"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."
"Someone 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'oeuvres. 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
Johannesbourgeois, 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 over-education 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 anyone
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."