Lizzie had not at all the look of a young lady who dusted things; she wore such pretty dresses and had such delicate fingers that it was difficult to imagine her immersed in sordid cares.
She came to meet Madame M; auunster on her arrival, but she said nothing, or almost nothing, and the Baroness again reflected--she had had occasion to do so before--that American girls had no manners.
She disliked this little American girl, and she was quite prepared to learn that she had failed to commend herself to Miss Acton.
Lizzie struck her as positive and explicit almost to pertness; and the idea of her combining the apparent incongruities of a taste for housework and the wearing of fresh, Parisian-looking dresses suggested the possession of a dangerous energy. It was a source of irritation to the Baroness that in this country it should seem to matter whether a little girl were a trifle less or a trifle more of a nonentity; for Eugenia had hitherto been conscious of no moral pressure as regards the appreciation of diminutive virgins.
It was perhaps an indication of Lizzie's pertness that she very soon retired and left the Baroness on her brother's hands.
Acton talked a great deal about his chinoiseries; he knew a good deal about porcelain and bric-a-brac. The Baroness, in her progress through the house, made, as it were, a great many stations.
She sat down everywhere, confessed to being a little tired, and asked about the various objects with a curious mixture of alertness and inattention.
If there had been any one to say it to she would have declared that she was positively in love with her host; but she could hardly make this declaration--even in the strictest confidence--to Acton himself.
It gave her, nevertheless, a pleasure that had some of the charm of unwontedness to feel, with that admirable keenness with which she was capable of feeling things, that he had a disposition without any edges; that even his humorous irony always expanded toward the point.
One's impression of his honesty was almost like carrying a bunch of flowers; the perfume was most agreeable, but they were occasionally an inconvenience. One could trust him, at any rate, round all the corners of the world; and, withal, he was not absolutely ******, which would have been excess; he was only relatively ******, which was quite enough for the Baroness.
Lizzie reappeared to say that her mother would now be happy to receive Madame Munster; and the Baroness followed her to Mrs. Acton's apartment.
Eugenia reflected, as she went, that it was not the affectation of impertinence that made her dislike this young lady, for on that ground she could easily have beaten her. It was not an aspiration on the girl's part to rivalry, but a kind of laughing, childishly-mocking indifference to the results of comparison.
Mrs. Acton was an emaciated, sweet-faced woman of five and fifty, sitting with pillows behind her, and looking out on a clump of hemlocks. She was very modest, very timid, and very ill; she made Eugenia feel grateful that she herself was not like that--neither so ill, nor, possibly, so modest. On a chair, beside her, lay a volume of Emerson's Essays. It was a great occasion for poor Mrs. Acton, in her helpless condition, to be confronted with a clever foreign lady, who had more manner than any lady--any dozen ladies--that she had ever seen.
"I have heard a great deal about you," she said, softly, to the Baroness.
"From your son, eh?" Eugenia asked. "He has talked to me immensely of you. Oh, he talks of you as you would like," the Baroness declared;
"as such a son must talk of such a mother!"
Mrs. Acton sat gazing; this was part of Madame Munster's "manner."
But Robert Acton was gazing too, in vivid consciousness that he had barely mentioned his mother to their brilliant guest.
He never talked of this still maternal presence,--a presence refined to such delicacy that it had almost resolved itself, with him, simply into the subjective emotion of gratitude.
And Acton rarely talked of his emotions. The Baroness turned her smile toward him, and she instantly felt that she had been observed to be fibbing. She had struck a false note.
But who were these people to whom such fibbing was not pleasing?
If they were annoyed, the Baroness was equally so; and after the exchange of a few civil inquiries and low-voiced responses she took leave of Mrs. Acton. She begged Robert not to come home with her; she would get into the carriage alone; she preferred that.
This was imperious, and she thought he looked disappointed.
While she stood before the door with him--the carriage was turning in the gravel-walk--this thought restored her serenity.
When she had given him her hand in farewell she looked at him a moment.
"I have almost decided to dispatch that paper," she said.
He knew that she alluded to the document that she had called her renunciation; and he assisted her into the carriage without saying anything.
But just before the vehicle began to move he said, "Well, when you have in fact dispatched it, I hope you will let me know!"