BY the time Sir Arthur and Lady Henge arrived, Camelia had fulfilled her prophecy and become a popular person. Under the blighting indifference of her first appearance Clievesbury had naturally retaliated with severity, but that the first impression had been erroneous the most severe owned—after Camelia had called on them. Camelia found the process of winning the whole neighborhood great fun, and its success gave her a delicious sense of efficiency. She cared nothing, absolutely nothing, for her neighbors, but once she determined to be cared for by them she found the facility of the task highly flattering to self-esteem.

She drove from place to place, sweet, modest, adaptable. She dispensed pretty compliments with a grace that disarmed the grimmest suspicion. She showed a pretty interest in every one. Indeed why should they not like her? Camelia thought she really deserved liking; and though she laughed at herself a little for the complimentary conclusion, her kindness struck her as rather nice. It was motiveless, was it not? almost motiveless, a game that it pleased her to play. Certainly she did not care to appear before Lady Henge on a background of unpopularity; the background must harmonize, become her; she would see to that. At the bottom of her heart Camelia cared very little for Lady Henge’s approval or disapproval; Lady Henge was part of the game; but Camelia had determined that the game required Lady Henge, like everybody else, to find her charming; the game required Arthur Henge to propose—then she might accept him; but she must make quite secure the possibility of refusing him. So Camelia aimed steadily at one result, and was not at all sure of her own decision once the result was reached, and this indecision gave her a happy sense of freedom.

She must capture Sir Arthur; this visit was definite, the last test; but once captured, Camelia wondered if she would care to keep. Theoretically she owned to a hard common-sense ambition that would make rejection doubtful; but when the moment for decision finally arrived, Camelia felt that this trait in her character might fail her; she did not really believe in it, though she paraded it, flaunted it. Every one might think her a hard-headed, hard-hearted little worldling—as far as practice went they were right, no doubt, in all honesty she must own that she gave them no occasion to think anything else; but she reserved a warm corner of unrevealed ideals—ideals she never herself looked at, where a purring self-content sat cosily.

Lady Henge and her son arrived on a Monday. Lady Henge was nervous, though her massive personality concealed the tremor, and unhappy—for she felt Arthur’s fate to be a foregone conclusion. She was not a clever but an immensely conscientious woman. She lived up to all her principles, and she took only the highest view of everything. Her son’s love for the pretty Miss Paton, who meddled frivolously with politics (Lady Henge meddled ponderously), and made collections of Japanese pictures, had thrown her into a dismal perturbation. She could not like Miss Paton; her cleverness was not disinterested; her sense of duty was less than dubious, she lived for pleasure, for admiration; she was no fit wife for a Henge.

The most imperative of the Henges’ stately requirements was that solemn sense of duty which Lady Henge embodied so conclusively.

She felt the tremor quieted, the unhappiness soothed, however, on seeing Camelia in her home. Indeed, Camelia’s background was masterly. By the end of the first day Lady Henge was owning to herself that the glare of London had perhaps been responsible for her former unfavorable impression. Camelia’s manner was perfect; she was quiet and gentle; her wish to please was frank but very dignified. Lady Henge felt that in no way was her favor being courted, and she was quite clever enough to appreciate that. Lady Paton was left to take all the initiatives, and behind her mother Camelia smiled with an air of happy obscurity.

The following days emphasized the initial approval. The image of the excellent Lady Elizabeth faded by degrees from Lady Henge’s mind, and the ache of disappointment with it. She wonderingly expanded into confidence under Camelia’s gentle influence.

She was a shy woman; she had been afraid of Camelia; but with tender touches the shyness and the fear seemed to be pressed away. There was nothing to be afraid of. Was it possible? She doubted sometimes, when alone and deeply thoughtful; but with Camelia quiet satisfaction was irresistible.

Perior watched the little comedy, convinced of its artificiality. That doubt of her final choice which preserved for Camelia her sense of independent pride free from all tarnish of self-interested scheming, he could not have believed in. Her motives were, he thought, very clear to him—as they must be to everybody else. He could not credit her with love; a girl so dexterously managing her hand was held by no compulsory force of real feeling. She was going to marry Arthur Henge, because he was a good match, not because she loved him; any girl might have loved him certainly, but Camelia was capable of loving no one. He was very sore, very angry, very moody. Lady Henge’s transparent bids to him for sympathy in irritating his scorn for Camelia irritated him, too, against her, against Arthur even. Why couldn’t they let him alone? They should get neither yea or nay from him, for, after all, Perior was inconsistent; the scorn did not shake his rather negative loyalty to his pupil, and beneath that there lay another and a deeper feeling, the feeling that made it possible for Camelia to hurt him.

