‘Why do you want to be different?’
‘Well, because everything else is different,’ Mrs Headway rejoined, with a little sigh. ‘Did you hear that I’d lost my husband?’ she went on, abruptly.
‘Do you mean – a – Mr—?’ and Littlemore paused, with an effect that did not seem to come home to her.
‘I mean Mr Headway,’ she said, with dignity. ‘I’ve been through a good deal since you saw me last: marriage, and death, and trouble, and all sorts of things.’
‘You had been through a good deal of marriage before that,’ Littlemore ventured to observe.
She rested her eyes on him with soft brightness, and without a change of colour. ‘Not so much – not so much –’
‘Not so much as might have been thought.’
‘Not so much as was reported. I forget whether I was married when I saw you last.’
‘It was one of the reports,’ said Littlemore. ‘But I never saw Mr Beck.’
‘You didn’t lose much; he was a simple wretch! I have done certain things in my life which I have never understood; no wonder others can’t understand them. But that’s all over! Are you sure Max doesn’t hear?’ she asked, quickly.
‘Not at all sure. But if you suspect him of listening at the keyhole, I would send him away.’
‘I don’t think he does that. I am always rushing to the door.’
‘Then he doesn’t hear. I had no idea you had so many secrets. When I parted with you, Mr Headway was in the future.’
‘Well, now he’s in the past. He was a pleasant man – I can understand my doing that. But he only lived a year. He had neuralgia of the heart; he left me very well off.’ She mentioned these various facts as if they were quite of the same order.
‘I’m glad to hear it; you used to have expensive tastes.’
‘I have plenty of money,’ said Mrs Headway. ‘Mr Headway had property at Denver, which has increased immensely in value. After his death I tried New York. But I don’t like New York.’ Littlemore’s hostess uttered this last sentence in a tone which was the résumé of a social episode. ‘I mean to live in Europe – I like Europe,’ she announced; and the manner of the announcement had a touch of prophecy, as the other words had had a reverberation of history.
Littlemore was very much struck with all this, and he was greatly entertained with Mrs Headway. ‘Are you travelling with that young man?’ he inquired, with the coolness of a person who wishes to make his entertainment go as far as possible.
She folded her arms as she leaned back in her chair. ‘Look here, Mr Littlemore,’ she said; ‘I’m about as good-natured as I used to be in America, but I know a great deal more. Of course I ain’t travelling with that young man; he’s only a friend.’
‘He isn’t a lover?’ asked Littlemore, rather cruelly.
‘Do people travel with their lovers? I don’t want you to laugh at me – I want you to help me.’ She fixed her eyes on him with an air of tender remonstrance that might have touched him; she looked so gentle and reasonable. ‘As I tell you, I have taken a great fancy to this old Europe; I feel as if I should never go back. But I want to see something of the life. I think it would suit me – if I could get started a little. Mr Littlemore,’ she added, in a moment – ‘I may as well be frank, for I ain’t at all ashamed. I want to get into society. That’s what I’m after!’
Littlemore settled himself in his chair, with the feeling of a man who, knowing that he will have to pull, seeks to obtain a certain leverage. It was in a tone of light jocosity, almost of encouragement, however, that he repeated: ‘Into society? It seems to me you are in it already, with baronets for your adorers.’
‘That’s just what I want to know!’ she said, with a certain eagerness. ‘Is a baronet much?’
‘So they are apt to think. But I know very little about it.’
‘Ain’t you in society yourself?’
‘I? Never in the world! Where did you get that idea? I care no more about society than about that copy of the Figaro.’
Mrs Headway’s countenance assumed for a moment a look of extreme disappointment, and Littlemore could see that, having heard of his silver-mine and his cattle-ranch, and knowing that he was living in Europe, she had hoped to find him immersed in the world of fashion. But she speedily recovered herself. ‘I don’t believe a word of it. You know you’re a gentleman – you can’t help yourself.’
‘I may be a gentleman, but I have none of the habits of one.’ Littlemore hesitated a moment, and then he added – ‘I lived too long in the great Southwest.’
She flushed quickly; she instantly understood – understood even more that he had meant to say. But she wished to make use of him, and it was of more importance that she should appear forgiving – especially as she had the happy consciousness of being so, than that she should punish a cruel speech. She could afford, however, to be lightly ironical. ‘That makes no difference – a gentleman is always a gentleman.’
