“Well, I fancy she’s married to that man.”
“If it’s the girl I think you mean, she is married to him. Her name is Sibella Holland.” It was not very well-bred to call Lionel Holland a bounder without first finding out if he was a friend of mine.
“What a ripping name! They’ve got a flat below mine. I should very much like to know them.”
“Do you want me to introduce you?”
Considering that Sir Anthony had gone out of his way on more than one occasion to be rude to me, I could not help thinking that there was a certain insolence in his obvious readiness to make use of me. If he intended doing so, however, I should certainly return the compliment.
“I am obliged to hurry away now, but that’s my address. I am usually at home between six and seven.”
I gave him a card and said good-bye.
I had promised to spend the evening with the Gascoynes. I was making immense strides with their niece, and I fancy that both Mr. and Mrs. Gascoyne were a little surprised at our having so much in common.
Chapter XIV
If I was to have access to Sibella at all, it was necessary to make friends with her husband, and the only way to make friends with him was to be useful to him. I knew quite well that my continued success—and success in his eyes was a question of moving in a higher grade of society—had annoyed him beyond measure. He believed that money ought to be able to buy anything. Money is a thing the power of which the vulgar are always overrating and the cultured are always underrating. He and Sibella had a large income, with the prospect of a very much larger one, therefore the doors of good society should fly open. They knew people who had been her friends before marriage, and who moved in what a celebrated English lady novelist would have called “genteel circles,” but her husband, having neither the atmosphere of good breeding nor the tact which might have taken its place, was ambitious of forcing the most select assemblies.