Ten Degrees Backward

by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

"For instance?"

"Well, you aren't properly proud of the things you ought to be proud of, and you've got such lots of them," explained Fay, with some lack of lucidity.

"Anyhow I'm jolly proud of the one thing I've a right to be proud of, and that is my wife," I replied.

"That's you all over, wrapping other people up in the mantle of your own virtues, and then admiring the other people for being so awfully well dressed. It's really you that makes us such a tremendously attractive couple. People like me because I'm your wife, and yet you'll always believe they like you because you're my husband. It really is stupid to put the cart before the horse in that way, Reggie."

I put my arm through Fay's, drawing her nearer to me. "Then what on earth do you want me to do, carry a pocket-mirror about with me, and keep taking it out and admiring myself, like Narcissus, or else thrust the sanguinary hand of my recent baronetcy into every stranger's face?"

"Oh, Reggie, what an idiot you are! Of course, I think it is perfectly sweet of you not to have a swelled head because you are rich and landed and a baronet and all that, and not to have a swelled head because it is such an extremely good-looking one, with such regular features; I thoroughly approve of that sort of humility, as I'm the last person in the world to encourage swank; but what I do mean is that you have so little confidence in yourself and your own powers that you stand on one side and let other people do the things that you'd do a million times better than they can. You are like that old Emperor who thought he couldn't govern Europe, and so began to wind up the clock instead."

I smiled. "You've got hold of the wrong end of the stick this time, milady; it was because Charles the Fifth was sick of the weight of empire that he retired to a monastery and made clocks: and it was considered a most swaggery thing at the time, and was tremendously applauded by an admiring Europe, because he was just as good at clockmaking as he was at ruling the world."

"What you might call a good all-round man."

"Precisely. Now I am the contrary of that. The experience of life has taught me that I am equally inefficient in government and in clockmaking—in short, that I am a thoroughgoing failure, and that therefore my truest wisdom lies in getting other and superior people to rule my empire and make my clocks."

I regret to record that at this point of the conversation Lady Kingsnorth stood stock still in the middle of the road, and protruded from between her scarlet lips the point of a little pink tongue, and then remarked in terse if inelegant language: "You silly ass!"