第42章 THE SEVENTH(3)

Sir Richmond recalled that little speech now as he returned from Salisbury station to the Old George after his farewell to Martineau.He recalled too the soft firmness of her profile and the delicate line of her lifted chin.He felt that this time at any rate he was not being deceived by the outward shows of a charming human being.This young woman had real firmness of character to back up her free and independent judgments.He smiled at the idea of any facile passion in the composition of so sure and gallant a personality.Martineau was very fine-minded in many respects, but he was an old maid; and like all old maids he saw man and woman in every encounter.But passion was a thing men and women fell back upon when they had nothing else in common.

When they thought in the pleasantest harmony and every remark seemed to weave a fresh thread of common interest, then it wasn't so necessary.It might happen, but it wasn't so necessary....If it did it would be a secondary thing to companionship.That's what she was,--a companion.

But a very lovely and wonderful companion, the companion one would not relinquish until the very last moment one could keep with her.

Her views about America and about her own place in the world seemed equally fresh and original to Sir Richmond.

"I realize I've got to be a responsible American citizen,"she had said.That didn't mean that she attached very much importance to her recently acquired vote.She evidently classified voters into the irresponsible who just had votes and the responsible who also had a considerable amount of property as well.She had no illusions about the power of the former class.It didn't exist.They were steered to their decisions by people employed, directed or stimulated by "father" and his friends and associates, the owners of America, the real "responsible citizens." Or they fell a prey to the merely adventurous leading of "revolutionaries." But anyhow they were steered.She herself, it was clear, was bound to become a very responsible citizen indeed.She would some day, she laughed, be swimming in oil and such like property.Her interest in Sir Richmond's schemes for a scientific world management of fuel was therefore, she realized, a very direct one.But it was remarkable to find a young woman seeing it like that.

Father it seemed varied very much in his attitude towards her.He despised and distrusted women generally, and it was evident he had made it quite clear to her how grave an error it was on her part to persist in being a daughter and not a son.At moments it seemed to Sir Richmond that she was disposed to agree with father upon that.When Mr.Grammont's sense of her regrettable femininity was uppermost, then he gave his intelligence chiefly to schemes for tying her up against the machinations of adventurers by means of trustees, partners, lawyers, advisers, agreements and suchlike complications, or for acquiring a workable son by marriage.

To this last idea it would seem the importance in her life of the rather heavily named Gunter Lake was to be ascribed.But another mood of the old man's was distrust of anything that could not be spoken of as his "own flesh and blood," and then he would direct his attention to a kind of masculinization of his daughter and to schemes for giving her the completest control of all he had to leave her provided she never married nor fell under masculine sway."After all," he would reflect as he hesitated over the practicability of his life's ideal, "there was Hetty Green."This latter idea had reft her suddenly at the age of seventeen from the educational care of an English gentlewoman warranted to fit her for marriage with any prince in Europe, and thrust her for the mornings and a moiety of the afternoons of the better part of a year, after a swift but competent training, into a shirt waist and an office down town.She had been entrusted at first to a harvester concern independent of Mr.Grammont, because he feared his own people wouldn't train her hard.She had worked for ordinary wages and ordinary hours, and at the end of the day, she mentioned casually, a large automobile with two menservants and a trustworthy secretary used to pick her out from the torrent of undistinguished workers that poured out of the Synoptical Building.This masculinization idea had also sent her on a commission of enquiry into Mexico.There apparently she had really done responsible work.

But upon the question of labour Mr.Grammont was fierce, even for an American business man, and one night at a dinner party he discovered his daughter displaying what he considered an improper familiarity with socialist ideas.This had produced a violent revulsion towards the purdah system and the idea of a matrimonial alliance with Gunter Lake.Gunter Lake, Sir Richmond gathered, wasn't half a bad fellow.Generally it would seem Miss Grammont liked him, and she had a way of speaking about him that suggested that in some way Mr.Lake had been rather hardly used and had acquired merit by his behaviour under bad treatment.There was some story, however, connected with her war services in Europe upon which Miss Grammont was evidently indisposed to dwell.About that story Sir Richmond was left at the end of his Avebury day and after his last talk with Dr.Martineau, still quite vaguely guessing.