And, as it began, so that matter has remained.
I didn't care whether she had come out of that bedroom or whether she hadn't.
It simply didn't interest me. Florence didn't matter.
I suppose you will retort that I was in love with Nancy Rufford and that my indifference was therefore discreditable.
Well, I am not seeking to avoid discredit.
I was in love with Nancy Rufford as I am in love with the poor child's memory, quietly and quite tenderly in my American sort of way.
I had never thought about it until I heard Leonora state that I might now marry her.
But, from that moment until her worse than death, I do not suppose that I much thought about anything else.
I don't mean to say that I sighed about her or groaned; I just wanted to marry her as some people want to go to Carcassonne.
Do you understand the feeling—the sort of feeling that you must get certain matters out of the way, smooth out certain fairly negligible complications before you can go to a place that has, during all your life, been a sort of dream city?
I didn't attach much importance to my superior years.
I was forty-five, and she, poor thing, was only just rising twenty-two.
But she was older than her years and quieter.
She seemed to have an odd quality of sainthood, as if she must inevitably end in a convent with a white coif framing her face.
But she had frequently told me that she had no vocation; it just simply wasn't there—the desire to become a nun.
Well, I guess that I was a sort of convent myself; it seemed fairly proper that she should make her vows to me.
No, I didn't see any impediment on the score of age.
I dare say no man does and I was pretty confident that with a little preparation, I could make a young girl happy.
I could spoil her as few young girls have ever been spoiled; and I couldn't regard myself as personally repulsive.
No man can, or if he ever comes to do so, that is the end of him.
But, as soon as I came out of my catalepsy, I seemed to perceive that my problem—that what I had to do to prepare myself for getting into contact with her, was just to get back into contact with life.
I had been kept for twelve years in a rarefied atmosphere; what I then had to do was a little fighting with real life, some wrestling with men of business, some travelling amongst larger cities, something harsh, something masculine.
I didn't want to present myself to Nancy Rufford as a sort of an old maid.
That was why, just a fortnight after Florence's suicide, I set off for the United States.
II
IMMEDIATELY after Florence's death Leonora began to put the leash upon Nancy Rufford and Edward.
She had guessed what had happened under the trees near the Casino.
They stayed at Nauheim some weeks after I went, and Leonora has told me that that was the most deadly time of her existence.
It seemed like a long, silent duel with invisible weapons, so she said.
And it was rendered all the more difficult by the girl's entire innocence.
For Nancy was always trying to go off alone with Edward—as she had been doing all her life, whenever she was home for holidays.
She just wanted him to say nice things to her again.
You see, the position was extremely complicated.
It was as complicated as it well could be, along delicate lines.
There was the complication caused by the fact that Edward and Leonora never spoke to each other except when other people were present.
Then, as I have said, their demeanours were quite perfect.
There was the complication caused by the girl's entire innocence; there was the further complication that both Edward and Leonora really regarded the girl as their daughter. Or it might be more precise to say that they regarded her as being Leonora's daughter.
And Nancy was a queer girl; it is very difficult to describe her to you.
She was tall and strikingly thin; she had a tortured mouth, agonized eyes, and a quite extraordinary sense of fun.
You, might put it that at times she was exceedingly grotesque and at times extraordinarily beautiful.
Why, she had the heaviest head of black hair that I have ever come across; I used to wonder how she could bear the weight of it.
She was just over twenty-one and at times she seemed as old as the hills, at times not much more than sixteen.
At one moment she would be talking of the lives of the saints and at the next she would be tumbling all over the lawn with the St Bernard puppy.
She could ride to hounds like a Maenad and she could sit for hours perfectly still, steeping handkerchief after handkerchief in vinegar when Leonora had one of her headaches.
She was, in short, a miracle of patience who could be almost miraculously impatient.
It was, no doubt, the convent training that effected that.
I remember that one of her letters to me, when she was about sixteen, ran something like:
"On Corpus Christi"—or it may have been some other saint's day, I cannot keep these things in my head—"our school played Roehampton at Hockey. And, seeing that our side was losing, being three goals to one against us at halftime, we retired into the chapel and prayed for victory.
We won by five goals to three."
And I remember that she seemed to describe afterwards a sort of saturnalia.