“Had you many victims? Were there any suicides?”
“Don’t talk nonsense. You know how little young men care nowadays. There were some of them who would have liked to marry me, had everything been made easy, settlements, and all that. And,” with sudden solemnity, “I might have had a coronet if I had made the most of my chances.”
“A hard-up coronet, do you mean? A coronet that wanted regilding.”
“No, sir. All those go to America. My coronet was well provided for—but it was not to be,” with a faint sigh. “I could not throw Hubert over. He was so ridiculously fond of me.”
“Was? Is, I hope,” said Jack, this retrospective survey of a girl’s career being made one afternoon in the snowy Christmas week, as Jack and his sister tramped home with the shooters, after a day on the hills.
“Yes, he still adores me, poor fellow, though he has found me out ever so long ago.”
“Found you out—how?”
“Oh, he has found that I am frivolous and selfish, and utterly worthless, from the socialist’s point of view. He has found out that although I am fond of pretty cottages and cottage gardens, I don’t care much about the cottagers, and that I never know what to say to them. He has found out that I haven’t the interests of the poor really at heart. In short, he has found that I am a thorough-bred Tory instead of a hot-headed Radical, as he is. I’m afraid we ought never to have married. It is like trying to join fire and water.”
“Oh, but I think you manage to get on capitally together, in spite of any difference in your political views. Indeed, I did not think you knew much about politics.”
“I don’t. I know hardly anything. I never read the debates, and my mind always wanders when people are talking politics; but my Conservatism and Hubert’s Radicalism enter into everything—into our way with servants, into our treatment of our friends, into our ideas about dress, manners, church. I cannot even shake hands with a cottager as he does. I have tried to imitate him, but I can’t achieve that unconscious air of equality which comes so natural to him. And do what I will I can’t help feeling ashamed of that great-grandfather of his who began life in Sheffield as a poor lad, and who invented something—some quite small thing, it seems to me—and so laid the foundations of the Hartley wealth. That is a little bit of family history which I should so like everybody to forget, while poor Hubert is quite proud of it. At Hartley Manor he loves to show strangers the great-grandfather’s portrait in his working clothes—just as he looked when he invented the thing, whatever it was.”