India -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, English
He made it his business to get introduced to Mrs. Haggert, and the
introduction prospered. He also made it his business to see as much as he
could of that lady. When a man is in earnest as to interviews, the
facilities which Simla offers are startling. There are garden-parties, and
tennis-parties, and picnics, and luncheons at Annandale, and
rifle-matches, and dinners and balls; besides rides and walks, which are
matters of private arrangement. Hannasyde had started with the intention
of seeing a likeness, and he ended by doing much more. He wanted to be
deceived, he meant to be deceived, and he deceived himself very
thoroughly. Not only were the face and figure the face and figure of Alice
Chisane, but the voice and lower tones were exactly the same, and so were
the turns of speech; and the little mannerisms, that every woman has, of
gait and gesticulation, were absolutely and identically the same. The turn
of the head was the same; the tired look in the eyes at the end of a long
walk was the same; the stoop-and-wrench over the saddle to hold in a
pulling horse was the same; and once, most marvelous of all, Mrs.
Landys-Haggert singing to herself in the next room, while Hannasyde was
waiting to take her for a ride, hummed, note for note, with a throaty
quiver of the voice in the second line, "Poor Wandering One!" exactly as
Alice Chisane had hummed it for Hannasyde in the dusk of an English
drawing-room. In the actual woman herself--in the soul of her--there was
not the least likeness; she and Alice Chisane being cast in different
moulds. But all that Hannasyde wanted to know and see and think about, was
this maddening and perplexing likeness of face and voice and manner. He
was bent on making a fool of himself that way; and he was in no sort
disappointed.
Open and obvious devotion from any sort of man is always pleasant to any
sort of woman; but Mrs. Landys-Haggert, being a woman of the world, could
make nothing of Hannasyde's admiration.
He would take any amount of trouble--he was a selfish man habitually--to
meet and forestall, if possible, her wishes. Anything she told him to do
was law; and he was, there could be no doubting it, fond of her company so
long as she talked to him, and kept on talking about trivialities. But
when she launched into expression of her personal views and her wrongs,
those small social differences that make the spice of Simla life,
Hannasyde was neither pleased nor interested. He didn't want to know
anything about Mrs. Landys-Haggert, or her experiences in the past--she
had traveled nearly all over the world, and could talk cleverly--he wanted
the likeness of Alice Chisane before his eyes and her voice in his ears.
Anything outside that, reminding him of another personality, jarred, and
he showed that it did.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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