The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/Maud-Evelyn/Chapter 2

by Henry James

II

And yet see what it brought forth—the beginning of which was something that, early in the autumn, I learned from poor Lavinia. He had written to her, they were still such friends; and thus it was that she knew his aunt and his cousin to have come back without him. He had stayed on—stayed much longer and travelled much further: he had been to the Italian lakes and to Venice; he was now in Paris. At this I vaguely wondered, knowing that he was always short of funds and that he must, by his uncle's beneficence, have started on the journey on a basis of expenses paid. 'Then whom has he picked up?' I asked; but feeling sorry, as soon as I had spoken, to have made Lavinia blush. It was almost as if he had picked up some improper lady, though in this case he wouldn't have told her, and it wouldn't have saved him money.

'Oh, he makes acquaintance so quickly, knows people in two minutes,' the girl said. 'And every one always wants to be nice to him.'

This was perfectly true, and I saw what she saw in it. 'Ah, my dear, he will have an immense circle ready for you!'

'Well,' she replied, 'if they do run after us I'm not likely to suppose it will ever be for me. It will be for him, and they may do to me what they like. My pleasure will be—but you'll see.' I already saw—saw at least what she supposed she herself saw: her drawing-room crowded with female fashion and her attitude angelic. 'Do you know what he said to me again before he went?' she continued.

I wondered; he had then spoken to her. 'That he will never, never marry———'

'Any one but me!' She ingenuously took me up. 'Then you knew?'

It might be. 'I guessed.'

'And don't you believe it?'

Again I hesitated. 'Yes.' Yet all this didn't tell me why she had changed colour. 'Is it a secret—whom he's with?'

'Oh no, they seem so nice. I was only struck with the way you know him—your seeing immediately that it must be a new friendship that has kept him over. It's the devotion of the Dedricks,' Lavinia said. 'He's travelling with them.'

Once more I wondered. 'Do you mean they're taking him about?'

'Yes—they've invited him.'

No, indeed, I reflected—he wasn't proud. But what I said was: 'Who in the world are the Dedricks?'

'Kind, good people whom last month he accidentally met. He was walking some Swiss pass—a long, rather stupid one, I believe, without his aunt and his cousin, who had gone round some other way and were to meet him somewhere. It came on to rain in torrents, and while he was huddling under a shelter he was overtaken by some people in a carriage who kindly made him get in. They drove him, I gather, for several hours; it began an intimacy, and they've continued to be charming to him.'

I thought a moment. 'Are they ladies?'

Her own imagination meanwhile had also strayed a little. 'I think about forty.'

'Forty ladies?'

She quickly came back. 'Oh no; I mean Mrs. Dedrick is.'

'About forty? Then Miss Dedrick———'

'There isn't any Miss Dedrick.'

'No daughter?'

'Not with them, at any rate. No one but the husband.'

I thought again. 'And how old is he?'

Lavinia followed my example. 'Well, about forty, too.'

'About forty-two?' We laughed, but 'That's all right!' I said; and so, for the time, it seemed.

He continued absent, none the less, and I saw Lavinia repeatedly, and we always talked of him, though this represented a greater concern with his affairs than I had really supposed myself committed to. I had never sought the acquaintance of his father's people, nor seen either his aunt or his cousin, so that the account given by these relatives of the circumstances of their separation reached me at last only through the girl, to whom, also,—for she knew them as little,—it had circuitously come. They considered, it appeared, the poor ladies he had started with, that he had treated them ill and thrown them over, sacrificing them selfishly to company picked up on the road—a reproach deeply resented by Lavinia, though about the company too I could see she was not much more at her ease. 'How can he help it if he's so taking?' she asked; and to be properly indignant in one quarter she had to pretend to be delighted in the other. Marmaduke was 'taking'; yet it also came out between us at last that the Dedricks must certainly be extraordinary. We had scant added evidence, for his letters stopped, and that naturally was one of our signs. I had meanwhile leisure to reflect—it was a sort of study of the human scene I always liked—on what to be taking consisted of. The upshot of my meditations, which experience has only confirmed, was that it consisted simply of itself. It was a quality implying no others. Marmaduke had no others. What indeed was his need of any?