Cheriton closed the door.
“Yes, I dare say she would,” said Caroline Crewkerne, with her hanging-judge demeanor. “All the same, Cheriton, you talk like a fool.”
What Caroline Crewkerne said to Cheriton, and what Cheriton said to Caroline Crewkerne, I shall not set down. The plain truth is, I dare not. She was a survival of a famous aristocracy which was never accustomed to mince its language. She had always been used, as her Georgian forbears had before her, to call a spade a spade. It was a mark of caste. And Cheriton, too, beneath his superficial airs and dandified graces, which had earned for him the title of “the last of the macaronis,” which really meant nothing at all, had a strain of the most uncompromising frankness.
Really I must apologize to my readers for these two old and hardened worldlings. I hope they will make all the allowance that is possible, for whatever the pretensions of one of them, neither was inclined to view the great institution we call Woman at all romantically. Cheriton would certainly have rebutted the charge with scorn, but none the less it is perfectly just. His affectation of delicacy was only skin deep. Had a third person overheard their conversation without being furnished with the key to it, he would have concluded that it had to do with the bringing into the world of a pedigree horse, a thoroughbred dog, a prize cow, or a speckled rhinoceros. And he must have wondered how it was that two persons who had obviously moved in good society from their youth up, could sit tête-à-tête in a beautiful room in one of the most fashionable thoroughfares in all London, discoursing with remarkable point and gusto upon a subject which would have befitted a couple of yokels in a farmyard.
“There’s my niece,” said Caroline Crewkerne.
“Have you a niece?” said Cheriton.
“A girl of Polly’s. You remember Polly?”
“Polly was a very plain woman,” said Cheriton, slowly. “I think, take her altogether, she was the plainest woman I ever saw.”
“It is odd,” said Caroline, “that I had all the good looks as well as all the brains. It made life so difficult for Polly. Yet I think her heart was better than mine.”
“Yes, Caroline, I think so,” said Cheriton, assenting gracefully. “But I don’t seem to remember Polly’s marriage.”