"Because of other fools."
"I"ll take you as far as Regent"s Park. The other fools are on the other side of that."
"I"ll chance so far," and, waving his hand vaguely towards the house, he got in. It did not seem to occur to him that there was any want of ceremony in his farewell to the Carlins.
"I suppose," she said, "you think most of us fools?"
"I"ve been learning to think it less and to show it less still."
"You"re not much changed, though."
"I"ve had some of my corners chipped off by collision with other hard substances."
"Thank you for that "other"!" cried Mrs. Dennison, with a little laugh.
"They must have been very hard ones."
"I didn"t say that they weren"t a little bit injured too."
"Poor things! I should think so."
"I have my human side."
"Generally the other side, isn"t it?" she asked with a merry glance. The talk had suddenly become very pleasant. He laughed, and stopped the carriage. A sigh escaped from Mrs. Dennison.
"Next time," he said, "we"ll talk about you, or Miss Ferrars, or that little Miss Marjory Valentine, not about me. Good-bye," and he was gone before she could say a word to him.
But it was natural that she should think a little about him. She had not, she said to herself with a weary smile, too many interesting things to think about, and she began to find him decidedly interesting; in which fact again she found a certain strangeness and some material for reflection, because she recollected very well that as a girl she had not found him very attractive. Perhaps she demanded then more colouring of romance than he had infused into their intercourse; she had indeed suspected him of suppressed romance, but the suppression had been very thorough, betraying itself only doubtfully here and there, as in his judgment of her accepted suitor. Moreover, let his feelings then have been what they might, he was not, she felt sure, the man to cherish a fruitless love for eight or nine years, or to suffer any resurrection of expired emotions on a renewed encounter with an old flame. He buried his dead too deep for that; if they were in the way, she could fancy him sometimes shovelling the earth over them and stamping it down without looking too curiously whether life were actually extinct or only flickering towards its extinction; if it were not quite gone at the beginning of the gravedigger"s work, it would be at the end, and the result was the same. Nor did she suppose that ghosts gibbered or clanked in the orderly trim mansions of his brain. In fact, she was to him a more or less pleasant acquaintance, sandwiched in his mind between Adela Ferrars and Marjory Valentine--with something attractive about her, though she might lack the sparkle of the one and had been robbed of the other"s youthful freshness. This was the conclusion which she called upon herself to draw as she drove back from Hampstead--the plain and sensible conclusion. Yet, as she reached Curzon Street, there was a smile on her face; and the conclusion was hardly such as to make her smile--unless indeed she had added to it the reflection that it is ill judging of things till they are finished. Her acquaintance with Willie Ruston was not ended yet.
"Maggie, Maggie!" cried her husband through the open door of his study as she pa.s.sed up-stairs. "Great news! We"re to go ahead. We settled it at the meeting this morning."
Harry Dennison was in exuberant spirits. The great company was on the verge of actual existence. From the chrysalis of its syndicate stage it was to issue a bright b.u.t.terfly.
"And Ruston was most complimentary to our house. He said he could never have carried it through without us. He"s in high feather."
Mrs. Dennison listened to more details, thinking, as her husband talked, that Ruston"s cheerful mood was fully explained, but wondering that he had not himself thought it worth while to explain to her the cause of it a little more fully. With that achievement fresh in his hand, he had been content to hold his peace. Did he think her not worth telling?
With a cloud on her brow and her smile eclipsed, she pa.s.sed on to the drawing-room. The window was open and she saw Tom Loring"s back in the balcony. Then she heard her friend Mrs. Cormack"s rather shrill voice.
"Not say such things?" the voice cried, and Mrs. Dennison could picture the whirl of expostulatory hands that accompanied the question. "But why not?"
Tom"s voice answered in the careful tones of a man who is trying not to lose his temper, or, anyhow, to conceal the loss.
"Well, apart from anything else, suppose Dennison heard you? It wouldn"t be over-pleasant for him."
Mrs. Dennison stood still, slowly peeling off her gloves.
"Oh, the poor man! I would not like to hurt him. I will be silent. Oh, he does his very best! But you can"t help it."
Mrs. Dennison stepped a yard nearer the window.
"Help what?" asked Tom in the deepest exasperation, no longer to be hidden.
"Why, what must happen? It must be that the true man----"
A smile flickered over Maggie Dennison"s face. How like Berthe! But whence came this topic?
"Nonsense, I tell you!" cried Tom with a stamp of his foot.
And at the sound Mrs. Dennison smiled again, and drew yet nearer to the window.
"Oh, it"s always nonsense what I say! Well, we shall see, Mr. Loring,"
and Mrs. Cormack tripped in through her window, and wrote in her diary--she kept a diary full of reflections--that Englishmen were all stupid. She had written that before, but the deep truth bore repet.i.tion.
Tom went in too, and found himself face to face with Mrs. Dennison.
Bright spots of colour glowed on her cheeks; had she answered the question of the origin of the topic? Tom blushed and looked furtively at her.
"So the great scheme is launched," she remarked, "and Mr. Ruston triumphs!"
Tom"s manner betrayed intense relief, but he was still perturbed.
"We"re having a precious lot of Ruston," he observed, leaning against the mantelpiece and putting his hands in his pockets.
"_I_ like him," said Maggie Dennison.
"Those are the orders, are they?" asked Tom with a rather wry smile.
"Yes," she answered, smiling at Tom"s smile. It amused her when he put her manner into words.
"Then we all like him," said Tom, and, feeling quite secure now, he added, "Mrs. Cormack said we should, which is rather against him."
"Oh, Berthe"s a silly woman. Never mind her. Harry likes him too."
"Lucky for Ruston he does. Your husband"s a useful friend. I fancy most of Ruston"s friends are of the useful variety."
"And why shouldn"t we be useful to him?"
"On the contrary, it seems our destiny," grumbled Tom, whose destiny appeared not to please him.
CHAPTER IV.
TWO YOUNG GENTLEMEN.
Lady Valentine was the widow of a baronet of good family and respectable means; the one was to be continued and the other absorbed by her son, young Sir Walter, now an Oxford undergraduate and just turned twenty-one years of age. Lady Valentine had a jointure, and Marjory a pretty face.
The remaining family a.s.sets were a country-house of moderate dimensions in the neighbourhood of Maidenhead, and a small flat in Cromwell Road.
Lady Valentine deplored the rise of the plutocracy, and had sometimes secretly hoped that a plutocrat would marry her daughter. In other respects she was an honest and unaffected woman.