presented to the 
 UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 SAN DIEGO 
 
 by 
 
 Mrs. Griff ing Bancroft
 
 A House Party * * * * * * 
 ******** By" Ouida" 
 
 Chicago and New York * * * 
 Rand, McNally & Company
 
 A HOUSE-PARTY 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 LADY USK'S STRANGE INVITATIONS. 
 
 IT is an August morning. It is an old English 
 manor-house. There is a breakfast-room hung with 
 old gilded leather of the times of the Stuarts ; it has 
 oak furniture of the same period ; it has leaded lat- 
 tices with stained glass in some of their frames, and 
 the motto of the house in old French, "J'ay bon 
 vouloir," emblazoned there with the crest of a heron 
 resting in a crown. Thence, windows open on to a 
 green, quaint, lovely garden, which was laid out by 
 Monsieur Beaumont when he planned the gardens of 
 Hampton Court. There are clipped yew-tree walks 
 and arbors and fantastic forms; there are stone ter- 
 races and steps like those of Haddon, and there are 
 peacocks which pace and perch upon them ; there are 
 beds full of all the flowers which blossomed in the 
 England of the Stuarts, and birds dart and butterflies 
 pass above them ; there are huge old trees, cedars,
 
 4 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 lime, hornbeam ; beyond the gardens there are the 
 woods and grassy lawns of the home park. 
 
 The place is called Surrenden Court, and is one of 
 the houses of George, Earl of Usk, his favorite house 
 in what pastoral people call autumn, and what he calls 
 the shooting season. 
 
 Lord Usk is a well-made man of fifty, with a good- 
 looking face, a little spoilt by a permanent expression 
 of irritability and impatience, which is due to the state 
 of his liver ; his eyes are good-tempered, his mouth is 
 querulous ; nature meant him for a very amiable man, 
 but the dinner-table has interfered with, and in a meas- 
 ure upset, the good intentions of nature : it very often 
 does. Dorothy, his wife, who is by birth a Fitz- 
 Charles, third daughter of the Duke of Derry, is a still 
 pretty woman of thirty-five or six, inclined to an em- 
 bonpoint which is the despair of herself and her maids ; 
 she has small features, a gay expression, and very in- 
 telligent eyes ; she does not look at all a great lady, 
 but she can be one when it is necessary. She prefers 
 those merrier moments in life in which it is not neces- 
 sary. She and Lord Usk, then Lord Surrenden, were 
 greatly in love when they married ; sixteen years have 
 gone by since then, and now it seems very odd to each 
 of them that they should ever have been so. They are 
 not, however, bad friends, and have even at the bottom 
 of their hearts a lasting regard for each other. This 
 is saying much, as times go. When they are alone
 
 STRANGE INVITATIONS. 5 
 
 they quarrel considerably ; but then they are so seldom 
 alone. They both consider this disputatiousness the 
 inevitable result of their respective relations. They 
 have three sons, very pretty boys and great pickles, 
 and two young and handsome daughters. The eldest 
 eon, Lord Surrenden, rejoices in the names of Victor 
 Albert Augustus George, and is generally known as 
 Boom. 
 
 They are now at breakfast in the garden-chamber ; 
 the china is old Chelsea, the silver is Queen Anne, the 
 roses are old-fashioned Jacqueminots and real cabbage 
 roses. There is a pleasant scent from flowers, coffee, 
 cigarettes, and newly-mown grass. There is a litter of 
 many papers on the floor. 
 
 There is yet a fortnight before the shooting begins ; 
 Lord Usk feels that those fifteen days will be intoler- 
 able ; he repents a fit of fright and economy in which 
 he has sold his great Scotch moors and deer-forest to 
 an American capitalist ; not having his own lands in 
 Scotland any longer, pride has kept him from accept- 
 ing any of the many invitations of his friends to go to 
 them there for the Twelfth ; but he has a keen dread 
 of the ensuing fifteen days without sport. 
 
 His wife has asked her own set ; but he hates her 
 set ; he does not much like his own ; there is only 
 Dulcia Waverley whom he does like, and Lady 
 Waverley will not come till the twentieth. He feels 
 bored, hipped, annoyed ; he would like to strangle the
 
 6 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 American who has bought Achnalorrie. Achnalorrie, 
 having gone irrevocably out of his hands, represents to 
 him for the time being the one absolutely to be desired 
 spot on earth. Good heavens ! he thinks, can he have 
 been such a fool as to sell it ? 
 
 When he was George Rochfort, a boy of much 
 promise going up to Oxford from Eton, he had a clever 
 brain, a love of classics, and much inclination to 
 scholarly pursuits ; but he gradually lost all these tastes 
 little by little, he could not very well have said how ; 
 and now he never hardly opens a book, and he has 
 drifted into that odd, English habit of only counting 
 time by the seasons for killing things. There is 
 nothing to kill just now except rabbits, which he 
 scorns, so he falls foul of his wife's list of people she 
 has invited, which is lying, temptingly provocative, of 
 course, on the breakfast-table, scribbled in pencil on a 
 sheet of note-paper. 
 
 "Always the same thing!" he says, as he glances 
 over it. " Always the very worst lot you could get 
 together, and there isn't one of the husbands or one of 
 the wives ! " 
 
 " Of course there isn't," says Lady TJsk, looking up 
 from a Society newspaper which told her that her 
 friends were all where they were not, and fitted all 
 the caps of scandal on to all the wrong heads, and yet 
 from some mysterious reason gave her amusement on 
 account of its very blunders.
 
 STRANGE INVITATIONS. 7 
 
 " I do think," he continues, " that nobody on earth 
 ever had such absolutely indecent house-parties as 
 yours ! " 
 
 " You always say these absurd things." 
 
 " I don't think they're absurd. Look at your list : 
 everybody asks that he may meet somebody whom he 
 shouldn't meet ! " 
 
 " What nonsense ! As if they didn't all meet every- 
 where every day, and as if it mattered ! " 
 
 " It does matter." 
 
 He has not been a moral man himself, but at fifty 
 he likes to faire la morale pour les autres. When we 
 are compelled to relinquish cakes and ale ourselves, 
 we begin honestly to believe them indigestible for 
 every body ; why should they be sold, or be made, at 
 all? 
 
 " It does matter," he repeats. " Your people are 
 too larky, much too larky. You grow worse every 
 year. You don't care a straw what's said about 'em so 
 long as they please you, and you let 'em carry on till 
 there's the devil to pay." 
 
 " They pay him, I don't ; and they like it." 
 
 " I know they like it, but I don't choose you should 
 give 'em opportunity for it." 
 
 " Oh, nonsense ! " 
 
 "Not nonsense at all. This house is a kind of 
 Agapemone, a sort of Orleans Club." 
 
 " You ought not to be bored ia it, then."
 
 8 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 " One is always bored at one's own place. I tell you 
 I don't like your people. You ask everybody who 
 wants to meet somebody else ; and it's never respect- 
 able. It's a joke at the clubs. Jack's always saying to 
 his Jill, ' We'll get Lady Usk to ask us together,' and 
 they do. I say it's indecent." 
 
 " But, my dear, if Jack sulks without his Jill, and if 
 Jill's in bad form without Jack, one must ask them to- 
 gether. I want people to like me and to enjoy them- 
 selves." 
 
 "Enjoy themselves! That means flirting till all's 
 blue with somebody you'd hate if you'd married 
 her." 
 
 " What does that matter, so long as they're 
 amused ? " 
 
 " What an immoral woman you are, Dolly ! To 
 hear you " 
 
 " I only mean that I don't think it matters ; you 
 know it doesn't matter; everybody's always doing 
 
 it." 
 
 " If you'd only ask some of the women's husbands, 
 
 some of the men's wives " 
 
 " I cofcldn't do that, dear. I want people to like my 
 house ! " 
 
 " Just as I say you're so immoral." 
 
 " No, I'm not. Nobody ever pays a bill for me, ex- 
 cept you." 
 
 " Enviable distinction ! Pay ! I think I do pay !
 
 STRANGE INVITATIONS. 9 
 
 Though why you can't keep within your pin- 
 money " 
 
 " Pin-money means money to buy pins. I did buy 
 two diamond pins with it last year, eight hundred 
 guineas each." 
 
 *' You ought to buy clothes." 
 
 " Clothes ! What an expression ! I can't buy a 
 child's frock even ; it all goes in little things, and all 
 my own money too ; wedding-presents, christening- 
 presents, churches, orphanages, concerts; and it's all 
 nonsense you're grumbling about my bills to Worth 
 and Elise and Yirot ; Boom read me a passage out of 
 his Ovid last Easter, in which it describes the quanti- 
 ties of things that the Roman women had to wear and 
 make them look pretty ; a great deal more than any 
 of us ever have, and their whole life was spent over 
 their toilets, and then they had tortoise-shell steps to 
 get down from their litters, and their dogs had 
 jewelled collars; and liking to have things nice is 
 nothing new, though you talk as if it were a crime and 
 we'd invented it ! " 
 
 Usk laughs a little crossly as she comes to the end 
 of her breathless sentences. " Naso Magister eris" 
 he remarks, " might certainly be inscribed over the 
 chamber doors of all your friends ! " 
 
 " I know you mean something odious. My friends 
 are all charming people." 
 
 " I'll tell you what I do mean, that I don't like
 
 10 A H6USE-PABTY. 
 
 the house made a joke of in London ; I'll shut it up 
 and go abroad if the thing goes on. If a scandal's 
 begun in town in the season, it always comes down 
 here to carry on ; if there are two people fond of each 
 other when they shouldn't be, you always ask 'em 
 down here and make pets of 'em. As you're taking 
 to quoting Ovid, I may as well tell you that in his time 
 the honest women didn't do this sort of thing ; they 
 left it to the light-o'-loves under the porticoes." 
 
 " I really don't know what I've done that I should 
 be called an honest woman ! One would think you 
 were speaking to the housemaids ! I wish you'd go 
 and stay in somebody else's house : you always spoil 
 things here." 
 
 " Very sorry. I like my own shooting. Three days 
 here, three days there, three days t'other place, and ex- 
 pected to leave the game behind you and to say 
 ' thanks ' if your host gives you a few brace to take 
 away with you, not for me, if I know it, while there's 
 a bird in the covers at my own places." 
 
 " I thought you were always bored at home ? " 
 
 "Not when I'm shooting. I don't mind having 
 the house full, either, only I want you to get decenter 
 people in it. Why, look at your list! they're all 
 paired like animals in the ark. Here's Lady Arthur 
 for Hugo Mountjoy, here's lona and Madame de 
 Caillac, here's Mrs. Curzon for Lawrence, here's Dick 
 Wootton and Mrs. Faversham, here's the Duke and
 
 STRANGE INVITATIONS. II 
 
 Lady Dolgelly, here's old Beaumanoir and Olive 
 Dawlish. I say it's absolutely indecent, when you 
 know how all these people are talked about ! " 
 
 " If one waited for somebody not talked about, one 
 would have an empty house or fill it with old fogies. 
 My dear George, haven't you ever seen that advertise- 
 ment about matches which will only light on their 
 own boxes? People in love are like those matches. 
 If you ask the matches without the boxes, or the 
 boxes without the matches, you won't get anything 
 out of either." 
 
 " Ovid was born too early : he never knew this 
 admirable illustration ! " 
 
 " There's only one thing worse than inviting people 
 without the people they care about ; it is to invite 
 them with the people they're tired of : I did that 
 once last year. I asked Madame de Saumur and 
 Gervase together, and then found that they had 
 broken with each other two months before. That is 
 the sort of blunder I do hate to make ! " 
 
 " Well, nothing happened ?" 
 
 " Of course nothing happened. Nobody ever shows 
 anything. But it looks so stupid in me : one is always 
 expected to know " 
 
 " What an increase to the responsibilities of a host- 
 ess ! She must know all the ins and outs of her 
 acquaintances' unlawful affections as a Prussian officer 
 knows the French by-roads ! How simple an affair it
 
 12 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 used to be when the Victorian reign was young, and 
 Lord and Lady So-and-So and Mr. and Mrs. Nobody 
 all came to stay for a week in twos and twos as inevi- 
 tably as we buy fancy pigeons in pairs ! " 
 
 " You pretend to regret those days, but you know 
 you'd be horribly bored if you had always to go out 
 with me." 
 
 "Politeness would require me to deny, but truthful- 
 ness would compel me to assent." 
 
 "Of course it would. You don't want anybody 
 with you who has heard all your best stories a thou- 
 sand tunes, and knows what your doctor has told you 
 not to eat ; I don't want anybody who has seen how I 
 look when I'm ill, and knows where my false hair is 
 put on. It is quite natural. By the way, Boom says 
 Ovid's ladies had perukes, too, as one of them put her 
 wig on upside down before him, and it chilled his 
 feelings towards her : it would chill most people's. I 
 wonder if they made them well in those days, and 
 what they cost." 
 
 " I think you might have invited some of the hus- 
 bands." 
 
 " Oh, dear, no. Why ? They're all staying some- 
 where else." 
 
 5 " And your friends are never jealous, I suppose ; at 
 least, never about their husbands ? " 
 
 " An agreeable woman is never jealous of anybody. 
 She hasn't time to be. It is only the women who
 
 STRANGE INVITATIONS. 13 
 
 can't amuse themselves who make that sort of 
 fuss." 
 
 "Are you an agreeable woman, my dear?" 
 
 " I have always been told so, by everybody excep* 
 yourself." 
 
 Lord TJsk rose and laughed as he lighted a cigar. 
 
 "Well, I won't have any scandal in the house 
 Mind that." 
 
 "You'd better put that up on a placard, as you 
 have put ' No fees allowed to the servants,' up in the 
 hall." 
 
 " I'm sure I would with pleasure if I thought any 
 oody would attend to it. I don't like your set, Dolly. 
 That's the truth. I wish you'd drop nine-tenths of 
 'em." 
 
 "My dear George, I wish you would mind your 
 own business, to use a very vulgar expression. Do I 
 ever say anything when you talk nonsense in the 
 Lords, and when you give your political picnics and 
 shout yourself hoarse to the farmers who go away and 
 vote against your man? Do I ever say anything 
 when you shoot pheasants which cost you a sovereign 
 a head for their corn, and stalk stags which cost you 
 eighty pounds each for their keep, and lose races with 
 horses which cost you ten thousand a year for their 
 breeding and training ? Do I ever say anything when 
 you think that people who are hungering for the whole 
 of your land will be either grateful or delighted be-
 
 14 A HOUSE-PAttTT. 
 
 cause you take ten per cent, off their rents? You 
 know I don't. I think you ought to be allowed to 
 ruin yourself and accelerate the revolution in any 
 absurd way which may seem best to you. In return, 
 pray let me manage my own house-parties and choose 
 my own acquaintances. It is not much to ask. 
 What! are you going away? How exactly like a 
 man, to go away when he gets the worst of the 
 argument ! " 
 
 Lord TJsk has gone into the gardens in a towering 
 rage. He is a gentleman : he will quarrel with his 
 wife all day long, but he will always stop short of 
 swearing at her, and he feels that if he stays in the 
 room a moment longer he will swear : that allusion to 
 the Scotch stags is too much for humanity (with a 
 liver) to endure. When Achnalorrie is sold to that 
 beastly American, to be twitted with what stags used 
 to cost ! Certainly they had cost a great deal, and the 
 keepers had been bores, and the crofters had been 
 nuisances, and there had always been some disease or 
 other among the birds, and he had never cared as 
 much as some men for deer-stalking; but still, as 
 Achnalorrie is irrevocably gone, the thirty-mile drive 
 over the bleak hills, and the ugly houses on the stony 
 strathside, and the blinding rains, and the driving 
 snows, and the swelling streams which the horses had 
 to cross as best they could, all seem unspeakably lovely 
 to him and the sole things worth living for: and then
 
 STRANGE INVITATIONS. 15 
 
 his wife has the heartlessness to twit him with the cost 
 of each stag ! 
 
 t; Women have no feeling," he growls, as he walks 
 about the gardens. " If they think they can make a 
 point they'll make it, let it hurt you how it may." 
 
 He strolls down between two high yew walls with 
 his hands in his pockets, and feels injured and ag- 
 grieved. He ought to be a very happy person ; he is 
 still rich despite the troubles of the times, he has fine 
 estates, fair rents, handsome children, and a lite of 
 continual change, and yet he is bored and doesn't like 
 anything, and this peaceful, green garden, with its 
 innumerable memories and its delicious, dreamful 
 solitudes, says nothing at all to him. Is it his own 
 fault or the fault of his world? He doesn't know. 
 He supposes it is the fault of his liver. His father 
 was always contented, and jolly as a sand-boy ; but 
 then in his father's time there was no grouse-disease, 
 no row about rents, no wire fencing to lame your 
 horses, no Ground Game Bill to corrupt your farmers, 
 no Leaseholder's Bills hanging over your London 
 houses, no corn imported from Arkansas and Cali- 
 fornia, no Joe Chamberlain, When poor Boom's turn 
 comes, how will things be? Joe Chamberlain Presi- 
 dent, perhaps, and Surrenden cut up into allotment- 
 grounds. 
 
 He possesses two other very big places in adjacent 
 
 counties, Orme Castle and Denton Abbey, but they 
 2
 
 16 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 are ponderous, vast, gorgeous, ceremonious, ugly : he 
 detests both of them. Of Surrenden he is, on the 
 contrary, as fond as he can be of anything except the 
 lost Achnalorrie and a little cosey house that he has at 
 Newmarket where the shadow of Lady Usk has never 
 fallen. 
 
 He hears the noise of wheels on gravel. It comes 
 from the other side of the house ; it is his brake and 
 his omnibus going down the avenue on their way to 
 the nearest railway-station, four miles off, to meet 
 some of his coming guests there. Well, there'll be 
 nothing seen of them till two o'clock at luncheon. 
 They are all people he hates, or thinks he hates, for 
 that best of all possible reasons, that his wife likes 
 them. Why can't Dulcia Waverley come before the 
 20th ? Lady Waverley always amuses him, and 
 agrees with him. It is so pleasant to be agreed with, 
 only when one's own people do so it makes one almost 
 more angry than when one is contradicted. When his 
 wife agrees with him it leaves him nothing to say. 
 When Dulcia Waverley agrees with him it leaves him 
 with a soothing sense of being sympathized with and 
 appreciated. Dulcia Waverley always tells him that 
 he might have been a great statesman if he had 
 chosen : as he always thinks so himself, the echo of his 
 thoughts is agreeable. 
 
 He sits down in one of the clipped-yew-tree arbors to 
 light a new cigar and smoke it peaceably. A peacock
 
 STRANGE IN VITA TIONS. 1 7 
 
 goes past him, drawing its beautiful train over the 
 iynooth-shaven grass. A mavis is singing on a rose- 
 bough. The babble of a stream hidden under adjacent 
 "tj'ees is pleasant on the morning silence. He doesn't 
 notice any of it ; he thinks it odiously hot, and what 
 fools they were who clipped the yew-tree into the 
 shape of a periwig, and what a beast of a row that 
 trout-stream makes. Why don't they turn it, and 
 sbnd it farther from the house? He's got no money 
 to do anything, or he would have it done to-morrow. 
 
 A peacock begins to scream. The noise of a peacock 
 cannot be said to be melodious or soothing at any 
 time. 
 
 " Why don't you ring that bird's neck ? " he says 
 savagely to a gardener's boy who is gathering up fallen 
 rose-leaves. 
 
 The boy gapes and touches his hair, his hat being 
 already on the ground in sign of respect. The pea- 
 cocks have been at Surrenden ever since Warren 
 Hastings sent the first pair as a present to the Lady 
 Usk of that generation, and they are regarded with a 
 superstitious admiration by all the good Hampshire 
 people who walk in the gardens of Surrenden or visit 
 them on the public day. The Sui-renden peacocks are 
 as sacred to the neighborhood and the workpeople as 
 ever was the green ibis in old Egypt. 
 
 " How long will they touch their caps or pull their 
 forelocks to us ? " thinks Lord Usk ; " though I don't
 
 18 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 see why they can reasonably object to do it as long as 
 we take off our hats to Wales and say ' Sir ' to him." 
 
 This political problem suggests the coming elections 
 to his mind : the coming elections are a disagreeable 
 subject for meditation : why wasn't he born in his 
 grandfather's time, when there were pocket boroughs 
 as handy and portable as snuff-boxes, and the county 
 returned Lord Usk's nominee as a matter of course 
 without question ? 
 
 " Well, and what good men they got in those days," 
 he thinks, "Fox, and Hervey, and Walpole, and 
 Burke, and all the rest of 'em ; fine orators, clever 
 ministers, members that did the nation honor ; every 
 great noble sent up some fine fellow with breeding and 
 brains; bunkum and bad logic and dropped aspirates 
 had no kind of chance to get into the House in those 
 days. Now, even when Boom's old enough to put up 
 himself, I dare say there'll be some biscuit-baker or 
 some pin-maker sent down by the Radical Caucus or 
 the English Land League who'll make the poor devils 
 believe that the millennium's coming in with them, 
 and leave Boom nowhere ! " 
 
 The prospect is so shocking that he throws his 
 cigar-end at the peacocks and gets up out of the ever- 
 green periwig. 
 
 As he does so he comes, to his absolute amazement, 
 face to face with his friend Lord Brandolin. 
 
 Lord Brandolin is supposed by all the world, or at
 
 STRANGE INVITATIONS. 19 
 
 least that large portion of it which is interested in his 
 movements, to be at that moment in the forest-recesses 
 of Lahore. 
 
 " My dear George," says Lord Brandolin, in a very 
 sweet voice, wholly unlike the peacocks', " I venture 
 to take you by surprise. I have left my tub at Wey- 
 mouth and come on foot across-country to you. It is 
 most unpardonable conduct, but I have always abused 
 your friendship." 
 
 The master of Surrenden cannot find words of 
 welcome warm enough to satisfy himself. He is 
 honestly delighted. Failing Dulcia Waverley, no- 
 body could have been so agreeable to him as Brando- 
 lin. For once a proverb is justified, " a self-invited 
 guest is thrice welcome." He is for dragging his 
 visitor in at once to breakfast, but Brandolin resists. 
 He has breakfasted on board his yacht ; he could not 
 eat again before luncheon ; he likes the open air, he 
 wishes to sit in the pei'iwig and smoke. 
 
 " Do not let us disturb Lady Usk," he said. " I 
 know chatelaines in the country have a thousand and 
 one things to do before luncheon, and I know your 
 house is full from gable to cellar." 
 
 " It will be by night," says the master of Surren- 
 den, with disgust, " and not a decent soul among 'em 
 all." 
 
 " That is very sad for you," says Brandolin with a 
 twinkle in his handsome eyes. He is not a handsome
 
 20 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 man, but he has beautiful eyes, a patrician profile, and 
 a look of extreme distinction ; his expression is a little 
 cynical, but more amused ; he is about forty years old, 
 but looks younger. He is not married, having by 
 some miracle of good fortune, or of personal dexterity, 
 contrived to elude all the efforts made for his capture. 
 His barony is one of the oldest in England, and he 
 would not exchange it, were it possible, for a dukedom. 
 
 " Since when have you been so in love with decency, 
 George ? " he asks, gravely. 
 
 Lord Usk laughs. " Well, you know I think one's 
 own house should be proper." 
 
 " No doubt," says Lord Brandolin, still more gravely. 
 " To do one's morality vicariously is always so agree- 
 able. Is Lady Waverley not here ? She would save 
 a hundred Sodoms, with a dozen Gomorrahs thrown in 
 gratis." 
 
 " I thought you were in India," says his host, who 
 does not care to pursue the subject of Lady Waver- 
 ley's saintly qualifications for the salvation of cities or 
 men. 
 
 " I went to India, but it bored me. I liked it when 
 I was twenty-four ; one likes so many things when one 
 is twenty-four, even champagne and a cotillion. 
 How's Boom?" 
 
 " Very well ; gone to his cousins' in Stiff oik. Sure 
 you won't have something to eat ? They can bring it 
 here in a minute if you like out-of-doors best."
 
 STRANGE INVITATIONS. 21 
 
 
 " Quite sure, thanks. What a lovely place this is ! 
 
 I haven't seen it for years. I don't think there's 
 another garden so beautiful in all England. After 
 the great dust-plains and the sweltering humid heats 
 of India, all this coolness and greenness are like Para- 
 dise." 
 
 Brandolin laughs languidly. 
 
 " Hot ! you ungrateful, untravelled country squire I 
 I should like to fasten you to a life-buoy in the middle 
 of the Red Sea. Why do Englishmen perspire in 
 every pore the moment the thermometer's above zero 
 in their own land, and yet stand the tropics better than 
 any other Europeans ? " 
 
 " You know I've sold Achnalorrie ? " says his host, 
 d propos de rien^ but to him Achnalorrie seems 
 ci propos of everything in creation. 
 
 Brandolin is surprised, but he does not show any 
 surprise. "Ah! Quite right, too. If we wished to 
 please the Radicals we couldn't find any way to please 
 them and injure ourselves equal to our insane fashion 
 of keeping hundreds of square acres at an enormous 
 cost, only that for a few weeks in the summer we may 
 do to death some of the most innocent and graceful of 
 God's creatures." 
 
 That's just the bosh Dolly talks." 
 
 "Lady Usk is a wise politician, then. Let her 
 train Boom for his political life. I don't know which 
 is the more utterly indefensible, our enormous High-
 
 22 ^ HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 land deer- slaughter or our imbecile butchery of birds. 
 They ought to have recorded the introduction of 
 battue-shooting into the British Isles by the Great and 
 Good on the Albert Memorial." 
 
 " One must shoot something." 
 
 " I never saw why. But ' something ' honestly found 
 by a setter in stubble, and three thousand head of 
 game between five guns in a morning, are very dif- 
 ferent things. What did they give you for Ach- 
 nalorrie ? " 
 
 Usk discourses of Achnalorrie with breathless elo- 
 quence, as of a lover eulogizing the charms of a mis- 
 tress forever lost to him. 
 
 Brandolin listens with admirable patience, and af- 
 'fects to agree that the vision of the American crawl- 
 ing on his stomach over soaking heather in a thick fog 
 for eight hours after a " sag of ten " is a vision of 
 such unspeakably enviable bliss that it must harrow 
 the innermost soul of the dispossessed lord of the soil. 
 
 " And yet, do you know," he says, in conclusion, " I 
 am such a degenerate mortal, such an unworthy 'son 
 of a gun,' that I would actually sooner be sitting in 
 these lovely, sunny, shady gardens, where one expects 
 to see all Spenser's knights coming through the green 
 shadows towards one, than I would be the buyer of 
 Achnalorrie, even in the third week of August ? " 
 
 " You say so, but you don't mean it," says the seller 
 of Achnalorrie.
 
 STRANGE IN VITA TIONS. 23 
 
 "I never say what I don't mean," says Brandolin. 
 " And I never cared about Scotland." 
 
 The other smokes dejectedly, and refuses to be com- 
 forted. 
 
 " Lady Waverley isn't here ? " asks Brandolin, with 
 a certain significance. Lady Waverley alone would 
 have the power of making the torturing vision of the 
 American among the heather fade into the background 
 of her host's reflections.
 
 24 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE UNEXPECTED GUEST. 
 
 " DOLLY is nasty about Achnalorrie," says Lord 
 Usk, as they at last rise and approach the house. 
 
 "Not logical if she objects to moors on political 
 principles. But ladies are seldom logical when they 
 are as charming as Lady Usk." 
 
 " She never likes me to enjoy anything." 
 
 " I don't think you are quite just to her : you know 
 I always tell you so." (Brandolin remembers the 
 sweetness with which Dorothy Usk invites Lady 
 Waverley season after season.) "You are a great 
 grumbler, George. I know grumbling is a Briton's 
 privilege, provided for and secured to him in Magna 
 Charta; but still too great abuse of the privilege spoils 
 life." 
 
 "Nobody was ever so bothered as I am." Lord 
 Usk regards himself invariably with compassion us 
 an ill-used man. " You always take everything light- 
 ly ; but then you aren't married, and I suppose you 
 get some of your rents ? " 
 
 " I have always been rather poor, but I don't mind 
 it. So long as I needn't shut up or let the old place,
 
 THE UNEXPECTED GUEST. 25 
 
 and can keep my boat afloat, I don't much care about 
 anything more. I've enough for myself." 
 
 " Ah, that's just it ; but when one has no end of 
 family expenses and four great houses to keep up, and 
 the counties looking to one for everything, and the 
 farmers, poor devils, ruined themselves, it's another 
 matter. I assure you if I hadn't made that sacrifice 
 of Achnalorrie " 
 
 Lady Usk coming out of the garden-room down 
 the steps of one of the low windows spares Brandolin 
 the continuation of the lament. She looks pretty; 
 mindful of her years, she holds a rose-lined sun- 
 umbrella over her head ; the lace and muslin of her 
 breakfast-gown sweep the lawn softly; she has her 
 two daughters with her, the Ladies Alexandra and 
 Hermoine, known as Dodo and Lilie. She welcomes 
 Brandolin with mixed feelings, though with unmixed 
 suavity. She is glad to see him because he amuses 
 Usk, and is a person of wit and distinction whom 
 everybody tries to draw to their houses ; but then he 
 upsets all her nicely-balanced combinations ; there is 
 nobody for him ; he will be the " one out " when all 
 her people so nicely arranged and paired ; and, as she 
 is aware that he is not a person to be reconciled to 
 such isolation, he will dispossess somebody else and 
 cause probably those very dissensions and complica- 
 tions from which it is always her effort to keep all her 
 house-parties free. However, there he is ; and he is
 
 26 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 accustomed to be welcomed and made much of wher- 
 ever he goes. She can do no less. 
 
 Brandolin makes himself charming in return, and 
 turns pretty compliments to her and the children, 
 which he can do honestly, for he has always liked 
 Dorothy Usk, and the two young girls are as agree- 
 able objects of contemplation as youth, good looks, 
 fair skins, pretty frocks, open air, much exercise, and 
 an indescribable air of " breeding " can make them. 
 An English patrician child is one of the prettiest and 
 most wholesome things on the face of the earth. 
 
 He goes to play lawn tennis with them and their 
 youngest brother Cecil, called the Babe ; and Lady 
 CTsk, under her rose-lined umbrella, sits as umpire, 
 while her lord saunters off disconsolately to an inter- 
 view with his steward. In these times those inter- 
 views are of an unbroken melancholy, and always 
 result in producing the conviction in his mind that 
 Great Britain cannot possibly last out another year. 
 Without the nobility and gentry what will she be ? 
 and they will all go to the lands they've bought in 
 America, if they're in luck, and if they aren't will 
 have to turn shoeblacks. 
 
 " But the new electorate won't have its shoes 
 blacked, won't even have any shoes to black," 
 suggests Mr. Lanyon, the land-steward, who began 
 life as an oppidan at Eton and captain of an Eight, 
 but has been glad to take refuge from the storm on
 
 THE UNEXPECTED GUEST. 27 
 
 the estates of his old Eton comrade, a trust which he 
 discharges with as much zeal as discretion, dwelling 
 contentedly in a rose-covered grange on the edge of 
 the home-woods of Surrenden. If Boom finds things 
 at all in order when he comes into possession, it will 
 be wholly due to John Lanyon. 
 
 In one of the pauses of their game the tennis- 
 players hear the brake and the omnibus returning. 
 None of those whom they bring will be visible until 
 luncheon at two o'clock. 
 
 " Have you anybody very nice, Lady Usk ? " asks 
 Brandolin of his hostess. 
 
 She hesitates ; there are some women that he would 
 call nice, but then they each have their man. " I 
 hardly know," she answers, vaguely. " You don't like 
 many people, if I remember " 
 
 " All ladies, surely," says Brandolin, with due 
 gravity. 
 
 " I'm sure you don't like Grandma Sophy," says the 
 saucy Babe, sitting cross-legged in front of him. He 
 means the Dowager Duchess of Derry, a very unpleas- 
 ant person of strong principles, called by the profane 
 " Sophia, by the grace of God," because she ruled Ire- 
 land in a viceroyalty of short duration and long- 
 enduring mischief. She and Brandolin do not agree, 
 a fact which the Babe has seen and noted with the all- 
 seeing eyes of a petted boy who is too much in his 
 mother's drawing-rooms.
 
 28 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 " I plead guilty to having offended her Grace 
 Sophia," says Brandolin, " but I conclude that Lady 
 Usk's guests are not all like that most admirable 
 lady." 
 
 The Babe and his sisters laugh with much irreverent 
 enjoyment ; her Grace is not more appreciated by hei 
 grandchildren than she was by Ireland. 
 
 " If I had known you were going to be so kind as 
 to remember us, I would have invited some of your 
 friends," says his hostess, without coming to the rescue 
 of her august mother's name. " I am so sorry ; but 
 there is nobody I think who will be very sympathetic 
 to you. Besides, you know them all already." 
 
 " And is that fatal to sympathy ? What a cruel 
 suggestion, dear Lady Usk ! " 
 
 *' Sympathy is best new, like a glove. It fits best ; 
 you don't see any wrinkles in it for the first hour." 
 
