Then as she always rested before dinner, people would come to tea with her in her bedroom. St. John didn't like it at all. There was to him something inherently disreputable about the horizontal. If she were too tired to sit up in an armchair, she was too tired to see any one—except him, of course, who understood her (which was just what he didn't do).
"But my back does ache so easily. After all, if I were really ill you wouldn't mind."
"That is different."
"How ill do I have to be before I can abdicate the perpendicular in the presence of a young man?" He consoled himself with the thought that she was extremely, exceptionally innocent. She told him that thousands of people were extremely, exceptionally innocent. It was a fact which could never be explained to juries. St. John doubted it. He believed in a vast number of rules to which all of the people he liked and most of the people he knew were exceptions.
The train drew up at the platform. Ariadne got out. The footman explained to her that his Lordship was so very sorry not to be able to come to the station, but he was attending a cattle show.
"Of course," said Ariadne, and she felt it.
She got into the brougham—it was so characteristic of St. John not to use a motor in the country—which had that delightful, almost forgotten, smell of broughams, and drove through an avenue of oaks up to the fine old Georgian house, dignified and mellow and lived in—a house proud of its cellar and its stables—of its linen and its silver—a house where men were men and women were women—where the master hunted and sat on the Bench, and the mistress embroidered and looked after the household—each having his separate functions and the one joint one of propagating the race.
In the hall, St. John's housekeeper, in a black taffetas apron, welcomed her.
"His Lordship would be most distressed not to have been there when her ladyship arrived, but the cattle show——"
"Of course," said Ariadne, and hinted at a quite special awareness of the importance of Cattle Shows.