It would have been droll if it had not been so exemplary to see her tracing the loves of the duchesses beside the innocent cribs of her children.The immoral and the maternal lived together in her diligent days on the most comfortable terms, and she stopped curling the mustaches of her Guardsmen to pat the heads of her babes.She was haunted by solemn spinsters who came to tea from continental pensions, and by unsophisticated Americans who told her she was just loved in THEIR country."I had rather be just paid there," she usually replied; for this tribute of transatlantic opinion was the only thing that galled her.The Americans went away thinking her coarse; though as the author of so many beautiful love-stories she was disappointing to most of these pilgrims, who had not expected to find a shy, stout, ruddy lady in a cap like a crumbled pyramid.She wrote about the affections and the impossibility of controlling them, but she talked of the price of pension and the convenience of an English chemist.She devoted much thought and many thousands of francs to the education of her daughter, who spent three years at a very superior school at Dresden, receiving wonderful instruction in sciences, arts and tongues, and who, taking a different line from Leolin, was to be brought up wholly as a femme du monde.The girl was musical and philological; she made a specialty of languages and learned enough about them to be inspired with a great contempt for her mother's artless accents.Greville Fane's French and Italian were droll; the imitative faculty had been denied her, and she had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.She knew it, but she didn't care;correctness was the virtue in the world that, like her heroes and heroines, she valued least.Ethel, who had perceived in her pages some remarkable lapses, undertook at one time to revise her proofs;but I remember her telling me a year after the girl had left school that this function had been very briefly exercised."She can't read me," said Mrs.Stormer; "I offend her taste.She tells me that at Dresden--at school--I was never allowed." The good lady seemed surprised at this, having the best conscience in the world about her lucubrations.She had never meant to fly in the face of anything, and considered that she grovelled before the Rhadamanthus of the English literary tribunal, the celebrated and awful Young Person.Iassured her, as a joke, that she was frightfully indecent (she hadn't in fact that reality any more than any other) my purpose being solely to prevent her from guessing that her daughter had dropped her not because she was immoral but because she was vulgar.I used to figure her children closeted together and asking each other while they exchanged a gaze of dismay: "Why should she BE so--and so FEARFULLYso--when she has the advantage of our society? Shouldn't WE have taught her better?" Then I imagined their recognising with a blush and a shrug that she was unteachable, irreformable.Indeed she was, poor lady; but it is never fair to read by the light of taste things that were not written by it.Greville Fane had, in the topsy-turvy, a serene good faith that ought to have been safe from allusion, like a stutter or a faux pas.
She didn't make her son ashamed of the profession to which he was destined, however; she only made him ashamed of the way she herself exercised it.But he bore his humiliation much better than his sister, for he was ready to take for granted that he should one day restore the balance.He was a canny and far-seeing youth, with appetites and aspirations, and he had not a scruple in his composition.His mother's theory of the happy knack he could pick up deprived him of the wholesome discipline required to prevent young idlers from becoming cads.He had, abroad, a casual tutor and a snatch or two of a Swiss school, but no consecutive study, no prospect of a university or a degree.It may be imagined with what zeal, as the years went on, he entered into the pleasantry of there being no manual so important to him as the massive book of life.It was an expensive volume to peruse, but Mrs.Stormer was willing to lay out a sum in what she would have called her premiers frais.
Ethel disapproved--she thought this education far too unconventional for an English gentleman.Her voice was for Eton and Oxford, or for any public school (she would have resigned herself) with the army to follow.But Leolin never was afraid of his sister, and they visibly disliked, though they sometimes agreed to assist, each other.They could combine to work the oracle--to keep their mother at her desk.