"Where to?" asked the pigeon.
"Hu-s-s-sh!" droned the meek member; "that's a serious question."
"To Jim!" finished the racing man, smartly; "but I don't care. Jim, dead or alive, is equally useless to me."
"Oh! He isn't in your debt, then?"
"Catch me trusting him--not much. But what's the use of talking obituary notices? Let's bridge."
"If your play is as bad as your grammar, I prefer to stand out," said Methuselah, and the symposium broke up, in time to prevent bickering between crabbed age and irreverent youth.
There were many such talks during the nine minutes' wonder of Jim's unexpected sickness, and it was generally considered that he would return in spirits of wine to the family vault. Leah did not hear these encouraging prognostications, so conducive to the entire success of the plot. She was tolerating life at San Remo, under the hired roof of a truly great dame, who wished to disentangle her from the golden nets of ultra-fast society. A grass-widow has to be more careful to keep up appearances than the genuine crape article, even at the risk of being bored by highly placed humanity, as dull as stainless. Lady Hengist and her friends belonged to that seventh heaven where newly rich Peris and the Mammons who cocker them seek admittance in vain. Social laws differ from those of nature, inasmuch as the gilded scum does not invariably rise to the top. Hence the creation of the over-discussed smart set, which is taken by the suburban reader of back stairs journalism as representative of the British aristocracy.
Lord Hengist came of an autochthonous family which had been at home when William the Conqueror raided the ancestral cabin. His wife was descended from a knight who emigrated from Normandy in 1066, with apparently several million others, judging by the claims put forward by those who enter the peerage. This alliance--they were too great to talk of mere marriage--resulted in two children, not made of ordinary clay, but compounded of the superlative porcelain sort. Their parents possessed a genuine mediæval castle, as uncomfortable as the builders knew how to make it, and which had the rare distinction of possessing a state-bedroom in which Elizabeth had never slept. The family archives read like the Book of Numbers, and their ancestors had made history at opulent wages for the benefit of the Hengist coffers. The men had sided with the Stewarts and ratted to the Guelphs; the women bloomed in Lely and Kneller portraits in loosely slipping clothes, with pastoral accessories; and finally, the present head of the house, with four seats, two children, a charming wife and a large income, lived comfortably on the loot of ages. Of all these things Lord and Lady Hengist were so proud that they had no need to exhibit pride.
Well-born as Leah Kaimes was, the pleasant, if somewhat stately and stiff, life of these genuine rulers wearied her intensely. Bread and milk is insipid after a repast of ortolans in aspic, and a motor-flight is more exhilarating than a donkey-ride. Moreover, it annoyed her to see how sensibly the Hengists spent their many pounds a day. They could have had much more fun for the money, had they known the right shops; but they patronised out-of-date establishments, where the goods were of an excellent quality, but just five minutes behind the newest things. Of course, this was Leah's figurative way of saying that the Hengists came out of the Ark. They always bought the wrong things at the wrong shops, and had a middle-class eye to the lasting quality of the goods they purchased. They were clothed rather than dressed, and being colour-blind, invariably chose garments which matched abominably with their complexions. In a word, the Hengists were so commonplace as to be original. Lady Jim could not understand why they should have been thrust into positions which they could not fill. It was like bringing cows into the drawing-room.
"It's so hard for me to taste the pleasures of self-denial," complained Hengist, one day, as they sauntered on the promenade.