From that moment Lord Blyston pushed “the lad” perpetually towards 18A Berkeley Square.
Rupert Louth was fair and very good-looking, reckless and full of go. And wherever he went he carried with him an outdoor atmosphere. He cared nothing for books, music, or intellectual pursuits. Nevertheless, he was at home everywhere, and quite as much at ease in a woman’s drawing-room as rounding up cattle in Canada or lassooing wild horses in Texas. He lived entirely and wholeheartedly for the day, and was a magnificent specimen of dashing animal life; for certainly the animal predominated in him.
Lady Sellingworth fell in love with him—it really was like falling in love each time—and resolved to marry him. A wonderful breath of manhood and youth exhaled from “the lad” and almost intoxicated her. It called to her wildness. It brought back to her the days when she had been a magnificent girl, had shot over the moors, and had more than held her own in the hunting field. After she had married Lord Sellingworth she had given up shooting and hunting, had devoted herself more keenly to the arts, to mental and purely social pursuits, to the opera, the forming of a salon, to politics and to entertaining, than to the physical pleasures which had formerly played such a prominent part in her life. Since his death she had put down her horses. But now she began to change her mode of living. She went with Rupert to Tattersalls, and they picked up some good horses together. She began riding again, and lent him a mount. She was perpetually at Hurlingham and Ranelagh, and developed a passion for polo, which he played remarkably well. She played lawn tennis at King’s Club in the morning, and renewed her energy at golf.
Louth was really struck by her activity and competence, and said of her that she was a damned good sport and as active as a cat. He also said that there wasn’t a country in the world that bred such wonderful old women as England. This remark he made to his father, who rejoined that Adela Sellingworth was not an old woman.
“Well, she must be near fifty!” said his son. “And if that isn’t old for a woman where are we to look for it?”
Lord Blyston replied that there were many women far older than Adela Sellingworth, to which his son answered:
“Anyhow, she’s as active as a cat, so why don’t you marry her?”
“She’s twenty years too young for me,” said Lord Blyston. “I should bore her to death.”
It had just occurred to him that Rupert could be very comfortable on Lord Sellingworth’s and Lord Manham’s combined fortunes, though he had no idea that Lady Sellingworth had ever thought of “the lad” as a possible husband.
Other people, however, noticed the new development in her life.