"My dear Duchess, is not the view charming?"
The Duchess made so slight an inclination of her head that it was hardly an affirmative. She did not approve of Mrs. Oswald Carey. Not that her approval mattered anything nowadays. But she thought it bad enough to be a professional beauty and sell one's photograph; and worse still to rent one's face out to enliven dining-parties, and one's neck and shoulders to adorn dinners. True, she herself rented their great name, their ducal title; but then she never could get used to it in others.
If Mrs. Carey noticed the snub, she showed no sign in her face, but turned to Mr. Sydney. He also had found the Duchess rather thorny; and was ready as ever to pay the homage that one who is only a wit owes to beauty. And we know that beauty is more queen than ever in this material age. It is long since our grandfathers first found the folly of dreams and banished art and poetry from England—with opium and other idle drugs.
"Mr. Sydney, you look as fresh as a daisy. I am so glad the vol-au-vent agreed with you."
"My dear madam, you know not of what you speak. My night was terrible, and no such aurora as yourself was in my troubled dream at dawn." Sydney looked over at the Duchess, fancying this speech was rather nicely turned; but her Grace was quite impassive, and evidently maintaining a sort of conversational armed neutrality.
"Oh, Mr. Sydney, you should have more care of yourself, or I fear the day will come when you will dine no longer, but merely sit up and take nourishment. Now, we expect you to be so funny at luncheon."
Sydney began to be offended thinking this too flippant treatment of a man of his position. Meantime Maggie Windsor had been asking Dacre about the beauty. "She told me last night she was a very old friend of Lord Brompton's?"
"Yes, I believe she was. I fancy even there may have been some childish love affair between them." Dacre spoke bluntly, as usual. Love affairs had found no place in Dacre's mind; his only thought was his country and his King; and he spoke with little consciousness of the individual human life his words might wound.
"Look there!" cried Sydney, "there is Goodwood House." Geoffrey looked across the park (they had gone down the hill, through the wood, and were now in the open again) and saw a great, rambling house, the central part of white stone, with two semicircular bays. This part was evidently old, but long brick wings were added of more modern construction. "The county has bought it for a lunatic asylum, I hear from Jawkins," said the wit grimly.
"Where is the Duke of Richmond?" asked Geoffrey. "Still in Russia?"