"Should one," wondered Felicity, "give friendship, as one is supposed to give money, on C.O.S. principles? Perhaps so; I must think about it."
But her thinking always brought her back to the same conclusion as before. Consequently her circle of friends grew and grew. She even included in it a few of the rich and prosperous, not wishing her chain of fellowship, whose links she kept in careful repair, to fail anywhere. But it showed strain there. It was forged and flung by the rich and prosperous, and merely accepted by Felicity.
Leslie, though rich and prosperous, stepped into the linked circle led by Peter, who was neither. Having money, and a desire to make himself conscious of the fact by using it, he consulted Miss Hope as to how best to be philanthropic. He wanted, it seemed, to be a philanthropist as well as a collector, and felt incapable of being either otherwise than through agents. His personal share in both enterprises had to be limited to the backing capital.
Miss Hope said, "Start a settlement," and he had said, "I can't unless you'll work it for me. Will you?" So he started a settlement, and she worked it for him, and he came about the place and got in the way and wrote heavy cheques and adored Felicity and suggested at suitable intervals that she should marry him.
Felicity had no intention of marrying him. She called him a rest. No one likes being called a rest when they desire to be a stimulant, or even a gentle excitement. Felicity was an immense excitement to Mr. Leslie (though he concealed it laboriously under a heavy and matter-of-fact exterior) and it is of course pleasanter when these things are reciprocal. But Mr. Leslie perceived that she took much more interest even in her young cousin Peter than in him. "Do you find him a useful little boy?" she asked him this afternoon, before Peter and Urquhart arrived.
Leslie nodded. "Useful boy—very. And pleasant company, you know. I don't know much about these things, but he seems to have a splendid eye for a good thing. Funny thing is, it works all round—in all departments. Native genius, not training. He sees a horse between a pair of shafts in a country lane; looks at it; says 'That's good. That would have a fair chance for the Grand National'—Urquhart buys it for fifty pounds straight away—and it does win the Grand National. And he knows nothing special about horses, either. That's what I call genius. It's the same eye that makes him spot a dusty old bit of good china on a back shelf of a shop among a crowd of forged rubbish. I've none of that sort of sense; I'm hopeless. But I like good things, and I can pay for them, and I give that boy a free rein. He's furnishing my house well for me. It seems to amuse him rather."
"He loves it," said Felicity. "His love of pleasant things is what he lives by. Including among them Denis Urquhart, of course."
"Yes." Leslie pursed thoughtful lips over Denis Urquhart. He was perhaps slightly touched with jealousy there. He was himself rather drawn towards that tranquil young man, but he knew very well that the drawing was one-sided; Urquhart was patently undrawn.
"Rather a flash lot, the Urquharts, aren't they?" he said; and Peter, who liked him, would have had to admit that the remark was perilously near to a bound. "Seem to have a sort of knack of dazzling people."
"He's an attractive person, of course," Miss Hope replied; and she didn't say it distantly; she was so sorry for people who bounded, and so many of her friends did. "It's pleasing to see, isn't it—such whole-souled devotion?"