She smoothed the back of Felicia's hot hands. Her own were cool and soft, and their touch was very grateful to Felicia.
“My poor child,” she said, “my poor child.”
She herself had suffered. She knew from sad tasting the bitterness of many fruits that grow in the garden of life. Like many women, she judged the flavour of another's future experiences by the aftertaste of her own past. There were many, many Dead Sea apples that a woman had to eat before the grave closed over her. The sight of the young soul shrinking at the foretaste filled her with a sense of infinite pathos.
“I wonder if you would let me call you by your name sometimes when we are alone,” she said, gently.
The girl flashed a grateful glance.
“Would you really? It is Felicia.”
“And mine is Katherine. I wonder how it would sound?”
“Katherine?” echoed Felicia, with a puzzled smile. “What do you mean?”
“I have not heard it for very many years. To everybody I have known I have been Mrs. Stapleton. I should like to be called by my own name once again. Would you do so?”
“Oh! yes—gladly. But how sad! How very, very lonely you must be. I think I should pine away with loneliness. There must be quite a hundred people who call me Felicia.”
“Then you must give us poor forlorn creatures some of your happiness,” said Katherine, with a smile. “You must make allowances for us. Do not judge us too harshly.”
“Oh! you must not compare yourself with the others,” said Felicia; “you are quite different from—Mme. Popea, for instance.”
“Ah, no, not very much,” said Katherine, with a touch of bitterness. “We only differ a little through the circumstances of our upbringing, nationality, and so on. We are all the same at heart, weary of ourselves, of life, of each other. Most women have their homes, their children, their pleasant circle of friends. None of us has. We are failures. Either we have sought to get too much from life and heaven has punished us for presumption, or circumstance has been against us—we have been too poor to conquer it. Ah, no, my dear child, don't think that we are merely a set of selfish, coarse, ill-tempered women. Each of us knows in her own heart that she is a failure, and she knows that all the others know it.”
A flush of colour bad come into her delicate cheek as she said this, and her lips closed rather tightly, showing fine, almost imperceptible vertical lines. Yet her eyes looked kindly at Felicia and smoothed any rough impression her words may have made.
The other's eyes met hers rather wonderingly. The tragedy that underlay this commonplace pension life was a new conception.
“I'll try to think more kindly of them,” she said.
“And what about poor me?”
“Ah, you! I have never thought unkindly about you. In fact, I have wanted to know you, but you have always been so distant and reserved, until this evening; you and Mr. Chetwynd. He is so clever, and so old—and I am only a girl—that I am afraid of boring him.”
Katherine laughed at her naïve confusion. “Why, Mr. Chetwynd is the kindest and most courteous old man in the world! I'll tell you what we'll do. I will get your seat moved up to our end of the table—away from Mme. Boccard, who has had you long enough—and then you can sit next to him. Would you like that?”
Felicia assented gladly. Mme. Boccard was a rather oppressive neighbour. Her conversation was as chaff before the wind, both in substance and utterance; and the few straws that Felicia, with her schoolgirl's knowledge of French, was able to seize, did not afford her much satisfaction.
“How can I thank you for being so kind to me?” she said, a little later, before they parted for the night.
“By calling me Katherine sometimes,” said the other. “I am not so very, very old, you know; and, my dear child, it would comfort me.”
Felicia went to sleep that night happier than she had done since her arrival in Geneva. But she pondered many things before her eyes closed. She was ready to pity Mme. Popea for being a failure, but Mrs. Stapleton had failed to explain to her the necessary connection between an unhappy life and Le Journal Amusant. If the latter was a necessary solace, it brought fresh terrors to the anticipation of sorrow.
CHAPTER II.—KATHERINE.
Don't waste your pity upon me,” wrote old Mr. Chetwynd to his son Raine, an Oxford don. “This is not the Euxine, and even if it were, there would be compensation.
I have fallen in love in my old age. She is a little brown-haired, brown-eyed, fresh-coloured English girl, who has come lately to sit by me at table. Owing to her, a change has come o'er the spirit of my meals.
I say and do all kinds of foolish things. I caught myself yesterday brushing my coat before coming down to dinner. I shall be wearing a flower in my buttonhole before long. I am already supplied with bouquets.
“My young lady's ignorance is fascinating; it forms a bond between us. The Oxford young ladies, who will tell you of their charming talk with the dear professor, little know what wicked satirical thoughts they have left behind in the dear professor's breast. But this one actually does not want to teach me anything. Think of it! She is Homeric. I told her she reminded me of Nausicaa. Instead of taking the allusion as a text to preach the newest theories of female education, she asked me sweetly who Nausicaa was. It is wonderful! In brief, my dear Raine, if you value the place you hold in your poor old daddy's heart, you must pay me your promised visit with the utmost celerity.”
He was a striking figure in the pension, this old scholar, whose heart Felicia had won. All the ladies knew that he was a professor, wonderfully learned, and that he was writing a learned book, in which pursuit he spent half his days among the musty manuscripts in the Geneva University Library. In consequence, they looked upon him with a certain awe. They saw very little of him, except at meals, and then only those who were within easy conversational distance profited much by his society. Now and then, on rare occasions, he came into the salon after dinner, where he would take a hand at piquet with Mme. Popea, whose conspicuously best behaviour on these occasions was a subject of satirical pleasure to the others. But as a general rule he retired to his own room and his private avocations.
As a matter of fact, he was an Oxford scholar of considerable repute, honoured and welcomed in every Common Room. In his middle age he had filled a professorial chair in a Scotch University, which after some years he had resigned for reasons of climate and failing health. At present he was engaged on critical work dealing with the Swiss Reformers, and involving accurate documentary research. He had already spent the latter part of the summer at Zürich, examining the Zwinglius MSS., and now he was busy with the Calvinistic treasures of Geneva. How long his task would last would depend upon his rate of progress. But as he had let his small house in Oxford for a year, and as the quiet of the Pension Boccard suited him, he had decided upon staying at Geneva for a considerable time.
A strange anomaly, with his learning and industry, in the midst of the heterogeneous feminine idleness of the Pension. In a vague way all the women felt it. His appearance, too, was strikingly suggestive of a personality inaccessible to the trivialities round which their own souls centred. Once a strong, thick-set man, he retained at seventy-two, great breadth of bent shoulders. His hair, scanty at the top and long, was still black, as were his heavy eyebrows, beneath which gleamed lustrous black eyes. The sombre depth of the latter and the deep furrowings on his dark, square face gave it, in moments of repose, a stern expression but when a smile or the play of fancy or interest lit it up, it was like the sunshine breaking upon a granite scaur. The very magic of the change had in it something eerie, incomprehensible. And