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L OU, se ^^ Jcc^ /\Cl>7\e 
 
 A HOUSE PARTY 
 
 A NOVEL 
 
 BY 
 
 OU IDA^ .,^.u' 
 
 IN ONE VOLUME, 
 
 LONDON 
 HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS 
 
 13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET 
 1887 
 W// Rights Reserved 
 
A HOUSE PARTY. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 It Is an August morning. It Is an old 
 Enorlish Manor-house. There Is a break- 
 fast-room hung with old gilded leather of 
 the time of the Stuarts ; It has oak fur- 
 niture of the same period ; It has leaded 
 lattices, with painted glass In some of then- 
 frames, and the motto of the house In old 
 French ''Jay 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 
 
 884 
 
2 A House Party. 
 
 laid out by ]\Ionsieur Beaumont when he 
 planned the gardens of Hampton Court. 
 There are clipped yew tree walks and 
 arbours and fantastic forms ; there are 
 s<"one terraces and steps like those of 
 H addon, and there are peacocks which 
 pace and perch upon them ; there are beds 
 full of all the flowers which blossomed in 
 the Eno^land of the Stuarts, and birds 
 dart and butterflies pass above them ; 
 there are huge old trees, cedars, lime, 
 hornbeam : bevond the Q^ardens there are 
 the woods and Qrrassv lawns of the home 
 park. 
 
 The place is called Surrenden Court, 
 and is one of the houses of George, 
 Earl of Usk ; his favourite house in what 
 pastoral people call autumn, and what he 
 calls the shootinor season. 
 
 Lord Usk is a well-made man of fifty, 
 Vv'ith a good-looking face, a little spoilt 
 by a permanent expression of irritability 
 
A House Party, 3 
 
 and impatience, which is due to the state 
 of his Hver ; his eyes are good-tempered, 
 his mouth querulous ; nature meant him 
 for a verv aimable man. but the chnner- 
 table has interfered with, and in a measure 
 upset, the good intentions of nature : it 
 very often does. Dorothy, his wife, who is 
 by birth a F'itz-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 intelligent 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 necessary. 
 
 She and Lord Usk, then Lord Surrenden, 
 were ereatlv in love v-hen thev married ; 
 sixteen vears have c^one bv since then, and 
 it now seems very odd to each of them 
 that thev should ever have been so. 
 
4 A House Party, 
 
 They arc 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 they quarrel considerably, but 
 then they are so seldom alone. They 
 both consider this disputatiousness the 
 inevitable result of their respective rela- 
 tions. They have three sons, very pretty 
 boys and great pickles ; and two young 
 and handsome daughters. The eldest son. 
 Lord Surrenden, rejoices in the names of 
 Victor Albert Augustus George, and is 
 generally known as Boom. 
 
 They are now at breakfast in the gar- 
 den-chamber ; the china is old Chelsea, 
 the silver is Queen Anne's, the roses are 
 old-fashioned Jacquimines and real cabbage 
 roses. There is a pleasant scent from 
 flowers, coffee, cigarettes and newly-mown 
 grass. There is a litter of niany papers 
 on the floor. 
 
A Ho2Lse Party. 5 
 
 There Is yet a fortnight before the 
 shooting begins ; Lord Usk feels that 
 those fifteen days will be Intolerable. He 
 repents a fit of fright and economy in 
 which he has sold his Q-reat Scotch moors 
 and deer forest to an American capitalist ; 
 not having his own lands in Scotland 
 any longer, pride has kept him from 
 accepting 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 American who has bought 
 Achnalorrle. Achnalorrle havings o^one Irre- 
 vocably out of his hands, represents to 
 him for the time being the one absolutely 
 
6 A House Party. 
 
 to be desired spot upon earth. Good 
 Heavens I he thinks, how can he have 
 been such a fool as to sell it I 
 
 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 litde. he could not very 
 well have said how ; and now he never 
 hardly opens a book, and he has drifted 
 into the odd English habit of only count- 
 ing 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 notepaper. 
 
 "Always the same thing!" he says, as 
 he glances over it. "Always the very 
 worst lot you could get together, and there 
 
A Ho2ise Party. 7 
 
 Isn't one of the husbands Invited or one 
 of the wives !"" 
 
 "Of course there Isn't," savs Ladv Usk, 
 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. 
 
 '* I do think," he continues, " that no- 
 body on earth ever had such absolutely 
 Indecent house parties as yours I'' 
 
 " You alwavs sav these absurd thlnQ^s." 
 
 '' I don't think they're absurd. Look at 
 vour list : evervbodv asked that he mav 
 meet somebody whom he shouldn't meet !" 
 
 "What nonsense I As If they didn't 
 all meet everywhere every day, and as If 
 it mattered 1" 
 
 " It does matter." 
 
 He has not been a moral man himself» 
 
8 A House Pai-ty. 
 
 but at fifty he likes to fairc la police 
 pour Ics aiitrcs. When \vc arc compelled 
 
 to relinquish cakes and ale ourselves, we 
 
 begin honestly to believe them indigestible 
 
 for everybody ; 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 
 Hke it." 
 
 "I know they like it, but I don't choose 
 you should give 'em opportunity for. it." 
 
 " Oh, nonsense." 
 
 " Xot nonsense at all. This house is 
 a kind of Agapemone, a sort of Orleans 
 Club." 
 
 "You oueht not to be bored in it then." 
 
 ** One is always bored at ones own 
 
A House Party. 9 
 
 place. I tell you. I don't like your people. 
 You ask everybody who wants to meet 
 somebody else ; and it's never respectable. 
 It's a joke at the clubs. Jack's always 
 saving to his Jill, 'We'll get Lady Usk 
 to ask us together/ and they do. I say 
 it's indecent.'' 
 
 ''But. mv dear, if Jack sulks without 
 his Jill, and if Jill's In bad form without 
 her Jack, one must ask them together. I 
 want people to like me and to enjoy 
 themselves." 
 
 " Enjoy themselves ! That means flirt- 
 ing till all's blue with somebody you'd 
 hate if you married her." 
 
 "What does that matter so long as 
 thev're amused ?" 
 
 " What an immoral woman you are, 
 Dollv ! To hear vou " 
 
 '' I onlv mean that I don't think it 
 matters ; vou know it doesn't matter ; 
 •everybody's always doing it." 
 
lo ^1 House Party. 
 
 "If you'd only ask some of the women's 
 husbands, some of the men's wives " 
 
 *' I couldn't do that, dear. I want 
 people to like my house !" 
 
 "Just as I say — you're so immoral." 
 
 "No, I'm not. Xobody ever pays a 
 bill for me, except you." 
 
 " Enviable distinction I Pay ! I think 
 I do pay I 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 ouQ^ht to buv 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 your grumbling about 
 my Ijills to Worth and T^lise and X'irot. 
 Boom read me a passage out ot his 
 
A House Party. 1 1 
 
 Ovid last Easter, In \\hlch It describes 
 the quantities 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 toilettes, 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 nothinor new, thoui^h vou talk as if it 
 were a crim.e and we'd invented it I" 
 
 Usk laughs a lltde crosslv as she 
 comes to the end of her breathless sen- 
 tences. '' Naso Magister crai," he remarks, 
 "mio-ht certainlv be inscribed over the 
 chamber doors of all your friends." 
 
 " I know you mean something odious. 
 ]\Iy friends are all charming people." 
 
 '' I'll tell you what I do mean — that I 
 don't like the house made a joke of m 
 London; I'll shut it up and go abroad 
 if the thincT j^oes on. If a scandal's 
 
 o o 
 
12 A House Party. 
 
 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 lio^ht-o'-loves under the 
 Porticoes." 
 
 '' I really don't know what I've done 
 that I should be called an honest woman I 
 One would think you were speaking to 
 the housemaids ! I wish vou'd q^o and 
 stay in somebody else's house, you always 
 spoil things here.'' 
 
 " \'ery sorry I can't oblige you. but I 
 like my own shooting. Three days here, 
 three days there, three days t'other place, 
 and expected to leave the game behind 
 vou and to sav, 'thanks,' if vour host 
 ^ives you a few brace to take away with 
 
A House Party. 13; 
 
 you — not for me if I know it, while there's 
 a bird in the covers at my own places." 
 '' I thought vou w^ere always bored at 
 home ?" 
 
 " Not when I'm shooting. I don't mind 
 having the house full either, only I want 
 vou 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 LavvTence, here's Dick Wootton and 
 Mrs. Faversham, here's the Duke and 
 Lady Dolgelly, here's old Beaumanoir and 
 Olive Dawlish. I say it's absolutely in- 
 decent, 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 ad- 
 vertisement about matches which will only 
 
14 A House Party. 
 
 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 
 Qfet anvthinor out of either." 
 
 '' Ovid was born too early ; he never 
 knew this admirable illustration !" 
 
 ''There's onlv one thin^r worse than 
 
 y o 
 
 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 T 
 
 "Of course nothing happened. Nobody 
 ever shows anything. But it looks so 
 stupid in luc, one is always expected to 
 know " 
 
 ** What an increase to the responsi- 
 
A House Party. 15 
 
 l)llitles of a hostess I She must know 
 all the Ins and outs of her acquaintances' 
 unlawful affections as a Prussian officer 
 knows the French bye-roads I How simple 
 an affair it used to be when the X'ictorian 
 reign was young, and Lord and Lady 
 So and So and ]\Ir. and ]\Irs. Xobodv 
 all came to stay for a week in twos and 
 twos as inevitably as we buy fancy 
 pigeons in pairs !" 
 
 '' You pretend to regret those days, 
 but you know you'd be horribly bored 
 if vou had alwavs to 0^0 out with me." 
 
 '' Politeness would require me to denv. 
 but truthfulness would compel me to 
 assent." 
 
 " Of course it would. You don't want 
 anybody with you who has heard all 
 your best stories a thousand times, and 
 knows what your doctor has told you 
 not to eat ; I don't want anybody who 
 has seen how I look when Lm ill, and 
 
1 6 A House Party, 
 
 knows where my false hair Is put on. 
 It's 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 feel- 
 ings towards her ; it would chill most 
 people's. I wonder if they made them 
 well in those days, and what they cost." 
 
 Lord Usk rises and laughs as he 
 lights a cigar. 
 
 '' I think you might have invited some 
 of the ladies' husbands." 
 
 " Oh, dear, no. Why ? They're all 
 staying somewhere else." 
 
 *'And your friends arc never jealous, 
 I suppose ; at least, never about their 
 own husbands ?" 
 
 '*An agreeable woman Is never jealous 
 of anybody, She hasn't time to be. It 
 Is onlv the women who can't amuse 
 themselves who make that sort of fuss." 
 
 *' Arc you an agreeable woman, my dear ?"' 
 
A House Party, 1 7 
 
 " I have always been told so by every- 
 body except yourself." 
 
 " Well, I won't liave any scandal in 
 the house. ?^IInd that."' 
 
 " You'd better put that up on a placard 
 as you have put : ' Xo fees allowed to 
 the servants,' up in the hall. " 
 
 " I'm sure I would with pleasure if I 
 thought anybody would attend to it. I 
 don't like your set. Dolly. That's the 
 truth. I wish you'd drop nine-tenths of "em." 
 
 '' ]\Iy dear George, I wish you would 
 mind your own business, to use a very 
 vulgar expression. Do I ever say any- 
 thing when you talk nonsense in the 
 Lords, and when you give your political 
 pic-nics, and shout yourself hoarse to the 
 farmers, who go away and vote against 
 vour man ? Do I ever sav anvthinof 
 when you shoot pheasants which cost | 
 you a sovereign a head for their corn, | 
 and stalk stags which cost you eighty 
 
iS A House Parly. 
 
 pounds each for their keep, and lose races 
 with horses that cost you ten thousand 
 a vear for their breedino: and tralnlncr ? 
 Do 1 ever say anvthincr when vou think 
 that people who are hungering for the 
 whole of your land, will be either grate- 
 ful or delic^hted because vou take ten 
 per cent, off their rents ? You know I 
 don't. I think vou ouQ^ht to be allowed 
 to ruin yourself and accelerate the re- 
 volution 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 Usk has gone Into the garden 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 
 
A Ho7ise Party. 19 
 
 the room a moment longer he will swear 
 — that allusion to the Scotch stags is too 
 much for humanity (with a liver) to en- 
 dure. 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 amongst the birds, and 
 he had never cared as much as some 
 men for deer-stalking, but still, as Achna- 
 lorrie is irrevocably gone, the thirty mile 
 drive over the bleak hills, and the ugly 
 house 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 un- 
 speakably lovely to him, and the sole things 
 worth livincT for : and then his wife has 
 the heartlessness to twit him with the cost 
 of each stao:. 
 
20 A House Party. 
 
 *' 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 clown between two hi^h vew 
 walls with his hands in his pockets, and 
 feels injured and aggrieved. 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 life of continual change, and vet 
 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 sup- 
 poses 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 
 
A House Party, 2 1 
 
 horses, no Ground Game Bill to corrupt 
 your farmers, no Leaseholders' Bills hang- 
 ing over your London houses, no corn 
 imported from Arkansas and California, 
 no Joe Chamberlain. When poor Boom's 
 turn comes how will things be ? Joe 
 Chamberlain President, perhaps, and Sur- 
 renden cut up into allotment-grounds. 
 
 He possesses two other very big places 
 in adjacent counties, Orme Castle and 
 Denton Abbey, but they 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, cosy 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 
 
22 A House Party. 
 
 the nearest railway station, four miles off, 
 to meet some of his cominc: quests 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. Whv can't Dulcia 
 Waverley come before the twentieth .^ 
 Lady W^averley 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 sympathised with 
 and appreciated. Dulcia Waverley always 
 tells him that he might have been a 
 greater man than Lord Salisbury if he 
 had chosen ; as he always thinks so him- 
 self, the echo of his thoughts is agreeable. 
 
A House Party. 23 
 
 He sits down in one of the clipped 
 vew tree arbours to lio-ht a new ciear 
 and smoke it peaceably. A peacock goes 
 past him drawing its beautiful train over 
 the smooth shaven grass. A mavis is 
 singing on a rose bough. The babble of 
 a stream hidden under adjacent trees is 
 pleasant on the morning silence. He 
 doesn't notice any of it ; he thinks it 
 odiously hot. and what fools they vrere 
 who clipped a 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 send it further from the 
 house 1 He's got no money to do any- 
 thing, or he Vv'ould have it done to- 
 morrow. 
 
 A peacock begins to scream. The noise 
 of a peacock cannot be said to be melo- 
 dious or soothinof at anv time. 
 
 " Whv don't vou wrino- that bird's 
 neck ?"' he says savagely to a gardener's 
 
24 A House Party, 
 
 boy who Is gathering up fallen rose 
 leaves. 
 
 The boy gapes and touches his hair ; 
 his hat beino: already on the Q^round in 
 sign of respect. The peacocks have been 
 at Surrenden ever since Warren Hastings 
 sent the first pair as a present to the 
 Ladv Usk of that Q^eneratlon, and thev 
 are regarded with a superstitious admira- 
 tion by all the good Hampshire people 
 who walk in the gardens of Surrenden 
 or visit them on the public day. The 
 Surrenden peacocks are as sacred to the 
 neighbourhood 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 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 prol^lcm suggests the com- 
 ing elections to his mind ; the coming 
 
A House Party. 25 
 
 elections are a disagreeable subject for 
 meditation : why wasn't he born in his 
 grandfather's time, v.dien 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 Q-ood men the country 
 got in those days," he thinks, "Fox and 
 Hervey and W'alpole and Burke, and all 
 the rest of em ; fine orators, clever minis- 
 ters, members that did the nation honour. 
 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. Xow, even when Boom's 
 old enough to put up himself, I daresay 
 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 
 
26 A H021SC Party. 
 
 the IMillenium's comlncr in with them and 
 leave Boom nowhere !" 
 
 The prospect was so shocking that he 
 throws his cigar end at the peacocks and 
 gets up out of the evergreen periwig. 
 
 As he does so he comes, to his absolute 
 amazement, face to face with his friend 
 Lord Brandolln. 
 
 Lord Brandolln Is supposed by all the 
 workl, or at 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 Bran- 
 dolln In a verv sweet voice, whollv unHke 
 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 friend- 
 shl[j." 
 
 The master of Surrendcn cannot find 
 
A House Party, 27 
 
 words of welcome warm enouQ-h to satisfy 
 himself. He is honestly delio^hted. Fail- 
 inpf Dulcia Waverlev, nobody could haye 
 been so ao^reeable to him as Brandolin. 
 For once a proyerb is justified, '' a self- 
 invited Q^uest is thrice welcome." He is 
 for drao^Q-inof his visitor in at once to 
 breakfast but Brandolin resists. He has 
 breakfasted on board his yacht ; he could 
 not eat ao^ain before luncheon ; he likes 
 the open air, he wishes to sit in the 
 periwig 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 Q^able to cellar." 
 
 "It will be by night," says the master 
 of Surrenden with disgust, " and not a 
 decent soul amongst 'em all." 
 
 " That is very sad for you," says 
 Brandolin, with a twinkle in his hand- 
 
2 8 A House Party, 
 
 some eyes. He is not a handsome 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 
 baron V is one of the oldest in E norland, 
 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 lauQ^hs. " Well, vou know, I 
 thing one's own house should be proper." 
 
 " Xo doubt," says Lord Brandolin, still 
 more gravely. " To do one's morality 
 vicariously is always so agreeable. Is 
 Lady Waverley not here .^ She would 
 save a hundred vSodoms with a dozen 
 Gomorrahs thrown in gratis." 
 
A House Party. 29 
 
 " I thought you were in India," says his 
 host, who does not care to pursue the 
 subject of Lady Waverley's saintly quaH- 
 fications 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 cotillon. 
 How's Boom ?'' 
 
 '' Very well ; gone to his cousins in 
 Suffolk. Sure you won't have something 
 to eat ? They can bring it here in a 
 minute if you like out-of-doors best." 
 
 *' 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 Eno;land. After the o-reat 
 dust plains and the sweltering humid heats 
 of India, all this coolness and greenness 
 are like Paradise." 
 
 " It's awfully hot !" 
 
 Brandolin lauQ^hs lanQ:uIdlv. 
 
30 A Ho2tsc Party, 
 
 " Hot ! you ungrateful, untravelled, 
 country squire ! I should like to fasten 
 vou to a life buov in the middle of the 
 Red Sea. Why do Englishmen perspire 
 in every pore the moment the thermo- 
 meter's above zero in their own land, 
 and yet stand the tropics better than 
 any other European ?" 
 
 " You know I've sold Achnalorrie ?" 
 says his host, ap7'opos dc ricn, but to 
 him Achnalorrie seems apropos of every- 
 thing 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 unemployed at an enormous cost, 
 only that for a few weeks in the summer 
 we may do to death some of the most 
 innocent and crraceful of God's creatures." 
 
A House Party, 31 
 
 " 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 utterlv 
 
 indefensible — our enormous Hio-hland deer 
 
 o 
 
 slauQ^hter or our imbecile butcherv of 
 birds. Thev ou2:ht to have recorded the 
 introduction of battue shootinof into the 
 British Isles by the Great and Good on 
 the Albert memorial." 
 
 " One must shoot somethlnQ^." 
 
 *' I never saw why. But ' something' 
 honestly found by a setter in stubble, 
 and three thousand head of game be- 
 tween five Q^uns m a mxornino; are verv 
 different things. What did they give you 
 for Achnalorrle ?" 
 
 Usk discourses of Achnalorrle v.'ith 
 breathless eloquence as of a lover eulo- 
 Q;isinQ: the charms of a mistress for ever 
 lost to him. 
 
 Brandolin listens with admirable patience, 
 
32 A House Party. 
 
 and affects to agree that the vision of 
 the American crawHng on his stomach 
 over soakino^ heather in a thick foe for 
 eight hours after a ''stag 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 vet, do vou know," he savs In 
 conclusion, " I am such a deQ^enerate 
 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 
 knio^hts cominor throuo;h the careen shadows 
 towards one, than I would be the buver 
 of Achnalorrie, even in the third week 
 of August." 
 
 " You say so, but you don't mean It," 
 savs the seller of Achnalorrie. 
 
 " I never say what I don't mean," 
 says Brandolin. " And 1 never care about 
 Scotland.'' 
 
A House Painty. -i^Z 
 
 The other smokes dejectedly, and re- 
 fuses to be comforted. 
 
 '* Lady Waverley isn't here ?" asks Bran- 
 doHn, with a certain sig^nificance. Lady 
 Waverley alone would have the power 
 of making the torturing vision of the 
 American amongst the heather fade Into 
 the background of her host's reflections. 
 
 D 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 •" Dolly Is nasty about Achnalorrle," says 
 Lord Usk. as they at last rise and 
 approach the house. 
 
 " Xot logical If she objects to moors on 
 political principles. But ladles 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 Dorothv Usk invites Ladv Wa\erley 
 season after season.) "You are a great 
 grumbler, George. I know grumbling is 
 a I3riton's [jrlvilege, provided for and 
 secured to him in [Magna Charta, but 
 
A House Party. 35 
 
 still, too great abuse of the privilege spoils 
 life." 
 
 '' Nobody was ever so bothered as I am." 
 Lord Usk regards himself invariably with 
 compassion as an ill-used man. '' You 
 always take everything lightly ; 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 lon^: as I needn't shut 
 up or let the old place, and can keep my 
 boat afloat, I don't much care about any- 
 thinof more. I've enouQ^h for myself." 
 
 O CD > 
 
 '' Ah, that's just It ; but when one has 
 no end of family expenses and four great 
 houses to keep up, and the counties look- 
 Inof to one for evervthln^f, and the farmers, 
 poor devils, ruined themselves, it's another 
 matter. I assure you If I hadn't made 
 that sacrifice of Achnalorrle " 
 
 Lady Usk coming out of the garden- 
 room down the steps of one of the low 
 
o 
 
 6 A House Party. 
 
 windows spares Brandolin the continuation 
 of the lament. She looks pretty. ^lind- 
 ful 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 Ladles Alexandra and Hermxoine, 
 known as Dodo and Lllie. She welcomes 
 Brandolin with mixed feelino-s, thoueh with 
 unmixed suavltv. She is o-lad to see him 
 
 ^ o 
 
 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 are so 
 nicely arranged and paired ; and as she Is 
 aware that he Is not a person to be recon- 
 ciled to such Isolation, he will dispossess 
 somebody else and cause probably those 
 very dissensions and complications from 
 which it is always her effort to keep her 
 
A House Party. 2il 
 
 house parties free. However, there he Is, 
 and he Is accustomed to be welcomed and 
 made much of wherever he Q^oes. She can 
 do no less. 
 
 Brandolln makes himself charmlne in re- 
 turn, and turns pretty compliments to her 
 and the children, which he can do honestly, 
 for he has always liked her, and the two 
 vouno- orirls are as aQ^reeable objects of 
 contemplation as youth, good looks, fair 
 skins, pretty frocks, open air, much exer- 
 cise, and an indescribable air of "breedlnof" 
 can make them. An English patrician 
 child Is one of the prettiest and most whole- 
 some things on the face of the earth. 
 
 He presently goes to play lawn tennis 
 with them and their vounQ-est brother Cecil, 
 called the Babe ; and Ladv Usk, under her 
 rose-lined umbrella, sits as umpire, while 
 her lord saunters off disconsolatelv to an 
 Interview with his steward. In these times 
 those Interviews are of an unbroken melan- 
 
38 A House Party. 
 
 choly, 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 thev will all o^o to the lands 
 they've bouQ^ht in America, if thev're in 
 luck, and if thev 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 ^Ir. Lanyon, the land 
 steward, v^ho began life as an oppidan at 
 Eton and captain of an Eight, but has 
 been Mad to take refuo^e from the storm 
 on 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 fmds 
 things at all In order when he comes Into 
 possession it will be wholly due to John 
 Lanyon. 
 
A House Party. 39 
 
 In one of the pauses of their game the 
 tennis players hear the brake and the 
 omnibus returning. Xone 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 thev each 
 have their man. " I hardly know,'' she 
 answers, vaguely. "You don't like many 
 people, if I remember " 
 
 *'A11 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 
 Dowao-er Duchess of Derrv, a verv un- 
 pleasant person of strong principles, called 
 by the profane " Sophia, by the grace of 
 God," because she ruled Ireland in a vice- 
 royalty of short duration and long enduring 
 
40 A House Party. 
 
 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 mothers drawing-rooms. 
 
 " I plead guilty to having offended Her 
 Grace Sophia," says Brandolin, " but I 
 conclude that Ladv Usk's Q^uests are not 
 all like that most admirable ladv."' 
 
 The Babe and his sisters lauQrh with 
 much irreverent enjoyment ; Her Grace is 
 not more appreciated by her grandchildren 
 than she was bv Ireland. 
 
 "If I had known vou were Qroino' 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 aucrust mother's name. " I am so 
 sorry ; but there is nobody I think wlio 
 v.ill be very sympathetic to you. Besides, 
 you know them all already." 
 
 " And is that fatal to sympatliy ? What 
 a cruel suggestion, dear Lady L\sk !" 
 
A House Party. 41 
 
 ''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 ?vladame 
 Sabaroff/' says Dodo, a very cvcillc 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 
 riofht." 
 
 " She gave me two Ukraine ponies and 
 a real drochsky," says the Babe. 
 
 "And Boom a Circassian mare, all white, 
 and each of us a set of Siberian tur- 
 quoises," says Lillie. 
 
 "Her virtues must be as many as her 
 charms," savs Brandolin. 
 
42 A House Party. 
 
 " She is a lovelv creature," adds Ladv 
 Lsk, "but I dont 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 Bran- 
 dolin. " I am not sure that I do like fast 
 women ; they are painful to one's vanity ; 
 they tlirt with everybodv." 
 
 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 vear of what we liked 
 last year." 
 
 "It was Lady Leamington last year!" 
 cries the terrible Babe. 
 
 Brandolin topples him over on the grass 
 and hoists him up on his own shoulders. 
 " You precocious rascal ! What will you 
 be when vou are twentv ."^ " 
 
 " Babe's future is a thing of horror to 
 
A House Pai'tv. 4 
 
 o 
 
 contemplate/' says his mother, smiling 
 
 placidly. 
 
 "Who is }sladame Sabaroff?" asks Bran- 
 dolin again, with a vague curiosity. 
 
 '' A princess in her own right ; a god- 
 daughter of the Emperors,"' says Dodo. 
 " She is so handsome, and her jewels — 
 you never saw such jewels." 
 
 " Her father was a Prince Karounine,"" 
 adds Lady Usk, "and her husband held 
 some very high place at Court, I forget 
 
 what." 
 
 " Held ? Is he disgraced, then, or 
 
 dead?' 
 
 ^' Oh ! dead ; that is what is so nice 
 
 for her," says Dodo. 
 
 "Heartless Dodo!" says Brandolin. 
 
 '' Then if I marrv vou four years hence 
 
 I must kill mvself to become endeared 
 to you ?'' 
 
 " I should pity you indeed if you were 
 
 to marrv Dodo," savs Dodo's mother. 
 
44 ^ House Party. 
 
 *' She has not a q-rain of anv human 
 feeHng. except for her dog." 
 
 Dodo laughs. She Hkes to be called 
 heartless : she thinks it is c/ii'c and crrown 
 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 Skve reii2:ns now over Dodo's soul. 
 Happy somebody !" says Brandolin. '* I 
 shall be too old to be that somebodv. 
 Besides, Dodo will demand from fate an 
 Adonis and a Crcesus in one !" 
 
 Dodo smiles, showing her pretty white 
 teeth ; she likes the banter and the flirta- 
 tion with some of her father's friends. 
 She feels quite old ; in four years' time 
 her mother will present her. and she 
 means to marrv directlv after that. 
 
 " \\ hen does this Russian croddcss, who 
 
 o 
 
 drops ponies and turquoises out of the 
 
A House Painty. 45 
 
 clouds, arrive here ?" asks Branclolln, 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 engagements. 
 
 '' 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 vou 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 favourite with the chil- 
 dren at Surrenden, where he has always 
 passed some weeks of most years ever 
 since they can remember, or he either, 
 
4 6 A HotLse PiiTty. 
 
 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 extravagant desires, 
 and he Is able to keep his old estate of 
 St. Hubert's Lea. in Warwickshire, unem- 
 barrassed. His chief pleasure has been 
 travelling and sailing, and he has travelled 
 and sailed wherever a horse or a drome- 
 dary, a schooner or a canoe, can pene- 
 trate. He has told some of his travels 
 in books so admlral^ly written that, luirahilc 
 dictu ! they please both learned ]:)eople 
 and lazy people. They have earned him 
 a reputation beyond the drawing-rooms and 
 clubs of his own fashionable acquaintances. 
 He has even considerable learning him- 
 self, although he carries it so lightly 
 that tew people suspect it. He has had 
 a great many passions In his life, but 
 
A House Party. 47 
 
 they have none of th^em made any very 
 profound impression on him. When any 
 one of them has grown tiresome or 
 seemed Hkely to enchain him more than 
 he thoueht desirable, he has ahvavs 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 gaiety, and a sincerity 
 in it, which endear him inexpressibly to 
 all his friends. His friendships have hither- 
 to 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 remarks to him, enviously. 
 
4^ ^-I House Party. 
 
 " 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." 
 
 " I should be content if I could bee in 
 with one,' says Usk. 
 
