The Convert. Elizabeth Robins
to admire as well as to stand a little in awe of. Unlike one another as the Borrodailes were, in one respect they presented to the world an undivided front. From their point of view, just as laws existed to keep other people in order, so was 'fashion' an affair for the middle classes. The Borrodailes might dress as dowdily as they pleased, might speak as uncompromisingly as they felt inclined. Were they not Borrodailes of Borrodaile? Though open expression of this spirit grows less common, they would not have denied that it is still the prevailing temper of the older aristocracy. And so it has hitherto been true that among its women you find that sort of freedom which is the prerogative of those called the highest and of those called the lowest. It is the women of all the grades between these two extremes who have dared not to be themselves, who ape the manners, echo the catchwords, and garb themselves in the elaborate ugliness, devised for the blind meek millions.
As the Lady Sophia, now a little in advance of her companions, came stalking towards the steps, out from a little path that wound among the thick-growing laurels issued Paul Filey. He raised his eyes, and hurriedly thrust a small book into his pocket. The young lady paused, but only apparently to pat, or rather to administer an approving cuff to, the Bedlington terrier lying near the lower step.
'Well,' she said over her shoulder to Filey, 'our side gave a good account of itself that last round.'
'I was sure it would as soon as my malign influence was removed.'
'Yes; from the moment I took on Dick Farnborough, the situation assumed a new aspect. You'll never play a good game, you know, if you go quoting Baudelaire on the links.'
'Poor Paul!' his hostess murmured to her niece, 'I always tremble when I see him exposed to Sophia's ruthless handling.'
'Yes,' whispered Hermione. 'She says she's sure he thinks of himself as a prose Shelley; and for some reason that infuriates Sophia.'
With a somewhat forced air of amusement, Mr. Filey was following his critic up the steps, she still mocking at his 'drives' and the way he negotiated his bunkers.
Arrived at the top of the little terrace, whose close-shorn turf was level with the flagged floor of the colonnade, Mr. Filey sought refuge near Hermione, as the storm-tossed barque, fleeing before the wind, hies swift to the nearest haven.
Bending over the Bedlington, the Amazon remained on the top step, her long, rather good figure garbed in stuff which Filey had said was fit only for horse-blankets, but which was Harris tweed slackly belted by a broad canvas girdle drawn through a buckle of steel.
'Will you tell me,' he moaned in Hermione's ear, 'why the daughter of a hundred earls has the manners of a groom, and dresses herself in odds and ends of the harness room?'
'Sh! Somebody told her once you'd said something of that sort.'
'No!' he said. 'Who?'
'It wasn't I.'
'Of course not. But did she mind? What did she say, eh?'
'She only said, "He got that out of a novel of Miss Broughton's."'
Filey looked a little dashed. 'No! Has Miss Broughton said it, too? Then there are more of them!' He glanced again at the Amazon. 'Horrible thought!'
'Don't be so unreasonable. She couldn't play golf in a long skirt and high heels!'
'Who wants a woman to play golf?'
Hermione gave him his tea with a smile. She knew with an absolute precision just how perfectly at that moment she herself was presenting the average man's picture of the ideal type of reposeful womanhood.
As Lord John and the two other men, his companions, came up the steps in the midst of a discussion—
'If you stop to argue, Mr. Farnborough,' said Lady John, holding out a cup, 'you won't have time for tea before you catch that train.'
'Oh, thank you!' He hastened to relieve her, while Hermione murmured regrets that he wasn't staying. 'Lady John didn't ask me,' he confided. As he saw in Hermione's face a project to intercede for him, he added, 'And now I've promised my mother—we've got a lot of people coming, and two men short!'
'Two men short! how horrible for her!' She said it half laughing, but her view of the reality of the dilemma was apparent in her letting the subject drop.
Farnborough, standing there tea-cup in hand, joined again in the discussion that was going on about some unnamed politician of the day, with whose character and destiny the future of England might quite conceivably be involved.
Before a great while this unnamed person would be succeeding his ailing and childless brother. There were lamentations in prospect of his too early translation to the Upper House.
The older men had been speaking of his family, in which the tradition of public service, generations old, had been revived in the person of this younger son.
'I have never understood,' Lord John was saying, 'how a man with such opportunities hasn't done more.'
'A man as able, too,' said Borrodaile, lazily. 'Think of the tribute he wrung out of Gladstone at the very beginning of his career. Whatever we may think of the old fox, Gladstone had an eye for men.'
'Be quiet, will you!' Lady Sophia administered a little whack to the Bedlington. 'Sh! Joey! don't you hear they're talking about our cousin?'
'Who?' said Filey, bending over the lady with a peace-offering of cake.
'Why, Geoffrey Stonor,' answered Sophia.
'Is it Stonor they mean?'
'Well, of course.'
'How do you know?' demanded Filey, in the pause.
'Oh, wherever there are two or three gathered together talking politics and "the coming man"—who has such a frightful lot in him that very little ever comes out—it's sure to be Geoffrey Stonor they mean, isn't it, Joey?'
'Perhaps,' said her father, dryly, 'you'll just mention that to him at dinner to-night.'
'What!' said Farnborough, with a keen look in his eyes. 'You don't mean he's coming here!'
Sophia, too, had looked round at her host with frank interest.
'Comin' to play golf?'
'Well, he mayn't get here in time for a round to-night, but we're rather expecting him by this four-thirty.'
'What fun!' Lady Sophia's long face had brightened.
'May I stay over till the next train?' Farnborough was whispering to Lady John as he went round to her on the pretext of more cream. 'Thank you—then I won't go till the six forty-two.'
'I didn't know,' Lady Sophia was observing in her somewhat crude way, 'that you knew Geoffrey as well as all that.'
'We don't,' said Lord John. 'He's been saying for years he wanted to come down and try our links, but it's by a fluke that he's coming, after all.'
'He never comes to see us. He's far too busy, ain't he, Joey, even if we can't see that he accomplishes much?'
'Give him time and you'll see!' said Farnborough, with a wag of his head.
'Yes,' said Lord John, 'he's still a young man. Barely forty.'
'Barely forty! They believe in prolonging their youth, don't they?' said Lady Sophia to no one in particular, and with her mouth rather more full of cake than custom prescribes. 'Good thing it isn't us, ain't it, Joey?'
'For a politician forty is young,' said Farnborough.
'Oh, don't I know it!' she retorted. 'I was reading the life of Randolph Churchill the other day, and I came across a paragraph of filial admiration about the hold Lord Randolph had contrived to get so early in life over the House of Commons. It occurred to me to wonder just how much of a boy Lord Randolph was at the time. I was going to count up when I was saved the trouble by coming to a sentence that said he