“I’m not a goose, thank you. But you’ll never make an ass of yourself, so it doesn’t matter. Of course you’ll be a great man.”
“I wish I could believe it.”
“It’s plain enough to every one else. All you need is ambition, and I can see that growing already. If your party is defeated, so much the better for you. You can devote your energies and your gifts to putting new life into it. You’re just what the old fogies need. I don’t see how you could start out more favourably, and I don’t see what is to prevent your being the next great man.”
Cecil’s nostrils quivered suddenly. He looked for an instant longer into the eyes that had expressed many more things to him than admiration for his intellectual equipment, put out his hand impulsively and took hers, then returned to his studies.
CHAPTER IX
THEY moved up to town on the third of April. Lady Barnstaple had taken a tiny and costly house for them in Green Street, and as there had been much correspondence on the subject, and many samples had travelled from London to Yorkshire and back, it was almost in order when the young couple arrived to take possession.
“For goodness’ sake, have it light and bright,” Lady Barnstaple had written. “London is such a grimy hole, people simply love colour. Don’t mind bothering me; if I were poor I’d be a house decorator. The only fault I had to find with the Abbey was that it was furnished.”
Lee found her doll’s house a delicious nest of colour and luxury after the feudal severity of her tower; and although Cecil was even more serious than when he had married, she managed, during that first spring in London, to make him feel that they were playing at keeping house and at the lighter side of life. She could always amuse and interest him when she thought it wise to do so.
They went out very little, for he detested crushes in hot ill-ventilated rooms, and large dinners were not more to his taste; but he liked the play, and they were always to be seen at Tattersall’s on Sunday afternoons, and often in the Park, which had not yet been vulgarised as a promenade. In the mornings they rose early and rode either through the Park with the many of stereotyped habits, or out into the country; occasionally to Richmond, where they breakfasted at the Star and Garter, and tried to imagine that it was still brilliant and wicked. Sometimes, of an afternoon, they traversed three or four “At Homes,” where Lee had an enchanting sense of being in the great world at last, and Cecil kept his eyes longingly on the windows. At the play they always took a box, as Cecil became restless in the narrower confines of the stalls, and Lord Barnstaple and Mary Gifford usually accompanied them. Lady Barnstaple, although she sang her daughter-in-law’s praises in a loud high key, flatly refused to elevate her passing charms into a box of which Lee was the radiant and novel star. Lee was greatly admired, and knew that she could have been the bride of the season, had Cecil permitted; but although she felt some natural regret, especially when her mother-in-law expostulated, and Lady Mary Gifford commiserated, on the whole she did not care. Cecil barely let her out of his sight, and once he sulked for an entire day because she went to a luncheon; she was happy, and nothing else mattered. When she was stared out of countenance at the opera and theatre he took it as a matter of course, but the newspaper comments were less to his taste, and he peremptorily forbade her to give her photograph to any of the illustrated weeklies, or to be the heroine of certain enterprising “lady-journalists,” who wished to exploit her beauty and her many delectable gowns. Her semi-seclusion gave her a touch of mystery, and one woman’s magazine would have made her known to fifty thousand provincials; but Cecil was disgusted at the bare idea of sharing his wife with the public, and flung the artful request for an interview into the fire. Lee was much amused, and assured him that Mrs. Montgomery had brought her up to regard notoriety with horror.
“And after all,” she said to Lady Barnstaple, “suppose I did become a professional beauty, that would place Cecil in a contemptible position, and I’d rather be a desperate failure than do that.”