If you're in the way, he just walks over you – and sometimes when you're not: for fun, I suppose."
"Alfred says he's very clever," observed Lady Semingham, in a tone that evaded any personal responsibility for the truth of the statement.
"Well, I dislike him very much," declared Adela.
"We won't have him again when you're coming, dear," promised her friend soothingly.
Adela looked at her, hesitated, opened her fan, shut it again, and smiled.
"Oh, I didn't mean that, Bessie," she said with half a laugh. "Do, please."
"But if you dislike him – "
"Why, my dear, doesn't one hate half the men one likes meeting – and all the women!"
Lady Semingham smiled amiably. She did not care to think out what that meant; it was Adela's way, just as it was her husband's way to laugh at many things that seemed to her to afford no opening for mirth. But Adela was not to escape. Semingham himself appeared suddenly at her elbow, and observed,
"That's either nonsense or a truism, you know."
"Neither," said Adela with spirit; but her defence was interrupted by Evan Haselden.
"I'm going," said he, and he looked out of temper. "I've got another place to go to. And anyhow – "
"Well?"
"I'd like to be somewhere where that chap Ruston isn't for a little while."
Adela glanced across. Ruston was still talking to Marjory Valentine.
"What can he find to say to her?" thought Adela.
"What the deuce she finds to talk about to that fellow, I can't think," pursued Evan, and he flung off to bid Lady Semingham good-night.
Adela caught her host's eye and laughed. Lord Semingham's eyes twinkled.
"It's a big province," he observed, "so there may be room for him – out there."
"I," said Adela, with an air of affected modesty, "have ventured, subject to your criticism, to dub him Juggernaut."
"H'm," said Semingham, "it's a little obvious, but not so bad for you."
CHAPTER III
MRS. DENNISON'S ORDERS
Next door to Mrs. Dennison's large house in Curzon Street there lived, in a small house, a friend of hers, a certain Mrs. Cormack. She was a Frenchwoman, who had been married to an Englishman, and was now his most resigned widow. She did not pretend to herself, or to anybody else, that Mr. Cormack's death had been a pure misfortune, and by virtue of her past trials – perhaps, also, of her nationality – she was keenly awake to the seamy side of matrimony. She would rhapsodise on the joys of an ideal marriage, with a skilful hint of its rarity, and condemn transgressors with a charitable reservation for insupportable miseries. She was, she said, very romantic. Tom Loring, however (whose evidence was tainted by an intense dislike of her), declared that affaires du cœur interested her only when one at least of the parties was lawfully bound to a third person; when both were thus trammelled, the situation was ideal. But the loves of those who were in a position to marry one another, and had no particular reason for not following that legitimate path to happiness, seemed to her (still according to Tom) dull, uninspiring – all, in fact, that there was possible of English and stupid. She hardly (Tom would go on, warming to his subject) believed in them at all, and she was in the habit of regarding wedlock merely as a condition precedent to its own violent dissolution. Whether this unhappy mode of looking at the matter were due to her own peculiarities, or to those of the late Mr. Cormack, or to those of her nation, Tom did not pretend to say; he confined himself to denouncing it freely, and to telling Mrs. Dennison that her next-door neighbour was in all respects a most undesirable acquaintance; at which outbursts Mrs. Dennison would smile.
Mrs. Dennison, coming out on to the balcony to see if her carriage were in sight down the street, found her friend close to her elbow. Their balconies adjoined, and friendship had led to a little gate being substituted for the usual dwarf-wall of division. Tom Loring erected the gate into an allegory of direful portent. Mrs. Cormack passed through it, and laid an affectionate grasp on Maggie Dennison's arm.
"You're starting early," she remarked.
"I'm going a long way – right up to Hampstead. I've promised Harry to call on some people there."
"Ah! Who?"
"Their name's Carlin. He knows Mr. Carlin in business. Mr. Carlin's a friend of Mr. Ruston's."
"Oh, of Ruston's? I like that Ruston. He is interesting – inspiring."
"Is he?" said Mrs. Dennison, buttoning her glove. "You'd better marry him, Berthe."
"Marry him? No, indeed. I think he would beat one."
"Is that being inspiring? I'm glad Harry's not inspiring."
"Oh, you know what I mean. He's a man who – "
Mrs. Cormack threw up her arms as though praying for the inspired word. Mrs. Dennison did not wait for it.
"There's the carriage. Good-bye, dear," she said.
Mrs. Dennison started with a smile on her face. Berthe was so funny; she was like a page out of a French novel. She loved anything not quite respectable, and peopled the world with heroes of loose morals and overpowering wills. She adored a dominating mind and lived in the discovery of affinities. What nonsense it all was – so very remote from the satisfactory humdrum of real life. One kept house, and gave dinners, and made the children happy, and was fond of one's husband, and life passed most – Here Mrs. Dennison suddenly yawned, and fell to hoping that the Carlins would not be oppressively dull. She had been bored all day long; the children had been fretful, and poor Harry was hurt and in low spirits because of a cruel caricature in a comic paper, and Tom Loring had scolded her for laughing at the caricature (it hit Harry off so exactly), and nobody had come to see her, except a wretch who had once been her kitchenmaid, and had come to terrible grief, and wanted to be taken back, and of course couldn't be, and had to be sent away in tears with a sovereign, and the tears were no use and the sovereign not much.
The Carlins fortunately proved tolerably interesting in their own way. Carlin was about fifty-five – an acute man of business, it seemed, and possessed by an unwavering confidence in the abilities of Willie Ruston. Mrs. Carlin was ten or fifteen years younger than her husband – a homely little woman, with a swarm of children. Mrs. Dennison wondered how they all fitted into the small house, but was told that it was larger by two good rooms than their old dwelling in the country town, whence Willie had summoned them to take a hand in his schemes. Willie had not insisted on the coal business being altogether abandoned – as Mrs. Carlin said, with a touch of timidity, it was well to have something to fall back upon – but he required most of Carlin's time now, and the added work made residence in London a necessity. In spite of Mr. Carlin's air of hard-headedness, and his wife's prudent recognition of the business aspect of life, they neither of them seemed to have a will of their own. Willie – as they both called him – was the Providence, and the mixture of reverence and familiarity presented her old acquaintance in a new light to Maggie Dennison. Even the children prattled about "Willie," and their mother's rebukes made "Mr. Ruston" no more than a strange and transitory effort. Mrs. Dennison wondered what there was in the man – consulting her own recollections of him in hope of enlightenment.
"He takes such broad
