FullReads

He laughed heartily. “What a delightful confusion of metaphors! I’m sure you’ve got Irish blood somewhere.”

“Of course I have. Did I never tell you I am descended from the kings of Ireland?”

He took off his hat mockingly. “I salute Miss Brian Boru.”

“You’re an awfully good fellow,” he told her on a later occasion. “I almost believe I’d take your money if you were not a woman.” “If I were not a woman I should not offer it to you–I should want a career of my own.”

“And my career would content you?” he asked, touched.

“Absolutely,” she lied. “The interest I should take in it–wouldn’t that be sufficient interest on the loan?”

“There is one thing you have taught me,” he said slowly–“how conventional I am! But every prejudice in me shrinks from your proposition, much as I admire your manliness.”

“Perhaps it could be put on more conventional lines–superficially,” she suggested in a letter that harked back to this conversation. “One might go through conventional forms. That adorable Disraeli–I have just been reading his letters. How right he was not to marry for love!”

The penultimate stage of the pre-nuptial comedy was reached in the lobby of the Opera, while Society was squeezing to its carriage. It was after the Rheingold, and poor Lady Chelmer could hardly keep her eyes open, and actually dozed off as she leaned against a wall, in patient martyrdom. Walter Bassett had been specially irritating, for he had not come up to the box once, and everybody knows (as the Hon. Tolshunt had said, with unwonted brilliance) the Rheingold is in heavy bars.

“I didn’t know you admired Wagner so much,” Amber said scathingly, as Walter pushed through the grooms. “Such a rapt devotee!”

“Wagner is the greatest man of the century. He alone has been able to change London’s dinner-hour.”

Amber could not help smiling. “Poor Lady Chelmer!” she said, nodding towards the drowsing dowager. “Since half-past six!”

“Is that our carriage?” said the “Prisoner of Pleasure,” opening her eyes.

“No, dear–I guess we are some fifty behind. Tolly and the Marquis are watching from the pavement.”

The poor lady sighed and went to sleep again.

“Behold the compensations of poverty,” observed Walter Bassett. “The gallery-folk have to wait and squeeze before the opera; the carriage-folk after the opera.”

“You forget the places they occupy during the opera. Poor Wagner! What a fight! I wish I could have helped his career.” And Amber set a wistful smile in the becoming frame of her white hood.

“The form of the career appears to be indifferent to you,” he said, with a little laugh.

“As indifferent as the man,” she replied, meeting his eyes calmly.

The faint scent of her hair mingled with his pleasurable sense of her frank originality. For the first time the bargain really appealed to him. He could not but see that she was easily the fairest of that crush of fair women, and to have her prostrated at the foot of his career was more subtly delicious than to have her surrender to his person. The ball was at his foot in surely the most tempting form that a ball could take. And the fact that he must leave her hurriedly to write the musical criticism that was the price of his stall, was not calculated to diminish his appreciation of all the kingdoms of the world which his temptress was showing him from her high mountain.

“Alas! I must go and write a notice,” he sighed.

“Satan’s Secretary?” she queried mischievously.

He started. Had he not been just thinking of her as a Satan in skirts?

“En attendant that I become Satan’s master,” he replied ambiguously, as he raised his hat.

“Oh, to drive off with him into the peace and solitude of Love–away from the grinding paths of ambition,” thought Amber, when the horses pranced up.

IV

CROISE

“Women, not measures,” said the reigning wit anent the administration which Amber’s Salon held together, and in which her husband occupied a position quite disproportionate to his nominal office, and still more so to the almost unparalleled brevity of his career as a private member.