________________________________________________
_ "A most variable climate," said the Duchess; "and how
unfortunate that we should have had that very cold weather at
a time when coal was so dear! So distressing for the poor."
"Someone has observed that Providence is always on the side
of the big dividends," remarked Reginald.
The Duchess ate an anchovy in a shocked manner; she was
sufficiently old-fashioned to dislike irreverence towards
dividends.
Reginald had left the selection of a feeding-ground to her
womanly intuition, but he chose the wine himself, knowing
that womanly intuition stops short at claret. A woman will
cheerfully choose husbands for her less attractive friends,
or take sides in a political controversy without the least
knowledge of the issues involved--but no woman ever
cheerfully chose a claret.
"Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me," said
Reginald: "they remind me of one's childhood that one goes
through, wondering what the next course is going to be like--
and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more
of the hors d'oeuvres. Don't you love watching the different
ways people have of entering a restaurant? There is the
woman who races in as though her whole scheme of life were
held together by a one-pin despotism which might abdicate its
functions at any moment; it's really a relief to see her
reach her chair in safety. Then there are the people who
troop in with an-unpleasant-duty-to-perform air, as if they
were angels of Death entering a plague city. You see that
type of Briton very much in hotels abroad. And nowadays
there are always the Johannesbourgeois, who bring a Cape-to-
Cairo atmosphere with them--what may be called the Rand
Manner, I suppose."
"Talking about hotels abroad," said the Duchess, "I am
preparing notes for a lecture at the Club on the educational
effects of modern travel, dealing chiefly with the moral side
of the question. I was talking to Lady Beauwhistle's aunt
the other day--she's just come back from Paris, you know.
Such a sweet woman" -
"And so silly. In these days of the over-education of women
she's quite refreshing. They say some people went through
the siege of Paris without knowing that France and Germany
were at war; but the Beauwhistle aunt is credited with having
passed the whole winter in Paris under the impression that
the Humberts were a kind of bicycle . . . Isn't there a
bishop or somebody who believes we shall meet all the animals
we have known on earth in another world? How frightfully
embarrassing to meet a whole shoal of whitebait you had last
known at Prince's! I'm sure in my nervousness I should talk
of nothing but lemons. Still, I daresay they would be quite
as offended if one hadn't eaten them. I know if I were
served up at a cannibal feast I should be dreadfully annoyed
if anyone found fault with me for not being tender enough, or
having been kept too long."
"My idea about the lecture," resumed the Duchess hurriedly,
"is to inquire whether promiscuous Continental travel doesn't
tend to weaken the moral fibre of the social conscience.
There are people one knows, quite nice people when they are
in England, who are so DIFFERENT when they are anywhere the
other side of the Channel."
"The people with what I call Tauchnitz morals," observed
Reginald. "On the whole, I think they get the best of two
very desirable worlds. And, after all, they charge so much
for excess luggage on some of those foreign lines that it's
really an economy to leave one's reputation behind one
occasionally."
"A scandal, my dear Reginald, is as much to be avoided at
Monaco or any of those places as at Exeter, let us say."
"Scandal, my dear Irene--I may call you Irene, mayn't I?"
"I don't know that you have known me long enough for that."
"I've known you longer than your god-parents had when they
took the liberty of calling you that name. Scandal is merely
the compassionate allowance which the gay make to the
humdrum. Think how many blameless lives are brightened by
the blazing indiscretions of other people. Tell me, who is
the woman with the old lace at the table on our left? Oh,
THAT doesn't matter; it's quite the thing nowadays to stare
at people as if they were yearlings at Tattersall's."
"Mrs. Spelvexit? Quite a charming woman; separated from her
husband" -
"Incompatibility of income?"
"Oh, nothing of that sort. By miles of frozen ocean, I was
going to say. He explores ice-floes and studies the
movements of herrings, and has written a most interesting
book on the home-life of the Esquimaux; but naturally he has
very little home-life of his own."
"A husband who comes home with the Gulf Stream WOULD be
rather a tied-up asset."
"His wife is exceedingly sensible about it. She collects
postage-stamps. Such a resource. Those people with her are
the Whimples, very old acquaintances of mine; they're always
having trouble, poor things."
"Trouble is not one of those fancies you can take up and drop
at any moment; it's like a grouse-moor or the opium-habit--
once you start it you've got to keep it up."
"Their eldest son was such a disappointment to them; they
wanted him to be a linguist, and spent no end of money on
having him taught to speak--oh, dozens of languages!--and
then he became a Trappist monk. And the youngest, who was
intended for the American marriage market, has developed
political tendencies, and writes pamphlets about the housing
of the poor. Of course it's a most important question, and I
devote a good deal of time to it myself in the mornings; but,
as Laura Whimple says, it's as well to have an establishment
of one's own before agitating about other people's. She
feels it very keenly, but she always maintains a cheerful
appetite, which I think is so unselfish of her."
"There are different ways of taking disappointment. There
was a girl I knew who nursed a wealthy uncle through a long
illness, borne by her with Christian fortitude, and then he
died and left his money to a swine-fever hospital. She found
she'd about cleared stock in fortitude by that time, and now
she gives drawing-room recitations. That's what I call being
vindictive."
"Life is full of its disappointments," observed the Duchess,
"and I suppose the art of being happy is to disguise them as
illusions. But that, my dear Reginald, becomes more
difficult as one grows older."
"I think it's more generally practised than you imagine. The
young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have
reminiscences of what never happened. It's only the middle-
aged who are really conscious of their limitations--that is
why one should be so patient with them. But one never is."
"After all," said the Duchess, "the disillusions of life may
depend on our way of assessing it. In the minds of those who
come after us we may be remembered for qualities and
successes which we quite left out of the reckoning."
"It's not always safe to depend on the commemorative
tendencies of those who come after us. There may have been
disillusionments in the lives of the mediaeval saints, but
they would scarcely have been better pleased if they could
have foreseen that their names would be associated nowadays
chiefly with racehorses and the cheaper clarets. And now, if
you can tear yourself away from the salted almonds, we'll go
and have coffee under the palms that are so necessary for our
discomfort." _
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