part:
"How's my sister and Foxy?" she asked – meaning Sir Renard and Lady Spinney.
Sir Charles regretted he had not seen them.
"And you?"
"Quite fit, thanks." And he gravely trusted that her own health was satisfactory.
"You haven't changed your mind?" she asked with a smile which the profane might consider more like a grin.
Sir Charles said he had not, and a healthy colour showed under the tan.
"All these years," commented the old lady, ironically.
"Four," said Sir Charles.
"Was it four years ago when you saw her in Egypt?"
"Four years – last month – the tenth."
"And never saw her again?"
"Never."
Mrs. Sprowl shook with asthmatic mirth:
"Such story-book constancy! Why didn't you ask your friend the late Sirdar to have Leeds pitched into the Nile. It would have saved you those four years' waiting? You know you haven't many years to waste, Sir Charles."
"I'm forty-five," he said, colouring painfully.
"Four years gone to hell," said the old lady with that delicate candour which sometimes characterised her… "And now what do you propose to do with the rest of 'em? Dawdle away your time?"
"Face my fate," he admitted touching his moustache and fearfully embarrassed.
"Well, if you're in a hurry, you'll have to go down South to face it. She's at Palm Beach for the next three weeks."
"Thank you," he said.
She looked up at him, her little opaque green eyes a trifle softened.
"I am trying to get you the prettiest woman in America," she said. "I'm ready to fight off everybody else – beat 'em to death," she added, her eyes snapping, then suddenly kind again – "because, Sir Charles, I like you. And for no other reason on earth!"
Which was not the exact truth. It was for another man's sake she was kind to him. And the other man had been dead many years.
Sir Charles thanked her, awkwardly, and fell silent again, pulling his moustache.
"Is – Mrs. Leeds – well?" he ventured, at length, reddening again.
"Perfectly. She's a bit wiry just now – thin – leggy, y' know. Some fanciers prefer 'em weedy. But she'll plump up. I know the breed."
He shrank from her loud voice and the vulgarity of her comments, and she was aware of it and didn't care a rap. There were plenty of noble ladies as vulgar as she, and more so – and anyway it was not this well-built, sober-faced man of forty-five whom she was serving with all the craft and insolence and brutality and generosity that was in her – it was the son of a dead man who had been much to her. How much nobody in these days gossiped about any longer, for it was a long time ago, a long, long time ago that she had made her curtsey to a young queen and a prince consort. And Sir Charles's father had died at Majuba Hill.
"There's a wretched little knock-kneed peer on the cards," she observed; "Dankmere. He seems to think she has money or something. If he comes over here, as my sister writes, I'll set him straighter than his own legs. And I've written Foxy to tell him so."
"Dankmere is a very good chap," said Sir Charles, terribly embarrassed.
"But not good enough. His level is the Quartier d'Europe. He'll find it; no fear… When do you go South?"
"To-morrow," he said, so honestly that she grinned again.
"Then I'll give you a letter to Molly Wycherly. Her husband is Jim Wycherly – one of your sort – eternally lumbering after something to kill. He has a bungalow on some lagoon where he murders ducks, and no doubt he'll go there. But his wife will be stopping at Palm Beach. I'll send you a letter to her in the morning."
"Many thanks," said Sir Charles, shyly.
CHAPTER IV
Strelsa remained South longer than she had expected to remain, and at the end of the third week Quarren wrote her.
"Dear Mrs. Leeds:
"Will you accept from me a copy of Karl's new book? And are you ever coming back? You are missing an unusually diverting winter; the opera is exceptional, there are some really interesting plays in town and several new and amusing people – Prince and Princess Sarnoff for example; and the Earl of Dankmere, an anxious, and perplexed little man, sadly hard up, and simple-minded enough to say so; which amuses everybody immensely.
"He's pathetically original; plebeian on his mother's side; very good-natured; nothing at all of a sportsman; and painfully short of both intellect and cash – a funny, harmless, distracted little man who runs about asking everybody the best and quickest methods of amassing a comfortable fortune in America. And I must say that people have jollied him rather cruelly.
"The Sarnoffs on the other hand are modest and nice people – the Prince is a yellow, dried-up Asiatic who is making a collection of parasites – a shrewd, kindly, and clever little scientist. His wife is a charming girl, intellectual but deliciously feminine. She was Cynthia Challis before her marriage, and always a most attractive and engaging personality. They dined with us at the Legation on Thursday.
"Afterward there was a dance at Mrs. Sprowl's. I led from one end, Lester Caldera from the other. One or two newspapers criticised the decorations and favours as vulgarly expensive; spoke of a 'monkey figure' – purely imaginary – which they said I introduced into the cotillion, and that the favours were marmosets! – who probably were the intellectual peers of anybody present.
"The old lady is in a terrific temper. I'm afraid some poor scribblers are going to catch it. I thought it very funny.
"Speaking of scribblers and temper reminds me that Karl Westguard's new book is stirring up a toy tempest. He has succeeded in offending a dozen people who pretend to recognise themselves or their relatives among the various characters. I don't know whether the novel is really any good, or not. We, who know Karl so intimately, find it hard to realise that perhaps he may be a writer of some importance.
"There appears to be considerable excitement about this new book. People seem inclined to discuss it at dinners; Karl's publishers are delighted. Karl, on the contrary, is not at all flattered by the kind of a success that menaces him. He is mad all through, but not as mad as his redoubtable aunt, who tells everybody that he's a scribbling lunatic who doesn't know what he's writing, and that she washes her fat and gem-laden hands of him henceforth.
"Poor Karl! He's already thirty-seven; he's written fifteen books, no one of which, he tells me, ever before stirred up anybody's interest. But this newest novel, 'The Real Thing,' has already gone into three editions in two weeks – whatever that actually means – and still the re-orders are pouring in, and his publishers are madly booming it, and several indignant people are threatening Karl with the law of libel, and Karl is partly furious, partly amused, and entirely astonished at the whole affair.
"Because you see, the people who think they recognise portraits of themselves or their friends in several of the unattractive characters in the story – are as usual, in error. Karl's people are always purely and synthetically composite. Besides everybody who knows Karl Westguard ought to know that he's too decent a fellow, and too good a workman to use models stupidly. Anybody can copy; anybody can reproduce the obvious. Even photographers are artists in these days. Good work is a synthesis founded on truth, and carried logically to a conclusion.
"But it's useless to try to convince the Philistines. Once possessed with the idea that they or their friends are 'meant,' as they say, Archimedes's lever could not pry them loose from their agreeably painful obsession.
"Then there are other sorts of humans who are already bothering Karl. This species recognise in every 'hero' or 'heroine' a minute mental and physical analysis of themselves and their own particular, specific, and petty emotions. Proud, happy, flattered, they permit nobody to mistake the supposed tribute which they are entirely self-persuaded that the novelist has