The Half-Hearted | Page 5

send them news of him."
Alice laughed and became silent. What merry haphazard people were
these she had fallen among! At home everything was docketed and
ordered. Meals were immovable feasts, the hour for bed and the hour
for rising were more regular than the sun's. Her father was full of
proverbs on the virtue of regularity, and was wont to attribute every
vice and misfortune to its absence. And yet here were men and women
who got on very well without it. She did not wholly like it. The little
doctrinaire in her revolted and she was pleased to be censorious.
"You are a very learned young woman, aren't you?" said Lady
Manorwater, after a short silence. "I have heard wonderful stories about
your learning. Then I hope you will talk to Mr. Stocks, for I am afraid
he is shocked at Bertha's frivolity. He asked her if she was in favour of
the Prisons Regulation Bill, and she was very rude."

"I only said," broke in Miss Afflint, "that owing to my lack of definite
local knowledge I was not in a position to give an answer
commensurate with the gravity of the subject." She spoke in a perfect
imitation of the tone of a pompous man.
"Bertha, I do not approve of you," said Lady Manorwater. "I forbid you
to mimic Mr. Stocks. He is very clever, and very much in earnest over
everything. I don't wonder that a butterfly like you should laugh, but I
hope Miss Wishart will be kind to him."
"I am afraid I am very ignorant," said Alice hastily, "and I am very
useless. I never did any work of any sort in my life, and when I think of
you I am ashamed."
"Oh, my dear child, please don't think me a paragon," cried her hostess
in horror. "I am a creature of vague enthusiasms and I have the sense to
know it. Sometimes I fancy I am a woman of business, and then I take
up half a dozen things till Jack has to interfere to prevent financial ruin.
I dabble in politics and I dabble in philanthropy; I write review articles
which nobody reads, and I make speeches which are a horror to myself
and a misery to my hearers. Only by the possession of a sense of
humour am I saved from insignificance."
To Alice the speech was the breaking of idols. Competence,
responsibility were words she had been taught to revere, and to hear
them light-heartedly disavowed seemed an upturning of the foundation
of things. You will perceive that her education had not included that
valuable art, the appreciation of the flippant.
By this time the carriage was entering the gates of the park, and the
thick wood cleared and revealed long vistas of short hill grass, rising
and falling like moorland, and studded with solitary clumps of firs.
Then a turn in the drive brought them once more into shadow, this time
beneath a heath-clad knoll where beeches and hazels made a pleasant
tangle. All this was new, not three years old; but soon they were in the
ancient part of the policy which had surrounded the old house of
Glenavelin. Here the grass was lusher, the trees antique oaks and
beeches, and grey walls showed the boundary of an old

pleasure-ground. Here in the soft sunlit afternoon sleep hung like a
cloud, and the peace of centuries dwelt in the long avenues and golden
pastures. Another turning and the house came in sight, at first glance a
jumble of grey towers and ivied walls. Wings had been built to the
original square keep, and even now it was not large, a mere moorland
dwelling. But the whitewashed walls, the crow-step gables, and the
quaint Scots baronial turrets gave it a perfection to the eye like a house
in a dream. To Alice, accustomed to the vulgarity of suburban villas
with Italian campaniles, a florid lodge a stone's throw from the house,
darkened too with smoke and tawdry with paint, this old-world
dwelling was a patch of wonderland. Her eyes drank in the beauty of
the place--the great blue backs of hill beyond, the acres of sweet
pasture, the primeval woods.
"Is this Glenavelin?" she cried. "Oh, what a place to live in!"
"Yes, it's very pretty, dear." And Lady Manorwater, who possessed half
a dozen houses up and down the land, patted her guest's arm and looked
with pleasure on the flushed girlish face.
Two hours later, Alice, having completed dressing, leaned out of her
bedroom window to drink in the soft air of evening. She had not
brought a maid, and had refused her hostess's offer to lend her her own
on the ground that maids were a superfluity. It was her desire to be a