went away to the angels, Lady Beranger, knowing that mitigated affliction in the shape of jet and bugles are always becoming, has “just one or two intimate friends” come down to share the quiet of the country and to sympathise with the family woe.
It need not be said that, with that worldly wisdom that looks sharp after its own interests, these intimate friends are Lord Delaval and Mr. Stubbs.
Of course such glittering fish must not be lost sight of before they are safely landed.
It is not unusual in the Upper Ten, as has recently been proved, for the noblesse to rise from the funeral baked-meats to sit down to wedding-cake.
Anyway, as the convenances are not rigid on this score, it is on the cards that before Trixy’s crape grows rusty she will don the orange and myrtle.
And now that Sandilands offers no flirting material with which she can keep her hand in and show off her power, save “poor Mr. Stubbs,” she goes with less reluctant feet towards the altar of Moloch than she did in Town, where her “future” cut such a comical appearance among the golden youths that she really hated the very sight of him.
“It’s rather a bore that one can’t go and get married respectably at St. Peter’s,” she remarks pettishly to Zai. “I might as well be a housemaid, to walk across the garden path to that paltry little church, and hear old Boresome gabble a few words by which Stubbs and I shall be made—one! Ugh! Do you know, Zai, I expect we shall be very much two! We haven’t a single idea in common, and only one pleasure—contradicting one another.”
“Don’t marry him, then, for goodness sake, Trixy! You’ll be a wretched girl if you do. If you can’t love a man, you must at any rate respect him, or look up to him as having a superior intellect to your own,” Zai replies, thinking of Lord Delaval; then she frowns and chases away the thought of him as fast as she can.
“Well, I don’t love Stubbs—(he asked me this morning to call him Peter, but I couldn’t, I really couldn’t)—and I don’t respect him particularly, and I certainly don’t consider his intellect superior to mine, but I intend to marry him all the same. Love and respect! Good heavens, Zai! Such things are all very well in their way, but you don’t suppose that I should think of balancing them with that lovely suite from Jackson and Graham’s? Why, those white and gold chairs, with the crests carved on the backs, are ten times more worth having than all that fiddle-faddle of love and respect!”
Zai does not answer. She knows, perhaps, that some of Trixy’s notions are unanswerable, and is simply conscious of the fact that she rather envies her her sentiments.