Alice Munros Best

well, if you come from poor people and live in a dump, then I will have to withdraw my offer.”
    “But I’m glad,” said Patrick. “I’m glad you’re poor. You’re so lovely. You’re like the Beggar Maid.”
    “Who?”
    “‘King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid.’ You know. The painting. Don’t you know that painting?”
    Patrick had a trick – no, it was not a trick, Patrick had no tricks – Patrick had a way of expressing surprise, fairly scornful surprise, when people did not know something he knew, and similar scorn, similar surprise, whenever they had bothered to know something he did not. His arrogance and humility were both oddly exaggerated. The arrogance, Rose decided in time, must come from being rich, though Patrick was never arrogant about that in itself. His sisters, when she met them, turned out to be the same way, disgusted with anybody who did not know about horses or sailing, and just as disgusted by anybody knowing about music, say, or politics. Patrick and they could do little together but radiate disgust. But wasn’t Billy Pope as bad, wasn’t Flo as bad, when it came to arrogance? Maybe. There was a difference, though, and the difference was that Billy Pope and Flo were not protected. Things could get at them: D.P.’s; people speaking French on the radio; changes. Patrick and his sisters behaved as if things could never get at them. Their voices, when they quarrelled at the table, were astonishingly childish; their demands for food they liked, their petulance at seeing anything on the table they didn’t like, were those of children. They had never had to defer and polish themselves and win favor in the world, they never would have to, and that was because they were rich.
    Rose had no idea at the beginning how rich Patrick was. Nobody believed that. Everybody believed she had been calculating and clever, and she was so far from clever, in that way, that she really did not mind if they believed it. It turned out that other girls had been trying, and had not struck, as she had, the necessary note. Older girls, sorority girls, who had never noticed her before began to look at her with puzzlement and respect. Even Dr. Henshawe, when she saw that things were more serious than she had supposed, and settled Rose down to have a talk about it, assumed that she would have an eye on the money.
    “It is no small triumph to attract the attentions of the heir to a mercantile empire,” said Dr. Henshawe, being ironic and serious at the same time. “I don’t despise wealth,” she said. “Sometimes I wish I had some of it.” (Did she really suppose she had not?) “I am sure you will learn how to put it to good uses. But what about your ambitions, Rose? What about your studies and your degree? Are you going to forget all that so soon?”
    “Mercantile empire” was a rather grand way of putting it. Patrick’s family owned a chain of department stores in British Columbia. All Patrick had said to Rose was that his father owned some stores. When she said
two different worlds
to him she was thinking that he probably lived in some substantial house like the houses in Dr. Henshawe’s neighborhood. She was thinking of the most prosperous merchants in Hanratty. She could not realize what a coup she had made because it would have been a coup for her if the butcher’s son had fallen for her, or the jeweller’s; people would say she had done well.
    She had a look at that painting. She looked it up in an art book in the library. She studied the Beggar Maid, meek and voluptuous, with her shy white feet. The milky surrender of her, the helplessness and gratitude. Was that how Patrick saw Rose? Was that how she could be? She would need that king, sharp and swarthy as he looked, even in his trance of passion, clever and barbaric. He could make a puddle of her, with his fierce desire. There would be no apologizing with him, none of that flinching, that lack of faith, that seemed to be revealed in all transactions with Patrick.
    She could not turn Patrick down. She could not do it. It was not the amount of money but the amount of love he offered that she could notignore; she believed that she felt sorry for him, that she had to help him out. It was as if he had come up to her in a crowd carrying a large, simple, dazzling object – a huge egg, maybe, of solid silver, something of doubtful use and punishing weight – and was offering it to her, in fact thrusting it at her, begging her to take some of the