“So poor Lord Quantock was telling me last night, with tears in his eyes. Then you come in, it seems.”
“Well, well,” said Mr. Jess soothingly, “we shall see what we shall see.”
“No doubt,” said Lady Barbara, bored with Mr. Jess.
The reception was rather ghastly. Lady Barbara supposed “we ought to mingle,” and gallantly tried it upon Mrs. Middleham, who had her daughter Mary’s fine eyes crystallized, as it were, in her head, stiffened into glass and intensely polished! Mr. Germain, seconding his friend’s effort while rigidly ignoring that an effort was to be made, performed the introduction—“Ah—do you know Lady Barbara Rewish? Mrs. Middleham,” and departed, not without hearing Mrs. Middleham say that she did not know her ladyship.
“Such a pretty wedding,” said Lady Barbara; “she looked delicious.”
Mrs. Middleham, who was not without character, said that Mary was a very good girl. She had her “back up,” as her daughter Jinny said, and neither gave nor took any odds. Lady Barbara replied that we were all good at that age—and then found herself stranded. To see Jinny with Mr. Gradeley, Q.C., had been a cure for the spleen. She ignored him, till he perspired in her service.
Mary was cutting the cake while Mr. Germain was engaged in the very unpleasant task of watching his sister-in-law “put things on a proper footing” before Mr. Middleham. He could tell by the quivering eyelids of the poor man that things were being put there with vigour. “No, madam, no,” Mr. Middleham was heard to say. “I don’t know that we could fairly expect more than that.”
“Nor do I,” said Mrs. James, with the air of one who adds, “I should think not.”
“Mr. Germain has been more than kind,” he ventured to proceed; “princely, indeed—and we should not presume——.”
“Of course not,” said Mrs. James, and was echoed, somewhat to her discomfiture, by Mrs. Middleham, who had escaped from Lady Barbara by the simple means of walking away.