“I was talking to her—to Miss Paton—about Woman’s Suffrage to-day,” so Lady Henge would start a conversation, “she seems to have thought rather deeply on the subject of a widened life for women—the development of character by responsibility—the democratic ideal, is it not?” Lady Henge combined staunch conservatism with a devout belief in Humanity.

Perior answered “Yes, I suppose so,” to the question.

“She has, I see, a great deal of influence down here in the country—more than I could have expected in such a gay young creature. Mrs. Grier spoke to me of her good-heartedness, her generous help in charitable matters. Mrs. Grier, as you know, is deeply interested in the improvement of the condition of the laboring classes. I shall count upon Miss Paton next year; her aid would be very effective; she could help me with some of my clubs—a pretty face, a witty tongue, popularize one; she has promised to address the Shirt Makers’ Union. She takes so much interest in all these absorbing social problems,—interest so unassuming, so free from all self-reference.”

They were in the drawing-room after dinner. Perior seemed, in watching Camelia fulfil herself, to find a searing fascination, for he was often at Enthorpe Lodge of late. The faint flavor of inquiry in Lady Henge’s assertions only elicitated, “I’m sure she’d be popular.” No; he would not be held responsible for Camelia; and again he determined that Lady Henge should on the subject of Camelia’s full fitness get from him neither a yea or a nay.

Lady Henge’s clear brown eyes had turned contemplatively upon her son and Camelia, who were sitting on an isolated sofa in a frank tÊte-À-tÊte.

Perior’s glance followed hers, and while she read in Arthur’s absorbed attitude and expression the wisdom of submissive partisanship—the utter futility of further resistance, Perior studied the half grave, half playful smile with which Camelia received her lover’s utterances. She seemed to feel Perior’s scrutiny, for her eyes swerved suddenly and met his, and the smile hardened a little as she looked at him.

“She is very lovely,” Lady Henge said with an irrepressible sigh. “It is a very unusual type of loveliness,” at which Perior looked away from Camelia and back at his companion. “He is very fond of her,” Lady Henge added—a little tearfully, Perior suspected.

“He has taken it seriously for quite a while, I believe.”

“Oh yes, yes indeed,” Lady Henge, conscious of having herself made the only barrier to an earlier declaration, spoke a little vaguely. “Arthur’s wife will have many responsibilities,” she went on; “I think that—if she accepts Arthur—Miss Paton will prove equal to them.” The “if she accepts Arthur” Perior thought rather noble, “and her gaiety will be good for him, he needs such sunshine. I must not be so selfish as to think that I could give it him. And then—with all her gaiety,” here a recrudescence of the vein of urgency crept once more into Lady Henge’s voice, “she has depths, Mr. Perior—great depths, has she not? Neither Arthur nor I take life lightly, you know,” and Lady Henge held him with a waiting pause of silence.

“Yes, I know you don’t,” he said, and then found himself forced to add, “there are many possibilities in Camelia.”

At all events, he might have said much more. Again he looked across at Camelia as he spoke, and again her eyes met his. She rose abruptly, and crossed the room.

“Lady Henge,” she said, standing before her guest in an attitude of delicate request, “won’t you play for us? We all want to hear you—and not as mere interpreter, you know—one of your own compositions, please.”

If there were a vulnerable spot in Lady Henge’s indisputable array of virtues it was a touching egotism in regard to her musical capabilities. She fancied herself the pioneer of a new school, and hoped for a rather shallow smattering of form and polyphony to more than atone by an immense amount of feeling. She smiled now, drawing off her gloves immediately, even while saying, with the diffidence of a master—

“I am afraid my poÈmes symphoniques are not quite on the after-dinner level, my dear. You know I can’t promise a comfortable accompaniment to conversation.”

“Don’t degrade us by the implication,” smiled Camelia; “we are at least appreciative.”

