The girl looked intelligent, as if she had heard the name before. And Mr. Brooke, following her upstairs to the drawing-room, reflected on the quickness with which servants make themselves acquainted with their masters' and mistresses' affairs, and the disadvantages of a civilization in which you were at the mercy of your servants' tongues.
These reflections had no bearing on his own circumstances: they proceeded entirely from Mr. Brooke's habit of taking general views, and making large applications of small things.
The day was cloudy, and, although it was only five o'clock, the streets were growing dark. The weather was chilly, moreover, and the wind blew from the East. It was a pleasant change to enter Mrs. Romaine's drawing-room, which was full of soft light from a glowing little fire, full of the scent of roses and the lovely tints of Indian embroideries, Italian tapestries, dead gold-leaf backgrounds, and china that was beautiful as well as rare. Lady Alice Brooke, in her narrow isolation from the world, would not have believed that so charming a room could be found east of Great Portland Street. In which opinion she was very much mistaken; for her belief that in "society" and society's haunts alone could one find taste, culture, and beauty, led her to ignore the vast number of intellectual and artistic folk who still sojourn in the dim squares of Bloomsbury and Regent's Park. Sooth to say Lady Alice knew absolutely nothing of the worlds of intellect and art, save by means of an occasional article in the magazines, or a stroll through the large picture galleries of London during the season. She was a good woman in her way, and—also in her way—a clever one; but she had been brought up in another atmosphere from that which her husband loved, elevated in a totally different school, and she was not of a nature to adapt herself to what she did not thoroughly understand.
Mrs. Romaine knew well enough that she was quite as well able to hold her own in the fashionable world if once she obtained an entrance to it as any Lady Alice or Lady Anybody of her acquaintance. But then the difficulty of entering if was very great. She had not sufficient fortune to vie with women who every year spent hundreds on their dress and on their dinner. She was handsome, but she was middle-aged. She had few friends of sufficient distinction to push her forward. And she was a wise woman. She thought it better to live where she enjoyed a good deal of popularity and consideration; where she could entertain in a modest way, where her husband had been well known, and she could glow with the reflected light that came to her from his shining abilities. These reasons were patent to the world: she really made no secret of them. But there was another reason, not quite so patent to the world, for her living quietly in Russell Square, and this reason she kept strictly to herself.
Mrs. Romaine had been a widow for three years. Her husband had been a very learned man—Professor of numerous Oriental languages at University College for some years, afterwards a Judge in Calcutta; and as he had always lived in the West Central district during his Professorate, Mrs. Romaine declared that she loved it and could live nowhere else. The house in Russell Square was only partly hers. Her brother rented some of the rooms (shared the house with her, as Mrs. Romaine vaguely phrased it), and lightened the expense. But the two drawing-rooms, opening out of one another, were entirely at Mrs. Romaine's disposal, and she was generally to be found there between four and five o'clock in an afternoon—a fact of which it is to be presumed that Mr. Brooke was aware.
"So you have come back to town?" she said, rising to meet him, and extending both hands with a pretty air of appropriative friendship.
"Yes; but I hardly expected to find you here so early."
Mrs. Romaine shrugged her shoulders a little.
"I found the country very dull," she said. "And you?"
"Oh, I went to Norway. I was well enough off. I rather enjoyed myself. Perhaps I required a little bracing up for the task that lies before me." He laughed as he spoke.