Lee laughed, although the sensation of dismay induced by Lady Barnstaple’s visit returned at his words. “I’m afraid not. Sulphur and arsenic and iron are as much as can be expected of one poor little ranch.”
“Perhaps we can sell the springs to a syndicate—who knows? Syndicates are always buyin’ things and givin’ seven figgers for ’em. I’ll tell you what we’ll do. The next old Jew or brewer that wants to get into Society we’ll send for and tell him that the ranch at seven figgers is our price for a week’s shooting at the Abbey and three dinners in town,” and he gave his ungenial chuckle.
“You aren’t all really as bad as that over here, are you?”
“Oh, we’re mixed, like you Americans. We’re all right so long as we don’t need money; but, you see, we need such a cursed lot of it—several thousand times more than the nobodies who sit outside and criticise us. It’s in our blood, and when we can’t get it one way we try another. We all cling to certain ideals, though: I’ve never gambled with a parvenu. It’s true I made an ass of myself and married one, but I pulled up just after. Miss Pix is the only other that has got inside my doors. That’s the one point Emmy and I agree on: I have my ideals”—he laughed again—“and, like all upstarts, she despises other upstarts. Monmouth is the only person in the house except Miss Pix without an hereditary title, and he’s grandson of a duke, and a Guardsman. Some of the smartest women of the day are untitled, but Emmy won’t have ’em. Wonder who she’ll have this time five years?—Second-rate actors and long-haired poets, probably.”
Lee wondered at even a dilapidated set of ideals, and at a pride—and pride was written all over him—which would permit him to live on a woman’s money. Of course he may have argued that Lady Barnstaple was paying a fair yearly rent for the title and the Abbey, but it was an old-world view-point, to which it would take a long period of habit to accustom the new. She wondered if she had any right to despise a man who was a mere result of a civilisation so different from her own, but felt unindulgent. In the United States, if a penniless man married for money, he had the decency to affect the habit of the worker, if it were only to write alleged poems for the magazines, or to attach himself to a Legation.
After dinner she went with the women into another immense room, also panelled to the ceiling. Each panel was set with a portrait, several of which she knew at a glance to be the originals of bygone masters. Their flesh tints were uniformly pink: Lee glanced upward. The stone ceiling, arched and heavily carved, was set with electric pears. It was an irritating anomaly.
Lee thought the women looked very nice, and wondered if she was ever to be introduced to anybody. Emmy was flitting about again—rather the upper part of her seemed to flit as if propelled by the somewhat unwieldy machinery below. She looked indubitably common, despite her acquired “air” and the exquisite taste of her millinery; and Lee wondered what these women—who, well-dressed or ill, loud-voiced or semi-subdued, delicately or heavily modelled of face, intensely modern all of them, looked what they were, and as if they assumed the passing fad in manners, even the fad of vulgarity, as easily and adjustably as a new sleeve or a larger waist—could find in this particular American to their fancy.
“Do sit here by me!” A young woman on a small sofa swept aside her skirts and nodded brightly to Lee. She had sat opposite at dinner, and spoken across the table several times to Captain Monmouth, whom she addressed as “Larry.” She had a large open voice and a large open laugh, and, to use an unforgettable term of Lord Barnstaple’s, she rather sprawled. But she was exquisitely fine of feature and cold of colouring, although charged straight up through her lithe figure with assumed animation or ungoverned nervousness, Lee could not determine which. The bride sat down at once.
“You are Lady Mary Gifford,” she said smiling. “I asked Captain Monmouth who you were.”
“Oh, did you ask who I was? How nice! I wish everybody in the room was talking about me as they are about you. But my day for that is past. Would you guess I was twenty-four?”