WHEN the last guest had grimaced at her and left the drawing-room, Lady Holme stood with her hand on the mantelpiece, facing a tall mirror. She was alone for the moment. Her husband had accompanied Mrs. Wolfstein downstairs, and Lady Holme could hear his big, booming voice below, interrupted now and then by her impudent soprano. She spoke English with a slight foreign accent which men generally liked and women loathed. Lady Holme loathed it. But she was not fond of her own sex. She believed that all women were untrustworthy. She often said that she had never met a woman who was not a liar, and when she said it she had no doubt that, for once, a woman was speaking the truth. Now, as she heard Mrs. Wolfstein’s curiously improper laugh, she frowned. The face in the mirror changed and looked almost old.
This struck her unpleasantly. She kept the frown in its place and stared from under it, examining her features closely, fancying herself really an old woman, her whimsical fascination dead in its decaying home, her powers faded if not fled for ever. She might do what she liked then. It would all be of no use. Even the voice would be cracked and thin, unresponsive, unwieldy. The will would be phlegmatic. If it were not, the limbs and features would not easily obey its messages. The figure, now beautiful, would perhaps be marred by the ungracious thickness, the piteous fleshiness that Time often adds assiduously to ageing bodies, as if with an ironic pretence of generously giving in one direction while taking away in another. Decay would be setting in, life becoming perpetual loss. The precious years would be gone irrevocably.
She let the frown go and looked again on her beauty and smiled. The momentary bitterness passed. For there were many precious years to come for her, many years of power. She was young. Her health was superb. Her looks were of the kind that lasts. She thought of a famous actress whom she resembled closely. This actress was already forty-three, and was still a lovely woman, still toured about the world winning the hearts of men, was still renowned for her personal charm, worshipped not only for her talent but for her delicious skin, her great romantic eyes, her thick, waving hair.
Lady Holme laughed. In twenty years what Robin Pierce called her “husk” would still be an exquisite thing, and she would be going about without hearing the horrible tap, tap of the crutch in whose sustaining power she really believed so little. She knew men, and she said to herself, as she had said to Robin, that for them beauty lies in the epidermis.
“Hullo, Vi, lookin’ in the glass! ‘Pon my soul, your vanity’s disgustin’. A plain woman like you ought to keep away from such things—leave ‘em to the Mrs. Wolfsteins—what?”
Lady Holme turned round in time to see her husband’s blunt, brown features twisted in the grimace which invariably preceded his portentous laugh.
“I admire Mrs. Wolfstein,” she said.
The laugh burst like a bomb.
“You admire another woman! Why, you’re incapable of it. The Lord defend me from hypocrisy, and there’s no greater hypocrisy than one woman takin’ Heaven to witness that she thinks another a stunnin’ beauty.”
“You know nothing about it, Fritz. Mrs. Wolfstein’s eyes would be lovely if they hadn’t that pawnbroking expression.”
“Good, good! Now we’re goin’ to hear the voice of truth. Think it went well, eh?”
He threw himself down on a sofa and began to light a cigarette.
“The evening? No, I don’t.”
“Why not?”
He crossed his long legs and leaned back, resting his head on a cushion, and puffing the smoke towards the ceiling.
“They all seemed cheery—what? Even Lady Cardington only cried when you were squallin’.”
It was Lord Holme’s habit to speak irreverently of anything he happened to admire.
“She had reason to cry. Miss Filberte’s accompaniment was a tragedy. She never comes here again.”
“What’s the row with her? I thought her fingers got about over the piano awful quick.”
“They did—on the wrong notes.”
She came and sat down beside him.
“You don’t understand music, Fritz, thank goodness.”
“I know I don’t. But why thank what’s-his-name?”
“Because the men that do are usually such anaemic, dolly things, such shaved poodles with their Sunday bows on.”
“What about that chap Pierce? He’s up to all the scales and thingumies, isn’t he?”
“Robin—”
“Pierce I said.”
“And I said Robin.”
Lord Holme frowned and stuck out his under jaw. When he was irritated he always made haste to look like a prize-fighter. His prominent cheek-bones, and the abnormal development of bone in the lower part of his face, helped the illusion whose creation was begun by his expression.
“Look here, Vi,” he said gruffly. “If you get up to any nonsense there’ll be another Carey business. I give you the tip, and you can just take it in time. Don’t you make any mistake. I’m not a Brenford, or a Godley-Halstoun, or a Pennisford, to sit by and—”
“What a pity it is that your body’s so big and your intelligence so small!” she interrupted gently. “Why aren’t there Sandow exercises for increasing the brain?”
“I’ve quite enough brain to rub along with very well. If I’d chosen to take it I could have been undersecretary—-”
“You’ve told me that so many times, old darling, and I really can’t believe it. The Premier’s very silly. Everybody knows that. But he’s still got just a faint idea of the few things the country won’t stand. And you are one of them, you truly are. You don’t go down even with the Primrose League, and they simply worship at the shrine of the great Ar-rar.”
“Fool or not, I’d kick out Pierce as I kicked out Carey if I thought—”
“And suppose I wouldn’t let you?”
Her voice had suddenly changed. There was in it the sharp sound which had so overwhelmed Miss Filberte.
Lord Holme sat straight up and looked at his wife.
“Suppose—what?”
“Suppose I declined to let you behave ridiculously a second time.”
“Ridiculously! I like that! Do you stick out that Carey didn’t love you?”
“Half London loves me. I’m one of the most attractive women in it. That’s why you married me, blessed boy.”
“Carey’s a violent ass. Red-headed men always are. There’s a chap at White’s—”
“I know, I know. You told me about him when you forbade poor Mr. Carey the house. But Robin’s hair is black and he’s the gentlest creature in diplomacy.”
“I wouldn’t trust him a yard.”
“Believe me, he doesn’t wish you to. He’s far too clever to desire the impossible.”
“Then he can stop desirin’ you.”
“Don’t be insulting, Fritz. Remember that by birth you are a gentleman.”
Lord Holme bit through his cigarette.
“Sometimes I wish you were an ugly woman,” he muttered.
“And if I were?”
She leaned forward quite eagerly on the sofa and her whimsical, spoilt-child manner dropped away from her.
“You ain’t.”
“Don’t be silly. I know I’m not, of course. But if I were to become one?”
“What?”
“Really, Fritz, there’s no sort of continuity in your mental processes. If I were to become an ugly woman, what would you feel about me then?”
