This had been the period when the girl-widow, released from the bondage into which she had entered so lightly, returned with intense zest to the delightful frivolous world of which she had seen but little before her marriage. For three or four years Mrs. Robinson enjoyed all that this delicately dissipated section of society could give her in the way of lightly balanced emotion and fresh sensation, and her mother had been apparently in no wise shocked or surprised that it should be so.
Then had followed a period of travel, when the young widow had seen something of a wider world. Finally, Penelope had settled down to the life of which we know—still, when she was in London, seeing something of the gay, light-hearted circle of men and women who had once surrounded 'Perdita' with the pleasant and not insincere flattery they are ever ready to bestow on any and every human being who for the moment interests and amuses them. Mrs. Robinson had retained her place, as it were her niche, among them. They still delighted in 'Perdita's' beauty, and in her exceptional artistic gift; also—and she would have felt indeed angered and disgusted had she known it—her reputed wealth, which was by no means so great as was rumoured, played its part in keeping up her prestige with a world which is apt to become at times painfully aware of the value of money.
On the other hand, David Winfrith was not loved among these men and women who considered high living thoroughly compatible with—indeed, an almost indispensable adjunct to—high thinking. Winfrith took a grim pleasure in acting as kill-joy to certain kinds of human sport to which they were addicted, and, worse than that, he positively bored them! And so, when Mrs. Robinson, having drawn him once more into her innocent, but none the less dangerous, toils, had again formed with him an absorbing and intimate friendship, certain of her acquaintances were no longer as eager to be with her as they had once been, and they considered that their dear 'Perdita' was making herself slightly ridiculous.
Another reason why Mrs. Robinson found it impossible to divine how her mother would regard what she was now on the eve of doing, was because the younger woman knew well how her father would have regarded such a union as that which she was contemplating.
Lord Wantley had not been in the habit, as his wife had always been, of looking at life and those about him with charitable ambiguity; and there was no doubt as to how the great philanthropist, who had been in his lifetime a pillar of the Low Church party, regarded the slightest deviation from the moral law. Penelope now remembered with great discomfort and prevision of pain that concerning actual matters of life and conduct Lady Wantley's 'doxy' had always been, so far as she knew it, her husband's 'doxy.'
CHAPTER XII
'Ah! le bon chemin que le droit chemin!'
Déroulède.