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In fact, it can only be," she went on, with one of her disconcerting flashes of astuteness, "for one of two reasons; either because you feel you ought to help me, or because, for some reason, you think you owe it to Mrs. Leath to let her know what you know of me." Darrow stood still in the path.
Madame de Chantelle could not resist such incontestable claims. She seemed to feel her son's hovering and discriminating presence, and she gave Darrow the sense that he was being tested and approved as a last addition to the Leath Collection. She also made him aware of the immense advantage he possessed in belonging to the diplomatic profession.
His great rival, Donald of Leath Conn, did not long survive him: he died at Derry, also in a religious house, on the 5th of the Ides of February, A.D. 1121. While these two able men were thus for more than a quarter of a century struggling for the supremacy, a third power was gradually strengthening itself west of the Shannon, destined to profit by the contest, more than either of the principals.
"What can I say that Mrs. Leath has not already told you?" "Mrs. Leath has told me nothing whatever but the fact and her pleasure in it." "Well; aren't those the two essential points?" "The essential points to YOU? I should have thought " "Oh, to YOU, I meant," she put in keenly.
At last she felt herself in contact with the actual business of living: but even this impression was not enduring. Everything but the irreducible crude fact of child-bearing assumed, in the Leath household, the same ghostly tinge of unreality. Her husband, at the time, was all that his own ideal of a husband required.
She was also a Snob of the Snobs, and thanked God on her knees every night for Lady St. Leath, Mrs. Combermere and Mrs. Sampson, by whose graces she was left in her present position. Joan was still too near childhood to be considered very seriously, and it was well known that her father did not take her very seriously either.
"I've been keeping..." said Miss Milton. "That is, there's a special copy.... Lady St. Leath specially asked " "Is it in, or isn't it?" asked Johnny. "There is a copy, Lord St. Leath " With confused fingers Miss Milton searched in a drawer. She produced the book. "You told me," said Joan, forgetting now in her anger St. Leath and all the world, "that there wouldn't he a copy for weeks.
Leath treated his mother's foibles with a respect which Anna's experience of him forbade her to attribute wholly to filial affection. In the early days, when she was still questioning the Sphinx instead of trying to find an answer to it, she ventured to tax her husband with his inconsistency.
Leath the previous spring had given it a definite direction. With such a comrade to focus and stimulate his energies he felt modestly but agreeably sure of "doing something". And under this assurance was the lurking sense that he was somehow worthy of his opportunity. His life, on the whole, had been a creditable affair.
She had spoken also, with an intense eagerness of affection, of her little girl Effie, who was now nine years old, and, in a strain hardly less tender, of Owen Leath, the charming clever young stepson whom her husband's death had left to her care... A porter, stumbling against Darrow's bags, roused him to the fact that he still obstructed the platform, inert and encumbering as his luggage.
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