Chapter XXV

Viola Egerton was as interested in life as a well-cared for kitten. She did not want to get to the end of her ball of wool; but she loved tangling it up.

She wanted to destroy a little, tease a little, explore a great deal, and play imaginary games in an imaginary jungle, without being too much interfered with by reality. She chased her own tail with ardour, and she thought, when she had succeeded in catching it, she would have done something very handsome.

She did not wish to be too different from other people. Viola was afraid of the spark of imagination which pushed her beyond the hedges of her upbringing, and she was even more afraid of the tides of young generosity which threatened to make her ridiculous by their intensity.

She didn’t want to make people think she was tiresome and clever any more than that she was innocent and dull. Above everything she wanted to be considered modern; to be like some of the girls she knew—audacious, a little hard, without continuity, and knowing rapidly and thoroughly what they wanted.

These young people went their own way and were not easily upset.

Viola Egerton knew that she did not possess these qualities. She wavered even over what she wanted, her judgment slid away from application, and more often than not she went other people’s way, because she liked pleasing them better than she liked pleasing herself.

Above all, she liked to please her mother. Mrs. Egerton was as charming when she was pleased as a warm day in spring, and she was as inclement as the edge of an east wind when people were careless, or wilful enough to displease her.

She had been an indulgent mother, but there had always been something behind her indulgence which could not be trifled with. She let her two children do what they liked after she had chosen it.

Harry never found this out. When his mother had moulded him into the precise form she thought a young man of his station should present, she let him go on at his own momentum, and Harry went on, serenely, selfishly, and above all safely, under the impression that he was exercising his own free will.

But Viola had qualms. She had recognised even as a child that when her heart was set upon an inconvenient mongrel puppy, her mother had instantly presented her with a magnificent wax doll; and it had not been precisely the same thing to her.

But she only once openly defied her mother. She wanted to read _Ann Veronica_, every one was saying that it was a dreadful book and ought never to be read by young girls. Almost every girl in Viola’s set read it, and most of them thought they were potential Ann Veronicas, though perhaps more intelligent. Mrs. Egerton said when she saw it in Viola’s hands, ‘Oh, that tiresome book. I shouldn’t bother about it——’ and _Ann Veronica_ mysteriously disappeared, a sapphire blue leather bound volume of _An English Woman’s Love Letters_ taking its place. Viola went out, bought another copy of _Ann Veronica_, read it with flaming cheeks and an uneven heart, and took it to her mother. ‘I wanted to read it after all,’ she said defiantly, ‘and I went and bought it.’

Mrs. Egerton said, ‘Did you, darling? What a pity. There is a copy somewhere in the house. I’m afraid it must have bored you dreadfully.’

The worst of it was that Viola couldn’t feel like Ann Veronica. Nobody defied her to go to balls; on the contrary, they brought round padded motors and took her.

Neither of her parents were ever rude to her, or ordered her about, and it is much more difficult to rebel against velvet than against violence.

As soon as Viola’s education was finished, her mother said to her, ‘Dearest, you’re the greatest friend I have in the world. It would break my heart if, because we’re two grown up women in one house. We didn’t get on.

‘I purpose to share all my pleasures with you and all my confidence—and whatever you choose to tell me in return shall be kept secret. We will talk over all you want to do, so that I shan’t make any mistakes.’

They did talk it over, and most of Viola’s inspirations evaporated; but on the whole what replaced them was more inspiring still. Mrs. Egerton was as good as her word; she gave her daughter her confidence; that is to say, she told her what she thought it would be good for her to know, and she made it extremely amusing.

Other girls in Viola’s set went out more alone and were tasting the delights of new-won social freedom. Viola was anxious to reproduce their liberty in her own life, but when it came to the point, Mrs. Egerton raised her charming eyebrows, and said with laughing, experienced eyes,—

‘But you don’t want to get kissed by young men in cabs, do you, darling?’

And Viola wasn’t quite modern enough to say that she did. She could only stammer and grow red, and look silly, and decide that no liberty was worth having at the price of having to meet her mother’s amused wise eyes, while she was using it.

Viola had with acuteness, the sensitiveness of the untried. No young girl can explain easily that she wants to learn what older women know. She wishes to appear to know already. She wishes not to know exactly, but to be possessed of the adroitness which comes with knowledge; above all she wishes to escape being watched while she is finding out.

