Louisa Pallant | Page 3

say immediately, none the less,
that she gave me neither then nor later any sign of a desire to contract a
loan. She had scant means--that I learned--yet seemed for the moment
able to pay her way. I took the empty chair and we remained in talk for
an hour. After a while she made me sit at her other side, next her
daughter, whom she wished to know me--to love me--as one of their
oldest friends. "It goes back, back, back, doesn't it?" said Mrs. Pallant;
"and of course she remembers you as a child." Linda smiled all sweetly
and blankly, and I saw she remembered me not a whit. When her
mother threw out that they had often talked about me she failed to take
it up, though she looked extremely nice. Looking nice was her strong
point; she was prettier even than her mother had been. She was such a
little lady that she made me ashamed of having doubted, however
vaguely and for a moment, of her position in the scale of propriety. Her
appearance seemed to say that if she had no acquaintances it was
because she didn't want them--because nobody there struck her as
attractive: there wasn't the slightest difficulty about her choosing her
friends. Linda Pallant, young as she was, and fresh and fair and
charming, gentle and sufficiently shy, looked somehow exclusive--as if
the dust of the common world had never been meant to besprinkle her.
She was of thinner consistency than her mother and clearly not a young
woman of professions--except in so far as she was committed to an
interest in you by her bright pure candid smile. No girl who had such a
lovely way of parting her lips could pass for designing.
As I sat between the pair I felt I had been taken possession of and that

for better or worse my stay at Homburg would be intimately associated
with theirs. We gave each other a great deal of news and expressed
unlimited interest in each other's history since our last meeting. I
mightn't judge of what Mrs. Pallant kept back, but for myself I quite
overflowed. She let me see at any rate that her life had been a good deal
what I supposed, though the terms she employed to describe it were
less crude than those of my thought. She confessed they had drifted,
she and her daughter, and were drifting still. Her narrative rambled and
took a wrong turn, a false flight, or two, as I thought Linda noted, while
she sat watching the passers, in a manner that betrayed no
consciousness of their attention, without coming to her mother's aid.
Once or twice Mrs. Pallant made me rather feel a cross-questioner,
which I had had no intention of being. I took it that if the girl never put
in a word it was because she had perfect confidence in her parent's
ability to come out straight. It was suggested to me, I scarcely knew
how, that this confidence between the two ladies went to a great length;
that their union of thought, their system of reciprocal divination, was
remarkable, and that they probably seldom needed to resort to the
clumsy and in some cases dangerous expedient of communicating by
sound. I suppose I made this reflexion not all at once--it was not wholly
the result of that first meeting. I was with them constantly for the next
several days and my impressions had time to clarify.
I do remember, however, that it was on this first evening that Archie's
name came up. She attributed her own stay at Homburg to no refined
nor exalted motive--didn't put it that she was there from force of habit
or because a high medical authority had ordered her to drink the waters;
she frankly admitted the reason of her visit to have been simply that she
didn't know where else to turn. But she appeared to assume that my
behaviour rested on higher grounds and even that it required
explanation, the place being frivolous and modern--devoid of that
interest of antiquity which I had ever made so much of. "Don't you
remember--ever so long ago--that you wouldn't look at anything in
Europe that wasn't a thousand years old? Well, as we advance in life I
suppose we don't think that quite such a charm." And when I mentioned
that I had arrived because the place was as good as another for awaiting
my nephew she exclaimed: "Your nephew--what nephew? He must
have come up of late." I answered that his name was Archie Parker and

that he was modern indeed; he was to attain legal manhood in a few
months and was in Europe for the first time. My last news of him had
been from Paris and I