"Only three," said Sir Evelyn, as if modestly disclaiming a well deserved honour which had not been bestowed on him.
"Three seems no end of a lot to me," said Mrs. Eames. "In fact three is no end of a lot when it's Royal Commissions. Of course three cigarettes wouldn't be much or three apples. Was anyone else ever Chairman of three Royal Commissions?"
Sir Evelyn was not vainer or fonder of praise than most elderly and successful men. Vanity is supposed to be the besetting sin of young women. It is really the devil's most successful lure for old gentlemen, and Sir Evelyn had not escaped it. Long after the other six deadly sins have ceased to be dangerous, when the blood is too sluggish for lust, when bitter experience has taught the folly of gluttony, when there is little left in life with the power to move to anger, whenever avarice—though Byron calls it an old-gentlemanly vice—is a temptation of the past, then vanity attacks a man whose life has given any excuse for it, and he generally falls. With grey hairs and a measure of success there comes to most of us, as to Sir Evelyn, a strong sense of our own importance.
"I wonder," he said modestly, "how you come to be interested in my commonplace career."
"You mustn't think," said Mrs. Eames, "that because I live in Hailey Compton I'm interested in nothing except the parish pump."
"No doubt," said Sir Evelyn, becoming ponderously playful, "so omniscient a lady will be able to guess what has brought me here to-day."
Mrs. Eames took off her bathing cap and ran her fingers through her hair as if deeply pondering. Her hair was red and had been cropped by the village barber, a fisherman and only an amateur at hair-cutting, who had heard of but not actually seen the fashionable bobbing and shingling. The result was comfortable but not becoming. The absence of floating locks made Mrs. Eames's face look bigger than it was and her features did not bear exaggeration well. They gave the impression of having been rather hurriedly put into their places—eyes, nose, mouth and chin—by a modeller who had learnt his art through a correspondence class. The general effect was lumpy and, on closer looking, rather crooked.
"A little bird whispered to me——" she said.
"A little what?"
"Bird. Of course it wasn't really a bird. And even if it had been it wouldn't have whispered. Birds don't. They twitter. I ought to have said 'Lilith lisped to me——'"