ER XXVIII

ARABIAN NIGHTS IN ENGLAND

I had much to reconstruct that season in regard to Margarita. I had
found her once before, in Paris, no longer a child, but a woman; I
found her now no woman merely, but a woman of the world. It seems
incredible, indeed, and I have puzzled over it many an hour when the
demon of sciatica has clawed at my hip and Hodgson's faithful hands
have dropped fatigued from his ministrations. How she did it, how an
untrained, emotional little savage, with hands as quick to strike as
the paws of a cub lioness, with tongue as unbridled as the tongue of a
four-year-old, with no more religion than a Parisian _boulevardier_,
with not one-tenth the instruction of a London board-school child--how
such a creature became in two years an (apparently) finished product
of civilisation, I am at a loss to comprehend. That she did it is
certain. My own eyes have seen Boston Brahmins drinking her tea
gratefully; my own ears have heard New York fashionables babbling in
her drawing-room. As for London, she dominated one whole season, and
not to be able to bow to her, when she rode on her grey gelding of a
morning, was to argue oneself unbowed to! Paris can never forget her,
for did she not invent an entirely new _Marguerite_? And the Republic
of Art is not ungrateful. She would have been a social success in
Honolulu or Lapland, the witch!

Whether her ancestor the prince or her ancestress the actress made her
development possible, whether her Connecticut grandfather or her
Virginia grandmother taught her, how much she owed her bandit father
who defied the world and her mother, the nun, who won it--both for
love--who shall say?

When I look back on those wonderful months I find that the fanciful
sprite whose province it is to tint imperishably the choice pictures
that shall brighten the last grey days, has selected for my gallery
not those hours when the footlights stretched between us, though one
would suppose them beyond all doubt the most brilliant, but quaint,
unexpected bits, sudden, unrehearsed scenes that stand out like tiny,
jewelled landscapes viewed through a reversed telescope, or white
sudden statues at the end of a dark corridor.

There is that delicious afternoon when we went, she and I and Sue
Paynter and an infatuated undergrad, to Oxford together, and ate
strawberries and hot buttered tea-cake and extraordinary little buns
choked with plums, and honey breathing of clover and English meado