 " What cynicism ! Do you know that I am very 
 fond of old gloves? But, then, I never was a 
 dandy " 
 
 " Lord Brandolin will like Madame Sabaroff," says 
 Dodo, a very eveitte young lady of thirteen. 
 
 " Fair prophetess, why ? And who is Madame 
 Sabaroff? A second O. K., a female Stepniak?" 
 
 " What are those ? " says Dodo. " She is very 
 handsome, and a princess in her own right." 
 
 " She gave me two Ukraine ponies and a real 
 droschky," says the Babe.
 
 TEE UNEXPECTED GUEST. 29 
 
 " And Boom a Circassian mare, all white, and each 
 of us a set of Siberian turquoises," says Lilie. 
 
 " Her virtues must be as many as her charms," says 
 Brandolin. 
 
 "She is a lovely creature," adds Lady Usk, "but I 
 don't think she is your style at all ; you like fast 
 women who make you laugh." 
 
 " My tastes are catholic where your adorable sex is 
 in question," says Brandolin. " I am not sure that I 
 do like fast women ; they are painful to one's vanity ; 
 they flirt with everybody." 
 
 Lady Usk smiles. " The season before last, I 
 recollect " 
 
 " Dearest lady, don't revert to pre-historic times. 
 Nothing is so disagreeable as to think this year of 
 what we liked last year." 
 
 " It was Lady Leamington last year ! " cries the ter- 
 rible Babe. 
 
 Brandolin topples him over on the grass and hoists 
 him up on his own shoulders. " You precocious 
 rascal ! What will you be when you are twenty ? " 
 
 " Babe's future is a thing of horror to contemplate," 
 says his mother, smiling placidly. 
 
 " Who is Madame Sabaroff ? " asks Brandolin, again, 
 with a vague curiosity. 
 
 "A princess in her own right; a god-daughter of 
 the Emperor's, says Dodo. " She is so handsome, 
 and her jewels you never saw such jewels."
 
 30 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 " Her father was Chancellor," adds her mother, " and 
 her husband held some very high place at court, I 
 forget what." 
 
 " Held? Is he disgraced, then, or dead?" 
 
 ** Oh, dead j that is what is so nice for her," says 
 Dodo. 
 
 "Heartless Dodo!" says Brandolin. "Then if I 
 marry you four years hence I must kill myself to be- 
 come endeared to you ? " 
 
 "I should pity you indeed if you were to marry 
 Dodo," says Dodo's mother. " She has not a grain of 
 any human feeling, except for her dog." 
 
 Dodo laughs. She likes to be called heartless ; she 
 thinks it is chic and grown-up ; she will weep over 
 a lame puppy, a beaten horse, a dead bird, but she 
 is "hard as nails to humans," as her brother Boom 
 phrases it. 
 
 " Somebody will reign some day where the Skye 
 reigns now over Dodo's soul. Happy somebody ! " says 
 Brandolin. " I shall be too old to be that somebody. 
 Besides, Dodo will demand from fate an Adonis and a 
 Croesus in one ! " 
 
 Dodo smiles, showing her pretty white teeth ; she 
 likes the banter and the flirtation with some of her 
 father's friends. She feels quite old; in four years' 
 time her mother will present her, and she means to 
 marry directly after that. 
 
 " When does this Russian goddess who drops ponies
 
 THE UNEXPECTED GUEST. 31 
 
 and turquoises out of the clouds arrive here?" asks 
 Brandolin, as he picks up his racquet to resume the 
 game. 
 
 " She won't be here for three days," says Lady Usk. 
 
 "Then I fear I shall not see her." 
 
 "Oh, nonsense! You must stay all the month, at 
 least." 
 
 "You are too good, but I have so many engage- 
 ments." 
 
 "Engagements are made to be broken. I am sure 
 George will not let you go." 
 
 "We won't let you go," cries the Babe, dragging 
 him off to the nets, " and I'll drive you this afternoon, 
 behind my ponies." 
 
 "I have gone through most perils that can confront 
 a man, Babe, and I shall be equal even to that," says 
 Brandolin. 
 
 He is a great favorite with the children at Surrenden, 
 where he has always passed some weeks of most years 
 ever since they can remember, or he either, for he was 
 a godson and ward of the late Lord Usk, and always 
 welcome there. His parents died in his infancy : even 
 a long minority failed to make him a rich man. He 
 has, however, as he had said, enough for his not ex- 
 travagant desires, and is able to keep his old estate of 
 St. Hubert's Lea, in Warwickshire, unembarrassed. 
 His chief pleasure has been travelling and sailing, and 
 
 he has travelled and sailed wherever a horse or a drome- 
 3
 
 32 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 dary, a schooner or a canoe, can penetrate. He has 
 told some of his travels in books so admirably written 
 that, mirdbile dictu! they please both learned people 
 and lazy people. They have earned him a reputation 
 beyond the drawing-rooms and clubs of his own fash- 
 ionable acquaintances. He has even considerable learn- 
 ing himself, although he carries it so lightly that few 
 people suspect it. He has had a great many passions in 
 his life, but they have none of them made any very pro- 
 found impression on him. When any one of them has 
 grown tiresome or seemed likely to enchain him more 
 than he thought desirable, he has always gone to Central 
 Asia or the South Pole. The butterflies which he has 
 broken on his wheel have, however, been of that order 
 which is not crushed by abandonment, but mends itself 
 easily and soars to new spheres. He is incapable of 
 harshness to either man or woman, and his character 
 has a warmth, a gayety, and a sincerity in it which 
 endear him inexpressibly to all his friends. His friend- 
 ships have hitherto been deeper and more enduring than 
 his amours. He is, on the whole, happy, as happy 
 as any thinking being can be in this world of anomalies 
 and purposeless pains. 
 
 "But then you always digest all you eat," Usk re- 
 marks to him, enviously. 
 
 "Put it the other way and be nearer the point," 
 says Brandolin. " I always eat what I can digest, and 
 I always leave off with an appetite."
 
 THE UNEXPECTED GUEST. 83 
 
 "I should be content if I could begin with one," 
 says Usk. 
 
 Brandolin is indeed singularly abstemious in the 
 pleasures of the table, to which the good condition of 
 his nerves and constitution may no doubt be attributed. 
 "I have found that eating is an almost entirely un- 
 necessary indulgence," he says in one of his books. 
 " If an Arab can ride, fight, kill lions, and slay French- 
 men on a mere handful of pulse or of rice, why cannot 
 we live on it too?" Whereat Usk wrote once on 
 the margin of the volume, in pencil, " Why should 
 we?" 
 
 The author, seeing this one day, wrote also on the 
 margin, " For the best of all reasons : to do away with 
 dyspepsia and with doctors, who keep their carriages 
 on our indigestion and make fifty thousand a year each 
 out of it." 
 
 Usk allowed that the reason was excellent ; but then 
 the renunciation involved was too enormous.
 
 84 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 OTHER HUSBANDS' WIVES AND OTHER WIVES' HUS 
 BANDS. 
 
 LET it not for an instant be supposed that the guests 
 of Surrenden are people looked in the least coldly 01 
 shyly on by society. Not they. They go to drawing- 
 rooms, which means nothing ; they are invited to state 
 balls and state concerts, which mean much. They are 
 among the most eminent leaders of that world of 
 fashion which has of late revolutionized taste, temper, 
 and society in England. Mrs. Wentworth Curzon sails 
 a little near the wind, perhaps because she is careless, 
 and now and then Lady Dawlish has been "talked 
 about," because she has a vast number of debts and a 
 lord who occasionally makes scenes ; but, with these 
 exceptions, all these ladies are as safe on their pedestals 
 as if they were marble statues of chastity. That their 
 tastes are studied and their men asked to meet them 
 everywhere is only a matter of delicate attention, like 
 the bouquets which the housekeeper sets out in their 
 bedrooms and the new novels which are laid on their 
 writing-tables. 
 
 **I like my house to be pleasant," says Dorothy
 
 WIVES AND HUSBANDS. 35 
 
 Usk, and she does not look any further than that : 
 as for people's affairs, she is not supposed to know 
 anything about them. She knows well enough that 
 lona would not come to her unless she had asked the 
 Marquise de Caillac, and she is fully aware that Law- 
 rence Hamilton would never bestow the cachet of his 
 illustrious presence on Surrenden unless Mrs. Went- 
 worth Curzon brought thither herfourgons, her maids, 
 her collie dog, her famous emeralds, and her no less 
 famous fans. Of course she knows that, but she is 
 not supposed to know it. Nobody except her hus- 
 band would be so ill-bred as to suggest that she did 
 know it ; and if any of her people should ever by any 
 mischance forget their tact and stumble into the news- 
 papers, or become notorious by any other accident, she 
 will drop them, and nobody will be more surprised at 
 the discovery of their naughtiness than herself. Yet 
 she is a kind woman, a virtuous woman, a very warm 
 friend, and not more insincere in her friendships than 
 any one else ; she is only a hostess of the last lustre 
 of the nineteenth century, a woman who knows her 
 London and follows it in all its amazing and illimit- 
 able condonations as in its eccentric and exceptional 
 severities. 
 
 The guests are numerous ; they might even be said 
 to be miscellaneous, were it not that they all belonged 
 to the same set. There is Dick Wootton, who believes 
 himself destined to play in the last years of the nine-
 
 36 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 teenth century the part played by Charles Greville in 
 the earlier. There is Lord Vanstone, an agreeable, 
 eccentric, unsatisfactory valetudinarian, who ought to 
 have done great things with his life, but has always 
 been too indolent and had too bad health to carry out 
 his friends' very large expectations of him. There is 
 the young Duke of Whitby, good-natured and foolish, 
 with a simple pleasant face and a very shy manner. 
 " If I had that ass's opportunities I'd make the world 
 spin," says Wriothesley Ormond, who is a very poor 
 and very witty member of Parliament, and also, which 
 he values more, the most popular member of the 
 Marlborough. There is Lord lona, very handsome, 
 very silent, very much sought after and spoilt by 
 women. There is Hugo Mountjoy, a pretty young 
 fellow in the Guards, with a big fortune and vague 
 ideas that he ought to " do something ; " he is not sure 
 what. There is Lawrence Hamilton, who, as far as is 
 possible in an age when men are clothed, but do not 
 dress, gives the law to St. James Street in matters 
 of male toilet. There is Sir Adolphus Beaumanoir, 
 an ex-diplomatist, admirably preserved, charmingly 
 loquacious, and an unconscionable flirt, though he is 
 seventy. Each of these happy or unhappy beings has 
 the lady invited to meet him in whom his affections 
 are supposed to be centred, for the time being, in 
 those tacit but potent relations which form so large a 
 portion of men's and women's lives in these days. It
 
 WIVES AND HUSBANDS. 37 
 
 is this condonance on the part of his wife which George 
 Usk so entirely denounces, although he would be very 
 much astonished and very much annoyed if she made 
 any kind of objections to inviting Dulcia Waver- 
 ley. Happily there is no Act of Parliament to com- 
 pel any of us to be consistent, or where would any- 
 body be ? 
 
 Lady Dolgelly, much older than himself, and with a 
 faille de couturidre as all her intimate friends delight 
 to reveal, is supposed to be indispensable to the ex- 
 istence of His Grace of Whitby; Lady Leamington 
 is not less necessary to the happiness of Wriothesley 
 Ormond. Mr. Wootton would be supposed incapable 
 of cutting a single joke or telling a single good story 
 unless his spirits were sustained by the presence of 
 Mrs. Faversham, the prettiest brunette in the universe, 
 for whom Worth is supposed to make marvellous com- 
 binations of rose and gold, of amber and violet, of deep 
 orange and black, and of a wondrous yellow like that 
 of the daffodil, which no one dares to wear but herself. 
 Mrs. Wentworth Curzon is the momentary goddess of 
 Lawrence Hamilton ; and Lord lona, as far as he has 
 ever opened his handsome mouth to say anything 
 " serious," has sworn himself the slave of Madame de 
 Caillac. Sir Adolphus has spread the aegis of his 
 semi-paternal affection over the light little head of that 
 extravagant little beauty, Lady Dawlish ; whilst Hugo 
 Mountjoy is similarly protected by the prescient wis-
 
 38 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 dom and the rare experience of his kindest of friends, 
 Lady Arthur Audley. 
 
 Sir Hugo and several other gilded youths there 
 present are all exact patterns of one another, the 
 typical young Englishman of the last years of this 
 curious century ; the masher pure and simple ; close- 
 shaven, close-cropped, faultlessly clothed, small of 
 person, small of features, stiff, pale, insignificant, po- 
 lite, supercilious, indifferent ; occasionally amusing, 
 but never by any chance original ; much concerned as 
 to health, climate, and their own nerves : often talk- 
 ing of their physicians, and flitting southward before 
 cold weather like swallows, though they have nothing 
 whatever definite the matter with them. 
 
 These young men are all convinced that England is 
 on the brink of ruin, and they talk of it in the same 
 tone with which they say that their cigarette is out, or 
 the wind is in the east. The Throne, the Church, the 
 Lords, and the Thirty-Nine Articles are all going 
 down pell-mell next week, and it is very shocking ; 
 nevertheless, there is no reason why they should not 
 be studious of their digestions and very anxious about 
 the parting of their hair. 
 
 It never occurs to them that they and their fathers' 
 battue-shooting, pigeon-shooting, absenteeism, clubism, 
 and general preference for every country except their 
 own, may have had something to do with bringing 
 about this impending cataclysm. That all the grand
 
 WIVES AND HUSBANDS. 39 
 
 old houses standing empty, or let to strangers, among 
 the- rich Herefordshire pastures, the green "Warwick- 
 shire woods, the red Devon uplands, the wild West- 
 moreland fells, may have also something to do with it, 
 never occurs to them. That while they are flirting at 
 Aix, wintering at Pau, throwing comfits at Rome, 
 losing on the red at Monaco, touring in California, or 
 yawning in Berlin, the demagogue's agents are whis- 
 pering to the smock-frocks in the meadows, and pour- 
 ing the gall of greed and hatred into the amber ale of 
 the village pothouse, never occurs to them. If any 
 one suggests it, they stare : " such a beastly climate, 
 you know ; nobody can stand it. Live in the country ? 
 Oh, Lord ! who could live in the country ? " 
 
 And then they wonder that Mr. George has replaced 
 Sir Roger de Coverley, and that Joseph Chamberlain's 
 voice is heard instead of Edmund Burke's. 
 
 Their host could kick them with a sensation of con 
 siderable satisfaction. Their neatness, smallness, and 
 self-complacency irritate him excessively. The bloods 
 of George the Fourth's time at least were men, so he 
 says. 
 
 " You do these poor boys injustice," says Brandolin. 
 " When they get out in a desert, or are left to roast 
 and die under the equator, they put off all their affec- 
 tations with their starched cambric, and are not alto- 
 gether unworthy of their great-grandfathers. Britons 
 are still bad ones to beat when the trial comes."
 
 40 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 " They must leave their constitutions at their clubs, 
 then, and their nervous system in their hat-boxes," 
 growls Usk. "If you are like those namby-pamby 
 fellows when you are twenty, Boom, I'll put a bullet 
 through your head myself," he says to his heir one 
 morning, when that good-looking and high-spirited 
 boy has come back from Suffolk. 
 
 Boom laughs. He is a careless, high-spirited, ex- 
 travagant lad, and he does not at present lean towards 
 the masher type. Gordon is in his head ; that is his 
 idea of a man. The country had one hero in this 
 century, and betrayed him, and honors his betrayer ; 
 but the hearts of the boys beat truer than that of the 
 House of Commons and the New Electorate. They 
 remember Gordon, with a noble, headlong, quixotic 
 wish to go and do likewise. That one lonely figure 
 standing out against the yellow light of the desert 
 may perhaps be as a pharos to the youth of his nation, 
 and save them from the shipwreck which is nigh. 
 
 " Curious type, the young fellows," says Brandolin, 
 musingly. "I don't think they will keep England 
 what our fathers and grandfathers made it. I don't 
 think they will, even if Chamberlain and Company 
 will let them, which they certainly won't." 
 
 * Tell you what it is," says Usk, " it all comes of 
 having second horses hunting, and loaders behind you 
 out shooting." 
 
 " You confound cause and effect. The race wouldn't
 
 WIVES AND HUSBANDS. 41 
 
 have come to second horses and men to load if it hadn't 
 degenerated. Second horses and men to load indicate 
 in England just what pasties of nightingales' tongues, 
 and garlands of roses, indicated with the Romans, 
 effeminacy and self-indulgence. The Huns and the 
 Goths were knocking at their doors, and Demos and 
 the Debacle are knocking at ours. History repeats 
 itself, which is lamentable, for its amazing tendency to 
 tell the same tale again and again makes it a bore. 
 
 " I should like to know, by the way," he continues, 
 " why English girls get taller and taller, stronger and 
 stronger, and are as the very palm of the desert for 
 vigor and force, whilst the English young man gets 
 smaller and smaller, slighter and slighter, and has the 
 nerves of an old maid and the habits of a valetudi- 
 narian. It is uncommonly droll ; and if the dis- 
 parity goes on increasing, the ladies will not only get 
 the franchise, but they will carry the male voter to the 
 polling-place on their shoulders." 
 
 " As the French women did their husbands out of 
 some town that surrendered in some war," said Boom, 
 who was addicted to historical illustration and never 
 lost occasion to display it. 
 
 " They won't carry their husbands" murmurs Bran. 
 dolin. " They'll drive them, and carry somebody else." 
 
 " "Will they have any husbands at all when they can 
 do as they like ? " says Boom. 
 
 "Probably n**V says Brandolin. "My dear boy,
 
 42 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 what an earthly paradise awaits you when you shall be 
 of mature acre, and shall have seen us all descend one 
 
 O * 
 
 by one into the tomb, with all our social prejudices 
 and antiquated ways ! " 
 
 " I dare say he'll be a navvy in New Guinea by that 
 time, and all his acres here will be being let out by the 
 state at a rack-rent which the people will call free 
 land," says the father with a groan. 
 
 " Very possible, too," replied Brandolin. 
 
 The boy's eyes go thoughtfully towards the land- 
 scape beyond the windows, the beautiful lawns, the 
 smiling gardens, the rolling woods. A look of reso- 
 lution comes over his fair frank face. 
 
 " They shan't take our lands without a fight for it, 
 he says, with a flush on his cheeks. 
 
 " And the fight will be a fierce one," says Brandolin, 
 with a sigh, " and I am afraid it is in Mr. Gladstone's 
 * dim and distant future,' that is to say, very near at 
 hand indeed." 
 
 " Well, I shall be ready," says the lad. Both his 
 father and Brandolin are silent, vaguely touched by 
 the look of the gallant and gracious boy, as he stands 
 there with the sun in his brave blue eyes, and thinking 
 of the troubled time which will await his manhood in 
 this green old England, cursed by the spume of wordy 
 demagogues, and hounded on to envenomed hatreds 
 and causeless discontents, that the professional poli- 
 tician may fatten on her woes.
 
 WIVES AND HUSBANDS. 43 
 
 What will Boom live to see? 
 
 It will be a sorry day for the country when her 
 wooded parks and stately houses are numbered with 
 the things that are no more. 
 
 Brandolin puts his arm over the boy's shoulder, and 
 walks away with him a little way under the deep 
 boughs of yew. 
 
 " Look here, Boom," he says to him, " you won't 
 care to be like those fellows, but you don't know how 
 hard it is to get out of the fashion of one's set, to 
 avoid going with the stream of one's contemporaries. 
 Nobody can say what will be the style of the 'best 
 men ' when you're of age, but I'm much afraid it will 
 still be the Masher. The Masher is not very vicious, 
 he is often cultured, he is a more harmless animal than 
 he tries to appear, but he is weak ; and we are coming 
 on times, or times are coming on us, when an English 
 gentleman will want to be very strong if he is to hold 
 his own and save his country from shame in her old 
 age. Don't be conventional. Scores of people who 
 would be ashamed to seem virtuous haven't courage 
 to resist appearing vicious. Don't talk all that odious 
 slang which is ruining English. Don't get into that 
 stupid way of counting the days and seasons by steeple, 
 chases, coursing-meetings, flat-races, and the various 
 different things to be shot at. Sport is all very well 
 in its place, but Squire Allworth beating the tur- 
 nips with a brace of setters is a different figure to
 
 44 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 Lord Newgold sending his hampers of pheasants to 
 Leadenhall. Certainly, Mr. Bradlaugh has no more 
 right to make a misdemeanor of our covert-shooting, 
 and put the axe to our home woods, than we have to 
 make a misdemeanor of his shoes and stockings, or put 
 an axe to his head. But I think if of our own accord 
 we centre our minds and spent our guineas less on 
 our preserves, we might be wiser, and if we grudged 
 our woods less to the hawk and the woodpecker and 
 the owl and the jay, and all the rest of their native 
 population, we should be wiser still. I never see a 
 beast or a bird caught or dead in a keeper's trap but 
 that I think to myself that after all, if we ourselves 
 are caught in the end between the grinning jaws of 
 anarchy, it will really be only partial justice on our 
 injustice. Only I fear that it won't better the birds 
 and beasts very much, even when we all go to prison 
 for the crime of property, and Bradlaugh will grub up 
 their leafy haunts with a steam plough from Chicago."
 
 ENGLISH CONVENTIONALITY. 45 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ENGLISH CONVENTIONALITY. 
 
 MEANWHILE, let the country be going to the dogs 
 as it may, Surrenden is full of very gay people, and 
 all its more or less well-matched doves are cooing at 
 Surrenden, whilst the legitimate partners of their 
 existences are diverting themselves in other scenes, 
 Highland moors, German baths, French chateaux, 
 Channel yachting, or at other English country houses. 
 It is George Usk's opinion that the whole thing is 
 immoral : he is by no means a moral person himself. 
 His wife, on the contrary, thinks that it is the only 
 way to have your house liked, and that nobody is sup- 
 posed to know anything, and that nothing of that sort 
 matters ; she is a woman who on her own account has 
 never done anything that she would in the least mind 
 having printed in the Morning Post to-morrow. 
 
 " Strange contradiction ! " muses Brandolin. " Here 
 is George, who's certainly no better than he should be, 
 hallooing out for Dame Propriety, and here's my lady, 
 who's always run as straight as a crow flies, making 
 an Agapemone of her house to please her friends. To
 
 46 A HOUSE-PARI'Y. 
 
 the pure all things are pure, I suppose ; but if purity 
 can stand Mrs. Wentworth Curzon and Lady Dawlish, 
 I think I shall select my wife from among les jolies 
 impures" 
 
 However, he takes care audibly to hold up his 
 hostess's opinions and condemn her lord's. 
 
 "The poor little woman means well, and only likes 
 to be popular," he reflects ; " and we are none of us 
 so sure that we shan't want indulgence some day." 
 
 Brandolin is very easy and elastic in his principles, 
 as becomes a man of the world ; he is even considered 
 by many of his friends a good deal too lax in all his 
 views ; but in the depths of his soul there is a vague 
 dislike to similar looseness of principle in women. He 
 may have been glad enough to avail himself of the 
 defect ; that is another matter ; he does not like it, 
 does not admire it : licentiousness in a woman seems 
 to him a fault in her taste ; it is as if she wore fur slip- 
 pers with her court train. " Of course," he will say, 
 apologetically, " this idea of mine is born of the ab- 
 surd English conventionality which sleeps in all of us ; 
 nothing better ; an Englishman is always conventional 
 somewhere, let him live as he will." 
 
 He himself is the most unconventional of beings, 
 appalls his county, terrifies his relations, and irrevoc- 
 ably offends the bishop of his diocese ; he has lived 
 with Arabs, Bohemians, and wild men of the woods, 
 and believes that he has not such a thing as prejudice
 
 ENGLISH CONVENTIONALITY. 47 
 
 about him ; yet at the bottom of his soul there is this 
 absurd feeling born of sheer conventionality, he can- 
 not thoroughly like a light-minded woman. Absurd, 
 indeed, in the times in which his lot is cast ! He is 
 quite ashamed of it. 
 
 Dorothy Usk does not favor the modern mode of hav- 
 ing relays of guests for two or three days ; she thinks it 
 makes a country house too like an hotel. She wishes 
 her people to be perfectly well assorted, and then to 
 stay with her at least a week, even two weeks or three 
 weeks. People do not often object: Orme, Denton, 
 and Surrenden are all popular places, and Surrenden is 
 perhaps most popular of all. 
 
 "An ideal house," says Brandolin, who would not 
 stay a day where he was not as free as air. 
 
 " It's too much like an hotel," grumbles the master 
 of it, " and an hotel where the table-d''h6te bell rings to 
 deaf ears. Lord ! I remember in my poor mother's 
 days everybody had to be down to breakfast at nine 
 o'clock every morning as regularly as if they were 
 charity children, and the whole lot of 'em were marched 
 off to church on Sunday whether they liked it or not. 
 The villagers used to line the path across the fields to 
 see the great folks pass. Now it's as much as ever 
 Dolly can do to get a woman or two up in time to go 
 with her. How things are changed, by Jove ! And it 
 isn't so very long ago, either." 
 
 "The march of intellect, my dear George," says
 
 48 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 Brandolin ; " neither le bon Dieu nor we are great folks 
 any longer." 
 
 " Well, I think it's a pity," sighs Usk. " Every- 
 body was happier then, and jollier too, though we do 
 tear about so to try and get amused." 
 
 " There is still nothing to prevent you going to sleep 
 in the big pew if it pleases you," replies Brandolin ; 
 " and Lawrence Hamilton always goes that he may look 
 at Mrs. Curzon's profile as she sings: she is really 
 saintly then. I think Sunday service is to English- 
 women what confession is to Catholic ladies : it sweeps 
 all the blots off the week's tablets. It is convenient, if 
 illogical." 
 
 "You are very irreligious," says his host, who is 
 invariably orthodox when orthodoxy doesn't interfere 
 with anything. 
 
 " Not more so than most people," says Brandolin. " I 
 have even felt religious when I have been alone in the 
 savannas or in the jungle. I don't feel so in a wooden 
 box covered with red velvet, with a curate bawling in 
 my ears about the hewing in pieces of Agag." 
 
 " That's nothing to do with it," says Usk : " we're 
 bound to set an example." 
 
 "That's why you doze in public, and Mrs. Curzon 
 wears her big pearls, to lead the school-children in the 
 way they should go." 
 
 " That's nothing to do with it," repeats Lord TJsk, 
 somewhat crossly. He has a comfortable if indistinct
 
 ENGLISH CONVENTIONALITY. 49 
 
 idea that he does something patriotic, patriarchal, and 
 highly praiseworthy in getting up an hour earlier than 
 usual one Sunday out of three, and putting on a tall 
 hat, a frock-coat, and a pair of new gloves, to attend 
 the village church for morning service when he is at 
 Orme, Denton, or Surrenden in fine weather. 
 
 If he sleeps, what of that ? There are curtains to 
 the pew, and nobody sees him except the Babe, who 
 takes fiendish rapture in catching big flies and releasing 
 them from a careful little hand to alight on his father's 
 forehead or nose. The Babe would define the Sunday 
 morning as a horrid bore tempered by blue-bottles. 
 
 " What a curiously conventional mind is the Eng- 
 lish mind!" thinks Brandolin, when he is alone, 
 " Carlyle is right : the gig is its standard. The gig 
 is out of fashion as a vehicle, but the national mind 
 remains the same as in the age of gigs, content with 
 the outside of things, clinging to the husk, to the 
 shell, to the outward appearance, and satisfied with 
 these. My dear friend puts on his chimney-pot, then 
 takes it off and snores in his pew, and thinks that he 
 has done something holy which will sustain both 
 Church and State, as he thinks that he prays when he 
 buries his face in his hat and creases his trousers on a 
 hassock! Mysterious consolations of the unfathom- 
 able human breast I "
 
 50 4 HOUSE-PASTY. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 A RUSSIAN PRINCESS. 
 
 A FEW new people have come by the brake, and 
 make their appearance at luncheon. More come by 
 the five-o'clock train, and are visible at six-o'clock tea, 
 which is always to be had in the library any time be- 
 fore seven : dinner at all the Usk houses is always at 
 nine. Brandolin's doctrines do not prevail with any 
 of his acquaintances, although he, unlike most pro- 
 fessors, emphasizes them by example. 
 
 Among the people who come by the latter train are 
 the famous Mr. Wootton, a man very famous at Lon- 
 don dinner-parties, and Lady Gundrede Vansittart, 
 whose dinners are the best in London. 
 
 " Where would those two people be if you brought 
 the pulse and the rice you recommend into fashion ? " 
 says their host to Brandolin. " Take 'em away from 
 the table, they'd be good for nothing. He wouldn't 
 say * Bo' to a goose, and she wouldn't be worth leaving 
 a card upon. Believe me, my dear Guy, such esprit as 
 there is left in us is only brought out by eating." 
 
 "I think you invert all your reasonings," says 
 Brandolin. " Say rather, that too much eating has 
 destroyed all esprit. Don't we eat all day long every-
 
 A RUSSIAN PtilNCESS. 51 
 
 where, or at least are expected to do so ? You lament 
 your ruined digestion. It is impossible to digest when 
 time is only counted by what our beloved Yankees 
 call square meals (why square I fail to fathom), and 
 for women it is worse than for us, because they eat 
 such quantities of sweet things we don't touch, and 
 then the way they go in for caviare bread-and-butter, 
 and anchovy sandwiches, and all kinds of rich cakes, 
 and deux doigts de Madere or glasses of kuramel at 
 the tea-hour, it is frightful ! I wonder they have any 
 complexions at all left, even with the assistance of all 
 the * secrets de Venus? " 
 
 "You won't alter 'em, my dear fellow," replies 
 Usk, " if you put yourself out about it ever so much. 
 If you were to marry a savage out of Formoso, or an 
 Esquimaux, she'd take kindly to the caviare and the 
 kiimmel before a week was out, if you brought her to 
 Europe. Why, look at dogs, you may keep 'em on 
 biscuit and tripe if they live in the kennels, but if they 
 once come to the dining-room they'll turn their noses 
 up at a beef-steak if it isn't truffled ! " 
 
 " Dogs, at least, stop short of the kummel," says 
 Brandolin ; " but if you were to put together the 
 sherry, the dry champagne, the liqueurs at tea, the 
 brandy in the chasse at dinner, which a fashionable 
 woman takes in the course of the day (not counting 
 any pick-me-up that she may require in her own 
 room), the amount would be something enormous,
 
 52 A UOUSE-PABTY. 
 
 incredible ! You would not believe the number 
 of women who have cured me of an unhappy pas- 
 sion for them by letting me see what a lot they could 
 drink." 
 
 "You will adore the Sabaroff, then. She never 
 touches anything that I see, except tea." 
 
 "Admirable person ! I am ready to adore her. 
 Tell me more about her. By the way, who is she ? " 
 
 " Oh, you must go to Dolly for biographies of her 
 foreigners. I can't keep even their names in my 
 head." 
 
 " Foreigners ! What an expression ! " cries Dorothy 
 Usk, in disdain. " Since steam effaced frontiers, no- 
 body but insular people like ourselves ever use such a 
 term. Nationalities are obliterated." 
 
 She is very fond of Xenia Sabaroff : she has a great 
 many warm attachments to women who help to make 
 her house attractive. 
 
 "Nationalities are still discernible in different to- 
 baccos," murmurs Brandolin. " The Havana won't ac- 
 knowledge an equal in the Cavour." 
 
 " Dolly don't know anything about her," continues 
 Usk, clinging to the subject. 
 
 " Oh, my dear ! " cried his wife, shocked, " when 
 she is the niece of the great Chancellor and her mother 
 was a Princess Dourtza." 
 
 " You don't know anything about her," repeats Usk, 
 with that unpleasant obstinacy characteristic of men
 
 A B USSIAN PKINCESS. 53 
 
 when they talk to their wives. " You met her in 
 Vienna and took one of your crazes for her, and she 
 may have sent a score of lovers to Siberia, or deserve 
 to go there herself, for anything you can tell. One can 
 never be sure of anything about foreigners." 
 
 "How absurd you are, and how insular/" cries 
 Dorothy Usk, again. " ' Foreigners ! ' As if there 
 were any foreigners in these days, when Europe is like 
 one family ! " 
 
 " A family which, like most families, squabbles and 
 scratches pretty often, then," says Usk, which seems 
 to his wife a reply too vulgar to be worthy of contra- 
 diction. He is conscious that Xenia Sabaroff is a 
 very great lady, and that her quarterings, backed by 
 descent and alliance, are wholly irreproachable, in- 
 deed, written in that libra cToro, the " Almanach de 
 Gotha," for all who choose to read. 
 
 Her descent and her diamonds are alike immaculate, 
 but her character? he is too old-fashioned a Briton 
 not to think it very probable that there is something 
 louche there. 
 
 Usk is a Russophobist, as becomes a true Tory. 
 He has a rooted impression that all Russians are spies 
 when they are not swindlers ; much as in the early 
 years of the century his grandsire had been positive 
 that all Frenchmen were assassins when they were not 
 dancing-masters. The White Czar has replaced the 
 Petit Caporal, and the fur cap the cocked hat, in the
 
 54 A HOUSE-PARTY 
 
 eyes of Englishmen of Usk's type, as an object of 
 dread and detestation. He would never be in the least 
 surprised if it turned out that the real object of Ma- 
 dame Sabaroff s visit to Surrenden were to have possible 
 opportunities to examine the facilities of Weymouth 
 as a landing-place for Cossacks out of Muscovite cor- 
 vettes. 
 
