“I’m afraid my superiority must be put down to advancing years and growing laziness. I never was so good a shot as Hubert, and I have never been as keen a sportsman.”
“Perhaps that is because you have spent so much of your holiday life on the Continent. Hubert would be miserable if he were asked to spend a winter out of the British Isles, unless he were pig-sticking in India, or fishing in Canada, or hunting lions in Africa. He cannot get on without killing things. You are not like that. You have no thirst for blood.”
“No,” answered Jack, with a laugh; “I am not great at killing things, though I am just English enough to think poorly of the straightest run if it doesn’t end in blood.”
“Oh, of course, I know you can ride, and that you have a proper English love of hunting and shooting, but you don’t give your life up to sport and farming as Hubert does. You have only to look at his boots, and you can understand his life. Such an array of bluchers, tops, brogues, waterproof fishing boots and dreadful hobnailed, broad-toed things, that look like instruments of torture—as if they had been modelled upon the boot that one reads of under the Plantagenets and Tudors. People talk of writing as an index of character. I would rather see a man’s boots than his penmanship if I wanted to know what kind of man he was.”
“And you put me down as a single-soled, effeminate person?” said Jack; whereat there was a laugh from the house-party, sitting cosily round the morning-room fire, with the exception of one industrious matron who sat by the window, toiling at an early English counterpane which required to be worked upon a frame.
“No, no. I don’t consider you womanish. You would never sink into the useful family friend, or the tame cat, even if you were to remain a bachelor all your life. But your boots are more human than Hubert’s; and you are fond of art, and books, and music, for which I fear he cares very little.”
“He cares for something much better,” said Vansittart. “He cares for humanity, and is always thinking how he can improve the condition of the people who are dependent upon him. His cottages at Hartley are models of all that cottages should be, and there is not a good point about them that he has not thought out for himself.”
“Yes, he is always his own architect, and he has really some very good notions, though he is not as picturesque as I should like him to be in his ideas. The cottages about here may not be as commodious as ours in Yorkshire, but they are ever so much prettier—dear old cottages, more than half roof, and with the quaintest casements.”
“And very little light or air inside, I dare say; capital cottages for the landscape, but not so agreeable for the folks inside.”
The party in the morning-room consisted of the three Miss Champernownes, daughters of a Cornish baronet, all three handsome, stylish, accomplished, everything in short that Mrs. Vansittart would have approved in a daughter-in-law; Mrs. Baddington, the lady of the counterpane, who was so completely absorbed in her needlework that she might as well have stopped at her own fireside; but as her husband, Major Baddington, was a good shot and a pleasant companion, the lady’s inoffensive dulness was tolerated in country houses.