‘Not always,’ said Littlemore, laughing.
‘It’s impossible that, through your sister, you shouldn’t know something about European society,’ said Mrs Headway.
At the mention of his sister, made with a studied lightness of reference which he caught as it passed, Littlemore was unable to repress a start. ‘What in the world have you got to do with my sister?’ he would have liked to say. The introduction of this lady was disagreeable to him; she belonged to quite another order of ideas, and it was out of the question that Mrs Headway should ever make her acquaintance – if this was what, as that lady would have said – she was ‘after’. But he took advantage of a side-issue. ‘What do you mean by European society? One can’t talk about that. It’s a very vague phrase.’
‘Well, I mean English society – I mean the society your sister lives in – that’s what I mean,’ said Mrs Headway, who was quite prepared to be definite. ‘I mean the people I saw in London last May – the people I saw at the opera and in the park, the people who go to the Queen’s drawing-rooms. When I was in London I stayed at that hotel on the corner of Piccadilly – that looking straight down St James’s Street – and I spent hours together at the window looking at the people in the carriages. I had a carriage of my own, and when I was not at my window I was driving all round. I was all alone; I saw every one, but I knew no one – I had no one to tell me. I didn’t know Sir Arthur then – I only met him a month ago at Homburg. He followed me to Paris – that’s how he came to be my guest.’ Serenely, prosaically, without any of the inflation of vanity, Mrs Headway made this last assertion; it was as if she were used to being followed, or as if a gentleman one met at Homburg would inevitably follow. In the same tone she went on: ‘I attracted a good deal of attention in London – I could easily see that.’
‘You’ll do that wherever you go,’ Littlemore said, insufficiently enough, as he felt.
‘I don’t want to attract so much; I think it’s vulgar,’ Mrs Headway rejoined, with a certain soft sweetness which seemed to denote the enjoyment of a new idea. She was evidently open to new ideas.
‘Every one was looking at you the other night at the theatre,’ Littlemore continued. ‘How can you hope to escape notice?’
‘I don’t want to escape notice – people have always looked at me, and I suppose they always will. But there are different ways of being looked at, and I know the way I want. I mean to have it, too!’ Mrs Headway exclaimed. Yes, she was very definite.
Littlemore sat there, face to face with her, and for some time he said nothing. He had a mixture of feelings, and the memory of other places, other hours, was stealing over him. There had been of old a very considerable absence of interposing surfaces between these two – he had known her as one knew people only in the great Southwest. He had liked her extremely, in a town where it would have been ridiculous to be difficult to please. But his sense of this fact was somehow connected with Southwestern conditions; his liking for Nancy Beck was an emotion of which the proper setting was a back piazza. She presented herself here on a new
basis – she appeared to desire to be classified afresh. Littlemore said to himself that this was too much trouble; he had taken her in that way – he couldn’t begin at this time of day to take her in another way. He asked himself whether she were going to be a bore. It was not easy to suppose Mrs Headway capable of this offence; but she might become tiresome if she were bent upon being different. It made him rather afraid when she began to talk about European society, about his sister, about things being vulgar. Littlemore was a very good fellow, and he had at least the average human love of justice; but there was in his composition an element of the indolent, the sceptical, perhaps even the brutal, which made him desire to preserve the simplicity of their former terms of intercourse. He had no particular desire to see a woman rise again, as the mystic process was called; he didn’t believe in women’s rising again. He believed in their not going down; thought it perfectly possible and eminently desirable, but held it was much better for society that they should not endeavour, as the French say, to mêler les genres. In general, he didn’t pretend to say what was good for society – society seemed to him in rather a bad way; but he had a conviction on this particular point. Nancy Beck going in for the great prizes, that spectacle might be entertaining for a simple spectator; but it would be a nuisance, an embarrassment, from the moment anything more than contemplation should be expected of him. He had no wish to be rough, but it might be well to show her that he was not to be humbugged.
‘Oh, if there’s anything you want you’ll have it,’ he said in answer to her last remark. ‘You have always had what you want.’
‘Well, I want something new this time. Does your sister reside in London?’
‘My dear lady, what do you know about my sister?’ Littlemore asked. ‘She’s not a woman you would care for.’
