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Too Old for Dolls: A Novel

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Title: Too Old for Dolls: A Novel

Author: Anthony M. Ludovici


        
Release date: March 21, 2009 [eBook #28378]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28378

Credits: E-text prepared by Sankar Viswanathan, Suzanne Shell, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


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E-text prepared by Sankar Viswanathan, Suzanne Shell, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)



TOO OLD FOR DOLLS

A Novel

by

ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI

Author of "Mansel Fellowes," "Catherine Doyle," "A Defence
of Aristocracy," Etc.







G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1921

Copyright, 1921
by
G. P. Putnam's Sons




THE ENGLISH FLAPPER[1]


    _From Nature's anvil hot she hails,
      The forge still glowing on her cheek.
    Untamed as yet, Life still prevails
      Within her breast and fain would speak._

    _But all the elfs upon the plain,
      And in the arbour where she lolls,
    Repeat the impudent refrain;
      Too young for babes, too old for dolls._

    _Her fingers deft have guessed the knack
      Of making each advantage tell:
    Her hat, her hair still down her back,
      Her frocks and muff of mighty spell;_

    _Her springtide "tailor-mades" quite plain:
      In summer-time her parasols;
    Each eloquent with the refrain:
      Too young for babes, too old for dolls._

    _Behold with what grave interest
      She looks at all, or hind or squire;
    In truth more keenly than the best
      Matriculation marks require._

    _She's told to learn from all she sees;
      To watch the seasons, how they go,
    And note the burgeoning of trees,
      Or bulbs and pansies, how they grow._

    _"Enough that they are fair!" she cries;
      "Why should I learn how lilies blow?"
    And, dropping botany, she sighs
      For some new flounce or furbelow._

    _The murmur of the woodland wild,
      The sound of courting birds that sing,
    Are sweeter music to this child
      Than all piano practising._

    _She reads of love time and again,
      And writes sad lays and barcarolles,
    All emphasising the refrain:
      Too young for babes, too old for dolls._

    _And, truth to tell, the world's a thing
      Of wonder for a life that's new,
    And trembling her passions sing
      Their praise within her father's pew._

    _Magnificats or credos sung,
      Thus oft acquire a deeper note,
    When they're intoned by voices young,
      Or issue from a virgin's throat._

    _For all the world's a wondrous thing,
      And magic to the life that's new,
    And heartily her voice-chords ring
      Beside her father's in his pew._

    _Who sees her clad in muslin white,
      With eyes downcast and manner prim,
    May well be minded by the sight,
      Of angels pure or cherubim._

    _Yet, oh, the secret lusts of life!
      The thrills and throbs but half divined;
    The future and the great word "Wife,"
      Which ofttimes occupy her mind!_

    _The wicked thoughts that come and go,
      The dreams that leave her soul aghast,
    And make her long to hold and know
      The entertaining truth at last!_

    _But still the elfs upon the plain,
      And in the arbour where she lolls,
    With merry gesture cry again:
      Too young for babes, too old for dolls._

[Footnote 1: _First published in THE NEW AGE, December 4th, 1919._]




Too Old for Dolls

CHAPTER I


On a vast Chesterfield, every unoccupied square inch of which seemed to
bulge with indignant pride, Mrs. Delarayne reclined in picturesque
repose. Her small feet, looking if possible more dainty than usual in
their spruce patent leather shoes, were resting on a rich silk cushion
whose glistening gold tassels lay heavily amid all the crushed splendour
of the couch. Other cushions, equally purse-proud and brazen, supported
the more important portions of the lady's frame, and a deep floorward
curve in the line of the Chesterfield conveyed the impression that,
however tenderly Mrs. Delarayne might wish to be embraced by her
furniture and its wedges of down, she was at all events a creature of
substantial proportions and construction.

The picture presented was one of careless and secure opulence.

The contents of the room in which Mrs. Delarayne rested had obviously
been designed and produced by human effort of the most conscientious
and loving kind. All the objects about her were treasures either of art
or antiquity, or both, and stood there as evidence of the power which
their present owner, or her ancestors, must have been able to exercise
over hundreds of gifted painters, cabinet-makers, needlewomen, potters,
braziers, carvers, metal-workers, and craftsmen of all kinds for
generations.

It was late in June in the ninth year of King Edward VII's reign--that
halcyon period when nobody who was anybody felt particularly happy,
because no such person had actually experienced what unhappiness was.
Certainly Mrs. Delarayne had not, unless she had shown really
exceptional fortitude and self-control over her husband's death.

A sound in the room suddenly made her turn her head, and she dropped her
book gently into the folds of her dress.

"My dear child," she exclaimed, addressing her elder daughter, "are you
still there? I thought you had gone long ago! I must have been asleep."

"You did sleep, Edith dear," her daughter replied, "because I heard you
snoring. You only picked up your book a moment ago."

Mrs. Delarayne examined her own blue-veined knotty hands with the
expression of one who is contemplating a phenomenon that is threatening
to become a nuisance, and then dropping them quickly out of sight again,
she glanced eagerly round the room as if she wished to forget all about
them. She did not relish her daughter's allusion to her
snoring,--another sign of the same depressing kind as her blue-veined
knotty hands,--and her next remark was made with what seemed unnecessary
anger.

"Instead of wasting your time here, Cleo," she observed, picking up her
book again, "why don't you go upstairs and pull some of those nasty
black hairs off your upper lip? You know who's coming to-day, and you
also know that young men, in this country at any rate, strongly object
to any signs of temperament in a girl. They think it incompatible with
their ideal of the angel, or the fairy, or some other nonsense."

Cleopatra rose, jerked her shoulders impatiently, and snorted.

"I should have thought it better to be natural," she blurted out. "If
it's natural for me to have dark hairs on my upper lip, then surely I
should not remove them."

Again Mrs. Delarayne dropped her book and glanced round very angrily.
"Don't be stupid, Cleo!" she cried. "What do you suppose 'natural' means
nowadays? Has it any meaning at all? Is it natural for you to blow your
nose in a lace handkerchief? Is it natural for you to do your hair up?
Is it natural for you to eat marrons glaces as you do at the rate of a
pound and a half a week,--yes, a pound and a half a week; I buy them so
I ought to know, unless the servants get at them--when you ought to be
living in a cave, dressed in bearskins and gnawing at the roots of
trees? Don't talk to me about 'natural.' Nothing is natural nowadays,
except perhaps the inexhaustible stupidity of people who choke over a
little process of beautification and yet swallow the whole complicated
artificiality of modern life."

As Mrs. Delarayne turned her refined and still very beautiful face to
the light, it became clear that she at any rate did not choke over any
"little process of beautification"; for she was at least fifty-five
years of age, and at a distance of two or three yards, looked thirty.

Cleopatra moved mutinously towards the door.

"That's right, my dear," said her mother in more conciliatory tones. "I
don't mind your upper lip; I like it. But then I understand. Denis does
not understand, and I'm convinced that he doesn't like it."

Flushing slightly, Cleopatra turned to face her mother. "Edith dear, how
can you talk such nonsense!" she exclaimed. "What do I care whether
Denis likes it or not?"

Mrs. Delarayne smiled. "Well, I do, my dear. When you are my age you'll
be as anxious as I am to get your daughters married."

The younger woman turned her head. "Married!" she cried. "Oh when shall
I hear the end of that litany! I suppose you want me to marry anybody,
it doesn't matter whom, so long as I----"

"H'm," grunted the parent. "I don't think the discussion of that
particular point would prove profitable."

Cleopatra sailed haughtily out of the room, and there was just the
suggestion of an angry slam in the way she closed the door after her.

She was now twenty-five years of age. "Much too old," was the mother's
comment. "It must be this year or never." She was a good-looking girl,
dark, with large intelligent eyes, a pretty, straight nose, and full
well-shaped lips. About five foot six in height, she was also well
developed. Certainly her colouring was not quite all that it might have
been; but she was naturally a little anaemic, as all decent girls should
be who, at twenty-five years of age, are still unmarried. "It seems
absurd," thought her mother, "that such a creature should have had to
wait so long." And then with an effort she turned her thoughts to less
depressing matters.

Mrs. Delarayne was a widow. Her late husband, a wealthy, retired
Canadian lawyer, had been dead four years, having left her in her
fifty-first year very comfortably off with two attractive daughters. She
had inherited everything he possessed, including two handsome
establishments, the one in Kensington and the other at Brineweald,
Kent,--and in his will there had not been even a small special provision
for either of his children. Economically, therefore, Cleopatra and
Leonetta Delarayne were bound hand and foot to their mother. But
although Mrs. Delarayne was by no means averse to power, she wielded it
so delicately in her relations with her offspring, that after their
father's death neither of her daughters ever learnt to doubt that what
was "Edith's" was theirs also. In regard to one question alone did Mrs.
Delarayne ever lay her hands significantly upon her gold bags--and that
was marriage. She never concealed from them that she would be liberal to
the point of recklessness if they married, but that she would draw in
her purse-strings very tightly, indeed, if they remained spinsters. In
fact it was understood that when she died each of her daughters, if wed,
would inherit half her wealth, but if they remained old maids, the bulk
of it would most certainly go to some promising though impecunious young
man in her circle.

She professed to loathe the sight, so common alas! in England, of the
affluent spinster, "growing pointlessly rotund on rich food at one of
the smug hotels or boarding-houses for parasitic nonentities, which are
distributed so plentifully all over the land," while thousands of
promising young men had to wait too long before they were able to take
their bride to the altar. It was her view that this feature of social
life in England was truly the white man's burden, and she vowed that no
money of hers would ever help to produce so nauseating a spectacle.
Behind Mrs. Delarayne's laudable views on this subject, however, there
were doubtless other and less patriotic considerations, which may or
may not be revealed in the course of this story.

A few minutes later the maid entered the room and announced, "Sir Joseph
Bullion."

"Show him in," cried her mistress, throwing her legs smartly off the
Chesterfield, adjusting her dress with a few swift touches, and then
reclining limply amid the cushions in a manner suggesting extreme
feebleness and fatigue.

The maid reappeared and ushered in a very much over-dressed old
gentleman.

He stood for some seconds on the threshold, smiling engagingly into the
room. It was difficult to refrain from the thought that his affability
was largely the outcome of entire self-satisfaction; for as he posed in
the full light of the window, there was that about his attitude and
expression which seemed to invite and defy the most searching
inspection. Nor did his eyes smile with true kindliness, but rather with
the conscious triumph of the attractive debutante.

Mrs. Delarayne quietly noticed all these familiar traits in her friend,
and responded in the expected manner with one or two idle compliments
that afforded him infinite satisfaction.

"No, sit here beside me," she whispered, as if every effort to speak
might prove too much for her.

Sir Joseph did as he was bid, lingered tenderly over the handshake, and
gazed with strained sympathy into his companion's healthy face.

"Younger than ever!" he exclaimed, "but not very well I fear."

He was accustomed to Mrs. Delarayne's occasional affectation of
valetudinarian peevishness, alleged ill-health as a fact. As a rule it
was the prelude to the request for a favour on a grand scale, and being
a man of very great wealth, and therefore somewhat tight-fisted, he was
always rendered unusually solemn by his friend's fits of indisposition.

They chatted idly for a while; Mrs. Delarayne gradually receding from
the position of one on the verge of a dangerous malady, to that of a
person merely threatened with a serious breakdown if her worries were
not immediately made to cease.

It was a strange relationship that united these two people. Although Sir
Joseph was not more than five years the lady's senior, she always
treated him as if he belonged to a previous geological period; and he,
chivalrously shouldering the burden of aeons, had acquired the courteous
habit of opening all his anecdotal pronouncements with such words as:
"You would not remember old so-and-so," or "You cannot be expected to
remember the days when";--a formality which, while it delighted Mrs.
Delarayne, convinced her more and more that although Sir Joseph might
make an excellent ancestor, it would have been an indignity for a woman
of her years to accept him as a lover.

Sir Joseph had already been married once, and it had been the mistake
of his life. Before he could have had the shadow of a suspicion that he
was even to be an immensely wealthy man, he had, out of sentiment, taken
a woman of his own class whom he had found somewhere in the Midlands.
With her decease Sir Joseph, who was rapidly becoming a substantial and
important member of society, hoped that his lowly past had died also;
and when from the window of the first coach he watched the hearse
bearing his wife swing round through the gates of the cemetery, he
mentally recorded the resolution that on that day all uncertain syntax,
all abuse and neglect of aspirates, and all Midland slang should be
banished from his house for ever. He had loved his wife, but he frankly
acknowledged to his soul that her death had been opportune; and as her
coffin was lowered into the grave, he could not help muttering the
thought, "Here also lies Bad Grammar. R.I.P."

Now compared with the late Mrs. Bullion, Mrs. Delarayne seemed to Sir
Joseph a paragon of brilliance. She had dazzled him from the moment of
their first meeting, and she continued to do so without effort, or, it
must be admitted, without malicious intent either. Here was a woman who
could be an honour to a wealthy man, who could gratify his lust for
display, and carry the convincing proofs of his great wealth right under
the noses of the very best people, without ever provoking the usual
comments of the spiteful and the envious. She was a creature, moreover,
with a large circle of influential and distinguished friends, and she
possessed that inimitable calmness of bearing in their company, beside
which Sir Joseph's mental picture of the first Mrs. Bullion partook of
the mobility of a cinematograph or of a Catherine wheel in full action.

Mrs. Delarayne on the other hand had, as we have already seen, tutored
herself into regarding Sir Joseph simply as a venerable old relic. In
her fifty-fifth year this brave lady held very decided views about youth
and age, and was very far from admitting that a man five years her
senior was the only possible match for her. Indeed it was only the
presence of her daughters that for some time past had prevented her from
seriously contemplating and arranging a very different kind of match.
Since their father's death she had schooled them into calling her
"Edith"; she had also succeeded by means of certain modifications in her
appearance, not confined entirely to her raiment and her coiffure, in
creating the illusion of thirty; and everything she said and did was
calculated to confirm this process of self-deception. She loathed old
age. The very breath of an old person in the room in which she sat was
enough to oppress and stifle her. It always struck her that the bitter
smell of corpses was not far distant from the couch whereon they
reclined. She wanted youth. Rightly or wrongly she thought she was
entitled to the best, and who will deny that youth is the best? She was
devotedly attached to young men. She would have required a good deal of
persuasion to believe that a man of thirty was too young for her; and if
she had deprived herself of this one luxury, it was, as we have seen,
simply out of regard for her daughters. She entertained no rooted
objection to disparity in ages as a matter of principle.

In the circumstances, Sir Joseph's senile raptures were simply tiresome,
and had he not been enormously rich she would have thought them a little
presumptuous. But there were many ways in which Sir Joseph Bullion's
friendship proved useful to her. He was not only a wealthy man, he was
also highly influential, and again and again she had used him and his
power for her own private purposes.

She proposed to use him again on this occasion.

"As a matter of fact," she said, correcting herself for the fourth time,
"I am not so much indisposed as angry."

"Not with me, I hope?" exclaimed the baronet.

As he proceeded to chuckle asthmatically over the fantastic
improbability of this suggestion, the elderly matron with marked
irritation called him sharply to order. "Have you read the papers?" she
demanded.

"'Ave I read the papers?" he repeated. "Of course I've read the papers."

Occasionally, very occasionally, particularly after periods of much
autogenous mirth, Sir Joseph Bullion dropped an H. But he never noticed
it. It was a sort of unconscious reverberation of former days; as if his
lowly past, especially that portion of it which had been spent with the
first and ungrammatical Mrs. Bullion, insisted on revealing itself to
the world, to be acknowledged and congratulated on what it had achieved.

"Well then," pursued the widow firmly, "you know about Lord Henry!"

"Lord Henry?" he cried. "What about Lord Henry?"

Mrs. Delarayne began to examine her rings very studiously, as if she
wished to make quite certain that none of the stones had gone astray in
the last five minutes. "It's all very well, Joseph," she observed
quietly; "but if Lord Henry goes--I go. Now understand that once and for
all. I can't endure London without him."

"Not really?" he ejaculated, leaning forward. "Are you serious? D'you
mean Lord Henry, the biologist or something?"

Mrs. Delarayne continued the close scrutiny of her rings.

"Of course I mean it," she said in the same quiet but utterly
unanswerable way. "You have no idea what Lord Henry means to me. He's
literally the only young man in London who does not treat me as if I
were a creature of mediaeval antiquity."

Sir Joseph crestfallen sank back again hopelessly into the cushions.

Mrs. Delarayne proceeded to explain that owing to the meddlesomeness of
some officious busybody on the Executive Council of the Society for
Anthropological Research--an old maid she felt certain--Lord Henry
Highbarn had been invited to go to Central China as the Society's
plenipotentiary, in order to investigate the reasons of China's
practical immunity from lunacy and nervous diseases of all kinds. Lord
Henry had accepted the honour and was leaving in three months' time. She
then picked up the newspaper, and read aloud the concluding paragraph of
the article on the subject:

     "His departure from this country will be a severe blow to
     the hundreds of nervous invalids who annually benefit from
     his skill at his Sanatorium in Kent, and the world of
     science will find it difficult to replace him. It appears
     that Lord Henry has one or two ardent disciples who will be
     in a position to carry on his great work, but a leading
     London specialist, Dr. David Melhado, declared to our
     representative to-day, that without the guidance of Lord
     Henry's brilliant and original genius, it is doubtful
     whether any of his pupils will ever dare to treat the more
     obscure nervous cases on their master's drastic and
     unprecedented lines."

"There now!" she cried, crumpling up the paper and throwing it away.
"You see what that means. It means that women like myself are once more
to be condemned to the dangerous misunderstanding to which we were
exposed before Lord Henry came on the scene. And we certainly can't
survive it."

Sir Joseph surveyed his companion's robust figure and healthy
countenance for some seconds, and an incredulous smile gradually spread
over his flushed and puffy features. "Surely there can't be very much
wrong with you--is there?" he dared to suggest for once.

Mrs. Delarayne's eyes suddenly flashed with fire, and she cowed him by a
single glance. "Don't talk of things you understand so little," she
snapped. "Lord Henry must at all costs be induced to remain in
England,--that's your job. He must not go. And anyhow China is such a
ridiculous place to go to. Nobody ever goes to China except
missionaries. Of course the Chinese haven't any nerves, because they
haven't any daughters--they kill them all. That's a very simple way of
keeping your mental balance. I confess that the prospect of going to
China is not an inviting one, and yet if Lord Henry goes, I don't see
what other alternative we poor sufferers will have."

Sir Joseph again glanced dubiously at the healthy woman beside him, and
drummed his knees thoughtfully with his large fingers.

"You know without me telling you," he observed at last, "that I'll do
whatever you want. It's happened before and it'll happen again." And he
rolled his bloodshot eyes as if to make it quite clear that for this
great favour a great reward would be expected.

Mrs. Delarayne examined him covertly and began to wonder with a sudden
feeling of despair how such a creature could possibly hope to be a match
for Lord Henry.

"And if I do induce Lord Henry to remain in England,--what then?" the
baronet demanded.

The widow sighed. "You'll be a public benefactor," she said; "a blessing
to your race."

"I don't suppose there's much money, is there, in this trip to China?"
he asked pompously. "And Lord Henry can't be a very rich man."

"He's very poor," replied Mrs. Delarayne.

Sir Joseph smiled knowingly and lay back amid the cushions with an air
of perfect self-appreciation and confidence.

"There's only one thing that great wealth cannot do, it seems to me," he
said, smiling and making every kind of grimace indicative of the immense
difficulty he was experiencing in not laughing at what was passing
through his mind.

Mrs. Delarayne dreaded the worst, but felt that not to press for
enlightenment at this juncture would reveal an indifference which would
prove unfavourable to her schemes. "And what is that?" she asked.

"It cannot change a woman's fancy, of course!" Sir Joseph ejaculated,
and laughed very violently indeed. "'Ave you caught my meaning?" he
added, as his hilarity subsided.

Mrs. Delarayne toyed with her book.

"Come, come, Edith!" he pursued. "If I get Lord Henry to remain in
London, as I've no doubt I shall,--what then?" He ogled her roguishly.

Mrs. Delarayne tried, while smiling politely, to introduce as little
encouragement as possible into her expression.

"Between you and I," the baronet continued, "it isn't as if we had a
whole lifetime before us. You may have,--I haven't. These delays are a
little unwise at our time of life."

He caught her hand and for some reason, possibly his great agitation,
pressed her finger-nails deep into the convex bulb of his large hot
thumb, as if he were intent upon testing their sharpness.

Mrs. Delarayne removed her hand. "Joseph, I had hoped you were not going
to refer to this again for some while. I have told you hundreds of
times, or more, that a woman cannot marry with decency a second time
when she has two strapping daughters who have not yet married once."

Sir Joseph shrugged his shoulders.

"It's all very well," pursued the widow, "but it is difficult enough for
Cleo to forgive my having married at all. I could not possibly confront
her with a second husband before she, poor girl, had met her first. Oh
no!--it would be too great an insult. I'd die of shame. No, before you
have me you'll have to get my daughters married. That bargain I strike
with you."

