These creations of Italy in her early prime are the most
spontaneous of the children of beauty. There are no great differences
among them; the common type is lovely; they spring like flowers from one
root, in which are the forces both of Greece and the Italy of Leonardo.
It was their harmony, their cheerfulness, their touch of something
universal, that were somehow reproduced in this English girl, and that
made the secret of her charm.
She went on thinking about Tatham.
Presently she had built a castle high in air; she had worked it out--how
she was to make Lord Tatham clearly understand, before he had any chance
of proposing (if that were really in the wind, and she were not a mere
lump of conceit), that marrying was not her line; but that, as a friend,
he might rely upon her. Anything--in particular--that she could do to
help him to a wife, short of offering herself, was at his service. She
would be eyes and ears for him; she would tell him things he did not in
the least suspect about the sex.
But as to marrying! She rose from her seat, stretching her arms toward
the sky and the blossoming trees, in that half-wild gesture which so
truly expressed her. Marrying Duddon! that vast house, and all those
possessions; those piles of money; those county relations, and that web
of inherited custom which would lay its ghostly compulsion on Tatham's
wife the very instant he had married her--it was not to be thought of for
a moment! She, the artist with art and the world before her; she, with
her soul in her own keeping, and all the beauty of sky and fell and
stream to be had for the asking, to make herself the bond slave of
Duddon--of that formidably beautiful, that fond, fastidious mother!--and
of all the ceremonial and paraphernalia that must come with Duddon! She
saw herself spending weeks on the mere ordering of her clothes, calling
endlessly on stupid people, opening bazaars, running hospitals,
entertaining house parties, with the _clef des champs_ gone forever--a
little drawing at odd times--and all the meaning of life drowned in its
trappings.
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