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Yes, it was a man she had worshipped. A woman need not be ashamed of that. As Matthew he had seemed to her conceited, priggish. As Aston Rowant she wondered at his modesty, his patience. And all these years he had been dreaming of her; had followed her to New York; had There came a sudden mood so ludicrous, so absurdly unreasonable that Ann herself stopped to laugh at it.
"What's it got to do with you?" she said. "I am Aston Rowant," said Matthew. The Central Park, together with the universe in general, fell away and disappeared. Somewhere out of chaos was sounding a plaintive voice: "What is she like? Can't you tell me? Is she young or old?" It seemed to have been going on for ages.
At the suggestion of an editor more kindly than the general run, and urged by need, he had written some short pieces of a less ambitious nature. It was in bitter disappointment he commenced them, regarding them as mere pot-boilers. He would not give them his name. He signed them "Aston Rowant." It was the name of the village in Oxfordshire where he had been born. It occurred to him by chance.
She made one supreme gigantic effort, causing the Central Park to reappear, dimly, faintly, but it was there again. She was sitting on a seat. Matthew Aston Rowant, whatever it was was seated beside her. "You've seen her? What is she like?" "I can't tell you." He was evidently very cross with her. It seemed so unkind of him. "Why can't you tell me or, why won't you tell me?
They would never know one another, and that would give her boldness. They would be comrades, meeting only in dreamland. In this way commenced the whimsical romance of Sylvia and Aston Rowant; for it was too late now to change the name it had become a name to conjure with. The stories, poems, and essays followed now in regular succession.
She would have no idea he was Aston Rowant. If she happened to be young, beautiful, in all ways satisfactory, he would announce himself. How astonished, how delighted she would be. But if not! If she were elderly, plain? The wisest, wittiest of women have been known to have an incipient moustache. A beautiful spirit can, and sometimes does, look out of goggle eyes.
Thus Samuel Pechell married the daughter of François Gaultier, Esq., and his sister Mary married Brigadier-General Cailland, of Aston Rowant. Among the distinguished French nobles in London was the Marquis de Montandre, descended from the De la Rochefoucaulds, one of the greatest families in France.
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