‘Yes! And is it true, then, that you are a sculptor by profession, that you have become an artist to the exclusion of other aims! Of course there is a way of looking at things which makes such a life seem the most charming possible.’ Mrs. Thorne clasped her thin clever hands as though entering some mysterious general protest against art and its followers. ‘And still, one has regrets. I was foolishly ambitious about you, if you remember, Mr. Arbuthnot. In our romantic boy-and-girl Paris days, I quite thought you were to get into Parliament. To be the people’s friend. A kind of second Mirabeau. To make a tremendous name.’
Gaston Arbuthnot’s face for a second betrayed sincere perplexity. When was Linda Constantia ambitious in her hopes about his intellectual future! At what period of that shallow flirtation, a decade of years ago, could dreams of a seat in the House of Commons, and of Parliamentary victories, have been possible to her?
‘I am open to flattery, Mrs. Thorne. When does a mediocre man not glory in the fine things which, according to his friends, he might have done? Yet it seems to me I never held a political opinion in my life.’
‘You once held very strong ones. Why, in a letter you wrote me after—after we had said good-bye in Paris, you were so nobly warm, I remember, about the English lower classes! Our sisters and brothers in the alleys, whose claims that dear, immortal Mrs. Browning so beautifully reveals to us.’
Gaston Arbuthnot, at this mention of a letter, felt the ground grow solid beneath his feet.
‘I must have written to you from Cambridge; for the moment, perhaps, had taken up some of Geff’s fads. Let me introduce my cousin, by the bye. Geoffrey Arbuthnot—Mrs. Thorne.’
Mrs. Thorne, who knew that in Geoffrey Arbuthnot she would never have a friend, smiled ambrosially. Geff rose. He gave the lady the lowest, at the same time the coldest bow in the world. It was a true case of elective dislike at first sight.
‘Yes,’ went on Gaston, ‘I remember.’ He drew forward a garden-chair, into which Mrs. Thorne—no unpleasing picture in her broad Leghorn hat, her cambric morning gown, her eight-buttoned gloves, her cream-coloured sunshade—sank gracefully. ‘I had taken up one of Geff’s fads. The British Workman was an epidemic among all classes of Cambridge undergraduates that term. Get hold of your poorer brother in his hour of sobriety—that is to say, on a Friday afternoon. Present him with a bookshelf of your own carving. Explain to him the newest thing out in draining-pipes. Show him how to make a window-box of rough cork, and present him with half a dozen slips of scarlet geranium. Humanise him—always, of course, with the capital H. Humanise him!’
‘You call work so utterly noble as this “a fad”? I assure you, Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot, I am wild myself about the working classes. At this very moment I ought to be visiting among my district people.’
Mrs. Thorne’s eyes offered Geoffrey a glance of tentative sympathy.