It was the old wail, the woman’s plaint, eternal as the hills, ever recurring as the wind and the rains recur; as monotonous as they.
CHAPTER V
IT was Lady Wilmot’s at-home day, but so early in the afternoon that she could still indulge in the tête-à-tête gossip with the friend who had lunched with her, a branch of her life’s occupation in which she excelled.
She was a woman who supported well her fifty-five years. A little portly, her gray crinkled hair arranged à la Marquise, her ample skirts further suggesting the era of powder and patches, her bright eyes full of rather malicious humor, Lady Wilmot was a somewhat striking figure. That she was more feared than loved probably flattered the vanity which was not the least of her characteristics. The circumstance certainly did not affect her. Possessed of an income sufficiently large to make the exercise of life’s amenities a matter of inclination rather than of necessity, her inclination was naturally capricious, and she not infrequently smiled to hear herself described with a nervous laugh as “so delightfully uncommon.”
“Uncommon rude, my dear,” had been her reply in one instance, “as you would have discovered if I had happened to be Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Smith, or Mrs. Robinson.”
As it was, Lady Wilmot’s parties were attended by as heterogeneous a throng as any private house in London. In search of possible amusement, she cast her net wide, and, in company with men and women of her own sort, drew into the Onslow Square drawing-room, journalists who wrote fashion articles, novelists who went into many editions, painters whose imposing canvases appeared every year on the sacred walls of the Academy, as well as those who worked in Chelsea garrets. Then there were the faddists.
“I have the best collection in London,” Lady Wilmot was wont to boast. “I have several excellent antique Vegetarians, a very good color, considering; a complete set of Mystics, only slightly cracked; any number of women athletes in a fairly good state of preservation, as well as one or two interesting oddments.”
Lady Wilmot’s present guest was her niece, a sharp-faced little woman, who for two or three years had been living quietly in the country on account of her health. This fact at least was stimulating. It meant arrears of gossip to be retailed respecting the life-history of their common acquaintances, and since half-past one Lady Wilmot’s tongue had not been idle.
The doings of the immediate family lasted through a protracted and hilarious lunch, and when, somewhat maimed and damaged, its members had been dismissed, there still remained the concentric circles of acquaintances. Lady Wilmot began at the inner rings.
“You know Rose Summers is home?” she said, settling the fat cushions at her back with a view to lengthy comfort. “No, dear, without her gaby of a husband. She’s left him out there to get into mischief. Oh, yes, my dear, he’s not too great a fool for that. None of them are. Did you never meet Jack Summers? A huge imbecile, you know. Over life-size, all body and no brains. The ideal man for a soldier.”