 Brandolin is indeed singularly abstemious 
 in the pleasures of the table, to which the 
 good condition of his nerves and constitu- 
 tion may no doubt be attributed. " I have 
 found that eatino^ is an almost entirelv un- 
 necessarv indulo^ence," he savs in one of his 
 books. "If an Arab can ride, hcrht, kill 
 
 o 
 
 lions and slay Frenchmen 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 seeinor this one dav 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 
 
A Hottsc Party. 49 
 
 and make fiftv-thousand a vear each out of 
 
 it." 
 
 Usk allowed that the reason was excellent: 
 but then the renunciation involved was too 
 enormous. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 Let it not for an instant be supposed that 
 the guests of Surrenden are people looked 
 in the least coldly or shyly on by society. 
 Not they. They go to Drawing-rooms, 
 which means nothing ; they are invited to 
 State balls and State concerts, which means 
 much. They are amongst the most eminent 
 leaders of that world of fashion which has 
 of late revolutionised taste, temper and 
 society in England. Mrs. Went worth 
 Curzon sails a little near the wind, perhaps 
 because she is careless, and now and then 
 Lady Dawlish has been " talked about," 
 ])ecause she has a vast number of debts 
 and a lord who occasionallv makes scenes, 
 but with these exceptions, all these ladies 
 
A House Party. 51 
 
 are as safe on their pedestals as If thev 
 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 
 Vv'ritino; tables. 
 
 The Q-uests are numerous, thev mio^ht 
 €ven be said to be miscellaneous were it 
 not that thev all belong; to the same set. 
 There is ]\Ir. W'ootton, who believes him- 
 self destined to play in the last years of 
 the nineteenth century the part played by 
 Charles Greville in the earlier. There is 
 Lord \'anstone, an ao:reeable, eccentric, un- 
 satisfactory valetudinarian, who ought to 
 have clone ereat things with his liie. 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 
 
52 A House Party. 
 
 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 a very witty member of Parlia- 
 ment, 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 
 blor fortune and vaQ^ue Ideas that he ouQrht 
 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 toilette. There is Sir Adolphus 
 Beaumanoln an ex-diplomatist, admirably 
 preserved, charmingly loquacious, and an 
 unconscionable llirt, though he is seventy. 
 Each of these happy or unhappy beings 
 
A House Party. =,^ 
 
 has the lady Invited to meet him in whom 
 his aftections are supposed to be centred, 
 for the time beino^, in those tacit but 
 potent relations which form so large a 
 portion ot men and women's lives in these 
 days. It is this condonance on the part 
 of his wife which George Usk so entirely 
 denounces. althouQ-h he vrould be verv 
 much astonished and very much annoyed 
 if she made any kind of objections to 
 inviting Dulcia Waverley. Happily, there 
 is no Act of Parliament to compel any 
 of us to be consistent, or where would 
 anybody be ? 
 
 Lady Dolgelly, much older than himself, 
 and with a faille dc coiitiiricrc. as all her 
 intimate friends delight to reveal, is sup- 
 posed to be indispensable to the existence 
 of His Grace of Whitby : Lord \'anstone 
 would depart to-morrow if he did not hnd 
 here a certain Countess from the Austrian 
 Leo^ation ; Ladv Leamins^ton is not less 
 
54 -^ House Party. 
 
 necessary to the happiness of Wriothesley 
 Ormond. ]\Ir. 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. Faver- 
 sham, the prettiest brunette In the universe, 
 for whom Worth Is supposed to make 
 marvellous combinations of rose and ofold, 
 of amber and violet, of deep orange and 
 black, and of a wondrous yellow like that 
 of the daftbdil, which no one dares to 
 w^ear 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 uugis of his 
 semi-paternal affection over the light little 
 head of that extravagant little beauty,. 
 Lady Dawllsh, whilst Hugo Mountjoy Is 
 similarly protected by the prescient wisdom 
 
A House Party. 55 
 
 and the rare experience of his kindest of 
 friends, Lady Arthur Audley. 
 
 " I like my house to be pleasant/' says 
 Dorothy 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 
 aw^are that Lawrence Hamilton would never 
 bestow the cachet of his illustrious presence 
 on Surrenden unless Mrs. Wentworth 
 Curzon brought thither her fourgons, her 
 maids, her collie dog, her famous emeralds, 
 and her no less famous fans. Of course 
 she knows that, but she is not sup- 
 posed to know it. Nobody except her 
 husband 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 newspapers, 
 or become notorious by any other accident. 
 
56 A House Party, 
 
 she will drop them, and nobody will be 
 more surprised at the discovery of their 
 nauQfhtiness than herself. Yet, she is a kind 
 woman, a virtuous woman, a verv warm 
 friend, and not more insincere in her friend- 
 ships than anyone 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 amazino^ and illimitable 
 condonations as in its eccentric and ex- 
 ceptional severities. " Such an awfully 
 jolly person, don't you know ?" her young 
 men all say of her. 
 
 These young men are all exact patterns 
 of one another, the typical young English- 
 man 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, in- 
 significant, polite, supercilious, inditlerent ; 
 occasionally amusing, but never ])y any 
 chance original ; much concerned as to 
 
A House Party. 57 
 
 health. cHmate, and their own nerves ; 
 often talking of their physicians, and tht- 
 tino- southward before cold weather like 
 swallows, though they have nothing what- 
 ever definite the matter with them. 
 
 These vounQ: men are all convinced that 
 England is on the brink of ruin, and they 
 talk of It in the same tone with v/hich 
 thev sav that their cisfarette 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 ; neverthe- 
 less, 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 shoot- 
 ing, absenteeism, clubism. and general 
 preference for every country except their 
 own, may have had something to do 
 
58 A House Party. 
 
 ^vith bringing about this Impending cata- 
 clysm. That all the grand old houses stand- 
 ing empty, or let to strangers, amongst the 
 rich Herefordshire pastures, the green 
 Warwickshire woods, the red Devon up- 
 lands, the wild Westmoreland 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 whisper- 
 ing to the smock-frocks In the meadows, 
 or pouring the gall of greed and hatred 
 into the amber ale of the village pothouse, 
 never occurs to them. If anyone suggests 
 it. thev stare : " Such a beastlv 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 
 
A House Party. 59 
 
 that Joseph Chamberlain's voice is heard 
 instead of Edmund Burke's. 
 
 Their host could kick them \vith a sen- 
 sation of considerable satisfaction. Their 
 neatness, smallness, and self-complacency 
 irritate him excessively. The bloods of 
 Georr^e IV.'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 aftectations 
 with their starched cambric, and are not 
 altogether unworthy of their great-grand- 
 fathers. Britons are still bad ones to beat 
 when the trial comes." 
 
 •* Thev must leave their constitutions 
 at their clubs then, and their nervous 
 system in their hat-boxes," growls L sk. 
 "If you are like those namby-pamby 
 fellows when you are twenty. Boom, I'll 
 put a bullet through your head myself" 
 
6o A House Party. 
 
 he savs to his heir one mornlnor. when that 
 good-looking and high-spirited boy has 
 come back from Suffolk. 
 
 Boom laughs. He is a careless, high- 
 spirited, extravagant 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 honours 
 his betrayer ; but the hearts of the boys 
 beat truer than that of the House of Com- 
 mons and the New Electorate. They 
 remember Gordon, with a noble, headlong, 
 Quixotic wish to q^o and do likewise. That 
 one lonely fissure standincr out acrainst 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. musinc^lv. " I don't think thev 
 will kefp I'ngland what our fathers and 
 
A House Party. 6i 
 
 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 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 
 
62 A House Party, 
 
 very palm of the desert for vigour 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 valetudinarian. It is uncommonly droll, 
 and if the disparity goes on increasing, the 
 ladies will not onlv Q^et 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 his- 
 torical illustration, and never lost occasion 
 to display It. 
 
 "Thev won't carrv their Jinsbands'' mur- 
 murs Brandolln. " They'll drive tJiem, and 
 carrv somebodv else." 
 
 "Will they have any husbands at all when 
 they can do as they like ?" says Boom. 
 
 " Probably not," says Brandolln. '' My 
 dear boy, what an earthly paradise awaits 
 you when you shall be of mature age, and 
 
A House Party. 63 
 
 shall have seen us all descend one bv one 
 into the tomb, with all our social prejudices 
 and antiquated ways." 
 
 "I daresay 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 landscape beyond the window^s, the beau- 
 tiful lawns, the smiling gardens, the rolling 
 woods. A look of resolution comes over his 
 fair, frank face. 
 
 ''They shan't take oiir 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'm afraid it 
 is in ]Mr. Gladstone's ' dim and distant 
 future' — that Is to say, very near at hand 
 indeed." 
 
64 y^ House Party. 
 
 "Well, I shall be ready," says the lad. 
 Both his father and Brandolln are silent, 
 vaguely touched by the look of the gallant 
 and orraclous bov, as he stands there with 
 the sun in his brave blue eves, 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 
 politician may fatten on her woes. 
 
 What will Boom live to see .^ 
 
 It will be a sorrv dav for the countrv 
 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 don't mean to be like those fellows, 
 but you don't know how hard it is to get 
 
A House Party. 65 
 
 out of the fashion of one's set, to avoid 
 going with the stream of one's contem- 
 poraries. Nobody can say what will be 
 the style of the ' best men' when you're of 
 ao-e, but I'm much afraid it will still be the 
 ]\Iasher. The ]\Iasher 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 con- 
 ventional. 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 steeplechases, 
 coursinof meetino-s, flat races, and the 
 various different things to be shot at. 
 Sport is all very well in its place, but 
 
66 A House Party. 
 
 Squire Allworthy beating the turnips with 
 a brace of setters, is a different fiQ^ure to 
 Lord Newgold sending his hampers of 
 pheasants to Leadenhall. Certainly, Mr. 
 Bradlaugh has no more right to make a 
 misdemeanour of our covert-shooting^, and 
 put the axe to our home woods, than we 
 have to make a misdemeanour of his shoes 
 and stockings, or put an axe to his head. 
 But I think if of our own accord we 
 centred 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 cauQ^ht or dead 
 in a keeper's trap but that I think to 
 myself that after all, if we ourselves are 
 caught in the grinning jaws of anarchy, it 
 will really be only partial justice on our 
 injustice. Only I fear that it won't better 
 
^4 HoiLse Party. 67 
 
 the birds and beasts very much ; even 
 when we all go to prison for the crime 
 of property, Bradlaugh will grub up their 
 leafy haunts with a steam plough from 
 Chicago." 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 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 comfortably 
 w^hilst the legitimate partners of their 
 existences are diverting themselves in other 
 scenes, Highland moors, German baths, 
 French chateaux, Channel yachting, or 
 other English country houses. It is George 
 Usk's opinion that the whole thing is im- 
 moral, yet he is by no means a moral person 
 himself. His wife, on the contrar\-, thinks 
 that it is the onlv way to have vour house 
 liked, and that nobody is supposed to know 
 anything, and that nothing of that sort 
 matters ; yet she is a woman who, on her 
 
A House Party. 69 
 
 own account, has never done anvthino: that 
 she would in the least mind having printed 
 in the ATorning Post to-morrow. 
 
 "Strange contradiction!" muses Bran- 
 dolin. " Here is George, who's certainly no 
 better than he should be, halloaing out for 
 Dame Propriety, and here's my lady, who's 
 always run as straight as a crow tiies, 
 making an Agapemone of her house to 
 please her friends. To the pure all things 
 are pure, I suppose, but if purity can stand 
 Mrs. Wentworth Curzon and Lady Dawlish, 
 I think I shall select 7u\ wife from amonest 
 les jo lies inipuresr 
 
 However, he takes care audiblv 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 may 
 not want indulgence some day." 
 
 Brandolin is verv easv and elastic in his 
 
70 A Ho7tse Party, 
 
 principles, as becomes a man of the world ; 
 he is even considered bv 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 ; fast habits and manners in a woman 
 seem to him a fault in her taste ; it is as if 
 she wore fur slippers with her Court train. 
 " Of course." he will say, apologetically, 
 " this idea of mine is born of the absurd 
 English conventionality which sleeps in all 
 of us, nothinor better ; an Eno^lishman is 
 always conventional at heart let him live as 
 he will."" 
 
 He himself is the most unconventional 
 of beings, appals his county, terrifies his 
 relations, and irrevocably offends the bishop 
 of his diocese ; he has lived with Arabs, 
 French artists, and wild men of the woods, 
 
A House Party. 71 
 
 and believes that he has not such a thine 
 as a prejudice about him ; yet. at the bottom 
 of his soul, there is this absurd feelinof 
 born of sheer conventionality — he cannot 
 thoroughly like a light-minded woman. 
 Absurd, indeed, in the times in which his 
 lot is cast I He is quite ashamed of it. 
 
 Dorothy Usk does not favour the modern 
 mode of having relays of guests for two 
 davs or three davs : 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 Vv'eeks 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 
 
72 A House Party. 
 
 table dWiote bell rings to deaf ears. Look 
 how they all stray downstairs just as it 
 pleases 'em ! Lord I 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 folk 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 Brandolin ; "neither le bon Dicu or we 
 are great folks any longer." 
 
 " Well, I think it's a pity," sighs Usk. 
 " Everybody was happier then, and jollier 
 too, though we do tear about so to try and 
 get amused." 
 
.-i House Party. 73 
 
 •' There is still nothing to prevent you 
 going to sleep in the big pew if it pleases 
 vou,'" replies Brandolin ; " and Lawrence 
 Hamilton always goes that he may look at 
 ^Irs. Curzon's profile as she sings ; she is 
 reallv saindy then. I think Sunday service 
 is to Enoflish 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 pleasant. 
 
 " Xot more so than most people/' says 
 Brandolin. "' I have even felt religious 
 when I have been alone in the savannahs 
 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 nothino^ to do with it/' savs L sk, 
 "we're bound to set an example/' 
 
74 ^ House Party. 
 
 " That's why you cloze in public, and ?^Irs. 
 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 Usk, somewhat crosslv. He has a 
 comfortable if indistinct 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 Hies and releasing them 
 from a careful little hand to alight on his 
 father's forehead or nose. The Babe would 
 define the Sundav mornino- as a horrid bore 
 tempered by bluebottles. 
 
A House Party, 75 
 
 *' What a curiously conventional mind is 
 the English 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 appear- 
 ance, and satisfied with these. ?yly 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 unfathomable 
 human breast !" 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 A FEW new people have come by the 
 brake, and make their appearance at 
 luncheon. ^lore come bv the five o'clock 
 train, and are visible at six o'clock tea, 
 which is always to be had in the library 
 anytime before seven : dinner at all the Usk 
 houses is always at nine. Brandolin's doc- 
 trines do not prevail with any of his 
 acquaintances, although he. unlike most 
 professors, emphasises them by example. 
 
 Amongst the people who come by the 
 latter train are the great ^\r. Wootton, 
 very famous at London dinner parties, and 
 Lady Gundrede Wansittart, whose dinners 
 are the best in London. 
 
A House Party. "jj 
 
 " Where would those two people be if 
 vou broui2:ht the pulse and the rice you 
 recommend into fashion ?" says the 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 
 be worth leaving a card upon. Believe me, 
 my dear Guy, such esprit as there is left 
 in us now-a-days is only brought out by 
 eating." 
 
 '' I think vou invert all vour reasonings," 
 savs Brandolin. " Sav, rather, that too 
 much eating has destroyed all esprit. Don't 
 we eat all day long everywhere, 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 
 
yS A House Party. 
 
 bread and butter, and anchovy sandwiches, 
 and all kinds of rich cakes and deitx doiots 
 de Madcre. or glasses of Kummel 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 Vcimsy 
 
 " You won't alter 'em. my dear fellow^" 
 replied Usk, " if you put yourself out about 
 it ever so much. If you were to marry a 
 savage out of Formosa, or an Esquimaux, 
 she'd take kindly to the caviare and the 
 Kummel before a week was out, if you 
 brought her to Europe. AA'hy, look at dogs, 
 you may keep 'em on biscuit and tripe if 
 they live in the kennels, but if they once 
 come to the cUninc^-room thev'll turn their 
 noses up at a beefsteak if it isn't truffled !" 
 
 '' Dogs, at least, stop short of the Kum- 
 mel," says Brandolin, " but if you were 
 to put together the sherry, the dry cham- 
 pagne, the liqueurs at tea, the brandy in 
 the cJiasse at dinner, which a fashionable 
 
A House Party. 79 
 
 ^voman 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 — incredible ! You 
 would not believe the number of women 
 who have cured me of an unhappy passion 
 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 biogra- 
 phies 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, nobody but insular 
 people like ourselves ever use such a term. 
 Nationalities are obliterated." 
 
So A House Party. 
 
 She is very fond of Xenia Sabaroff; she 
 has a o^reat manv warm attachments to 
 women who help to make her house 
 attractive. 
 
 " XatlonaHties are still discernible in 
 different tobaccos/" murmurs Brandolin. 
 '' The Havannah won't acknowledofe an 
 equal In the Cavour." 
 
 *' Dollv don't know anvthingf about 
 her," continues Usk, clinging to the 
 subject. 
 
 " Oh, my dear I'' cried his wife, shocked, 
 *' when she is the niece of the great Chan- 
 cellor and her mother was a Princess 
 Dourtza.'' 
 
 '* You don't know anvthinq; about her," 
 repeats Usk, with that unpleasant obstinacy 
 characteristic of men when they talk to their 
 wives. " You met her In \'Ienna 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. 
 
A House Party. 8i 
 
 One can never be sure of anvthinof about 
 foreigners." 
 
 " How absurd you are, and how insidai','^ 
 cries Dorothv Usk ao-aln. " ' Foreigners ! ' 
 As if there were any foreigners in these 
 days, when Europe is Hke one family ! " 
 
 "A family which, like most families, squab- 
 bles and scratches pretty often then," says 
 Usk, which seems to his wife a replv too 
 vulgar to be worthy of contradiction. He 
 is conscious that Xenia Sabaroff is a verv 
 great lady, and that her quarterlngs, backed 
 by descent and alliance, are whollv irre- 
 proachable, Indeed, written in that libro 
 d'oro. the Almanac de Gotha, for all who 
 chose 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. 
 
 L sk is a Russophobist, as becomes a true 
 Tor}-. He has a rooted impression that 
 
 G 
 
82 A House Party. 
 
 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 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 ]\Iadame Sabaroff's visit 
 to Surrenden were to have possible oppor- 
 tunities to examine the facilities of Wey- 
 mouth as a landing place for Kossacks out 
 of Muscovite corvettes. 
 
 " Russians are tremendous swells at 
 palaver," he says, with much contempt ; 
 
 '' gammon you no end If you like to believe 
 
 'em ; but they've always some political 
 
 dodge or other behind It all." 
 
 " I don't say she Isn't an agreeable 
 
 woman," he continues now : his admira- 
 
A House Party. 83 
 
 tion of ]\Iadame Sabaroft' 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. 
 
 " ]\Iy dear George," observes Brandolin, 
 ''■ there are preconceived ideas about all 
 nationalities. As a rule, they are com- 
 pletely false. The received Continental Idea 
 Is that an EnQ^Hshman Is a bluft", blunt, un- 
 pleasant, opinionated person ; very cross, 
 verv clean too, it is true, but, on the 
 streno-th of his tub and his constitution, 
 despising all the rest of mankind. Xow, 
 how completely absurd such an opinion 
 is. You yourself are an example of the 
 suaviter in inodo, fort iter in re, of which 
 the true blue Briton always gives so 
 admirable an example." 
 
 Usk laughs, but sulkily ; he has the 
 
84 A House Party. 
 
 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, 
 " toboeeanine." as thev sav in Canada, 
 at the rate of hftv miles a minute, to 
 land in the slouQrh of Socialism, and be 
 picked out of it by some military despot ; 
 democracy invariably ending in absolutism. 
 *'\Vhat ridiculous rubbish about Russians," 
 says his wife. "You might as well say 
 that the dcnwiscllcs-vianncqnins at Worth's 
 or Rodrigue's are conspiring for the 
 Orleanists when thev trv on mv clothes!" 
 
A House Party. 85 
 
 '' 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 everything." 
 
 ''T\iO?^^ faiseitrs, as you call 'em," con- 
 tinues Usk, unheedini2:, " are at the root 
 of half the misery of society. \\^omen get 
 into debt up to their eyes for their toilettes, 
 and they don't care what abominations they 
 commit 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 dav." 
 
 " And if women are Q:uvs aren't the men 
 furious ?" asked his wife. " Even if they 
 trv to economise, aren't thev alwavs taunted 
 with beino: dowdies ? You none of vou 
 know anything about the cost of things, 
 and you expect everybody to be bien inise 
 
S6 A House Party, 
 
 on a halfpenny a day. V\'hen Boom saw 
 me at Ascot this vear he stared at me and 
 whispered to me, ' Oh, I say, mother I 
 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 
 daresay, like you, he will expect her to get 
 her bonnets from \'Ir6t at ten francs a 
 piece !' 
 
 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 to, he swears he Is 
 ashamed to be seen with them. You can't 
 dress well, vou can't do anythlncr well, 
 without srjendlnc{ monev, and if vou haven't 
 monev vou must q^et into debt. That is 
 as clear as that two and two are four. 
 
A House Party. 87 
 
 Whenever do men remember their own 
 extravao^ances ? You smoke ten clgfars a 
 day ; your cigars cost a shilling or elghteen- 
 pence each — that Is, ten or fifteen shillings 
 a day ; five pounds a week, not counting 
 your cigarettes ! Good Heavens I 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 toilettes don't 
 hurt our digestion, and what would the 
 world look like if women weren't well 
 dressed in It ? Your clofars benefit no- 
 body, and only make your teeth yellow." 
 
 '' Well, in a vear thev cost about what 
 one ball gown does that's worn twice." 
 
 " I alwavs 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. 
 
SS A House Party. 
 
 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 onlv reads his 
 classics upside down like that he'd better 
 leave 'em alone." 
 
 *' You are never content. ]\Iost men 
 would be delighted if a boy read at ally 
 " I don't know why. I'm sure," replies 
 Usk, drearilv. " Readincr's Qfoincr out, vou 
 know ; nobodv'll read at all fiftv vears hence; 
 poking about in guinea-pigs' stomachs, and 
 giving long names to insects out of the 
 
 coal-hole is what they call education now-a- 
 
 days." 
 
 " Frederic Harrison has said very apdy," 
 
 remarks Brandolin. who is present at this 
 
A House Party. 89 
 
 conjugal colloquy, and seeks to make a 
 diversion on it, "that the boast of science 
 is to send the Indian mails across seas and 
 deserts in nine days. But that science 
 cannot put in those mail bags a single 
 letter equal to \'oltaire's or the Sevigne's, 
 and he doubts very much that there is one." 
 
 '' It's an ill bird that fouls its own nest, 
 or its own century," says Usk, grimly ; 
 " still. I'm verv Q^lad if those scientific 
 prigs fall out amongst themselves." 
 
 " I think some people write charming 
 letters still," says Dorothy Usk. "Of course 
 when one is in a hurry — and one is almost 
 alwavs in a hurrv " 
 
 "Hurrv is fatal, Ladv Usk," savs Brando- 
 lin. "It destroys style, grace, and harmony. 
 It is the curse of our times. The most 
 lovelv thino^ 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. 
 
90 A Hojtse Party, 
 
 "There Is nothing private In It, and nothing 
 wonderful, but there Is a grace In the ex- 
 pressions; whilst the English, for a foreigner, 
 is absolutely marvellous." 
 
 " I thoucrht there were no foreigners,'' 
 savs Usk ; "I thought steam had effaced 
 nationalities ?" 
 
 His wife does not deign to reply. 
 
 Brandolln has taken the letter with hesi- 
 tation. " Do you really think I may read 
 It?" 
 
 " When I tell you to do so," says Dolly 
 Usk, Impatiently. "Besides, there Is nothing 
 In It, only It Is pretty." 
 
 Brandolln reads ; It is on verv thick 
 paper, almost imperceptibly scented, with a 
 princess's crown embossed on It, and a 
 gold X. 
 
 "It is very kind of you, dear Lady Usk, 
 to have remembered a solitaire like mvself 
 In the midst of vour charmino^ children and 
 your many joys. (' ]My many annoy- 
 
A House Party. 91 
 
 ances, she means/ Interpolates Lady Usk.) 
 I will be with voii, as vou so amiablv 
 wish, next Tuesday or Wednesday. I am 
 for the moment In Paris, haying been this 
 month at AIx, not that I haye any aches 
 or pains myself, but a friend of mine, ]\larle 
 Woronszoff, has many, and tries to cure 
 them by ^varm sunshine and the cold douches 
 which her physicians prescribe. There are 
 many pleasant people here ; eyeryone Is 
 supposed to be yery 111 and suffering agony, 
 but eyeryone 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 ]\Iors be Indeed amongst 
 us, she looks just like eyeryone else. I 
 came to AIx from my own place on the 
 White Sea, and the gay groups, the bright 
 alleys, the green embowered chalets, and 
 the goatherds with their flocks which come 
 tinkline their bells down the hillsides in all 
 directions, all seem to me like an operetta 
 
92 A House Party. 
 
 of Offenbach's, spiritualised and washed with 
 the pure dayhght and the mountain air, but 
 still Offenbach. How are your children ? 
 Do they still care for me ? That is very 
 sweet of them. A dav at their vears is as 
 loner 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, mv recollections 
 of Orme tell me d avancc 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 onlv 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.) An revoir, dear 
 Lady Usk. Receive the assurance of my, 
 highest consideration, and believe in my 
 sincere regard. Bien a voiis. — Xkma P. 
 
 SAIiAKOFF." 
 
A House Party, 93 
 
 ** A very pretty letter," says Brandolin. 
 *' Many thanks," and he restores it to its 
 owner. 
 
 '' Bunkum I" says Usk. 
 
 *'Not a bit in the world," says his wife, 
 with contempt and indignation. " S/ie does 
 not ' pose' if you do !" 
 
 " Mv dear Georo^e," savs Brandolin, " vou 
 are one of those thorough-going Britons 
 who always think that everybody who 
 doesn't deal in disagreeable remarks must 
 be lying. Believe me, there are people 
 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 
 beastlv bad dav,' one savs to 'em when 
 it's pouring cats and dogs, and they 
 answer : ' Oh, ves, 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 
 
94 ^ House Painty. 
 
 on small provocation," replies Brandolin. 
 " To look at rain in that liofht areues true 
 philosophy. Unfortunately, philosophy is 
 too often strained to burstino: 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 
 amongst us would vievr it with equanimity." 
 
 Rain is at that moment running down 
 the painted panes of the Surrenden case- 
 ments, 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 
 
A House Party. 95 
 
 against making more pasture, grazing's all 
 very well ; but, If 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'mx all for pasture," replies Brandolln, 
 " and, as the British Isles can never, under 
 anv cultivation whatever, feed all their 
 population, we may as well dedicate our- 
 selves to what Is picturesque. I am 
 fascinated by Laveleye's portrait of Eng- 
 land when she shall have turned grazier 
 excluslvelv ; It Is lovelv ; ' L'Anorleterre re- 
 devlendra ce qu'elle etalt sous les Tudors, 
 un grand pare vert, parseme d'ormes et de 
 chenes ou boeufs et moutons se promeneront 
 dans des prairies sans llmltes.' " 
 
 '''Prairies sans llmites ? ' How'll they 
 
96 A House Party, 
 
 manage that when the land's to be all 
 sliced up in litde bits between peasant 
 proprietors ! " says Usk. 
 
 " I don't think Laveleye believes in 
 peasant proprietors, though he is a pro- 
 fessor of social economy." 
 
 " Social economy ! " says Usk, with a 
 o-roan. " 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 prin- 
 cipal outcome of two thousand centuries of 
 Christianity, civilisation, and culture. The 
 result is not perfectly satisfactory, or en- 
 couraging, one must admit," says Brandolin, 
 as he reaches down a volume of eighteenth- 
 century memoirs, and adds, with entire irre- 
 levancy 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 
 
A Ho2tse Party. 97 
 
 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 
 remaininQ: to us. in which ]\Iessalina can 
 still do her little murders comfortably with- 
 out anv fuss beino^ made." 
 
 '' She isn't ]\Iessalina, at least, I think 
 not. But one never knows." 
 
 *' No. one never knows till one tries," 
 said Brandolin. 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 Ladv 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 for ever with the children, 
 because the children are not verv often 
 
 H 
 
98 A Ho2ise Party. 
 
 visible, and without flirting civilised life is 
 dull, even for a man who is more easily 
 consoled by ancient authors off the library 
 shelves than most people can be. 
 
 This conversation occurs in the forenoon, 
 in Ladv Usk's boudoir. In the late after- 
 noon, in the library, over their teacups, the 
 ladies talk of Xenia Sabaroff It is per- 
 ceptible to Brandolin that they would prefer 
 that she should not arrive. 
 
 "Is she so very good-looking?" he asks 
 of }vlrs. Wentworth Curzon. 
 
 "Oh, ves," replies that ladv, with an 
 accent of depreciation in her tones. " Yes, 
 she is very handsome ; but too pale, and 
 her eyes too large. You know those Rus- 
 sian women are mere paqticts 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 
 
A House Party. 99 
 
 Princess Kraskawa ; she went slei^hinQf in 
 all weathers, wore the frankest of Q-ineer- 
 bread wigs, and was always surrounded by 
 about fiftv Q^randchildren/' 
 
 Princess Kraskawa had been for many 
 years ambassadress 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 
 alwavs maladives,'' 
 
 '* Ah," says Brandolin. pensively, " but 
 the physical and moral perfection of English- 
 women alwavs makes them take too hio^h a 
 standard : poor humanity toils hopelessly 
 and utterlv exhausted manv miles behind 
 them." 
 
