The Chaperon | Page 5

that she had never appreciated anything, that she was
nothing but a tinted and stippled surface. Her situation was peculiar
indeed. She had been the heroine of a scandal which had grown dim
only because, in the eyes of the London world, it paled in the lurid light
of the contemporaneous. That attention had been fixed on it for several
days, fifteen years before; there had been a high relish of the vivid
evidence as to his wife's misconduct with which, in the divorce-court,
Charles Tramore had judged well to regale a cynical public. The case
was pronounced awfully bad, and he obtained his decree. The folly of
the wife had been inconceivable, in spite of other examples: she had
quitted her children, she had followed the "other fellow" abroad. The
other fellow hadn't married her, not having had time: he had lost his life
in the Mediterranean by the capsizing of a boat, before the prohibitory
term had expired.
Mrs. Tramore had striven to extract from this accident something of the
austerity of widowhood; but her mourning only made her deviation
more public, she was a widow whose husband was awkwardly alive.
She had not prowled about the Continent on the classic lines; she had
come back to London to take her chance. But London would give her
no chance, would have nothing to say to her; as many persons had

remarked, you could never tell how London would behave. It would
not receive Mrs. Tramore again on any terms, and when she was
spoken of, which now was not often, it was inveterately said of her that
she went nowhere. Apparently she had not the qualities for which
London compounds; though in the cases in which it does compound
you may often wonder what these qualities are. She had not at any rate
been successful: her lover was dead, her husband was liked and her
children were pitied, for in payment for a topic London will
parenthetically pity. It was thought interesting and magnanimous that
Charles Tramore had not married again. The disadvantage to his
children of the miserable story was thus left uncorrected, and this,
rather oddly, was counted as HIS sacrifice. His mother, whose
arrangements were elaborate, looked after them a great deal, and they
enjoyed a mixture of laxity and discipline under the roof of their aunt,
Miss Tramore, who was independent, having, for reasons that the two
ladies had exhaustively discussed, determined to lead her own life. She
had set up a home at St. Leonard's, and that contracted shore had
played a considerable part in the upbringing of the little Tramores.
They knew about their mother, as the phrase was, but they didn't know
her; which was naturally deemed more pathetic for them than for her.
She had a house in Chester Square and an income and a victoria--it
served all purposes, as she never went out in the evening--and flowers
on her window-sills, and a remarkable appearance of youth. The
income was supposed to be in part the result of a bequest from the man
for whose sake she had committed the error of her life, and in the
appearance of youth there was a slightly impertinent implication that it
was a sort of afterglow of the same connection.
Her children, as they grew older, fortunately showed signs of some
individuality of disposition. Edith, the second girl, clung to her aunt
Julia; Eric, the son, clung frantically to polo; while Rose, the elder
daughter, appeared to cling mainly to herself. Collectively, of course,
they clung to their father, whose attitude in the family group, however,
was casual and intermittent. He was charming and vague; he was like a
clever actor who often didn't come to rehearsal. Fortune, which but for
that one stroke had been generous to him, had provided him with
deputies and trouble-takers, as well as with whimsical opinions, and a
reputation for excellent taste, and whist at his club, and perpetual cigars

on morocco sofas, and a beautiful absence of purpose. Nature had
thrown in a remarkably fine hand, which he sometimes passed over his
children's heads when they were glossy from the nursery brush. On
Rose's eighteenth birthday he said to her that she might go to see her
mother, on condition that her visits should be limited to an hour each
time and to four in the year. She was to go alone; the other children
were not included in the arrangement. This was the result of a visit that
he himself had paid his repudiated wife at her urgent request, their only
encounter during the fifteen years. The girl knew as much as this from
her aunt Julia, who was full of tell-tale secrecies. She availed herself
eagerly of the license, and in course of the period that