“I have.”
“Well, I shall feel grateful to you when you have probed the truth—doubly grateful, if you can prove that my doubts about my wife are unfounded.”
“I expect to earn that double gratitude.”
“Be it so,” he said, with great emphasis. “It is no drawback on your professional merits, to my mind, that you have already formed an opinion that my wife is as good as I could wish her, and that I am a jealous fool. I should not like to know that you had condemned her beforehand. I am persuaded that you will do your duty faithfully towards me, and considerately towards her.”
I promised him that much.
There was a ball at Almack’s the very next day. Mrs. Percival was to be there, and so was her husband. They would go separately, after the manner of the ton—she in her brougham, and he in his cab.
I did not think Almack’s a desirable place to begin my inquiries in. It would not be easy for me to gain admission into this closest of all assemblies, although I could have encompassed that, as I had before. I preferred a stand-point of observation where etiquette was less rigid.
Next week there was to be a grand fancy-dress ball, under a potent body of lady patronesses, for the relief of starvation in Whitechapel; and Mrs. Percival, acting under the feeble light of conventional charity, thought it her duty to buy a ticket (price one guinea, of which an infinitessimal portion was netted for the indigent), and to largely patronise her dressmaker and milliner, in proof of her intense sympathy with the famishing poor.
I attended this ball, and was sickened by its palpable mockery of the distress it was ostensibly designed to relieve; but I must not get off the track of my narrative to moralise.
At this ball I saw nothing to justify a suspicion of impropriety on the part of Mrs. Percival; nor did I at a flower-show which was held in the grounds of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham; nor at a public breakfast which the Marchioness of L—— gave in her grounds at Chiswick. A more private scrutiny of the lady’s movements also went to prove her strictly virtuous in character.