Viola, more sensitive than most, made a swift retreat into her ignorance.

She was allowed plenty of friends of her own age, but her mother was always her most intimate companion, she was like an enchanting elder sister. She laughed at Viola very little, and never before any one else, and she gave her a sense of enormous social ease.

Her wisdom and experience were like skilful tools, ready to slip into her daughter’s nervous hands at every crisis.

Mrs. Egerton never used anything she possessed against Viola; her wit, her knowledge of the world, even her still splendid beauty—were not rivals to her daughter’s gifts—they were always reinforcements.

She had been a noted beauty in her day, and no one would have known that it was over, if she had not so placidly asserted it. Only Mrs. Egerton herself knew that her placidity and her renunciation were but the cloak of an ambition—as bitter as salt, and as hot as flame.

She had failed to do what she wanted with her own life, but she had determined to do it with her daughter’s.

Harry was perfectly useless. He would never give his mother any trouble; he was her husband over again, a decent, reliable, pleasant fellow, without a leader’s eyes or hands.

He would not lose money, and when he died (which would probably be not before eighty) he would never be heard of again.

Mrs. Egerton had wanted power and a great name. She had believed at eighteen that Tom Egerton, who was very handsome and had just won a fortune out of a peculiarly brilliant stroke of business, was capable of presenting her with what she wanted.

He couldn’t become an ambassador because he was not a linguist, but he might, if carefully run, become anything else. He talked a great deal and men listened to him; he almost always said what the men of his own class were thinking—and he never said what they weren’t. Unfortunately, Tom’s shipping deal had really been the work of a common young under-manager, whom the firm had to get rid of, because he wanted to be made a director and had no capital beyond his brains.

Tom never did anything brilliant afterwards, but he went on making a good deal of money regularly and thinking that it was, on the whole, due to him that the money was made.

He did not realise that money follows money as duck follows duck, and his increasing fortune looked very like brains—coming in, in large quantities, fairly easily, and not going out again, because he always had the sense not to do anything silly with it.

Tom couldn’t see what more his wife wanted. He was very much in love with her, and for the first five years of their married life he met her efforts to rouse him into political leadership, by kindred efforts of his own. He puffed himself out like the frog who wanted to be thought a bullock, but he had just enough commonsense to stop in time to prevent any serious explosion. If a command of platitude, and a modest sense of self-importance were enough to have made Tom a Cabinet Minister, there is no doubt he would have become one. He believed in himself and he believed in all the causes which support such a self, but he wasn’t as a speaker, infectious.

He tried twice for a seat, failed with a too obvious majority against him, and retired from public life with the knowledge that his wife thought him a fool.

He was not the type of man who can go on being in love with a woman who thinks him a fool; but he always admired her, and he never did anything at all desperate.

He liked his home, his children and his business; he managed his cellars excellently and was a delightful host.

What he did with his private life was his own affair; he could afford discretion.

Mrs. Egerton never failed to be perfectly polite to her husband, and perfectly indifferent to him. She spent a great deal of money, but it was thoroughly well spent; and her conduct was irreproachable.

She often used to say with her wistful, two-edged smile, ‘I am the Early Victorian wife and mother, you know. I have no life outside my poor little home.’

They had a house in Grosvenor Square and one in the country.

No trainer ever studied a prospective favourite for the Derby with more watchful precautionary care than Mrs. Egerton gave to her only daughter.

She played for Viola’s sensitive, imaginative heart as great men play for kingdoms; and the child loved her, responded to her, and grew very much what her mother had hoped; but Mrs. Egerton was not wholly sure of her.

What in herself was a pleasant, romantic sentiment which often led her to be very sorry for people when she could do nothing to help them, had the dangerous element of intensity in Viola. Mrs. Egerton was a well-bred woman and she never told unnecessary lies, but she did not carry conclusions when they were too heavy to be comfortable, she put them down; and there were moments when she thought Viola did not know when to let unpleasant conclusions drop. She was an inconveniently truthful child, and she was never silly in the right place.

Even Viola’s humour was more intelligent for her age than was at all advisable.

