“I cannot give way in this, Amy. My conscience will not permit me.”
“Very well. May I have the carriage, or must I order a hansom?”
“My dear child, I can refuse you nothing in reason. The brougham is now, as it always has been, entirely at your disposal.”
Miss Rivers left the room, and Mr. Shelf scrubbed his dog’s ragged head. “She’s angry with me now, George,” he said, with a fat, satisfied smile, “but I think she’ll change her mind afterwards. She’s a clever girl, and she’ll see. So will that young beggar Fairfax, confound him!”
Then Mr. Shelf put George on a comfortable chair, and turned to his table. He had, as may be imagined, a good deal of writing to get through, and a considerable deal of burning; and the work took him till very late. Then he dressed, slipped out for dinner, and returned by eleven o’clock, to stand behind his wife, and watch her as she received her guests, and share with her the warm congratulations on their coming accession to title. He thought he had never seen the woman look so handsome or so queenly, and once or twice he half regretted the blow which he was going to bring down upon her. But then his eyes would fall on the walls of the room, and the silver lamps, and the flowers; and the items of that gorgeous display would go into his soul, and wither up any morsel of compassion which might have been there.
“A man’s impelling motive is not always under his own hat,” he overheard some one saying as they passed him, and he applied the words to himself; and when he remembered the ruthless extravagance which no words or entreaties of his own could stay, and which alone (so he believed) had forced him into knavery, he felt that social death was a poor requital to the woman who had worked his ruin. A knife was more her due. And yet, and yet, she was such a monstrous fine woman, and so thoroughly clever in the rôle she had set herself to play.
It certainly was a gorgeous assembly. Not made up exclusively of the very best people perhaps, though many of them were there; but it looked wealth unspeakable. Men in evening dress cannot show this; if they fail to appear like waiters, that is the utmost they can expect. But the women! They carried it on their shoulders and backs, as they have done since the beginning of time. Their dresses were a dream of cost and loveliness, their jewelery a chain of rainbows.
“Oh, Lord,” said one young man with predatory instincts, who propped a wall, “why aren’t I a practising bushranger just now? There’s some of the finest diamonds in all the world here to-night, and two Johnnies with pistols could stick up the whole house. Why’s England such a beastly safe place? If there was a hard, wooden chair anywhere here to sit on and think, I believe I’d turn anarchist on the spot.”
“Don’t reduce the crowd to L. S. D.,” said a fellow prop. “It spoils the poetry of the thing. Now, I find them good enough to look at.”
“Never said they weren’t,” rejoined the other. “Only thing is they aren’t mine. Now, I could do very well with the lot of them.”