“My music is emotionally exhaustive,” said Lady Henge, shaking her head and rising massively. “In my humbler way I have tried to do for the abstract what Wagner did for the concrete. I do not depict the sea, but the psychological sensations the sea arouses in us.” Lady Henge was moving towards the piano, her very back, with its serene, brocaded breadth, imposing by its air of large self-confidence a hush upon the babble of drawing-room flippancy.

“Oh, good gracious!” Gwendolen Holt ejaculated in an alarmed whisper to her neighbor Mr. Merriman.

“Poor dear Lady Henge,” murmured Lady Tramley, leaning back in her delicate thinness, and fixing sad eyes upon her musical friend.

“Awfully bad, is it?” Mr. Merriman inquired.

“Awfully,” said Gwendolen.

“Well, it’s all one to me,” said Mr. Merriman jocosely.

“I paint the soul of man, as influenced by the forces of nature,” still delivering explanatory comments, Lady Henge had seated herself at the piano. “My symphonic poem—‘Thalassa,’ shall I give you that?” and from a careful adjustment of the piano-stool, she looked up at Camelia, who had followed her.

Sir Arthur, on his solitary sofa, showed some dismay at the imminence of his mother’s performance. Perior, who had heard Lady Henge play, fixed enduring eyes on the cornice. Camelia dropped into the vacant seat beside him.

“Hold your breath, Alceste,” she murmured, her smiling eyes still gently observant of Lady Henge, who, after a majestic turn up and down the key-board, had paused in a menacing attitude, one hand lifted in a heavily pouncing position.

“She’ll have our heads under water in a minute. Ah! here comes the splash!” The very walls quivered as that fierce hand fell. A volcanic, incoherent volume of sound hurtled forth upon the stillness. From thenceforward they might have been sitting amidst the clamorous concussions of a thunder-storm, Lady Henge, high priestess of terrified humanity, making valiant warfare with the angry gods. The wind, or rather the effect of the wind upon the shrinking mind of man, shrieked in long sweeps down the key-board—Lady Henge’s execution with the flat of her hand being boldly impressionistic; the waves beat out their stormy rhythm in crashing chords of very feeble construction, but in noisiness immensely effective, leaping, bounding, shouldering, swallowing one another with a splendid inconsequence as to time or key. A chaos of stammering phrases cried out fitfully above the steady bellowing of the bass.

Physically the composition was most certainly exhausting. Lady Henge’s fine, flushed profile, bent with brooding intensity above the key-board, evinced a panting effort to cope with the mighty requirements of her creation.

“It sounds as if she were being tossed in her cabin, doesn’t it?” Camelia’s soft voice murmured under the safe cover of the tumult, her face keeping the expression of grave attention, “and horribly seasick. One hears the bottles breaking, and the basins clashing, and the boots being hurled from side to side. Anything but abstract. Intimately descriptive rather—don’t you think?” A side glint of her eye evidently twinkled for sympathy; but Perior solemnly stared at the ceiling.

“The construction too,” Camelia said more soberly, “she plunged us into the free fantasia—and perhaps at the end she may fish us out with the dominant phrase—but I haven’t caught it yet; ah, this thudding finale announces the journey’s end.” And she jumped up as Lady Henge, with a fine, tense look of soul-experience, rose from the piano. The dazed and wilted listeners chimed out the polite chorus usual on such occasions. Camelia led Lady Henge to her chair. “Thank you—so much,” she said. Lady Henge smiled dimly, her eyes fixed on vacancy.

“It was like a glorious wind blowing about one. It made me think of Wordsworth’s sonnets—of the soul in nature,” said Camelia. Perior still looked stolidly at the ceiling, and she felt his silence to be ominous.

“Such music,” she added, “gives one courage for life.” She was angry with Perior. Lady Henge pressed her hand.

“Thanks, my dear. Yes—you felt. One must hear, of course, a composition many times before entering into the sanctuary of the artist’s meaning.” Camelia’s mouth retained its sympathetic gravity. Perior said nothing; and faint, relieved little groups of talk twittered like birds after a storm.

“And you, Mr. Perior,” Lady Henge, fanning herself largely turned to this silent critic. “You, too, are a musician as I know, a musician at least in appreciation. What do you think of my ‘Thalassa’? Frankly now—as one artist to another.” Perior moved his eyes slowly from the ceiling, and dropped them to Camelia’s face. He grew very red.

