Her brother started. “What do you mean?”
“Simply,” she answered with a shrug, “that we owe this to Mr. Aubrey Playford.”
“That fellow? Ah, yes; you forbade him the house.”
“It was necessary,” Alexia said coldly. “When people forget themselves, they can scarcely complain if the rest of the world shows a disposition to consign them to oblivion. But he came here the other day and confirmed my opinion of him by giving me my choice between this scandal and himself.”
Prosper began to pace the room impatiently. “It is unfortunate, Alix,” he remarked somewhat querulously, “that you seem fated to fascinate the wrong men.”
“It carries a sufficient punishment with it, my dear Prosper,” she returned. “You need not add your reproaches.”
The veering of scandal’s vane had afforded considerable relief to the Duke and Duchess of Lancashire. His Grace found that he could walk the streets once more and enter his clubs without the inconvenience of feeling himself a marked man; and the Duchess, resuming her social activities, rejoiced in discussing the affair almost from an outsider’s standpoint.
Dormer Greetland was disposed to be very jocular on the subject.
“The poor Duke,” he said, “is going about like a convict on ticket-of-leave. He has been serving his time with the Duchess, and a very uncomfortable time it has evidently been. They say she has taken the unique opportunity of wigging the poor man for every act of his somewhat monotonous career. According to her he has never done anything right in all his life, except marrying her, and even there she has never forgiven him for not being a more interesting bridegroom. The wretched Duke, who can’t help his personality, was brought up to rely upon his strawberry leaves, and in the faith of the gospel that a Duke need not bother about intellect or even appearance. For the last ten years he has been enduring the process of having all that nonsense shaken out of him, and the Duchess can put plenty of vim into her shaking. Yes; this affair has afforded an excellent opportunity for summing up the evidence against him, and he has been found guilty on every count of the indictment. He has had a pretty bad time of it. He could only plead his dukedom, but he could hardly expect that to go down with his partner in it, who was at once judge and prosecuting counsel. They say things got so bad that he had to lock himself up in his own rooms and subsist on a stray tin of biscuits, a miscellaneous assortment of tabloids, and a syphon of soda-water flavoured with bay rum. The regimen has had such a lowering effect on his constitution that he is more ducal than ever. He is so fine-drawn, what with his troubles matrimonial and commissariat, that Percy Nayland as he saw him go into the Carlton said he looked like the ghost of the Feudal System in a frock-coat.”