Part 3 (2/2)

Talking about the people, she told me: ”They draw such nice distinctions. They speak of 'a lady' and 'a real lady.' A 'real lady'

is a person who gives no trouble. If Mrs. Vanbrugh wants anything from the butcher, and he has already sent to her house once that day, she does not expect him to send again; she sends to him--and she is 'a real lady.' Mrs. Stanton is also thoughtful, but she is something more; she is sociable and kind, and talks to them all in a friendly way, just as if they were human beings; and she is something more than 'a real lady'--she's 'a real nice lady.'

”Do you know Mrs. Polter at the fish-shop? What a fine-looking woman she is! Middle-aged, intelligent, and a very good specimen of her cla.s.s, I should think. She has eight children already, and would consider the ninth a further blessing. Her husband is a good-looking man, too, and most devoted. In fact, they are quite an ideal pair with their eight children and their fish-shop. He had to go to Yarmouth the other day to buy bloaters, and while he was away she went by the five o'clock train every morning to choose the day's supply of fish for the shop, and he was quite unhappy about it. He was afraid she would 'overdo' herself, and rather than that should happen he desired her to let the business go to the--ahem! He made her write every day to say how she was, and was wretched till he returned to relieve her of her arduous duties. She made friends with me during the scarlet fever epidemic. Number eight was a baby then, and she was afraid he might catch the disease and be taken to the hospital and die for want of her; and I sympathised strongly with her denunciations of the cruelty of the act. Fancy taking little babies from their mothers! Barbarous, don't you think it? One day a lady came into the shop while I was there. She was dressed in a bright pink costume, with a large hat all smothered in pink feathers. I thought of the Queen of Sheba, and felt alarmed. Mrs.

Polter told me afterwards she was 'just a lady,' rolling in recently acquired wealth, and 'as hard to please as if she had never washed her own doorstep.' It was then I learnt the difference between 'a lady' and 'a real lady.'”

One of Ideala's exploits got into the paper somehow, and she was annoyed about it, and anxious to make us believe the account of the risk she ran had been greatly exaggerated. I was present when she gave her own version of the story, which was characteristic in every way.

”I heard frantic cries from the river,” she said. ”Some one was shrieking, 'The child will be drowned!' and I ran to see what was the matter. A man was tearing up and down on the bank, a child was struggling in the water, and as there was n.o.body else to be seen he looked to _me_ for a.s.sistance! I advised him to go in and bring the child out, but the idea did not appear to commend itself to him, so he took to running up and down again, bawling, 'The child will be drowned!' And indeed it seemed very likely; so I was obliged to go in and bring it out myself. The man was overjoyed when I restored it to him. He clasped it in his arms with every demonstration of affection; and then he looked at me and became embarra.s.sed. He evidently felt that he ought to say something, but the difficulty was what to say. At last a bright idea seemed to strike him. His countenance cleared, and he spoke with much feeling. 'I am afraid you are rather wet,' he observed; and then he left me, and a sympathetic landlady, who keeps a little public-house by the river, and had witnessed the occurrence, took me in and dried me. She gave me whisky and hot water, and entertained me for the rest of the afternoon. She is a remarkable woman, and I should visit her often were it not for her love of, and faith in, whisky and hot water. I tell her there are five things which make the nose red-- viz., cold, tight-lacing, disease of the right side of the heart, dyspepsia, and alcohol, and the greatest of these is alcohol; but she says a little colour anywhere would be an improvement to me, and I feel that I can have nothing in common with a woman who has such bad taste in the distribution of colour.”

CHAPTER VII.

Ideala's notions of propriety were altogether unconventional. She never could be made to understand that it was not the proper thing to talk familiarly to any one she met, and discuss any subject they were equal to with them.

”It is good for people to talk, and natural, and therefore proper,” she said. ”If I can give pleasure to a stranger by doing so, or he can give pleasure to me, it would not be right to keep silent.”

