“‘Let us be consistent,’” said Lady Pomphrey, her three saddle-bag chins quivering with emotion, “‘or let us die’—that is what I have always said. Here is my only niece, Wendoleth Caer-Brydglingbury, goes—actually goes—and marries a Liberal Member of Parliament in a red necktie—who makes speeches in townhalls and tents, and things, to masses of people, all about pulling down the House of Lords and abolishing the Peerage, and absolutely declines to allow his wife to drop her title. To you—so intimate a friend, don’t you know?—I may say in confidence I am sickened. I cannot imagine what the world is coming to. I could wish to die and leave it, were it not that Jane and Charlotte are still unmarried, and I have promised to present three of the sweetest girls—well-bred Americans of the best type, without a trace of accent—at the first Drawing-room of the Winter Season. And the family diamonds are being reset in view of Rustleton’s approaching marriage—a union satisfactory from every point of view, especially a mother’s.” Lady Pomphrey paused for breath, and the intimate friend-they had met at Bad Smellstein a fortnight previously while taking little early morning walks, and drinking little glasses of excessively nauseous waters warranted to correct the most aristocratic acidity—the intimate friend murmured something sympathetic.
“Of course, I might have known one could look to you for comprehension and all that sort of thing,” said Lady Pomphrey, graciously bending her head, which was enveloped 318in a large mushroom hat of blue straw tied down all round with a drab silk veil, and patting the intimate friend upon the knee with the stick of her celebrated green silk sunshade. “One of those delightful literary creatures-was it Algernon Meredith or George Swinburne?—has termed friendship ‘the marriage of true minds.’ Ever since the Hambridge-Osts introduced us—in a thunderstorm—at the firework display in the Park in honor of the Grand Duke’s birthday—and being Sunday, I will own that the nerve-shattering meteorological demonstrations that drove us to shelter in that extremely leaky Chinese pavilion seemed to me but a judgment upon German Sabbath-breakers—ours has been such a union. Cemented by your helpfulness in the matter of sandbags for a rattling window—Lord Pomphrey is completely impervious to all such nerve-shattering tortures, and will sleep happily in his cabin on the yacht in Cowes Roads through a Royal Naval Review—and your timely ministrations with soda-mint lozenges when acute indigestion virtually prostrated me after a homicidal plat of eels with cranberry-sauce, of which I foolishly partook at the table d’h?te. The mysteriousness of it allured me. I wished for once to feel like a German. Now I feel assured their extraordinary diet accounts for much that is abstruse and metaphysical in the national character. For you cannot possibly be normal if you are fed upon abnormal things. And I am grateful that Rustleton has never shown himself in the least susceptible to the attractions of their women. I know—almost quite intimately—a Grand Duchess who has brought up every one of her nine young daughters upon red-cabbage soup, with sausage-meat balls and dumplings; and somehow it is suggested in the girls’ complexions and figures—especially the dumplings.”
The friend tittered. Lady Pomphrey placed upon the seat beside her a straw handbag containing a Tauchnitz 319edition of the last new Mudie novel, a black fan, a large bottle of frightfully strong salts, several spare pocket-handkerchiefs, several indelible-ink pencils, and a quantity of obsolete railway tickets, and became more confidential than ever.
“Had I been consulted by destiny when the arrangement of Rustleton’s matrimonial future came sur le tapis I could not—with my expiring breath I would repeat this—could not be more completely satisfied. It began by his hating her.... She hit him on the nose with a diabolo in June at Ranelagh, and, ‘Mother,’ he said afterwards to me—his upper lip perfectly rigid with wounded dignity—‘I should have greatly preferred to have been born in the days of “Coningsby,” or “Lothair.” Muscular young women create in me a feeling of positive aversion!’ He found her agitating even at that early stage of affairs? How subtle of you to see that!”
The flattered friend murmured an interrogation.
