"Will we?" she asked, indifferently.

"And we'll go up to town this autumn."

"Yes, there's nothing to keep us here," she said, "now."

CHAPTER V

I

ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-NINE Curzon Street was the dowry that the third Marquess of Longlan provided for his daughter, Lady Caroline Lacey, on her marriage in 1818 with Viscount Clare, the only son of the second Earl of Clarehaven. It was a double-fronted Georgian house with a delicate fanlight over the door, from which a fan-shaped flight of steps guarded by a pair of tall iron flambeau-stands led down to the pavement. That famous old beau, the first marquess, had given an eye to the architecture, and, being himself a man of fine proportions, had seen to it that the rooms of his new house would set off his figure to advantage. Solid without being stolid, dignified but never pompous, graceful but nowhere flimsy, and for everybody except the servants, who lived like corpses in a crypt, convenient—the town residence of Lord Clarehaven was as desirable as those desirable young men of Assyria upon whom in their blue clothes Aholah doted not less promiscuously than house-agents have doted upon a good biblical word.

When the second earl took charge of his wife's dowry, the fashions of the Regency were in the meridian, and the house was decorated and furnished to suit the prevailing mode. Apart from the verse of the period, there have been few manifestations of art and craft more detestable either for beauty or for comfort than those of the Regency. Great bellying lumps of furniture as fat and foul as the First Gentleman himself, and with as much superfluity of ornament as the First Gentleman's own clothes, were introduced into 129 Curzon Street to spoil the fine severity of the Georgian structure. Ugly furniture was added by the third earl, whose taste—he was a vice-chamberlain of the royal household in the 'fifties—was affected by his position as a mind is affected by misfortune. The dowager during the esthetic ardors that glowed upon the first years of her married life hung a few green and yellow draperies in the drawing-room, and during the early 'nineties she stocked these with woolen spiders or with butterflies of silk and velvet; in fact, when the fifth earl took over the control of his town house it was filled from the cellars to the attics with the accumulated abominations of eighty-five barbarous years. No doubt he would never have noticed the ugliness of the furniture if the discomfort of it had not been so obtrusive; but when he was planning to live merrily with his bride in Curzon Street he invited Messrs. Waring & Gillow to bring the house up to date with its own period and the present, allowing them a free hand with everything except the chairs, beds, and sofas, of which it was stipulated that none was to rate form or style above comfort. On the whole the result was an improvement; and since there are always enough relays of new competitors in the race for originality, purchasers were soon found even for those triads of chairs that are still seen in mid-Victorian drawing-rooms like empty cruets upon the mantelpiece of a coffee-room, and Tony was able to get a good price for the furniture of Gillows, who were by now as thoroughly worm-eaten as their handicraft. The arrangement with the decorators being modified by Dorothy's unwillingness to live in London, he postponed the complete renovation of the house to that happy date in the future when he and she should agree that East West, town's best.

Now at Clare, when Dorothy was lying in bed, careless of everything, Tony invited her to choose patterns from the books of wall-papers and chintzes sent down by Messrs. Waring & Gillow. Finding his wife in no mood to choose anything, he decided to gratify as well as he was able the taste she had expressed five or six years ago in the Halfmoon Street flat. The result was a series of what are called "chaste color schemes," which after being debauched by numerous chairs upholstered in glossy scarlet leather became positively meretricious under the temptation of silver-cased blotters and almanacs; four months after Dorothy's confinement the transformation of 129 Curzon Street into the dream of a Vanity girl was complete. She was still in too listless a mood to do anything except give a tired assent to whatever her husband proposed; physically and emotionally she was worn out, and when a second agricultural fête and flower-show was billed for August 25, 1908, she scarcely had the heart to present in person the silver cup and five pounds for the best flowers grown from the seeds she had supplied with such enthusiasm. Every adjunct of the show accentuated her own failure; from the women with their new babies to the chickens and the parsnips, everything seemed a rebuke to her own sterility.

Dorothy's pride might often degenerate into mere self-confidence, but it had hitherto been her mainstay in life; her failure to produce that son had sapped the foundations of pride by destroying self-confidence; her dignity as Tony's wife had been assailed, and she began to fret about the shallowness of her feeling for her husband. She would have been able to support a blow that fell with equal heaviness upon both, because she would have rejoiced in proving to Tony that she was more courageous than he; but he, from want of imagination, had let her feel that she had made a fuss about nothing; his attitude had been such, indeed, that in resuming relations with him she could not dispel the morbid fancy that she was behaving like his kept mistress. Once, in her determination to define their respective views of marriage, she asked him how he could bear to make love to a woman who was apparently so cold; in his answer he implied that her coldness was rather attractive than otherwise.

"But if you thought I really hated you to come near me?" she pressed.