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.