 " Russians are tremendous swells at palaver," he says, 
 with much contempt, " gammon you no end if you like 
 to believe 'em : they've always some political dodge or 
 other behind it all." 
 
 " I don't say she isn't an agreeable woman," he con- 
 tinues, now: his admiration of Madame Sabaroff is 
 much mitigated by his sense that she has a rather 
 derisive opinion of himself. " I don't say she isn't 
 an agreeable woman, but she gives me the idea of 
 artificiality, insincerity, mystery." 
 
 " Just because she's a Russian ! " cries his wife, with 
 disdain. 
 
 " My dear George," observes Brandolin, " there are 
 preconceived ideas about all nationalities. As a rule, 
 they are completely false. The received Continental 
 idea is that an Englishman is a bluff, blunt, unpleas- 
 ant, opinionated person, very cross, very clean too it is 
 true, but 011 the strength of his tub and his constitu 
 tion despising all the rest of mankind. Now, how 
 completely absurd such an opinion is ! You yourself 
 are an example of the suaviter in modo, fortiter in re,
 
 A RUSSIAN PRINCESS. 55 
 
 of which the true-blue Briton always gives so admi- 
 rable an example." 
 
 Usk laughs, but sulkily ; he has the impression that 
 his beloved friend is making fun of him, but he is not 
 quite sure. He himself believes that he is an ideal 
 Englishman ; Brandolin is only half or a quarter of one, 
 he does not shoot, wears furs in winter, only drinks 
 very light Rhenish wine, never goes to any church, and 
 never cuts his hair very short. Added to this, he has 
 no fixed political opinion, except a general impression 
 that England and the world in general are going down- 
 hill as fast as they can, " tobogganing " as they say in 
 Canada, at the rate of fifty miles a minute, to land in 
 the slough of Socialism and be picked out of it by 
 some military despot, a democracy invariably ending in 
 absolutism. 
 
 " What ridiculous rubbish ! " says his wife. " You 
 might as well say that the demoiselles-mannequins at 
 "Worth's or Rodrigue's are conspiring for the Orlean- 
 ists when they try on my clothes." 
 
 " They are conspiring for the ruin of your family," 
 says Usk, with a groan. " Whose purse can stand 
 those Paris prices ? " 
 
 " What an irrelevant remark ! " cries Lady Usk. 
 " You are always dragging money-questions into every- 
 thing." 
 
 " Those faiseurs, as you call 'em, continues Usk, un- 
 heeding, " are at the root of half the misery of society.
 
 56 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 Women get into debt up to their eyes for their toilets, 
 ami they don't care what abomination they do if they 
 get enough out of it to go on plunging. Hundred- 
 guinea gowns soon make up a pretty total when you 
 change 'em three times a day." 
 
 " And if women are guys aren't the men furious ? " 
 asks his wife. " Even if they try to economize, aren't 
 they always taunted with being dowdies ? You, none 
 of you, know anything about the cost of things, and you 
 expect everybody to be bien mise on a halfpenny a day. 
 When Boom saw me at Ascot this year he stared at 
 me, and whispered to me, ' Oh, I say, mother ! you've 
 got the same bonnet on you had at the Oaks. I do 
 hope the other fellows won't notice it.' That is how 
 he will speak to his wife some day ; and yet I dare say, 
 like you, he will expect her to get her bonnets from 
 Virot at ten francs apiece ! " 
 
 Lady Usk is angry and roused. 
 
 " Look at my poor little sister," she goes on. 
 " What a life that brute Mersey leads her about 
 money ! All those dreadfully plain girls to dress, and 
 nothing to do it on, and yet if they are not all well 
 got up wherever they go, he swears he is ashamed 
 to be seen with them. You can't dress well, you can't 
 do anything well, without spending money ; and if 
 you haven't money you must get into debt. That is 
 as clear as that two and two are four. When ever 
 do men remember their own extravagances ? You
 
 A RUSSIAN PRINCESS. 57 
 
 smoke ten cigars a day ; your cigars cost a shilling or 
 eighteenpence each, that is ten or fifteen shillings a 
 day ; five pounds a week, not counting your cigarettes ! 
 Good heavens! five pounds a week for sheer silly 
 personal indulgence that your doctors tell you will 
 canker your tongue and dry up your gastric juice! 
 At all events, our toilets don't hurt our digestion ; and 
 what would the world look like if women weren't 
 well dressed in it ? Your cigars benefit nobody, and 
 only make your teeth yellow." 
 
 "Well, in a year they cost about what one ball- 
 gown does that's worn twice." 
 
 " I always wear mine three times, even in London," 
 says Dorothy Usk, with conscious virtue. " But I 
 don't see any sin in spending money. I think it 
 ought to be spent. But you are always dragging 
 money-questions into everything, and Boom says that 
 the Latin person whom you and Lord Brandolin are 
 always quoting declares most sensibly that money 
 should always be regarded as a means, never as an 
 end ; and if it is to be a means to anything, must not 
 it be spent before it can become so ? " 
 
 " That's neither here nor there," replies her lord ; 
 " and if Boom only reads his classics upside down like 
 that he'd better leave 'em alone." 
 
 " You are never content. Most men would be de- 
 lighted if a boy read at all" 
 
 " I don't know why, I'm sure," replies Usk, drearily.
 
 jflj A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 " Reading's going out, you know ; nobody '11 read at 
 all fifty years hence : poking about in guinea-pigs' 
 stomachs, and giving long names to insects out of the 
 coal-hole, is what they call education nowadays." 
 
 "Frederic Harrison has said very aptly," remarks 
 Brandolin, who is present at this conjugal colloquy, 
 and seeks to make a diversion on it, " that the boast 
 of science is to eend the Indian mails across seas and 
 deserts in nine days, but that science cannot put in 
 those mail-bags a single letter equal to Voltaire's or 
 Sevigne's, and he doubts very much that there is one." 
 
 " Its an ill bird that fouls its own nest," says Usk, 
 grimly : " still, I'm very glad if those scientific prigs 
 fall out among themselves." 
 
 " I think some people write charming letters still," 
 says Dorothy Usk. " Of course when one is in a hurry 
 and one is almost always in a hurry " 
 
 " Hurry is fatal, Lady Usk," says Brandolin. " It 
 destroys style, grace, and harmony. It is the curse of 
 our times. The most lovely thing in life is leisure ; 
 and we call it progress to have killed it." 
 
 " Read this letter," says his hostess, giving him one 
 which she holds in her hand. " There is nothing pri- 
 vate in it, and nothing wonderful, but there is a grace 
 in the expressions ; whilst the English, for a foreigner, 
 is absolutely marvellous." 
 
 "I thought there were no foreigners?" says Usk 
 " I thought steam had effaced nationalities?"
 
 A HU8SIAN PRINCESS. 59 
 
 His wife does not deign to reply. 
 
 Brandolin has taken the letter with hesitation. 
 " Do you really think I may read it?" 
 
 " When I tell you to do so," says Dolly Usk, im- 
 patiently. " Besides, there is nothing in it, only it is 
 pretty." 
 
 Brandolin reads; it is on very thick paper, almost 
 imperceptibly scented, with a princess's crown em- 
 bossed on it and a gold X. 
 
 "It is very kind of you, dear Lady Usk, to have 
 remembered a solitaire like myself in the midst of 
 your charming children and your many joys." ("My 
 many annoyances, she means," interpolates Lady Usk.) 
 "I will be with you, as you so amiably wish, next 
 Tuesday or Wednesday. I am for the moment in 
 Paris, having been this month at Aix, not that I have 
 any aches or pains myself, but a friend of mine, Marie 
 Woronszoff, has many, and tries to cure them by warm 
 sunshine and the cold douches which her physicians 
 prescribe. There are many pleasant people here; 
 everyone is supposed to be very ill and suffering 
 agony, but everyone laughs, flirts, plays, sits under 
 the little tents under the trees, dances at the Casino> 
 and eats a fair dinner as usual, so that if Pallida Mors 
 be indeed among us she looks just like everyone else. 
 I came to Aix from my own place on the White Sea, 
 and the gay groups, the bright alleys, the green em- 
 bowered chalets, and the goatherds with their flocks
 
 60 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 which come tinkling their bells down the hill-sides in 
 all directions, all seemed to me like an operetta of 
 Offenbach's, spiritualized and washed with the pure 
 daylight and the mountain-air, but still Offenbach. 
 How are your children? Do they still care for me? 
 That is very sweet of them. A day at their years is 
 as long as a season at mine. Assure them of my 
 unforgetting gratitude. I shall be pleased to be in 
 England again, and, though I do not know Surrenden, 
 my recollections of Orme tell me cTavance that I shall 
 in any house of yours find the kindest of friends, the 
 most sympathetic of companions, Say many things to 
 your lord for me. I think he is only so discontented 
 because the gods have been too good to him and 
 given him too completely everything he can desire." 
 (" That's all she knows about it ! " says Usk, sotto voce.) 
 " Au revoir, dear Lady Usk. Receive the assurance 
 of my highest consideration, and believe in my sincere 
 regard. J2ien ct vous. XENIA P. SABAROFF." 
 
 " A very pretty letter," says Brandolin. " Many 
 thanks." And he restores it to its owner. 
 
 " Bunkum ! " says Usk. 
 
 " Not a bit in the world," says his wife, with contempt 
 and indignation. " /She does not ' pose,' if you do ! " 
 
 "My dear George," says Brandolin, " you are one 
 of those thorough-going Britons who always think 
 that everybody who doesn't deal in disagreeable re- 
 marks must be lying. Believe me, there are people
 
 A RUSSIAN PRINCESS. 61 
 
 who really see ' the side that's next the sun,' even in 
 a crab-apple." 
 
 " And deuced irritating, too, they are," says Usk, 
 with emphasis. "'What a beastly bad day,' one 
 says to 'em when it's pouring cats and dogs, and they 
 answer, ' Oh, yes, but rain was so wanted we must be 
 thankful.' That's the kind of answer that would 
 make a saint swear." 
 
 "You are not a saint, and you swear on small 
 provocation," replies Brandolin. " To look at rain 
 in that light argues true philosophy. Unfortunately 
 philosophy is too often strained to bursting in our 
 climate, by having to contemplate rain destroying the 
 crops. If we only had rain when we wanted it, I 
 think the most unreasonable among us would view 
 it with equanimity." 
 
 Rain is at that moment running down the painted 
 panes of the Surrenden casements, and driving across 
 the lawns and terraces of the Surrenden gardens. It 
 makes Usk very cross : all the ensilage in the world 
 will not console him for ripening corn beaten down 
 in all directions, and young families of pheasants dying 
 of cramp and pip in their ferny homes. 
 
 " Dig a big pit and cram your soaked grass into it : 
 very well, I don't say no," he growls. "But what 
 about your mildewed wheat ? And where should we 
 be if we had to undergo a blockade? I'm not against 
 making more pasture, grazing's all very well; but if
 
 62 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 there's a war big enough to sweep the seas of the grain- 
 ships that come to us from the Colonies and the United 
 States, where shall we be if we've nothing to eat but 
 our own beef and mutton ? Beef and mutton are solid 
 food, but I believe we should all go mad on them if 
 we'd no bread to eat too." 
 
 " I'm all for pasture," replies Brandolin ; " and as 
 the British Isles can never, under any cultivation 
 whatever, feed all their population, we may as well 
 dedicate ourselves to what is picturesque. I am 
 fascinated by Laveleye's portrait of England when 
 she shall have turned grazier exclusively : it is lovely : 
 * L'Angleterre redeviendra ce qu'elle etait sous les 
 Tudors, un grand pare vert, parseme d'ormes et de 
 ehenes, ou boeufs et moutons se promeneront dans des 
 prairies sans limites.' " 
 
 " ' Prairies sans limites ? ' when the land's to be all 
 sliced up in little bits between peasant proprietors ! " 
 says Usk. 
 
 " I don't think Laveleye believes in peasant proprie- 
 tors, though he is a professor of social economy." 
 
 " Social economy! " gays Usk, with a groan. " Oh, 
 I know that fool of a word ! In plain English, it 
 
 means ruin all round, and fortune for a few d d 
 
 manufacturers." 
 
 " The d d manufacturer is the principal outcome 
 
 of two thousand centuries of Christianity, civilization, 
 and culture. The result is not perfectly satisfactory or
 
 A RUSSIAN PRINCESS. 63 
 
 encouraging, one must admit," says Brandolin, as he 
 reaches down a volume of eighteenth-century memoirs, 
 and adds, with entire irrelevancy to manufacturers or 
 memoirs, " Is she really as handsome as your children 
 tell me?" 
 
 "Who?" asks Usk. "Oh, the Russian woman 
 yes, very good-looking. Yes, she was here at Easter, 
 and she turned their heads." 
 
 " Has she any lovers older than Babe ? " 
 " She has left 'em in Russia if she has." 
 " A convenient distance to leave anything at : Italy 
 and Russia are the only countries remaining to us in 
 which Messalina can still do her little murders com- 
 fortably without any fuss being made." 
 
 " She isn't Messalina, at least I think not. But one 
 never knows." 
 
 "No, one never knows till one tries," says Bran- 
 dolin. And he wishes vaguely that the Russian 
 woman were already here. He is fond of Surrenden, 
 and fond of all its people, but he is a little, a very 
 little, bored. He sees that all Lady Usk's doves are 
 paired, and he does not wish to disturb their harmony, 
 possibly because none of the feminine doves attract 
 him. But he cannot flirt forever with the children, 
 because the children are not very often visible, and 
 without flirting civilized life is dull, even for a man 
 who is more easily consoled by ancient authors off the 
 
 library- shelves than most people can be. 
 6
 
 64 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 This conversation occurs in the forenoon in Lady 
 Usk's boudoir. In the late afternoon in the library 
 over their teacups the ladies talk of Xenia Sabaroff. 
 It is perceptible to Brandolin that they would prefer 
 that she should not arrive. 
 
 " Is she really so very good-looking ? " he asks of 
 Mrs. Wentworth Curzon. 
 
 " Oh, yes," replies that lady, with an accent of de- 
 preciation in her tones. " Yes, she is very handsome ; 
 but too pale, and her eyes too large. You know these 
 Russian women are mere paguets de nerfs, shut up in 
 their rooms all day and smoking so incessantly : they 
 have all that is worst in the Oriental and Parisienne 
 mixed together." 
 
 " How very sad ! " says Brandolin. " I don't think 
 I have known one, except Princess Kraskawa : she 
 went sleighing in all weathers, wore the frankest of 
 gingerbread wigs, and was always surrounded by about 
 fifty grandchildren." 
 
 Princess Kraskawa had been for many years ambas- 
 sadress in London. 
 
 " Of course there are exceptions," says Nina Curzon ; 
 "but generally, you know, they are very depraved, 
 such inordinate gamblers, and so fond of morphine, and 
 always maladives" 
 
 " Ah," says Brandolin, pensively, " but the physica 
 and moral perfection of Englishwomen always makes 
 them take too high a standard : poor humanity toils
 
 A RUSSIAN PRINCESS. 65 
 
 hopelessly, and utterly exhausted, many miles behind 
 them." 
 
 " Don't talk nonsense," says Mrs. Curzon ; " we are 
 no better than our neighbors, perhaps, but we are not 
 afraid of the air, we don't heat our houses to a thousand 
 degrees above boiling-point, we don't gamble, at least 
 not much, we don't talk every language under the 
 sun except our own, and yet not one of them grammat- 
 ically." 
 
 " Decidedly," reflected Brandolin, " Lawrence must 
 have looked too often at Madame Sabaroff." 
 
 " Sabaroff is dead, isn't he ? " he asked, aloud. " You 
 know I have been out of society for a year : the whole 
 map of Europe gets altered in one's absence." 
 
 " Sabaroff was shot in a duel four years ago," replies 
 Mrs. Curzon, " a duel about her." 
 
 " What a fortunate woman ! To get rid of a hus- 
 band, and to get rid of him in such interesting circum- 
 stances ! C'est le comble de bonheur /" 
 
 " That depends. With her it resulted in her exile 
 from court." 
 
 " Oh, to be sure ; when Russians are naughty they 
 are sent to live on their estates, as riotous children are 
 dismissed to the nursery. Was she compromised, 
 then?" 
 
 " Very much compromised ; and both men were 
 killed, for the adversary of Sabaroff had been wounded 
 mortally, when, with an immense effort, bo fired and 
 
 shot the prince through the lungs." 
 5
 
 66 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 "A pretty little melodrama. Who was the op- 
 ponent?" 
 
 " Count Lustoff, a colonel of the Guard. I wonder 
 you did not hear of it : it made a stir at the time." 
 
 "I may have heard: when one doesn't know the 
 people concerned, no massacre, even of the Innocents, 
 makes any impression on one. And the result was that 
 the lady had to leave the imperial court ? " 
 
 "Yes: they do draw a line there" 
 
 Brandolin laughs ; it tickles his fancy to hear Mrs. 
 Wentworth Curzon condemning by implication the 
 laxity of the court of St. James. 
 
 " They can't send us to our estates," he replies, " the 
 lands are so small and the railways are so close. Else 
 it would have a very good effect if all our naughty 
 people could be shut up inside their own gates, with 
 nobody to speak to but the steward and the rector. 
 Can you imagine anything that would more effectively 
 contribute to correct manners and morals ? But how 
 very desolate London would look ! " 
 
 "You think everybody would be exiled inside his 
 own ring-fence 1 " 
 
 " Her own ring-fence, well, nearly everybody. 
 There would certainly be no garden-parties at Marl- 
 borough House." 
 
 Mrs. Wentworth Curzon is not pleased ; she is a 
 star of the first magnitude at Marlborough House. 
 
 " Why does she take this absent woman's character
 
 A RUSSIAN PRINCESS. 67 
 
 away ? " thinks Brandolin, with a sense of irritation. 
 " I will trust the Babe's instincts sooner than hers." 
 
 He does not know Xenia Sabaroff; but he admires 
 the photograph of her which stands on the boudoir 
 table, and he likes the tone of the letter written from 
 Aix. With that spirit of contradiction which is in- 
 born in human nature, he is inclined to disbelieve all 
 that Nina Curzon has told him. Lustoff and Saba- 
 roff probably both deserved their fates, and the de- 
 parture from the court of St. Petersburg might very 
 possibly have been voluntary. He has a vague feeling 
 of tenderness for the original of the photograph. It 
 often happens to him to fall sentimentally and ephem- 
 erally in love with some unknown woman whose 
 portrait he has seen or of whose charms he has heard. 
 Sometimes he has avoided knowing these in their 
 actual life, lest he should disturb his ideals. He is 
 an imaginative man with a great amount of leisure in 
 which to indulge his fancies, and his knowledge of 
 the world has not hardened his feelings or dulled his 
 fancy. There is something of the Montrose, of the 
 Lord Surrey, in him. 
 
 " To think of all one knows about that hussy," he 
 muses, as he smokes a cigar in his bedroom before 
 dressing for dinner. By the uncomplimentary epithet 
 he means Mrs. Wentworth Curzon. " Such a good 
 fellow as Fred Curzon is, too, a man who might have 
 been made anything of if she'd only treated him
 
 68 -4 HOUSE-PARTf. 
 
 decently. When he married her he adored the 
 ground she walked on, but before a week was out she 
 began to fret him, and jar at him, and break him in, 
 as she called it ; he was too poor for her, and too slow 
 for her, and too good for her, and she was vilely cruel 
 to him, it's only women who can be cruel like that, 
 she's had more lovers than anybody living, and she's 
 taken every one of 'em for money ; nothing but 
 money. Old Melton gave her the Park-Lane House, 
 and Glamorgan gave her her emeralds, and Dartmoor 
 paid her Paris bills for ten years, and Riverston takes 
 all her stable-expenses. Everything she does is done 
 for money ; and if she puts any heart at all now into 
 this thing with Lawrence, it is only because she's get- 
 ting older and so getting jealous, they always do as 
 they get on, and then she calls Russians dissolute 
 and depraved, good Lord ! " 
 
 With which he casts aside his cigar, and resigns 
 himself to his servant's hands as the second gong 
 sounds.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE FIKST MEETING. 
 
 THE very bachelor rooms at Surrender! are condu- 
 cive to revery and indolence, cosily comfortable and 
 full of little attentions for the guest's bien-dtre, among 
 which there is a printed paper which is always laid on 
 the dressing-table in every room at this house : it 
 contains the latest telegrams of public news, which 
 come every afternoon from a London news-agency. 
 
 " I dare say to the political fellows they are delight- 
 ful," reflects Brandolin, as he glances down the lines, 
 " but to me they unpleasantly recall an uncomfortable 
 world. I don't dine the worse, certainly, for knowing 
 that there is a revolution in Patagonia or an earth- 
 quake in Bolivia, but neither do I dine the better for 
 being told that the French government is destituant all 
 moderate prefets in favor of immoderate ones. It is 
 very interesting, no doubt, but it doesn't interest me, 
 and I think the possession of these fresh scraps of 
 prosaic news spoils dinner-conversation." 
 
 Brandolin does not consider it conversation to say, 
 " Have you seen so-and-so ? " or, " What a sad thing
 
 70 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 such-an-such is, isn't it! " He likes persiflage, he 
 likes banter, he likes argument, he likes antithesis, he 
 likes brilliancy, and the dinner-tables of the epoch 
 seldom offer these good things with their Metternich 
 hock and Mouton Rothschild. He is fond of talking 
 himself, and he can be also a very good listener. If 
 you cannot give the quid pro quo in hearing as in 
 speaking, you may be immensely clever, but you will 
 be immediately pronounced a bore, like Macaulay and 
 Madame de Stael. Brandolin likes talking not for the 
 sake of showing himself off. but for the sake of being 
 amused, of eliciting the opinions and observing the 
 minds of others, and he is convinced that if the con- 
 versational art were cultured as it used to be in Bour- 
 bon Paris, life would become more refined, more agree- 
 able, more sympathetic, and less given over to gross 
 pleasures of the appetites. 
 
 " Children should be taught to talk," he observes 
 one day to Lady Usk, " and they should not be allowed 
 to be slovenly in their speech any more than in their 
 dress. You would not let them enter your presence 
 with unbrushed hair, but you do let them use any bald, 
 slangy, or inappropriate words which come uppermost 
 to them. There is so much in the choice of words ! A 
 beautiful voice is a delicious thing, but it avails little 
 without the usage of apt and graceful phrases. Did 
 you ever hear Mrs. Norton sustain a discussion or 
 relate an anecdote ? It was like listening to perfect
 
 THE FIRST MEETING. 71 
 
 phrasing in music. When she died, the art of conver- 
 sation died with her." 
 
 " We are always in such a hurry," says Lady Usk, 
 which is her habitual explanation of anything in which 
 her generation is at fault. " And hurry is always vul- 
 gar, you know, as you said the other day; it cannot 
 help itself." 
 
 " You are a purist, my dear Brandolin," says Lady 
 Dolgelly, who hates him. 
 
 " ' Purity, daughter of sweet virtues mild ! ' " mur- 
 murs Brandolin. " Alas, my dear ladies, I cannot 
 hope that she dwells with me in any form ! When 
 she has a home in your own gentle breasts, who can 
 hope that she would ever take shelter in a man's?" 
 
 " How impertinent and how nasty he is ! " thinks 
 the lady ; and she detests him a little more cordially 
 than before. There is not a very good feeling towards 
 him among any of the ladies at Surrenden : he does 
 not make love to them, he does not endeavor to alter 
 existing arrangements in his favor ; it is generally felt 
 that he would not care to do so. What can you ex- 
 pect from a man who sits half his days in a library ? 
 
 The Surrenden library is well stored, an elegant 
 and lettered lord of the eighteenth century having 
 been a bibliophile. It is a charming room panelled 
 with inlaid woods, and with a ceiling painted after 
 Tiepolo ; the bookcases are built into the wall, so that 
 the books look chez eux, and are not mere lodgers or
 
 72 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 visitors ; oriel windows look out on to a portion of the 
 garden laid out by Beaumont. One window has been 
 cut down to the ground, an anachronism and innova- 
 tion indeed, somewhat impairing the uniformity of the 
 room. The present Lady Usk had it done, but one 
 forgives her the sacrilege when one feels how pleasant 
 it is to walk out from the mellow shadows of the 
 library on to the smooth-shaven grass and gather a rose 
 with one hand whilst holding an eighteenth-century 
 author with the other. 
 
 It is in the smaller library adjacent, filled with 
 modern volumes, that five-o'clock tea is always to be 
 had, with all the abundant demoralizing abominations 
 of caviare, kummel, etc. It is a gay room, with 
 dessus-des-portes after Watteau and every variety of 
 couch and of lounging-chair. " Reading made easy " 
 somebody calls it. But there is little reading done 
 either in it or in the big library : Brandolin when he 
 goes there finds himself usually alone, and can com- 
 mune as he chooses with Latin philosophy and Gaulois 
 wit. 
 
 " You used to read, George ? " he says to his host, in 
 expostulation. 
 
 " Yes, I used, ages ago," says Usk, with a yawn. 
 
 Brandolin looks at him with curiosity. 
 
 " I can understand a man who has never read," he 
 replies, "but I cannot understand a man losing the 
 taste for reading if he has ever had it. One can dwell
 
 THE F1EST MEETING. 73 
 
 contented in Bceotia if one has never been out of it, 
 but to go back to Boeotia after living in Attica " 
 
 " It's one's life does it." 
 
 u What life ? One has the life one wishes." 
 
 "That's the sort of thing a man says who hasn't 
 married." 
 
 "My dear George, you cannot pretend your wife 
 would prevent your reading Latin and Greek, or even 
 Sanscrit. I am sure she would much sooner you read 
 them than well, than do other things you do do." 
 
 " I don't say she would prevent me," returns the 
 lord of Surrenden, with some crossness, " but it's the 
 kind of life one gets into that kills all that sort of 
 thing in one. There is no time for it." 
 
 " I keep out of the life : why don't you ? " 
 
 " There's no time for anything," says Usk, gloomily. 
 "There's such heaps of things to see to, and such 
 numbers of places to go to, and then one lives au jour 
 le jour, and one gets into the swim and goes on, and 
 then there's the shooting, and when there isn't the 
 shooting there's the season, and the racing. 
 
 " I lead my own life," Brandolin remarks. 
 
 " Yes ; but you don't mind being called eccentric." 
 
 "No; I don't mind it in the least. If they say 
 nothing worse of me I am grateful." 
 
 " But you couldn't do it if you had all my places, 
 and all my houses, and all my brothers, and all my 
 family. You're a free agent. I declare that all the
 
 74 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 time goes away with me in such a crowd of worries 
 that I've hardly a second to smoke a cigarette in, in 
 any peace ! " 
 
 Brandolin smiles. 
 
 A sixth part of most days his host passes leaning 
 back in some easy-chair with a cigar in his mouth, 
 whether his venue be Surrenden, Orme, Denton, the 
 smoking-room of a club, or the house of a friend, 
 whether London or the country. Usk's own view of 
 himself is of a man entirely devoted to, and sacrificed 
 to, business, politics, the management of his estates, 
 and the million-and-one affairs which perpetually as- 
 sail him ; but this is not the view which his friends 
 take of him. 
 
 When ever is the view that our friends take of us 
 our view ? 
 
 " Once a scholar always a scholar, it seems to me," 
 says Brandolin. " I could as soon live without air as 
 without books." And he quotes Cowley, 
 
 " Books should as business entertain the light." 
 
 " You don't continue the quotation," says Usk, with 
 a smile. 
 
 " Autres temps autres mceurs" says Brandolin. He 
 laughs, and gets up : it is four in the afternoon ; the 
 delicious green garden is lying bathed in warm amber 
 light; one of the peacocks is turning round slowly
 
 
 THE FIRST MEETING. 75 
 
 with all his train displayed ; he seems never to tire of 
 turning round. 
 
 " How exactly that bird is like some politicians one 
 could name ! " says Brandolin. " Do you know that 
 this charming garden always reminds me of St. 
 Hubert's Lea, our west garden, I mean? I think 
 the same man must have laid them out. Is it not 
 Bulwer Lytton who says that so long as one has a 
 garden one always has one room which is roofed by 
 heaven?" 
 
 "A heaven mitigated by gardeners' wages, very 
 considerably mitigated," says Usk. 
 
 You are cynical, George, and your mind is running 
 on pounds, shillings, and pence, an offence against 
 Nature on such a day as this. There is nothing so 
 demoralizing as to think of money." 
 
 " To have debts and not to think of 'em is more so ; 
 and Boom " 
 
 " Sell something of his that he likes very much, to 
 pay his debts : that's the only way I know of to check 
 a boy at the onset. Your father did it with me the 
 very first time I owed twenty pounds ; and he read 
 me a lesson I never forgot. I have been eternally 
 obliged to him ever since." 
 
 " What did he sell ? " 
 
 "My cob, a cob I adored. I wept like a child, 
 but he didn't see my tears. What I saved up next 
 half to trace out that cob and buy him back at twice
 
 76 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 his value, what I denied myself to make up the 
 money, nobody would believe ; and the beast wasn't 
 easy to find : some dealer had taken him over to 
 Ireland." 
 
 That could be done with you," says Usk gloomily. 
 " It would be no use to do it with Boom : his mother 
 would buy him some other horse the next day. You've 
 no chance to bring up a boy decently if he's got a 
 mother. 
 
 " The reverse is the received opinion of mankind," 
 said Brandolin ; " but I believe there's something to 
 be said for your view. No end of women have no 
 idea of bringing up their children, and when they 
 ought to be ordered a flogging they fondle them." 
 
 "Dolly does," says her husband. "What's a 
 woman's notion of a horse ? That he must have slen- 
 der legs, a coat like satin, and be fed on apples and 
 sugar : still, they saw his mouth till he half dislocates 
 his neck, and tear his ribs open with their spur. 
 They're just as unreasonable with their children. 
 
 " Who is that woman ? " says Brandolin, making a 
 step across the window and into the garden. " Now I 
 am perfectly certain that is Madame Sabaroff, without 
 your saying so." 
 
 " Then I needn't say so," replies Usk. " I wonder 
 when she came. They didn't expect her till to- 
 morrow." 
 
 They both look at a lady in one of the distant alleys
 
 THE FIRST MEETING. 'i'i 
 
 walking between the high green walls. She is dressed 
 in some soft cream-colored stuff with quantities of 
 lace. She carries a sunshade of the same hue. She 
 has a tall cane in her other .hand. On either side of 
 her are the Ladies Alexandra and Hermione, and be- 
 fore her gambols hi his white sailor clothes, with his 
 blue silk stockings and his silver buckled shoes, the 
 Babe. 
 
 " Decidedly the Sabaroff," says Usk. " Won't you 
 come and speak to her ? " 
 
 " With pleasure," says Brandolin. " Even if the 
 Babe brains me with the cane ! " 
 
 He looks very well as he walks bareheaded over the 
 the grass and along the green alley ; he wears a loose 
 brown velvet coat admirably made, and brown 
 breeches and stockings ; his legs are as well made as 
 his coat ; the sun shines on his curling hair ; there is a 
 degag^ picturesque, debonair, yet distinguished look 
 about him, which pleases the eyes of Xenia Sabaroff, 
 as they watch him draw near. 
 
 " Who is that person with your father ? " she asks. 
 The children tell her, all speaking at once. 
 
 She recognizes the name ; she has heard of him 
 often hi the world, and has read those books which 
 praise solitude and a dinner of herbs. " I doubt his 
 having been alone very long, however," she reflects, as 
 she looks at him. A certain unlikeness in him to 
 Englishmen in general, some women who are fond of
 
 78 A IIOUSE-PAETY. 
 
 him fancifully trace to the fact that the first Brandoliu 
 was a Venetian, who fled for his life from the Re- 
 public, and made himself conspicuous and acceptable 
 for his talents alike as a lutist and a swordsman at the 
 court of Henry the Second. "It can't count, its so 
 very far away," he himself objects; but perhaps it 
 does count. Of all things ineffaceable, the marks of 
 race are the most indelible. 
 
 The Venetian Brandolin married the daughter of a 
 Norman knight, and his descendants became affection- 
 ate sons of England, and held their lands of St. Hu- 
 bert's Lea safely under the wars of the Roses, of the 
 Commonwealth, and of the Jacobites. They were al- 
 ways noticeable for scholarly habits and artistic tastes, 
 and in the time of George the Second the Lord Bran- 
 dolin of the period did much to enrich his family man- 
 sion and diminish the family fortunes by his importa- 
 tions of Italian sculptures and pictures and his patron- 
 age of Italian musicians. The house at St. Hubert's 
 Lea is very beautiful, but it requires much more to 
 keep it up than the present owner possesses. He is 
 often urged to let it, but he scouts the idea. " You 
 might as well ask me to sell the Brandolin portraits, 
 like Charles Surface," he says, angrily, whenever his 
 more intimate friends venture on the suggestion. So 
 the old house stands in its wann-hued and casket-like- 
 loveliness, empty save for his occasional visits and the 
 presence of many old and devoted servants.
 
