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"So that it only means then, after all, that I, at the best, must keep you up?" He fixed on her the nice eyes Lady Wantridge admired. "Do you mean to tell me that already at this very moment I'm not distinctly keeping you?" She gave him back his look. "Wait till she HAS asked you, and then," Mamie added, "decline." Scott, not too grossly, wondered. "As acting for YOU?"
"Why not, when you've done it in so many other cases?" "There ARE no other cases so bad. One meets them at any rate as they come. Some you can manage, others you can't. It's no use, you must give them up. They're past patching; there's nothing to be done with them. There's nothing accordingly to be done with Mrs. Medwin but to put her off." And Lady Wantridge rose to her height.
"I'll see you again when I've seen her." "Lady Wantridge? I hope so, indeed. I'll turn up late to-morrow, if you don't catch me first. Has it come to you yet?" the visitor, now at the door, went on. "No; but it will. There's time." "Oh a little less every day!"
"You say I can't twist their heads about. But I HAVE twisted them." It had been quietly produced, but it gave her companion a jerk. "They say 'Yes'?" She summed it up. "All but one. SHE says 'No." Mrs. Medwin thought; then jumped. "Lady Wantridge?" Miss Cutter, as more delicate, only bowed admission. "I shall see her either this afternoon or late to-morrow. But she has written."
And even at this Lady Wantridge wasn't shocked; she showed that ease and blandness which were her way, unfortunately, of being most impossible. She remarked that SHE might listen to such things, because she was clever enough for them not to matter; only Mamie should take care how she went about saying them at large.
The door opened however at the moment she spoke and Scott Homer presented himself. Scott Homer wore exactly, to his sister's eyes, the aspect he had worn the day before, and it also formed to her sense the great feature of his impartial greeting. "How d'ye do, Mamie? How d'ye do, Lady Wantridge?" "How d'ye do again?" Lady Wantridge replied with an equanimity striking to her hostess.
Good-bye," said Lady Wantridge. But Mamie had not half done with her. She felt more and more or she hoped at least that she looked strange. She WAS, no doubt, if it came to that, strange. "Lady Wantridge," she almost convulsively broke out, "I don't know whether you'll understand me, but I seem to feel that I must act with you I don't know what to call it! responsibly. He IS my brother."
His way of doing so and he had already done so, as for Lady Wantridge, in respect to their previous encounter struck her even at the moment as an instinctive if slightly blind tribute to her possession of an idea; and as such, in its celerity, made her so admire him, and their common wit, that she on the spot more than forgave him his queerness. He was right. He could be as queer as he liked!
It had come absolutely of a sudden, straight out of the opposition of the two figures before her quite as if a concussion had struck a light. The light was helped by her quickened sense that her friend's silence on the incident of the day before showed some sort of consciousness. She looked surprised. "Do you know my brother?" "DO I know you?" Lady Wantridge asked of him.
Lady Wantridge came straight to the point. "You mean you depend on it?" "Awfully!" "Is it all you have?" "All. Now." "But Mrs. Short Stokes and the others 'rolling, aren't they? Don't they pay up?" "Ah," sighed Mamie, "if it wasn't for THEM !" Lady Wantridge perceived. "You've had so much?" "I couldn't have gone on." "Then what do you do with it all?" "Oh most of it goes back to them.
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