She carried this idea of her duty to her neighbour rather far sometimes.

I remember her telling me once about two old gentlemen she had travelled with the day before.

”The sun came in and bothered me, and one of them offered to draw the blind,” she said, ”and he remarked it was rather a treat to see the sun, we have so little of it now; and I said that was true, and told him how I pitied the farmers. I had to stay in my room the other day with a bad cold, and I amused myself watching one of them at work in some fields opposite. The state of his mind was expressed by his boots. On Monday the sun was s.h.i.+ning, the air was mild, and it seemed as if we were going to have a continuance of fine weather, and the farmer appeared of a cheerful countenance, and his boots were polished and laced. On Tuesday there was an east wind, veering south, with showers, and his boots were laced, but not polished. On Wednesday there was frost, fog, and gloom, and they were neither laced nor polished. On Thursday there was a snowstorm, and he had no boots at all on; and after that I did not see him, and I wondered if he had committed suicide--in which case I thought the jury might almost have brought in a verdict of 'justifiable _felo-de-se_.' And when I told that story the other old gentleman shut his book, and began to talk too. And I said I thought the weather was much colder than it used to be, for I could remember wearing muslin dresses in May, and I could not wear them at all now; but I did not know if the change were in the climate or in myself--perhaps a little of both--though, indeed, I knew that, to a certain extent, it was in the climate, which had been very much altered in different districts by drainage, and cutting, or planting--altered for the better, however, as a rule. And one old gentleman had heard that before, but did not understand it exactly, so I explained it to him; and then I talked about changes of climate in general, and the formation of beds of coal, and the ice period, and sun-spots, and the theory of comets, and about my husband getting up to see the last one, and going out in a felt hat and dressing-gown with a bed-candle to look for it--and about that dream of mine, did I tell you? I dreamt the comet came into our drawing-room, and the leg of a Chinese table turned into a snake and snorted at it, and the comet looked so taken aback that I woke myself with a shout of laughter. And then we talked of popular superst.i.tions about comets, and dreams, and ghosts-- particularly ghosts, and I told a number of creepy stories, and one old gentleman pretended he didn't believe in them, but he did, and so did the other without any pretence; and we talked about Darwinism, and the nature of the soul, and Nihilism, and the state of society--and--and a few other things. And they were such dear delightful old gentlemen, and they knew such a lot, and were so clever; and one of them was a Railway Director, and the other couldn't let his farms, and was bothered about his pheasants, and wanted to have the trains altered to suit him. I should so like to meet them both again.”

”And how long did all this take, Ideala?”

”Oh, some hours. I fancy their dreams would be rather confused last night,” she added, naively.

”Poor old gentlemen!” said I.

This sociability and inclination to talk the matter out, and, I may say, a certain amount of innocence and lack of worldly wisdom into the bargain, betrayed her occasionally into small improprieties of conduct that were not to be excused, and would possibly not have been forgiven in any one but Ideala. But such things were allowed in her as certain things are allowed in certain people--not because the things are right in themselves, but because the people who do them see no harm in them.

There are people, too, who seem to enjoy the privilege of making wrong right by doing it. Society, however, only accords this privilege to a limited and distinguished few.

When Ideala saw for herself that she had done an unjustifiable thing she was very ready to confess it. I always fancied she had some latent idea of making atonement in that way. It never mattered how much a story told against herself, nor how much malicious people might make of it to her discredit; she told all, inimitably, and with scrupulous fidelity to fact.

One day she was standing waiting for a train at the station at York, and in her absent way she fixed her eyes on a gentleman who was walking about the platform.

Presently he went up to her, and, without any apology or show of respect, remarked: ”I am sure I have seen you before.”

”Probably,” Ideala rejoined, as if the occurrence were the most natural thing in the world, ”but I do not remember you. Perhaps if I heard your name----?”

”Oh, I don't suppose you ever heard my name,” he said.

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