"I don't believe she could do either. And yet she is human—feminine-human—and can enjoy an interesting scandal—local, if possible. She enjoys it passively. She does nothing to swell the snowball, and will hardly help to roll it along. She remains perfectly passive, and never goes further than to say that she is shocked and disappointed. And yet I believe she enjoys it."
"It is only the excitement that one enjoys. We had scandals even in the convent—girls who behaved badly, dishonourably, about their studies; cheating in order to get a better chance of a prize. I'm afraid we were all too deeply interested in the crime and the punishment. It was something to think about and talk about when life was particularly monotonous."
Lady Emily was watching them from the other side of the table, and lending rather an indifferent ear to Mr. Roebuck's account of Homburg and the people he and his wife had met there. They had only just returned from that exhilarating scene. He could talk of nothing but H.R.H.'s condescension; the dear duchess; Lady this, Lord the other; and the prodigious demand there had been for himself and his wife in the very smartest society.
"Four picnics a day are hardly conducive to the cure of suppressed gout," said Mr. Roebuck; "and there were ever so many days when we had to cut ourselves up into little bits—lunching with one party, taking coffee with another, driving home with somebody else, going to tea-fights all over the place. Dinner engagements I positively set my face against. Mimosa and I were there for rest and recuperation after the season—positively washed out, both of us. You have no idea what a rag my wife looked when we took our seats in the club train."
Happily for Lady Emily, who had been suffering this kind of thing for half an hour, the coffee had gone round, and at her first imploring glance Mrs. Mornington rose and the ladies left the dining-room. Yet even this relief was but temporary; for Mrs. Roebuck appropriated Lady Emily in the garden, and entertained her with her own view of Homburg, which was smarter, inasmuch as it was more exclusive than Mr. Roebuck's.
"A horrid place," said the lady. "One meets all one's London friends mixed up with a herd of foreign royalties whom one is expected to cultivate. I used to send Richard to all the gaieties, while I stopped at home and let my maid-companion read to me. We shall go to Marienbad next August. If one could be at Homburg without people knowing one was there, the place might be tolerable."
"I have been told the scenery is very fine," hazarded Lady Emily.
"Oh, the scenery is well enough; but one knows it, and one has seen so much finer things in that way. When one has been across the Cordilleras, it is absurd to be asked to worship some poor little hills in Germany."
"I have seldom been out of Suffolk, except to visit some of my people in Scotland. Ben Lomond and Ben Nevis are quite big enough for me."
"Oh, the Scotch hills are dear things, with quite a character of their own; and a Scotch deer forest is the finest thing of its kind all over the world. The duke's is sixty thousand acres—and Dick and I always enjoy ourselves at Ultimathule Castle—but after being lost in a snowstorm in the Cordilleras——"