IT IS A COLD DAY in January, 1782. There is an echo in the air, as though the invisible had snapped its fingers; and the street musicians find their strings drawn taut, so that their fiddles sound an octave higher, with a shrill, emasculate, castrato sound not unlike the tone of a glass harmonica. London is white. There is a foundation of dirty snow, reticulated by sleet, upon which stands a burned-out edifice of trees. The sky, a half-formed cataract, shows here and there the blind blue of vision, hardened and rimed over. In Covent Garden the horses blow steam over the vegetables. Down near Blackfriars Bridge, the shores of the Thames are a similitude of asbestos and isinglass, cracked to the edges of water which looks a glossy black.

In Portman Square, Mr. Greville does not mind any of this. Being interested in little except appearances (it is why he has bought the house), Mr. Greville does not mind much of anything except being snubbed. Lacking other qualities, he has made a virtue of vertu, which has no need of heat, and is himself an object of vertu, so he seldom feels the cold—in the weather, in the world, or in anything. Mr. Greville is pettifogging, pusillanimous, pretentious and pink, but he is also the younger son of the Earl of Warwick (and thus the Honorable Charles Greville), so somehow he hangs on. He is an amateur, a dilettante, a kleinigkeitskrämer, a pococurante. Call him what you will, he has made the Grand Tour, he is much the same in all languages. He is not ill-favored, despite the affronted eyes of the perpetual diner-out: his mouth is shapely, his voice a sonorous squeak; his manner is adroit; he does have a heart, small, well-regulated, but sufficient to keep his cheeks aglow. If it fits in with his plans, he contrives to be kind; and so he takes in everyone except his betters. And Emily is not among his betters, as he himself would be the first to state.

He is reading a letter, an excellent example of the papermaker’s art, since he has provided the paper himself, but the writing, though legible, is a servant’s copperplate, too genteel to be correct, too emotive for gentility. He catches a word here and there:

He is delighted. Things have worked out to plan. He will afford her some comfort, if not much. Though he feels ambition to be vulgar, and no doubt he is right, Greville does have plans. This time they have been successful. At the cost of handing the girl a bundle of franked covers, he is now in a position to have her on the cheap. He is pleased, for though knocking up tuppence tarts in Green Park does well enough for a commoner, it is not prudent; it is not comfortable; it is not sedate; it does not satisfy. And besides, there is always the Peril to Health. So he can afford to be generous. Not only is the girl prepared to be discreet, but her mother will make an excellent gouvernante of small economies.

“My dear Emily,” he writes, and considers he is being kind, as indeed, for him, he is, and tells her she has been imprudent (she has: she is with child), and extravagant (Sir H. allowed her the use of a carriage). It is best, in emotional matters, to establish the business arrangements in writing. He says he will look after the child. He has no love of children, being one himself—he has no love of rivalry in anything, for there is the risk of failure, the no less embarrassing possibility of success—but these things are sometimes important to women, and besides (noblesse oblige) the child may just be his. He would not dream of acknowledging it, but he cannot bring himself entirely to reject it, either. He is like this in many things, which no doubt explains why he has just lost his seat in Parliament.

He has not kept his seat, but he wishes to keep Emily. Therefore he encloses money—with an adjuration not to spend it—seals the letter, and settles back to wait. He is content to wait. Indeed, poor man, he will wait his life away, patient, sly, cunning, bland, adroit, not entirely deficient in charm, but doomed always to sit at the wrong mouseholes, for the right ones have been taken up already by larger, quicker, more aggressive cats. Still, in his small way he does know how to manage a catnip mouse, and how is he to know that this time he has a catamount by the tail instead? She scarcely knows it herself.

*

She is disconsolate in Wales, where she is about to receive his letter; or rather, since it is better in this world to put all pain behind us, and since the only way to do this is to modulate present events to the past tense, endure, and hope for pleasure presently, Wales was where she was.

Indiscretion had brought her there. It was not her fault. In a world which preferred the huffy distinction of immobility, a trait imported from the imagined French, she had had the vulgarity to be born vivacious. As the country daughter of a village blacksmith, and hence trite, she could not help but be. The world was alive to her, not merely a charade, for she had seen it in color; and after you have seen the world in color, the gray ground of the English water-color school does not suffice.

Wales, however, was damned cold. The Reverend Gilpin in his works upon the Picturesque, admired that countryside but spent his winters in a comfortable parsonage, whereas Emily was imbedded in what could scarcely be called a crofter’s cot. Icicles bayoneted the eaves, and the thatch was slimy with hoarfrost, which gave it the mucous glitter of elvers in a pail. The chimney smoked. Indeed, it had smoked the owners, so that Granny Morgan looked like some Frisian curiosity, freshly extracted from a Danish bog.

Had it been any other season, Emily could have gone for pensive strolls in the ivied ruins of the nearby abbey, to be caught up and rescued by a passing nobleman; but paper shoes, which were what she had fled in, cannot withstand the snow. Therefore she had no choice but to sit indoors and wonder which answer she would get to her letter, yes or no; for if one were bad, the other would be worse. Why this misfortune had befallen her, she did not know, for she had meant no harm. She never did.

*

She had only tried to better her situation, first by taking one with the family of a fat-faced physician named Dr. Budd, and then in other ways. Dr. Budd’s house was near Blackfriars Bridge, and Emily had not been happy there, and what was worse, it was the time of the Gordon Riots, which had frightened her.

“Nonsense, my girl, so long as you stay indoors you’ll not come to harm,” said the cook; but a rock came through one pane of the kitchen window, smash, and something very like a gunny sack smacked into the areaway, but was human, and had its bones cracked, and bled and died.

There was nowhere to run but up to the attics to hide. There is nothing for anyone of common sense to do but that, in any age, with the devil right behind you; but still, if you can get to the top first, by the time he gets up he’s winded himself—he’s just like you are—so he has to behave himself after that. He hasn’t the breath for his original intentions. He can only marvel that he made it to the top at all.

If anything, the Budds were worse than the riots, what with the starched-cambric rustle of intrigue belowstairs, and such sounds as she overheard of the same thing going on with a silken swoop above, among the quality. So what with the giggles and buckteeth of the second parlormaid, a most superior person, and the gravelly eyes of Dr. Budd’s lady, who always had a plump arm to interfere—and Lord, how the wicked man did pinch—Emily soon came to regard herself, without complacence, as a pretty creature, though not, though never, with him.

With, as it happened—but she could not quite remember this clearly—a real officer, a lieutenant in the Navy, who had sworn eternal devotion; but unfortunately he had had to sail away, as they so often do, so down she went with a bump again, and how was she to rise? What she had done immediately after that, except that there had been a great deal of it, she neither could nor would remember.

“My child,” said an old crone, in cheap night lodgings, “why are you here? You are too young and pretty. You do not belong here for another fifteen years at least.” And she peered about the slumside dormitory, where ugly women crept drunkenly from cot to cot, the youngest of them thirty-five.

Since no one had spoken kindly to her for several days, Emily tumbled her story out, among these dank and greasy shadows, and begged for sympathy.

“I saw no harm in it,” she said (indeed she had enjoyed herself). “But then the Budds turned me out, so I want employment.”

“The harm is in the getting caught,” said the old crone. “And as for employment, we women have but one, but in the future you must mind your wage.”

Emily was indignant. “I could not go with any man I did not like,” she said.

“No woman ever does, but grant, the rich are always likable,” said the old crone. “If nothing else, ’tis money makes them so. But never spend your earnings, for as you can see about you, that is a fair cruel thing for any woman to do. And if you are seriously minded to reform, perhaps I can assist you, for I have among my acquaintance a Dr. Graham, a most philanthropic man.” And she gave a lopsided, well-intended, but dissembling leer.

*

So Emily went to work for Dr. Graham’s Temple of Health, an establishment in Adelphi Terrace much patronized by the voyeur; and as for the old crone, she spoke privately with the learned proprietor, pocketed her 2/6, and was never seen again.

Two gentlemen at the Temple of Health attracted Emily’s attention, the first because he stared at her so, the second because she could not help it; he reminded her of her naval gentleman. They came day after day, to watch her while she impersonated the Goddess of Health and gave old gentlemen their mud baths. She had several weeks to gather her impressions.

Greville had the eyes of an affronted pig, though in actuality pigs have vivacious eyes; and though she liked him well enough, she did not like him very much. She thought him stuck up. “I am not,” he seemed to say, “as other men. Tinsel goods are all very well for your present situation, but when you wish quality, as no doubt in time you will, you may have me.” What girl of spirit would accept so grand a proposal made upon a scale so small?

