The Way of Ambition. Robert Hichens
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The minx was evidently uppermost in her as they approached the others. She walked with a dainty slowness, a composed consciousness, that were almost the least bit affected, and as she stood still for a minute close to her mother, with her long eyes half shut, she looked typically of the world worldly, languid, almost prettily disdainful.
Mrs. Shiffney was speaking of the concert of that afternoon with discrimination and with enthusiasm.
"Of course he's a little monkey," she concluded, evidently alluding to some artist. "But what a little monkey! I was in the front row, and he called my attention to everything he was going to do, sometimes in Russian, sometimes in dreadful French, or in English that was really a criminal offense, and very often with his right elbow. He has a way of nudging the air in one's direction so that one feels it in one's side. Animal magnetism, I suppose. And he begs for sympathy as if it were a biscuit. Do you know him, Mr. Heath?"
"No, not at all. I know very few big artists."
"But all the young coming ones, I suppose? Did you study abroad?"
"I went to the Royal College at Kensington Gore."
Mrs. Shiffney, who was very cosmopolitan, had a flat in Paris, and was more often out of England than in it, slightly raised her eyebrows.
"You haven't studied in France or Germany?"
Heath began to look rather uncomfortable, and slightly self-conscious.
"No," he said quickly.
He paused, then as if with a decided effort he added:
"I think the training a student gets at the Royal College is splendid."
"Of course it is," said Max Elliot, heartily.
Mrs. Shiffney shook her shoulders.
"I'm sure it's quite perfect," she said, in her rather deep voice, gazing at the young composer with eyes in which a light satire twinkled. "Don't think I'm criticizing it. Only I'm so dreadfully un-English, and I think English musicians get rather into a groove. The Hallelujah bow-wow, you know!"
At this point in the conversation Charmian tranquilly interposed.
"Mr. Heath," she said, slightly protruding her chin, "when you've done with my only mother"—Mrs. Shiffney's lips tightened ever so little—"I want you to be very nice to me."
"Please tell me," said Heath, with the almost anxious eagerness that seemed to be characteristic of him.
Mrs. Mansfield fixed her blazing eyes on her daughter, slightly drawing down her gray eyebrows.
"Well, it's rather a secret."
Charmian glanced round at the others, then she added:
"It's about the Nutcracker."
"The Nutcracker!"
Heath puckered up his forehead.
"Yes." She moved a little, and looked at the chair not far from the fire on which she had sat when first she came into the room. "I care rather for boxing. Now"—she went slowly toward the chair, followed by Heath, "what I want to know, and what you can tell me, is this"—she sat down, and leaned her chin on her upturned palm—"on present form do you believe the Nutcracker is up to Conky Ja-ky Joe?"
As Claude Heath sat down to reply to this question, Mrs. Shiffney said:
"Conky Jarky Joe! I thought I was dans le mouvement up to my dog-collar, but I know nothing about the phenomenon. Where does it belong to?"
"Wonderland," said Elliot, in a gravely romantic voice.
"That's the land I've never seen, although I've had the yacht for so many years."
"Nor I!" said Paul Lane. "I don't believe it exists, or we must have been there. We have both been everywhere."
"Tell the poor things about it," said Mrs. Mansfield. "Then Adelaide can get up steam on The Wanderer and realize her dreams."
"But Mr. Elliot told me he met you there, and I remember distinctly his saying the fight was on between those two pets of the ring," said Charmian plaintively, after a certain amount of negation from Claude Heath.
"Yes, but I'm sure he didn't tell you I was an authority on boxing form."
"You aren't?"
"No, indeed!"
"But you want to be?"
"I shouldn't mind. But it isn't my chief aim in life."
Charmian was silent. She leaned back, taking her chin from her hand, and at last said gravely:
"It isn't that, then?"
"That—what?" exclaimed Heath, looking at her and away from her.
"That you want. It's something else. Because you know you want a very, very great deal of something."
"Oh, a good many of us do, I suppose."
"I don't think I do. I'm quite satisfied with my life. I have a good mother, a comfortable home. What should a properly-brought-up English girl, who has been educated at Brighton, want more?"
"I'm very glad indeed to know that a Brighton education stands its receiver in such good stead in the after years, very glad indeed!"
"You are laughing at me. And that's unchristian."
"Oh, but—but you were laughing at me!"
Despite Heath's eagerness, and marked social readiness of manner, Charmian was disagreeably conscious of a mental remoteness in him. Only the tip of his mind, perhaps scarcely that, was in touch with hers. Now she almost regretted that she had chosen to begin their acquaintance with absurdity, that she had approached Heath with a pose. She scarcely knew why she had done so. But she half thought, only half because of her self-respect, that she had been a little afraid of him, and so had instinctively caught up some armor, put a shield in front of her. Was she really impressed by a well-spoken-of Te Deum? She glanced at Heath inscrutably, as only woman can, and knew that she was not. It was the man himself who had caused her to fall into what she already thought of as a mistake. There was in Heath something that almost confused her. And she was not accustomed to be confused.
"I've made a bad beginning," she almost blurted out, not able to escape from artifice, yet speaking truth. "And I'm generally rather good at beginnings. It's so easy to take the first step, I think, despite that silly saying which, of course, I'm not going to quote. It's when one is getting to know a person really well that difficulties generally begin."
"Do they?"
"Yes, because it's then that very reserved people begin hurriedly building barricades, isn't it? I ask you, because I'm not at all reserved."
"But how should I know any better than you?"
"You mean, when you're so unreserved, too? No, that's true."
Heath's eyes troubled Charmian. She was feeling with every moment less at ease in his companionship and more determined to seem at ease. Being generally self-possessed, she had a horror of slipping into shyness and so retrograding from her usual vantage ground. She expected him to speak. It was his turn. But he said nothing. She felt sure that he had seen through her last lie, and that he was secretly resenting it as a heavy-footed approach to sacred ground. What a blunderer she was to-night! Desperation seized her.
"We must leave the question to the reserved," she said. "Poor things! I always pity them. They can never taste life as you and I and our kind are able to. We are put here to try to know and to be known. I feel sure of that. So the reserved are for ever endeavoring to escape their destiny. No wonder they are punished!"
"I am not sure that I entirely agree with your view as to the reason why we are put here," observed Heath, without a trace of obvious sarcasm. Nevertheless, the mere words stung Charmian's almost childish self-conceit.
"But