The Testing of Diana Mallory | Page 4

by the wish to please. She
desired above all things to be liked--that is, if she could not be loved.
Mrs. Colwood brought with her a warm and favoring atmosphere.
Diana unfolded.
* * * * *
In the course of this first exploratory conversation, it appeared that the
two ladies had many experiences in common. Mrs. Colwood had been
two years, her two short years of married life, in India; Diana had
travelled there with her father. Also, as a girl, Mrs. Colwood had spent
a winter at Cannes, and another at Santa Margherita. Diana expressed
with vehemence her weariness of the Riviera; but the fact that Mrs.
Colwood differed from her led to all the more conversation.
"My father would never come home," sighed Diana. "He hated the
English climate, even in summer. Every year I used to beg him to let us
go to England. But he never would. We lived abroad, first, I suppose,
for his health, and then--I can't explain it. Perhaps he thought he had
been so long away he would find no old friends left. And indeed so
many of them had died. But whenever I talked of it he began to look

old and ill. So I never could press it--never!"
The girl's voice fell to a lower note--musical, and full of memory. Mrs.
Colwood noticed the quality of it.
"Of course if my mother had lived," said Diana, in the same tone, "it
would have been different."
"But she died when you were a child?"
"Eighteen years ago. I can just remember it. We were in London then.
Afterwards father took me abroad, and we never came back. Oh! the
waste of all those years!"
"Waste?" Mrs. Colwood probed the phrase a little. Diana insisted, first
with warmth, and then with an eloquence that startled her companion,
that for an Englishwoman to be brought up outside England, away from
country and countrymen, was to waste and forego a hundred precious
things that might have been gathered up. "I used to be ashamed when I
talked to English people. Not that we saw many. We lived for years and
years at a little villa near Rapallo, and in the summer we used to go up
into the mountains, away from everybody. But after we came back
from a long tour, we lived for a time at a hotel in Mentone--our own
little house was let--and I used to talk to people there--though papa
never liked making friends. And I made ridiculous mistakes about
English things--and they'd laugh. But one can't know--unless one has
lived--has breathed in a country, from one's birth. That's what I've lost."
Mrs. Colwood demurred.
"Think of the people who wish they had grown up without ever reading
or hearing about the Bible, so that they might read it for the first time,
when they could really understand it. You feel England all the more
intensely now because you come fresh to her."
Diana sprang up, with a change of face--half laugh, half frown.
"Yes, I feel her! Above all, I feel her enemies!"

She let in her dog, a fine collie, who was scratching at the door. As she
stood before the fire, holding up a biscuit for him to jump at, she turned
a red and conscious face towards her companion. The fire in the eyes,
the smile on the lip seemed to say:
"There!--now we have come to it. This is my passion--my hobby--this
is me!"
"Her enemies! You are political?"
"Desperately!"
"A Tory?"
"Fanatical. But that's only part of it, 'What should they know of
England, that only England know!'"
Miss Mallory threw back her head with a gesture that became it.
"Ah, I see--an Imperialist?"
Diana nodded, smiling. She had seated herself in a chair by the fireside.
Her dog's head was on her knees, and one of her slender hands rested
on the black and tan. Mrs. Colwood admired the picture. Miss
Mallory's sloping shoulders and long waist were well shown by her
simple dress of black and closely fitting serge. Her head crowned and
piled with curly black hair, carried itself with an amazing
self-possession and pride, which was yet all feminine. This young
woman might talk politics, thought her new friend; no male man would
call her prater, while she bore herself with that air. Her eyes--the
chaperon noticed it for the first time--owed some of their remarkable
intensity, no doubt, to short sight. They were large, finely colored and
thickly fringed, but their slightly veiled concentration suggested an
habitual, though quite unconscious struggle to see--with that clearness
which the mind behind demanded of them. The complexion was a clear
brunette, the cheeks rosy; the nose was slightly tilted, the mouth fresh
and beautiful though large; and the face of a lovely oval.