“How the deuce could you become ugly?”
“Oh, in a hundred ways. I might have smallpox and be pitted for life, or be scalded in the face as poor people’s babies often are, or have vitriol thrown over me as lots of women do in Paris, or any number of things.”
“What rot! Who’d throw vitriol over you, I should like to know?”
He lit a fresh cigarette with tender solicitude. Lady Holme began to look irritated.
“Do use your imagination!” she cried.
“Haven’t got one, thank God!” he returned philosophically.
“I insist upon your imagining me ugly. Do you hear, I insist upon it.”
She laid one soft hand on his knee and squeezed his leg with all her might.
“Now you’re to imagine me ugly and just the same as I am now.”
“You wouldn’t be the same.”
“Yes, I should. I should be the same woman, with the same heart and feelings and desires and things as I have now. Only the face would be altered.”
“Well, go ahead, but don’t pinch so, old girl.”
“I pinch you to make you exert your mind. Now tell me truly—truly; would you love me as you do now, would you be jealous of me, would you—”
“I say, wait a bit! Don’t drive on at such a rate. How ugly are you?”
“Very ugly; worse than Miss Filberte.”
“Miss Filberte’s not so bad.”
“Yes, she is, Fritz, you know she is. But I mean ever so much worse; with a purple complexion, perhaps, like Mrs. Armington, whose husband insisted on a judicial separation; or a broken nose, or something wrong with my mouth—”
“What wrong?”
“Oh, dear, anything! Whatl’homme qui virhad—or a frightful scar across my cheek. Could you love me as you do now? I should be the same woman, remember.”
“Then it’d be all the same to me, I s’pose. Let’s turn in.”
He got up, went over to the hearth, on which a small wood fire was burning, straddled his legs, bent his knees and straightened them several times, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his trousers, which were rather tight and horsey and defined his immense limbs. An expression of profound self-satisfaction illumined his face as he looked at his wife, giving it a slightly leery expression, as of a shrewd rustic. His large blunt features seemed to broaden, his big brown eyes twinkled, and his lips, which were thick and very red and had a cleft down their middle, parted under his short bronze moustache, exposing two level rows of square white teeth.
“It’s jolly difficult to imagine you an ugly woman,” he said, with a deep chuckle.
“I do wish you’d keep your legs still,” said Lady Holme. “What earthly pleasure can it give you to go on like that? Would you love me as you do now?”
“You’d be jolly sick if I didn’t, wouldn’t you, Vi, eh?”
“I wonder if it ever occurs to you that you’re hideously conceited, Fritz?”
She spoke with a touch of real anger, real exasperation.
“No more than any other Englishman that’s worth his salt and ever does any good in the world. I ain’t a timid molly-coddle, if that’s what you mean.”
He took one large hand out of his pocket, scratched his cheek and yawned. As he did so he looked as unconcerned, as free from self-consciousness, as much a slave to every impulse born of passing physical sensation as a wild animal in a wood or out on a prairie.
“Otherwise life ain’t worth tuppence,” he added through his yawn.
Lady Holme sat looking at him for a moment in silence. She was really irritated by his total lack of interest in what she wanted to interest in him, irritated, too, because her curiosity remained unsatisfied. But that abrupt look and action of absolutely unconscious animalism, chasing the leeriness of the contented man’s conceit, turned her to softness if not to cheerfulness. She adored Fritz like that. His open-mouthed, gaping yawn moved something in her to tenderness. She would have liked to kiss him while he was yawning and to pass her hands over his short hair, which was like a mat and grew as strongly as the hair which he shaved every morning from his brown cheeks.
“Well, what about bed, old girl?” he said, stretching himself.
Lady Holme did not reply. Some part of him, some joint, creaked as he forced his clasped hands downward and backward. She was listening eagerly for a repetition of the little sound.
“What! Is mum the word?” he said, bending forward to stare into her face.
At this moment the door opened, and a footman came in to extinguish the lights and close the piano. By mistake he let the lid of the latter drop with a bang. Lady Holme, who had just got up to go to bed, started violently. She said nothing but stared at him for an instant with an expression of cold rebuke on her face. The man reddened. Lord Holme was already on the stairs. He yawned again noisily, and turned the sound eventually into a sort of roaring chant up and down the scale as he mounted towards the next floor. Lady Holme came slowly after him. She had a very individual walk, moving from the hips and nearly always taking small, slow steps. Her sapphire-blue gown trailed behind her with a pretty noise over the carpet.
When her French maid had locked up her jewels and helped her to undress, she dismissed her, and called out to Lord Holme, who was in the next room, the door of which was slightly open.
“Fritz!”
“Girlie?”
His mighty form, attired in pale blue pyjamas, stood in the doorway. In his hand he grasped a toothbrush, and there were dabs of white tooth-powder on his cheeks and chin.
“Finish your toilet and make haste.”
He disappeared. There was a prolonged noise of brushing and the gurgling and splashing of water. Lady Holme sat down on the white couch at the foot of the great bed. She was wrapped in a soft white gown made like a burnous, a veritable Arab garment, with a white silk hood at the back, and now she put up her hands and, with great precision, drew the hood up over her head. The burnous, thus adjusted, made her look very young. She had thrust her bare feet into white slippers without heels, and now she drew up her legs lightly and easily and crossed them under her, assuming an Eastern attitude and the expression of supreme impassivity which suits it. A long mirror was just opposite to her. She swayed to and fro, looking into it.
“Allah-Akbar!” she murmured. “Allah-Akbar! I am a fatalist. Everything is ordained, so why should I bother? I will live for the day. I will live for the night. Allah-Akbar, Allah-Akbar!”
The sound of water gushing from a reversed tumbler into a full basin was followed by the reappearance of Lord Holme, looking very clean and very sleepy.
Lady Holme stopped swaying.
“You look like a kid of twelve years old in that thing, Vi,” he observed, surveying her with his hands on his hips.
“I am a woman with a philosophy,” she returned with dignity.
“A philosophy! What the deuce is that?”
“You didn’t learn much at Eton and Christchurch.”
“I learnt to use my fists and to make love to the women.”
“You’re a brute!” she exclaimed with most unphilosophic vehemence.
“And that’s why you worship the ground I tread on,” he rejoined equably. “And that’s why I’ve always had a good time with the women ever since I stood six foot in my stockin’s when I was sixteen.”
Lady Holme looked really indignant. Her face was contorted by a spasm. She was one of those unfortunate women who are capable of retrospective jealousy.