Mrs Headway was silent a moment. ‘You don’t respect me!’ she exclaimed suddenly in a loud, almost gay tone of voice. If Littlemore wished, as I say, to preserve the simplicity of their old terms of intercourse, she was apparently willing to humour him.
‘Ah, my dear Mrs Beck …!’ he cried, vaguely, protestingly, and using her former name quite by accident. At San Diego he had never thought whether he respected her or not; that never came up.
‘That’s a proof of it – calling me by that hateful name! Don’t you believe I’m married? I haven’t been fortunate in my names,’ she added, pensively.
‘You make it very awkward when you say such mad things. My sister lives most of the year in the country; she is very simple, rather dull, perhaps a trifle narrow-minded. You are very clever, very lively, and as wide as all creation. That’s why I think you wouldn’t like her.’
‘You ought to be ashamed to run down your sister!’ cried Mrs Headway. ‘You told me once – at San Diego – that she was the nicest woman you knew. I made a note of that, you see. And you told me she was just my age. So that makes it rather uncomfortable for you, if you won’t introduce me!’ And Littlemore’s hostess gave a pitiless laugh. ‘I’m not in the least afraid of her being dull. It’s very distinguished to be dull. I’m ever so much too lively.’
‘You are indeed, ever so much! But nothing is more easy than to know my sister,’ said Littlemore, who knew perfectly that what he said was untrue. And then, as a diversion from this delicate topic, he suddenly asked, ‘Are you going to marry Sir Arthur?’
‘Don’t you think I’ve been married about enough?’
‘Possibly; but this is a new line, it would be different. An Englishman – that’s a new sensation.’
‘If I should marry, it would be a European,’ said Mrs Headway calmly.
‘Your chance is very good; they are all marrying Americans.’
‘He would have to be some one fine, the man I should marry now. I have a good deal to make up for! That’s what I want to know about Sir Arthur; all this time you haven’t told me.’
‘I have nothing in the world to tell – I have never heard of him. Hasn’t he told you himself?’
‘Nothing at all; he is very modest. He doesn’t brag, nor make himself out anything great. That’s what I like him for: I think it’s in such good taste. I like good taste!’ exclaimed Mrs Headway. ‘But all this time,’ she added, ‘you haven’t told me you would help me.’
‘How can I help you? I’m no one, I have no power.’
‘You can help me by not preventing me. I want you to promise not to prevent me.’ She gave him her fixed, bright gaze again; her eyes seemed to look far into his.
‘Good Lord, how could I prevent you?’
‘I’m not sure that you could. But you might try.’
‘I’m too indolent, and too stupid,’ said Littlemore jocosely.
‘Yes,’ she replied, musing as she still looked at him. ‘I think you are too stupid. But I think you are also too kind,’ she added more graciously. She was almost irresistible when she said such a thing as that.
They talked for a quarter of an hour longer, and at last – as if she had had scruples – she spoke to him of his own marriage, of the death of his wife, matters to which she alluded more felicitously (as he thought) than to some other points. ‘If you have a little girl you ought to be very happy; that’s what I should like to have. Lord, I should make her a nice woman! Not like me – in another style!’ When he rose to leave her, she told him that he must come and see her very often; she was to be some weeks longer in Paris; he must bring Mr Waterville.
‘Your English friend won’t like that – our coming very often,’ Littlemore said, as he stood with his hand on the door.
‘I don’t know what he has got to do with it,’ she answered, staring.
‘Neither do I. Only he must be in love with you.’
‘That doesn’t give him any right. Mercy, if I had had to put myself out for all the men that have been in love with me!’
‘Of course you would have had a terrible life! Even doing as you please, you have had rather an agitated one. But your young Englishman’s sentiments appear to give him the right to sit there, after one comes in, looking blighted and bored. That might become very tiresome.’
‘The moment he becomes tiresome I send him away. You can trust me for that.’
‘Oh,’ said Littlemore, ‘it doesn’t matter, after all.’ He remembered that it would be very inconvenient to him to have undisturbed possession of Mrs Headway.
She came out with him into the ante-chamber. Mr Max, the courier, was fortunately not there. She lingered a little; she appeared to have more to say.
‘On the contrary, he likes you to come,’ she remarked in a moment; ‘he wants to study my friends.’
‘To study them?’
