“That I can well believe,” he declared. “I have never eaten so many good dishes in my life as here.”
“Yes, I have a talent in that direction,” she assented. “And I am prouder of it because it represents a triumph over my ancestral prejudices. You will get nothing good to eat in Ireland. The Irish have never respected food as a proper subject for serious human thought. It is the rarest thing to hear them mention it. There may be some fine spiritual quality in that—but at all events we cook well here, and I have worked a complete revolution in that respect on the estate. There are certainly no such cooks and housekeepers anywhere else in England as my women. But you see what I mean. There is no effort to take women away from the work they have always been doing, but only to make them do it better.”
“But that in itself is very much,” urged Christian. Somehow he had the feeling that he was defending the System against a critic.
“Undoubtedly,” she admitted. “And of course we do something more than that. In a good many cases, when it was not inconvenient, I have put young girls of aptitude forward to learn designing and other arts. Some of them have made me some very tolerable tapestry, and a few of them are as intelligent and valuable in the greenhouses as our best men. In the matter of music they really beat them. Emanuel insists on a choir of glee singers in each village—and at Christmas time we have a competition of ‘waits’ which will be worth your while coming to hear. For my part, I have a string orchestra of girls that I should not be ashamed to have play in London.”
The word seemed to bring them back, “You were going to speak to me,” Christian ventured, “about London. One thing—I shall see you there often, shall I not?”
She slowly shook her head. “No, we have outgrown London, I’m afraid. It can be proved, I believe, that it is the biggest town in the world—but to us it is too small for comfort. It is now more than a year since we have been up at all. Why should we go? We have the National Gallery by heart, and the year’s pictures are rather distressing than otherwise. The theaters are intellectually beneath notice. There is the opera of course, and the concerts, but the people annoy us by talking loudly, and besides, we have our own music, and occasionally we bring down a Paderewski or a Sarasate for our people to hear. At the houses where we would naturally go, the women talk about matters of which I know absolutely nothing, and Emanuel either quarrels with the men about what they call their politics, or chokes silently with rage and disgust. And then the spectacle of the people in the streets—the poor of London!—that fairly sickens our hearts. We have no joy of going at all. Occasionally we have guests down here, but it is not a very happy time they have of it. Everything is so strange to them that they are confused, and walk about with constraint, as if they were being shown around an asylum. So it happens that I see very few women of my own class—and really know less about them than most people. And yet,” she added, with a twinkle in her eye, “so naturally audacious a race are the Irish—it is precisely about ladies in London society that I am going to read you a lecture.”
Christian drew up his feet, and assumed an air of delighted anticipation.
“First of all, you are six and twenty, and you will be thinking of marrying. What is more, you are what is called a great match, and for every thought that you give to the subject of a wife, others will give ten thousand to the subject of you as a possible husband.”
The young man looked into her kindly eyes with a sustained glance of awakening thought. This dazzling and princely position which she had thus outlined—sure enough, it was his! How extraordinary that this had not suggested itself to him before! Or had the perception of it not really lain dormant in his consciousness all the while? This question propounded itself to a mind which was engrossed in something else—for of a sudden there rose upon the blank background of his thoughts the luminous face of a lady, beautiful, distinguished, exquisitely sensitized, and as by the trick of a dream she first wore a large garden hat, and then was bare-headed, her fair hair gathered loosely back into a careless knot. The mental picture expanded, to show the full length of her queenly figure as she descended a broad staircase, with one lovely hand like a lily against the oak of the rail. Then it contracted, and underwent a strange metamorphosis, for it was another face which he saw, a pale, earnest, clever face, and instead of the great stairway, there was the laced tawdriness of a French railway compartment.
Then, with a start, and a backward movement of the head, he was free of dreamland, and blushingly conscious of having stared his cousin out of countenance. He laughed with awkward embarrassment. “I—I suppose it is true—what you say,” he remarked, stumblingly.