Artists -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Love stories; Rich people -- Fiction
"Dear aunt," remarked Miss Lister wearily, "I wish you wouldn't trouble
to quote the English classics to me when we are alone. It is pure waste
of breath, because you see I KNOW you have read them all. Here is my
door. Now come right in and make yourself comfy on that couch. I am
going to sit in this palatial arm-chair opposite, and do a little very
needful explaining. My! How they fix one to the floor! These ancestral
castles are all right so far as they go, but they don't know a thing
about rockers. Now I have a word or two to say about Miss Champion.
She's a real good sort, and I like her. She's not a beauty; but she has
a fine figure, and she dresses right. She has heaps of money, and could
have rarer pearls than mine; but she knows better than to put pearls on
that brown skin. I like a woman who knows her limitations and is
sensible over them. All the men adore her, not for what she looks but
for what she is, and, my word, aunt, that's what pays in the long run.
That is what lasts. Ten years hence the Honourable Jane will still be
what she is, and I shall be trying to look what I'm not. As for Garth
Dalmain, he has eyes for all of us and a heart for none. His pretty
speeches and admiring looks don't mean marriage, because he is a man
with an ideal of womanhood and he can't see himself marrying below it.
If the Sistine Madonna could step down off those clouds and hand the
infant to the young woman on her left, he might marry HER; but even
then he would be afraid he might see some one next day who did her hair
more becomingly, or that her foot would not look so well on his Persian
rugs as it does on that cloud. He won't marry money, because he has
plenty of it. And even if he hadn't, money made in candles would not
appeal to him. He won't marry beauty, because he thinks too much about
it. He adores so many lovely faces, that he is never sure for
twenty-four hours which of them he admires most, bar the fact that, as
in the case of fruit trees, the unattainable are usually the most
desired. He won't marry goodness--virtue--worth--whatever you choose to
call the sterling qualities of character--because in all these the
Honourable Jane Champion is his ideal, and she is too sensible a woman
to tie such an epicure to her plain face. Besides, she considers
herself his grandmother, and doesn't require him to teach her to suck
eggs. But Garth Dalmain, poor boy, is so sublimely lacking in
self-consciousness that he never questions whether he can win his
ideal. He possesses her already in his soul, and it will be a fearful
smack in the face when she says 'No,' as she assuredly will do, for
reasons aforesaid. These three days, while he has been playing around
with me, and you and other dear match-making old donkeys have gambolled
about us, and made sure we were falling in love, he has been
worshipping the ground she walks on, and counting the hours until he
should see her walk on it again. He enjoyed being with me more than
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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