Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/173

FLICKERBRIDGE didn't keep you 'down', as we say, enough. The wonder of your colour—daub you over with grey as I might—must have come through and told the tale. She scents battle from afar—by which I mean she scents 'quaintness.' But keep her off. It's hideous, what I'm saying—but I owe it to you. I owe it to the world. She'll kill you."

"You mean I sha'n't get on with her?"

"Oh, fatally! See how I have. She's intelligent, remarkably pretty, remarkably good. And she'll adore you."

"Well then?"

"Why, that will be just how she'll do for you."

"Oh, I can hold my own!" said Miss Wenham with the head-shake of a horse making his sleigh-bells rattle in frosty air.

"Ah, but you can't hold hers! She'll rave about you. She'll write about you. You're Niagara before the first white traveller—and you know, or rather you can't know, what Niagara became after that gentleman. Addie will have discovered Niagara. She will understand you in perfection; she will feel you down to the ground; not a delicate shade of you will she lose or let anyone else lose. You'll be too weird for words, but the words will nevertheless come. You'll be too exactly the real thing and to be left too utterly just as you are, and all Addie's friends and all Addie's editors and contributors and readers will cross the Atlantic and flock to Flickerbridge, so, unanimously, universally, vociferously, to leave you. You'll be in the magazines with illustrations; you'll be in the papers with headings; you'll be everywhere with everything. You don't understand—you think you do, but you don't. Heaven forbid you should understand! That's just your beauty—your 'sleeping' beauty. But you needn't. You can take me on trust. Don't have her. Say, as a pretext, as a reason, anything in the world you like. Lie to 161