Henry James - Henry James - The Complete Novels (The Greatest Novelists of All Time – Book 10)

Lizzie reappeared to say that her mother would now be happy to receive Madame Munster; and the Baroness followed her to Mrs. Acton’s apartment. Eugenia reflected, as she went, that it was not the affectation of impertinence that made her dislike this young lady, for on that ground she could easily have beaten her. It was not an aspiration on the girl’s part to rivalry, but a kind of laughing, childishly-mocking indifference to the results of comparison. Mrs. Acton was an emaciated, sweet-faced woman of five and fifty, sitting with pillows behind her, and looking out on a clump of hemlocks. She was very modest, very timid, and very ill; she made Eugenia feel grateful that she herself was not like that — neither so ill, nor, possibly, so modest. On a chair, beside her, lay a volume of Emerson’s Essays. It was a great occasion for poor Mrs. Acton, in her helpless condition, to be confronted with a clever foreign lady, who had more manner than any lady — any dozen ladies — that she had ever seen.

“I have heard a great deal about you,” she said, softly, to the Baroness.

“From your son, eh?” Eugenia asked. “He has talked to me immensely of you. Oh, he talks of you as you would like,” the Baroness declared; “as such a son must talk of such a mother!”

Mrs. Acton sat gazing; this was part of Madame Munster’s “manner.” But Robert Acton was gazing too, in vivid consciousness that he had barely mentioned his mother to their brilliant guest. He never talked of this still maternal presence — a presence refined to such delicacy that it had almost resolved itself, with him, simply into the subjective emotion of gratitude. And Acton rarely talked of his emotions. The Baroness turned her smile toward him, and she instantly felt that she had been observed to be fibbing. She had struck a false note. But who were these people to whom such fibbing was not pleasing? If they were annoyed, the Baroness was equally so; and after the exchange of a few civil inquiries and low-voiced responses she took leave of Mrs. Acton. She begged Robert not to come home with her; she would get into the carriage alone; she preferred that. This was imperious, and she thought he looked disappointed. While she stood before the door with him — the carriage was turning in the gravel-walk — this thought restored her serenity.

When she had given him her hand in farewell she looked at him a moment. “I have almost decided to dispatch that paper,” she said.

He knew that she alluded to the document that she had called her renunciation; and he assisted her into the carriage without saying anything. But just before the vehicle began to move he said, “Well, when you have in fact dispatched it, I hope you will let me know!”

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