 "Don't talk nonsense," says ^Irs. Curzon, 
 '' we are no better than our neighbours, 
 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 
 
TOO A Ho2tse Party. 
 
 gamble — at least not much — and we don't 
 talk every language under the sun except 
 our own. and yet not one of them gram- 
 matically." 
 
 "Decidedly," reflects Brandolin. "Law- 
 rence must have looked too often at 
 Madame Sabaroff. Sabaroff Is dead, Isn't 
 he?" he asks 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 ]\Irs. Curzon ; " a duel about 
 her." 
 
 "What a fortunate woman! To get rid 
 of a husband, and to get rid of him In such 
 interesting circumstances ! Ccst Ic co/ndle 
 cic bonhc2Lr ./" 
 
 "That depends. With her It resulted In 
 her exile from Court." 
 
 " Ah, to be sure, when Russians are 
 naughty they are sent to live on their 
 
A House Party. loi 
 
 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, he fired, and shot the Prince 
 through the lungs." 
 
 *' A pretty little melodrama. Who was 
 the opponent ?" 
 
 "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 Impres- 
 sion on one. And the result was that the 
 lady had to leave the Imperial Court!" 
 
 '' Yes ; they do draw a line there'' 
 
 Brandolln laughs ; It tickles his fancy to 
 hear Mrs. Wentworth Curzon condemning 
 by Implication the laxity of the Court of 
 St. Jamxes. 
 
I02 A Ho2tse Party. 
 
 " They can't send tis 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 deso- 
 late London would look !' 
 
 '' You think everybody would be exiled 
 Inside his own rincr-fence .-^ ' 
 
 " Her own ring-fence — well, nearly every- 
 body. There would certainly be no garden 
 parties at Marlborough House." 
 
 Mrs. Wentworth Curzon is not pleased : 
 she is a star of the first maQ-nitude at 
 Marlborough House. 
 
 " Why does she take this absent woman's 
 character away ?" thinks Brandolin, with a 
 sense of Irritation. "I will trust the Babe's 
 instincts sooner than hers." 
 
A House Party. 103 
 
 He does not know Xenia Sabaroff, but 
 he admires the photograph of her which 
 stands on the boudoir table, and he Hkes 
 the tone of the letter written from Aix. 
 With that spirit of contradiction which is 
 inborn in human nature, he is inclined to 
 disbelieve all that Xina Curzon has told 
 him. Lustoff and Sabaroff probably both 
 deserved their fates, and the departure from 
 the Court of St. Petersburg might very 
 possibly have been voluntary. He has a 
 vao'ue feelino' of tenderness for the oriorinal 
 of the photograph. It often happens to 
 him to fall sentimentally and ephemerally 
 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 imagi- 
 native man, with a great amount of leisure 
 in which to indulge his fancies, and his 
 knowledge of the world has not hardened 
 
T04 A House Party. 
 
 his feelinors or dulled his fancv. 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 uncomplimentar)^ 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 decently. When he 
 married her he adored the ground she 
 walked on. but before a week was out she 
 began to fret him. and jeer 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 any- 
 body living, and she's taken every one of 
 'em for money ; nothing but money. Old 
 Melton gave her the Park-lane House, and 
 
A House Party. 105 
 
 Glamoro^an Q:ave her her emeralds, and 
 Dartmoor paid her Paris bills for ten years, 
 and RIverston takes all her stable expenses. 
 Evervthinor she does is done for money, 
 and if she puts any heart at all now into 
 this thincr with Lawrence, it is only 
 because she's getting 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 very bachelor rooms at Surrenden are 
 conducive to reverie and indolence, cosilv 
 comfortable and full of little attentions for 
 the guest's hicn ctrc, amongst which there 
 is a printed paper which is always laid on 
 the dressinor-table in everv room at this 
 house ; it contains the latest telesrrams of 
 public news which come every afternoon 
 from a London news ao^encv. 
 
 *' I daresay to the political fellows they 
 are delightful." reflects Brandolin. as he 
 glances down the lines, *' but to me they 
 unpleasantly re-call an uncomfortable world. 
 I don't dine the worse, certainly, for know- 
 ing that there is a revolution in Patagonia, 
 or an earthquake in Bolivar, but neither 
 
A Hoiise Party. 107 
 
 do I dine the better for being told that 
 the French Government is destifua/it all 
 moderate Prefets in favour of immoderate 
 ones. It is verv interestino^, 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 conver- 
 sation to say "Have you seen so and so.'"' 
 or, " What a sad thinor such and such is, 
 isn't it?" He likes persitiage, he likes 
 banter, he likes aro^ument, he likes anti- 
 thesis, he likes brilliancy, and the dinner 
 tables of the epoch seldom offer these 
 good things with their ]^Ietternich hock 
 and ?^Iouton Rothschild. He is fond of 
 talking: himself and he can be also a verv 
 good listener. If you cannot give the quid 
 quo pro in hearing, as in speaking, you 
 may be immensely clever, but you will 
 be immediately pronounced a bore, like 
 jNIacaulav and ^ladame de Stael. Bran- 
 
io8 .-7 House Party. 
 
 dolin 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 conversational art 
 were cultured as it used to be in the Paris 
 of the Bourbons, life would become more 
 refined, more agreeable, more sympathetic, 
 and less given over to gross pleasures of 
 the appetites. 
 
 ''Children should be taught to talk," he 
 observed 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 inap- 
 propriate words which come uppermost to 
 them. There is so much in the choice of 
 words ! A beautiful voice is a delicious 
 thin;j^, but it avails little without the usage 
 of apt and graceful phrases. Did you ever 
 
A House Party. 109 
 
 hear ]\Irs. Xorton sustain a discussion or 
 relate an anecdote? It was like listening 
 to perfect phrasing in music. When she 
 died the art of conversation died with 
 
 her.'' 
 
 ''We are always in such a hurry,'' says 
 Ladv Usk, which is her habitual explana- 
 tion of anything in which her generation 
 is at fault. " And hurry is always vulgar. 
 vou know, as vou 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 !' " 
 
 murmurs Brandolin. " Alas I my dear 
 ladies, I cannot hope that she dwells with 
 me in any form I 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 ladv ; and she detests him 
 
iio A H021SC Party, 
 
 a little more cordially than before. There 
 is not a very good feeling towards him 
 amongst any of the ladies at Surrenden ; 
 he does not make love to them, he does 
 not endeavour to alter existing arrange- 
 ments in his favour ; it is generally felt 
 that he would not care to do so. What 
 can you expect from a man who sits 
 half his davs in a librarv ? 
 
 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 seem cJicz cux, and are not 
 mere lodgers or visitors ; oriel windows 
 look on to a portion of the garden laid 
 out by Beaumont. One window has been 
 cut down to the ground, an anachronism 
 and innovation, indeed, somewhat impairing 
 the uniformity of the room. The present 
 
A Hotise Party. 1 1 1 
 
 Lady Usk had it done, but one forgives 
 her the sacrileQ^e 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 
 demoralising abominations of caviare, Kum- 
 mel, etc. It is a gay room, with dcssits des 
 partes after Watteau, and every variety ot 
 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 v^'ith Latin philosophy 
 and Gaulois wit. 
 
 " You 2iscd to read, George T he says 
 to his host in expostulation. 
 
112 A House Party. 
 
 "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 rephes, " but I cannot under- 
 stand a man losing the taste for reading 
 if he has ever had it. One can dwell con- 
 tented in Boeotia if one have never been 
 out of it, but to p-o back to Boeotia after 
 living in Attica 
 
 " It's one's life does it." 
 
 ''What life .^ One has the life one 
 wishes." 
 
 ''That's the sort of thinor a man savs 
 who hasn't married."" 
 
 *' My dear George ! you cannot pretend 
 that your wife would prevent your reading 
 Latin and Greek, or even Sanscrit I I am 
 sure she would much sooner you read 
 them than — well — than did other thines 
 you do do." 
 
 " I don't say she would prevent me," 
 
A Ho7Lse Party, 1 1 3 
 
 returns the lord of Surrenclen. with some 
 crossness, "but it's the kind of Hfe 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 
 
 vou ?" 
 
 *' 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 an jour 
 le jour, and one gets into the swim and 
 o-oes on, and then there's the shooting, 
 and when there isn't the shooting there's 
 the season and the racing." 
 
 ''I lead mv own life," Brandolin remarks. 
 
 '' Yes ; but you don't mind being called 
 eccentric." 
 
 *' Xo ; I don't mind it in the least. If 
 they say nothing worse of me I am 
 grateful." 
 
 '' But vou couldn't do it if vou had all 
 my places, and all my houses, and all my 
 
 I 
 
114 A House Party. 
 
 bothers, and all my fcimily — you're a free 
 agent. I declare that all the time goes 
 awav 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 easv chair with a 
 clear 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 
 assail him : but this Is not the view which 
 his friends take of him. 
 
 Whenever 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 
 
.-i House Party, 115 
 
 as soon live without air as without books," 
 and he quotes Cowley — 
 
 " Books should, like business, entertain the day," 
 
 " You don't continue the quotation," says 
 Usk, with a smile. 
 
 ''A litres temps, atitrcs niariirs'' says Bran- 
 dolin. He laughs and gets up ; it is four 
 In the afternoon : the delicious green garden 
 is Ivlne bathed In warm amber llo^ht ; one 
 of the peacocks Is turning round slowly 
 with all his train displayed ; he seems never 
 to tire of turnino^ round. 
 
 '' How exactly that bird is like some 
 politicians one could name," says Brandolln. 
 ''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* 
 
ii6 A House Party, 
 
 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 de- 
 moralising 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 verv 
 much, to pay his debts ; that's the only 
 wav I know of to check a bov 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 
 eternallv oblic^'ed to him ever since." 
 
 "What did he sell.^" 
 
 " M\" col J, a cob I adored. I wept like 
 a child, but he didn't see my tears. What 
 I saved up next month to trace out that cob 
 and buy him back at twice his value ; — 
 what I denied myself to make up the 
 
A House Party. 117 
 
 money — xnobody would believe ; and the 
 beast wasn't easy to find ; some dealer had 
 taken him over to Ireland." 
 
 ''That could be done vv'Ith you," says 
 U sk, orloomilv. " It would be no use to 
 do It vrlth 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. 
 Xo end of women have no Idea of bringing 
 up their children, and when they ought 
 to be ordered a tiogging they fondle 
 them." 
 
 "Dolly does," says her husband. "What's 
 a woman's notion of a horse ? That he 
 must have slender 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 
 
iiS A House Party. 
 
 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. " Xow, I am perfectly certain 
 that is r^Iadame Sabaroff, without vour 
 
 savmor so. 
 
 " Then I needn't say so," replies Usk. 
 '* I wonder when she came. Thev didn't 
 expect her till to-morrow." 
 
 Thev both look at a ladv in one of the 
 distant allevs walklncr between the hi^h, 
 green walls. She is dressed in some soft 
 cream-coloured stuft", 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 before her gambols in his 
 white sailor clothes, with his blue silk stock- 
 ings and his silver-buckled shoes, the Babe. 
 
 " Decided! V the Sabaroff,'' savs Usk. 
 *' Won't you come and speak to her .^" 
 
A House Party. T19 
 
 " With pleasure." says Brandolln. ''Even 
 if the Babe brains me with the cane I" 
 
 He looks very well as he walks bare- 
 headed over the grass and along the green 
 alley. He wears a loose brown velvet coat, 
 admirably made, and brown breeches and 
 stockings ; his leQ;s are as well made as his 
 coat ; the sun shines on his curling hair, 
 there is a degage, picturesque, debonnair, 
 vet distinguished, look about him which 
 pleases the eyes of Xenia SabaroA' as they 
 watch him draw near. 
 
 ''Who is that person with your father?" 
 she asks. The children tell her, all speak- 
 
 ing at once. 
 
 She recoQfnises the name ; she has heard 
 of him often in the world, and has read 
 those books which praise solitude and a 
 dinner of herbs. *' I doubt his having been 
 alone verv lono-. however," she reflects, as 
 she looks at him. A certain unlikeness in 
 him to Englishmen in general, some 
 
I20 A Ho2ise Party. 
 
 Avomen who arc fond of him fancifully trace 
 to the fact that the first Brandolin was a 
 \'enetian, who fled for his life from the 
 Republic, 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, it's 
 so very far away," he himself objects ; but 
 perhaps it does count. Of all things in- 
 effaceable, the marks of race are the most 
 indelible. 
 
 The \'enetian Brandolin married the 
 daughter of a Xorman knight, and his 
 descendants became affectionate sons of 
 England, and held their lands of St. 
 Hubert's Lea safely under the Wars of the 
 Roses, of the Commonwealth, and of the 
 Jacobites. They were always noticeable 
 for scholarly habits and artistic tastes, 
 and in the time of George H., the Lord 
 Brandolin of the period did much to enrich 
 his family mansion and diminish the family 
 
A Ho2ise Party. 121 
 
 fortunes, by his importations of Italian 
 artists. 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 sueeestion. So the old house 
 stands in its warm-hued and casket-like 
 loveliness, empty, save for his occasional 
 visits, and the presence of many old and 
 devoted servants. 
 
 " An interesting woman," he thinks now, 
 as he exchanQ;es vrith the Princess Sabaroff 
 the usual compliments and commonpla.ces 
 of a presentation. " Russians are always 
 interestino- ; thev are the onlv women about 
 whom you feel that you know very little ; 
 they are the only vronien vvdio, in this 
 chatterbox of a generation, tout cii dehors 
 
122 A House Party. 
 
 as It Is, preserve some of the vague charm 
 of mystery — and what a charm that is I" 
 
 His reasons for aclmlrlncr her are not 
 those of the Babe and his sisters, but he 
 admires her ahiiost as much as they. Bran- 
 dohn, who, in his remote travels, has seen 
 a great deal of that simple nature which 
 is so much lauded by many people, has a 
 great appreciation of well-dressed women, 
 and Madame Sabaroff Is admirably dressed, 
 from her lono^ loose cream-coloured gloves 
 to her bronze shoes with their miniature 
 diamond 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 abomin:ibly 
 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 conimitted some 
 flagrant offence. 
 
A House Party. 123 
 
 "' Those brats are alwavs botherino- you. 
 Princess," says their father. 
 
 " They are very kind to me," rephes 
 Xenia Sabaroff, in English which has 
 absolutely no foreio^n accent. " Thev make 
 me feel at home I What a charming place 
 this is I I like it better than your castle, 
 what is its name, where I had the pleasure 
 to visit you at Easter ? " 
 
 '' Orme," replies its master. "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 ov/ner is a 
 constant temptation to providence to deal 
 in thunderbolts, or have matches left about 
 by housemaids," says Brandolin. 
 
 '* I think Lord Usk has not a contented 
 mind," says ^vladame Sabaroft, amused. 
 
 " Contented I By Jove, who should be, 
 when EnMand's croino: to the doQfs as fast 
 as she can ? " 
 
124 -"^ HotLse Party. 
 
 "In every period of your history," says 
 the Princess, " your country is always des- 
 cribed as going headlong to ruin, and yet 
 she has not gone there yet, and she has 
 not done ill." 
 
 '' ' Our constitution is established on a 
 nice equipoise, with dark precipices and 
 deep waters all around it.' So said Burke," 
 replies Brandolin. "At the present 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 engulphed. Myself, 
 I confess, I do not think that time is very 
 far distant." 
 
 " I hope it is ; I am very much attached 
 to England," replies the Princess Xenia, 
 gravely, "and to naughty English boys," 
 she adds, passing her hand o\'er the shining 
 locks of the Babe. 
 
 " She must be in lo\-e with an English- 
 man," thinks Brandolin, with the one-sided 
 
A H021SC Party. 125 
 
 construction which a man is always ready 
 to place on the words of a woman. " ^.lust 
 we go indoors ? "' he asks, regretfully, as she 
 is movinor towards the house. "It is so 
 pleasant in these quaint, green arbours. 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 mv hostess," 
 says ]vladame 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' 
 
126 A House Party. 
 
 bear them off to the schoolroom ; the Babe 
 goes to his doom sullenly : he would be 
 tearful, only that were too unmanly. 
 
 " Whv do vou let those Innocents be 
 tortured, George ? " asks Brandolin. 
 "'Books should, like business, entertain the day,'" 
 
 replies Usk ; '' ::o you said, at least, just 
 now. Their Qrovernesses 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 vou educate vour children 
 when vou have 'em, then ? " 
 
 ** He always gets out of any impersonal 
 argument by putting some personal question," 
 ■complains Brandolin to Madame Sabaroff. 
 "It is a common device, but always an un- 
 worthy 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 
 
A House Party. 127 
 
 them tauQ-ht in that wav at all. I should 
 o-et the wisest old man I could find, a 
 Samuel Johnson touched with a John 
 Ruskin, and should tell him to make 
 learnino; delio-htful 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 ? 
 Xo, mv old tutor tauQ^ht me to feel all the 
 deliofht and the sweet savour of him, 
 roamino; in the oak woods of mv own old 
 place." 
 
 '' I am devoutly thankful," says his host, 
 " that Dorothy, amongst her many caprices, 
 had never had the fancy you have for a 
 Dr. Johnson double with a John Ruskin, 
 to correct my quotations, abuse my archi- 
 tecture, and make prigs of the children." 
 
 " Prigs !" exclaimed Brandolin. '' Prigs ! 
 When did ever real scholarship and love 
 
128 A House Party. 
 
 of nature make anything approaching to a 
 prig ? Science and class-rooms make prions, 
 not Latin verse and cowslip meadows."' 
 
 ''That is true, I think," savs the Princess 
 Xenia, with her serious smile. 
 
 ''If thev are beq-innino: to aorree with one 
 another, I shall be dc trop.^^ thinks Usk. 
 who is verv crood-natured to his euests, 
 and popular enough with women not to be 
 resigned to play what is vulgarly termed 
 "second fiddle" (though why an expres- 
 sion borrowed from the orchestra should be 
 vulgar it were hard to say). So he goes 
 a few paces off to speak to a gardener ; 
 and by degrees edges away towards the 
 house, leaving Brandolin and Madame 
 Sabaroff to themselves in the creen vew 
 helmet arbour. 
 
 Brandolin is in love with his subject and 
 does not abandon it. 
 
 "It is absurd," he continues, "the wav 
 in which children are made to loathe all 
 
A House Painty. 12a 
 
 scholarship by Its association with their own 
 pains and subjection. A child is made, as 
 a punishment, to learn by rote fifty lines 
 of \'irgil. Good Heavens! It ought rather 
 to be as a reward that he should be 
 allowed to open \'irgil ! 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 
 books should be. on the contrarv, his 
 cruellest chastisement !" 
 
 "He would be a very exceptional child, 
 surely, if he thought so ?"' says ?vladame 
 Sabaroff 
 
 *' I was not an exceptional child," he 
 answers, "but that is how I was brought 
 up and how I felt." 
 
 '* You had an exceptional training, then T 
 
 "It ought not to be exceptional : that is 
 
 just the mischief. Up to the time I was 
 
 K 
 
130 ^ House Parly. 
 
 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 crood he 
 left behind him lives after him ; whatever 
 grains of sense I have shown, and what- 
 ever 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 
 studv which has been the greatest con- 
 solation and the purest pleasure of my 
 life. That is why I pity so profoundly 
 these poor Rochfort children, and the tens 
 of thousands like them, who are being 
 educated by the commonplace, flavourless, 
 cramming system which people call educa- 
 tion. It may be education ; it is not 
 culture. \\\ya\. will the Ilabe always asso- 
 ciate with his Latin themes .'^ Four walls, 
 hated books, inkv, achin^: fincfers and a 
 headache. Whereas, I never see a L.itin 
 
A House Party. 131 
 
 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 
 mvself the words of one, I always smell 
 the cowslips, and the lilac, and the haw- 
 thorn of the spring mornings when I was 
 a boy." 
 
 Xenia Sabaroff looked at him with some 
 httle wonder and more approval. 
 ■ " ]\Iv 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 under-rating 
 the influences of your tutor. I must believe 
 that had you been educated at an English 
 public school, or even in a French Lycee, 
 you would still have become a scholar, still 
 have loved vour books." 
 
 "Alas, ?^Iadame!" says Brandolln, with 
 
T 1 --> 
 
 A House Party, 
 
 a little sigh. '* Perhaps I have only been 
 what Matthew Arnold calls ' a foiled cir- 
 cuitous wanderer ' in the orbit of life !" 
 
 " I imarrine that vou have not very often 
 been foiled," replies the lady, with a smile, 
 " and wandering has a great deal to be 
 said in its favour, especially for a man. 
 Women are happiest, perhaps, at anchor." 
 
 '' Women used to be : not our women ; 
 nous avons chaiif^d tout ccla. But I have 
 bored you too much with myself and my 
 opinions." 
 
 " No, you Interest me," says his com- 
 panion, with a serious serenity which de- 
 prives the words of all sound of llattery 
 or encouragement. " I have long admired 
 your writings," she adds, and Brandolin 
 colours a litde 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 
 
A House Party. 133 
 
 and humiliates him. But the admiration 
 of as lovely a woman as Xenia Sabaroti 
 would lay a flattering unction to the soul 
 of any man, even if she were absolutely 
 mindless ; and she gives him the impres- 
 sion that she has a good deal of mind, 
 and one out of the common order. 
 
 '' AIv writings have no other merit," he 
 says, after the expression of his sense of 
 the honour she does him, "than being abso- 
 lutely 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 Xewman 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 wandering if one has a home," replies 
 :\Iadame Sabaroff, with a slight sigh, which 
 gave him the impression, that though, no 
 
134 ^'^ House Party. 
 
 doubt, she had many I:ouses, 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 traditions of his race, 
 which make many people accuse him of 
 great family pride, though, as has been 
 well said 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 artists touch, its antiquities, its land- 
 scapes, and its old - world and sylvan 
 charms. 
 
 " It must be charmincr to care for anv 
 place so much as that," says his companion, 
 after hearing him with interest. 
 
 " I think one cares niore for places than 
 for people," he replies. 
 
A Ho 7 IS e Party. 135 
 
 *' Sometimes one cares for neither," says 
 Xenia Sabarorf. with a tone which in a 
 less lovelv 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 verv bio; cedar near at hand ; ser- 
 vants are brinoino; out foldino^ tables, fold- 
 ing chairs, a silver camp kettle, cakes, Iruit, 
 cream, liqueurs, sandwiches, wines, all those 
 items of an afternoon tea on which Bran- 
 dolin has animadverted with so much disgust 
 in the librarv an hour before. Lady L sk 
 has chosen to take these murderous com- 
 pounds 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, as he rises with regret from 
 his seat under the evero-reen helmet. 
 
 Xenia Sabaroff is pleased at the expres- 
 
136 A House Party. 
 
 sion. She is too handsome for men often 
 to speak to her rationally ; they usually 
 plunge headlong into attempts at homage 
 and tlatterv, of which she is nauseated. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 " How do vou like Lord Brandolin ? " says 
 Ladv Usk. when she can sav so unobserved. 
 
 " I like him very much." replies ]\Iadame 
 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 Phcenix 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 ultimatelv fill all offices 
 
13S A House Party. 
 
 of State that the ambition of an Enelishman 
 can aspire to ; and Xenia Sabaroft' is so 
 enormously rich, as well as so unusually 
 handsome, that it would be a perfectly 
 ideal union ; and, desiring it infinitely, the 
 mistress of Surrenden, with that tact 
 which distinguishes herself, has never 
 named Lord Gervase to the Princess 
 Sabaroff nor the Princess Sabaroft" to 
 Lord Gervase. He is to be at Surrenden 
 in a week's time. Xow. she vaeuelv 
 wishes that Brandolin had not these eieht 
 days' start of him. But, then, Bran- 
 dolin, she knows, will only flirt ; that is 
 to say, if the Russian lady allows him to 
 do so ; he is an unconscionable flirt, and 
 never means anything by his tenderest 
 speeches. Brandolin, she knows, is not a 
 person who will ever marry ; he has lost 
 scores of the most admiral)le opportunities, 
 and rejected the fairest and best filled 
 hands that have been offered to him. 
 
A House Party. 139 
 
 To the orderly mind of Lady Usk, he 
 represents an Ishmael for ever wandering 
 In wild woods, outside the pale of general 
 civilisation. 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 fashion. 
 A verv 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. 
 
 '' Whv don't vou ever m.arrv, Lord Bran- 
 dolln ?" asks Dorothy Usk the next day. 
 " Why have you never married ?"' 
 
 ''Because he's much too sensible," growls 
 her husband, but adds, with Infinite com- 
 passion : " He'll have to, some day, or the 
 name will die out." 
 
 " Yes, I shall have to, some dav, to use 
 
140 A House Party. 
 
 your very grammatical expression," assents 
 Brandolin. " I don't wish the name to die 
 out. and there's nobody to come after me 
 except the Southesk-\'anes, who detest me 
 as I detest them." 
 
 '' Well, then, why not make some mar- 
 riage, at once ? " says Lady Usk. " I 
 know so many charming " 
 
 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 
 possibly, 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 aofo that vou must 
 marry ! " she observes, with some impatience. 
 
 " Dh, there Is no positive 'must' about 
 it," says Brandolin, dubiously. "The name 
 
A House Party. 141 
 
 doesn't matter Q-reatlv, after all; it Is onlv 
 that I don't like the place to go to the 
 Southesk - \'anes ; 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 mv Indian beasts, strangle my 
 African birds, turn my old servants adrift, 
 and make the country round hideous with 
 high farming." 
 
 '' ]\Iarrv, then, and put an end to any 
 possibility so dreadful.'' says Dorothy L sk. 
 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 affectionate 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 
 
142 A House Pafiy. 
 
 tiresome. A naughty woman is delightful ; 
 but then she is, if you marry her, com- 
 promising. Which am I to take of the two ? 
 I should be bored to death by what Renan 
 calls la fciimic pure, and against la femrne 
 tarec' as a wife, I have a prejudice. The 
 women who would amuse me, I would not 
 marry if I 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 f^imily pride." 
 
 Lady Usk feels shocked, but she does 
 not like to show it, because it is e?o old- 
 fashioned and prudish and arrierd now-a- 
 days to be shocked at anything. 
 
 '* I have thouQ^ht about it verv often, I 
 assure vou," continues Brandolin, " and 
 sometimes I have really thought that I 
 would marrv a hio^h-caste Hindoo woman. 
 They are very beautiful, and their forms 
 far more exquisite than any European's, 
 
A House Party, 143 
 
 wholly uncramped as they are by any 
 stays, and accustomed to spend so many 
 hours on all kinds of arts for the embellish- 
 ment of the skin." 
 
 " I don't think, you know," Lady Usk 
 interposes hastily, to repress more re- 
 miniscences, " that vou need be afraid of 
 the young girls of our time being innocent ; 
 they are eveilUcs enough, Heaven knows, 
 and experienced enough in all conscience." 
 
 " Oh, but that is odious," says Brandolin, 
 with diso'ust. " The o-irls of the day are 
 horrible ; nothing is unknown to them ; 
 thev smoke, thev Q^amble, 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 extrayaQ-ance. Lord deliver 
 me from any one of them! I would sooner 
 see St. Hubert's Lea cut up into allot- 
 ment - grounds than save it from the 
 
144 ^ House Party. 
 
 Southesk-X'anes bv marrvlno: a debutante 
 with her mind fixed on establishing herself, 
 and her youthful memories already full of 
 dead-and-o^one flirtations. Xo I let me 
 wait for Dodo, if you will give me per- 
 mission to educate her." 
 
 " 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'm afraid you would return 
 her to us, and sigh for your high-caste 
 Hindoo." 
 
 '' Prav, how would vou educate her ; what 
 is missing in her present education ? " asks 
 Lady Usk, somewhat piqued at what he 
 implies. 
 
 *' I would let her see a great deal more 
 of her 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 
 
A House Party. 145 
 
 ought to be flattered or offended. Bran- 
 dolln has a way of mingling graceful com- 
 pliments 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 
 w^hat he means," she thinks, irritably. " I 
 do believe he intends to imply that I neglect 
 mv children ! " 
 
 Brandolin seems to her an unpleasant 
 man ; eccentric, 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 women have much better figures than 
 we have," she says, an hour later to Leila 
 Faversham. 
 
 "Black women!" exclaims that ladv, in 
 unspeakable horror. 
 
 *' Well, Hindoos ; it is the same thing," 
 says Lady Usk, with that ignorance of her 
 
 L 
 
146 A House Party. 
 
 Indian fellow-subjects which is characteristic 
 of EnMish society, from the hio^hest strata 
 to the lowest. 
 
 " Oh. he is always so odd, you know," 
 says ]\Irs. Faversham, as of a person whom 
 it is hopeless even to discuss. Brandolin is 
 indeed so odd that he has never perceived 
 her own attractions. What can seem odder 
 to a pretty woman than that ? 
 
 Leila Faversham tells Ladv 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 Warw^ickshire, just as he keeps the 
 Indian animals and the African birds." 
 