“I won’t—how dare you speak to me of those women?” she said bitterly. “You insult me.”
“Hang it, there’s no one since you, Vi. You know that. And what would you have thought of a great, hulkin’ chap like me who’d never—well, all right. I’ll dry up. But you know well enough you wouldn’t have looked at me.”
“I wonder why I ever did.”
“No, you don’t. I’m just the chap to suit you. You’re full of whimsies and need a sledge-hammer fellow to keep you quiet. It you’d married that ass, Carey, or that—”
“Fritz, once for all, I won’t have my friends abused. I allowed you to have your own way about Rupert Carey, but I will not have Robin Pierce or anyone else insulted. Please understand that. I married to be more free, not more—”
“You married because you’d fallen jolly well in love with me, that’s why you married, and that’s why you’re a damned lucky woman. Come to bed. You won’t, eh?”
He made a stride, snatched Lady Holme up as if she were a bundle, and carried her off to bed.
She was on the point of bursting into angry tears, but when she found herself snatched up, her slippers tumbling off, the hood of the burnous falling over her eyes, her face crushed anyhow against her husband’s sinewy chest, she suddenly felt oddly contented, disinclined to protest or to struggle.
Lord Holme did not trouble himself to ask what she was feeling or why she was feeling it.
He thought of himself—the surest way to fasten upon a man the thoughts of others.
ROBIN PIERCE and Carey were old acquaintances, if not exactly old friends. They had been for a time at Harrow together. Pierce had six thousand a year and worked hard for a few hundreds. Carey had a thousand and did nothing. He had never done anything definite, anything to earn a living. Yet his talents were notorious. He played the piano well for an amateur, was an extraordinarily clever mimic, acted better than most people who were not on the stage, and could write very entertaining verse with a pungent, sub-acid flavour. But he had no creative power and no perseverance. As a critic of the performances of others he was cruel but discerning, giving no quarter, but giving credit where it was due. He loathed a bad workman more than a criminal, and would rather have crushed an incompetent human being than a worm. Secretly he despised himself. His own laziness was as disgusting to him as a disease, and was as incurable as are certain diseases. He was now thirty-four and realised that he was never going to do anything with his life. Already he had travelled over the world, seen a hundred, done a hundred things. He had an enormous acquaintance in Society and among artists; writers, actors, painters—all the people who did things and did them well. As a rule they liked him, despite his bizarre bluntness of speech and manner, and they invariably spoke of him as a man of great talent; he said because he was so seldom fool enough to do anything that could reveal incompetence. His mother, who was a widow, lived in the north, in an old family mansion, half house, half castle, near the sea coast of Cumberland. He had one sister, who was married to an American.
Carey always declared that he was thatrara avisan atheist, and that he had been born an atheist. He affirmed that even when a child he had never, for a moment, felt that there could be any other life than this earth-life. Few people believed him. There are few people who can believe in a child atheist.
Pierce had a totally different character. He seemed to be more dreamy and was more energetic, talked much less and accomplished much more. It had always been his ambition to be a successful diplomat, and in many respects he was well fitted for a diplomatic career. He had a talent for languages, great ease of manner, self-possession, patience and cunning. He loved foreign life. Directly he set foot in a country which was not his own he felt stimulated. He felt that he woke up, that his mind became more alert, his imagination more lively. He delighted in change, in being brought into contact with a society which required study to be understood. His present fate contented him well enough. He liked Rome and was liked there. As his mother was a Roman he had many Italian connections, and he was far more at ease with Romans than with the average London man. His father and mother lived almost perpetually in large hotels. The former, who was enormously rich, was amalade imaginaire. He invariably spoke of his quite normal health as if it were some deadly disease, and always treated himself, and insisted on being treated, as if he were an exceptionally distinguished invalid. In the course of years his friends had learned to take his view of the matter, and he was at this time almost universally spoken of as “that poor Sir Henry Pierce whose life has been one long martyrdom.” Poor Sir Henry was fortunate in the possession of a wife who really was a martyr—to him. Nobody had ever discovered whether Lady Pierce knew, or did not know, that her husband was quite as well as most people. There are many women with such secrets. Robin’s parents were at present taking baths and drinking waters in Germany. They were later going for an “after cure” to Switzerland, and then to Italy to “keep warm” during the autumn. As they never lived in London, Robin had no home there except his little house in Half Moon Street. He had one brother, renowned as a polo player, and one sister, who was married to a rising politician, Lord Evelyn Clowes, a young man with a voluble talent, a peculiar power of irritating Chancellors of the Exchequer, and hair so thick that he was adored by the caricaturists.
Robin Pierce and Carey saw little of each other now, being generally separated by a good many leagues of land and sea, but when they met they were still fairly intimate. They had some real regard for each other. Carey felt at ease in giving his violence to the quiet and self-possessed young secretary, who was three years his junior, but who sometimes seemed to him the elder of the two, perhaps because calm is essentially the senior of storm. He had even allowed Robin to guess at the truth of his feeling for Lady Holme, though he had never been explicit, on the subject to him or to anyone. There were moments when Robin wished he had not been permitted to guess, for Lady Holme attracted him far more than any other woman he had seen, and he had proposed to her before she had been carried off by her husband. He admired her beauty, but he did not believe that it was her beauty which had led him into love. He was sure that he loved the woman in her, the hidden woman whom Lord Holme and the world at large—including Carey—knew nothing about. He thought that Lady Holme herself did not understand this hidden woman, did not realise, as he did, that she existed. She spoke to him sometimes in Lady Holme’s singing, sometimes in an expression in her eyes when she was serious, sometimes even in a bodily attitude. For Robin, half fantastically, put faith in the eloquence of line as a revealer of character, of soul. But she did not speak to him in Lady Holme’s conversation. He really thought this hidden woman was obscured by the lovely window—he conceived it as a window of exquisite stained glass, jewelled but concealing—through which she was condemned to look for ever, through which, too, all men must look at her. He really wished sometimes, as he had said, that Lady Holme were ugly, for he had a fancy that perhaps then, and only then, would the hidden woman arise and be seen as a person may be seen through unstained, clear glass. He really felt that what he loved would be there to love if the face that ruled was ruined; would not only still be there to love, but would become more powerful, more true to itself, more understanding of itself, more reliant, purer, braver. And he had learnt to cherish this fancy till it had become a little monomania. Robin thought that the world misunderstood him, but he knew the world too well to say so. He never risked being laughed at. He felt sure that he was passionate, that he was capable of romantic deeds, of Quixotic self-sacrifice, of a devotion that might well be sung by poets, and that would certainly be worshipped by ardent women. And he said to himself that Lady Holme was the one woman who could set free, if the occasion came, this passionate, unusual and surely admirable captive at present chained within him, doomed to inactivity and the creeping weakness that comes from enforced repose.
