But should I, or should I not, undertake to confirm or remove the unjust husband's suspicions?
Upon this I could not make up my mind. I required time for consideration. It was arranged that Mr. Percival should see me again in three days.
During the interval between his first and second visits, I carefully balanced reasons for and against the engagement, and at length resolved to accept it. If I did not undertake it, I knew others would, if it were offered them. If they took it in hand, I was not at all sure that they would perform their task with becoming delicacy and consideration. I thought it not improbable that some rude or vulgar man might be instructed, and that he might, by starting on his inquiry with a foregone conclusion of the lady's guilt, so interpret what he saw of her free conduct as to increase her husband's jealousy. On the other hand, if I undertook the affair, I doubted not the result would be a vindication of Mrs. Percival in her husband's eyes.
Mr. Percival punctually kept his appointment with me.
"I hope," he said, "you have agreed to assist me?"
"Well, I shall feel grateful to you when you have probed the truth--doubly grateful, if you can prove that my doubts about my wife are unfounded."
"I expect to earn that double gratitude."
"Be it so," he said, with great emphasis. "It is no drawback on your professional merits, to my mind, that you have already formed an opinion that my wife is as good as I could wish her, and that I am a jealous fool. I should not like to know that you had condemned _her_ beforehand. I am persuaded that you will do your duty faithfully towards me, and considerately towards her."
There was a ball at Almack's the very next day. Mrs. Percival was to be there, and so was her husband. They would go separately, after the manner of the _ton_--she in her brougham, and he in his cab.
I did not think Almack's a desirable place to begin my inquiries in. It would not be easy for me to gain admission into this closest of all assemblies, although I could have encompassed that, as I had before. I preferred a stand-point of observation where etiquette was less rigid.
Next week there was to be a grand fancy-dress ball, under a potent body of lady patronesses, for the relief of starvation in Whitechapel; and Mrs. Percival, acting under the feeble light of conventional charity, thought it her duty to buy a ticket (price one guinea, of which an infinitessimal portion was netted for the indigent), and to largely patronise her dressmaker and milliner, in proof of her intense sympathy with the famishing poor.