 '' How very shocking ! " says Lady 
 Dawlish. " But I daresay it is very 
 economical ; they only eat a spoonful of 
 rice and wear a yard of calico, you know, 
 and as he is so poor that must suit him." 
 
 Lady Dawlish tells this fact to Nina 
 Curzon, addino; various embellishments of 
 
A House Party. 147 
 
 her fancy ; ]^Irs. Curzoii thinks the notion 
 new and amusing ; she writes of it that 
 mornino; to a journal of societv which she 
 occasionallv honours with news of her 
 world, not from want of the editor's fees, 
 but from the amusement it affords her to 
 destroy the characters of her acquaintances. 
 The journal will immediately, she knows, 
 produce a mysterious but sensational para- 
 graph regarding the black women in War- 
 wickshire, or some other article headed 
 " An Hereditary Legislator 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 
 Brandolin that evening, as he dresses for 
 dinner. *' Interesting, and, moreover, with 
 something original, something mysterious 
 and suggestive in her. Despite Lady Usk, 
 there is a difference still in different nation- 
 
148 A House Party. 
 
 allties. I could still swear to an English- 
 woman anywhere, if I only saw the back of 
 her head and her shoulders. Xo English- 
 woman could have the delicious 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 favourably 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 
 developed between the shoulder and 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 
 
A House Party. 149 
 
 say so a hundred times. She has it, and 
 so she wears that flat bracelet to emphasise 
 the fact." 
 
 Brandolin feels annoyed. There is no 
 reason in life why he should object to 
 Aladame Sabaroft' having any number of 
 affectations and vanities, or why he should 
 mind hearing^ this handsome old vivetir 
 discuss them ; but he is annoved bv both 
 facts. 
 
 There is not a plain woman amongst the 
 Qfuests at Surrenden, some are even far 
 bevond the averao-e of ^ood looks, and all 
 have that c/iic which lends in itself a kind 
 of beauty to the woman of the world. But 
 the handsomest of them all. Xina Curzon 
 herself, pales beside the beautiful pallor of 
 the Russian lady, contrasted as it is Vvith 
 the splendour of her jewels, the red rose 
 of her lips, and the darkness of her eye- 
 lashes and eyes. 
 
 At dinner, Xenia Sabaroff does not speak 
 
150 A House Party, 
 
 much ; she has a dreamy look, almost a 
 fatigued one. 
 
 Brandolin is opposite to her : as there 
 are no ornaments or flowers on the table 
 higher than eight inches, he can contem- 
 plate 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, anti- 
 thetical, 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 livinrr 
 and famous personages ; the result is ad- 
 mirable, and has earned him his o-reat 
 reputation as a raconteur of contemporary 
 
A House Party. 151 
 
 scandal. He has six delicious things ready 
 now, and he cannot iind 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 yictlm. 
 
 ''A monologuist, a monologuist I " replies 
 ]^Ir. Wootton, with a deprecatory accent. 
 
 Lady Arthur is silenced, for she has not 
 the slightest Idea what a monologuist is. 
 She fancies it means some kind of a 
 sect like the ?vIormons, and Brandolin is 
 so odd that he may possibly belong to a 
 sect, or may haye founded one, like Law- 
 rence Oliphant. She remembers the black 
 women that they talked of, and does not 
 like to ask, being a sensitlye person, yery 
 delicate-minded and perfectly proper, except 
 her one little affair with Sir Hugo, which 
 eyerybody says is most creditable to her, 
 Arthur Audley being the scamp that he Is. 
 
152 A House Party. 
 
 Dinner over. Branclolln finds a pleasant 
 seat on a low chair behind the bigger 
 chair on which ^sladame Sabaroff is reclin- 
 ing ; other men devoted to other women 
 look longingly at her : some approach ; 
 Brandolin comprehends why she Is not 
 beloved in her generation by her own 
 sex. 
 
 After a time she is induced to sins: ; she 
 has a very sweet \'oIce of great power, 
 with much pathos in It : she sings \'olk- 
 slieder of her own countrv, stranq^e, vearninor 
 wistful sonQ^s, full of the vaq^ue mvstical 
 melancholy of the Russian peasant. She 
 ceases to sing abruptly, and walks back to 
 seat ; her diamonds o:leam in the ll^fht 
 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 those attachments 
 which have so often at once embellished 
 and disturbed his existence. 
 
A House Party. i 
 
 JO 
 
 Like all romantic people, his heart is 
 much vounsfer than his vears. It has not 
 been scarred by any one of those tragic 
 passions which, like fire on a hillside, 
 wither up all Q-reen thino-s, so that not a 
 blade of grass will grow v/here it has 
 passed. He has usually found love only 
 the most agreeable of pastimes. He has 
 always wondered why anybody allows it 
 to tear their life to tatters, as a bad actor 
 tears a tine 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 philoso- 
 pher, 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 \'enus, and found that the 
 Jiuman creature's defects outbalanced her 
 
154 ^ House Party. 
 
 charms, cind 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 certain 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 hands in the pockets of a 
 loose velvet jacket, he summons 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 nothino' at all about this 
 lad\-, exce^jt that she has a voice like 
 Albani's, big jewels, and a Russian name !" 
 he thinks, with some derision of himself : 
 
A House Party. 155 
 
 the smokers do not find him amusing, while 
 
 his companions seem to him Insufterably 
 
 tiresome. He hears the echo of ^Madame 
 
 Sabaroffs grave, low, melodious voice, and 
 
 Is not In temper for the somewhat scabreux 
 
 jests of the Sxmoklng-room. He thinks that 
 
 it Is all very well for boys to like that 
 
 sort of salacious talk, but It seems to him In- 
 
 tolerablv absurd that men of his own ao^e. and 
 
 older, should hnd any kind of savour In it. 
 
 Thev tease him about the black women, 
 
 moreover, and for once he Is not easy 
 
 enough to be good-tempered and Indlfterent. 
 
 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 ?vlrs. Curzon's 
 
 anecdote. 
 
 " What stupid stories that old blagiicur 
 Wootton has told, and what beastly ones 
 Fred Ormond has related ; and all as if 
 they were something new, too ; as If the 
 
156 A Ho7ise Party. 
 
 one weren't taken out 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 thev hold their 
 tonofues ? And what fools we are to sit 
 shut up with gaslights and tobacco on such 
 a nio^ht as this ; a niofht 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, sug- 
 gestive 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 the black- 
 l)irds scraping and turning over the mould 
 and the grass ; it is dark, yet he can 
 distlno^ulsh the masses of the crreat woods 
 beyond the gardens, the outlines of the 
 trees near his casement, the shape of 
 the clouds as they mo\'e slowly southward. 
 
A Ho7ise Party. 157 
 
 He wonders in v\-hat part of the old house, 
 whose fantastic roofs and turrets, and gar- 
 goyles and ivy coloured 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 Tslr. 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 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 
 Usk, angrily, always ready to defend a 
 friend in absence. 
 
15S A House Party. 
 
 "Oh, books I" says ^\\\ Wootton, with 
 bland but unutterable disdain. ^Ir. Wootton 
 Is a critic of books, and therefore naturally 
 despises them. 
 
 "What would vou have him do?" crrowls 
 Usk, pugnaciously. 
 
 ^\r. Wootton stretches his legs out, and 
 2fazes with abstracted air at the celllnor. 
 " Public life," he murmurs. " Public life Is 
 the only possible career for an English- 
 man of position. But it demands sacrifices, 
 It demands sacrifices." 
 
 "You mean that one has to marry?" 
 says the young Duke of Whitby, timidly. 
 [Mr. Wootton smiles on him loftily. 
 " Marrv ! Yes. undoubtedly ; and avoid 
 scandals afterwards ; avoid, bevond all, 
 those connections which lend such a charm 
 to existence, but are so apt to get Into 
 the newspapers !" 
 
 There Is a general laugh. 
 
 Mr. Wootton has not Intended to make 
 
A House Party. 159 
 
 them laugh, and he resumes with stateHness, 
 as though they had not interrupted him, 
 "The country expects those sacrifices; no 
 man succeeds in iDubhc hfe in E no-land 
 who does not make them." 
 
 " ^Melbourne, Palmerston. Sydney Her- 
 bert surely didn't make "em?" murmurs 
 one rebellious hearer. 
 
 Air. \\ ootton waves him aside, as he 
 would do an importunate flv : " 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 a 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 Beaconsfield remarked 
 to me once " 
 
 And Mr. Wootton tells a storv of Disraeli, 
 
i6o A House Party. 
 
 a verv eood storv, onlv he has taken it 
 out of the journals of the President des 
 Brosses and fathered it on to Disraeli. 
 But ^I. le President des Brosses is an author 
 seldom read now, and nobody knows ; if 
 thev did, nobody would care. 
 
 " Public opinion," he resumes, " is irresis- 
 tible in England, and if it once turn against 
 a man, were he ^Messiah himself, he could 
 do nothing. It is not an intelligent 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 he may have an un- 
 seemly 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 who 
 compromises him. It thinks, unhappily or 
 happily as you may choose to consider, 
 that genius should keep the whole ten 
 
A House Party. i6i 
 
 commandments. Now, genius Is con- 
 spicuous for breaking them." 
 
 Mr. Wootton here knocks a little ash 
 off his clear, 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 
 malversation hurt the gentleman in public 
 estimation 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 for ever under it if it had got 
 talked about ; he would never have ex- 
 plained It away, or made It even contin- 
 
 M 
 
-[62 A House Party. 
 
 ■gently endurable to the nation. You may, 
 If vou 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 abvss of unmeasured and unmeasur- 
 able 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 rumoured that you admire your 
 neighbour's wife, down you go for ever. 
 And yet," continues Mr. Wootton, pensively, 
 " people do admire their neighbour'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 
 
A House Party. 163 
 
 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 honour 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 jealousies 
 or demagogue's greeds. 
 
 ''Do vou reallv think .^ " savs 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, vou 
 know ? " 
 
164 A House Party. 
 
 "It Is most necessary to appear to keep 
 very straight," replies ^\x. Wootton. 
 
 The two things are obviously different 
 to the meanest capacity. 
 
 The vounof man sloths. 
 
 "And to have that — that — appearance, 
 one must be married ? " 
 
 " Indisputably. Marriage Is as necessary 
 to respectability In an^ great position as a 
 brougham to a doctor, or a butler to a 
 bishop. It Is like a judge's wig : the wig 
 is absurd, tiresome, stIHIng, but It Imposes 
 on the public and must be worn," replies 
 the elder, smiling compassionately at the 
 wick of his candle. He does not care 
 a straw^ about the Duke, he has no 
 daucrhters to marrv, and ]\Ir. Wootton's 
 social eminence Is far beyond the power 
 of dukes or princes to make or mend. 
 
 " Rut," stammers his Grace of Whitby, 
 growing red, yet burning with a desire 
 for Instruction, " but don't you think 
 
A House Party. 165 
 
 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. 
 
 '' TJiat luould depend entirely iipon the 
 lady s temper^' 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 sad- 
 ness and perplexity. 
 
 The temper of Lady Dolgelly Is a known 
 quantity, and the quality of It Is alarming. 
 Ladv Dolofellv Is not vouno^, she is Qrood- 
 looking, and she has debts. Lord Dolgelly 
 has. Indeed, hitherto let her pay her debts 
 In any way she chose, being occupied 
 enough with paying such of his own as 
 he cannot bv anv dexterltv avoid ; but 
 there Is no knowing what he may do any 
 
1 66 A House Parly, 
 
 day out of caprice or ill-nature, and although 
 he will never obtain a divorce, he mav trv 
 for one. which will equally effectually con- 
 vulse the Duke's countv, and the Cathedral 
 city which is situated In its centre. His 
 own aftair with Lady Dolgelly 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 London, until London Qrrew tired of 
 it ; he is, Indeed, aware that evervbodv 
 invites them in the kindest manner together, 
 but he attributes this coincidence to her 
 tact In the manag^ement of her set and 
 choice of her own engagements. 
 
 The human mind Is like the ostrich, Its 
 own projects serve to it the purpose which 
 sand plays to the ostrich ; comfortably 
 buried in them It defies the scrutiny of 
 mankind ; wrajjt in Its own absorbing 
 passions it leaves Its hansom before a 
 lady's hall door, or leaves its coroneted 
 
A House Party. 167 
 
 handkerchief on a bachelor's couch, and 
 never dreams that the world is looking 
 on round the corner or through the key- 
 hole. Human nature, the moment It Is 
 interested, becomes blind. Therefore, the 
 Duke has put his question In all good 
 faith. 
 
 He would abhor any kind of scandal 
 He is devoted 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 
 uncomfortable If he thought people were 
 talking grossly of him In his own county ; 
 and he has a horror of Lord Dolgelly^ 
 noisy, Insolent, coarse, a gambler, and a 
 rake. 
 
 Arrived at his bedroom door, Mr. 
 Wootton Is touched vaguely with a kind 
 feeling towards his humble interrogator, or 
 with some other sentiment less kindly, it 
 may be. He pauses, looks straight before 
 
i68 A House Party. 
 
 him at the wick of his candle, and speaks 
 Avith that oracular air so becoming to him, 
 ^vhich many ungrateful people are known 
 to loathe. 
 
 " That kind of connections are invariably 
 dangerous, 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, especially if the 
 lady be no longer young. When a woman 
 is no longer young there is a desperate 
 achaiiicniciil in her tenacity about a last 
 passion which is like that of the mariner 
 clinging to a spar in the midst of a gusty 
 
^4 House Party. 169 
 
 sea. It is not easy for the spar to dis- 
 engage itself. On the whole, therefore, 
 women of rank are, perhaps, best avoided 
 in this sense. Passions are safest which 
 can be terminated by the cheque-book. 
 The cheque-book is not always, indeed, 
 refused bv crreat ladies— when thev are in 
 debt — but a cheque-book is an unpleasant 
 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 doorway. 
 
 He smiles a little blandly as his man 
 undresses him. Five vears before, Lady 
 Dolgelly oftended 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 in- 
 accessible but indelible note - book, his 
 memory, he has written her name down 
 
1 70 A House Party. 
 
 as that of one to whom he has a debt to 
 pay. '\fc lui ai domic dn fil a ixtoi'drc,'' 
 he thinks, as he drops into his first doze. ■ 
 
CHAPTER VHI. 
 
 *'Alax is really coming to-morrow!" says 
 Dorothy Usk to her lord, with pleasure, 
 a few days later, looking up from a 
 telegram. 
 
 "How you excite yourself!" says Usk, 
 with rude disdain. " What can you see 
 in him to care about ? He is a pretentious 
 humbug, if ever there was one ! " 
 
 " George ! " She regards him with horror 
 and amaze. Is he wholly cut 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 Warwick- 
 shire. 
 
 '' A pretentious humbug," repeats Usk. 
 He likes to ticket his relations and con- 
 
172 A House Party. 
 
 nections with well-chosen descriptions. "All 
 ofood looks and soft sawder ; women like 
 that sort of thing " 
 
 '* Of course, we like good manners, 
 though they are not your weakness," in- 
 terrupts his wife, with acerbity. " Alan 
 has the manners of a man who respects 
 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. " jNIy dear Dolly, 
 vou'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 
 mav understand doQ^s and horses, and deer 
 and jxirtridges, but about human nature he 
 
A House Party. 173 
 
 knows no more than the old man at the 
 lod2:e Q^ates. 
 
 " Surely she can't be soft on Gervase 
 herself, " her husband reflects, with a 
 sensation of amusement ; "it would be 
 too funnv after runnino- so straio^ht all 
 these years, and just as her daugh::jrs 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 Gervase, such a coxcomb 
 and such a humbuQ^ as the fellow is ! 
 
 '' Respect women, good Lord I "" ejacu- 
 lated Usk in his solitude. 
 
 " To be sure.'" adds that honest Qrentle- 
 man in his own mind. " there are very 
 few of 'em who would thank you to 
 respect 'em now-a-days." 
 
 *' Gervase will be here to-morrow,"" he 
 savs in the course of the dav to Princess 
 Sabaroff. 
 
1 74 ^ House Party, 
 
 " Indeed," she replies, with indifference, 
 " who is he ?" 
 
 "A friend of mv wife's ; at least a cousin; 
 I thouQrht vou miofht know him ; he was 
 some time In Russia." 
 
 "Xo. ' There is a coldness in the nega- 
 tive disproportloned 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 another," 
 says Brandolin. "He will have one quali- 
 fication rare In an English foreign minister; 
 dally growing rarer, thanks to the imbecili- 
 ties of examinations; he knows how to bow 
 and he knows what to say." 
 
 "A friend of yours?" 
 
 " Oh, no ; an acquaintance. He thinks 
 \-er)' ill of me." 
 
 "Why.^" 
 
 " Because I do nothing for my country. 
 He thinks he does a great deal when he 
 
A House Party. 175 
 
 has fomented a quarrel or received a 
 decoration." 
 
 " That is not orenerous. 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." 
 
 " 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 Toryism of Peel, mine 
 is the Toryism of Pitt — there are leagues 
 between the two." 
 
 " I know : the one is Opportunism ; the 
 other is Optimate-ism." 
 
 " Perhaps," says Brandolin. 
 " Does she know Gervase, despite her 
 denial ?" he wonders. He has an impres- 
 sion that she does. There was a look of 
 recoQfnition in her eves when she gave that 
 vague, bland gesture in answer to her host. 
 All trifles in her interest him, as they 
 
176 u4 Ho? ISC Party, 
 
 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 discourse 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 maiti-e, 
 a posc7u\ 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 aristocratic birth. 
 
 Meanwhile, In her own room, Xenia 
 Sabaroff is pursuing her own reflections 
 whilst her maid disrobes her. 
 
 "It will be better to see him once and 
 for all," she muses. " I cannot go on for 
 ever avoiding him in every city in Europe. 
 
A House Party. 177 
 
 \'en- likely he will not even remember my 
 face or my name I" 
 
 She feels a strong temptation to Invent 
 some plausible reason and break off her 
 visit to Surrenden: but she is a courao^eous 
 woman, and dight is repugnant to her. 
 More than once of late she has avoided a 
 meetinsr which is disao^reeable to her bv 
 some abrupt change of her own plans or 
 reversal of her own engagements. To con- 
 tinue to do this seems weakness. Indeed, 
 to do it at all seems too great a liattery 
 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 equally an humiliation. She 
 is a proud woman, as well as a courageous 
 one. There are memories associated with 
 
 N 
 
i;S A Ho2tse Party. 
 
 this coming guest which are bitter and 
 hateful. 
 
 Women Hke Mrs. Wentworth Curzon 
 carry such memories Hghtly, 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 difterent to them. 
 
 It has not been difficult for her to avoid 
 meetlnof 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 
 departure 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. 
 
A House Party. lyg 
 
 Yet she is conscious of a sense of pain 
 and excitation as her woman puts on her a 
 maize satin tea-gown, covered with point 
 d'Alencon, at five o'clock the next dav, and 
 she knows that when she goes down to 
 the tea-room in a few minutes Gervase, 
 who was to arrive by the afternoon train, 
 will in all probability be present there. 
 
 Everyone is indoors 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 drinking a glass of Kummel, and Bran- 
 dolin is playing with the dog ; conversing 
 with Nina Curzon and the mistress of the 
 house, and standinsf in front of them, is a 
 tall, fair man, irreproachable in temtc, and 
 extremely distinguished in appearance. He 
 
I So A House Party. 
 
 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, toppHng over a stool and treading 
 mercilessly on the trains of tea-fjowns 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 im- 
 passive features. 
 
 "Is that not Princess Sabaroff?" he asks 
 of his hostess, with a certain breathless 
 astonishment betrayed in his voice. 
 
 Lady Usk assents. *'One of my dearest 
 friends," she adds. " I think vou 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, kneel- 
 ing half on her lap and half off it, with 
 no respect for the maize satin, whilst his 
 
A House Party, i8i 
 
 impatient little feet beat the devil's tatoo 
 amongst the point d'Alencon. 
 
 '' My dear Babe, do not be such a mon- 
 opolist," said Brandolin, as he approaches 
 with a cup of tea and a wafer of caviare 
 bread and butter. "Your shoes have 
 seventeenth-centurv buckles, it is true, vet 
 still thev are scarcelv bibelots to be 
 wTapped 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. 
 
 Xenia Sabaroff does not take as much 
 notice of him as usual. She is reserved 
 and pre-occupied. Brandolin, 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, unconscious impulse 
 of curiosity. 
 
1 82 A House Party, 
 
 Brandolin notes the gesture, as her actions 
 have an interest for him which grows daily 
 in its fascination. " There is Dorothy Usk'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 dis- 
 pleasure or constraint. 
 
 " Lady Usk is very soon satisfied," she 
 replies, coldly. "Her own amiability makes 
 her see perfection everywhere." 
 
 '* It is a quality we cannot value too 
 highly in so imperfect a world. It is 
 better than seeing everything en noii\ 
 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 absurd and untrue. Our Dostoievsky 
 Is a wiser novelist than vour Dickens. Yet 
 one is so weak, one must believe something." 
 
 " It is pretty for a woman to think so," 
 
A Hottse Party. 183 
 
 says Brandolin. "but myself, I have never 
 seen why. I may hope, I may wish, I 
 may regret, I may — if I am very sanguine, 
 even expect ; but beheve — no !" 
 
 " Perhaps I should like to believe in a 
 woman," he adds, more softly, with that 
 inflection of his voice which has alwavs 
 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 weariness, "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 com- 
 panion. 
 
 Then she drops the subject decidedly by 
 approaching the other ladies. Brandolin 
 has a faint sense of discomfiture and 
 sadness ; he is accustomed to very facile 
 
184 A House Party. 
 
 conquests ; and yet he is not a coxcomb like 
 Lawrence Hamilton ; he does not precisely 
 anticipate 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 enougfh to 
 think that he dislikes mystery, yet, as an 
 element of romance, it has always an 
 irresistible fascination for romantic tem- 
 peraments. 
 
 Gervase, meanwhile, has sunk into a chair 
 by the side of Xina Curzon, and is saying in 
 a whisper, "Who is that lady .^ The one 
 with her back to us. to whom Lord Bran- 
 dolin is so ciuprcssc ? I thought I knew all 
 the Usks' people." 
 
 " Look in vour Russian memories, and 
 you will probably find that you know her 
 too," rejjlies Mrs. Curzon. 
 
 " Oh, she is Russian ^. " says Gervase, 
 
A Hottse Party. 185 
 
 then adds, neelieentlv, " I think, now vou 
 tell me that, I have seen her before. Is 
 she not the Princess Sabaroff?" 
 
 " Why did you pretend not to know her," 
 thinks Xina Curzon, as she answers : " Yes, 
 that is her name. You must have met her 
 in Petersburg." 
 
 •' Petersburg is verv dim in mv memories," 
 he replies, evasively. ''Its baccarat Is what 
 made the deepest impression on my remem- 
 brance and my fortunes. Xow 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 
 rlo^ht ?" 
 
 " vSo charming for her," savs Xina Cur- 
 zon. " Englishwomen never have anything 
 happen for them picturesque like that ; 
 our men always die of Indigeston or 
 going after a fox." 
 
 " It is very curious." 
 
 " What is ? Dyspepsia ? Hunting ? " 
 
1 86 A HozLse Party. 
 
 " How one comes across people." 
 
 '"After long years,'" quotes Mrs. Cur- 
 zon, 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 one set In It that Is decent, so we 
 can't ever get out of It. It must have 
 been verv nice In Romeo and Juliet's davs 
 when a little drive to ]^Iantua took you 
 into realms wholly inaccessable to your 
 Verona acquaintances. Xow-a-days, 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, de- 
 spite our improved facilities, we are not 
 constant." 
 
 " He means to Impl\- that he threw over 
 the Sabaroff," thinks Mrs. Curzon, " but 
 he is such a boaster of his bomics fortunes 
 
A House Party. 187 
 
 that one can never know whether he is 
 Ivlno^/' 
 
 " Prav let me make you known to 
 Madame Sabaroff," savs Ladv Usk to him 
 a httle later. " She is such a very dear 
 friend of mine, and I see you have been 
 lookine 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 perfectly well-bred and 
 impassive, it might almost be said that the 
 suggested presentation hlls him with some 
 vaofue nervousness. 
 
 Nina Curzon watches him inquisitively 
 as he is led up and presented to [Madame 
 Sabaroff. 
 
 "I think I have had the honour before 
 now in Petersburg," murmurs Gervase. 
 She looks at him very coldly. 
 
 ''I think not." she replies; the words are 
 of the simplest, but cest le ton qui 
 
iS8 A House Party. 
 
 fait la in2Lsiq2ie, and for the solitary time 
 In his existence, Lord Gervase is embar- 
 rassed. 
 
 BrandoHn, playing with the collie 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 daresay you have 
 forgotten ; his father was alive and his 
 name was Baird, then, you know." 
 
 Xenia Sabaroff makes a little polite 
 gesture expressive of entire Indifference to 
 the change in these tides. With an action 
 which would be rude in anv woman less 
 high-bred, she turns away her head and 
 speaks to BrandoHn, ignoring the acquaint- 
 ance and the presence of Gervase. 
 
 Across the Qrood-natured and busv brain 
 of her hostess there Hashes an electric and 
 odious thought ; is It i)ossIble that Usk 
 may be right, and tliat tliere may be 
 somethini^ wronor after all in this her latest 
 
A House Party. 1S9 
 
 and most adored friend ? She feels that 
 she will die of suffocated curiosity if she 
 do not speedily get her cousin alone, and 
 learn all he has ever known or heard of 
 the Princess Sabaroff 
 
 "A snub direct I'" whispers Lawrence 
 Hamilton to ^Ir. Wootton. 
 
 *' Or a cut direct ; which ?" says that 
 far-sio^hted Qrentleman. 
 
 *' Anvhow, 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, colours, and looks at once annoyed 
 and confused. He stands before Xenia 
 Sabaroff for a few moments hesitatino^ and 
 irresolute, conscious that everyone is look- 
 ing at him ; then he takes refuge with 
 Lady Dawlish, whom he detests, because 
 she is the nearest person to him. 
 
iQO A House Party, 
 
 ** Madame Sabaroff is eclipsing the black 
 women. '" says that lady. 
 
 " What black women ?" asks Gervase, 
 very inattentive and bored. She tells him 
 the story of the Hindoo harem and he 
 hears no word of It. 
 
 " Brandolln is alwavs so odd," he savs, 
 indifferently, watching the hand of Xenia 
 Sabaroff as it rests on the shoulder of the 
 Babe who Is leanln^r ao^alnst her knees 
 gazing at her adoringly. 
 
 "Why did you pretend not to know 
 her ? " says Mrs. Curzon to him. 
 
 He smiles the fatuous smile with which 
 a man ingeniously 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 XIna Curzon, the words, 
 although so modest, tell her as much as 
 the loudest boast could do. 
 
 Gervase is angered. Irritated, interested 
 
A Ho2tse Party. 191 
 
 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 Sur- 
 renden Court saw him In It. '' W^hat a fool 
 Dolly was not to tell me she was here," he 
 thinks, forgetting that his 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 an eternity! And she is 
 handsomer than she was then ; very hand- 
 some ; 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 
 Dawllsh. 
 
 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 indifference recon- 
 
192 A House Party. 
 
 ciles her to herself. Is It possible, she 
 wonders, that she ever loved, or ever 
 thought that she loved, this man ? 
 
 Throughout that evening he does not 
 venture to approach her again, and he 
 endeavours to throw himself with some 
 show of warmth into a tlirtation with 
 Nina Curzon. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Gervase saunters into his hostess's boudoir 
 the next morning, avaihng himself of 
 the privilege accorded 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 Cupldon ; 
 yet, despite the frivolity of these associa- 
 tions, she contrives to get through a vast 
 
 o 
 
194 ^ House Par-ty. 
 
 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 being 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 cccur to the 
 recital of their attachments to other 
 women. \^ery often she gives them very 
 good advice, but she does not obtrude it 
 unseasonablv. " An awfullv nice woman 
 all round," is the general verdict of her 
 visitants to the boudoir. She does not 
 seek to be more than that to them. 
 
 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 favourite cigarettes, praises some 
 
A Ho2Lse Party. 195 
 
 new china, suggests an alteration in the 
 arrangement of the fans, and makes critical 
 discourses apropos of her collection of snuff- 
 boxes. 
 
 When he is going away, he lingers a 
 moment, intently looking at a patch box 
 of vernis ?vlartin, 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 per- 
 fectly charming ?" 
 
 ''Very good-looking," says Gervase, 
 absently. " You don't know anvthins: about 
 her, then ?'' 
 
 " Know ?" repeats his hostess. " What 
 should I know ? What everybody does, 
 I suppose. I met her first at the Duchess 
 de Luynes. You can't possibly mean that 
 there can be anything — anything " 
 
196 A House Party. 
 
 *' Oh, no," replies Gervase, but It pro- 
 duces on his questioner the same effect as 
 If he had said '' Oh, yes." 
 
 "How odious men are! Such scandal- 
 mongers," says 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 reputation just 
 by raising his eyebrows or twisting his 
 moustache !" 
 
 " I have no moustache 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 acquaintance ?" 
 
 " 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 
 
A Ho2ise Party, 197 
 
 — and of course one knows he was shot 
 In a duel about her, and I beHeve 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 to calumny, but the 
 protestation produces on her the impres- 
 sion that he could tell her a great deal 
 wholly to the contrary if he chose. 
 
 " She certalnlv was stavino: with ?vladame 
 de Luynes," she Insists. 
 
