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She laughed, her ready, girlish laugh, which always seemed to him so young; and they climbed the crooked stairs of Studio Building, their breath hardly being any longer sufficient for much speech. "I'm going to take you to Arthur Fenton's first," Rangely observed, as they paused to rest on one of the landings. "These stairs are awful. I wonder how he gets his elderly sitters up here."
Inside the vehicle, hunched up in the corner of the seat, was a man who presented an appearance of helplessness which struck them both with a sobering effect. "Is the fellow drunk?" said Mr. Rangely. Victoria's answer was a little cry which startled him, and drew his look to her. She had touched her horse with the whip, and her eyes had widened in real alarm. "It's Hilary Vane!" she exclaimed.
Now he would say: 'Well, a man must live, you know; and the public will only pay for what it wants. It's lamentable." "You put it rather worse than it is," her husband responded. "We are all in the habit of judging men as if their degradation was deliberate, which as a matter of fact I suppose it never is. Rangely hasn't coolly accepted the choice between honesty and Philistinism.
"In fifteen minutes I shall be standing on the piano in the drawing- room, straightening a picture. I never can bear a picture crooked, and I had Jane tip it a little this morning, just to vex me. Fred Rangely will come in unannounced. Of course I shall be dreadfully confused, and have to get down.
When he reached Fairview he was asked to dinner, as he could not possibly get back to the Inn in time. Mr. Flint had gone to Sumner with the engineers, leaving orders to be met at the East Tunbridge station at ten; and Mrs. Flint, still convalescent, had dined in her sitting room. Victoria sat opposite her guest in the big dining room, and Mr. Rangely pronounced the occasion decidedly jolly.
He ceased to protest, and Mr. Rangely quickly tied the other horse and came to Victoria's aid. Supported by the young Englishman, Hilary climbed the stone steps and reached the porch, declaring all the while that he needed no assistance, and could walk alone. Victoria rang the bell, and after an interval the door was opened by Euphrasia Cotton.
Rangely little imagined the part he was playing as little as he deserved it. Reluctant to leave, propriety impelled him to ask for a trap at ten, and it was half past before he finally made his exit from the room with a promise to pay his respects soon very soon. Victoria stood before the fire listening to the sound of the wheels gradually growing fainter, and her mind refused to work.
Staggchase would regard his position as a declaration of independence, and indeed when the lady read the Observer that morning she smiled with an air of comprehension. "That's an end to that," she said to herself. "When you've known a man as long as I have Fred Rangely, he's like a book that's been read; you've got all the good there is in him. There are other men in the world."
Quicker to drive in her own runabout, did she dare to try to move him into it. She made up her mind. "Please follow on behind with that trap," she called out to Rangely; "I'm going to Ripton." He nodded understandingly, admiringly, and Victoria started Hilary's horse out of the bushes towards the entrance way. From time to time she let her eyes rest upon him anxiously.
Good morning." And with a chuckling laugh, he took himself out. A NECESSARY EVIL. Julius Caesar; ii. 2. "Oh, I assure you that my temper has been such for a week that my family have threatened to have me sent to a nervine asylum," Ethel Mott observed to Fred Rangely, who was calling on her, ostensibly to inquire after her health, some trifling indisposition having kept her housed for a few days.
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