Robert Chambers - The Fighting Chance стр 17.

What does Sylvia expect with Howards millions? A man?

Grace Ferrall drew bridle. The curious thing is, Kemp, that she liked him.

Likes him?

No, liked him. I saw how it was; she took his silences for intellectual meditation, his gallery, his library, his smatterings for expressions of a cultivated personality. Then she remembered how close she came to running off with that cashiered Englishman, and that scared her into clutching the substantial in the shape of Howard.... Still, I wish I hadnt meddled.

Meddled how?

Oh, I told her to do it. We had talks until daylight.... She may marry himI dont knowbut if you think any live woman could be contented with a muff like that!

Thats immoral.

Kemp, Im not. Shed be mad not to marry him; but I dont know what Id do to a man like that, if I were his wife. And you know what a terrific capacity for mischief there is in Sylvia. Some day shes going to love somebody. And it isnt likely to be Howard. And, oh, Kemp! I do grow so tired of that sort of thing. Do you suppose anybody will ever make decency a fashion?

Youre doing your best, said Ferrall, laughing at his wifes pretty, boyish face turned back toward him over her shoulder; youre presenting your cousin and his millions to a girl who can dress the part

Dont, Kemp! I dont know why I meddled! I wish I hadnt

I do. You cant let Howard alone! Youre perfectly possessed to plague him when hes with you, and now youve arranged for another woman to keep it up for the rest of his lifetime. What does Sylvia want with a man who possesses the instincts and intellect of a coachman? She is asked everywhere, she has her own money. Why not let her alone? Or is it too late?

You mean let her make a fool of herself with Stephen Siward? That is where she is drifting.

Do you think

Yes, I do. She has a perfect genius for selecting the wrong man; and shes already sorry for this one. Im sorry for Stephen, too; but its safe for me to be.

She might make something of him.

You know perfectly well no woman ever did make anything of a doomed man. Hed kill herI mean it, Kemp! He would literally kill her with grief. She isnt like Leila Mortimer; she isnt like most girls of her sort. You men think her a rather stunning, highly tempered, unreasonable young girl, with a reserve of sufficiently trained intelligence to marry the best our market offersand close her eyes;a thoroughbred with the caprices of one, but also with the grafted instinct for proper mating.

Well, thats all right, isnt it? asked Ferrall. Thats the way I size her up. Isnt it correct?

Yes, in a way. She has all the expensive training of the thoroughbredand all the ignorance, too. She is cold-blooded because wholesome; a trifle sceptical because so absolutely unawakened. She never experienced a deep emotion. Impulses have intoxicated her once or twiceas when she asked my opinion about running off with Cavendish, and that boy and girl escapade with Rivington; nothing at all except high mettle, the innocent daring lurking in all thoroughbreds, and a great deal of very red blood racing through that superb young body. But, Ferrall reined in to listen, but if ever a man awakens herI dont care who he isyoull see a girl you never knew, a brand-new creature emerge with the last rags and laces of conventionality dropping from her; a woman, Kemp, heiress to every generous impulse, every emotion, every vice, every virtue of all that brilliant race of hers.

You seem to know, he said, amused and curious.

I know. Major Belwether told me that he had thought of Howard as an anchor for her. It seemed a pityHoward with all his cold, heavy negative inertia.... I said Id do it. I did. And now I dont know; I wish, almost wish I hadnt.

What has changed your ideas?

I dont know. Howard is safer than Stephen Siward, already in the first clutches of his master-vice. Would you mate what she inherits from her mother and her mothers mother, with what is that poor boys heritage from the Siwards?

After all, observed Ferrall dryly, were not in the angel-breeding business.

We ought to be. Every decent person ought to be. If they were, inherited vice would be as rare in this country as smallpox!

People dont inherit smallpox, dear.

Never mind! You know what I mean. In our stock farms and kennels, we weed out, destroy, exterminate hereditary weakness in everything. We pay the greatest attention to the production of all offspring except our own. Look at Stephen! How dared his parents bring him into the world? Look at Sylvia! And now, suppose they marry!

Dearest, said Ferrall, my head is a whirl and my wits are spinning like five toy tops. Your theories are all right; but unless you and I are prepared to abandon several business enterprises and take to the lecture platform, Im afraid people are going to be wicked enough to marry whom they like, and the human race will he run as usual with money the favourite, and love a case of also-ran. By the way, how dared you marry me, knowing the sort of demon I am?

The gathering frown on Mrs. Ferralls brow faded; she raised her clear grey eyes and met her husbands gaze, gay, humourous, and with a hint of tendernessenough to bring the colour into her pretty face.

You know Im right, Kemp.

Always, dear. And now that we have the world off our hands for a few minutes, suppose we gallop?

But she held her horse to a walk, riding forward, grave, thoughtful, preoccupied with a new problem, only part of which she had told her husband.

For that night she had been awakened in her bed to find standing beside her a white, wide-eyed figure, shivering, limbs a-chill beneath her clinging lace. She had taken the pallid visitor to her arms and warmed her and soothed her and whispered to her, murmuring the thousand little words and sounds, the breathing magic mothers use with children. And Sylvia lay there, chilled, nerveless, silent, ignorant why her sleeplessness had turned to restlessness, to loneliness, to an awakening perception of what she lacked and needed and began to desire. For that sad void, peopled at intervals through her brief years with a vague mother-phantom, had, in the new crisis of her career, become suddenly an empty desolation, frightening her with her own utter isolation. Fill it now she could not, now that she needed that ghost of child-comfort, that shadowy refuge, that sweet shape she had fashioned out of dreams to symbolise a mother she had never known.

Driven she knew not why, she had crept from her room in search of the still, warm, fragrant nest and the whispered reassurance and the caress she had never before endured. Yes, now she craved it, invited it, longed for safe arms around her, the hovering hand on her hair. Was this Sylvia?

And Grace Ferrall, clearing her sleepy eyes, amazed, incredulous of the cold, child-like hands upon her shoulders, caught her in her arms with a little laugh and sob and drew her to her breast, to soothe and caress and reassure, to make up to her all she could of what is every childs just heritage.

And for a long while Sylvia, lying there, told her nothingbecause she did not know howmerely a word, a restless question half ashamed, barely enough to shadow forth the something stirring her toward an awakening in a new world, where with new eyes she might catch glimpses of those dim and splendidly misty visions that float through sunlit silences when a young girl dreams awake.