The Chaperon | Page 7

opinion of all the world. It
was a revelation to Rose that she herself might look a little like that.
She knew however that aunt Julia had not seen her deposed
sister-in-law for a long time, and she had a general impression that Mrs.
Tramore was to-day a more complete production--for instance as
regarded her air of youth--than she had ever been. There was no
excitement on her side--that was all her visitor's; there was no
emotion--that was excluded by the plan, to say nothing of conditions
more primal. Rose had from the first a glimpse of her mother's plan. It
was to mention nothing and imply nothing, neither to acknowledge, to
explain nor to extenuate. She would leave everything to her child; with
her child she was secure. She only wanted to get back into society; she
would leave even that to her child, whom she treated not as a
high-strung and heroic daughter, a creature of exaltation, of devotion,
but as a new, charming, clever, useful friend, a little younger than
herself. Already on that first day she had talked about dressmakers. Of
course, poor thing, it was to be remembered that in her circumstances
there were not many things she COULD talk about. "She wants to go
out again; that's the only thing in the wide world she wants," Rose had
promptly, compendiously said to herself. There had been a sequel to
this observation, uttered, in intense engrossment, in her own room half
an hour before she had, on the important evening, made known her
decision to her grandmother: "Then I'll TAKE her out!"
"She'll drag you down, she'll drag you down!" Julia Tramore permitted
herself to remark to her niece, the next day, in a tone of feverish
prophecy.
As the girl's own theory was that all the dragging there might be would
be upward, and moreover administered by herself, she could look at her
aunt with a cold and inscrutable eye.
"Very well, then, I shall be out of your sight, from the pinnacle you
occupy, and I sha'n't trouble you."
"Do you reproach me for my disinterested exertions, for the way I've
toiled over you, the way I've lived for you?" Miss Tramore demanded.
"Don't reproach ME for being kind to my mother and I won't reproach
you for anything."
"She'll keep you out of everything--she'll make you miss everything,"

Miss Tramore continued.
"Then she'll make me miss a great deal that's odious," said the girl.
"You're too young for such extravagances," her aunt declared.
"And yet Edith, who is younger than I, seems to be too old for them:
how do you arrange that? My mother's society will make me older,"
Rose replied.
"Don't speak to me of your mother; you HAVE no mother."
"Then if I'm an orphan I must settle things for myself."
"Do you justify her, do you approve of her?" cried Miss Tramore, who
was inferior to her niece in capacity for retort and whose limitations
made the girl appear pert.
Rose looked at her a moment in silence; then she said, turning away: "I
think she's charming."
"And do you propose to become charming in the same manner?"
"Her manner is perfect; it would be an excellent model. But I can't
discuss my mother with you."
"You'll have to discuss her with some other people!" Miss Tramore
proclaimed, going out of the room.
Rose wondered whether this were a general or a particular vaticination.
There was something her aunt might have meant by it, but her aunt
rarely meant the best thing she might have meant. Miss Tramore had
come up from St. Leonard's in response to a telegram from her own
parent, for an occasion like the present brought with it, for a few hours,
a certain relaxation of their dissent. "Do what you can to stop her," the
old lady had said; but her daughter found that the most she could do
was not much. They both had a baffled sense that Rose had thought the
question out a good deal further than they; and this was particularly
irritating to Mrs. Tramore, as consciously the cleverer of the two. A
question thought out as far as SHE could think it had always appeared
to her to have performed its human uses; she had never encountered a
ghost emerging from that extinction. Their great contention was that
Rose would cut herself off; and certainly if she wasn't afraid of that she
wasn't afraid of anything. Julia Tramore could only tell her mother how
little the girl was afraid. She was already prepared to leave the house,
taking with her the possessions, or her share of them, that had
accumulated there during her father's illness. There had been a going
and coming of her maid, a thumping about of