Lord Holme and Leo Ulford were of a similar type. Both were strong, healthy, sensual, slangy, audacious in a dull kind of fashion—Lady Holme did not call it dull—serenely and perpetually intent upon having everything their own way in life. Both lived for the body and ignored the soul, as they would have ignored a man with a fine brain, a passionate heart, a narrow chest and undeveloped muscles. Such a man they would have summed up as “a rotter.” If they ever thought of the soul at all, it was probably under some such comprehensive name. Both had the same simple and blatant aim in life, an aim which governed all their actions and was the generator of most of their thoughts. This aim, expressed in their own terse language, was “to do themselves jolly well.” Both had, so far, succeeded in their ambition. Both were, consequently, profoundly convinced of their own cleverness. Intellectual conceit—the conceit of the brain—is as nothing to physical conceit—the conceit of the body. Acute intelligence is always capable of uneasiness, can always make room for a doubt. But the self-satisfaction of the little-brained and big-muscled man who has never had a rebuff or a day’s illness is cased in triple brass. Lady Holme knew this self-satisfaction well. She had seen it staring out of her husband’s big brown eyes. She saw it now in the boyish eyes of Leo Ulford. She was at home with it and rather liked it. In truth, it had at least one merit—from the woman’s point of view—it was decisively masculine.
Whether Leo Ulford was, or was not, a blackguard; as Mrs. Trent had declared, did not matter to her. Three-quarters of the men she knew were blackguards according to the pinched ideas of Little Peddlington; and Mrs. Trent might originally have issued from there.
She got on easily with Leo Ulford because she was experienced in the treatment of his type. She knew exactly what to do with it; how to lead it on, how to fend it off, how to throw cold water on its enterprise without dashing it too greatly, how to banish any little, sulky cloud that might appear on the brassy horizon without seeming to be solicitous.
The type is amazingly familiar to the woman of the London world. She can recognize it at a glance, and can send it in its armchair canter round the circus with scarce a crack of the ring-mistress’s whip.
To-night Lady Holme enjoyed governing it more than usual, and for a subtle reason.
In testing her power upon Leo Ulford she was secretly practising her siren’s art, with a view that would have surprised and disgusted him, still more amazed him, had he known it. She was firing at the dummy in order that later she might make sure of hitting the living man. Leo Ulford was the dummy. The living man would be Fritz.
Both dummy and living man were profoundly ignorant of her moving principle. The one was radiant with self-satisfaction under her fusillade. The other, ignorant of it so far, would have been furious in the knowledge of it.
She knew-and laughed at the men.
Presently she turned the conversation, which was getting a little too personal—on Leo Ulford’s side—to a subject very present in her mind that night.
“Did you have a talk with Miss Schley the other day after I left?” she asked. “I ran away on purpose to give you a chance. Wasn’t it good-natured of me, when I was really longing to stay?”