Zuleika Dobson - Max Beerbohm [22]
"I won't listen to another word!" cried Zuleika. "You are the most insolent person I have ever met. I happen to come of a particularly good family. I move in the best society. My manners are absolutely perfect. If I found myself in the shoes of twenty Duchesses simultaneously, I should know quite well how to behave. As for the one pair you can offer me, I kick them away—so. I kick them back at you. I tell you—"
"Hush," said the Duke, "hush! You are over-excited. There will be a crowd under my window. There, there! I am sorry. I thought—"
"Oh, I know what you thought," said Zuleika, in a quieter tone. "I am sure you meant well. I am sorry I lost my temper. Only, you might have given me credit for meaning what I said: that I would not marry you, because I did not love you. I daresay there would be great advantages in being your Duchess. But the fact is, I have no worldly wisdom. To me, marriage is a sacrament. I could no more marry a man about whom I could not make a fool of myself than I could marry one who made a fool of himself about me. Else had I long ceased to be a spinster. Oh my friend, do not imagine that I have not rejected, in my day, a score of suitors quite as eligible as you."
"As eligible? Who were they?" frowned the Duke.
"Oh, Archduke this, and Grand Duke that, and His Serene Highness the other. I have a wretched memory for names."
"And my name, too, will soon escape you, perhaps?"
"No. Oh, no. I shall always remember yours. You see, I was in love with you. You deceived me into loving you..." She sighed. "Oh, had you but been as strong as I thought you... Still, a swain the more. That is something." She leaned forward, smiling archly. "Those studs—show me them again."
The Duke displayed them in the hollow of his hand. She touched them lightly, reverently, as a tourist touches a sacred relic in a church.
At length, "Do give me them," she said. "I will keep them in a little secret partition of my jewel-case." The Duke had closed his fist. "Do!" she pleaded. "My other jewels—they have no separate meanings for me. I never remember who gave me this one or that. These would be quite different. I should always remember their history... Do!"
"Ask me for anything else," said the Duke. "These are the one thing I could not part with—even to you, for whose sake they are hallowed."
Zuleika pouted. On the verge of persisting, she changed her mind, and was silent.
"Well!" she said abruptly, "how about these races? Are you going to take me to see them?"
"Races? What races?" murmured the Duke. "Oh yes. I had forgotten. Do you really mean that you want to see them?"
"Why, of course! They are great fun, aren't they?"
"And you are in a mood for great fun? Well, there is plenty of time. The Second Division is not rowed till half-past four."
"The Second Division? Why not take me to the First?"
"That is not rowed till six."
"Isn't this rather an odd arrangement?"
"No doubt. But Oxford never pretended to be strong in mathematics."
"Why, it's not yet three!" cried Zuleika, with a woebegone stare at the clock. "What is to be done in the meantime?"
"Am not I sufficiently diverting?" asked the Duke bitterly.
"Quite candidly, no. Have you any friend lodging with you here?"
"One, overhead. A man named Noaks."
"A small man, with spectacles?"
"Very small, with very large spectacles."
"He was pointed out to me yesterday, as I was driving from the Station ... No, I don't think I want to meet him. What can you have in common with him?"
"One frailty, at least: he, too, Miss Dobson, loves you."
"But of course he does. He saw me drive past. Very few of the others," she said, rising and shaking herself, "have set eyes on me. Do let us go out and look at the Colleges. I do need change of scene. If you were a doctor, you would have prescribed that long ago. It is very bad for me to be here, a kind of Cinderella, moping over the ashes of my love for you. Where is your hat?"