“I remember those days quite well,” said Anne. Her voice, as well as her looks, was quite different from her sisters’. Instead of their rich and sensuous tones, beautiful like their father’s, Anne’s voice had a dovelike quality of cooing softness; but she could always make herself heard. “I remember,” she continued, touching her mother’s coarse hand outspread on the table, “when mamma used to make our gowns, and we looked quite as nice as the girls who could afford to have their clothes made by a dressmaker.”
“Them was happy days,” said Mrs. Clavering. It was her only remark during luncheon.
They talked of their plans for the coming week, as people do to whom pleasure and leisure are new and intoxicating things. Anne was plied with questions about Mrs. Luttrell’s dinner. She told freely all about it, being secretive only concerning Baskerville, merely mentioning that he was present.
“A more toploftical, stuck-up F. F. V.—or F. F. M., I suppose he is—I never saw than this same Mr. Baskerville, and as dull as ditchwater besides,” said Lydia.
Here Reginald spoke. “Mr. Baskerville is very highly esteemed by the bishop of the diocese,” he said.
“And by people of a good deal more brains than the bishop of the diocese,” added Clavering. “Baskerville is one of the brainiest men of his age I ever knew. He is fighting me in this K. F. R. business; but all the same I have a high opinion of his gray matter, and I wish you two girls—Élise and Lydia—knew men like Baskerville instead of foreign rapscallions and fortune-hunters like Rosalka. And I wish you went to dinners such as Anne went to last night, instead of scampering over the town to all sorts of larky places with all sorts of larky people.”
To this Lydia replied. So far, she had achieved neither marriage nor divorce, but she was not averse to either. “I think the dinners Anne goes to must be precious dull. Now, our men and our parties, whatever they are, they aren’t dull. I never laughed so much in my life as I did at Rosalka’s stories.”
Clavering’s face grew black. He was no better than he should be himself, and ethically he made no objection to his daughters’ amusing themselves in any way but one; but old prejudices and superstitions made him delicate on the one point upon which he suspected two of his daughters were the least squeamish. He said nothing, however, nor did Anne or Reginald; it was a subject none of them cared to discuss. When luncheon was over, Mrs. Clavering and Anne made ready for their early Sunday afternoon walk—a time to which Mrs. Clavering looked forward all the week and with which Anne never allowed any of her own engagements to interfere.
Meanwhile Clavering himself, interested for the first time in the tall, shabby house across the way, walked out upon the broad stone steps of his own place and watched the windows opposite, hoping for a glimpse of Elizabeth Darrell’s face. While he stood there smoking and apparently engaged in the harmless enjoyment of a lovely autumn afternoon, Richard Baskerville approached. Baskerville denied himself the pleasure of seeking Anne in her own home, but he often found himself, without his own volition, in the places where he would be likely to meet her, and so he was walking along the street in which she lived. Seeing Clavering on the steps Baskerville would have passed with a cool nod, but Clavering stopped him; and the younger man, thinking Anne Clavering might be within sight or might appear, compromised with his conscience and entered into conversation with Clavering. It was always an effort on Baskerville’s part to avoid Clavering, whose extraordinary charm of manner and personality was a part of his capital. Baskerville, deep in the study of Clavering’s career, felt a genuine curiosity about the man and how he did things and what he really thought of himself and his own doings. He reckoned Clavering to be a colossal and very attractive scoundrel, whom he was earnestly seeking to destroy; and his relations were further complicated with Clavering by the fact that Anne Clavering was—a very interesting woman. This Baskerville admitted to himself; he had got that far on the road to love.
The Senator, with the brilliant smile which made him handsomer than ever, said to Baskerville, “We may as well enjoy the privilege of speaking before you do me up in the matter of the K. F. R. land grants.”