Deep in the Surrey hills, and long secluded from the world, there runs
a drowsy valley known to the rustics whom it nurtures as the Vale of
Caterham.
Of late years our English passion for the countryside has discovered
this enchanted spot; a railway has conveyed to it those who were
wise enough to seize early upon its subtle beauties, and the happy
homes of a population freed from urban care are still to be seen
rising upon every sward. Here Purley, which stands at the mouth of
the Vale, Kenley, Warlingham and Caterham Stations receive at morning
and discharge at evening the humbler breadwinners whom economic
circumstance compels to absent themselves from the haunting woods of
Surrey during the labours of the day. Some few, more blest, in mansions
more magnificent, can contemplate throughout untroubled hours the
solemn prospect of the hills.
Here it was that Mr. Clutterbuck was building the new home.
The sense of proportion which had always marked his life and had
contributed so largely to his financial success, was apparent upon
every side. He was content with some seven acres of ground, chosen in
the deepest recess of the dale, and, since water is rare upon that
chalk, he was content with but a small lake of graceful outline, and of
no more than eighteen inches in depth; in the midst an island, destined
with time to bear a clump of exotic trees, stood for the moment a bare
heap of whitish earth diversified rather than hidden by a few leafless
saplings.
The house itself had been raised with businesslike rapidity under the
directions of Mrs. Clutterbuck herself, who had the wisdom to employ
in all but the smallest details, an architect recommended by the Rev.
Isaac Fowle.
The whole was in the taste which the sound domestic sense of modern
England has substituted for the gloomy stucco and false Italian loggias
of our fathers. The first storey was of red brick which time would
mellow to a glorious and harmonious colour; the second was covered
with roughcast, while the third and fourth appeared as dormer windows
in an ample roof containing no less than fifteen gables. The chimneys
were astonishingly perfect examples of Somersetshire heading, and
the woodwork, which was applied in thin strips outside the main
walls of the building, was designed in the Cheshire fashion, with
draw-pins, tholes and spring-heads tinctured to a sober brown. The oak
was imported from the distant Baltic and strengthened with iron as a
precaution against the gape and the warp.
The glass, which was separate from the house and stood in a great dome
and tunnel higher up on the hillside where it sheltered the Victoria
Regia, the tobacco plant, the curious and carnivorous _Hepteryx
Rawlinsonia_, the palm and the common vine. A lodge guarded both
the northern and the southern entrances and a considerable approach
swept up past the two greyhounds which dignified the cast-iron gates;
themselves a copy, upon a smaller scale, of the more famous Guardini's
at Bensington, while the main door was of pure elm studded with one
hundred and fifty-three large nails. The rooms within were heated not
only by fireplaces of exquisite decoration, but also secretly by pipes
which ran beneath the floors and had this inconvenience, that the
captious, withdrawing from the fierceness of the blaze to some distant
margin of the apartment, would marvel at the suffocating heat which
struck them in the chance corner of their retirement.
Of the numerous bath-rooms fitted in copper and Dutch tiles, of the
chapel, the vesting chamber and the great number of bedrooms--many
with dressing-rooms attached--I need not speak.
The stables were connected with the mansion by a covered way, which
the guests could use in all weathers when there was occasion to visit
the stables and to admire Aster, West Wind, Cœur de Lion, Ex Calibur,
Abde-el-Kader, and the little pink pony, Pompey, which was permanently
lame, but had caught Mrs. Clutterbuck's eye at Lady Moreton's sale, and
had cost no less than 250 guineas.
"The Plâs" was the simple name suggested somewhat later by Charlie
Fitzgerald, but for the moment Mr. and Mrs. Clutterbuck, well
acquainted with the hesitation of all cultured people to adopt
pretentious names for their residences, were content to leave it
unchristened, and to allude to it among their acquaintance by nothing
more particular than the beautiful title of "Home."
In the spring of 1911 the last drier had been applied to the walls,
and with the early summer of that year Mr. Clutterbuck and his wife
sat before the first fire upon their new hearth. It was a fire of old
ship logs, and they were delighted to confirm the fact that it produced
small particoloured flames.