The other gentleman, Sir Harry Featherstonehaugh, had eyes of a warmer, softer quality, like soaked raisins. He was handsome, sleek, boisterous and seductive. He knew how to put you at your ease. He made jokes (Greville never made jokes); he never gave lectures (Greville had with him always an invisible podium); he asked her to go to the country with him. He did not seem disappointed when she said, “Not likely.” Instead he gave her things, sweetmeats, a shawl, a good dinner or something silly. Then, if she liked it, he asked her again. He was hearty and never vulgar, he knew how to treat you properly, and they became friends.

So what was the harm in it?

What fort would not capitulate upon such terms, in short, everything, and a truce with life. She had been besieged too often. In time one comes to dread manning the same defenses every day, just as many a wary bitch has allowed herself to be taken during the season, merely to litter and have done with it.

Besides, he took her to Up Park, and she had never seen a country house before, let alone driven sensuously between its gates, around the bend so accurately calculated by Capability Brown, and there was the house, an enlarged toybox upon an eminence, and all the retainers out to receive them, cap in hand, except for the housekeeper, who had the prim look of a Presbyterian gratified, but not amazed, by still more evidence of sin.

“Never mind,” said Emily, who didn’t, not just then, “I am the image of a lady; I would confound Beau Nash,” and leaped down tomboy hoyden instead of waiting to be handed out, and went indoors to drawing rooms hung with yellow silk, and everything so fine.

Over the wall of the local grange in Cheshire, where she was born, she had seen big fat blooms of white lilac as a child, and jumped to catch them, but they were too high, and there was no way in. Whereas here there were lilac trees everywhere, though the season was over and they would not bloom again until next year. She would stay.

So for the next six months she lapped luxury not only with appetite but aptitude, the way a child tucks into gooseberry fool; for the decorum of an occasional bonbon may satisfy effete minds, but gooseberry fool is the epitome of porridge, and who can have enough of that? It is only the adult who makes choices. A child or a dog merely goes from dish to dish, whiffling down whatever’s there, without comparisons.

It was the same with everything. There were horses, so she rode them, and rode them uncommonly well. There were pier glasses, so she peered into them and never saw any image but her own in them again. But then, women are seldom spontaneous; at most they consent to a plastic pose. Show me as I am, they cry, but what they mean is, give me back that first revelation at the mirror.

She danced; she drank; she gambled. There were amateur theatricals. So, since she had a natural talent for the histrionic, she was the Empress in Kotzebue’s The Mother, and so felt real emotions for the first time.

In short, she had all but two of the attributes of a courtesan. She lacked passion (but would have liked such things if they occurred at the right time, which they never did. Either she wished to enjoy the comfort of freshly ironed linen and a feather bolster all to herself or to examine her fingernails—and there was Sir Harry instead. Men never understand these things. It is useless to explain. So one must put up with it, though few people look their best with their hair out of place, or unshaven in the morning. He did not seem to realize that). The realization, one morning while he snored, that he was an animal, despite his good manners and bad taste, revolted her. For that was her other limitation: she liked things to be nice. It is part of the secret women hand around among themselves at teatime, like the head of St. John the Baptist on a plate; when all is said and done, they are merely animals. Whereas we, of course, are not.

However, though men are incurably given, for short periods of time, to the primitive pleasures of mere repetition, it is possible to hold their attention in other ways by the use of such ingratiating riddles and spells as “Oh, Harry, not now”; “Please don’t”; “Oh you shouldn’t! You are so silly,” or if all else fails, a simple fact of nature assures us three to five days a month of peace and quiet. So after a while things went better and she became a sort of mascot to Sir Harry’s two packs, the Snyder one he used for hunting, and the black, white and tan kind he hunted with. Both the Snyders and the Raeburn Hoppner packs piled up into imperial heaps in the evening, like Roman senators after an orgy; had the same sort of loose skin, raised a cry in the same manner, and wagged their tails. Some of them were nice, agreeable, healthy young men who smelled of leather and oatmeal soap, buckskins and gillyflower water, but she was not to be caught out.

Of Sir Harry she was now a little afraid, as the poor are of their landlords. Besides, she was with child.

“Then you’ll have to pack up and get out.”

He was behind his desk, in the household offices. Now for the first time she saw the raw cruelty of an amiable man who likes everybody well enough, but whose personal comfort has been endangered. It is the look good hosts have whose guests have stayed too long. Glimpse it once, and you will never dine there with the same ease again.

“But I live here …” Emily was bewildered.

“The season is over. We are all going away. Christmas is coming. At Christmas we go home to our families. Do you understand?”

Emily didn’t.

“Then I will make it plain. I would as soon pay another man’s gambling debts as acknowledge a trull’s child.” Turning to the housekeeper, he added, “See that the girl is packed up and sent off and pay her ticket to wherever she wishes to go. And that’s an end to it.”

Emily still didn’t understand. She wasn’t like that.

“Come,” said Sir Harry, not unkindly. “You have had an expensive summer. You have hired phaetons at five and a half guineas the day, ridden two Arabs lame, and drunk the cellar dry with the rest of us, at 8/6 the bottle. So now you must pay for it in your own time, for I shall not. I pay only for the summer, and a damned bore most of it was, too. You are very young. You will have other summers, my dear, somewhere.”

She now understood. “Oh its my dear, is it?” she shouted.

Sir Harry dreaded scenes almost as much as he dreaded wrinkles in his buckskins. Today’s were yellow and, flawlessly tight, as so they should have been, for he had had them wetted and then dried on him, which took hours.

“Get the girl away,” he said, “and see she does not write.”

The housekeeper got her away. Like the devils in a morality (and life was moral, was it not, if it was anything), she had her pitchfork ready, and wielded it with a will. To few of us is it given to participate in the drama of salvation, but she was lucky in her situation: she had her chance once a year. Later she married him, by methods based upon what the others had done wrong.

Emily went first to her grandmother’s and then to Wales, with nothing to sniffle over but some dresses snipped of their buttons, for Granny had sold those to a passing tinker; and nothing to amuse her but the drama of her own life, which she thereupon enacted with vehemence. Feeling be damned. There’s always rhetoric, and even alone, we are at least assured of an audience of one, which is better than nothing. If we can render feeling convincingly, we need never undergo it again. The expression of feeling is nothing but solfège.

“Loved, adored, feted, encouraged to dance upon the tabletops, and then cast out, with child—dropped, abandoned, hustled away by the back stairs on a frosty morning. Can any career have been so misfortunate as mine?” she demanded.

Like most audiences, Granny Morgan, though enthrallable, was tough minded. “Oh a good many, I imagine, dearie,” she said.

“I truly loved Sir Harry,” said Emily with dignity and pathos, besides.

“Nonsense, a man like that ain’t nothin’ but what he owns. And in my opinion not even that, unless he parts with some of it. If you had loved him, you would not have given in so easily, for a woman in love has nothing to offer but herself, so naturally that is the one thing she refuses to give. Whereas, merely to go to bed for cash—you did get cash, didn’t you, dearie?—allows her to hold herself in reserve, put something by, feel respectable, and none of your honeymooning hinghang-how off to Bath in a curricle, and blossoms in the dust in the morning, neither.”

“Not a shilling,” said Emily.

“Oh, dearie, that’s bad.”

“But I learned how to ride, across the fields in the morning, and dew on everything, and steam off the horse; it was an h’Arab, a great-great-grandson of Eclipse. He said I reminded him of Rubens; of course that was early on.”

“Rubens is all very well for a musty old country house, but means little to the modern connoisseur of taste or beauty,” snapped Granny Morgan, holding one of the dresses up. It looked bedraggled. “I’m afraid they don’t suit, dear. There is nothing for it but to wait for a new style.”

“I wrote him seven times. I exposed my heart.”

“Oh that! But did you write the other one, the practical one—about the money and all?”

“Yes,” said Emily, brought low. “But I fear he is very practical.”

That was when the postboy came.

*

“Well, what does he say?” asked Granny Morgan.

Emily had been frowning. Charles Greville did not write an easy hand, and besides, you had to twist the paper around to follow the sentence, because he would not waste a fresh sheet—not him.

“He holds out promise of reform.”

“But will he pay for it?”

“He says so.”

“Then let him reform as much as he pleases,” said Granny Morgan. “Some men are like that, you know. One of my men, now, wouldn’t touch goose until it was green. It gave me the shivers, bumping into it in the dark in the pantry, hung high and a-slitherin’.”

A log fell in the grate.

“You know, tainted meat,” explained Granny Morgan. “And I suppose he wants you to have the child here?”

“Well, he says not there.”

*

Definitely not there.

Like most humane men, Greville did definitely shrink from the human. To be human is to be smirched. To be humane, requires nothing more intimate than benevolence. The singular success of that bucolic pasticcio, Love in a Village (still performed) arose in large measure from its irreality. So Greville moved out toward the villages, where a cottage would be cheaper. He was determined, for he did not overestimate his own charms (he never overestimated anything), to keep Emily a virginal distance from town. He found what he wanted in a series of small two-storied builders’ huts run up for speculation on Edgware Row, way out in the country, the nearest excitement an occasional hanging at Tyburn Hill, with the town on the horizon and Hyde Park not too far away.

