“Pray, pray don’t suggest such a thing,” entreated Eve, very much in earnest. “Lady Hartley will think us vulgar, pushing girls.”
“Lady Hartley will think nothing of the kind. She was saying, only a few hours ago, that she would like to see more of you all. You must all come, remember—all five. The Champernownes leave by an early train to-morrow morning,” he added cheerfully; “there will be plenty of room for you.”
“Are the Miss Champernownes going away?”
“Yes, they go on to a much smarter house, where baccarat is played of an evening, instead of our modest billiards and whist. My brother-in-law is a very sober personage. He is not in the movement. It is my private opinion that those three handsome young ladies have been unspeakably bored at Redwold Towers.”
“I am very glad they are going,” answered Eve, frankly. “We don’t know them, so their going or coming ought not to make any difference to us. But there is something oppressive about them. They are so handsome, they dress so well, and they seem so thoroughly pleased with themselves.”
“Yes, there’s where the offence comes in. Isn’t it odd that from the moment a man or woman lets other people see that he or she is thoroughly delighted with his or her individuality, talents, beauty, or worldly position, everybody else begins to detest that person? A Shakespeare or a Scott must go through life with a seeming unconsciousness of his own powers, if he would have his fellow-men love him.”
“I think both Shakespeare and Scott contrived to do so, and that is one of the reasons why all the world worships them,” said Eve, and on this slight ground they founded a long conversation upon their favourite books and authors. He did not find her “cultured.” Of the learning which pervades modern drawing-rooms—the learning of the Fortnightly, and the Contemporary, the Nineteenth Century and Macmillan—he found her sorely deficient. She had read no new books, she knew nothing of recent theories in art, science, or religion. She knew her Shakespeare and Scott, her Dickens, Thackeray, and Bulwer-Lytton, and had read the poets whom everybody reads. She had never heard of Marlow, and Beaumont and Fletcher were to her only names. She revelled in fiction, the old, familiar fiction of the great masters; but history was a blank. She had not read Froude; she had never heard of Green, Gardiner, Freeman, or Maine.
“You will find us woefully ignorant,” she explained, when she had answered in the negative about several books, which to him were of the best. “We have only had a nursery governess. She was a dear old thing, but I don’t think you could imagine a more ignorant person. She came to us when I was six, and she only left us when Peggy was nine, and she would have stayed on as a kind of Duenna, only she had a poor, old, infirm mother, and she was the only spinster daughter left, and so had to go home and nurse the mother. She was very strong upon the multiplication table, and she was pretty good at French. She knew La Grammaire des Grammaires by heart, I believe. But as to history or literature! Even the little we contrived to pick up for ourselves was enough to enable us to make fun of her. We used to ask her why Charles the Second didn’t make Erasmus a bishop, or whether Eleanor of Aquitaine was the daughter or only the niece of Charlemagne. She always tumbled into any trap we set for her.”
“A lax idea of chronology, that was all,” said Vansittart.
He walked very nearly to the Homestead, and was dead beat by the time he got back to Redwold Towers. He had been tramping about ever since luncheon. He and Eve Marchant had done a good deal of talking in that four-mile walk, but not once had he mentioned Sefton’s name, nor had he made the faintest attempt to discover the drift of that confidential conversation of which a few brief sentences had reached his ear. Yet those sentences haunted his memory, and the thought of them came between him and all happier thoughts of Eve Marchant.