He smiled ecstatically. "Promise?"

"I promise."

He bent forward and kissed her very clumsily, and Mrs. Delarayne by
blowing her nose was able deftly to wipe her mouth without his noticing
the movement.

"What is that young fool, my secretary, doing?" he enquired at last.
"Did I not bring him and Cleo together all through the spring at
Brineweald Park?"

"Denis is a nincompoop," Mrs. Delarayne declared drily. "I don't believe
for a minute that we should any of us be here if he had taken Adam's
place in the Garden of Eden. What a fortunate thing it was, by-the-by,
that the Almighty did not choose a very modern sort of man to live in
sin with Eve!"

Sir Joseph laughed. "Denis a nincompoop? I don't believe it."

Mrs. Delarayne snorted.

"But how are they getting on?"

"Don't ask me," she sighed wearily. "They philander. They are now at the
very dangerous and inconclusive stage of being 'practically engaged.' It
never signifies anything, because no man who really means business has
the patience to be practically engaged."

Sir Joseph looked and felt sympathetic.

"They hold hands, I believe," the widow resumed, "and discuss the
philosophers. Probably in a year's time if all goes well they will kiss
and discuss the poets."

Sir Joseph uttered an expletive of surprise.

"Yes--I'm disappointed in Denis. I don't trust these very cheerful men,
who have a ready laugh and a sense of humour. They laugh to conceal the
fact that they cannot crow, and they crack jokes because they cannot
break hearts. Give me the broody serious men with fierce looks and slow
smiles."

"Isn't Cleo in love with him?"

"Poor soul!" Mrs. Delarayne exclaimed. "She does her best. She would
take him, of course, simply because it will soon be an indignity for her
to remain single one minute longer. She would probably die of shame too
if someone else took Denis from her. But I think you know, that the man
who provokes Cleo's love will have to be a little bit different from
Denis."




CHAPTER II


On being dismissed from her mother's presence, Cleopatra did not go as
she had been commanded to her mirror in order to remove the little
shadow of down that adorned her upper lip. She retired instead to the
library, and ensconcing herself in one of the large leather easy chairs,
continued her reading of Jane Austen's _Sense and Sensibility_.

Occasionally while she read she would raise her eyes from the printed
page to look at her unengaged hand as it rested on the arm of the chair
she occupied, and for some moments she would be wrapped in thought.

There had been no lack of competition for that hand since the day when,
at her coming-out dance, she had so eagerly extended it to Life for all
that Life had to offer. It was not that it had come back empty to her
side that made her sad. If occasionally she was moved by a little
bitterness about her brief existence, it was rather because the kind of
things with which her outstretched hand had been filled were so dismally
unsatisfying. She counted the men she had been compelled to refuse. They
numbered only two, but there were at least three others whom she had
never allowed to get as far as a proposal.

Again for the hundredth time she passed them in review. Had she acted
wisely? Were they so utterly impossible? Now, at the age of twenty-five,
her worldly wisdom answered, "Nay," but deep down in her breast a less
cultivated and more vigorous impulse answered most emphatically "Yea."

From early girlhood onwards Cleopatra had cherished very definite ideas
about the man of her taste. In this she was by no means exceptional. But
perhaps the circumstances that she had abided more steadfastly than most
by the pattern her imagination had originally limned distinguished her
from her more fickle sisters. The fault she found with the modern world
was that it did not offer you man whole or complete, but only in
fragments. To be quite plain, it offered you, from the athlete to the
poet, a series of isolated manly characteristics, but it did not give
you all the manly characteristics in one being at once, which
constituted the all-round man of her dreams.

Whether it was that man had specialised too much of recent years, or
what the reason might be, Cleopatra could not tell. But whenever she
passed the men of her acquaintance in review, she always arrived at the
same conclusion, that each represented only a fragment of what the whole
man of her ideal was, and doubtless of what man himself had once been.
It was as if she had been deposited among the ruins of a once beautiful
cathedral. Fine pieces of screen architecture, exquisite portions of the
capitals, delightful gargoyles, lay in profusion all around: but the
whole building could be reconstructed in all its majesty, only by an
effort of the imagination. This effort of the imagination she had made
as a girl of seventeen.

To-day it seemed to her, you might choose the cleanly-bred, healthy,
upright, jaunty athlete, and sigh in vain for a companion who could
either sob or rejoice with you over the glory of a sonnet, a picture, or
a statue; or else you might choose the slightly effete and partly
neurotic poet or artist, and languish unconsoled, away from the joys of
the fine, clean, stubbornly healthy body. The kind of fire that led to
elopements, to wild and clandestine love-making, could now, with too few
exceptions, be found only among ne'er-do-wells, foreign adventurers,
cut-throats or knaves; while the stability that promised security for
the future and for the family, seemed generally to present itself with a
sort of tiresome starchiness of body and jejuneness of mind, that
thought it childish to abandon itself to any emotion.

She was deep enough, primitively female enough to demand and expect a
certain savour of wickedness in him who wooed her. But she was more
accustomed to perceive the outward signs of this coveted quality in the
waiters at the Carlton, or the Savoy, and among dust-men, coal-heavers
and butcher-boys, than in the men of her mother's circle.

Had man been tamed out of all recognition? Or was her instinct wrong,
and was it perverse to sigh for fire, wickedness, stability,
cultivation, and healthy athleticism--all in the same man? She had read
of Alcibiades, of men who were not fragmentary. Could such a man be born
nowadays, and if born could he survive? Certainly the men she had
refused had not been of this stamp.

It was miserably disappointing, and with it all there was her mother's
untiring insistence upon the urgency of getting married. It was more
than disappointing: it was a genuine grievance, but a grievance of a
kind which most young women nowadays bury unredressed, and the former
existence of which in their lives they reveal only by a tired, wasted
look in their faces, which leads their husbands to consider
them--"delicate."

With all her fastidiousness in regard to the man of her desire, however,
Cleopatra was not to be confused with the romantic idealist who craves
for that which never has been and never can be possible on earth. To
have misunderstood her to this extent would have been a gross injustice.
She had built up her picture of her mate, not with the help of feverish
and morbid fancy, but guided only by the hints of an exceptionally
healthy body. Modest to a degree to which only great reserves of
passion can attain, it was to her a dire need that her mate should have
fire, because half-consciously she divined that only fire purified and
sanctified the transition from girlhood to womanhood. Half-heartedness
here, or the lack of a great passionate momentum, that carried
everything before it, spelt to her something distinctly discomfiting,
not to say indecent. And in this, far from being a romantic idealist,
she was entirely right and realistic. This explains why her taste
inclined more resolutely to the adventurous idea of love, to the
impromptu element, to the wild ardour of first embraces that must
perforce flee from the sight of fellow creatures, than to the kind of
graduated passion which begins with conversation, proceeds to a public
engagement with staring people all about you, and ends with the still
more measured tempo of a Church wedding. All the waiting, all the
temporising, all the toadlike deliberation that these various slow steps
involved, ran counter to her deepest feeling, that her love must be a
matter of touch and go, a sudden kindling of two fires, the burning not
of green wood but of a volcano.

But where, these days, could she find the partner who was prepared, and
above all equipped, to play his part to hers? This was her grievance.
And again in justice to her it must be acknowledged that it was a
genuine one.

The young man whom her mother was at present "running" for her, was a
creature at whom, as a girl of eighteen, she would not have looked a
second time. But how much more modest in its demands had her taste not
become as she had advanced in years! How much more docile and
unassuming! She saw other girls marrying men not unlike Denis Malster;
so why couldn't she? She concluded that it must evidently be the fate of
modern women to accept the third-rate, the third-best--in fact
disillusionment as a law of their beings; and having no one to support
her in her soundest instincts, she began rather to doubt the validity of
their claim, than to turn resolutely away from marriage altogether.

And now there was to be a complication in her trouble. Leonetta was
returning home for good--Leonetta, the child eight years her junior,
Leonetta was now as fresh, as attractive, and as blooming, as she
herself had been when she was just seventeen, and whom, from habit, she
still called "Baby."

Quietly she had waited and waited for the man of her heart, and been
able to do this without the additional annoyance of competition to
disturb or excite her. Peacefully these seven years she had lain like a
watcher on the shore, scanning the horizon with her glass, without even
a nudge of the elbow from her younger sister. And now she was no longer
to be alone. A distracting, possibly an utterly defeating element was
going to be introduced into her peaceful though anxious existence, and
she shuddered unmistakably at the thought.

As yet she had harboured no conscious hostility towards her junior,
merely a desire to keep her as long as possible at a distance, in order
that the one relationship of which she had the deepest dread--that of
competitors in the same field--might be warded off indefinitely, or,
better still, never experienced between them.

She did not yet fear Baby. The disparity in their ages seemed too great
and too obvious for that: but in recollecting certain incidents in their
childhood, and one or two things about Baby's appearance and behaviour
during the last two years, Cleopatra could not entirely free herself
from a perfectly definite feeling of vexation in regard to her sister.
Baby had not troubled her at all as an infant. It was as a child of
eight, when Cleopatra was just sixteen, that her sister had first
revealed disquieting proclivities. She had, for instance, a command of
blandishments which to her elder were a closed book. By means of wiles
and cajoleries utterly inimitable, she could extract money and presents
from adults from whom the haughty Cleopatra would not even have
solicited a kiss. In five years Baby had received more boxes of
chocolates and more dolls than her sister had received during her whole
lifetime. This was not, however, because the younger child was in any
respect more beautiful than the elder, but rather owing to the younger's
extraordinary gift for securing what she wanted by any means that might
come to hand.

For a long while Cleopatra had looked on, wistfully it is true, but not
enviously at her sister's astonishingly successful career: for was not
Baby only a child after all? And, from the age of eleven to fourteen,
Leonetta had been so outrageously gawky and unattractive, no matter how
beautifully she happened to be clad, that Cleopatra's feelings of
uneasiness about her sister were laid to rest as if for ever during this
period.

Then, all of a sudden--and the day was written indelibly on the elder
girl's memory--on a certain spring morning, at the time of year when
winter frocks are doffed for lighter and brighter confections, Cleopatra
beheld a vision, the nature of which was such as in a trice to
resuscitate all those anxieties about her junior which, to do her
justice, she had long ago relegated to oblivion.

The event occurred in Mrs. Delarayne's bedroom. Cleopatra, then a girl
of twenty-two, was discussing with her mother the details of the Easter
holiday programme and with her back to the door and her face to the
window, was as completely unconscious of the surprise awaiting her as
the bedroom furniture itself.

All at once the door opened. At first Cleopatra did not turn round, and
it was only when the exceptionally fulsome manner of her mother's
outburst of joy awakened her suspicions that at last she looked round
and was confronted by the vision.

It was Baby--undoubtedly it was Baby; but certainly not the awkward
child of a month, of a week, of a day, or even an hour ago. It was Baby
transformed, nay transfigured, as if by magic. Whether the change had
been gradual and imperceptible, or as sudden as Cleopatra imagined it to
have been, the elder girl did not stop to think; she simply allowed her
eyes to dwell almost spellbound upon the startling apparition facing
her, and as quickly as a dart, before she was able to arrest it, a pang,
a pain, or a convulsion of some sort, was communicated to her heart, the
meaning of which she did not dare at first to analyse.

For Leonetta, from a Mohawk, from a sexless savage with tangled hair and
blotchy features, from an angular filly devoid of grace and charm, had
by a stroke of the wand become metamorphosed into a remarkably
attractive young woman. It was startling: but it was also undeniable. It
was not the vernal frock, of that Cleopatra was convinced; although Mrs.
Delarayne had concentrated chiefly upon this feature in her transports
of joy over her younger daughter's dramatic and spontaneous assumption
of womanly beauty. Had it been only the frock Cleopatra was intelligent
enough to have known that the pang she had felt would have been left
unexplained. No, it was more fundamental than that. All the dress had
accomplished was to set an acute accent over a development which, though
already at its penultimate stage, had so far escaped the notice of
Cleopatra and her mother. The picture had been present the day before,
but it had not been quite perfectly focussed. The new frock had focussed
it sharply.

Cleopatra remembered having asked herself whether Leonetta could be
aware of the change that had come over her. But plainly her behaviour
had dispelled this suspicion. Leonetta had behaved on that memorable
occasion exactly as she had done throughout the previous week. Not even
a sign of enhanced self-possession or assurance had betrayed the fact of
an inward change, and somehow this unconsciousness of her accession of
power only seemed to Cleopatra to make that power more formidable.

Events followed rapidly one upon the other after that. Everybody noticed
the change and the improvement. Everybody commented on it. Mrs.
Delarayne was doubly rejoiced, because although both her daughters were
beautiful, Leonetta's features and style were more her mother's than
Cleopatra's were. Cleopatra was a Delarayne, her beauty was if anything
more severe and more stately than her mother's. Now the resemblance
between Leonetta and her mother had become striking. But strangers were
little occupied with this aspect of Leonetta's beauty. And when
Cleopatra observed that the attention of men, in and out of doors, had
become more marked towards her sister, and that they had begun even to
turn round to stare at her in the street, the elder girl knew that her
vision on that unforgettable spring morning had not been an
hallucination: on the contrary it was a fact, and one to which she must
do her best to reconcile herself.

Gradually the consequences of the change were forced upon the
consciousness of Leonetta herself and her manner became correspondingly
modified. Leonetta knew that she was a beautiful young woman. Leonetta
realised that this meant power, and at last she gauged to the smallest
fraction the extent of that power.

Then followed a mighty tussle in Cleopatra's heart. The influence the
elder daughter had always exercised over the mother's mind now presented
itself as a temptation, as a weapon she might use in a threatened
struggle. But it must not be supposed that this temptation was yielded
to without a furious conflict.

Leonetta did not know French well. French would give the stamp of finish
to an education which, in the case of the younger daughter, with her
constitutional disinclination for study, was little more than
make-believe. Ought not Baby to be sent abroad? Was it not doing her the
greatest service to speed her thither? Crudely Cleopatra concluded that
she was really acting altruistically in warmly advocating this
scheme--self-analysis is frequently as inaccurate as this;--besides,
would not she, Cleopatra, in the interval become engaged, married, and
an independent person outside her mother's home, and away from
Leonetta's "pitch"? The programme was surely all in favour of the
younger girl.

The plan was laid before Mrs. Delarayne, calmly, solemnly, with all the
elaborate minutiae of earnest concern about a sister's welfare that
Cleopatra could summon. And the result was that within six weeks of that
terrible Easter, arrangements had been made for Leonetta to spend at
least a year in a large and expensive school at Versailles, where she
could not only acquire the vernacular, but also become infected with the
polish of the native.

Sublimely unsuspecting, Leonetta had embraced her sister passionately on
the platform of Charing Cross station, and Cleopatra had even shed a
tear of pious sorrow.

Her mother had pointed out to Cleopatra at the time that she herself had
enjoyed none of the advantages which she urged with so much generous
fervour on behalf of her sister. Cleopatra had replied that she had had
other advantages, a University education, a classical training, the kind
of cultivation for which Leonetta was unsuited and in the acquisition of
which she would have been unhappy.

But worse was to come. At the end of the year Leonetta had returned;
and, if it is possible to imagine the superlative surpassed, certainly
Leonetta's appearance on her return, her increased vivacity, her perfect
command of French, her new tricks with her hair and clothes, utterly
eclipsed the Leonetta who had left her Kensington home a year
previously.

Nothing had happened to Cleopatra in the meantime, and the elder girl,
after having rapidly adopted subtly modified imitations of her sister's
style of coiffure, was once again thrust hopelessly into the very
position against which her nobler instincts most heartily rebelled. She
refused to remain in a relation of tacit, covert, and ill-concealed
rivalry to one whom the whole world, including her mother, expected her
to love. It was ignominious; it was intolerable. It poisoned her to the
very marrow. It made her ache at night when she ought to have been
sleeping. Had she been less like Leonetta than she was, had she
possessed less passion, less beauty, and less desire than her sister,
she could have endured it. As it was the position entailed a perpetual
upheaval of her peace of mind.

She was at her wits' end. To face her mother with another scheme for
Leonetta's welfare was out of the question. What could she do?

Fortunately for Cleopatra, Leonetta herself brought about the
unravelment in a manner sufficiently satisfactory to her sister.

Charming and, in many ways, irresistible as she was, Leonetta had
brought back a will of her own from Versailles, and a tongue, too, by
means of which she secured that will's highest purposes. During her
absence from London, however, her mother had acquired certain habits and
tastes, the pursuit of which now frequently clashed with her own plans
and ran distinctly counter to her notion of what a mother should be and
should do. For Cleopatra had made singularly few claims upon her
mother's time all this while, and had never questioned her absolute
right to seek her enjoyment when and where she chose.

After a year of this novel experience, during which Mrs. Delarayne had
discovered new haunts and new households in which she could behave, even
if she were not accepted, as a person who was not of "mediaeval
antiquity," her taste for this kind of life had developed. Enamoured as
this sprightly quinquagenarian had always been of the other sex, and
resolute as she was to show that an old war-horse could prance as
bravely as a colt to the stirring trumpet call of youth, she had entered
heart and soul into an existence which her late husband would have
deprecated as strongly as he had once admired the spirit which led her
to do it.

Now the sudden intrusion of a full-grown, wilful and extraordinarily
vigorous girl of fifteen and a half years upon these newly acquired
habits, proved a source of some vexation to the widow; and, love
Leonetta as she might, she very quickly discovered that the peace of
mind and freedom of action that Cleopatra had allowed her unstintingly
were to be despotically withheld by her younger and more exacting
offspring.

Cleopatra watched and understood all this. It seemed that Mrs. Delarayne
and Leonetta were inevitably heading towards a catastrophe; nor did the
elder girl take any steps, either by word or deed, to guide either of
them to a peaceable adjustment of their differences.

Gradually Leonetta grew to be deliberately rude with her parent, would
refuse to fetch and carry for her, was quickly bored over any little
personal service performed for her, and did her best in every way to
cramp the widow's ever freshly sprouting affection.

At last Cleopatra felt she must put in a word. Her mother was very
highly strung, in any case too much so to be exposed constantly to
irritation and sorrow. Could she help? Could she speak to Baby?

It was then that Mrs. Delarayne had opened her heart to Cleopatra. No,
she had made up her mind. Reluctantly she had been forced to the
conclusion that Leonetta must go away,--to a school of domesticity, or
of gardening or something,--where she could acquire not only
information, but also the discipline which would save her from growing
up an impossible woman.

Cleopatra had given vent to a sigh of relief, and with decent slowness
and hesitation had ultimately agreed.

A somewhat acrimonious quarrel between Mrs. Delarayne and Leonetta, a
day or two after this conversation had taken place, proved to be the
determining factor. In her passion Leonetta had declared that she would
be as glad as anything to go, if only for company, as it seemed to her
that her mother was eternally "gadding about"; and it was only when she
was alone in a first-class carriage travelling northward that she
regretted this hasty and ill-considered speech.

Another year had passed in this way; Leonetta had by now become,
according to the domesticity school reports, an accomplished
housekeeper, and, as a girl of seventeen, was on her way home. Coming
home!--Cleopatra had dwelt on this homecoming every wakeful hour of the
last thirty days, and again she felt that pang, or pain, or strange
convulsion of the heart, which she loathed because it humiliated her,
and which she combated because it threatened to master her.

Thus did Cleopatra meditate over her lot as she examined her fine,
strong, disengaged hand, as she sat in the study on that afternoon in
June; and Jane Austen's _Sense and Sensibility_ had little to offer her
either in comfort or enlightenment.

It was a fine hand she looked at. The fingers were well-shaped, long and
even, without any of those thicknesses at the joints which so often mar
the beauty of hands even in men. The finger-nails were not too long, and
there was a sort of "well-upholstered" fulness of the fingers and palm
which spoke of health and latent efficiency. It was not a small hand, or
in any case, not too small a hand, and on the inside it possessed those
soft corrugations that denote artistic sensibilities.




CHAPTER III


The central offices of Bullion and Bullion Ltd. were in Lombard Street.
They occupied a large building constructed of ferroconcrete, on each
floor of which, except the first, there was accommodation for hundreds
of clerks.

The room occupied by Sir Joseph Bullion, on the first floor, was one of
those apartments with very tall mantelpieces and enormous windows, which
seem to have been designed for a race of giants. Certainly Sir Joseph
himself, unless he had climbed on a chair, could never have rested his
elbow against the mantelpiece, nor could he have deposited his cigar
thereon without an unusually strenuous effort. The remaining
appointments of the room, except for two or three exquisite Stuart
cabinets and some priceless old masters on the walls, were designed on
the same scale. Sir Joseph's own table, for instance, though of normal
height, looked as if it might have been purchased by the acre, while the
carpet, a huge Turkey, presented an enormously long pile, as soft as
moss, to the feet. Even the chair on which the head of the firm sat was
exceptionally large, and seemed to offer its occupant the constant
alternative of definitely selecting either one or the other side of the
extensive surface which lay between its arms.