It was a bargain. There would even be room for his mineral specimens. “Nature’s jewels,” as he would explain to Emily, and, to others who might notice the absence of busts after the antique, “Her sculpture, too.” But since Greville was art dealer for his uncle, in a good season there would be bustos enough, and what furniture was not worth the selling could be used here when he had gotten rid of the town house in Portman Square, for he planned to combine pleasure with economy—a thought that made the snow outside (he was returning from his solicitors’ in a carriage) sparkle to him like ermine in a pantomime.

“Please, dear Greville, tell my poor, distraught mother that I am saved, and that I recommend her to my Benefactor,” Emily had written. He had done so, and far from finding her distraught, had found her a brisk, practical woman of that class. She would make an excellent housekeeper for little more than the household allowance and a share of Emily’s pin money. It did not occur to him to ask why, any more than it occurred to him to ask why she chose to call herself Mrs. Cadogan, when there was no evidence of a husband, and Emily called herself Lyon. He took such things for granted. It did not occur to her to tell him why, either. So did she.

She had received him in the public room of a coaching inn, in dim light, would have preferred to have interviewed him in her own parlor, but at that moment had none. She was a good-humored woman, too experienced to be budged by the mere blandishments of vice, but respectability had, for her, the irresistible appeal of novelty. In her turn she was as impressed as he had been, and in much the same way. When it came to members of the upper orders, she had seen worse.

“He is a fine gentleman,” she wrote to her daughter. “A fine gentleman. He likes everything proper and sedate, if you catch my meaning. It is a fine chance to improve yourself. The other gentleman was not. You have been very giddy, but I was a young girl once myself, and say nothing. However, now you have had your lesson, you must be a girl of spirit, and snatch the opportunity. He would prefer you have the child alone. My thoughts are with you, if my body is not. Do nothing indelicate.”

Being a girl of spirit, Emily tore the letter up. As for the lesson, she had not had it yet; it would be at least another two months until she had it, and she could scarcely wait to get rid of it. She did not like to be seen at a disadvantage. Meanwhile she struck a bargain with herself. She had been a hoyden; now she would be a lady—in Portman Square in March, or not later at the most than April. She had tried the Profession and failed. She did not think she liked young men. They jounced you too much. From now on she would remain content with old ones, for Greville, at thirty-three, had certainly the patina of age, and she did hope that was not a surface, merely.

*

Greville stood in the drawing room of his unsuccessful mousetrap. He was feeling joyous, but moldy. The joy was caused by anticipation; the mold, by the failure of the mousetrap. It had been built to catch an heiress, but when it came to cases, the girls were nothing but intermediaries between their parents and their fortunes, and Greville did not like to deal with intermediaries. He had dealt with the parents direct, and they, in their turn, had dealt as directly with him.

He was not discouraged. He still had confidence that in time he would discover the right parents. What he did not like, though he had no diffidence about taking commissions as a middleman for his uncle’s Italian antiques, was to be put to the indignity of selling his own excess furniture.

Mrs. Cadogan saw what the house was for and that it had failed. She even saw why.

“Oh, sir, you shouldn’t be fussing about furniture, that is what a housekeeper is for,” she said, and earned his gratitude; not his undying gratitude, for Greville’s gratitude was apt to perish unexpectedly from internal injuries, not differing in that respect from most other people’s gratitude, but still, it was a beginning.

It had been planned to be. Mrs. Cadogan had early observed that most men in Mr. Greville’s station needed not one woman but two; that is, one to keep them running, and one to keep them on the run—or to be blunt, a housekeeper and a whore. Not that it would ever do to be blunt; you could tell that by the way the poor gentleman hemmed and hawed, with yards and yards of padding around an almost invisible meaning, like something too fragile to be jounced.

Like Emily, she had expected to come here. But no, Greville said he had taken a cottage at Paddington. The air was salubrious there; it would be more suitable. A girl such as Emily, fresh, unspoiled (he winced), accustomed to the country, would naturally prefer country air and a quiet existence alone with him. We must assist our little flowers to unfold.

Mrs. Cadogan understood perfectly. He could not afford to keep the house.

“And will there be unsightly marks?” he asked.

Mrs. Cadogan blinked. “Marks?”

“It was my understanding that sometimes in these cases, because of the … ah, sudden change in … er, weight … I suppose you might say, that there were in that case, well … ah, marks.”

Mrs. Cadogan had once been forced to seek employment of a quack in Mecklenberg Square, but a quack, if he knows nothing else, as indeed he doesn’t, at least knows his terminology.

“You mean striae, sir,” she said. “Why no, I don’t expect so, for I told her not to move about too much. Besides, the birth was premature. It couldn’t have weighed that much.”

“I should have thought it was the pregnancy that was premature,” said Greville with asperity, but only because he had caught sight of a scratch on a Sheraton chair. With his customary acumen in such matters, if in such matters only, he had been one of the first to buy from Mr. Sheraton’s workshop, while the price was cheap. How had it gotten there?

To that Mrs. Cadogan had no reply. It had happened before her time.

*

Emily had voided the miserable object, but had had to give it suck, and though impatient, what with one thing and another, did not want to see it go. But neither, if she could not have it, did she ever want to see it again.

The wet nurse, who had made a long journey to fetch it back to its grandmother—for at least they were sure who the grandmother was—paused in the doorway.

“Now, miss, be sensible.”

“I don’t want you to take it away.”

“You hired me to take it away, and what would I do without the money? And you love your grandmother, don’t you? You wouldn’t want to deprive your grandmother of its board and keep, would you? The poor old lady has little enough as it is.”

“But it’s mine.”

“And more shame to you,” said the wet nurse heartily. “That’s what I say, and I’ve had ten o’ me own. Each one of them,” she went on, “a shame. For unless they die at once, the lambs, then I have to find a wet nurse for them, at very high rates, I assure you, and where it will all end I’m sure I don’t know. It’s worse than taking in each other’s wash, and with wash, you can wash it more than once and you needn’t be too particular about the dirt on it, neither.”

“Let me keep it at least one more day.”

“Indeed, I shall not. I am paid by the day, and, selfish creature, would you starve me? You think of nobody but yourself.”

“But it’s my baby.”

“And it’s my livelihood you’re trying to rob me of, so you needn’t take that tone,” said the wet nurse, and waddled away with it toward the door.

“Poor child, condemned never to know a woman’s love,” shrieked Emily, in a last thespian lurch.

“Now there’s where you’re wrong,” said the wet nurse. “I should say it was the father it would never know.” The higher the fee the greater the immorality, as far as she could judge, and since in this case the fee had been minimal, she banged the door twice, for she had small patience with small sins. If one is going to sin at all, one may as well get it over with in a lump and devote one’s life to repentance; and Emily, she had seen at once, was a repeater.

Emily wept for days, but beginning to feel lonely and bored, and having somewhere to go, decided to be about her business, which was to search out a father; though Greville was not a father, he might perhaps make a suitable uncle, given the right niece. She wanted to be soothed. Why has life no temperate zone, when the world has one on the other side of the Channel, so they say, but farther south, or in America, among the Indians?

“I want,” cried Emily, “to be safe,” forgetting that, as Herr Goethe says, the dangers of life are infinite, and that safety is among them. But then, she had not read Herr Goethe yet and not had, so far, his splendid opportunities for no less splendid observation.

*

Though as much the victim as anybody else of the soul’s inflation, Mrs. Cadogan was cubically correct in her estimates, and so met Emily with exactly the right degree of ballon. Greville was shy (which for once stood to his advantage) as well as ruthless, and had gone out on a pretense errand to negotiate the sale of a Greek vase of ravishing shape and pornographic design, so that if the one excellence did not sell it, the other would, for art allows us to contemplate that which we would not countenance in life; it allows us to achieve heights of the spirit otherwise denied us, as he never tired of saying, and besides, he knew just the right buyer.

It was April, and therefore spring, the season of gratitude. In such weather chilblains cease to itch and begin to heal; it is by such signs that we know it is spring. The snow was swept into thawing heaps, exposing here and there an area of green drugget, thinly worn, called grass. And though the fruit trees had come into bloom, the blossoms had the cloudy, frangible look of Murano glass, sedate but foreign. The air had the faintly puzzling but nostalgic odor of partially evaporated scent, too strong, too sweet, hoarded for too long, and dilute in a gust of wind. In Hyde Park, as Emily drove by, a single exploratory squirrel ran across the ground and spiraled up a tree; a white swan had warm breast feathers for the first time in months, and opened its heavy wings, like a pickpocket’s coat, to show how the trick was done. The road was muddy, despite some lingering frost, another harbinger.

