Netta entered the drawing-room to see her husband pacing up and-down before a strange lady, who sat in one of the crimson armchairs, entirely at her ease.
"So this is your wife, Edmund," said Lady Tatham, as she rose.
"It is. You'll make mock of her no doubt—as you do of me."
"Nonsense! I never make mock of anybody," said a musical voice, rich however through all its music in a rather formidable significance. The owner of it turned toward Netta.
"I hope, Mrs. Melrose, that you will like Cumbria?"
Netta, accustomed to Edmund's "queerness," and determined to hold her own, settled herself deliberately opposite her visitor, and was soon complaining in her shrill voice of the loneliness of the place and the damp of the climate. Melrose never once looked at his wife. He was paler than usual, with an eager combative aspect, quite new to Netta. He seemed for once to be unsure of his ground—both to expect attack, even to provoke it—and to shrink from it. His eyes were fixed upon Lady Tatham, and followed her every movement.
Attention was certainly that lady's due; and it failed her rarely. She had beauty—great beauty; and a personality that refused to be overlooked. Her dress showed in equal measure contempt for mere fashion, and a close study of effect. The lines of her long cloak of dull blue cloth, with its garnishings of sable, matched her stately slenderness well; and the close-fitting cap over the coiled hair conveyed the same impression of something perfectly contrived and wholly successful. Netta thought at first that she was "made up," so dazzling was the white and pink, and then doubted. The beauty of the face reminded one, perhaps, of the beauty of a boy—of some clear-eyed, long-chinned athlete—masterfully simple—a careless conqueror.
How well she and Edmund seemed to know each other! That was the strange, strange thing in Netta's eyes. Presently she sat altogether silent while they talked. Melrose still walking up and down—casting quick glances at his guest. Lady Tatham gave what seemed to be family news—how "John" had been sent to Teheran—and "George" was to be military secretary in Dublin—and "Barbara" to the astonishment of everybody had consented to be made a Woman of the Bedchamber—"poor Queen!"—how Reginald Pratt had been handsomely turned out of the Middleswick seat, and was probably going to "rat" to an Opposition that promised more than the Government—that Cecilia's eldest girl—"a pretty little minx"—had been already presented, and was likely to prove as skilful a campaigner for a husband as her mother before her—that "Gerald" had lost heavily at Newmarket, and was now a financial nuisance, borrowing from everybody in the family—and so on, and so on.
Melrose received these various items of information half scornfully, half greedily; it might have been guessed that his interest in the teller was a good deal keener than his interest in the things told. The conversation revealed to Netta phases in her husband's existence wholly unknown to her. So Edmund had been in Rome—for two or three years—in the Embassy! That she had never known. He seemed also to have been an English member of Parliament for a time. In any case he had lived, apparently for years, like other men of his kind—shooting, racing, visiting, travelling, fighting, elections. She could not fit the facts to which both alluded with her own recollections of the misanthrope who had first made acquaintance with her and her family in Florence three years before this date; and her bewilderment grew.
As for the others, they had soon, it seemed, completely forgotten the thin sallow-faced wife, who sat with her back to the window, restlessly twisting her rings.