The Finer Grain

This at last arrested him again. “My dear Cornelia, she doesn’t know–!”

He had paused as for the desperate tone, or at least the large emphasis of it, so that she took him up. “The more reason then to help her to find it out.”

“I mean,” he explained, “that she doesn’t know anything.”

“Anything?”

“Anything else, I mean—even if she does know that.”

Cornelia considered of it. “But what else need she—in particular—know? Isn’t that the principal thing?”

“Well”—and he resumed his circuit—“she doesn’t know anything that we know. But nothing,” he re-emphasised—“nothing whatever!”

“Well, can’t she do without that?”

“Evidently she can—and evidently she does, beautifully. But the question is whether I can!”

He had paused once more with his point—but she glared, poor Cornelia, with her wonder. “Surely if you know for yourself–!”

“Ah, it doesn’t seem enough for me to know for myself! One wants a woman,” he argued—but still, in his prolonged tour, quite without his scowl—“to know for one, to know with one. That’s what you do now,” he candidly put to her.

It made her again gape. “Do you mean you want to marry me?”

He was so full of what he did mean, however, that he failed even to notice it. “She doesn’t in the least know, for instance, how old I am.”

“That’s because you’re so young!”

“Ah, there you are!”—and he turned off afresh and as if almost in disgust. It left her visibly perplexed—though even the perplexed Cornelia was still the exceedingly pointed; but he had come to her aid after another turn. “Remember, please, that I’m pretty well as old as you.”

She had all her point at least, while she bridled and blinked, for this. “You’re exactly a year and ten months older.”

It checked him there for delight. “You remember my birthday?”

She twinkled indeed like some far-off light of home. “I remember every one’s. It’s a little way I’ve always had—and that I’ve never lost.”

He looked at her accomplishment, across the room, as at some striking, some charming phenomenon. “Well, that’s the sort of thing I want!” All the ripe candour of his eyes confirmed it.

What could she do therefore, she seemed to ask him, but repeat her question of a moment before?—which indeed presently she made up her mind to. “Do you want to marry me?”

It had this time better success—if the term may be felt in any degree to apply. All his candour, or more of it at least, was in his slow, mild, kind, considering head-shake. “No, Cornelia—not to marry you.”

His discrimination was a wonder; but since she was clearly treating him now as if everything about him was, so she could as exquisitely meet it. “Not at least,” she convulsively smiled, “until you’ve honourably tried Mrs. Worthingham. Don’t you really mean to?” she gallantly insisted.

He waited again a little; then he brought out: “I’ll tell you presently.” He came back, and as by still another mere glance over the room, to what seemed to him so much nearer. “That table was old Twelfth-Street?”

“Everything here was.”

“Oh, the pure blessings! With you, ah, with you, I haven’t to wear a green shade.” And he had retained meanwhile his small photograph, which he again showed himself. “Didn’t we talk of Mary Cardew?”

“Why, do you remember it?” She marvelled to extravagance.

“You make me. You connect me with it. You connect it with we.” He liked to display to her this excellent use she thus had, the service she rendered. “There are so many connections—there will be so many. I feel how, with you, they must all come up again for me: in fact you’re bringing them out already, just while I look at you, as fast as ever you can. The fact that you knew every one—!” he went on; yet as if there were more in that too than he could quite trust himself about.

“Yes, I knew every one,” said Cornelia Rasch; but this time with perfect simplicity. “I knew, I imagine, more than you do—or more than you did.”

It kept him there, it made him wonder with his eyes on her. “Things about them—our people?”

“Our people. Ours only now.”

Ah, such an interest as he felt in this—taking from her while, so far from scowling, he almost gaped, all it might mean! “Ours indeed—and it’s awfully good they are; or that we’re still here for them! Nobody else is—nobody but you: not a cat!”

“Well, I am a cat!” Cornelia grinned.

“Do you mean you can tell me things—?” It was too beautiful to believe.

“About what really was?” she artfully considered, holding him immensely now. “Well, unless they’ve come to you with time; unless you’ve learned—or found out.”

“Oh,” he reassuringly cried—reassuringly, it most seemed, for himself—“nothing has come to me with time, everything has gone from me. How can I find out now! What creature has an idea–?”

She threw up her hands with the shrug of old days—the sharp little shrug his sisters used to imitate and that she hadn’t had to go to Europe for. The only thing was that he blessed her for bringing it back.

“Ah, the ideas of people now–!”

“Yes, their ideas are certainly not about us” But he ruefully faced it. “We’ve none the less, however, to live with them.”

“With their ideas—?” Cornelia questioned.

“With them—these modern wonders; such as they are!” Then he went on: “It must have been to help me you’ve come back.”

She said nothing for an instant about that, only nodding instead at his photograph. “What has become of yours? I mean of her.”

This time it made him turn pale. “You remember I have one?”

She kept her eyes on him. “In a ‘pork-pie’ hat, with her hair in a long net. That was so ‘smart’ then; especially with one’s skirt looped up, over one’s hooped magenta petticoat, in little festoons, and a row of very big onyx beads over one’s braided velveteen sack—braided quite plain and very broad, don’t you know?”

He smiled for her extraordinary possession of these things—she was as prompt as if she had had them before her. “Oh, rather—‘don’t I know?’ You wore brown velveteen, and, on those remarkably small hands, funny gauntlets—like mine.”

“Oh, do you remember? But like yours?” she wondered.

“I mean like hers in my photograph.” But he came back to the present picture. “This is better, however, for really showing her lovely head.”

“Mary’s head was a perfection!” Cornelia testified.

“Yes—it was better than her heart.”

“Ah, don’t say that!” she pleaded. “You weren’t fair.”

“Don’t you think I was fair?” It interested him immensely—and the more that he indeed mightn’t have been; which he seemed somehow almost to hope.