“Oh, I say, she is not ‘informed!’” cried Lord Lambeth. “No one would do such a thing as that.”
“She is made to feel it,” the young girl insisted—“as if they were afraid she would make a rush for the door. No; you have a lovely country,” said Bessie Alden, “but your precedence is horrid.”
“I certainly shouldn’t think your sister would like it,” rejoined Lord Lambeth with even exaggerated gravity. But Bessie Alden could induce him to enter no formal protest against this repulsive custom, which he seemed to think an extreme convenience.
Percy Beaumont all this time had been a very much less frequent visitor at Jones’s Hotel than his noble kinsman; he had, in fact, called but twice upon the two American ladies. Lord Lambeth, who often saw him, reproached him with his neglect and declared that, although Mrs. Westgate had said nothing about it, he was sure that she was secretly wounded by it. “She suffers too much to speak,” said Lord Lambeth.
“That’s all gammon,” said Percy Beaumont; “there’s a limit to what people can suffer!” And, though sending no apologies to Jones’s Hotel, he undertook in a manner to explain his absence. “You are always there,” he said, “and that’s reason enough for my not going.”
“I don’t see why. There is enough for both of us.”
“I don’t care to be a witness of your—your reckless passion,” said Percy Beaumont.
Lord Lambeth looked at him with a cold eye and for a moment said nothing. “It’s not so obvious as you might suppose,” he rejoined dryly, “considering what a demonstrative beggar I am.”
“I don’t want to know anything about it—nothing whatever,” said Beaumont. “Your mother asks me everytime she sees me whether I believe you are really lost—and Lady Pimlico does the same. I prefer to be able to answer that I know nothing about it—that I never go there. I stay away for consistency’s sake. As I said the other day, they must look after you themselves.”
“You are devilish considerate,” said Lord Lambeth. “They never question me.”