the telephone.
“Is that you, Elizabeth?” came the voice of Mrs. Pallitson; “you must have Bobbie back. Don’t say it’s impossible, you must. The Bishop of Sokotra, my husband’s uncle, is staying here. Sokotra, never mind how it’s spelt. Bobbie told him last night at dinner what he thought of Christian missions; I’ve often said the same thing myself, but never to a bishop. Nor have I expressed it in quite such offensive language. The bishop refuses to stay another day under the same roof as Bobbie. He, the bishop, is not merely an uncle, but a bachelor uncle, with private means. It’s all very well to say he should show a tolerant and charitable spirit; charity begins at home, and this is a colonial bishop. Sokotra, I keep telling you; it doesn’t matter where it is, the point is that the bishop is here, and we can’t allow him to leave us in a temper.”
“How about the marchioness?” shrilled Mrs. Duff-Chubleigh at her end of the phone, having first carefully glanced round to see that nobody was within hearing distance of her remarks. “She’s just as important to me as the Bishop of Scooter, or wherever it is, is to you. I don’t know why he should take such absurd unreasonable offence because Christian missions were unfavourably criticised; anyone might express an opinion on a subject of that sort, even to a colonial bishop. It’s a very different thing being called to your face a moth-eaten old hen. I hear that she is going to give a hunt ball at Cloudly this winter, and it’s quite probable that she’ll ask me over there for it. And now you want me to ruin everything and have a most unpleasant contretemps by taking that boy back under my roof. You can’t expect it of me. Besides, we can’t keep shifting Mr. Chermbacon backwards and forwards as though he was the regulator of an erratic clock. What do you say?”
“The bishop won’t stay another night unless Bobbie goes today,” came over the phone in hard relentless tones. “I’ve told Bobbie he must leave the first thing after lunch, and I’ve ordered the motor to be ready for him. Margaret can follow tomorrow.”
Then there followed a pitiless silence at the Pallitson end of the telephone. Vainly Mrs. Duff-Chubleigh rang up again and again, and put the fruitless and despairing question “Are you there?” to the cold emptiness of unresponsive space. The Pallitsons had cut themselves off.
“The telephone is the coward’s weapon,” muttered Mrs. Duff-Chubleigh furiously; “those heavy blonde women are always a mass of selfishness.”
Then she sat down to write a telegram, as a last appeal to Celeste’s better feelings.
Am having carp taken out of fishpond. I can face drowning, but will not be nibbled.—Elizabeth.
As a matter of fact Bobbie Chermbacon and the marchioness travelled up to town by the same train. He had grasped the fact that his presence was not in request at either of the house-parties, and she was hurriedly summoned to London, where her husband had entered on the illness which, in a few days, made her a widow and a dowager. Bobbie’s enthusiasm for chestnut hair and dreamy Madonna eyes did not lead him to repeat his visit to the Duff-Chubleigh household. He spent the winter in Egypt, and some ten months later he married the widowed marchioness.
The Oversight
“It’s like a Chinese puzzle,” said Lady Prowche resentfully, staring at a scribbled list of names that spread over two or three loose sheets of notepaper on her writing-table. Most of the names had a pencil mark running through them.
“What is like a Chinese puzzle?” asked Lena Luddleford briskly; she rather prided herself on being able to grapple with the minor problems of life.
“Getting people suitably sorted together. Sir Richard likes me to have a house party about this time of year, and gives me a free hand as to whom I should invite; all he asks is that it should be a peaceable party, with no friction or unpleasantness.”
“That seems reasonable enough,” said Lena.
“Not only reasonable, my dear, but necessary. Sir Richard has his literary work to think of; you can’t expect a man to concentrate on the tribal disputes of Central Asian clansmen when he’s got social feuds blazing under his own roof.”
“But why should they blaze? Why should there be feuds at all within the compass of a house party?”
“Exactly; why should they blaze or why should they exist?” echoed Lady Prowche; “the point is that they always do. We have been unlucky; persistently unlucky, now that I come to look back on things. We have always got people of violently opposed views under one roof, and the result has been not merely unpleasantness but explosion.”
“Do you mean people who disagree on matters of political opinion and religious views?” asked Lena.
“No, not that. The broader lines of political or religious difference don’t matter. You can have Church of England and Unitarian and Buddhist under the same roof without courting disaster; the only Buddhist I ever had down here quarrelled with everybody, but that was on account of his naturally squabblesome temperament; it had nothing to do with his religion. And I’ve always found that people can differ profoundly about politics and meet on perfectly good terms at breakfast. Now, Miss Larbor Jones, who was staying here last year, worships Lloyd George as a sort of wingless angel, while Mrs. Walters, who was down here at the same time, privately considers him to be—an antelope, let us say.”
“An antelope?”
“Well, not an antelope exactly, but something with horns and hoofs and tail.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Still, that didn’t prevent them from being the chummiest of mortals on the tennis court and in the billiard-room. They did quarrel finally, about a lead in a doubled hand of no-trumps, but that of course is a thing that no account of judicious guest-grouping could prevent. Mrs. Walters had got king, knave, ten, and seven of clubs—”
“You
