Since I have read with Vicki Frau von Lindeberg is quite different. She is courteous with the careful courtesy decent people show their dependents; kindly, even gracious at times. She is present at the reading, darning socks and ancient sheets with her carefully kept fingers, and she treats me absolutely as though I were attached to her household as governess. She is no longer afraid we will want to be equals. She asks me quite often after the health of him she calls my good father. And when a cousin of hers came last week to stay a night, a female Dammerlitz on her way to a place where you drink waters and get rid of yourself, she presented me to her with pleasant condescension as the kleine Engländerin engaged as her daughter's companion. 'Eine recht Hebe Hausgenossin,' she was pleased to add, gently nodding her head at each word; and the cousin went away convinced I was a resident official and that the tales she had heard about the Lindeberg's poverty couldn't be true.
'It's not scriptural,' I complained to Vicki, stirred to honest indignation.
'You mean, to say things not quite—not quite?' said Vicki.
'Such big ones,' I fumed. 'I'm not little. I'm not English. I'm not a Hausgenossin. Why such unnecessary ones?'
'Now, Rose-Marie, you do know why Mamma said "little."'
'It's a term of condescension?'
'And Engländerins are rather grand things to have in the house, you know—expensive, I mean. Always dearer than natives. Mamma only wants Cousin Mienchen to suppose we are well off.'
'Oh,' said I.
'You don't mind?' said Vicki, rather timidly taking my hand.
'It doesn't hurt me,' said I, putting a little stress on the me, a stress implying infinite possible hurt to Frau von Lindeberg's soul.
'It is horrid,' murmured Vicki, her head drooping over her book. 'I wish we didn't always pretend we're not poor. We are. Poor as mice. And it makes us so sensitive about it, so afraid of anything's being noticed. We spend our lives on tenterhooks—not nice things at all to spend one's life on.'
'Wriggly, uncomfortable things,' I agreed.
'I believe Cousin Mienchen isn't in the least taken in, for all our pains.'
'I don't believe people ever are,' said I; and we drifted into a consideration of the probable height of our temperatures and color of our ears if we could know how much the world we pose to really knows about us, if we could hear with what thoroughness those of our doings and even of our thoughts that we believed so secret are discussed.
Frau von Lindeberg wasn't there, being too busy arranging comforts for her cousin's journey to preside, and so it was that we drifted unhindered from Milton into the foggier regions of private wisdom. We are neither of us wise, but it is surprising how talking to a friend, even to a friend as unwise as yourself, clears up your brains and lets in new light. That is one of the reasons why I like writing to you and getting your letters; only you mustn't be offended at my bracketing you, you splendid young man, with poor Vicki and poor myself in the class Unwise. Heaven knows I mean nothing to do with book-learning, in which, I am aware, you most beautifully excel.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XLIX
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I am very sorry indeed to hear that your engagement is broken off. I feared something of the sort was going to happen because of all the things you nearly said and didn't in your letters lately. Are you very much troubled and worried? Please let me turn into the elder sister for a little again and give you the small relief of having an attentive listener. It seems to have been rather an unsatisfactory time for you all along. I don't really quite know what to say. I am anyhow most sincerely sorry, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to talk about Miss Cheriton. It is of course lamentable that our writing to each other should have been, as you say it was, so often the cause of quarrels. You never told me so, or I would at once have stopped. You fill several pages with surprise that a girl of twenty-two can be so different from what she appears, that so soft and tender an outside can have beneath it such unfathomable depths of hardness. I think you have probably gone to the other extreme now, and because you admired so much are all the more violently critical. It is probable that Miss Cheriton is all that you first thought her, unusually charming and sympathetic and lovable, and your characters simply didn't suit each other. Don't think too unkindly in your first anger. I am so very sorry; sorry for you, who must feel as if your life had been convulsed by an earthquake, and all its familiar features disarranged; sorry for your father's disappointment; sorry for Miss Cheriton, who must have been wretched. But how infinitely wiser to draw back in time and not, for want of courage, drift on into that supreme catastrophe, marriage. You mustn't suppose me cynical in calling it a catastrophe—perhaps I mean it only in its harmless sense of dénouement; and if I don't I can't see that it is cynical to recognize a spade when you see it as certainly a spade. But do not let yourself go to bitterness, and so turn into a cynic yourself. You say Miss Cheriton apparently prefers a duke, and are very angry. But why if, as you declare, you have not really loved her for months past, are you angry? Why should she not prefer a duke? Perhaps he is quite a nice one, and you may be certain she felt at once, the very instant, when you left off caring for her. About such things it is as difficult for a woman to be mistaken as it is for a barometer to be hoodwinked in matters meteorologic. It was that, and never the duke, that first influenced her. I am as sure of it as if I could see into her heart. Of course she loved you. But no girl with a spark of decency would cling on to a reluctant lover. What an exceedingly poor thing in girls she would be who did. I can't tell you how much ashamed I am of that sort of girl, the girl who clings, who follows, who laments,—as if the world, the splendid, amazing world, were empty of everything but one single man, and there were no sun shining, no birds singing, no winds blowing, no hills to climb, no trees to sit under, no books to read, no friends to be with, no work to do, no heaven to go to. I feel now for the first time that I would like to know Miss Cheriton. But it is really almost impossibly difficult to write this letter; each thing I say seems something I had better not have said. Write to me about your troubles as often as you feel it helps you, and believe that I do most heartily sympathize with you both, but don't mind, and forgive me, if my answers are not satisfactory. I am unpracticed and ill at ease, clumsy, limited, in this matter of frank writing about feelings, a matter in which you so far surpass me. But I am always most sincerely your friend,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
L
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—It's not much use for the absent to send bland advice, to exhort to peace and putting aside of anger, when they have only general principles to go on. You know more about Miss Cheriton than I do, and I am obliged to believe you when you tell me you have every reason to be bitter. But I can make few comments. My mouth is practically shut. Only, as you told me you long ago left off caring for her, the smart you are feeling now must be, it seems to me, simply the smart of wounded vanity, and for that I'm afraid I have no soothing lotion ready. Also I am bound to say that I think she was quite right to give you up once she was sure you no longer loved her. I am all for giving up, for getting rid of things grown rotten before it is too late, and the one less bright spot I see on her otherwise correct conduct is that she did not do it sooner. Don't think me hard, dear friend. If I were your mother I would blindly yearn over my boy. As it is, you must forgive my unfortunate trick of seeing plainly. I wish things would look more adorned to me, less palpably obvious and ungarnished. These tiresome eyes of mine have often made me angry. I would so much like to sympathize wholly with you now, to be able to be indignant with Miss Cheriton, call her a minx, say she is heartless, be ready with all sorts of healing balms and syrups for you, poor boy in the clutches of a cruel annoyance. But I can't. If you could love her again and make it up, that indeed would be a happy thing. As it is—and your letter sets all hopes of the sort aside once and for ever—you have had an escape; for if she had not given you up I don't suppose you would have given her up—I don't suppose that is a thing one often does. You would have married her, and then heaven knows what would have become of your unfortunate soul.