The party was not a large one – only twelve – and it was entirely legal in character. Besides host and hostess there were three couples – two barrister couples and one solicitor couple. One of the couples brought a daughter, who fell to Arthur's lot. Arthur got on very well with his girl, who was fortunately an enthusiast about lawn-tennis; she interested without absorbing him; he was able to be polite without ceasing to watch the two people who really arrested his attention, his hostess and – most strangely, most wonderfully! – Mr. Justice Lance. For at half-past eight the old Judge, by his arrival, completed the party.
A catalogue of Mrs. Norton Ward's personal attractions would sound commonplace enough. She had small features, was fair, rather pretty, rather pale, and rather short; there seemed no more to say. But she possessed a gracious candour of manner, an extreme friendliness and simplicity, a ready merriment, and together with these a complete freedom from self-consciousness. Somehow she struck Arthur as a highly refined, feminised, etherealised counterpart of Joe Halliday – they were both such good human creatures, so superlatively free from 'nonsense' of all sorts. He took to her immensely from the first moment and hoped very much that she would talk to him a little after dinner. He felt sure that he could get on with her; she did not alarm or puzzle him; he knew that he had "got her right."
When Norton Ward moved, according to ritual, into his wife's vacant place beside Mr. Justice Lance, he beckoned to Arthur to come and sit on the Judge's other side and introduced him. "You just missed the pleasure of hearing his maiden argument the other morning, Judge," he added, laughing slyly at Arthur, who had not got over the surprise of encountering Lance, j., as a private – and harmless – individual.
"Ah, I remember – a case of yours! But O'Sullivan wouldn't give Mr. Lisle a chance!"
He spoke in the same soft, rather weary voice that he had used in court; with his sparse white hair he looked older than when he was in his wig; he was very carefully dressed, and his thin fine hands wore a couple of rather ornate rings. He had keen blue eyes and a large well-shaped nose.
"I don't know that Lisle was altogether sorry! The first time! Even you remember the feeling, I dare say?"
"Nervous? Was that it, Mr. Lisle?" He smiled faintly. "You must remember that we're much inured to imperfection." He looked on the young man with a pleasant indulgence, and, at the same time, a certain attention.
"You always remember our frailty, but there are others!" said the host.
"Ah, ah! I sat with my Brother Pretyman, so I did! Perhaps he does forget sometimes that one side must be wrong. Hence the unpopularity of litigation, by the way."
Arthur was gaining his ease; the friendliness of both his companions helped him; towards the Judge he was particularly drawn; he felt that he would be all right before Lance, j., in future – if only Pretyman, j., were elsewhere! But, alas, a question was enough to plunge him back into trouble. Norton Ward had turned to talk to his other neighbour, but Sir Christopher Lance spoke to him again.
"Are you any relation to Godfrey Lisle? Lisle of Hilsey, you know."
"Yes, Sir Christopher, I'm – I'm a distant cousin."
"Well, I thought you had something of the family look. I've not had the pleasure of seeing you at his house – in town, I mean – I haven't been to Hilsey lately."
"I – I've never been there," Arthur stammered. He was blushing very red. Here he was, up against this terrible business of the Godfrey Lisles again – and just as he had begun to get along so nicely!
His confusion, nay, his distress, could not escape the Judge. "I hope I haven't made a faux pas, Mr. Lisle? No quarrel, or anything of that sort, I hope?"
"No, sir, but I don't know them. I haven't called yet," Arthur blurted out; he seemed to himself to be always having to blurt it out.
Sir Christopher's eyes twinkled, as, following the host's example, he rose from the table.
"If I were you, I should. You don't know what you're missing."
Upstairs Mrs. Norton Ward was better than Arthur's hopes. She showed him at once that she meant to talk to him and that she expected to like doing it.
"I'm always friends with everybody in Frank's chambers," she said, as she made him sit by her. "I consider them all part of the family, and all the glory they win belongs to the family; so you must make haste and win glory, if you can, for us!"
"I'm afraid I can't win glory," laughed Arthur. "At least it doesn't look like it – at the Bar."
"Oh, win it anyhow – we're not particular how – law, politics, literature, what you like! Why, Milton Longworth was Frank's pupil once – for a month! He did no work and got tipsy, but he's a great poet now – well, isn't he? – and we're just as proud as if he'd become Attorney-General."
"Or – well – at all events, a County Court Judge!" Arthur suggested.
"So just you do it somehow, Mr. Lisle, won't you?"
"I'll try," he promised, laughing. "The other day I heard of you in your glory. You sounded very splendid," he added.
Then he had to tell her all about how he had heard, about Mildred Quain, and so about the rest of the circle in Regent's Park. His shyness vanished; he gave humorous little sketches of his friends. Of course she knew Sarradet's shop, and was amused at this lifting of the veil which had hidden the Sarradet private life. But being the entirely natural creature she was, talking and thinking just as one of her class naturally would, she could not help treating the Sarradets as something out of her ordinary experience, as something rather funny – perhaps also instructive – to hear about, as social phenomena to be observed and studied. Without her own volition or consciousness her mind naturally assumed this attitude and expressed it in her questions and comments; neither were cruel, neither malicious, but both were absolutely from the outside – comments and questions about a foreign country addressed to a traveller who happened to have paid a visit there; for plainly she assumed, again instinctively, that Arthur Lisle was no more a native of that country than herself. Or he might almost have been an author presenting to an alert and sympathetic reader a realistic and vivacious picture of the life of a social class not his own, be it what is called higher or lower, or just quite different.
Whatever the gulf, the difference, might be – broad or narrow, justly felt or utterly exaggerated – Arthur Lisle would have been (at twenty-four) more than human not to be pleased to find himself, for Mrs. Norton Ward, on the same side of it as Mrs. Norton Ward. She was evidently quite genuine in this, as she seemed to be in everything. She was not flattering him or even putting him at his ease. She talked to him as "one of ourselves" simply because that seemed to her what he undoubtedly was – and what his friends undoubtedly, though of course quite blamelessly, were not.
They were thus in the full swing of talk – Arthur doing most of it – when the Judge came across the room and joined them. Arthur at once rose, to make way, and the lady too seemed to treat his audience as finished, although most graciously. But the Judge took hold of his arm and detained him.
"Do you know, Esther," he said, "that this young man has, by right of kinship, the entrée to the Shrine? And he doesn't use it!"
"What?" she cried with an appearance of lively interest. "Oh, are you related to the Godfreys, Mr. Lisle?"
Arthur blushed, but this time less acutely; he was getting, as the Judge might have put it, much inured to this matter of the Godfrey Lisles.
"Don't ask him questions about it; for some reason or another he doesn't like that."
"I don't really think my cousin Godfrey would care about – "
"Not the least the point, is it, Esther?" said the Judge