CHAPTER XIII.

_LESSONS IN WORLD-WISDOM._

With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter's heart; They were dangerous guides, the feelings: she herself was not exempt.

"Well, Adele, what have you done with Arthur?"

The speaker was a comely, elderly lady who had sailed, in the full magnificence of brocade and lace, into the dining-room of her handsome house. A substantial lunch was on the table, an obsequious butler was in waiting, a fair-haired girl was seated in one of the arm-chairs, her head resting on her hand.

At the sound of her mother's voice she looked up. "Dropped him _en route_, mamma," she said pleasantly.

"And why did you not bring him in?"

"He had business, I believe, in town."

"Business, indeed! You should be his first business. Mark my words, Adele--though it seems impossible to instill worldly wisdom into _your_ brain--boys are volatile and require keeping in hand. A girl ought to be tolerably _exigeante_ if she would either make or keep a conquest, especially when a boy of Arthur's age and character is in question." Then to the butler: "Take the covers, James; after that you can go down stairs. Miss Churchill and I will wait upon ourselves to-day. One always forgets James," she continued as he retired, "he is so quiet and unobtrusive; but then--faithful creature!--I feel very sure _he_ could make no mischief of anything he hears."

"I wish, all the same, mamma," said Adele rather fretfully, "that you would not always talk of my affairs and Arthur's before the servants. Burton, James, Elizabeth, it seems not to matter at all before which of them you speak."

"My dear Adele, you are a child. These people know your character and mine, and are pretty well acquainted with all our affairs, without our taking the trouble of informing them. I wonder who leaves Arthur's letters about sometimes."

"Arthur's letters?" Adele shrugged her shoulders almost imperceptibly. "All the world is at liberty to see them."

"There it is again, my dear; we return to the subject we were discussing a few minutes ago. When do you intend to make a lover of your cousin? You know you cannot possibly remain in this brother-and-sisterly stage. You must give him one or two lessons or he'll slip through your fingers yet."

Adele was accustomed to her mother's style of conversation, so it did not particularly shock her; she only smiled rather strangely: "Arthur wants no lessons from _me_, mamma."

"Ah! then you are further advanced than I thought; but really, Adele, you have been brought up so simply I wonder sometimes if you know at all what it means to have a lover. _I_ was very different with _my_ first lover, a cousin too, though we didn't marry after all. A very good thing; he was poor and idle: I should have been a wretched woman. Now, Arthur is well off, and not at all extravagant; no strong tastes either; just the kind of man whom a woman can mould to her will; but then she must know how, and I fear, Adele, you are a sad baby in these matters."

"It's not for want of instruction, mamma," said Adele rather maliciously.

But the good-natured Mrs. Churchill scarcely saw the point of her daughter's satire. "You are right," she said. "I have done my very best to instill into your mind some knowledge of the world you live in, Adele. I considered it a duty," she sighed faintly. "Had your poor father been alive, the case might have been different. Women who are thrown on their own resources, like you and me, my child, _must_ be equal to the task of taking care of themselves."

It was a task in which, apparently, Mrs. Churchill had never failed: she did not certainly look the worse for care and anxiety. She pressed her handkerchief to her eyes--a habit, simply, for not the faintest moisture was there to remove, but to mention the departed Mr. Churchill without paying this tribute of regard to his dear memory would have been most unseemly. A pause for this trivial operation then Mrs. Churchill continued: "I have wished for some time to speak to you about this matter, Adele. I have managed for you so far; I can do so no further."

The last words seemed to astonish the young girl. She looked up: "_You_ have managed, mamma? What _can_ you mean?"

"Why, little goose! to whom do you think you owe your lover? Not to Arthur, certainly. He would have gone on droning about the house for ever, without the slightest consideration for your feelings or mine, engrossing you and shutting out others. I brought him to book and showed him his duty." (The fond mother showed her white teeth at the remembrance.) "When they were all laying themselves out to entrap him, too! Lady Lacy and her pretty nieces, Mrs. Campbell and her ugly daughters; even gaunt Mr. Godolphin, with that extensive motherless child of his. Ha! ha! it was _too_ good!"

But Adele did not seem to join in her mother's mirth. She had dropped her knife and fork in a kind of despair, while a sudden pallor, quickly succeeded by a vivid flush, showed her distress.

"Good gracious, child! what is wrong?" cried her mother.

Her answer was given through a flood of tears: "Oh, mamma! mamma! how could you? And I was so happy, and I thought he liked me a little--only a very little--and that, in spite of everything, it might be all right some day? Now--now--"

The last part of the sentence was lost in the folds of her pocket-handkerchief.

Poor Adele was rather upset with the events of the morning, following as they did upon the knowledge of what she looked upon as Arthur's desertion; to hear now that even their engagement, in which she had rejoiced as a proof of his real affection for her, as a kind of pledge for his return, was due not to his own unbiassed freedom of choice, but to her mother's machinations,--this was a kind of finishing-stroke to her misfortunes. She continued to sob, somewhat to her mother's annoyance.