“Frankly now,” Lady Henge reiterated with genial urgency.

“I think it is very bad,” said Perior. The sentence fell with a thud, like a stone.

Lady Henge flushed, and her fan fluttered to stillness; Camelia, her eyebrows lightly lifted, met Perior’s square look.

“Bad,” Lady Henge repeated, with a pathetic mingling of deprecating pride and pain, “really bad, Mr. Perior?”

“Very bad,” said Perior.

The unmitigated sentence reduced her to feeble plaintiveness.

“But why? This is really savage, you know.”

“Excuse me, I know I seem rude,” he looked at her now with something of an effort. “You see I tell you the uncompromising truth. Your piece is weak, and crude, and incoherent!”

Now that she met his eyes, Lady Henge saw that it gave him pain to speak so. Camelia standing over them smiled unruffled.

“It is a case of Berlioz and the Conservatoire, Schumann and the Philistines, Lady Henge. Mr. Perior is an old classicist—understands nothing outside strictest adherence to form. Your more modern march of the DavidsbÜndler could say nothing to him.” Perior did not look at her.

“If you will allow me, Lady Henge, I will come some day and go over a lot of Schumann with you. I think you will recognize the difference. His power and genuineness are apparent. And Schumann has a great deal to say.”

He smiled at her as he spoke, a very sweet smile—asking tolerance for the friend in spite of the critic’s unwilling arrogance. Lady Henge was soothed, though decidedly shaken.

“You are severe, you know.”

“But you prefer severity to silly fibs.”

“I may be silly,” Camelia here put in with a touch of coldness, “if so, I stand convicted with you, Lady Henge, for I found your ‘Thalassa’ neither crude, nor weak, nor incoherent; but I can’t be accused of fibbing. You will play your symphonic poem to me again, won’t you? and we will leave Mr. Perior to the pleasures of iconoclastic conservatism.” After so speaking, Camelia went back to her seat beside Sir Arthur.

He had a book in his hand, and was turning the leaves vaguely, he put it down as he looked up at her. For a man well over thirty, Sir Arthur had certain boyish traits, as a frank nervousness of glance now revealed.

“Well?” Camelia smiled, feeling a something in the silence.

“It was bad, wasn’t it?” said Sir Arthur.

“Bad?”

“Yes, poor mother.”

“I don’t think it bad.”

Sir Arthur surveyed her with pained hesitation.

“Why do you say that?” he demanded, with an abruptness of wounded tenderness that put Camelia alertly on her guard.

“Why do you say that?” she asked, rounding innocent eyes at him.

“I saw you laughing at it, with Perior—not that he laughed. I heard what he said too, I prefer that, you know.”

Camelia herself was feeling wounded, was smarting under a sense of angry humiliation. This added and unexpected blow brought the blood vividly to her face, and the sincerity of her discomfort seemed even to herself to warrant the sincerity of her quick question.

“You suspect me of lying?”

Camelia hardly thought that she had lied; neither the flush nor the tone of voice was acted.

Sir Arthur looked away. “I saw you laughing,” he repeated.

“I was laughing,” Camelia declared. “Not at Lady Henge,” she added.

Sir Arthur kept a silence in which doubt and a longing to believe evidently struggled.

“I said to Mr. Perior that the rocking passage with the chord accompaniment made me feel seasick—from its realism; that touch of levity doesn’t imply insincerity in my admiration—I always smile at the birds in the ‘Pastoral.’ Why should I be insincere? If I had not liked it, I would have said so.”

Sir Arthur’s long breath escaped with the relief of recovered joy.

“Don’t be insincere;—dearest,” he added, looking at her; and seeing the surprise with which she received the grave, impulsive word, he went on quickly, yet gently.

“You know you often want to please people—to make every one like you;—even I have fancied it—forgive me, won’t you, at the price of a little falseness. When one feels as I do, the least flaw cuts into one like a knife.” With Camelia’s triumph there now mingled a bitter distaste; she could hardly bring herself to look into his honest, adoring eyes; the quickness of her breath and wavering of her glance were, again, quite spontaneous, and that she knew them to be effective, deepened her humiliation.

“To see you laugh at mother—and then praise her—I thought it; and I can’t tell you how it pained me. You forgive me?”