Opposite him at a smaller table sat his chief private secretary, Denis
Malster, a pale, clean-shaven, intelligent-looking young man, with
mouse-coloured hair, grey eyes, and somewhat thin lips. Certainly Mrs.
Delarayne must have been right about his sense of humour, for a pleasant
twinkle played about his eyes, even while he was at work, which gave him
the air of one amused by what he was doing.

Sir Joseph did not pretend to understand the people who served him; but
having been hard driven himself in his day, he had a pretty shrewd
notion of the power he could safely exercise over them, and of the
duties, supplementary to the office routine, which he could reasonably
induce them to fulfil. To make fourths at tennis or at bridge, to fill a
gap at a Cinderella dance or at a dinner, or to help at a charity
bazaar--these were some of the duties which Sir Joseph's highest
personnel knew that they might be called upon to perform at any moment
for one of Sir Joseph's numerous lady friends.

Thus a few days after his visit to Mrs. Delarayne, which has already
been described, the Chairman of Bullion and Bullion Ltd., occupying the
centre of his thronelike chair, was engaged on two tasks, either one of
which would have been sufficient to occupy the wits of any ordinary
man. He had before him the figures showing the business of his firm for
the half year, and in the intervals of his study of these data, he was
covertly watching his chief private secretary, with a view to estimating
his chances of success in regard to a certain secret scheme in which
this young man was to play a leading part.

Suddenly his dual activities were interrupted by the chief messenger,
who, entering in his usual pompous fashion, presented a card to his
chief, bearing the name Aubrey St. Maur. "The gentleman wishes to see
you urgently, Sir Joseph," said the man.

Sir Joseph passed the card to his assistant, and waited for
enlightenment.

Denis Malster examined it, rose, and returned it to Sir Joseph. "Lives
in Upper Brook Street, Mayfair," he said; "he's evidently somebody, but
I've never heard of him."

"The point is," Sir Joseph exclaimed sharply, "have I an appointment
with him?"

"No, sir, you have no appointment with him," said Denis firmly, without
referring to the notes on his table.

Sir Joseph was too well aware of his secretary's efficiency to doubt
this assurance, and bade him go to see what Mr. Aubrey St. Maur wanted.

In a moment Denis returned. "He's from Lord Henry Highbarn," he informed
his chief. "He wishes to deliver a message to you."

Sir Joseph glanced out of the huge window at his side, and appeared to
take counsel of the tangle of chimney pots and telegraph wires that
formed the only prospect from that side of the building. He repeated the
name once or twice in a mystified manner, at length remembered the
difficult task Mrs. Delarayne had asked him to perform in persuading
Lord Henry to abandon his mission to China, and bade his secretary show
St. Maur in.

The young man who followed Denis back into the room was a person of
refined and handsome appearance, who, as he advanced towards Sir Joseph,
introduced himself and explained his business with a degree of grace and
composure at which even the seasoned old Stuart furniture seemed to
stare in amazement.

St. Maur took a chair beside Sir Joseph's vast table, and Malster
returned to his place.

"You are doubtless aware," said the stranger, "that Lord Henry was due
here at this very moment."

Sir Joseph looked furtively towards his secretary and nodded.

St. Maur then proceeded to explain that owing to urgent Party duties at
Westminster Lord Henry could not possibly reach Lombard Street before
six o'clock that evening, and begged Sir Joseph to say whether he could
see him at that hour. He was to return to Westminster at once and convey
Sir Joseph's reply to Lord Henry.

The baronet fixed the appointment with Lord Henry for that hour, and St.
Maur rose to go.

"Half a minute!" exclaimed Sir Joseph. "Please remain seated a moment
longer, Mr. St. Maur, and tell me something about Lord Henry. I am a
busy man and have not much time to keep myself informed of all these
matters. Lord Henry must be a younger son of the Marquis of Firle, is he
not?"

"He's the third and youngest son," replied St. Maur.

"And may I ask for details about the title;--you must think me
dreadfully ignorant!"

"Not at all, sir," St. Maur answered. "It is a Charles I. creation. They
are a Sussex family. As you probably know, Charles I. did not create
peers indiscriminately. The Stuart creations are, on the whole, a credit
to the monarchs who were responsible for them, particularly those of
Charles I."

Sir Joseph nodded politely, but looked as if this information did not
quite harmonise with his own conception of that prince.

"The fourth Earl of Chesterfield perhaps disgraced himself a little over
Dr. Johnson," St. Maur added, "but as a rule the families who owe their
rank to the Royal Martyr have upheld their great traditions with
singular success. And possibly against the case of the fourth Earl of
Chesterfield we may set that of the sixth Lord Byron, who gave us
_Childe Harold_ and _Manfred_."

Sir Joseph was genuinely interested. "Lord Henry is, I believe, a very
wonderful personality," he remarked.

"You are right, sir," replied St. Maur, "very wonderful."

The young man rose again. He was a little above medium height, with dark
crisp hair and a sallow complexion. His figure and features gave the
impression of metallic virility: they were at once hard, supple,
clean-cut, and finely moulded. His mouth was a little full, and his jaw
perhaps a trifle heavy, but the deep thoughtful eyes gave a balance to
his face which saved it from appearing unduly sensual.

"That is a pleasant young man," Sir Joseph declared, when St. Maur had
gone.

"Yes," Denis replied half-heartedly. He, too, had been impressed by St.
Maur, but not favourably. For Denis Malster, cultivated, sleek, and
refined though he was, just lacked that exuberance and vitality which he
had observed in St. Maur, and which made the latter so conspicuously his
superior. Denis had nothing to compensate him for his tame, careful,
Kensington breeding. St. Maur, on the other hand, had that fire and
warmth of blood, without which even the highest breeding is little more
than the extirpation of the animal at the expense of the man. Denis was
an easy winner with the women of his class, precisely because of the
parade which, in his face, nature made of his gentle antecedents; but he
had sufficient intelligence to realise that when women are confronted
by a man possessing all he possessed, besides that something more that
was noticeable in St. Maur the best of them do not hesitate a second in
selecting the St. Maur type.

"I wonder if that is all true about Charles I.?" Sir Joseph demanded
with a little irritation.

Denis leant back in his chair and his eyes twinkled. "I doubt whether it
is true of Charles I.," he said; "but it certainly isn't true of his son
and heir, for Charles II. used the peerage more or less as a sort of
foundling hospital for his various illegitimate offspring."

Sir Joseph smiled, as he frequently did, at his secretary's odd way of
summing up a case, and then quickly resuming his gravity, glanced
searchingly at Denis as if pondering whether the word of such a man
could confidently be taken against that of an Aubrey St. Maur. For some
minutes he paced the rug in front of the fire-place, his hands behind
his back, and his head bowed. At last he raised his eyes and looked more
affably than usual at his assistant.

"You know, Malster," he began, "I've been thinking for some time that
although you appear to take to this work less quickly than some men I
have had, you are on the whole trying your hardest--are you not?"

Denis, a little startled by the palpable injustice of this remark, rose,
and resting the points of his fingers lightly on the table, leant
forward. "Ye--yes, sir," he stammered.

"'Ow old are you?" Sir Joseph continued.

"Twenty-eight, sir."

Sir Joseph repeated the words. "How much are you getting?"

"Eight hundred, sir," Denis replied.

Sir Joseph turned sharply on his heel and slightly accelerated his pace
across the rug.

"H'm! Well, I propose to make it a thousand," he said thoughtfully.

Denis Malster smiled nervously. "Thank you, Sir Joseph."

"I propose to do this," continued the baronet, "because I think you must
be wanting to marry, and because I think it wrong that a man of your age
should be prevented from marrying owing to lack of means. D'you
understand? Only that!"

"I think it most considerate of you," Denis faltered again.

"Well, that's settled," said Sir Joseph drily. "But," he added, always
on tenterhooks of anxiety lest one of his staff should begin to think
too much of himself, "I should like you to be quite clear about my
reasons for the change. I don't want you to run away with the notion
that I am giving you a rise because I am entirely satisfied with your
work."

As he said this Sir Joseph resumed his seat, and pulled in his heavy
chair as smartly as he was able, with the air of a man who had neatly
achieved his object without abandoning the usual safe-guards.

It was a minute to six when the messenger announced Lord Henry Highbarn,
and the moment the announcement was made, Denis, reaching for his hat
and stick, took leave of his chief. He strode out into the street with a
sprightly gait, humming as he went:

    "I don't adore the girl in blue
    For all her family's after you."

       *       *       *       *       *

There is probably in most men a sense of quality, a power of divination
in regard to value which, on occasions when they are confronted by a
stranger whose worth they do not know, informs them immediately of the
comparative rarity or commonness of his type. This sense may at first be
baffled by the delusive disguises in which men sometimes present
themselves, but as a rule a chance word, an artless gesture, or even a
glance, quickly corrects the initial error of the eye, and in a moment
the original estimate is adjusted to the unmistakable evidence of a
definite quality.

When this peculiar apprehensiveness in regard to worth becomes aware of
any marked superiority in a fellow creature,--an experience which in
unhappy lives very seldom occurs,--a feeling of certainty usually
accompanies it, which is as mysterious as the evidence upon which it is
based is intangible and elusive. A man knows that he has met his
superior, he knows too how far the superiority he recognises extends,
and he is conscious of experiencing something exceptional, something
exquisitely precious.

That such encounters are becoming every day more rare, probably explains
the increasing growth, in modern times, of that kind of disbelief and
heresy which, far from being wanton, arises from a total inability to
envisage greatness, whether in kings, ideals, or gods. For we arrive at
our most exalted images, not by solitary flights of imagination
unassisted, but by actual progressive steps in the world of concrete
things; so that the spring-board from which we take our final leap into
the highest concepts of what a god might be, is always the highest man
we happen to have met. We can have no other starting-point. Hence in an
age when greatness among men is too rare to be felt as a universal fact,
a disbelief in all gods is bound sooner or later to supervene.

When Lord Henry Highbarn presented himself before Sir Joseph, it was
plain from the meek droop of the baronet's eyelids and the subdued
hesitating tone of his voice, that something in the young nobleman's
appearance had like a flash intimated to the experienced financial
magnate that here was someone of a quality as unfamiliar as it was rare.
Moreover, the difference which the older man felt distinguished him from
his visitor was of a kind too fundamental and insuperable to challenge
even that friendly rivalry so instinctive between two natures each
conscious of their own particular efficiency and excellence.

Indeed, it needed all the elaborate complications of our modern
civilisation to account even for the meeting of these two people under
the same roof, not to speak of the fact that they met on an equal
footing.

The one, a plain but not unpretentious man of business, still a little
perplexed by his stupendous success, and not yet certain of his precise
social level, revealed in his unshapely but kindly features the modest
rung on which Nature herself would probably have placed him, if the
peculiar economic conditions of his Age had not intervened to bring
about a different result; while two characteristics alone led one to
suspect his latent power,--his large energetic hands with their powerful
spatulate fingers, and his masterful and meditative dark eyes.

The other,--a tall, muscular, youthful-looking aristocrat, with deep-set
thoughtful blue eyes, a straight finely-chiselled nose, and a full
eloquent mouth (the whole overshadowed by an unusually lofty brow, from
which, particularly over the temples, the hair had noticeably
receded)--possessed that unconscious ease of manner and unassertive
masterfulness of bearing, which derive on the one hand from breeding,
and on the other from a constant habit of preoccupation with external
problems, that is unfavourable to any self-concern. As his alert vision
took in the details of his surroundings, including the person of Sir
Joseph himself, on whom he appeared to cast only the most casual
sidelong glances, it was clear that his mind, far from being occupied
with internal questionings, was measuring even then the probable extent
to which this visit might serve some ultimate important purpose upon
which the whole gravity and earnestness of his being seemed to be
concentrated; and if his solemn features occasionally relaxed into a
smile, it was precisely the habitual gravity of his mien that lent his
passing levity such extraordinarily persuasive merriness.

It was chiefly Lord Henry's air of preoccupation that set Sir Joseph so
quickly at his ease. For although the baronet was familiar enough with
the sons of peers and peers themselves,--for had he not a number of them
on his various boards?--there was, as we have seen, something more than
mere rank in his youthful visitor to disturb him.

While the first courteous platitudes were being exchanged, Sir Joseph
quietly took stock of his companion, and was for a brief moment a little
perturbed by the latter's unconventional attire.

We have noticed that though he was young, Lord Henry's hair receded a
little from his brow, and made it appear even loftier than it actually
was. Between the high bald temples, however, a wisp of stiff fair hair
still remained over the centre of the young man's forehead, somewhat
resembling that seen in the portraits of Napoleon, and with this tuft
his long well-shaped and sensitive fingers would play continuously
while he spoke, with the result that he constantly bowed his head.

Occasionally, therefore, when his customary gravity gave way for a space
and his face was irradiated with a smile or a laugh, an expression of
such irresistible and almost wicked mirth suffused his features, owing
to the upward glance he was constrained to give you from the bowed angle
of his head, that willy-nilly you were compelled to laugh with him.

Sir Joseph felt this; he was also aware of the peculiar charm of it; but
what struck him even more forcibly were Lord Henry's loose-fitting and
apparently badly cut clothes. Anyone else so clad would have looked
hopelessly dowdy, while the carelessly knotted green tie that bulged all
askew from beneath the young man's ample collar, seemed for a moment
almost offensive.

It was strange how the displeasure provoked by these shortcomings in his
attire gradually vanished beneath the steady persuasiveness of the
wearer's fascinating personality; and very soon not only had Sir Joseph
ceased from feeling their aggressiveness, but had actually begun to
associate them inseparably with the strange charm of the creature before
him.

"Mrs. Delarayne," said Lord Henry, "would give me no peace until I came
to see you, Sir Joseph, so you must forgive me for forcing myself upon
you in this way, and relying for your forbearance simply upon the
strength of the friendship you bear her."

He laughed, and Sir Joseph perforce laughed with him.

"'Ave you seen her lately?" the baronet enquired.

"She's always seeing me," Lord Henry replied, smiling in a manner that
was at once childishly winsome and wise. He was still startlingly
boyish, despite his thirty-three years, and though his slight baldness
added a few years to his face, he did not look a month older than
five-and-twenty.

"She is very fond of you," Sir Joseph proceeded earnestly, beginning to
feel, for the first time, not only that Mrs. Delarayne's infatuation was
clearly justified, but also that young St. Maur had probably been right
in his remarks concerning Charles I.'s creations. It was strange to
recognise the evidences of unusual wisdom in such a childish face; it
reminded him vaguely of what he had heard or dreamt of Chinese
mandarins,--evidently such phenomena were possible.

"She's an amazingly captivating woman," muttered Lord Henry, still
pulling at the tuft of hair over his brow. "Her blank refusal to accept
the fact of her advancing years is the most wonderful and at the same
time the most pathetic thing about her."

Sir Joseph, with an expression of deep curiosity, leant heavily over the
right arm of his chair, and stared expectantly at his visitor.

"She has not had her second decisive love affair, you see," Lord Henry
continued. "And every day she arrays herself to experience it,--that
second and decisive love affair which alone reconciles the best women to
old age and to snow-white locks."

Sir Joseph fidgeted. He did not understand, but thought he did. "Her
second and decisive love affair," he repeated,--"yes."

"We are apt to forget," continued Lord Henry, "that all deep, decently
constituted women have two definite relationships to man, one alone of
which is insufficient to satisfy them. The first is their relationship
of wife to the man more or less of their own generation whom they have
loved; the second is the relationship of mother to the man of their
children's generation, whom under favourable circumstances they
worship."

Sir Joseph shifted in his chair, raised his hand to his chin and looked
fixedly at the speaker.

"This last and most precious relationship is the only one that
reconciles a woman to her wrinkles and makes her happy in her grey
hairs. Without it she takes to peroxide, smooths out her wrinkles with
cream, and what is even more tragic, developes a tendency to pursue the
young men of her children's generation. People call it ridiculous,
lunatic,--so it would be, if it were not so nobly, so terribly
pathetic."

"But I have known women with grown-up sons behave exactly as Mrs.
Delarayne behaves," Sir Joseph objected with as much breath as he could
summon in his surprise at what Lord Henry had said.

"Not sons with whom they are in love," Lord Henry corrected. "Most
mothers have sons, but of these not all experience that great love for
one of their male offspring which is perhaps the most beautiful, the
most passionate, and the most permanent of earthly relationships. Mrs.
Delarayne is obviously a woman who would have been capable of such a
relationship had she only had a son."

"Is it only one particular son?" Sir Joseph enquired with an unconscious
note of profound humility in his voice.

"Always--yes!"

Lord Henry, still tugging at his wisp of hair, now turned to Sir Joseph,
and blinking very quickly, as was his wont when deeply absorbed in a
subject, contemplated the baronet for a moment in silence.

"Doesn't that clear up the problem of Mrs. Delarayne a little for you?"
he asked at last. "Believe me, few women care to admit that they are
thirty-five unless they have a husband whom they love, and still fewer
women resign themselves to their fiftieth year unless they are wrapped
up in a beloved son."

Sir Joseph, to whom Mrs. Delarayne, except for her repeated refusals of
his hand, had never been precisely a problem, demurred a little. "It
certainly sheds some light,--yes," he said slowly. "But don't you think
that a second great love with a man more or less of her own generation
is equally satisfying to a woman like that?"

"How can it be when it is simply a repetition of a former and thoroughly
explored experience?" Lord Henry replied. "I do not mean, mind you, that
great-hearted women who have not enjoyed that exquisite relationship to
a beloved son, are conscious that it is this circumstance which has been
lacking in their lives. Because precious little whatever is conscious in
the best women. But in their loathing and repudiation of advancing
years, and in their repeated attachments to men of my generation, such
women reveal to the psychologist the constant ache they feel from the
vast empty chamber in their hearts."

For some moments Sir Joseph played idly with an ivory paper-knife on his
desk. He had completely forgotten the object of Lord Henry's visit. It
was as if he had always known the man, and that they were just having
one of their usual pleasant chats after their work was done. Such was
the power that Lord Henry possessed of immersing his listeners in the
thoughts that occupied his mind.

"And this," continued the younger man, after a while, "is the only
consideration which makes me feel I ought to marry. I mean that it
almost amounts to wanton vandalism not to give a wife of one's choice
and a son of one's own begetting at least the chance of beautifying the
world by this most wonderful of all relationships."

"You are a poet," said Sir Joseph with that spontaneous penetration of
which the uncultivated are sometimes capable.

"If to understand Mrs. Delarayne a man must be a poet, then I am one,"
Lord Henry replied, smiling in his irresistible way.

Sir Joseph perforce smiled too, and the return to earth which this faint
levity signified, reminded him of the real object of the young
nobleman's visit. The thought did not reassure him, however; for after
all the intelligence he had been able to glean regarding his visitor's
character, he realised that if Lord Henry had resolved to undertake this
mission to China, it would obviously serve no purpose to exhort him to
change his mind. It was clear that Mrs. Delarayne could not have
understood the man she was dealing with; or, if she had, she must have
urged this step as a last hope.

As a forlorn hope it certainly appeared to Sir Joseph, and it was only
half-heartedly that he opened the attack.

"And now tell me about China," he said. "Have you quite made up your
mind?"

Lord Henry rose, thrust his hands deep into his trousers pockets, and
paced the hearth-rug.

"I think so," he replied, musing deeply as he glanced from one to the
other of Sir Joseph's art treasures.

"But you are doing good here," the baronet protested feebly. "What good
will you do in China?"

"I'm not convinced that I am doing good here," Lord Henry rejoined
sharply. "That's precisely the point."

"But everybody says you are."

"No doubt."

Sir Joseph turned to his ivory paper-knife. He did not understand.

"If it's doing good," Lord Henry added, "to salve the nervous wreckage
that our unspeakable Western civilisation produces with every
generation; if it's doing good to render the disastrous mess which we
have made of human life possible for a few years longer, by bringing
relief to the principal victims of it; then, indeed, I am a desirable
member of society. But I question the whole thing. I question very much
whether it can be doing good to help this hopeless condition of things
to last one moment longer than it need."

Sir Joseph glanced up a little anxiously. "Are you serious?" he
enquired.

Lord Henry sat down again.

"Am I serious?" he scoffed. "Can you be serious, can you be sane, and
expect me to think otherwise? But you have been a great success by means
of the very system which is rotten and iniquitous to the core. How could
you sympathise?"

Sir Joseph stammered hopelessly that he was trying to sympathise.

"You are no doubt convinced," Lord Henry continued, "that all you are
witnessing to-day is what you would call Progress. And the further we
recede from a true understanding of human life and its most vital needs,
and the more we complicate the world and increase its machinery, the
more persuaded you become of the reality of your illusion. How could it
be otherwise?"