Emily had spent enough of her life defenseless and on foot, greatly to appreciate the superior elevation and extensive mobility of a carriage. It did feel grand to move along that way, with no more effort than was required to watch the coachman’s back and to prevent one’s own back from being sprained by an unexpected lurch. She sat there with the equanimity of a parcel, misdirected, but now on its way to the right address; it need do nothing but wait to be unwrapped. For the moment, its time is its own.

The carriage reached Tyburn Hill and went on. To her right, at a distance, stood some houses, like a row of ivory dominoes, waiting to be added to; to her left, open countryside, inhabited by rooks, though while she watched, a cow sat down. The carriage was not moving rapidly. There was time for the cow to sit down. Then the coachman turned into Edgware Row and stopped.

“My goodness, is this mine?”

“If it’s not, it soon will be, I expect,” said the coachman, with a wink which clapped her back into the lower orders. It was her voice; though silent, she had felt a lady.

He handed her down quite respectful-like, as though perhaps this was her first time at this sort of thing, which required gentleness, and the rudeness could wait until later, when the thing was done.

The front door opened and Mrs. Cadogan came out onto the stoop, chunky and proper, so the coachman had to swallow his grin, hand the trunk down, and believe what he would have preferred to believe, given the chance. They were rich merchants, perhaps, in a small way.

“Emily,” cried Mrs. Cadogan, with a glance at her daughter’s figure and then relieved smiles.

“Oh, Ma,” said Emily, who really was most glad to see her, and ran to her, but was the taller of the two, so she did not snuggle well. It was an affecting scene.

Properly affected, and moreover adequately tipped, the coachman tilted his cap and drove away. There being no neighbors with a curiosity to satisfy, the women went indoors.

Emily was fond of her mother, for the two women had seen little of each other in their lifetimes, and so had not gotten stuck by that emotional taffy-pull between the generations which leaves each side with sticky fingers always—the solicitude of a mother seldom, if ever, being accompanied by anything but a total obliviousness to her children’s feelings. However, a discreet system of delegated authority (Emily had been reared by her Grandmother Kidd) had left Emily and Mrs. Cadogan free from bitterness. Indeed, so essential were they the one to the other, that they might have been, if not fellow conspirators, then animal and trainer.

Mrs. Cadogan began training at once, by example, and showed her the house.

Born to the lower classes, and her experience so far limited exclusively to the upper, Emily had never before been in one of those middle-class establishments where everything is new—like the world before the Fall—but God, Eve and Adam. It was like being in a shop in which everything has been bought for one already, so that there is no agony of choice. Not only was the house fresh as paint, but the paint was fresh as well, in colors of clotted cream, with a French scenic wallpaper in the dining room, the carpets untrod, the furniture polished to a sample sheen. In the library, however, the books looked used, though at least the bindings appeared to have been oiled recently.

“Who’s Demosthenes?” asked Emily, staring at a set of the Orations in tooled calf.

“Somebody valuable I expect,” said Mrs. Cadogan proudly. “Mr. Greville is particular.”

“Oh dear,” said Emily, who had forgotten him for the moment, but felt some reverence for his possessions. “Is he like this, do you suppose?”

“Well, I moved the furniture about a bit and added flowers. He’s been fussing. I suspect he’s as nervous as you are.”

“I’m not nervous.”

“Then pretend to be,” snapped Mrs. Cadogan. “These worldly gentlemen are always shy, you know. Soft words may butter no parsnips, but they do very well for a gentleman, so unless you want to eat parsnips again, use butter. That’s my advice to you. And never show your temper. Mr. Greville does not care for temper. Did you get any jewelry?”

“Granny had to sell it.”

“And good riddance. Jewelry is vulgar. He says so, so don’t ask for it. He is not rich, therefore he is apt to be fastidious. Drinking is frowned on, and so is cards. Cosmetics is fast, so don’t use ’em. And now you’d better see the arrangements upstairs.”

There were four rooms upstairs, four rooms down. The four down were library, drawing room, sitting room, dining room. The four up were, on the left of the stairs, Greville’s bedroom, and behind it Mrs. Cadogan’s bedsitter, containing her few cherished possessions—a cracked Lowestoft plate bearing the arms of the Dukes of Bristol, her marriage lines to Mr. Cadogan (she had found them on a peddler’s barrow and taken a fancy to the name), a small trunk, much traveled and always locked, a china statuette of George II—and on the right of the stairs, Emily’s sitting room and bedroom. There being no attics, the cook and the parlormaid lived in the basement, behind the kitchen.

The sitting room contained everything necessary to repose and leisure, namely a spinet, or inferior sort of harpsichord with an insufficiency of keys, a music rack, a chair for the as yet unhired music teacher, a chaise longue, a table for sirop glasses and bowls of sweets, a glassed bookcase containing the works of Madame de La Fayette in the original and of Mrs. Barbauld in English, a grammar, an embroidery frame, a box for silks, a large mirror in a severe gold frame, a table for playing patience on, and two chairs on either side of the fireplace, one for him and one for her.

The bedroom, on the other hand, was a cheerful room containing a bed, a chair for breeches and dressing gowns, a small wardrobe (Greville thought of everything, or at any rate, planned to limit expenditure), and on the dressing table a mint copy of Hayley’s Triumphs of Temper, a work of educative merit superior to all those of Hannah More combined. It was to be her Book of Hours. It taught temper, and at the worst, at least its noble numbers were conducive to sleep.

Across the bed lay, freshly starched, a somewhat peculiar garment, half village milkmaid out of Rousseau, half negligee out of Crèbillon fils.

“He would like you to wear that. It is a morning costume,” explained Mrs. Cadogan, unpacking the remains of Emily’s finery. “And as I suspected, he would not like you to wear these. So off to the barrowboy they go.”

“But those are my clothes!”

“It is a new life, and therefore there will be new clothes,” said Mrs. Cadogan, herself wearing a striped dress, a crisp apron, and a mobcap in which she resembled nothing so much as an amiable toad. “If I can dress the part, you can. So off with your things, and then we’ll go downstairs to wait.”

The only reassuring thing so far was that in the back garden there was a white lilac tree in early bloom, drowsy with bees, and heavy on the branch. It was an omen. But all the same, the wait seemed very long.

*

Greville had been detained. He had had no trouble with the vase. “It is a great art in life to know how to sell air,” says Gracián, subsection 267, or, since Greville could read Spanish, “Gran sutileza del vivar saber vender el aire.” But Greville did not know how to sell air. He merely knew how to displace it; in his case an inherited skill for which, nonetheless, he took great credit. The vase had sold itself, rather winningly.

The trouble was Emily. Seduction is an art. The ability is given at birth. We can polish the skill, but we cannot polish what we do not have. And though it was essential to appear the seducer and to chuckle about the little lady tucked away somewhere, and possible to do the tucking, given one had the deposit money, the actual process of performing the rite had left Greville weary and wary to the point where he sometimes wondered if other gentlemen of his acquaintance did not also exaggerate their trophies the better to conceal their wounds. However, go home he must, and so home at last he went, though with his mask on. He was kindly but above these things. That was his mask.

He hoped Emily was comfortable and had recovered from her untimely experience. He had no doubt but that Emily was tired this evening and would require rest. In short, what the devil was he to do with her?

On the second day, Emily and Mrs. Cadogan refrained from discussing what had not happened the first night, which was also what did not happen on the second; on the third evening, Greville was out; on the fourth morning Emily had hysterics; and on the fourth evening Mrs. Cadogan, though gingerly, took the matter into her own hands.

“Em’ly is here only to do your bidding. You have but to say, and she will do what you wish. Em’ly has retired only to await you, sir.”

“Has no one ever told you the word is in three syllables?” demanded Greville, irritated both with himself and her.

“What word is that, sir?”

“Em’ly,” snapped Greville.

“How else would I address her? She is my daughter.”

“Then we must change the name,” said Greville firmly. “I shall think about it and advise you.” When she had gone, he sat glumly to the contemplation of his port, alone, for he could not very well show her off to his male acquaintance until he had something to show.

Today is Thursday, he said to himself. I shall approach her on Friday and every Friday thereafter. That will be suitable; and he began to devise lists of names. The Fair Teamaker of Edgware Row was the epithet he had chosen, but what the devil was he to call her?

Port is a heavy drink. Three bottles of it are even heavier. It was all he could do to stumble up to bed.

“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Cadogan, who had been hoping for developments, and philosophically blew her candle out. “What is to become of us?”

Emily was asleep and vastly enjoying herself. She infinitely preferred to sleep alone, though such luxuries are seldom possible, short of widowhood. Men are so messy.

