"How's the 'Tale of Two Sexes,' or whatever it's called, getting on?"
flippantly enquired Sir Julian of his agent.
"Coming out any day now," said Mark, with a grin, "and the gifted
authoress is coming to stay with us next month. Will you and Lady
Rossiter come and dine one night? I'm afraid you'll get a very poor
dinner, but you know what to expect of Sarah. I should like to make it
rather more amusing for Iris, if you can face it."
"Delighted," said Sir Julian untruthfully.
The proposed entertainment was one which he had sampled before, and for
which he had conceived a profound distaste.
An element of novelty was introduced, however, at the eleventh hour,
when the evening of the dinner-party arrived. Mark greeted Sir Julian
and Lady Rossiter on the threshold.
"A creature called Douglas Garrett has turned up, by what he and Iris
call a coincidence. Of course, I had to ask the chap to dinner, and
he's gone to the 'King's Head' to get his things."
"The more the merrier," said Julian rather gloomily.
"I've got Miss Marchrose to come, so we shall be even numbers," said
Mark cheerfully.
"Good."
"You should have let me know," murmured Edna gently. "She may perhaps
want keeping in countenance a little, as regards evening dress. I could
so easily have put on a high gown."
Regrets on the score of Edna's modest and extremely becoming
_décolletage_, half shrouded in tulle, proved unnecessary.
Miss Iris Easter was in full dinner-dress, of a rose colour that
enhanced her extreme fairness and prettiness.
Small as was Julian's admiration for her personality, he was always
struck afresh at the sight of her, at the size of her enormous eyes--as
nearly violet as any eyes outside the pages of a novel--her crinkled,
fluffy hair, her general delicacy of form and feature. Even the
misguided instinct which had led her to outline a charming upper lip
with sealing-wax red could not detract from her porcelain prettiness.
She was the possessor of a high, youthful, lisping voice that always
reminded Julian of the adjective "fluted," and a pronunciation that is
best indicated by the fact that she always pronounced her own name as
though it were spelt "heiress."
At the sight of Lady Rossiter she cried:
"Eoh! _heow_ blessed to see you again, dear Lady Rahsittur!" and almost
similarly greeted Sir Julian, with her head very much on one side.
Lady Rossiter said "My dear!" in a tone which simultaneously conveyed
protest at Miss Easter's excessive effusion and the unspoken admission
that any lesser enthusiasm would never have met the case, and Julian
laughed a little, simply because Iris was so pretty and her monstrous
affectation had not yet had time to produce its usual effect upon his
temper.
"Where's your young man?" Mark asked her, with a laugh. "He ought to be
back by this time."
"Douglas?" said Iris, in a careless and interrogatory way, as though
the enquiry might refer to any number of attendant swains. "Oh, he'll
be here directly. I can hear the dear kiddies, Mark."
So could everyone else, as Ruthie and Ambrose whined, argued, and
stampeded their way downstairs.
The usual violent onslaught on the door-handle ensued, but after it had
been wrenched from Ambrose by Ruthie's superior height and strength
of muscle, they effected a decorous entry into the drawing-room
hand-in-hand.
"Oh, you sweet pets!" was the misguided exclamation of their Auntie
Iris. Julian wondered if it were provoked by the unwonted starchy
whiteness of Ruthie's skirts, which had a look of having been outgrown
by her some months previously, or by the long, pale sausage of hair
that had been forced into an unwilling curl on the extreme top of her
brother's head.
"Say how do you do," Mark admonished them, with a rather puzzled look
as he took in the cleanly aspect for once presented by his progeny.
"How fast Ruthie is growing!" said Lady Rossiter, in a slightly
disparaging tone. Mark gazed regretfully at the legs of his daughter
and muttered under his moustache:
"They want someone to see to their clothes. Sarah does her best, but
servants can't be expected----"
Lady Rossiter turned upon him a deepened gaze expressive of
compassion, comprehension, and much else that was destined to remain
unappreciated, as further sounds of arrival took Mark to the door.
"That was a cab, surely," said Lady Rossiter. "I suppose it's Miss
Marchrose. That seems rather an expensive item for her."
"How dear of you, Lady Rossiter! I do believe you always think of every
little thing."
On this extravagant assertion of Miss Easter's her brother returned to
the drawing-room with his two remaining guests.
Mr. Douglas Garrett was a tall, saturnine youth, whose conversation
principally consisted in emphasising the gulf separating the rest of
humanity from himself and some persons unspecified, but amalgamated
under the monosyllable "we."
