第41章

Maggie wondered often as to Aunt Anne's, real thoughts.But Aunt Anne only smiled her dim cold smile, gave her cold hand into the girl's warm one and said, "Good afternoon, Caroline.I hope your father and mother are well." "They're dears, you know," Caroline said to Maggie; "I do admire your Aunt Anne; she keeps to herself so.I wish I could keep to myself, but I never was able to.Poor mother used to say when I was quite little, 'You'll only make yourself cheap, Carrie, if you go on like that.Don't make yourself cheap, dear.' But what I say is, one's only young once and the people who don't want one needn't have one."Nevertheless there were, even in these very early days, directions into which Maggie did not follow her new friend.Young as she was in many things, in some ways she was very old indeed.She had been trained in another school from Caroline; she felt from the very first that upon certain questions her lovely friend was inexperienced, foolish and dangerously reckless.On the question of "men," for instance, Maggie, with clear knowledge of her father and her uncle, refused to follow Caroline's light and easy excursions.

Caroline was disappointed; she had a great deal to say on the subject and could speak, she assured Maggie, from a vast variety of experience: "Men are all the same.What I say is, show them you don't care 'that' about them and they'll come after you.Not that Icare whether they do or no.Only it's fun the way they go on.You just try, Maggie."But Maggie had her own thoughts.They were not imparted to her friend.Nothing indeed appeared to her more odd than that Caroline should be so wise in some things and so foolish in others.She did not know that it was her own strange upbringing that gave her independent estimates and judgments.

The second influence that, during these first weeks, developed her soul and body was, strangely enough, her aunt's elderly friend, Mr.

Magnus.If Caroline introduced her to affairs of the world, Mr.

Magnus introduced her to affairs of the brain and spirit.

She had never before known any one who might be called "clever." Her father was not, Uncle Mathew was not; no one in St.Dreots had been clever.Mr.Magnus, of course, was "clever" because he wrote books, two a year.

But to be an author, was not a claim to Maggie's admiration.As has been said before, she did not care for reading, and considered that the writing of books was a second-rate affair.The things that Mr.

Magnus might have done with his life if he had not spent it in writing books! She regarded him with the kind indulgence of an elder who watches a child brick-building.He very quickly discovered her attitude and it amused him.They became the most excellent friends over it.She on her side very quickly discovered the true reason of his coming so often to their house; he loved Aunt Anne.At its first appearance this discovery was so strange and odd that Maggie refused to indulge it.Love seemed so far from Aunt Anne.She greeted Mr.

Magnus from the chill distance whence she greeted the rest of the world--she gave him no more than she gave any one else--But Mr.

Magnus did not seem to desire more.He waited patiently, a slightly ironical and self-contemptuous worshipper at a shrine that very seldom opened its doors, and never admitted him to its altar.It was this irony that Maggie liked in him; she regarded herself in the same way.Their friendship was founded on a mutual detachment.It prospered exceedingly.

Maggie soon discovered that Mr.Magnus was very happy to sit in their house even though Aunt Anne was not present.His attitude seemed to be that the atmosphere that she left behind her was enough for him and that he could not, in justice, expect any more.Before Maggie's arrival he had had but a slender excuse for his continual presence.He could not sit in the empty drawing-room surveying the large and ominous portrait of the Cardinal childhood, quite alone save for Thomas, without seeming a very considerable kind of fool.

And to appear that in the eyes of Aunt Anne, who already regarded mankind in general with pity, would be a mistake.

Now that Maggie was here he might come so often as he pleased.Many was the dark afternoon through the long February and March months that they sat together in the dim drawing-room, Maggie straining her eyes over an attempted reform of some garment, Mr.Magnus talking in his mild ironical voice with his large moon-like spectacles fixed upon nothing in particular.

Mr.Magnus did all the talking.Maggie fancied that, all his life, he had persisted in the same gentle humorous fashion without any especial attention as to the wisdom, agreement or even existence of his audience.She fancied that all men who wrote books did that.

They had to talk to "clear their ideas." She raised her eyes sometimes and looked at him as he sat there.His shabby, hapless appearance always appealed to her.She knew that he was, in reality, anything but hapless, but his clothes never fitted him, and it was impossible for him to escape from the Quixotic embarrassments of his thin hair, his high cheek-bones, his large spectacles.His smile, however, gave him his character; when he smiled--and he was always smiling--you saw a man independent, proud, wise and gentle.He was not a fool, Mr.Magnus, although he did love Aunt Anne.

To a great deal that he said Maggie paid but little attention; it was, she felt, not intended for her.She had, in all her relations with him, to struggle against the initial disadvantage that she regarded all men who wrote books with pity.She was not so stupid as not to realise that there were a great many fine books in the world and that one was the better for reading them, but, just because there were, already, so many fine ones, why write more that would almost certainly be not so fine? He tried to explain, to her that some men were compelled to write and could not help themselves.

"I wrote my first book when I was nineteen.One morning I just began to write, and then it was very easy.Then everything else was easy.