Summoned from sleep in some dark part of the night, she felt a body in the bed beside her. It was a smooth, hairless, slim body, adolescent in quality, and breathing liquorous fumes. It was an apologetic body, she decided, as well it might be for disturbing her, so she was not alarmed.

“Feel no fear,” said the body. “It is only Greville.”

Which was true enough. “Oh, dear, dear Greville,” she said, and stroked his hair which, since he did not shave for a wig but had it cut to a stubble, was no more alarming to touch than it would have been to rub a hedgehog the right way.

To her surprise, though naturally revolted (men are beasts), she was not displeased. The sensation was localized, transitory and brief. He did not derange her hair. He did not make ugly noises. There was the added advantage that she could not see him. It could not be denied that the sensation, so long as one was careful not to become aroused, was conducive to repose; and when he was adequately relieved he had the good taste to go away and not to clutter up the bed.

“Very well then,” he said, in Ms own room. “From now on it will be Thursdays.”

“Very well then,” said Emily, in her own bed. “Really, all things considered, it is not so bad, and later on I suppose he will taper off—most men do.”

“Very well then, at least it has led to something, and I suppose in the morning we will find out what,” said Mrs. Cadogan, and went to sleep again.

“Damn,” said the parlormaid, awakened in her bed by sheer frustration. “It is a suitable employment, but what young man would come this far out of town to see me?” She was an authentic member of the lower orders and would not last long.

It is a rum household, thought the cook, in the midst of slumber. “But that no doubt is because they are members of the gentry, or as near as makes no difference. Tomorrow they shall have overcooked turbot for lunch, with a shriveled lemon, curdled hollandaise sauce and some dead parsley for garniture, and that will take care of them.” For she took pride in her work and worried incessantly.

*

In the morning, Greville came downstairs, descriptions of illicit rapture completed in his head, and halfway down, paused, for Mrs. Cadogan was in the hall, looking up at him.

“I have decided to call her Emma Hart,” he said. “Emma is a fashionable name, and as for Hart, it is a pun, for not only does she seem to have one, but she is like a young doe.”

He then entered the dining room where he ate two eggs, three grilled kidneys, half a sausage and some kedgeree to keep his strength up; after which he sauntered to town, not only a virile, but a proven man.

Mrs. Cadogan bounced upstairs as fast as short legs could take her.

“You have given satisfaction,” she said, bursting in on Emily, who was about to commence “The Jolly Miller” on the spinet, in order to express herself.

“I have made my sacrifice,” said Emily.

“He has given you a new name.”

“He has given me what?” Emily’s mind had toyed for the moment with jewelry.

“He wishes you to be called Emma—Emma Hart,” said Mrs. Cadogan.

It was not a diamond, but it would do. “I must say I like the sound of it,” said Emma, new born, trying it a few times and even playing it on the not quite harpsichord (E, A, A), back and forth, into a little jig. She was in good spirits. He had given her her adolescence back again, quite untarnished, except on Thursdays. She had had no idea these things could be so sedately done.

It was the beginning, not of a passion, which she would have viewed with repugnance—being at bottom a stout English girl—but of affection, which she felt far more. There was something endearing about him after all; he was the runt of an imaginary litter.

“But dear me,” she said, “isn’t he stingy?”

*

“The color is back in her cheeks. I have rescued her from the mire. She is like a rose after rain, a briar rose,” said Greville.

“And she loves you for it, of course?”

“Passionately,” said Greville, determining that Emma should never sleep with any man whose reticence he could not trust, which meant with no man. “She is like a Greek goddess.”

“Which one?” asked Towneley.

They were in his atelier. Lest for a moment anyone might believe that Towneley did anything except be Towneley, it must be added that by atelier he meant the room in which he kept his sculpture, not the room in which he did it. Lady Di Beauclerc might so far forget herself as to deign to draw a little, but Towneley never forgot himself. Being well-bred, he admired only. What he admired most was mostly Roman sculpture, for he liked a sure thing, and usually a copy of a sure thing at that, which is what the Romans had admired. However, as did the Romans, he called it Greek.

“A Hebe,” said Greville, catching sight of one.

“Come now,” said Towneley, “if that is the case, you may as well have a Ganymede instead. But I do not think that is quite your taste. An Athene perhaps?”

“She is untutored.”

“A Thetis? Perhaps she has had naval connections?”

She had. Greville blushed.

Towneley was satisfied. He had rather thought so. “Of course we will come to see her. What does your uncle have to say, by the way?”

Greville had several uncles, but Sir William was always the one referred to. For he was more than famous: he was also a connoisseur, and had already sent back from Naples more Etruscan vases than any other living Englishman.

“Not only is he the power behind the throne,” Towneley had once said, in his not unkindly—but if we wish to be witty we cannot have qualms—way, “he is also the chair the nephew sits in.” It was true enough. Greville cut a fine figure, what with that idyllic face, but without his uncle he would scarcely have been competent to cut ice.

This kind of bickering, since it was the only kind he knew, seemed to Greville both warm and congenial. It was the great world of little gossip, and he knew no other. Indeed it was easier to gossip about the great than actually to endure them, for any show of vigor, except in the matter of bric-a-brac and chitchat, would have been detected at once and despised. In this world one exerted oneself only to inherit money or to conceal the fact that one had not. Since Greville did both, he qualified; his position was secure. But as one must provide the occasion for gossip as well as the gossip itself, he had come to ask his cronies to Edgware Row.

So Emma, who did not, in the presence of her mother, find the absence of other women distressing, but was bored, soon had a host of distinguished gentlemen, all pink, all plump and all benign, to entertain her. There was Towneley himself, the first epicene man she had met, though apt to pinch in the dark to prove his manhood; there was Mr. Hayley, almost as dull as his verse, but just as distinguished and far nicer. And there was Lord Bristol, the Bishop of Derry, rosy cheeked as a law lord and just as spiritual; a lovably wicked old man (he was fifty-two) who told her God must have been in a romantic mood the day He created her. He had pudgy hands and a wholesome laugh, and she liked him best.

Each one, as he left, said to the others: “Now how do you suppose he managed that?” Greville was pleased and proud of her. She had conducted herself well. But must she conduct herself in that voice?

“It is her native Doric,” explained the Bishop of Derry. “Her wood-note wild.” To Emma he said, “My dear child, speak more softly, enunciate, and if you cannot put the ‘h’s’ back where they belong, do not be impatient on that account to shove them in where they most certainly don’t. Never grow excited; and practice aspirating into a candle flame each night—that will soon take care of everything.”

“Asp, eat, oat, Ute,” said Emma, obediently. “Heat, heart, hot, hut.” And soon she had it in the proper order, unless she did get excited, and with the exception of “a.”

“Hate, hat, hard, Harold,” prompted the Bishop amiably. “And then there is the problem of such things as honor. Their derivation is usually French, and that is why we do not pronounce them properly. They are not quite a part of the English tongue, you see.”

“Yes, I see,” said Emma, and for a wonder she did. “It is one of your jokes.”

“It is one of God’s jokes,” he corrected her. “But we do the best we can.”

“What are Utes?”

“American Indians,” said the Bishop. “Have you never read your Voltaire? A pity. He is one of the few pleasures of which the Cloth is capable. Because it is naughty, you know. I shall send you a copy, for while you are at it, you may just as well learn French.”

“There seems a great deal to learn.”

“Not as much as you might think. Consider Charles.”

Emma was shocked. “Greville is truly learned,” she said, and meant it. It was no more than he said himself.

“I know. It is a great waste. However, you must not mind my little ironies.”

“I don’t,” said Emma, who didn’t.

The Bishop of Derry went away, sighing for true, as opposed to technical, innocence, and wondered how Greville did manage it.

*

He managed it, among other things, by rigging thimbles and saving string, and all those other stratagems to which those who would have the world think well of them are put. The house was to be run on £100 a year. He insisted on it. He also insisted Emma keep accounts, writing down such sums as apples, 2½ pence; mangle, 5 pence; coach, a shilling; and poorman, ½ pence. For five poormen, you could buy more apples. For five coaches, muslin by the yard. So she wore muslin by the yard. It was not merely economy. It was discipline. For dress, charity and entertainment, she had £30 pin money per annum. The housemaid was paid £8, and the cook £9. Therefore the cook did very little cooking, but did sometimes dust; and when she was not dusting, Mrs. Cadogan did most of the cooking. She was an excellent cook. It was an excellent arrangement.

His sherry, port and portraits he paid for himself, as also the rent of the house. That was his contribution, and as for entertainment, it need not prove too dear, for in the absence of any other, they had him.

