“Much as I should like to possess Ordham, I have no desire to live in England. I do not care for English life except at rare intervals. There is nothing of the English country gentleman in me, and I prefer the Continent. That was one of my reasons for entering the diplomatic service.”
“How can anybody like those down-at-the-heel aristocracies and vulgar bourgeoisies with all the money when one can have England—the only real thing? Oh, Jackie dear, please, please stay!” She clasped her hands, and he noted afresh, sharply displeased with himself, how beautiful she was. “I know, I know we shall be much happier here. And I haven’t half seen London, been really a part of its wonderful life.”
“You are talking like a spoilt child, crying for a toy,” he said pleasantly. “Do you realize that you are asking me to give up my career?”
“Do you really care as much about it as you think? If you had been the oldest son and inherited four years ago, should you have thought about it?”
He took another turn up and down the room. “Perhaps not,” he said finally. “But I think a great deal about it at present.”
“I don’t believe you have ever known what you wanted. Somebody always—Lady Bridgminster says that she and your father chose your career, that you were always too indolent to plan anything, take any initiative. Oh, I have heard her discuss you a thousand times. I am sure that if you settle down here, you will like it a million times better than that tiresome old Continent. You can run for Parliament if you want a career. Lady Bridgminster says that you have all sorts of abilities if you would only wake up, and politics are certainly in your blood.”
A white light was rising in his brain. “I fancy that I am quite the most dronish man alive. More than once in my life I have had the sensation of being gently engineered up to or past some crisis—and too indolent—polite word!—even to attempt to formulate the impression.” He paused a full minute as if he would repress the question that finally slipped from his tongue, “Was I engineered into this marriage?”
Mabel flushed again and her eyes expanded, but she clapped her hands with a fine assumption of gay defiance. “Should you really have thought of marrying me if the idea had not deliberately been put into your head?”
He gazed at her with heavy veiled eyes, which she misread, and which covered revolt and fury. “How interesting,” he said softly. “Do tell me about it. It was your clever mother, of course.”
“And yours! She frightened you and roused all your stubbornness by threatening you with that dreadful Rosamond Hayle—who was engaged all the time! Oh, it was too funny!” Mabel, carried away by her little sense of drama, and completely deceived by her husband’s smiling face, ran on. “You can’t find any fault with me, at least, for I was frightfully in love with you—I never thought of any one else from the moment we met in Munich. Lady Bridgminster, of course, wanted you to marry a fortune, and Momma was equally set on the match, as she is so hard to please, and you are as much her ideal as mine. Heavens! how they coached poor little me. My head nearly burst with the effort even to look intellectual. I had to play the scornful indifferent beauty lest your lordship wander off in search of more difficult game. And all the time I was simply dying to write you a little note and ask you to meet me for a walk in Kensington Gardens and have it out. That last week I had to take to embroidery in order to keep my eyes down. If you could see those stitches! But Momma and Lady Bridgminster said that I must hold off a while longer, that if I dropped into your hand like a ripe plum, you would find some way of getting out of it; your mother says that the only time you really rouse yourself is when you want to get out of something you have let yourself in for, and then you display positive genius. I was frightened half to death. Oh, thank heaven, it is all over!”