Sir Joseph expostulated ineffectually, and Lord Henry continued:

"Still, I am not a reformer," he said. "I do not wish to reform, even if
I could. It is not only too late, things are also too desperate. What I
chiefly want is to take refuge somewhere where humanity and its deepest
needs are the subject of greater mastery, greater understanding; so that
I can cease from being distracted by the immensity of modern error. No
great intellect, no great creative power can exist in this country;
because the moment it becomes conscious it is so obsessed by the shams
and the shamelessness that surround it, that instead of devoting itself
to the joys and enrichment of life, it feels impelled by the horrors on
every side to take up the social system and attempt to put it right.
This sterile pitfall is now the temptation of the greatest minds. Your
Shelley, your Coleridge, even your Byron,--what did they do? Menaced by
this same vortex of negative effort, sentenced to intellectual
annihilation if they attempted to straighten out the muddle of
modernity, they fled, or drowned themselves in water or opium."

He had ceased playing with his tuft of hair. His face was distraught
with indignation and with the bitterness of a thwarted love of mankind;
it was also illuminated by the distant dream of a world as he would have
it, so that though he brought down his fist on the corner of Sir
Joseph's table with some weight, the baronet was too much moved to
notice the gesture.

"Things are so bad," he pursued, lightly lowering his voice, "that to
have any genuine insight to-day, any special human feeling to-day, means
perforce to devote these gifts to the social problem, instead of to art
and to beauty. That is the curse of being born into this Age. The
gigantic ghastliness of modern Western civilisation successfully engulfs
every superior brain that comes to being in its midst."

Sir Joseph fell back limply in his chair. He acknowledged the game was
lost before the struggle had actually begun. How could he presume to
strike a bargain with such a man? He remembered Mrs. Delarayne, however,
and braced himself once more.

"There are times," Lord Henry began again, glancing kindly at Sir
Joseph, "when I feel that perhaps I ought at least to risk even my life
in order to do something here, in this country. But what is one man's
life in the face of this sea of blunders? What is even a giant's effort,
against the Lilliputian swarm of modern men who are determined to gain
the precipice?"

"I was hoping," said Sir Joseph quietly, "that I might make you an
offer which would induce you to abandon this mission to the Far East. I
was hoping, in fact, that I might help you."

Lord Henry glanced thoughtfully at the baronet and then shook his head.

Sir Joseph, more and more convinced that he was embarking on a hopeless
enterprise, persisted notwithstanding.

"I am prepared to put a considerable sum of money at your disposal," he
said. "I believe your sanatorium for nervous disorders in Kent is a
veritable public boon. I feel that I could not find a nobler public
object for my wealth than to support you in your work."

Lord Henry rapped his fingers on his knees impatiently.

"Could I not assist you in enlarging this establishment? Could I not
give it a permanent foundation or effect what alterations in it you may
suggest for its improvement and greater utility? If by the same token I
succeeded in retaining you in England, I feel I should in addition be
doing a personal service to someone, to a lady, for whom you and I have
a very deep respect."

Lord Henry blinked rapidly as he turned to face the old gentleman at his
side, and his smile was kind and courteous.

"If, Sir Joseph, my only motive in going abroad were indeed to transact
the business of the Society for Anthropological Research, I might
perhaps be induced to yield to the temptation you so generously put in
my way. But seeing that possibly my principal object is to give my
endowments a fair chance away from this whirlpool of confusion, which
makes social reform a morbid _idee fixe_, I cannot persuade myself that
it would be worth while."

"But supposing," Sir Joseph persisted lamely, "I gave you
_carte-blanche_ to extend your work as you liked?"

"And with what object?"

"I have told you the object," the baronet replied mildly.

"No!" exclaimed the younger man with emphasis. "The object would be to
add to the organisations which are springing up everywhere for the
purpose of making our impossible civilisation possible for at least a
little while longer. _That_ would be the ultimate object."

"How much would you require?" Sir Joseph suggested in his most melting
tones, still clinging desperately to his belief in the only bait he
possessed.

Lord Henry laughed despondently. "Only enough to purchase sufficient
dynamite to blow my present sanatorium skywards," he said. Then resuming
his gravity and rising, he extended a hand to the baronet.

"No," he added, "I'm afraid my mind is made up. I must leave this
country, Mrs. Delarayne or no Mrs. Delarayne. Thank you very much
indeed, all the same. I have seen you and enjoyed our talk. Mrs.
Delarayne's behest has at least been strictly obeyed."

"When will you be leaving?" Sir Joseph enquired, gracefully throwing
down his cards.

"In about three months' time, I expect."

"I am sorry, very sorry," ejaculated the baronet.

The two men walked gravely to the door.

On the threshold Lord Henry stopped, and looking methodically round the
room, pointed at last to one of the most beautiful of Sir Joseph's
Stuart cabinets.

"You also unconsciously acknowledge that there is something revolting
and intolerable about this Age, Sir Joseph," he said smiling
mischievously; "otherwise why do you use your wealth to surround
yourself both here, and as I understand at Brineweald too, with all the
treasures of art that were produced by our ancestors."

Lord Henry laughed again; his deep thoughtful eyes filled with the tears
of mirth, and he vanished from the room leaving Sir Joseph contemplating
his costly old furniture with feelings of utter bewilderment.




CHAPTER IV


Despite Sir Joseph's very careful reservations in regard to the
increase, which unsolicited he had thought fit to make in his chief
secretary's salary, Denis, who was perfectly well aware of his own
efficiency, was inclined rather to discount every feature of his
master's generous behaviour, except the covert tribute which he believed
it was intended to make to his invaluable services. He knew the business
man's instinctive reluctance to reveal his full appreciation of a
subordinate's worth, and felt he must allow for this. But, on the other
hand, in view of Sir Joseph's intimate relations with the Delarayne
household, he was unable altogether to dispel a certain lurking anxiety
concerning the baronet's very precise allusions to the question of
marriage, which it was hard to believe could have been altogether
gratuitous. This thought was disquieting.

Denis Malster, without being exactly an incurable philanderer, was
nevertheless insufficiently commonplace to contemplate marriage, in the
Pauline sense, as a necessity. He was much more disposed, at least for
the present, to regard it merely as a piquant possibility, towards which
his very attitude of indecision lent him an extra weapon of power in
his relations with the other sex.

His life, hitherto, had been enjoyable, he thought, simply because it
had been an uninterrupted preparation for marriage without the dull
certainty of a definite conclusion. To excite interest in the other sex
and envy in his own had, ever since he had been a boy of eighteen,
constituted the breath of his nostrils, the one spring from which he
drew his love of life and his desire to live. Immaculate in his dress,
adequately cultivated and intellectual in his speech, and carefully
punctilious in the adoption of such amateur pursuits as would be likely
to give him the stamp of artistic connoisseurship, he had until now
employed his ample income principally in furnishing his extensive
wardrobe, in collecting old books and prints, and in giving his chambers
that appearance of _outre_ refinement, which was calculated to force his
friends to certain inevitable conclusions concerning both his means and
the extent of his aesthetic development.

In the circumstances, therefore, it was difficult for him to regard the
addition to his income, which Sir Joseph had suddenly thought fit to
make, as anything more than a fresh means of indulging his various whims
to an even greater degree than he had indulged them heretofore,--those
whims which had by now become almost driving passions to the exclusion
of all else;--and he was certainly not in the least disposed to take
Sir Joseph at his word, and to embark upon that undertaking which he
knew would put an abrupt end to all the careless dalliance in which his
clothes, his fastidious speech, and his parade of artistic
discrimination played so effective a part.

Such were the thoughts that occupied his mind as he made his way from
Lombard Street to his rooms in Essex Court; and by the time he had
dressed for dinner and was waiting for a cab in the Strand, a look of
fixed determination had settled on his face which was indicative of the
firm resolve he had made.

In any case Sir Joseph could not expect him to marry immediately. For a
while yet, therefore, he would continue to enjoy the life so full of
secret triumphs which he had succeeded in leading ever since he had
entered the house of Bullion & Bullion, and from this day with the
additional pleasures that his increased income would allow. Had he not
been told by Mrs. Delarayne herself that a man should not marry until
flappers had ceased to turn round to get a second look at him in the
street? And was there not something profoundly wise in this advice,
although it had been pronounced in one of the old lady's most flippant
moods? A smile of complacent well-being spread slowly over his features
as he recalled this remark, and the last endorsement was mentally
affixed to his private plans.

What would Cleopatra Delarayne do? Charitably, almost chivalrously, he
imagined, he gave her a thought. Had he led her to hope? Undoubtedly he
had. But then he had not resolved never to marry; he had merely
determined to postpone the step _sine die_. Perhaps in a year or two he
would come to a definite understanding with Cleopatra. After all, she
was only twenty-five. She was an attractive girl, and she would be
wealthy. He felt that marriage with her would not be an uninviting
conclusion to another year or two of his present delightful existence.
Thus he satisfied his conscience and gratified his deepest wishes into
the bargain.

He dined alone at the Cafe Royal. It was a sultry evening, and London
was still stifling after a sweltering day. One had the feeling that the
roofs and masonry of the buildings all about were still burning, as
probably they were, with the heat of the sun that had been pouring down
upon them all day; and the big city seemed to breathe its hot dust into
the face of its inhabitants.

Having nothing better to do, he thought how pleasant it would be to
finish the day in Mrs. Delarayne's cool garden in Kensington, and
thither he betook himself after his meal, devoutly hoping that they
would be at home.

Cleopatra had evidently been half expecting him, for she appeared in the
drawing-room on the heels of the maid who had ushered him in, and gave
him a friendly welcome. Mrs. Delarayne had ensconced herself upstairs
and did not wish to be disturbed, and at that moment her penetrating
voice could be heard conducting what appeared to be a most lively and
acrimonious debate with someone unknown across the telephone. So on
Denis's suggestion they went into the garden and installed themselves
there in Cleopatra's favourite bower.

"Rather late for the Warrior to be upbraiding a tradesman," Denis
observed. "I wonder what she can be doing."

He had nicknamed Mrs. Delarayne "the Warrior" himself. He was sensitive
enough to apprehend the strong strain of courage in her character; he
had on several occasions been impressed by the tenacious boldness of her
claims to youth and by the energy she displayed in keeping up the
difficult part,--frequently entailing exertions out of all proportion to
her bodily vigour;--so he had nicknamed her "the Warrior." But this
sobriquet was used only when he and Cleopatra were alone together.

"The poor Warrior is peevish anyhow, you see," Cleopatra explained.
"Baby comes home to-morrow, and if there's anything that annoys mother
to exasperation, it is to have to cluck and fuss round her chick like an
old hen. She loathes it, and Baby always makes her feel she must do it."

Denis pretended to be interested only in a casual way. "What sort of a
girl is--Baby?" he asked. "Is she like you?"

"I suppose she is like me to the same extent that I am like the
Warrior," the girl replied. "But she's most like the Warrior herself.
Imagine my mother at the age of seventeen and you know my sister. Surely
you have seen that old photograph of the Warrior as a girl in the
drawing-room? It is simply Baby over again,--or rather _vice versa_."

"I must look at it," said Denis thoughtfully.

"In fact they are so much alike," Cleopatra proceeded, "that they know
each other inside out, and annoy each other accordingly."

"They don't get on well then?" he enquired.

"Oh, yes, but Baby's a little trying at times. You see, she will forget
for instance that we call mother Edith, and have done ever since father
died; and she will suddenly shout Mother! out loud on crowded railway
platforms, or at the Academy, or worse still at garden parties, which
always gives the Warrior one of those nervous attacks for which she has
to go to Lord Henry."

Denis started almost imperceptibly at the mention of Lord Henry's name,
and turned an interested face towards the girl. "Do you know Lord
Henry?" he asked.

"No, I don't. There are some men the Warrior knows whom she never
introduces to me. I feel as if I knew Lord Henry very well indeed, but I
have never met him."

"You haven't lost much," Denis snapped.

"I beg your pardon?" Cleopatra exclaimed, smiling kindly but
deprecatingly, and arching her neck a little, as she scented the
injustice behind his remark.

"He dresses abominably," Denis pursued, "and from what I can gather is
benighted enough to believe in our beheaded sovereign Charles I."

"He must be very able though," the girl objected. "It isn't often, is
it, that our aristocracy distinguish themselves? And d'you know that he
is a Fellow of the Royal Society entirely on the strength of his
original research into the subject of modern nervous disorders?"

Denis pouted and smiled with an ostentatious show of incredulity. "He's
the son of the Marquis of Firle, remember!"

"Oh, but I don't believe that's got anything to do with it--honestly!"
she retorted.

Cleopatra knew her mother as well as any daughter has ever known her
parent; she could have compiled a catalogue of Mrs. Delarayne's foibles
more exhaustive and elaborate than any that Mrs. Delarayne's worst
enemies could have produced; but, on the other hand, she had so often
found her mother a safe guide where her fellow creatures were concerned,
and had thus acquired so deep a faith in her mother's judgment, that it
was hard for her to believe that in the matter of Lord Henry the Warrior
could be mistaken.

She regarded her companion for some moments in silence. He was cutting a
cigar, and failed to notice that she was observing him.

Certainly he was very sleek and smart, and showed that perfect
efficiency in all he did which betokens general ability. What was it
then that gave her a little pang of doubt whenever she was moved by an
impulse to look up to him? His voice, it is true, was thin and a trifle
high-pitched,--always a bad sign in a man,--but she would have
overlooked all his shortcomings if only her craving to revere where she
loved had been sufficiently gratified. He was beyond all question the
best type of man who had hitherto paid her attention. Others, perhaps,
might have been more manly; but then they had been clumsy, heavy, and
puerile, and had, above all, lacked that air of complete efficiency
which was perhaps Denis's greatest asset.

She thought herself foolish for expecting too much from life, and
without any effort turned a kindly smiling face to her visitor.

"The Warrior!" he ejaculated suddenly, blowing sharp strong puffs from
his cigar; and he was either annoyed or made a good pretence of it.

Yes, there, indeed, was Mrs. Delarayne, stalking majestically up the
garden, and from the way she glanced rapidly from side to side, and
grabbed at her frock, it was plain that she was in none too pleasant a
mood.

Denis rose when she was about four yards from them.

She glanced quickly at Cleopatra, seemed to notice the perfect serenity
of both young people with marked dissatisfaction, rapidly recorded the
fact that her daughter's hair was utterly undisturbed, and smiled
grimly. "Evidently things have taken their usual course," she mused.
"He had not even attempted to kiss her!"

"Don't you think you two people are rather silly to sit out here doing
nothing?" she demanded irascibly.

"It's so delightfully cool," Denis protested.

"Yes, too cool!" snapped the old lady with a deliberate glance at her
daughter, which was intended to convey the full meaning of her words.

Cleopatra moved impatiently. Her mother always made her feel so
miserably defective, and this was hard to forgive.

Mrs. Delarayne settled herself elegantly in a wicker chair, took a
cigarette from a case, and snapped the case to with a decisive click.
She looked hot and a little tired, and as Denis proffered her a light he
noticed the beads of perspiration amid the powder round her eyes.

"I've had the most tiresome evening imaginable," she croaked.

"I thought so," said her daughter. "We heard you."

"Really men are most ridiculous cowards," she cried, frowning hard at
Denis. "There's Sir Joseph, for instance. He's failed ignominiously with
Lord Henry; has been unable to induce him to give up his absurd mission
to China, and instead of coming here to tell me all about it, he keeps
me thirty-five minutes brawling at him over the 'phone in this heat,
simply because he daren't face me!"

Denis stretched out his legs before him and clasped his hands at the
back of his head. This was a signal, well known to the women, that a
long analytical speech was to follow, and Mrs. Delarayne looked wearily
away, as if to imply before the start that she was not in the least
interested.

"It's all organisation nowadays," Denis began. "If you can organise your
machinery with the help of good subordinates, the trick is done. And
since Sir Joseph simply exudes lubricants, everything works smoothly and
successfully. He----"

"Don't talk of exuding lubricants in this weather, please!" Mrs.
Delarayne interrupted. "I suffer from the heat almost as badly as
butter."

It was becoming clear to Cleopatra that her mother was for some reason
intent on chastising their visitor, and she watched the interesting woman
before her with her filial feeling in almost complete abeyance. The
children of remarkable parents frequently do this after they have turned a
certain age. It is not disrespect, but merely absent-mindedness.

It was almost dark now, and Denis noticed Mrs. Delarayne's fine profile
outlined against the lighted rooms of the house. There was a sadness
delineated on her handsome, aristocratic face, which, as he had observed
before, was to be seen only when her features were quite still. Could
this apparently gay widow still be mourning her husband? Denis was
sufficiently romantic and ill-informed to imagine this just possible.

"So the interview between Sir Joseph and Lord Henry was a failure?" he
enquired trying to be sympathetic.

"Yes, of course," Mrs. Delarayne rejoined, flinging her cigarette into
the bushes at her side. "And I do so hate the idea of going out to
China."

Cleopatra laughed. "But, Edith, surely you don't really mean that you'll
go to China if Lord Henry goes?"

Denis glanced quickly at Cleopatra and in his eyes she read the
supercilious message: "People of _our_ generation could not be so
foolish."

"You don't flatter yourself, Cleo, I hope," Mrs. Delarayne retorted
icily, "that I say these things to amuse you and Denis, do you?"

Cleopatra signified by a glance directed at Denis that she did not like
the message in his eyes, and regretting the laugh with which she had
opened her last remark, she turned conciliatingly to her mother.

"I'd go with you, Edith dear, if you wanted me to," she said.

For the first time since he had made their acquaintance Denis began to
have the shadow of an understanding of the depth of these two women's
attachment to each other, and he bowed his head.

"Thank you, Cleo," Mrs. Delarayne replied after satisfying herself that
there was not a trace of insincerity either in the voice or features of
her daughter. "We'll see."

She rose, smoothed down the front of her frock with a few rapid
gestures, and turned to the younger people.

"Come on!" she said. "You and I cannot afford to lose our beauty sleep,
Cleo. Two hours before midnight,--you know the time, and it's now
half-past nine."

Evidently Mrs. Delarayne intended to be rude to Denis. Sir Joseph had
told her something across the telephone, and she had expected a result
which had not occurred.

       *       *       *       *       *

The following morning after breakfast Mrs. Delarayne as usual retired to
the bureau in the library where every day she devoted at least thirty
minutes to her housekeeping duties.

Silently on this occasion Cleopatra followed in her wake, and pretending
to be in search of a book, lingered in her mother's company longer than
was her wont after the morning meal. Book after book was taken down from
the shelves, perfunctorily examined and returned to its place. Once or
twice the girl looked towards her mother, possibly in the hope that the
elder woman would provide the opening to the subject that was uppermost
in both their minds. At last Cleopatra spoke.

"Baby comes home to-day," she said, in a voice strained to appear
cheerful.

Mrs. Delarayne looked up from a tradesman's book. "Yes," she sighed
wearily. "One of Sir Joseph's cars is coming to fetch us at half-past
two. The train reaches King's Cross at three. Will you come?"

"Of course,--rather!" Cleopatra exclaimed, taking down another book and
examining it cursorily.

There was silence again, and Cleopatra could be heard running quickly
through the pages of the volume she held.

"What is Baby going to do?" she asked after a while.

"Don't ask me!" exclaimed the mother.

"Haven't you any plans?" the daughter enquired with studied
indifference, her eyes wandering vacantly over the letter-press before
them.

"Plans--what plans?" ejaculated the old lady. "I suppose the poor child
will have to put up with us now. You don't suppose we can send her
gadding about the Continent again?"

"I didn't dream of any such thing!" Cleopatra protested a little
guiltily.

"No, I promised her that she should come home for good after the School
of Domesticity, and she expects it. You saw what she said in her last
letter."

"Naturally," Cleopatra added, closing her book and replacing it
hurriedly on the shelves.

"We'll have to put up with it--that's all, my dear. I hope she won't be
too trying. But you must really help me a little by taking her off my
hands, particularly on my Bridge and 'Inner Light' days."

Cleopatra cast a glance full of meaning at her mother, and quietly left
the room. She had heard all she wanted to hear.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile, the subject of this conversation, ensconced comfortably in
the corner of a first-class carriage, was speeding rapidly towards
London.

Looking remarkably at her ease in a smart tailor-made frock of navy
serge, silk stockings, suede shoes, and a perfect summer hat trimmed
with bright cherries as red as her lips, she sat amid a farraginous
medley of newspapers, small parcels, and shiny leather traps, and
presented an attractive picture of a flourishing schoolgirl of
seventeen,--careless, mischievous, and keenly, though discreetly,
interested in everything about her;--but, perhaps a little too healthy,
and certainly too beautiful, to be quite typical either of the class or
of the kind of school from which she hailed.

Her large dark eyes, veiled by unusually long lashes, looked sharply at
you and then quickly turned away, with that air of mystery and secrecy,
and love of secrets at all costs--even mock secrets--peculiar to the
young virgin of all climes. Occasionally in glancing away they would
half close in a thoughtful smile, which, to the uninitiated, unaware of
the irrepressible spirits of their owner, was as unaccountable as it was
provoking.

There was an air of childhood still clinging, as if from habit alone, to
the outward insignia of maturity, in this mercurial, magnetic, and
undaunted young person; and in her malicious elfish eyes could be read
the solemn determination to force every possible claim that her double
advantage, as child and adult, could, according to the occasion, uphold.