Carey’s passion for Lady Holme had come into being shortly before her marriage. No one knew much about it, or about the rupture of all relations between him and the Holmes which had eventually taken place. But the fact that Carey had lost his head about Lady Holme was known to half London. For Carey, when carried away, was singularly reckless; singularly careless of consequences and of what people thought. It was difficult to influence him, but when influenced he was almost painfully open in his acknowledgment of the power that had reached him. As a rule, however, despite his apparent definiteness, his decisive violence, there seemed to be something fluid in his character, something that divided and flowed away from anything which sought to grasp and hold it. He had impetus but not balance; swiftness, but a swiftness that was uncontrolled. He resembled a machine without a brake.
It was soon after his rupture with the Holmes that his intimates began to notice that he was becoming inclined to drink too much. When Pierce returned to London from Rome he was immediately conscious of the slight alteration in his friend. Once he remonstrated with Carey about it. Carey was silent for a moment. Then he said abruptly:
“My heart wants to be drowned.”
Lord Holme hated Carey. Yet Lady Holme had not loved him; though she had not objected to him more than to other men because he loved her. She had been brought up in a society which is singularly free from prejudices, which has no time to study carefully questions of so-called honour, which has little real religious feeling, and a desire for gaiety which perhaps takes the place of a desire for morals. Intrigues are one of the chief amusements of this society, which oscillates from London to Paris as the pendulum of a clock oscillates from right to left. Lady Holme, however, happened to be protected doubly against the dangers—or joys by the way—to which so many of her companions fell cheerful, and even chattering, victims. She had a husband who though extremely stupid was extremely masterful, and, for the time at any rate, she sincerely loved him. She was a faithful wife and had no desire to be anything else, though she liked to be, and usually was, in the fashion. But though faithful to Lord Holme she had, as has been said, both the appearance and the temperament of a siren. She enjoyed governing men, and those who were governed by her, who submitted obviously to the power of her beauty and the charm of manner that seemed to emanate from it, and to be one with it, were more attractive to her than those who were not. She was inclined to admire a man for loving her, as a serious and solemn-thinking woman, with bandeaux and convictions, admires a clergyman for doing his duty. Carey had done his duty with such fiery ardour that, though she did not prevent her husband from kicking him out of the house, she could not refrain from thinking well of him.
Her thoughts of Robin Pierce were perhaps a little more confused.
She had not accepted him. Carey would have said that he was not “her type.” Although strong and active he was not the huge mass of bones and muscles and thews and sinews, ignorant of beauty and devoid of the love of art, which Carey had described as her ideal. There was melancholy and there was subtlety in him. When Lady Holme was a girl this melancholy and subtlety had not appealed to her sufficiently to induce her to become Lady Viola Pierce. Nevertheless, Robin’s affection for her, and the peculiar form it took—of idealising her secret nature and wishing her obvious beauty away—had won upon the egoism of her. Although she laughed at his absurdity, as she called it, and honestly held to her Pagan belief that physical beauty was all in all to the world she wished to influence, it pleased her sometimes to fancy that perhaps he was right, that perhaps her greatest loveliness was hidden and dwelt apart. The thought was flattering, and though her knowledge of men rejected the idea that such a loveliness alone could ever command an empire worth the ruling, she could have no real objection to being credited with a double share of charm—the charm of face and manner which everyone, including herself, was aware that she possessed, and that other stranger, more dim and mysterious charm at whose altar Robin burnt an agreeably perfumed incense.
She had a peculiar power of awakening in others that which she usually seemed not to possess herself—imagination, passion, not only physical but ethereal and of the mind; a tenderness for old sorrows, desire for distant, fleeting, misty glories not surely of this earth. She was a brilliant suggestionist, but not in conversation. Her face and her voice, when she sang, were luring to the lovers of beauty. When she sang she often expressed for them the under-thoughts and under-feelings of secretly romantic, secretly wistful men and women, and drew them to her as if by a spell. But her talk and manner in conversation were so unlike her singing, so little accorded with the look that often came into her eyes while she sang, that she was a perpetual puzzle to such elderly men as Sir Donald Ulford, to such young men as Robin Pierce, and even to some women. They came about her like beggars who have heard a chink of gold, and she showed them a purse that seemed to be empty.
Was it themilieuin which she lived, the influence of a vulgar and greedy age, which prevented her from showing her true self except in her art? Or was she that stupefying enigma sometimes met with, an unintelligent genius?
There were some who wondered.
In her singing she seemed to understand, to love, to pity, to enthrone. In her life she often seemed not to understand, not to love, not to pity, not to place high.
She sang of Venice, and those who cannot even think of the city in the sea without a flutter of the heart, a feeling not far from soft pain in its tenderness and gratitude, listened to the magic bells at sunset, and glided in the fairy barques across the liquid plains of gold. She spoke of Venice, and they heard only the famished voice of the mosquito uttering its midnight grace before meat.
Which was the real Venice?
Which was the real woman?
ON the following day, which was warm and damp; Lady Holme drove to Bond Street, bought two new hats, had her hand read by a palmist who called himself “Cupido,” looked in at a ladies’ club and then went to Mrs. Wolfstein, with whom she was engaged to lunch. She did not wish to lunch with her. She disliked Mrs. Wolfstein as she disliked most women, but she had not been able to get out of it. Mrs. Wolfstein had overheard her saying to Lady Cardington that she had nothing particular to do till four that day, and had immediately “pinned her.” Besides disliking Mrs. Wolfstein, Lady Holme was a little afraid of her. Like many clever Jewesses, Mrs. Wolfstein was a ruthless conversationalist, and enjoyed showing off at the expense of others, even when they were her guests. She had sometimes made Lady Holme feel stupid, even feel as if a good talker might occasionally gain, and keep, an advantage over a lovely woman who did not talk so well. The sensation passed, but the fact that it had ever been did not draw Lady Holme any closer to the woman with the “pawnbroking expression” in her eyes.
