“Dear Julia!” cried Mrs. Winstone, in a tone which, although subdued, made an effect of floating across space until the drawing-room seemed immense, “come and meet my friends.”
Julia, born without mauvaise honte, passed the ordeal of introduction in a fashion which delighted her aunt, and sat down under the lorgnette of Mrs. Macmanus.
This intimate friend of Mrs. Winstone was also in her thirty-fifth year, but enormously rich, as lazy of body as she was quick of mind, and, inclined to gout, quite indifferent to both youth and clothes. Her black frock would not have been worn by her maid, her stays were of the old school, her hair was parted, and about her eyes were many amiable lines. There were those who maintained that she was a snob of the subtlest dye, daring to look like a frump because of her income and her ramifications in the peerage; but they were quite wrong. Mrs. Macmanus was so little of a snob that she rarely recognized snobbery in others, hated every variety of discomfort, and could not have been more amiable and kind-hearted had she been poor and a nobody.
Mr. Pirie, although only forty-five, was already an old beau. Left with an income sufficient for a luxurious bachelor, too selfish to ask the present Mrs. Macmanus to share it when she was a penniless girl, and with none of the recommendations essential to the capture of predatory heiresses, he had lived for twenty-five years in very comfortable rooms in Jermyn Street, dining out every night during the season, taking his yearly waters at Carlsbad, visiting at country houses. In no way distinguished, people wondered sometimes why they continued, year after year, to invite him; but he had been astute enough to hang on until he had become a fixed habit, and now, should any of the ailments which come from too much dining with owners of chefs take him off, he would have been sincerely missed for a season; he was a good-natured gossip, who could put vitriol on his tongue at the unique moment. Mrs. Macmanus had been free for fifteen years, and he had proposed to her fifteen times; but not only was that astute widow content with her present state, but she never quite forgave him for not proposing before he was obliged to wear a toupee. She liked him, however, and gave him a corner at her fireside. For several years she had tried to make him work, being of that order of woman that has no patience with the idler. In her youth, she had been quite impassioned on the subject, but had learned that to backbone the invertebrate was as easy as to turn marble into flesh. When, a few years later, the Americans discovered the hookworm, she concluded that half England had it, and became entirely charitable.
Young Herbert, who immediately carried his tea over to Julia’s side, was but recently out of Oxford, reading law to please his father (an eminently practical peer), but quietly preparing himself for literature. He had a fresh frank face, which refused to look politely bored, large blue eyes, that danced at times with youth and the zest of life, and although dressed with the perfection of detail of a Lord Algy FitzMiff, his movements, like his voice, were often quick and eager. He had been cultivating Mrs. Winstone with a view to succeeding Lord Algy, since she was so much the fashion, and rippin’ besides, but she vanished from his calculations the moment he set eyes on her niece, and never returned.
He had heard nothing of the marriage, Mrs. Winstone with fashionable casualness having omitted to mention it, and society being as indifferent to the performances of a man who spent his leaves of absence in Paris, as to the heir presumptive of an unfashionable duke.
“Miss France—surely—” he began. But Julia bridled. She was proud of her married state. She sat up very straight and looked at him primly.
He laughed aloud. “Really?” he asked teasingly. “Well, I suppose you are too young to like to be told you look so, but—I can’t take it in. Do I know your husband, perhaps? France—there are several. You are a bride, of course.”
“I have been married just twenty-four days. My husband is a lieutenant in the navy. He won’t be here for a month or two yet —”
“In the navy—what—what—is his first name?”