“You haven’t the pleasure of Mr. Ira Nutcombe’s acquaintance, Claire, or you wouldn’t talk like that. He wasn’t the sort of man you could get things out of. He didn’t even tip the caddie. Besides, can’t you see what I mean? I couldn’t trade on a chance acquaintance of the golf links to—”
“That is just what I complain of in you. You’re too diffident.”
“It isn’t diffidence exactly. Talking of old Nutcombe, I was speaking to Gates again the other night. He was telling me about America. There’s a lot of money to be made over there, you know, and the committee owes me a vacation. They would give me a few weeks off any time I liked.
“What do you say? Shall I pop over and have a look round? I might happen just to drop into something. Gates was telling me about fellows he knew who had dropped into things in New York.”
“What’s the good of putting yourself to all the trouble and expense of going to America? You can easily make all you want in London, if you will only try. It isn’t as if you had no chances. You have more chances than almost any man in town. With your title you could get all the directorships in the City that you wanted.”
“Well, the fact is, this business of taking directorships has never quite appealed to me. I don’t know anything about the game and I should probably run up against some wildcat company. I can’t say I like the directorship wheeze much. It’s the idea of knowing that one’s name would be being used as a bait. Every time I saw it on a prospectus I should feel like a trout fly.”
Claire bit her lip.
“It’s so exasperating!” she broke out. “When I first told my friends that I was engaged to Lord Dawlish they were tremendously impressed. They took it for granted that you must have lots of money. Now I have to keep explaining to them that the reason we don’t get married is that we can’t afford to. I’m almost as badly off as poor Polly Davis who was in the Heavenly Waltz Company with me when she married that man, Lord Wetherby. A man with a title has no right not to have money. It makes the whole thing farcical.
“If I were in your place I should have tried a hundred things by now, but you always have some silly objection. Why couldn’t you, for instance, have taken on the agency of that what-d’you-call-it car?”
“What I called it would have been nothing to what the poor devils who bought it would have called it.”
“You could have sold hundreds of them, and the company would have given you any commission you asked. You know just the sort of people they wanted to get in touch with.”
“But, darling, how could I? Planting Breitstein on the club would have been nothing compared with sowing these horrors about London. I couldn’t go about the place sticking my pals with a car which, I give you my honest word, was stuck together with chewing gum and tied up with string.”
“Why not? It would be their fault if they bought a car that wasn’t any good. Why should you have to worry once you had it sold?”
It was not Lord Dawlish’s lucky afternoon. All through lunch he had been saying the wrong thing, and now he put the coping stone on his misdeeds. Of all the ways in which he could have answered Claire’s question he chose the worst.
“Er—well,” he said, “noblesse oblige, don’t you know, what?”
For a moment Claire did not speak. Then she looked at her watch and got up.
“I must be going,” she said coldly.
“But you haven’t had your coffee yet.”
“I don’t want any coffee.”
“What’s the matter, dear?”
“Nothing is the matter. I have to go home and pack. I’m going to Southampton this afternoon.”
She began to move toward the door. Lord Dawlish, anxious to follow, was detained by the fact that he had not yet paid the check. The production and settling of this took time, and when finally he turned in search of Claire she was nowhere visible.
Bounding upstairs on the swift feet of love he reached the street. She had gone.
II
A gray sadness surged over Bill Dawlish. The sun hid itself behind a cloud, the sky took on a leaden hue and a chill wind blew through the world. He scanned Shaftesbury Avenue with a jaundiced eye, and thought that he had never seen a beastlier or more depressing thoroughfare. Piccadilly, however, into which he shortly dragged himself, was even worse. It was full of men and women and other depressing things.
He pitied himself profoundly. It was a rotten world to live in, this, where a fellow couldn’t say, “Noblesse oblige” without upsetting the universe. Why shouldn’t a fellow say, “Noblesse oblige?” Why—At this juncture Lord Dawlish walked into a lamppost.
The shock changed his mood. Gloom still obsessed him, but blended now with remorse. He began to look at the matter from Claire’s viewpoint, and his pity switched from himself to her. In the first place, the poor girl had rather a rotten time. Could she be blamed for wanting him to make money? No. Yet whenever she made suggestions as to how the thing was to be done he snubbed her by saying, “Noblesse oblige.” Naturally a refined and sensitive young girl objected to having things like, “Noblesse oblige” said to her. Where was the sense in saying Noblesse oblige? Such a damn silly thing to say! Only a perfect ass would spend his time rushing about the place saying Noblesse oblige to people.
“By Jove!” Lord Dawlish stopped in his stride. He disentangled himself from a pedestrian who had rammed him on the back. “I’ll do it!”
He hailed a passing taxi and directed the driver to make for the Pen and Ink Club.
The
