After which people knew about the matter and found it a subject for edifying and quite stimulating discussion. There was something fantastic in the situation. Coombe was the last man on earth to have taken the slightest notice of the child’s existence! It was believed that he had never seen her—except in long clothes—until she had glared at him and put her hand behind her back the night she was brought into the drawing-room. She had been adroitly kept tucked away in an attic somewhere. And now behold an addition of several wonderful, small rooms built, furnished and decorated for her alone, where she was to live as in a miniature palace attended by servitors! Coombe, as a purveyor of nursery appurtenances, was regarded with humour, the general opinion being that the eruption of a volcano beneath his feet alone could have awakened his somewhat chill self-absorption to the recognition of any child’s existence.
“To be exact we none of us really know anything in particular about his mental processes.” Harrowby pondered aloud. “He’s capable of any number of things we might not understand, if he condescended to tell us about them—which he would never attempt. He has a remote, brilliantly stored, cynical mind. He owns that he is of an inhuman selfishness. I haven’t a suggestion to make, but it sets one searching through the purlieus of one’s mind for an approximately reasonable explanation.”
“Why ‘purlieus’?” was the Starling’s inquiry. Harrowby shrugged his shoulders ever so lightly.
“Well, one isn’t searching for reasons founded on copy-book axioms,” he shook his head. “Coombe? No.”
There was a silence given to occult thought.
“Feather is really in a rage and is too Feathery to be able to conceal it,” said Starling.
“Feather would be—inevitably,” Harrowby lifted his near-sighted eyes to her curiously. “Can you see Feather in the future—when Robin is ten years older?”
“I can,” the Starling answered.
The years which followed were changing years—growing years. Life and entertainment went on fast and furiously in all parts of London, and in no part more rapidly than in the slice of a house whose front always presented an air of having been freshly decorated, in spite of summer rain and winter soot and fog. The plants in the window boxes seemed always in bloom, being magically replaced in the early morning hours when they dared to hint at flagging. Mrs. Gareth-Lawless, it was said, must be renewed in some such mysterious morning way, as she merely grew prettier as she neared thirty and passed it. Women did in these days! Which last phrase had always been a useful one, probably from the time of the Flood. Old fogeys, male and female, had used it in the past as a means of scathingly unfavourable comparison, growing flushed and almost gobbling like turkey cocks in their indignation. Now, as a phrase, it was a support and a mollifier. “In these days” one knew better how to amuse oneself, was more free to snatch at agreeable opportunity, less in bondage to old fancies which had called themselves beliefs; everything whirled faster and more lightly—danced, two-stepped, instead of marching.