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Updated: June 21, 2025
But if he allowed to himself that he would never have spoken to Savilla Dassonville that day at San Marco, if she had been to the eye anything that Eunice Goodward was, he told himself it was because he was not sure from behind which of those charming ambuscades the arrows of desolation might be shot.
She was evidently on terms with the Lessings which permitted her acceptance of him at the family valuation, but the perfection of her method was such that it never quite sunk his identity as the junior partner in his character of Uncle Peter. This was a nuance, if Peter had but known it, which Eunice Goodward could have no more missed than she could have eaten with her knife.
He felt himself flung as it were across great distances, and dizzy with the turn, to her side. He was there to maintain in the face of all worldly reckoning, the excluding, spiritual quality of their relation. The more his engagement to Eunice Goodward failed of being the usual, the expected thing, the more authority it derived for its supernal sources.
So she came, busy with the hummed fragments of her songs, and turned the lamp full on Peter before she was aware of him, but she was not half so much disconcerted. "You must be Mr. Weatheral," she said. "Mrs. Lessing sent me to say she expected you. I am Miss Goodward."
If Eunice Goodward had been a piece of furniture, Ellen couldn't have appraised her better at her obvious worth: beauty and character and family and the mysterious cachet of society. Clarice had been at work there, too, he suspected. Miss Goodward fitted in Ellen's mind's eye into her brother's life and fortune as a picture into its frame.
For he meant quite simply to marry Eunice Goodward if she would have him, and it was no vanity which gave him hope, but a tribute to her fineness as being able to see herself so absolutely the one thing his life waited for. He knew himself, modestly, no prize for her except as he was added to by inestimable passion.
Goodward had said to him, strolling up and down the hotel veranda where through the wide French windows they had glimpses of Eunice whirling away on the ice polished floor of the ballroom within; "they cling the more to gayety as they see the graver things of life bearing down upon them." "You think she sees that?" "Ah, there's much a mother sees, Mr. Weatheral "
He liked the girl well enough but he did not want her as he had wanted Eunice Goodward, as he wanted expansively at this moment to want something, somebody who was not Eunice he was perfectly clear on this point but should be in a measure all she stood for to him. He had renewed in the night, though in so short a time, not less acutely, all the wounded misery of what Eunice had forced upon him.
The way opened before them, beautiful in late bloom and heavy fern, above which the sea wind kept a perpetual movement of aliveness. "Eunice will miss it," Mrs. Goodward rallied; "such a perfect afternoon!" She gave him the oblique smile again, weighted this time with the knowledge of all that Peter hadn't been able or hadn't tried to keep from her.
For some reason she sighed.... He was turning all this over in his mind when suddenly Ellen recalled him. "Have you told Clarice yet?" "I mean to, Sunday, if you don't mind my not coming down to you. Miss Goodward is spending the week end at Maplemont, and by staying at Julian's " "Of course." Ellen sympathized. "I shall want to know what Clarice says."
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