 THE FI&ST MEETING. 1$ 
 
 " An interesting woman," he thinks now, as he ex- 
 changes with the Princess Sabaroff the usual compli- 
 ments and commonplaces of a presentation. " Russians 
 ai % e always interesting : they are the only women about 
 whom you feel that you know very little ; they are the 
 only women who, in this chatterbox of a generation 
 tout en dehors as it is, preserve some of the vague 
 charm of mystery ; and what a charm that is ! " 
 
 His reasons for admiring her are not those of the 
 Babe and his sisters, but he admires her almost as 
 much as they. Brandolin, who in his remote travels 
 has seen a great deal of that simple natm-e which is so 
 much lauded by many people, has a great appreciation 
 of well-dressed women, and the Madame Sabaroff is 
 admirably dressed, from her long loose cream-colored 
 gloves to her bronze shoes with their miniature dia- 
 mond clasps. 
 
 " Didn't I tell you ? " whispers the Babe, climbing 
 up behind Brandolin. 
 
 " Yes you did," returned Brandolin, " and you were 
 quite right ; but it is abominably bad manners to 
 whisper, my dear Cecil." 
 
 The Babe subsides into silence with hot cheeks : 
 when anybody calls him Cecil he is conscious that he 
 has committed some flagrant offence. 
 
 " Those brats are always bothering you, princess," 
 says their father. 
 
 " They are very kind to me," replies Xenia Sabaroff, 
 6
 
 80 A BOUKE-PAETY. 
 
 in English which has absolutely no foreign accent. 
 " They make me feel at home ! What a charming 
 place this is ! I like it better than your castle what 
 is its name ? where I had the pleasure to visit you at 
 Easter." 
 
 " Orme. Oh, that's beastly, a regular barn : 
 obliged to go there just for show, you know." 
 
 " Orme was built by Inigo Jones, and the ingratitude 
 to fortune of its owner is a constant temptation to 
 Providence to deal in thunder-bolts, or have matches 
 left about by housemaids," says Brandolin. 
 
 " I think Lord Usk has not a contented mind," says 
 Madame Sabaroff, amused. 
 
 " Contented 1 By Jove, who should be, when Eng- 
 land's going to the dogs as fast as she can ? " 
 
 " In every period of your history," says the prin- 
 cess, " your country is always described as going head- 
 long to ruin ; and yet she has not gone there yet, and 
 she has not done ill." 
 
 " * Our constitution is established on a mere equi- 
 poise, with dark precipices and deep waters all round 
 it.' So said Burke," replies Brandolin. " At the pres- 
 ent moment everybody has forgotten the delicacy of 
 this nice equipoise, and one day or other it will lose its 
 balance and topple over into the deep waters, and be 
 engulfed. Myself, I confess I do not think that time 
 is very distant." 
 
 ** I hope it is : I am very much attached to Eng-
 
 THE FI&ST MEETING. 81 
 
 land," replies the Princess Xenia, gravely, "and to 
 naughty English boys," she adds, passing her hand 
 over the shining locks of the Babe. 
 
 " She must be in love with an Englishman," thinks 
 Brandolin, with the one-sided construction which a 
 man is always ready to place on the words of a 
 woman. " Must we go indoors?" he asks, regretfully, 
 as she is moving towards the house. " It is so pleas- 
 ant in these quaint green arbors. To be under a roof 
 on such a summer afternoon as this, is to fly in the 
 face of a merciful Creator with greater ingratitude 
 than Usk's ingratitude to Inigo Jones." 
 
 " But I have scarcely seen my hostess," says Madame 
 Sabaroff ; nevertheless, she resigns herself to a seat 
 in a yew-tree cut like a helmet. 
 
 There are all manner of delightful old-fashioned 
 flowers, such flowers as Disraeli gave to the garden of 
 Corisande, growing near in groups encircled by clipped 
 box-edging. 
 
 Those disciples of Pallas Athene who render the 
 happy lives of the Surrenden children occasionally a 
 burden to them seize at that moment on their prey and 
 bear them off to the school-room. The Babe goes to 
 his doom sullenly; he would be tearful, only that 
 were too unmanly. 
 
 "Why do you let those innocents be tortured, 
 George ? " asks Brandolin. 
 
 " Books should, like business, entertain the day/' 
 6
 
 82 A HOU8E-PABTY. 
 
 replies TJsk: "so you said, at least, just now. Then 
 governesses are of the same opinion." 
 
 " That is not the way to make them love books, to shut 
 them up against their wills on a summer afternoon." 
 
 "How will you educate your children when you 
 have 'em, then ? " 
 
 " He always gets out of any impersonal argument 
 by putting some personal question," complains Bran- 
 dolin to Madame Sabaroff. " It is a common device, 
 but always an unworthy one. Because a system is 
 very bad, it does not follow that I alone of all men 
 must be prepared with a better one. I think if I had 
 children I would not have them taught in that way at 
 all. I should get the wisest old man I could find, a 
 Samuel Johnson touched with a John Ruskin, and 
 should tell him to make learning delightful to them, 
 and associated, as far as our detestable climate would 
 allow, with open-air studies in cowslip meadows and 
 under hawthorn hedges. If I had only read dear 
 Horace at school, should I ever have loved him as I 
 do ? No ; my old tutor taught me to feel all the de- 
 light and the sweet savor of him, roaming in the oak 
 woods of my own old place." 
 
 "I am devoutly thankful," says his host, "that 
 Dorothy among her caprices had never had the fancy 
 you have, for a Dr. Johnson double with a Ruskin, to 
 correct my quotations, abuse my architecture, and 
 make prigs of the children."
 
 THE FIRST MEETING. 83 
 
 " Prigs ! " exclaims Brandolin. " Prigs ! When did 
 ever real scholarship and love of nature make anything 
 approaching to a prig? Science and class-rooms make 
 prigs, not Latin verse and cowslip meadows." 
 
 "That is true, I think," says the Princess Xenia, 
 with her serious smile. 
 
 " If they are beginning to agree with one another I 
 shall be de trop? thinks Usk, who is very good-nat- 
 ured to his guests, and popular enough with women 
 not to be resigned to play what is vulgarly termed 
 " second fiddle " (though why an expression borrowed 
 from the orchestra should be vulgar it were hard to 
 say). So he goes a few paces off to speak to a gar- 
 dener, and by degrees edges away towards the house, 
 leaving Brandolin and Madame Sabaroff to themselves 
 in the green yew-helmet arbor. 
 
 Brandolin is in love with his subject, and does not 
 abandon it. 
 
 " It is absurd," he continues, " the way in which chil- 
 dren are made to loathe all scholarship by its associa- 
 tion with their own pains and subjection. A child is 
 made as a punishment to learn by rote fifty lines of 
 Virgil. Good heavens ! It ought rather to be as a 
 reward that he should be allowed to open Virgil ! To 
 walk in all those delicious paths of thought should be 
 the highest pleasure that he could be brought to know. 
 To listen to the music of the poets should be at once 
 his privilege and his recompense. To be deprived of
 
 84 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 books should be, on the contrary, his cruellest chastise- 
 ment !" 
 
 " He would be a very exceptional child, surely," says 
 Madame Sabaroff. 
 
 " I was not an exceptional child," he answers, " but 
 that is how I was brought up and how I felt." 
 
 a You had an exceptional training, then ?" 
 
 " It ought not to be exceptional : that is just the 
 mischief. Up to the time I was seventeen, I was 
 brought up at my own place (by my father's directions, 
 in his will) by a most true and reverent scholar, whom 
 I loved as Burke loved Shackleton. He died, God 
 rest his soul, but the good he left behind him lives 
 after him : whatever grains of sense I have shown, and 
 whatever follies I have avoided, both what I am and 
 what I am not, are due to him, and it is to him that I 
 owe the love of study which has been the greatest con- 
 solation and the purest pleasure of my life. That is 
 why I pity so profoundly these poor Rochefort chil- 
 dren, and the tens of thousands like them, who are 
 being educated by the commonplace, flavorless, cram- 
 ming system which people call education. It may be 
 education ; it is not culture. What will the Babe al- 
 ways associate with his Latin themes ? Four walls, 
 hated books, inky, aching fingers, and a headache. 
 Whereas I never look at a Latin line in a newspaper, 
 be it one ever so hackneyed, without pleasure, as at the 
 face of an old friend, and whenever I repeat to myself
 
 THE FIRST MEETING. 85 
 
 the words, I always smell the cowslips and the lilac and 
 the hawthorn of the spring mornings when I was a boy." 
 
 Xenia Sabaroff looked at him with some little won- 
 der and more approval. 
 
 " My dear lord," she says seriously, " I think in 
 your enthusiasm you forget one thing, that there is 
 ground on which good seed falls and brings forth 
 flowers and fruit, and there is other ground on which 
 the same seed, be it strewn ever so thickly, lies 
 always barren. Without underrating the influences 
 of your tutor, I must believe that had you been edu- 
 cated at an English public school, or even in a French 
 Lyce"e, you would still have become a scholar, still 
 have loved your books." 
 
 "Alas, madam," says Brandolin, with a little sigh, 
 "perhaps I have only been what Matthew Arnold 
 calls a ' foiled circuitous wanderer ' in the orbit of life ! " 
 
 "I imagine that you have not very often been 
 foiled," replies the lady, with a smile, " and wander- 
 ing has a great deal to be said in its favor, especially 
 for a man. "Women are happiest, perhaps, at anchor." 
 
 " Women used to be : not our women. Nous avons 
 change tout cela. I have bored you too much with 
 myself and my opinions." 
 
 " No, you interest me," says his companion with a 
 serious serenity which deprives the words of all sound 
 of flattery or encouragement. " I have long admired 
 your writings," she adds, and Brandolin colors a little
 
 86 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 with gratification. The same kind of phrase is said 
 to him on an average five hundred times a year, and 
 his usual emotion is either ennui or irritation. The 
 admiration of fools is folly, and humiliates him. But 
 the admiration of so lovely a woman as Xenia Sa- 
 baroff would lay a flattering unction to the soul of 
 any man, even if she were absolutely mindless; and 
 she gives him the impression that she has a good deal 
 of mind, and one out of the common order. 
 
 " My writings have no other merit," he says, after 
 the expression of his sense of the honor she does him, 
 " than being absolutely the chronicle of what I have 
 seen and what I have thought ; and I think they are 
 expressed in tolerably pure English, though that is 
 claiming a great deal in these times ; for since John 
 Newman laid down the pen there is scarcely a living 
 Briton who can write his own tongue with eloquence 
 and purity." 
 
 " I think it must be very nice to leave off wander- 
 ing if one has a home," replies Madame Sabaroff, with 
 a slight sigh, which gave him the impression that, 
 though no doubt she had many houses, she had no 
 home. " Where is your place that you spoke of just 
 now ? the place where you learned to love Horace ? " 
 
 Brandolin is always pleased to speak of St. Hubert's 
 Lea. He has a great love for it and for the tradi- 
 tions of his race, which makes many people accuse him 
 of great family pride, though, as has been well said
 
 THE FIRST MEETING. 87 
 
 Apropos of a greater man than Brandolin, it is rather 
 that sentiment which the Romans defined as piety. 
 When he talks of his old home he grows eloquent, 
 unreserved, cordial ; and he describes with an artist's 
 touch its antiquities, its landscapes, and its old-world 
 and sylvan charms. 
 
 " It must be charming to care for any place so much 
 as that," says his companion, after hearing him with 
 interest. 
 
 " I think one cares more for places than for people," 
 he replies. 
 
 " Sometimes one cares for neither," says Xenia 
 Sabaroff, with a tone which in a less lovely woman 
 would have been morose. 
 
 " One must suffice very thoroughly to one's self in 
 such a case ? " 
 
 " Oh, not necessarily." 
 
 At that moment there is a little bustle under a very 
 big cedar near at hand ; servants are bringing out 
 folding tables, folding chairs, a silver camp-kettle, 
 cakes, fruit, cream, liqueurs, sandwiches, wines, all 
 those items of an afternoon tea on which Brandolin 
 has animadverted with so much disgust in the library 
 an hour before. Lady Usk had chosen to take these 
 murderous compounds out of doors in the west garden. 
 She herself comes out of the house with a train of her 
 guests around her. 
 
 "Adieu to rational conversation," says Brandolin,
 
 88 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 as he rises with regret from his seat under the ever- 
 green helmet. 
 
 Xenia Sabaroff is pleased at the expression. She 
 is too handsome for men often to speak to her ration- 
 ally : they usually plunge headlong into attempts at 
 homage and flattery, of which she is nauseated.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 AN EXTBEMELY INTERESTING WOMAN. 
 
 "How do you like Lord Brandolin?" says Lady 
 Usk, when she can say so unobserved. 
 
 " I like him very much," replies Madame Sabaroff. 
 "He is what one would expect him to be from his 
 books ; and that is so agreeable, and so rare." 
 
 Dorothy Usk is not pleased. She does not want 
 her Russian phoenix to admire Brandolin. She has 
 arranged an alliance in her own mind between the 
 Princess Sabaroff and her own cousin Alan, Lord 
 Gervase, whom she is daily expecting at Surrenden. 
 Gervase is a man of some note in diplomacy and 
 society ; she is proud of him, she is attached to him, 
 she desires to see him ultimately fill all offices of state 
 that the ambition of an Englishman can aspire to ; 
 and Xenia Sabaroff is so enormously rich, as well as 
 so unusually handsome. It would be a perfectly ideal 
 union ; and, desiring it infinitely, the mistress of Sur 
 renden, with that tact which distinguishes her, has 
 never named Lord Gervase to the Princess Sabaroff 
 nor the Princess Sabaroff to Lord Gervase. He is to 
 be at Surrenden in a week's time. Now she vaguely
 
 90 A IIOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 wishes that Brandolin had not these eight days' start 
 of him. But then Brandolin, she knows, will only 
 flirt ; that is to say, if the Russian lady allow him to do 
 so : he is an unconscionable flirt, and never means any- 
 thing by his tenderest speeches. Brand in, she 
 knows, is not a person who will ever marry; he 
 has lost scores of the most admirable opportunities, 
 and rejected the fairest and best-filled hands that have 
 been offered to him. To the orderly mind of Lady 
 Usk, he represents an Ishmael forever wandering in 
 wild woods, outside the pale of general civilization. 
 She can never see why people make such a fuss with 
 him. She does not say so, because it is the fashion to 
 make the fuss, and she never goes against a fashion. 
 A very moral woman herself, she is only as charitable 
 and elastic as she is to naughty people because such 
 charity and elasticity is the mark of good society in 
 the present day. Without it, she would be neither 
 popular nor well bred ; and she would sooner die than 
 fail in being either. 
 
 " Why don't you ever marry, Lord Brandolin ? " 
 asks Dorothy Usk, " Why have you never married ? " 
 
 " Because he's much too sensible," growls her hus- 
 band, but adds, with infinite compassion, "He'll have 
 to, some day, or the name will die out." 
 
 " Yes, I shall have to, some day, to use your very 
 grammatical expression," assents Brandolin. " I don't 
 wish the name to die out, and there's nobody to come
 
 AN INTERESTING WOMAN. 91 
 
 after me except the Southesk-Vanes, who detest me as 
 I detest them." 
 
 " Well, then, why not make some marriage at 
 once?" says Lady Usk. "I know so many charm- 
 ing " 
 
 Brandolin arrests the sentence with a deprecatory 
 gesture, " Dear Lady Usk, please ! I like you so 
 much, I wouldn't for worlds have you mixed up in 
 anything which would probably, or at least very pos- 
 sibly, make me so much dislike you in the years to 
 come." 
 
 Usk gives a laugh of much enjoyment. 
 
 His wife is slightly annoyed. She does not like this 
 sort of jesting. 
 
 "You said a moment ago that you must marry I" 
 she observes, with some impatience. 
 
 " Oh, there is no positive ' must ' about it," says 
 Brandolin, dubiously. " The name doesn't matter 
 greatly after all ; it is only that I don't like the place 
 to go to the Southesk-Vanes; they are my cousins, 
 heaven knows how many times removed ; they have 
 most horrible politics, and they are such dreadfully 
 prosaic people that I am sure they will destroy my 
 gardens, poison my Indian beasts, strangle my African 
 birds, turn my old servants adrift, and make the coun- 
 try round hideous with high farming." 
 
 " Marry, then, and put an end to anything so dread- 
 ful," says Dorothy Usk.
 
 92 -A- HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 Brandolin gets up and walks about the room. It is 
 a dilemma which has often been present to his mind in 
 various epochs of his existence. 
 
 " You see, my dear people," he says, with affection- 
 ate confidence, " the real truth of the matter is this. 
 A good woman is an admirable creation of Providence, 
 for certain uses in her generation ; but she is tiresome. 
 A naughty woman is delightful ; but then she is, if 
 you marry her, compromising. Which am I to take 
 of the two ! I should be bored to death by what 
 Renan calls la femmepure and against lafemme taree 
 as a wife 1 have a prejudice. The woman who would 
 amuse me I would not marry if 1 could, and as, if I 
 were bored, I should leave my wife entirely, and go 
 to the Equator or the Pole, it would not be honest in 
 me to sacrifice a virgin to the mere demands of my 
 family pride." 
 
 Lady Usk feels shocked, but she does not like to 
 show it, because it is so old-fashioned and prudish and 
 arriere nowadays to be shocked at anything. 
 
 " I have thought about it very often, I assure you," 
 continues Brandolin, " and sometimes I have really 
 thought that I would marry a high-caste Hindoo 
 woman. They are very beautiful, and their forms far 
 more exquisite than any European's, wholly uncramped 
 as they are by any stays, and accustomed to spend so 
 many hours on all kinds of arts for the embellishment 
 of the skin."
 
 AN INTERESTING WOMAN. 93 
 
 " I don't think, you know," Lady Usk interposes, 
 hastily, to repress more reminiscences, " that you need 
 be afraid of the young girls of our time being innocent ; 
 they are eveillees enough, heaven knows, and experi- 
 enced enough in all conscience." 
 
 " Oh, but that is odious," says Brandolin, with dis- 
 gust. " The girls of the day are horrible ; nothing is 
 unknown to them ; they smoke, they gamble, they flirt 
 without decency or grace, their one idea is to marry 
 for sake of a position which will let them go as wild 
 as they choose, and for the sake of heaps of money 
 which will sustain their unconscionable extravagance. 
 Lord deliver me from any of them ! I would sooner 
 see St. Hubert's Lea cut up into allotment-grounds 
 than save it from the Southesk-Vanes by marrying a 
 debutante with her mind fixed on establishing herself, 
 and her youthful memories already full of dead-and- 
 gone flirtations. No! let me wait for Dodo, if you 
 will give me permission to educate her,' 1 
 
 " Dodo will never be educated out of flirting ; she 
 is born for it," says her father, " and she will be a 
 handful when she gets into society. I am afraid you 
 would return her to us and sigh for your high-caste 
 Hindoo." 
 
 " Pray, how would you educate her ? what is missing 
 in her present education ? " asks Lady TJsk, somewhat 
 piqued at what he implies. 
 
 "I would let her see a great deal more of her
 
 94 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 mother than she is allowed to do," says Brandolin : 
 ' where could she take a better model ? " he adds, with 
 a bow of much grace. 
 
 Her mother is not sure whether she ought to be 
 flattered or offended. Brandolin has a way of min- 
 gling graceful compliments and implied censure with so 
 much skill and intricacy that to disentangle them is 
 difficult for those whom he would at once flatter and 
 rebuff. " One never quite knows what he means," she 
 thinks, irritably. " I do believe he intends to imply 
 that I neglect my children ! " 
 
 Brandolin seems to her an unpleasant man, eccen- 
 tric, discourteous, and immoral. She cannot imagine 
 what George or the world sees to admire and like so 
 much in him. 
 
 " Lord Brandolin actually declares that black wom- 
 en have much better figures than we have," she says, 
 an hour later, to Leila Faversham. 
 
 " Black women ! " exclaims that lady, in unspeakable 
 horror. 
 
 " Well, Hindoos : it is the same thing," says Lady 
 Usk with that ignorance of her Indian fellow-subjects 
 which is characteristic of English society, from the 
 highest strata to the lowest. 
 
 " Oh, he is always so odd, you know," says Mrs. 
 Faversham, as of a person whom it is hopeless even to 
 discuss. Brandoliu is indeed so odd that he has never 
 perceived her own attractions. What can seem odder 
 to a pretty woman than that ?
 
 AN INTERESTING WOMAN. 95 
 
 Leila Faversham tells Lady Dawlish ten minutes 
 later that Brandolin has confessed that he only likes 
 black women. " Isn't it horrid ? He actually has 
 numbers of them down in Warwickshire, just as he 
 keeps the Indian animals and the African birds." 
 
 "How very shocking ! " says Lady Dawlish. "But 
 I dare say it is very economical: they only eat a 
 spoonful of rice and wear a yard of calico, you know, 
 and, as he is poor, that must suit him." 
 
 Lady Dawlish tells this fact to Nina Curzon, adding 
 various embellishments of her fancy ; Mrs. Curzon 
 thinks the notion new and amusing ; she writes of it 
 that morning to a journal of society which she occa- 
 sionally honors with news of her world, not from 
 want of the editor's fee, but from the amusement it 
 affords her to destroy the characters of her acquaint- 
 ances. The journal will immediately, she knows, 
 produce a mysterious but sensational paragraph re- 
 garding the black women in Warwickshire, or some 
 article headed " An Hereditary Legislature at Home." 
 Brandolin is a person whom it is perfectly safe to 
 libel : he is very indolent, very contemptuous, and he 
 never by any chance reads a newspaper. 
 
 " An extremely interesting woman," muses Brando- 
 lin that evening, as he dresses for dinner. "Inter- 
 esting, and moreover with something original, some- 
 thing mysterious and suggestive, in her. Despite 
 
 Lady Usk, there is a difference still in different na- 
 7
 
 96 -4 HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 tionalities. I could still swear to an Englishwoman 
 anywhere, if I only saw the back of her head and her 
 shoulders. No Englishwoman could have the deli- 
 cious languor of Madame Sabaroff's movements." 
 
 She interests him ; he decides to stay on at Surrenden. 
 
 When he sees her at dinner he is still more favor- 
 ably impressed. 
 
 Her figure is superb, and her sleeveless gown shows 
 the beauty of her bust and arms ; she has a flat band 
 of diamonds worn between the elbow and the shoulder 
 of the right arm. The effect is singular, but good. 
 
 " It is to show that she has the muscle above the 
 elbow," says old Sir Adolphus, who is learned in 
 sculpture and anatomy. " You know, not one woman 
 in ten thousand has it ; and for want of it their arms 
 fall in above the elbow. I have heard sculptors say 
 so a hundred times. She has it, and so she wears that 
 flat bracelet to emphasize the fact. 
 
 Brandolin feels annoyed. There is no reason in life 
 why he should object to Madame Sabaroff having any 
 number of affectations and vanities, or why he should 
 mind hearing this handsome old viveur discuss them ; 
 but he is annoyed by both facts. 
 
 There is not a plain woman among the guests of 
 Surrenden : some are even far beyond the average of 
 good looks, and all have that chic which lends in 
 itself a kind of beauty to the woman of the world. 
 But the handsomest of them all, Nina Curzon herself,
 
 AN INTERESTING WOMAN. 97 
 
 pales beside the beautiful pallor of the Russian lady, 
 contrasted as it is with the splendor of her jewels, the 
 red rose of her lips, and the darkness of her eyelashes 
 and eyes. 
 
 At dinner, Xenia Sabaroff does not speak much: 
 she has a dreamy look, almost a fatigued one. 
 
 Brandolin is opposite to her : as there are no orna- 
 ments or flowers on the table higher than eight inches, 
 he can contemplate her at his leisure across the field 
 of shed rose-leaves which is between them. Finding 
 that she is so silent, he talks in his best fashion, in his 
 most reckless, antithetical, picturesque manner : he 
 perceives he gains her attention, though he never 
 directly addresses her. 
 
 He also makes Mr. Wootton furious. Mr. Wootton 
 has half a dozen good stories untold. His method of 
 getting good stories is ingenious : he procures obscure 
 but clever memoirs, French and English, which are 
 wholly forgotten, alters their most piquant anecdotes a 
 little, and fits them on to living and famous person- 
 ages; the result is admirable, and has earned him 
 his great reputation as a raconteur of contemporary 
 scandal. He has six delicious things ready now, and 
 he cannot find a moment in which he can lead up to 
 and place any one of them. 
 
 " Brandolin is so amusing when he likes," says Lady 
 Arthur Audley, incautiously, to this suppressed and 
 sullen victim. 
 7
 
 98 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 " A monologist ! a monologist ! " replies Mr. Woot- 
 ton, with a deprecatory accent. 
 
 Lady Arthur is silenced, for she has not the slightest 
 idea what a monologist is. She fancies it means some 
 kind of a sect like the Mormons, and Brandolin is so 
 odd that he may possibly belong to a sect, or may have 
 founded one, like Laurence Oliphant. She remembers 
 the black women that they talked of, and does not like 
 to ask, being a sensitive person, very delicate-minded, 
 and perfectly proper, except her one little affair with 
 Sir Hugo, which everybody says is most creditable 
 to her, Arthur Audley being the scamp that 
 he is. 
 
 Dinner over, Brandolin finds a pleasant seat on a 
 low chair behind the bigger chair on which Madame 
 Sabaroff is reclining ; other men devoted to other 
 women look longingly at her, some approach ; Bran- 
 dolin comprehends why she is not beloved in her 
 generation by her own sex. 
 
 After a time she is induced to sing ; she has a very 
 sweet voice, of great power, with much pathos in it ; 
 she sings volkslieder of her own country, strange 
 yearning wistful songs, full of the vague mystical 
 melancholy of the Russian peasant. She ceases ab- 
 ruptly, and walks back to her seat ; her diamonds 
 gleam in the light like so many eyes of fire. Brandolin 
 has listened in silence, conscious of a troubled pleasure 
 within himself, which is invariably the herald of one of
 
 AN INTERESTING WOMAN. 99 
 
 those attachments which have so often at once embel- 
 lished and disturbed his existence. 
 
 Like all romantic people, his heart is much younger 
 than his years. It has not been scarred by any one of 
 those tragic passions which, like fire on a hill-side, 
 wither up all green things, so that not a blade of grass 
 will grow where it has passed. He has usually found 
 love only the most agreeable of pastimes. He has 
 always wondered why anybody allowed it to tear their 
 life to tatters, as a bad actor tears a fine piece of blank 
 verse. An uncle of his possessed an Aphrodite in 
 Paphian marble which had been dug up in a vineyard 
 at Luna, and a work of great beauty of the second 
 period of Greek art. A lover of pleasure, but withal 
 a philosopher, his uncle treasured and adored this 
 statue, and whenever he felt that any living woman 
 was getting more power over him than he liked, he 
 compared her in his mind with the Luna Venus, and 
 found that the human creature's defects outbalanced 
 her charms, and thus reduced the potency of the latter 
 to more reasonable dimensions. 
 
 Instead of his uncle's Luna goddess, Brandolin keeps 
 in some remote and sealed-up nook of his mind a cer- 
 tain ideal ; now and then he remembers it, takes it out 
 and looks at it, and it has usually served with him at 
 such moments the purpose which the Luna marble 
 served with his uncle. 
 
 As he saunters towards the smoking-room with his
 
 100 A 1IOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 hands in the pockets of a loose velvet jacket, he sum- 
 mons this useful resident of his brain, intending to 
 banish with it the remembrance, the too enervating 
 remembrance, of Xenia Sabaroff. But, to his surprise, 
 they seem very like one another, and their features 
 blend confusedly into one. 
 
 *' And I know nothing at all about this lady, except 
 that she has a voice like Albani's, big jewels, and a 
 Russian name ! " he thinks, with some derision of 
 himself. The smokers do not find him amusing, 
 while his companions seem to him insufferably tire- 
 some, lie hears the echo of Madame Sabaroff's 
 grave, low, melodious voice, and is not in temper for 
 the somewhat scabreux jests of the smoking-room. 
 He thinks that it is all very well for boys to like that 
 sort of salacious talk, but it seems to him intolerably 
 absurd that men of his own age, and older, should find 
 any kind of savor in it. 
 
 They tease him about the black women, moreover, 
 and for once he is not easy enough to be good-tem- 
 pered and indifferent. He answers contemptuously 
 and irritably, and of course all his friends suppose, 
 which they had not supposed before, that there is, 
 after all, some truth in Mrs. Curzon's anecdote. 
 
 "What stupid stories that old blagueur Wootton 
 has told in the smoking-room, and what beastly ones 
 Fred Ormond has related ! and all as if they were 
 something new, too! as if the one weren't taken out
 
 AN INTERESTING WOMAN. 101 
 
 of the manuscripts at Bute House, and the other out 
 of last week's ' Figaro' ! If men won't be original, 
 or can't be, why don't they hold their tongues ? " 
 
 " What fools we are to sit shut up with gas-lights 
 and tobacco on such a night as this ! a night for 
 Lorenzo and Jessica, for Romeo and Juliet," he 
 thinks, as he stands awhile at the open window of his 
 own bedroom. 
 
 It is three o'clock : there is a faint suggestive light 
 which means the dawn, young birds are twittering, 
 there is a delicious scent of green leaves, of full-blown 
 roses, of dewy mosses ; the air is damp and warm, he 
 can hear the feet of blackbirds scraping and turning 
 over the mould and the grass ; it is dark, yet he can 
 distinguish the masses of the great woods beyond the 
 gardens, the outlines of the trees near his casement, 
 the shape of the clouds as they move slowly south- 
 ward. He wonders in what part of the old house, 
 whose fantastic roofs and turrets and gargoyles and 
 ivy-colored buttresses are hidden in the dusk of the 
 summer night, they have given the Princess Sabaroff 
 her chamber. He remains some time at the open 
 window, and goes to his bed as the dawn grows rosy. 
 
 " Lord Brandolin is in a very bad temper," says 
 Mr. Wootton, when the smoking-room door has closed 
 on the object of his detestation ; then he pauses, and 
 adds, significantly, " The Brandolins, you know, were 
 always a little just a little clever family, very
 
 102 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 clever, but we all know to what great wits are sadly 
 often allied. And this man has never done anything, 
 with all his talent and opportunities ; never done 
 anything at all ! " 
 
 " He has written first-rate books," says TJsk, angrily, 
 always ready to defend a friend in absence. 
 
 "Oh, books!" says Mr. Wootton, with bland but 
 unutterable disdain. Mr. Wootton is a critic of books, 
 and therefore naturally despises them. 
 
 " What would you have him do ? " growls TJsk, 
 pugnaciously. 
 
 Mr. Wootton stretches his legs out, and gazes with 
 abstracted air at the ceiling. " Public life," he mur- 
 murs. " Public life is the only possible career for an 
 Englishman of position. But it demands sacrifices ; 
 it demands sacrifices." 
 
 " You mean that one has to marry ? " says the young 
 Duke of Queenstown, timidly. 
 
 Mr. Wootton smiles on him loftily. " Marry ? yes, 
 undoubtedly ; and avoid scandal afterwards ; avoid, 
 beyond all, those connections which lend such a charm 
 to existence, but are so apt to get into the news- 
 papers." 
 
 There is a general laugh. 
 
 Mr. Wootton has not intended to make them laugh 
 and he resumes, with stateliness, as though they had 
 not interrupted him. " The country expects those 
 sacrifices : no man succeeds in public life in England 
 who does not make them."
 
 AN INTERESTING WOMAN. 103 
 
 "Melbourne, Palmerston, Sidney Herbert?" mur- 
 murs one rebellious hearer. 
 
 Mr. Wootton waves him aside as he would do an 
 importunate fly. " Not to touch on living persons, I 
 would select Lord Althorp as the model of the public 
 leader most suited to this country. It would not suit 
 Lord Brandolin to lead the blameless life of Lord 
 Althorp. It would not suit him even to pretend to 
 lead it. I doubt if he could even look the part, if he 
 tried. The English are a peculiar people ; they always 
 mix public and private life together. Lord Beacons- 
 field remarked to me once " 
 
 And Mr. Wootton tells a story of Disraeli, a very 
 good story, only he has taken it out of the journals 
 of the President des Brosses and fathered it on to 
 Disraeli. But M. le President des Brosses is an author 
 seldom read now, and nobody knows ; if they did, no- 
 body would care. 
 
 " Public opinion," he resumes, " is irresistible in 
 England ; and if it once turn against a man, were he 
 Messiah himself, he could do nothing. It is not an in- 
 telligent public opinion : it confuses public and private 
 qualifications. A man may be a great statesman and 
 yet dislike his wife and like somebody else's. A man 
 may be a great hero and yet may have an unseemly 
 passion or an unpaid tailor. But the British public 
 does not understand this. It invariably overlooks the 
 man's greatness, and only sees the lady or the tailor
 
 10 4 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 who compromises him. It thinks unhappily or hap- 
 pily, as you please to consider that genius should 
 keep the whole ten commandments. Now, genius is 
 Conspicuous for breaking them." 
 
 Mr. Wootton here knocks a little ash off his cigar, 
 and smiles like a man who has said something 
 neatly. 
 
