Cashel Byron's Profession

She began to tire of the subject of Cashel and Lydia. She began to

tire of Lucian's rigidity. She began to tire exceedingly of the

vigilance she had to maintain constantly over her own manners and

principles. Somehow, this vigilance defeated itself; for she one

evening overheard a lady of rank speak of her as a stuck-up country

girl. The remark gave her acute pain: for a week afterwards she did

not utter a word or make a movement in society without first

considering whether it could by any malicious observer be considered

rustic or stuck-up. But the more she strove to attain perfect

propriety of demeanor, the more odious did she seem to herself, and,

she inferred, to others. She longed for Lydia's secret of always

doing the right thing at the right moment, even when defying

precedent. Sometimes she blamed the dulness of the people she met

for her shortcomings. It was impossible not to be stiff with them.

When she chatted with an entertaining man, who made her laugh and

forget herself for a while, she was conscious afterwards of having

been at her best with him. But she saw others who, in stupid

society, were pleasantly at their ease. She began to fear at last

that she was naturally disqualified by her comparatively humble

birth from acquiring the well-bred air for which she envied those

among whom she moved.

One day she conceived a doubt whether Lucian was so safe an

authority and example in matters of personal deportment as she had

hitherto unthinkingly believed. He could not dance; his conversation

was priggish; it was impossible to feel at ease when speaking to him.

Was it courageous to stand in awe of his opinion? Was it courageous

to stand in awe of anybody? Alice closed her lips proudly and began to

be defiant. Then a reminiscence, which had never before failed to

rouse indignation in her, made her laugh. She recalled the

scandalous spectacle of Lucian's formal perpendicularity

overbalanced and doubled up into Mrs. Hoskyn's gilded arm-chair in

illustration of the prize-fighter's theory of effort defeating

itself. After all, what was that caressing touch of Cashel's hand in

comparison with the tremendous rataplan he had beaten on the ribs of

Paradise? Could it be true that effort defeated itself--in personal

behavior, for instance? A ray of the truth that underlay Cashel's

grotesque experiment was flickering in her mind as she asked herself

that question. She thought a good deal about it; and one afternoon,

when she looked in at four at-homes in succession, she studied the

behavior of the other guests from a new point of view, comparing the

most mannered with the best mannered, and her recent self with both.

The result half convinced her that she had been occupied during her

first London season in displaying, at great pains, a very unripe

self-consciousness--or, as she phrased it, in making an insufferable

fool of herself.