Part 1 (2/2)

I thought she would have talked after that, but she did not. When I spoke to her once or twice she answered absently; and presently she forgot me altogether, and began to sing to herself softly:

Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea, Thy tribute wave deliver; No more by thee my steps shall be For ever and for ever.

Then suddenly recollecting herself, she stopped, and exclaimed, in much confusion, ”O please forgive me! That stupid thing has been running in my head all day--and it is a way I have. I always forget people and begin to sing.”

She did not see in the least that her apology might have been considered an adding of insult to injury, and, of course, I was careful not to let her know that I thought it so, although I must confess that for a moment I felt just a trifle aggrieved. I thought my presence had bored her, and was surprised to see, when I got up to go, that she would rather have had me stay.

She cared little for people in general, and had few likings. It was love with her if anything; but those whom she loved once she loved always, never changing in her affection for them, however badly they might treat her. And she had the power of liking people for themselves, regardless of their feeling for her; indeed, her indifference on this score was curious. I once heard a lady say to her: ”You are one of the few young married ladies whom I dare chaperon in these degenerate days.

No degree of admiration or wors.h.i.+p ever seems to touch you. Is it real or pretended, your unconsciousness?”

”Unconsciousness of what?”

”Of the feeling you excite.”

”The feeling _I_ excite?” Ideala seemed to think a moment; then she answered gravely: ”I do not think I am conscious of anything that relates to myself, personally, in my intercourse with people. They are ideas to me for the most part--men especially so.”

That way she had of forgetting people's presence was one of her peculiarities. If she liked you she was content just to have you there, but she never showed it except by a regretful glance when you went away. She was very absent, too. One day I found her with a big, awkward volume on her knee, heated, excited, and evidently put out.

”Is anything the matter?” I wanted to know.

”O yes,” she answered desperately; ”I've lost my pen, and I'm writing for the mail.”

”Why, where are you looking for it?” I asked.

She glanced at me, and then at the book.

”I--I believe,” she faltered, ”I was looking for it among the p's in the French dictionary.”

On another occasion I watched her revising a ma.n.u.script. As she wrote her emendations she gummed them on over the old copy, and she was so absorbed that at last she put the gum-brush into the ink-bottle.

Discovering her mistake, she gave a little disconcerted sort of laugh, and took the brush away to wash it. She returned presently, examining it critically to see if it were perfectly cleansed, and having satisfied herself, she carefully put it back in the ink-bottle.

But perhaps the funniest instance of this peculiarity of hers was one that happened in the Grosvenor Gallery on a certain occasion. She had been busy with her catalogue, doing the pictures conscientiously, and not talking at all, when suddenly she burst out laughing.

”Do you know what I have been doing?” she said. ”I wanted to know who that man is”--indicating a gentleman of peculiar appearance in the crowd--”and I have been looking all over him for his number, that I might hunt up his name in the catalogue!”

Her way of seeing a.n.a.logies as plausible as the obvious relation of p to pen, and of acting on wholly wrong conclusions deduced from most unexceptionable premises, was another characteristic. She always blamed her early education, or rather want of education, for it. ”If I had been taught to think,” she said, ”when my memory was being burdened with historical anecdotes torn from the text, and other useless sc.r.a.ps of knowledge, I should be able to see both sides of a subject, and judge rationally, now. As it is, I never see more than one side at a time, and when I have mastered that, I feel like the old judge in some Greek play, who, when he had heard one party to a suit, begged that the other would not speak as it would only poggle what was then clear to him.”

But in this Ideala was not quite fair to herself.

It was not always--although, unfortunately, it was oftenest at critical moments--that she was beset with this inability to see more than one side of a subject at a time. The odd thing about it was that one never knew which side, the pathetic or the humorous, would strike her.

Generally, however, it was the one that related least to herself personally. This self-forgetfulness, with a keen sense of the ludicrous, led her sometimes, when she had anything amusing to relate, to overlook considerations which would have kept other people silent.

”I saw a pair of horses running away with a heavy wagon the other day,”

<script>