“Yes,” he said again, fatuously, “You’ll have your hands full.”
Frances had a horrible feeling of being caught in a net.
“I’m afraid I can’t undertake such a responsibility,” she said, with a sickly smile.
Horace smiled indulgently at her. After a third cocktail, he was becoming a little garrulous on the subject of his brother; partly because he thought it would interest Frankie and partly because it was his great topic anyway. His pride in his brother was rather surprising to Frankie; she couldn’t know, of course, from what a stodgy, obscure family this charming irresponsibility had sprung, couldn’t imagine how audacious his extravagances appeared, how remarkable his social progress; in fine, she couldn’t see him as a Naylor.
It was not until much later that she divined something of the relations between these two. Sons of a well-to-do manufacturer, they had both “received advantages” in the way of education and so forth, but while Horace remained immutably the son of a wealthy manufacturer who had had “advantages,” Lionel in some mysterious way, not unusual in this world, had turned out to be aristocratic, elegant, fashionable. His brother took a naïve pride in this; he admired Lionel as he did royalty, not very useful, but immensely valuable in his place. He never urged him to go into business; he was quite satisfied that he should go his own dazzling way. For Horace was not the classic business man of stage and story, who despises and berates the idler; he was something much newer, the money-maker who is apologetic and secretly bewildered; who feels called upon to justify his activity. Lionel was what he would have liked to be, only that he knew it to be impossible. He acknowledged that they were of different clay.
He told Frankie how Lionel had no idea of time, and was always late.
How he kept the most exclusive people waiting for him and never had a proper excuse.
How he spent preposterous sums on handkerchiefs, his hobby.
How altogether idle and rude and popular he had been “at home.”
In spite of her common-sense, Frankie began to feel that the attentions of such a man were something to boast of, to treasure. He wasn’t rude to her, ever.