“The young men you and grandmother point out to me as nice and eligible, and all that, are simply awful. They have no chins, or too much, and no teeth, or too many, and they don’t talk at all, or they gabble all the time, about nothing. They never read, they don’t care for Art or Poetry—they aren’t interested in anything but Bridge and racing; and if you told them that Beethoven composed the ‘Honeysuckle and the Bee,’ or that Chopin wrote ‘When I Marry Amelia,’ they’d believe you. They like married women better than girls, and people who dance at theaters better than the married women——”
“Pet, you’d better go to Mademoiselle.... Ask her, with my love, to fix you up some French history to translate,” Lady Beaumaris suggested.
“I should prefer a Gallic verb,” Lord Beaumaris amended. “I marry in accordance with my parents’ wishes. Thou marriest in accordance with thy parents’ wishes. He marries—and so on! And make a solid schoolroom tea while you are about it, my child,” he continued, as Susanna bestowed a parting strangle upon Alaric, kicked over a footstool, and rose to leave the room. “For I fear we are to be deprived of your society at dinner this evening.”
Susanna’s lovely red underlip pouted; her blue eyes clouded with tears. She flashed a resentful look at her sire, and went out.
“She is not manageable by any ordinary methods,” said Lord Beaumaris, running his forefinger round the inside of his collar, and shaking his head. “In such a case Contumacy must be combated with Craft, and Defiance met with Diplomacy. Alaric, regrettable as is the course you have counseled us to pursue, I feel inclined to adopt it.... I shall write to-night to make an appointment on Wednesday with the Duke of Halcyon at the Peers’ Club, and—I shall be obliged if you will, at your early convenience—favor me with the address of the young man Wopse.”
II
The garden châlet was damp; it had been raining, and the glittering appearance of the walls betrayed the fact. “As though a bally lot of snails had been dancin’ a cotillon on ’em!” said the Duke of Halcyon. He yawned dismally as he opened the casement and leaned out, looking, in his gaudily-hued silken night-suit, like a tulip drooping from the window-sill. Then the keeper’s wife came splashing up the muddy path carrying a tray covered with a mackintosh, and the knowledge that his breakfast would presently be set before him, and set before him in a lukewarm, flabby, and tepid condition, caused Halcyon to groan. But presently, when bathed, shaved, and attired in a neat knickerbocker suit of tawny-orange velveteen, with green silk stockings and tan shoes, salmon-colored silk shirt, rainbow necktie, and Panama, he issued, cigarette in mouth, from the châlet, and strolled in the direction of the newly-restored west wing, his Grace’s equanimity seemed restored. He even hummed a tune, which might have been “The Honeysuckle and the Bee” or “God Save the King,” as he mounted the short, wide, double flight of marble steps that led from the terrace, and, pushing open the glazed swing-doors, entered the ballroom, the entire space of which was filled by a bewildering maze of ropes and scaffolding, as though a giant spider had spun a cobweb in hemp and pine. A smell of turpentine and size was in the air, and a paint-table occupied a platform immediately under the skylight dome, the sides of which were already filled in with outlines, transferred from cartoons designed by the artist engaged to ornament the apartment. That gentleman, arrayed in a blue canvas blouse and wearing a deerstalker cap on the back of a well-shaped head, was actively engaged in washing in the values of a colossal nude figure-group with a bucket of sepia and a six-foot brush. He whistled rather queerly as his bright eye fell upon the intruder.
“You’re there, are you?” said the Duke unnecessarily. “Shall I come up?”
“If you can!” said Halcyon Wopse, with a decided smile, that revealed a very complete set of very white teeth. “But, to save time, perhaps I had better come down to you.” And the painter swung himself lightly down from stage to stage until he reached the ground-level of his august relative.
“Put what you’ve got to tell me as clearly as you can,” said the Duke. “I never was a sap at Eton, and the classical names of these Johnnies you’re thingambobbing on the what’s-a-name rather queer me.”