 " It is the first time I ever heard you compliment 
 genius," murmurs Lawrence Hamilton. 
 
 "In Italy," pursues Mr. Wootton, "not very long 
 ago a minister was accused of buying a piano out of 
 the public funds for his mistress. Neither the piano 
 nor the mistress hurt the gentleman in public esti- 
 mation in that soft and accommodating clime. But 
 that piano, though he might have paid for it with his 
 own money, would have ruined an English politician. 
 Though it had been the very smallest cottage piano 
 conceivable, it would have buried him forever under 
 it if it had got talked about ; he would never have ex- 
 plained it away, or made it even contingently endur- 
 able to the nation. You may, if you are a public man 
 in England, commit every conceivable blunder, add 
 millions to the national debt, eat your own words 
 every evening in debate, and plunge the country into 
 an abyss of unmeasured and unmeasurable revolution, 
 and they will still have confidence in you if you read 
 the lessons in church and walk home with your wife ; 
 but if it is ever rumored that you admire your neigh-
 
 AN INTERESTING WOMAN. 105 
 
 bor's wife, down you go forever. And yet," continues 
 Mr. Wootton, pensively, "people do admire their 
 neighbor's wife in England, and it seems a venial 
 offence when one compares it with the desertion of 
 Gordon, or the encouragement of a hydra-headed 
 greed for the rich man's goods." 
 
 "With which Mr. "Wootton yawns, rises, and also 
 declares his intention to go to bed. 
 
 The young duke follows him and walks by his side 
 down the corridor. He is not at all like Disraeli's 
 young duke : he is awkward, shy, and dull, he is neither 
 amiable nor distinguished, but he has a painstaking 
 wish in him to do well by his country, which is almost 
 noble in a person who has been toadied, indulged, and 
 tempted in all ways and on all sides ever since his cradle 
 days. It is the disinterested patriotism which has been 
 so largely the excellence and honor of the English 
 nobility, and which is only possible in men of position 
 so high that they are raised by it from birth above all 
 vulgar covetousness or pecuniary needs. 
 
 " Do you really think ? " says the duke, timidly, for 
 he is very afraid of Henry "Wootton, " do you really 
 think that to have any influence on English public life 
 it is necessary necessary to keep so very straight, as 
 regards women, I mean, you know?" 
 
 " It is most necessary to appear to keep very 
 straight," replies Mr. Wootton. " The two things 
 are obviously different to the meanest capacity."
 
 106 A UOUSE-PA&TY. 
 
 The young man sighs. 
 
 " And to have that that appearance, one must be 
 married ? " 
 
 " Indisputably. Marriage is as necessary to respect- 
 ability in any great position as a brougham to a doctor, 
 or a butler to a bishop," replies the elder, smiling com- 
 passionately at the wick of his candle. He does not 
 care a straw about the duke : he has no daughters to 
 marry, and Mr. Wootton's social eminence is far beyond 
 the power of dukes or princes to make or mend. 
 
 "But," stammers his Grace of Queenstown, growing 
 red, yet burning with a desire for instruction, "but 
 don't you think a a connection with with any lady 
 of one's own rank is quite safe, quite sure not to cause 
 scandal?" 
 
 Mr. Wootton balances his candlestick carefully on 
 one finger, pauses in his walk, and looks hard at his 
 questioner. 
 
 " That would depend entirely upon the lady's tem- 
 per," replies this wise monitor of youth. 
 
 They are words of wisdom so profound that they 
 sink deep into the soul of his pupil, and fill him with 
 a consternated sadness and perplexity. The temper of 
 Lady Dawlish is a known quantity, and the quality 
 of it is alarming. Lady Dawlish is not young, she is 
 good-looking, and she has debts. Lord Dawlish has 
 indeed hitherto let her pay her debts in any way she 
 chose, being occupied enough with paying such of his
 
 
 AN INTERESTING WOMAN. 107 
 
 own as he cannot by any dexterity avoid ; but there is 
 no knowing what he may do any day out of caprice or 
 ill nature, and, although he will never obtain a divorce, 
 he may try for one, which will equally effectually con- 
 vulse the duke's county and the cathedral city which 
 is situated in its centre. His own affair with Lady 
 Dawlish is, he firmly believes, known to no human 
 being save themselves and their confidential servants ; 
 he little dreams that it has been the gossip of all Lon- 
 don until London grew tired of it ; he is indeed aware 
 that everybody invited them in the kindest manner 
 together, but he attributed this coincidence to her tact 
 in the management of her set and choice of her own 
 engagements. 
 
 The human mind is like the ostrich : its own pro- 
 jects serve to it the purpose which sand plays to the 
 ostrich : comfortably buried in them, it defies the 
 scrutiny of mankind ; wrapped in its own absorbing 
 passions, it leaves its hansom before a lady's hall door, 
 or leaves its coroneted handkerchief on a bachelor's 
 couch, and never dreams that the world is looking on 
 round the corner or through the keyhole. Human 
 nature the moment it is interested becomes blind. 
 Therefore the duke has put his question in good faith. 
 
 He would abhor any kind of scandal. He is de- 
 voted to his mother, who is a pious and very proper 
 person ; he has a conscientious sense of his own vast 
 duties and responsibilities ; he would feel most uncom-
 
 108 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 fortable if he thought people were talking grossly of 
 him in his own county ; and he has a horror of Lord 
 Dawlish, noisy, insolent, coarse, a gambler and a rake. 
 
 Arrived at his bedroom door, Mr. Wootten is 
 touched vaguely with a kind feeling towards his hum- 
 ble interrogator, or with some other sentiment less 
 kindly, it may be. He pauses, looks straight before 
 him at the wick of his candle, and speaks with that 
 oracular air so becoming to him which many ungrate- 
 ful people are known to loathe. 
 
 " That kind of connections are invariably danger- 
 ous ; invariably," he remarks. " They have their 
 uses, I admit, they have their uses : they mould a 
 man's manners when he is young, they enable him to 
 acquire great insight into female character, they keep 
 him out of the lower sorts of entanglements, and they 
 are useful in restraining him from premature marriage. 
 But they are perilous if allowed to last too long. If 
 permitted to claim privileges, rights, usurpations, they 
 are apt to become irksome and compromising, espe- 
 cially if the lady be no longer young. When a woman 
 is no longer young there is a desperate acharnement in 
 her tenacity about a last passion which is like that of 
 the mariner clinging to a spar in the midst of a gusty 
 sea. It is not easy for the spar to disengage itself. 
 On the whole, therefore, women of rank are perhaps 
 best avoided in this sense. Passions are safest which 
 can be terminated by the check-book. The check-
 
 AN INTERESTING WOMAN. 109 
 
 book is not always indeed refused by great ladies, 
 when they are in debt, but a check-book is an un- 
 pleasant witness in the law courts. However, as I 
 said before, all depends on the lady's temper: no 
 woman who has a bad temper is ever truly discreet. 
 Good-night to your Grace." And Mr. "Wootton, with 
 his candle, disappears within his door-way. 
 
 He smiles a little blandly as his man undresses him. 
 Five years before, Lady Dawlish offended him at a 
 house-party at Sandringham, taking a fiendish pleasure 
 in capping all his best stories and tracing the sources 
 of all his epigrams. In that inaccessible but indelible 
 note-book, his memory, he has written her name down 
 as that of one to whom he has a debt to pay. "Je 
 lui ai donne dufil & retordre" he thinks, as he drops 
 into his first doze.
 
 110 A BOUSE-PAKTX. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 A NEW ABUTTAL WHO PKOVES AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE. 
 
 " ALAN is really coming to-day ! " says Dorothy 
 Usk to her lord, with pleasure, a few days later, look- 
 ing up from a telegram. 
 
 " How you excite yourself ! " says Usk, with rude 
 disdain. " What can you see to care about ? He is a 
 pretentious humbug, if ever there was one ! " 
 
 " George ! " She regards him with horror and 
 amaze. Is he wholly out of his mind ? Her cousin 
 is Lady Usk's ideal of what an English gentleman 
 should be. He does not keep black women down in 
 Warwickshire. 
 
 "A pretentious humbug," repeats Usk. He likes 
 to ticket his relations and connections with well- 
 chosen descriptions. " All good looks and soft sawder. 
 Women like that sort of thing " 
 
 " Of course we like good manners, though they are not 
 your weakness," interrupts his wife, with acerbity. 
 "Alan has the manners of a man who respects
 
 A NEW AEEIVAL 111 
 
 women : that may seem very tame to you and your 
 friend Brandolin, but in these days it has at least the 
 charm of novelty." 
 
 " Respects women ! " Usk is unable to restrain his 
 hilarity. " My dear Dolly, you're not a chicken : you 
 can't mean that you don't know that Gervase " 
 
 " I know that he is well-bred. You were so once, 
 but it is a very long time ago," replies his wife, with 
 cutting sententiousness, and with that unkind reply 
 she leaves him. As if she did not understand men 
 better than he, she thinks, contemptuously. He may 
 understand dogs and horses, and deer and partridges, 
 but about human nature he knows no more than the 
 old man at the lodge gates. 
 
 " Surely she can't be soft on Gervase herself ? " her 
 husband reflects, with a sensation of amusement ; " it 
 would be too funny, after running so straight all these 
 years, and just as her daughters are growing up ; but 
 they often are like that." 
 
 He is not sure whether the idea diverts or irritates 
 him, but he knows that he has always detested Ger- 
 vase, such a coxcomb and such a humbug as the fellow 
 is! 
 
 "Respect women, good Lord!" ejaculates Usk in 
 his solitude. 
 
 " To be sure," adds the honest gentleman in his own 
 mind, " there are very few of 'em who would thank 
 you to respect 'em nowadays." 
 
 6
 
 112 A HOUSE-PAHTY. 
 
 " Gervase will be here by dinner," he says in the 
 course of the day to Princess Sabaroff. 
 
 " Indeed," she replies, with indifference. " Who is 
 he?" 
 
 ** A friend of my wife's ; at least a cousin. I 
 thought you might know him ; he was some time in 
 Russia." 
 
 " No," and there is a coldness in the negative 
 disproportioned to so simple a denial, "I do not 
 think so. I do not remember such a name. Who is 
 he?" 
 
 " A person who is expected to be great in foreign 
 affairs some day or other," says Brandolin. " He will 
 have one qualification rare in an English foreign 
 minister, daily growing rarer, thanks to the imbecil- 
 ities of examinations : he knows how to bow and he 
 knows what to say." 
 
 " A friend of yours ? n 
 
 " Oh, no ; an acquaintance. He thinks very ill of 
 me." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " Because I do nothing for my country. He thinks 
 he does a great deal when he has fomented a quarrel 
 or received a decoration." 
 
 " That is not generous. The world owes much to 
 diplomatists : it will know how much in a few years, 
 when it will be governed by clerks controlled by 
 telephones."
 
 A NEW ARRIVAL. 113 
 
 " That is true : I stand corrected. But Gervase 
 and I have few sympathies ; none, indeed, except 
 politically, and even there we differ, his is the Tory- 
 ism of Peel, mine is the Toryism of the late Lord 
 Derby : there are leagues between the two." 
 
 " I know : the one is opportunism ; the other Is 
 optiinate-ism." 
 
 "Perhaps," says Brandolin, with a smile, and 
 thinks, meantime, " She knows something about him. 
 What is it?" 
 
 " Does she know Gervase, despite her denial ? " he 
 wonders. He has an impression that she does. There 
 was a look of recognition in her eyes when she gave 
 that vague bland gesture in answer to her host. All 
 trifles in her interest him, as they always do interest a 
 man in a woman whom he admires and is not sure that 
 he understands ; and Gervase he is aware has been a 
 good deal in Russia. 
 
 He himself has known the subject of their dis- 
 course ever since they were boys, and had that sort 
 of intimacy with him which exists between men who 
 live in the same sets and belong to the same clubs. 
 But to him Gervase seems a petit-mattre, a poseur, a 
 man artificial, conventional, ambitious in small things, 
 and to Gervase he himself seems much as he does to 
 Lady Usk, a perverse and lawless Bohemian, only 
 saved from the outer darkness by the fact of his aris- 
 tocratic birth.
 
 114 A HOUSE-PASTY. 
 
 Meanwhile, in her own room, Xenia Sabaroff is pur- 
 suing her own reflections whilst her maid disrobes her. 
 
 "It will be better to see him once and for all," she 
 muses. u , I cannot go on forever avoiding him in 
 every city in Europe. Very likely he will not even 
 remember my face or my name." 
 
 She feels a strong temptation to invent some plaus- 
 ible reason and break off her visit to Surrenden ; but 
 she is a courageous woman, and flight is repugnant to 
 her. More than once of late she has avoided a meet- 
 ing which is disagreeable to her, by some abrupt 
 change of her own plans or reversal of her own en- 
 gagements. To continue to do this seems weakness. 
 Indeed, to do it at all seems too great a flattery to the 
 person avoided. What is painful is best encountered 
 without procrastination. It is the old question of 
 grasping the nettle. 
 
 A haughty flush passes over her face at her own 
 reflections. After all, to have any emotion at all 
 about it, pleasurable or painful, is humiliation. She 
 is a proud woman, as well as a courageous one. There 
 are memories associated with this coming guest which 
 are bitter and hateful. 
 
 Women like Mrs. Wentworth Curzon carry such 
 memories lightly, or rather do not carry them at all, 
 but bury them by scores, pell-mell, one on the top of 
 another, like old letters, and forget all about their 
 interment ; but she is different from them.
 
 A NEW ARRIVAL. 115 
 
 It has not been difficult for her to avoid meeting 
 Lord Gervase ; he is one of those persons whose 
 movements are known and chronicled ; but she is 
 conscious that the time is come when she can no 
 longer escape doing so, except by such an abrupt de- 
 parture that it would seem to herself too great a 
 weakness, and be to him too great a flattery, for such 
 a step to enter for an instant into the category of 
 possibilities. It is, she reflects, or it should be, a 
 matter to her of absolute indifference to see again a 
 person whom she has not seen for seven years. 
 
 Yet she is conscious of a sense of pain and excita- 
 tion as her woman puts on her a maize satin tea-gown 
 covered with point d'Alen9on at five o'clock the next 
 day, and she knows that when she goes down to the 
 room in a few minutes Gervase, who was to arrive by the 
 afternoon train, will in all probability be present there. 
 
 Everyone is in-doors that day, for a fine summer 
 rain is falling without, and has been falling since 
 noon. All the house-party are in the library, and the 
 children are there also ; the windows are open, and the 
 sweet smell from the damp gardens and wet grass fills 
 the air. 
 
 Everyone is laughing and talking; Usk is drink- 
 ing a glass of kiimmel, and Brandolin is playing with 
 the dog ; conversing with Nina Curzon and the 
 mistress of the house, and standing in front of them, 
 is a tall fair man irreproachable in tenue and extreme! jr
 
 116 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 distinguished in appearance. He is Lord Gervase. 
 His back is towards the door, and he does not see or 
 hear her enter, but as the Babe rushes towards her, 
 toppling over a stool and treading mercilessly on the 
 trains of tea-gowns in the wind of his going, the noise 
 made by the child makes him turn his head, and an 
 expression of recognition mingled with amazement 
 passes over his usually impassive features. 
 
 " Is that not Princess Sabaroff ? " he asks of his 
 hostess, with a certain breathless astonishment betrayed 
 in his voice. 
 
 Lady TTsk assents. " One of my dearest friends," 
 she adds. " I think you don't know her ? I will 
 present you in a moment. She is as clever as she is 
 beautiful. The children adore her. Look at Babe." 
 
 The Babe has dragged his princess to a couch and 
 climbed up on it himself, kneeling half on her lap and 
 half off it, with no respect for the maize satin, whilst 
 his impatient little feet beat the devil's tatoo among 
 the point d'Alenjon. 
 
 " My dear Babe, do not be such a monopolist," says 
 Brandolin, as he approaches with a cup of tea and a 
 wafer of caviare bread-and-butter. " Your shoes have 
 seventeenth-century buckles, it is true, yet still they 
 are scarcely bibelots to be wrapped up in a lady's dress." 
 
 The Babe grins saucily, tossing his hair out of his 
 eyes ; but, with unwonted obedience, he disentangles 
 his feet with some care out of the lace.
 
 A NEW ARRIVAL. H7 
 
 Xenia Sabaroff does not take as much notice of him 
 as usual. She is reserved and preoccupied. Bran- 
 dolin, like the child, fails in awakening her interest or 
 attention. She has seated herself almost with her 
 back to where Gervase is standing, but every now and 
 then she looks half round, as by an irresistible uncon- 
 scious impulse of curiosity. 
 
 Brandolin notes the gesture, as her actions have an 
 interest for him which grows daily in its fascination. 
 " There is Dorothy TJsk's Phoenix," he says to her, in 
 a low tone, when the Babe has scampered off after 
 bon-bons; he indicates Gervase with a glance. Her 
 eyebrows contract slightly, as in some displeasure or 
 constraint. 
 
 " Lady Usk is very soon satisfied," she replies, 
 coldly. "Her own amiability makes her see perfec- 
 tion everywhere." 
 
 " It is a quality we cannot value too highly in so 
 imperfect a world. It is better than seeing everything 
 en noir, surely?" says Brandolin. "If we make 
 people what we think them, as optimists say, it is best 
 to be optimistic." 
 
 " I dislike optimism," she says, curtly. " It is ab- 
 surd and untrue. Our Dostoievsky is a wiser novelist 
 than your Dickens. One must believe something," 
 she says. 
 
 " It is pretty for a woman to think so," says Bran- 
 dolin, " but myself I have never Been why. I may
 
 (18 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 Lope, I may wish, I may regret, I may if I am very 
 sanguine even expect ; but believe no ! " 
 
 " Perhaps I should like to believe in a woman," 
 he adds, more softly, with that inflection of his voice 
 which has always had at all events the effect of making 
 women believe in him. 
 
 Madame Sabaroff is not so easily touched as many. 
 She pauses a moment, then says, with a certain weari- 
 ness, " Anybody who can believe can love : that is 
 nothing new." 
 
 " What would be new ? To love and disbelieve in 
 what we love ? It would be very painful." 
 
 *' It would be a test," says his companion. 
 
 Then she drops the subject decidedly, by approach- 
 ing the other ladies. Brandolin has a faint sense 
 of discomfiture and sadness : he is accustomed to 
 very facile conquests; and yet he is not a coxcomb, 
 like Lawrence Hamilton : he did not precisely antici- 
 pate one here, but habit is second nature, and it has 
 been his habit to succeed with women with rapidity 
 and ease. That sense of mystery which there is also 
 for him in the Princess Xenia oppresses whilst it 
 allures him. He is English enough to think that he 
 dislikes mystery, yet as an element of romance it has 
 always an irresistible fascination for romantic tempera- 
 ments. 
 
 Gervase meanwhile has sunk into a chair by the side 
 of Nina Curzon, and is saying, in a whisper, " Who is
 
 A NEW ARRIVAL. 119 
 
 that lady ? The one with her back to us, to whom 
 Lord Brandolin is so empresse ? I thought that I knew 
 all the Usks' people." 
 
 " Look in your Russian memories, and you will prob- 
 ably find that you know her too," replies Mrs. Curzon. 
 
 " Oh, she is Russian ? " says Gervase, then adds, 
 negligently, " I think, now you tell me that, I have 
 seen her before. Is she not the Princess Sabaroff?" 
 
 "Why did you pretend not to know her?" thinks 
 Nina Curzon as she answers, " Yes, that is her name. 
 You must have met her in Petersburg." 
 
 " Petersburg is very dim in my memories," he re- 
 plies, evasively. " Its baccarat is what made the 
 deepest impression on my remembrance and my fort- 
 unes. Now I think of it, however, I recollect her 
 quite well : her husband was Anatole Sabaroff, and 
 Lustoff shot him in a duel about her ? Am I right ? " 
 
 " So charming for her ! " says Nina Curzon. " Eng- 
 lishwomen never have anything happen for them 
 picturesque like that ; our men always die of indiges- 
 tion, or going after a fox." 
 
 " It is very curious." 
 
 "What is? Dyspepsia? Hunting?" 
 
 " How one comes across people." 
 
 " ' After long years,' " quotes Mrs. Curzon, with 
 mock romance in her tones. " Generally, I think," she 
 adds, with a little yawn, " we can never get rid of our 
 people, the world is so small, and there is really only
 
 120 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 one set in it that is decent, so we can't ever get out of 
 it. It must have been very nice in Romeo and Juliet's 
 days, when a little drive to Mantua took you into 
 realms wholly inaccessible to your Verona acquaint- 
 ances. Nowadays, if you run away from anybody in 
 London you are sure to run against them in Yeddo or 
 Yucatan." 
 
 "Constancy made easy, like the three R's," says 
 Gervase. "Unfortunately, despite our improved fa- 
 cilities, we are not constant." 
 
 "He means to imply that he threw over the Sab- 
 aroff," thinks Mrs. Curzon ; " but he is such a boaster 
 of his bonnes fortunes that one can never know whether 
 he is lying." 
 
 " Pray let me make you known to Madame Sabaroff," 
 says Lady Usk to him, a little later. " She is such a 
 very dear friend of mine, and I see you have been 
 looking at her ever since she entered the room." 
 
 " She is a very handsome person : any one would 
 look at her," replies her cousin. Were he not so per- 
 fectly well-bred and impassive, it might almost be said 
 that the suggested presentation fills him with some 
 vague nervousness. 
 
 Nina Curzon watches him inquisitively as he is led 
 up and presented to Madame Sabaroff. 
 
 U I think I have had the honor before now, in 
 Petersburg," murmurs Gervase. She looks at him 
 very coldly.
 
 A NEW ARRIVAL. 121 
 
 " I think not," she replies. The words are of the 
 simplest, but c'est le ton quifait la musique, and, for 
 the solitary time in his existence, Lord Gervase is 
 embarrassed. 
 
 Brandolin, playing with the colley dog near at 
 hand, listens and observes. 
 
 Lady Usk is not so observant. " It is a long time 
 since he was in Russia," she says to her friend, " I 
 dare say you have forgotten. His father was alive, 
 and his name was Baird then, you know." 
 
 Xenia Zabaroff makes a little polite gesture expres- 
 sive of entire indifference to the change in these titles. 
 With an acticm which would be rude in any woman 
 less high-bred, she turns away her head and speaks to 
 Brandolin, ignoring the acquaintance and the presence 
 of Gervase. 
 
 Across the good-natured and busy brain of her 
 hostess there flashes an electric and odious thought : 
 is it possible *hat Usk may be right, and that there 
 may be somet hing wrong, after all, in this her latest 
 and most adored friend? She feels that she will die 
 of suffocated curiosity if she do not speedily get her 
 cousin alon'B and learn all he has ever known or heard 
 of the Princess Sabaroff. 
 
 "A 80 nb direct!" whispers Lawrence Hamilton to 
 Mr. Written. 
 
 "Of a cut direct: which?" says that far-sighted
 
 122 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 u Anyhow, it's delightful to see him let in for it," 
 reflects Usk, who has also observed the incident from 
 where he stands by the liqueurs. 
 
 Gervase, who has never been known to be at a loss 
 in any position, however difficult, colors and looks at 
 once annoyed and confused. He stands before Xenia 
 Sabaroff for a few moments hesitating and irresolute, 
 conscious that every one is looking at him ; then he 
 takes refuge with Lady Dawlish, whom he detests, be- 
 cause she is the nearest person to him. 
 
 " Madame Sabaroff is eclipsing the black women," 
 says that lady. 
 
 * 4 What black women ? " asks Gervase, very inatten- 
 tive and bored. She tells him the story of the Hindoo 
 harem, and he hears no word of it. 
 
 "Brandolin is always so odd," he says, indifferently, 
 watching the hand of Xenia Sabaroff as it rests on the 
 shoulder of the Babe, who is leaning against her knees 
 gazing at her adoringly. 
 
 Gervase is angered, irritated, interested, and mortified 
 all at once. He has never been in an absurd position 
 before, and he is aware that he was in one a moment 
 ago, and that the whole house-party of Surrenden 
 Court saw him in it. " What a fool Dolly was not to 
 tell me she was here ! " he thinks, for^ettin^ that his 
 
 * o o 
 
 cousin and hostess has not the remotest suspicion that he 
 
 and the Princess Xenia have ever met each other before. 
 
 " Seven years ! " he thinks. " Good heavens ! what
 
 A NEW ARRIVAL. 123 
 
 an eternity ! And she is handsomer than she was then ; 
 very handsome ; wonderfully handsome." 
 
 He looks at her all the while from under his half- 
 closed eyelids, whilst he talks he knows not what kind 
 of rubbish to Lady Dawlish. 
 
 Xenia Sabaroff does not once look his way. The 
 moment which she had dreaded has passed, and it has 
 made no impression whatever upon her: her indif- 
 ference reconciles her to herself. Is it possible, she 
 wonders, that she ever loved, or ever thought that she 
 loved, this man ? 
 
 "Why will you always treat me as a stranger, 
 Madame Sabaroff ? " murmurs Gervase to her that 
 night when for a moment he is alone near her, while 
 the cotillion overture commences. 
 
 " You are a stranger to me," replies Xenia Sabaroff ; 
 and as she speaks she looks full at him. 
 
 He colors with discomfiture. " Because in the due 
 course of nature I have succeeded to my father's title, 
 you seem to consider that I have changed my whole 
 identity," he says, with great irritation. 
 
 She is silent ; she looks down on the white ostrich- 
 feathers of her fan. He is vaguely encouraged by that 
 silence. " Strangers ! That is surely a very cold and 
 cruel word between those who once were friends ? " 
 
 The direct appeal to her makes her look up once 
 more, with great hauteur in the coldness of her face. 
 
 " Sir, I think when people have forgotten that each
 
 124 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 other exist, it is as though they had never met. They 
 are perhaps something more distant still than strangers, 
 for to strangers friendship in the future is possible ; 
 but those who have been separated by oblivion on the 
 one hand and by contempt on the other are parted as 
 surely and eternally as though death had divided them." 
 
 Gervase gathers some solace from the very strength 
 of the words. She would not, he thinks, feel so 
 strongly unless she felt more than he allows : he gazes 
 at her with feigned humility and unfeigned admiration 
 and regret. 
 
 "If Madame Sabaroff," he murmurs, "can doubt 
 her own powers of compelling remembrance, she is the 
 one person on earth only who can do so." 
 
 She is stung to anger. 
 
 " I am really at loss to decide whether you are in" 
 tentionally insolent or unintentionally insincere. You 
 are possibly both." 
 
 " I am neither. I am only a man who passionately 
 and uselessly rebels against his fate." 
 
 " Who regrets his own actions, you mean to say. 
 That is nothing uncommon." 
 
 " Well, who regrets the past, if you will put it so, 
 and who would atone for it would you allow him." 
 
 " Atone ! Do you suppose that you owe me repara- 
 tion ? It is I who owe you thanks for a momentary 
 oblivion which did me immeasurable service." 
 
 "That is a very harsh doctrine. The Princess
 
 A NEW ARRIVAL. 125 
 
 Xenia whom I knew was neither so stern nor so 
 sceptical." 
 
 " The Princess Xenia whom you knew was a child, 
 a foolish child ; she is dead, quite as much dead as 
 though she were under so many solid square feet of 
 Baltic ice. Put her from your thoughts : you will 
 never awake her." 
 
 Then she rises and leaves him and goes out of the 
 ball-room. 
 
 Throughout that evening he does not venture to 
 approach her again, and he endeavors to throw him- 
 self with some show of warmth into a flirtation with 
 Nina Curzon. 
 
 "Why did you pretend not to know her?" says 
 Mrs. Curzon to him. 
 
 He smiles, the fatuous smile with which a man in- 
 geniously expresses what he would be thought a brute 
 to put into words. 
 
 " She does not deign to know me now," he says, 
 modestly, and to the experienced comprehension of 
 Nina Curzon the words, although so modest, tell her 
 as much as the loudest boast could do.
 
 HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 DELICATE GKOUNDS. 
 
 GERVASB saunters into bis hostess's boudoir the 
 next morning, availing himself of the privilege ac- 
 corded to that distant relationship which it pleases 
 them both to raise into an intimate cousinship. It 
 is a charming boudoir, style Louis Quinze, with the 
 walls hung with flowered silk of that epoch, and the 
 dado made of fans which belonged to the same period. 
 Lady Usk writes here at a little secretaire painted by 
 Fragonard, and uses an inkstand said to have belonged 
 to Madame de Parabere, made in the shape of a silver 
 shell driven by a gold Cupidon ; yet, despite the 
 frivolity of these associations, she contrives to get 
 through a vast mass of business at this fragile table, 
 and has one of the soundest heads for affairs in all 
 England. Gervase sits down and makes himself 
 agreeable, and relates to her many little episodes of 
 his recent experiences. 
 
 She is used to be the confidante of her men ; she 
 is young enough to make a friend who is attractive 
 to them, and old enough to lend herself de bon cceur 
 to the recital of their attachments to other women.
 
 , DELICATE GROUNDS. 127 
 
 Very often she gives them very good advice, but she 
 does not obtrude it unseasonably. " An awfully nice 
 woman all round," is the gener.il verdict of her visit- 
 ants to the boudoir. She does not seek to be more 
 than that to him. 
 
 Gervase does not make any confidences: he only 
 tells her things which amuse her and reveal much 
 about her acquaintances, nothing about himself. He 
 smokes some of her favorite cigarettes, praises some 
 new china, suggests an alteration in the arrangement 
 of the fans, and makes critical discourses d propos of 
 her collection of snuff-boxes. 
 
 When he is going away, he lingers a moment in- 
 tently looking at a patch-box of vernis Martin, and 
 says, with studied carelessness, " Dolly, tell me, when 
 did you make the acquaintance of Madame Sabaroff ?" 
 
 " Last year, at Cannes : why do you want to know ? 
 She came and stayed with us at Orme last Easter. Is 
 she not perfectly charming?" 
 
 "Very good-looking, says Gervase, absently. "You 
 don't know anything about her, then?" 
 
 "Know?" repeats his hostess. "What should I 
 know ? What everybody does, I suppose. I met her 
 first at the Duchesse de Luynes'. You can't possibly 
 mean that there can be anything anything " 
 
 " Oh no," replies Gervnse ; but it produces on his 
 questioner the same effect as if he had said, " Oh, yes." 
 
 " How odious men are ! such scandal-mongers," 
 o
 
 128 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 eays Lady Usk, angrily. "Talk of our damning 
 with faint praise' ! There is nothing comparable to 
 the way in which a man destroys a woman's repu- 
 tation just by raising his eyebrows or twisting his 
 mustache." 
 
 " I have no mustache to twist, and am sure there 
 is no reputation which I wish to destroy," says her 
 cousin. 
 
 ** Then why do you ask me where I made her ac- 
 quaintance ? " 
 
 " My dear Dolly ! Surely the most innocent and 
 general sort of question ever on the lips of any human 
 being!" 
 
 "Possibly; not in the way you said it, however; 
 and when one knows that you were a great deal in 
 Russia, it suggests five hundred things, five thousand 
 things : and of course one knows he was shot in a duel 
 about her, and I believe people have talked." 
 
 " I have never helped them to talk. When do they 
 not talk?" 
 
 And beyond this she cannot prevail upon him to 
 go : he pretends that the Princess Sabaroff is beyond 
 all possibility of any approach of calumny, but the 
 protestation produces on her the impression that he 
 could tell her a great deal wholly to the contrary if he 
 chose. 
 
 " She certainly was staying with Madame de Luynes," 
 she insists.
 
 DELICATE GROUNDS. 129 
 
 " Who ever said the lady might not stay with the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury ? " replies Gervase. 
 
 She is irritated and vexed. 
 
 Xenia Sabaroff is her idol of the moment, and if her 
 idol were proved human she would be very angry. 
 She reflects that she will have Dodo and the children 
 kept more strictly in the school-room, and not let them 
 wander about over the park as they do with their 
 Russian friend most mornings. 
 
 " One can never be too careful with children of that 
 age," she muses, "and they are terribly evdlUes 
 already." 
 
 Dorothy Usk's friendships, though very ardent, are 
 like most friendships which exist in society: they are 
 apt to blow about with every breeze. She is cordial, 
 kind, and in her way sincere ; but she is what her 
 husband characterizes as " weathercocky." 
 
 Who is not " weathercocky " in the world ? 
 
 Although so tolerant in appearance of naughty peo- 
 ple, because it is the fashion to be so, and not to be 
 so looks priggish and dowdy and odd, she never at the 
 bottom of her heart likes her naughty people. She 
 has run very straight herself, as her lord would express 
 it ; she has been always much too busy to have time 
 or inclination to be tempted "off the rails," and she 
 has little patience with women who have gone off 
 them ; only she never says so, because it would look 
 so goody-goody and stupid, and for fear of looking so 
 9
 
 130 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 she even manages to stifle in her own breast her own 
 antipathy to Dulcia Waverley. 
 
