Sandra Belloni | Page 4

I have some talent for drawing
men out."
And Arabella replied: "Certainly, dear, you have; and I think I have
some too."
The gentle altercation lasted half-an-hour, but they got no farther than
this. Mr. Pericles was either hopeless of protecting himself from such
shrewd assailants, or indifferent to their attacks, for all his defensive
measures were against the cold. He was muffled in a superbly mounted
bearskin, which came up so closely about his ears that Arabella had to
repeat to him all her questions, and as it were force a way for her voice
through the hide. This was provoking, since it not only stemmed the
natural flow of conversation, but prevented her imagination from
decorating the reminiscence of it subsequently (which was her
profound secret pleasure), besides letting in the outer world upon her.
Take it as an axiom, when you utter a sentimentalism, that more than
one pair of ears makes a cynical critic. A sentimentalism requires
secresy. I can enjoy it, and shall treat it respectfully if you will confide
it to me alone; but I and my friends must laugh at it outright.

"Does there not seem a soul in the moonlight?" for instance. Arabella,
after a rapturous glance at the rosy orb, put it to Mr. Pericles, in
subdued impressive tones. She had to repeat her phrase; Mr. Pericles
then echoing, with provoking monotony of tone, "Sol?"--whereupon
"Soul!" was reiterated, somewhat sharply: and Mr. Pericles, peering
over the collar of the bear, with half an eye, continued the sentence, in
the manner of one sent thereby farther from its meaning: "Ze
moonlight?" Despairing and exasperated, Arabella commenced afresh:
"I said, there seems a soul in it"; and Mr. Pericles assented bluntly: "In
ze light!"--which sounded so little satisfactory that Arabella explained,
"I mean the aspect;" and having said three times distinctly what she
meant, in answer to a terrific glare from the unsubmerged whites of the
eyes of Mr. Pericles, this was his comment, almost roared forth:
"Sol! you say so-whole--in ze moonlight--Luna? Hein? Ze aspect is of
Sol!--Yez."
And Mr. Pericles sank into his bear again, while Wilfrid Pole, who was
swinging his long cavalry legs to rearward, shouted; and Mr. Sumner, a
rising young barrister, walking beside Cornelia, smiled a smile of
extreme rigidity. Arabella was punished for claiming rights of birth.
She heard the murmuring course of the dialogue between Cornelia and
Mr. Sumner, sufficiently clear to tell her it was not fictitious and was
well sustained, while her heart was kept thirsting for the key to it. In
advance were Adela and Edward Buxley, who was only a rich
alderman's only son, but had the virtue of an extraordinary power of
drawing caricatures, and was therefore useful in exaggerating the
features of disagreeable people, and showing how odious they were:
besides endearing pleasant ones exhibiting how comic they could be.
Gossips averred that before Mr. Pole had been worried by his daughters
into giving that mighty sum for Brookfield, Arabella had accepted
Edward as her suitor; but for some reason or other he had apparently
fallen from his high estate. To tell the truth, Arabella conceived that he
had simply obeyed her wishes, while he knew he was naughtily
following his own; and Adela, without introspection at all, was making
her virgin effort at the caricaturing of our sex in his person: an art for
which she promised well.

Out of the long black shadows of the solitary trees of the park, and
through low yellow moonlight, they passed suddenly into the muffed
ways of the wood. Mr. Pericles was ineffably provoking. He had come
for gallantry's sake, and was not to be rallied, and would echo every
question in a roar, and there was no drawing of the man out at all. He
knocked against branches, and tripped over stumps, and ejaculated with
energy; but though he gave no heed or help to his fair associate, she
thought not the worse of him, so heroic can women be toward any
creature that will permit himself to be clothed by a mystery. At times
the party hung still, fancying the voice aloft, and then, after listening to
the unrelieved stillness, they laughed, and trod the stiff dry ferns and
soft mosses once more. At last they came to a decided halt, when the
proposition to return caused Adela to come up to Mr. Pericles and say
to him, "Now, you must confess! You have prohibited her from singing
to-night so that we may continue to be mystified. I call this quite
shameful of you!"
And even as Mr. Pericles was protesting that he was the most mystified
of the company, his neck lengthened, and his head went round, and his
ear was turned to the sky, while he breathed an elaborate