He drank down his glassful, and fell suddenly grave.
“I have no wish, nec cupias nec metuas, to constitute myself your rival. This mourning suit, my lord, is of a recent cut.”
His tone was so dignified, the illusion so sorrowfully significant, that Ned was smitten in a moment. How were his ears startled then to hear a rallying laugh for anticlimax!
“My dear fellow, believe me, I am not of those who imagine a bond in every light exchange of glances. My dear fellow, all we who are not Turks are shareholders in a woman’s beauty. There may be a managing director who has the right to a more intimate knowledge of it: what care we who speculate in the open market, so long as it flatters us with the soundness of our investment! We draw the interest without responsibility, and are always ready to commit the conduct of the business to him that hath the acknowledged right to control it.”
He got to his feet.
“Hush!” he said; “we are summoned. Elect yourself to be this managing director if you will. I am quite content to rest, drawing my modest dividend that you have no right to begrudge me.”
* * * * * * * *
The advent of so distinguished a party in the assembly rooms created quite a little furore of excitement amongst the honest burgesses of Bury. My lord, the reserved and almost inaccessible; the illustrious parliamentarian, whose very presence seemed to secure to all in the place a sort of reversionary interest in those glories of Carlton House with which he was notoriously familiar; the little stranger princess, whose sojourn in the remote English town was so eloquent of the tragedy that even then was threatening to foreclose upon her house—these were the nucleus of such a coruscation of stars of the first magnitude as had never, within living memory, added its lustre to the congregated social lights of the borough.
But when madame la comtesse, adapting her conduct of the expedition to those principles of which she was the present representative, permitted her royal young charge the unconventional licence of dancing with any and all who had the high good fortune to procure themselves an introduction to her, local opinion underwent a gradual transformation that culminated, it is to be feared, in actual scandalisation.
“It transcends,” was the pronunciation, in a deep voice, of Mrs Prodmore. “Anything so unblushingly shameless I had not dreamed could be. I protest we are threatened with a Gomorrah.”