Lady of Quality

The door was hardly shut behind Miss Farlow when he demanded, in the voice of one driven to the extreme limit of his patience: 'How you can endure to have that prattle-bag living with you is beyond my comprehension!'

'Well, I must confess that it is beyond mine too,' she answered, allowing her mirth to escape her.

'What the devil possessed her to come in babbling about thread and teething powder when she must have known you were not alone?'

'Rampant curiosity,' she replied. 'She must always discover whatever may be going on in the house.'

'Good God! Send her packing!' he said peremptorily.

'I wish I might! But since the world thinks that I should sink myself beneath reproach if I didn't employ a respectable female to act as my chaperon I fear I can't. It would be too brutal to dismiss her, for she means well, and what possible reason could I give for getting rid of her?'

'That you are about to be married!'

She was growing accustomed to his abrupt utterances, but this one came as a shock to her. She stared at him with startled eyes, and only managed to say faintly: 'Pray don't be absurd!'

'I am not being absurd. Marry me! I'll engage myself to keep you safe from all such pernicious bores as your cousin.'

'You are being absurd!' she declared, in a much stronger voice. 'Marry you to escape from poor Maria? I never heard anything to equal it! You must be out of your mind!'

'No – unless to be deep in love is to be out of one's mind! I am, you see. After all these years, to have found the woman I had come to think didn't exist – !' He saw that she was looking at him in considerable astonishment, and exclaimed, with a rueful crack of laughter: 'Oh, my God, what a mull I'm making of it! I deserve that you should refuse ever to speak to me again, don't I?'

'Yes,' she said candidly.

'I can't make elegant speeches. I wish I could! If I could find the words to tell you what's in my heart – !' He broke off, and took a quick turn about the room.

'Do you always find it impossible to make elegant speeches?' she asked. 'I can't bring myself to believe that, sir. You must have made many pretty speeches in your time – unless report has wronged you.'

'To the incognitas? That's a very different matter!' he said impatiently. 'A man don't form a connection with a convenient with the same feelings as he has when he forms a lasting passion for the one woman in the world he wishes to make his wife!' He came to a sudden stop in his agitated perambulation, and directed a look of fierce enquiry at her, saying incredulously: 'Good God, are you holding it against me that I have frequently had some high-flyer in keeping?'

This blunt reference to his checkered career, coupled as it was with his cool acceptance of her understanding of the meaning of such terms as he had used to describe his mistresses, pleased rather than shocked her, and certainly did him no harm in her eyes. Contrasting his attitude with her brother's, she thought it was as refreshing as it was unusual, and, insensibly, she warmed to him. The abominable Mr Carleton was not one either to credit unmarried ladies with an innocence very few of them possessed, or to subscribe to the convention that prohibited a gentleman from mentioning in their presence any subject that could bring a blush to their cheeks. She liked this, but saw no reason why she should say so. Instead, she said, with unruffled composure: 'By no means, sir! Your past life concerns no one but yourself. But if I were to accept your extremely obliging offer your future life would also concern me, and, at the risk of offending you, I must tell you that I have no ambition to marry a rake.'

He did not seem to be at all offended; rather, he seemed to be amused. He heard her out in appreciative silence, but when she came to an end, he adjured her not talk like a ninnyhammer. 'Which, dear love, I know well you are not! You should know better than to suppose I should continue in that way of life if I were married to you. I shouldn't even wish to! No man who had the inestimable good fortune to call you his wife would ever desire any other woman. If you don't know that, there is nothing I can do or say to convince you!'

She felt her cheeks growing hot, and instinctively pressed her hands to them. 'You are very obliging, sir, but – but sadly mistaken, I fear! I am not the – the paragon you seem to think me!' she stammered. 'I – I know that I am generally held to be quite pretty, but –'

'If ever I heard such a whisker!' he interjected. 'Generally held to be quite pretty? You are generally held to be a diamond of the first water, my girl! And don't tell me you don't know it, for I am a hard man to bridge, and I give you fair warning that you'll catch cold if you try to gammon me!'

She smiled. 'That I can well believe! Try, in your turn, to believe me when I say that I don't admire my kind of – oh, beauty, for want of a better word!'

'There isn't one,' he said. 'I have a wide experience of beauties, but during the course of a misspent career I have never set eyes on a woman as beautiful as you are.'

She tried to laugh, and said: 'It is clearly midsummer moon with you! I think you have fallen in love with my face, Mr Carleton!'

'Oh, no!' he responded, without hesitation. 'Not with your face, or with your elegant figure, or your graceful carriage, or with any of your obvious attributes! Those I certainly admire, but I didn't fall in love with any of them, any more than I fell in love with Botticelli's Venus, greatly though I admire her beauty!'

She knit her brows, in honest bewilderment. 'But you know nothing about me, Mr Carleton! How could you, on so short an acquaintance?'

'I don't know how I could: I only know that I do. Don't ask me why I love you, for I don't know that either! You may be sure, however, that I don't regard you as a valuable piece to be added to my collection!'

This acid reference to Lord Beckenham's determined courtship drew a smile from her, but she said: 'You have paid me so many extravagant compliments, that I need not scruple to tell you that yours is not the first offer I have received.'

'I imagine you must have received many.'

'Not many, but several. I refused them all, because I preferred my – my independence to marriage. I think I still do. Indeed, I am almost sure of it.'

'But not quite sure?'

'No, not quite sure,' she said, in a troubled tone. 'And when I ask myself what you could give me in exchange for my liberty, which is very dear to me, I – oh, I don't know, I don't know!'