“Who is she?” repeated Lady Pomphrey. “But surely the newspapers?... You suffer too acutely from dancing spots in the field of vision ever to read when undergoing a cure?... Poor dear, I can feel for you. She is the Hon. Céline Twissing—will be Baroness Twissing of Hopsacks in her own right when old Lord Twissing dies. He insisted upon that arrangement in the interests of his only child; when the intimation was conveyed from a Certain Quarter that the Jubilee Baronetcy he already enjoyed would be changed into a Peerage did he encourage the idea. Quite a bluff old English type, and I must say in hospitality Imperial. ‘Twissing’s Bonded Breweries.’... A colossal fortune, and that sweet girl is to inherit nearly the whole. Shall I say that my heart went out to her from the first instant I saw her? As a mother yourself, you will understand! Here comes the young woman with the tray 320for our glasses. Ja, bitte, Ich danke Sie.... You don’t mean to tell me the creature is a Cockney?... How distressing! I may be fanciful, possibly I am,” said Lady Pomphrey, “but I do prefer my surroundings to be congruous and in tone. I’m sure you feel what I convey? You do? How nice that is!...”
The friend smiled and inaudibly murmured something.
“Of course,” cried Lady Pomphrey, “you’re on thorns to hear all about Rustleton’s love-match. As I told you, Céline Twissing—the Christian name has been Gallicized from Selina—and why on earth not? Céline is an expert at diabolo. It’s a knack, sending these little black and red demons as high as a house, or into your neighbor’s eye; and she is a talented as well as a charming girl. With three languages, several sciences, a system of physical-culture exercises, golf, tennis, and the laws of hockey at her finger-ends, she would have gone far in these days of violent recreations and brusque manners, even without a dot. Masculine? Oh dear no! Perhaps deficient in reverence for what we were taught to believe in as the superior sex. Perhaps lacking in feminine finesse. I have heard it said that the girl of the twentieth century cannot cajole, and is ignorant how to be alluring. Perhaps it is a pity. The woman who has a gift of managing difficult people, smoothing absurd people down, and being perfectly amiable to the absolutely objectionable is practically priceless as a greaser of the social cog-wheels. Now Céline calls that sort of woman, plumply and plainly, a hypocrite.... But is it not a woman’s duty to be a hypocrite, if telling the truth to everybody makes the world a place of gnashing?” demanded Lady Pomphrey, making her eyebrows climb up out of sight under the shadow of her mushroom hat.
The compliant friend assented.
“You understand, then, how dissonant was the chord 321Céline Twissing struck in Rustleton. With his Plantagenet dash in the blood, his hereditary intolerance of anything smacking of vulgarity, his medieval attitude of chivalry towards Woman, his Early Victorian dislike of the outré and the bizarre, he frankly found her intolerable. ‘In a drawing-room,’ he said to me in confidence, ‘that girl reminds me of a Polar bear in a hothouse.’ Where the boy could have seen one I cannot imagine—probably it was only a young man’s daring figure of speech. Shall we walk about a little? I think I felt a twinge.”
The friend agreed, and, gently ambling up and down the Kreuzbrunnen Promenade, Lady Pomphrey continued her narrative.
“Rustleton said she was a New Girl of the worst type. Then came the diabolo affair, which, considering Céline’s remarkable knack, I cannot think accidental. The bridge of Rustleton’s nose was seriously contused, and his monocle was shattered—fortunately without danger to the eye. He took no revenge beyond an epigram, quite worthy of La Rochefou—what’s his name?... She is keen on dancing, unlike other muscular girls; and said so in my boy’s near vicinity. ‘Why not? She has hops in her blood,’ he uttered. Of course, a little bird carried it to her ear.... How d’ye do, Lady Frederica? How d’ye do, Count Pyffer? I quite agree with you.... Piercing winds, varied by muggy airlessness and a distressingly relaxing warmth, have made the last eight days intolerable.... My dear, where was I when I left off?” The suffering friend indicated the point. Lady Pomphrey continued:
“And after all they have come together. Quite a romance. If a mother’s prayers have any influence, ... and I am old-fashioned enough to believe they have.... But I knew Rustleton too well to breathe a hint of my hopes. I did not stoop to intrigue, as some mothers 322would, to bring the young people together. But dearest Jane, who is always my right hand, conceived a devoted friendship for Céline just at the psychological moment, and owing to that she and Rustleton were constantly thrown in each other’s way. Céline quite exerted herself to be overwhelmingly unpleasant. Jane says that during a bicycling excursion in the neighborhood of our place at Cluckham-Pomphrey, she offered to help him to lift his machine over a stile, and would have done it unaided and alone if Rustleton had not peremptorily seized the frame-bar, gripping both her hands in his. On Jan............