 There have been very many martyrs to the sense 
 that they ought to smile at virtue when they hate it, 
 but Dorothy Usk's martyrdom is of a precisely op- 
 posite kind : she forces herself to seem to approve the 
 reverse of virtue whilst she detests it. Anything is 
 better, in her creed, than looking odd ; and nowadays 
 you do look so odd and so old-fashioned if you make 
 a fuss about anything. Still, in her heart of hearts 
 she feels excessively vexed, because it is quite appar- 
 ent to her that Gervase knows something very much 
 to the disadvantage of her new acquaintance. 
 
 "George will be so delighted if he finds out that 
 Madame Sabaroff is like all those horrid women he is 
 so fond of," she reflects. " I shall never hear the last 
 of it from him. It will be a standing joke for him 
 the whole of his life." 
 
 Certainly Madame Sabaroff is letting Brandolin 
 carry on with her more than is altogether proper. 
 True, they are people who may marry each other if 
 they please, but Brandolin is not a man who marries, 
 and his attentions are never likely to take that form. 
 He probably pays so much court to Madame Sabaroff 
 because he has heard that of her which leads him to 
 suppose that his efforts may be couronne, as French 
 vaudevillists say, without any thought of marriage. 
 
 Lady tlsk has always known that he is horribly
 
 DELICATE GROUNDS. 131 
 
 unprincipled, more so than even men of his world 
 usually are. That bantering tone of his is odious, she 
 thinks; and he always has it, even on the gravest 
 subjects. 
 
 " What's the row, my lady ? You look ruffled ! " 
 inquires Usk, coming into her boudoir with a sheaf of 
 half-opened letters in his hand. 
 
 " There are always things to annoy one," she an- 
 ewers, vaguely. 
 
 " It is an arrangement of a prudential Providence 
 to prevent our affections being set on this world," 
 replies Usk, piously. 
 
 His wife's only comment on this religious declara- 
 tion is an impatient twist to the tail of her Maltese 
 dog. 
 
 Usk proceeds to turn over to her such letters as 
 bore him ; they are countable by dozens ; the two or 
 three which interest him have been read in the gun- 
 room and put away in an inside pocket. 
 
 "Mr. Bruce could attend to all these," she says, 
 looking with some disgust at the correspondence. 
 Bruce is his secretary. 
 
 " He always blunders," says Usk. 
 
 "Then change him," says his wife; nevertheless 
 she is pleased at the compliment implied to herself. 
 
 " All secretaries are fools," says Usk, impartially. 
 
 " Even secretaries of state," says Mr. Wootton, who 
 has the entree of the boudoir, and saunters in at that
 
 132 ^ HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 moment. " I have some news this morning," he 
 adds : " Coltsfoot marries Miss Hoard." 
 u Never ! " exclaims Dorothy Usk. 
 "Perfectly true," says Mr. Wootton. "Both of 
 them staying at Dunrobin, and engagement publicly 
 announced." 
 
 Lord Coltsfoot is heir to a dukedom ; Miss Hoard 
 is the result in bullion of iron-works. 
 
 "Never!" reiterates Lady Usk. "It is impossi- 
 ble that he can do such a horrible thing ! "Why, 
 she has one shoulder higher than the other, and red 
 eyes ! * 
 
 "There are six millions paid down," replies Mr. 
 Wootton, sententiously. 
 
 " What the deuce will Mrs. Donnington say ? " 
 asks TJsk. 
 
 " One never announces any marriage," remarks 
 Mr. Wootton, " but there is a universal outcry about 
 what will some lady, married long ago to somebody 
 else, say to it. Curious result of supposed monog- 
 amy!" 
 
 " It is quite disgusting ! " says Lady Usk. " Some 
 of these new people are presentable, but she isn't ; and 
 Coltsfoot is so good-looking and so young." 
 
 " It is what the French call an ' alliance trds comme 
 il fautj" says Usk, from sheer spirit of contradiction. 
 " The dukedom is as full of holes as an old tin pot ; 
 she tinkers it up with her iron and gold ; and I bet
 
 DELICATE GROUNDS. 133 
 
 you that your friend Worth will manage to cut Lady 
 Coltsfoot's gowns so that one shoulder higher than the 
 other will become all the rage next season." 
 
 " Of course you set no store on such a simple thing 
 as happiness," says his wife, with acerbity. 
 
 " Happiness ? Lord, my dear ! Happiness was 
 buried with Strephon and Chloe centuries ago ! We 
 are amused or bored, we are successful or unsuccess- 
 ful, we are popular or unpopular, we are somebody 
 or we are nobody, but we are never either happy or 
 miserable." 
 
 " People who have a heart are still both I " 
 
 " A heart ! You mean spoons 1 " 
 
 " What a hideous expression ! Strephon and Chloe 
 never used that." 
 
 " When we have an unfortunate passion now," re- 
 marks Mr. Wootton, " we go to Carlsbad. It's only 
 an affair of the liver." 
 
 " Or the nerves," suggests Usk. " Flirtation is the 
 proper thing : flirtation never hurts anybody : it's like 
 puff-paste, seltzer water, and Turkish cigarettes." 
 
 " Puff-paste may bring on an indigestion when one's 
 too old to eat it ! 
 
 " There ! Didn't I tell you so ? She's always say- 
 ing something about my age. A man is the age that 
 he feels." 
 
 " No, a woman is the age that she looks. If you 
 will quote things, quote them properly."
 
 |34 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 " The age that she looks ? That's so very variable. 
 She's twenty when she enters a ball-room at midnight, 
 she's fifty when she comes out at sunrise ; she's sixteen 
 when she goes to meet somebody at Hurlingham, she's 
 sixty when she scolds her maid and has a scene with 
 her husband ! " 
 
 Lady Usk interrupts him with vivacity: "And 
 he ? Pray, isn't he five-and-twenty when he's in Paris 
 alone, and five-and-ninety when he's grumbling at 
 home?" 
 
 " Because he's bored at home 1 Youth is, after all, 
 only good spirits. If you laugh you are young, but 
 your wife don't make you laugh ; you pay her bills, 
 and go with her to a state ball, and sit opposite to her 
 at dinner, and when you catch a cold she is always 
 there to say, ' My dear, didn't I tell you so ? ' but I 
 defy any man living to recall any hour of his existence 
 in which his wife ever made him laugh ! " 
 
 "And yet you wanted me to ask married people 
 together." 
 
 " Because I wanted it all to be highly proper and 
 deadly dull. Surrenden has got a sort of reputation 
 of being a kind of Orleans Club." 
 
 " And yet you complain of being bored in it ! " 
 
 " One is always bored in one's own house ! One 
 can never take in to dinner the person one likes." 
 
 tt You make up to yourself for the deprivation after 
 dinner 1 "
 
 DELICATE GROUNDS. 135 
 
 " My lady's very ruffled to-day," says Usk to Mr. 
 Wootton. "I don't know which of her doves has 
 turned out a fighting-cock." 
 
 " That reminds me," observes Mr. Wootton. " I 
 wanted to ask you, did you know that Gervase, when 
 he was Lord Baird, was very much au mieux with 
 Madame Sabaroff? I remember hearing long ago 
 from Russians " 
 
 Lady Usk interrupts the great man angrily : " Very 
 much au mieux ! What barbarous polyglot language 
 for a great critic like you ! Must you have the as- 
 sistance of bad grammar in two tongues to take away 
 my friend's reputation ? " 
 
 Lord Usk chuckles. "Reputations aren't taken 
 away so easily ; they're very hardy plants nowadays, 
 and will stand a good deal of bad weather." 
 
 Mr. Wootton is shocked. " Oh, Lady Usk I Repu- 
 tation ! You couldn't think I meant to imply of any 
 guest of yours only, you know, he was secretary in 
 Petersburg when he was Lord Baird, and so " 
 
 " Well, it doesn't follow that' he is the lover of 
 every woman in Petersburg ! " 
 
 Mr. Wootton is infinitely distressed. " Oh, indeed, 
 I didn't mean anything of that sort." 
 
 " You did mean everything of that sort," murmurs 
 his hostess. 
 
 "But, you see, he admired her very much, was 
 constantly with her, and yesterday I saw they didn't
 
 136 A HOUSE-PAETY. 
 
 speak to each other, so I was curious to know what 
 could be the reason." 
 
 " I believe she didn't recognize him." 
 
 Mr. "Wootton smiles. " Oh, ladies have such pro- 
 digious powers of oblivion and remembrance ! " 
 
 " Yes," observes Usk, with complacency : " the 
 storms of memory sometimes sink into them as if 
 they were sponges, and sometimes glide off them as if 
 they were ducks. It is just as they find it convenient. 
 But Madame Sabaroff can't have been more than a 
 child when Gervase was in Russia." 
 
 Mr. Wootton smiles again significantly. " She was 
 married." 
 
 " To a brute ! " cries Dorothy Usk. 
 
 " All husbands," says Lord Usk, with a chuckle, 
 " are brutes, and all wives are angels. C'est int- 
 prime f " 
 
 "I hope no one will ever call me an angel! I 
 should know at once that I was a bore ! " 
 
 "No danger, my lady: you've no wings on your 
 shoulders, and you've salt on your tongue." 
 
 " I'm sure you mean to be odiously rude, but to my 
 taste it's a great compliment." 
 
 "My dear Alan," says Dorothy Usk, having got 
 him at a disadvantage in her boudoir one-quarter of 
 an hour after luncheon, " what has there been between 
 you and the Princess Sabaroff? Everybody feels 
 there is something. It is in the air. Indeed, every-
 
 DELICATE GROUNDS. 137 
 
 body i talking about it. Pray tell me. I am dying 
 to know." 
 
 Gervase is silent. 
 
 " Everybody in the house is sure of it," continues 
 his hostess. " They don't say so, of course, but they 
 think so. Nina Cui'zon, who is mauvaise langue, 
 pretends even that she knows all the circumstances; 
 and it would seem that they are not very nice circum- 
 stances. I really cannot consent to go on in the dark 
 any longer." 
 
 " Ask the lady," replies Gervase, stiffly. 
 
 " I certainly shall do nothing so ill-bred. You are 
 a man, you are a relation of mine, and I can say 
 things to you I couldn't possibly say to a stranger, 
 which Madame Sabaroff is quite to me. If you won't 
 answer, I shall only suppose that you paid court to 
 her and were * spun,' as the boys say at the examina- 
 tions." 
 
 " Not at all," says Gervase, haughtily. 
 
 " Then tell me the story." 
 
 He hesitates. " I don't know whether you will 
 think very well of me if I tell you the truth." 
 
 " That you may be sure I shall not. No man ever 
 t>ehaves well where women are in the question." 
 
 " My dear Dolly, what unkind exaggeration ! If 
 I tell you anything, you will be sure not to repeat what 
 I say? Madame Sabaroff considers me a stranger 
 to her : I am bound to accept her decision on such a 
 point,"
 
 138 A HOUSE-PARTY 
 
 "You knew her in Russia?" 
 
 " Yes : when I was there she was the new beauty at 
 the court. She had been married a year or less to 
 Paul Sabaroff. I had the honor of her friendship at 
 that time : if she withdraws it now I must acquiesce." 
 
 Oh ! " 
 
 Lady Usk gives a little sound between a snort and a 
 sigh. 
 
 She is annoyed. The gossipers are right, then. She 
 is sorry the children have been so much with their 
 friend, and she is infuriated at the idea of her hus- 
 band's triumph over her credulity. 
 
 " Oh, pray don't think don't think for a moment 
 
 " murmurs Gervase; but his cousin understands 
 
 that it is the conventional compulsory expostulation 
 which every man who is well-bred is bound to make 
 on such subjects. 
 
 " She must have been very young then ? " she says, 
 beating impatiently on her blotting-book with her gold 
 pen. 
 
 " Very young ; but such a husband as Paul Sabaroff 
 made is well, a more than liberal education to any 
 woman, however young. She was sixteen, I think, 
 and very lovely; though she is perhaps handsomer 
 now. I had the honor of her confidence ; she was 
 unhappy and incomprise; her father had given her 
 hand in discharge of a debt at cards ; Sabaroff was a 
 gambler and a brute ; at the end of the second winter
 
 DELICATE GROUNDS. 139 
 
 season he had a violent fit of jealousy, and sent her to 
 his estate on the White Sea " 
 
 "Jealousy of you?" 
 
 Gervase bowed. 
 
 "Where she was kept in a state of surveillance 
 scarcely better than absolute imprisonment. I did all 
 manner of crazy and romantic things to endeavor to 
 see her ; and once or twice I succeeded ; but he had 
 discovered letters of mine, and made her captivity 
 more rigorous than ever. I myself was ordered on 
 the special mission to Spain, you remember, and I 
 left Russia with a broken heart. From that time to 
 this I have never seen her." 
 
 "But your broken heart has continued to do its 
 daily work ? " 
 
 "It is a figure of speech. I adored her, and the 
 husband was a brute. When Lustoff shot him he 
 only rid the world of a brute. You have seen that 
 broad bracelet she wears above the right elbow? 
 People always talk so about it. She wears it to hide 
 where Sabaroff broke her arm one night in his violence : 
 the marks of it are there forever." 
 
 Lady Usk is silent: she is divided between her 
 natural compassion and sympathy, which are very 
 easily roused, and her irritation at discovering that her 
 new favorite is what Usk would call " just like all the 
 rest of them." 
 
 "You perceive." he added, "that, as the princess
 
 140 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 chooses wholly to ignore the past, it is not for me to 
 recall it. I am obliged to accept her decision, however 
 much I must suffer from it." 
 
 " Suffer 1 " echoes his cousin. " After her husband's 
 death you never took the trouble to cross Europe to 
 see her." 
 
 ** She had never answered my letters," says Gervase, 
 but he feels that the excuse is a frail one. And how, 
 he thinks, angrily, should a good woman like his 
 cousin, who has never flirted in her life and never 
 done anything which might not have been printed in 
 the daily papers, understand a man's inevitable incon- 
 stancy ? 
 
 * I assure you that I have never loved any woman 
 as I loved her," he continues. 
 
 "Then you are another proof, if one were wanted, 
 that men have died and worms have eaten them, but 
 not for 
 
 " I did not die, certainly," Gervase says, much irri- 
 tated ; " but I suffered greatly, whether you choose to 
 believe it or not." 
 
 " I am not inclined to believe it," replies his hostess, 
 " It is not your style." 
 
 " I wrote to her a great many times." 
 
 He pauses. 
 
 Lady Usk fills up the pause. " And she answered 
 you ? " she inquires. 
 
 " N-no," replies Gervase, unwilling to confess such
 
 DELICATE GROUNDS. 141 
 
 an affront to him. " She did not write. Prudence, I 
 suppose ; or perhaps she might be too closely watched, 
 or her letters might be stopped : who can say ? " 
 
 " Nobody but herself, clearly. Well ? " 
 
 " I was sent to Madrid ; and I heard nothing of her 
 except that Sabaroff was shot in a duel about her with 
 Lustoff ; but that was two years afterwards." 
 
 And when he was shot why did you not in due 
 course go to the White Sea, or wherever she was, and 
 offer yourself ? " 
 
 "The truth is, I had become acquainted with a 
 Spanish lady " 
 
 " A great many Spanish ladies, no doubt I What a 
 half-hearted Lothario ! " 
 
 "Not at all. Only just at that time " 
 
 "Manillas, mandolines, balconies, bull-fights, high 
 mass, and moonlight had the supremacy ! My dear 
 Alan, tell your story how you will, you can't make 
 yourself heroic." 
 
 " I have not the smallest pretension to do so," says 
 Gervase, very much annoyed. "I have no heroism. 
 I leave it to Lord Brandolin, who has been ship- 
 wrecked five hundred times, I believe, and ridden as 
 many dromedaries over unknown sand-plains as Gor- 
 don " 
 
 ** As you don't care in the least for her, why should 
 you care if his shipwrecks and his dromedaries interest 
 her ? We don't know that they do ; but "
 
 142 -A- HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 " How little sympathy you have ! " 
 
 " George says I have always a great deal too much. 
 What do you want me to sympathize with ? Accord- 
 ing to your own story, you 'loved and rode away' ; at 
 least, took a through-ticket across Europe, as Lovelace 
 has to do in these prosaic days. If you did not go 
 back to Russia when you might have gone back, 
 d, qui la fautef Nobody's but your own and the 
 nameless Spanish lady or ladies' ! " 
 
 " You are very perverse." 
 
 " It is you who are, or who were, perverse. Accord- 
 ing to your own story, you adored a woman when she 
 was unattainable ; when she became attainable you did 
 not even take the trouble to get into a railway-carriage : 
 you were otherwise amused. What romantic element 
 is there in such, a tale as yours to excite the smallest 
 fragment of interest ? To judge you out of your own 
 mouth, you seem to me to have behaved with most un- 
 interesting inconstancy." 
 
 " It was four years, and she had never answered my 
 letters." 
 
 " Really a reason to make you esteem her infinitely 
 more than if she had answered them. My dear Alan, 
 you were a flirt, and you forgot as flirts forget : why 
 should one pity you for being so easily consoled ? You 
 ought to be infinitely grateful that Madame Sabaroff 
 did not send you reams of reproaches, and telegraph 
 you compromising messages which would have got you
 
 DELICATE GROUNDS. 143 
 
 into trouble in Downing Street. The thing died a 
 natural death ; you did not care to keep it alive : why 
 are you now all lamentations over its grave ? I really 
 do not follow the course of. your emotions, if you 
 feel any emotion : I thought you never did. Madame 
 Sabaroff has never been a person difficult to follow or 
 to find ; the fashionable intelligence of the newspapers 
 would at any time have enabled you to know where 
 she was; you never had inclination or remembrance 
 enough to make you curious to see her again, and then 
 when you come across her in a country house you 
 think yourself very ill used because she does not all 
 at once fall into your arms. You couldn't possibly 
 care about her, since you never tried to see her all those 
 years ! " 
 
 Dorothy Usk is really annoyed. 
 
 She is not a person who has a high standard of 
 humanity at any time, and she knows men thoroughly, 
 and they have no chance of being heroes in her sight. 
 But she likes a man to be a man, and to be an ardent 
 lover if he be a lover at all, and her favorite cousin 
 seems to her to wear a poor aspect in this page of his 
 autobiography. 
 
 " Pray, did you know that she is as rich as she is ?" 
 she asks, with some sharpness in her tone. 
 
 Gervase colors a little, being conscious that his re- 
 sponse cannot increase his cousin's sympathies with 
 
 him. 
 
 10
 
 144 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 " No. Is she rich ? Paul Sabaroff was poor. He 
 had gambled away nearly everything. Your children 
 have a great deal of blague about her riches, but I 
 suppose it is all nonsense." 
 
 " Not nonsense at all. Two years ago some silver 
 was discovered on a bit of rough land which belonged 
 to her, somewhere beyond the Urals, I think, and she is 
 enormously rich, will be richer every year, they say." 
 
 Indeed 1 " 
 
 He tries to look indifferent, but his cousin's pen- 
 etrating eyes seem to him to be reading his very soul. 
 
 "How dreadfully sorry he must be that he didn't 
 leave Madrid ! " she thinks, and aloud says, irritably, 
 " Why on earth didn't you try to renew things with 
 her all these three years ? " 
 
 " I imagined that I had forgotten her." 
 
 " Well, so you had, completely forgotten her, till 
 you saw her here." 
 
 " On my honor, she is the only woman I have ever 
 really loved." 
 
 " Oh, men always say that of somebody or another, 
 generally of the most impossible people. George 
 always declares that the only woman he ever really 
 loved was a pastry-cook when he was at Christ- 
 church." 
 
 "Dear Dorothy, don't joke. I assure you I am 
 thoroughly in earnest." 
 
 " She certainly has forgotten you."
 
 DELICATE GROUNDS. ]45 
 
 She knows that for him to be convinced of this is 
 the surest way to revive a died-out passion. 
 
 " Who knows ? She would be indifferent in that 
 case, and polite : as it is, she is cold, even rude." 
 
 " That may be resentment." 
 
 " Resentment means remembrance." 
 
 " Oh, not always." 
 
 *' Then she has a number of my letters." 
 
 " So you said ; you cannot be so very sure she has 
 kept them. Other people may have written her the 
 same sort of letters, or more admirable letters still : 
 how can you tell?" 
 
 He colors angrily. " She is not afemme legdre" 
 
 " She is receiving a great deal of attention now from 
 Lord Brandolin, and she does not seem to dislike it. 
 They say he writes exquisite letters to women he is 
 fond of ; I don't know myself, because I have never 
 had anything more interesting from him than notes 
 about dinners or visits ; but they say so. They even 
 say that his deserted ladies forgive his desertions be- 
 cause he writes his farewells so divinely." 
 
 " Lord Brandolin's epistolary accomplishments do 
 not interest me in the least. Everybody knows what 
 he is with women." He pauses a moment, then adds, 
 with some hesitation, 
 
 " Dear Dorothy, you know her very well. Don't 
 you think you could find out for me, and tell me n 
 
 "What?" 
 10
 
 146 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 "Well, what she thinks or does not think; in a 
 word, how I stand with her." 
 
 "No,- oh, no, my dear Alan; I couldn't attempt 
 anything of that sort, in my own house, too : it 
 would seem so horribly rude. Besides, I am not in 
 the least not the very least intimate with her. I 
 think her charming, we are bonnes connaissances, the 
 children adore her; but I have never said anything 
 intimate to her in my life, never." 
 
 " But you have so much tact." 
 
 " The more tact I have, the less likely shall I be to 
 recall to her what she is evidently perfectly deter- 
 mined to ignore. You can do it yourself if you want 
 it done. You are not usually shy." 
 
 Gervase gets up impatiently, and walks about in the 
 narrow limits of the boudoir, to the peril of the Sevres 
 and Saxe. 
 
 " But women have a hundred indirect ways of find- 
 ing out everything : you might discover perfectly well, 
 if you chose, whether whether, she feels anger or 
 any other sentiment ; whether whether, in a word, it 
 would be prudent to recall the past to her." 
 
 Lady Usk shakes her head with energy, stirring all 
 its pretty blonde curls, real and false. " Entre Varbre 
 et r^corce ne mettez pas le doigt. That is sound advice 
 which I have heard given at the Fran9ais." 
 
 "That is said of not interfering between married 
 people."
 
 DELICATE GROUNDS. 147 
 
 " It is generally true of people who wish, or may 
 not wish, to marry. And I suppose, Alan, that when 
 you speak in my house of renewing your your re- 
 lations with the Princess Sabaroff, you do not mean 
 that you have any object less serious than le bon 
 motif?" 
 
 Gervase is amused, although he is disconcerted and 
 irritated. 
 
 "Come Dorothy, your guests are not always so 
 very serious, are they? I never knew you so prim 
 before." 
 
 Then she in turn feels angry. She always steadily 
 adheres to the convenient fiction that she knows 
 nothing whatever of the amorous filaments which 
 bind her guests together in pairs, as turtle-doves might 
 be tied together by blue ribbons. 
 
 "If you only desire to reawake the sentiments of 
 Madame Sabaroff in your favor that you may again 
 make sport of them, you must excuse me if I say that 
 I cannot assist your efforts, and that I sincerely hope 
 they will not be successful," she says, with dignity and 
 distance. 
 
 " Do you suppose his are any better than mine ? " 
 asks Gervase, irritably, as he waves his hand towards 
 the window which looks on the west gardens. Be- 
 tween the yew and cedar-trees, at some distance from 
 the house, Brandolin is walking besides Xenia Saba- 
 roff ; his manner is interested and deferential : she
 
 148 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 moves with slow and graceful steps down the grassy 
 paths, listening with apparent willingness, her head is 
 uncovered, she carries a large sunshade opened over it 
 made of white lace and pale-rose silk, she has a cluster 
 of Duchess of Sutherland roses in her hand. They 
 are really only speaking of recent French poets, but 
 those who look at them cannot divine that. 
 
 " He is not my cousin, and he does not solicit my 
 assistance," says Dorothy Usk, seeing the figures in 
 her garden with some displeasure. "Je nefais pas la 
 police pour les autres ; but if he asks me what you 
 asked me, I should give him the same answer that I 
 give to you." 
 
 "He is probably independent of any assistance," 
 says Gervase, with irritable irony. 
 
 " Probably," says his hostess, who is very skillful at 
 fanning faint flame. " He is not a man whom I like 
 myself, but many women most women, I believe 
 think him irresistible. 
 
 Thereon she leaves him, without any more sympathy 
 or solace, to go and receive some county people who 
 have come to call, and who converse principally about 
 prize poultry. 
 
 " Comme elles sont assommees avec leurs poules f " 
 says the Marquise de Caillac, who chances to be present 
 at this infliction, and gazes in stupefaction at a dow- 
 ager duchess who has driven over from twenty miles off, 
 who wears very thick boots, her own thin gray hair,
 
 DELICATE GROUNDS. 149 
 
 water-proof tweed clothing, and a hat tied under her 
 double chin with black strings. " Tfnpaquetl" mur- 
 murs Madame de Caillac ; " un veritable paquet ! " 
 
 " C'est la vertu anglaise y un peu demodee says Lord 
 Ion a, with a yawn. 
 
 Gervase stays on as well as Brandolin, somewhat 
 bored, very much enerve t but fascinated, too, by the 
 presence of his Russian Ariadne, and stung by the 
 sight of Brandolin's attentions to her into such a 
 strong sense of revived passion that he means what he 
 says when he declares to his cousin that the wife of 
 Sabaroff was the only woman he has ever really loved. 
 Her manner to him also, not cold enough to be compli- 
 mentary, but entirely indifferent, never troubled, never 
 moved in any way by his vicinity or by his direct 
 allusions to the past, is such as irritates, piques, at- 
 tracts, and magnetizes him. It seems to him incredi- 
 ble that any woman can ignore him so utterly. If she 
 only seemed afraid of him, agitated in any way, even 
 adversely, he could understand what was passing in 
 her mind ; but he cannot even flatter himself that she 
 does this : she treats him with just such perfect indif- 
 ference as she shows to the Duke of Queenstown 01 
 Hugo Mandeville or any one of the gilded youths 
 there present. If he could once see a wistful memory 
 in her glance, once see a flush of color on her face at his 
 approach, it is probable that his vanity would be satis- 
 fied and his interest cease as quickly as it has revived ;
 
 150 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 but he never does see anything of this sort, and, by 
 the rule of contradiction, his desire to see it increases. 
 And he wonders uneasily what she b/*s done with his 
 letters.
 
 COMPROMISING LETTERS. lol 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 COMPROMISING LETTERS. 
 
 LORD GERVASE was eight years younger when he 
 wrote those letters than he is now, and he has un- 
 pleasant recollections of unpleasant passages in them 
 which would compromise him in his career, or at least 
 get him horribly talked about, were they ever made 
 sport of in the world. Where are his letters ? Has 
 Madame Sabaroff kept them? He longs to ask her, 
 but he dare not. 
 
 He does not say to his cousin that he has more than 
 once endeavored to hint to Xenia Sabaroff that it 
 would be sweet to him to recall the past, would she 
 permit it. But he has elicited no response. She has 
 evaded without directly avoiding him. She is no 
 longer the impressionable shy girl whom he knew in 
 Russia, weighted with an unhappy fate, and rather 
 alarmed by the very successes of her own beauty than 
 flattered by them. She is a woman of the world, who 
 knows her own value and her own power to charm, 
 and has acquired the talent which the world teaches, 
 of reading the rninds of others without revealing her
 
 152 ^ HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 pwn. Saule pleureur ! the Petersburg court ladies had 
 used to call her in those early times when the tears 
 had started to her eyes so quickly , but no one ever 
 sees tears in her eyes now. 
 
 Gervase is profoundly troubled to find how much 
 genuine emotion the presence of a woman whose 
 existence he had long forgotten has power to excite in 
 him. He does not like emotion of any kind ; and in 
 all his affairs of the heart he is accustomed to make 
 others suffer, not himself. Vanity and wounded vanity 
 enter so largely into the influences moulding human 
 life, that it is very possible, if the sight of him had had 
 power to disturb her, the renewal of association with 
 her would have left him unmoved. But, as it is, 
 he has been piqued, mortified, excited, and attracted ; 
 and the admiration which Brandolin and Lawrence 
 Hamilton and other men plainly show of her is the 
 sharpest spur to memory and to desire. 
 
 Whenever he has remembered Xenia Sabaroff, at 
 such rare times as he has heard her name mentioned 
 in the world, he has thought of her complacently as 
 dwelling in the solitudes of Baltic forests, entirely 
 devoted to his memory. Women who are entirely 
 devoted to their memory men seldom trouble them- 
 selves to seek out ; but to see her courted, sought, and 
 desired, more handsome than ever, and apparently 
 wholly indifferent to himself, is a shock to his self- 
 esteem, and galvanism to his dead wishes and slumber-
 
 COMPROMISING LETTERS. 153 
 
 ing recollections. He begins to perceive that he 
 would have done better not to forget her quite so 
 quickly. 
 
 Meanwhile, all the guests at Surrenden, guided by 
 a hint from Nina Curzon, begin to see a quantity of 
 things which do not exist, and to exert their minds 
 in endeavoring to remember a vast deal which they 
 never heard with regard to both himself and her. 
 No one knows anything or has a shadow of fact to go 
 on, but this is an insignificant detail which does not 
 tie their tongues in the least. Nina Curzou has in- 
 vention enough to supply any lacunce, and in this 
 instance her imagination is stimulated by a double 
 jealousy: she is jealous of Lawrence Hamilton, whom 
 she is inclined to dismiss, and she is jealous of Bran- 
 dolin, whom she is inclined to appropriate. 
 
 Twenty-four hours have not elapsed since the 
 arrival of Gervase, before she has given a dozen 
 people the intimate conviction that she knows all about 
 him and the Princess Sabaroff, and that there is some- 
 thing very dreadful in it, much worse than in the 
 usual history of such relations. Everything is pos- 
 sible in Russia, she says, and has a way of saying this 
 which suggests unfathomable abysses of license and 
 crime. 
 
 No one has the slightest idea what she means, but 
 no one will be behind any other' in conjecturing; and 
 there rises about the unconscious ficrure of Xenia
 
 154 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 Sabaroff a haze of vague suggested indistinct sus- 
 picion, like the smoke of the blue fires which hide 
 the form of the Evil One on the stage in operas. 
 Brandolin perceives it, and is deeply irritated. 
 
 " What is it to me?" he says to himself, but says so 
 in vain. 
 
 Fragments of these ingenious conjectures and im- 
 aginary recollections come to his ear and annoy him 
 intensely, annoy him the more because his swift in- 
 tuitions and unerring perceptions have told him from 
 his own observation that Xenia Sabaroff does not see 
 in Gervase altogether a stranger, though she has 
 greeted him as such. Certain things are said which 
 he would like to resent, but he is powerless to do so. 
 
 His days have been delightful to him before the 
 arrival of this other man at Surrenden ; now they are 
 troubled and imbittered. Yet he is not inclined to 
 break off his visit abruptly and go to Scotland, Ger- 
 many, or Norway, as might be wisest. He is in love 
 with Xenia Sabaroff in a manner which surprises him. 
 self. He thought he had outlived that sort of boyish 
 and imaginative passion. But she has a great powei 
 over his fancy and his senses, and she is more like his 
 earliest ideal of a woman than anyone he has ever 
 met. 
 
 " Absurd that I should have an ideal at all at my 
 age ! " he thinks to himself , but, as there are some 
 who are never accompanied by that ethereal attendant
 
 COMPROMISING LETTERS. 155 
 
 even in youth, so there are some whom it never leaves 
 till they reach their graves. 
 
 Therefore when he hears these vague, floating, disa- 
 greeable jests, he suffers acutely, and finds himself in 
 the position which is perhaps most painful of all to 
 any man who is a gentleman, that of being compelled 
 to sit silent and hear a woman he longs to protect 
 lightly spoken of, because he has no right to defend 
 her, and would indeed only compromise her more if 
 he attempted her defence. 
 
 People do not venture to say much before TJsk, 
 because he is her host and might resent it, but never- 
 theless he too hears also something, and thinks to 
 himself, " Didn't I tell Dolly foreigners are never any 
 better than they should be ? " 
 
 But Dulcia Waverley is here, and her languid and 
 touching ways, her delicate health, and her soft sym- 
 pathies have an indescribable sorcery for him at all 
 times, so that he thinks but very little since her ar- 
 rival of anything else. Usk likes women who believe 
 devoutly that he might have been a great politician 
 if he had chosen, and who also believe in his ruined 
 digestion : no one affects both these beliefs so intensely 
 as Lady Waverley, and when she tells him that he 
 could have solved the Irish question in half an hour 
 had he taken office, or that no one could understand 
 his constitution except a German doctor in a bath in 
 the Bohmerwald, whither she goes herself every au- 

 
 156 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 t man, she does, altogether and absolutely, anything she 
 chooses with him. 
 
 His wife sees that quite well, and dislikes it, but it 
 might be so much worse, she reflects : it might be a 
 woman out of society, or a public singer, or an Amer- 
 ican adventuress: so she is reasonable, and always 
 makes bonne mine to Dulcia Waverley, with her 
 nerves, her cures, and her angelic smiles. After all, it 
 does not much matter, she thinks, if they like to go 
 and drink nasty waters together and poison themselves 
 with sulphur, iron, and potassium. It is one of the 
 odd nineteenth-century ways of playing Antony and 
 Cleopatra. 
 
