He was in the army, but left it because it was too expensive. He went out to the Colonies--South Africa--as A.D.C. He was there now.
Mrs. Summer said he would never marry anyone else. He had never looked at anyone else. He was supposed, at one time, to have liked an Italian lady, but that was all nonsense.
"You don't believe me," she said. "But I promise you it's true. He is that kind of man--terribly faithful; faithful and constant. You see, Jean isn't an ordinary girl. If one once loved her it would be difficult to love anyone else. She was just the same when he knew her as she is now."
"She is just as beautiful now, at least she could be----"
"Yes, if someone thought so. Telling wouldn't be necessary."
Mrs. Summer said it was extremely unlikely she would ever meet anyone abroad who would be the kind of man.
I said I thought life was a play in which every entrance and exit was arranged beforehand, and the momentous entrance and the _scène à faire_ might quite as well happen at Haréville as anywhere else.
Mrs. Summer made no comment. I thought to myself: "She knows about Kranitski and doesn't want to discuss it."
"The man who marries Jean would be very lucky," she said. "Jean is--well--there is no one like her. She's more than _rare_. She's _introuvable_."
I said that Rudd thought she would never marry anyone.
"Perhaps not," she said, "but if Mr. Rudd is right about her he will be right for the wrong reasons. Sometimes the people who see everything wrong _are_ right. It is very irritating."
I asked her if she thought Rudd was always wrong.
"I don't know," she said, "but he would be wrong about Jean. Wrong about you. Wrong about me. Wrong about Princess Kouragine, and wrongest of all about Netty Lennox. Perhaps his instincts as an artist _are_ right. I think people's books are sometimes written by _someone else_, a kind of planchette. All the authors I have met have been so utterly and completely wrong about everything that stared them in the face."
Yes, she liked them, but she thought they were written by a familiar spirit. She couldn't fit him into his books.
"Then," I said, "supposing he wrote a book about Miss Brandon, however wrong he might be about her, the book might turn out to be true."