# The Soft Side (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900)/Maud-Evelyn/Chapter 4

IV
I had unfortunately run the risk of boring him again with that idea, and, though he had not repudiated it at the time, I felt in my having returned to it the reason why he never reappeared for weeks. I saw 'my girl,' as I had called her, in the interval, but we avoided with much intensity the subject of Marmaduke. It was just this that gave me my perspective for finding her constantly full of him. It determined me, in all the circumstances, not to rectify her mistake about the childlessness of the Dedricks. But whatever I left unsaid, her ​naming the young man was only a question of time, for at the end of a month she told me he had been twice to her mother's and that she had seen him on each of these occasions.
'Well then?'
'Well then, he's very happy.'
'And still taken up———'
'As much as ever, yes, with those people. He didn't tell me so, but I could see it.'
I could too, and her own view of it. 'What, in that case, did he tell you?'
'Nothing—but I think there's something he wants to. Only not what you think, she added.
I wondered then if it were what I had had from him the last time. 'Well, what prevents him?' I asked.
'From bringing it out? I don't know.'
It was in the tone of this that she struck, to my ear, the first note of an acceptance so deep and a patience so strange that they gave me, at the end, even more food for wonderment than the rest of the business. 'If he can't speak, why does he come?'
She almost smiled. 'Well, I think I shall know.'
I looked at her; I remember that I kissed her. 'You're admirable; but it's very ugly.'
'Ah,' she replied, 'he only wants to be kind!'
'To them? Then he should let others alone. But what I call ugly is his being content to be so "beholden"———'
'To Mr. and Mrs. Dedrick?' She considered as if there might be many sides to it. 'But mayn't he do them some good?'
The idea failed to appeal to me. 'What good can Marmaduke do? There's one thing,' I went on, 'in case he should want you to know them. Will you promise me to refuse?'
She only looked helpless and blank. 'Making their acquaintance?'
'Seeing them, going near them—ever, ever.'
​Again she brooded. 'Do you mean you won't?'
'Never, never.'
'Well, then, I don't think I want to.'
'Ah, but that's not a promise.' I kept her up to it. 'I want your word.'
She demurred a little. 'But why?'
'So that at least he shan't make use of you,' I said with energy.
My energy overbore her, though I saw how she would really have given herself. 'I promise, but it's only because it's something I know he will never ask.'
I differed from her at the time, believing the proposal in question to have been exactly the subject she had supposed him to be wishing to broach; but on our very next meeting I heard from her of quite another matter, upon which, as soon as she came in, I saw her to be much excited.
'You know then about the daughter without having told me? He called again yesterday,' she explained as she met my stare at her unconnected plunge, 'and now I know that he has wanted to speak to me. He at last brought it out.'
I continued to stare. 'Brought what?'
'Why, everything.' She looked surprised at my face. 'Didn't he tell you about Maud-Evelyn?'
I perfectly recollected, but I momentarily wondered. 'He spoke of there being a daughter, but only to say that there's something the matter with her. What is it?'
The girl echoed my words. 'What "is" it?—you dear, strange thing! The matter with her is simply that she's dead.'
'Dead?' I was naturally mystified. 'When, then, did she die?'
'Why, years and years ago—fifteen, I believe. As a little girl. Didn't you understand it so?'
'How should I?—when he spoke of her as "with" them and said that they lived for her!'
​'Well,' my young friend explained, 'that's just what he meant—they live for her memory. She is with them in the sense that they think of nothing else.'
I found matter for surprise in this correction, but also, at first, matter for relief. At the same time it left, as I turned it over, a fresh ambiguity. 'If they think of nothing else, how can they think so much of Marmaduke?'
The difficulty struck her, though she gave me even then a dim impression of being already, as it were, rather on Marmaduke's side, or, at any rate—almost as against herself—in sympathy with the Dedricks. But her answer was prompt: 'Why, that's just their reason—that they can talk to him so much about her.'
'I see.' Yet still I wondered. 'But what's his interest———?'
'In being drawn into it?' Again Lavinia met her difficulty. 'Well, that she was so interesting! It appears she was lovely.'
I doubtless fairly gaped. 'A little girl in a pinafore?'
'She was out of pinafores; she was, I believe, when she died, about fourteen. Unless it was sixteen! She was at all events wonderful for beauty.'
'That's the rule. But what good does it do him if he has never seen her?'
She thought a moment, but this time she had no answer. 'Well, you must ask him!'
I determined without delay to do so; but I had before me meanwhile other contradictions. 'Hadn't I better ask him on the same occasion what he means by their "communicating"?'
Oh, this was simple. 'They go in for "mediums," don't you know, and raps, and sittings. They began a year or two ago.'
'Ah, the idiots!' I remember, at this, narrow-mindedly exclaiming. 'Do they want to drag him in———?'
'Not in the least; they don't desire it, and he has nothing to do with it.'
​'Then where does his fun come in?'
Lavinia turned away; again she seemed at a loss. At last she brought out: 'Make him show you her little photograph.'
But I remained unenlightened. 'Is her little photograph his fun?'
Once more she coloured for him. 'Well, it represents a young loveliness!'
'That he goes about showing?'
She hesitated. 'I think he has only shown it to me.'
'Ah, you're just the last one!' I permitted myself to observe.
'Why so, if I'm also struck?'
There was something about her that began to escape me, and I must have looked at her hard. 'It's very good of you to be struck!'
'I don't only mean by the beauty of the face,' she went on; 'I mean by the whole thing—by that also of the attitude of the parents, their extraordinary fidelity, and the way that, as he says, they have made of her memory a real religion. That was what, above all, he came to tell me about.'
I turned away from her now, and she soon afterwards left me; but I couldn't help its dropping from me before we parted that I had never supposed him to be that sort of fool.