Meanwhile Hartopp and Joey had not come back. Dwala had been out into Park Lane three or four times in the course of the morning, looking vainly up and down for them. There was only a patient four-wheeled cab, with two big new leather trunks on it, standing a little way off the gate; the driver opened his eyes heavily each time Dwala emerged, and then returned to sleep.
It was one of those solemn summer days which visit London like dreams: one of those days when Hyde Park, with its smooth lawns and ancient dignity of trees, seems like the revelation of a purpose in this fantastic world—a purpose to which the surface of aristocratic life, with its carriages and frocks and parasols, seems so well attuned, that one is convinced that the whole mass of it must needs be as respectable as Nature.
They came at last: Dwala was on the steps to meet them: Hartopp in a well-brushed black tail coat; Joey looking ugly in a tight velvet frock and feathered hat, her hair drawn back into a pig-tail, all clean but her hands.
They both looked tired and saddened. Dwala felt a sudden disillusion, a reduction of something big to small dimensions.
‘Is that your cab outside?’ he asked.
Joey nodded. ‘But we’ve not decided yet. We’ve only come to have a look.’
She ran up the steps, and stopped, peering into the dark entry, awed by the motionless forms of the big footmen.
They went all over the house with Dwala, from bottom to top, conscientiously, doggedly, examining everything. Joey insisted: Hartopp followed, mumbling morosely. Joey listened to all explanations with that air of undue, almost effusive, attentiveness, which marches so nearly with boredom. They saw Huxtable once on a landing: he was passing from one room to another, in spectacles, with a bundle of papers; he always wore spectacles till tea-time. He looked at them drily, externally, as one looks at events in another family.
A kind of depression, a melancholy hush, weighed on the whole house and household, as if someone had just died. One thing only was certain: they all knew that the pretence of a probation was an empty one; Hartopp and Joey had come to stay.
Hartopp was aware of this, and wondered at his own blank listlessness. The Enemy of Society felt suddenly as a wild bull might, which had spent a long hot day goring a big cathedral and was now being led quietly to a pew. There is a magic in our masquerading: it is with deep feelings of solemnity that man shuffles off one disguise and gets into another; the fraudulent company-promoter, growing rich, enters upon his fortune almost with the same ennobling awe as a young girl going to her Confirmation.