“A most variable climate,” said the Duchess; “and how
unfortunate that we should have had that very cold weather
at a time when coal was so dear! So distressing for the
poor.”
“Some one has observed that Providence is always on the
side of the big dividends,” remarked Reginald.
The Duchess ate an anchovy in a shocked manner; she was
sufficiently old-fashioned to dislike irreverence towards
dividends.
Reginald had left the selection of a feeding-ground to her
womanly intuition, but he chose the wine himself, knowing
that womanly intuition stops short at claret. A woman will
cheerfully choose husbands for her less attractive friends,
or take sides in a political controversy without the least
knowledge of the issues involved---but no woman ever
cheerfully chose a claret.
“Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for
me,” said Reginald: “they remind me of one's childhood
that one goes through, wondering what the next course is
going to be like---and during the rest of the menu one
wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oevres. Don't you
love watching the different ways people have of entering a
restaurant? There is the woman who races in as though her
whole scheme of life were held together by a one-pin
despotism which might abdicate its functions at any moment;
it's really a relief to see her reach her chair in safety.
Then there are the people who troop in with
an-unpleasant-duty-to-perform air, as if they were angels of
Death entering a plague city. You see that type of Briton
very much in hotels abroad. And nowadays there are always
the Johannes-bourgeois, who bring a Cape-to-Cairo atmosphere
with them---what may be called the Rand Manner, I suppose.”
“Talking about hotels abroad,” said the Duchess, “I am
preparing notes for a lecture at the Club on the educational
effects of modern travel, dealing chiefly with the moral
side of the question. I was talking to Lady Beauwhistle's
aunt the other day---she's just come back from Paris, you
know. Such a sweet woman---”
“And so silly. In these days of the overeducation of
women she's quite refreshing. They say some people went
through the siege of Paris without knowing that France and
Germany were at war; but the Beauwhistle aunt is credited
with having passed the whole winter in Paris under the
impression that the Humberts were a kind of bicycle....
Isn't there a bishop or somebody who believes we shall meet
all the animals we have known on earth in another world? How
frightfully embarrassing to meet a whole shoal of whitebait
you had last known at Prince's! I'm sure in my nervousness I
should talk of nothing but lemons. Still, I daresay they
would be quite as offended if one hadn't eaten them. I know
if I were served up at a cannibal feast I should be
dreadfully annoyed if any one found fault with me for not
being tender enough, or having been kept too long.”
“My idea about the lecture,” resumed the Duchess
hurriedly, “is to inquire whether promiscuous Continental
travel doesn't tend to weaken the moral fibre of the social
conscience. There are people one knows, quite nice people
when they are in England, who are so different when they
are anywhere the other side of the Channel.”
“The people with what I call Tauchnitz morals,” observed
Reginald. “On the whole, I think they get the best of two
very desirable worlds. And, after all, they charge so much
for excess luggage on some of those foreign lines that it's
really an economy to leave one's reputation behind one
occasionally.”
“A scandal, my dear Reginald, is as much to be avoided at
Monaco or any of those places as at Exeter, let us say.”
“Scandal, my dear Irene---I may call you Irene, mayn't
I?”
“I don't know that you have known me long enough for
that.”
“I've known you longer than your god-parents had when
they took the liberty of calling you that name. Scandal is
merely the compassionate allowance which the gay make to the
humdrum. Think how many blameless lives are brightened by
the blazing indiscretions of other people. Tell me, who is
the woman with the old lace at the table on our left? Oh,
that doesn't matter; it's quite the thing nowadays to stare
at people as if they were yearlings at Tattersall's.”
“Mrs. Spelvexit? Quite a charming woman; separated from
her husband---”
“Incompatibility of income?”
“Oh, nothing of that sort. By miles of frozen ocean, I
was going to say. He explores ice-floes and studies the
movements of herrings, and has written a most interesting
book on the home-life of the Esquimaux; but naturally he has
very little home-life of his own.”
“A husband who comes home with the Gulf Stream would be
rather a tied-up asset.”
“His wife is exceedingly sensible about it. She collects
postage-stamps. Such a resource. Those people with her are
the Whimples, very old acquaintances of mine; they're always
having trouble, poor things.'
“Trouble is not one of those fancies you can take up and
drop at any moment; it's like a grouse-moor or the
opium-habit---once you start it you've got to keep it up.”
“Their eldest son was such a disappointment to them; they
wanted him to be a linguist, and spent no end of money on
having him taught to speak---oh, dozens of languages!---and
then he became a Trappist monk. And the youngest, who was
intended for the American marriage market, has developed
political tendencies, and writes pamphlets about the housing
of the poor. Of course it's a most important question, and
I devote a good deal of time to it myself in the mornings;
but, as Laura Whimple says, it's as well to have an
establishment of one's own before agitating about other
people's. She feels it very keenly, but she always
maintains a cheerful appetite, which I think is so unselfish
of her.”
“There are different ways of taking disappointment.
There was a girl I knew who nursed a wealthy uncle through a
long illness, borne by her with Christian fortitude, and
then he died and left his money to a swine-fever hospital.
She found she'd about cleared stock in fortitude by that
time, and now she gives drawing-room recitations. That's
what I call being vindictive.”
“Life is full of its disappointments,” observed the
Duchess, “and I suppose the art of being happy is to
disguise them as illusions. But that, my dear Reginald,
becomes more difficult as one grows older.”
“I think it's more generally practised than you imagine.
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old
have reminiscences of what never happened. It's only the
middle-aged who are really conscious of their
limitations---that is why one should be so patient with
them. But one never is.”
“After all,” said the Duchess, “the disillusions of
life may depend on our way of assessing it. In the minds of
those who come after us we may be remembered for qualities
and successes which we quite left out of the reckoning.”
“It's not always safe to depend on the commemorative
tendencies of those who come after us. There may have been
disillusionments in the lives of the mediaeval saints, but
they would scarcely have been better pleased if they could
have foreseen that their names would be associated nowadays
chiefly with racehorses and the cheaper clarets. And now,
if you can tear yourself away from the salted almonds, we'll
go and have coffee under the palms that are so necessary for
our discomfort.”