The evening before, she had met Arthur Berkeley once more at a small At Home, and had learned from him full particulars as to the dire straits into which the poor Le Bretons had finally fallen. Now, Hilda Tregellis was a kind-hearted girl at bottom, and when she heard all about it, she said at once to Arthur, ‘I shall go and see them myself to-morrow, Mr. Berkeley, whether mamma allows me or not.’
‘What good will it do?’ Arthur had answered her quickly. ‘You can’t find work for poor Le Breton, can you? and of course if you can’t do that you can be of no earthly use in any way to the poor creatures.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Hilda responded warmly. ‘Sympathy’s always something, isn’t it, Mr. Berkeley? Nobody ought to know that better than you do. Besides, there’s no saying when one may happen to turn up useful. Of course, I’ve never been of the slightest use to anybody in all my life, myself, I know, and I dare say I never shall be, but at least there’s no harm in trying, is there? I’m on speaking terms with such an awful lot of people, all of them rich and many of them influential—Parliament, and Government offices, and all that sort of nonsense, you know—people who have no end of things to give away, and can’t tell who on earth they’d better give them to, for fear of offending all the others, that I might possibly hear of something or other.’
‘I’m afraid, Lady Hilda,’ Berkeley answered smiling, ‘none of those people would have anything to offer that could possibly be of the slightest use to poor Le Breton. If he’s to be saved at all, he must be saved in his own time and by his own methods. For my own part, I don’t see what conceivable chance of success in life there is left for him. You can’t imagine a man like him making money and living comfortably. It’s a tragedy—all the dramas of real life always ARE tragedies; but I’m terribly afraid there’s no conceivable way out of it.’
Lady Hilda only looked at him with bold good humour. ‘Nonsense,’ she said bravely. ‘All pure rubbishing pessimistic nonsense. (I hope pessimistic’s the right word—it’s a very good word, anyhow, even if it isn’t in the proper place.) Well, I don’t agree with you at all about this question, Mr. Berkeley. I’m very fond of Mr. Le Breton, really very fond of him; and I believe there’s a corner somewhere for every man if only he can jog down properly into his own corner instead of being squeezed forcibly into somebody else’s. The worst of it is, all the holes are round, and Mr. Le Breton’s a square man, I allow: he wants all the angles cutting down off him.’
‘But you can’t cut them off; that’s the very trouble,’ Arthur answered, with just a faint rising suspicion that he was half jealous of the interest Hilda showed even in poor lonely Ernest Le Breton. Gracious heavens! could he be playing false at last to the long-cherished memory of little Miss Butterfly? could he be really beginning to fall just a little in love, after all, with this bold beautiful Lady Hilda Tregellis? He didn’t know, and yet he somehow hardly liked himself to think it. And while Edie was still so poor too!
‘No, you can’t cut them off; I know that perfectly well,’ Hilda rejoined quickly. ‘I wouldn’t care twopence for him if I thought you could. It’s the angles that give him all his charming delicious originality. But you can look out a square hole for him somewhere, you know, and that of course would be a great deal better. Depend upon it, Mr. Berkeley, there are square holes up and down in the world, if only we knew where to look for them; and the mistake that everybody has made in poor Mr. Le Breton’s case has been that instead of finding one to suit him, they’ve gone on trying to poke him down anyhow by main force into one of the round ones. That goes against the grain, you know; besides which I call it a clear waste of the very valuable solid mahogany corners.’
Arthur Berkeley looked at her silently for a moment, as if a gleam of light had burst suddenly in upon him. Then he said to her slowly and deliberately, ‘Perhaps you’re right, Lady Hilda, though I never thought of it quite in that light before. But one thing certainly strikes me now, and that is that you’re a great deal cleverer after all than I ever thought you.’
Lady Hilda made a little mock curtsey. ‘It’s very good of you to say so,’ she answered, half-saucily. ‘Only the compliment is rather double-edged, you must confess, because it implies that up to now you’ve had a dreadfully low opinion of my poor little intelligence.’
So after that conversation Lady Hilda made up her mind that she would certainly go the very next day and call as soon as possible upon Edie Le Breton. Nobody could tell what good might possibly come of it; but at least there could come no harm. And so, when the carriage drew up it the door at half-past eleven, Hilda Tregellis stepped into it with a vague consciousness of an important mission, and ordered Jenkins to drive at once to the side street in Holloway, whose address Arthur Berkeley had last night given her. Jenkins touched his hat with mechanical respect, but inwardly wondered what the dickens my lady would think if only she came to know of these ‘ere extrornary goin’s on.