“Do finish your reading, Wilfrid,” says Lady Southwold, coaxingly. “Your views are so disinterested if they are a—a—a little difficult to carry out as the world is constituted.”
“Excuse me,” replies Bertram, “I have trespassed too long on every one’s indulgence. It is, I believe, altogether impossible to attempt to introduce altruism and duty into a society which considers Lord Marlow’s type of humanity as either wholesome or ornamental.”
“I never knew a lecture that didn’t end in a free fight,” says his uncle Southwold, hurriedly. “But we can’t have one here, Wilfrid, there are too many ladies present.”
A shabby little old gentleman, doubled up in his chair, who is his grace of Bridlington, murmurs doubtfully: “I don’t see how your theories would work, Bertram.”
“Don’t you, Duke? Is there not such a proverb as Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra?”
The duke nods, and coughs. “There is. But I am afraid it will land you in Queer Street sometimes. There’s another old saw, you know, ‘Look before you leap!’ Safer of the two, eh?”
“For the selfish, no doubt,” replies Bertram.
His hand is on his note-book; he is thinking with regret of the concluding passages which he has not been able to read, and a little also that Cicely Seymour, the young lady who snubs Marlow, has a very beautiful profile, as a white gauze hat laden with white lilac rests on the fair coils of her hair.
That brute Marlow is at her elbow, saying something idiotic; Bertram cannot hear what, but he hears her laugh, and knows that she is probably being made to laugh at himself.
The intruding Marlow’s jeer at his vegetarian views is unjust to him, for he is tall and well made, though slender; but then, as his people often tell him, his muscle was built up in the score of unregenerate years before his Oxford terms, when he was as philistine as any other Eton boy, though he liked his books better than the playing-fields.