Her thick dark hair did not hang down her back in the rich spiral curl
which is now becoming so common among schoolgirls; for that it was too
plentiful, too troublesomely luxuriant. It hung like heavy bronze in a
thick stiff plait--a badge both of her robust youth and the redundant
richness of her blood,--and at its extremity it was tied with a broad
ribbon of black silk. Beneath her hat, bold festoons of hair reached
down almost to her eyebrows, and to these portions of her coiffure she
constantly applied her soft shapely sun-tanned fingers, as if to
reassure herself that they were keeping their proper position.

The roguish expression of her face was partly due to pure health and
partly to wanton spirits, and her features possessed that exceptional
animation which, even in the simple process of eating a fondant,
produced the impression of extreme mobility.

Having long previously examined her fellow-passengers and judged them
uninteresting, she divided her attention between the fleeting landscape
at her side, a box of fruit creams, which she was consuming with grave
perseverance, and the contents of a pocket-portfolio, which she
appeared to be slowly sorting and weeding out. To everything she did,
however, to each one of her movements, she had the air of imparting so
much mysteriousness, so much elaborate secrecy, that she soon found
herself the object of the united attention of all her companions. And
occasionally when her fresh full lips parted in a smile at the things
she read, the old gentleman opposite her had to turn also to the
fleeting landscape as a prophylactic against the infection of her high
spirits.

She gave the impression of that aggressive vitality with which Nature
seems deliberately to equip her more favoured female children at this
age, as if to challenge the other sex to a definite attitude
immediately. A quivering freshness--the "bloom" of the poets--gave a
soft shimmer to her skin of which the powder of later years is such a
palpably poor travesty; her limbs were nicely rounded and not too
fragile; her teeth, like Cleopatra's, were perfect, and although she was
a trifle smaller than her sister, she was broad across the shoulders,
and well developed.

Leonetta, as we have already seen, knew that she was attractive; but she
did not know this fact as surely and unmistakably as--say, a philosopher
looking at her did. She probably knew that she was sunburnt, for
instance; but she was not aware of the depth which the dark natural
virginal pigmentation of her neck, eyes, and knuckles, lent to the warm
tanning of her skin. She did not know how prone the philosopher is to
associate the combination of these two rich colourings with the wicked,
dusky denizens of a tropical jungle--those creatures whose blood he
suspects of being something deeper than red, who really look as if they
were made from the earth and were going back to it, and who have nothing
of that translucent pallor suggestive of heaven-sent and heaven-destined
attributes.

She probably knew her dark eyes were fine and that their lashes were
long; but she would have been surprised and perhaps even a little hurt
if she had been told that their most striking feature was that, to every
man, modest and shrewd enough to divine all that they could exact, they
were terrifying. She knew her teeth were faultless; but she did not even
suspect the thrill of pained joy that went through the philosopher's
frame when he saw the life-hunger they revealed, and, what was more, the
full deep bite and fast hold they would take of Life's entrails. A young
girl's canines are self-revelatory in this respect. Let them be big and
prominent, as Leonetta's were, and the fastness of her hold on Life,
once she has bitten, promises to break all records. The sensitive
philosopher has little patience with your fair delicate misses with
small mouse-like canines. There are too many of them to begin with, and
they are so instinctively ladylike.

Perhaps the most amusing thing in this world is to watch the antics of
a large-canined virgin _de bonne famille_ who is trying to be a
lady,--by "lady" is here meant someone who, among other parlour tricks,
can perform the feat of "controlling" her feelings,--who has, that is to
say, on the one hand "control" and on the other hand "feelings," and
whose feelings are weaker than her control.

Leonetta's highly pigmented and sunburnt fingers suddenly ceased their
twofold activity with the box of fondants and the pocket-portfolio of
secret papers, and held a letter long and steadily before her eyes.
Again the old gentleman opposite turned to the landscape of fields on
his right, and his loose lips worked ominously. The fixity of those keen
eyes with their tell-tale slight inward squint, as she studied the
letter, proved too much for him, particularly when she began to smile;
and his glance wandered desperately to the country he was traversing, in
the cool, pallid British greenness of which he found relief.

Evidently the letter was a piece of life, for Leonetta was now in deadly
earnest, pinching her beautiful tawny neck thoughtfully here and there
with her free hand, as she read, and breathing deeply. Her glance
travelled rapidly, too, over certain passages, and would then stop dead,
sometimes in order to allow a smile to dawn, sometimes to wander a
moment to frown at the country-side. Evidently certain portions of the
letter were quite uninteresting, or else she knew them by heart.

The letter she read was as follows:

     "My own dearest Leo,

     "Oh, how I miss you already! But I shan't be the _only_ one!
     That's _some_ comfort. Think of church now without your
     dreadful remarks about all the still more dreadful people. I
     know one or two who are not going to church any more now.
     Don't you feel ashamed of yourself? Don't you ever feel
     ashamed of yourself? And the river on Wednesdays, and the
     _park_ on Saturday afternoons! The place will be dead. It
     will be a vast waste. You told me to make up to Dorothy
     Garforth. But she's not _you_. She'll never have the pluck
     to talk to strange young men about their motor bikes or
     their horses and things. You _were_ a wonder! Still my own
     dear Leo, you promised to invite me up to London to meet
     your people, didn't you, and don't you dare to forget. I
     shall pine away here if you do.

     "I must tell you something that happened last night. Well, I
     met Charlie as I was coming home from saying good-bye to
     you. He was desolate. You really have been a little cruel.
     He said you gave him back his match-box and gold pencil, and
     that that meant you did not want anything more to do with
     him. He said he had been waiting behind the usual shrubbery
     in the park for two hours, for a long last good-bye and that
     you never turned up. I know what you mean about him, that he
     isn't smart and clean and all that, but he is rather nice
     all the same. Almost the best we knew. I think the hair on
     his hands, as you pointed out, made up for a heap of other
     shortcomings in him. But I know what you mean. He's a little
     rough and there's an end of it. I thought of telling him to
     write to you; but then it struck me you would not like him
     to. He said you were a flirt, and that you would only have
     a rich man. I said it wasn't that a bit, that he had quite
     misunderstood you. I couldn't tell him the truth, could
     I?--that he wasn't altogether '_toothsome_,' as you call it.
     He said he had seen us talking to that motor-cyclist fellow
     in the park last Saturday, and that proved it. I said it
     proved nothing, because we did not know then that he was one
     of the wealthiest boys in the county. However he seemed very
     bitter.

     "Did you really give him so much encouragement? Of course
     men _do_ think it a lot if you let them kiss you. Aren't
     they stupid? They can't understand that even if one does not
     love them overmuch one wants to know what it's like. And you
     _did_ like pretending you were deeply in love, didn't you
     now?--all the time? I tell you who'll be glad you've gone,
     Alice Dewlap. She was sweet on Charlie long before you met
     him, because Kitty told me so.

     "Oh, Leo, you were a wicked creature, a regular godsend!
     What shall we do without you! _Do_ ask me to come soon.
     That's cool, isn't it? Asking for an invitation. But you
     know what I mean. Think of me in church next Sunday. Good
     Lord deliver us! Tell me what to say to Charlie if he
     bothers me about you again. And don't forget to tell me all
     that happens in London. Describe all the men you meet
     minutely,--you know to the smallest detail as you used to
     here. You taught me to notice heaps of things I should never
     have thought of.

     "Good-bye my dearest treasure-trove, with heaps of love and
     kisses.

                   "Yours for ever and ever,

                                          "Nessy."

The old gentleman lost sight of Leonetta during the lunch interval; but
when she returned from the restaurant car, slightly flushed, and her
eyelids lazily drooping, he concluded that she had probably partaken
heartily of the good fare provided, more particularly as a few stray
crumbs still clung about the corners of her lips, betraying to his
experienced eye the unconscious eagerness which healthy people
habitually show over their meals. Wisely he did not infer from these
evidences of a youthful and unimpaired appetite that she was slovenly in
her table manners, because the unmistakable gentleness of her upbringing
precluded any such possibility. The observation merely confirmed his
general impression of her, and left him pondering over the relationship
of daintiness to health.

Drowsily the girl re-opened the letter which she had been perusing
before the luncheon hour, and re-read it once or twice; then dropping it
listlessly upon her lap, she turned upon her fellow-passengers a look of
such guileless interest that they might have been excused had they been
moved by that compassion, so frequently unwarranted, for innocence on
the threshold of Life's great adventure.

The letter she held had been brought to her that morning by Vanessa's
maid. Leonetta and Vanessa had made friends the moment they first met,
and when Vanessa, duly qualified, had left the School of Domesticity,
about six months after Leonetta's arrival there, they had continued to
see each other outside its walls. There was a difference of only a year
in their ages, Vanessa being the elder; but the younger girl with her
greater keenness of vision, more exuberant health and spirits, and more
resolute unscrupulosity, had so carried the heart of the other by storm
that it was Vanessa, the provincial termagant, who looked up to and
worshipped her sister dare-devil of the Metropolis, and who watched her
for her every cue.

The train was nearing London; already the coquettish veil of smoke with
which the "hub of the Universe" conceals the full horror of her ugliness
from the eyes of critics, gave the summer sky a murky yellow tinge.
Leonetta yawned, glanced across the vast city which she hoped would
hence-forward be her home, and then suddenly recollecting that her
mother and sister would probably be at King's Cross to meet her, quickly
folded the letter that was lying on her lap and relegated it to one of
the interstices of her pocket-portfolio.




CHAPTER V


Leonetta was home again and the old house in Kensington felt the change
acutely. The stairs creaked in a manner almost indignant; doors which
for months had disported themselves with quiet dignity, manifested a
sudden and youthful tendency to slam; Palmer, the parlour-maid could
never be found, except at the heels of her youngest mistress, who seemed
to have requisitioned her entire services; while a fresh young voice, as
imperious as it was melodious, could be heard on almost every floor at
the same time, calling the stately rooms back to life again, and
shivering the cobwebs of monotony as it were by acoustic principles
alone.

The expression of the kindly maiden aunt, who, after having played for
some while with a boisterous and powerful young nephew, gradually
realises that he is becoming too rough for her, is, as everybody knows,
one of tremulous expectancy, in which a half-frightened flickering smile
plays only a deceptive and scarcely convincing part in concealing the
feelings of anxiety and disapproval that lie behind it.

Now there was, as we have seen, little of the maiden aunt in Mrs.
Delarayne's disposition, and yet this is precisely the expression which,
from the moment of Leonetta's arrival at King's Cross, had fastened upon
her features. It was the look of one who, though anxious to humour a
youthful relative as far as possible, was nevertheless determined that
the young creature's pranks should not be allowed to extend to
incendiarism, personal assault and battery, homicide, or anything
equally upsetting. It scarcely requires description: the brows are
permanently slightly raised, the eyes are kept steadily upon the
youthful relative in question in mingled astonishment and fear, while
there is the aforesaid agitated smile, which threatens at any moment to
assume the hard and petulant lines of impatient reproach.

Leonetta had quite properly insisted upon a completely new outfit. She
had not "unpacked" in the accepted sense. She had simply emptied her
boxes into the dust-bin. Some of her things, it is true, had fallen to
Palmer, and to Wilmott, her mother's maid, but very few of them, indeed,
had she been willing to return to her wardrobe or her chests of drawers.

No one could take exception to this procedure. It was perfectly right
and proper. It was the way it was done, as if it had been a forgone and
incontrovertible conclusion, that unnerved Mrs. Delarayne, and drove
Cleopatra, more abashed than indignant, to the quietest corner of the
house for peace and solitude.

Obviously Leonetta had as yet received no check from life, no threat of
an obstacle, or worse still a snub. Her pride pranced with an assurance,
a certainty, that was at once baffling and unbaffled. In the presence of
her sister's unbroken and unshaken will and resolute assertion of her
smallest rights, Cleopatra shrank as before the force of an elemental
upheaval. Her tottering self-confidence swayed ominously in the
neighbourhood of the younger girl, and it was with alarm and
helplessness in her eyes, that she sought a refuge where she could
breathe undisturbed.

In the library she dropped desperately into a chair, and her glance ran
nervously up and down the bookshelves, while her ears listened
stealthily for echoes of the voice that was subordinating the house.

She had forgotten during these blissful months how beautiful her sister
was. Some mysterious power in her, that found it easy to forget these
things, had even led her memory to form quite a moderate estimate of
Leonetta's charms in her absence,--even her sister's telling tricks with
her hair had been completely banished from her mind.

Cleopatra rose and walked to the fire-place. On the mantelpiece, she
knew, there was a photograph of herself at Leonetta's age. She felt she
wanted to examine this record of her adolescence. She was groping for
strength: she wished to fortify herself.

She drew the photograph towards her. No, she had not changed so very
much. Only something inside her seemed to have grown less tense, less
self-confident. Also, she had not had Leonetta's advantages,--advantages
that she herself had been chiefly instrumental in securing for her
younger sister. More arts than that of wielding the French tongue are
learned in Paris. Apparently she never had arranged her hair quite as
Baby arranged hers.

And then, all at once, the door opened, and she pushed the photograph
violently from her, so that it fell with a clatter on the marble of the
mantelpiece. It was her mother; and as the door opened and shut, the
sound of Leonetta's voice upstairs swelled and died away again.

"Oh, it's you," Cleopatra cried, setting up the fallen frame.

Mrs. Delarayne walked to the window, spasmodically drew back a curtain,
and then turned to face her daughter.

"She's amazingly high-spirited, isn't she?"

"Extraordinary!" Cleopatra exclaimed.

"Can you go with her to Mlle. Claude's to-morrow to order those frocks?
You see, I have my Inner Light meeting in the afternoon."

"She won't like it."

"What does it matter? She won't listen to my suggestions, so I might
just as well stay at home as go with her. She knows exactly what she
wants down to the last button."

"Then why can't she go alone?"

"Well,--I don't know," replied Mrs. Delarayne anxiously; "she might
perhaps feel that neither of us was taking much interest in her, don't
you think?"

"How much are you allowing her?"

"A hundred pounds."

"Edith!"

"My dear,--I could say nothing!"

"But I never had half that sum all at once."

"I know," sighed her mother wearily. "But you can have it now, or more
if you want it."

There was a loud drumming of feet, and the door opened.

"Oh, Peachy darling!" Leonetta cried, "you're the very person I wanted
to see, and I couldn't think what had become of you."

She was brandishing a paper of the latest Paris fashions in her hand as
she skipped to her mother's side.

"You see," she pursued, "this is what I want for my best evening
turn-out, I couldn't find it a moment ago." And she proceeded to
describe to her mother what the particular confection consisted of.

"Of course they do these things miles better in Paris," she added with a
pout.

"No doubt," said Mrs. Delarayne coldly.

"And they're not a scrap more expensive either," Leonetta continued.

"Possibly not," her mother rejoined. Then there was a moment's silence
while Leonetta ran rapidly through the newspaper in her hands.

At last Mrs. Delarayne spoke.

"Leo, darling," she began, "would you mind very much if Cleo went with
you to-morrow instead of me?"

Leonetta glanced up, scrutinised her mother and sister for a second, and
her brow clouded. "Oh, Peachy," she cried at last, "you are a worm!"

Mrs. Delarayne sat down, and fumbled nervously with a brooch at her
neck. She realised dimly that she ought to protest against being
addressed in this manner by her younger daughter and stared vacantly at
Cleopatra.

"You see," she said, "I have my Inner Light meeting."

"Your inner what?" Leonetta exclaimed contemptuously.

A slight flush crept slowly up the widow's neck, and she looked
hopelessly in the direction of her elder daughter.

Leonetta laughed. "Inner Light!" she cried. "Peachy, you are getting
into funny ways in your old age; now come, aren't you?"

A look of such deep mortification came into Mrs. Delarayne's eyes, that
Cleopatra herself felt provoked.

"There's no need to be rude, Baby!" she ejaculated angrily, not
realising quite how much of her anger was utterly unconnected with her
sister's treatment of their mother.

Leonetta glanced down at her paper in the thoughtful manner of a buck
about to butt. For the first time she had perceived clearly that much
of which she had not the smallest inkling must have happened during her
long absences from home, and that these two women,--her mother and
sister,--were united by strangely powerful bonds. Being an intelligent
creature, therefore, she decided to postpone the framing of her strategy
until she had learned more about the strength that seemed to be
constantly combining against her.

She raised her eyes at last, and looked straight into her sister's face.

"I can't think what makes you so dreadfully stuffy," she declared,
"surely there's no harm in what I said."

Mrs. Delarayne, who longed only for one thing--that the remark
complained about, with its brutal reference to her old age, should not
be repeated, and least of all discussed,--here interposed a word or two.

"No, my darling Leo, of course not. You come fresh from school; you are
full of new ideas and schemes; and we,--well, we've remained at home."

This observation was perhaps a little feeble, and it also constituted a
desertion of Cleopatra, but in any case it seemed to give Leonetta the
necessary hint, for she went quite close to her mother and began
smoothing her hair. "You must tell me all about the Inner Light some
time," she said, "it sounds ripping."

She glanced triumphantly at her sister as she spoke. Half of her action
had been completely unconscious. Obviously she felt the need of making
one of these women her friend, and instinctively she inclined to the one
who appeared to be the more powerful.

"Peachy darling," she continued, "don't you think this white satin frock
that the Claude hag is going to make me might be my coming-out frock? It
will be new for the early autumn."

Cleopatra gasped, and Mrs. Delarayne gave her a glance full of meaning.

"You see," Leonetta pursued, "it will be the best of the lot, won't it?"

Mrs. Delarayne drew Leonetta towards her with an affectionate gesture,
and smiled in that ingratiating manner so necessary to timidity in
distress.

"But I didn't know you were to come out this autumn," she protested
lamely, not daring to look at Cleopatra, whose attitude she only too
shrewdly divined.

"It's ridiculous," Cleopatra exclaimed; "I didn't come out until I was
eighteen. You know, Edith, you and father wouldn't hear of making it a
moment sooner."

"Yes, but things are a little different now," Leonetta interposed.

"It would be unfair, grossly unfair, Edith," Cleopatra protested, "if
you let her come out earlier than I did. Particularly as I did my best
to make you and father let me, and you both absolutely refused."

Leonetta was now gently stroking her mother's hair. She would not trust
her eyes to look at her sister.

"Well, Peachy," she said, "surely you can't make a fuss about six
months, whatever you say, Cleo. After all, I'll be seventeen and a
half."

"Any way," Cleopatra snapped, "it won't be right."

"But what can it matter to you?" the younger girl demanded, glaring not
too amiably at her sister.

Cleopatra's face coloured a little at this question.

"Oh, nothing," she replied, and she moved towards the door. "I don't
care what you do."

"Where are you going to, Cleo dear?" Mrs. Delarayne enquired in a voice
fraught with all the sympathy she could not openly express.

"I'm going out to get a breath of air," replied Cleopatra without
turning her head; and she swept out of the room, performing as she went
those peculiar oscillations of the upper part of her body, which are not
unusually adopted by young women who are very much upon their dignity
when they retire. The oscillations in question consist in curving the
body sideways over small obstacles, such as chairs and tables, at the
moment of passing them, as if with an exaggerated effort to combine the
utmost care with the utmost rapidity of movement.

Mrs. Delarayne rose and went sadly to the window. Her eyes, full of
self-pity, gazed with unwonted indifference at the passers-by. How
thankful she would have been to have Mr. Delarayne at her side at this
critical moment in her life. There were times when she was not
unappreciative of the many advantages of widowhood; but this was not
precisely the moment when the bright side of her peculiar situation
seemed to be conspicuous. With Leonetta home for good, and Cleo still
unmarried, she felt the need of help and advice; and it was significant
that, as she became more and more aware of the practical usefulness that
the late Mr. Delarayne might have had at this juncture, her thoughts
turned rather to Lord Henry than to Sir Joseph Bullion.

She must speak to Lord Henry. He would know how to direct her.

A sound in the room disturbed her meditations. Leonetta, having
concluded a further examination of the Paris fashions, had tossed the
paper on to the table.

"Peachy darling," she began, with slow deliberation. "May I have a
friend to stay with me?"

Mrs. Delarayne continued to gaze into the street. She did not like being
called Peachy. She had an indistinct feeling that it sounded
vulgar,--why she would have been unable to explain. Nevertheless, since
anything was preferable to being called "Mother" at the top of
Leonetta's strident soprano in the public highway, and for some reason
or other Leonetta would not make use of the name "Edith," she felt that
it would perhaps be diplomatic to say nothing.

"Who is she?" she enquired cautiously.

Leonetta was silent for a moment. It was not the question, but the
caution that dictated it, that struck the girl as strange.

"Isn't it enough that she is a friend of mine?" she observed.

"Quite, of course!" Mrs. Delarayne hastened to reply. "I only
meant,--what is her name, who are her people?"

"Vanessa Vollenberg," answered Leonetta.

"It sounds foreign," was the mother's quiet comment.

"As a matter of fact, it is."

"It sounds a little Jewish."

"She is a Jewess," Leonetta admitted.

Mrs. Delarayne purred approvingly over her remarkable display of
insight.

"She's very beautiful and wonderfully clever," Leonetta pursued.

"How old?"

