"Very saucy hump," insisted the male linguist--"quite birdish. Sorry the old Duke an' Frith hopped, maybe."
"How very unnatural!" sighed Mrs. Penworthy, reverting to English in her disgust. "Quite too awf'l to think how luck hooks on to her. Really makes one wish to be a bad woman, to see how she lands the salmon," she finished more creditably.
Algy's latest successor was right, for once in his life of mistakes. Leah was not entirely her own brilliant self, notwithstanding that successful inauguration of the new era. The early excitement consequent on the conversation with Aksakoff had died away, and again she felt the old haunting fear of the possible. But this absurd mood, she hoped, would pass away when the test came. Facing her enemies, male and female, she would doubtless fight like a cornered rat, and would conquer from sheer determination not to be beaten. Nevertheless, this period of suspense was trying to one who had no listener, and who could not talk herself into heroics by mere monologues. A confidant was necessary only to the weaker part of her character, since her deepest feelings advised her that pure strength must needs be solitary. She was an oak, not an ivy, and unknowingly agreed with Emerson as to the vitiating effects of comfortable circumstances. "Cast the bantling on the rocks," sang the Seer of Concord, and Leah indubitably squirmed thereon, as Jim had informed her in his simple way in a conversation now--apparently--some centuries old.
"Every month's a year now," sighed Leah, wearily.
However, pending a possible fight for her social throne, the Duchess made the very best of the passing hour. After the pagan entertainment of the winter solstice, she endured the gorging Christianity of a few belated country-houses, whose inhabitants were still eating in honour of a Birth which had taken place some two thousand years ago, as a Book they seldom read assured them. She went alone to these Vitellian feasts, as Jim was off the chain until such time as he would be needed to play Duke during the season. The aristocratic prodigal's reformation was but skin-deep, and the late whitewash soon wore off to show the unchanged black fleece, since he began with the zeal of a newly uniformed subaltern to poach on various matrimonial manors. Mrs. Penworthy he had naturally grown tired of, as she preferred syndicates to partnerships, so he placed his tried affections on Lady Sandal, who was horsey and doggy and tremendously expensive on account of her betting craze. She and Jim talked kennels and stables, discussing their very unplatonic loves between times, and found each other kindred guttersnipes of the earthly, sensual kind. Leah, speedily informed by a feminine sidewind of this new amusement of Jim's four-and-twenty leisure hours, did not object, or even hint her knowledge of his backsliding. It kept him out of her way, and Lord Sandal, a Nero with limitations, who dwelt in a superlative glass house, was not likely to submit his wife's latest sin to the fierce light which beats upon the divorce court witness-box. Nothing could be more satisfactory to a woman who wanted complete freedom, and Leah again thanked the agreeable fetish for making straight her very crooked paths.
But all this time the sword dangled over Leah's head, and its menace became so insupportable that she wished the single hair would give way, to decide brusquely for hit or miss. Her desire was gratified on the very night when she made her curtsey to the Sovereigns. Having created an immense impression, the Duchess, with eyes as radiant as the family diamonds crowning her imperial head, returned at midnight to her home in the company of a purring husband. Jim really felt that Leah had upheld the family name with her insolent beauty, and moreover, was quite the grandest-looking woman in London, or out of it. When they arrived in their own drawing-room, and she had emerged a royal court butterfly from the chrysalis of her cloak, he turned abruptly and took her in his arms with the hug of a bear.
"Leah," he murmured hoarsely--"oh, Leah!" and kissed her fair on the mouth with the kiss of Pan.
But only once did he exercise that connubial privilege, for she released herself roughly with a sense of intolerable outrage. "Isn't it rather late in the day?" she asked, scornful and angry.
"'Pon my word, Leah, I'd be a good husband to you if you would only let me."
"Oh, as an over-married Turk I am sure you would be admirable. I know you disapprove of monogamy."