Part 26 (2/2)
”By-the-way, they tell me Ashe is a great man.”
She caught the note of incredulous contempt in his voice and laughed.
”They say he'll be in the cabinet directly.”
”And Lady Kitty, I understand, is a scandal to G.o.ds and men, and the most fas.h.i.+onable person in town?”
”Oh, not now,” said Mary. ”That was last year.”
”You mean people are tired of her?”
”Well, after a time, you know, a naughty child--”
”Becomes a bore. Is she a bore? I doubt; I very much doubt.”
”Go and see,” said Mary. ”When do you lunch there?”
”I think to-morrow. Shall I find you?”
”Oh no. I am not at all intimate with Lady Kitty.”
Cliffe's slight smile, as he followed her into the large drawing-room, died under his mustache. He divined at once the relation between the two, or thought he did.
As for Mary, she caught her last sight of Cliffe, standing bareheaded on the steps of the emba.s.sy, his lean distinction, his ugly good looks marking him out from the men around him. Then, as they drove away she was glad that the darkness hid her from Lady Tranmore. For suddenly she could not smile. She was filled with the perception that if Geoffrey Cliffe did not now ask her to marry him, life would utterly lose its savor, its carefully cherished and augmented savor, and youth would abandon her. At the same time she realized that she would have to make a fight of it, with every weapon she could muster.
IX
”Wasn't I expected?” said Darrell, with a chilly smile.
”Oh yes, sir--yes, sir!” said the Ashes' butler, as he looked distractedly round the drawing-room. ”I believe her ladys.h.i.+p will be in directly. Will you kindly take a seat?”
The man's air of resignation convinced Darrell that Lady Kitty had probably gone out without any orders to her servants, and had now forgotten all about her luncheon-party--a state of things to which the Hill Street household was, no doubt, well accustomed.
”I shall claim some lunch,” he thought to himself, ”whatever happens.
These young people want keeping in their place. Ah!”
For he had observed, placed on a small easel, the print of Madame de Longueville in costume, and he put up his eye-gla.s.s to look at it. He guessed at once that its appearance there was connected with the fancy ball which was now filling London with its fame, and he examined it with some closeness. ”Lady Kitty will make a stir in it--no doubt of that!”
he said to himself, as he turned away. ”She has the keenest _flair_ of them all for what produces an effect. None of the others can touch her--Mrs. Alcot--none of them!”
He was thinking of the other members of a certain group, at that time well known in London society--a group characterized chiefly by the beauty, extravagance, and audacity of the women belonging to it. It was by no means a group of mere fas.h.i.+onables. It contained a large amount of ability and accomplishment; some men of aristocratic family, who were also men of high character, with great futures before them; some persons from the literary or artistic world, who possessed, besides their literary or artistic gifts, a certain art of agreeable living, and some few others--especially young girls--admitted generally for some peculiar quality of beauty or manner outside the ordinary canons. Money was really presupposed by the group as a group. The life they belonged to was a life of the rich, the houses they met in were rich houses. But money as such had no power whatever to buy admission to their ranks; and the members of the group were at least as impatient of the claims of mere wealth as they were of those of mere virtue.
On the whole the group was an element of ferment and growth in the society that had produced it. Its impatience of convention and restraint, the exaltation of intellectual or artistic power which prevailed in it, and even the angry opposition excited by its pretensions and its exclusiveness, were all, perhaps, rather profitable than harmful at that moment of our social history. Old customs were much shaken; the new were shaping themselves, and this daring coterie of young and brilliant people, living in one another's houses, calling one another by their Christian names, setting a number of social rules at defiance, discussing books, making the fame of artists, and, now and then, influencing politics, were certainly helping to bring the new world to birth. Their foes called them ”The Archangels,” and they themselves had accepted the name with complacency.
Kitty, of course, was an Archangel, so was Mrs. Alcot. Cliffe had belonged to them before his travels began. Louis Harman was more or less of their tribe, and Lady Tranmore, though not herself an Archangel, entertained the set in London and in the country. Like various older women connected with the group, she was not of them, but she ”harbored”
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