And Fair
He seeks in her."
Francis Thompson: "Any Saint."
"D'you remember once saying that you wanted the tonic of a good scandal?" asked Jack Waring one night three years later. "It was soon after King Edward's death."
"And we were all very respectable and dull." Valentine Arden roused from sleep, blinked at the clock and rang for a whiskey and soda. "One recalls it. There is a difference between court mourning and the second coming of Christ, but the English are the last people in the world to recognize it. And there is a difference between taking a tonic and being pelted to death with medicine bottles. Since those days one scans the paper each morning to see what new reputations have been lost. Who has made the latest Roman holiday?"
"Oh, it's this old business about your friend Barbara Neave."
Jack threw the paper to Arden and took up another in which he could read, with insignificant verbal changes, a second and equally gratifying account of his own prowess in the Court of Appeal that day. Three years earlier he had talked to Eric Lane of abandoning his unproductive criminal work on circuit; he now wondered whether he dared abandon circuit work altogether and concentrate on his London practice. After, perhaps, six years more he would be wondering whether to risk his whole practice by applying for silk. Success was none the less gratifying because he had backed his own determination against the disparaging anticipations of his friends. Jack knew as well as any one that he was not a great lawyer; but natural shrewdness gained him a reputation for sound judgement; slowness passed for caution; and the inelasticity which saved him from seeing all round a case was reinforced by an obstinate refusal to let go the single point which he had grasped. More than one over-astute witness in those three years had entered the box with assurance and left it in dismay.
Only those who had known him longest wondered occasionally whether his practice had not been bought at the price of his soul. The plea of work and a ponderous affectation of age excused him from any effort to widen his interests. As old a friend as Eric Lane was allowed to drop out of his life; he refused to enter a new house and on one pretext or another reduced the number of the old, until any time that he could spare from work was divided between his club and his home in the country. At the first his friends were at liberty to visit him, if they chose; but he was obviously happier with the two Chancery silks and the one Indian judge, all of them twice his age, in whose company he dined nightly. And the influence of Red Roofs was even more lamentable on a man who was born self-centred and opinionated; Mrs. Warning and Agnes idolized and spoiled him, the colonel crystallized an intolerant conservatism of ideas which was better justified as the mature experience of a middle-aged soldier and country gentleman than as the untried prejudice of a thirty-year-old barrister. "A man may be a prig or a bore or both," said Pentyre at a time of temporary estrangement, "but he needn't be so infernally pleased with himself about it." The school of sport and fashion which Jack had once led at Oxford entertained the same feeling, if it expressed it with more disappointment and less candour.
"The coroner would seem to have spoken with visible emotion," commented Arden, trying to disguise his relish as he read the paper which Jack had thrown to him. "One wishes one had stayed to the end."
"I've no doubt she'll try to use it as another advertisement," Jack grunted. "What her unfortunate people must think.... And what the younger generation is coming to. It's a good thing for Jim that he's being spared all this."