第27章

When the staggering record of her ignorance on seven subjects was set down in a green-covered blank book, she awaited the result not only with resignation, but with positive hope; a hope that proved to be ill-founded, for curiously enough the tutor was still in love with her. Salemina was surprised, but I was not. Of course I had to know anatomy in order to paint, but there is more in it than that. In painting the outsides of people I assure you that I learned to guess more of what was inside them than their bony structures! I sketched the tutor while he was examining Francesca and I knew that there were no abysmal depths of ignorance that could appall him where she was concerned. He couldn't explain the situation at all, himself. If there was anything that he admired and respected in woman, it was a well-stored, logical mind, and three months' tutoring of Francesca had shown him that her mental machinery was of an obsolete pattern and that it was not even in good working order. He could not believe himself influenced (so he confessed to me) by such trivial things as curling lashes, pink ears, waving hair (he had never heard of Marcel), or mere beauties of colour and line and form. He said he was not so sure about Francesca's eyes. Eyes like hers, he remarked in confidence, were not beneath the notice of any man, be he President of Harvard University or Master of Balliol College, for they seemed to promise something never once revealed in the green examination book.

"You are quite right," I answered him; "the green book is not all there is of Miss Monroe, but whatever there is is plainly not for you"; and he humbly agreed with my dictum.

Is it not strange that a man will talk to one woman about the charms of another for days upon days without ever realizing that she may possibly be born for some other purpose than listening to him? For an hour or two, of course, any sympathetic or generous-minded person can be interested in the confidences of a lover; but at the end of weeks or months, during which time he has never once regarded his listener as a human being of the feminine gender, with eyes, nose, and hair in no way inferior to those of his beloved,--at the end of that time he should be shaken, smitten, waked from his dreams, and told in ringing tones that in a tolerably large universe there are probably two women worth looking at, the one about whom he is talking, and the one to whom he is talking!

May 12, 19-To go on about Francesca, she always had a quick intelligence, a sense of humour, a heart, and a conscience; four things not to be despised in the equipment of a woman. The wit she used lavishly for the delight of the world at large; the heart had not (in the tutor's time) found anything or anybody on which to spend itself; the conscience certainly was not working overtime at the same period, but I always knew that it was there and would be an excellent reliable organ when once aroused.

Of course there is no reason why the Reverend Ronald MacDonald, of the Established Church of Scotland, should have been the instrument chosen to set all the wheels of Francesca's being in motion, but so it was; and a great clatter and confusion they made in our Edinburgh household when the machinery started! If Ronald was handsome he was also a splendid fellow; if he was a preacher he was also a man; and no member of the laity could have been more ardently and satisfactorily in love than he. It was the ardour that worked the miracle; and when Francesca was once warmed through to the core, she began to grow. Her modest fortune helped things a little at the beginning of their married life, for it not only made existence easier, but enabled them to be of more service in the straggling, struggling country parishes where they found themselves at first.

Francesca's beautiful American clothes shocked Ronald's congregations now and then, and it was felt that, though possible, it was not very probable, that the grace of God could live with such hats and shoes, such gloves and jewels as hers. But by the time Ronald was called from his Argyllshire church to St. Giles's Cathedral in Edinburgh there was a better understanding of young Mrs. MacDonald's raiment and its relation to natural and revealed religion. It appeared now that a clergyman's wife, by strict attention to parochial duties; by being the mother of three children all perfectly well behaved in church; by subscribing generously to all worthy charities; by never conducting herself as light-mindedly as her eyes and conversation seemed to portend,--it appeared that a woman COULD live down her clothes! It was a Bishop, I think, who argued in Francesca's behalf that godliness did not necessarily dwell in frieze and stout leather and that it might flourish in lace and chiffon. Salemina and I used to call Ronald and Francesca the antinomic pair. Antinomics, one finds by consulting the authorities, are apparently contradictory poles, which, however, do not really contradict, but are only correlatives, the existence of one making the existence of the other necessary, explaining each other and giving each other a real standing and equilibrium.

May 7, 19-What immeasurable leagues of distance lie between Salemina, Francesca, and me! Not only leagues of space divide us, but the difference in environment, circumstances, and responsibilities that give reality to space; yet we have bridged the gulf successfully by a particular sort of three-sided correspondence, almost impersonal enough to be published, yet revealing all the little details of daily life one to the other.