"We poor motor-cyclists can't hope to be as punctual as the rest of
the world," he observed to Lady Rossiter, to whom he was presented by
Iris as "My great friend, Mr. Garrett, dear Lady Rossiter, but everyone
calls him Douglas."
"You will hardly need to be told that I have Scotch blood in me,
after that," gravely said Mr. Garrett. "We Kelts are faithful to the
traditional old names of the Clan."
"Oh," said Iris, her head more on one side than ever. "Isn't there some
poem about, 'Douglas, Douglas, tender and true'?"
Mr. Garrett inclined his head towards her in acknowledgment and
murmured something about "we lovers of the dear old bard" which nobody
seemed quite to catch.
The room, not over large, now appeared to be rather uncomfortably
crowded, and pervaded, moreover, by a growing consciousness that
something must be happening to the dinner.
Lady Rossiter said to Mark, "I always love a _little_ house, especially
in winter. They are so much warmer," at the same time holding a
newspaper between herself and the fire, the size of which was out of
all proportion to the room and to the number of its occupants.
"I know you love kiddies," Auntie Iris remarked in a general sort of
way to Miss Marchrose, Julian, and Mr. Garrett. "These little people
are too quaint for words; aren't you, children?"
The rather embarrassing enquiry appeared to present no difficulty to
Ruthie, who made it the ground of a sudden onslaught upon Mr. Garrett.
"Are you married?" she enquired with loudness and assurance of the
astonished young man.
"Certainly not," said Mr. Garrett, with emphasis. Ruthie immediately
took an uninvited seat upon his knee.
"Come here, Ambrose dear," said Auntie Iris hastily, "and talk to us."
"Eh?" said Ambrose, looking enquiringly at her through his spectacles.
It needed no intuition to recognise either the intonation or the
vocabulary of Sarah in the pleasing monosyllable shot forth by Master
Easter.
"What have you been doing to-day?" rather rashly pursued Auntie Iris.
"Eh?"
"Don't say 'eh' like that, darling. I can't imagine what's come over
the child."
"That's Peekaboo's new bad habit," his sister gleefully proclaimed.
"He says 'eh' to everything now."
Ambrose looked venomously at her, but said nothing.
"Do you know what we Scotch lads and lassies used to be taught in our
nursery days?" Mr. Garrett enquired.
"Eh?"
"We used to be taught," Mr. Garrett said, with great distinctness and
an air of originality, "Birds in their little nests agree."
"That's what Sarah says."
Mr. Garrett looked rather depressed at this unenthusiastic reception of
his scholastic axiom.
There ensued a pause, during which Julian could hear his host and Lady
Rossiter pursuing a conversation in which the last thing had long been
said.
He turned to Miss Marchrose, and ill-adapted as were her twenty-eight
years, her tired eyes, and her rather worn mauve foulard to bear
comparison with the radiant Iris, Julian found it pleasant to look at
her and to listen to her charming voice.
The satisfaction, however, was not afforded to him for long. "Auntie
Iris! Shall I say my piece?" Ruthie asked in her accustomedly
penetrating accents.
Everybody looked doubtful.
"Hark!" exclaimed Julian, quite involuntarily. "Isn't that----?"
Sarah, looking heated, announced dinner.
"Oh, what a pity!" said Ruthie. "But I daresay me and Ambrose will be
still here when you come out from dinner. So I can say it then."
With this altruistic reassurance still ringing in the air, to an
accompaniment of stubbornly reiterated "ehs" from Ambrose, the
dining-room was reached.
"I see that your novel is being very well advertised," Sir Julian began
conversation with his hostess. "We have it on order, but it has not yet
arrived. I hope that means that the sales are going well."
"Don't hope that," said Mr. Garrett in a deep voice across the table.
"Why not?" said Mark, after giving Sir Julian due time for the enquiry
which nothing would have induced him to make.
"'Why, Ben!' is not to be lightly put before the multitude. Iris has
shown extraordinary courage in attacking a problem which could only
present itself to thinking minds. The very title tells one that--a
Story of the Sexes. By the by, Iris, we realists of the new school
are inclined to wish that you had made _that_ the name of the book
outright."
"No, no," said Mark, and added courageously, "Besides, I like 'Why,
Ben!' It's so original."
"Is your book a novel?" Miss Marchrose enquired of Iris.
Mr. Garrett took the reply upon himself. "An extraordinarily powerful
study of man's primitive needs," he explained.
"Iris--Miss Easter--has gone straight down to the very bed-rock of
the soil. We present-day pagans are gradually winning our way back to
Mother Nature, don't you think?"
Julian involuntarily glanced at his wife at this perverted example of
her own theories.