Mrs. Wolfstein was not in the most exclusive set in London, but she was in the smart set, which is no longer exclusive although it sometimes hopes it is. She knew the racing people, nearly all the most fashionable Jews, and those very numerous English patricians who like to go where money is. She also knew the whole of Upper Bohemia, and was apersona gratissimain that happy land of talent and jealousy. She entertained a great deal, generally at modish restaurants. Many French and Germans were to be met with at her parties; and it was impossible to be with either them or her for many minutes without hearing the most hearty and whole-souled abuse of English aspirations, art, letters and cooking. The respectability, the pictures, the books and the boiled cabbage of Britain all came impartially under the lash.
Mrs. Wolfstein’s origin was obscure. That she was a Jewess was known to everybody, but few could say with certainty whether she was a German, a Spanish, a Polish or an Eastern Jewess. She had much of the covert coarseness and open impudence of a Levantine, and occasionally said things which made people wonder whether, before she became Amalia Wolfstein, she had not perhaps been—well really—something very strange somewhere a long way off.
Her husband was shocking to look at: small, mean, bald, Semitic and nervous, with large ears which curved outwards from his head like leaves, and cheeks blue from much shaving. He was said to hide behind his anxious manner an acuteness that was diabolic, and to have earned his ill-health by sly dissipations for which he had paid enormous sums. There were two Wolfstein children, a boy and a girl of eleven and twelve; small, swarthy, frog-like, self-possessed. They already spoke three languages, and their protruding eyes looked almost diseased with intelligence.
The Wolfstein house, which was in Curzon Street, was not pretty, Apparently neither Mrs. Wolfstein nor her husband, who was a financier and company promoter on a very large scale, had good taste in furniture and decoration. The mansion was spacious but dingy. There was a great deal of chocolate and fiery yellow paint. There were many stuffy brown carpets, and tables which were unnecessarily solid. In the hall were pillars which looked as if they were made of brawn, and arches with lozenges of azure paint in which golden stars appeared rather meretriciously. A plaster statue of Hebe, with crinkly hair and staring eyeballs, stood in a corner without improving matters. That part of the staircase which was not concealed by the brown carpet was dirty white. An immense oil painting of a heap of dead pheasants, rabbits and wild duck, lying beside a gun and a pair of leather gaiters, immediately faced the hall door, which was opened by two enormous men with yellow complexions and dissipated eyes. Mrs. Wolfstein was at home, and one of the enormous men lethargically showed Lady Holme upstairs into a drawing-room which suggested a Gordon Hotel. She waited for about five minutes on a brown and yellow sofa near a table on which lay some books and several paper-knives, and then Mrs. Wolfstein appeared. She was dressed very smartly in blue and red, and looked either Oriental or Portuguese, as she came in. Lady Holme was not quite certain which.
“Dear person!” she said, taking Lady Holme’s hands in hers, which were covered with unusually large rings. “Now, I’ve got a confession to make. What a delicious hat!”
Lady Holme felt certain the confession was of something unpleasant, but she only said, in the rather languid manner she generally affected towards women:
“Well? My ear is at the grating.”
“My lunch is at the Carlton.”
Lady Holme was pleased. At the Carlton one can always look about.
“And—it’s a woman’s lunch.”
Lady Holme’s countenance fell quite frankly.
“I knew you’d be horrified. You think us such bores, and so we are. But I couldn’t resist being malicious to win such a triumph. You at a hen lunch! It’ll be the talk of London. Can you forgive me?”
“Of course.”
“And can you stand it?”
Lady Holme looked definitely dubious.
“I’ll tell you who’ll be there—Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mrs. Trent—do you know her? Spanish looking, and’s divorced two husbands, and’s called the scarlet woman because she always dresses in red—Sally Perceval, Miss Burns and Pimpernel Schley.”
“Pimpernel Schley! Who is she?”
“The American actress who plays all the improper modern parts. Directly a piece is produced in Paris that we run over to see—you know the sort! the Grand Duke and foreign Royalty species—she has it adapted for her. Of course it’s Bowdlerised as to words, but she manages to get back all that’s been taken out in her acting. Young America’s crazy about her. She’s going to play over here.”
“Oh!”
Lady Holme’s voice was not encouraging, but Mrs. Wolfstein was not sensitive. She chattered gaily all the way to the Haymarket. When they came into the Palm Court they found Lady Cardington already there, seated tragically in an armchair, and looking like a weary empress. The band was playing on the balcony just outside the glass wall which divides the great dining-room from the court, and several people were dotted about waiting for friends, or simply killing time by indulging curiosity. Among them was a large, broad-shouldered young man, with a round face, contemptuous blue eyes and a mouth with chubby, pouting lips. He was well dressed, but there was a touch of horseyness in the cut of his trousers, the arrangement of his tie. He sat close to the band, tipping his green chair backwards and smoking a cigarette.
As Mrs. Wolfstein and Lady Holme went up to greet Lady Cardington, Sally Perceval and Mrs. Trent came in together, followed almost immediately by Lady Manby.
Sally Perceval was a very pretty young married woman, who spent most of her time racing, gambling and going to house parties. She looked excessively fragile and consumptive, but had lived hard and never had a day’s illness in her life. She was accomplished, not at all intellectual, clever at games, a fine horsewoman and an excellent swimmer. She had been all over the world with her husband, who was very handsome and almost idiotic, and who could not have told you what the Taj was, whether Thebes was in Egypt or India, or what was the difference, if any, between the Golden Gate and the Golden Horn. Mrs. Trent was large, sultry, well-informed and supercilious; had the lustrous eyes of a Spaniard, and spoke in a warm contralto voice. Her figure was magnificent, and she prided herself on having a masculine intellect. Her enemies said that she had a more than masculine temper.
Lady Manby had been presented by Providence with a face like a teapot, her nose being the spout and her cheeks the bulging sides. She saw everything in caricature. If war were spoken of, her imagination immediately conjured up visions of unwashed majors conspicuously absurd in toeless boots, of fat colonels forced to make merry on dead rats, of field-marshals surprised by the enemy in their nightshirts, and of common soldiers driven to repair their own clothes and preposterously at work on women’s tasks. She adored the clergy for their pious humours, the bench for its delicious attempts at dignity, the bar for its grotesque travesties of passionate conviction—lies with their wigs on—the world political for its intrigues dressed up in patriotism. A Lord Chancellor in full state seemed to her the most delightfully ridiculous phenomenon in a delightfully ridiculous universe. And she had once been obliged to make a convulsive exit from an English cathedral, in which one hundred colonial bishops were singing a solemn hymn, entirely devastated by the laughter waked in her by this most sacred spectacle.
