“She would have been millions of miles too good for him!” said Cocky’s wife, with boundless contempt. “They don’t want merely rank; they want character.”
“My dear Mouse,” said Hurstmanceaux, “the other day a young fellow went into a café in Paris, had a good soup, fish, and roti, and three cups of coffee. An unfeeling landlord arrested him as he was about to go off without paying. The people in the streets pitied him, on the whole, but they thought the three cups of coffee too much. ‘Ca c’est trop fort de café,’ said a workman in a blouse to me. In a similar manner, allow me to remark that if your new friends, in addition to the smart dinner of rank, require the strong coffee of character, they are too exacting. The people in the streets won’t let them have both.”
Lady Kenilworth felt very angry at this impudent anecdote, and pulled to pieces some narcissus standing near her in an old china bowl.
“The analogy don’t run on all fours,” she said petulantly. “My people can pay. You have a right to anything if you only pay enough for it.”
“Most things—not everything quite,” said her brother indolently, as he took up his hat and cane and whistled his collie dog, who was playing with the Blenheims. “Not everything quite—yet,” he repeated, as if the declaration refreshed him. “You have not the smallest effect upon me, and you will not present your protégés to me—remember that, once for all. Adieu!”
Then he touched her lightly and affectionately on her fair hair, shook himself like a dog who has been in dirty water, and left her.
Mouse, who was not a patient or resigned woman by nature, flashed a furious glance after him from the soft shade of her dark eyelashes, and her white teeth gnawed restlessly and angrily the red and lovely under-lip beneath them. He could have done so much if he would! His opinion was always listened to, and his recommendation was so rarely given that it always carried great weight. He would have told her that they were so respected precisely because he did not do such things as this which she wanted him to do.
He was a very tall and extremely handsome man, with a debonnair and careless aspect, and a distinguished way of wearing his clothes which made their frequent shabbiness look ultra chic. The Courcy beauty had been a thing of note for many generations, and he had as full a share of it as his sister, whom he strongly resembled. He was fourteen years older than she, and she had long been accustomed to regard him as the head of her House, for he had succeeded to the earldom when a schoolboy, and she had never known her father. He had tried his best to alter the ways of the Kenilworth establishment, but he had failed. If he talked seriously to his sister, it always ended in his paying some bill; if he talked seriously to his brother-in-law, it always ended in his being asked to settle some affair about an actress or a dispute in a pot-house. They both used him—used him incessantly; but they never attended to his counsels or his censure. They both considered that as he was unmarried, spent little, and was esteemed stingy, they really only did him a service in making him “bleed” occasionally.
“He’s such a close-fisted prig,” said Lord Kenilworth, and his wife always agreed to the opinion.
“Ronnie is a bore,” she said, “he is always asking questions. If anybody wants to do any good they should do it with their eyes shut, and their mouths shut; a kindness is no kindness at all if it is made the occasion for an inquisitorial sermon. Ronnie does not often refuse one in the end, but he is always asking why and how and what, and wanting to go to the bottom of the thing, and it is never anything that concerns him. If he would just do what one wants and say nothing, it would be so much nicer, so much more delicate; I cannot endure indelicacy.”