 "Whoever said the ladv mlo^ht 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 
 
198 A Ilotcsc Party. 
 
 more strictly In the school-room, and not 
 let them wander about over the park as 
 thev do with their Russian friend most 
 mornings. 
 
 " One can never be too careful with 
 children of that age," she muses, '' and 
 they are terribly evilldes 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 characterises as " weather- 
 cocky." 
 
 Who is not " weathercocky " in the 
 world ? 
 
 Although so tolerant In appearance of 
 naughty people, 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, 
 
A House Party. 199 
 
 as her lord would express It : she has 
 been ahvavs much too busv to have time 
 or inclination to be tempted " off the rails," 
 and she has little patience with women 
 who have Q^one off them ; onlv she never 
 says so, because it would look so goody- 
 goody and stupid, and for fear of look- 
 ing so she even manages to stifle in her 
 own breast her own antipathy to Dulcia 
 Waverley. 
 
 There have been verv manv martvrs to 
 
 / « y 
 
 the sense that thev ouQ^ht to smile at 
 virtue when they hate it, but Dorothy 
 Usk's martyrdom is of a precisely opposite 
 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 now-a-days you do 
 look so odd and so old-fashioned if you 
 make a fuss about anvthino-. Still, in her 
 heart of hearts, she feels excessivelv vexed, 
 because it is quite apparent to her that 
 
200 A House Pari v. 
 
 Gervase knows somethinor 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." 
 
 Certainlv, ^Madame Sabaroff is lettinor 
 Brandolin carrv 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 couronnd, 
 as P^rench vaudevillists say, without any 
 thouo^ht of marriaofe. 
 
 Lady Usk has always known he is 
 horribly unprincipled : more so than even 
 
A House Party, 201 
 
 men of his world usually are. That banter- 
 ing 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 answers, 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 
 declaration 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," 
 
202 u'l House Party. 
 
 she savs, lookinof with some discyust at the 
 correspondence. Bruce is his secretary. 
 
 "He alwavs blunders," savs Usk. 
 
 ** Then change him/' says his wife ; 
 nevertheless she is pleased at the compli- 
 ment implied to herself. 
 
 "All secretaries are fools," says Usk, 
 impartially. 
 
 " Even Secretaries of State," savs ]\Ir. 
 Wootton, who has the entree of the boudoir, 
 and saunters in at that moment. " I have 
 some news this morninor," he adds : " Colts- 
 foot marries Miss Hoard." 
 
 ''Never!" exclaims Dorothy Usk. 
 
 " Perfectly true," says ?^Ir. Wootton. 
 *' Both of them stavincf at Dunrobin, and 
 engagement publicly announced." 
 
 Lord Coltsfoot is heir to a dukedom ; 
 Miss Hoard is the result, in bullion, of 
 ironworks. 
 
 " Never ! " reiterates Lady Usk. "It is 
 impossible that he can do such a horrible 
 
A HoiLse Party. 203 
 
 thing ! Why, she has one shoulder higher 
 than the other and red eyes." 
 
 *' There are six miUions paid down," 
 replies Mr. Wootton, sententiously. 
 
 '' What the deuce will i\Irs. Donningtoa 
 say ?" asks Usk. 
 
 ''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 monogamy ?" 
 
 *' It is quite disgusting!" says Lady Usk. 
 '' Some of those 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 
 ires comine 2 1 faiit^ " says Usk, from 
 sheer spirit of contradiction. " The duke- 
 dom is as full of holes as an old tin pot ; 
 she tinkers it up with her iron and gold ; 
 and I bet you that your friend Worth will 
 manage to cut Lady Coltsfoot's gowns so 
 
204 ^ House Party. 
 
 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 ! Happi- 
 ness was buried with Strephon and Chloe 
 centuries ago ! We are amused or bored ; 
 we are successful or unsuccessful ; 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 !" 
 
 "A heart! You mean spoons!" 
 
 " What a hideous expression ! Strephon 
 and Chloe never used that." 
 
 " When we have an unfortunate passion 
 now," remarks Mr. Wootton. "we go to 
 Karlsbad. It's only an affair of the liver." 
 
 "Or the nerves," suQ^trests Usk. " Flirta- 
 tion is the proper thing, flirtation never 
 
A House Party. 205 
 
 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 saying something about my age. 
 'A man is the age that he leels.' " 
 
 ''Xo, 'a woman is the age that she 
 looks.' If you will quote things, quote 
 them properly." 
 
 "The age that she looks? That's so 
 very variable. She's twenty when she 
 enters a ballroom 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 hus- 
 band !" 
 
 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?" 
 
2o6 A House Party. 
 
 " Because he's bored at home ! Youth is, 
 after all, only good spirits. If you laugh 
 vou are vounor, but vour 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, ' IMy 
 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 
 feel lively !" 
 
 '' 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." 
 
A House Party. 207 
 
 "You make up to yourself for the 
 deprivation after dinner !" 
 
 " }vlv ladv's verv ruffled to-dav," savs 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 ait viieux with 
 INIadame Sabaroff.^ I remember hearing 
 lonof aofo from Russians " 
 
 Lady Usk interrupts the great man 
 angrily : 
 
 '*Very much an viieiix / What bar- 
 barous polyglot language for a great critic 
 like vou ! Must vou have the assistance 
 of bad grammar in two tongues to take 
 away my friend's reputation T 
 
 Lord Usk chuckles. 
 
 " Reputations aren't taken away so easily ; 
 thev're verv hardv plants now-a-days, and 
 will stand a good deal of bad weather!" 
 
2oS A House Parly. 
 
 Mr. Wootton is shocked. 
 
 " Oh, dearest Lady Usk ! Reputation ! 
 You coukhi't think I meant to imply of any 
 guest of yours — only, you know, he was 
 secretary m Petersburg when he was Lord 
 Baird, and so — and so " 
 
 ''Well! It does not 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 don't speak to each other, so I 
 was curious to know what could be the 
 reason." 
 
 " I believe she didn't recognise him." 
 
 Mr. Wootton smiles. 
 
 " Oh ! ladies have such prodigious powers 
 of oblivion — and remembrance !" 
 
A House Party. 209 
 
 '' Yes," observes Usk, with complacency ; 
 '* the storms of memory sometimes sink into 
 them as if they were sponges, and some- 
 times ehde off them as if thev were ducks. 
 It is just as they lind it convenient." 
 
 '' But Madame Sabaroff can't have been 
 more than a chikl when Gervase was in 
 Russia," cries Lady L sk. 
 
 Mr. W'ootton smiles ao^ain sio-nihcantlv. 
 
 " She was married." 
 
 '' To a brute !" 
 
 ''All husbands," says Usk, with another 
 chuckle, "are brutes, and all wives are 
 angels. Cest iiuprinicy 
 
 *' I hope no one will ever call me an 
 angel : I should know at once that I was 
 a bore !" 
 
 " Xo danorer, mv ladv : vou've no wings 
 on vour shoulders, and vou've salt on vour 
 
 tongue. 
 
 ''I'm sure you mean to be odiously rude, 
 but to my taste it's a great compliment." 
 
 p 
 
2 10 A House Party. 
 
 *' My dear Alan," says Dorothy Usk, ^ 
 having eot him at a disadvantacre in her ' 
 boudoir a quarter-of-an-hour after this 
 discussion, " What has there been be- 
 tween you and the Princess Sabaroff? 
 Everybody feels there is something. It 
 is in the air. Indeed, everybody is talking 
 about it. Prav tell me ! I am dvinof to 
 now. 
 
 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 
 Curzon, who is maiivaisc langiic. pretends 
 even that she knows all the circumstances, 
 and it would seem that they are not very 
 nice circumstances. I really cannot con- 
 sent to cfo on in the dark any loncrer." 
 
 "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 
 
A House Party. 211 
 
 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 examinations." 
 
 " 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 behaves well where women are 
 in the question." 
 
 " ]\Iy dear Dolly! what unkind exaggera- 
 tion! 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." 
 
 "You knew her in Russia?" 
 
 "Yes; when I was there she was the 
 new beauty at the Court. She had been 
 
2 12 A House Party. 
 
 married a year or less to Anatole Sabaroff. 
 I had the honour of her friendship at that 
 time ; if she withdraws It now I must 
 acquiesce." 
 
 -Oh!" 
 
 Ladv Usk orlves a Httle sound between 
 a snort and a sigh. 
 
 She is annoyed. The gosslpers 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 conven- 
 tional 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 blottlng- 
 book with her gold pen. 
 
 '* Very young ; but such a husband as 
 
A House Party. 213 
 
 Anatole 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 honour of her confidence, 
 she was unhappy and ijiconiprise ; 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 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 sur- 
 veillance scarcely better than absolute 
 imprisonment. I did all manner of crazy 
 and romantic things to endeavour 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 
 
2 14 ^ House Party. 
 
 mission to Spain — you remember — and I 
 left Russia with a broken heart. From 
 that time to this I have never seen her." 
 
 " But vour 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 onlv 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 for ever." 
 
 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 favourite is what Usk would call 
 "just like all the rest of them." 
 
 *' You perceive," he added, " that as the 
 Princess chooses wholly to ignore the past. 
 
A Ho2tse Party. 215 
 
 it Is not for me to recall it. I am obliged 
 to accept her decision, however much I 
 must suffer from it." 
 
 '' Suffer !" echoes his cousin. " After 
 her husband's death you never took the 
 trouble to cross Europe to see her ?' 
 
 "Could not get away," 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 inconsistency. 
 
 *' 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 irritated. " But I suffered greatly, 
 whether vou choose to believe it or 
 not. 
 
2i6 A House Party. 
 
 " I am not inclined to believe it," replies 
 his hostess. " It is not your style." 
 
 '■ I wrote to her a orreat manv times." 
 
 He pauses. 
 
 Lady Usk fills up the pause. "And 
 she answered you .-^ " she inquires. 
 
 *' X-no," replies Gervase, unwilling to 
 confess such 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 
 
 sav T' 
 
 '^ Nobodv but herself, clearlv. 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 vears 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 
 ^vith a Spanish lady " 
 
A House Party. 217 
 
 "A izreat manv Spanish ladies, no doubt! 
 What a hah'-hearted Lothario I" 
 
 "Xot at all. Only just at that time " 
 
 '' Manillas, mandolines, balconies, bull- 
 lights, high mass and moonlight had the 
 supremacy I ^ly 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 shipwrecked five 
 hundred times, I believe, and ridden as 
 many dromedaries over unknown sand-plains 
 as Gordon "' 
 
 "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 " 
 
 " How little sympathy you have I" 
 
 "George says I have always a great 
 deal too much. What do you want me to 
 .sympathise with ? According to your own 
 
2iS A House Parly. 
 
 storv \'0u ' loved and rode awav ;' 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, a qui la fatilc ? 
 Nobody's but your own and the nameless 
 Spanish lady or ladles' !" 
 
 "You are very perverse." 
 
 "It Is you who are, or who were, 
 perverse. According to your own story you 
 adored a woman when she was unattain- 
 able ; when she became attainable you did 
 not even take the trouble to get Into a 
 rallwav carrlacre : vou 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 
 vour own mouth, vou seem to have behaved 
 wiih most uninteresting inconstancy." 
 
 "It was four years, and she had never 
 answered my letters." 
 
 " Really a reason to make you esteem 
 
A HotLse Painty. 219 
 
 her infinltel}' 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 com- 
 fortably and so easily consoled ? You 
 ought to be infinitely grateful that Madame 
 Sabaroft" did not send you reams of 
 reproaches, and telegraph you compromis- 
 ing messages which would have got you 
 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 news- 
 papers would at any time have enabled 
 you to know where she was ; you never 
 had inclination or remembrance enough ta 
 make you curious to see her again, and 
 
2 20 A Ho7tse Party, 
 
 then when you come across her in a 
 country house, you think yourself very 
 ill-used because she does not all at once 
 fall in 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 thorouQfhlv, and thev 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 favourite 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 colours a little, being conscious 
 that his response cannot increase his 
 cousin's sympathies witli him. 
 
A House Party. 221 
 
 "• No ; is she rich ? Anatole Sabaroff was 
 poor. He had gambled away nearly every- 
 thing. 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, some- 
 where beyond the Urals, I think, and she 
 is enormously rich, will be richer every 
 year they say." 
 
 *' Indeed!" 
 
 He endeavours to look indifferent, but 
 his cousin's penetrating eyes seem to him 
 to be reading his very soul. 
 
 '' How dreadfullv sorrv 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 
 years : 
 
 '' I imagined that I had forgotten 
 her." 
 
222 A House Party. 
 
 "Well, so you had; completely for- 
 gotten her, till you saw her here." 
 
 "On my honour, she Is the only woman 
 I have ever reallv loved." 
 
 "Oh, men always say that of somebody 
 or another, generally of the most Impossible 
 people. George always declares that the 
 onlv woman he ever reallv 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." 
 
 She knows that for him to be convinced 
 of this is the surest way to revive a dled- 
 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." 
 
A Ho2tse Pa7Hy. 223 
 
 '' 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 colours ano-rllv. 
 
 " She is not a feynvie //^^r^." 
 
 " She is receiving a great deal of atten- 
 tion now from Lord Brandolln. 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 m^ore interesting 
 from him than notes about dinners or 
 visits, but thev sav so. Thev even say 
 that his deserted ladies forgive his 
 desertions because he writes his farewells 
 so divinely." 
 
 '* Lord Brandolin's epistolary accomplish- 
 ments do not interest me in the least. 
 Evervbodv knows what he is with women." 
 
2 24 -^ House Party. 
 
 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 " 
 
 "What?" 
 
 ''Well, what she thinks or does not 
 think ; In a word, how I stand with 
 her." 
 
 '' Xo— 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 connaissanees, 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 llkelv 
 shall 1 be to recall to her what she Is 
 evidently perfectly determined to ignore. 
 
A House Party. 225 
 
 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 finding out everything ; you 
 might discover perfectly well, if you chose, 
 whether — whether she feels angry 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 larbre et l(^corce ne 
 mettez pas le doigt. That is sound advice 
 which I have heard given at the Francais." 
 
 " That is said of not interfering between 
 married people." 
 
 ''It is generally true of people who 
 wish, or mav not wish, to marrv. And I 
 suppose, Alan, that when you speak in my 
 
 Q 
 
2 26 A House Party. 
 
 house of renewing your — your — relations 
 with the Princess Sabaroff, you do not 
 mean that you have any object less serious 
 than le bon motif 7' 
 
 Gervase is amused, although he is dis- 
 concerted and irritated. 
 
 ''Come, Dolly, 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 ribands. 
 
 ''If vou desire to re-awake the senti- 
 ments of Madame Sabaroft' in your own 
 favour, 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 that they will not be suc- 
 cessful," she says, with dignity and distance. 
 
A House Party. 227 
 
 '' 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. Between 
 the vew and cedar trees, at some distance 
 from the house, Brandolin is walking 
 beside Xenia Sabaroff; his manner is 
 interested and deferential, she 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 ne fais pas la police 
 
 poitr Ics antres ; but if he asked me what 
 
2 28 A House Party. 
 
 you ask me, I should give him the same 
 answer that I qrave to vou." 
 
 '' He is probably independent of any 
 assistance," says Gervase, with irritable 
 irony. 
 
 '' Probably," says his hostess, who is 
 very skilful 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. 
 
 " Coninic elks sont assoinviates az'ce leurs 
 ponies f' says the Marquise de Caillac, who 
 chanced to be present at this infliction ; 
 and gazes In stupefaction at a Dowager- 
 Duchess who has driven over from twenty 
 miles off, who wears very thick boots, her 
 own thin grey hair, waterproof tweed 
 
A House Party. 229 
 
 clothing, and a hat tied under her double 
 chin with black strings. '' Un paqiietP' 
 murmurs [Marquise de Caillac, " icu veritable 
 paquct /" 
 
 " Cest la z'crtu Anglaise, lui pen demoded^'' 
 says Lord lona, with a yawn. 
 
 Gervase stays on at Surrenden, some- 
 what bored, very much cnervd, 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 savs 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 complimentary, 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, attracts 
 and mao^netises him. It seems to him in- 
 credible that anv woman can io^nore him 
 
230 A HoiLse Party. 
 
 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 him- 
 self that she does this ; she treats him with 
 just such perfect Indifference as she shows 
 to the Duke of Whitby or Hugo 
 jMountjoy, 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 colour on her face at his 
 approach, It Is probable that his vanity 
 would be satisfied, and his Interest cease 
 as quickly as It has revived ; 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 has done with his letters. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 Lord Gervase was eight years younger 
 when he wrote those letters, than he is 
 now, and he has unpleasant 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 
 Sabaroft" kept them ? He longs to ask her^ 
 but he dare not. 
 
 He does not sav to his cousin that he 
 has more than once endeavoured 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 directlv avoiding^ 
 
2^2 
 
 A House Pa rty. 
 
 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 minds of others without 
 revealing her own. Saitle pleicretir ! 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 lonof 
 forgotten, has power to excite in him. H e 
 does not like emotion of anv kind ; and in 
 all his affairs of the heart he is accustomed to 
 make others suffer, not himself. X^anity 
 and wounded vanity enter so largely into 
 
A House Party, 233 
 
 the Influences moulding human Hfe, 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 themselves 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 
 
2 34 ^ House Party. 
 
 galvanism to his dead wishes and slumbering 
 recollections. He begins to perceive that 
 he would have done better not to forget 
 her quite so quickly. 
 
 Meanwhile, everybody staying at Surren- 
 den, guided by a hint from Xina Curzon, 
 begin to see a quantity of things which 
 do not exist, and to exert their minds In 
 endeavourlno: to remember a vast deal which 
 thev never heard with regard to both 
 himself and her. Xo one knows anvthinor, 
 or has a shadow of fact to q:o on, but this 
 is an Insignificant detail which does not 
 tie their tongues in the least. Xina 
 Curzon has invention enough to supply 
 anv lacnncr, and in this instance her ImaQ^I- 
 nation is stimulated by a double jealousy ; 
 she Is jealous of Lawrence Hamilton, whom 
 she Is inclined to dismiss, and she is jealous 
 of Brandolln, whom she is Inclined to 
 appropriate. 
 
 Twenty-four hours have not elapsed 
 
A Ho2Lse Pa7'ty. 235 
 
 since the arrival of Gervase before she 
 has given a dozen people the intimate con- 
 viction that she knows all about him and 
 the Princess Sabaroff, and that there is 
 something verv dreadful in it : much worse 
 than in the usual history of such relations. 
 Everything is possible in Russia, she says, 
 and has a wav of savins; this which 
 suQfQ:ests unfathomable abvsses of licence 
 and crime. 
 
 Xo one has the slio^htest idea what she 
 means, but no one will be behind any 
 other in conjecturing ; and there rises about 
 the unconscious fiorure of Xenia Sabaroft 
 a haze of va2:ue, suQ^o-ested. 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 
 
236 A Ho2Lse Party, 
 
 and Imaoflnarv recollections come to his 
 ear and annov him intensely ; annov him 
 the more because his swift intuitions 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 davs have been dello^htful to him 
 before the arrival of this other man at 
 Surrenden ; now they are troubled and 
 embittered. Yet, he Is not inclined to 
 break off his visit abruptly and go to 
 Scotland, Germany, or Xorway, as might 
 be wisest. He Is in love with Xenia 
 Sabaroff In a manner which surprises him- 
 self. He thouQrht he had outlived that sort 
 of boyish and imaginative passion. But 
 she has a great power over his fancy and 
 his senses, and she Is more like his earliest 
 
A Ho2ise Party. 237 
 
 ideal of a woman than anyone he has ever 
 
 met. 
 
 " Absurd that I should have an Ideal at 
 all at my age I" he thinks to himself, but 
 as there are some who are never accom- 
 panied by that ethereal attendant, even in 
 youth, so there are some whom it never 
 leaves till they reach their graves. 
 
 Therefore, when he hears these vague, 
 floatino-, disao-reeable jests, he sufters acutely, 
 and finds himself in the position which is. 
 perhaps, most painful of all to any man 
 who is a gentleman, that of being com- 
 pelled to sit silent and hear a woman he 
 longs to defend lightly spoken of, because 
 he has no right to defend her, and would, 
 indeed, onlv compromise her more if he 
 attempted her defence. 
 
 People do not venture to say much 
 before Usk, because he is her host and 
 mio-ht resent it, but, nevertheless, he too 
 hears also something and thinks to him- 
 
238 A House Party. 
 
 self, '' 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 sympathies, have an 
 indescribable sorcery for him at all times, 
 so that he thinks but very litde, since her 
 arrival, of anything else. Usk likes women 
 who believe devoutlv that he mi^ht 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 \\'averley, 
 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 Bcehmer- 
 wald, whither she goes herself every 
 autumn, she does, altogether and abso- 
 lutely, anything she chooses with him. 
 
A House Party. 239 
 
 His wife sees that quite well, and dis- 
 likes it, but it might be so much worse, 
 she reflects : it might be a woman out 
 of society, or a public singer, or an 
 American adventuress ; so she is reason- 
 able and always makes bonne mine to 
 Dulcia Waverley with her nerves, her 
 cures, and her angelic smiles. After all, 
 it does not make much matter, she thinks, 
 if thev 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 Ladv W'averlev and his own 
 liver, to put together words dropped by 
 different people then under his own roof ; 
 to ponder upon them ; and finally to 
 interroQ:ate his wife. 
 
 "Did you know that people say they 
 
240 A Ho7tse Pa7'ty, 
 
 used to carry on together ? " he asks, with- 
 out 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 anvthinof between 
 them in the vulo^ar sense which vou 
 
 O y 
 
 would imply renders them eligible for my 
 society," replies Dorothy Usk, with the 
 severity of a woman whose conscience Is 
 clear, and the tranquility of a woman who 
 is telling a falsehood. 
 
 Usk stares at her. 
 
 ** Well, if vou knew it, vou 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, 
 
A Ho2tse Party. 241 
 
 who had had a certain sympathy for 
 each other when honour kept them apart. 
 there is nothing very culpable In it. 
 What is your objection ?" 
 
 "Oh, Lord I I've no objection; I don't 
 care a straw," says her lord, with a very 
 moody expression. " But Brandolln will, 
 I suspect ; she's certainly encouraged him. 
 I think you might have shown us your 
 cards." 
 
 " Lord Brandolln 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 
 verv lono: date and most romantic orlein. 
 He has loved her hopelessly for eight 
 years." 
 
 L'sk gives a grim guffaw. 
 
 " The constancy has had many interludes, 
 
 R 
 
242 A Ho2cse Party. 
 
 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 his wife, with disgust, "and 
 were she otherwise, the loves of vour friend 
 are soon consoled. He writes a letter, 
 takes a vovao^e, and throws his memories 
 overboard. Alan's temperament is far more 
 serious." 
 
 ''If by serious you mean selfish, I agree 
 
 with you. There isn't such another d 
 
 egotist anywhere under 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 
 
A Hotise Party, 243 
 
 and delightful, with the blinds down and 
 an odour of attar of roses. 
 
 If anyone 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 7in pc7t : putting 
 the thing as it ought to be put, as it must 
 be put, if Geryase 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 belieying that her version 
 of the story is 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 
 
2 44 ^ House Party, 
 
 figures are so superior to any European's \ 
 But George Is always so absurd about his 
 friends." 
 
 Whereon, beino; in an irritated and un- 
 kind mood, she desires the servant, who 
 just then announces the visit of the Rector 
 of the parish, to show that reverend per- 
 son 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 
 moment 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 occasion, and 
 in her sweet, low voice discourses of village 
 choirs, and village readings, and village 
 medicines and morals, with such divine 
 patience and feminine adaptability, that the 
 good man dismisses from his mind as im- 
 
A House Party. 245 
 
 possible what he had certainly fancied he 
 saw In the moment when the library door 
 opened before him. 
 
 If ever there was purity Incarnate, Dulcia 
 Waverley looks It, with her white gown, 
 her :sIadonna-lIke hair, her dewy, pensive 
 eyes, and her appealing smile. She suggests 
 the portraits In the Keepsakes and Forget- 
 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 Raphaellte bands which, In 
 any other woman, would look absurd ; but 
 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 \'enetian 
 waters. Onlv If she had ever spoken 
 candldlv all she knows, which she never 
 
246 A House Party, 
 
 by any chance does, she would say 
 that to succeed thus with Othello, or any 
 other male creature, you must be, under 
 all your apparent weakness, tenacious as a 
 magnet 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 has been com- 
 pelled to draw 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 Usk admit 
 that there Is the slightest Impropriety In 
 the relations of any of her guests : their 
 unimpeachable immaculateness 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. 
 
A House Party. 247 
 
 She will never know a person who Is 
 really compromised. Therefore, if there 
 be any soil on the wlng-s of her doves, she 
 shuts her eyes to It so long as those of 
 the world are shut. She has the agree- 
 able power of never seeing but what she 
 wishes to see; so, although for the moment 
 she has been uncomfortably shocked, she 
 recovers her composure rapidly, and per- 
 suades herself that Gervase merely spoke 
 of a passing attachment, perfectly pure. 
 Why should he not marry the object of 
 it ? To the mind of Dorothv 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 these days, with Socialists at the 
 
248 A House Party. 
 
 roots, and a Jacquerie tearing at the fruits 
 of them, any soHd 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 fire- 
 wood, 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 ; 
 bygones are always best burled. The people 
 who manage to be happy are those who 
 understand the art of burying them, and use 
 plenty of quicklime. 
 
 During the twenty years which have elapsed 
 since her presentation, Dolly Usk has had a 
 very varied experience of men and women, 
 and has continually been solicited to interfere 
 in their love affairs, or has even interfered 
 
A Ho2cse Party, 249 
 
 'Nvithout being solicited. She likes the feeling 
 of beino- a dha ex viachiua to her friends, 
 and thouQ-h she has so decidedlv refused 
 Gervase her assistance to discover the state 
 of Xenia Sabaroff s feelings towards him, she 
 beo-ins in her own mind immediately to cast 
 about for some indirect means of learning it, 
 and arranges in her own fancv the whole storv 
 as it will sound prettiest and most proper if 
 she be ever called on to relate it to the world. 
 She has a talent at putting such stories 
 nicely in order, that anything which may be 
 objectionable in them is altogether invisible, 
 as a clever faiscur will so arrange old laces 
 on a Court train that the darns and stains 
 in them are wholly hidden away. She 
 likes exercisino^ her ino^enuitv in this wav, 
 and although the narrative given her by 
 Gervase has certainly seemed to her ob- 
 jectionable, and one which places the hero 
 of it in an unpleasant light, it may with 
 tact be turned so as to show nothing but 
 
250 A House Party. 
 
 what Is Interestlnor. And to this end she 
 also begins to drop httle hints, little phrases, 
 sucrorestive 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 of all understanding, 
 that she cannot continue to try them In 
 that direction. 
 
 ''If that odious Brandolln were not 
 here ! " she thinks, Irritably. 
 
 The attentions of Brandolln are very 
 marked to the Princess Sabaroff, and are 
 characterised by that carelessness of com- 
 ment and that colour of romance which 
 have always marked his Interest In any 
 woman. He Is not a rival a plaisantcr. 
 she knows : but then she knows, too, 
 that he never is serious in these matters. 
 
A Ho2ise Party. 251 
 
 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. ]\Iadame Sabaroff 
 hesitates, is inclined to refuse, but at 
 length acquiesces. 
 
 Unfortunately, Usk, 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. 
 
252 A Ho2ise Party. 
 
 Xenia Sabaroff has seen and suffered 
 enough to make her not Hghtly 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 inconsistency 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 Brandolln, softly, 
 '' but thev come aofain." 
 
 ''In the fields, perhaps," replies XenIa 
 Sabaroff. 
 
 " And In the human heart," says Bran- 
 dolln. 
 
 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 
 
A Ho2tse Party, 253 
 
 infidelltv of anv lover, which has tauQ^ht 
 her so earlv the instabilitv 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 holdino; women lio^htlv, he is 
 a man whose theories of what thev ouQ-ht 
 to be are hio;h and chfhcult to realise. 
 Each day that he sees her at Surrenden 
 tends to convince him more and more 
 that she does realise them, despite the 
 calumnies which are set floating round her 
 name. 
 
 One dav, amono^st several new arrivals, 
 a countr^^man of hers comes down from 
 London, where, being momentarily Charge 
 d'Affairs of the Russian Legation, he has 
 been cursing the heat, the dust, the deserted 
 
2 54 -^ House Painty. 
 
 squares, the empty clubs, the ugly parks, 
 and rushlncT out of town whenever he can 
 for twenty-four hours, as he now comes 
 to Surrenden from Saturday to ^londay. 
 
 "'Coimne 2111 calicot ! Cormne icn calicotf' 
 he says, piteously : '' Such are the miseries 
 of the diplomatic service." 
 
 He kisses the hands of Madame Sabaroff 
 with ardour and reverence ; he has known 
 her in her own country. A gleam of 
 amusement comes into his half-shut grey 
 eves as he recoQ^nises Gervase. 
 
 The next morning is Sunday ; Usk and 
 Dulcia Waverley are at church with the 
 children and Lady Usk and Xina Curzon. 
 
 Brandolin strays into the small library, 
 takes down a book and stretches himself on 
 a couch. He half expects that ^ladame 
 Sabaroff will come down before luncheon and 
 also seek a book, as she did last Sunday. 
 He lights a cigarette and waits, lazily watch- 
 ing the peacocks drawing their trains over 
 
A House Party. 255 
 
 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, but the Russian Secretary, 
 Gregor Litroff, always called " Toffy " by his 
 female friends in England. 
 
