“Lady Mary has been telling me of your good fortune,” she remarked kindly, sipping her tea, and looking at him in as motherly a way as so very splendid a person could look. “You must be quite excited—I suppose you are already making a hundred plans?
“I seem to know you quite well,” she went on, not giving him the chance to reply, “Lady Mary is always telling anecdotes of ‘her boy’, very entertaining ones they are too, and I should fancy characteristic.”
She helped herself to more cream and regarded him coolly.
“When she reads prayers, she always makes a special and very full mention of you.”
Lady Mary winced abjectly and looked deprecatingly at her nephew, but his eyes were fastened on Gwen. His aunt felt she had escaped for once. She settled herself into her pillows, and wondered vaguely what would happen next.
She had a horrid feeling that there were breakers ahead somewhere, but as she never by any chance could see farther than her own nose, she decided not to make any effort at sighting them, but to drift on with faith.
“Very considerate of my aunt!” said Strange, in a pause.
“Oh, that is only one instance of her consideration and the least important. She has done much more than that for you, she is like John the Baptist without the skins and locusts, she has ‘been preparing the way before’ you, and you have only to appear to be mobbed, Sir Humphrey. There’s not a matron nor a maid in London who doesn’t babble of you; your name is rippling off a hundred tongues at this very minute; you are the hero of a hundred teas. All this came on after a long round of calls Lady Mary and I paid last Monday,” she continued, scanning him. “I had only heard your name before, in the outward world, that is—the Baronetcy never affected Lady Mary’s prayers and anecdotes, they were always with us—in a queer aside way, as if one hinted at dark things that had better not be unearthed. Ah, but that is all changed! You have no notion though how exhausting the process has been to Lady Mary.”
She stopped at last.
“No,” he said, looking at his aunt, “I certainly hadn’t perceived any symptoms of a cave-in about her. Monday, did you say, Miss Waring? Would you mind letting me have your visiting list for that day, Aunt Moll? I suppose I know some of the people, and my soul’s one desire for years has been to pose as an afternoon-tea hero. I shall just have time to get a foretaste of the joys this afternoon. Good-bye, Aunt Moll, pray don’t look anxious on my account, my morals are tough enough to run the gauntlet of all the teas in London, and my digestion is unimpaired. Good-bye, Miss Waring,” he said, bowing gravely in her direction, “thank you for standing by my aunt on Monday’s warpath, I am gratified to see you are in no sort of way exhausted by the process. Damnation!” he muttered as he got out into the street, “she smells of a hothouse with her overpowering beauty and her insolent airs, and that cool inexorable way of hers. Oh, Aunt Moll, you’ll rue the day you made me a by-word. To think I had to swallow all that, and let a girl bait me!”