Xenia Sabaroff is her idol of the moment, and if her idol were proved human she would be very angry. She reflects that she will have Dodo and the children kept more strictly in the school-room, and not let them wander about over the park as they do with their Russian friend most mornings.
"One can never be too careful with children of that age," she muses, "and they are terribly éveillées already."
Dorothy Usk's friendships, though very ardent, are like most friendships which exist in society: they are apt to blow about with every breeze. She is cordial, kind, and in her way sincere; but she is what her husband characterizes as "weathercocky."
Who is not "weathercocky" in the world?
Although so tolerant in appearance of naughty people, because it is the fashion to be so, and not to be so looks priggish and dowdy and odd, she never at the bottom of her heart likes her naughty people. She has run very straight herself, as her lord would express it; she has been always much too busy to have time or inclination to be tempted "off the rails," and she has little patience with women who have gone off them; only she never says so, because it would look so goody-goody and stupid, and for fear of looking so she even manages to stifle in her own breast her own antipathy to Dulcia Waverley.
There have been very many martyrs to the sense that they ought to smile at virtue when they hate it, but Dorothy Usk's martyrdom is of a precisely opposite kind: she forces herself to seem to approve the reverse of virtue whilst she detests it. Anything is better, in her creed, than looking odd; and nowadays you do look so odd and so old-fashioned if you make a fuss about anything. Still, in her heart of hearts she feels excessively vexed, because it is quite apparent to her that Gervase knows something very much to the disadvantage of her new acquaintance.
"George will be so delighted if he finds out that Madame Sabaroff is like all those horrid women he is so fond of," she reflects. "I shall never hear the last of it from him. It will be a standing joke for him the whole of his life."
Certainly Madame Sabaroff is letting Brandolin carry on with her more than is altogether proper. True, they are people who may marry each other if they please, but Brandolin is not a man who marries, and his attentions are never likely to take that form. He probably pays so much court to Madame Sabaroff because he has heard that of her which leads him to suppose that his efforts may be couronné, as French vaudevillists say, without any thought of marriage.
Lady Usk has always known that he is horribly unprincipled,—more so than even men of his world usually are. That bantering tone of his is odious, she thinks; and he always has it, even on the gravest subjects.
"What's the row, my lady? You look ruffled!" inquires Usk, coming into her boudoir with a sheaf of half-opened letters in his hand.