see her got rid of," said Bradstock.
And even Ethel Mytton laughed.
"Augustin! Ethel Mytton! How can you say such things and laugh? It's wicked; it's indecent!"
"Yes," said Penelope, "that's what I say. There's nothing to choose between your way and the American way the millionaire women have over there, when they hold a flower-show in a gilded room, and get married under a bell of roses at the cost of a hundred thousand dollars. I'd rather be knocked down by a nice savage, or run away with by a viking, or caught by a pirate. I won't be breathed over in Eden by a stuffy crowd. If—if—"
"Oh, if what?" gasped Titania.
"If I ever do get married," said Penelope, "I'll never tell any of you beforehand!"
"Good heavens!" said the duchess, "you won't tell us?"
"I won't."
"You'll let us find out! Shall I know nothing of the marriage of my brother's child till I read it in the Times? It shall not be! Augustin, does she mean it?"
Augustin lighted a cigarette and walked to the window, which looked down on the traffic of Piccadilly.
"I give it up," said Augustin. "When could I answer riddles? Do you mean it, Pen?"
And Penelope, rising up, stood on the hearthrug and, looking like the descendant of a viking and some fair Venetian, declared that she did mean it. And she further went on to say, in great haste and with a most remarkable flow of words, that it shouldn't be in the Times or any other paper. And she said that if Titania, Duchess of Goring, was her aunt, it couldn't be helped, and that her principles were more to her than any one's approval. Though she loved her aunt and her dear sweet guardian, these same principles were even dearer than they were. And she said that they had no principles ("not even Guardy dear"), and that they only thought of a demon thing called Society, which was at once a fetich and a phantom. And she became so excited that she talked like a real woman orator upon a platform, and expressed her intention of using her influence to bring about reform, especially in such matters and with regard to young men who did nothing, and seemed to think they had been created for that very purpose. And, as she talked, there wasn't a man in the world who would not have yearned to take his coat off and ask for a pick and shovel at the least, for she was as beautiful as any young goddess fresh from Grecian foam or from high Olympus. Even Bradstock sighed to think that he had never done anything for the human race, which required so much help, but sit in the Upper House, a speechless phantom. And Ethel Mytton cried with an imparted enthusiasm, while the duchess wept with horror.
"And more than that," said Penelope, who broke down in her eloquence and resorted to the tone of conversation, "more than that, I'll never, never let you know whom I marry! I mean it! That—that's flat!"
And after this damp but awful peroration, she sat down with heaving bosom, and poor, bewildered Titania shook her head till it looked as if it would come off. She found no flow of words to oppose Penelope with. The biggest river is nothing when it flows into the sea, and, if Titania was the Amazon, Pen was the South Atlantic.
"Not who he is?" said the duchess, as feebly as if she were no more than a brook in a meadow.
"I will not," said Penelope, like a sea in a cyclone.
"Not— Oh, I must go home," piped Titania. "Augustin, she's capable of marrying a chauffeur, because he can drive at sixty miles an hour,—or—or a groom!"
"I'd rather marry either or both," said Pen, furiously, "than be mobbed and musicked into matrimony with a grinning crowd of idiots looking on."
"This is immoral," said Titania, "it's very immoral; you couldn't marry both. I'll go home, Bradstock."
And Bradstock took her there.
"You've done it, Titania," he said, as they drove. "She's as obstinate and as violent as a passive resister. You've put her bristles up, and Pen never goes back from what she says."
"You are very like a man, Augustin," sobbed the duchess.
"She's more like a woman than I'm like a man," growled Bradstock.
He had never risen to eminence, and only once to his feet in the Upper House, and sometimes this rankled.
"Yes, I mean it, I mean it," said Penelope.
"And I wanted to be your bridesmaid," sobbed Ethel.
"You never will be, and you can tell every one what I say."
"I won't," said Ethel, "I won't."
And she went away and told them.
CHAPTER II.
In spite of what good conventional people said, there was nothing abnormal in Penelope's character. The walking world appears abnormal to an institute for cripples; good going is an absurdity, and as for running— The truth is that Penelope, by some unimaginable freak of fortune, had been born quite sound and sane, barring her one lack, that of humour. The providential death of her parents at an early age saved her from a deal of teaching. Bradstock saved her from a great deal more, and she saw to the rest. It pleased Augustin, Lord Bradstock, to play with gunpowder, in spite of what he said about dynamite. He encouraged her to trust to herself in a way that every well-regulated woman considered highly dangerous, and he used to enrage her in order to hear what she had to say to him. There was a period in which she swore vigorously. She learnt her language from an old stableman, who adored her even more than he did any horse. This was at the age of three. Her first interview with her aunt, the Duchess of Goring, was positively so shocking to Titania, who was mid-Victorian, and never got over it, that the poor thing almost fainted when Penelope, a shining brat of three, damned her eyes with terrific vigour. Goring, who was that very curious and absurd survival of a thousand ages, known as a sportsman, roared with laughter. There was humanity in him. There was none in Titania, though there might have been if she had married any one but a duke. And Penelope damned her eyes for saying she mustn't go to the stables without a retinue, an escort, a bodyguard of footmen and nurses and governesses.
"I haven't a governeth now," lisped Penelope. "I thacked the latht one, didn't I, Bradstock?"
Lady Bradstock, number two, was then reigning without governing as far as Bradstock was concerned, and governing without reigning as far as another was concerned, and she paid no attention to Penelope, except to encourage her to amuse her guardian. Thus Penelope grew like a tree in the open, and there were no Dutch gardeners to clip her. At fifteen she greeted her last governess, a lady of great learning and no ability, with the news that she had had her luggage got ready, and that there was the carriage at the door for her. There is no defending such conduct. Pen never defended it herself in later years. She acknowledged she had been a brute to Miss Mackarness, and gave her a position as housekeeper in one of her own houses, that she never visited, with permission to receive the shillings some visitors paid to see a mansion like a sarcophagus, with one treasure of a Turner in it.
The trouble was that Penelope was natural. She had not been trained to become so; she grew so. There is no more painful and laborious a process than to learn to be natural in later life. But to grow like it! Ah, that was splendid, and many unthinking people laughed to hear Pen when she swore, or cried, or begged for pardon, or dominated the whole little world around her. The world indeed smiled on Pen, and now she was twenty-one and splendid, mobile, gracious, Venetian, strong, and as rich as an American heiress, and she already had as many wooers as Penelope of old. But the
