I had almost avoided the general election, but some of its consequences, on my return, had smartly to be faced.The season, in London, began to breathe again and to flap its folded wings.
Confidence, under the new Ministry, was understood to be reviving, and one of the symptoms, in a social body, was a recovery of appetite.People once more fed together, and it happened that, one Saturday night, at somebody's house, I fed with George Gravener.
When the ladies left the room I moved up to where he sat and begged to congratulate him."On my election?" he asked after a moment; so that I could feign, jocosely, not to have heard of that triumph and to be alluding to the rumour of a victory still more personal.Idare say I coloured however, for his political success had momentarily passed out of my mind.What was present to it was that he was to marry that beautiful girl; and yet his question made me conscious of some discomposure--I hadn't intended to put this before everything.He himself indeed ought gracefully to have done so, and I remember thinking the whole man was in this assumption that in expressing my sense of what he had won I had fixed my thoughts on his "seat." We straightened the matter out, and he was so much lighter in hand than I had lately seen him that his spirits might well have been fed from a twofold source.He was so good as to say that he hoped I should soon make the acquaintance of Miss Anvoy, who, with her aunt, was presently coming up to town.Lady Coxon, in the country, had been seriously unwell, and this had delayed their arrival.I told him I had heard the marriage would be a splendid one; on which, brightened and humanised by his luck, he laughed and said "Do you mean for HER?" When I had again explained what I meant he went on: "Oh she's an American, but you'd scarcely know it; unless, perhaps," he added, "by her being used to more money than most girls in England, even the daughters of rich men.That wouldn't in the least do for a fellow like me, you know, if it wasn't for the great liberality of her father.He really has been most kind, and everything's quite satisfactory."He added that his eldest brother had taken a tremendous fancy to her and that during a recent visit at Coldfield she had nearly won over Lady Maddock.I gathered from something he dropped later on that the free-handed gentleman beyond the seas had not made a settlement, but had given a handsome present and was apparently to be looked to, across the water, for other favours.People are simplified alike by great contentments and great yearnings, and, whether or no it was Gravener's directness that begot my own, Iseem to recall that in some turn taken by our talk he almost imposed it on me as an act of decorum to ask if Miss Anvoy had also by chance expectations from her aunt.My enquiry drew out that Lady Coxon, who was the oddest of women, would have in any contingency to act under her late husband's will, which was odder still, saddling her with a mass of queer obligations complicated with queer loopholes.There were several dreary people, Coxon cousins, old maids, to whom she would have more or less to minister.Gravener laughed, without saying no, when I suggested that the young lady might come in through a loophole; then suddenly, as if he suspected my turning a lantern on him, he declared quite dryly: "That's all rot--one's moved by other springs!"A fortnight later, at Lady Coxon's own house, I understood well enough the springs one was moved by.Gravener had spoken of me there as an old friend, and I received a gracious invitation to dine.The Knight's widow was again indisposed--she had succumbed at the eleventh hour; so that I found Miss Anvoy bravely playing hostess without even Gravener's help, since, to make matters worse, he had just sent up word that the House, the insatiable House, with which he supposed he had contracted for easier terms, positively declined to release him.I was struck with the courage, the grace and gaiety of the young lady left thus to handle the fauna and flora of the Regent's Park.I did what I could to help her to classify them, after I had recovered from the confusion of seeing her slightly disconcerted at perceiving in the guest introduced by her intended the gentleman with whom she had had that talk about Frank Saltram.I had at this moment my first glimpse of the fact that she was a person who could carry a responsibility; but I leave the reader to judge of my sense of the aggravation, for either of us, of such a burden, when I heard the servant announce Mrs.
