“Mrs. Jedsley is in the drawing-room,” Camelia announced, “so I ran away. I am really afraid of her.”

Mrs. Fox-Darriel laughed slightly; she put down the book with which she was solacing a lazy afternoon on the sofa, and, looking at Camelia’s cloth dress and sailor hat, asked her if she had been out again.

“Yes, just back. I only stayed in the drawing-room long enough to show Mrs. Jedsley that she scared me. It’s those eyebrows, you know, that lack of eyebrow rather, emphasized by an angry redness in the place where they should be. No, I cannot face her.”

“She is rather Épatante. I suppose you were walking with your brace of suitors.”

“No, I don’t know where they are. I was walking by myself. I think I must have walked eight miles,” Camelia added, stretching out her feet to look at her dusty shoes.

“You certainly are an unsociable hostess, but those boys are becoming bores. Whom do you expect next week? You must have something to leaven the lump of pining youthful masculinity.”

“That poet is coming—the one who writes the virile poems, you know, and whose article of faith is the joie de vivre; and Lady Tramley, dear creature, Lord Tramley, and—would you specify Sir Arthur as leaven?”

“Do you mean to imply that he isn’t pining?”

“I imply nothing so evident.”

“Wriggling, then—that you must own.”

Camelia was sitting near the window, opened on its framing magnolia leaves, and said rather coolly as she took off her hat—

“No, I am wriggling. I must decide now.”

This was a masterly assurance. Mrs. Fox-Darriel reflecting that nothing succeeds like unruffled self-confidence, and that Camelia’s had never shown a ripple of doubt, owned to herself that her slightly stinging question was well answered.

“Don’t wriggle, my dear; decide,” she said, accepting the restatement very placidly, “you could not do better. To speak vulgarly—the man is rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

“Beautifully rich,” Camelia assented.

“Ah—indeed he is.”

“And he himself is wise and excellent,” Camelia added; “I like him very much.”

“He is coming alone?”

“No, Lady Henge comes too.”

Mrs. Fox-Darriel gave her friend a sharp glance.

“That’s very serious, you know, Camelia. I think you must have decided—to suit Lady Henge.”

Camelia smiled good-humoredly. “I will suit her—and then see if he suits me.”

Mrs. Fox-Darriel lay reflecting on the sofa. Camelia accepted frankness to a certain point, beyond that point she repulsed it. It was rather sly of her, Mrs. Fox-Darriel thought, to keep up these needless pretences. Camelia must be anxious for the match—anxious to a certain degree, and her careful preservation of the false dignity of her position was really rather mean. As for Mrs. Fox-Darriel, she desired the match with a really disinterested fervor. She felt a certain personal pride in Camelia’s success; she had resigned supremacy, and only asked Camelia to uphold her own. Camelia as Lady Henge would, from a very charming person, have become a very important personage, a truly momentous friend. Her fondness for the child would ensure the child’s loyalty. A near friend of the Prime Minister’s wife—who knew? The thought flitted pleasantly through Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s mind, and the thought, too, of all that Camelia, in an even less exalted position, could do for the impecunious Hon. Charlie, Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s husband. There was really no possibility of a doubt in Camelia’s mind. Mrs. Fox-Darriel simply did not believe her, and regretted her lack of candor; but at the same time she felt a little anxiety. There were certain phases in Camelia that had always baffled her investigations, an unexpectedness that Mrs. Fox-Darriel had encountered more than once.

“It is really the very best thing you could do,” she observed now, “and I wouldn’t play with him if I were you. I know that he is the image of fidelity, and yet the Duchess of Amshire is very anxious for him to marry her girl, that ugly Lady Elizabeth, and Lady Henge favors that match, and he really is under his mother’s thumb.”

“Decidedly I must waste no time,” said Camelia, laughing, “and decidedly it would be the best thing I could do, since the Marquis was snapped up by the American girl—swarming with millions. I think I should have been a Marchioness, Frances, had not that strange look, between a squint and a goggle, in his eyes made me hesitate.”

“Oh, the Marquis! You know that this is far better. This man means a lot.”

“He swarms with millions too,” said Camelia. “Come, Frances, preach me a nice little worldly sermon on the supreme utility of riches—without the gloves now.”

“I usually remove them when I approach the subject,” Mrs. Fox-Darriel sighed with much sincerity. “My poor Charlie! How we keep our heads above water I really don’t know, and, as it is, the sharks are nibbling at our toes! Supreme! Money, my dear, is the only thing! Once you’ve that foundation you may begin to erect your sentiments, your moralities.”

“And how few people are honest enough to say so. You and I are honest, Frances; it buys everything, of course.”

“Well, almost everything. One must thank Nature for beauty and cleverness.”