"Perhaps," said Edna very sweetly, "Mother Nature is herself leading us
home. One has only to look round one, after all. Personally, I have a
tiny, tiny little nature-class which means a great deal to me. And I
make everyone join who has one little spark of the Divine Fire, whoever
it may be. But then I'm afraid I'm a socialist--a rank, rank democrat."
The announcement provided ample opportunity for the more strenuous form
of egotism known as General Conversation.
"Oh, Lady Rossiter!" piped Iris; "but I always say that if the
socialists divided everything up and made everyone equal to-day, things
would all go back to the old way to-morrow!"
"I must admit that we thinkers are all in favour of democracy as a
rule," said Mr. Douglas Garrett, obviously resentful at having to agree
with anyone present; "but take the Keltic element alone--perhaps I
shall make my point best by putting my own case to you...."
His sombre gaze was fixed upon Miss Marchrose, who brazenly ignored the
whole of the last half of his sentence, and said pleasantly that she
knew nothing about politics and had always been brought up to believe
the whole subject quite unfit for feminine ears.
"This from an emancipated lady who has taken up a business career!"
said Edna, with a hint of mockery. "I quite imagined you an advocate of
woman's rights, Miss Marchrose."
"The cry of Woman's Rights, my dear Edna, was a catchword which has
passed out of the language while Miss Marchrose was still in the
nursery," said Sir Julian suavely; "consequently it probably conveys
nothing to her generation, whatever it may do to ours."
Julian was quite conscious of the anything but doubtful taste of this
chivalrous rebuke, and felt rather grateful to Iris for breaking in
with the artless and time-honoured statement that _she_ always had all
the rights she wanted, and men always seemed ready to give up their
seats in omnibuses or railway carriages so as to offer them to _her_.
She also added that she could not think why this was.
Sir Julian gave her the required explanation of the phenomenon,
while Mark turned with a certain aspect of relief to his neighbour,
Miss Marchrose, and Mr. Douglas Garrett and Lady Rossiter looked
disapprovingly at one another and both began to talk at once with
immense firmness and determination.
Julian never knew by what means his wife accomplished her end, but
at a later stage of dinner, when Mark and Miss Marchrose had been
laughing at one another's jokes for some time, Edna's voice suddenly
fell audible on the other side of the table addressing herself to Mr.
Garrett: "... but Clarence Isbister is the only son, and a particularly
nice boy."
Julian would not look at Miss Marchrose, but Edna's voice had been so
distinct that both Mark and she stopped speaking. It was Iris, however,
with the praiseworthy instinct of her kind for following up any clue,
however remote, that might eventually lead to an only son, who asked:
"Are those the Shropshire Isbisters?"
"A branch of the same family. But I was telling Mr.--er----"
Edna made a slight and insultingly-meant pretence at having forgotten
Mr. Garrett's name. Nobody supplied it, unless an exception be made of
Iris, who murmured that everyone called him Douglas.
"----About some dear cousins of mine, Isbisters--people who live in
Queen's Gate Gardens most of the year."
Lady Rossiter paused, looking straight at Miss Marchrose, who said
nothing at all, and looked calmly back at her.
There was complete silence for an instant. Before it had assumed
significance, Mark Easter broke it with cheerful trivialities.
Julian wondered whether Miss Marchrose was conscious of challenge.
Her face was inscrutable, but he felt by no means sure that she had not
very accurately interpreted Edna's unspoken warning that Mark Easter,
if necessary, should yet be told how Clarence Isbister had fared at the
hands of his betrothed.
When the not-too-successful dinner had come to an end, and Mark had
returned to the drawing-room with the reluctant Julian and a now
eloquent Garrett, whose discourse on the convivial proclivities of
"we-fellows-about-town" had met with the smallest possible amount
of attention from either of his seniors, success seemed within more
measurable distance of the evening's entertainment.
Julian was not, indeed, pleased to find the son and daughter of the
house sprawlingly occupying the hearthrug, to the exclusion of everyone
else from sight or heat of the fire, but he perceived that Ruthie and
Ambrose, objectionable in themselves, had at least served to obviate
possible mutual friction between the remaining occupants of the room.
Lady Rossiter was maintaining with persevering sweetness a kindly
catechism as to the tastes and habits of Master Ambrose Easter, who
responded with his newly-acquired monosyllable, reiterated upon a
loud, enquiring, unintelligent note. Iris was picturesquely turning
over a heap of music just where the lamplight fell on her bright, soft
hair, and Miss Marchrose, leaning back in an armchair, hearkened with
an unsympathetic expression to Ruthie's noisy and highly-emphasised
rendering of an objectionable poem blatantly entitled "I am Grandpa's
Little Sweetheart."