"A year older than I am,--eighteen and a half."

"Jewesses are always pretty at that age," Mrs. Delarayne muttered,
glancing at her daughter furtively for a moment.

"Oh yes, I know," Leonetta replied with unexpected warmth; "and they
fade quickly afterwards. That's what everybody says."

It was clear that for some obscure reasons, she was very much attached
to Vanessa Vollenberg.

"But Mrs. Vollenberg," she continued, "is the most beautiful woman in
the world. She has been painted by every great artist in Europe. So she
can't have faded much."

"How long do you want Vanessa to stay?"

Leonetta suggested that her friend might go to Brineweald with them for
a fortnight; Mrs. Delarayne said that it might be three weeks if she
chose, and the girl bounded towards her mother and embraced her.

"Oh Peachy, my own Peachy,--that is sweet of you," she exclaimed, "you
are forgiven for not coming to the Claude hag to-morrow."

One of the points in Cleopatra's nature that greatly endeared her to her
parent, was that she scarcely ever kissed, and when she did so, it was
delicately, with a respectful consideration for her mother's facial
toilet. Moreover, she never, in any circumstances, disarranged her
mother's hair.

"Are they well off?" Mrs. Delarayne asked, easing a ringlet of hair
tenderly back into its position near her ear.

"If you mean the Vollenbergs," Leonetta answered, "they're as rich as
you and Sir Joseph knocked into one."

Her mother protested.

"Oh, very well. He owns a whole quarter of Hull, and has a West Indian
Copra business into the bargain."

Leonetta did not know what "copra" was, but she thought it sounded
sufficiently like a precious metal to suggest immense wealth.

Later in the evening, Mrs. Delarayne and Cleopatra were alone in the
former's bedroom.

"I have a feeling," Cleopatra was saying, "that I don't love Denis
sufficiently to go mad about him. You know what I mean: he may be the
best specimen of manhood who has ever crossed this threshold, but he
does not electrify me."

"That's very sound," her mother rejoined with unusual emphasis. "There's
no need to be electrified by the man one marries."

"Yes, but I feel that one ought,--I mean that seeing that I could,--you
know,--if one is going to be something to a man, one feels that one
would like to be electrified by him."

Mrs. Delarayne deposited her voluminous transformation lovingly upon the
dressing-table,--Cleo was such an intimate friend!

"Rubbish!" she ejaculated. "Romantic rubbish! How often have I told you
girls that provided a man can keep you in comfort and has a clean sweet
mouth, it doesn't matter a rap about anything else. Even if he has dirty
hands and finger-nails in addition, it doesn't signify;--there's the
English Channel and the Atlantic close by to wash them in. But if he
hasn't a clean, sweet mouth, a second deluge wouldn't wash it for him.
How can you attach so much importance to trifles, when in Denis you have
the two first prerequisites in an eminent degree? You are romantic, my
dear Cleo. And matrimony is a matter of flesh and blood. When the
demands of these are properly attended to, I assure you the rest is mere
foolishness. Denis can keep you in comfort, and he has the teeth of an
African negro. What more can you want? You cannot go on losing chance
after chance through these romantic notions."

"But surely," Cleo objected hopelessly, "a man ought to fire you with
something more exciting than the consideration of his means and his
dentition!"

"In our class," Mrs. Delarayne rejoined with gravity, "men no longer set
fire to anything. Get that out of your mind at once. Modern English
civilisation has entirely failed to produce men who can be at once
gentlemen and fiery lovers. We have wanted things both ways, and that is
why we have failed. We have wanted nice clean-minded men with whom we
could walk, talk, and play games freely. But that means men who can
exercise self-control. Now, of course, we are certainly free to enjoy
men as safe playmates all through our youth; but we are, I'm afraid,
also free to be bored with them as husbands for the rest of our lives."




CHAPTER VI


There are many people who would have considered Mrs. Delarayne a selfish
mother. Despite the fact that no man, woman, or child has ever yet been
known to perform an unselfish action, the superstition still holds
ground, that "selfish" and "unselfish" are two different and possible
descriptions of human life and action. Believing, as we do, however,
that no intellectually honest man can any longer attach any significance
to these words, it cannot be admitted in these pages that Mrs. Delarayne
was selfish. Neither was she at all conscious of any evil impulses when,
standing at the dining-room window on her "Inner Light" afternoon, she
watched her two children leave the house on their way to the "Claude
hag," as Leonetta called the lady. On the contrary, she felt wonderfully
free, exceptionally happy, profoundly relieved. The big house was
silent. She was alone. She even had to suppress the half-formed longing
that it might always be so.

She knew that Cleopatra felt no deep sympathy with any part of the
"Inner Light" doctrine, and she was convinced, before enquiring, that
Leonetta would sympathise with it even less. Although, therefore, she
expected a number of young men that afternoon,--Lord Henry, St. Maur,
and Malster, among them,--who might have interested her daughters, she
was not in the least conscious of having acted with deliberate hostility
in arranging so neatly that they should be out of the house when these
gentlemen came.

To explain precisely what the "Inner Light" meetings meant to Mrs.
Delarayne would entail such a long discussion of the relation of women's
religiosity in general to sex and to self-deception, that it would
require almost the compass of another independent treatise to deal with
it adequately.

In a word Mrs. Delarayne suffered, as a large number of modern women
suffer, from receiving no sure and reliable guidance from men. As a
widow this was, of course, incidental to her position; but she knew well
enough that there were thousands who still had their husbands, who were
no better off than she was. In addition to this, she had succumbed to
the influence of that absurd belief, so prevalent in cultivated circles,
that typical modern thought is superior to Christianity.

She felt the ease and peace of mind that resulted from having a belief
of some sort; but she would have regarded it as a surrender of principle
to return to Christianity; and, far from suspecting that most modern
thought, as manifested in the doctrine of the "Inner Light," for
instance, or Theosophy, or Christian Science, is inferior to
Christianity, she had become a member of the Inner Light, and paid its
heavy entrance fee of fifty guineas, with a feeling of deep pride and
satisfaction.

The doctrine of the Inner Light was an importation from America. It had
been introduced into England by a very intelligent, very tall, but very
delicate looking Virginian lady, about fifteen years before this story
opens. It had not spread very much, it is true,--its total number of
members in Great Britain amounted only to two thousand five hundred; but
it was all the more select on that account, and it was guaranteed by its
founders and by all who belonged to it, to be entirely free from those
"regrettable remnants of superstition which so very much marred the
beauty of the older religions."

It professed to recognise only one purifying and creative agent in life,
and that was Light. "The world was all darkness and death," said the
first prophet of the "Inner Light,"--an American named Adolf
Albernspiel, who had died worth half a million dollars,--"and then Light
appeared, and with it Life and the great lucid Powers: Thought, Spirit,
Order."

It was so obviously superior to Christianity, it commended itself so
cogently to the meanest intelligence, that the members of the "Inner
Light," try how they might to exercise the tolerance which is universal
to-day, could hardly refrain from a mild consciousness of superiority
when they looked down upon other creeds.

Thus the priests of the Order were not called "Fathers" or "Brethren,"
which implied a false anthropomorphic relationship to a supreme parent
"God"; they were simply "Incandescents":--Incandescent Bernard,
Incandescent Margaret, Incandescent Mansel, and so on. Again, in
allowing women to officiate at the altar of the Supreme Incandescence,
the doctrine of the Inner Light rose superior to Christianity. "Owing to
Judaic tradition and influence," as his Incandescence Albernspiel had
truly pointed out, "the Christian Church had never enjoyed the eminent
advantage of women's ministration. Even the Greeks had been wiser than
this. And thus much of an essential character in all true religion had
always been absent from Christianity, owing to this proscription of
feminine influence." (_The Doctrine of the Inner Light_, Vol. II., p.
1303.)

There was only one Temple in England, at which all the faithful met once
a year, and that was at Liverpool. It was hoped that other churches
would be built sooner or later in other big centres, but
meanwhile,--that is to say, pending the collecting of the necessary
building fund,--all the faithful outside Liverpool were recommended to
meet once a month at each other's houses, where one of the Incandescents
would hold a service.

The Incandescent for London was a pale and feverish looking little man,
Gerald Tribe by name, with false teeth and large, bony red hands, who
lived as a sort of non-paying guest at the house of Miss Mallowcoid,
Mrs. Delarayne's elder sister, at Hampstead. It was a perfectly orderly
arrangement, because, apart from the fact that he had his young wife
with him, he was in any case such a learned and pure-minded young man,
that, as Miss Mallowcoid declared, even if he had not been married, she
would have regarded it as a privilege to live under the same roof with
him. She admitted, of course, that his wife was so far beneath him as to
present an almost insufferable objection to the arrangement; but Miss
Mallowcoid regarded this creature as the trial and chastisement sent by
the supreme Incandescence, to bring both her own and Gerald Tribe's
inner light to ever greater prodigies of brilliance and power.

Miss Mallowcoid, who had been responsible for her sister, Mrs.
Delarayne's conversion to the Inner Light, was expected that afternoon,
as were also Sir Joseph Bullion, and all the London faithful. Lord Henry
had also reluctantly agreed to attend this one meeting after months of
persuasion from Mrs. Delarayne.

If Mrs. Delarayne had been asked why she had joined the cult of the
Inner Light, she would have probably replied that it was a simple
doctrine. Light was the beginning, Light would be the end. Life on earth
was simply the struggle of Light against Darkness. When you died, you
became one with the Eternal Incandescence. Age, old age,--and this was
the part that chiefly attracted Mrs. Delarayne,--_was simply the fatigue
incurred by battling with darkness_. When Light prevailed, as it would
in the other world, Age would pass away, _and everybody would remain
eternally youthful_.

Thus, far from feeling selfish or unselfish, Mrs. Delarayne was
conscious only of a sensation of supreme elation, as she watched her
daughters leave the house on that afternoon in July. She was even able
to contemplate their unusual beauty, which would have made them a credit
to any family, with unmixed feelings of pride as they walked down the
square, and she smiled as she noticed the eagerness with which Leonetta
strode ahead, just about half a pace in front of her sister. When she
turned away from the window, therefore, and once again surveyed the
large stately dining-room, with its row upon row of chairs all ready for
the meeting, she was conscious only of feeling supremely happy and above
all secure.

Lord Henry was to come at last. For months, in fact ever since her first
initiation into the Order, she had implored him to attend a meeting, and
now that her will had prevailed she felt confident that once he saw with
his own eyes the large number of distinguished people gathered that day
under her roof--all followers and devotees of the Inner Light,--he would
be forced to acknowledge that there was a good deal in it.

Among the first arrivals was Sir Lionel Borridge, the inventor of the
most up-to-date calculating machine, and a mathematician of renown. He
had a conical brow like a beautifully polished knee, and very sad eyes
which seemed to proclaim to the world that the study of mathematics was,
on the whole, a most harrowing occupation. With him came his aged wife
and spinster daughter. Both appeared to be over fifty, and, like the
head of their household, also deeply depressed by mathematics. These
three, looking so learned, looking so miserable with learning, were
surely the best evidence that could be advanced in support of the truth
of the Inner Light; for they were all convinced adherents of the Order.
Sir Joseph arrived punctually at three, the hour appointed for the
meeting. With him came Malster, and one of the junior secretaries of
Bullion Ltd., a certain Guy Tyrrell. Lord Henry and St. Maur came a
minute after time, and were followed by a phalanx of ladies of uncertain
age, with their Poms, their Pekinese, their Yorkshire and their toy
terriers.

Mrs. Delarayne's dining-room was filling rapidly. A buzz of
conversation, accompanied by the shuffling of the latest arrivals' feet,
began to pervade the large room, and necks were craned in tense
expectation of celebrities.

The philocanine Palmer was entrusted with the care of the legion of lap
dogs out in the garden,--for the religious meeting could not admit even
the most docile pet animal; and the sound of their spiteful yappings
could be heard through the open windows at the back of the room.

"You know, my dear," said Lady Muriel Bellington, who had brought her
Mexican hairless, "of course he is very, very naughty. And it's very
tiresome. But they are so minute, one couldn't beat them. It would be
really too too!"

Lady fflote, already purple with the heat, went almost black at the
suggestion of beating the Mexican hairless.

"Beat them!" she ejaculated. "Oh that would be very wrong. Oh no, you
couldn't bully them. Better far let them tyrannise over you. I should
never forgive myself."

In another part of the room Sir Lionel Borridge was leaning across Mrs.
Gerald Tribe, the delicate and emaciated wife of the Incandescent Gerald
Tribe, to address a word to Miss Mallowcoid.

"I think it possible, you know," he said very gravely, and looking the
image of the most unconquerable woe, "that I may be able to give our
minister certain mathematical facts, which I feel convinced are all in
support of the doctrine of the Inner Light. I was working at them with
my daughter last night,--the results are simply astounding--astounding,
that's the only word."

Miss Mallowcoid ejaculated, "Really! Really!" in a hushed, awed voice,
and then quickly proceeded to communicate the thrilling intelligence to
her right hand neighbour, who marvelled as reverently and as inaudibly
as she had done.

Sir Joseph, feeling a little bewildered, was asking Guy Tyrrell a
string of questions which this young man was quite unqualified to
answer, and both looked and felt extremely uncomfortable.

Lord Henry, who was seated in the second row from the front, between
Denis Malster and St. Maur, glanced round at the crowd behind him, and
frowned darkly.

"I think, you know, Lord Henry," said Denis Malster, noticing the young
nobleman's expression of angry scorn, "you do not allow sufficiently for
the fact that all of us have a subconscious inkling of the supernatural
behind phenomena, and these attempts on the part of the followers of the
Inner Light, of the Theosophists, or the Spiritualists, to realise the
nature of this supernatural basis to the material and visible world, are
all proofs of this subconscious inkling."

"I don't think," Lord Henry replied, "that you are sufficiently inclined
to allow for the fundamental fact, that mankind is very, very slow in
dropping an old habit. We are now, thank goodness, witnessing the slow
death agony of Christianity. These people here are among those who plume
themselves on having abandoned Christian dogma. But deep down in their
natures, there is not the inkling of the supernatural of which you
speak, but simply the religious habit,--the habit of believing in
something vague and indemonstrable, the habit of services and
congregational worship. And while they are dropping away from the old
Church in all directions, they simultaneously, from sheer habit, create
new-fangled creeds very much more absurd than anything the Church ever
taught, and not nearly so beautiful."

At this moment a hush suddenly fell upon the whole company, and Mrs.
Delarayne, who by virtue of her role as hostess, was officiating as
assistant to the Incandescent Gerald that afternoon, entered the room by
a small door at the back, followed by the minister.

Everyone stood up, and Lord Henry noticed that the venerable bald head
of Sir Lionel Borridge was bowed in humble reverence.

The service lasted about three quarters of an hour; even Sir Joseph
Bullion, who, as the latest of the elect, was the new broom of the
afternoon, was seen to gape once during the course of it; and when it
was over and a sort of blessing had been pronounced by the minister, the
whole company filed out of the dining-room into the library for
refreshment and also for the discussion of the meeting.

Everyone seemed intent upon reaching Mrs. Delarayne, and among those who
struggled most to achieve this end was Sir Joseph Bullion.
Congratulations were being pronounced on all sides. "How well she had
read the Articles of Faith!" "How clearly she had announced the hymns!"
"How cool and collected she was, and yet how reverent!"

Gradually the throng pressed less thickly about her, and Sir Joseph
reached his idol.

"Wonderful, Edith,--wonderful!" he whispered. "And what a beautiful
impressive service!"

Mrs. Delarayne grasped his hand, and even nodded, but her eyes were busy
elsewhere. She was watching the movements of Lord Henry, who had not yet
spoken to her, and who, apparently in animated conversation with Sir
Lionel Borridge, had hitherto held himself aloof.

"You wouldn't remember, of course," Sir Joseph pursued, "the arrival of
Baroness Puckha Bilj in London in the late eighties, with her doctrine
of 'Self-Exteriorisation.' The Inner Light reminds me somewhat of that.
We were her bankers. She was most successful."

"Your husband surpassed himself, Mrs. Tribe," said Denis Malster to the
emaciated wife of the Incandescent Gerald. Denis felt extremely superior
behind his solid Anglican Protestant entrenchments, and thought that he
could afford to be generous and even patronising to the members of a
struggling creed.

"Of course, Baroness Puckha Bilj had not your advantages," continued the
undaunted Sir Joseph. "She was already advanced in years when she left
Hungary."

"Have some cake?" said Mrs. Delarayne.

"I admit," Lord Henry was saying, "that a new religion is perhaps the
most urgent need of modern times; but then this Age is scarcely great
enough to make it."

"Come, come!" exclaimed Sir Lionel gruffly, his melancholy eyes closing
heavily as he spoke, "you are a little hard surely. Is not this your
first attendance here? I don't seem to remember having seen you amongst
us before."

Lord Henry apologised and turned away. He had noticed his hostess's eye
upon him, and he hastened towards her.

"Sir Lionel's conversation seems to have been singularly engrossing,"
remarked Mrs. Delarayne as he approached.

"It always amazes me," declared the young nobleman with laughter in his
eyes, "how the men of the so-called 'exact sciences' become involved in
our new emergency substitutes for a great Faith."

Mrs. Delarayne purred with a slightly treble note of dissent.

"Why not?" Sir Joseph demanded.

"I suppose it is the refuge of the mind that deals only with precise and
exact terms and rules, to plunge into the opposite extreme,--into blue
mistiness for instance. Or is it perhaps the fact that mathematicians
and physicists deal very largely with symbols, with abstractions as
opposed to realities, and that they therefore easily fall a prey to this
sort of thing?"

Sir Joseph shrugged his shoulders and tried hard to look wise.

"The worst of it is," Lord Henry pursued, "the adherence of a man like
Borridge, makes lesser men imagine that the creed to which he lends his
support, must have something in it."

Mrs. Delarayne contented herself with pouting, and casting a glance full
of distress signals at Sir Joseph.

But Sir Joseph appeared not to notice, and taking unnecessarily large
bites at a piece of cake he held, was evidently hoping to convey the
impression that a sudden and inconvenient access of appetite prevented
his opposing Lord Henry as violently as he might otherwise have done on
the subject of the Inner Light.

The occupants of the room were beginning to revolve in that purposeful
manner which augurs of leave-taking. People came up to shake hands with
their hostess, and gradually the library emptied. Only Denis Malster,
St. Maur, Sir Joseph, and Lord Henry remained.

Their hostess fidgeted uneasily. She wished to be alone with Lord Henry.
Gradually the others understood, and ultimately took their leave.

"Now quickly, explain to me," Lord Henry began severely, "why you have
anything to do with this arrant nonsense. Surely it would be more
dignified, more sensible to be a Christian again, than to lend your
support to this inferior modern bunkum?"

Mrs. Delarayne, with her elbow on the mantelpiece and her chin in her
hand, stood sulking and was mute.

"Good Heavens! The Inner Light!" He strode towards her. "Promise me
you'll give it up," he said.

"What for?"

That was her position. What for? What did he propose to offer in
compensation? His protection? His devotion? His love? Then the sacrifice
might be worth while. She bowed her head and smiled icily. She adored
this young man. This was the last weapon she believed she could still
wield against him. She was aware, perhaps, that the Inner Light was all
nonsense. The fact that he said it was made it abundantly probable to
her. But was it possible that the Inner Light might afford her a means
of bringing their relationship to its desired conclusion?

"A supremely intelligent woman like you," Lord Henry continued,
"--really! And the Incandescent Gerald! And hymn number 27----!"

"You may scoff," said the poor lady, feeling uncommonly hot, "but it all
means something to me."

"That is not true!" Lord Henry exclaimed. "You know it's not true. Oh,
and Lady fflote, and Lady Muriel. And Adolf Albernspiel--God!"

"Are you still determined to go to China?" Mrs. Delarayne demanded, her
voice faltering a little.

"As firmly as ever."

"Well, don't let us quarrel then," she said. "The time is short enough."

"Lord Henry," she began hesitatingly, as she pulled a marguerite to
pieces over the fender. "I asked you to stay for a few minutes because
I wanted to consult you on a very delicate matter."

He sat down facing her, and began to tug at the mesh over his brow. He
frowned and blinked rapidly, as was his wont when interested. He
wondered whether this charming and unhappy creature realised how
thoroughly he understood her.

"You know Leonetta is home again," Mrs. Delarayne continued.

Lord Henry nodded.

"She is rather difficult to manage."

He nodded again.

"She is so full of life, so eager, so--well, can you imagine me at
seventeen? Can you picture the mercurial creature I was, with every
sense agog, with every nerve on the _qui vive_?--a dreadful little
person in every way."

Lord Henry chuckled, and gave his forelock one or two unusually rapid
twists.

"Leonetta is if anything worse than I was," Mrs. Delarayne continued,
"for she is of this century. I belonged to the last one. D'you
understand?"

He bowed.

"She is vitality incarnate,--wilful, womanly, vain, beautiful,--not more
beautiful than Cleopatra, but more intrepid, more inquisitive, more
determined to live than her elder sister."

"Have you a photograph of her?" Lord Henry enquired.

