'll sound him. I'll
look into the matter tonight."
"Don't, don't; you'll spoil everything!" She spoke as with some finer
view. "Remove him quickly--that's the only thing."
I didn't at all like the idea of removing him quickly; it seemed too
summary, too extravagant, even if presented to him on specious
grounds; and moreover, as I had told Mrs. Pallant, I really had no wish
to change my scene. It was no part of my promise to my sister that,
with my middle-aged habits, I should duck and dodge about Europe. So
I temporised. "Should you really object to the boy so much as a son-in-
law? After all he's a good fellow and a gentleman."
"My poor friend, you're incredibly superficial!" she made answer with
an assurance that struck me.
The contempt in it so nettled me in fact that I exclaimed: "Possibly! But
it seems odd that a lesson in consistency should come from YOU."
I had no retort from her on this, rather to my surprise, and when she
spoke again it was all quietly. "I think Linda and I had best withdraw.
We've been here a month--it will have served our purpose."
"Mercy on us, that will be a bore!" I protested; and for the rest of the
evening, till we separated--our conversation had taken place after
dinner at the Kursaal--she said little, preserving a subdued and almost
injured air. This somehow didn't appeal to me, since it was absurd that
Louisa Pallant, of all women, should propose to put me in the wrong. If
ever a woman had been in the wrong herself--! I had even no need to go
into that. Archie and I, at all events, usually attended the ladies back to
their own door--they lived in a street of minor accommodation at a
certain distance from the Rooms--where we parted for the night late, on
the big cobblestones, in the little sleeping German town, under the
closed windows of which, suggesting stuffy interiors, our cheerful
English partings resounded. On this occasion indeed they rather
languished; the question that had come up for me with Mrs. Pallant
appeared--and by no intention of mine--to have brushed the young
couple with its chill. Archie and Linda too struck me as conscious and
dumb.
As I walked back to our hotel with my nephew I passed my hand into

his arm and put to him, by no roundabout approach, the question of
whether he were in serious peril of love.
"I don't know, I don't know--really, uncle, I don't know!" was, however,
all the satisfaction I could extract from the youth, who hadn't the
smallest vein of introspection. He mightn't know, but before we
reached the inn--we had a few more words on the subject--it seemed to
me that I did. His mind wasn't formed to accommodate at one time
many subjects of thought, but Linda Pallant certainly constituted for the
moment its principal furniture. She pervaded his consciousness, she
solicited his curiosity, she associated herself, in a manner as yet
informal and undefined, with his future. I could see that she held, that
she beguiled him as no one had ever done. I didn't betray