‘He wants to find out about me, and he thinks they may tell him something. Some day he will ask you right out, “What sort of a woman is she, any way?” ’
‘Hasn’t he found out yet?’
‘He doesn’t understand me,’ said Mrs Headway, surveying the front of her dress. ‘He has never seen any one like me.’
‘I should imagine not!’
‘So he will ask you, as I say.’
‘I will tell him you are the most charming woman in Europe.’
‘That ain’t a description! Besides, he knows it. He wants to know if I’m respectable.’
‘He’s very curious!’ Littlemore cried, with a laugh.
She grew a little pale; she seemed to be watching his lips. ‘Mind you tell him,’ she went on with a smile that brought none of her colour back.
‘Respectable? I’ll tell him you’re adorable!’
Mrs Headway stood a moment longer. ‘Ah, you’re no use!’ she murmured. And she suddenly turned away and passed back into her sitting-room, slowly drawing her far-trailing skirts.
III
‘Elle ne se doute de rien!’ Littlemore said to himself as he walked away from the hotel; and he repeated the phrase in talking about her to Waterville. ‘She wants to be right,’ he added; ‘but she will never really succeed; she has begun too late, she will never be more tha
n half-right. However, she won’t know when she’s wrong, so it doesn’t signify!’ And then he proceeded to assert that in some respects she would remain incurable; she had no delicacy; no discretion, no shading; she was a woman who suddenly said to you, ‘You don’t respect me!’ As if that were a thing for a woman to say!
‘It depends upon what she meant by it.’ Waterville liked to see the meanings of things.
‘The more she meant by it the less she ought to say it!’ Littlemore declared.
But he returned to the Hôtel Meurice, and on the next occasion he took Waterville with him. The Secretary of Legation, who had not often been in close quarters with a lady of this ambiguous quality, was prepared to regard Mrs Headway as a very curious type. He was afraid she might be dangerous; but, on the whole, he felt secure. The object of his devotion at present was his country, or at least the Department of State; he had no intention of being diverted from that allegiance. Besides, he had his ideal of the attractive woman – a person pitched in a very much lower key than this shining, smiling, rustling, chattering daughter of the Territories. The woman he should care for would have repose, a certain love of privacy – she would sometimes let one alone. Mrs Headway was personal, familiar, intimate; she was always appealing or accusing, demanding explanations and pledges, saying things one had to answer. All this was accompanied with a hundred smiles and radiations and other natural graces, but the general effect of it was slightly fatiguing. She had certainly a great deal of charm, an immense desire to please, and a wonderful collection of dresses and trinkets; but she was eager and preoccupied, and it was impossible that other people should share her eagerness. If she wished to get into society, there was no reason why her bachelor visitors should wish to see her there; for it was the absence of the usual social encumbrances which made her drawing-room attractive. There was no doubt whatever that she was several women in one, and she ought to content herself with that sort of numerical triumph. Littlemore said to Waterville that it was stupid of her to wish to scale the heights; she ought to know how much more she was in her place down below. She appeared vaguely to irritate him; even her fluttering attempts at self-culture – she had become a great critic, and handled many of the productions of the age with a bold, free touch – constituted a vague invocation, an appeal for sympathy which was naturally annoying to a man who disliked the trouble of revising old decisions, consecrated by a certain amount of reminiscence that might be called tender. She had, however, one palpable charm; she was full of surprises. Even Waterville was obliged to confess that an element of the unexpected was not to be excluded from his conception of the woman who should have an ideal repose. Of course there were two kinds of surprises, and only one of them was thoroughly pleasant, though Mrs Headway dealt impartially in both. She had the sudden delights, the odd exclamations, the queer curiosities of a person who has grown up in a country where everything is new and many things ugly, and who, with a natural turn for the arts and amenities of life, makes a tardy acquaintance with some of the finer usages, the higher pleasures. She was provincial – it was easy to see that she was provincial; that took no great cleverness. But what was Parisian enough – if to be Parisian was the measure of success – was the way she picked up ideas and took a hint from every circumstance. ‘Only give me time, and I shall know all I have need of,’ she said to Littlemore, who watched her progress with a mixture of admiration and sadness. She delighted to speak of herself as a poor little barbarian who was trying to pick up a few crumbs of knowledge, and this habit took great effect from her delicate face, her perfect dress, and the brilliancy of her manners.