Mrs. Delarayne darted across the room, and returned with a large framed
photograph which she handed to her visitor.

"There's the latest. It was taken a month ago."

Lord Henry examined it closely.

"Yes," he said, with his customary gravity in dealing with interesting
questions. "I see. I see now. Well?"

"Can you see the girl she is? Daring,--oh, and can I say it?"

Lord Henry looked up and blinked rapidly again.

"A little--a little----"

"A little inclined to temperamental precocity?" Lord Henry enquired.

Mrs. Delarayne, very much relieved, nodded quickly.

"That's exactly it,--that's just what I meant to say,--that's it
precisely. Oh how accurately that describes her!"

The elegant widow was uncommonly agitated and anxious. Lord Henry noted
her state of mind, and wondered what it signified.

"I feel--people tell me,--I feel I ought perhaps to tell Leonetta----"

"You are wondering," Lord Henry interrupted, hoping to help her,
"whether it is your duty to enlighten the child at all concerning----"

She sat down beside him. "Yes, I am," she said quickly.

"Has she asked any questions?" Lord Henry demanded, allowing his hand
for a moment to hang motionless from his mesh of hair and glancing up at
the cornice.

"No, I scarcely expect that," Mrs. Delarayne replied. "But in case. You
see Cleopatra was so different. I never had any difficulty with her. Her
reserve was always so rigid, I would have trusted her as a _cantiniere_
in a barracks of Zouaves. I never spoke a word about anything to
Cleopatra. But Leonetta!"

"Yes, I see. You think Leonetta different?"

"What ought I to do? Do help me! Some say this and some say that. Some
say that a mother should speak; some say that they never did, and they
don't see why I should. My sister, Miss Mallowcoid, you know, says I
ought to."

Lord Henry gave vent to an expletive of contempt.

"I'll do what you say;--only what you say," said the harassed matron,
resting a hand on his.

"You should begin, my dear lady," Lord Henry replied, "by utterly
distrusting all the nonsense the modern world says on this subject."

"But I do,--I don't! I mean, I pay no heed to what anybody says but
you."

A shadow from the Inner Light passed across Lord Henry's mind; but that,
he rightly imagined, was the widow's last little fortress against him.

"The bond that unites parent to child is a very precious one," Lord
Henry continued. "It is, however, as brittle as it is precious. A
trifle will snap it. Now there is one aspect of the relationship between
parent and child, the physical aspect, the physical relation, which lies
beneath a sort of sacred seal: it is deliberately never fully realised;
it does not require to be fully realised, particularly by the child----"

Mrs. Delarayne nodded quickly and smiled.

"Think of the havoc you may create, through yourself breaking this seal
by calling this delicate aspect into prominence, by discussing with your
child all those matters which, as between you and her, by virtue of your
relationship, are a closed book!"

"Yes, I see, I see," cried the widow quickly. "My feelings, my
instincts, were always against it from the very start, and I see now
that I was right."

"The modern world is immensely stupid; few of us know how immensely
stupid it is. Everything that modern thought expresses, on this subject,
particularly, you must feel sure therefore is utterly and radically
absurd. You cannot afford to weaken the precious bond that unites you to
your children; therefore do not attempt this business."

"Yes, I see. Yes, you are right. I feel you are right."

"It can only lead to the most acute embarrassment as between parent and
child,--however well it is done;--and you would do it admirably, I
know. Unfortunately, when one is embarrassed one is not at one's best
for understanding. Consequently the whole proceeding, besides being
dangerous, would be utterly futile."

Mrs. Delarayne pressed his hand. "It is at times like these," she burst
out a little tearfully, "that I think of you going to China, and all
that."

He rose.

"One minute," she said, turning eyes glistening with tears pleadingly
upon him. "You have not told me what to do."

"The natural and proper thing," he replied, "is to keep her well in hand
and then to trust her to her husband. The good husband is the best
hierophant."

"Yes, I understand," said Mrs. Delarayne rising also.

"They master these things better on the Continent than we do in
England," Lord Henry continued. "The young girl is carefully supervised,
scrupulously watched, and a good husband is entrusted with the rest.
That is by far the best."

"Yes," Mrs. Delarayne exclaimed, laughing in her old way for the first
time that afternoon, "but then, you see, they happen to have the
Continental husband to whom they can entrust the matter."

"True," Lord Henry replied. "Never mind. We must try to find her someone
who is as like a Continental husband as possible."

"St. Maur is a most fascinating boy," Mrs. Delarayne observed.

"Ah--hands off Aubrey, at least for the present. He's not ripe yet,"
said Lord Henry; and in a moment he was gone.




CHAPTER VII


A day or two later,--that is to say on the Saturday before Sir Joseph's
evening At Home in honour of Leonetta's homecoming,--Mrs. Delarayne
herself gave a dinner party, to which a few of her more intimate friends
were invited. Sir Joseph, of course, was among the guests, as were also
Denis and Guy Tyrrell. For some reason, into which she made no effort to
enquire, however, Mrs. Delarayne did not ask Lord Henry.

On the afternoon of the day in question, Leonetta, after her tea,
ensconced herself in the library and wrote the following letter to her
friend, Vanessa Vollenberg:

     "My Sweetheart,

     "It is Saturday and we are having a dinner party this
     evening, and I'm feeling awfully excited. Things are
     particularly slow here on the whole. I have scarcely spoken
     to a man since I addressed my porter at King's Cross four
     days ago. Isn't it rank? What mother and my sister Cleo do
     with their men I can't imagine, unless they think they are
     better out of harm's way. I know they know heaps of men.

     "By the way, talking of keeping out of harm's way, you
     remember you used to tell me at school that if I looked long
     enough at a young man with my dark eyes he would get
     sunburnt,--well, the day before yesterday a very funny thing
     happened. I was in the train with poor old Cleo (she's grown
     a most appalling old maid, by-the-bye), and there was a
     young man opposite who really looked a most awful devil. You
     know, he had those wicked eyes that go up at their outside
     corners like tigers'. He was heavenly. I simply couldn't
     take my eyes off him, and he kept looking at me. Cleo said
     very stuffily (she's always stuffy with me), 'Don't stare!'
     and he must have overheard, because he turned away, and
     there was a most devilish curl on his lips. If we hadn't got
     out at the next station, I'm sure we should have ended by
     smiling at each other quite openly. You know, he was one of
     the sort who one guesses has got good teeth before they even
     open their mouths.

     "Some men are coming this evening, thank God! But what
     they'll be like Heaven alone knows! I have hopes though,
     because mother always did have a sweet tooth for rather nice
     men, you see father was tremendously attractive. But what
     poor Auntie Cleo's choice will be I daren't think. One of
     the men is supposed to be earmarked for her.

     "Oh, and now listen. Peachy--that's my mother--insists upon
     your coming to our place at Brineweald for at least three
     weeks during the summer holidays. Oh, Nessy, my heart's
     love!--what a joy to see you again! So you will come, won't
     you? I told Peachy you could play a good game of tennis, and
     now she insists on your coming. So mind, no refusal. You
     must tell your dear mother she simply must spare you, and
     there's an end of it.

     "Thank you a billion trillion times for your absolutely
     divine letter. But I cannot write about all you say, I'm too
     excited as it is. When can you come? Then we can talk. Oh
     for another long talk with my wise and wicked Nessy.

     "Now listen! We leave for Brineweald in about ten days. Can
     you join us in about a fortnight from now? We might have
     gone at once, but I must have some clothes. And it seems to
     me that it will take all my time to get them before we
     start.

     "Oh, and now another thing (and this is very, _very_ secret,
     so secret that you must _swear_ you'll tear up this letter
     _at once_, the moment you have read it). You remember you
     and the other girls used to laugh at me at school about my
     brown neck and my brown eyelids, and my brownish knuckles.
     You used to chaff me and tell me it was because I hadn't
     washed. Well, you were all wrong, and I told you at the time
     you were all wrong. I have just been reading a most
     interesting book, all about these things (but you must never
     let Peachy know about it, as it is one of father's and I
     have been reading it on the sly). Remember you've sworn to
     tear this letter up. In any case it explains all about my
     brown neck and my brown eyelids and knuckles. It calls it
     'Pigmentation'--the '_pigmentation of the mature virgin_.'
     Isn't it interesting? So you see it was quite natural; and I
     can't help it; on the contrary it shows I am very vigorous.
     So you were all wrong--even Miss Butterworth who said I was
     afraid of cold water.

     "But I'll forgive everything to my sweet Nessy if only, _if
     only_ she will come to the bosom of her love at Brineweald.

                 "With crates of kisses,

                                "Yours ever,

                                        "LEO."

     "P.S. Excuse this short scribble. I must go to dress. Tell
     Charlie that if he has not kissed that horrid Dewlap girl
     yet, I send him a nice long kiss. By-the-bye, he's such a
     blind fool, he won't have noticed she bites her nails. _Do_
     tell him!

                                    "Yours LEO."

This letter written, sealed, and stamped, Leonetta put on a
tam-o'-shanter, and ran to the post with it; whereupon hurrying
upstairs, she burst violently into her mother's bedroom, to announce
what she had done. It was half-past six and her mother was dressing.

Now Mrs. Delarayne's toilet, as may be imagined, was an unusually
elaborate and skilful business. Every corner of her large bedroom seemed
to offer its contribution towards the final effect. The bed, the chairs,
and even the mantelpiece participated in the process, while cupboard and
wardrobe doors stood ominously open.

Mrs. Delarayne's maid Wilmott,--silent, grave, preoccupied and
efficient,--moved hither and thither, calmly but quickly, her head
discreetly bowed, her voice more subdued than at ordinary times, as if
she were officiating at a rite; and gradually, very gradually, the
business proceeded.

Facing a corner of the bedroom, with a large window to her left, Mrs.
Delarayne sat before her dressing-table, upon which, towering above the
forest of bottles, brushes, boxes, and other paraphernalia, stood a
large triple mirror, which enabled the elegant widow to get three
different aspects of her handsome face at the same time.

The expression upon Mrs. Delarayne's face when she peered into this
formidable reflector of her own image was scarcely self-complacent or
serene. It was rather studious, anxious, critical, almost fierce, like
that one would expect to find on the face of an ancient alchemist
contemplating an alembic of precious compounds. Year in, year out, ever
since her gradually waning youth had begun to add ever fresh
complications to her once rapid and easy toilet, Mrs. Delarayne had
faced herself with this determined and defiant expression on her
features, resolved to overcome every difficulty and every undesirable
innovation of time. Slowly the complex equipment had grown up. Now it
was so extensive, that it required all the dexterity and knowledge that
habit alone can impart, in order to master and understand its
multitudinous intricacies.

In this mirror, then, when her expression was at its fiercest in
intentness and concentration, she saw her daughter enter the room behind
her, and for an instant a spasmodic frown darkened her already lowering
brow.

"I cannot see you now, you know that, Leo darling," she hastened to
exclaim as sweetly as possible, while her daughter was still on the
threshold.

"All right, Peachy,--I shan't keep you a moment."

A slight flush crept up the mother's neck just below her ears,--this was
a thing Cleo had too much delicacy to do. Cleo never disturbed her while
she was dressing,--and she straightway stopped all operations and laid
her hands resignedly in her lap.

"Well, be quick," she said, with ill-concealed irritation. "What is it?"

In the glass she could see her daughter's quick and intelligent eyes
wandering all about her with the deepest interest, and resting here and
there as if more than usually absorbed, and she frowned again.

Meanwhile, Leonetta, who had not seen her mother's bedroom, particularly
the dressing-table, at such a busy crisis for many years, and who, when
she had seen it in the past had been too young to grasp its full
meaning, was too eagerly engaged scanning its imposing array of creams,
scents, powders, oils, salves, cosmetics, tresses of hair, and other
"aids," to be able to remember what she had come for, and simply stood
there like one fascinated and spellbound.

"Quick, child! can't you see you're wasting my time?" her mother
ejaculated irascibly. "Besides, you've got to get dressed too!"

This was an unfortunate remark. It brought out more vividly than was
necessary, the immense contrast between her own and her daughter's
toilet, and before she had time to think, Leonetta had replied.

"Oh, I've got heaps of time. It doesn't take me a moment. I'll race you
easily, even now."

Then a thought entered Leonetta's mind, which, to her credit be it said,
she resisted at first, but which was too overpowering to be completely
banished. It struck her for a moment that there was something faintly
comical, almost pathetically ridiculous, in this elderly matron taking
such laborious and elaborate pains to make herself attractive. Try as
she might, Leonetta, from her angle of vision of seventeen years, could
not repress the question: "What was it all for? What was the good of it
all? Who could possibly care? Was the end commensurate with the
exhaustive and exhausting means?" As the fierce light from the window
beat down upon her mother's face, it seemed so old, so wondrously old,
that all the formidable machinery of beautification about the room
struck a chord of compassion in the flapper's breast, which was,
however, at once compounded with humour in her mind. And then she could
control herself no longer, and was forced to smile,--one of those broad
mirthful smiles that are parlously near a laugh. Feeling, however, that
her mood was one of derision, she turned quickly aside,--but not soon
enough successfully to evade her mother's observant scrutiny.

Mrs. Delarayne was too well aware of the awkward possibilities of the
situation, and moreover too acutely sensitive generally, to be in any
doubt as to the meaning of her younger daughter's amusement, and the
flush beneath her ears spread to her cheeks. Simultaneously, however,
her handsome face seemed suddenly to grow wonderfully stern and
composed, and her eyes flashed with the fire which every woman seems to
hold in reserve for an anti-feminine attack.

"Wilmott," she said quietly, "will you leave the room a moment? I'll
ring when I want you."

Without even turning round to satisfy her curiosity, the well-trained
servant dropped on to the corner of the bed the things she held in her
hands, and was gone.

For some unaccountable reason Leonetta at the same time felt a tremor of
apprehension pass slowly over her, and her hands grew icily cold. She
could feel her mother's masterful will in the atmosphere of the room,
and glancing tremulously askance at the widow's unfinished coiffure,
every line of which seemed crisp with power, walked over to the
hearth-rug.

Mrs. Delarayne's redness had now vanished. She was if anything a little
pale, and she turned to face her daughter.

"I am not angry, Leo," she began with terrifying suavity, "but I felt I
really could not explain all these things to you,"--she waved a hand
over the mass of articles displayed on the dressing-table,-- "in front
of Wilmott. You see, servants have to take these things for granted
without explanation."

Leonetta felt her ears beginning to burn furiously. Her mother could be
terrible.

"Yes, you see now," continued the widow, "how worrying and how difficult
are the means which I have to use to make myself presentable. Age is a
tiresome thing, is it not? It is so much more simple when one is young."

The invincible "Warrior" smiled kindly, and saw that tears were
gathering in her daughter's eyes.

"Would you perhaps like me to go through these things with you, and
explain them to you one by one?" she continued. "I have had to learn it
all myself. I might save you a good many pitfalls in the remote future."

Leonetta's throat was dry, and her lips were parched.

"No, thank you," she replied hoarsely, and she made quickly towards the
door.

"You have not told me what you wanted to say," said her mother
playfully.

"I'll tell you later on," rejoined the girl in broken tones.

"Then will you please ring for Wilmott?" said Mrs. Delarayne, turning
calmly to face her mirror again.

And after savagely pressing the bell, the flapper vanished.

With her eyes blinded by stinging tears, and feeling very much more
maddened by regret than by mortification, Leonetta fled to her room. She
was not only staggered, she was also thoroughly ashamed. A boy suddenly
butted by a lamb, which he had believed he might torment with impunity,
could not have felt more astonished. A convert brought face to face with
the livid wounds which, in her days of unbelief, she had inflicted upon
a Christian martyr could not have felt more deeply dejected and
penitent. Like a flash, an old emotion of childhood had filled her
breast; an old emotion that seemed only to have gathered strength in the
intervening years,--that blind, unthinking and dependent love of the
infant for its mother.

Should she go back and throw herself at the wonderful woman's knees?
Should she set out her plea for forgiveness in the folds of her mother's
dress as she had done as a baby? No, Wilmott would be there,--Wilmott
and everything besides! Moreover,--she looked in the glass,--her face
was distraught, her ears flared, her eyes still smarted horribly. Even
if Wilmott were dismissed as before, the girl would guess something.

Slowly she proceeded with her dressing, and, as she did so, a certain
vague delicacy of feeling, a sort of secret reverence for her brave
youth-loving mother downstairs, kept her from glancing too frequently in
the glass. The contrast now, instead of elating her, simply accentuated
her reminiscence of guilt. The very speed with which she adjusted her
hair and made it "presentable," as her mother had expressed it, brought
back the cruel memory of what had happened only a few minutes
previously.

In being thus affected by Mrs. Delarayne's able and perfectly relentless
handling of a difficult situation; in feeling her love for her mother
intensified backwards, so to speak, to the degree it had attained in
infancy, as the result of the incident, Leonetta showed not only that
she was worthy of her incomparable mother, but also that she had
survived less unimpaired, than some might have thought, the questionable
blessings of a finishing education.

Mrs. Delarayne who, without being truculently triumphant, was
nevertheless mildly conscious of having scored a valuable and highly
desirable point, repaired to the drawing-room twenty minutes later in a
mood admirably suited to giving her guests a warm and hearty welcome.

Cleopatra was the first to join her. Each woman honestly thought that
she had rarely seen the other look quite so beautiful, and the comments
that were exchanged were as sincere as they were flattering.

Mrs. Delarayne was too loyal to betray one sister to the other, so she
did not refer to the incident in her bedroom. Occasionally, however,
thoughts of it would make her glance a little anxiously in the direction
of the door, and as she did so, she fervently hoped that the lesson she
had administered to her younger daughter had not been too severe.

"I wonder what Baby can be doing all this time!" Cleopatra exclaimed at
last.

"I'll go and see, I think," said Mrs. Delarayne, lifting her dress just
slightly in front, and making towards the door.

"No, Edith," her daughter exclaimed, rising quickly. "I'll go. I cannot
have you making yourself hot by climbing all those stairs. Please let me
go!"

Mrs. Delarayne's wiry arm braced itself as her hand clasped the handle
of the door. "I think I'd better go," she replied.

For the first time Cleopatra began to suspect that something had
happened. She knew the relations existing between Leonetta and her
mother, but as the latter had always been so surprisingly patient and
long-suffering, she was very far from suspecting what had actually
occurred.

Their hesitation was cut short for them by the arrival of the first
guest, Sir Joseph Bullion, who, a moment later, was followed by Denis
Malster, Guy Tyrrell, Agatha Fearwell and her brother Stephen (friends
of Cleopatra's), and Miss Mallowcoid.

The last to enter the drawing-room was Leonetta. She had evidently
dreaded encountering her mother and sister alone, and she had purposely
waited till she heard the guests arrive before coming down. Although to
those who knew her there were certain unusual signs of demurity in her
expression and demeanour in the early part of the evening, she presented
a dramatically beautiful appearance, and the sober reserve of her mood
if anything enhanced this effect, by lending it the additional charm of
mystery and inscrutableness.

Cleopatra was a little puzzled. Never had she expected that Leo would
behave in this way, particularly in the presence of young men, and her
feeling towards her sister underwent a momentary revulsion. She noticed
that Denis scarcely took his eyes off her sister; but she also observed
that Leo hardly ever responded, and simply talked quietly and demurely
on to Guy Tyrrell or Stephen Fearwell. She could not understand, nor did
her deepest wishes allow her to suspect, that her sister's delightfully
sober mood was only a transient one.

During the dinner a slight diversion was created by Leonetta's
addressing her parent as "Mother." But the poor child was so confused
when she realised what she had done, and particularly when she thought
of why she had done it, that everybody except Miss Mallowcoid
endeavoured to ease the situation by being tremendously voluble.

After what had occurred between herself and her mother, the cold and
distant appellation "Edith" did not spring naturally or spontaneously to
Leonetta's lips. On the other hand "Peachy" seemed to belong to another
and previous existence. She did not wish her mother to suspect,
however, that she had used the term "mother" with deliberate intent to
annoy.

"That's right, my child," cried Miss Mallowcoid. "It is really
refreshing to hear one of you girls, at least, addressing your mother in
the usual and proper fashion!"

Leonetta with her cheeks ablaze, glared at her aunt menacingly.

"Well, I don't like it," she blurted out. "It was a slip of the tongue.
Cleo and I much prefer the name Edith."

She spoke sharply and even rudely, seeing that it was her aunt she was
addressing, but Mrs. Delarayne, who was beginning to understand the
penitential spirit she was in, smiled kindly at her notwithstanding.

"I always look upon them as three sisters," Sir Joseph exclaimed
somewhat laboriously, "whatever they call one another."

Miss Mallowcoid scoffed, and Mrs. Delarayne patted his hand
persuasively. "You get on with your dinner," she said playfully.

Meanwhile Miss Mallowcoid had not taken her vindictive eyes off her
younger niece, and the latter in sheer desperation plunged into an
animated but very perfunctory conversation with her right-hand
neighbour, Guy Tyrrell.

