glad, Mr. Ruston? Some people like being married."
"Oh, I don't claim to be above it, Mrs. Dennison," he answered with a laugh, "but a wife would have been a great hindrance to me all these years."
There was a simple and bona fide air about his statement; it was not raillery; and Mrs. Dennison laughed in her turn.
"Oh, how like you!" she murmured.
Mr. Ruston, with a passing gleam of surprise at her merriment, bade her a very unemotional farewell, and left her. She sat down and waited idly for her husband's return. Presently he came in. He had caught Ruston in the hall, delivered his pamphlet, and was whistling cheerfully. He took a chair near his wife.
"Rum chap that!" he said. "But he's got a good deal of stuff in him;" and he resumed his lively tune.
The tune annoyed Mrs. Dennison. To suffer whistling without visible offence was one of her daily trials. Harry's emotions and reflections were prone to express themselves through that medium.
"I didn't do half-badly, to-day," said Harry, breaking off again. "Old Tom had got it all splendidly in shape for me – by Jove, I don't know what I should do without Tom – and I think I put it pretty well. But, of course, it's a subject that doesn't catch on with everybody."
It was the dullest subject in the world; it was also, in all likelihood, one of the most unimportant; and dull subjects are so seldom unimportant that the perversity of the combination moved Maggie Dennison to a wondering pity. She rose and came behind the chair where her husband sat. Leaning over the back, she rested her elbows on his shoulders, and lightly clasped her hands round his neck. He stopped his whistle, which had grown soft and contented, laughed, and kissed one of the encircling hands, and she, bending lower, kissed him on the forehead as he turned his face up to look at her.
"You poor dear old thing!" she said with a smile and a sigh.
CHAPTER II
THE COINING OF A NICKNAME
When it was no later than the middle of June, Adela Ferrars, having her reputation to maintain, ventured to sum up the season. It was, she said, a Ruston-cum-Violetta season. Violetta's doings and unexampled triumphs have, perhaps luckily, no place here; her dancing was higher and her songs more surpassing in another dimension than those of any performer who had hitherto won the smiles of society; and young men who are getting on in life still talk about her. Ruston's fame was less widespread, but his appearance was an undeniable fact of the year. When a man, the first five years of whose adult life have been spent on a stool in a coal merchant's office, and the second five somewhere (an absolutely vague somewhere) in Southern or Central Africa, comes before the public, offering in one closed hand a new empire, or, to avoid all exaggeration, at least a province, asking with the other opened hand for three million pounds, the public is bound to afford him the tribute of some curiosity. When he enlists in his scheme men of eminence like Mr. Foster Belford, of rank like Lord Semingham, of great financial resources like Dennison Sons & Company, he becomes one whom it is expedient to bid to dinner and examine with scrutinising enquiry. He may have a bag of gold for you; or you may enjoy the pleasure of exploding his prestige; at least, you are timely and up-to-date, and none can say that your house is a den of fogies, or yourself, in the language made to express these things (for how otherwise should they get themselves expressed?) on other than "the inner rail."
It chanced that Miss Ferrars arrived early at the Seminghams, and she talked with her host on the hearth-rug, while Lady Semingham was elaborately surveying her small but comely person in a mirror at the other end of the long room. Lord Semingham was rather short and rather stout; he hardly looked as if his ancestors had fought at Hastings – perhaps they had not, though the peerage said they had. He wore close-cut black whiskers, and the blue of his jowl witnessed a suppressed beard of great vitality. His single eye-glass reflected answering twinkles to Adela's pince-nez, and his mouth was puckered at the world's constant entertainment; men said that he found his wife alone a sufficient and inexhaustible amusement.
"The Heathers are coming," he said, "and Lady Val and Marjory, and young Haselden, and Ruston."
"Toujours Ruston," murmured Adela.
"And one or two more. What's wrong with Ruston? There is, my dear Adela, no attitude more offensive than that of indifference to what the common herd finds interesting."
"He's a fright," said Adela. "You'd spike yourself on that bristly beard of his."
"If you happened to be near enough, you mean? – a danger my sex and our national habits render remote. Bessie!"
Lady Semingham came towards them, with one last craning look at her own back as she turned. She always left the neighbourhood of a mirror with regret.
"Well?" she asked with a patient little sigh.
"Adela is abusing your friend Ruston."
"He's not my friend, Alfred. What's the matter, Adela?"
"I don't think I like him. He's hard."
"He's got a demon, you see," said Semingham. "For that matter we all have, but his is a whopper."
"Oh, what's my demon?" cried Adela. Is not oneself always the most interesting subject?
"Yours? Cleverness; He goads you into saying things one can't see the meaning of."
"Thanks! And yours?"
"Grinning – so I grin at your things, though I don't understand 'em."
"And Bessie's?"
"Oh, forgive me. Leave us a quiet home."
"And now, Mr. Ruston's?"
"His is – "
But the door opened, and the guests, all arriving in a heap, just twenty minutes late, flooded the room and drowned the topic. Another five minutes passed, and people had begun furtively to count heads and wonder whom they were waiting for, when Evan Haselden was announced. Hot on his heels came Ruston, and the party was completed.
Mr. Otto Heather took Adela Ferrars in to dinner. Her heart sank as he offered his arm. She had been heard to call him the silliest man in Europe; on the other hand, his wife, and some half-dozen people besides, thought him the cleverest in London.
"That man," he said, swallowing his soup and nodding his head towards Ruston, "personifies all the hideous tendencies of the age – its brutality, its commercialism, its selfishness, its – "
Miss Ferrars looked across the table. Ruston was seated at Lady Semingham's left hand, and she was prattling to him in her sweet indistinct little voice. Nothing in his appearance warranted Heather's outburst, unless it were a sort of alert and almost defiant readiness, smacking of a challenge to catch him napping.
"I'm not a mediævalist myself," she observed, and prepared to endure the penalty of an exposé of Heather's theories. During its progress, she peered – for her near sight was no affectation – now and again at the occasion of her sufferings. She had heard a good deal about him – something from her host, something from Harry Dennison, more from the paragraphists who had scented their prey, and gathered from the four quarters of heaven (or wherever they dwelt) upon him. She knew about the coal merchant's office, the impatient flight from it, and the rush over the seas; there were stories of real naked want, where a bed and shelter bounded for the moment all a life's aspirations. She summed him up as a buccaneer modernised; and one does not expect buccaneers to be amiable, while culture
