was ridiculously moral and conventional, and, except for her voice, she might have been a shopkeeper's wife in any suburb.
"My dear Penelope," said Titania, "I'm glad to see you again. You look positively sweet, my darling, after all these parties and carryings-on, and what not, and now at last you are quite grown up and yourself and your own and twenty-one. I wish I was. I was nine stone then exactly,—not a pound more. Oh, and it's you, Ethel. I hope your dear papa is not overworking himself, now he's a cabinet minister. Cabinet ministers will overwork themselves. I've known them die of it. Tell him what I say, will you? But of course he will pay no attention, and in time will die like the rest. It's no use advising men to be sensible. I've given it up. Ah, here at last is Lord Bradstock."
Titania flowed on wonderfully; she flowed exactly like the twisting piece of glass in a mechanical clock which mimics a jet of water. She turned round and never advanced. But Augustin, Lord Bradstock, was as calm as a mill-pond, as a mere in the mountains. He was tall and thin and ruddy and white-haired at fifty. He had been twice a widower.
"Why at last, Titania?" he yawned, as he stood with Penelope's hand in his. He was still her guardian in his heart, though she was out of tutelage.
"I say at last, Augustin, because you were not here before me," cried Titania. "And I expected you to be here before me from what you said this morning. I told you I meant to come in and speak quietly and seriously to Penelope, and you said you would come, too."
Penelope's eyes thanked her guardian, and they smiled at him half-secretly, saying as plain as any words: "What a dear you are to come in and dilute aunty for me!"
"Yes," said Bradstock, "I think I said I would prepare her."
"I've not had a single chance lately to say a word for her good," cried Titania, "what with this person and that person and the horde. I think it is time now, Penelope, that you reorganized your amazing circle of acquaintances, mostly men, by the way. While Augustin was responsible for you, of course you were obstinate, but now you are in a position of greater freedom you will see the advisability of being guided by your aunt. I'm sure, I'm positive of it."
Now the real sore point with the duchess was this matter of the "horde." It was the only picturesque phrase she ever invented in her life, and without any doubt it did characterize in some measure the remarkable collection of men who were pretenders to Penelope's hand and fortune.
"Out of the entire, the entire—"
"Caboodle," said Bradstock, suggestively.
The duchess shook her head like a horse in fly-time.
"No, Augustin, not caboodle; pray, what is caboodle? Out of the entire—lot, Penelope, there are hardly three who belong to your class. I entreat you to go through them and dismiss those of whom we can't approve, I and Lord Bradstock."
"Don't drag me in," said Bradstock. "They are all very good fellows; I approve of them all."
"Tut, tut," said Titania, "is this the way you help, Augustin? You are a hindrance. I believe it is entirely owing to you that Penelope has these strange and alarming ideas. Yes, my dear, I'm afraid it is. He is not the kind of man who should have been your guardian. I ought to have been consulted. I knew a bishop who would have been admirable, most admirable. He's dead, dear man, and the present one is a scandal to the Protestant Church, what with incense and processions and candles and confession-boxes. But, as I was saying, I do hope you will dismiss some of these men. And I hope you will be sensible and not say shocking things. No one should say shocking things till they are married, and even then with discretion. Socialism and reform and marriage! Dear me, you really must not talk about marriage, but you must get married to a suitable person. I'm sure, Augustin, we should have no insuperable objection to, let us say, young Bramber. He'll be an earl by and by. And you mustn't talk about reforming society, my dear love. It is quite impossible to reform society without abolishing it, my pet. Ethel darling, many cabinet ministers have owned as much to me with much alarm, almost with tears. It's no use trying. Tell your dear father so, Ethel. I forgot to mention it the other day when we discussed the London County Council and its terrible extravagance compared with the economy of the government. We talked, too, about the War Office, and I told him that it couldn't be reformed without abolishing it, which was not to be thought of for an instant. What should we do without a War Office, as we are always fighting? He sighed deeply, poor man. Dr. Lumsden Griff says sighing is cardiac in its origin, and I wish your father would see him, Ethel. He's the first doctor in London for the ventricles of the heart. So every one says. But about your ideas, Penelope—"
"Good heavens, aunty, I haven't any left," said Penelope. This was not in the least surprising, for Titania reduced any ordinary gathering to idiocy at the shortest notice.
"Oh, but you have," said Titania, "and society cannot endure ideas, my love. Anything but ideas, darling."
"Well, well," sighed Bradstock, "what is the use of talking to her, Titania? Pen is Pen, and there's an end of it."
"I wish there was," cried the duchess. "But she rails against marriage. And she's only twenty-one. Dear, dear me!"
"She pays too much attention to you married women," said Bradstock. "How's the duke, by the way?"
As the duke was engaged in running two theatres at the same time, not wholly in the interests of art or finance, Bradstock might have asked after his health at some other juncture. Titania ignored him.
"She rails against marriage," lamented Titania.
"I don't," said Penelope.
"You do," said her aunt.
"It's only the horrible publicity," said Penelope, "and the way things are done, and the ghastly presents and the bishops and the newspaper men and the horrible crowd outside and the worse crowd inside, and all the horrid fluff and flummery of it. If I'm ever married, I'll get it done in a registrar's office."
"Oh, Penelope," wailed Ethel.
But Titania became terrible.
"You shall not be, Penelope," she cried. "I could not stand it. As your aunt, my dear— Oh, my love, I knew some one who was married in that way, and it was a most shocking affair, and of course it turned out that he had been married before and was a bigamist. The scandal was hushed up, and the first wife, who was the sweetest girl, and died of consumption shortly afterward at her father's vicarage in Kent or Yorkshire, near Pevensey or Pontefract; at any rate it began with a P, and the man, though a villain, was a gentleman, for he married the second one all over again in a foreign place, with a chaplain officiating; much better than a registrar, who can marry you, I'm told, in pajamas if he likes, though not like a bishop, which one might have expected in his case. You all knew him slightly, at any rate. Never, my dear, get married at a registrar's."
"It's better than the open shame of a cathedral and a bishop," said Penelope. "Being married is one's private business, and it's nothing but horrid savagery to have crowds there!"
"Bravo!" said Bradstock, and Titania turned on him.
"Did I not say all this was your fault, Augustin? You were no more fit to be her guardian than you are to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Am I a savage, Penelope? and did I not get married in a cathedral, a most beautiful cathedral, all Gothic and newly restored at a vast expense? My dear, I am amazed and horrified and shocked to think that you should not perceive the quite exquisite fitness of being married in a piece of lovely Gothic architecture, to the very loveliest music, breathing over Eden, and so on, while all your dearest friends shed tears of purest joy—"
"To