"Children, I thought you were in bed long ago," said Mark, eyeing them
in a rather dejected fashion.
"Sarah can't put us to bed yet, she's got to wash up," said Ambrose, in
a practical way.
"Listen, Daddy!" cried Ruthie:
"So _I_'m the little girlie who always has to _go_
And stand each happy Christmas beneath the mistle_toe_,
And Grandpa comes up softly----"
"Ruthie! Stop that."
"But Daddy, it's my piece!"
Mark sank into a chair with a sort of groan.
"The Rector's daughter gives them lessons, and she will teach them
these things," he confided to Miss Marchrose, who responded almost more
sympathetically than was courteous.
"We've just come to the end."
Accordingly, when Ruthie's final assertion of her hypothetical
grandparent's infatuation had died away, and Lady Rossiter had said
coldly, "Very nice, Ruthie dear," and Mr. Garrett had muttered
something about we votaries of the Muse to Iris, and everybody else had
maintained an unenthusiastic silence, Mark Easter bribed, commanded,
and cajoled his children into immediate disappearance from the
drawing-room.
"Auntie Iris will come and tuck you up, darlings," exclaimed Miss
Easter winningly, waiting until they might safely be assumed to be well
out of hearing, and merely with the evident intention of captivating
Mr. Douglas Garrett.
He immediately joined her as she stood, still fluttering music-leaves.
"Won't you sing?" he enquired tenderly.
But Iris was in the case of the majority of those of her sex known to
sing. She had studied for some time, reported ecstatic opinions of her
voice, its power and its quality, possessed a large quantity of music,
and had never been heard to utter a note.
"The Signora won't hear of my trying my voice yet," said Iris, in the
accustomed formula of these carefully sheltered nightingales. "She
thinks it may take eight or ten years to develop it, and then I might
even think of Grand Opera. It seems too quaint, doesn't it?"
This last tribute to modesty appearing to require no reply, Mr. Garrett
turned to Miss Marchrose.
"I fancy from your speaking voice that you can sing," he said kindly.
"We musicians are not over-critical, as I'm sure Iris will tell you,
and I'm sure it would be delightful to hear you."
Miss Marchrose looked at her host.
"Do," he said.
He and Julian listened to her, while Iris and Mr. Garrett retired to a
distant sofa and conversed in undertones, and Lady Rossiter put on one
of her kindest expressions.
Miss Marchrose had chosen the only old-fashioned volume from amongst
Iris's extremely modern selection, and she sang "Annie Laurie" and
"Jock o' Hazeldean." Her voice had the indescribable quality of pathos
that is sometimes heard in Irish voices, and was fairly well trained,
though it was quite evident that no cherishing Signora had ever had the
charge of it. It was not a beautiful voice, but every note within its
small compass was exceedingly sweet.
"Thanks--thanks so much," said Mr. Garrett from his sofa. "We Kelts
have a very soft corner for the Songs of Hame. Won't you try 'Loch
Lomond'?"
But Miss Marchrose said no, and that she was afraid that she had
forgotten that part of her audience was Scotch, or she would never
have attempted Scotch songs, thus making an end of the pretty illusion
that her selection had been out of compliment to Mr. Garrett and his
nationality.
"Isn't your voice sufficiently trained to be of a little use to you?"
Lady Rossiter asked the singer. "Private engagements are really not so
very difficult to get, and I'm sure you'd like adding to the music of
the world better than that eternal shorthand."
"I am better qualified to add to the music of the world on a typewriter
than on a piano," said Miss Marchrose.
"Go on singing," Julian told her.
This time she sang popular musical comedy songs, rather amusingly, and
with the slightest of accompaniments.
Mark roared with laughter, Lady Rossiter substituted a tolerant look
for the one of kindness, and Iris and Mr. Garrett exchanged a slight
shudder.
"Well done!" said Sir Julian, when she stopped. "But sing 'Annie
Laurie' once more."
He listened with peculiar satisfaction while she did as he had asked
her.
The dinner-party was broken up by Lady Rossiter, who said to Miss
Marchrose as she bade her good night:
"We mustn't keep your cab waiting; that 'King's Head' fly charges
abominably as it is. Besides, I don't forget that you have to be at
work at nine to-morrow morning. Good night."
She drew on her fur coat, preparatory to walking with Julian the few
hundred yards to their own gates.
As they turned away, Mark Easter handed Miss Marchrose into her cab,
and they heard him say, "Good night, Annie Laurie."