Her self-disgust now seemed to lend her a certain sense of atoning self-respect. “How good you are!” she said, looking at him very gravely, and this recognition of his goodness restoring still more fully that sick self-respect, she was able to smile at him, to think that she must not exaggerate the little contretemps, and to ask herself whether she might not fall in love with Sir Arthur—simply and naturally. Dear man! The words were almost on her lips—her eyes at least caressed him with the implication.

He looked embarrassed, but very happy. “No—no! Please don’t say that! How divinely kind you are. I have been insufferable. It is noble of you to understand—. Can’t we get away from all these people—if only for a moment. Let us go into the garden—it is very warm.” She would rather not have gone into the garden, but she could not refuse him, she felt that to some extent she would like to justify his faith in her, and to shake from her that snake-like imputation of baseness. She glanced at Perior as she went out; he was talking most affably with Lady Henge, and did not look at her. His lack of faith stung perhaps more than Sir Arthur’s faith. It was unmerited too, more unmerited than Sir Arthur’s trust, so she told herself, stepping down from the terrace on to the gravel-path, and the sense of unmerited scorn sharpened that wish to justify herself—as far as might be—to the kinder judge.

“No, Sir Arthur, you are good,” she went on, pausing before him, her hands clasped behind her after a little-girl fashion habitual with her; “and I am horrid—it’s quite true—but not as horrid as you thought me. I do like to please people. I am often pettily, impulsively false; it’s quite, quite true. I do like your mother’s piece, but probably not as much as I implied to her by my praise—not as much as greater things: and Mr. Perior’s silence made me angry too; but I probably was a little insincere, and that every one is the same is no excuse for me. I don’t want to be like every one, and you don’t want me to be, do you? But if I had not liked it, you would not have wished me to express myself with the bludgeon-like directness of our rugged friend, would you?” Camelia asked the question with real anxiety, conscious though she was that she had thought the composition quite as ridiculous as Perior had declared it. After all, his ugly sincerity justified her kindly fibbing; and as for the laughing, she was sorry she had laughed, since Sir Arthur had seen her. His erectness of moral vision would so distort that unintentional meanness that she could not be asked to confess it; but her partial confession, all the same, left her confused by the stinging of small, uncomfortable compunctions. These, however, did not show themselves in her eyes, nor in the pure lines of her face. Her silvered garments and exquisite whiteness gave her in the moonlight an angelic look that might well humble modest manhood before her. Sir Arthur had never felt himself so near to the girl he loved, nor his love so well justified.

“No, I don’t think it’s necessary to give a person the truth like a box on the ear,” he said, and he would have taken her hands, but Camelia again put them behind her back, and stood smiling at him.

“Poor old Perior,” he added, and they walked slowly for a little way down the path. “You can understand it, though, can’t you? He thought you were fibbing, and that made him give mother the ruthless coup de dent.”

This was very true, and so Camelia knew, knowing, too, that she had been fibbing. “But that didn’t justify the coup de dent,” she declared, “and why should he think I was fibbing?” The bit of audacity was so inevitable that she hardly felt a qualm over its enunciation. On Perior’s loyalty she relied as she relied on the ground beneath her feet.

“Well, he knows that you are clever, and that your taste has not been distorted—as mother’s has—by fancied talent.” Sir Arthur was all candid confidence.

“He was very nasty,” said Camelia, “and I shall tell him so. And now that I have made my little confession, and that you have absolved me—for I am absolved, am I not?—shall we go in?” Camelia drew back from the proposal she saw looming in the moonlight; there was time, ample time, for that, now that she was sure of him, quite sure. A warm little thrill of pleasure went over her at the thought that it was she who was not ready, was not sure, though she had never liked him more.

“Must we go in?” Sir Arthur looked up at her as she stood on the step above him. He was very handsome Camelia thought with some complacency.

“I think we must,” she said prettily, adding, “I promised to do my skirt dancing for them, you know. You must tell me it is delightful when I have done, even if you laugh at me while I am dancing.” Sir Arthur had held out his hand, and she put hers in it.

“You absolve me, don’t you?” he said. “You forgive me? You are not angry?”

“Angry? Have I seemed angry?”

“You had the right to be.”

