"Meet me there to-morrow afternoon," said Kitty. "Four o'clock."
"Delighted!" said Lord Magellan, making a note on his shirt-cuff. "And who lives there?"
"My mother," said Kitty, abruptly, and walked away.
Ashe followed her in discomfort. This young man was the son of a certain Lady Magellan, an intimate friend of Lady Tranmore's—one of the noblest women of her generation, pure, high-minded, spiritual, to whom neither an ugly word nor thought was possible. It annoyed him that either he or Kitty should be introducing her son to Madame d'Estrées.
It was really tiresome of Kitty! Rich young men with characters yet indeterminate were not to be lightly brought in contact with Madame d'Estrées. Kitty could not be ignorant of it—poor child! It had been one of her reckless strokes, and Ashe was conscious of a sharp annoyance.
However, he said nothing. He followed his companions from church to church, till pictures became an abomination to him. Then he pleaded letters, and went to the club.
"Will you call on maman to-morrow?" said Kitty, as he turned away, looking at him a little askance.
She knew that he had disapproved of her invitation to Lord Magellan. Why had she given it? She didn't know. There seemed to be a kind of revived mischief and fever in the blood, driving her to these foolish and ill-considered things.
Ashe met her question with a shake of the head and the remark, in a decided tone, that he should be too busy.
Privately he thought it a piece of impertinence that Madame d'Estrées should expect either Kitty or himself to appear in her drawing-room at all. That this implied a complete transformation of his earlier attitude he was well aware; he accepted it with a curious philosophy. When he and Kitty first met he had never troubled his head about such things. If a woman amused or interested him in society, so long as his taste was satisfied she might have as much or as little character as she pleased. It stirred his mocking sense of English hypocrisy that the point should be even raised. But now—how can any individual, he asked himself, with political work to do, affect to despise the opinions and prejudices of society? A politician with great reforms to put through will make no friction round him that he can avoid—unless he is a fool. It weighed sorely, therefore, on his present mind that Madame d'Estrées was in Venice—that she was a person of blemished repute—that he must be and was ashamed of her. It would have been altogether out of consonance with his character to put any obstacle in the way of Kitty's seeing her mother. But he chafed as he had never yet chafed under the humiliation of his relationship to the notorious Margaret Fitzgerald of the forties, who had been old Blackwater's chère amie before she married him, and, as Lady Blackwater, had sacrificed her innocent and defenceless step-daughter to one of her own lovers, in order to secure for him the step-daughter's fortune—black and dastardly deed!