Tramore would cover a span of life for which such an allowance of sin was small.The girl could laugh indeed now at that theory of her being dragged down.If one thing were more present to her than another it was the very desolation of their propriety.As she glanced at her companion, it sometimes seemed to her that if she had been a bad woman she would have been worse than that.There were compensations for being "cut" which Mrs.Tramore too much neglected.
The lonely old lady in Hill Street--Rose thought of her that way now--was the one person to whom she was ready to say that she would come to her on any terms.She wrote this to her three times over, and she knocked still oftener at her door.But the old lady answered no letters; if Rose had remained in Hill Street it would have been her own function to answer them; and at the door, the butler, whom the girl had known for ten years, considered her, when he told her his mistress was not at home, quite as he might have considered a young person who had come about a place and of whose eligibility he took a negative view.That was Rose's one pang, that she probably appeared rather heartless.Her aunt Julia had gone to Florence with Edith for the winter, on purpose to make her appear more so; for Miss Tramore was still the person most scandalised by her secession.Edith and she, doubtless, often talked over in Florence the destitution of the aged victim in Hill Street.Eric never came to see his sister, because, being full both of family and of personal feeling, he thought she really ought to have stayed with his grandmother.If she had had such an appurtenance all to herself she might have done what she liked with it; but he couldn't forgive such a want of consideration for anything of his.There were moments when Rose would have been ready to take her hand from the plough and insist upon reintegration, if only the fierce voice of the old house had allowed people to look her up.But she read, ever so clearly, that her grandmother had made this a question of loyalty to seventy years of virtue.Mrs.Tramore's forlornness didn't prevent her drawing-room from being a very public place, in which Rose could hear certain words reverberate: "Leave her alone; it's the only way to see how long she'll hold out." The old woman's visitors were people who didn't wish to quarrel, and the girl was conscious that if they had not let her alone--that is if they had come to her from her grandmother--she might perhaps not have held out.She had no friends quite of her own; she had not been brought up to have them, and it would not have been easy in a house which two such persons as her father and his mother divided between them.Her father disapproved of crude intimacies, and all the intimacies of youth were crude.He had married at five-and-twenty and could testify to such a truth.
Rose felt that she shared even Captain Jay with her grandmother; she had seen what HE was worth.Moreover, she had spoken to him at that last moment in Hill Street in a way which, taken with her former refusal, made it impossible that he should come near her again.She hoped he went to see his protectress: he could be a kind of substitute and administer comfort.
It so happened, however, that the day after she threw Lady Maresfield's invitation into the wastepaper basket she received a visit from a certain Mrs.Donovan, whom she had occasionally seen in Hill Street.She vaguely knew this lady for a busybody, but she was in a situation which even busybodies might alleviate.Mrs.Donovan was poor, but honest--so scrupulously honest that she was perpetually returning visits she had never received.She was always clad in weather-beaten sealskin, and had an odd air of being prepared for the worst, which was borne out by her denying that she was Irish.She was of the English Donovans.
"Dear child, won't you go out with me?" she asked.
Rose looked at her a moment and then rang the bell.She spoke of something else, without answering the question, and when the servant came she said: "Please tell Mrs.Tramore that Mrs.Donovan has come to see her.""Oh, that'll be delightful; only you mustn't tell your grandmother!"the visitor exclaimed.
"Tell her what?"
"That I come to see your mamma."
"You don't," said Rose.
"Sure I hoped you'd introduce me!" cried Mrs.Donovan, compromising herself in her embarrassment.
"It's not necessary; you knew her once."
"Indeed and I've known every one once," the visitor confessed.
Mrs.Tramore, when she came in, was charming and exactly right; she greeted Mrs.Donovan as if she had met her the week before last, giving her daughter such a new illustration of her tact that Rose again had the idea that it was no wonder "people" had liked her.The girl grudged Mrs.Donovan so fresh a morsel as a description of her mother at home, rejoicing that she would be inconvenienced by having to keep the story out of Hill Street.Her mother went away before Mrs.Donovan departed, and Rose was touched by guessing her reason--the thought that since even this circuitous personage had been moved to come, the two might, if left together, invent some remedy.Rose waited to see what Mrs.Donovan had in fact invented.
"You won't come out with me then?"
"Come out with you?"
"My daughters are married.You know I'm a lone woman.It would be an immense pleasure to me to have so charming a creature as yourself to present to the world.""I go out with my mother," said Rose, after a moment.
"Yes, but sometimes when she's not inclined?""She goes everywhere she wants to go," Rose continued, uttering the biggest fib of her life and only regretting it should be wasted on Mrs.Donovan.
"Ah, but do you go everywhere YOU want?" the lady asked sociably.
"One goes even to places one hates.Every one does that.""Oh, what I go through!" this social martyr cried.Then she laid a persuasive hand on the girl's arm."Let me show you at a few places first, and then we'll see.I'll bring them all here.""I don't think I understand you," replied Rose, though in Mrs.
