“I know nothing about other cases,” Mrs. Dolphin said, “I only know about this one. It so happens that I’ve been brought near it, and that an appeal has been made to me. The English are very romantic—the most romantic people in the world, if that’s what you mean. They do the strangest things from the force of passion—even those of whom you would least expect it. They marry their cooks, they marry their coachmen, and their romances always have the most miserable end. I’m sure this one would be wretched. How can you pretend that such a flaming barbarian can be worked into any civilisation? What I see is a fine old race—one of the oldest and most honourable in England, people with every tradition of good conduct and high principle—and a dreadful disreputable vulgar little woman, who hasn’t an idea of what such things are, trying to force her way into it. I hate to see such things—I want to go to the rescue!”
“Well, I don’t,” Littlemore returned at his leisure. “I don’t care a pin for the fine old race.”
“Not from interested motives, of course, any more than I. But surely on artistic grounds, on grounds of decency?”
“Mrs. Headway isn’t indecent—you go too far. You must remember that she’s an old friend of mine.” He had become rather stern; Mrs. Dolphin was forgetting the consideration due, from an English point of view, to brothers.
She forgot it even a little more. “Oh if you’re in love with her too!” she quite wailed, turning away.
He made no answer to this, and the words had no sting for him. But at last, to finish the affair, he asked what in the world the old lady wanted him to do. Did she want him to go out into Piccadilly and announce to the passers-by that there had been one winter when even Mrs. Headway’s sister didn’t know who was her husband?
Mrs. Dolphin’s reply was to read out Lady Demesne’s letter, which her brother, as she folded it up again, pronounced one of the most extraordinary communications he had ever listened to. “It’s very sad—it’s a cry of distress,” she declared. “The whole meaning of it is that she wishes you’d come and see her. She doesn’t say it in so many words, but I can read between the lines. Besides, she told me she’d give anything to see you. Let me assure you it’s your duty to go.”
“To go and abuse Nancy Beck?”
“Go and rave about her if you like!” This was very clever of Mrs. Dolphin, but her brother was not so easily beguiled. He didn’t take that view of his duty, and he declined to cross her ladyship’s threshold. “Then she’ll come and see you,” said his visitor with decision.
“If she does I’ll tell her Nancy’s an angel.”