 '' Dieu de Diezc ! 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 my Lady Waverley 
 on the other, solemnly going to church. 
 How droll! He would not do it in 
 London." 
 
 " It is not more ridiculous to go to 
 church in a tall hat than to prostrate your- 
 self and kiss a wooden cross, as you would 
 do if you were at home," says Brandolin, 
 
256 A House Pai'ty. 
 
 contemptuously, eyeing the Intruder with 
 irritation. 
 
 " That mav be/' savs the Secretary, eood- 
 humouredly. "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 Q^et rid of this man. 
 
 *' And he takes Lady Waverley for an 
 example too ? " asks Litroff with a 
 laugh. 
 
 " Religion enjoins us," replies Brandolin, 
 curtly, " to offer what we have most 
 precious to the Lord." 
 The Secretary laughs again. 
 *' That is very good," he says, with enjoy- 
 ment. 
 
 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 tctc-a-tctc and a walk In 
 the home wood fadinQ[ farther and farther 
 
A House Pai'ty. 257 
 
 from view. ]\Ir. Wootton has several 
 telegram 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. 
 W^e shall all be glad when we have got the 
 thing over ; seen Windsor burnt, London 
 sacked, Ireland admitted to the American 
 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 conver- 
 sation round to the Princess Sabaroff. 
 
 Brandolin, appearing absorbed in his book, 
 Hes on his couch wondering whether he 
 should meet her anywhere about the gardens 
 if he went out. He listens ancrrilv when he 
 hears her name. 
 
 s 
 
25S A Ho7ise Party. 
 
 '^Was she ever talked about?" asks ^Ir. 
 Wootton. searching the book-shelves. 
 
 "What charming woman is not ?" returns 
 Litroff. Q^allantlv. 
 
 " Vl\ dear Count," replies -\Ir. 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." 
 
 "Ah, trulv," savs Litroff, ''so have we, 
 I daresay ; I have never asked." 
 
 ''No doubt you have." says ]Mr. Wootton, 
 kindly. "The virtue of its women is the 
 ereat safes^uard of a nation." 
 
 "One understands why England is losing 
 her nice equipose then, now," murmurs 
 Brandolin. 
 
 INIr. Wootton disregards him. 
 
 " But Madame Sabaroff z^'as talked about, 
 I think? unjustly, no doubt?" he insists. 
 
 Mr. Wootton always insists. 
 
 " Ach !" says Litroff, apologetically ; 
 
A House Party. 259 
 
 " Sabaroff was such a great brute. It was 
 very natural " 
 
 "What was natural?" 
 
 " That she should console herself." 
 
 "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 ?" 
 
 " Xot 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 
 certain, 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. ]\Ir. Wootton looks after 
 him. 
 
 " No one could blame her," says Litroff, 
 
26o A Ho2tse Party. 
 
 who is a good-natured man. " She was 
 married when she was scarcely sixteen to 
 a brute ; she was immensely admired ; she 
 was alone in the midst of a society both 
 loose and brilliant ; Gervase laid sie^e to 
 her sans treve, and she was hardly more 
 than a child then." 
 
 '' Where there is no principle early 
 mplanted " begins ?ylr. Wootton. 
 
 But Litroff is not patient under preach- 
 ing. ''My dear sir," he says, impatiently, 
 '' principle (of that kind) is more easily 
 implanted in plain women than in hand- 
 somer ones. Madame Sabaroff is a proud 
 woman, which comes to nearly the same 
 thing as a high-principled one. She has 
 lived like a saint since Sabaroff was shot, 
 and if she takes 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 
 
A House Party. 261 
 
 admirable and edifying spectacle as Miladi 
 Waverley and Miladi Usk going to sit in 
 church with George Usk between them." 
 
 Whereupon the Russian Secretary takes 
 a Figaro off the newspaper table, and 
 rudely opens it and flourishes between Mr. 
 Wootton and himself, in sign that the con- 
 versation is ended. 
 
 Mr. Wootton has never been so treated 
 in his life. 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 Brandolin 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 Innumerable 
 roses fill the warm, moist air with fragrance. 
 There is a sea breeze blowing from the sea 
 coast some thirteen miles away; his schooner 
 is in harbour there ; he thinks that It would 
 be wisest to go to it and sail away again 
 for as many thousand miles as he has just 
 left behind him. Xenia Sabaroff has a crreat 
 
 o 
 
 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 
 
A House Party. 263 
 
 may be that kind of sorceress of which 
 IMary Stuart is the eternal type, cold only 
 that others may burn ; reculant pour viieux 
 sauter, exquisitely feminine, only to be more 
 dangerously powerful. He does not wish to 
 play the role of Chastelard, or of Douglas, 
 or of Henry Darnley. He is stung to the 
 quick by what he has heard said. 
 
 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 
 admiration ; 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,. 
 
264 A House Party. 
 
 or even 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 idealic 
 qualities. He walks on unconsciouslv till 
 he has left the west garden and entered 
 the wood which joins it, and the grassy 
 seats made underneath the bouehs. As he 
 goes, his heart thrills, his pulse quickens : 
 he sees ]\Iadame Sabaroff. She is seated 
 on one of the turf banks reading; all the dogs 
 of the house at her feet. He has almost 
 walked on to her before he has perceived 
 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 free of the wood as I," she 
 replies, with a smile. *' I promised the 
 children to keep their dogs quiet, and to 
 
A House Party. 265 
 
 await them here as they return from their 
 church." 
 
 ''You are too Q:ood to the children," says 
 Brandolin. 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 passionately 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 through 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!" 
 
266 A Hottse Party, 
 
 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 welcome, the Babe Is 
 dashing on in advance. There is an end 
 of their brief tcte-a-tcte ; he passionately 
 regrets the loss of it, though he Is not 
 sure of what he would have said in 
 it. 
 
 *' Always together!" says DulcIa Waver- 
 ley in a whisper to Usk, as she sees them. 
 *' Does he know that he succeeds Lord 
 Gervase, do you think T^ 
 
 ''How should I know ?" says Usk, "and 
 Dolly says there was nothing between her 
 and Gervase ; nothing, at least It was all 
 in honour, as the T^rench say." 
 
A Ho2cse Party. 267 
 
 "Oh, of course," agrees Lady Waverley, 
 with her plaintive eyes gazing dreamily 
 down the aisle of larch trees. The children 
 have run on to ^^ladame Sabaroff. 
 
 "Where is Alan?" thinks Dolly Usk. 
 anerilv, on seeinQ- Brandolin. 
 
 Gervase, who is not an early riser, is then 
 takino- his coffee in bed as twelve strikes. 
 He detests an English Sunday ; although 
 at Surrenden it is disguised as much as 
 possible to look like any other day, still 
 there is a Sunday feeling in the air, and 
 Usk does not like people to play cards on 
 Sunday ; it is one of his ways of being 
 virtuous vicariously. 
 
 "Primitive Christianitv," savs 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, 
 disconsolately. " We might just as well go 
 to sleep at home, and it is so hot in that pew 
 with all that red cloth !" 
 
268 A Ho2ise Party. 
 
 '' My love !" says Dulcia Waverley, scan- 
 dalised. 
 
 " Lady Waverley don't go to sleep !" cries 
 the Babe in his terribly clear little voice. 
 *' She was writino: in her hvmn-book and 
 showing it to papa." 
 
 No one appears to hear this indiscreet 
 remark except Dodo, who laughs somewhat 
 rudely. 
 
 '' I was trvinof to remember the hvmn of 
 Faber's ' Longing for God.' " says Lady 
 Waverlev, who is never known to be at a 
 loss. '' The last verse escapes me. Can 
 anvone 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 
 missinor lines. 
 
 o 
 
 "There is so little religious feeling 
 anv where in E norland," she remarks, with 
 a sicrh. 
 
A House Party. 269 
 
 '' It's the confounded levelling that destroys 
 It," says Usk, echoing the sigh. 
 
 ''They speak of Faber," says ]\Iadame 
 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. 
 
 The beasts of burden linger on their way 
 Like slaves, who will not speak when they obey : 
 Their eyes, when their looks to us they raise. 
 With something of reproachful patience gaze. 
 
 Labour 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 addressinof Brandolin as she recites 
 them ; thev are a little behind the others. 
 
 He does not reply, but looks at her with 
 an expression in his eyes which astonishes 
 
270 A House Party, 
 
 and troubles her. He Is thinking, as the 
 music of her tones stirs his Innermost soul, 
 that he can believe no evil of her, will 
 believe none. No. though the very angels of 
 Heaven were to crv out aofalnst her. 
 
 " 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 w^Ith 
 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 
 rapprochement^ 
 
 '' I daresay 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 showing him your letters, if, as 
 
A House Party. 271 
 
 vou seem to think, she carries them about 
 with her everywhere Hke a reHquary." 
 
 " I never presumed to imagine that she 
 had preserved them for a day." 
 
 "Oh! yes, vou did. You had a vision of 
 her weeping over them In secret every night, 
 until you saw her here, and found her as 
 unHke a ddlaissce as a woman can be." 
 
 " Certainly, she does not look that. 
 Posslblv, if Dido could have been dressed 
 by Worth and Rodrigues, had diamonds as 
 big as plovers' eggs, and been adored by 
 Lord Brandolin, she would never have 
 perished in despair. Atitres temps, a^itres 
 moettrsr 
 
 He speaks with sullen and scornful bitter- 
 ness ; his handsome face Is momentarily 
 flushed. 
 
 Dorothy Usk looks at him with in- 
 quisitiveness ; she has never known him 
 fail to rely on his own attractions before. 
 "You are unusually modest," she replies. 
 
'^'"^ A Hottse Party, 
 
 - 1 - 
 
 " Certainly, In our days, if yEneas does not 
 come back, \ye take somebody else ; some- 
 times we do that eyen if he does come back!" 
 
 Geryase is moodily silent. 
 
 ''I neyer knev; you 'funk a fence' before!" 
 says his cousin to him, sarcastically. 
 
 " I haye tried to say something to her," 
 replies Geryase, moodily, ''but she glyes 
 me no hearino-, no occasion." 
 
 " I should haye thought you were used 
 well enough to make both for yourself," 
 returns his cousin, with curt sympathy. 
 *' You haye always been 'master of your- 
 self, though women sigh,' a paraphrase of 
 Pope at your seryice." 
 
 Geryase smiled, conscious of his past 
 successes and willinQ^ to acknowledo^e them. 
 
 " But you see she does not sigh !" he 
 murmurs, with a sense that the admission 
 is not flattering to his own aiuoii}' propre. 
 
 "You haye lost the power to make her 
 sigh, do you mean ? ' 
 
A House Party. 273 
 
 *' 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 helpless- 
 ness I I should never have believed that 
 vou would be baffled bv anv \\'oman, above 
 all by a woman who once loved you." 
 
 "It Is not easv to make a fire out of 
 ashes." 
 
 " Xot If the ashes are quite cold, cer- 
 tainly, but If a spark remains In them, the 
 fire soon comes ao^aln." 
 
 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 Indeliblv on the hearts of women. 
 
 " Perhaps she wishes to marry Brandolln.^" 
 suggests Dorothy Usk. 
 
 *• Pshaw !'' says Lord Gervase. 
 
 T 
 
2 74 ^ Ho7LSC Party. 
 
 '^Why pshaw?" repeats his cousin, per- 
 sistently. "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 cleansing as the 
 Augean stable — but I daresay she doesn't 
 know anything 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 
 Brandolln Is quite serious." 
 
 "Preposterous!" replies Lord Gervase. 
 '' Really, I don't see that," replies his 
 judicious cousin. " A great many women 
 have wanted to marrv ///w, thouo^h one 
 wonders why. Indeed, I have heard some 
 of them declare that he Is wholly Irre- 
 sistible when he chooses." 
 
 ''With Hindoos, perhaps," says Gervase. 
 
A House Party. 275 
 
 ''With our women/' says his cousin. 
 *• Ladv Marv lardine 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 
 she 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 to be disputed. He has been a 
 spoiled child of fortune and of the draw- 
 ing-rooms all his years, and the slightest 
 opposition is intolerable to him. 
 
 " I have no doubt," continues Dorothy 
 Usk, " 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 
 
2/6 A House Party. 
 
 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 
 affections of a woman whom he seriously 
 sought." 
 
 *' What do vou mean ?" asks Gervase, 
 abruptly, pausing in his walk to and from 
 the boudoir. 
 
 " Only what I say," she answers. ''If 
 you wish to doigncr Brandolln, give him 
 some idea of the truth. 
 
 Gervase laughs a little. 
 
 " On my honour," he thinks, with some 
 bitterness, '' for sheer uncompromising mean- 
 ness, 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, " when a man has behaved to 
 any woman as you, by your own account, 
 
A House Party. 277 
 
 have behaved to INIadame Sabaroff, I 
 think it is a httle late in the day to 
 pretend to much elevation of feeling." 
 
 " You do not understand " 
 
 '' I have alwavs found," savs his cousin, 
 Impatiently '' that whenever we presume 
 to pronounce an opinion on any man's 
 conduct and think 111 of it, we are 
 alwavs told that we don't understand 
 anvthino;. When we flatter the man, or 
 compliment him on his conduct, there is 
 no end to the marvellous powers of our 
 penetration, the fineness of our instincts, 
 the accuracv 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, starded and made 
 nervous by the admiration she excited 
 and the homage she received, under the 
 brutality of her husband, the raillery of 
 
2; 8 A House Party. 
 
 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 emotions 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 dis- 
 missed 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, sup- 
 posed to be preparing their 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 o-o and lean out of one of 
 the windows, whilst her sister draws a 
 
A House Party, 279 
 
 caricature of the sleeping virgin from 
 Deutschland, and the Babe sHps awav 
 from his books to a mechanical Punch, 
 which, contraband in the school-room, is 
 far dearer to him than his Gradus and 
 the Rule of Three. 
 
 Dodo, with her hands thrust amongst 
 her abundant locks, lolls with half her 
 body in the air, and. by twisting her neck 
 almost to dislocation. manao;es to see round 
 an ivv-Q^rown buttress of the east walk 
 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 I" she groans. " Oh, what a 
 while it takes one to grow up !'' 
 
 "Who are going to ride .^"" asks Lillie, 
 too fascinated bv her drawino^ to leave it. 
 
 " Lots of them," replies Dodo, who speaks 
 four languages, and her own worst of all. 
 *'A11 of them, pretty nearly. ^Mamma's on 
 
2 So A Hojise Party. 
 
 Pepper, and Lady \\'averley's got Bo-peep 
 — she's always nervous you know. I can't 
 see very much 'cause of the Ivy. Oh, 
 there's the Princess on Satan, nobodv else 
 could ride Satan ; Lord Brandolln's put her 
 up, and now he's riding by her — they're 
 gone now — and papa's stopping behind them 
 all to do something to Bo-peep's girths" — 
 whereat the dutiful Dodo laughs rudely, 
 as she laughed coming home from church. 
 
 The sound of the horses' hoofs going 
 further 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 fraj^rant, Qfardeners are waterlncr 
 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 
 
' A House Party. 281 
 
 she is bv any means ardently devoted to 
 nature, but she loves life, movement, Q^aietv, 
 
 & 
 
 and she dearlv lo\'es showino: off her fimire 
 on her ponies, and being flirted with by her 
 father's friend. 
 
 " 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 bouo-hs. 
 
 "With whom?" asks Lillie, 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 
 vou've been doinof." 
 
 The lady from Deutschland is always 
 known to them by this endearing epithet. 
 
 "I don't care," savs Lillie, kickino- her 
 bronze boots in the air. " Do you think 
 she'll marrv Lord Brandolin ?" 
 
282 A Ho2Lse Party. 
 
 "Who? Goggles?" 
 
 "The idea!" They laugh deliclously. 
 " You say he's in love with Xenia. If 
 they're in love they will marry," says Lillie, 
 pensively. 
 
 " No, they won't ; people who are in love 
 never marry," replies Dodo. 
 
 "What do they do then?" inquires the 
 vounc^er 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 roundabout 
 way," objects Lillie. "I shouldn't care to 
 marry at all," she adds, "only one can't 
 ever be Mistniss of the Robes if one 
 doesn't." 
 
 " Oh, everybody marries, of course, only 
 some muff it, and don't get all they want 
 In' it," replies the cynic Dodo. 
 
 " lil Faiiiour, Miladi Alexandra 7' says 
 
A House Party. 283 
 
 the French governess, entering at that 
 moment. ''On done mettez vous Fajuour P" 
 
 '' N021S ne soniincs pas dcs boitrgcoises,'' 
 returns Dodo, very haughtily. 
 
 The Babe, sitting astride on a chair, 
 trying to mend his mechanical Punch, who 
 screamed and beat his wife absoliuncut 
 comrne la nature, as the French governess 
 said, before he was broken, hears the dis- 
 course of his sisters and muses on it. He 
 is verv fond of Brandohn 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 
 
284 ^ Ho7ise Party. 
 
 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 endeavour to make it say more words 
 than it coukl say, but this sHght 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 measureable 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 opportunity ; he 
 is always where the ladies are, and his 
 sharp little wits have ])een preternaturally 
 quickened in that atmosphere of what the 
 PVench call '' l^odeiir fciuiniuy 
 
 He has to wait some days for his occasion; 
 the frank and friendly intercourse which 
 existed at first Ix^tween I-^randolin and 
 Madame Sal^aroff is altered ; they are never 
 
A House Party. 285 
 
 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 mornino^, the Babe coaxes her 
 out to 'go with him to his garden; a tloral 
 republic, where a cabbage comes up cheek 
 by jowl with a gloxiana, and plants are 
 plucked up by the roots to see if they are 
 growing aright. The Babe's system of 
 horticulture is to dior intentlv for ten minutes 
 in all directions, to make himself very red in 
 the face, and then to call Dick, Tom, or 
 Harr}', any under-gardeners who may be 
 near, and sav : "Here, do it, will vou ? " 
 
2 86 A House Party. 
 
 Nevertheless, he retauis the behef 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 lltde 
 more in order," she permits herself to 
 observe. 
 
 "Oh, that's their fault," says the Babe. 
 just as iNI. Grevy would say of disorder in 
 the Chambers, the Babe meaning Dick, 
 Tom. or Harry, as the President would 
 mean Clemenceau, Rochefort, or ^I. de Mun. 
 
 "Mydear Babe, how exacdy 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 under-strappers. 
 May I inquire since when it has become the 
 fashion to set sunflowers with their heads 
 downwards ?" 
 
A House Party. "^^^I 
 
 "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 Xewton, 
 if your destiny were not already cast, to 
 dazzle the world by a blending 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 opportunity, 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 distant part of the grounds of Sur- 
 renden. It is noon : most people staying 
 in the house are still in their own rooms ; 
 it is solitary, sunny, still ; a thrush is sing- 
 ino- in a iessamine thicket, there is no 
 other sound except that of a gardener's 
 
288 A Ho7Lse Party. 
 
 broom sweeping on the other side of the 
 laurel hedge. 
 
 The Babe feels that it is now or never 
 for his coup dc inaitrc. 
 
 He plucks a rose, the best one he has, 
 and offers it to Madame Sabaroff, who 
 accepts it gratefully, though it is con- 
 siderably earwig-eaten, and puts it in her 
 corsage. 
 
 The eyes of Brandolin follow it wistfully. 
 
 The child glances at them alternately 
 from under his hair, then his small features 
 assume an expression of cherubic innocence 
 and unconsciousness. The most ruse little 
 roQfue in the whole kinQ;dom, he knows 
 how to make himself look like a perfect 
 reproduction of Sir Joshua Reynolds' Art- 
 lessness or Infancy. He gazes up in 
 Xenia Sabaroff 's face, with angelic sim- 
 plicity admiraljly assumed. 
 
 " When you marry lum," lie says, 
 
 ]K)inting to Brandolin with admirably affected 
 
A Hotise Pai'ty. 289 
 
 naivete, "you will let me hold up your 
 train, won't you ? I always hold up my 
 friends' trains when thev marrv. I have 
 a page's dress, Louis something or other, 
 and a sword, and a velvet cap with a 
 bado^e and a feather ; I alwavs look verv 
 well." 
 
 '' Oh, what an odious petit viaitre you will 
 be when you are a man, my dear Babe !" 
 savs Xenia Sabaroff 
 
 She does not take any notice of his 
 opening words, but a tiush of colour comes 
 over her face and passes as quickly as it 
 came. 
 
 ''Petit viaitre! 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 prayer to his,'* 
 
 u 
 
290 A House Party. 
 
 murmurs Brandolln, ''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 Brandolln. 
 The Babe glances at them under his thick 
 eyelashes, and being a fine moiiche, only 
 innocent in appearance, he runs off after a 
 butterfly. He has not been brought up in 
 a feminine atmosphere of poitdre de riz and 
 lait diris without learnln.^ discretion- 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 "The Babe is a better courtier than 
 gardener," savs Xenia Sabaroff, as she shakes 
 a green aphid out of her rose : her tone is 
 careless, but her voice is not quite under 
 her command and has a httle 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 Sabaroff: she is startled, astonished, 
 troubled ; she was not expecting any such 
 entire avowals. 
 
292 A House Party. 
 
 ''Many men must have said as much to you 
 who have more to recommend them than I. 
 Say something to me: what will you say?" 
 
 She does not immediately reply ; 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 are people who 
 believe that I have been the dclaissee of 
 Lord Gervase. They do not phrase it so 
 roughly, but that is what they say." 
 
 Brandolin's very lips were white, but 
 his voice does not falter for one moment, 
 as he answered: "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 ?" 
 
A House Party, 293 
 
 The sunny air seems to turn round 
 with him for an instant ; his brain grows 
 dizzy ; his heart contracts with a sicken- 
 ing pain ; but in the next moment a great 
 wave of strong and perfect faith In the 
 woman he cares for Hfts his soul up on it 
 it as a sea wave Hfts 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 for ever, rise in them now. 
 
 ''You are very noble," she replies, and 
 leaves her hand for an instant within his. 
 
294 ^ Ho7tsc Pcwty. 
 
 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 undeslred he may be. 
 
 '' Dodo says that women never marry 
 anybody they love," he says, breathlessly, 
 " but that Is not true, Is It, and vou will 
 let me carry your train ?" 
 
 " Hush, my dear," says Xenia Sabaroff, 
 laying her . hand en 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 Brandolln, and then, with 
 her hand still on the little boy's shoulder, 
 she turns away from him and walks slowiy 
 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 
 
A House Party. 295 
 
 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, w^Ith 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 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 
 
296 A House Party. 
 
 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 aQ^aln before dinner. 
 
 She does 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 reputation 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 
 
A House Paiiy. 297 
 
 into speech, he utters paradoxes, and 
 suggests views so startHng, that the wife of 
 the Lord Lieutenant is scandahsed, and 
 thinks the lunacy laws are defective if they 
 cannot include and incarcerate him. She 
 feels sure that the rumour about the Hindoo 
 women at St. Hubert's Lea is entirelv true. 
 
 After dinner, he is free to approach the 
 lady of his thoughts, but he endeavours in 
 vain to tell from her face what answer he will 
 receive, what time and meditation mav have 
 done or undone for him. She avoids the 
 interrogation of his eyes, and is surrounded 
 bv other men as usual. 
 
 The evening seems to him intolerably long 
 and intolerablv tedious. It is, however, for 
 others very gay. There is an improvised 
 dance, ending in an impromptu cotillon, and 
 following on an act of a comic opera given 
 with admirable spirit by Lady Dawlish, 
 ?^Irs. Curzon, and some of the younger men. 
 Everyone is amused, but the hours seemed 
 
29S A Ho2ise Party. 
 
 very slow to him : Gervase scarcely leaves 
 
 her side at all, and Brandolin, with all his 
 chivalrous refusal and unchano^inQ^ 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 memorv and weio;h on him like the 
 incubus of a nio^htmare. With a sensation of 
 dread he realises 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, but scarcely always of his thoughts. 
 
 " But I will never ask her one svllable," he 
 thinks, "and I will marrv 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 
 
A House Party. 299 
 
 wear awav, and the noise and absurdities of 
 the cotillon 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." 
 
 '' Why will you always treat me as a 
 stranger, Madame Sabaroff?'' murmurs Ger- 
 vase to her that same night when, for a 
 moment, he Is alone near her, while the 
 cotillon draws to a close. 
 
 '' You are a stranger — to me." replies 
 Xenia Sabaroff; and as she speaks she 
 looks full at him. 
 
 He colours 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 
 
300 A House Party. 
 
 white ostrich feathers of her fan. He is 
 vaguely encouraged by that silence. 
 
 " Strangers !" he says, with annoyance 
 and reproach. " 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 greater hauteur in the 
 coldness of her face. 
 
 "Sir, I think when people have forgotten 
 that each other exist, it is as though they 
 had never met. They are, perhaps, some- 
 thing 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 
 
A Ho2ise Party. 301 
 
 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 only 
 on earth who can do so." 
 
 She is stung to anger ? 
 
 *' I am really at a loss to decide whether 
 you are intentionally insolent or uninten- 
 tionally insincere. You are possibly both." 
 
 " I am neither ! I am only a man who 
 passionately and uselessly rebels against 
 his fate." 
 
 ''Who reo^rets his own actions, vou 
 mean to say. That is nothing un- 
 common." 
 
 " 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 reparation ? It is I who owe 
 
302 A House Party. 
 
 you thanks for a momentary oblivion 
 which did me immeasurable service." 
 
 "That is a very harsh doctrine. The 
 Princess 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 solid square feet of Baltic ice. 
 Put her from your thoughts ; you will 
 never awake her." 
 
 Then she rises and leaves him and 
 '-^oes out of the ballroom. 
 
 Soon after she leaves the ballroom 
 altogether, and goes to her bedchamber. 
 
 Brandolin goes to his before the cotillon is 
 over, but he sleeps very little. He longs for 
 the morrow, and yet he dreads it. " Quaud 
 mcmc,'' he murmurs, as from his bed he sees 
 the white dawn over the dark masses of the 
 Surrcnden woods. Tell him what she may, 
 he thinks, he will give her his life if she will 
 
A Ho2tse Party. 303 
 
 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 honour of 
 his name and race, and he Is willing, blind- 
 fold, to trust her with It. 
 
 That morning It seems to him as If the 
 hours would never pass, though they are few, 
 until the clock strikes eleven. The house Is 
 still, almost everyone Is asleep, for the 
 cotillon, successful as only unpremeditated 
 thlnofs ever are, had lasted till the sun was 
 high, and the dew on the grass of the garden 
 was drv. 
 
 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 
 
304 A House Party. 
 
 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 yesterday ; 
 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 ^w^, soft 
 rain is falling, wet jessamine flowers tap 
 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." 
 
 " I want to know hv\\. one thinpf." 
 
A House Parly. 305 
 
 She smiled a little sadly. 
 
 " Oh I you think so now, because you 
 are in love with me. But in time to 
 comie. when that is passed, you will not 
 be so easily content. If "' — she hesitates 
 a moment — "if there is to be anv com- 
 munitv between our lives vou 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 wretched." 
 
 His eyes fiash with joy. 
 
 "Then"' — he beo^ins. breathlesslv. 
 
 '' Oh I hovr like a man that is I" she savs. 
 sadlv. "To think but of the one thino-, 
 of the one present moment, and to be 
 ready to give all the future in pawn for 
 it I Wait to hear everything. And first 
 of all I must tell you that Lord Ger\-ase 
 also wrote me a letter this morning in 
 which he asks me to marr\- him." 
 
 "And vou?" 
 
 V 
 
3o6 A House Party. 
 
 " I shall not marry Lord Gervase. But 
 I will not disoruise from vou that once I 
 
 o * 
 
 Avould have done so orladlv had I been 
 free to do it." 
 
 Brandolin is silent : he changes colour. 
 
 " I bade him come here for my answer," 
 she continues. '' 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." 
 
 '* 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 gentleness, "that if our lives are to 
 be passed near one another — 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 
 
A House Party. 307 
 
 become unable to banish it. It would 
 Q^row and Q;row until vou were mastered 
 by it. You believe in what I tell you 
 now, but how lonQ- would vou believe 
 after marriao-e ?" 
 
 " I want no proof, I only want your 
 word. Xay, I do not even want that. I 
 will ask you nothing. I swear that I will 
 never ask vou anvthino;." 
 
 " That is very beautiful ; and I am 
 sure that you mean it now. But it could 
 not last. You are a very proud man : 
 vou are o-entilliomnie de race. It would in 
 time become intolerable to you if you 
 believed that anv one livins: man had anv 
 title to point a finger of scorn at you. 
 You have a rio-ht to know what mv 
 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 
 
3o8 A House Party. 
 
 that If you yourself hear what I say to 
 him. Go ; and wait there !" 
 
 Brandolin hesitates. To Hsten unseen Is 
 a part which seems very cowardly to him, 
 and vet she Is rio^ht, no doubt ; all the 
 peace of the future may depend on it. He 
 Is ready to pledge himself blindly In the 
 dark in all wavs. but he knows that she, 
 in forbidding him to do so, speaks the word 
 of wisdom, of foresight, and of truth. 
 
 "Go!" she repeats. "]\Ien 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 
 
A House Party. 309 
 
 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 realitv onlv 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 eoes on into the one where she awaits 
 his coming. 
 
