Free A Quiet Adjustment by Benjamin Markovits Page A

exploration.
    Lady Melbourne, then, served both as a model and a warning of what a womanly ambition could effect for itself. Annabella believed herself, not unhappily, to be made up of the same materials as her aunt. They were both strong-willed, subtle, vain; yes, she was willing to admit that much. And if Annabella had been used to regarding the differences between them with some complacence, she now began to revise, not her opinion perhaps, but the certainty with which it was held. Lady Melbourne, unquestionably, had had a brilliant career. She had managed to attach, with a degree of immorality that her niece hoped at some point to calculate, the greatest figures of her day—with the result that the best of society, its soldiers, its statesmen, its artists, now revolved around her sun. Lord Byron was only the latest, and not perhaps the brightest, of her planets; and the prospect of shifting the centre of his orbit to herself was not without its attractions to Annabella.
    There could be no doubt, of course, that the niece regulated her feelings with a greater propriety than her aunt had ever been disposed to attempt. But whether the difference between them should be attributed to an excess or an absence of certain qualities was becoming for Annabella a very decided point. Was there a talent for sin? Could virtue be considered a deficiency of it? Annabella, in the course of that summer, had begun to learn something about the force and variety of desire. It was only a question, perhaps, of how successfully she could translate her virtue into a style with which to engage the society around her—if she wished, that is, to make an equal name for herself in time.
    Their coffee had grown cold. As Annabella sipped it, a man came into her view, dragging his rake across the gravel of the avenue; he appeared and disappeared between the trees. It was out of her silence that Lady Melbourne’s suggestion seemed to grow. ‘Would Annabella care—it should only take a minute or two—to make a list of whatever qualities in a husband she felt were necessary to attach her?’ After all, it was a library, there must be paper and ink in it; Lady Melbourne promised to leave her to collect her thoughts.
    Annabella might have resented such interference more if it did not involve just the kind of game that she delighted in. It seemed to promise her a sort of playing at life. Still, a touch of that resentment coloured the way she acted it out. ‘Indeed, that’s just what I would like,’ she said and began, gently, to tease her aunt’s expectations. ‘It hits off my idea of what they call a literary marriage, exactly: between a woman, that is, and a list of qualities. I feel I have the character of the perfect husband so clearly in mind that sketching it would be a positive pleasure.’ A literary marriage, in flesh and blood, was naturally what both of them had at the back of their thoughts: Lord Byron’s name figured all the more prominently between them for being unmentioned. If only Annabella could persuade him to show his hand, without being compelled to give away her own! She believed that nothing could make her feelings clearer than the confession of his . She wished, above all, to determine the state of her affections. That was the prize, for which a certain amount of sincerity might be sacrificed. The worst she would be guilty of was ambiguity; her real fear was failing to stick to it under pressure of her aunt’s conversation.
    That she was, in the most important sense, at odds with Lady Melbourne, she had no doubt—in spite of the fact that one of the feelings her aunt inspired in her was a desire to confide. Annabella’s confessional instincts were always strong, and though she hoped, at least in part, to overcome them, her greatest stroke was to guess from the first that nothing could conceal how much she had at stake as well as honesty—in a careful measure, of course,