He thought he was marrying a friendless orphan, whose divine inheritance was poetry and beauty; and he found that he had married the Disbrowes.
They were all terribly friendly. They never hinted at his inferior social status, his vulgar level as a tradesman, only trading in money instead of goods. They behaved as if, by marrying their cousin, he had become a Disbrowe. Lady Helstone, Lady Balgowrie, Lord and Lady Okehampton treated him with affection without arrière pensée. The most that Okehampton, as a man of the world, wanted from the great financier was his advice about the investment of his paltry surplus, so trifling an amount that he blushed to allude to the desire in such exalted company.
But now a time had come when Vera needed no counsel from the Disbrowes, and when she was beginning to treat those social obligations about which she, as a tyro, had laboured diligently, with a royal carelessness. Her aunts complained that she had grown casual, and that she had even gone very near offending some of their particular friends, people whom to have on her visiting list ought to have been the crown of her life.
Vera apologised.
"I know far too many people," she said; "my house is becoming a caravanserai."
She said "my house" unconsciously—with the deep-seated knowledge that all those splendid rooms and the splendid crowds that filled them meant very little in her husband's life.
Six years of the "too much" had changed Lady Felicia's granddaughter. The things that money can buy had ceased to charm; the people whom in her first season she had thought it a privilege to know had sunk into the dismal category of bores. Almost everybody was a bore; except a few men of letters, who had known her father, or who loved his verses. For those she had always a welcome; and she was proud when they told her that she was her father's daughter. Her eyes, her voice were his, these enthusiasts told her. She was a creature of fire and light, as he was.
After three or four years of pleasure in trivial things, she had grown disdainful of all delights, except those of the mind and the imagination. The opera, or the theatre when Shakespeare was acted, always charmed her, but for the olla podrida of music and nonsense that most people cared for she had nothing but scorn. She never missed a fine concert or a picture show, but she broke half her engagements to evening parties, or appeared for a quarter of an hour and vanished before her hostess had time to introduce the new arrivals, American or continental, who were dying to know her.
The general impression was that she gave herself airs: but they were airs that harmonised with her fragile beauty, the something ethereal that distinguished her from other women.
"If any stout, florid creature were to behave like Madame Provana, she would be cut dead," people told Vera's familiar friend, Lady Susan Amphlett.