“Not with you,” said Camelia, and at that he kissed her hand, and they went back into the drawing-room.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Camelia as she undressed that night decided that Perior was responsible for her still smarting irritation. It was too tiresome. Of course, apparently she had not behaved nicely; but, in neatly analyzing the whole affair, she could find herself guilty of nothing worse than a little humorous gaiety—that took an old friend’s sympathy for granted—(could one not think things one did not say? she had only thought aloud—to him), and a little kindly hypocrisy practised every day by models of uprightness. Perior’s rudeness set a standard by which social conventions were guilty of black falseness. It was too bad of him, and her anger put him aside with a sense of relief. The only really serious part was the stinging sequel. How closely Arthur Henge must have watched her to catch that irrepressible glint of the eye. He had caught it, though, and she had lied about it—well, yes—lied, deliberately lied to a man she respected.

Of course it made her feel uncomfortable—of course it did. “I am not the vain puppet he thinks me,” she said, leaning on her dressing-table, and looking gravely at her illuminated reflection—the he being Perior—“the very fact of my worrying over such a trifling incident proves that I am not. It is his fault that I should feel so.” She paused for a further turn of silent meditation before adding, “My only fault was in having trusted to his sense of fun, in having been amused. The rest followed inevitably. I could not have told Arthur Henge that I found his mother ridiculous, now could I, you foolish creature?” and irrepressibly Camelia smiled at her lenient accuser in the glass. At this point of the colloquy a gentle tap at the door ushered in Mary. Mary, in a dressing-gown of just the wrong shade, was not an interesting object, and Camelia glanced over her reflection in the mirror without turning. She continued her own train of thought, hardly listening to Mary, though vaguely conscious that the awkward inquiries after her comfort were rather pointless.

“I thought you might want something, Camelia. I thought you looked rather pale,” said Mary, drawing near with some timidity.

“No, thanks. I should have asked Grant, you know,” replied Camelia, her elbows still on the dressing-table. She absently watched Mary lift her discarded gown from the floor, fold it, and lay it neatly over the back of a chair. “Don’t mind about picking up those things, Mary,” she added, yawning a little, and wishing rather that Mary would go. “Grant can do all that.”

“I like to tidy up after you.” Mary’s smile was slightly forced. “See, Camelia, you need me to look after you—your pearl necklace under a chair.”

“It must have caught in my bodice,” said Camelia, glancing at the necklace as Mary laid it on the dressing-table. “That certainly was stupid of me. Thanks, dear.” Mary still lingered.

“You don’t want anything, you are sure? You feel quite well—and—happy, Camelia?” The question was so odd that Camelia turned her head and looked up, surprised, at Mary’s rather embarrassed countenance.

“Happy?” she repeated.

“Yes; I fancied you might have something to tell me.” This initiative was certainly amazing in the reserved Mary, and Camelia stared.

“Something to tell you?” Then her deliberate departure for the moonlit tÊte-À-tÊte with Sir Arthur coming luminously to her mind, she began to laugh. “Why, Mary, did you come in a congratulatory mood?”

Mary’s badly mastered nervousness melted somewhat. “Oh, Camelia—may I?” her face lighted to an almost charming eagerness—a charm that our Æsthetic heroine was quick to recognize. “May I?”

“May you? No, you little goose,” Camelia said good-humoredly. “Upon my word, Mary, you should have had your portrait painted at that moment; you never looked so—significant. Are you so anxious to get rid of me then?” The charming look had crumbled into inextricable confusion.

“Oh, Camelia, how can you?—how could you think——?”

“Now, Mary, imaginative efforts are bad for you; don’t indulge them.”

“I hoped—I only wanted——”

“Yes, of course, you want me to be happy; and very nice it is of you too. Be patient, Mary; you shall congratulate me some day. I haven’t decided when that shall be. I haven’t really quite decided how I shall be happy—there are so many ways—the choice of a superlative is perplexing. When I choose you need not come to me, I promise you.” Camelia rose, stretching her arms above her head, and smiling very kindly at her cousin.

Her own words made her feel comfortable. Still smiling, she put her arm around Mary’s neck and kissed her. “I shall tell you immediately. Now run to bed, dear, for you look pale.” When Mary was gone, Camelia finished undressing, and got into bed in a frame of mind much reassured as to her own intrinsic merit.