They are now at breakfast in the garden-chamber; the china is old Chelsea, the silver is Queen Anne, the roses are old-fashioned Jacqueminots and real cabbage roses. There is a pleasant scent from flowers, coffee, cigarettes, and newly-mown grass. There is a litter of many papers on the floor.
There is yet a fortnight before the shooting begins; Lord Usk feels that those fifteen days will be intolerable; he repents a fit of fright and economy in which he has sold his great Scotch moors and deer-forest to an American capitalist; not having his own lands in Scotland any longer, pride has kept him from accepting any of the many invitations of his friends to go to them there for the Twelfth; but he has a keen dread of the ensuing fifteen days without sport.
His wife has asked her own set; but he hates her set; he does not much like his own; there is only Dulcia Waverley whom he does like, and Lady Waverley will not come till the twentieth. He feels bored, hipped, annoyed; he would like to strangle the American who has bought Achnalorrie. Achnalorrie, having gone irrevocably out of his hands, represents to him for the time being the one absolutely to be desired spot upon earth. Good heavens! he thinks, can he have been such a fool as to sell it?
When he was George Rochfort, a boy of much promise going up to Oxford from Eton, he had a clever brain, a love of classics, and much inclination to scholarly pursuits; but he gradually lost all these tastes little by little, he could not very well have said how; and now he never hardly opens a book, and he has drifted into that odd, English habit of only counting time by the seasons for killing things. There is nothing to kill just now except rabbits, which he scorns, so he falls foul of his wife's list of people she has invited, which is lying, temptingly provocative, of course, on the breakfast-table, scribbled in pencil on a sheet of note-paper.
"Always the same thing!" he says, as he glances over it. "Always the very worst lot you could get together, and there isn't one of the husbands or one of the wives!"
"Of course there isn't," says Lady Usk, looking up from a Society newspaper which told her that her friends were all where they were not, and fitted all the caps of scandal on to all the wrong heads, and yet from some mysterious reason gave her amusement on account of its very blunders.
"I do think," he continues, "that nobody on earth ever had such absolutely indecent house-parties as yours!"
"You always say these absurd things."
"I don't think they're absurd. Look at your list: everybody asks that he may meet somebody whom he shouldn't meet!"
"What nonsense! As if they didn't all meet everywhere every day, and as if it mattered!"