"You ought to buy clothes."
"Clothes! What an expression! I can't buy a child's frock even; it all goes in little things, and all my own money too; wedding-presents, christening-presents, churches, orphanages, concerts; and it's all nonsense you're grumbling about my bills to Worth and Elise and Virot; Boom read me a passage out of his Ovid last Easter, in which it describes the quantities of things that the Roman women had to wear and make them look pretty; a great deal more than any of us ever have, and their whole life was spent over their toilets, and then they had tortoise-shell steps to get down from their litters, and their dogs had jewelled collars; and liking to have things nice is nothing new, though you talk as if it were a crime and we'd invented it!"
Usk laughs a little crossly as she comes to the end of her breathless sentences. "Naso Magister eris," he remarks, "might certainly be inscribed over the chamber doors of all your friends!"
"I know you mean something odious. My friends are all charming people."
"I'll tell you what I do mean,—that I don't like the house made a joke of in London; I'll shut it up and go abroad if the thing goes on. If a scandal's begun in town in the season, it always comes down here to carry on; if there are two people fond of each other when they shouldn't be, you always ask 'em down here and make pets of 'em. As you're taking to quoting Ovid, I may as well tell you that in his time the honest women didn't do this sort of thing; they left it to the light-o'-loves under the porticoes."
"I really don't know what I've done that I should be called an honest woman! One would think you were speaking to the housemaids! I wish you'd go and stay in somebody else's house: you always spoil things here."
"Very sorry. I like my own shooting. Three days here, three days there, three days t'other place, and expected to leave the game behind you and to say 'thanks' if your host gives you a few brace to take away with you,—not for me, if I know it, while there's a bird in the covers at my own places."
"I thought you were always bored at home?"
"Not when I'm shooting. I don't mind having the house full, either, only I want you to get decenter people in it. Why, look at your list!—they're all paired, like animals in the ark. Here's Lady Arthur for Hugo Mountjoy, here's Iona and Madame de Caillac, here's Mrs. Curzon for Lawrence, here's Dick Wootton and Mrs. Faversham, here's the Duke and Lady Dolgelly, here's old Beaumanoir and Olive Dawlish. I say it's absolutely indecent, when you know how all these people are talked about!"
"If one waited for somebody not talked about, one would have an empty house or fill it with old fogies. My dear George, haven't you ever seen that advertisement about matches which will only light on their own boxes? People in love are like those matches. If you ask the matches without the boxes, or the boxes without the matches, you won't get anything out of either."