Page:The Blind Bow-Boy (IA blindbowboy00vanv).pdf/172

 stincts, actually follows them; not the way I do, consciously and scrupulously, after years of trying to do something else, but involuntarily, automatically, and she has done so from birth, I should imagine. . . . I have had great fun teaching her how to dress, how to walk, how to speak, not too apparently; just a hint here and a hint there, which she accepts and takes advantage of, makes her own, so to speak, only too greedily. She is a born duchess, natural like a duchess—never alarmed lest she be doing something that others will consider wrong or in bad taste—and, consequently, an aristocrat, entirely free from vulgarity. For you know it is my belief that only those are vulgar who make pretensions to be what they are not. Perhaps you would consider her vulgar. Some day, it is entirely possible, I may consider her vulgar myself. I can see her in the future, driving past me without bowing, when she reaches a sncial station in life which she regards as higher than mine. At present, she is only concerned with love, but she will doubtless go beyond that. She will be disappointed and disillusioned by love, as all of us are some time or other, and she will probably marry a rich man and live unhappily ever after, because, au fond, she is an animal, and she will only be happy so long as she lives like an animal, naturally and a little libidinously. She is just through with Bunny, who adores her.

And that brings me to Paul, who is the only person I never really worry about. Paul is so good and kind and amusing and helpless and lucky. At present, he is being taken care of by a rich and eccentric old gentleman, who has put his son in Paul's charge, for a new kind of education. Harold Prewett—that is the boy's awful name—is, I should imagine, undergoing a course in worldliness. His