“You won’t like the Colonel. I am positive upon that point,” said Maud. “Hubert is an excellent judge of character, and he couldn’t stand the Colonel; although he felt sorry for the man and tried to be civil to him. Colonel Marchant is an impossible person.”
“What has he done that makes him impossible?”
“Oh, I really can’t give you the exact details; but they say all sorts of unpleasant things about him.”
“ ‘They say.’ We know who ‘they’ are—an unknown quantity, which, when inquired into, resolves itself into half a dozen old women of both sexes.”
“Unhappily everybody knows that he is in debt all over the neighbourhood.”
“He must be a remarkable man to have found a neighbourhood so trustful.”
“Oh, I suppose he pays a little on account from time to time, or he would not be able to go on anyhow; but really, now, Jack, you can’t expect me to be on intimate terms with a household of that kind. I am very glad to have those poor girls at my garden-parties, for they are pretty and tolerably well-behaved, though their frocks and hats are too dreadful. What did I tell you Lady Corisande Hawberk called those poor girls when she saw them here last summer, Claudia?”
“Lady Hartley’s burlesque troupe.”
“Yes, that was it—Lady Hartley’s burlesque troupe! They were all three dressed differently—and so fine—especially the two younger. The eldest is a shade more enlightened. One wore cheap black lace over apricot silk—you are a man, so you don’t know what cheap black lace means—and a Gainsborough hat. Another was in peach-coloured cotton—that papery, shiny cotton, which is meant to look like silk, with a straw sailor hat all over nodding peach-coloured poppies—and her parasol!—heavens, her parasol! bright scarlet cotton, and six feet high! Lady Corisande was immensely amused.”
“Is poverty so good a joke?” asked Vansittart, black as thunder.
“Oh, it wasn’t their poverty one laughed at. It was their childlike ignorance of our world and its ways. If they had all three worn clean white frocks and neat straw hats they would have looked charming. It was the effort to be in the height of fashion—”
“With colours and materials three years old,” put in Claudia.
“I tell you it is poverty you laugh at—poverty alone that is ridiculous. We have arrived at a state of things in which there is nothing respected or respectable except money. We pretend to honour rank and ancient lineage, but in our secret hearts we set no value on either unless sustained by wealth.”
“What a tirade!” cried Lady Hartley, “and all because of a little good-natured laughter at those girls’ frocks. To think that a pretty face, which you have seen only twice, should exercise such dominion over you!”
The ladies left the dining-room in a cluster to put on their hats for a walk to the ice. Skating was the rage at Redwold Towers, and even Mrs. Vansittart went to look on. She liked to see her son and daughter disporting themselves, each an adept in the art; and then there was the off-chance of meeting the German nurse with the year-old baby somewhere in the grounds before sunset. The baby had already taken a strong grip upon the grandmother’s heart.
John Vansittart did not go with the skaters, as it had been his wont to go. Nor did he offer to keep his mother company in her afternoon walk. He was in a sullen and resentful mood, resentful of he knew not what; so he started on a solitary ramble in the Redwold copses, where he would have only robins and jays and chaffinches, and the infinite variety of living things whose names he knew not, for his companions.
He was angry with all those talking women, his sister first and foremost; but most of all was he angry with himself.
Yes, it was her beauty that had caught him, that picture of Titania delicately fair against the darkly purple night, her pale gold hair, her sapphire eyes shining in the starlight. Yes, his sister’s flippant tongue had hit upon the humiliating truth. It was only because this girl appealed to his fancy that he was so eager and so angry, this girl whom he had seen the other night for the first time, of whose heart, character, antecedents, kindred, he knew absolutely nothing. It was only because she was so lovely in his eyes that he was prepared to champion her, ready to marry her if she would have him.
“I am a fool,” he told himself, “an arrant fool, a fool so foolish that even shallow-brained Maud can see my folly. I know nothing of this girl, absolutely nothing except that surface frankness which passes for innocence—and which might be assumed by Becky Sharp herself. Indeed, we are told that it was Becky’s guilelessness which always impressed people in her favour. May not this girl, daughter of a shady father, be every bit as clever and farseeing as Becky Sharp? I dare say she is laughing at my infatuation already, and wondering how far it will lead me. Sefton, too! Miss Green said there was an understanding between them. His manner was certainly a thought too easy. No doubt she is trying to hook Sefton, a landowner, one of the best matches in the neighbourhood. And she puts on that standoffish manner of malice aforethought, to lead him on by keeping him off. I should be an idiot if I were to commit myself, without knowing a great deal more about the young lady. I have been getting absolutely maudlin about the girl. This is how half the unhappy marriages are made.”
He stopped in his swinging walk, after tramping along the narrow muddy track at five miles an hour. The ring of the skates, the shouts of boys playing hockey, sounded clear upon the frosty air. He was not more than a mile from the pond as the crow flies.
“Sophy said their gowns would be finished this morning,” he mused. “I wonder whether they will be on the ice this
