Indiscretion

by Jude Morgan

his daughter was less prodigal with her feelings, or at least with the expression of them. This was not reserve: more the prudence of someone who keeps still in a wildly pitching boat.

‘Oh! I beg your pardon, Mrs Catling,’ Caroline says after a moment. ‘You seemed so confident of reading my thoughts to your own satisfaction that I supposed my assent irrelevant.’

lot. It is plainly Mrs Catling’s pleasure to pin her acquaintance like so many butterflies, and there is nothing to be gained by wriggling.

This again was a relief to Caroline, who had long striven without success to cultivate the dislike of sustenance proper to young ladies. Probably her appetite had been quickened by the habits of her father’s household, where lobster-salad and champagne one day would be followed by a week of bread and cheese.

The old lady had entrenched herself in the position of being undeceivable; and like most dogmas, this one exacted absurdity as the price of assurance.

‘You mean, being a woman I must like to hear complimentary things said about women? Perhaps. But then each of us always makes an exception for ourselves in such generalizations. Hence that other class of men, who seek to win the favour of the female sex by roundly abusing them. Many a woman sees that as a challenge: “I’ll convert him,” thinks she. And if she can get the man to esteem her, whilst despising all her sisterhood, then all the better. Where’s the merit in fascinating a man who admires all women anyway?’

‘Is it for something specific,’ she gently asked, ‘or are you meaning to be apologetic generally? No need for either. Though I can see where the second might be useful. I’m sure in the future I shall say and do many things I shall be sorry for, and it would be agreeable if one could do the apologizing for them all now. A sort of wash-day of regrets. But I interrupt you.’

and generally there was that degree of discomfort and inconvenience inseparable from social pleasures, and which in normal circumstances would be

judged unendurable.

‘I am not sure how to answer you, Mr Leabrook: there is so little precedent. When a man asks a woman to marry him, it is I believe usual to begin with an expression of gratitude for the offer, whether she means to accept or decline. When a man simply declares that he is in love with a woman, there is similarly I imagine some formula of acknowledgement that may cover the confusion of the moment, whether she returns his sentiments or not. But when a man asks a woman to go off with him and become his mistress for some unspecified time on some unspecified terms, there is as far as I can see no ready response – certainly none that could do justice to her indignation, or his conceit.’

‘Not wholly mistaken, perhaps, Mr Leabrook. I do not say that I could never be persuaded to sacrifice my reputation to passion – only that it would take a great deal more than I feel for you to make me do it.’

It came as a revelation, not quite commensurate with the proven existence of the fairies, but almost as charming and bewildering, that all the time there had been this other race of beings: kind, gentle, reliable, unworldly.

‘Severe self-examination, even when painful, is one of the best exercises for the soul.’

Isabella is the person with whom, in a room full of silly, boastful people, you will exchange a silent, speaking glance that becomes a smile: the person to whom you never need to explain yourself laboriously: the person you will not compete with.

and Caroline discovered in herself a strong wish to encounter Mr Milner again, a wish comparable perhaps only to that impulse which makes us prod at a bruise, for in their short association they seemed to have done nothing but vex one another.

but I insist that you at least consider the novel notion that not everyone thinks exclusively about you all the time. Our own petty concerns, I am afraid, prevent us enjoying that luxury.’

‘There is one unalterable rule of social intercourse,’ Stephen Milner said to Caroline, as they set out to walk across the terrace and down to the park, ‘and that is, that any group of people who say we must do this again, and meet up to do so, will not enjoy themselves.’

‘I have a plan to push her off a cliff, of course, though I must overcome the trifling obstacle of our being fifty miles inland. Really, Mr Downey, you are ridiculous.’

‘Yes – assuming such a rudely posed question requires an answer, yes, sir, I am glad. But I am glad as I would be at a spell of sunshine – because it is simply a good thing, not something I intended or brought about.’