It might bring quite suitable young men up too short.

But these were faults of youth, and she was too lovely not to be easily forgiven.

Viola had not inherited her mother’s splendid regularity of features, but she had got her clear olive skin, the beauty of the lines of her small head superbly carried, the delicate curve of her chin, and eyebrows which had the fine, firm lightness of a butterfly’s wings. The eyes beneath them were not as brilliant as Mrs. Egerton’s; they were a shade darker and their expression was tentative and candid. Viola hadn’t anything to hide, and she had a great deal to learn. Men thought them charming eyes.

She was much smaller than her mother; nature had finished her off with the same attention to detail; her hands were like white pointed flowers, her feet and ankles had never needed the implacable care with which her mother had treated them.

Mrs. Egerton left nothing in her daughter’s appearance to chance or nature. She despised people who leave well alone, when with a little attention to detail they could make it better.

No girl in London was as well turned out as Viola Egerton. She was as actually strong, and as fragile looking, as a briar rose. She could have stood any exposure, but she looked as if she had never been exposed. She did not have freckles, colds or nerves.

Viola herself was perfectly unconscious of the processes applied to her. She accepted cold cream for her skin, drank barley water when she would have preferred tea, and enjoyed regular and delightful exercise without thinking about these practices. She supposed she was clean and tidy like everybody else.

Viola never discovered that she was as much a work of art as one of Leonardo’s faintly smiling women; nor that secretly in her mother’s mind there was the same high price attached to her.

It was true that a casual glance from a pair of masculine eyes—and all Mrs. Egerton’s care might be thrown away. The point of Viola’s life must be marriage, and after she had made her beautiful, Mrs. Egerton knew that she still had the harder task in front of her, of making her beauty safe.

Fortunately she had already avoided the worst pitfalls. Viola showed no genius. She had not even any very strong tastes.

She had had the best teachers in Europe, and she sang in a perfectly trained, sweet, small voice, and danced nearly as well as she had been taught. She took to perfection in dress as naturally as a bee to lavender. She hadn’t much time for reading, and read what was in the house.

All the slighter dangers of the roused intellect had been successfully escaped, but there was always the more acute danger of personal friends. Mrs. Egerton had her house full of the right kind of men, and Viola had talked to them from childhood without apparent supervision. The Egertons received as many other women as Mrs. Egerton considered necessary. She did not like other women, but when they had to be there they were there; and she was perfectly charming to Viola’s girl friends.

With infinite skill and precaution she managed to prevent any deep intimacy between Viola and these young persons.

When Viola showed too marked an inclination for ‘dear Maud’ she found herself more and more thrown with ‘dear Edith,’ and if ‘dear Edith’ threatened to be at all tiresome, she faded without any apparent reason into ‘dear Mabel.’

The Suffrage question was for a time a direct menace, but Mrs. Egerton handled it from the first with supreme skill. She behaved as if the women who wanted a vote suffered from the same serious disability to attract which is supposed to haunt the unmarried. Attractive women did not need to clamour for either a vote or a husband. What they wanted happened without any legal stir. She refused to take the subject seriously. ‘I know, dear,’ she said to Viola. ‘Suffragettes are the most dreadful nuisance, and anti-Suffragettes are worse. I think we won’t let people bore us over them.’ And she made a rule that no discussion on the question should ever be allowed in her house.

Viola felt indefinably relieved by the shelving of this painful subject. She wanted to think the vote didn’t matter, because she knew that if it did she, too, ought to go white-faced and trembling to noisy meetings, and walk with tired feet over the London streets. She even wondered whether the whole question wasn’t so extreme as to make law-breaking less an enormity than some of the laws hastily devised against it. At a word of positive opposition she would have hoisted her colours and known what they were.

But Mrs. Egerton said she thought that women would probably get the vote in the end, if enough of them wanted it sufficiently, and could have got it long ago if half a dozen really charming women hadn’t been able to get a great deal more without bothering. But what these poor dears who were making such a fuss didn’t realise was that a vote in itself was really worth nothing at all, except perhaps to quite poor people. It took the edge off sacrifice to think that if you gave everything you had, and did everything you didn’t want to do, you would get nothing at all for it.

