“She’s made to feel it—as if they were afraid she’d make a rush for the door. No, you’ve a lovely country”—she clung as for consistency to her discrimination—“but your precedence is horrid.”
“I certainly shouldn’t think your sister would like it,” Lord Lambeth said, with even exaggerated gravity. But she couldn’t induce him—amused as he almost always was at the effect of giving her, as he called it, her head—to join her in more formal reprobation of this repulsive custom, which he spoke of as a convenience she would destroy without offering a better in its place.
VI
Percy Beaumont had all this time been a very much less frequent visitor at Jones’s Hotel than his former fellow traveller; he had in fact called but twice on the two American ladies. Lord Lambeth, who often saw him, reproached him with his neglect and declared that though Mrs. Westgate had said nothing about it he made no doubt she was secretly wounded by it. “She suffers too much to speak,” said his comrade.
“That’s all gammon,” Percy returned; “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’re always there yourself, confound you, and that’s reason enough for my not going.”
“I don’t see why. There’s enough for both of us.”
“Well, I don’t care to be a witness of your reckless passion,” said Percy Beaumont.
His friend turned on him a cold eye and for a moment said nothing, presently, however, speaking a little stiffly. “My passion doesn’t make such a show as you might suppose, considering what a demonstrative beggar I am.”
“I don’t want to know anything about it—anything whatever,” said Beaumont. “Your mother asks me every time she sees me whether I believe you’re really lost—and Lady Pimlico does the same. I prefer to be able to answer that I’m in complete ignorance, that I never go there. I stay away for consistency’s sake. As I said the other day, they must look after you themselves.”
“Well, you’re wonderfully considerate,” the young man returned. “They never question me.”