‘Before all the stablemen?’ she pleaded. ‘Bob will laugh at me so.’
‘Most probably,’ said her father dryly; ‘and the others too. I shall not blame them.’
He sat tapping his boot with his riding-whip, not dreaming that he would be disobeyed, and Sophia suddenly saw her chance. Throwing away the end of her cigarette, she bolted round the corner of the stable like a ferreted rabbit, and plunged into the thick bushes which lined the road. Her father started up with an astonished oath, but he was too late, and he turned a gorgon face to the group of stablemen whom he had told to wait.
‘You set of idiotic deformities!’ he cried in a voice that would have made Fedora tremble for a fortnight. ‘How dare you stand there gaping! Get to your work, all of you! Never have I seen such a bandy-legged crew!’
Sophia meanwhile crouched, quivering with a sickly feeling of nausea, among the bushes. She was half afraid, half exultant at what she had done. What the consequence might be she scarcely dared to think; lifelong imprisonment in a dungeon seemed terribly possible. But she had revolted; she had asserted her independence, and gloried in the deed, like an early Christian martyr.
At the age of fourteen she proposed to her English tutor that he should elope with her, and that they should together seek an appointment in a circus. Failing his acceptance, she got him to teach her écarté. She was quickly fascinated with the game and its subtly compounded mixture of luck and skill. She insisted that he play her for counters, and her exultation at winning a hundred of these off him in the course of an hour expressed itself, as it subsequently appeared, prophetically.
‘When I grow up, Mr. Buckhurst,’ she said, ‘I shall be a gambler.’
And Mr. Buckhurst, counting out ten red and five white, thought it extremely probable that she would.
But the games of écarté came to the ears of the Prince, and after a thunderous dismissal of Mr. Buckhurst, he sent for his daughter.