If it be wondered why a fortune of barely half a million should
have been saddled with so spacious a building, it must be replied
that a large part of every important income must of necessity be
expended in luxury, and that the form of luxury which most appealed
to this hospitable and childless pair was a roof under which they
might later entertain numerous gatherings of friends, while, to those
long accustomed during the active period of life to somewhat cramped
surroundings, ease of movement and spacious apartments are a great
and a legitimate solace in declining years. Here Mr. Clutterbuck, did
he weary of his study, could wander at ease into the morning-room;
from thence to the picture gallery which adjoined the well-lit hall,
or if he chose to pursue his tour he could find the peacock-room, the
Japanese room, the Indian room, and the Henri Quatre Alcove and Cosy
Corner, and the Jacobean Snuggery awaiting him in turn. Had he been a
younger man he would probably have added a swimming-bath; as it was,
the omission of this appendage was all that marred the splendid series
of apartments.
Doubtless he had overbuilt, as ordinary standards of wealth are
counted, but the standards of financial genius are not those of
commerce, and this very excess it was which brought him the first
beginnings of his public career. It was impossible that display upon
such a scale and so near London, should not attract the attention
of households at once well-born and generous. Our political world is
ever ready to admit to the directing society of the nation those whose
prudence and success in business have shown them worthy of undertaking
the task of government. In the height of the season, as Mr. and Mrs.
Clutterbuck were sitting at their breakfast, a little lonely in the
absence of any guests in that great house, the lady's post was found to
contain an invitation from no less a leader of London than the widow of
Mr. Barttelot Smith.
* * * * *
Mary Smith had about her every quality that entitled her to lead the
world, which she in fact did lead with admirable power. She had been
born a Bailey. Her mother was a Bunting; she was therefore of that well
established middle rank which forms perhaps the strongest core in our
governing class. Her husband, Barttelot Smith, of Bar Harbour, Maine,
and the New Bessemer, Birmingham, Alabama, had died in 1891, after a
very brief married life, which had barely sufficed to introduce him to
the Old Country and a world of which the hours and the digestion were
quite unsuitable to him.
The fortune of which his widow was left in command after her
bereavement was ample for the part it was her genius to play; and
though her means were not of that exaggerated sort to which modern
speculation has accustomed us, yet her roomy house in St. James's
Place, her Scotch forest, the two places in Cumberland, and the place
she rented in the heart of the Quorn permitted her to entertain upon
a generous scale; while large and historic but cosy Habberton on the
borders of Exmoor afforded a secure retreat for the few weeks in
August, which, if she were in England, she devoted to the society of
her intimates.
She was a woman of high culture, the intimate friend of the Prime
Minister--not as a politician, but as a poet--and through her sister,
Louise, the sister-in-law of the leader of the Opposition, whose
extraordinary polo play in the early eighties had endeared him to the
then lively girl much more than could family ties.
Such other connections as she had with the political world were
quite fortuitous. Her aunt, Lady Steyning, had seen, of course, the
most brilliant period of the Viceroyalty in India, before the recent
deplorable situation had destroyed at once the dignity and the leisure
of that post; while a second aunt, the oldest of the three surviving
Duchesses of Drayton, though living a very retired life at Molehurst,
naturally brought her into touch with the Ebbworths and all the Rusper
group of old Whig families, from young Lord Rusper, to whom she was
almost an elder sister, to the rather disreputable, but extremely
wealthy, Ockley couple, whom she chivalrously defended through the
worst of the storm.
It would be a great error to imagine that this charming and tactful
woman found her interests in such a world alone--she was far too
many sided for that. Her collection of Fragonards had many years ago
laid at her feet the whole staff of the Persian Embassy, and opened
an acquaintance with a world of Oriental experience; with it she
discovered and cultivated the two chief Eastern travellers of our
time, Lord Hemsbury and Mr. Teak; upon quite another side her modest
but sincere and indefatigable interest in the lives of the poor
had naturally led to a warm understanding between herself and Lord
Lambeth--the indefatigable empire builder whom the world had known as
Mr. Barnett of the M'Korio, and who now, as the aged Duke of Battersea,
had earned by his unceasing good deeds, the half-playful, half-reverend
nickname of "Peabody Yid" among the younger members of his set.
It was not a little thing to have gained the devotion of such a man,
and it was, in a sense, the summit of Mary Smith's achievement: but she
was more than a sympathetic and universal friend; she was also--as
such friends must always be--a power in both Political parties--and
perhaps in three.
