A curious snorting sound drew momentary and disgusted attention to the Anarchist, who appeared to be choking badly through the long straws—foreigners are so hopelessly ignorant of the niceties of table manners. Mrs. Dinwiddie looked disappointed, even defrauded, until she caught Ermengarde's eye, when her high-featured visage expanded into a genial smile. But Dorris was all gurgles, triumphant, exasperating. "I knew it all the time," she exclaimed scornfully. "I was sure you were not his wife, but Lady Seaton and Mr. Welbourne would have it you were."
"Mr. Allonby's is a very remarkable work," Lady Seaton said. "I don't know when I have been so thoroughly roused and invigorated by any book. All thinking people must be grateful to the author of 'Storm and Stress.'"
"All thinking people are," the nephew added; with firm conviction.
"Very kind of you to say so," Ermengarde faintly murmured.
"They're just mad about it on our side," Mrs. Dinwiddie told her. "We judge that Arthur Allonby has arrived with 'Storm and Stress' on our side."
"A not unusual way of crossing the Atlantic," Ermengarde hazarded, at her wits' end, and imagining some wild mistake or confusion of names, though not without some vague memory of the title mentioned, in connexion with a postal packet from Arthur's publishers, the contents of which she was always going, from a sense of duty, to investigate, and always from innumerable causes omitting to. It would not run away; it could be opened and read at any time, which is no time.
"Well, I reckon it didn't make him sick anyhow," Mrs. Dinwiddie replied, with a grim smile, and Dorris stridently supposed that successful writers usually went to America to read their works in public, and always found that American cookery upset their internal economy more seriously than crossing the Atlantic, an observation that appeared to afford joy to everybody but the captive, whom it plunged into reverie of a melancholy nature.
The Allonby! Not her own native charm, then, but the prestige of that tiresome old Arthur's name was the cause of this new deference that had come to Ermengarde of late. And he had never told her—a lump rose in her throat—had left her to hear his good fortune casually from strangers. To be sure, he could hardly have been expected to write to her: "I have just become a celebrity," "My new novel is a marvel of genius," "I am one of the most remarkable men of this age." Still, she was injured. A wife should not be the last person to hear of a husband's promotion.
Going home in the train that afternoon, she found her neighbour absorbed in a Tauchnitz volume, and sudden curiosity overpowering good manners, she made out "Storm and Stress" on the top of the page. Dining with friends in one of the big barrack hotels that evening, she saw the book lying on little tables in the lounge, in the drawing-room, in her host's sitting-room; and, her glance being detected upon it, heard that it was being read all over Mentone, the Riviera, at Rome, at Florence, in the Engadine, in Paris, wherever wandering Britons congregated; that it was being discussed at suburban dinners and teas, and was found in the reading-rooms of West End clubs; that it had been consigned to the fire by Bishops, and preached about by Archdeacons; that it was talked of by people of culture, and had even penetrated to our most ancient Universities, where undergraduates, face downwards on the turf of sunny college gardens, had been known to pass shining hours in its perusal. And he had never said a word, and had grudged her five hats.
"How proud and happy you must be, dear Mrs. Allonby," said her hostess. "And how does he take it? Is he surprised, or does he take it all for granted? He must at least have known that he was going to make a hit."