“Not a bad run, you know, sir,” he would remark, in the midst of a description of a race—the duke was always pleased to hear of the great events of the outer world into which he so seldom entered. “Soup Ladle ought to have won; all the pencilers had the spondulacs upon her; but she ran wild and all over the shop—”
At this point his grace would look puzzled, and, with a smile, remarked gently:
“Forgive me, my dear Norman, but I’m afraid I do not quite understand. I fear that you will think that I am growing stupid. Who are the ‘pencilers,’ and what are ‘spondulacs?’ and—I think you said that the horse with the ridiculous name ran into a shop. Is there any shop near the course? I do not remember it.”
Then Norman would laugh and look guiltily at Lilias, who often sat in the garden with them and listened with intense amusement; and she would smile and shake her head as much as to say that she would not help him.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Norman would explain, with a suppressed groan. “Quite forgot I wasn’t talking to one of the other Johnnies—I mean, fellows. The book-makers are called pencilers—they book their bets with metallic pencils, you know; and spondulacs is money, and when I say that Soup Ladle ran all over the shop, I mean that she was all over the course.”
“Ah, yes, I see,” the duke would say. “Quite so. It was very stupid of me; but—my dear Norman, I am quite out of the world, and am ignorant of its jargon.”
“That’s all right, sir,” Norman would say, encouragingly; and start off again, with a nod of self-satisfaction to Lilias and a whispered “Got off that time; shall catch it some day, though; and serve me right.”
Lilias ought to have been shocked at the young man’s slang and general levity, but, strange to say, she was not. Your very quiet and exquisitely mannered women are always attracted by the wild and rough-and-ready way of the other sex. It is the law of natural selection.
She liked to listen to Norman’s stories, and his laugh—frequent and not seldom rather loud—did not jar upon her; and Norman, half unconsciously, got into the habit of going about with her and talking to her. Though she insisted that Esmeralda should be the “mistress” at Belfayre, and always consulted her upon all important matters connected with the huge household, Lilias still, in reality, “ran” the place, and she often found Norman at her elbow at busy moments. He wanted her to go for a walk, or a ride, or to play tennis with him; and when she declared that she was busy with the housekeeper, or arranging the menu for a lunch or dinner, he, after a slight remonstrance, dropped into a chair beside her, and, as she put it, “hindered” her terribly.
“You’ve made me put down the wrong soup and leave out one of the entrées,” she would say. “Can’t you find something to amuse yourself with for half an hour?”