"I don't see the use of worrying about loop-holes if I don't want to back out of anything. I shall never consciously put myself anywhere where it might be necessary to wriggle out on all fours."
"Oh! I dare say. I thought all that in my salad days, but you'll grow out of it as you get older. You'll chip your shell, John, like the rest of us, he! he! and not be above a shift. There's not a man who won't stoop to a shift on a pinch, provided the pinch is sharp enough, any more than there is a woman, bespoken or otherwise, who does not like being made love to, provided it is done the right way. That is my experience."
Lord Frederick's experience was that of most men of his stamp, the crown of whose maturer years, earned by a youth of strenuous self-indulgence, is a disbelief in human nature. Secret contempt of women, coupled with a smooth and adulatory manner towards them, show only too plainly the school in which these opinions have been formed.
"Look at Hemsworth," continued Lord Frederick, as Mrs. Courtenay and Di, and Lord Hemsworth in close attendance, were being gradually drifted towards the room in which they were standing. "If Hemsworth goes on giving that girl a hold over him, he will find himself deuced uncomfortable one of these days. He had better hold hard while he can. Discretion is the better part of valour. I've been telling him so."
"Why should he hold hard?" said John, rather absently. "After all, none but the brave deserve the fair."
"And none but the brave can live with some of them. He, he!" said Lord Frederick, chuckling. "There are cheaper ways of getting out of love than by marriage; but she is a fine woman. Hemsworth has got eyes in his head, I must own. I remember being dreadfully in love with her mother, nearly thirty years ago, and she with me. She had that sort of stand-off manner which takes some men more than anything; it did me. I wonder more women don't adopt it. I very nearly married her. He, he! But Tempest, your uncle, made a fool of himself while I hesitated, and was wretched with her, poor devil! I have never had such a shave since. Upon my word" putting up his eyeglass—"if I were a young man, I think I'd marry Di Tempest. Those large women wear well, John; they don't shrivel up to nothing like Mrs. Graham, or expand like Lady Torrington, that emblem of plenty without waist. He, he! Look at Mrs. Courtenay, too. There's a fine old pelican with an eye to the main chance. Always look at the mother and the grandmother if you can. But she is on too large a scale for you."
"Not in the least," said John, calmly. "I cherish thoughts of Miss Delmour, who is quite three inches taller."
"Don't marry a Delmour! They are too thin. Those girls have neither mind, body, nor estate. I have seen two generations of them. They have a sort of prettiness when they are quite new; but look at her married sisters. They all look as if they had shrunk in the wash."
"I must go and speak to Mrs. Courtenay," said John, from whose impenetrable face it would have been difficult to judge whether his companion's style of conversation amused or disgusted him. "Three years' absence blunts the recollection of one's friends." And he moved away towards the next room. The recollection of a good many people, however, had apparently not become blunted, and it was some time before he could make his way to Mrs. Courtenay, who was talking with a Turkish Ambassador and revolutionizing his ideas of English women.
She was genuinely glad to see John, having known him from a boy.