“But can’t we have our things?”
“In about half an hour,” pleaded Mr. Palliser.
“I suppose we must bear it, Alice?” said Lady Glencora as she got into the carriage that was waiting for her.
Alice thought of the last time in which she had been in that room—when George and Kate had been with her—and the two girls had been quite content to wait patiently while their trunks were being examined. But Alice was now travelling with great people—with people who never spoke of their wealth, or seemed ever to think of it, but who showed their consciousness of it at every turn of their lives. “After all,” Alice had said to herself more than once, “I doubt whether the burden is not greater than the pleasure.”
They stayed in Paris for a week, and during that time Alice found that she became very intimate with Mr. Palliser. At Matching she had, in truth, seen but little of him, and had known nothing. Now she began to understand his character, and learned how to talk to him. She allowed him to tell her of things in which Lady Glencora resolutely persisted in taking no interest. She delighted him by writing down in a little pocketbook the number of eggs that were consumed in Paris every day, whereas Glencora protested that the information was worth nothing unless her husband could tell her how many of the eggs were good, and how many bad. And Alice was glad to find that a hundred and fifty thousand female operatives were employed in Paris, while Lady Glencora said it was a great shame, and that they ought all to have husbands. When Mr. Palliser explained that that was impossible, because of the redundancy of the female population, she angered him very much by asserting that she saw a great many men walking about who, she was quite sure, had not wives of their own.
“I do so wish you had married him!” Glencora said to Alice that evening. “You would always have had a pocketbook ready to write down the figures, and you would have pretended to care about the eggs, and the bottles of wine, and the rest of it. As for me, I can’t do it. If I see an hungry woman, I can give her my money; or if she be a sick woman, I can nurse her; or if I hear of a very wicked man, I can hate him;—but I cannot take up poverty and crime in the lump. I never believe it all. My mind isn’t big enough.”
They went into no society at Paris, and at the end of a week were all glad to leave it.
“I don’t know that Baden will be any better,” Lady Glencora said; “but, you know, we can leave that again after a bit—and so we shall go on getting nearer to the Kurds.”
To this, Mr. Palliser demurred. “I think we had better make up our mind to stay a month at Baden.”
“But why should we make up our minds at all?” his wife pleaded.
“I like to have a plan,” said Mr. Palliser.
“And so do I,” said his wife—“if only for the sake of not keeping it.”
“There’s nothing I hate so much as not carrying out my intentions,” said Mr. Palliser.
Upon this, Lady Glencora shrugged her shoulders, and made a mock grimace to her cousin. All this her husband bore for a while meekly, and it must be acknowledged that he behaved very well. But, then, he had his own way in everything. Lady Glencora did not behave very well—contradicting her husband, and not considering, as, perhaps, she ought to have done, the sacrifice he was making on her behalf. But, then, she had her own way in nothing.
She had her own way in almost nothing; but on one point she did conquer her husband. He was minded to go from Paris back to Cologne, and so down the Rhine to Baden. Lady Glencora declared that she hated the Rhine—that, of all rivers, it was the most distasteful to her; that, of all scenery, the scenery of the Rhine was the most overpraised; and that she would be wretched all the time if she were carried that way. Upon this, Mr. Palliser referred the matter to Alice; and she, who had last been upon the Rhine with her cousins Kate and George Vavasor, voted for going to Baden by way of Strasbourg.
“We will go by Strasbourg, then,” said Mr. Palliser, gallantly.
“Not that I want to see that horrid church again,” said Glencora.
“Everything is alike horrid to you, I think,” said her husband. “You are determined not to be contented, so that it matters very little which way we go.”
“That’s the truth,” said his wife. “It does matter very little.”
They got on to Baden—with very little delay at Strasbourg, and found half an hotel prepared for their reception. Here the carriage was brought into use for the first time, and the mistress of the carriage talked of sending home for Dandy and Flirt. Mr. Palliser, when he heard the proposition, calmly assured his wife that the horses would not bear the journey. “They would be so out of condition,” he said, “as not to be worth anything for two or three months.”
“I only meant to ask for them if they could come in a balloon,” said Lady Glencora.
This angered Mr. Palliser, who had really, for a few minutes, thought of pacifying his wife by sending for the horses.
“Alice,” she asked, one morning, “how many eggs are eaten in Baden every morning before ten o’clock?”
Mr. Palliser, who at the moment was in the act of eating one, threw down his spoon, and pushed his plate from him.
“What’s the matter, Plantagenet?” she asked.
“The matter!” he said. “But never mind; I am a fool to care for it.”
“I declare I didn’t know that I had done anything wrong,” said Lady Glencora. “Alice, do you understand what it is?”
Alice said
