Part 15 (2/2)

”That's good! Men and women are seldom at one on such matters.”

Lady Sellingworth shot a glance at the man discussed and felt absurdly like a traitor.

Soon afterwards Sir Seymour's lunch party broke up.

In leaving the restaurant Lady Sellingworth pa.s.sed so close to the young man that her gown almost brushed against him. He looked up at her, and this time the meaning of his glance was unmistakable. It said: ”I want to know you. How can I get to know you?”

She went home feeling almost excited. On the hall table of her house she found a note from Rupert Louth asking her whether she would help ”little Bertha” by speaking up for her to a certain great dressmaker, who had apparently been informed of the Louths' shaky finances. Louth's obstinate reliance on her as a devoted friend of him and his disdainfully vulgar young wife began to irritate Lady Sellingworth almost beyond endurance. She took the letter up with her into the drawing-room, and sat down by the writing-table holding it in her hand.

It had come at a dangerous moment.

Louth's blindness now exasperated her, although she had desperately done her best to close his eyes to the real nature of her feeling for him and to the unexpressed intentions she had formed concerning him and had been forced to abandon. It was maddening to be tacitly rejected as a possible wife and to be enthusiastically claimed as a self-sacrificing friend.

Surely no woman born of woman could be expected to stand it. At that moment Lady Sellingworth began almost to hate Rupert Louth.

What a contrast there was between his gross misunderstanding of her and the brown man's understanding! Already she began to tell herself that this man who did not know her nevertheless in some subtle, almost occult, way had a clear understanding of her present need. He wanted sympathy--his eyes said that--but he had sympathy to give. She began to hate the controlling absurdities of civilization. All her wildness seemed to rise up and rush to the surface. How inhuman, how against nature it was, that two human beings who wished to know each other should be held back from such knowledge by mere convention, by the unwritten law of the solemn and formal introduction! A great happiness might lie in their intercourse, but conventionality solemnly and selfishly forbade it, unless they could find a common acquaintance to mumble a few unmeaning words over them. Mumbo-Jumbo! What a fantastic world of stupidly obedient puppets this world of London was! She said to herself that she hated it. Then she thought of her first widowhood and of her curious year in Paris.

There she might more easily have made the acquaintance of the unknown man in some Bohemian cafe, where people talked to each other casually, giving way to their natural impulses, drifting in and out as the whim took them, careless of the _convenances_ or actively despising them. In London, at any rate if one is English and cursed by being well known, one lives in a strait waist-coat. Lady Sellingworth felt the impossibility of speaking to a stranger without an introduction in spite of her secret wildness.

And if he spoke to her?

She remembered Sir Seymour's instant judgment on him. It had made her feel very angry at the time when it was delivered, but then she had not held any mental debate about it. She had simply been secretly up in arms against an attack on the man she was interested in. Now she thought about it more seriously.

Although she had never been able to love Sir Seymour, she esteemed him very highly and valued his friends.h.i.+p very much. She also respected his intellect and his character. He was not a petty man, but an honest, brave and far-seeing man of the world. Such a man's opinion was certainly worth something. One could not put it aside as if it were the opinion of a fool. And after a brief glance at the stranger Sir Seymour had unhesitatingly p.r.o.nounced him to be an outsider.

Was he an outsider?

As a rule Lady Sellingworth was swift in deciding what was the social status of a man. She could ”place” a man as quickly as any woman. But, honestly, she could not make up her mind about the stranger. Although he was so exceptionally good-looking, perhaps, he was not exactly distinguished looking. But she had known dukes and Cabinet Ministers who resembled farmers and butlers, young men of high rank who had the appearance of grooms or bookies. It was difficult to be sure about anyone without personal knowledge of him.

When she had first seen the young man in Bond Street it had certainly not occurred to her that there was anything common or shady in his appearance. And the d.u.c.h.ess of Wellingborough had not hinted that she held such an opinion about him. And surely women are quicker about such matters than men.

Lady Sellingworth decided that Seymour Portman was prejudiced. Old courtiers are apt to be prejudiced. Always mixing with the most distinguished men of their time, they acquire, perhaps too easily, a habit of looking down upon ordinary but quite respectable people.

Here Lady Sellingworth suddenly smiled. The adjective ”respectable”

certainly did not fit the Bond Street young man. He looked slightly exotic! That, no doubt, had set Sir Seymour against him. He was not of the usual type of club man. He ”intrigued” her terribly. As the d.u.c.h.ess of Wellingborough would have phrased it, she was ”crazy” to know him.

She even said to herself that she did not care whether he was on the shady side of the line or not. Abruptly a strong democratic feeling took possession of her. In the affections, in the pa.s.sions, differences of rank did not count.

Rupert Louth had married a Crouch!

Lady Sellingworth looked at his note which was still in her hand, and memories of the disdainful young beauty ”queening it”--that really was the only appropriate expression--”queening it” with vulgar gentility among the simple mannered, well-bred people to whom Louth belonged rose up in her mind. How terrible were those definite airs of being a lady!

How truly unspeakable were those august condescensions of the undeniable Crouch!

When Lady Sellingworth mused on them her sense of the equality before G.o.d of all human creatures decidedly weakened.

She wrote a brief letter to Louth declining to ”speak up” to the great dressmaker. ”Little Bertha” must manage without her aid. She made this quite clear, but she wrote very charmingly, and sent her love at the end to little Bertha. That done, almost violently she dismissed Louth and his wife from her mind and became democratic again!

Putting Louth and little Bertha aside, when it came to the affections and the pa.s.sions what could one be but just a human being? Rank did not count when the heart was awake. She felt intensely human just then. And she continued to feel so. Life was quickened for her by the presence in London of a stranger whom n.o.body knew. This might be a humiliating fact.

But how many facts connected with human beings if sternly considered are humiliating!

And n.o.body knew of her fact.

<script>