Into her loneliness, into her childless solitude, into the hardness, cynicism, and barren emptiness of her latter years, a young girl had stepped from nowhere, and she had suddenly filled her whole life with the swift enchantment of love.
A word or two, a smile, the magic of two arms upon her bony shoulders, the shy touch of youthful lips--these were the very simple ingredients which apparently had transmuted the brass and tinsel and moral squalor of Aunt Hannah's life into charming reality.
From sudden tenderness to grim love, to jealous, watchful, passionate adoration--these were the steps Mrs. Hammerton had taken in the brief interval of time that had elapsed since she had first seen Jacqueline.
Into the clear, truthful eyes she had looked, and had seen within only an honest mind and a clean young soul. Wisdom, too, only lacking in experience, she divined there; and less of wisdom than of intelligence; and less of that than of courage. And it all was so clear, so perfectly apparent to the cold and experienced scrutiny of the woman of the world, that, for a while, she could not entirely believe what she understood at the first glance.
When she _was_ convinced, she surrendered. And never before in all her unbelieving, ironical, and material career had she experienced such a thrill of overwhelming delight as when, that evening at Silverwood, Jacqueline had drawn her head down and had touched her dry forehead with warm, young lips.
Everything about the girl fascinated her--her independence and courage; her adorable bashfulness in matters where experience had made others callous--in such little things, for example, as the response to an invitation, the meeting with fashionable strangers--but it was only the nice, friendly, and thoroughbred shyness of inexperience, not the awkwardness of under-breeding or of that meaner vanity called self-consciousness.
Poor herself, predatory, clever, hard as nails, her beady eyes ever alert for the main chance, she felt for the first time in her life the real bitterness of comparative poverty--which is the inability to give where one loves.
She had no illusions; she knew that what she had to offer the girl would soon pall; that Jacqueline would choose her own friends among the sane and simple and sincere, irrespective of social and worldly considerations; that no glitter, no sham, no tinsel could permanently hold her attention; no lesser ambition seduce her; no folly ever awake her laughter more than once. What the girl saw she would understand; and, in future, she would choose for herself what she cared to see and know of a new world now gradually opening before her.