 Notwithstanding the absorption of his thoughts, 
 Usk, however, one day spares a moment from Lady 
 Waverley and his own liver, to put together words 
 dropped by different people then under his own roof, 
 to ponder upon them, and finally to interrogate his 
 wife. 
 
 " Did you know that people say they used to carry 
 on together ? " he asks, without preamble. 
 
 "Who?" asks the lady of Surrenden, sharply. 
 
 " Madame Sabaroff and Gervase," he growls. *' It'd 
 be odd if they hadn't, as they've come to this house ! " 
 
 " Of course I knew they were friends ; but there was 
 never anything between them in the vulgar sense which 
 you would imply renders them eligible for my house," 
 replies Dorothy Usk, with the severity of a woman
 
 COMPROMISING LETTERS. 157 
 
 whose conscience is clear, and the tranquillity of a 
 woman who is telling a falsehood. 
 
 Usk stares at her. " Well, if you knew it, you rode 
 a dark horse, then, when you asked her here ? " 
 
 " Your expressions are incoherent," returns his wife. 
 " If I wished two people to meet when both were free, 
 who had had a certain sympathy for each other when 
 honor kept them apart, there is nothing very culpable 
 in it? What is your objection ? " 
 
 " Oh, Lord, I've no objection : I don't care a straw," 
 says her lord, with a very moody expression. " But 
 Brandolin will, I suspect : she's certainly encouraged 
 him. I think you might have shown us your cards." 
 
 "Lord Brandolin is certainly old enough to take 
 care of himself in affairs of the heart, and experienced 
 enough, too, if one is to believe all one hears," replies 
 his wife. " What can he care, either, for a person he 
 has known a few days ? Whereas the attachment of 
 Gervase to her is of very long date and most roman- 
 tic origin. He has loved her hopelessly for eight 
 years." 
 
 Usk gives a grim guffaw. " The constancy has had 
 many interludes, I suspect ! Now I see why you took 
 such a craze for the lady; but you might have said 
 what you were after to me, at any rate. I could have 
 hinted to Brandolin how the land lay, and he wouldn't 
 have walked with his eyes shut into her net." 
 
 " Her ' net ' ? She is as cold as ice to him ! " replies
 
 158 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 his wife, with disgust ; " and, were she otherwise, the 
 loves of your friend are soon consoled. He writes a 
 letter, takes a voyage, and throws his memories over- 
 board. Alan's temperament is far more serious." 
 
 " If by serious you mean selfish, I agree with you^ 
 There isn't such another d d egotist anywhere un- 
 der the sun." And, much out of temper, Usk flings 
 himself out of the room and goes to Lady Waverley, 
 who is lying on a sofa in the small library. She has a 
 headache, but her smile is sweet, her hand cool, her 
 atmosphere soothing and delightful, with the blinds 
 down and an odor of attar of roses. 
 
 If any one were to tell Dolly Usk that she had 
 been making up fibs on this occasion, she would be 
 mortally offended and surprised. She would reply 
 that she had only been brodant un peit, putting the 
 thing as it ought to be put, as it must be put, if Ger- 
 vase is to obtain the hand of Xenia Sabaroff, and if 
 nobody is to know anything which ought not to be 
 known. Indeed, she has pondered so much on this 
 manner of putting it, that she has almost ended in 
 believing that her version of the story in the true one. 
 
 " Brandolin's feelings, indeed ! " she thinks, with 
 great contempt. " As if any pain he might feel, if he 
 did feel any, would not be due and fitting retribution 
 upon him for the horrid life he has led, and the way 
 he has played fast and loose with women. He can go 
 back to his Hindoos, whose figures are so superior to
 
 COMPROMISING LETTERS. 159 
 
 any European's! But George is always so absurd 
 about his friends." 
 
 Whereon, being in an irritated and unkind mood, 
 she desires the servant, who just then announces the 
 visit of the rector of the parish, to show that reverend 
 person into the small library, where she knows that 
 Dulcia "Waverley is trying to get rid of her headache, 
 It is very seldom that she is unwise enough to indulge 
 in this kind of domestic vengeance ; but at this mo- 
 ment it seems sweet to her. 
 
 The unfortunate and innocent rector finds the lord 
 of Surrenden monosyllabic and impolite, but Lady 
 Waverley, woman-like, is wholly equal to the occa- 
 sion, and in her sweet low voice discourses of village 
 choirs, and village readings, and village medicines and 
 morals, with such divine patience and feminine adapta- 
 bility that the good man dismisses from his mind 
 as impossible what he had certainly fancied he saw 
 in the moment when the library door opened before 
 him. 
 
 If ever there was purity incarnate, Dulcia Waver- 
 ley looks it, with her white gown, her Madonna-like 
 hair, her dewy pensive eyes, and her appealing smile. 
 She suggests the portraits in the Keepsakes and For- 
 get-me-Nots of fifty years ago ; she has always about 
 her the faint old-fashioned perfume of attar of roses, 
 and she wears her soft fair hair in Raphaelite bands 
 
 which in any other woman would look absurd: but 
 11
 
 160 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 her experience has told her that, despite all change in 
 modes and manners, the surest weapons to subdue 
 strong men are still those old-fashioned charms of 
 fragility and of apparent helplessness which made 
 Othello weep when his bridal moon was young above 
 the Venetian waters. Only if she had ever spoken 
 candidly all she knows, which she never by any 
 chance does, she would say that to succeed thus with 
 Othello, or with any other male creature, you must be, 
 under all your apparent weakness, tenacious as a mag- 
 net and cold as steel. Therein lies the secret of all 
 power : the velvet glove and the iron hand may be an 
 old saying, but it is a truth never old. 
 
 The conclusion which she had drawn from Gervase 
 and his fragmentary story has seriously annoyed and 
 shocked his cousin, but on reflection she decides to 
 adhere to her invariable rule of ignoring all that is 
 equivocal in it, and treating it accordingly. 
 
 No one has ever heard Lady TJsk admit that 
 there is the slightest impropriety in the relations of 
 any of her guests : it is one of those fictions like the 
 convenient fictions of the law, which are so useful that 
 every one agrees not to dispute their acceptance. She 
 will never know a person who is really compromised. 
 Therefore, if there be any soil on the wings of her 
 doves, she shuts her eyes to it so long as those of the 
 world are shut. She has the agreeable power of never 
 seeing what she wishes to see : so, although for the
 
 COMPROMISING LETTERS. 161 
 
 moment she has been uncomfortably shocked, she re- 
 covers her composure rapidly, and persuades herself 
 that Gervase merely spoke of a passing attachment, 
 perfectly pure. Why should he not marry the object 
 of it ? To the mind of Dorothy Usk that would make 
 everything right. Things may have been wrong once, 
 but that is nobody's business. Xenia Sabaroff is a 
 charming and beautiful woman, and the silver-mine 
 beyond the Urals is a very real thing. Lady Usk is 
 not a mercenary, she is even a generous woman ; but 
 when English fortunes are so embarrassed as they are 
 in this day, with Socialists at the roots and a Jac- 
 querie tearing at the fruits of them, any solid fortune 
 situated out of England would be of great use to any 
 Englishman occupying a great position. 
 
 "We shall all of us have to live abroad before 
 long," she reflects, with visions of Hodge chopping 
 down her palms for firewood and Sally smashing the 
 porcelain in her model dairy. 
 
 No doubt the relations of her cousin and her guest 
 have not been always what they ought to have been ; 
 but she does not wish to think of this, and she will 
 not think of it : by-gones are always best buried. The 
 people who manage to be happy are those who under- 
 stand the art of burying them and use plenty of 
 quicklime. 
 
 During the twenty years which has elapsed since 
 
 her presentation, Dolly Usk has had a very varied 
 11
 
 162 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 experience of men and women, and has continually 
 been solicited to interfere in their love-affairs, or has 
 even interfered without being solicited. She likes the 
 feeling of being a diva ex machina to her friends, and, 
 though she had so decidedly refused Gervase her assist- 
 ance to discover the state of Xenia Sabaroff s feelings 
 towards him, she begins in her own mind immediately 
 to cast about for some indirect means of learning it, 
 and arranges in her own fancy the whole story as it 
 will sound prettiest and most proper, if she be ever 
 recalled on to relate it to the world. 
 
 She has a talent at putting such stories so nicely in 
 order that anything which may be objectionable in 
 them is altogether invisible, as a clever faiseitr will so 
 arrange old laces on a court train that the darns and 
 stains in them are wholly hidden away. She likes 
 exercising her ingenuity in this way ; and, although 
 the narrative given her by Gervase has certainly 
 seemed to her objectionable, and one which places the 
 hero of it in an unpleasant light, it may with tact be 
 turned so as to show nothing but what is interesting. 
 And to this end she also begins to drop little hints, 
 little phrases suggestive of that virtue of blameless and 
 long constancy with which it is necessary to invest her 
 cousin Alan, if he is to be made a centre of romance. 
 She even essays these very delicately on the ear of 
 Xenia Sabaroff ; but they are met with so absolute a 
 lack of response, so discouraging and cold an absence
 
 COMPROMISING LETTERS, 163 
 
 of all understanding, that she cannot continue to try 
 them in that direction. 
 
 " If that odious Brandolin were not here ! " she 
 thinks, irritably 
 
 The attentions of Brandolin are very marked to the 
 Princess Sabaroff, and are characterized by that care- 
 lessness of comment and that color of romance which 
 have always marked his interest in any woman. He 
 is not a rival d, plaisanter, she knows ; but then she 
 knows, too, that he never is serious in these matters. 
 When she first hears the story of Gervase, she heartily 
 wishes that there were any pretence to get rid of 
 Xenia Sabaroff, and hastily wonders what excuse she 
 could make to break up her Surrenden circle. But on 
 reflection she desires as strongly to retain her there ; 
 and, as there is to be a child's costume ball on the 
 occasion of the Babe's birthday a fortnight hence, she 
 makes the children entreat their friend to stay for it, 
 and adds her own solicitation to theirs. Madame 
 Sabaroff hesitates, is inclined to refuse, but at length 
 acquiesces 
 
 Unfortunately, TJsk, who always to his wife's mind 
 represents the bull in the china-shop with regard to 
 any of her delicate and intricate combinations, insists 
 that Brandolin shall not leave either. So the situation 
 remains unchanged, though many guests come and go, 
 some staying two days, some three or four. 
 
 Xenia Sabaroff has seen and suffered tnough to
 
 164 ^ HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 make her not lightly won or easily impressed. She 
 knows enough of the world to know her own value 
 in it, and she has measured the brutality and the in- 
 consistency which may lie under the most polished 
 exterior. 
 
 " I am not old yet in years," she says, once, " but 
 I am very old in some things. I have no illusions." 
 
 " When there is a frost in spring the field-flowers 
 die," says Brandolin, softly, " but they come again." 
 
 " In the fields, perhaps," replies Xenia Sabaroff. 
 
 "And in the human heart," says Brandolin. 
 
 He longs to ask her what have been the relations 
 between her and Gervase which people seem so sure 
 have existed once ; he longs to know whether it was 
 the brutality of her husband, or the infidelity of any 
 lover, which has taught her so early the instability of 
 human happiness. 
 
 But he hesitates before any demand, however veiled 
 or delicate, upon her confidence. He has known her 
 such a little while, and he is conscious that she is not 
 a femme facile. It is her greatest fascination for him : 
 though he is credited with holding women lightly, he 
 is a man whose theories of what they ought to be are 
 high and difficult to realize. Each day that he sees 
 her at Surrenden tends to convince him more and more 
 that she does realize them, despite the calumnies which 
 are set floating round her name. 
 
 One day, among several new arrivals, a countryman
 
 COMPROMISING LETTERS. 165 
 
 of hers comes down from London, where, being mo- 
 mentarily charge-d 'affaires of the Russian Legation, 
 he has been cursing the heat, the dust, the deserted 
 squares, the empty clubs, the ugly parks, and rushing 
 out of town whenever he can for twenty-four hours, as 
 he now comes to Surrenden from Saturday to Monday. 
 " Comme un calicot ! Comme un calicot ! " he says, 
 piteously. Such are the miseries of the diplomatic 
 service. 
 
 He kisses the hand of Madame Sabaroff with ardor 
 and reverence : he has known her in her own country. 
 A gleam of amusement comes into his half-shut gray 
 eyes as he recognizes Gervase. 
 
 The next morning is Sunday. Usk and Dulcia 
 Waverley are at church, with the children and Lady 
 TJsk and Nina Curzon. 
 
 Brandolin strays into the small library, takes down 
 a book, and stretches himself on a couch. He half 
 expects that Madame Sabaroff will come down before 
 luncheon and also seek a book, as she did last Sunday. 
 He lights a cigarette and waits, lazily watching the 
 peacocks drawing their trains over the velvety turf 
 without. It is a lovely dewy morning, very fresh and 
 fragrant after rains in the night. He thinks he will 
 persuade her to go for a walk : there is a charming 
 walk near, under deep trees by a little brown brook, 
 full of forget-me-nots. 
 
 He hears a step, and looks up : he does not see her,
 
 166 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 but the Russian secretary, Gregor Litroff, always called 
 " Toffy " by his female friends in England. 
 
 "Dieu de Dieuf What an institution your English 
 Sunday is!" says Litroff, with a yawn. "I looked 
 out of my window an hour ago, and beheld Usk 
 in a tall hat, with his little boy on one side and 
 miladi Waverley on the other, solemnly going to 
 church. How droll I He would not do it in Lon- 
 don." 
 
 " It is not more ridiculous to go to church in a tall 
 hat than to prostrate yourself and kiss a wooden cross, 
 as you would do if you were at home," says Bran- 
 dolin, contemptuously, eying the intruder with irrita- 
 tion. 
 
 " That may be," says the secretary, good-humoredly. 
 " We do it from habit, to set an example, not to make 
 a fuss. So, I suppose, does he." 
 
 " Precisely," says Brandolin, wondering how he shall 
 get rid of this man. 
 
 " And he takes Lady Waverley for an example, too ? " 
 asks Litroff, with a laugh. 
 
 " Religion enjoins us," replies Brandolin, curtly, 
 u to offer what we have most precious to the Lord." 
 
 The secretary laughs again. 
 
 " That is very good," he says, with enjoyment. 
 
 Mr. Wootton comes in at that instant. He has 
 been away, but has returned : the cooks at Surrenden 
 are admirable. Brandolin sees his hopes of a ttte-fo
 
 COMPROMISING LETTERS. 167 
 
 tdte and a walk in the home wood fading farther and 
 farther from view. Mr. Wootton has several tele- 
 gram-papers in his hand. 
 
 " All bad news, from all the departments," he 
 remarks. 
 
 " There is nothing but bad news," says Brandolin. 
 " It is painful to die by driblets. We shall all be glad 
 when we have got the thing over, seen Windsor 
 burnt, London sacked, Ireland admitted to the Ameri- 
 can Union, and Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone crowned at 
 Westminster. 
 
 Mr. Wootton coughs : he does not like unseemly 
 jests, nor to have the gravity and exclusiveness of the 
 private intelligence he receives doubted. He turns to 
 Litroff, talks of Russian politics, and brings the con- 
 versation round to the Princess Sabaroff. 
 
 Brandolin, appearing absorbed in his book, lies on 
 his couch wondering whether he should meet her any- 
 where about the gardens if he went out. He listens 
 angrily when he hears her name. 
 
 " Was she ever talked about ? " asks Mr. Wootton, 
 searching the book-shelves. 
 
 "What charming woman is not?" returns Litroff. 
 gallantly. 
 
 " My dear count," replies Mr. Wootton, with grave 
 rebuke, "we have thousands of noble wives and 
 mothers in England before whom Satan himself would 
 be obliged to bow in reverence,"
 
 J68 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 " Ah, truly," says Litroff : " so have we, I dare say : 
 I have never asked." 
 
 "No doubt you have," says Mr. Wootton kindly. 
 " The virtue of its women is the great safeguard of a 
 nation." 
 
 " One understands why England is losing her nice 
 equipoise, then, now," murmurs Brandolin. 
 
 Mr. Wootton disregards him. 
 
 " But Madame Sabaroff was talked about, I think, 
 unjustly, no doubt ? " he insists. 
 
 Mr. Wootton always insists. 
 
 " Ach ! " says Litroff, apologetically, " Sabaroff was 
 such a great brute. It was very natural " 
 
 * What was natural ? " 
 
 " That she should console herself. 7 * 
 
 "Ah ! she did console herself?" 
 
 " Litroff smiles. " Ask Lord Gervase : he was Lord 
 Baird at that time. We all expected he would have 
 married her when Sabaroff was shot." 
 
 "But it was Lustoff who shot Sabaroff in a duel 
 about her ? " 
 
 " Not about her. Lustoff quarrelled with him about 
 a gambling affair, not about her at all, though people 
 have said so. Lord Baird Gervase was, I am cer- 
 tain, her first lover, and has been her only one, as 
 yet." 
 
 Brandolin flings his book with some violence on the 
 floor, gets up and walks to the window. Mr. Woottou 
 looks after him.
 
 COMPROMISING LETTERS. 169 
 
 "No one could blame her," says Litroff, who is a 
 good-natured man. " She was married when she was 
 scarcely sixteen to a brute; she was immensely ad- 
 mired ; she was alone in the midst of a society both 
 loose and brilliant ; Gervase laid siege to her sans 
 trdoe, and she was hardly more than a child." 
 
 "Where there is no principle early implanted," 
 begins Mr. Wootton 
 
 But Litroff is not patient under preaching. "My 
 dear sir," he says, impatiently, " principle (of that 
 kind) is more easily implanted in plain women than in 
 handsomer ones. Madame Sabaroff is a proud woman, 
 which comes to nearly the same thing as a high-prin- 
 cipled one. She has lived like a saint since Sabaroff 
 was shot, and if she take up matters with her early 
 lover again it will only be, I imagine, this time, pour le 
 bon motif. Anyhow, I don't see why we should blame 
 her for the past, when the present shows us such an 
 admirable and edifying spectacle as miladi Waverley 
 and miladi Usk going to sit in church with George 
 Usk between them ! 
 
 Whereon the Russian secretary takes a " Figaro " 
 off the newspaper-table, and rudely opens it and flour- 
 ishes it between Mr. Wootton and himself, in sign that 
 the conversation is ended. 
 
 Mr. Wootton has never been so treated in his/ life.
 
 170 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 WAS SHE GUILTY? 
 
 BBANDOLIN walks down the opening between the 
 glass doors into the garden. He paces impatiently the 
 green shady walks where he has seen her on other 
 mornings than this. It is lovely weather, and the in- 
 numerable roses fill the warm moist air with fragrance. 
 There is a sea-breeze blowing from the sea-coast 
 some thirty miles away ; his schooner is in harbor 
 there ; he thinks that it would be wisest to go to 
 it and sail away again for as many thousand miles 
 as he had just left behind him. Xenia Sabaroff has a 
 great and growing influence over him, and he does not 
 wish her to exercise it and increase it if this thing 
 be true : perhaps, after all, she may be that kind of 
 sorceress of which Mary Stuart is the eternal type, 
 cold only that others may burn, reculant pour mieux 
 sauter, exquisitely feminine only to be more danger- 
 ously powerful. He does not wish to play the r6le 
 of Chastelard, or of Douglas, or of Henry Darnley. 
 He is stung to the quick by what he has heard 
 said.
 
 WAS SHE GUILTY ? 171 
 
 It is not new : since the arrival of Gervase the 
 same thing has been hinted more or less clearly, more 
 or less obscurely, within his hearing more than once ; 
 but the matter-of-fact words of Litroff have given 
 the tale a kind of circumstantiality and substance 
 which the vague uncertain suggestions of others did 
 not do. Litroff has, obviously, no feeling against her ; 
 he even speaks of her with reluctance and admira- 
 tion ; therefore his testimony has a truthfulness about 
 it which would be lacking in any mere malicious 
 scandal. 
 
 It is intensely painful to him to believe, or even to 
 admit to himself as possible, that it may be thus true. 
 She seems to him a very queen among women : all 
 the romance of his temperament clothes her with ideal 
 qualities. He walks on unconciously till he has left 
 the west garden and entered the wood which joins it, 
 and the grassy seats made underneath the boughs. 
 As he goes, his heart thrills, his pulse quickens : he 
 sees Madame Sabaroff. She is seated on one of the 
 turf banks, reading, the dog of the house at her feet. 
 He has almost walked on to her before he has per- 
 ceived her. 
 
 " I beg your pardon," he murmurs, and pauses, 
 undecided whether to go or stay. 
 
 She looks at him a little surprised at the ceremony 
 of his manner. 
 
 " For what do you beg my pardon ? You are as
 
 172 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 free of the wood as I," she replies, with a smile. " I 
 promised the children to keep their dogs quiet, and to 
 await them here as they return from their church." 
 
 " You are too good to the children," says Brando- 
 lin, still with restraint. Her eyes open with increased 
 surprise. She has never seen his manner, usually so 
 easy, nonchalant and unstudied, altered before. 
 
 " He must have heard bad news," she thinks, but 
 says nothing, and keeps her book open. 
 
 Brandolin stands near, silent and absorbed. He is 
 musing what worlds he would give, if he had them, 
 to know whether the story is true ! He longs pas- 
 sionately to ask her in plain words, but it would be 
 too brutal and too rude ; he has not known her long 
 enough to be able to presume to do so. 
 
 He watches the sunshine fall though the larch 
 boughs on to her hands in their long loose gloves and 
 touch the pearls which she always wears at her throat. 
 
 " How very much he is unlike himself ! " she 
 thinks ; she misses his spontaneous and picturesque 
 eloquence, his warm abandon of manner, his caressing 
 deference of tone. At that moment there is a gleam 
 of white between the trees, a sound of voices in the 
 distance. 
 
 The family party are returning from church. The 
 dogs jump up and wag their tails and bark their wel- 
 come, The Babe is dashing on in advance. There is 
 an end of their brief tdte~a~tete\ he passionately re-
 
 WAS SHE GUILTY f 173 
 
 grets the loss of it, though he is not sure of what he 
 would have said in it. 
 
 " Always together ! " says Dulcia Waverley, in a 
 whisper, to Usk, as she sees them. " Does he know 
 that he succeeds Lord Gervase, do you think ? " 
 
 "How should I know?" says Usk; "and Dolly 
 says there was nothing between her and Gervase, 
 nothing ; at least it was all in honor, as the French 
 say." 
 
 " Oh, of course," agrees Lady Waverley, with her 
 plaintive eyes gazing dreamily down the aisle of larch- 
 trees. The children have run on to Madame Sabaroff. 
 
 " Where is Alan ? " thinks Dolly Usk, angrily, on 
 seeing Brandolin. 
 
 Gervase, who is not an early riser, is then taking 
 his coffee in bed as twelve strikes. He detests an 
 English Sunday: although at Surrenden it is dis- 
 guised as much as possible to look like any other day, 
 still there is a Sunday feeling in the air, and TJsk does 
 not like people to play cards on Sundays : it is his way 
 of being virtuous vicariously. 
 
 "Primitive Christianity," says Brandolin, touching 
 the white feathers of Dodo's hat and the white lace on 
 her short skirts. 
 
 " We only go to sleep," replies the child, disconso- 
 lately. " We might just as well go to sleep at home ; 
 and it is so hot in that pew, with all that red cloth ! " 
 
 " My leve ! " says Dulcia Waverley, scandalized.
 
 174 A ROUSE-PAETY. 
 
 " Lady Waverley don't go to sleep ! " cries the Babe, 
 in his terribly clear little voice, " She was writing in 
 her hymn-book and showing it to papa." 
 
 No one appears to hear this indiscreet remark except 
 Dodo, who laughs somewhat rudely. 
 
 "I was trying to remember the hymn of Faber's 
 'Longing for God.'" says Lady Waverley, who is 
 never known to be at a loss. " The last verse escapes 
 me. Can any one recall it ? It is so lamentable that 
 sectarianism prevents those hymns from being used in 
 Protestant churches." 
 
 But no one there present is religious enough or 
 poetic enough to help her to the missing lines. 
 
 "There is so little religious feeling anywhere in 
 England," she remarks with a sigh. 
 
 "It's the confounded levelling that destroys it," 
 says Usk, echoing the sigh. 
 
 "They speak of Faber," says Madame Sabaroff. 
 "The most beautiful and touching of all his verses 
 are those which express the universal sorrow of the 
 world." 
 
 And in her low, grave, melodious voice she repeats 
 a few of the lines of the poem : 
 
 " The sea, unmated creature, tired and lone, 
 Makes on its desolate sands eternal moan. 
 Lakes on the calmest days are ever throbbing 
 Upon their pebbly shores with petulant sobbing.
 
 'A 
 WAS SHE GUILTY? 175 
 
 " The beasts of burden linger on their way 
 Like slaves, who will not speak when they obey; 
 Their eyes, whene'er their looks to us they raise, 
 With something of reproachful patience gaze. 
 
 ********** 
 
 " Labor itself is but a sorrowful song, 
 The protest of the weak against the strong; 
 Over rough waters, and in obstinate fields, 
 And from dark mines, the same sad sound it yields." 
 
 She is addressing Brandolin as she recites them ; 
 they are a little behind the others. 
 
 He does not reply, but looks at her with an ex- 
 pression in his eyes which astonishes and troubles her. 
 He is thinking, as the music of her tones stirs his in- 
 nermost soul, that he can believe no evil of her, will 
 believe none, no, though the very angels of heaven 
 were to cry out against her.
 
 176 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 MEMORIES AND SUSPICIONS. 
 
 " WHERE were you all this morning ? " asks Lady 
 Usk of her cousin, after luncheon. 
 
 "I never get up early," returns Gervase. "You 
 know that." 
 
 " Brandolin was in the home wood with Madame 
 Sabaroff as we returned from church," remarks Dolly 
 Usk. " They were together under a larch-tree. They 
 looked as if they were on the brink of a quarrel or 
 at the end of one : either may be an interesting rap- 
 prochement" 
 
 "I dare say they were only discussing some poet. 
 They are always discussing some poet." 
 
 " Then they had fallen out over the poet. Poets 
 are dangerous themes. Or perhaps she had been show- 
 ing him your letters, if, as you seem to think, she 
 carries them about with her everywhere like a reli- 
 quary." 
 
 " I never presume to imagine that she had preserved 
 them for a day."
 
 MEMORIES AND SUSPICIONS. 177 
 
 " Oh, yes, you did. You had a vision of her weep- 
 ing over them in secret every night, until you saw her 
 here and found her as unlike a delaisse as a woman 
 can be." 
 
 " Certainly she does not look that. Possibly, if 
 Dido could have been dressed by Worth and Rod- 
 rigues, had diamonds as big as plovers' eggs, and been 
 adored by Lord Brandolin, she would never have 
 perished in despair. Autres temps autres moeurs" 
 
 He speaks with sullen and scornful bitterness : his 
 handsome face is momentarily flushed. 
 
 Dorothy Usk looks at him with inquisitiveness : she 
 has never known im fail to rely on his own attrac- 
 tions before. " You are unusually modest," she re- 
 plies. " Certainly, in our days, if JEneas does not 
 come back, we take somebody else : sometimes we do 
 that even if he does come back." 
 
 Gervase is moodily silent. 
 
 " I never knew you c funk a fence ' before ! " says his 
 cousin to him, sarcastically. 
 
 " I have tried to say something to her," replies 
 Gervase, moodily, " but she gives me no hearing, no 
 occasion." 
 
 " I should have thought you were used well enough 
 to make both for yourself," returns his cousin, with 
 curt sympathy. " You have always been ' master of 
 yourself, though women sigh,' a paraphrase of Pope 
 
 at your service." 
 12
 
 178 -^ HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 Gervase smiled, conscious of his past successes and 
 willing to acknowledge them. 
 
 " But you see she does not sigh ! " he murmurs, with 
 a sense that the admission is not flattering to his own 
 amour-propre. 
 
 " You have lost the power to make her sigh, do you 
 mean?" 
 
 " I make no impression on her at all. I am utterly 
 unable to imagine her feelings, her sentiments, how 
 much she would acknowledge, how much she would 
 ignore." 
 
 " That is a confession of great helplessness ! I 
 should never have believed that you would be baffled 
 by any woman, above all by a woman who once loved 
 you." 
 
 " It is not easy to make a fire out of ashes.'' 
 
 " Not if the ashes are quite cold, certainly ; but 
 if a spark remains in them, the fire soon comes 
 again." 
 
 He is silent : the apparent indifference of a person 
 whom he believed to be living out her life in solitude, 
 occupied only with his memory, annoys and mortifies 
 him. He has never doubted his own power to write 
 his name indelibly on the hearts of women. 
 
 " Perhaps she wishes to marry Brandolin ? " suggests 
 Dorothy Usk. 
 
 *' Pshaw ! " says Lord Gervase. 
 
 ** Why pshaw ? " repeats his cousin, persistently.
 
 MEMORIES AND SUSPICIONS. 179 
 
 " He would not be a man to my taste, and he hates 
 marriage, and he has a set of Hindoos at St. Hubert's 
 Lea, which would require as much cleaning as the 
 Augean stable ; but I dare say she doesn't know any- 
 thing about them, and he may be persuading her that 
 he thinks marriage opens the doors of Paradise : men 
 can so easily pretend that sort of thing ! A great 
 many men have wanted to marry her, I believe, since 
 she came back into the world after her seclusion. 
 George declares that Brandolin is quite serious." 
 
 " Preposterous ! " replies Lord Gervase. 
 
 " Really, I don't see that," replies his judicious 
 cousin. " A great many women have wanted to marry 
 him, though one wonders why. Indeed, I have heard 
 some of them declare that he is wholly irresistible when 
 he chooses." 
 
 " With Hindoos, perhaps," says Gervase. 
 
 " With our own women," says his cousin. " Lady 
 Mary Jardine died of a broken heart because he 
 wouldn't look at her." 
 
 "Pray spare me the roll-call of his victims," says 
 Lord Gervase, irritably : he is passionately jealous of 
 Brandolin. He himself had forgotten Xenia Sabaroff, 
 and forgotten all his obligations to her, when sne had 
 been, as he always had believed, within reach of his 
 hand if he stretched it out ; but viewed as a woman 
 whom other men wooed and another man might win, 
 she has become to him intensely to be desired and
 
 180 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 to be disputed. He has been a spoiled child of fort- 
 une and of the drawing-rooms all his years, and the 
 slightest opposition is intolerable to him. 
 
 " I have no doubt," continues Dorothy Usk, gently, 
 continuing her embroidery of a South Kensington 
 design of lilies and palm-leaves, " that if he were 
 aware you had a prior claim, if he thought or knew 
 that you had ever enjoyed her sympathy, he would 
 immediately withdraw and leave the field : he is a 
 very proud man, with all his carelessness, and would 
 not, I think, care to be second to anybody in the affec- 
 tions of a woman whom he seriously sought." 
 
 "What do you mean?'' asks Gervase, abruptly, 
 pausing in his walk to and fro the boudoir. 
 
 "Only what I say," she answers. "If you wish 
 to eloigner Brandolin, give him some idea of the 
 truth." 
 
 Gervase laughs a little. 
 
 " On my honor," he thinks, with some bitterness, 
 u for sheer uncompromising meanness there is nothing 
 comparable to the suggestions which a woman will 
 make to you ! " 
 
 " I couldn't do that," he says, aloud. " What would 
 he think of me?" 
 
 "My dear Alan," replies Dorothy Usk, impatiently, 
 getting her silks in a tangle, "when a man has be- 
 haved to any woman as you, by your own account, 
 have behaved to Madame Sabaroff, I think it is a
 
 MEMOEIES AND SUSPICIONS. 181 
 
 little late in the day to pretend to much elevation of 
 feeling." 
 
 " You do not understand " 
 
 " I have always found," says his cousin, impatiently 
 searching for shades of silk which she does not see, 
 " that whenever we presume to pronounce an opinion 
 on any man's conduct and think ill of it we are always 
 told that we don't understand anything. When we 
 flatter the man, or compliment him on his conduct, 
 there is no end to the marvellous powers of our pene- 
 tration, the fineness of our instincts, the accuracy of 
 our intuitions." 
 
 Gervase does not hear : his thoughts are elsewhere : 
 he is thinking of Xenia Sabaroff as he saw her first in 
 the Salle des Palmiers in the Winter Palace, a 
 mere girl, a mere child, startled and made nervous by 
 the admiration she excited and the homage she re- 
 received, under the brutality of her husband, the rail- 
 lery of her friends ; but that time is long ago, very 
 long, as the life of women counts, and Xenia Sabaroff 
 is now perfect mistress of her own emotions, if emo- 
 tions she ever feels. Gervase cannot for one moment 
 tell whether the past is tenderly remembered by her, 
 is utterly forgotten, or is only recalled to be touched 
 and dismissed without regret. He is a vain man, but 
 vanity has no power to reassure him here. 
 
