"And I fancy," Mrs. Milvain resumed, lowering her voice rather confidentially, "that John would have done more if it hadn't been for his wife, your Aunt Emily. She was a very good woman, devoted to him, of course, but she was not ambitious for him, and if a wife isn't ambitious for her husband, especially in a profession like the law, clients soon get to know of it. In our young days, Mr. Denham, we used to say that we knew which of our friends would become judges, by looking at the girls they married. And so it was, and so, I fancy, it always will be. I don't think," she added, summing up these scattered remarks, "that any man is really happy unless he succeeds in his profession."Mrs. Cosham approved of this sentiment with more ponderous sagacity from her side of the tea-table, in the first place by swaying her head, and in the second by remarking:
"No, men are not the same as women. I fancy Alfred Tennyson spoke the truth about that as about many other things. How I wish he'd lived to write 'The Prince'--a sequel to 'The Princess'! I confess I'm almost tired of Princesses. We want some one to show us what a good man can be. We have Laura and Beatrice, Antigone and Cordelia, but we have no heroic man. How do you, as a poet, account for that, Mr. Denham?""I'm not a poet," said Ralph good-humoredly. "I'm only a solicitor.""But you write, too?" Mrs. Cosham demanded, afraid lest she should be balked of her priceless discovery, a young man truly devoted to literature.
"In my spare time," Denham reassured her.
"In your spare time!" Mrs. Cosham echoed. "That is a proof of devotion, indeed." She half closed her eyes, and indulged herself in a fascinating picture of a briefless barrister lodged in a garret, writing immortal novels by the light of a farthing dip. But the romance which fell upon the figures of great writers and illumined their pages was no false radiance in her case. She carried her pocket Shakespeare about with her, and met life fortified by the words of the poets. How far she saw Denham, and how far she confused him with some hero of fiction, it would be hard to say. Literature had taken possession even of her memories. She was matching him, presumably, with certain characters in the old novels, for she came out, after a pause, with:
"Um--um--Pendennis--Warrington--I could never forgive Laura," she pronounced energetically, "for not marrying George, in spite of everything. George Eliot did the very same thing; and Lewes was a little frog-faced man, with the manner of a dancing master. But Warrington, now, had everything in his favor; intellect, passion, romance, distinction, and the connection was a mere piece of undergraduate folly. Arthur, I confess, has always seemed to me a bit of a fop; I can't imagine how Laura married him. But you say you're a solicitor, Mr. Denham. Now there are one or two things I should like to ask you--about Shakespeare--" She drew out her small, worn volume with some difficulty, opened it, and shook it in the air. "They say, nowadays, that Shakespeare was a lawyer. They say, that accounts for his knowledge of human nature. There's a fine example for you, Mr.
Denham. Study your clients, young man, and the world will be the richer one of these days, I have no doubt. Tell me, how do we come out of it, now; better or worse than you expected?"Thus called upon to sum up the worth of human nature in a few words, Ralph answered unhesitatingly:
"Worse, Mrs. Cosham, a good deal worse. I'm afraid the ordinary man is a bit of a rascal--""And the ordinary woman?"
"No, I don't like the ordinary woman either--"Ah, dear me, I've no doubt that's very true, very true." Mrs. Cosham sighed. "Swift would have agreed with you, anyhow--" She looked at him, and thought that there were signs of distinct power in his brow.
He would do well, she thought, to devote himself to satire.
"Charles Lavington, you remember, was a solicitor," Mrs. Milvain interposed, rather resenting the waste of time involved in talking about fictitious people when you might be talking about real people.
"But you wouldn't remember him, Katharine.""Mr. Lavington? Oh, yes, I do," said Katharine, waking from other thoughts with her little start. "The summer we had a house near Tenby.
I remember the field and the pond with the tadpoles, and making haystacks with Mr. Lavington.""She is right. There WAS a pond with tadpoles," Mrs. Cosham corroborated. "Millais made studies of it for 'Ophelia.' Some say that is the best picture he ever painted--""And I remember the dog chained up in the yard, and the dead snakes hanging in the toolhouse.""It was at Tenby that you were chased by the bull," Mrs. Milvain continued. "But that you couldn't remember, though it's true you were a wonderful child. Such eyes she had, Mr. Denham! I used to say to her father, 'She's watching us, and summing us all up in her little mind.'
And they had a nurse in those days," she went on, telling her story with charming solemnity to Ralph, "who was a good woman, but engaged to a sailor. When she ought to have been attending to the baby, her eyes were on the sea. And Mrs. Hilbery allowed this girl--Susan her name was--to have him to stay in the village. They abused her goodness, I'm sorry to say, and while they walked in the lanes, they stood the perambulator alone in a field where there was a bull. The animal became enraged by the red blanket in the perambulator, and Heaven knows what might have happened if a gentleman had not been walking by in the nick of time, and rescued Katharine in his arms!""I think the bull was only a cow, Aunt Celia," said Katharine.