 " Are you really risen so early ?" she 
 savs, with a sarcastic coldness in her voice. 
 " I remembered afterwards 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 
 
3IO A Hotisc Party, 
 
 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 
 anvthincj to do." 
 
 "You say that very cruelly; so cruelly 
 that It makes vour forcrlveness more unkind 
 than vour hatred would be." 
 
 *' I intend no unklndness. I merelv wish 
 to express Indifference. Perhaps I am even 
 mistaken in savinor that I entirelv forcrlve 
 you. When I remember that you once 
 possessed any intluence over me, I scarcely 
 do forgive you, for I am forced to despise 
 myself." 
 
A House Party. 3 1 r 
 
 " Those are very hard words I Perhaps 
 in the past I was unworthy of having 
 known and loved you ; but if you will 
 believe in my regret, and allow me occa- 
 sion to atone, you shall never repent of your 
 indulgence. Pray hear me out, Xenia " 
 
 ''You cannot call me bv that name. It 
 is for my friends ; you are not numbered 
 amono^st 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 repenting 
 that I had done so ; for I should soon have 
 fathomed the shallowmess of your character, 
 
312 A House Party. 
 
 the artificiality and poverty of your senti- 
 ments, 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 drunkard and a 
 brute. He treated me in private as he had 
 treated the women captured in Turkestan, or 
 sold as slaves in Persia. You knew that ; 
 you were his intimate associate. You used 
 your opportunities to interest me and win 
 your way into my confidence. I had no one 
 
A House Pa7'ty. 313 
 
 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 svmpathv ; I thouQ:ht vou a verv 
 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 I You made 
 me care for you ; I do not deny it I But 
 why did I care ? Because I saw in you the 
 imao^e of a thousand thino^s vou were not. 
 Because I imaQ-ined that mv own fanciful 
 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 attachment, of your exalted 
 imaginations. I dare not say that I was 
 not ; but now that I meet vou aeain, now 
 that I care for you ten thousand — ten 
 million times more " 
 
314 ^^ House Parly, 
 
 "What is that to me?" she says, with 
 almost insolent coldness. "It was not I 
 who loved vou — 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 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 intrio-ue under cover of vour friend- 
 ship with my husband, then, child though I 
 was, I saw vou as vou were, and I hid 
 myself from you I You thought that Sabaroff 
 exiled me from his jealousy of you to the 
 northern estates, but it is not so. I 
 entreated him to let me leave Petersburg, 
 and he had grown tired of torturing me and 
 let me go !" 
 
 " Vou blame me for being nierely human. 
 I loved you not better but not worse than 
 men do love. ' 
 
A Hotise Party. 315 
 
 *' I blame vou for havino^ been Insincere, 
 treacherous, dishonest. You approached me 
 under cover of the most dehcate and 
 forbearing sympathy and reverence, and you 
 only wore those masks to cover the vulgar 
 designs 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 ot 
 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 eyes. I burnt your 
 letters as thev came to me. But after the 
 
o 
 
 1 6 A Ho7ise Pa7'ty, 
 
 death of Prince Sabaroff you were careful 
 to write no more !" 
 
 Gervase colours hotly ; there is an accent 
 in the words which makes them strike him 
 like whips. 
 
 "If you had written to me after that," 
 
 she continues, '' perhaps I should have 
 
 answered you, perhaps not : I cannot tell. 
 
 When you knew that I was set free, you 
 
 were silent ; vou staved awav, I know not 
 ' y y 
 
 where. I never saw vou aofain ; I never 
 heard from you again. Xow, I thank you 
 for vour neMect and oblivion, but at the 
 same time, I confess that it made me suffer. 
 I was verv vounQ^ still and romantic. For 
 a while I expected every month which 
 melted the snow would brinfj vou back. 
 So much I admit, thoucrh it will flatter vou." 
 It does not flatter him as she says it ; 
 rather it wounds him. He has a hateful 
 sfmse of his own impotency to stir her one 
 hand's breadth, to breathe one spark of 
 
A Ho7tse Party. 317 
 
 warmth into those ashes gone cold for 
 ever. 
 
 " I do not think."" she continues, *' that 
 I ever loved you in the sense that women 
 can love ; but you had the power to make 
 me suffer, to feel your oblivion, to re- 
 member you when you had forgotten me. 
 When I went into the world ao-ain I heard 
 of your successes with others, and gradually 
 I came to see vou in vour true lio-ht, and, 
 almost the drunken brutality of Prince 
 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 honour to offer me your hand 
 after el^ht years. I can onlv sav. as I have 
 said before, that it is seven years too late 1" 
 
 **Too late, only because Lord Brandolin 
 now Is everything to you." 
 
 *' Lord Brandolin may possibly be some- 
 thing to me In the future. But, if Lord 
 
3iS A House Pa^-ty, 
 
 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 aofitated as no other woman 
 had ever seen him, Gervase bows low and 
 leaves her abruptly, pushing open one of 
 the glass doors on to the garden and 
 closinof it with a clash behind him. 
 
 Xenia Sabaroff goes towards the large 
 librarv, her silvery train catching the lights 
 and shadows as she goes. 
 
 Brandolin meets her with his hands out- 
 stretched. 
 
 *' 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 vou know that the world will 
 always say that he was my lover T 
 
A Hotise Party, 319 
 
 ''I do not think that the world will say 
 it — of my wife; but if it 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 certainly I have a ereat love." 
 
 t> 
 
 '' 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 ril 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, 
 
320 A Hoitsc Party. 
 
 especially If, as you Imply, they carried on 
 together years ago ; he'd be eternally throw- 
 ing the past 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 dignity. " I never suppose 
 that all my friends are not all they ought to 
 be, whatever yours may leave to be desired. 
 If he were attached long ago to ^ladame 
 Sabaroff, It Is neither your affair nor mine. 
 It may possibly concern Lord Brandolln If 
 he has the Intentions which you attribute 
 to him." 
 
 "Brandolln 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 !" 
 
A Ho2ise Party. 321 
 
 " 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 Sur- 
 renden. 
 
 At the first Drawing-room this year, the 
 admired of all eyes, and the centre of all 
 comment, is the Lady Brandolin. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 w 
 
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 LODGERS PEERAGE 
 
 AND BAROXETAGE, 
 
 CORRECTED BY THE NOBILITY. 
 FIFTY-FIF TH EDITIO N FOR 1886. 
 
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 Historical View of the Peerage. i The Archbishops and Bishops of England 
 
 Parliamentary Eoll of the House of Lords. | and Ireland. 
 
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 orders of Precedence. Alphabetical List of Surnames assumed by 
 
 Alphabetical List of Peers of Great Britain I members of Noble Families, 
 and the United Kingdom, holding supe- ; Alphabetical List of the Second Titles of 
 rior rank in the Scotch or Irish Peerage. } Peers, osuaUy borne by their Eldest 
 
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 Table of Precedency among Men. 
 Table of Precedency among Women. 
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 Peers of the Blood RoyaL 
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 Families of such Extinct Peers as have left 
 
 "Widows or Issue. 
 Alphabetical List of the Surnames of all the 
 
 Peers. lated. 
 
 ing married Commoners, retain the title 
 of Lady before their own Christian and 
 their Husband's Surnames. 
 
 Alphabetica.1 Index to the Daughters of 
 Viscounts and Barons, who, having 
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 being a Baronet or Knight Hon. Lady. 
 
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 LONDON : UUEST AND LLACKETT, PUBLISHERS. 
 
THE NEW AND POPULAR NOVELS. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY HURST & BLACKETT. 
 
 IX LETTERS OF GOLD. By Thomas St. E. 
 
 Hake. - vols. 
 '• Mr. Hake does not indulge in padding, and never forgets that his first, and, 
 
 indeed, only business, is to tell a story."— Athenceum. 
 
 LIKE LUCIFER. By Denzil Vaxe. 3 vols. 
 
 "There is sDme pleasant writing in 'Like Lucifer,' and the plot is workman- 
 like.'" — Academy. 
 
 ■ ••DenzLl Vane has a talent for lively, fluent writing, and a power of tracing 
 character." — Whitehall Eevkic. 
 
 A DAUGHTER OF THE GODS. By Jane 
 
 Sta>'LET. 2 vols. 
 " ' A Daughter of the Gods " is very pretty. That is a description which speci- 
 ally Buits the easy-flowing, love-raaking story."' — AtMrvxum. 
 
 THRO' LOVE AND AVAR. By Violet Faxe, 
 
 Author of •• Sophy : or the Adventures of a Savage," &c. 3 vols. 
 
 " 'Thro" Love and "VTar' has a succinct and intelligible plot, and is written 
 with a quaint combination of acute perception, veiled sarcasm, and broad fun, 
 which is certain to ensure for it a wide popularity."' — The World, 
 
 " We find, as we might expect from Miss Fane"s past work, these three volumes 
 brimftd of cynical and racy humour, yet not lacking in serious foundation.""— rj/?i«. 
 
 SIR ROBERT SHIRLEY, BART. By Johx Ber- 
 wick Hakwood, Author of " Lacly Flavia," " The Tenth Earl," 
 &c. 3 vols. 
 " ' Sir Robert Shirley. Bart," is a thoroughly good story. The book ia whole- 
 some in tone, and will please all those whose taste is not perverted by a too 
 highly-spiced style of Qction.'— Morning Post. 
 
 LUCIA. By Mrs. Augustus Cravex, Author of 
 
 " A Sister's Story." Translated by Lady Herbert of Lea. 2 vols. 
 
 '• This is a verv prettv. touching, and consoling story. The tale is as much above 
 the ordinary roriiance as the fresh air of the seaside is better than the stifling at- 
 mosphere of the fashionable quarter of the gayest city.""— ^f. James's Gazette, 
 
 •• • Lucia ■ is as good a novel as has been published for a long imie." —Academy. 
 
 LOVE, THE PILGRIM. By May Crommelix, 
 
 Author of •' Queenie,"' " A Jewel of a Girl," Arc. 3 vols. 
 " ' Love, the Pilgrim " is a pretty story, which, beginning quietly, develops into 
 one of very sensational incident indeed."" — Graphic 
 " A tale of thrUling interest"" — Scotsman. 
 
 THE KIXG CAN DO NO WRONG. By Pamela 
 
 SxETD, Author of " Jack Urquhart's Daughter." 2 vols. 
 
 " This novel gives evidence of imagination, insight into character, and power of 
 delineation."" — AtT^iencFum. , . . i. . ■ 
 
 '• Shows command of exceptional narrative and descriptive power— the story is 
 told with cleverness and force."' — Scotsman. 
 
THE NEW AND POPULAR NOVELS. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY HURST & BLACKETT. 
 
 ONCE AGAIN. By Mrs. Forrester, Author of 
 
 "Viva," " Mignon,"' " My Lord and My Lady," &c. 3 vols. 
 
 A WILFUL YOUNG WOMAN. By A. Price, 
 
 Author of " A Rustic Maid," " Wlio is Sylvia ?" &c. 3 vols. 
 
 THE SURVIVORS. By Henry Cresswell, Author 
 
 of " A Modern Greek Heroine," " Incognita," &c. 3 vols. 
 
 A WICKED GIRL. By Mary Cecil Hay, Author 
 
 of " Old Myddelton's Money," &c. 3 vols. 
 '• The Story, ' A Wicked Cxirl,' has a ingeniously carried out plot, iliss Hay is 
 a graceful writer, and her pathos is genuine." — Morning Post. 
 
 OUT OF THE GLOAMING. By E. J. Porter. 
 
 2 vols. 
 
 THE WOOING OF CATHERINE. By E. Frances 
 
 PoTXTEK, Author of " My Little Lady," &c. 2 vols. 
 " Miss Poynter" s two volumes are well-written and gracefully composed." — 
 Academy. 
 
 ST. BRIAVELS. By Mary Deane, Author of 
 
 " Quatrefoil," &c. 3 vols. 
 
 " The authoress throughout writes with moderation and consistency, and her 
 three ample volumes well repay perusal." — Daily Telegraph. 
 
 " ' St. Briavels " is a story replete with variety, and in all developments of her 
 plot the author skilfully maintains an unabated interest." — Morning Post. 
 
 THE COURTING OF MARY SMITH. By F. W. 
 
 Robinson, Author of " Grandmother's Money," " No Church," &c. 
 
 3 vols. 
 
 " One of the finest studies that any of our novelists has produced of late years. 
 To read such a book is to strengthen the soul with a moral ionic."— Athenicum. 
 
 A LILY MAID, By William George Waters. 
 
 3 vols. 
 " A story of the keenest interest. Mr. "Waters' plot is neat, and his style is 
 bright and pleasing."'— Z)rti7^y Tdegraph. 
 
 •• ' A Lily Maid ' is throughout exceedingly pleasant reading."'— J/orni'ni? Post. 
 
 THE POWER OF GOLD. By George Lambert. 
 
 2 vols. 
 '" The Power of Gold ' is distinguished for skill in giving fresh interest to a 
 simple story, and the presentation of characters with real life about them."— 
 Graphic. 
 
 THE BETRAYAL OF REUBEN HOLT. By 
 
 Babbara Lake. 1 vol. crown 8vo. 63. 
 "The novel, though slight in construction, has one very dramatic episode, and 
 this is well worked up to." — Publisheri Circular. 
 
-a 
 
 HURST & BLACKETT'S 
 
 STA^sDARD LIBRARY. 
 
 L X D X : 
 13, GREAT JIAKLBOROUGH STREET, W 
 
 ff 
 
HURST &BLACKETT'S STAOT)APtD LIBRARY 
 
 OF CHEAP EDITIONS OF 
 
 POPULAR MODERN WORKS. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED BY 
 
 Sir J. E. Millais, Sir J. Gilbert, Holman Hunt, Birket Foster, 
 
 John Leech, John Tenniel, J. Laslett Pott, etc. 
 
 Each in a Single Volume, with Frontispiece, price 5s. 
 
 I.— SAM SLICK'S NATURE AND HUMAN NATURE. 
 
 "The first volume of Messrs. Hiirst and Blacketfs Standard Library of Cheap Editions 
 forms a very good beginning to what will doubtless be a very successful undertaking 
 'Nature and Human Nature ' is one of the best of Sam Slick's witty and humorous pro- 
 ductions, and well entitled to the large circulation which it cannot fail to obtain in itd 
 present convenient and cheap shape. The volume combines with the great recommenda- 
 tions of a clear, bold type and good paper, the lesser, but attractive merits of being well 
 illustrated and elegantly bound."— J/arnmgr Fost. 
 
 IL-_JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN. 
 
 "The new and cheaper edition of this interesting work will doubtless meet with great 
 success. John Halifax, the hero of this most beautiful story, is no ordinary hero, and 
 this his history is no ordinary book. It is a full-length portrait of a true gentleman, one 
 of nature's own nobility. It is also the history of a home, and a thoroughly English one. 
 The work abounds in incident, and many of the scenes are full of graphic power and true 
 pathos. It is a book that few will read without becoming wiser and hetter."— Scotsman. 
 
 "This story is very interesting. The attachment between John Halifax and his wife is 
 beautifully painted, as are the pictures of their domestic life, and the growing up of their 
 children; and the conclusion of the book is beautiful and touGh.mg."—Athenieuin. 
 
 IIL— THE CRESCENT AND THE CROSS. 
 
 BY ELIOT WARBURTON. 
 
 "Independent of its value as an original narrative, and its useful and interesting 
 information, this work is remarkable for the colouring power and play of fancy with 
 which its descriptions are enlivened. Among its greatest and most lasting charms is its 
 reverent and serious spirit." — Quarterly Review. 
 
 "Mr. Warburton has fulfilled the promise of his title-page. The 'Eeahties of Eastern 
 Tr-<^vel ' are described with a vividness which invests them with deep and abiding inter- 
 est; while the 'Romantic' adventures which the enterprising tourist met with in hia 
 course are narrated with a spirit which shows how much he enjoyed these reliefs from 
 the ennui of every-day life." — Globe. 
 
 IV.— NATHALIE. 
 
 BY JULIA KAVANAGH. 
 
 "'Nathalie 'is Miss Kavanagh's best imaginative effort. Its manner is gracious anfl 
 attractive. Its matter is good. A sentiment, a tenderness, are commanded by her which 
 are as individual as they are elegant. We should not soon come to an end were we to 
 specify all the delicate touches and attractive pictures which place ' Nathalie ' high among 
 books of its class." — Athenceum. 
 
 v.— A WOMAN'S THOUGHTS ABOUT WOMEN. 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF "JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN." 
 
 "These thoughts are good and humane. They are thoughts we would wish women to 
 think: they are much more to ihe purpose than the treatises upon the women and daugh- 
 ters of England, which were fashionable some years ago, and these thoughts mark the 
 progress of opinion, and indicate & higher tone of character, and a joster estimate of 
 woman's position." — Athenaeum. > , ,. . . 
 
 "This excellent book is characterised by good sense, good taste, and feeUng, and u 
 written in an earnest, philanthropic, as well as practical spirit."— i/orni/jy FcsL 
 
HURST & BLACKETT'S STANDARD LIBRARY 
 
 VI.— ADAM GRAEME OF MOSSGRAY. 
 
 BY MRS. OLIPHANT. 
 
 " ' Adam Graeme ' is a story awakening genuine emotions of interest and delight by itn 
 admirable pictures of Scottish life and scenery. The plot is cleverly complicated, and 
 there is great vitality in the dialogue, and remarkable brilliancy in the descriptive pas- 
 lages, as who that has read 'Margaret Maitland ' would not be prepared to expect? 
 But the story has a 'mightier magnet still,' in the healthy tone which pervades it, in its 
 feminine delicacy of thought and diction, and in the truly womanly tenderness of its 
 Bentimeuts. The eloquent author sets before us the essential attributes of Christiai? 
 virtue, their deep and silent workings in the heart, and their beautiful manifestations ij 
 the life, wiih a delicacy, a power, and a truth which can hardly be surpassed." — Momin 
 Pott. 
 
 VIL— SAM SLICK'S WISE SAWS AND 
 MODERN INSTANCES. 
 
 "We have not the slightest intention to criticise this book. Its reputation is made, and 
 will stand as long as that of Scott's or Bulwers novels. The remarkable originality of 
 its purpose, and the happy description it affords of American life and manners, still con- 
 tinue the subject of universal admiration. To say thus much is to say enough, though we 
 must just mention that the new edition forms a part of the Publishers' Cheap Standard 
 Library, which has included some of the very best specimens of light literature that ever 
 have been written." — Messenger. 
 
 Vni.— CARDINAL WISEMAN'S RECOLLECTIONS 
 OF THE LAST FOUR POPES. 
 
 " A picturesque book on Home and its ecclesiastical sovereigns, by an eloquent Eoman 
 Catholic. Cardinal Wiseman has here treated a special subject with so much generality 
 and geniality that his recollections will excite no ill-feeling in those who are most con- 
 Bcientiously opposed to every idea of human infallibihly represented iC- Papal domination." 
 —Athenxum. 
 
 IX.— A LIFE FOR A LIFE. 
 
 Br THE AUTHOR OF " JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN." 
 
 "We are always glad to welcome Mrs. Cr.aik. She writes from her own convic- 
 tions, and she has the power not only to conceive clearly what it is that she wishes to 
 Bay, but to express it in language effective and vigorous. In ' A Life for a Life ' she is 
 fortunate in a good subject, and she has produced a work of strong effect The 
 reader, having read the book through for the story, will be apt (if he be of our per- 
 suasion) to return and read again many pages and passages with greater pleasure 
 than on a first perusal. The whole book is replete with a graceful, tender deli- 
 cacy; and, in addition to its other merits, it is written in good careful English." — 
 Athenceum. 
 
 "' A Life for a Life ' is a book of a high class. The characters are depicted with a 
 masterly hand; the events are dramatically set forth; the descriptions of scenery and 
 sketches of society are admirably penned; moreover, the work has an object — a clearly 
 defined moral — most poetically, most beautifully drawn, and through all there is that 
 strong, reflective mind visible which lays bare the human heart and human mind to the 
 ver> core." — Morning Post. 
 
 X.— THE OLD COURT SUBURB. 
 BY LEIGH HUNT. 
 
 "A book which has afforded us no slight gratification. " — Atfienmum. 
 
 "From the mixture of (ioscriptiuu, anecdote, biography, and criticism, this book is v«^ry 
 yleasiiiit reading." — S/>i-ctutur. 
 
 " A more agreeable and eiitortaining book has not been published since Boswell pro- 
 .luced liis remiaiHceucea uf Johuaoo." — O/taerier, 
 
HURST & BLACKETT'S STANDARD LIBRARY 
 
 XI.— MAEGARET AND HER BRIDESMAIDS. 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF " THE YALLEY OF A HUNDRED FIRES." 
 
 " "We recommend all who are in search of a fascinating novel to read this work for 
 themselves. They will find it well worth their while. There are a freshness and origin- 
 ality about it quite charming, and there is a certain nobleness in the treatment both of 
 sentiment and incident which is not often foxnid."—Athenseum. 
 
 XIL— THE OLD JUDGE ; OR, LIFE IN A COLONY. 
 
 BY SAM SLICK. 
 
 "A peculiar interest attaches to sketches of colonial life, and readers could not have » 
 safer guide than the talented author of this work, who, by a residence of half a century, 
 has practically grasped the habits, manners, and social conditions of the colonists he d^ 
 scribes. All who wish to form a fair idea of the difficulties and pleasures of life in a new 
 country, unlike England in some respects, yet like it in many, should read ihia book." 
 John Bull. 
 
 Xin.— DARIEN; OR, THE MERCHANT PRINOE. 
 
 BY ELIOT WARBURTOX. 
 
 " This last production of the author of ' The Crescent and the Cross ' has the same 
 
 elements of a very wide popularity. It will please its thousands." — Globe. 
 
 " Eliot ^Va^burton■s active and productive genius is amply exemplided in the present 
 book. "We have seldom met with any work in which the realities of history and the 
 poetry of fiction were more happily interwoven." — UlusiraUd Xeics. 
 
 XIY.— FAMILY ROMANCE ; OR, DOMESTIC ANNALS 
 OF THE ARISTOCRACY. 
 
 BY SIR BERNARD BURKE, ULSTER KING OF ARMS. 
 
 "It were impossible to praise too highly this most interesting book, whether we should 
 have regard to its excellent plan or its not les.a excellent execution. It ought to be found 
 on every drawing-room table. Here you have nearly fifty captivating romances with the 
 pith of all their interest preserved in undiminished poignancy, and any one may be reaA 
 in half an hour. It is not the least of their merits that the romances are founded on fact 
 — or what, at least, has been handed down for truth by long tradition — and the romance 
 of reality far exceeds the romance of fiction." — Standard. 
 
 XY.— THE LAIRD OF NORLAW. 
 
 BY MRS. OLIPHAXT. 
 
 "We have had frequent opportunities of commending Messrs. Hurst and Blacketfn 
 Standard Library. For neatness, elegance, and distinctness the volumes in this eerie* 
 surpass anything with which we are familiar. 'The Laird of Norluw' will fully bubu-u 
 t&e author's high reputation. The reader is carried on from first to last with em energy 
 of sympathy that never flags." — Sunday Times. 
 
 '"The Laird of Norlaw' is worthy of the author's reputatioiL It is one of the most 
 exqtiisite of modem novels." — Observer. 
 
 XYI.--THE ENGLISHWOMAN IN ITALY. 
 BY MRS. G. GRETTON. 
 
 "Mrs. Gretton had opportunities which rarely fall to the lot of strangers of becominic 
 acquainted with the inner life and habits of a part of the Italian peninsula which is the 
 very centre of the national cri.«is. We can praise her performance as interesting, uneia/ 
 aerated, and full of opportune instruction." — The Times. 
 
 "Mrs. Gretton's book is timely, life-iike. and for every reason to be recommended, (t 
 is impossible to close the book without liking the writer as well as the subject. The wort 
 is engaging, because real."' — Alhenxum. 
 
HUEST & BLACKETT'S STANDxVRD LIBEARY 
 
 XVII.— NOTHING NEW. 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF " JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN." 
 
 "'Nothing New' displays all those superior merits which have made 'John Halifax ' 
 one of the most popular works of the day. There is a force and truthfulness about these 
 tales which mark them as the production of no ordinary mind, and we cordially recom- 
 mend them to the perusal of all lovers of Qction.''— Morning Post. 
 
 XVIIL— LIFE OF JEANNE D'ALBRET, QUEEN OF 
 
 NAVARRE. 
 
 BY MISS FREER. 
 
 "We have read this book with great pleasure, and have no hesitation in recommending 
 it to general perusal. It reflects the highest credit on the industry and ability of Miss 
 Freer. Nothing can be more interesting than her story of the life of Jeanne D"Albret. 
 and the narrative is as trustworthy as it is attractive." — Morning Post. 
 
 XIX.— THE VALLEY OF A HUNDRED FIRES. 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF " MARGARET AND HER BRIDESMAIDS." 
 
 "If asked to classify this work, we should give it a place between 'John Halifax' and 
 'The Caxtons.' " — Standard. 
 "The spirit in which the whole book is written is refined and good." — Athenxum. 
 "This is in every sense a charming novel" — Messenger. 
 
 XX.— THE ROMANCE OF THE FORUM ; OR, NARRATIVES, 
 SCENES, AND ANECDOTES FROM COURTS OF JUSTICE. 
 
 BY PETER BURKE, SERJEANT AT LAW. 
 
 "This attractive book will be perused with much interest. It contains a great variety 
 of singular and highly romantic stories." — John Bull. 
 
 "A work of singular interest, which can never fail to charm and absorb the reader'^ 
 attention. The pre^sent cheap and elegant edition includes the true story of the Colleec 
 'Bi,yra.."—niw>trated News. 
 
 XXI.— ADELE. 
 
 BY JULIA KAYANAGH. 
 
 "•Adile' is the best work we have read by iliss Kavanagh; it is a charming story, 
 foil of delicate character-painting. The interest kindled in the first chapter bums brightly 
 to the close." — Athenoeum. 
 
 '• ' Adeie ' will fully sustain the reputation of Miss Kavanagh, high as it already ranks." 
 —John Bull. 
 
 "'Adele' is a love-story of very considerable pathos and power. It is a very clever 
 noyeL"— i)aj7y Newt. 
 
 XXIL— STUDIES FROM LIFE. 
 
 BY TEffi AUTHOR OF " JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN." 
 
 "These 'Studies ' are truthful and vivid pictures of life, often earnest, always full of righ; 
 feeling, and occasionally liphtened by touches of quiet, genial humour. The volume is re- 
 markable for thought, sound sense, shrewd observation, and kind and sympathetic feeling 
 for all things good and beautiful." — Morning Post. 
 
 "These '.Studies from Life' are remarkable for graphic power and observation. Th^» 
 »"X>k will not diminish the reputation of the accomplished &\x\.]iqt."— Saturday Revino. 
 
HUEST & BLACKETT'S STANDARD LIBRARY 
 
 XXIIL— GRAITDMOTHER'S MONEY. 
 
 BY F. ^Y. ROBINSON. 
 
 "We commend 'Grandmother's Money' to readers in search of a good novel The 
 charactera are true to human nature, and the story is interesting." — Athenceum. 
 
 XXIV.— A BOOK ABOUT DOCTORS. 
 
 BY JOHN CORDY JEAFFRESON. 
 
 " A book to be read and re-read ; fit for the study as well as the drawing-room table and 
 the circulating library." — Lancet. 
 
 " This is a pleasant book for the fireside season, and for the seaside season. Mr. Jeaffre- 
 Bon has. out of hundreds of volumes, collected thousands of good things, adding thereto 
 much that appears in print for the first time, and which, of course, gives increased value 
 to this very readable book.'' — Athenceum. 
 
 XXY.— NO CHURCH. 
 
 BY F. W. ROBINSON. 
 
 ""We advise all who have the opportunity to read this book. It is well worth the 
 Btudy. ' ■ — Athenceum. 
 " A work of great originality, merit, and power." — Standard. 
 
 XXVI.— MISTRESS AND MAID. 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF " JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN." 
 
 "A good wholesome book, gracefully written, and as pleasant to read as it is instruc- 
 tive." — AthenoEum. 
 
 "A charming tale, charmingly told." — Standard. 
 
 "All lovers of a good novel will hail with delight another of iira Craik's charming 
 stories." — John Bull. 
 
 XXVII.— LOST AND SAVED. 
 
 BY THE HON. MRS. NORTON. 
 
 " 'Lost and Saved' will be read with eager interest by those who love a touching story. 
 It is a vigorous novel." — Times. 
 
 "This story is animated, full of exciting situations and stirring incidents. The charac- 
 ters are delineated with great power. Above and beyond these elements of a good novel, 
 there is that indefinable charm with which true genius invests all it touches."— Z)a»7yiVVtr*. 
 
 XXVIII.— LES MISERABLES. 
 
 BY VICTOR HUGO. 
 Authorised Copyright English Translation. 
 
 "The merits of 'Les Miserables ' do not merely consist in the conception of it as a 
 whole ; it abounds with details of unequalled beauty, il. Victor Hugo has stamped upon 
 every page the hall-mark of genius." — Quarterly Review. 
 
 XXIX.— BARBARA'S HISTORY. 
 
 BY AMELL\ B. EDWARDS. 
 