It was said--I know not with how much justice--that young Pulborough
(who was his own father) owed his Secretaryship of State more to her
direct influence than to his blood relationship to the aunt by marriage
of her second brother-in-law, The MacClure; and there were rumours,
certainly exaggerated, that when the Board of Trade was filled after
Illingsbury had fled the country, Paston's marriage with her niece
Elizabeth had decided his appointment.
I am careful to omit any reference to the Attorney-General of the
day--it was mere gossip--nor will I tarry upon her brother at the Home
Office, or her Uncle Harry at Dublin Castle, lest I should lead the
reader to imagine that her well-earned influence depended on something
other than her great soul and admirable heart.
It was a generous impulse in such a woman to send the large gilt
oblong of pasteboard which was the key to her house, and to a seat at
her board, to the lonely and now ageing couple in their retirement in
the Caterham Valley. But Mrs. Smith, even in her most heartfelt and
spontaneous actions, had always in view the nature of our political
institutions. The sudden fortune of Mr. Clutterbuck had no doubt been
exaggerated in the numerous conversations upon it which had enlivened
her drawing-room; if so, it was an error upon the right side, and her
instinct told her that she could not be much to blame in giving such a
man the opportunity to enter into the fuller life of his country.
Every rank in our carefully ordered society has its conventions; one,
which will doubtless appear ridiculous to many of my readers, is that
which forbids, among the middle classes, the extension of a warm
invitation to people whom one never happens to have seen. The basis for
this suburban convention it would be impossible to discover, but then,
convention is not logical; and whatever may be the historic origin of
the fetich, certain it is that most of our merchants and professional
men would never dream of asking a Cabinet minister or a peer to their
houses until at least a formal introduction had passed between them and
the statesman so honoured.
The converse is not true at all; our public men would accept or reject
such an invite as convenience dictated, and would hardly remember
whether they had the pleasure of an acquaintance or no: they approach
men of lesser value with unaffected ease and find it difficult to
tolerate the strict ritual of a narrower class; but their own society,
as they would be the first to admit, has its own body of unreasoning
etiquette, the more difficult to recognise because it is so familiar;
Buffle himself, for instance, would hardly tolerate a question in
Parliament upon his recent escapade.
The varying codes of varying strata of society are the cause of
endless misunderstandings; such a misunderstanding might have arisen
now, but once again it was a woman that saved the jar. Mary Smith
had unwittingly gone near to the line of offence, in the eyes of Mr.
Clutterbuck at least, when she posted her well-meant card for July
2. Mrs. Clutterbuck had not only a wider social experience than her
husband, but could also rely upon the instinctive psychology of her
sex. She overruled at once, and very wisely, the petty objections of
her husband to the form in which the acquaintance had been offered
them, and returned, by the morning's post in the third person and upon
pink paper, an acceptance to the kindly summons.
There were three weeks only in which to anticipate and prepare for
this novel experience, but they were three weeks during which Mr.
Clutterbuck was so thoroughly convinced by his wife, as very sincerely
to regret the first comments he had made upon a custom to which his
ignorance of life had made him take exception.
Meanwhile, in St. James's Place, the large and comfortable rooms which
had once been those of the exiled Bourbons and later of the Boxing
Club were the scene of more than one conversation between Mary Smith
and her friends in the matter of those whom Charlie Fitzgerald lightly
called "the mysterious guests."
"The less mysterious they are to you," said Mary Smith, nodding at this
same Charlie Fitzgerald one very private afternoon at tea, "the better
for you." She shut her lips and nodded again at him with emphasis.
"Oh Lord! Mary," said Charlie Fitzgerald, "is it going to be another of
them?"
He was twenty years and more her junior, but she tolerated anything
from the son of her favourite cousin; besides which, every one called
her Mary, and if she was to be called Mary she would as soon be called
Mary by an intimate younger relation as by the crowd of chance men and
women of her own age who used her name so freely.
"Yes," went on Mrs. Smith with decision, "it's going to be another of
them; and this time I hope you'll stick."
Her trim little body was full of energy as she said it, and her face
full of determination.
"It's never been my fault," said Fitzgerald reproachfully. "Was it my
fault that Isaacs got into trouble, or that old Burpham lost his temper
about the motor-car?"
"The last was your fault certainly," answered his cousin vivaciously.
"If you take a man's money, you mustn't use his motor-car without his
leave."
"He's an old cad," yawned Fitzgerald lazily.
"Every one knows that," said Mrs. Smith, "and no one thinks the better
of you for not understanding an old cad. It's a private secretary's
business to understand.... You won't get anything from me, anyhow, I
can tell you."
