Edmund Yates

“ He spoke with animation, and his bright eyes glowed with fire as he seized his old friend by the shoulders and used a feigned force to arrest his progress. You see Mr. Gordon Frere was brimming over with happiness. To be six-and-twenty years of age; to be good-looking; to have high animal spirits; to have indulgent tradespeople, and a tolerable sufficiency of pocket-money; to be in love with a very charming girl, and to have your passion returned, are all things calculated to make a man content with life, and disposed to regard human nature from its best point of view. ”

“ It was also characteristic of Hester Gould that, though she had determined to marry Streightley without permitting herself to love him, she told herself that night that she felt a degree of dislike to Katharine Guyon, which might, if she did not take care, grow into hatred.
"She is my unconscious and involuntary rival," said the strange woman, whose candour towards herself was never laid aside, "and I must not hate her; for hatred is troublesome--a passion--and I will never put myself under the tyranny of a passion." ”

“ Women? Yes, he had known women before--his mother, Ellen, Hester Gould. What had they in common with this soft, delicate, queenly creature, the touch of whose hand on his arm thrilled him to the bone, the sound of whose voice sent the blood rushing to his heart, the glance of whose eye--light, fleeting, and uninterested though it was--he would have purchased at the price of a king's ransom.
The dinner was good, and Mr. Guyon was gay; but neither succulent dishes nor brilliant sallies had much effect on Robert Streightley. ”

“ Guyon paused for an instant to take a sip from the cut-glass goblet and to throw away the butt-end of the cigarette. Feeling it incumbent on him to say something, Robert Streightley murmured, "Very kind!"
"No," said Mr. Guyon, raising himself on his elbow, and looking lazily across the table at his visitor, "not very kind. Shrewd, perhaps, but not kind. When a man is in want of serious advice, and goes to the fountain-head for--that kind of thing--boldly and without scruple, he may be said to be shrewd. ”

“ A man with the morals of a billiard-marker and an income of a couple of thousand a-year would have a better chance with old Guyon than a Bayard or a Galahad. He's a bad lot, this Mr. Guyon, but as sharp as a ferret, and he'll read Gordon like a book. All the poor boy's talk about what his political influence and what his father must do for him, and all that, won't weigh for an instant with a man like Guyon, who is up to every move on the board, and who will require money down from any one bidding for his daughter's hand. ”

“ Men can't and won't marry without money; and though you don't know much of the world, except the ball, supper, promenade, and park side of it, Katie, I daresay you know enough of it not to deny that. You don't know much of Streightley; and I daresay he's not the sort of fellow you would fancy if you did know ever so much of him. But then, you see, the sort of fellow you would fancy can't marry you, because you have no money, or won't, which comes to the same thing,--at all events doesn't--" Here Katharine released herself, and sat down. ”

“ Charles Yeldham found himself making holiday from his work, and taking part in a grand ceremony of nothing-doing with those whose lives were passed in never doing any thing; and, like most men who rarely emerge from the business of their lives to seek a temporary respite from perpetual work in a few brief hours of enjoyment, Charley was determined to make the most of his time, and to reap the full value of those precious hours which he had grudgingly given up. ”

“ Guyon's society--and of late he had been admitted into a great deal of Mr. Guyon's society--Robert Streightley seemed to feel himself a different being. There was nothing rough or unpleasant in his new friend and those to whom his new friend introduced him; he became for the first time in his life aware of the existence of another world, where well-bred ease, polished manners, and refined conversation were substituted for that eternal strife and fight and wrangle for money-getting in which his whole previous existence had been passed. ”

“ Guyon had found it impossible to get up a Greenwich dinner-party to comprise more than four individuals, including Robert Streightley and Daniel Thacker. He had avoided his daughter as much as possible of late; and Mr. Streightley had sedulously sought her society, with every kind of tacit encouragement within her father's power to give him. It was the day named for the Greenwich dinner; and Katharine, glad to be alone, and yet feverish and miserable in her solitude, had refused to go to Lady Henmarsh's, there to hold a causerie on their several autumn plans. ”

“ I simply tell you that an acceptance of yours will be due next week, an acceptance which you avow your perfect readiness to meet, and you talk about my looking on you with suspicion. I am perfectly ready to allow that our relations have been of a business nature; but I thought that I might take credit for having introduced into them some of the elements of private friendship. You have done me the honour of dining with me, and----"
"I have," murmured Guyon absently; "and doosid good dinners they were."
"And yet you talk about suspicion. This is not fair, Mr. Guyon; this is any thing but fair." ”

“ Guyon driving at?
"I will be perfectly plain with you, my dear Robert," said Mr. Guyon, "frank as the day, all open and aboveboard. I won't disguise from you, I don't attempt to disguise it from myself, that perhaps there never was a man less fitted than I am to have been blessed with what would be a crowning solace to many men--a daughter." Streightley involuntarily started as these words met his ear; and Mr. Guyon noticed the start, but he did not betray himself, and proceeded. "I'm not a domestic man, and not cut out for domestic happiness. ”

