She had cultivated it first on account of her cousin Morland King; she had ended in enthusiastic admiration.
“It is awfully good of you,” she said, when they were comfortably settled down to talk, “to waste your time with my unintelligent conversation.”
“There's no such thing as unintelligent conversation,” he declared.
“For a man like you there must be.”
“I could hold an intelligent conversation with a rabbit,” said Jimmie.
Norma Hardacre, on arriving home, entered the drawing-room, where her mother was reading a novel.
“Well?” said Mrs. Hardacre, looking up.
Norma threw her white silk cloak over the back of a chair.
“Connie sent her love to you.”
“Is that all you have to say?” asked her mother, sharply. She was a faded woman who had once possessed beauty of a cold, severe type; but the years had pinched and hardened her features, as they had pinched and hardened her heart. Her eyes were of that steel grey which the light of laughter seldom softens, and her smile was but a contraction of the muscles of the lips. Even this perfunctory tribute to politeness which had greeted Norma's entrance vanished at the second question.
“Morland King drove me home. What a difference there is between a private brougham and the beastly things we get from the livery-stable!”
“He has said nothing?”
“Of course not. I should have told you if he had.”
“Whose fault is it?”
Norma made a gesture of impatience. “My fault, if you like. I don't lay traps to catch him. I don't keep him dangling about me, and I don't flatter his vanities or make appeal to his senses, I suppose. I can't do it.”
“Don't behave like a fool, Norma,” said Mrs. Hardacre, rapping her book with a paper-knife. “You have got to marry him. You know you have. Your father and I are coming to the end of things. You ought to have married years ago, and when one thinks of the chances you have missed, it makes one mad. Here have we been pinching and scraping—”
“And borrowing and mortgaging,” Norma interjected.
“—to give you a brilliant position,” Mrs. Hardacre continued, unheeding the interruption, “and you cast all our efforts in our teeth. It's sheer ingratitude. Why you threw over Lord Wyniard I could never make out.”
“You seem to forget that, after all, there is a physical side to marriage,” said Norma, with a little shudder of disgust.
“I hate indelicacy in young girls,” said Mrs. Hardacre, freezingly. “One would think you had been brought up in a public house.”
“Then let us avoid indelicate subjects,” retorted Norma, opening the first book to her hand. “Where is papa?”
“Oh, how should I know?” said Mrs. Hardacre, irritably.
There was silence. Norma pretended to read, but her thoughts, away from the printed lines, caused her face to harden and her lips to curl scornfully. She had been used to such scenes with her mother ever since she had worn a long frock, and that was seven years ago, when she came out as a young beauty of eighteen. The story of financial embarrassment had lost its fine edge of persuasion by overtelling. She had almost ceased to believe in it, and the lingering grain of credence she put aside with the cynical feeling that it was no great concern of hers, so long as her usual round of life went on. She had two hundred a year of her own, all of which she spent in dress, so that in that one particular at least, if she chose to be economical, she was practically independent. Money for other wants was generally procurable, with or without unpleasant dunning of her parents. She lived very little in their home in Wiltshire, a beautiful and stately young woman of fashion being a decorative adjunct to smart country-house parties. In London, if she sighed for a more extensive establishment and a more luxurious style of living, it was what she always had done. She had hated the furnished house or flat and the livery-stable carriage ever since her first season. In the same way she had always considered the omission from her scheme of life of a yacht and a villa at Cannes and diamonds at discretion as a culpable oversight on the part of the Creator. But the sordid makeshift of existence to which she was condemned was not a matter of yesterday. In spite of the financial embarrassments of the maternal fable she had noticed no cutting down of customary expenditure. Her father still played the fool on the stock exchange, her mother still attired herself elaborately and disdained to eat otherwise than à la carte at expensive restaurants, and she, Norma, went whithersoever the smart set drifted her. She had nothing to do with the vulgarity of financial embarrassments.
As to the question of marriage she was as fully determined as her mother that she should make a brilliant match. She had had two or three disappointments—the unwary duke, for instance. On the other hand she had refused eligibles like Lord Wyniard out of sheer caprice.
The only man who had given her a moment's stir of the pulses, a moment's thought of throwing her cap over the windmills, was a young soldier in the Indian Staff Corps. But he belonged to her second season, before she had really seen the world and grasped the inner meaning of life. Besides, her mother had almost beaten her; and in an encounter between the dragon who guarded the gold of her daughter's affections and the young Siegfried, it was the hero that barely escaped destruction; he fled to India for his life. Norma lost all sight and count of him for three years. Then she heard that he had married a schoolfellow of hers and was a month-old father. It was with feelings of peculiar satisfaction and sense of deliverance that she sent her congratulations to him, her love to his wife, and a set of baby shoes to the child. She had cultivated by this time a helpful sardonic humour.
There was now Morland King, within reasonable distance of a proposal. Her experience detected the signs, although little of sentimentality had passed between them. He was young, as marrying men go—a year or two under forty—of good family, fairly good-looking, very well off, with a safe seat in Parliament being kept warm for him by a valetudinarian ever on the point of retirement. Norma meant to accept him. She contemplated the marriage as coldly and unemotionally as King contemplated the seat in Parliament. But through the corrupted tissue of her being ran one pure and virginal thread. She used no lures. She remained chastely aloof, the arts of seduction being temperamentally repugnant to her. Knowledge she had of good and evil (a euphemism, generally, for an exclusive acquaintance with the latter), and she was cynical enough in her disregard of concealment of her knowledge; but she revolted from using it to gain any advantage over a man. At this period of her life she set great store by herself, and though callously determined on marriage condescended with much disdain to be wooed. Her mother, bred in a hard school, was not subtle enough to perceive this antithesis. Hence the constant scenes of which Norma bitterly resented the vulgarity. “We pride ourselves on being women of the world, mother,” she said, “but that does n't prevent our remembering that we are gentlefolk.” Whereat, on one occasion, Mr. Hardacre, in his flustering, feeble way, had told Norma not to be rude to her mother, only to draw upon himself the vials of his wife's anger.
He came in now, during the silence that had fallen on the two women—a short, stout, red-faced man, with a bald head, and a weak chin, and a drooping foxy moustache turning grey. He was bursting with an interminable tale of scandal that he had picked up at his club—a respectable institution with an inner coterie of vapid, middle-aged dullards whose cackle was the terror of half London society. It is a superstition among good women that man is too noble a creature to descend to gossip.