The Coxon Fund | Page 8

the time when she observed that it was a pity this
lady wasn't intrinsically more interesting. That was refreshing, for it
was an article of faith in Mrs. Saltram's circle--at least among those
who scorned to know her horrid husband--that she was attractive on her
merits. She was in truth a most ordinary person, as Saltram himself
would have been if he hadn't been a prodigy. The question of vulgarity
had no application to him, but it was a measure his wife kept
challenging you to apply. I hasten to add that the consequences of your
doing so were no sufficient reason for his having left her to starve. "He
doesn't seem to have much force of character," said my young lady; at
which I laughed out so loud that my departing friends looked back at
me over their shoulders as if I were making a joke of their discomfiture.

My joke probably cost Saltram a subscription or two, but it helped me
on with my interlocutress. "She says he drinks like a fish," she sociably
continued, "and yet she allows that his mind's wonderfully clear." It
was amusing to converse with a pretty girl who could talk of the
clearness of Saltram's mind. I expected next to hear she had been
assured he was awfully clever. I tried to tell her--I had it almost on my
conscience--what was the proper way to regard him; an effort attended
perhaps more than ever on this occasion with the usual effect of my
feeling that I wasn't after all very sure of it. She had come to-night out
of high curiosity--she had wanted to learn this proper way for herself.
She had read some of his papers and hadn't understood them; but it was
at home, at her aunt's, that her curiosity had been kindled--kindled
mainly by his wife's remarkable stories of his want of virtue. "I suppose
they ought to have kept me away," my companion dropped, "and I
suppose they'd have done so if I hadn't somehow got an idea that he's
fascinating. In fact Mrs. Saltram herself says he is."
"So you came to see where the fascination resides? Well, you've seen!"
My young lady raised fine eyebrows. "Do you mean in his bad faith?"
"In the extraordinary effects of it; his possession, that is, of some
quality or other that condemns us in advance to forgive him the
humiliation, as I may call it, to which he has subjected us."
"The humiliation?"
"Why mine, for instance, as one of his guarantors, before you as the
purchaser of a ticket."
She let her charming gay eyes rest on me. "You don't look humiliated a
bit, and if you did I should let you off, disappointed as I am; for the
mysterious quality you speak of is just the quality I came to see."
"Oh, you can't 'see' it!" I cried.
"How then do you get at it?"
"You don't! You mustn't suppose he's good-looking," I added.
"Why his wife says he's lovely!"
My hilarity may have struck her as excessive, but I confess it broke out
afresh. Had she acted only in obedience to this singular plea, so
characteristic, on Mrs. Saltram's part, of what was irritating in the
narrowness of that lady's point of view? "Mrs. Saltram," I explained,
"undervalues him where he's strongest, so that, to make up for it
perhaps, she overpraises him where he's weak. He's not, assuredly,

superficially attractive; he's middle- aged, fat, featureless save for his
great eyes."
"Yes, his great eyes," said my young lady attentively. She had
evidently heard all about his great eyes--the beaux yeux for which
alone we had really done it all.
"They're tragic and splendid--lights on a dangerous coast. But he moves
badly and dresses worse, and altogether he's anything but smart."
My companion, who appeared to reflect on this, after a moment
appealed. "Do you call him a real gentleman?"
I started slightly at the question, for I had a sense of recognising it:
George Gravener, years before, that first flushed night, had put me face
to face with it. It had embarrassed me then, but it didn't embarrass me
now, for I had lived with it and overcome it and disposed of it. "A real
gentleman? Emphatically not!"
My promptitude surprised her a little, but I quickly felt how little it was
to Gravener I was now talking. "Do you say that because he's--what do
you call it in England?--of humble extraction?"
"Not a bit. His father was a country school-master and his mother the
widow of a sexton, but that has nothing to do with it. I say it simply
because I know him well."
"But isn't it an awful drawback?"
"Awful--quite awful."
"I mean isn't it positively fatal?"
"Fatal to what? Not to his magnificent