Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/991



HE was a lady of infinite sentiment—she would have told you so herself—sentiment that had kept her perilously young, as a wise friend put it, even if it had left the outward trace of lines on her fair face, and a certain wandering habit of the eye that made ever for discreet adventure.

Heretofore indiscretion had been impossible. Bulwarked by the facts of a Brahmin position, a conscience inherited with the Severn nose and developed along the same straight line, and a certain fastidiousness that swung instinctively to the mental rather than the emotional side of an equation, she had, up to her thirty-ninth birthday, kept within the well-ordered bounds of her own limitations. Not that she failed to fondle and cosset this fundamental sensibility; she was too aware of the quality and too proud of its existence to neglect it; but she had somewhat timidly recognized that action lay outside her grasp, and had turned with a delicate enthusiasm to appreciation as her field, fancying that in the recognition of beauty—the picture, the poem, the symphony—coupled with a more unconscious attention to the painter, the poet, the musician, she was giving free play to her nature. The effect she produced was gratifying. She was gracious, eager, sympathetic. She grew cunning in the use of a phrase; her quick ear caught the salience of a question; the answer flew back with a tint of its own. She refined everything that came to her; in an age of carelessness and wide speaking, a vast distinction. She became oracular, indefinable, precious; the isolation of her situation appealed; her wealth and her position allured, and, in short, she found herself a personage.

She lived, as it were, in a conservatory of the emotions; the air she breathed—soft and perfumed—bore no relation to the wind that blew outside. No sun blinded the eyes that saw only in shadowed reaches. She was serene, happy, content. But one day something happened—just after this same thirty-ninth birthday; whether by accident or design, whether nature, tired of husks, turned greedily to food, or the artistic sense, groping vaguely for a new emotion, clutched, by mistake, reality,—we shall never know. At all events Joanna Severn found herself in love.

Mrs. McTavish, who happened to be the wise friend in the case and a sister as well, twenty years older and a century more knowing, short, stout, aggressive, had drawn a chair to the couch on which Miss Severn lay, pathetic in white draperies, her face hidden in the cushions. One large jewelled hand rested heavily, yet with a certain kindness, on the younger woman's slender shoulder, and a palm-leaf fan—for it was a sultry May and she had hurried from the country—beat in her incisive words.

"My dear child," she was saying, "I haven't the heart to scold you, and I am too much concerned to laugh, though it is really ridiculous. You ought to see it yourself, Nanna; the whole thing is out of keeping! Why in the world couldn't you have gone on in your nice, happy way—happy for you, that is—you know I've never denied it would bore me to death—instead of suddenly letting it all go for naught and starting afresh on a new plan—by that I mean falling in love with Harry Doane like—a schoolgirl?"

Miss Severn gave no sign.

"I suppose you'll say that it is perfectly natural, this falling in love at forty—though it seems rather uncanny to me—and if it had been Judge Howard or John Temple or somebody like that who was suitable and established—I won't speak of money, because you've really enough yourself, thanks to Aunt Paterson—I should bow my head piously and order a gown in peace; but this boy—why, Nanna, it's absurd." She took