“Just—just a little,” admitted
Cecily, with fastidiousness and an amused smile.
“But Mr. Seaborne doesn’t impress me as
so original, so strong.”
“Oh, that he certainly isn’t,” said
Spence. “But acuter, and perhaps a finer
feeling in several directions.”
Miriam listened, and was tortured.
She had suffered all the evening from observing Cecily,
whose powers of conversation and charms of manner
made her bitterly envious. How far she herself
was from this ideal of the instructed and socially
trained woman! The presence of a stranger had
banished Cecily’s despondent mood, and put all
her capacities in display. With a miserable sense
of humiliation, Miriam compared her own insignificant
utterances and that bright, often brilliant, talk
which held the attention of every one. Beside
Cecily, she was still indeed nothing but a school-girl,
who with much labour was getting a smattering of common
knowledge; for, though Cecily had no profound acquirements,
the use she made of what she did know was always suggestive,
intellectual, individual.
What wonder that Mallard brought out his drawings
to show them to Cecily? There would be nothing
commonplace in her remarks and admiration.
She felt herself a paltry pretender to those possibilities
of modern womanhood which were open to Cecily from
her birth. In the course of natural development,
Cecily, whilst still a girl, threw for ever behind
her all superstitions and harassing doubts; she was
in the true sense “emancipated”—a
word Edward Spence was accustomed to use jestingly.
And this was Mallard’s conception of the admirable
in woman.
SILENCES
Cecily was seeing Rome for the first time, but she
could not enjoy it in the way natural to her.
It was only at rare moments that she felt Rome.
One of the most precious of her life’s anticipations
was fading into memory, displaced by a dull experience,
numbered among disillusionings. Not that what
she beheld disappointed her, but that she was not
herself in beholding. Had she stayed here on
her first visit to Italy, on what a strong current
of enthusiasm would the hours and the days have borne
her! What a light would have glowed upon the
Seven Hills, and how would every vulgarity of the
modern streets have been transformed by her imagination!
But now she was in no haste to visit the most sacred
spots; she was content to take each in its turn, and
her powers of attention soon flagged. It had
been the same in Florence. She felt herself reduced
to a lower level of existence than was native to her.
Had she lived her life— all that was worth
calling life?