"What a perfect baby you are still, Adele!" she said; "it's well, after all, that I sent James out of the room. Come, dry up your eyes, and tell me what is the meaning of this. To say that anything I told you just now could have caused such an outburst is perfectly absurd. What has Arthur been saying or doing? _I_ shall have to take him in hand."

Adele lifted up her glistening eyes and carmine cheeks from the grateful shade of her pocket-handkerchief. "You must do nothing of the kind, mamma," she said indignantly--she was quite unlike herself for the moment--"you have done mischief enough already."

"Mischief enough!" Mrs. Churchill's glass paused half-way between the table and her lips; she was absolutely petrified with surprise. Adele was an only daughter, and something of a spoilt child; but hitherto she had always been gentle and obedient, for she was naturally docile; then she and her mother had such different tastes that their wills very seldom clashed. This vigorous assertion of personality was a new thing, and for the moment clever, good-natured Mrs. Churchill, with all the knowledge of human nature upon which she plumed herself, scarcely knew how to treat it.

"This is what comes of romantic notions," she said severely. "I always thought the poetry-reading bad; if this kind of thing goes on I shall have to put a stop to it altogether. Now-a-days it seems to be the idea for young ladies and gentlemen to fall desperately in love, indulge in pretty poetic love-scenes and do a little wasting away for the benefit of one another. I suppose something of this has got into your silly little head, Adele. You and Arthur should have been moved spontaneously to fall into one another's arms, like the hero and heroine of a play. Bah, child! there's a behind-the-scenes to life as well as the stage, and lovers are generally only puppets; they _act_ the drama and other people pull the strings. Don't look so very woebegone: I tell you more than half the marriages in the world would never have taken place without some such helping hand as mine. You ought to be grateful instead of indignant."

Adele had dried her eyes. She was rather ashamed of her outburst; she ought to have known long ago that her mother's matter-of-fact nature and keen common sense would never chime in with her own ultra-refined, high-flown notions of life and action; and hers, after all, were the ideas of a young girl to whom the great world was still a land of visions and dreams; her mother's were those of a woman who knew something of the world, who had passed through very varied experiences, who, with all her good-nature--for Mrs. Churchill was what might have been called a comfortable matron--had grown a little hard and unsympathetic by reason of the rubs and raps she had encountered, making some of her fine gold dim.

"We need not discuss the matter," said Adele; "what is done _is_ done, and after all perhaps it makes very little difference in the end. I am sorry if I was rude to you, mamma, as no doubt you do what you think best for me; but in these matters I do wish that you would let me have _some_ voice. If I had known Arthur's proposal was brought about by you, I should have certainly refused him without any hesitation."

"So I supposed, my dear; therefore I was wise enough not to let either of the wise young people see my hand. Why, you romantic child! without me you would soon float on to misery. Grand notions are all very well in their way, but they can scarcely carry one through the world with any satisfaction to one's self, Adele; you'll find that out sooner or later. But come, enough of worldly wisdom for one day. Wash your eyes and make yourself look nice; I want you to pay some visits with me this afternoon."

Poor little Adele! she obeyed, but it was with a languid step. A few days before her life had been all sunshine; her love, her pleasant tastes, her bright hopes--everything had combined to make her happy; now, a change seemed impending--unreality was around her; what she had thought to be a firm standing-point turned out only shifting quicksands; the love was departing, and the revelation of how it had come robbed its past of all charm; even her pleasant tastes seemed deceptive, for if her mother's views of life were correct, farewell to the _Faerie Queene_, farewell to poetic imagery: it was the mirage that betrays the unwary soul, and in spite of the poet's vision the sad knowledge which that day's glimpse of another life had brought showed too clearly that beauty and joy were only too often divorced.

Adele appeared in the drawing-room in the course of half an hour dressed in pale silk, a rose-colored bonnet crowning her fair hair and pink-tinted gloves on her small hands, but nothing for the moment could remove the gloomy veil through which she viewed life and its surroundings.

Her mother was obliged to reprove her a little sharply. "My dear Adele," she said as they left one of the houses to which they had been bound, "you must really make an effort to be more agreeable and sprightly; melancholy does not suit you. Dark girls, with chiselled features and creamy complexions, may be allowed to move through society like beautiful mutes, but with golden hair and bright blue eyes like yours vivacity, let me tell you, is the only role. Sulking makes you look absolutely plain."

No girl likes to look "absolutely plain," and although Adele loudly disclaimed any sort of regard for what would or would not suit her style, she made an effort, and that evening Arthur, who came back, pale and exhausted, from the parting scene at the station, and who looked to Adele for sympathy, was rather hurt with what he was pleased to term her frivolity. Young men are so selfish!

Mrs. Churchill saw the little by-play--Adele's forced gayety, Arthur's sentimental-looking eyes following her inquiringly, and somewhat reproachfully, round the room. She congratulated herself on the success of her lesson.