Mrs. Cadogan, who had no allowance, did not happen to find Greville that amusing, but since Emma did, it could not be helped. Greville, who dressed, if not in the height, at least in the hand-me-downs and foothills of fashion, had an arrangement with his tailor. But what did he do with the other three hundred pounds a year he surely had? It was a mystery. He neither gilded the cage nor left it open. He neither forbade a trip to town, nor provided a carriage. So they could not find out. In the evenings, sometimes, if there were candles enough, he read them La Nouvelle Héloise. His French was like the rest of him: he did not stumble, he never lost his place, but he had no lilt. It was in truth a bore.

But Emma found La Nouvelle Héloise affecting.

“To think a simple love could live so simply,” she said.

“My dear, that’s why,” said Mrs. Cadogan, gathered up her darning (cotton and needles: 9 pence), and went to bed.

*

Greville now came spontaneously every Tuesday, as well as according to his system, on Thursdays. Emma did not mind. She was meek and submissive and grateful and still young enough to believe that everything went on forever, instead of grinding, as it did sometimes, to a halt. What was to be done? Not that Mrs. Cadogan longed for livelier scenes; she had had quite enough of those in her younger days, thank you, but since she happened to be a very good plain cook indeed, she did hanker after a slightly larger allowance and a nip or two on the bottle in the afternoons. Unfortunately Greville marked his bottles.

Then, to relieve the tedium, came the visit to Ranelagh. Either somebody had suggested the idea to him, or else it was to be their Annual Outing. They were eating, at the time the visit was proposed, one of Greville’s celebrated imaginary meals.

The phrase was the Bishop of Derry’s. “Go dine at his house; yes do, but come on to dine with me afterward,” he said. “Or better still, take along a Sandwich in your greatcoat pocket, lest you feel faint on your way back. Greville is the best creature in the world. Or the second best. But he serves imaginary meals. You are asked to dine. You are told the menu in advance. It is an excellent menu. The wine is superb. The dining room is elegantly appointed. The service is everything that service should be. You are even allowed to discuss the meal, a thing allowed in no other English household, for though we worship at the throne of Gastronomy, we do so ashamed, alone, and after fasting. However, to what I was saying: his meals are famous. His dishes are fine. His cutlery is impeccable. But there is no food. None whatever. A solitary pea upon a plate, an inch of flounder drowned in a sea of sauce, a scruple of savory imposed upon a merely ideal lozenge of toast. The man is not only mad, but thin.”

He was quite right: there was none. Only the knowledge that there was a carrot pudding steaming in the basement, and loads of lovely jam, sustained Emma and Mrs. Cadogan through these singularly absent feasts.

“To Ranelagh,” said Emma.

Greville sat there, the image of foppish benevolence.

“And would you like that, my child?”

“Oh yes, I should like that very much.”

“Then there is no difficulty,” said Greville. “We will go tonight, after the smoked salmon and the cottage pudding.”

The salmon would be sliced thin, to look like horn windows at sunset. As for the pudding, it was remarkable how such a man could live so long on starch, though true that he dined out frequently and sometimes brought the menu home to show it to them.

To Ranelagh they went. Of London’s pleasure gardens—there were once as many as five—it was the most famous and the most sedate. That is why he had chosen it. There are a limited number of places to which a kept woman of the demimonde may go. And he did not, for reasons of jealousy, wish her to go anywhere that the demimonde itself went. That left Ranelagh.

The building had been refurbished last year. It was a rotunda of vast dimensions, supported by a central column. Music was played there while you walked around and around. When you were tired of walking around and around, there were the gardens, which were the sacred precincts of the fribble and the fop, for the shrubbery had grown to a sufficient height to permit of privacy in diversion, so that sometimes a startled shriek was allowed to mingle with the mellifluous cadences of Performed Song.

Emma hummed, and God knew how she had learned it, but then women are as sensitive to the latest airs as savages are to tribal drums, and seem to learn just as much in the same way, even at a distance.

An outing demands a new dress. There was one. The two women had managed to smuggle one or two Repositories of Fashion and Mode into the sitting room upstairs, paid for out of the apple money. The result was not an entirely new dress, but an old white one, fitted with a transparent pelisse of scrounged tulle, dyed smoky in the basement, surreptitiously, with lampblack. With a blue sash, a transformed bonnet, some blue morocco pumps filched from the embers of Sir Harry’s wrath, and a muff to keep her hands warm—for it was summer—the outfit did well enough. So well that Greville wanted to ask where it had come from, but thought better of doing so, lest he be told. So instead he did an unusual thing: he smiled.

Emma smiled back. She was still too trustful. Since she was unconscious of her beauty as yet, she believed that people liked her for herself rather than merely for her appearance, and she felt very much herself this evening.

It was a quarter to nine by the clock on the library mantel. Above the clock hung the only small Paulus Potter in England, a portrait of a cow. Facing it, from the opposite wall, the Honourable Emily Bertie impersonated, though with delicacy, Thais. Since this had been touched up by the artist himself, to conform to the purity and exactitude—particularly to the exactitude—of Greville’s celebrated taste, the Honourable Emily Bertie looked smudged, but was large enough to balance the small Paulus Potter. Greville looked at her fondly. He had got her on the cheap, yet she was indisputably a Reynolds. She lent the room tone.

He was in a good humor. Emma and he made a handsome couple, he thought, nor was he wrong, for he was a handsome man, at least from the neck up, despite that look of a baby which has not been given what it wants for some time.

He had address. He was well-bred. It was merely that he could never understand why no one liked him better, since he was always careful to do everything the right way, from little compliments to even smaller gifts; from the procurement, on commission, of an urn, to agreeing with everyone when they told him to. He looked, in other words, like an Eton portrait, a presentation piece you give away as you leave, available always as a fourteenth at dinner if one had forgotten to ask him before, and as last man into the Cabinet.

Now where, everyone asked, when everything was made up, shall we put Greville?

“In his place,” said Lord North, the then First Minister.

“Well, he won’t do for the Cabinet. A gentleman in waiting, perhaps? I doubt if the King would mind.”

“The King has no mind. He has gone barmy again, so they say,” said North with a chuckle (or perhaps it was Pitt).

As indeed he had. Father George was toppled down with tares, mostly of his own sowing, and all burdensome. He was having one of his rest periods. And as for Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who had had a cool hoyden charm when young, she now looked like a dropsical mouse. But Greville had long ago given up trying to explain to Emma the nature of politics. She would not listen. The scramble for place did not interest her. As far as she was concerned, she had found hers, and high time, too, for she was seventeen.

Meanwhile here was the carriage, the horses stomping methodically, like prisoners taking their exercise; into the carriage they got, and “Ranelagh, my man,” said Greville, in a youthful, manly tone, and off they went across Paddington Green, down Park Lane and over the fields to Chelsea. The trees in Hyde Park were pools of black, like ink blots by the Brothers Cozens, of no artistic merit, but a curiosity; and the shrubbery was fragrant, indeterminate and blobby. The night was clear with a shimmer to it, the sky a miniscus, and here and there a star danced—all of them Emma’s, all of them musical. Inside her muff her hands met with cosy delight. He was not a dull old stick. Things would go better now.

The dull old stick sat with face averted, waiting. He was a town man. He preferred scenery where it belonged, at Drury Lane.

The Thames was a black mirror, reflecting the firefly lanterns of wherries, for since it was possible to arrive at Ranelagh by both carriage and boat, no matter which side one entered from or with whom, one never knew who might be there. Above the trees rose the Central Edifice, a large, purring dome. Before the carriage, rose the gates.

So they entered the gardens, a perfect Gainsborough couple, resembling that connubial self-portrait “The Walk,” in which, before feathery foliage which looks as though it had been taken from a hatbox rather than from nature, the painter, dressed as a gentleman, conducts his wife—who has a certain charm independent of assumed station—toward the spectator.

Greville took Emma’s arm; it was the expected thing.

Emma was disappointed. The trouble with respectability, even if perilously achieved, is that inevitably, since it consists in doing only the expected thing, it lacks spontaneity. It has no spirits. It does not run; it perambulates. They perambulated.

“My God,” she said, “is there nothing else to do but this?”

“What else would there be to do?” asked Greville indulgently, who was himself bored but found the sensation familiar and therefore congenial. Even the music was congenial.

“But does nobody sing?”

“Not during the symphony, no,” said Greville, and blinked like a barn owl. He had just seen some people he knew. He bowed.

“Who was that?”

“Nobody in particular,” said Greville, glossing over an actress, a member of Parliament and two disreputable duchesses, and for once he was right.

They were on their third lap around the Rotunda. Having deduced that she would be introduced to no one, Emma demanded to go outdoors. Greville was willing, for the third time around was never a novelty.

Emma could hear the jagged sounds of song.

