On some allusion to a lady who, though unknown to myself, was known to two or three of the company, it was asked by one of these if we had heard the odd circumstance of what she had just ‘come in for’ – the piece of luck suddenly overtaking, in the grey afternoon of her career, so obscure and lonely a personage. We were at first, in our ignorance, mainly reduced to crude envy; but old Lady Emma, who for a while had said nothing, scarcely even appearing to listen and letting the chatter, which was indeed plainly beside the mark, subside of itself, came back from a mental absence to observe that if what had happened to Lavinia was wonderful, certainly, what had for years gone before it, led up to it, had likewise not been without some singular features. From this we perceived that Lady Emma had a story – a story moreover out of the ken even of those of her listeners acquainted with the quiet person who was the subject of it. Almost the oddest thing – as came out afterwards – was that such a situation should, for the world, have remained so in the background of this person’s life. By ‘afterwards’ I mean simply before we separated; for what came out came on the spot, under encouragement and pressure, our common, eager solicitation. Lady Emma, who always reminded me of a fine old instrument that has first to be tuned, agreed, after a few of our scrapings and fingerings, that, having said so much, she couldn’t, without wantonly tormenting us, forbear to say all. She had known Lavinia, whom she mentioned throughout only by that name, from far away, and she had also known— But what she had known I must give as nearly as possible as she herself gave it. She talked to us from her corner of the sofa, and the flicker of the firelight in her face was like the glow of memory, the play of fancy, from within.
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“Then why on earth don’t you take him?” I asked. I think that was the way that, one day when she was about twenty – before some of you perhaps were born – the affair, for me, must have begun. I put the question because I knew she had had a chance, though I didn’t know how great a mistake her failure to embrace it was to prove. I took an interest because I liked them both – you see how I like young people still – and because, as they had originally met at my house, I had in a manner to answer to each for the other. I’m afraid I’m thrown baldly back on the fact that if the girl was the daughter of my earliest, almost my only governess, to whom I had remained much attached and who, after leaving me, had married – for a governess – ‘well’, Marmaduke (it isn’t his real name!) was the son of one of the clever men who had – I was charming then, I assure you I was – wanted, years before, and this one as a widower, to marry me. I hadn’t cared, somehow, for widowers, but even after I had taken somebody else I was conscious of a pleasant link with the boy whose stepmother it had been open to me to become and to whom it was perhaps a little a matter of vanity with me to show that I should have been for him one of the kindest. This was what the woman his father eventually did marry was not, and that threw him upon me the more.
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