"And, you foolish boy!" she broke out, laughing, and tapping him on the hand with her fan—"you looked so glum this morning when I couldn't go and see Lady Tressady—and—what do you think? Why, she has been at a party to-night—at a party, my dear!—and dressed! Mrs. Willy Smith told me she had seen her at the Webers'."
"I daresay," said George, rather shortly; "all the same, this morning she was very unwell."
Letty shrugged her shoulders, but she did not want to be disagreeable and argue the point. She was much pleased with her dress—with the last glance of herself that she had caught in the cloak-room looking-glass before leaving Berkeley Square—and, finally, with this well-set-up, well-dressed husband beside her. She glanced at him every now and then as she put on a fresh pair of gloves. He had been very much absorbed in this tiresome Parliament lately, and she thought herself a very good and forbearing wife not to make more fuss. Nor had she made any fuss about his going down to see Lady Maxwell at the East End. It did not seem to have made the smallest difference to his opinions.
The thought of Lady Maxwell brought a laugh to her lips.
"Oh! do you know, Harding was so amusing about the Maxwells to-day!" she said, turning to Tressady in her most good-humoured and confiding mood. "He says people are getting so tired of her,—of her meddling, and her preaching, and all the rest of it,—and that everybody thinks him so absurd not to put a stop to it. And Harding says that it doesn't succeed even—that Englishmen will never stand petticoat government. It's all very well—they have to stand it in some forms!"
And, stretching her slim neck, she turned and gave her husband a tiny flying kiss on the cheek. Mechanically grateful, George took her hand in his, but he did not make her the pretty speech she expected. Just before she spoke he was about to tell her of his evening—of the meeting, and of his drive home with Lady Maxwell. He had been far too proud hitherto, and far too confident in himself, to make any secret to Letty of what he did. And, luckily, she had raised no difficulties. In truth, she had been too well provided with amusements and flatteries of her own since their return from the country to leave her time or opportunities for jealousy. Perhaps, secretly, the young husband would have been more flattered if she had been more exacting.
But as she quoted Harding something stiffened in him. Later, after the ball, when they were alone, he would tell her—he would try and make her understand what sort of a woman Marcella Maxwell was. In his trouble of mind a confused plan crossed his thoughts of trying to induce Lady Maxwell to make friends with Letty. But a touch of that charm, that poetry!—he asked no more.
He glanced at his wife. She looked pretty and young as she sat beside him, lost in a pleasant pondering of social successes. But he wondered, uncomfortably, why she must use such a thickness of powder on her still unspoilt complexion; and her dress seemed to him fantastic, and not over-modest. He had begun to have the strangest feeling about their relation, as though he possessed a double personality, and were looking on at himself and her, wondering how it would end. It was characteristic, perhaps, of his half-developed moral life that his sense of ordinary husbandly responsibility towards her was not strong. He always thought of her as he thought of himself—as a perfectly free agent, dealing with him and their common life on equal terms.
The house to which they were going belonged to very wealthy people, and
Letty was looking forward feverishly to the cotillon.
"They say, at the last dance they gave, the cotillon gifts cost eight hundred pounds," she said gleefully, to George. "They always do things extraordinarily well."