“Oh let’s hurry, Greville, do,” she said, but Greville would not. He had heard Mrs. Bottarelli sing that moral aria da capo, “The Chaste Nymph Surprised,” before, and to judge by the pitch, she was up to the third, final, bitter resignation bit where she repines, tears her hair, slaps her bosom, rolls her eyes, creaks in her corsets, and never a fold or wrinkle out of place. Mrs. Bottarelli was getting on, and her enunciation was not correct, for how a dramatic soprano can sing with plumpers in her cheeks, he did not know. The only person he knew who might know was Towneley, who had a fine soprano shriek when surprised or when roistering upon the Continent, a thing he was fastidious enough never to do at home, except sometimes in the evenings; a little rouge for warmth, but you were not supposed to notice it.

Mrs. Bottarelli was succeeded by a Mr. Hudson, who sang “Content,” a largo jig by a Mr. Goodwin—a curious melody to be likened only to the effect of a fat man falling through glue.

Greville suggested an inspection of the ornamental water, but the lower ornamental water being bordered by far from ornamental members of the lower orders, turned back. Emma was again disappointed. She was willing to accept Greville as a model of deportment. He was the only model of deportment she had seen. But they seemed to be enjoying themselves down there, and she would have liked to watch.

“Greville, I am excited. May we dance?”

“It is not done unless there is a ball.”

“They were dancing by the ornamental water.”

Greville was shocked. His face recomposed itself and emitted a silent, peremptory hiss, which is what an owl does—hoot when it knows something, and hiss when it doesn’t—and he was very like an owl. “Those were the lower orders,” he said, and from his wrists shook back impatiently his bands, for in these moods he was a High Church clergyman too, not particularly devout, but way up in the thing, that was clear, and in regular attendance at Easter and at the marriage of his fortune-hunting friends—the last of the beagle pack, but there—whether it be St. George’s, Hanover Square, or over the hills and away as far as Wimbledon.

They were now back to Mr. Hudson, still dispelling “Content,” or the last few lingering notes of it anyhow, with becoming diffidence.

“I can sing better than that, and what is more, I shall,” shrieked Emma, and was away before she could be stopped, and up upon the podium. She was delighted with her own daring. So were the musicians. So was the audience. And as for Mr. Hudson, he had tired of “Content” years ago.

It was her first audience. She forgot about Greville. An audience was an enthralling thing. She had not known. She had been given a few private lessons, to while away the tedium of those hours she could not spend with Greville, so she sang.

she trilled, accompanying herself with a few experimental, but since she was eager to please, explicit gestures. The audience whistled, applauded and catcalled for more. She was a saucy lass.

What these songs said was true. The way she sang them did show that she believed that. As an encore, because she could not bear to leave yet, and as a tribute to Greville, she sang something more recent—Dr. Downman’s “To Thespia.” She could not see Greville in the crowd in front of her, but raising her arms toward where he had been, she warbled:

and made it a joyous invitation, like the “Song of Solomon” in the version you are allowed to read, but Greville in a good mood had explained some of the naughtier bits, and my, she had had no idea it was such a racy thing.

Emma’s gestures, though she had never before so deliberately made one, were those of a village Siddons. They had a mesmeric effect. As slowly she raised her arms toward Him, the audience turned to see to Whom. They found her most affecting.

Greville, who never forgot himself, lost his nerve and jumped nimbly behind a tree.

There was more applause. “Oh thank you,” said Emma. “But I can sing no more. I have exhausted my repertoire.”

“Indeed you cannot and have,” snapped Greville, rearing up out of nowhere. He grabbed her down and made off with her, followed by jeers, catcalls, admirative noises, empty gin bottles and derisory shrieks.

There would never, never, never be an end to it. He shook like the most expensive lap dog from Peru, shivering not for warmth, but as far away from her as he could get, with the rage of a baby most devilishly betrayed, let down, exposed, unmasked, traduced, made common sport of, should have known better than to take up with a common trull, I do not doubt Sir Harry’s taste, he has married his housekeeper, that explains his taste, but though he flung you out into the ungrateful grass after a mere six months, I wonder at his patience, even so; in other words, hate hath no synonym and rage no end to simile. Apart from that he would not speak.

“Why, whatever ’as ’appened?” demanded Mrs. Cadogan, surprised into the vernacular.

“Madam, you are her mother. Need you ask? She has shown her upbringing, lapsed into her native vulgarity, and made a fool of me,” snapped Greville, going into the library and slamming the door so hard that he set in motion both the small chandelier in the library and the large one in the dining room, whose vitreous derision lasted for a minute and a half by the clock—to Mrs. Cadogan, for an eternity.

The life here may not have been much, but as she had feared, it had been much too good to last. Wearily she trudged up the stairs, as far as she was concerned, just twenty-four hours before the removers, and already mentally bending with them to remove. If you cannot afford the theatre, you can always read the sonnets at home instead.

But Emma’s thespian talents, so freshly awakened only to be trampled underfoot, carried her through. Ripping off her ludicrous finery, a task not difficult—it had been basted merely; unstringing her corset, her dearest, most secret grownup possession so far, and he had not even noticed it; letting down her auburn hair; slipping into a simple cottage dress (which suited her to perfection, as she well knew); and pausing only for an instant before her mirror to make sure her wild, disheveled and grief-stricken locks were disheveled to the best possible advantage;—a Fair Penitent, a Magdalen, A Woman Undone and Utterly Given Up to Shame (it was at this point that she collided with Mrs. Cadogan on the stairs), a Village Milkmaid, La Penserosa with good cause, a Wailing and Abandoned Woman (taken from an engraving after Poussin’s “Massacre of the Innocents”), an Andromache, both Marys at the Tomb, Niobe Humbled utterly, Penelope perhaps—she dashed down the stairs, giggled out of nervousness, remembered to cry, and burst in upon him, weeping bitterly.

He was seated in a Greek chair, calming himself by the examination of a few choice rocks from his collection, two pieces of branch coral and a sea sponge of rare and intricate design. He looked annoyed.

“Forgive, forgive poor repentant Emma,” cried Emma, raising her hands clasped in the gesture of the old Hellenistic Beggar he admired so much—the wrong sex, but of that no matter. “Forgive”—she said, and paused—“an Errant Soul. Or, if you are ashamed of me, Dismiss me, Abandon Me, and I shall disappear as Poor and Miserable as when you found me—in fact, more miserable, for never again to see my Dear, Devoted Greville.”

From real emotion Greville shrank. But in this tirade he seemed to detect the authentic notes of a comfortable, conformable and convincing insincerity. Laying aside his branch coral, he consented to look at her, his pale blue eyes full for the moment of a responsive and therefore insincere tenderness, while at the same time having a blinding image of himself as he must have looked leaping behind that tree. But he decided to forgive. He was mollified.

Emma recited, adapting freely from Hayley, the house poet, and drying her tears—since he would not dry them for her—she abandoned the one attitude to take up another, head on his hand, sitting on the floor to be more comfortable.

“Come, it is too late in the evening for Greek attitudes,” said Greville. “Go to bed.”

At these kind words she scrambled up and went away. Her dress was thin. It could not be gainsaid, she had pink and delightful thighs.

Nonetheless the girl needed discipline, so he decided to abandon his spontaneous Tuesdays for the time being. When Thursday came around, he omitted Thursdays as well, and since Thursdays were a part of that system by which he regulated his life, this was the more serious omission. It was all very touch and go.

Emma kept to her room, too weak with shame to take any nourishment other than a custard at noon and a very large tea, three oranges, a bowl of apples, a bunch of grapes, half a pound cake, two bowls of Devonshire cream, a basket of strawberries, half a saddle of mutton, thirteen haws, to keep her hands busy, and two Anjou pears. Grief, she found, had made her hungry.

“What have I done?” she wailed. “What have I done?”

“You’ve been yourself, and it won’t do,” said Mrs. Cadogan. “Not in this household, anyway. From now on you must emulate others. There is no other way to please them.”

But it was Towneley who saved them.

*

“Of course I have heard about it,” he said, wagging a modish tasseled slipper. “It’s all over town. Which do you suggest, that I stuff my ears with loyalty, or cotton wool?”

Towneley was fond of Charles. If not his own sort of man, he was at least the next best thing—a fussy, prissy, predestinated bachelor, manly of course, but given to gossip in the right congenial way.

Someday the boy might marry. There are heiresses in Cumberland who will put up with anything. He had no desire to diddle him out of £10,000 a year. On the other hand, he had no desire to lose his company, either. Therefore he must be induced to keep Emma on. Besides, Towneley liked Emma, mildly. He judged people by his own evoked images—all of them artistic—and when he thought of Emma he saw first of all the Borghese hermaphrodite, and second, “St. Cecilia,” also in Rome, huddled up under her altar like Andromache in the snow. Since both these statues were among his favored female works (his favored male work was Georghetti’s “St. Sebastian” on the Palatine. Ah, if we had Georghetti’s “St. Sebastian” we should all be happy, if, as usual, bored), he had a soft spot in his heart for her. She was as sexless and as séduisant as a boy.

