CHAPTER II

SHE

Papa never will cease to meet with accidents and adventures.  If he only walks out to sit for half an hour with one of his old dames, as he calls them, something is sure to happen to him, and it is almost as sure that Mr. Pollingray will be passing at the time and mixed up in it.

Since Mr. Pollingray’s return from his last residence on the Continent, I have learnt to know him and like him.  Charles is unjust to his uncle.  He is not at all the grave kind of man I expected from Charles’s description.  He is extremely entertaining, and then he understands the world, and I like to hear him talk, he is so unpretentious and uses just the right words.  No one would imagine his age, from his appearance, and he has more fun than any young man I have listened to.

But, I am convinced I have discovered his weakness.  It is my fatal. peculiarity that I cannot be with people ten minutes without seeing some point about them where they are tenderest.  Mr. Pollingray wants to be thought quite youthful.  He can bear any amount of fatigue; he is always fresh and a delightful companion; but you cannot get him to show even a shadow of exhaustion or to admit that he ever knew what it was to lie down beaten.  This is really to pretend that he is superhuman.  I like him so much that I could wish him superior to such—­it is nothing other than—­vanity.  Which is worse?  A young man giving himself the air of a sage, or—­but no one can call Mr. Pollingray an old man.  He is a confirmed bachelor.  That puts the case.  Charles, when he says of him that he is a ‘gentleman in a good state of preservation,’ means to be ironical.  I doubt whether Charles at fifty would object to have the same said of Mr. Charles Everett.  Mr. Pollingray has always looked to his health.  He has not been disappointed.  I am sure he was always very good.  But, whatever he was, he is now very pleasant, and he does not talk to women as if he thought them singular, and feel timid, I mean, confused, as some men show that they feel—­the good ones.  Perhaps he felt so once, and that is why he is still free.  Charles’s dread that his uncle will marry is most unworthy.  He never will, but why should he not?  Mama declares that he is waiting for a woman of intellect, I can hear her:  ‘Depend upon it, a woman of intellect will marry Dayton Manor.’  Should that mighty event not come to pass, poor Charles will have to sink the name of Everett in that of Pollingray.  Mr. Pollingray’s name is the worst thing about him.  When I think of his name I see him ten times older than he is.  My feelings are in harmony with his pedigree concerning the age of the name.  One would have to be a woman of profound intellect to see the advantage of sharing it.

‘Mrs. Pollingray!’ She must be a lady with a wig.

It was when we were rowing up by Hatchard’s mill that I first perceived his weakness, he was looking at me so kindly, and speaking of his friendship for papa, and how glad he was to be fixed at last, near to us at Dayton.  I wished to use some term of endearment in reply, and said, I remember, ‘Yes, and we are also glad, Godpapa.’  I was astonished that he should look so disconcerted, and went on:  ’Have you forgotten that you are my godpapa?’