"That's right!" said the girl with sudden energy--"that'll do! Only let me prove that, and I'll give him up for ever."
"If I do this for you, Kitty, surely my love will be sufficiently proved. You will then--"
"Yes, we'll talk of that afterwards. I'll see you next week, and you'll tell me more of this new love-affair of--of his! Don't stop now. I'm all out of sorts. You've upset me. I wasn't in condition. I've been doing a little too much work lately. Go now, there's a good fellow! Good-by." Then stopping suddenly--"You're sure you're not selling me, Simnel?"
"I swear it!" said Simnel.
"I wish to heaven you had been," said the poor girl; "but we'll see about the new business next week. I think we'll spoil that pretty game between us, eh? There, good-by." And she set her teeth tight, and rushed from the room.
"So fax so good," said Mr. Simnel, as he rode quietly home. "She's taken it almost a little too strongly. My plan now is to soften her and turn her to me. I think I have a card in my hand that will win that trick, and then--the game's my own!"
[CHAPTER XXIII.]
MR. BERESFORD IN PURSUIT.
The idea suggested by Simnel, after the interview with Dr. Prater at the Flybynights, came upon Mr. Beresford with extraordinary force. It opened up to him a new train of thought, gave a complete turn to his intended course of life, afforded him matter for the deepest study and reflection. As we have already seen, he was a man with a faultless digestion, and without a scrap of heart--two qualities which had undoubtedly greatly conduced towards his success in life, and towards making him a careless, easy-going worldly philosopher. When he first saw Miss Townshend at Bissett Grange, he remembered her as a cheery little flirt whom he had met during the previous season; and finding her companionable and amusing, determined to carry on a flirtation which should serve as a pastime, and, at the break-up of the party, be consigned to that limbo already replete with similar amourettes. The presence of Captain Lyster, and the unmistakable evidence of his passion for the young lady, gave Mr. Beresford very little annoyance; he had a notion that, save in very exceptional cases, of which indeed he had had no experience, women had a horror of an earnest lover; that watchings and waitings, hangings on words, deep gazings into eyes, and all outward signs of that passion which induces melancholy and affords themes for poets, were as much rococo and out of date as carrying a lady's glove in your hat and perpetually seeking a fight with some one on her account. He thought that women hated "dreary" lovers, and were far more likely to be won by rattle, laughter, and raillery than by the deepest devotion of a silent and sighing order. Moreover, as he was only going in for flirtation, he would make his running while it lasted, and leave the Captain to come in with the weight-carrying proprieties after he had gone.
So far at first. Then came the recollection of his straitened position, the reflection that Miss Townshend was an heiress, and the determination to go in seriously for a proposal--a determination which was very short-lived, owing to the discovery of the lady's engagement to Gustav Schröder. From the time of her marriage, Mrs. Schröder was by Beresford mentally relegated to a corps which included several married ladies of his acquaintance; for the most part young and pretty women, whose husbands were either elderly, or immersed in business, or, what was equally available, immersed in pleasure, and more attentive to other men's wives than to their own; ladies who required "notice," as they phrased it, and who were sufficiently good-looking to command it from some men, between whom and themselves there existed a certain understanding. Nothing criminal, nor approaching to criminality; for despite the revelations of the Divorce Court, there is, I take it, a something, whether it be in what is called our phlegmatic temperament, whether it be in the bringing-up of our English girls,--bringing-up of domesticity utterly unknown to Continental-bred young ladies, which hallows and keeps constantly present the image of the doting father and the tender mother, and all the sacred home-associations,--a something which strengthens the weak and arrests the hand of the spoiler, and leaves the sacrifice incomplete. The necessity for "notice," or for "being understood," or "for having some one to rely on" (the husband engaged in business or in the House being, of course, utterly untrustworthy), has created a kind of society which I can only describe as a kind of solid bread-and-butter demi-monde--a demi-monde which, as compared with that state of existence known in France under the title, is as a club to a tavern, where the same things are carried on, but in a far more genteel and decorous manner. The relations of its different members to each other are as free from Wertherian sentimentalism as they are from Parisian license, and would probably be considered severely correct by that circle of upper Bohemians, of whose lives the younger Dumas has constituted himself the chronicler.