Miss Burns, who hurried in breathlessly ten minutes late, was very thin, badly dressed and insignificant-looking, wore her hair short, and could not see you if you were more than four feet away from her. She had been on various lonely and distant travelling excursions, about which she had written books, had consorted merrily with naked savages, sat in the oily huts of Esquimaux, and penetrated into the interior of China dressed as a man. Her lack of affectation hit you in the face on a first meeting, and her sincerity was perpetually embroiling her with the persistent liars who, massed together, formed what is called decent society.
“I know I’m late,” she said, pushing her round black hat askew on her shaggy little head. “I know I’ve kept you all waiting. Pardon!”
“Indeed you haven’t,” replied Mrs. Wolfstein. “Pimpernel Schley isn’t here yet. She lives in the hotel, so of course she’ll turn up last.”
Mrs. Trent put one hand on her hip and stared insolently at the various groups of people in the court, Lady Cardington sighed, and Lady Holme assumed a vacant look, which suited her mental attitude at the moment. She generally began to feel rather vacant if she were long alone with women.
Another ten minutes passed.
“I’m famishing,” said Sally Perceval. “I’ve been at the Bath Club diving, and I do so want my grub. Let’s skip in.”
“It really is too bad—oh, here she comes!” said Mrs. Wolfstein.
Many heads in the Palm Court were turned towards the stairs, down which a demure figure was walking with extreme slowness. The big young man with the round face got up from his chair and looked greedy, and the waiters standing by the desk just inside the door glanced round, whispered, and smiled quickly before gliding off to their different little tables.
Pimpernel Schley was alone, but she moved as if she were leading a quiet procession of vestal virgins. She was dressed in white, with a black velvet band round her tiny waist and a large black hat. Her shining, straw-coloured hair was fluffed out with a sort of ostentatious innocence on either side of a broad parting, and she kept her round chin tucked well in as she made what was certainly an effective entrance. Her arms hung down at her sides, and in one hand she carried a black fan. She wore no gloves, and many diamond rings glittered on her small fingers, the rosy nails of which were trimmed into points. As she drew near to Mrs. Wolfstein’s party she walked slower and slower, as if she felt that she was arriving at a destination much too soon.
Lady Holme watched her as she approached, examined her with that piercing scrutiny in which the soul of one woman is thrust out, like a spear, towards the soul of another. She noticed at once that Miss Schley resembled her, had something of her charm of fairness. It was a fainter, more virginal charm than hers. The colouring of hair and eyes was lighter. The complexion was a more dead, less warm, white. But there was certainly a resemblance. Miss Schley was almost exactly her height, too, and—
Lady Holme glanced swiftly round the Palm Court. Of all the women gathered there Pimpernel Schley and herself were nearest akin in appearance.
As she recognised this fact Lady Holme felt hostile to Miss Schley.
Not until the latter was almost touching her hostess did she lift her eyes from the ground. Then she stood still, looked up calmly, and said, in a drawling and infantine voice:
“I had to see my trunks unpacked, but I was bound to be on time. I wouldn’t have come down to-day for any soul in the world but you. I would not.”
It was a pretty speaking voice, clear and youthful, with a choir-boyish sound in it, and remarkably free from nasal twang, but it was not a lady’s voice. It sounded like the frontispiece of a summer number become articulate.
Mrs. Wolfstein began to introduce Miss Schley to her guests, none of whom, it seemed, knew her. She bowed to each of them, still with the vestal virgin air, and said, “Glad to know you!” to each in turn without looking at anyone. Then Mrs. Wolfstein led the way into the restaurant.
Everyone looked at the party of women as they came in and ranged themselves round a table in the middle of the big room. Lady Cardington sat on one side of Mrs. Wolfstein and Lady Holme on the other, between her and Mrs. Trent. Miss Schley was exactly opposite. She kept her eyes eternally cast down like a nun at Benediction. All the quite young men who could see her were looking at her with keen interest, and two or three of them—probably up from Sandhurst—had already assumed expressions calculated to alarm modesty. Others looked mournfully fatuous, as if suddenly a prey to lasting and romantic grief. The older men were more impartial in their observation of Mrs. Wolfstein’s guests. And all the women, without exception, fixed their eyes upon Lady Holme’s hat.
Lady Cardington, who seemed oppressed by grief, said to Mrs. Wolfstein:
“Did you see that article in theDaily Mailthis morning?”
“Which one?”
“On the suggestion to found a school in which the only thing to be taught would be happiness.”
“Who’s going to be the teacher?”
“Some man. I forget the name.”
“A man!” said Mrs. Trent, in a slow, veiled contralto voice. “Why, men are always furious if they think we have any pleasure which they can’t deprive us of at a minute’s notice. A man is the last two-legged thing to be a happiness teacher.”
“Whom would you have then?” said Lady Cardington.
“Nobody, or a child.”
“Of which sex?” said Mrs. Wolfstein.
“The sex of a child,” replied Mrs. Trent.
Mrs. Wolfstein laughed rather loudly.
“I think children are the most greedy, unsatisfied individuals in—” she began.
“I was not alluding to Curzon Street children,” observed Mrs. Trent, interrupting. “When I speak in general terms of anything I always except London.”
“Why?” said Sally Perceval.
“Because it’s no more natural, no more central, no more in line with the truth of things than you are, Sally.”
“But, my dear, you surely aren’t a belated follower of Tolstoi!” cried Mrs. Wolfstein. “You don’t want us all to live like day labourers.”
“I don’t want anybody to do anything, but if happiness is to be taught it must not be by a man or by a Londoner.”
“I had no idea you had been caught by the cult of simplicity,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “But you are so clever. You reveal your dislikes but conceal your preferences. Most women think that if they only conceal their dislikes they are quite perfectly subtle.”
“Subtle people are delicious,” said Lady Manby, putting her mouth on one side. “They remind me of a kleptomaniac I once knew who had a little pocket closed by a flap let into the front of her gown. When she dined out she filled it with scraps. Once she dined with us and I saw her, when she thought no one was watching, peppering her pocket with cayenne, and looking so delightfully sly and thieving. Subtle people are always peppering their little pockets and thinking nobody sees them.”
“And lots of people don’t,” said Mrs. Wolfstein.
“The vices are divinely comic,” continued Lady Manby, looking every moment more like a teapot. “I think it’s such a mercy. Fancy what a lot of fun we should lose if there were no drunkards, for instance!”
