"Oh, my dear, how charming! I must take another house!" It was in these words that her mother responded to the announcement Rose had just formally made and with which she had vaguely expected to produce a certain dignity of effect.In the way of emotion there was apparently no effect at all, and the girl was wise enough to know that this was not simply on account of the general line of non-allusion taken by the extremely pretty woman before her, who looked like her elder sister.Mrs.Tramore had never manifested, to her daughter, the slightest consciousness that her position was peculiar;but the recollection of something more than that fine policy was required to explain such a failure, to appreciate Rose's sacrifice.
It was simply a fresh reminder that she had never appreciated anything, that she was nothing but a tinted and stippled surface.
Her situation was peculiar indeed.She had been the heroine of a scandal which had grown dim only because, in the eyes of the London world, it paled in the lurid light of the contemporaneous.That attention had been fixed on it for several days, fifteen years before; there had been a high relish of the vivid evidence as to his wife's misconduct with which, in the divorce-court, Charles Tramore had judged well to regale a cynical public.The case was pronounced awfully bad, and he obtained his decree.The folly of the wife had been inconceivable, in spite of other examples: she had quitted her children, she had followed the "other fellow" abroad.The other fellow hadn't married her, not having had time: he had lost his life in the Mediterranean by the capsizing of a boat, before the prohibitory term had expired.
Mrs.Tramore had striven to extract from this accident something of the austerity of widowhood; but her mourning only made her deviation more public, she was a widow whose husband was awkwardly alive.She had not prowled about the Continent on the classic lines; she had come back to London to take her chance.But London would give her no chance, would have nothing to say to her; as many persons had remarked, you could never tell how London would behave.It would not receive Mrs.Tramore again on any terms, and when she was spoken of, which now was not often, it was inveterately said of her that she went nowhere.Apparently she had not the qualities for which London compounds; though in the cases in which it does compound you may often wonder what these qualities are.She had not at any rate been successful: her lover was dead, her husband was liked and her children were pitied, for in payment for a topic London will parenthetically pity.It was thought interesting and magnanimous that Charles Tramore had not married again.The disadvantage to his children of the miserable story was thus left uncorrected, and this, rather oddly, was counted as HIS sacrifice.His mother, whose arrangements were elaborate, looked after them a great deal, and they enjoyed a mixture of laxity and discipline under the roof of their aunt, Miss Tramore, who was independent, having, for reasons that the two ladies had exhaustively discussed, determined to lead her own life.She had set up a home at St.Leonard's, and that contracted shore had played a considerable part in the upbringing of the little Tramores.They knew about their mother, as the phrase was, but they didn't know her; which was naturally deemed more pathetic for them than for her.She had a house in Chester Square and an income and a victoria--it served all purposes, as she never went out in the evening--and flowers on her window-sills, and a remarkable appearance of youth.The income was supposed to be in part the result of a bequest from the man for whose sake she had committed the error of her life, and in the appearance of youth there was a slightly impertinent implication that it was a sort of afterglow of the same connection.
Her children, as they grew older, fortunately showed signs of some individuality of disposition.Edith, the second girl, clung to her aunt Julia; Eric, the son, clung frantically to polo; while Rose, the elder daughter, appeared to cling mainly to herself.Collectively, of course, they clung to their father, whose attitude in the family group, however, was casual and intermittent.He was charming and vague; he was like a clever actor who often didn't come to rehearsal.
Fortune, which but for that one stroke had been generous to him, had provided him with deputies and trouble-takers, as well as with whimsical opinions, and a reputation for excellent taste, and whist at his club, and perpetual cigars on morocco sofas, and a beautiful absence of purpose.Nature had thrown in a remarkably fine hand, which he sometimes passed over his children's heads when they were glossy from the nursery brush.On Rose's eighteenth birthday he said to her that she might go to see her mother, on condition that her visits should be limited to an hour each time and to four in the year.She was to go alone; the other children were not included in the arrangement.This was the result of a visit that he himself had paid his repudiated wife at her urgent request, their only encounter during the fifteen years.The girl knew as much as this from her aunt Julia, who was full of tell-tale secrecies.She availed herself eagerly of the license, and in course of the period that elapsed before her father's death she spent with Mrs.Tramore exactly eight hours by the watch.Her father, who was as inconsistent and disappointing as he was amiable, spoke to her of her mother only once afterwards.This occasion had been the sequel of her first visit, and he had made no use of it to ask what she thought of the personality in Chester Square or how she liked it.He had only said "Did she take you out?" and when Rose answered "Yes, she put me straight into a carriage and drove me up and down Bond Street," had rejoined sharply "See that that never occurs again." It never did, but once was enough, every one they knew having happened to be in Bond Street at that particular hour.