Towneley had a discursive mind. He returned abruptly to the point.

“My dear Charles,” he said. “You have mistaken your vocation. No wonder you are tired. You are minute in particulars, and have no principles whatsoever. Therefore you are either a scoundrel or a pedant. Since you live on unearned income, are precise in your accounts, and related to almost everybody, clearly you cannot be a scoundrel. Therefore a pedant you must be. You want employment, you relish the antique, you have an eye for sculpture—at any rate you seem to have an eye for mine—nature has supplied you with a Galatea, so chip away. Fashion her into one of the hetaerae. And then, if you really cannot abide her, sell her, for by that time she will fetch a better price.”

“Sell her?”

“Oh come now, Charles, what else is there to do with her? Think of the future. Every man has two chances at a good match: when he is young and seems romantic, and when he is older and seems a good catch. There are many women eager to marry a minister, should you become one, with or without portfolio. Meanwhile enjoy yourself: instruct the girl.”

“It is true that I have much to teach,” said Greville, with the obliviousness of true humility.

“My dear boy, of course you have,” said Towneley, with a cockatoo prance. “So why not get it out of your system now, while there is still time?”

So Emily was saved, in the best Hannah More style, by education. Greville commenced at once, though he would need advice.

The most notable exponent of education, excepting always Hannah More, was Mr. Day, the friend of Erasmus Darwin, the friend of Anna Seward, the friend of Johnson, who in his turn was the friend of Mrs. Thrale, who had married a merchant, so none of them was exactly respectable. Nor would the Bishop of Derry do. He was an admirable sedentary old rip whom eminence had rendered plummy, who admired erudition, could pull odds and ends of Horace out of a hat with the best of them, read the worst parts of Procopius in his cabinet, and had no use for education whatsoever. He preferred, he said, learning, for you can educate a rabbit, but nothing will make him learned unless he wants to be, in which case he is not a rabbit, so why stuff the memory with forcemeat, like a Michaelmas goose? It is a waste of time.

There was Rousseau….

Looking up at the Paulus Potter, Greville uttered an ungulate groan: should he begin with Taste or Tacitus? Or would his own moral apothegms be better? He had already instituted a course of instruction in those.

“If you give compliments solely in order to give pleasure, you will get what you want,” he had said when she was trying to butter up Mr. Hayley. “If you give them solely to get what you want, you will merely displease. You have not the art to dissimulate, dear Emma.”

“And it must be said, you do not seem to need it,” said Hayley, about whom everything was pleasant but his verse. “If you wish me to inscribe the Triumphs of Temper, why of course I shall.”

“I do not like the girl to appear pert,” said Greville. “She is at times.”

“You must come to the country more often. So is my climbing rose,” said Hayley. “She is Serena to the life.”

“Reading it is one of her few diversions.”

“She seems to wish to improve herself, at any rate,” said Hayley, Serena being the heroine of the above-mentioned work.

Indeed she did.

“Being ignorant of Taste, her only thought, upon seeing the sculpture around her, is to ask the subject of the scene, and so, to feed her curiosity, I have thought it best to instruct her in the elements of Classic Greek Myth,” wrote Greville to his uncle.

As for the celestial tittle-tattle of Greek myth, Emma had seldom heard such disgusting carryings on in her life, but into the memory box it went, and down went the lid, while Hope droned around the room with all the random diligence of a mosquito.

“The gnats in this part of Delaware are as large as sparrows. I have armed myself against them by wearing trousers,” wrote the Earl of Carlisle. In it went. Had she not been so pretty, Emma would have qualified as a bluestocking tomorrow. She had the erudition of a magpie; that is, she did not care what it was, what it meant or where it came from, but if it sparkled, into that jackdaw’s nest of a memory of hers it went. The worst was French.

“On pent comparer la société à une salle de spectacle: on n’y était aux loges que parce qu’on payait d’avantage,” mouthed Emma.

“And what is this ubiquitous caterwauling, pray?”

“It is French.”

“Child,” said Mrs. Cadogan, who lived in terror of foreign travel, for parsnips were not procurable abroad, “why?”

“It is a polite accomplishment and contains no ‘h’s,’” said Emma, holding out the book. “You see. There is an haitch. But you pay it no mind. That’s the beauty of it.”

“She is teachable. She shall vie with Mrs. Delaney,” said Greville.

“Ah, Charles,” said the Bishop of Derry, “you are a willful man. You would curdle cream. Have you not yet learned that artless prattle is superior to the artful kind?”

“Not twenty-four hours a day.”

“Ah well, perhaps not,” agreed the Bishop, and taking her hand, led Emma out into the garden, to name the flowers and plants and any animals therein at that time residing.

“Must I really read Dr. Johnson?” asked Emma.

“No, my child,” said the Bishop, who had been contemplating a zinnia, a most rare flower, and did not want his pleasure spoiled. “If an elephant could have written verse, he would have written much in the style of Johnson. It is not easy; it does not convince; but it is full of ponderous felicities. There is even here and there the gleam of a tusk. But though it is quotable, it cannot be read.”

“Not even the Dictionary?”

“The Dictionary is different. Here and there the Dictionary is amusing. As good as a novel, but with the words in their proper order, so I am told.”

“You are making fun of me.”

“No, I am only making fun with you. If Charles must convert you into that horrid grownup thing, a gentlewoman, he is going about it the wrong way. Even he should know a gentlewoman never reads, except, of course, the ‘Court Gazette.’”

“There is little other diversion here, except to sing and play the spinet and sew.”

The Bishop of Derry was shocked. “How sad,” he said, “to be so serious so young.”

“I am not sad. I find it paradise.”

“A strange Methodistic paradise, all gray. Now had you read the Alcoran, you would know that true paradise consists of nothing but your pretty self and milk and honey. My dear, you are diversion.” And the Bishop went back to contemplation of his copper zinnia, a plant from the New World, but in England, a novelty.

*

It was Mr. Hayley who provided the diversion, not the Bishop of Derry, and most certainly not Greville. Mr. Hayley had gone to see his friend Romney, the painter, who though he had been living in London for some years, had only recently arrived, and was at the moment fashionable. “Romney’s pictures are hard, dry and tasteless, and such as you would not like in the least. And I am enough secure that he will never make a first-rate painter,” wrote Northcote to his brother. That showed you how well established Romney had become. In these matters, a word from Northcote was enough.

Mr. Romney was a paranoiac of great charm, which is to say, in his own day, an original. His studio in Cavendish Square was vast. It was not England; it was not Italy; it was not anywhere. Freed for a moment from his vanities, his insanities and his own innate inabilities, he shut his eyes and life came flooding in, sepia wave after sepia wave of women who writhed and turned and were waves and not women, badly drawn, not drawn at all, merely fixed in the act of being either that bright turbulence the nearly blind see by daylight, or else the promise of something unknowable.

What I am I am, and that’s a pity, thought Mr. Romney. But what I draw for myself is quite another thing. For he had long ago given up hope that those half-understood and barely attended-to visions of his would ever find a model through whom he could express them.

He did not enjoy being a fashionable painter, for since all women of fashion desire to have the same face, he was forced to draw the same face always, which was not even the face of any particular woman, but only the face of fashion, and no relief in sight, but a change of style, which would merely be the same thing all over again with different eyebrows. Where is the woman with the courage to look like herself? Where, for that matter, the man? These do not exist. We are all afraid of something. Besides, he could not but hanker after the history or fancy piece, for since he had no talent for composition, that, of course, was what he longed to do.

In short, he was in the dumps. His talent was limited, in so far as he could draw accurately only what he saw. And who could get a woman to sit still long enough to show her character? She knows better. As soon as you begin to get close, she begins to fidget. As for sharing the canvas with anyone less undifferentiated than a child, that was out of the question, so there went composition. Even Reynolds had been constrained to draw the Waldegrave sisters separately.

Hayley wanted a portrait of Serena, engravable for a new edition of the Triumphs of Temper, and therefore an excellent advertisement for them both. The Triumphs of Temper is a poem of ideas. Where another poet would match words, therefore, Hayley matched wool. “He is a workbasket poet,” said Farrington, just as catty as Northcote and every inch the R.A. “His verses are upon every girl’s sofa.” And so they were, laid face down. A fresh edition appeared every year, at Confirmation time.

“But can she sit still?” asked Romney. “I am slow to compose.”

“I fear she sits still for quite long periods of time,” said Hayley. “She is a sweet thing, and has little else to do. Greville keeps her, you see.”

“Oh Greville,” said Romney, with a contemptuous snort. He, too, had had to deal with the purity and exactitude of Greville’s taste. “Very well, bring her along, and we’ll take a look at her.” It was Greville who had told him he was not quite ready yet. He decided to up his price, should a commission be forthcoming.

And so the second lesson began, with the first one as yet unlearned.