Lady Cardington looked shocked.
“The virtues are often more comic than the vices,” said Mrs. Trent, with calm authority. “Dramatists know that. Think of the dozens of good farces whose foundation is supreme respectability in contact with the wicked world.”
“I didn’t know anyone called respectability a virtue,” cried Sally Perceval.
“Oh, all the English do in their hearts,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “Pimpernel, are you Yankees as bad?”
Miss Schley was eatingsole a la Colbertwith her eyes on her plate. She ate very slowly and took tiny morsels. Now she looked up.
“We’re pretty respectable over in America, I suppose,” she drawled. “Why not? What harm does it do anyway?”
“Well, it limits the inventive faculties for one thing. If one is strictly respectable life is plain sailing.”
“Oh, life is never that,” said Mrs. Trent, “for women.”
Lady Cardington seemed touched by this remark.
“Never, never,” she said in her curious voice—a voice in which tears seemed for ever to be lingering. “We women are always near the rocks.”
“Or on them,” said Mrs. Trent, thinking doubtless of the two husbands she had divorced.
“I like a good shipwreck,” exclaimed Miss Burns in a loud tenor voice. “I was in two before I was thirty, one off Hayti and one off Java, and I enjoyed them both thoroughly. They wake folks up and make them show their mettle.”
“It’s always dangerous to speak figuratively if she’s anywhere about,” murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Holme. “She’ll talk about lowering boats and life-preservers now till the end of lunch.”
Lady Holme started. She had not been listening to the conversation but had been looking at Miss Schley. She had noticed instantly the effect created in the room by the actress’s presence in it. The magic of a name flits, like a migratory bird, across the Atlantic. Numbers of the youthful loungers of London had been waiting impatiently during the last weeks for the arrival of this pale and demure star. Now that she had come their interest in her was keen. Her peculiar reputation for ingeniously tricking Mrs. Bowdler, secretary to Mrs. Grundy, rendered her very piquant, and this piquancy was increased by her ostentatiously vestal appearance.
Lady Holme was sometimes clairvoyante. At this moment every nerve in her body seemed telling her that the silent girl, who sat there nibbling her lunch composedly, was going to be the rage in London. It did not matter at all whether she had talent or not. Lady Holme saw that directly, as she glanced from one little table to another at the observant, whispering men.
She felt angry with Miss Schley for resembling her in colouring, for resembling her in another respect—capacity for remaining calmly silent in the midst of fashionable chatterboxes.
“Will she?” she said to Mrs. Wolfstein.
“Yes. If she’d never been shipwrecked she’d have been almost entertaining, but—there’s Sir Donald Ulford trying to attract your attention.”
“Where?”
She looked and saw Sir Donald sitting opposite to the large young man with the contemptuous blue eyes and the chubby mouth. They both seemed very bored. Sir Donald bowed.
“Who is that with him?” asked Lady Holme.
“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “He looks like a Cupid who’s been through Sandow’s school. He oughtn’t to wear anything but wings.”
“It’s Sir Donald’s son, Leo,” said Lady Cardington.
Pimpernel Schley lifted her eyes for an instant from her plate, glanced at Leo Ulford, and cast them down again.
“Leo Ulford’s a blackguard,” observed Mrs. Trent. “And when a fair man’s a blackguard he’s much more dangerous than a dark man.”
All the women stared at Leo Ulford with a certain eagerness.
“He’s good-looking,” said Sally Perceval. “But I always distrust cherubic people. They’re bound to do you if they get the chance. Isn’t he married?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Trent. “He married a deaf heiress.”
“Intelligent of him!” remarked Mrs. Wolfstein. “I always wish I’d married a blind millionaire instead of Henry. Being a Jew, Henry sees not only all there is to see, but all there isn’t. Sir Donald and his Cupid son don’t seem to have much to say to one another.”
“Oh, don’t you know that family affection’s the dumbest thing on earth?” said Mrs. Trent.
“Too deep for speech,” said Lady Manby. “I love to see fathers and sons together, the fathers trying to look younger than they are and the sons older. It’s the most comic relationship, and breeds shyness as the West African climate breeds fever.”
“I know the whole of the West African coast by heart,” declared Miss Burns, wagging her head, and moving her brown hands nervously among her knives and forks. “And I never caught anything there.”
“Not even a husband,” murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Manby.
“In fact, I never felt better in my life than I did at Old Calabar,” continued Miss Burns. “But there my mind was occupied. I was studying the habits of alligators.”
“They’re very bad, aren’t they?” asked Lady Manby, in a tone of earnest inquiry.
“I prefer to study the habits of men,” said Sally Perceval, who was always surrounded by a troup of young racing men and athletes, who admired her swimming feats.
“Men are very disappointing, I think,” observed Mrs. Trent. “They are like a lot of beads all threaded on one string.”
“And what’s the string?” asked Sally Perceval.
“Vanity. Men are far vainer than we are. Their indifference to the little arts we practise shows it. A woman whose head is bald covers it with a wig. Without a wig she would feel that she was an outcast totally powerless to attract. But a bald-headed man has no idea of diffidence. He does not bother about a wig because he expects to be adored without one.”
“And the worst of it is that he is adored,” said Mrs. Wolfstein. “Look at my passion for Henry.”
They began to talk about their husbands. Lady Holme did not join in. She and Pimpernel Schley were very silent members of the party. Even Miss Burns, who was—so she said—a spinster by conviction not by necessity, plunged into the husband question, and gave some very daring illustrations of the marriage customs of certain heathen tribes.
Pimpernel Schley hardly spoke at all. When someone, turning to her, asked her what she thought about the subject under discussion, she lifted her pale eyes and said, with the choir-boy drawl:
“I’ve got no husband and never had one, so I guess I’m no kind of a judge.”
“I guess she’s a judge of other women’s husbands, though,” said Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Cardington. “That child is going to devastate London.”
Now and then Lady Holme glanced towards Sir Donald and his son. They seemed as untalkative as she was. Sir Donald kept on looking towards Mrs. Wolfstein’s table. So did Leo. But whereas Leo Ulford’s eyes were fixed on Pimpernel Schley, Sir Donald’s met the eyes of Lady Holme. She felt annoyed; not because Sir Donald was looking at her, but because his son was not.
