A week or two later Hurstmanceaux saw a paragraph in the morning papers which made him throw them hastily aside, leave his breakfast unfinished, and go to his sister’s house in Stanhope Street. Her ladyship was in her bath. “Say I shall return in half an hour. I come on an urgent matter.” Leaving that message with her servants he went to walk away the time in the Park. It was a fine and breezy morning, but Hurstmanceaux, who always hated the town, saw no beauty in the budding elms, or the cycling women, or even in Jack¹ or Boo, who were trotting² along on their little black Shetlands. When the time was up he waited restlessly another half hour in his sister’s boudoir, where he felt and looked like a St. Bernard dog shut up in a pen at a show.

 

She at last made her appearance, looking charming, with her hair scarce dry gathered loosely up with a turquoise-studded comb and a morning-gown of cloudy lace and chiffon floating about her; a modern Aphrodite.

 

“You have made your husband a director in the City,” said Hurstmanceaux without preface, almost before she had entered the room.

 

She was prepared for the attack and smiled, rather impertinently.

 

“What does it matter to you, Ronnie?”

 

“A director of a bank!”

 

“’Tisn’t your bank, is it?”

 

“A director of a bank!” he repeated. It seemed to him so monstrous³, so shocking that he had no words left.

 

“They won’t let him into the strong-room,” said Cocky’s wife. “It may be rather absurd; but it isn’t more absurd than numbers of other things—than your being asked to be a mayor, for instance.”

 

“If I had accepted I should not have disgraced the mayoralty.”

 

[121]“Cocky won’t disgrace anything. They’ll look after him.”

 

“Who did it?”

 

“Is that your business, dear Ronnie?”

 

“Oh, of course, it was that miserable⁴ cad from Dakota, whom you forced through the gates of Otterbourne House.”

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