RODERICK HUDSON
high light. You and I don't 'mind,' but I can easily put myself in the place of the proudest girl in the world, deeply wounded in her pride and not stopping to calculate probabilities, but muffling her wound with an almost sensuous relief in a splendour that stood within her grasp and would cover everything. Is it not possible that the late Mr. Light had made an outbreak before witnesses who are still living?—that the child's coming into the world was in itself a scandal? Say Light had quarrelled with his wife and was at the time virtually separated from her. Say too," Rowland went on, "that it quite imaginably came home to her—this first of all appeals from her father as a father."
"Ah, she won't have liked him for that!" Madame Grandoni declared. "Her being the Cavaliere's daughter must, if she had really been ignorant, have been a stiff dose for her to swallow."
"A reason the more then for her consenting to become grand!"
The old woman got up at last, resuming her progress and her sense of the situation. "Well, she has done what she was to do. She was nobly to decline it—yet not to miss it. Which would have been a pity."
It threw Rowland, as they went, into meditation again. "Yes, she clearly wasn't made to miss!"
He called on the evening of the morrow upon Mrs. Hudson and found Roderick with the two ladies. Their companion seemed to have but lately joined them, and Rowland afterwards learned that it was his first appearance since the writing of the note which had so distressed his mother. He had dropped
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