“Oh!”
“I’m up to stay,” he went on, his voice improving.
“Oh—yes—come at half-past five.”
“Thank you—good-by.” He held the receiver to his ear until he heard her ring off. “Good girl, Honoria,” he muttered. “Not like those beastly cads.” He went to the club, lunched with Browne, whom he found there, was beaten by him at billiards, losing ten dollars, and returned to the hotel to dress.
At a quarter-past five he started up the avenue afoot—a striking figure in clothes made in the extreme of the English fashion; but he would have been striking in almost any sort of dress, so distinguished was its pale, rather supercilious face, with one of his keen eyes ambushed behind that eyeglass, expressive in its expressionlessness. The occupants of every fifth or sixth carriage in the fashionable parade bowed to him with a friendliness that gave him an internal self-possession as calm as the external immobility which his control of his features enabled him always to present to the world.
He told Honoria his story in outline—“the surest way to win a woman’s friendship is to show her that you trust her,” he reflected. She was sympathetic in a way that soothed, not hurt, his vanity; but she sided with Catherine. “I half suspected her of being in love with Joe,” she said, “but I thought he was a confirmed bachelor. He played all round you—that’s the truth. I’m going to say something rather disagreeable—but I think it’s necessary.”
“I want—I need your advice,” he replied.
“You’ve been relying entirely too much on your title. You’ve let yourself be misled by what the newspapers say about that sort of thing. You don’t understand—I didn’t understand until I’d been here a while, and had got my point of view straight. They’re not so excited about titles now as they used to be when they had no fashionable society of their own, and had to look abroad to gratify their instinct for social position. If you’d come five years ago——”
“Just my rotten luck,” he muttered.
“Your title is a good thing—properly worked. It will catch a woman, especially if she’s not well forward ‘in the push,’ as they say. But it won’t hold her. She’s likely to use you to strengthen her social position, and then to drop you, unless she has lived in England, and has had her head turned, and has become—like your middle-classes.”