"You've said that before," said Charlie, looking down at her with a
smile.
"Yes, and I have kept it, too," said Mary.
To which he answered with some emphasis: "By God you have!" and looking
out into the trees in the Green Park he fell into a reverie, the
monotone of which was his large and increasing indebtedness. It did
not trouble him, but it furnished a constant food for his thoughts and
lent him just that interest in the acquirement of money which his Irish
character perhaps needed.
Later, as the room filled with callers, the conversation upon the
Clutterbucks became more general. A certain Mr. Higginson, who was
very smart indeed and wrote for the papers, was able to give the most
precise information: Old Clutterbuck had been worth four millions; he'd
dropped a lot on house property in Paris. He was worth nearly three
anyhow, but he was a miserly old beggar. He had made it by frightening
Charley Hatton.
At this all of his audience were pleased and several laughed.
"I'd frighten the beggar for less than four millions," said Charlie
Fitzgerald. He spread out his arms and made a loud roaring noise to
show how he'd do it, to the huge amusement of an aged general who loved
youth and high spirits, but to the no small annoyance of Mr. Higginson,
who hated being interrupted.
"Nonsense!" said Mary Smith, pouring out tea for a new caller in the
old familiar way (she detested a pack of servants and kept hers for
the most part in the double-decked basement underground). "Nonsense! I
believe he made it perfectly honestly. He's got a dear old face!"
Mary Smith had never seen his face, but a good word is never thrown
away.
"He's got an old hag of a wife," blurted out the General, "an old----"
Mary Smith put up her hand. "Now do be careful--you used that word only
last Thursday."
"Good Lord!" said Charlie Fitzgerald; "what a long time." And the
General and he, who had lunched together that same day, were amused
beyond the ordinary at the simple jest.
"I've never seen his wife," said Mary Smith severely and with perfect
truth. "She's probably just like everybody else. You people make up
ideas in your heads about classes that don't exist. Everybody's just
like everybody else.... Look at old Bolney!"
"Damned if he's like anybody else!" said Miss Mosel, taking her
cigarette out of her mouth and picking a long shred of yellow tobacco
from her underlip at the same time. "Mamma calls him Cow Bolney."
"She's quite wrong, my dear, thoroughly wrong," said the old General
fussily. "I wouldn't have believed it of your mother. I knew her when
she was your age."
"Don't believe it now," said Mary Smith soothingly, "Victoria tells
lies."
"No, I don't," said Miss Mosel stolidly. "Anyhow I'm coming to see old
Clutterbuck."
"Not if I know it," said Mary Smith grimly.
"Oh, I don't mean at dinner," caught up Victoria Mosel lightly. "I
wouldn't rag anybody's dinner, but you can't prevent my coming on,
after."
Mrs. Smith gazed at her imploringly. "Don't play the fool, Vic," she
begged.
"I shan't play the fool," said Victoria. "I only want to look on: I
won't touch."
"Who you goin' to get?" asked Charlie.
"Well, there's _you_," spreading out her fingers in what had been for
half a lifetime a pretty affectation of hers, and ticking them off.
"And there's old Mother D. of Drayton, and I shall try to get the Duke."
"Oh, your perpetual Peabody Yid," began Charlie.
"Don't," said his cousin, laughing with great charm.
"Well, yes, the Duke, and I've got _him_ already," she said pointing to
the General. "And ... and I must have William."
Vic Mosel and Mr. Higginson shouted together: "Risking William! Oh! I
say!" while Charlie's eye gleamed at the mention of her brother's name
and he gloated on the prospect of a really good shindy.
"Oh, fiddlesticks-ends," said Mary Smith. "He's a white man: besides
some one must do host for me. _You're_ too green" (she said that to
Fitzgerald), "and he'll behave all right. I'll warn him."
"Then," she went on hurriedly, "then there's Mrs. Carey and her mother,
and the Steynings--I can't remember the whole lot. Perkins would tell
you. There's sixteen, I know that."
"I'll hold the sponge for William Bailey," said Charlie solemnly; "the
General supports the Duke."
"If there's any row," said Mary Smith to him vigorously, "I shall know
who started it, and who will lose by it. William's a dear."
