‘And suppose the beautiful woman wanted to be happy herself, Mrs. Arbuthnot?’
‘Happiness comes naturally if you see it on the faces of the people round you.’
Their politics had not taken the turn Lord Rex desired. He harked back, a little abruptly, upon his first premises.
‘Yes, I am for absolute equality, Gardener Adam and his wife, and that style of thing. I would make the shopkeeping capitalist, just as much as the bloated aristocrat, turn over a fresh leaf. If I ever marry,’ said Lord Rex Basire—‘don’t feel at all like marrying at present, but if I ever do—I hope to get for my wife some simple little village barbarian who has never been to a ball, never heard an opera, never seen a racecourse in her life!’
‘A village barbarian—of what station?’ asked Dinah Arbuthnot.
‘Matter of blank indifference. I should marry the girl, not her station.’
‘And afterwards? Would the barbarian be accepted by your family? Or would you accept hers? Or would you, both, give up society?’
‘That would suit me best! Give up society. United to the woman one adored,’ said Lord Rex with fervour, ‘what could one want with artificial pleasures, with the eternal bore of dinners and dances?’
Dinah gave a chill laugh. She remembered the days when Gaston Arbuthnot was wont to use the like phrases, as a preface (so, in her present jealous misery, she thought) to returning to the world and its pleasures, unhampered by a wife.
‘When you marry, my lord,’ she observed, distantly, ‘you will, if you act wisely, choose some duke’s or earl’s daughter for your wife. Give up that notion of the village barbarian. As time wore on, and ... and the truth of things grew clear, the duke’s daughter would, at least, understand you. There could be no discoveries for her to make.’