How these women talked about their husbands! Lady Cardington, who was a widow, spoke of husbands as if they were a race which was gradually dying out. She thought the modern woman was beginning to get a little tired of the institution of matrimony, and to care much less for men than was formerly the case. Being contradicted by Mrs. Trent, she gave her reasons for this belief. One was that whereas American matinee girls used to go mad over the “leading men” of the stage they now went mad over the leading women. She also instanced the many beautiful London women, universally admired, who were over thirty and still remained spinsters. Mrs. Trent declared that they were abnormal, and that, till the end of time, women would always wish to be wives. Mrs. Wolfstein agreed with her on various grounds. One was that it was the instinct of woman to buy and to rule, and that if she were rich she could now acquire a husband as, in former days, people acquired slaves—by purchase. This remark led to the old question of American heiresses and the English nobility, and to a prolonged discussion as to whether or not most women ruled their husbands.
Women nearly always argue from personal experience, and consequently Lady Cardington—whose husband had treated her badly—differed on this point from Mrs. Wolfstein, who always did precisely what she pleased, regardless of Mr. Wolfstein’s wishes. Mrs. Trent affirmed that for her part she thought women should treat their husbands as they treated their servants, and dismiss them if they didn’t behave themselves, without giving them a character. She had done so twice, and would do it a third time if the occasion arose. Sally Perceval attacked her for this, pleading slangily that men would be men, and that their failings ought to be winked at; and Miss Burns, as usual, brought the marital proceedings of African savages upon the carpet. Lady Manby turned the whole thing into a joke by a farcical description of the Private Enquiry proceedings of a jealous woman of her acquaintance, who had donned a canary-coloured wig as a disguise, and dogged her husband’s footsteps in the streets of London, only to find that he went out at odd times to visit a grandmother from whom he had expectations, and who happened to live in St. John’s Wood.
The foreign waiters, who moved round the table handing the dishes, occasionally exchanged furtive glances which seemed indicative of suppressed amusement, and the men who were lunching near, many of whom were now smoking cigarettes, became more and more intent upon Mrs. Wolfstein and her guests. As they were getting up to go into the Palm Court for coffee and liqueurs, Lady Cardington again referred to the article on the proposed school for happiness, which had apparently made a deep impression upon her.
“I wonder if happiness can be taught,” she said. “If it can—”
“It can’t,” said Mrs. Trent, with more than her usual sledge-hammer bluntness. “We aren’t meant to be happy here.”
“Who doesn’t mean us to be happy?” asked poor Lady Cardington in a deplorable voice.
“First—our husbands.”
“It’s cowardly not to be happy,” cried Miss Burns, pushing her hat over her left eye as a tribute to the close of lunch. “In a savage state you’ll always find—”
The remainder of her remark was lost in thefrou-frouof skirts as the eight women began slowly to thread their way between the tables to the door.
Lady Holme found herself immediately behind Miss Schley, who moved with impressive deliberation and the extreme composure of a well-brought-up child thoroughly accustomed to being shown off to visitors. Her straw-coloured hair was done low in the nape of her snowy neck, and, as she took her little steps, her white skirt trailed over the carpet behind her with a sort of virginal slyness. As she passed Leo Ulford it brushed gently against him, and he drummed the large fingers of his left hand with sudden violence on the tablecloth, at the same time pursing his chubby lips and then opening his mouth as if he were going to say something.
Sir Donald rose and bowed. Mrs. Wolfstein murmured a word to him in passing, and they had not been sipping their coffee for more than two or three minutes before he joined them with his son.
Sir Donald came up at once to Lady Holme.
“May I present my son to you, Lady Holme?” he said.
“Certainly.”
“Leo, I wish to introduce you to Lady Holme.”
Leo Ulford bowed rather ungracefully. Standing up he looked more than ever like a huge boy, and he had much of the expression that is often characteristic of huge boys—an expression in which impudence seems to float forward from a background of surliness.
Lady Holme said nothing. Leo Ulford sat down beside her in an armchair.
“Better weather,” he remarked.
Then he called a waiter, and said to him, in a hectoring voice:
“Bring me a Kummel and make haste about it.”
He lit a cigarette that was almost as big as a cigar, and turned again to Lady Holme.
“I’ve been in the Sahara gazelle shooting,” he continued.
He spoke in a rather thick, lumbering voice and very loud, probably because he was married to a deaf woman.
“Just come back,” he added.
“Oh!” said Lady Holme.
She was sitting perfectly upright on her chair, and noticed that her companion’s eyes travelled calmly and critically over her figure with an unveiled deliberation that was exceptionally brazen even in a modern London man. Lady Holme did not mind it. Indeed, she rather liked it. She knew at once, by that look, the type of man with whom she had to deal. In Leo Ulford there was something of Lord Holme, as in Pimpernel Schley there was perhaps a touch of herself. Having finished his stare, Leo Ulford continued:
“Jolly out there. No rot. Do as you like and no one to bother you. Gazelle are awfully shy beasts though.”
“They must have suited you,” said Lady Holme, very gravely.
“Why?” he asked, taking the glass of Kummel which the waiter had brought and setting it down on a table by him.
“Aren’t you a shy—er—beast?”
He stared at her calmly for a moment, and then said:
“I say, you’re too sharp, Lady Holme.”
He turned his head towards Pimpernel Schley, who was sitting a little way off with her soft, white chin tucked well in, looking steadily down into a cup half full of Turkish coffee and speaking to nobody.
“Who’s that girl?” he asked.
“That’s Miss Pimpernel Schley. A pretty name, isn’t it?”
“Is it? An American of course.”
“Of course.”
“What cheek they have? What’s she do?”
“I believe she acts in—well, a certain sort of plays.”
A slow smile overspread Leo Ulford’s face and made him look more like a huge boy than ever.
“What certain sort?” he asked. “The sort I’d like?”
“Very probably. But I know nothing of your tastes.”
She did—everything almost. There are a good many Leo Ulfords lounging about London.
“I like anything that’s a bit lively, with no puritanic humbug about it.”
“Well, you surely can’t suppose that there can be any puritanic humbug about Miss Schley or anything she has to do with!”
He glanced again at Pimpernel Schley and then at Lady Holme. The smile on his face became a grin. Then his huge shoulders began to shake gently.
“I do love talking to women,” he said, on the tide of a prolonged chuckle. “When they aren’t deaf.”
Lady Holme still remained perfectly grave.
“Do you? Why?” she inquired.
“Can’t you guess why?”
“Our charity to our sister women?”
She was smiling now.