"It is a comfort to meet a person like you once in a while," she said. "Tell me, are women such fools about their legs in America as they are here?"
"Yes, quite," said Harry fervently; "if not actually worse. That's one thing that we don't seem to have learned any better about. It always makes me tired."
The two saw each other, infrequently but fairly regularly, throughout Harry's stay in England. They never corresponded, both admitting that they were bad letter writers, but when they met they were always able to pick up their friendship exactly where they had left it.
When Sir Giles came into the Rumbold property there was naturally a corresponding change in the circumstances of Lady Archibald and her daughters. Every penny of the property, which came to Sir Giles through the death of a maternal uncle, was entailed and inalienable from his possession; but he was able to alleviate her condition by giving her a large yearly allowance out of his income; and it was pointed out that such an arrangement would have the advantage of keeping the money safe from her husband. Lady Archibald took a small house in South Street and spent the winter and spring months there, and in the due course of time Beatrice was brought out into society.
Her undoubted beauty, which was of the dark and haughty type, and her excellent dancing were enough to make her a social success. This was a tremendous comfort to her mother, who was never obliged to worry about her at dances or scheme for invitations at desirable houses, and could confine her maternal anxiety to merely hoping that Beatrice would make a better match than she herself had. But Beatrice hated the whole proceeding, heartily and unaffectedly.
"The dancing men all bore me," she once said to Harry; "and I bore all the others. Almost all men are dull; at any rate, they appear at their dullest and worst in society, and the few interesting ones don't want to be bored by a chit like me, and I can't say that I blame them. As for the women—when they get into London society they cease to be women at all; they become fiends incarnate."
"I hope that success is not embittering your youthful heart," said Harry, smiling.
"Not success, but just being in what they are pleased to call society; that will make me bitter if I have much more of it. I don't know why it is; people are nice naturally—most of them, that is. Of course some people are born brutes, like—well, like my father; but most of them are nice at bottom. But somehow London makes beasts of them all. If I am ever Prime Minister—"
"Which, after all, is improbable."
"Well, if I am, the first thing I shall do will be simply to abolish London. We shall have just the same population, but it will be all rural. We shall all live in Arcadian simplicity, and while we may not be perfect, at least we shan't all be the scheming, selfish, merciless brutes that London makes of us."