“I want to ask you one question,” he said. “But pray don’t answer it unless you wish. Did Mrs. Allbutt tell you that the Opera Syndicate had made me a certain offer? Mind, I don’t draw any conclusions if you refuse to answer.”
Peggy had put up the huge red umbrella again, but at this she put it down with a snap.
“Hughie, I will never tell you not to talk again,” she said, “for I believe you guess best when you are silent. When did you guess?”
“Oh, I guessed right at the beginning!” he said.
“But I did it very well,” she said.
“Quite beautifully. And you used beautiful language about the golden river. But——”
“Well?” asked Peggy.
“Oh, nothing particular! I was only going to suggest that it would have been simpler to have advised me at once to accept their offer; or at any rate, to have asked me whether I intended to, instead of suggesting that I should go in for punt-racing. Mrs. Allbutt also advises me to accept. But I have practically made up my mind not to. Here we are again at home; what a pleasant morning.”
CHAPTER III
PEGGY RYE, probably one of the happiest people in London, was unquestionably one of the busiest, and, as is the habit of really busy people, could always find time for everything. She pursued her myriad schemes of philanthropy and kindness not only with a sense of duty, but brought to them a lively and genuine interest that made unshrinkable homespuns, innocuous wallpapers, unphosphorescent matches and leadless glaze things in themselves attractive and absorbing. If she was not opening a bazaar she was triumphantly closing some factory in which the conditions of work were injurious to the employés; and there were but few days when she was in town on which her great barrack of a house in Pall-Mall was not open to something of an alleviating and charitable nature. The house, in fact, as Hugh had once remarked, was a sort of Clapham Junction of philanthropy, and relief trains ran screaming through it in all directions and at the shortest possible intervals, while she, like a general pointsman for all the lines, tugged at her levers and sent the trains all on their various ways. Her levers, it may be remarked, were of various kinds, and it was firstly her own energies, her position, her time, her wealth that she cheerfully and eagerly devoted to her charitable deeds; but secondly she used the time, position, and money of her friends, plundering them with the utmost avidity and mercilessness. She insisted on their putting up new wallpapers—even though those they had were still recent—which, though perhaps ugly, were not stained with the blood of work-people. She made them buy homespun and tweeds which they did not want in order that Irish peasants should not want either; and she compelled them to load their dinner-tables with new services, which it was possible to eat off, she explained, in comfort, without the feeling at the back of your mind that every time you took a spoonful of soup you were really—so dreadful was the mortality at some of these china factories—committing an act of cannibalism. She even saw the bright side of the extreme friability of these uncannibal plates, because it so soon became necessary to order some more.