Lord Wrexham laughed, and then said: "Here we are at the peach-house. I want you to come and see some improvements I have just carried out in the stove, which I think will ensure our getting twice as many peaches as we have ever had out of this house before."
Whereupon his lordship plunged into a minute description of the methods whereby his peaches were to be prematurely ripened, and Isabel gave him her most satisfying attention.
When the walk was over, Isabel went to her own room and looked at herself in the glass. "Miss Carnaby," she said, "you are not really a handsome woman, and Fate has given you far more than you deserve. In exchange for a pretty wit and an indifferent face and a most admirable figure, you will receive a coronet and twenty thousand a year, with the best husband in the world thrown in as a perquisite, like a present of books with so many pounds of tea. So the least you can do for the next forty years is to talk pleasantly and intelligently about windmills and peach-houses and such like interesting subjects, remembering that—if you'd had your own foolish way—you might instead have been living upon a few paltry hundreds a year, with a jealous and bad-tempered young man who couldn't keep a civil tongue in his head for two days together."
For the rest of the Easter recess Isabel made herself specially charming to her host. She was flattered and petted on all sides, and he was the cause of it, so she felt accordingly grateful. The praise which is always accorded to the woman who doeth well to herself was hers in full measure just then; and it put her in a good humour with herself and with her world. She tried her utmost not to be bored when Wrexham talked to her about the things in which he was interested, and she succeeded, in so far as she hid her boredom from everybody in the house except herself and him; but, clever as she was, she was not quite clever enough for that.
CHAPTER XVIII.
A State Concert.
Rank and wealth I pass unheeding,
Never giving them their due,
For my heart and soul are needing
Nothing in the world but you.
"As I have often remarked," said Isabel one hot June morning, as she and Lady Farley were sitting together in the latter's boudoir, "the world—as the world—has nothing better to offer than a State Concert."
"I agree with you," replied her aunt, "it combines the charms of a religious service and a smart party, and has the advantages of both with the disadvantages of neither."
"The music is always good—so are the dresses and the diamonds—and the Palace is the coolest place in London."