Louisa Pallant | Page 9

to him,
however, that perception, and I spent my night a prey to the
consciousness that, after all, it had been none of my business to provide
him with the sense of being captivated. To put him in relation with a
young enchantress was the last thing his mother had expected of me or
that I had expected of myself. Moreover it was quite my opinion that he
himself was too young to be a judge of enchantresses. Mrs. Pallant was
right and I had given high proof of levity in regarding her, with her
beautiful daughter, as a "resource." There were other resources--one of
which WOULD be most decidedly to clear out. What did I know after
all about the girl except that I rejoiced to have escaped from marrying
her mother? That mother, it was true, was a singular person, and it was
strange her conscience should have begun to fidget in advance of my
own. It was strange she should so soon have felt Archie's peril, and
even stranger that she should have then wished to "save" him. The
ways of women were infinitely subtle, and it was no novelty to me that
one never knew where they would turn up. As I haven't hesitated in this
report to expose the irritable side of my own nature I shall confess that
I even wondered if my old friend's solicitude hadn't been a deeper
artifice. Wasn't it possibly a plan of her own for making sure of my
young man--though I didn't quite see the logic of it? If she regarded
him, which she might in view of his large fortune, as a great catch,
mightn't she have arranged this little comedy, in their personal interest,
with the girl?
That possibility at any rate only made it a happier thought that I should
win my companion to some curiosity about other places. There were

many of course much more worth his attention than Homburg. In the
course of the morning--it was after our early luncheon--I walked round
to Mrs. Pallant's to let her know I was ready to take action; but even
while I went I again felt the unlikelihood of the part attributed by my
fears and by the mother's own, so far as they had been roused, to Linda.
Certainly if she was such a girl as these fears represented her she would
fly at higher game. It was with an eye to high game, Mrs. Pallant had
frankly admitted to me, that she had been trained, and such an
education, to say nothing of such a performer, justified a hope of
greater returns. A young American, the fruit of scant "modelling," who
could give her nothing but pocket-money, was a very moderate prize,
and if she had been prepared to marry for ambition--there was no such
hardness in her face or tone, but then there never is--her mark would be
inevitably a "personage" quelconque. I was received at my friend's
lodging with the announcement that she had left Homburg with her
daughter half an hour before. The good woman who had entertained the
pair professed to know nothing of their movements beyond the fact that
they had gone to Frankfort, where, however, it was her belief that they
didn't intend to remain. They were evidently travelling beyond. Sudden,
their decision to move? Oh yes, the matter of a moment. They must
have spent the night in packing, they had so many things and such
pretty ones; and their poor maid, all the morning, had scarce had time
to swallow her coffee. But they clearly were ladies accustomed to come
and go. It didn't matter--with such rooms as hers she never wanted:
there was a new family coming in at three.

IV
This piece of strategy left me staring and made me, I must confess,
quite furious. My only consolation was that Archie, when I told him,
looked as blank as myself, and that the trick touched him more nearly,
for I was not now in love with Louisa. We agreed that we required an
explanation and we pretended to expect one the next day in the shape of
a letter satisfactory even to the point of being apologetic. When I say
"we" pretended I mean that I did, for my suspicion that he knew what
had been on foot--through an arrangement with Linda--lasted only a
moment. If his resentment was less than my own his surprise was
equally great. I had been willing to bolt, but I felt slighted by the ease

with which Mrs. Pallant had shown she could part with us. Archie
professed no sense of a grievance, because in the first place he was shy
about it and because in the second it was evidently not definite to him
that he had been