"Not well enough for another Goodwood."
"The race weeks come round so quickly as one gets old," sighed Mrs. Bellenden. "There seems hardly breathing time between the Two Thousand and the Leger—and while one is thinking about where to go for the winter, another year has begun and people are motoring to Newmarket for the Craven."
"The story of our lives from year to year is rather like a merry-go-round in a fair, but Mrs. Bellenden is too young to feel the rush."
"Too young! I feel old, ages old. As old as Rider Haggard's Ayesha when the spell was broken and the enchantress changed to a hag. But I am sadly disappointed at not meeting your wife," she went on, turning the wonderful eyes that people talked about with full power upon Claude. "I wanted to meet her in a nice friendly house. We have only met in crowds, and I believe she rather hates me."
"How can you imagine anything so impossible?"
"At any rate, she has given me no sign of liking, while I admire her intensely. Francis Symeon has talked to me about her. I have had so much of the world, the flesh, and the devil, that I want to know something of a lady whom he calls one of his beautiful souls."
Upon this Mr. Rutherford had to say something polite, a something which implied that his wife would be charmed to see more of the lovely Mrs. Bellenden.
People talked of Mrs. Bellenden's beauty to her face. It was one of the things which her own sex registered against her as a mark of bad style. She might be ever so handsome, other women admitted, but she was the worst possible style. A circus rider, promoted from the sawdust to a Mayfair drawing-room, could hardly have been worse.
It was not long since this woman had burst upon the world of London—a revelation of physical loveliness.