The Egertons went to Egypt for the worst winter, and in the summer Viola was nineteen and received her first proposal. It was a most satisfactory offer: ten thousand a year and a baronetcy of a quite respectable date.

Mrs. Egerton was not a vulgar woman, but she felt the same secret thrill of triumph with which a careful cat greets its kitten’s first mouse.

She took Viola’s refusal perfectly calmly. It was a very fine mouse, but she had not meant it to be final.

Sir Edgar Milton was an excellent match; but he wasn’t anything else. He had an engaging manner and the brains of a healthy schoolboy of fifteen. He wanted Viola as if she was cake, and cried when she refused him.

Viola cried as well; she cried a great deal too much; it even gave her mother a momentary pang of uneasiness as to whether a kitten of so remorseful a type would make a satisfactory mouser?

Viola’s next refusal was a man of the world. Bertram Montague had had a career with women, and a more inspiring and less erratic career in the House. He was the kind of man who may still, if it is made reasonably easy, do something remarkable.

Viola was flattered by his attentions and a little afraid of him. He was very clever with her, and she nearly accepted him because he made it seem as if there was no alternative. But something in his eyes at the last moment made her feel like a creature close to a trap. She ran away from him literally, and was very much ashamed of herself afterwards.

She didn’t cry after that refusal, but she felt very much relieved.

Mrs. Egerton thought two refusals were enough. She had a long, quiet talk with Viola, and she made her feel, without hurting her feelings, that to go on refusing nice, kind men, who would make perfectly good husbands, wouldn’t be considerate or even very well-bred.

‘Of course there’s no reason in the world why you should marry, my pet,’ she said tranquilly. ‘I never can see why to be an old maid should always seem a little ridiculous and left out, particularly as such very plain women marry, and sometimes such extremely pretty ones don’t; but if you’ve really made up your mind to avoid marriage, it would be kinder, wouldn’t it, to a little more avoid men?’

Mrs. Egerton didn’t point out how, in a house that was practically always full of them, they were to be avoided. She only smiled caressingly and said, ‘There is nothing in the world your father and I want less than to get rid of you, dearest.’

Viola knew that she had an ideal home, but she wanted sometime or other to get out of it, and of course she didn’t want to be unkind.

So when the third applicant came she accepted him. He was young, handsome, intelligent, and extravagantly in love with her. Viola really rather wanted to accept him. She thought it would be nice to go off alone together. It was always exciting when he came, and dull when he went.

She could do whatever she liked with him.

It was like owning a very intelligent dog who picks up tricks in a flash and never snaps at his biscuit till you say the word.

It was true that Viola was not sure that she wanted to marry him, but then she wasn’t sure that she wanted to marry any one, she was only sure that she didn’t want not to be married at all.

This man was the kind of husband she had always meant to have. He was cleverer than she was; he knew all about politics and had real books she had never heard of. He held his own easily in the society of much older men.

He had a pleasant wit and the air of never being left behind. He, too, would give Viola that reassuring sense of social security which her mother gave her.

Perhaps he would give her more, and reassure her sometimes wondering sense of moral questions, a little overlooked in the pressure of daily life.

But though he was the kind of man Viola wanted, he wasn’t the man himself. Nothing in her heart but pity responded to his pleading, burning eyes. Unfortunately she had a great deal of pity, and she did not know that pity can be cruel when it is given instead of love.

Mrs. Egerton comforted her by assuring Viola that love came gradually with nice women, and that the nicer they were the more gradually it came.

Her father said with even more than his usual confidence in his own judgment, ‘What I like about him, my darling, is he’s all right. You’ve chosen a white man.’ His future son-in-law was the son of his co-director.

Harry kissed her and said she was a lucky girl, and he hoped she’d invite him to Scotland and make her husband buy a yacht. A marriage founded on these simple principles couldn’t, in Harry’s eyes, go very far wrong.

Viola put her hand on his shoulder and said thoughtfully, ‘Harry, I wish I knew more about men,’ and Harry chuckled and said, ‘You will, old girl, you will,’ but of course what Viola had meant was _first_.

No one had tried to influence her about her engagement. She wasn’t being deceived or hoodwinked, no essential fact was kept from her.

She knew all about love; the only thing she had not had much opportunity of learning anything about was life.