“ Over the girl's whole bearing an indescribable softness, a winning grace was thrown,--the subtle, all-powerful charm created by the desire of pleasing; perhaps the most potent, and frequently the most unconscious, in a woman's possession. She looked her best, she talked her best, the animation of her manner never passing the bounds of perfect refinement, but ever spontaneous and unsubdued; the simple grace of her figure, the sensitive beauty of her face must have touched and warmed a duller man than Gordon Frere. ”

“ Guyon, intently scanning his face, derive the smallest idea from its expression. Then he made a few rapid calculations on the blotting-pad in front of him, and said:
"You play for a big stake, Mr. Guyon, and don't stick at asking trifles from your friends. Now, I like a big game; it at once invests any scheme with an interest for me which I cannot give to mere pottering petty hazards. And I don't say that I won't help you in this--on certain terms--only----"
"Your terms will be your own, my good fellow," cried Guyon, his eye sparkling at the thought of success. ”

“ Every body said they wished you'd been down there."
"Every body's very good," replied Thacker, sufficiently grimly. He hated hearing of any pleasure which he had not shared. "Every body's very good; but every body seems to forget that I've my business to attend to."
"Business, my dear boy," said Mr. Guyon, stretching out his legs and clasping his lavender-gloves in front of him; "and have we not all business to transact? I know, for one, that my time is nearly entirely devoted to business. ”

“ Guyon will handle the forceps with strength and skill, and poor Gordon will think that half his life is gone with the tug. But once over, when he begins to find that the gap is not so enormous as he at first imagined, when he sees people don't notice the alteration in his appearance, he'll begin to think it was a good job that it happened while he was yet young, and he'll settle down and get to work, and perhaps make the name and reputation which his talents, if they had any thing like fair play, entitle him to. It's wonderful the different light in which men see these things. ”

“ Katharine Guyon's manners were, in certain respects, perfect; they were, indeed, rather too perfect and independent; she presented too complete a contrast to the drooping-lily style of girl; and she never suffered from a sense of embarrassment. It was not, therefore, shyness which lent her downy cheek that beautiful flush it had worn at the entrance of her visitor, and continued to wear, or that softened glance which darkened the colour and deepened the expression of her eyes. ”

“ The tie between them was formed of mutual complaisance, not of influence and respect. Lady Henmarsh did not understand either the strength of Katharine's feelings or the determination of her temper; she had never seen either roused into action, and she regarded her as rather shrewder and more worldly-minded than most girls, as well as cleverer and better-looking. So, though she knew her to be self-willed, she calculated on her sense and shrewdness overcoming her obstinacy in a matter in which her worldliness would teach her that obstinacy was injurious and misplaced. ”

“ Hester Gould was a handsome woman at twenty, a period of life which she had reached only a few days before that on which she had made affectionate inquiries for Ellen Streightley; but she would probably be a handsomer woman at thirty, and if she then fulfilled the latent promise of beauty, would have a fair chance of retaining it long past the period at which the loveliness of women, in all but very exceptional cases, ceases to be a fact, and becomes a memory. ”

“ All right, my boy; tell away."
"I think I've mentioned her before, Charley," said Frere; "Miss Guyon--Kate Guyon, daughter of old Guyon, whom you've heard me speak of; a member of the club, you know; fellow who plays a deuced good game of whist, and that kind of thing. And the girl's really wonderful; very handsome, and with a regular well-bred look about her. None of your dumpy, dowdy, slummakin women--I hate that style--but tall and elegant; carries herself well, and has plenty to say for herself--when she chooses." ”

“ I must shift for myself the best way I can--get off abroad, and escape imprisonment; though I can't escape disgrace--and never hope to show my face in England again. And as for you, Katie, don't think me hard or cruel--I must tell you the truth; I must tell you the whole truth, that you may know what you really reject or accept. I see nothing for you but becoming a companion to a lady--which I take it is the most infernal kind of white slavery going--or being dependent on the charity of Lady Henmarsh. ”

“ I could not fancy him ever taking any pleasure or amusement, or being like other people--of course, I mean," she added explanatorily, "any of the pleasures of his class."
"O, I suppose not," said Frere; "a regular grub, who will be what he will be content to call rich when he's gray and gouty. But they have one consolation, Miss Guyon: as their business and their pleasure alike consist in money-getting, the one is not purchased at the expense of the other." ”

“ Lady Henmarsh asked the question very suddenly; and as Katharine answered it, her cheeks reddened with a painful blush, which did not fade again during the interview.
"No, Lady Henmarsh, he did not."
"Ah, I thought so. And now, my dear Kate, let me speak to you, as I feel, with the affection of a mother and the experience of a woman of the world. Gordon Frere has treated you very ill; he has exposed you to comments, very injurious and painful to any girl, still more so to a girl situated as you are. ”

“ Gordon Frere, who attended his lordship in the character of private secretary, and a numerous suite.
Katharine Guyon was not a fainting woman. She had never fainted in her life, and hysterical affections she held in equal suspicion and disdain. No merciful weakness came to lessen the physical anguish she experienced, when these few lines conveyed to her shrinking soul the full assurance of the fate that had befallen her. The physical suffering of a sudden grief is always terrible, most terrible where strength reigns with tolerable equality in body and mind. ”