"I'm not making conversation!" she answered impatiently. "You attacked me on such slender evidence that I was wondering whether you'd any better excuse for attacking people like Sir Adolf, who's a very fine musician——"
"And an impossible bounder," Jack interrupted. "My father pilled him at his club ten years ago; if he put up again, I'd pill him; if he got in, I'd resign."
"And I suppose you'd 'pill' Villon and Benvenuto Cellini and Verlaine——"
"I would, if they were friends of Erckmann," Jack answered cheerfully.
She shivered and lapsed into silence. Talking to Jack was like explaining colour to a blind man. She had never sought out the Erckmann circle; it was one of innumerable circles which a connoisseur in life patronized and sampled for its distinctive atmosphere. Her god-father, Dick Freyton, had kept a string of race-horses at Oxford and taken a double first; he had dined with the Queen one day and entertained a party of comedians and jockeys the next; he had been a gentleman-rider and an ambassador, a soldier and a collector of early printed Bibles, a competent sportsman and a more than competent poet. Touching life at every angle, there was an Elizabethan spaciousness about him;—Loring's father did not forbid him the house because Bessie Galton took her company to Liverpool and he invited them all to stay with him at Poolcup. Freyton was too big to be compromised. And the world had developed so fast that nowadays a woman could touch life at as many angles; for some it was the only thing to do. The queens of the salon were dead, the political hostesses were dying. There was room for one universalist.
They drove to the lodge of Croxton Hall in silence. It was only when she saw him dropping asleep that she fanned the discussion to life.
"It's men like you who kill art in this country," she sighed.
"I can never see why there should be a special code of morals for a fellow because he grows his hair long and plays the fiddle," Jack answered, as he helped her out of the car and rang the bell.
While he explained their return to the butler, Lady Barbara let fall her cloak into a chair and walked to a glowing fire at the end of the hall. In the fender stood a tureen of soup and an urn of cocoa; behind her a big table was invitingly set with sandwiches, cake, fruit, syphons and decanters. Jack watched her for a moment and then explored the table critically.
"Is there anything you'd like me to bring you?" he asked as he chose a cigar and poured himself a brandy and soda. "Don't forget you've had no supper."