“Ah,” he said, “that’s not in the contract! You shall hear as soon as we’re in Bushey Park, not before. We’re going to talk of Pauline Leicester all the way down.”
“I hear Katya Lascarides has come back,” she said. “Well, then, about your Pauline.”
“Well,” Grimshaw said, “I’ve said you haven’t got to fear Pauline’s taking any revenge on you, but you have got to fear that she’ll upset your little game with Dudley Leicester.”
“What’s my little game with Dudley, anyhow?” she said. “I don’t want him.”
“What Pauline’s going to do is to make a man of him,” Robert Grimshaw said. “She’ll put some life into him. She’ll put some backbone into him. He’ll end up by being a pretty representative County Member. But your game has always been to make a sort of cross between a puppy and a puppet out of him. It’s that little game that Pauline will spoil.”
She turned a furious red.
“Now, before God,” she said, “I’d have made a good wife to him. You haven’t the right to say that to me, Robert Grimshaw.” And she picked furiously at her thick riding-gloves with one hand after the other. “By Jove, if I’d my crop with me, I think I should lay it over your back.”
“You couldn’t lay it over my back,” he said placidly, “because I’m sitting down; but I’m not insulting you in that way. I dare say you’d have been perfectly faithful to Dudley—faithful and probably furiously jealous too; but you wouldn’t have made a man of him. He’d have lived a sort of doll’s life under your petticoats. You’d probably have made him keep a racing-stable, and drop a pot of money at Monte Carlo, and drop another pot over bridge, and you’d have got him involved all round, and he’d have dragged along somehow whilst you carried on as women to-day do carry on. That’s the sort of thing it would have been. Mind! I’m not preaching to you. If people like to live that sort of life, that’s their business. It takes all sorts to make a world, but ...”
Lady Hudson suddenly put her hand upon his knee.
“I’ve always believed, Robert Grimshaw,” she said—“I always did believe that it was you who made Dudley break off from me. You’re the chap, aren’t you, that made him look after his estates, and become a model landowner, and nurse the county to give him a seat? All that sort of thing.”