The Convert. Elizabeth Robins

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СКАЧАТЬ making allowances. Most of us gratify the dormant cruelty in human nature by keeping an eagle eye on the wretched late ones when at last they do slink in. Don't you know'—he turned to Lady John—'that look of half-resentful interest?'

      'Perfectly. Every one wants to see whether these particular culprits wear their rue with a difference.'

      'Or whether,' Borrodaile went on, 'whether, like the majority, they merely look abject and flustered, and whisper agitated lies. Personally I have known it to be the most interesting moment of the evening.'

      What brought Mrs. Fox-Moore's plight forcibly home to Mrs. Freddy was seeing Vida leave her own animated group to join her sister. Mrs. Freddy made her way across the room, stopping a moment to say to Freddy as she passed—

      'Do go and make conversation to Lady Whyteleafe.'

      'Which is Lady Whyteleafe?' drawled Freddy.

      'Oh, you always forget her! What am I to do with you? She's the woman with the pearls.'

      'Not that cross-looking——'

      'Sh! Yes, darling, that's the one. She's only looking like that because you aren't talking to her;' and Mrs. Freddy overtook Vida just as she reached the Desert Island where Mrs. Fox-Moore stood, looking seaward for a sail.

      A few moments later, after ringing for dinner, Mrs. Freddy paused an instant, taking in the fact that Lady Whyteleafe hadn't been made as happy by Mr. Tunbridge's attentions as his wife had prophesied. No, the angry woman with the pearls, so far from being intent upon Freddy's remarks, was levelling at Mrs. Freddy the critical eye that says, 'Now I shall see if I can determine just how miserably conscious you are that dinner's unpardonably late, everybody starving, and since you've only just rung, that you have at least eight minutes still to fill up before you'll hear that you are "served."' Lady Whyteleafe leaned against the back of the little periwinkle damask sofa, and waited to see Mrs. Freddy carry off these last minutes of suspense by an affectation of great good spirits.

      But the lady under the social microscope knew a trick worth two of that. She could turn more than one mishap to account.

      'Oh, Freddy! Oh, Lady Whyteleafe! I've just gone and said the most awful, dreadful, appalling thing! Oh, I should like to creep under the sofa and die!'

      'What's up?' demanded Mr. Freddy, with an air of relief at being reinforced.

      'I've been talking to Vida Levering and that funereal sister of hers.'

      'Oh, Mrs. Fox-Moore!' said Lady Whyteleafe, obviously disappointed. 'She's a step-sister, isn't she?'

      'Yes, yes. Oh, I wish she'd never stepped over my threshold!'

      'Why?' said Mr. Freddy, sticking in his eyeglass.

      'Don't, Freddy. Don't look at her. Oh, I wish I were dead!'

      'What have you been doing? She looks as if she wished she were dead.'

      'That's nothing. She always looks like that,' Lady Whyteleafe assured the pair.

      'Yes, and she makes it a great favour to come. "I seldom go into society," she writes in her stiff little notes; and you're reminded that way, without her actually setting it down, that she devotes herself to good works.'

      'Perhaps she doesn't know what else to do with all that money,' said the lady of the pearls.

      'She hasn't got a penny piece.'

      'Oh, is it all his? I thought the Leverings were rather well off.'

      'Yes, but the money came through the second wife, Vida's mother. Oh, I hate that Fox-Moore woman!' Mrs. Freddy laughed ruefully. 'And I'm sure her husband is a great deal too good for her. But how could I have done it!'

      'You haven't told us yet.'

      'They asked me who was late, and I said Dick Farnborough, and that I hoped he hadn't forgotten, for I had Hermione Heriot here on purpose to meet him. And I told Vida about the Heriots trying to marry Hermione to that old Colonel Redding.'

      'Oh, can't they bring it off?' said Lady Whyteleafe.

      'I've been afraid they would. "It's so dreadful," I said, "to see a fresh young girl tied to a worn-out old man."'

      'Oh!' remarked Lady Whyteleafe, genuinely shocked. 'And you said that to——'

      Mrs. Freddy nodded with melancholy significance. 'Even when Vida said, "It seems to do well enough sometimes," still I never never remembered the Fox-Moore story! And I went on about it being a miracle when it turned out even tolerably—and, oh, Heaven forgive me! I grew eloquent!'

      'It's your passion for making speeches,' said Mr. Freddy.

      At which, accountably to Lady Whyteleafe, Mrs. Freddy blushed and stumbled in this particular 'speech.'

      'I know, I know,' she said, carrying it off with an air of comic contrition. 'I even said, "There's a modesty in nature that it isn't wise to overstep" (I'd forgotten some people think speech-making comes under that head). "It's been realized," I said—yes, rushing on my doom!—"it's been realized up to now only in the usual one-sided way—discouraging boys from marrying women old enough to be their mothers. But dear, blundering, fatuous man"'—she smiled into her husband's pleasantly mocking face—'"he thinks," I said, "at any age he's a fit mate for a fresh young creature in her teens. If they only knew—the dreadful old ogres!" Yes, I said that. I piled it on—oh, I stuck at nothing! "The men think an ugly old woman monopolizes all the opportunities humanity offers for repulsiveness. But there's nothing on the face of the earth as hideous," I said, "as an ugly old man. Doesn't it stand to reason? He's bound to go greater lengths than any woman can aspire to. There's more of him to be ugly, isn't there? I appealed to them—everything about him is bigger, coarser—he's much less human," says I, "and much more like a dreadful old monkey." I raised my wretched eyes, and there, not three feet away, was the aged husband of the Fox-Moore woman ogling Hermione Heriot! Oh, let me die!' Mrs. Freddy leaned against the blue-grey sofa for a moment and half closed her pretty eyes. The next instant she was running gaily across the room to welcome Richard Farnborough and Captain Beeching.

      'I always know,' said Lord Borrodaile, glancing over the banisters as he and Vida went down—'I always know the kind of party it's going to be when I see—certain people. Don't you?'

      'I know who you mean,' Vida whispered back, her eyes on Mrs. Graham Townley's aggressively high-piled hair towering over the bald pate of the minister, as, side by side, they disappeared through the dining-room door. 'Why does Laura have her?'

      'Well, she's immensely intelligent, they say,' he sighed.

      'That's why I wonder,' laughed Vida. 'We are rather frivolous, I'm afraid.'

      'To tell the truth, I wondered, too. I even sounded my sister-in-law.'

      'Well?'

      'She said it was her Day of Reckoning. "I never ask the woman," she said, "except to a scratch party like this."'

      '"Scratch party"—with you and me here!'

      'Ah, we are СКАЧАТЬ