While the suit was going on, Mrs. Rushmore insisted that Margaret
should live with her, and Margaret was glad to accept her protection
and hospitality, for she felt that the obligation was not all on her
own side. Mrs. Rushmore was childless, a widow and very dependent on
companionship for such enjoyment as she could get out of her existence.
She had few resources as she grew older, for she did not read much and
had no especial tastes. The presence of such a girl as Margaret was a
godsend in many ways, and she looked forward with something like terror
to the not distant time when she should be left alone again, unless she
could induce one of her nieces to live with her. But that would not be
easy; they did not want her money, nor anything she could give them,
and they thought her dull. Her life would be very empty and sad, then.
She had never been vain, and she was well aware that such people as Mr.
Edmund Lushington could not be easily induced to come and spend a
fortnight with her if Margaret were not in the house. Besides, she
loved the girl for her own sake. It was very pleasant to delude herself
with the idea that Margaret was almost her daughter, and she wished she
could adopt her; but Margaret was far too independent to accept such an
arrangement, and Mrs. Rushmore had the common-sense to guess that if
the girl were bound to her in any way a sort of restraint would follow
which would be disagreeable to both in the end. If there could be a
bond, it must be one which Margaret should not feel, nor even guess,
and such a relation as that seemed to be an impossibility. Margaret was
not the sort of girl to accept anything from an unknown giver, and if
the suit failed it would be out of the question to make her believe
that she had inherited property from an unsuspected source. Mrs.
Rushmore, in her generosity, would have liked to practise some such
affectionate deception, and she would try almost anything, however
hopeless, rather than let Margaret be a professional singer.
The American woman was not puritanical; she had lived too much in
Europe for that and had met many clever people, not to say men of much
more than mere talent, who had made big marks on their times. But she
had been brought up in the narrow life of old New York, when old New
York still survived, as a tradition if not as a fact, in a score or two
of families; and one of the prejudices she had inherited early was that
there is a mysterious immorality in the practice of the fine arts,
whereas an equally mysterious morality is inherent in business.
Painters and sculptors, great actors and great singers without end, had
sat at her table and she was always interested in their talk and often
attracted by their personalities; yet in her heart she knew that she
connected them all vaguely with undefined wickedness, just as she
associated the idea of virtuous uprightness with all American and
English business men. Next to a clergyman, she unconsciously looked
upon an American banker as the most strictly moral type of man; and
though her hair was grey and she knew a vast deal about this wicked
world, she still felt a painful little shock when her favourite
newspaper informed her that a banker or a clergyman had turned aside
out of the paths of righteousness, as they occasionally do, just like
human beings. She felt a similar disagreeable thrill when she thought
of Margaret singing in public to earn a living. Prejudices are moral
corns; anything that touches one makes it ache more or less, but the
pain is always of the same kind. You cannot get a pleasurable sensation
out of a corn.