 In the warm afternoon of the next day the children 
 are in the school-room, supposed to be preparing their
 
 182 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 lessons for the morrow ; but the German governess, 
 who is alone as guardian of order in the temple of 
 intellect, has fallen asleep, with flies buzzing about her 
 blonde hair, and her blue spectacles pushed up on her 
 forehead, and Dodo has taken advantage of the fact to 
 go and lean out of one of the windows, whilst her 
 sister draws a caricature of the sleeping virgin from 
 Deutschland, and the Babe slips away from his books to 
 a mechanical Punch, which, contraband in the school- 
 room, is far dearer to him than his Gradus and rule of 
 three. 
 
 Dodo, with her hands thrust among her abundant 
 locks, lolls with half her body in the air, and, by 
 twisting her neck almost to dislocation, manages to see 
 round an ivy-grown buttress of the east wall, and to 
 espy people who are getting on their horses at the south 
 doors of the building. 
 
 " They are going out riding and I am shut up here ! " 
 she groans. " Oh, what a while it takes one to grow 
 up!" 
 
 " Who are going to ride ? " asks Lilie, too fascinated 
 by her drawing to leave it. 
 
 "Lots of them," replies Dodo, who speaks four 
 languages, and her own worst of all. " All of 
 them, pretty nearly. Mamma's on Pepper, and Lady 
 "Waverley's got Bopeep, she's always nervous, you 
 know. I can't see very much, 'cause of the ivy. Oh, 
 there's the princess on Satan, nobody else could ride
 
 MEMORIES AND SUSPICIONS. 183 
 
 Satan ; Lord Brandolin's put her up, and now he's 
 riding by her. They're gone now, and papa's stop- 
 ping behind them all to do something to Bopeep's 
 girths." Whereat the dutiful Dodo laughs rudely, as 
 she laughed coming home from church. 
 
 The sound of the horses' hoofs going farther away 
 down the avenue comes through the stillness, as her 
 voice and her laughter cease. 
 
 " What a shame to be shut up here just because one 
 isn't old ! " she groans, as she listens enviously. The 
 sun is pouring liquid gold through the ivy-leaves, the 
 air is hot and fragrant, gardeners are watering the 
 flower-beds below, and the sweet, moist scent comes up 
 to Dodo's nostrils and makes her writhe with longing 
 to get out ; not that she is by any means ardently de- 
 voted to nature, but she loves life, movement, gayety, 
 and she dearly loves showing off her figure on her 
 pony and being flirted with by her father's friends. 
 
 " I am sure Lord Brandolin is in love with her, 
 awfully in love," she says, as she peers into the distance, 
 where the black form of Satan is just visible through 
 far-off oak-boughs. 
 
 " With whom ? " asks Lilie, getting up from her 
 caricature to lean also out over the ivy. 
 
 "Xenia," says Dodo. She is very proud of calling 
 her friend Xenia. "Take care Goggles don't wake, 
 or she'll see what you've been doing." 
 
 The lady from Deutschland was always known to 
 them by this endearing epithet.
 
 184 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 " I don't care," says Lilie, kicking her bronze boots 
 in the air. " Do you think she'll marry Lord Brando- 
 lin?" 
 
 "Who? Goggles?" 
 
 " The idea ! " They laugh deliciously. 
 
 " You say he's in love with Xenia. If they're in love 
 they will marry," says Lilie, pensively. 
 
 "No, they won't: people who are in love never 
 marry," replies Dodo. 
 
 "What do they do, then?" inquires the younger 
 sister. 
 
 " They marry somebody else, and ask the one they 
 like to go and stay with them. It is much better," she 
 adds. " It is what I shall do." 
 
 " Why is it better ? It's a round about way," objects 
 Lilie. " I shouldn't care to marry at all," she adds, 
 " only one can't ever be Mistress of the Robes if one 
 doesn't." 
 
 * Oh, everybody marries, of course ; only some muff 
 it, and don't get all they want by it," replies the cynic 
 Dodo. 
 
 " Et T amour, Mlladi Alexandra?" says the French 
 governess, entering at that moment. " Ou done mettez- 
 vous I 'amour?" 
 
 " Nous ne sommes pas des bourgeoises" returns 
 Dodo, very haughtily. 
 
 The Babe, sitting astride on a chair, trying to mend 
 his mechanical Punch, who screamed and beat his wife
 
 MEMORIES AND SUSPICIONS. 185 
 
 dbsolument comme la nature, as the French governess 
 said, before he was broken, hears the discourse of his 
 sisters and muses on it. He is very fond of Brandolin, 
 and he adores his princess : he would like them to live 
 together, and he would go and see them without his 
 sisters, who tease him, and without Boom, who lords it 
 over him. Into his busy and precocious little brain 
 there enters the resolution to pousser la machine, as 
 his governess would call it. 
 
 The Babe has a vast idea of his own resources in the 
 way of speech and invention, and he has his mother's 
 tendencies to interfere with other people's affairs, and 
 is quite of an opinion that if he had the management 
 of most things he should better them. He has broken 
 his Parisian Punch in his endeavor to make it say more 
 words than it could say, but this slight accident does 
 not affect his own admiration and belief in his own 
 powers, any more than to have brought a great and 
 prosperous empire within measurable distance of civil 
 war affects a statesman's conviction that he is the only 
 person who can rule that empire. The Babe, like Mr. 
 Gladstone, is in his own eyes infallible. Like the 
 astute diplomatist he is, he waits for a good oppor- 
 tunity ; he is always where the ladies are, and his sharp 
 little wits have been preternaturally quickened in 
 that atmosphere of what the French call "Fodeur 
 feminine." 
 
 He has to wait some days for his occasion. The
 
 186 -4 HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 frank and friendly intercourse which existed at first 
 between Brandolin and Madame Sabaroff is altered : 
 they are never alone, and the pleasant discussions on 
 poets and poetry, on philosophers and follies, in the 
 gardens in the forenoon are discontinued, neither could 
 very well say why, but the presence of Gervase chills 
 and oppresses both of them and keeps them apart. She 
 has the burden of memory, he the burden of suspicion ; 
 and suspicion is a thing so hateful and intolerable to 
 the nature of Brandolin that it makes him miserable to 
 feel himself guilty of it. 
 
 But one morning the Babe coaxes her out to go with 
 him to his garden, a floral republic, where a cabbage 
 comes up cheek by jowl with a gloxinia, and plants 
 are plucked up by the roots to see if they are growing 
 aright. The Babe's system of horticulture is to dig 
 intently for ten minutes in all directions, to make him- 
 self very red in the face and then to call Dick, Tom, 
 or Harry, any under-gardener who may be near, and 
 say, " Here, do it will you ? " Nevertheless, he retains 
 the belief that he is the creator and cultivator of this 
 his garden, as M. Grevy believes that he is the chief 
 person in the French Republic ; and he takes Madame 
 Sabaroff to admire it. 
 
 " It would look better if it were a little more in 
 order," she permits herself to observe. 
 
 "Oh, that's their fault," said the Babe, just as 
 M. Gre"vy would say of disorder in the Chambers,
 
 MEMORIES AND SUSPICIONS. 187 
 
 the Babe meaning Dick, Tom, or Harry, as the Presi- 
 dent would mean Clemenceau, Rochefort, or M. de 
 Mun. 
 
 " My dear Babe, how exactly you are like the Head 
 of a Department ! " says Brandolin, who has followed 
 them out of the house and comes up behind them. 
 " According to the Head of a Department, it is never 
 the head that is at fault, always the understrappers. 
 May I inquire since when it has become the fashion to 
 set sunflowers with their heads downward 9 " 
 
 " I wanted to see if the roots would turn after the 
 sun," says the Babe, and regards his explanation as 
 triumphant. 
 
 " And they only die ! How perverse of them ! 
 You would become a second Newton, if your destiny 
 were not already cast, to dazzle the world by a blend- 
 ing of Beau Brummel and Sir Joseph Paxton." 
 
 The Babe looks a little cross ; he does not like to be 
 laughed at before his princess. He has got his oppor- 
 tunity, but it vexes him ; he has an impression that 
 his companions will soon drift into forgetting both 
 him and his garden. Since the approach of Brandolin 
 the latter has said nothing. 
 
 The children's gardens are in a rather wild and dis- 
 tant part of the grounds at Surrenden. It is noon ; 
 most people staying in the house are still in their own 
 rooms ; it is solitary, sunny, still ; a thrush is singing 
 in a jessamine thicket, there is no other sound except
 
 188 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 that of a gardener's broom sweeping on the other side 
 of the laurel hedge. 
 
 The Babe feels that it is now or never for his coup 
 de maitre. 
 
 He plucks a rose, the best one he has, and offers it 
 to Madame Sabaroff, who accepts it gratefully, though 
 it is considerably earwig-eaten, and puts it in her 
 corsage. 
 
 The eyes of Brandolin follow it wistfully. 
 
 The Babe glances at them alternately from under 
 his hair, then his small features assume an expression 
 of cherubic innocence and unconsciousness. The most 
 ruse little rogue in the whole kingdom, he knows how 
 to make himself look like a perfect reproduction of 
 Sir Joshua Reynold's Artlessness or Infancy. He 
 gazes up in Xenia Sabaroffs face with angelic sim- 
 plicity admirably assumed. 
 
 " When you marry him," says the Babe, pointing to 
 Brandolin, with admirably affected naivete, " you will 
 let me hold up your train, won't you ? I always hold 
 up my friends' trains when they marry. I have a 
 page's dress, Louis something or other, and a sword, 
 and a velvet cap with a badge and a feather : I always 
 look very well.'* 
 
 " Oh, what an odious petit-maitre you will be when 
 you are a man, my dear Babe ! " says Xenia Sabaroff. 
 
 She does not take any notice of his opening words, 
 but a flush of color comes over her face and passes as 
 quickly as it came,
 
 MEMORIES AND SUSPICIONS. 189 
 
 " Petit maitre, what is that?" says the Babe. 
 " But you will let me, won't you ? And don't marry 
 him till the autumn, or even the winter, because the 
 velvet makes me so hot when the day is hot, and the 
 dress wouldn't look nice made in thin things." 
 
 "Could I only add my prayers to his," murmurs 
 Brandolin, " and hope that in the autumn " 
 
 Xenia Sabaroff looks at him with a strange gaze : 
 it is penetrating, dreamy, wistful, inquiring. 
 
 "We jest as the child jests," she says, abruptly, and 
 walks onward. 
 
 * I do not jest," says Brandolin. 
 
 The Babe glances at them under his thick eyelashes, 
 and, being a, fine mouche, only innocent in appearance, 
 he runs off after a butterfly. He has not been brought 
 up in a feminine atmosphere of poudre de riz and lait 
 tfiris without learning discretion. 
 

 
 19 () A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 CHAPTER XIH. 
 
 EXPLANATOEY INTERVIEW IN THE LIBBABT. 
 
 " THE Babe is a better courtier than gardener," says 
 Xenia Sabaroff, as she shakes a green aphis out of her 
 rose : her tone is careless, but her voice is not quite 
 under her command, and has a little tremor in it. 
 
 Brandolin looks at her with impassioned eyes: he 
 has grown very pale. 
 
 "It is no jest with me," he says, under his breath. 
 " I would give you my life if you would take it ? " 
 
 The last words have the accent of an interrogation, 
 of an appeal. 
 
 " That is to say a great deal," replies Xenia Saba- 
 roff : she is startled, astonished, troubled ; she was not 
 expecting any such entire avowal. 
 
 " Many men must have said as much to you who 
 have more to recommend them than I. Say some- 
 thing to me : what will you say ? " 
 
 She does not immediately reply j she looks on the 
 ground, and absently traces patterns on the path with 
 the end of her long walking-stick. 
 
 " Do you know," she says, at last, after a silence 
 which seems to him endless, " do you know that there
 
 EXPLANATORY INTERVIEW. 191 
 
 are people who believe that I have been the delaissee 
 of Lord Gervase ? They do not phrase it so roughly, 
 but that is what they say." 
 
 Brandolin's very lips are white, but his voice does 
 not falter for one moment as he answers, " They will 
 not say it in my hearing." 
 
 " And, knowing that they say it, you would still 
 offer me your name ? " 
 
 " I do so." 
 
 "And you would ask me nothing save what I 
 choose to tell you ? " 
 
 The sunny air seems to turn round with him for an 
 instant : his brain grows dizzy ; his heart contracts 
 with a sickening pain ; but in the next moment a great 
 wave of strong and perfect faith in the woman he 
 cares for lifts his soul up on it, as a sea-wave lifts a 
 drowning man to land. 
 
 " You shall tell me nothing save what you choose,'' 
 he says, clearly and very tenderly. " I have perfect 
 faith in you. Had I less than that, I would not ask 
 you to be my wife." 
 
 She looks at him with astonishment and with 
 wondering admiration. 
 
 " Yet you know so little of me ! " she murmurs, in 
 amaze. 
 
 " I love you," says Brandolin ; then he kisses her 
 hand with great reverence. 
 
 The tears which she had thought driven from her 
 eyes forever, rise in them now. 
 
 13
 
 192 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 " You are very noble," she replies, and leaves her 
 hand for an instant within his. 
 
 The Babe, who has been watching from behind a 
 tuft of laurel, can control his impatience no longer, 
 but comes out of his ambush and runs towards them, 
 regardless of how undesired he may be. 
 
 " Dodo says that women never marry anybody they 
 love," he says, breathlessly ; " but that is not true, is 
 it, and you will let me carry your train ? " 
 
 " Hush, my dear," says Xenia Sabaroff, laying her 
 hand on the child's shoulder, while there is a sound in 
 her voice which subdues to silence even the audacious 
 spirit of the Babe. 
 
 " Give me time to think," she says, in a low tone 
 to Brandolin ; and then, with her hand still on the 
 little boy's shoulder, she turns away from him and 
 walks slowly towards the house. 
 
 The child walks silently and shyly beside her, his 
 happy vanity troubled for once by the sense that he has 
 made some mistake, and that there are some few things 
 still in the universe which he does not quite entirely 
 understand. 
 
 " You are not angry ? " he asks her, at last, with a 
 vague terror in his gay and impudent little soul. 
 
 " Angry with you ? " says Xenia Sabaroff. * My 
 dear child, no. I am perhaps angry with myself, 
 myself of many years ago." 
 
 The Babe is silent : he does not venture to ask any
 
 EXPLANA TOR Y INTER VIEW. 193 
 
 more, and he has a humiliating feeling that he is not 
 first in the thoughts of Madame Sabaroff, nay, that, 
 though his rose is in her gown and her hand upon his 
 shoulder, she has almost, very nearly almost, forgotten 
 him. 
 
 Brandolin does not attempt to follow her. Her 
 great charm for him consists in the power she possesses 
 of compelling him to control his impulses. He walks 
 away by himself through the green shadows of the 
 boughs, wishing for no companionship save hers. He 
 is fully aware that he has done a rash, perhaps an 
 utterly unwise, thing in putting his future into the 
 hands of a woman of whom he knows so little, and 
 has, perhaps, the right to suspect so much. Yet he 
 does not repent. 
 
 He does not see her again before dinner. She doea 
 not come into the library at the tea-hour ; there is a 
 large dinner that night ; county people are there, as 
 well as the house-party. He has to take in a stupid 
 woman, wife of the Lord- Lieutenant, who thinks him 
 the most absent-minded and unpleasant person she has 
 ever known, and wonders how he has got his reputa- 
 tion as a wit. He is so seated that he cannot even see 
 Xenia Sabaroff, and he chafes and frets throughout the 
 dinner, from the bisque soup to the caviare biscuit, and 
 thinks what an idiotic thing the habits of society have 
 made of human life. 
 
 When he is fairly at rare intervals goaded into speech, 
 18
 
 194 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 he utters paradoxes, and suggests views so startling 
 that the wife of the Lord-Lieutenant is scandalized, 
 and thinks the lunacy laws are defective if they can- 
 not include and incarcerate him. She feels sure that 
 the rumor about the Hindoo women at St. Hubert's 
 Lea is entirely true. 
 
 After dinner he is free to approach the lady of his 
 thoughts, but he endeavors in vain to tell from her 
 face what answer he will receive, what time and medi- 
 tation may have done or undone for him. She avoids 
 the interrogation of his eyes, and is surrounded by 
 other men as usual. 
 
 The evening seems to him intolerably long and in- 
 tolerably tedious. It is, however, for others very gay. 
 There is an improvised dance, ending in an impromptu 
 cotillion, and following on an act of a comic opera given 
 with admirable spirit by Lady Dawlish, Mrs. Curzon, 
 and some of the younger men. Every one is amused* 
 but the hours seem very slow to him : Gervase scarcely 
 leaves her side at all, and Brandolin, with all his chiv- 
 alrous refusal and unchanging resolution to allow no 
 shadow of doubt to steal over him, feels the odious 
 whispers he has heard and the outspoken words of 
 Litroff recur to his memory and weigh on him like the 
 incubus of a nightmare. With a sensation of dread, 
 he realizes that it is possible, do what he may, that 
 they may haunt him so all his life. A man may be 
 always master of his acts hut scarcely always of his 
 thoughts.
 
 EXPLANATORY INTERVIEW. 195 
 
 "But I will never ask her one syllable," he thinks, 
 " and I will marry her to-morrow if she chooses." 
 
 But will she choose ? 
 
 He is far from sure. He pleases her intelligence : 
 he possesses her friendship ; but whether he has the 
 slightest power to touch her heart he does not know. 
 If he loved her less than he does he would be more 
 confident. 
 
 As the interminable hours wear away, and the noise 
 and absurdities of the cotillion are at their height, she, 
 who never dances anywhere, drops her fan, and he is 
 before the others in restoring it to her. As she takes 
 it, she says, in a low voice, " Be in the small library at 
 eleven to-morrow." 
 
 Soon after she leaves the ball-room altogether, and 
 goes to her bed-chamber. 
 
 Brandolin goes to his before the cotillion is over, 
 but he sleeps very little. He longs for the morrow, 
 and yet he dreads it. " Quand m$me" he murmurs, 
 as from his bed he sees the white dawn over the dark 
 masses of the Surrenden woods. Tell him what she 
 may, he thinks, he will give her his life if she will 
 take it. He is madly in love, no doubt ; but there is 
 something nobler and purer than the madness of love, 
 than the mere violent instincts of passion, in his 
 loyalty to her. Before anything he cherishes the 
 honor of his name and race, and he is willing, blind- 
 fold, to trust her with it.
 
 196 ^ HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 That morning it seems to him as if the hours would 
 never pass, though they are few until the clocks strike 
 eleven. The house is still, almost every one is asleep, 
 for the cotillion, successful as only unpremeditated 
 things ever are, had lasted till the sun was high and 
 the dew on the grass of the garden was dry. 
 
 With a thickly-beating heart, nervous and eager as 
 though he were a boy of sixteen seeking his first love- 
 tryst, he enters the small library far before the hour, 
 and waits for her there, pacing to and fro the floor. 
 The room is full of memories of her : here they have 
 talked on rainy days and have strolled out on to the 
 lawns on fine ones ; there is the chair which she likes 
 best, and there the volume she had taken down yester- 
 day ; could it be only ten days since standing here he 
 had seen her first in the distance with the children ? 
 Only ten days ! It seems to him ten years, ten centuries. 
 
 The morning is very still, a fine soft rain is falling, 
 wet jessamine-flowers tap against the panes of the 
 closed windows, a great apprehension seems to make 
 his very heart stand still. 
 
 As the clock points to the hour she enters the room. 
 
 She is very pale, and wears a morning gown of 
 white plush, which trails behind her in a silver 
 shadow. He kisses her hands passionately, but she 
 draws them away. 
 
 " Wait a little," she says, gently. " Wait till you 
 know whatever there is to know."
 
 EXPLANA TOR Y INI ER VIEW. 1 97 
 
 " I want to know but one thing." 
 
 She smiles a little sadly. 
 
 "Oh, you think so now because you are in love 
 with me. But in time to come, when that is passed, 
 you will not be so easily content. If" she hesitates 
 a moment " if there is to be any community between 
 our lives, you must be quite satisfied as to my past. 
 It is your right to be so satisfied ; and were you not 
 so, some time or other we should both be wi-etched." 
 
 His eyes flash with joy. 
 
 " Then " he begins breathlessly. 
 
 " Oh ! how like a man that is ! " she says, sadly. 
 "To think but of the one thing, of the one present 
 moment, and to be ready to give all the future in 
 pawn for it ! Wait to hear everything. And first of 
 all I must tell you that Lord Gervase also last night 
 asked me to marry him." 
 
 And you ! " 
 
 " I shall not marry Lord Gervase. But I will not 
 disguise from you that once I would have done so 
 gladly, had I been free to do it." 
 
 Brandolin is silent : he changes color. 
 
 "I bade him come here for my answer," she con- 
 tinues. " He will be here in a few minutes. I wish 
 you to remain in the large library, so that you may 
 hear all that I say to him." 
 
 " I cannot do that ; I cannot play the part of 
 eavesdropper."
 
 198 -A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 " You will play that part, or any other that I ask 
 you, if you love me," she says, with a touch of 
 imperiousness. 
 
 " Do you not see," she goes on, with more gentle- 
 ness, " that if our lives are to be passed near each 
 other (I do not say that they are, but you seem to 
 wish it), you must first of all be convinced of the 
 truth of all I tell you ! If one doubt, one suspicion, 
 remain, you will, in time, become unable to banish 
 it. It would grow and grow until you were mastered 
 by it. You believe in what I tell you now ; but how 
 long would you believe after marriage ? " 
 
 " I want no proof : I only want your word. Nay, 
 I do not even want that. I will ask you nothing. 
 I swear that I will never ask you anything." 
 
 " That is very beautiful ; and I am sure that you 
 mean it now. But it could not last. You are a very 
 proud man ; you are gentilhomme de race. It would 
 in time become intolerable to you if you believed that 
 any one living man had any title to point a finger 
 of scorn at you. You have a right to know what 
 my relations were with Lord Gervase : it is necessary 
 for all the peace of our future that you should know 
 everything, know that there is nothing more left for 
 you to know. You can only be convinced of that if 
 you yourself hear what I say to him. Go ; and wait 
 there." 
 
 Brandolin hesitates. To listen unseen is a part
 
 EXPLANATORY INTERVIEW. 199 
 
 which seems very cowardly to him, and yet she is 
 right, no doubt ; all the peace of the future may 
 depend on it. He is ready to pledge himself blindly 
 in the dark in all ways, but he knows that she, in for- 
 bidding him to do so, speaks the word of wisdom, of 
 foresight, and of truth. 
 
 "Go," she repeats. "Men have a thousand ways 
 of proving the truth of whatever they say ; we have 
 none, or next to none. If you refuse me this, the sole 
 poor evidence that I can produce, I will never be to 
 you anything that you now wish. Never ; that I 
 swear to you." 
 
 He hesitates, and looks at her with a long inquiring 
 regard. Then he bows and goes. 
 
 After all, she is within her rights. She has no 
 other means to show him with any proof what this man 
 whose name is so odiously entangled with her own has, 
 or has not, been to her. 
 
 The house is still quite silent, and no one is likely 
 to come into those rooms until much later. Every 
 syllable said in the small library can be heard in any 
 part of the larger one. He stands in the embrasure 
 of one of the windows, the velvet curtains making 
 a screen behind him. He seems to wait for hours ; 
 in reality only five minutes have passed when he 
 hears the door of the great library open, and Gervase 
 passes quickly through the apartment without seeing 
 him, and goes on into the one where she awaits his 
 coming.
 
 200 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 "Are you realiy risen so early?" she says with a 
 sarcastic coldness in her voice. " I remembered after- 
 wards that it was too cruel to name to you any hour 
 before noon." 
 
 " You are unkind," he answers. " To hear what I 
 hope to hear, you may be sure that I would have gone 
 through much greater trials than even rising with the 
 lark, had you commanded it." 
 
 His words are light, but his accent is tender and 
 appealing. 
 
 "What do you hope to hear?" she asks, abruptly. 
 The question embarrasses him and sounds cold. 
 
 " I hope to hear that you pardon me the past and 
 will deign to crown my future." 
 
 " I pardon you the past, certainly. With neither 
 your present nor your future have I anything to do.'' 
 
 " You say that very cruelly, so cruelly that it 
 makes your forgiveness more unkind than your hatred 
 would be." 
 
 " I intend no unkindness. I merely wish to express 
 indifference. Perhaps I am even mistaken in saying 
 that I entirely forgive you. When I remember that 
 you once possessed any influence over me, I scarcely do 
 forgive you, for I am forced to despise myself." 
 
 " Those are very hard words ! Perhaps in the 
 past I was unworthy of having known and loved you ; 
 but if you will believe in my regret, and allow me 
 occasion to atone, you shall never repent of your in- 
 dulgence. Pray hear me out, Xenia "
 
 EXPLANATORY INTEEVIEW. 201 
 
 " You cannot call me by that name. It is for my 
 friends : you are not numbered among them." 
 
 " I would be much more than your friend. If you 
 will be my wife." 
 
 " It is too late," she replies, and her voice is as cold 
 as ice. 
 
 " Why too late ? We have all the best of our lives 
 unspent before us." 
 
 " When I say too late, I mean that if you had said 
 as much to me after the death of Prince Sabaroff I 
 should have accepted your hand, and I should have 
 spent the whole remainder of my existence in repent- 
 ing that I had done so ; for I should soon have fath- 
 omed the shallowness of your character, the artificiality 
 and poverty of your sentiments, the falseness of your 
 mind, and I should speedily have hated both myself 
 and you." 
 
 " You are not merciful, madame ! " 
 
 He is bitterly humbled and passionately incensed. 
 
 " Were you merciful ? " she asks him, with the 
 sound of a great anger, carefully controlled, vibrating 
 in her voice. " I was a child, taken out of a country 
 convent, and married as ignorantly as a bird is trapped. 
 I had rank, and I was burdened by it. I was in a 
 great world, a great court, and I was terrified by them. 
 The man I had been given to was a gambler, a drunk- 
 ard, and a brute. He treated me in private as he had 
 treated the women captured in Turkestan or sold as
 
 202 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 slaves in Persia. You knew that : you were his in- 
 timate associate. You used your opportunities to 
 interest me and win your way into my confidence. I 
 had no one in the whole world that I could trust. 
 I did trust you." 
 
 She pauses a moment. 
 
 Gervase does not dare reply. 
 
 " You were so gentle, so considerate, so full of sym- 
 pathy ; I thought you a very angel. A girl of sixteen 
 or seventeen sees the face of St. John in the first Faust 
 who finds his way into her shut soul ! You made me 
 care for you ; I do not deny it. But why did I care ? 
 Because I saw in you the image of a thousand things 
 you were not. Because I imagined that my own fanci- 
 ful ideal existed in you, and you had the ability to 
 foster the illusion." 
 
 " But why recall all this ! " he says, entreatingly. 
 " Perhaps I was unworthy of your innocent attach- 
 ment, of your exalted imaginations ; I dare not say 
 that I was not ; but now that I meet you again, now 
 that I care for you ten thousand ten million times 
 more " 
 
 " What is that to me ? " she says, with almost inso- 
 lent coldness. " It was not I who loved you, but a 
 child who knew no better, and whose heart was so 
 bleeding from the tortures of another man that the 
 first hand which soothed it could take it as one takes 
 a wounded bird ! But when my eyes opened to your
 
 EXPLANA TOR Y IN TEE VIEW. 203 
 
 drift and your desires, when I saw that you were no 
 better than other men, that you tried to tempt me to 
 the lowest forms of intrigue under cover of your 
 friendship with my husband, then, child though I 
 was, I saw you as you were, and I hid myself from 
 you ! You thought that Sabaroff exiled me from his 
 jealousy of you to the northern estates ; but it was 
 not so. I entreated him to let me leave Petersburg, 
 and he had grown tired of torturing me and let me 
 go." 
 
 " You blame me for being merely human. I loved 
 you not better but not worse than men do love. 
 
 " I blame you for having been insincere, treacherous, 
 dishonest. You approached me under cover of the 
 most delicate and forbearing sympathy and reverence, 
 and you only wore those masks to cover the vulgar de- 
 signs of a most commonplace Lothario. Of course, 
 now I know that one must not play with fire unless 
 one is willing to be burned. I did not know it then. 
 I was a stupid, unhappy, trembling child, full of poetic 
 fancies, and alone in a dissolute crowd. When you 
 could not make me what you wished to make me, I 
 seemed very tame and useless to you. You turned to 
 more facile women, no doubt, and you left Russia." 
 
 " I left Russia under orders ; and I wrote to you. 
 I wrote to you repeatedly. You never answered." 
 
 " No ; I had no wish to answer you. I had seen 
 you as you were, and the veil had fallen from my
 
 204 ^ HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 eyes. I burnt your letters as they came to me. But 
 after the death of Prince Sabaroff you were careful 
 to write no more." 
 
 Gervase colors hotly ; there is an accent in the 
 words which makes them strike him like whips. 
 
 "If you had written to me after that," she con- 
 tinues, " perhaps I should have answered you : perhaps 
 not ? I cannot tell. When you knew that I was set 
 free you were silent; you stayed away, I know not 
 where. I never saw you again ; I never heard from 
 you again. Now I thank you for your neglect and 
 oblivion, but at the time I confess that it made me 
 suffer. I was very young still, and romantic. For a 
 while I expected every month which melted the snow 
 would bring you back. So much I admit, though it 
 will flatter you." 
 
 It does not flatter him as she says it ; rather it 
 wounds him. He has a hateful sense of his own 
 impotency to stir her one hand's breadth, to breathe 
 one spark of warmth into those ashes gone cold for- 
 ever. 
 
 " I do not think," she continues, " that I ever loved 
 yon in the sense that women can love ; but you had 
 the power to make me suffer, to feel your oblivion, 
 to remember you when you had forgotten me. When I 
 went into the world again I heard of your successes 
 with others, and gradually I came to see you in your 
 true light, and, almost, the drunken brutality of Prince
 
 EXPLANATORY INTERVIEW. 205 
 
 Sabaroff seemed to me a manlier thing than your half- 
 hearted and shallow erotics had been. Now, when we 
 meet again by pure hazard in the same country house, 
 you do me the honor to offer me your hand after eight 
 years. I can only say, as I have said before, that it is 
 seven years too late ! " 
 
 "Too late, only because Lord Brandolin now is 
 everything to you." 
 
 " Lord Brandolin may possibly be something to me 
 in the future. But, if Lord Brandolin did not exist, if 
 no other living man existed, be sure that it would make 
 no difference to me or to you." 
 
 " Is that your last word ? " 
 
 Yes." 
 
 Pale and agitated as no other woman had ever seen 
 him, Gervase bows low and leaves her abruptly, push- 
 ing open one of the glass doors on to the garden and 
 closing it with a clash behind him. 
 
 Xenia Sabaroff goes towards the large library, her 
 silvery train catching the lights and shadows as she 
 goes. 
 
 Brandolin meets her with his hands outstretched. 
 
 " You are content, then ? " she asks. 
 
 " I am more than content, if I may be allowed to 
 atone to you for all that you have suffered." 
 
 His own eyes are dim as he speaks. 
 
 "But you know that the world will always say that 
 he was my lover?"
 
 206 A HOUSE-PARTY. 
 
 " I do not think that the world will say it of my 
 wife; but, if they do, I, at least, shall not be troubled." 
 
 "You have a great nature," she says, with deep 
 emotion. 
 
 Brandolin smiles. " Oh, I cannot claim so much as 
 
 that ; but I have a great love." 
 
 #***#**#* 
 
 " I'm awfully glad that prig's got spun," says George 
 Usk, as Gervase receives a telegram from the Foreign 
 Office which requires his departure from Surrenden at 
 four o'clock that afternoon. 
 
 " Spun ! What imagination ! " says his wife, very 
 angrily. " Who should have spun him, pray will you 
 tell me?" 
 
 " We shall never hear it in so many words," says 
 Usk, with a grim complacency, " but I'll swear, if I 
 die for it, that he's asked your Russian friend to 
 marry him and that she's said she won't. Very wise 
 of her, too. Especially if, as you imply, they carried 
 on together years ago: he'd be eternally throwing it 
 in her teeth : he's what the Yanks call a tarnation 
 mean cuss.' " 
 
 " I never implied anything of the sort," answers 
 the lady of Surrenden, with great decorum and dig- 
 nity. "I never suppose that all my friends are all 
 they ought to be, whatever yours may leave to be 
 desired. If he were attached long ago to Madame 
 Sabaroff, it is neither your affair nor mine. It may
 
 EXPLANATORY INTERVIEW. 20 1 
 
 possibly concern Lord Brandolin, if he have the 
 intentions which you attribute to him." 
 
 " Brandolin can take care of himself," says Usk, 
 carelessly. "He knows the time of day as well as 
 anybody, and I don't know why you should be rough 
 on it, my lady : it will be positively refreshing if any- 
 body marries after one of your house-parties; they 
 generally only get divorced after them." 
 
 " The Waverleys are very good friends still, I 
 believe," says Dorothy Usk, coldly. 
 
 The reply seems irrelevant, but to the ear of George 
 Usk it carries considerable relevancy. 
 
 He laughs a little nervously. " Oh, yes : so are we, 
 aren't we ? " 
 
 " Certainly," says the mistress of Surrenden. 
 **** * * * * * 
 
 At the first Drawing-room this year, the admired of 
 all eyes, and the centre of all comment, is the Lady 
 Brandolin. 
 
 14
 
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