“But a rarity in London,” he said, “and, bloom like yours, rare anywhere. In London, Madam, we have a glass-house admiration for glass-house flowers that wilt to ruin at a breath of open air. I have been guilty of the bad taste to share that admiration. I have been unpardonably forgetful of the flower of Lancashire.” And he bowed to Dorothy in as handsome apology as a laggard lover could make. “We heard a word at the club, Mr. Verner, which, as you observed, had the faculty of annoying me. It annoyed me because in a club one thinks club-wise and club-wisdom is opaque. I should not be annoyed now.”
“Are we to know what the word was?” asked Mrs. Verners not too discreetly.
Sir Harry raised his eyebrows slightly. Decidedly, he thought again, a clucking hen, but his management of her could wait: this was his hour of magnanimity. “At the club, Madam,” he said, “we were allowed to hear a Mr. Seccombe recommending me to visit my estates.” Sir Harry looked at Dorothy. “And it is in my mind that Seceombe counseled well.”
Considering the man and remembering the wager with Godalming, that was an admission even more handsome than his apology. It fell short, but only short, of actual declaration and perhaps that might have come had not Mrs. Verners attempted to force a pace which was astonishingly fast. She saw her expedition turning in its first engagement to triumphant victory, but she wanted the spoils of victory, she wanted a spade to be called unmistakably a spade, she wanted his declaration in round terms before he left that room.
“We are to see you back in Lancashire?” she said insinuatingly.
Sir Harry shuddered at her crude persistence, but, gallantly, “I have good reason to believe so,” he replied, scanning the reason with an admiration qualified now by wonder if she would become like her mother.
“And you will come to stay?”
“That I cannot say,” he was goaded to reply. Damn the woman! She was arousing his worst, she was reawakening his rebellion to the thought that he had had his fling, she was tempting him to continue it in the hope that when his fling was ended, Mrs. Verners would have, mercifully, also ended. He took his leave with some abruptness, treading a lower air than that of his expectancy.
But Dorothy held her place with him. For wife of his, this was the one woman and Mrs. Verners, in retrospect, diminished to the disarmed impotence to hurt of a spikeless burr.
He weighed alternatives—Dorothy, heather, the moors, domesticity, estates, his place in the county against the stews of St. James, the excitement of gambling on a horse, a prizefighter or the dice, the hot perfumes of balls, Ranelagh, the clubs, women. He even threw in Prinny and his place at Court, and against all these Dorothy, and what she stood for, held the balance down. He formed a resolution which he thought immutable.