“Damnation!”
Southwold puts his hat on his head, strikes his cane violently on the back of a chair, and rushes out of the room.
“What can it possibly matter to him?” murmurs Bertram. “The idea of money excites some people as valerian does cats.”
Lord Southwold, in a whirlwind of disgust, walks as rapidly as a gouty toe will let him through the three or four streets which divide him from his own house in Berkeley Square, and mounts the staircase of his home with his wrath at boiling-point. He goes into his wife’s morning-room, where she and Cicely Seymour are sitting, one reading, the other writing letters.
“It’s true!” he shouts. “It’s perfectly true! it’s been left to him and he won’t have it—can you believe that? he won’t have it!”
Cicely looks up from her book and says nothing; his wife looks up from her writing-pad and says with a sigh:
“I can believe it—of him.”
“Well, I can’t; though I’ve heard him say it with my own ears,” returns her lord, as he drops down on a soft seat with the air of a man crushed, annihilated, effaced from creation.
“And he said, ‘What could it possibly matter to us?’” he added in a faint tone.
Cicely closes her book.