And so the flashing talk went round, while, with Mr. Clutterbuck in the
Caterham glens, the hours crept on towards an appointed day; and the
horses were exercised and the motors ran, and the lake slowly filled,
and parties, a little larger with each succeeding week, groups of their
old friends and of their new, met and drank champagne at lunch, at
dinner, and at supper too, until June was ended.
The second of July was warm and fine: an open motor would have pleased
Mr. Clutterbuck for the run to town,--but Mrs. Clutterbuck, Mrs.
Clutterbuck knew! It was in the Limousine that they swept up the
London Road, past the Palace and round into St. James's Place. Mr.
Clutterbuck, who had long secretly wondered how those great houses upon
the Park were approached at all, and who had half believed that some
royal entry, hidden from the vulgar gaze, led into them, saw this great
mystery solved: he was silent upon his discovery. He wondered whether
one should tell the motor to go into the stables of the house, or what:
and again Mrs. Clutterbuck knew. She left it for the motor man and the
big flunkeys to thresh out between them.
When they were at table the many lights, the much wine and the more
talk entered her husband's soul and warmed it. The lights greatly
pleased him; the wine he drank freely. He was beginning to live.
He noted curiously the faces round the great table, and asked his
neighbour the names of more than one; that neighbour was Mrs. Carey,
than whom he could have had no better guide, for she knew every face
in London, to the number of two hundred or more. She pointed out the
large, beneficent features of the Duke of Battersea where he sat at
Mary Smith's right, hardly able to take his eyes from her face. Mr.
Clutterbuck in his turn gazed long and with increasing awe at the man
whose name stood for the power of England in so many distant harbours,
and whose career in finance was the model and the envy of all his own
society. He strained to listen and catch some word falling from his
lips, but the hubbub was too loud. The bright young laughing face
to his left was that of Charlie Fitzgerald, but he did not need the
information, for Mary Smith had been careful to introduce the lad with
an unmistakable intonation, and, as though by inadvertence, twice
over. The tall, square-faced, whiskered, spectacled man opposite who
sipped his soup as though every taste of it were to be thought out and
appreciated, was, he learnt, Mr. William Bailey, the brother of his
hostess; and as Mrs. Carey told him that name, she laughed discreetly,
for the eccentricities of Mr. William Bailey, though they were not
always harmless, were never without point to women of Mrs. Carey's
superficial character. She saw nothing in them but matter for her own
amusement.
Nothing perhaps struck Mr. Clutterbuck more in the great society he
had entered than the superb ease which distinguished it. Every member
of that world seemed free to pursue his own appetite or inclination
without restraint of form, and yet the whole was bound by just that
invisible limit which is the framework of good breeding. Here on his
right was Lord Steyning, talking at the top of his voice; a little
nearer Charlie Fitzgerald was whispering across his neighbour, Miss
Carey, to another guest whose name Mr. Clutterbuck did not know. The
Duke of Battersea felt no necessity to talk to any one beside his
hostess, or to take his eyes for more than a moment from her face;
while Mr. William Bailey shocked no one by maintaining a perfect
silence, and staring gloomily through his spectacles at a "Reynolds"
of his great grandfather, the Nabob, which he had frequently declared
in mixed company to be a forgery. It was this atmosphere of freedom
that gave Mr. Clutterbuck his chief pleasure in an evening which he
heartily, thoroughly, and uninterruptedly enjoyed.
When the women had gone away and the men were sitting at their ease,
with the silent William Bailey for host, a maze of acute interest
surrounded the merchant; he could hear the Duke of Battersea, a
little grumpy in the absence of the hostess, praising Lord Steyning
to his face for the arrangement of his garden, and turning his back
on Mr. Bailey, which gentleman, speaking for almost the first time
that evening, shoved up close to Mr. Clutterbuck and maintained his
character for oddity by asking how he liked the Peabody Yid.
Mr. Clutterbuck, uncertain whether this were a novel, a play, or a new
game, but unwilling to betray his ignorance, said that it depended upon
taste.
"It does," said Mr. Bailey, with emphasis; "it's a jolly house, isn't
it?"
Mr. Clutterbuck affirmed the grandeur and admirable appointment of
the house, but he could not help wondering whether William Bailey
would have been more pleased if he had found something to criticise.
Then, as Charlie Fitzgerald turned to talk to Mr. Clutterbuck, William
Bailey relapsed again into his silence, an attitude of mind which he
diversified in no way save by pulling out a pencil and sketching, with
some exaggeration of the ears, nape, and curled ringlets, the back
view presented to him by the venerable Duke of Battersea.
