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Updated: June 2, 2025
In a moment there came into view, round a curve in the leafy distance, two horses with riders, advancing at a brisk canter. Soon he perceived that the riders were ladies; they drew rein as they approached him, and then it was to be seen that they were the pair he had judged to be such close friends last night Lady Cressage and the daughter of the house.
It was their dull inability to read character which prompted them to regard him as merely a rich outsider who had married Edith Cressage. He viewed with a comfortable tolerance this infirmity of theirs. When the time came, if he wanted to do so, he could awaken them to their delusion as by forked lightning and the burst of thunder.
He had not been prepared, however, for the fact that it was the American who played the part of hostess. It was she who received him, and invited him to sit down, and generally made him free of the apartment. When he shook hands with Lady Cressage, there was somehow an effect of the incidental in the ceremony, as if she were also a guest.
In fact, when he recalled the circle of faces to which he had addressed his monologue of reminiscences curious experiences and adventures in Java and the Argentine, in Brazil and the Antilles and Mexico and the far West it was in the face of Lady Cressage that he seemed to discern the most genuine interest. Why should she frighten him, then, by daylight?
He visibly had pleasure in the disclosure of the other's ignorance. "They've been in London for two or three weeks. That is, Miss Madden has been taking flying trips to see cathedrals and so on, but Lady Cressage has stayed in town. Their long journeyings have rather done her up." He looked Plowden straight in the eye, and added with an air of deliberation: "I'm rather anxious about her health."
It would have been his sister, of course, who was evidently such chums with Lady Cressage, who gave him the hint to help the General to something if he could. And when you came to think of it, these aristocrats and military men and so on, had no other notion of making money save by directorships. Clearly, that was the way of it.
Having said this much, Lady Cressage swept the crumbs aside and looked up. "So now," she added, with a flushed smile, "since you love arguments so much, how do you answer that?" Celia smiled back. "Oh, I don't answer it at all," she said, and her voice carried a kind of quizzical implication. "Your proofs overwhelm me. I know nothing of him and you know so much!"
She seemed to his observation a wilful sort of person, who would not be restrained by small ordinary considerations from doing the things she wanted to do. Her relations with her companion afforded him food for much thought. Without any overt demonstrations, she produced the effect of ordering Lady Cressage about. This, so far as it went, tended to prejudice him against her.
The discussion seemed to be following lines familiar to them both. "That is only another way of saying what you discovered long ago," said Lady Cressage, passively "that I am deficient in the enthusiasms. But originally you were of the opinion that you had enthusiasms enough for two, and that my lack of them would redress the balance, so to speak.
There had been, as well, the General's hint that if the difficulty of Plowden's poverty were removed, he might still wish to marry her a hint which Thorpe discovered to be rankling with a sudden new soreness in his mind. Was that why he hated Plowden? No he said to himself that it was not. He was going to marry Lady Cressage himself.
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