It is time that this young man should be described. He was the type
usually called healthy and "clean-minded." He loved all sports and all
kinds of exercise, particularly walking, and he could talk about these
out-of-door occupations fairly amusingly. He was fair, blue-eyed,
clean-shaven, and healthy-looking, and he believed in the possibility of
being a "pal" to a girl,--particularly if she happened to be a flapper.
His age was twenty-seven.

It is not generally understood what precisely is implied by the so-called
healthy "clean-minded" unmarried Englishman of twenty-seven, or
thereabouts. As a rule the epithet "clean-minded" sums up not merely a
mental condition, but a method of life. It signifies that the young man to
whom it may justly be applied is either a master, or at least a lover, of
games, that his outlook is what is known as "breezy," that he observes the
rules of cricket in every relation to his fellow creatures, and that he is
capable of enduring defeat or success with the same impassable calm and
good-nature. Now it would be absurd to deny that here we have a very
imposing catalogue of highly desirable characteristics; it would, however,
be equally absurd to claim that the person in whom they are all happily
combined, necessarily displays, side by side with his mastery of games and
his deep understanding of cricket in particular, that mastery or
understanding of the mysteries of life, that virtuosity in the art of life,
which would constitute him a desirable mate. There is a _savoir faire_,
there are problems and intricacies in life, which no degree of familiarity
with cricket, no vast fund of experience in the football field, can help a
man to master; and it is even questionable whether a young man's ultimate
destiny as a husband and a father, far from being assisted, is not even
seriously complicated by the extent to which he must have specialised in
games and sports in order to earn for himself the whiteflower of
"clean-mindedness." It is the wives of such men who are in a position to
throw the most light on this question. There is no doubt that they
frequently have a tale to tell; but the best among them are naturally
disinclined to admit the very serious reasons they may have for disliking
the silver trophies that adorn their homes.

As the dinner wore on, animation waxed greater; Sir Joseph dropped an
ever-increasing number of aspirates, and Leonetta was actually heard to
laugh quite merrily.

Cleopatra still noticed that Denis was very much interested in her, and
also observed that, from time to time, Leonetta now responded to his
attentive scrutiny.

The conversation turned on gymnastics. Denis, Guy, and Leonetta all
seemed to be talking at once; it was a subject that Cleopatra did not
know much about.

"We always had three quarters of an hour's gym a day," said Leonetta,
looking straight at Denis.

He laughed. "Oh, well," he exclaimed, "you have done me. I haven't
touched parallel bars or a trapeze for ten years."

"Neither have I," Guy added.

Thereupon Leonetta allowed Guy to feel the muscles of her arm.

"Iron!" he ejaculated, while Cleopatra looked on with just a little
surprise.

"You might at least say steel," she interjected, trying to sustain her
role as one of the juveniles at table.

In the midst of a very prosy conversation with Sir Joseph and Miss
Mallowcoid, Mrs. Delarayne found opportunities enough to watch the
younger people, and she was not a little relieved to see the cloud
gradually lifting from Leonetta's brow. She knew that in the
circumstances she had not been too hard, and gathered from a hundred
different signs that her relationship to her younger daughter had been
materially improved by what had occurred.

Later on in the drawing-room, before the men arrived, however, Leonetta
seemed to suffer a relapse into her former mood of excessive sobriety,
and it was then that Miss Mallowcoid beckoned her niece to her.

"I think you were unnecessarily cross with me at dinner," Mrs. Delarayne
overheard her sister saying.

Leonetta pouted, and with an air of utter indifference turned to
Cleopatra.

"I think Guy Tyrrell rather tame, don't you? It was most awful uphill
work talking to him all through dinner."

Cleopatra held up a finger admonishingly. "You seemed to be talking
animatedly enough," she said.

"Yes," Leonetta began, "all about photography, walking tours, and things
that don't matter--" Then she felt Miss Mallowcoid's huge cold hand on
her arm.

"Leonetta dear, I said something to you a moment ago," lisped the
elderly spinster. And again Mrs. Delarayne looked up to try to catch her
daughter's reply.

"I'm sorry, Aunt Bella," said the girl, "but really one does not usually
expect to be congratulated on a slip of the tongue, and your--" she
burst out laughing.

Mrs. Delarayne thereupon resumed her conversation with Agatha Fearwell,
as she was now satisfied that Leonetta was both thoroughly recovered and
satisfactorily reformed.

"But I did not congratulate you, I--" her aunt persisted.

"Oh, well," Leonetta interrupted, "it really isn't worth discussing."

In any case it was not discussed, for at this juncture the men appeared.

They distributed themselves anything but haphazardly; Sir Joseph, for
instance, seating himself by the side of his hostess; Denis Malster
between Leonetta and her sister, and Guy and Stephen, as their
diffidence suggested, as remotely as possible from the younger women of
the party.

"Now, Leonetta," Sir Joseph began, "tell us something about your school
life. You are the only one amongst us who has just come from a strange
world."

Leonetta laughed. "Yes, a very strange world," she exclaimed.

Sir Joseph laughed too at what he conceived to be a most whimsical
suggestion.

"And did you 'ave nice teachers?" he pursued.

"Miss Tomlinson, the history mistress was my favourite," replied the
girl.

Denis remarked that he did not know they taught history at a school of
Domesticity.

"Yes, you see," Leonetta replied, "the history of the subject. Cookery
since the dawn of civilisation, or something desperate like that."

"Was she nice?" Sir Joseph enquired.

"I thought so," answered the girl, "though she wasn't beautiful. You
know, she had that sort of very long chin that you feel you ought to
shake hands with."

Sir Joseph laughed and made all kinds of grimaces at Mrs. Delarayne,
intended to convey that Leonetta was indeed a chip of the old block.

"That's unkind," said Miss Mallowcoid.

Denis Malster threw out his legs and clasped his hands at the back of
his head preparatory to making a speech.

"The heartlessness of flappers!" he murmured. "This is indeed a subject
worthy of elaboration. Why is the flapper usually heartless?"

Mrs. Delarayne was quick to perceive the unpleasant possibilities of
developing such a theme, particularly in view of what had happened
earlier in the evening, and, seeking to save Leonetta's feelings, she
valiantly tried to change the subject.

"Well, in any case," she said, addressing Leonetta, "you are none the
worse for it, my dear. Two years ago you were such a tomboy you could
scarcely get out of the door without chipping a piece off each hip; and
now----"

"Yes, now she chips pieces off other people," interposed Miss
Mallowcoid.

Leonetta, however, was not attending. Her eyes were for the moment
fastened on Denis Malster. He had known how to say just the very thing
to provoke her interest. He had as much as declared that she was
heartless. He,--a man,--had said this. It was like a challenge. She, who
felt all heart, or what the world calls "heart," was strangely moved.
How could he say such a thing? This was the last remark she would have
expected from any man. Her curiosity was kindled, and with it her
vanity.

She noticed, as her sister had noticed before her, that he was
efficient, well-groomed, smart of speech, passably good-looking,
independent at least in bearing, hard, at least in appearance, and
possessed of a certain gift of irony that could act like a lash.

She began to think more highly of him; in fact the recollection of his
last remark actually piqued her now she thought of it again. At last,
for sheer decency, she had to look away from him, and as she did so,
she observed that Cleopatra averted her eyes from her.

There was a stir in the company. Agatha Fearwell was going to sing, and
Miss Mallowcoid went to the piano.

The performance was not above the usual standard of such amateur
efforts, and at the end of it the singer was vouchsafed the usual
perfunctory plaudits.

Thereupon Sir Joseph requested a song from Cleopatra. This apparently
necessitated a long search in the music cabinet during which all the
young people rose from their seats. At last a song was found; it was a
sort of French folk-song entitled _Les Epouseuses du Berry_.

As Cleopatra turned to join her aunt at the piano, however, a spectacle
met her eyes which, innocent as it appeared, was nevertheless fatal to
her composure.

Denis Malster and Leonetta, facing each other in a far corner of the
room, with heads so close that they almost touched, and with hands
tightly clasped, were playing the old, old game of trying the strength
of each other's wrists, each endeavouring to force the other to kneel.

It was harmless enough,--simply one of those very transparent and very
early attempts that are almost unconsciously made by two young people of
opposite sexes, to become decently and interestingly in close touch with
each other.

Cleopatra's first feeling was one of surprise at Leonetta's being so
wonderfully resourceful in engaging the attention of men. When, however,
she observed the details of the contest,--the closely gripped hands, the
fingers intertwined, the palms now meeting, now parting, and the two
smiling faces, Denis Malster's rather attractive figure, appearing to
tremendous advantage now, she could not quite see why,--a feeling of
uncontrollable alarm took possession of her, and she spread her music
with some agitation before her aunt.

Miss Mallowcoid played the opening bars, and still the contest in the far
corner did not stop. Denis was not even aware that she--Cleopatra--was
about to sing.

At last Mrs. Delarayne, who had not been blind to what was taking place,
felt she must interfere. Cleopatra's first note was already overdue.

"Leo, Leo, my dear," she cried, "your sister is going to sing to us."

Leonetta turned round, said she was sorry, released her hands, and she
and Denis joined the seated group at some distance from the piano.

The incident, however, was not over yet; for, just as her sister sang
her first note, Leonetta, her eyes sparkling with excitement, and her
hands discoloured by the struggle, ejaculated loud enough for everyone
to hear, "Denis, you're a fibber. Your hands are like iron too!"

Mrs. Delarayne put a finger to her lips, but it was too late. There was
a sound of music being roughly folded up, and Cleopatra turned away
from the piano.

"If you're all going to talk," she said, looking a little pale, "it's no
use my singing, is it? I can wait a moment."

"Sorry, old girl," Leonetta cried. "It was only me. I'm dumb now."

Mrs. Delarayne had risen and was urging her elder daughter back to the
piano. Sir Joseph was also trying his hand at persuasion, and when Miss
Mallowcoid and Agatha added their prayers to the rest, Cleopatra at last
spread her music out again, and the song began.

Those, however, who know the swing and gaiety of _Les Epouseuses du
Berry_, will hardly require to be told how hopeless was the effect of it
when sung by a voice which, owing to recent and unabated vexation, was
continually on the verge of tears. Nothing, perhaps, is more thoroughly
tragic than a really lively melody intoned by a voice quavering with
emotion, and even Sir Joseph, who did not understand a word of the song,
was deeply grateful when it was all over.

Mrs. Delarayne made determined efforts at restoring the natural and
spontaneous good cheer which the party appeared to have lost, but her
exertions were only partially successful, and although Agatha Fearwell
and Cleopatra sang other songs, the recollection of that tragico-comic
_Les Epouseuses du Berry_ had evidently sunk too deeply to be removed.

That night, as Cleopatra was taking leave of her mother, in the latter's
bedroom, she lingered a little at the door.

"What is it, my darling?" Mrs. Delarayne demanded. "Do you want to ask
me something?"

"Yes, Edith," Cleopatra replied slowly, looking down at the handle she
was holding. "I am perfectly prepared to admit that Leo did not perhaps
intend to be offensive over my song, although, of course, as you know
she ruined the whole thing; but anyhow, do you think that she has any
right, so soon after meeting him, to call Mr. Malster 'Denis'? Isn't it
rather bad form?"

Mrs. Delarayne sighed. "Very bad form, my dear, very bad form," she
replied. "Of course, I admit, it's very bad form. But for all we know,
he may have asked her to do it. You see, both you and I call him
'Denis,' and I suppose he thought it would sound odd if Leo did not
also."

Still Cleopatra lingered. She wanted to say more, and Mrs. Delarayne
divined that she wanted to say more. The words, however, were hard to
find, and, at last, bidding her mother "Good-night," she departed only
half comforted.




CHAPTER VIII


Lord Henry felt he had done his best for England, and now his mind
turned covetously towards a country and a clime where his best promised
to yield richer and better fruit. He had mended society's nervous wrecks
so long that he had come to look upon the whole modern world as a
machine too hopelessly out of gear to repay his skilful efforts.

"People who never sit down to a meal with an appetite," he would say,
"people whose bodies are as surcharged as their houses with superfluous
loot, cannot hope to be well, physically or spiritually. We live on an
island huddled together, and yet we grow every day further apart. For
the acquisition of superfluous loot means incessant strife. The worst
sign of the times is that abstract terms no longer mean the same thing
to any two people. Individualism is thus destroying even the value of
language. Because where each man has his individual view a common
language itself becomes an impossibility. The effort of the Middle Ages
was to convert Europe into a single nation. The effort of the modern or
'Muddle' Age, is to convert each single nation into a Europe. That is
why abstract terms are slowly losing their value as the current coin of
speech."

St. Maur had attached himself to Lord Henry as a kind of voluntary or
honorary secretary. He assisted his master where and when he could, and
felt that he was more than adequately repaid in the enormous amount he
learnt from him.

"Is there no remedy?" he demanded seriously on a day early in August,
when the prospect of losing his friend was weighing more heavily than
usual upon him. The two were sitting talking in the study of Lord
Henry's cottage which stood in a lane off the London road, about two
miles north of Ashbury, where his sanatorium was situated.

"There is a remedy, of course," replied Lord Henry. "It would consist in
uniting modern nations afresh by means of a powerful common culture. It
is only then that men can be guided and led, for it is only then that
they can understand what they are taught about life and humanity. In the
Middle Ages a common culture was so universal, that even the barriers of
nationality did not prevent men from understanding one another. Now
there is such a total lack of a uniform culture that men of the same
nation speak an unknown tongue to one another. That is the recipe for
stupidity."

"But cannot this new uniform culture be created?" St. Maur insisted.

"It would mean a great new religion," Lord Henry answered. "And we are
all too much exhausted for such a stupendous undertaking. New religions
depend in the first place upon the belief in great men, and where are
the great men of to-day? Only those whose coarse impudence has made them
forget their limitations start new religions nowadays. And look at the
result!"

"There are enough of them at all events," suggested St. Maur.

"Exactly,--their number is the best comment on their futility."

"But surely the effort, general as it is, shows that people agree with
you, and feel the need that you see and recognise?"

"Yes, but the arrogance with which they pretend to supply the need
themselves, is the best proof of how deeply they misunderstand the
gravity of their plight. Look at these Theosophists, Spiritualists, and
members of the Inner Light,--mere cliques, mere handfuls of uninspired
and uninspiring cranks. They'll never spread a uniform and unifying
culture. They cannot therefore make language once more a common currency
for thought."

Aubrey St. Maur had endeared himself to Lord Henry chiefly by the
inordinate beauty of his person, his exuberant health, and his modesty.
He was wealthy and the only son of a wealthy father. All the "loot" of
the de Porvilliers had come to him through his mother, and to Lord
Henry's surprise had failed to turn his head. On the contrary, it had if
anything filled him with a feeling of guilt, or perhaps that which is
most akin to guilt--obligation. And he had long wondered how best he
could discharge this obligation to the world. In Lord Henry's company he
had elected to find a solution to this problem.

But Lord Henry did not want the youth to join him on his journey to
China. The love the young nobleman still felt for his native country
bade him leave this promising member of it, if only as a forlorn hope,
to prove to Englishmen that here and there, at ever more distant
intervals, their blood was still capable of producing something that was
eminently desirable.

"You will succeed your father in the Upper House," he said to St. Maur
on this occasion, when the latter expressed the desire to become a pious
mandarin, "and you will, I trust, be an example of health and wisdom to
all. The faith in blood and lineage wants people like you. There is so
precious little to which it can be pinned nowadays."

"That's all very well," protested St. Maur. "But you are deserting the
battlefield, and leaving an unfledged pupil in charge. Is this nothing
to you? Are you incapable of becoming attached to anybody? Without
fishing for compliments, is it nothing to you to break our friendship in
this way?"

Lord Henry, who as usual was curling his mesh of hair with his fingers,
cast a sidelong glance full of meaning at his friend and smiled.

"My dear boy, if it hadn't been for you," he said, "I should not be
here now. Do you suppose it amuses me to investigate the unsavoury
details of every society lady's nervous affliction? Do you suppose I'm
flattered by such and such a Guardsman's encomiums when I have cured his
stammer, or his inability to proceed beyond the letter 'P' when writing
a letter?"

"What is your real purpose in going to China?" persisted the younger
man. "I shan't divulge. Can't you tell me?"

"In the first place, my dear boy," Lord Henry replied, "curiosity. I
honestly want to see how Chinamen have escaped the madness that is
overtaking Europe. Secondly, I have a heart, and I love my country, and
I cannot witness my country's decline. Thirdly, and chiefly,--but this
is a secret,--I feel that now it is the duty of all enlightened Western
Europeans, who have seen the madness of European civilisation, to hasten
to the last healthy spot on earth and to preach the Gospel of
Europophobia,--that is to say, to warn the wise East against our
criminal errors, and to save it from becoming infected by our diseases.
If the world is to be saved, a _cordon sanitaire_ must be established
round Europe and everything like Europe; for Europe has now become a
pestilence."

St. Maur who had been standing at the window with his back turned to his
friend swung suddenly round, his face illumined as if by an inspiration.

"By Jove," he cried, "that is an idea! That is indeed a crusade! I
hadn't thought of that!"

"It is the only beneficent direction in which I feel I can use my
powers," said Lord Henry gravely. "It is, if you will, my religion. I
feel I am called to be a missionary to the East, to preach the solemn
warning against Western civilisation."

"God!" St. Maur exclaimed, "that's an idea with which to fire a
generation. It is a new gospel; a new gospel of sin and the Devil."

"I assure you," Lord Henry rejoined, "the bulk of the men at my club
would not turn a hair at the suggestion. They would simply turn their
papers over, nod significantly at each other, and whisper, 'The fellow's
not all there.'"

At this moment Lord Henry's man, Fordham, entered the room.

"Yes?" his master grunted from the depths of his chair.

"A lady to see you, my lord," replied the man.

"I'm out."

"That's what I said, my lord."

"Well?"

"The lady said that was all nonsense; she 'ad called at the Sanatorium,
and they'd said you was 'ere."

"Then her name's Delarayne," said Lord Henry.

"Yes, that's it, my lord."

"Very well, then, show her up."

"That woman's a wonder," St. Maur exclaimed. "It is a boiling hot day;
at any moment there may be a storm; there was probably no fly at the
station,--there never is when I come,--and she must have walked the
whole of the two miles in the dust. She has an eye on you, my friend."

"Yes," said Lord Henry, "and by the time a woman has her eye on you, she
usually has her claws in you as well. You needn't go," he added, as he
noticed St. Maur preparing to leave. "But she's an admirable woman. Good
taste amounts almost to heroism in these women who battle with age until
their very last breath."

Mrs. Delarayne, if anything more regal and more youthful than ever, but
certainly showing signs of having taken violent exercise along a chalky
thoroughfare, stepped eagerly towards Lord Henry.

"My dear Lord Henry," she began, "so good of you to be in only to me.
But oh, I felt I must see you before leaving town."

She turned and shook hands with St. Maur, and Lord Henry moved an easy
chair in her direction.

"Oh, that's right; give me a chair, quick!" she gasped. "I'm
broken--broken in body and spirit."

Lord Henry asked the expected question.

"Only this," she said, "that my life soon won't be worth a moment's
purchase."

"You are tired," suggested her host. "You don't look after yourself."

"It isn't that," Mrs. Delarayne rejoined. "Nobody takes greater care of
themselves than I do. I go to bed every night at ten o'clock precisely,
and read until half-past two. What more can I do?"

Lord Henry blinked rapidly, and surveyed her with an air of deep
interest. "And you say you are leaving town?" he enquired.

"Yes, I'm taking my family to Brineweald, you know. It is my annual
penance, my yearly sacrificial offering to my children. It lasts just
six weeks. By the end of it, of course, I am at death's door; but I feel
that I can then face the remaining forty-six weeks of gross selfishness
with a clean conscience and a brazen face."

"Who's going?"

"Oh, the usual crowd,--my daughters, of course, a friend of theirs, a
young Jewess, and perhaps the Fearwell children. The men of the party
and my sister Bella will be lodged at Sir Joseph's place, Brineweald
Park."

"It sounds engaging enough," said St. Maur.

"Oh, most!" sighed Mrs. Delarayne. "Oh, you can't think what a happy
mother I'd be if only I had no children!"

Both men laughed, and Mrs. Delarayne who, ever since her arrival, had
been casting unmistakable glances at St. Maur, at last succeeded in
silently conveying her meaning to him.

"Well, I'm afraid I must be going downstairs," he said, "I've letters to
write."

She extended a hand with alacrity. "Oh, it looks as if I were driving
you away," she said.

St. Maur protested feebly against this truthful interpretation of his
proposed retreat, and withdrew.

Lord Henry took a seat opposite to his visitor, who was obviously as shy
as a schoolgirl in his presence, and surveyed her covertly.

"Have you come to tell me that you have abandoned that absurd Inner
Light?" he demanded playfully.

"No, indeed; why should I?" she rejoined with affected indignation.

"It is unpardonable," he murmured.

"Why unpardonable?"

"Had you been a Protestant in the past, it would at least have been
comprehensible," he said, "because any kind of absurdity is possible
after one has been a Protestant. What after all are all th

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