Upstairs, Mary Smith, squatting familiarly beside Mrs. Clutterbuck,
giggled into her private ear with that delightful familiarity which had
ever put her guests into her intimate confidence, and swept away every
vestige of _gêne_ and of disparity in status. This charm of manner it
was for which those whom she still honoured chiefly loved her, and
which those whom she had seen fit to drop most poignantly regretted.
Upon Mrs. Clutterbuck, as she reclined on a Tutu Louis XVII., in an
attitude full of charm and of repose yet instinct with self-control,
the spell of Mary Smith was powerful indeed. Her talk was of the
great--and of their secretaries. She remembered stories of ambassadors,
and of their secretaries as well; and in what she had to say concerning
Secretaries of State, yet other secretaries of these secretaries
appeared--unpaid secretaries and under-secretaries, parliamentary
secretaries, and common negligible secretaries who did secretarial
work. The functions, position, and weight of a secretary had never
seemed so clear to Mrs. Clutterbuck before; nay, until that moment she
had given but little heed to the secretary's trade. She saw it now.
But all this was done so deftly and with such tact, and interrupted
with such merry little screams of laughter; in the course of it Mrs.
Clutterbuck was herself compelled to make so many confidences that the
atmosphere was one of mutual information, and the guest was confident
that she had contributed more than the hostess. When Mary Smith moved
off to play general post with the guests, and, as her charming phrase
went, "to make them to talk to one another," Mrs. Clutterbuck found how
singularly less a woman of the world was Mrs. Smith's somewhat prudish
aunt, Lady Steyning, long at Simla, some time our ambassadress at
Washington, and now about to be at the head of the Embassy in Paris. As
for Mrs. Carey, Mrs. Clutterbuck regarded her with loathing.
Downstairs Charlie Fitzgerald had been drinking port, and, keeping his
right hand firmly fixed upon the neck of the decanter, he had poured
out wine at intervals for Mr. Clutterbuck with a gesture which he
falsely termed "passing the bottle." He had not his cousin's manner or
science in the handling of a conversation, but the wine, though bad,
was a bond between them; they drank it largely, especially Fitzgerald:
it enabled him to recite with passion and Mr. Clutterbuck to receive
with faith, anecdotes of yet another batch of secretaries, and of Mr.
Fitzgerald's own adventures in his confidential relations with the
discredited Isaacs and the aged but irascible Lord Burpham; a last
engagement which he had apparently terminated from his fixed decision
to undertake no such work in the future, but to live the life of a
private gentleman, and possibly to enter the House of Commons.
It was impossible for Mr. Clutterbuck not to contrast again the
spontaneity and ease of the world round him with the much more sterile
associations of his middle and later manhood. Nor did anything please
him more in that ease and spontaneity than the Irish good nature
with which Charlie Fitzgerald poured at his feet his wealth of
social experience, and especially his experience in that secretarial
phase which Mr. Clutterbuck sincerely regretted that he should have
entirely abandoned. He could not help thinking, as he looked at the
handsome curly head and merry eyes, and as he heard the names of
the great and good flash constantly from the lips before him, how
perfect would that arrangement be which should permit some humbler
but similar man to be to him what Charlie Fitzgerald seemed to have
been to the eminent financier and the hot-tempered politician;
a-second-and-a-younger-eye-and-brain.
As they came into the drawing-room together, they were already fast
friends, and such was the effect of the atmosphere about him and
the exhilarating evening he had passed, that Mrs. Smith found it
quite impossible to make her Clutterbuck speak to any one save his
new-found acquaintance: a disappointment to those ladies who had heard
exaggerated accounts of his wealth, and were already interested in his
crescent-shaped moustaches and the fan of grey hair which he displayed
over his considerable forehead.
Mr. Clutterbuck noticed with some astonishment--if anything could
astonish him now--the entry of further guests at a late hour. They
came, as it seemed to him, without introduction and without ceremonial.
And he wondered, as he followed the imperial carriage and gestures of
Victoria Mosel among the rest, whether he also in some future year
might be found drifting thus through open doors free from the weary
necessities of etiquette. He doubted it.
They left at half-past eleven, and all the way home Mrs. Clutterbuck
complained of fatigue. But her husband, upon his arrival, felt it
necessary to continue the evening, and far into the early morning drank
yet more port, and considered the change in his life.