"Waal," said the American widow to Mrs. Fielden, "I think you are just lovely, and I would like to play with you always. I believe most people would like to kill me at Bridge. Caan't think why. Colonel Jardine, did you play the lost chord?"
"I know the tune," said the Colonel; "but I don't play at all."
The American turned bewildered eyes upon Mrs. Fielden, who said, smiling, "Colonel Jardine is practising the chromatic scale. I think he will be a very good player some day."
"How was I to know," said the Colonel, spluttering over his whisky-and-soda when the American widow had left, "that she meant the last card? That woman would drive me crazy in six weeks."
"I liked her," said Mrs. Fielden, "and she is very pretty."
There is a certain large-heartedness about this pretty woman of fashion and of the world which constrains her to say something kind about every one. With her the absent are always right, and I do not think I have ever heard her say an unkind word about any one. At Stanby, when people who are staying there make a newly-departed guest run the gauntlet of criticism—not always of the kindest sort—Mrs. Fielden says, in that royal fashion of hers which makes her approval the final decision in all matters, "I liked him." And the departed guest's character and reputation are safe. Her charity is boundless and quite indiscriminate, save that she sends a trifle more rain and sunshine on the unjust than on the just.
"Come to lunch with me some day," she said to me in the off-hand way in which she generally gives an invitation. "I am always at home at two o'clock. Why not come to-morrow? You are leaving town almost immediately, are you not?"
Mrs. Darcey-Jacobs is also asked to lunch; every one is asked to lunch. When one goes to the pretty widow's house in South Street one generally finds a dozen people lunching with her.
... She came into the room—late, of course—and found ten or twelve people waiting for lunch. "I am so sorry! Do you all know each other?" she asked of the rather constrained group of strangers making frigid conversation to each other in the flower-filled drawing-room. And then she began to introduce us to each other, and forgot half our names, and we went downstairs in a buzz of conversation and laughter, and filled with something that is odd and magnetic, which only comes when Mrs. Fielden arrives.
As is always the way at her lunch-parties, her carriage drives up to the door before any one has finished coffee, and then we all say good-bye, complaining of the rush of London.