Lady Connie | Page 2

however at one in the uneasy or excited anticipation
with which they were looking forward that evening to the arrival of a
newcomer, who was, it seemed, to make part of the household for some
time. Their father, Dr. Ewen Hooper, the holder of a recently founded
classical readership, had once possessed a younger sister of
considerable beauty, who, in the course of an independent and
adventurous career, had captured--by no ignoble arts--a widower, who
happened to be also an earl and a rich man. It happened while they
were both wintering at Florence, the girl working at paleography, in the
Ambrosian Library, while Lord Risborough, occupying a villa in the
neighbourhood of the Torre San Gallo, was giving himself to the
artistic researches and the cosmopolitan society which suited his health
and his tastes. He was a dilettante of the old sort, incurably in love with

living, in spite of the loss of his wife, and his only son; in spite also of
an impaired heart--in the physical sense--and various other drawbacks.
He came across the bright girl student, discovered that she could talk
very creditably about manuscripts and illuminations, gave her leave to
work in his own library, where he possessed a few priceless things, and
presently found her company, her soft voice, and her eager, confiding
eyes quite indispensable. His elderly sister, Lady Winifred, who kept
house for him, frowned on the business in vain; and finally departed in
a huff to join another maiden sister, Lady Marcia, in an English country
_ménage_, where for some years she did little but lament the flesh-pots
of Italy--Florence. The married sister, Lady Langmoor, wrote reams of
plaintive remonstrances, which remained unanswered. Lord
Risborough married the girl student, Ella Hooper, and never regretted it.
They had one daughter, to whom they devoted
themselves--preposterously, their friends thought; but for twenty years,
they were three happy people together. Then virulent influenza,
complicated with pneumonia, carried off the mother during a spring
visit to Rome, and six weeks later Lord Risborough died of the
damaged heart which had held out so long.
The daughter, Lady Constance Bledlow, had been herself attacked by
the influenza epidemic which had killed her mother, and the double
blow of her parents' deaths, coming on a neurasthenic condition, had hit
her youth rather hard. Some old friends in Rome, with the full consent
of her guardian, the Oxford Reader, had carried her off, first to
Switzerland, and then to the Riviera for the winter, and now in May,
about a year after the death of her parents, she was coming for the first
time to make acquaintance with the Hooper family, with whom,
according to her father's will, she was to make her home till she was
twenty-one. None of them had ever seen her, except on two occasions;
once, at a hotel in London; and once, some ten years before this date,
when Lord Risborough had been D.C.L-ed at the Encænia, as a reward
for some valuable gifts which he had made to the Bodleian, and he, his
wife, and his little girl, after they had duly appeared at the All Souls'
luncheon, and the official fête in St. John's Gardens, had found their
way to the house in Holywell, and taken tea with the Hoopers.

Nora's mind, as she and her sister sat waiting for the fly in which Mrs.
Hooper had gone to meet her husband's niece at the station, ran
persistently on her own childish recollections of this visit. She sat in the
window-sill, with her hand behind her, chattering to her sister.
"I remember thinking when Connie came in here to tea with us--'What
a stuck-up thing you are!' And I despised her, because she couldn't
climb the mulberry in the garden, and because she hadn't begun Latin.
But all the time, I envied her horribly, and I expect you did too, Alice.
Can't you see her black silk stockings--and her new hat with those
awfully pretty flowers, made of feathers? She had a silk frock
too--white, very skimp, and short; and enormously long black legs, as
thin as sticks; and her hair in plaits. I felt a thick lump beside her. And I
didn't like her at all. What horrid toads children are! She didn't talk to
us much, but her eyes seemed to be always laughing at us, and when
she talked Italian to her mother, I thought she was showing off, and I
wanted to pinch her for being affected."
"Why, of course she talked Italian," said Alice, who was not much
interested in her sister's recollections.
"Naturally. But that didn't somehow occur to me. After all I was only
seven."
"I wonder if she's really good-looking," said Alice slowly, glancing, as
she spoke, at the reflection of herself in an old