Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/277

Charles Dickens] discretion, and would never have been suspected of discomfiture had she not spoken of her daughter henceforth with suspicious effusion. Then "society" smiled and knew all about it, and felt that. Mr. Mansergh had been foolish indeed, but not immoderately, not unpardonably so. Lady Caroline was very popular and very much admired, and had her only friend's life been prolonged for a few years, until she had passed the dangerous period of youth, she might have been as worthy of esteem and affection as she was calculated to inspire admiration. But Mr. Mansergh died before his wife was twenty-three years old, and left her with a large fortune, brilliant beauty, and just sufficient knowledge of the world to enable her to detect and despise its most salient snares, but with a mind still but half educated, desultory habits, and a wholly unoccupied heart. Her grief for her husband's loss, if not poignant and torturing, was at least sincere, deep, and well founded. When he died, she had said to herself that she should never again have so true, so wise, and so constant a friend; and she was right. Life had many pleasant and some good things in store for Lady Caroline Mansergh, but such a love as that with which her husband had loved her was not among them. She acknowledged this always; the impression did not fade away with the first vehemence of grief—it lasted, and was destined to deepen. She strayed into a bad "set" before long, and to her youth and impulsiveness, with her tendency to ennui, and her sad freedom from all ties of attachment, the step from feeling that no one was so good as her husband had been, to believing that no one else was good at all, was very easy. And so Lady Caroline acquired a dangerous and demoralising trick of contempt for her fellows, which she hid under a mask of light and careless good nature indeed, and which was seriously offensive to no one, but which condemned her, nevertheless, to much interior solitude and dreariness. That she was not of the world she lived in, was due less to any exceptional elevation of sentiment than to a capricious and disdainful humour, which caused her to dismiss her associates from her thoughts after a brief scrutiny, in which their follies and foibles came into strong light, and the qualities which would have required time and patience to find out remained undiscovered.

It had occurred to Lady Caroline Mansergh, on several occasions of late, to wonder, whether she was destined ever to experience the passion called love. She had not remained ignorant of the science of flirtation up to her present time of life, but, she had not been beguiled, ever so briefly, into mistaking any of her flirtations for love. So she was accustomed to wonder wearily, when in an unusually desultory mood, whether she should ever feel that there existed in the world a human being for whom she should be willing to suffer, with whom life would be happy, without whom it would be intolerable, and whose welfare she could deliberately and practically prefer to her own. Of late she had begun to think that fate was against her in this particular. The idea of the possibility of feeling love for one of the men whom she was in the habit of meeting, was quite preposterous; she did not hold her favourite followers half so dear as Jehui, her black barb, or like them half so well as Gelert, her greyhound. Her life would, doubtless, continue to be the bright, fashionable, flimsy, careless, rather ennuyé existence it had hitherto been, and she should never know anything of the power, the pain, the engrossing influence of love. So much the better, she would think, in her more hopeful moods; it must be a narrowing kind of influence, bounding all one's horizon within such small limits, shutting up one's mortal vista with one figure.

When the Lady Caroline dismissed her maid, and resigned herself to reverie, on this night, it was not, after her accustomed fashion, to dwell in her thoughts on the dulness, staleness, flatness, and unprofitableness of the world in general, and the section of it in which she lived, in particular. She had quite a distinct subject for thought, she had a figure and a face in her fancy, a voice in her memory, which filled them wholly. What if she had been wrong, if not only love were coming to her, to fill her life with delight, and turn its weariness with purpose and meaning, but love at first sight? A ridiculous notion, entertained by schoolgirls, housemaids, novelists, and poets, but scouted by all reasonable people of the world, and "in society." She knew this, but she did not care; there was a strange delicious thrill about her heart, and in the swift flight of her thoughts she swept the beams of happy possibilities, and felt that she could, and would, and did despise society and its notions on this point.

What did she know about Walter Joyce? Absolutely nothing, but that he was young,