“Beauty and cleverness in rags have a sorry time of it in this world. But money, of course, especially if not too new, buys friends, power, good taste, morality. Poverty makes people base and cringing—makes criminals. One is jumped on in this world, scrunched into the earth, into the dirt, if one hasn’t money, and yet the hypocrites talk of compensation! Of all the sloppy, canting optimism with which people try to make themselves comfortable that is the sorriest! And while they talk they go on scrambling and scrunching for all they are worth; nasty beasts! They kick a man on the head, and say ‘the stupor compensates for the pain.’ That is the current theory about the lower classes.”

“Yet you enjoy the world, Camelia.”

“I am not jumped on.”

“You jump on other people, then?”

“Not in a sordid manner; I don’t have to soil my feet. Why shouldn’t I enjoy it?”

“And you think that Sir Arthur’s millions would emphasize the enjoyment?”

“Widen it, certainly. But don’t be gross, Frances. A great deal depends on him. I am not offering myself for sale, you know.”

“No, I don’t think you would. You have no need to.”

“He would really be glaringly golden, wouldn’t he, were he not draped with the mossy antiquity of his name?” said Camelia, drawing a white magnolia flower within the window frame, and bending her head to the scented cup.

“An ideal husband, from every point of view,” Mrs. Fox-Darriel resumed; “clever, very clever, and very good—rather overpoweringly good, Camelia.”

“I think goodness a most charming phenomenon, I shouldn’t mind studying it in a husband.”

“Mrs. Jedsley is good. Why don’t you study her?”

“There is nothing phenomenal in her goodness, it is a product of circumstance only. There is Mary,” Camelia added, tipping her chair a little towards the window for a clearer view of the lawn below. “Mary in a Liberty silk, of yellow-green, and smocked. Why, Mary, why wear a Liberty gown, especially smocked?”

“I have sometimes suspected that your colorless little cousin is here to play the part of a discord that resolves into and heightens your harmony,” said Mrs. Fox-Darriel; “or is it the post of whipping-boy that she fills?”

Camelia continued to look from the window placidly, only raising her eyebrows a little.

“No, Mary never gets a whipping, not even when I deserve one. Mamma is very fond of Mary; so am I,” she added. Mrs. Fox-Darriel took up her book with a little yawn that Camelia for all her placidity resented.

“How can you read that garbage?” she inquired smilingly, glancing at the title.

“The bÊte humaine rather interests me.”

“Even interpreted by another? The man is far more insupportable than Zola, inasmuch as he is clever, and an artist.”

“That’s why I read him. You seem to know a good deal about garbage, my dear.”

“I know a good deal about everything, I fancy!” said Camelia, with her gayest laugh. “I took a course of garbage once, just enough to make up my mind that I did not care for the flavor. We have a right to choose the phases of life we want to see represented.”

“I like garbage,” Mrs. Fox-Darriel said stubbornly.

“Yes, you are very catholic, I know. I am more limited.” Camelia still eyed the lawn, sniffing at the magnolia. Now she rose suddenly and went to the mirror.

“Mary puts on a sailor hat—so,” she said gravely, setting hers far back at a ludicrous angle. “Poor Mary!” She tilted the hat forward again, and briskly put the pin through it. “I am going down to harry Mrs. Jedsley. Good-bye, Frances.”

“Good-bye. I shall be down to tea presently.”

“The bÊte humaine will spoil your appetite!” laughed Camelia as she went out.

Mrs. Fox-Darriel heard her running down the corridor and the light rhythm of her feet on the stairs.

“Pretty little minx!” she said good-humoredly; and her thoughts turned to Sir Arthur. What a lucky girl was Camelia! It was rather tiresome, perhaps, to sit by and watch her triumphs. Mrs. Fox-Darriel found the rÔle of second-fiddle a little dull; still, it was well worth while to play it. She got up and went to the window, where the magnolia still swayed faintly from the suddenness of Camelia’s departure. Tapping the sill lightly with her finger-tips, Mrs. Fox-Darriel looked out, yawning once more, at the translucent blue of the sky, the still shining of the little lake beyond the trees, the sun-dappled lawn, and at Mary Fairleigh on the lawn in the funny Liberty dress. Mr. Perior was walking beside her, in riding costume, a whip in his hand. Mrs. Fox-Darriel surveyed them as they walked slowly away from the house. He had evidently just joined Mary; and as Camelia herself appeared on the lawn her departure took on an amusing aspect.

Now it really was too bad of Camelia, she could have no use for him herself. The sun flashed from her hair as she bounded gaily across the turf and caught Perior’s arm with a schoolgirl familiarity. Mrs. Fox-Darriel drew back sharply, but still observed from the screen of magnolia leaves Mary’s slow return to the house, and Camelia’s skipping step as she led Mr. Perior towards the garden. He held the whip clasped in his hand behind his back, and, as he walked, switched his calf in its leather gaiter. Mrs. Fox-Darriel fancied some temper in the action.