 "It is not often that we light upon a novel of so much merit and interest as 
 •Barbara's History.' It is a work conspicuous for taste and literary culture. It is a very 
 graceful and charming book, with a well-managed story, clearly-cut characters, and 
 sentiments expressed with an exquisite elocution. The dialogues especially sparkle wita 
 repartee. It is a book which the world will like. This is high praise of a work of art 
 aud so we intend it"— The Times. 
 
nUKST & BLACKETTS STANDARD LIBRARY 
 
 XXX.— LIFE OF THE REV. EDWARD IRVING. 
 BY MRS. OLIPHANT. 
 
 " A good book on a most interesting theme." — Time*. 
 
 " A truly interesting and most affecting memoir. ' Irving's Life ' ought to have a niche 
 In every gallery of religious biography. There are few lives that will be fuller of in- 
 • trnction, interest, and consolation." — Saturday Rtview. 
 
 XXXL— ST. OLAVE'S. 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF " JANITA'S CROSS." 
 
 "This novel is the work of one who possesses a great talent for writing, as well as 
 ''^ perience and knowledge of the world. The whole book is worth reading." — Athenceum. 
 
 "St, Olave's ' belongs to a lofty order of fiction. It is a good novel, but it is something 
 more. It is written with unflagging ability, and it is as even as it is clever. The author 
 has determined to do nothing short of the best, and has succeeded." — Morning Post. 
 
 XXXII.— SAM SLICK'S TRAITS OF AMERICAN HUMOUR. 
 
 •' Dip where you will into this lottery of fun, you are sure to draw out a prize. These 
 ' Traits ' exhibit most successfully the broad national features of American humour." — Post. 
 
 XXXIIL— CHRISTIAN'S MISTAKE. 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF " JOHX HiVLIFAX, GENTLEMAN." 
 
 " A more charming story has rarely been written. It is a choice gift to be able thus to 
 render human nature so truly, to penetrate its depths with such a searching sagacity, and 
 to illominate them with a radiance so eminently the writer's own." — Tima. 
 
 XXXIV.— ALEC FORBES OF HOWGLEN. 
 
 BY GEORGE MAC DONALD, LL.D. 
 
 "No account of this story would give any idea of the profound interest that pervades 
 the work from the first page to the last" — Athenceum. 
 
 "A novel of uncommon merit Sir Walter Scott said he would advise no man to try 
 to read ' Clarissa Harlowe ' out loud in company if he wished to keep his character for 
 manly superiority to tears. We fancy a good many hardened old novel-readers will feel 
 a rising in the throat as they follow the fortunes of Alec and Annie."— Pall Mall Gazettt. 
 
 XXXV.— AGNES. 
 
 BY MRS. OLIPHANT. 
 
 " 'Agnes ' is a novel superior to any of Mrs. Oliphant's former •wOTkB."—AthencBum. 
 
 "Mrs. Oliphant is one of the most admirable of our novelists. In her works there 
 are always to be found high principle, good taste, sense, and refinement 'Agnes ' is 
 a Btory whose pathetic beauty will appeal irresistibly to all readers."— J/w//UHy Puit. 
 
 XXXVI.— A NOBLE LIFE. 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF '* JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN." 
 
 "Few men and no women will read 'A Noble Life' without feeling themselves the 
 »»tter for the effort" — Upectator. 
 
 • A beiiulifully written and touching tale. It is a noble book."— i/omini7 Post. 
 
 "'A Noblo Life' is remarkable for the high types of character it presents, and the 
 fkill with which they are made to work out u stoiy of powerful and pathetic interest" 
 —Daily Keics. 
 
 XXX VII.— NEW AMERICA. 
 BY W. IIEPWORTH DIXUN. 
 
 "A very Interesting book. Mr. Dixon has written thoughtfully and well." — Tiwfs. 
 " We n'coninipnd everyone who feels any interest in human nature to read Mr. 
 "MiuuB very iuterosting book." — Saturday lUruw. 
 
HUKST & BLACKETT'S STANDARD LIBRARY 
 
 XXXYIII.— ROBERT FALCONER. 
 
 BY GEORGE MAC DONALD, LL.D. 
 
 " ' Robert Falconer ' is a work brimful of life and humour and of the deepest human 
 interest It is a book to be returned to again and again for the deep and searchine 
 knowledge it evinces of human thoughts and feelings." — Athenceum. 
 
 XXXIX.— THE WOMAN'S KINGDOM. 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF " JOHN HALIFAX, GEXTLEiLA^N." 
 
 "' The "Woman's Kingdom ' sustains the author's reputation as a writer of the purest 
 and noblest kind of domestic stories." — Alhenceum. 
 
 •' ' The Woman's Kingdom ' is remarkable for its romantic interest The characters ure 
 masterpieces. Edna is worthy of the hand that drew John Halifax." Morning Pott. 
 
 XL.— ANNALS OF AN EVENTFUL LIFE. 
 
 BY GEORGE WEBBE DASEXT, D.C.L. 
 
 " A racy, well-written, and original novel The interest never flags. The whole work 
 eptirkles with wit and humour." — Quarterly Review. 
 
 XLI.— DAVID ELGINBROD. 
 
 BY GEORGE MAC DOXALD, LL.D. 
 
 "A novel which is the work of a man of genius. It vrill attract the higtest class of 
 readers." — Times. 
 
 XLII.— A BRAVE LADY. 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF " JOHX HALIFAX, GEXTLEMAX." 
 
 "We earnestly recommend this novel It is a special and worthy specimen of the 
 authors remarkable powers. The reader's attention never for a moment flags." — Post 
 
 "'A Brave Lady' thoroughly rivets the unmingled sympathy of the reader, and her 
 history deserves to stand foremost among the author's works." — Daily Telegraph. 
 
 XLIII.— HANNAH. 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF " JOHX HALIFAX, GEXTLEMAX." 
 
 " A very pleasant healthy story, well and artistically told. The book is sure of a wi.le 
 circle of readers. The character of Hannah is one of rare beauty." — Standard. 
 
 "A powerful novel of social and domestic life. One of the most successful efforts of % 
 successful novelist" — Daily Xeus. 
 
 XLIY.— SAM SLICK'S AMERICANS AT HOME. 
 
 "This is one of the most amusing books that wo ever read." — Standard. 
 " 'The Americans at Home" will not be less popular than any of Judge Halliburton's 
 previous works." — Morning Post. 
 
 XL v.— THE UNKIND WORD. 
 
 T »' 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF "JOHX HALIFAX, GEXTLEMAX. 
 
 "These stories are gems of narrative. Indeed, some of them, in their_ touching grar« 
 and simplicity, seem to us to possess a charm even beyond the authoress's most popular 
 novels. Of none of them can this be said more emphatically than of that which opens th« 
 BPries, 'The Un'sind Word.' It is wonderful to see the imaginative power displayed in 
 the few delicate touches by which this successful love-story is sketched o-aX."—The Echo. 
 
HUEST & BLACKETT'S STANDARD LIBRARY 
 
 XLVI.— A ROSE IN JUNE. 
 
 BY MRS. OLIPHANT. 
 *"A Rose in June' ia as pretty as its title. The story ia one of the best and most 
 touching which we owe to the iudustry and talent of Mrs. Oliphant, and may hold ita own 
 with even ' The Chronicles of Carlingford.' "'—Times. 
 
 XL VII.— MY LITTLE LADY. 
 
 BY E. FRANCES POYXTER. 
 
 "This story presents a number of vivid and very charming pictures, Indeed, the whol© 
 book is charming. It is interesting in both character and story, and thoroughly good of 
 its iiind." — Saturday Review. 
 
 XLVIIL— PHCEBE, JUNIOR. 
 
 BY MRS. OLIPHANT. 
 "This last 'Chronicle of Carlingford' not merely takes rank fairly beside the first 
 which introduced us to 'Salem Chapel,' but surpasses all the intermediate records. 
 PLoebe, Junior, herself is admirably drawn." — Academy. 
 
 XLIX.^LIFE OF MARIE ANTOINETTE. 
 
 BY PROFESSOR CHARLES DUKE YONGE. 
 
 " A work of remarkable merit and interest, which will, we doubt not, become the moi 
 popular English history of Marie Antoinette."— .Sipec^aior. 
 
 L.— SIR GIBBIE. 
 
 BY GEORGE MAC DONALD, LL.D. 
 
 " ' Sir Gibbie ' is a book of genius."— PaZZ Mall Gazette. 
 " This book has power, pathos, and humour." — Athenaeum. 
 
 LL— YOUNG MRS. JARDINE. 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF " JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN." 
 •' 'Tonng Mrs. Jardine ' is a pretty story, written in pure English."— 7%^ Times. 
 " There is much good feeling in this book. It is pleasant and wholesome."— .4i/i€/jceu/a 
 
 LIL— LORD BRACKENBURY. 
 
 BY AMELIA B. EDWARDS. 
 
 "A very readable story. The author has well conceived the purpose of high-class 
 novel-writing, and succeeded in no small measure in attaining it There ia plenty of 
 variety, cheerful dialogue, and general ' verve ' in the hQQ]^"—Atlienceum. 
 
 Lni.-IT WAS A LOVER AND HIS LASS. 
 
 BY MRS. OLIPHANT. 
 
 "In • It was a Lover and his Lass,' we admire Mrs. Oliphant exceedingly. It would b© 
 worth reading a second time, were it only for the sake of one ancient Scottish spinster, 
 who is nearly the counterpart of the admirable Mrs. Margaret Maitland."— rinje*. 
 
 LIV.— THE REAL LORD BYRON— THE STORY OF 
 THE POETS LIFE. 
 
 BY JOHN CORDY JEAFFRESON. 
 
 "Mr. .TonffreRon comes forward with a narrative which must take a very important 
 place in Hyronic literature; and it m;iy reasonably be an licipatod that this book will be 
 regarded with deep interest by all who are concerned in the works and the fame of this 
 great English poet." — The Times. 
 
WORKS BY THE AUTHOR OF 
 
 'SAI SLICK, THE CLOCIOIAKEPt.' 
 
 Each in One Volume^ Frontispiece, and Uniformly Bound, Price 5*, 
 
 NATURE AND HUMAN NATURE. 
 
 ""We enjoy our old friend's company with unabated relish. This work is a ratfling 
 miscellany of Bharp sayings, stories, and hard hits. It is full of fun and fancy." — AthennunZ 
 
 •• Since Sam's flrst work he has written nothing so fresh, racy, and genuinely humorous aa 
 this. Every line of it tells in tome way or other— instructively, satirically, jocosely, or 
 wittily. Admiration of Sam's mature talents, and laughter at his droll yams, constantly 
 alternate as with unhaltLng avidity we peruse the work. The Clockmaker proves himself 
 the fastest time-kilier a-goLng."' — Observer. 
 
 WISE SAWS AND MODERN INSTANCES. 
 
 "This delightful hook will be the most popular, as beyond doubt it is the best, of all the 
 author's admirable works '' — Standard. 
 
 " The book before us will be read and laughed over. Its quaint and racy dialect will 
 please some readers — its abundance of yams will amuse others. There is something to 
 suit readers of every humour." — Athenceum. 
 
 "The humour of Sam Slick is inexhaustible. He is ever and everywhere a welcome 
 visitor ; smiles greet his approach, and wit and wisdom haag upon his tongue. We pro- 
 mise our readers a great treat from the perusal of these 'Wise Saws," which contain a 
 world of practical wisdom, and a treasury of the richest fun." — Morning Post. 
 
 THE OLD JUDGE ; OR, LIFE IN A COLONY. 
 
 " By common consent this work is regarded as one of the raciest, truest to life, most 
 humorous, and most interesting works which have proceeded from the prolific pen of its 
 author. We all know what shrewdness of observation, what power of graphic descrip- 
 tion, what natural resources of drollery, and what a happy method of hitting off the 
 broader characteristics of the life he reviews, belong to Judge Haliburton. We have all 
 those qualities here ; but they are balanced by a serious literary purpose, and are employed 
 in the communication of information respecting certain phases of colonial experience 
 which impart to the work an element of sober utility," — Sunday Times. 
 
 TRAITS OF AMERICAN HUMOUR. 
 
 " No man has done more than the facetious Judge Haliburton, through the mouth of the- 
 inimitable ' Sam.' to make the old parent cotmtry recognise and appreciate her queer 
 transatlantic progeny. His present collection of comic stories and laughable traits is a 
 budget of ftm, full of rich specimens of American humour." — Ghbe, 
 
 " Yankeeism. portrayed in its raciest aspect, constitutes the contents of these superla- 
 tively entertaining sketches. The work embraces the most varied topics — political parties, 
 religious eccentricities, the flights of literature, and the absurdities of pretenders to learn- 
 ing, all come in for their share of satire ; while we have specimens of genuine American 
 exaggerations and graphic pictures of social and domestic life as it ia The work will 
 have a wide circulation." — John Bull. 
 
 THE a:\iericans at home. 
 
 "In this highly entertaining work we are treated to another cargo of capital stories 
 from the inexhaustible store of our Yankee friend. In the volume before us he dishes up, 
 with his accustomed humour and terseness of style, a vast number of tales, none more- 
 entertaining than another, and all of them graphically illustrative of the ways and man- 
 ners of brother Jonathan. The anomalies of American law, the extraordinary adventures 
 incident to life in the backwoods, and, above all, the peculiarities of American society, are 
 variously, powerfully, and, for the most part, amusingly exemplifled."— /oAn Bull. 
 
 " In the picturesque delineation of character, and the felicitous portraiture of national 
 features, no writer equals Judge Haliburton. and the subjects embraced in the present 
 delightful book call forth, in new and vigorous exercise, his peculiar powers. 'Th& 
 Americans at Home ' will not be less popular than any of his previous vr orks."— Post. 
 
 LONDON : HU2ST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS. 
 
WORKS BY THE AUTHOR OF 
 
 JOM HALIFAX, GENTLE3IAN. 
 
 Each in One Volume^ Frontispiece., and Uniformly Bound, price 6s. 
 
 JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN. 
 
 " This 13 a very good and a very interesting work. It is designed to trace the career 
 from boyhood to age of a perfect man — a Christian gertleman, and it abounds in incident 
 both well and highly wrought. Throughout it is conceived in a high spirit, and written 
 with great ability. This cheap and handsome new edition is worthy to pass freely from 
 hand to hand as a gift-book in many households." — Examiner. 
 
 "The story is very interesting The attachment between John Halifax and his wife ia 
 beautifully painted, as are the pictures of their domestic life, and the growing up of their 
 children, and the conclusion of the book is beautiful and touching."' — Athenceum. 
 
 "The new and cheaper edition of this interesting work will doubtless meet with great 
 success. John Halifax, the hero of this most beautiful story, is no ordinary hero, and this 
 his history is no ordinary book. It is a full-length portrait of a true gentleman, one of 
 nature's own nobility. It is also the history of a home, and a thoroughly English one. 
 The work abounds in incident, and is full of graphic power and true pathos. It is a book 
 that few will read without becoming wiser and better." — Scotsman. 
 
 A WOMAN'S THOUGHTS ABOUT WOMEN. 
 
 •' A book of sound counsel It is one of the most sensible works of its kind, well written, 
 true-hearted, and altogether practical. Whoever wishes to give advice to a yoimg lady 
 may thank the author for means of doing so." — Examiner. 
 
 "These thoughts are worthy of the earnest and enlightened mind, the all-embracing 
 ■charity, and the well-earned reputation of the author of 'John Halifax.' " — Standard. 
 
 " This excellent book is characterised by good sense, good taste, and feeling, and is 
 written in an earnest, philanthropic, as well as practical spirit" — Post. 
 
 A LIFE FOR A LIFE. 
 
 " We are always glad to welcome this author. She writes from her own convictions, 
 and she has the power not only to conceive clearly what it is that she wishes to say. but 
 to express it in language effective and vigorous. In ' A Life for a Life ' she is fortunate 
 in a good subject, and she has produced a work of strong effect. The reader, having read 
 the book through for the story, will be apt (if he be of our persuasion) to return and read 
 again many pages and passages with greater pleasure than on a tirst perusal. The whole 
 book is replete with a graceful, tender delicacy ; and, in addition to its other merits, it ia 
 written in good careful English." — Athenceum. 
 
 NOTHING NEW. 
 
 "' Nothing New ' displays all those superior merits which have made ' John Halifax ' 
 one of the most popular works of the day." — Post. 
 
 "The reader will find these narratives calculated to remind him of that truth and 
 energy of human portraiture, that spell over human affections and emotioas, which have 
 stamped this author as one of the first novelists of our day." — John Bulk 
 
 THE WOMAN'S KINGDOM. 
 
 •" The Wotnan's Kingdom' sustains the authors reputation as a writer of the purest 
 and noh'est kind of domestic stories. The novelist's lesson is given with admirable force 
 and sweetness." — Athenfrum. 
 
 " ' Tho Woman's Kingdom ' is remarkable for its romantic interest The characters 
 are masterpieces. Edna is worthy of the hand that drew John Halifax." — Post. 
 
 STUDIES FROM LIFE. 
 
 "These Btndies are truthful and vivid pictures of life, often earnest, always full of right 
 feeling, and occasionally lightened by touches of quiet genial humour. The volume is re- 
 markable forthouf^ht. Bound sense, shrewd observation, and kind and sympathetic feeling 
 for all things good and beautiful" — Post. 
 
WORKS BY THE AUTHOR OF 
 
 JOHX HAHFAX, GEXTLEMAX. 
 
 (COKTLN-rED.) 
 
 CHRISTIAN'S MISTAKE. 
 
 "A more charming story, to our taste, has rarely been written. Within the compass 
 of a single volume the writer has hit oS a circle of varied characters, all true to nature — 
 some true to the highest nature — and she has entangled them in a story which keeps n3 
 in suspense till the knot is happily and gracefully resolved ; while, at the same time, a 
 pathetic interest is sustained by an art of which it would be difficult to analyse the secret. 
 It is a choice gift to be able thus to render human nature so truly, to penetrate its depths 
 with such a searching sagacity, and to illuminate them with a radiance so eminently the 
 writer's own. Even it tried by the standard of the Archbishop of York, we shou.d expect 
 that even he would pronounce 'Christian's Mistake' a novel without a fault." — The Times. 
 
 •• This is a story good to have from the circulating library, but better to have from une'a- 
 bookseller, for it deserves a p.ace in that little collection of clever and wholesome stories 
 which forms one of the comions of a well-appointed home."" — Examiner. 
 
 MISTRESS AND MAID. 
 
 " A good, wholesome book, as pleasant to read as it is ins'.ructive."" — Athenceum. 
 "This book is written with the same true-hearted earnestness as ' John Haiifax.' The- 
 spirit of the whole work is excellent"" — Examiner. 
 "A charming tale charmingly xo\±"—Standar'I. 
 
 A NOBLE LIFE. 
 
 "This is one of those pleasant tales in which the author of 'John Halifax ' speaks out 
 of a generous heart the purest traths of life." — Examiner. 
 
 " Few men, and no women, will read 'A Noble Lite ' without finding themselves the 
 better."" — Spectator. 
 
 "A story of powerful and pathetic interest." — Daily Xeics. 
 
 A BRAVE LADY. 
 
 " .\ very good novel showing a tender sympathy with human nature, and permeated 
 by a pure and noble spirit" — Examiner. 
 
 ••A most charming story." — Standard. 
 
 '• We earnestly recommend this novel It is a special and worthy specimen of the 
 author's remarkable powers. The reader"s attention never for a moment flags." — jfuit. 
 
 HANNAH. 
 
 " A powerful novel of social and domestic Ufa One of the most successful efforts of a 
 successful novelist"' — Daili/ Xeics. 
 
 •'A very pleasant, hea.tny story, well and artistically told. The book is sure of a wide 
 circle of readers. The character of Hannah is oae of rare beauty.'" — standard. 
 
 THE UNKIND WORD. 
 
 " The author of 'John Halifax" has written many fascinating stories, but we can call to 
 mind nothing from her pen that has a more enduring charm than the graceful sketches in 
 this work. Such a character as Jessie stands out from a crowd of heroines as the type of 
 all that is truly noble, pure, and womanly.'' — United Se-rvice ilafjazine. 
 
 YOUNG MRS. JARDINE. 
 
 " ' Young Mrs. Jardine ' is a pretty story, written in pure English."' — T?ie Times. 
 
 "There is much good feeling in this book. It is pleasant and wholesome.'" — Athenceum. 
 
 "A book that all should rea± Whilst it is quite the equal of any of its predecessors 
 in elevation of thought and style, it is perhaps their superior in interest of plot ami 
 dramatic intensity. The characters are admirably delineated, and the dialogue is natural 
 and clear."" — Morning Post. 
 
 LONDON : HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS. 
 
WORKS BY 
 
 MRS. OLIFHANT. 
 
 Each in One Volume, Frontispiece, and Uniformly Bound, Price 5s. 
 
 ADAM GRAEME OF MOSSGRAY. 
 
 •' ' Adam Graeme ' is a story awakening genuine emotions of interest and delight by its 
 admirable pictures of Scottish life and scenery. The plot is cleverly complicated, and 
 there is great vitality in the dialogue, and remarkable brilliancy in the descriptive pas- 
 sages, as who that has read ' JIargaret Mailand ' would not be prepared to expect? 
 But the story has a 'mightier magnet still,' in the healthy tone which pervades it, in its 
 feminine delicacy of thought and diction, and in the truly womanly tenderness of its 
 fientiments. The eloquent author sets before us the essential attributes of Christian 
 virtue, their deep and silent workings in the heart, and their beautiful manifestations in 
 the life, with a delicacy, a power, and a truth which can hardly be surpassed." — Morning 
 PotU 
 
 THE LAIRD OF NORLAW. 
 
 "We have had frequent opportunities of commending Messrs. Hurst and Blackett's 
 Standard Library. For neatness, elegance, and distinctness the volumes in this series 
 Burpass anything with which we are familiar. ' The Laird of Norlaw ' will fully sustain 
 the authors high reputation. The reader is carried on from first to last with an energy 
 of sympathy that never Mgs."— Sunday Times. 
 
 '"The Laird of Norlaw' is worthy of the author's reputation. It is one of the most 
 exquisite of modem novels." — Observer. 
 
 IT WAS A LOVER AND HIS LASS. 
 
 "In 'It was a Lover and his Lass,' we admire Mrs. Oliphant exceedingly. Her story is 
 a, very pretty one. It would be worth reading a second time, were it only for the sake of 
 one ancient "Scottish spinster, who is nearly the counterpart of the admirable Mrs. Mar- 
 garet Maitland." — Times. 
 
 AGNES. 
 
 •' ' Agnes ' is a novel superior to any of Mrs. Oliphant's former works." — Athenceum. 
 
 "Mrs. Oliphant is one of the most admirable of our novelists. In her works there are 
 always to be found high principle, good taste, sense, and refinement ' Agnes ' is a story 
 whose pathetic beauty will appeal irresistibly to all readers." — Morning Post. 
 
 A ROSE IN JUNE. 
 
 "'A Rose in June' is as pretty as its title. The story is one of the best and most 
 ■touching which we owe to the industry and talent of Mrs. Ohphant, and may hold its own 
 with even ' The Chronicles of Carlingford.' " — Times. 
 
 PHCEBE, JUNIOR. 
 
 "This last 'Chronicle of Carlingford' not merely takes rank fairly beside the first 
 ■which introduced us to ' Salem Chapel,' but Furpasses all the intermediate records. 
 Phcebe, Junior, herself is admirably drawn."— .dccKfemy. 
 
 LIFE OF THE REV. EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 "A good book on a most interesting theme." — Times. 
 
 "A truly interesting and most affecting memoir. 'Irving's Life' ought to have a niche 
 in every gallery of religious biography. There are few lives that will be fuller of in- 
 btruciioa, interest, and consolation." — Saturday Review. 
 
 LONDON : HUiiST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHEES. 
 
■WORKS BY 
 
 GEORGE MAC DOXALD, LL.D. 
 
 Each in One Volume, Frontispiece, and Uniformly Bound, Price bs. 
 
 ALEC FORBES OF HOWGLEN. 
 
 "No account of this story would give any idea of the profoond interest that perrades 
 the work from the flrst page to the \2.st."—Athensp.um. 
 
 "A novel of uncommon merit Sir Walter Scott said he would advise no man to try 
 to read ' Clarissa Harlowe ' out loud in company if he wished to keep his character for 
 manly superioritv to tears. "We fancy a good many hardened old novel-readers will feel 
 a rising in the throat as they follow the fortunes of Alec and Annie.''— Pa// MaU GazetU. 
 
 "The whole storvis one of surpassing excellence and beauty.'" — Daily yetcs. 
 
 " This book is full of good thought and good writing. Dr. Mac Donald looks in his stories 
 more to the souls of men and women than to their social outsida He reads life and 
 Nature like a true poet"— i^xamtner. 
 
 ROBERT FALCONER. 
 
 "' Robert Falconer ' is a work brimful of life and humour and of the deepest human 
 interest It is a work to be returned to a?ain and again for the deep and searching 
 knowledge it evinces of human thoughts and feelings.'" — Athenaeum. 
 
 "This story abounds in exquisite specimens of the word-painting in which Dr. Mac 
 Donald excels, charming transcripts of Nature, full of light, air, and colour."— 5aiurda.(/ 
 Review. 
 
 " This noble story displays to the best advantage all the powers of Dr Mac Donald's 
 genius." — Illustrated London Sews. 
 
 " • Robert Falconer ' is the noblest work of Action that Dr. Mac Donald has yet pro- 
 duced." — British Quarterly Review. 
 
 " The dialogues in ' Robert Falconer ' are so finely blended with humoor and pathos as 
 to make them in themielves an intellectual treat to which the reader returns again and 
 again." — Spectator. 
 
 DAVID ELGIXBROD. 
 
 " A novel which is the work of a man of genius. It will attract the highest class of 
 readers. ' — Times. 
 
 "There are many beautiful passages and descriptions in this book. The characters are 
 extremelv well drawiL" — Athenceum. 
 
 "A clever novel. The incidents are exciting, and the interest is maintained to the 
 close. It may be doubted if Sir "Walter Scott himself ever painted a Scotch flreside with 
 more truth than Dr Mac Donald." — Morning Post. 
 
 "David Elginbrod is the finest character we have met in fiction for many a day. The 
 descriptions of natural scenery are vivid, truthful, and artistic; the general reflections are 
 those of a refined, thoughtful 'and poetical philosopher, and the whole moral atmosphere 
 of the book is lofty, pure, and invigorating.'' — Globe. 
 
 SIR GIBBIE. 
 
 " ' Sir Gibbie ' is a book of genius."- Pa// Mall Garette. 
 
 "This book has power, pathos, and humour There is not a character which is not 
 lifelike. There are many powerful scenes, and the portraits will stay long in our 
 memory." — AthencBum. 
 
 " ' Sir Gibbie ' is unquestionably a book of genius. It abormds m humour, pathos, 
 insight into character, and happy touches of description." — Graphic 
 
 "'Sir Gibbie' contains some of the most charming writing the author has yet pro- 
 duced." — Scotsman. 
 
 " ' Sir Gibbie" is one of the most touching and beautiful stories that has been written 
 for many ye^irs. It is not a novel to be idly read and laid aside ; it Is a grand work, to be 
 kept neir'at hand, and studied and thought over." — Morning PosL 
 
 LONDON : HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS. 
 
WOBKS by the AUTHOR of 'JOHN HALIFAX: 
 Each in a Single Volume, with Frontispiece, price 5s. 
 
 JOHX HALIFAX, GENTLE^^IAN. 
 
 A ^voman's thoughts 
 
 ABOUT WOMEN. 
 A LIFE FOR A LIFE. 
 NOTHING NEW. 
 MISTRESS AND MAID. 
 THE woman's kingdom. 
 
 christian's MIST^yiE. 
 
 A NOBLE LIFE. 
 
 HANNAH. 
 
 THE UNKIND WORD. 
 
 A BRAYE LADY. 
 
 STUDIES FROM LIFE. 
 
 YOUNG MRS. JARDINE. 
 
 WORKS hy GEORGE MAC DOXALD, LL.D. 
 Each in a Single Volume, with Frontispiece, price Ss. 
 
 DAYID ELGINBROD. 
 ROBERT FALCONER. 
 
 ALEC FORBES. 
 SIR GIBBIE. 
 
 WORKS hy MRS. OLIPIIAXT. 
 Each in a Single Volume, with Frontispiece, price 5s. 
 
 IT WAS A LOVER AND HIS 
 
 LASS 
 THE LAIRD OF NORLAW. 
 A ROSE IN JUNE. 
 
 ADAM GRAEME OF MOSS- 
 GRAY. 
 PHCEBE, JUNIOR. 
 AGNES. 
 
 THE LIFE OF THE REY. EDWARD IRVING. 
 
 WORKS by the A UTHOR of ' SAM SLICK: 
 
 Each in a Single Volume, with Frontispiece, price 5s. 
 
 NATURE AND HUMAN 
 NATURE. 
 
 ^VISE Saws and modern 
 
 INSTANCES. 
 
 THE OLD JUDGE ; OR, LIFE 
 
 IN A COLONY. 
 TRAITS OF AMERICAN 
 
 HUMOUR. 
 
 TUE AMERICANS AT HOME. 
 
 LOXDOX: HURST AXD BLACKETT. 
 
1 
 
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 M> 21A-.'>0t/.-3,'62 General Library 
 (;7097tilO)476B University of California 
 
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