“As many as you like—and as respectful ones; but you won’t keep them up for ever!”
“You try to torment me,” said Count Otto.
She waited to explain. “I mean that I may have some of my family.”
“I shall be delighted to see them again.”
Again she just hung fire. “There are some you’ve never seen.”
In the afternoon, returning to Washington on the steamer, Vogelstein received a warning. It came from Mrs. Bonnycastle and constituted, oddly enough, the second juncture at which an officious female friend had, while sociably afloat with him, advised him on the subject of Pandora Day.
“There’s one thing we forgot to tell you the other night about the self-made girl,” said the lady of infinite mirth. “It’s never safe to fix your affections on her, because she has almost always an impediment somewhere in the background.”
He looked at her askance, but smiled and said: “I should understand your information—for which I’m so much obliged—a little better if I knew what you mean by an impediment.”
“Oh I mean she’s always engaged to some young man who belongs to her earlier phase.”
“The time before she had made herself—when she lived unconscious of her powers. A young man from Utica, say. They usually have to wait; he’s probably in a store. It’s a long engagement.”
Count Otto somehow preferred to understand as little as possible. “Do you mean a betrothal—to take effect?”
“I don’t mean anything German and moonstruck. I mean that piece of peculiarly American enterprise a premature engagement—to take effect, but too complacently, at the end of time.”
Vogelstein very properly reflected that it was no use his having entered the diplomatic career if he weren’t able to bear himself as if this interesting generalisation had no particular message for him. He did Mrs. Bonnycastle moreover the justice to believe that she wouldn’t have approached the question with such levity if she had supposed she should make him wince. The whole thing was, like everything else, but for her to laugh at, and the betrayal moreover of a good intention. “I see, I see—the self-made girl has of course always had a past. Yes, and the young man in the store—from Utica—is part of her past.”
“You express it perfectly,” said Mrs. Bonnycastle. “I couldn’t say it better myself.”