“It didn’t cost twopence,” said Dora. “Jim sent me up the feathers from Grote.”
Lady Austell looked at the straw with an experienced eye.
“It is very cheap for less than twopence,” she remarked. “The only question is whether it was necessary. Then you will join me down below, dear? I have a note to write, and we may as well leave it instead of posting it.”
This was illustrative of the cause that had made Dora say that when women grew up they were very odd people. Lady Austell would unfalteringly drive through miles of odious roads to deliver a note rather than post it, but would on the same day drive to Oxford Street (a two-shilling fare in a hansom) in order to purchase what she would have paid sixpence more for round the corner. She was the victim of the habit of petty economy, in pursuit of which passion—one of the most fatal—she would become a perfect spendthrift, casting florins and half crowns right and left in order to save pennies. She took great care of the pence and the half-crowns presumably took care of themselves, for at any rate she took no care of them. But when other people’s expenditure was concerned, she took care of it all.
The note that had to be left (which concerned cessation of subscription from a library in Leicester Square) caused them to traverse the length of Piccadilly, and to retrace it, before they could leave the jostling traffic and turn into the Park, and it so happened that in this traverse of the streets, the month being mid-July, and the hour the late afternoon, Lady Austell had been almost incessantly occupied (though by her own word, she disliked all conventionality) in smiling sadly and regretfully as was her manner, at all the people she knew, and bowing (without a smile) to those who appeared to know her. Somehow, her smile, even when it was most gracious and welcoming, always suggested to the person on whom it was bestowed that something had gone wrong with his affairs, and Lady Austell knew and was most sympathetic, so that Mrs. Osborne (seated in a landau that bobbed prodigiously, owing to the extreme resilience of the springs that came from her husband’s workshops) receiving one of these felt certain for a moment that Mr. O.’s mission that afternoon had not prospered until she remembered that she had seen Lady Austell smile like that before. Soon after, walking gaily eastward, came Austell, whom she had thought to be still in the country, and on whom she bestowed a glance of pained wonder, closely followed by Claude, looking in spite of the heat of the day extremely cool and comfortable in a straw-hatted suit. Dora did not see him; she was at the moment smiling violently at some one who did not see her. Then the motor checked for a moment at the gates of the Park, slid forward again into the less populous ways, and Lady Austell, abandoning the duties of recognition, did her duty by her daughter. As usual she began a little way off the point so that she could get well into her stride, so to speak, before you saw that she was going anywhere in particular. This was a settled policy with her; it insured, in racing parlance, a flying start instead of a start from rest. During the drive down Piccadilly she had been arranging her thoughts with her usual precision; she knew not only what she was going to say, but how she was going to say it.
She gave a little sigh.
“What sermons there are not only in stones,” she said, “but in streets. And, do you know, dear, when one drives down Piccadilly like that and sees all sorts and conditions of men and women jostling each other, what strikes me is not how different people are, but how alike they are. All the differences (she was getting into her stride now) which we think of as so great are really so infinitesimal. Real differences, the things that matter, do not lie on the surface at all. I think our tendency is to make far too much out of mere superficialities and to neglect or discount those traits and qualities which constitute the essential differences between one man and another. Don’t you think so, dear?”
The ingenious Latin language has certain particles used in asking questions, one of which, the grammarian tells us, is used if a negative reply is expected, another if the reply is expected to be affirmative. Lady Austell, speaking in the less rich language of our day, could not make use of these, but there was something in her intonation quite as effective as “nonne.” Dora, without question, found herself saying “yes.”
“I am so glad you agree with me, dear,” went on her mother, “and I am sure you will agree with me also in the fact that, this being so, we should try to judge people, or rather to appreciate them, by the true and inner standard, not by the more obvious but less essential characteristics that we see on the surface.”
Lady Austell’s voice sank a little.