As I have said, an engaging young man, and interesting. I wondered what he and life would make of one another, when they became better acquainted. Meanwhile our intimacy increased apace.
Human nature is, and apparently always has been, prone to poke fun at newly acquired greatness; I suppose that it hangs on the person stiffly, like a frock coat fresh from the tailor’s. If Lady Dundrannan wore her dignity and power rather consciously, she also wore them well. She made an imposing figure in her mourning; but her stateliness was pleasantly and variously tempered to suit the company in which she found herself. For Aunt Bertha and Sir Paget there was an infusion of the daughterly; for Captain Godfrey of the elder-sisterly. I myself still found in her that piquant directness of approach which, in an earlier moment of temerity, I have ventured to call her impudence; it seasoned and animated her grandeur. She was, behind her dignity, mockingly confidential; she shared a half-hidden joke with me. She was naturally impelled to share it, if there were anybody with whom she could; it was to her the spice of the situation. Not the situation itself, of course; that was to her entirely serious and all important; she was attached to Waldo with all her limpet tenacity, with all her solidity of purpose, with all the tenderness, moreover, of which her heart was capable; finally, with an intensity of straight downright passion, of which I know by hearsay, but should hardly have divined from her own demeanor. But the joke, though not the situation itself, was a lively element in it. She could not share it with Waldo, or Aunt Bertha, or Sir Paget; nor would she share it with young Godfrey Frost, since it hardly became the status of an elder sister. But she could and did share it with me. The joke, of course, was Lucinda.
It would have been a still better joke, had she known all that I knew about Madame Valdez, or Donna Lucinda Valdez, or Madame Chose’s needlewoman; she might not have been so ready to share it with me, had she known that I knew about the girl on the cliffs, passionately, shamefully sobbing in wounded love, pride, and spite. As matters stood to her knowledge, the joke was good enough, and yet fit to share. For here was she—the uninvited skeleton at the abortive feast—triumphant, in possession of the field, awaiting in secure serenity the fruition of her hopes. And so placed, moreover, that the attainment of her object involved no stooping; a queen bowing acquiescence from her throne is not said to stoop. Yes, here she was; here she was, with a vengeance; and—where was Lucinda?