“Mai’s, enfin, si c’est vrai,—si elle est réellement comme, ça, nest-ce pas,—mais c’est une honte,” was one of their refrains; and “Elle manque complètement de pudeur alors,” was another; to which the chorus: “Oh, pour sur!”
And poor little Miss couldn’t understand it. Observing the frigid and austere reserve with which they met her, feeling their half suppressed disapproval in the atmosphere, she searched her conscience vainly to discover what she could have done to anger them, and was, for a time I fear, exceedingly unhappy.
We men, meanwhile, were cursing ourselves for blockheads, chewing the sharp cud of repentance, and trying in a hundred sheepish, clumsy fashions to make amends. It would have been diverting for an outsider to have watched us; the deference with which we spoke and listened to her, the interest we took in her work, the infinite little politenesses we paid her. When all is said, the sins we were guilty of towards her had been chiefly metaphysical; it was what we had thought, rather than what we had done. But I don’t know that our contrition was on this account any the less acute; we had thought such a lot. We fancied a sister of our own in her position, and we conceived a frantic desire to punch the heads of the men who should have dared to think of her as we, quite nonchalantly and with no sense of daring, had thought of Miss. Our biggest positive transgression was the latitude of speech we had allowed ourselves at the table d’hôte; and the effect of that was happily neutralised (no thanks to us) by the poverty of her French. But, though our salvation lay in the circumstance, I am far from sure that it did not aggravate our remorse. We were profiting by her limitations, taking sanctuary in her ignorance; and that smacked disagreeably of the sneakish.
Our yearning to make amends was singularly complicated by the necessity we were under, as much for her sake as for our own, to prevent her ever guessing how (or even that) we had offended. Not to confess is to shirk the better half of atonement; yet confession in this case was impossible, concealment was imperative. That, if she should get so much as a glimmer of the truth, it would blast us forever in her esteem, was a consideration, but a trifling one to the thought of what her emotions must be like to realise the sort of place she had lately held in ours. No, she must never guess. With the consciousness in our hearts that we had practised a kind of intellectual foul play upon her, and in our minds a vivid picture of the different footing things would be on if she only knew, we must continue cheerfully to enjoy her smiles and her good graces, and try to look as if we felt that we deserved them. It was bare-faced hypocrisy, it was a game of false pretences; but it was Hobson’s choice. We could not even cease to thee-and-thou her, lest she should wonder at the change, and from wonderment proceed to ratiocination.