“Not unless I marry.”

Isabel declined this topic, on which Mrs. Jack Bendish would have expatiated.  “Laura says you have a lovely old house in Somersetshire.  It must be jolly to have an ancestral house.”

“Mine is not ancestral,” said Lawrence amused.  “My father bought it forty years ago at the time of the agricultural depression.  It belonged to some county people—­Sir Frank Fleet—­who couldn’t afford to keep it up.  It is a lovely place, Farringay, but it’s full of Fleet ghosts and the neighbourhood doesn’t let me forget that I’m an alien.”

“But how absurd! how narrow-minded!” exclaimed Isabel.  “Houses must change hands now and then, and I dare say your father was a better landlord than the Fleets were.  Besides, see how much worse it might have been!  There’s Wilmerdings, here in Chilmark, that the Morleys have taken:  his name isn’t Morley at all, Yvonne says it’s Moss in the City:  but they foreclosed on the Orr-Matthews’ mortgage and turned them out, and that darling old place is delivered over to a horrid little Jew!”

“Poor Morley!” said Lawrence laughing.  “I am a Jew myself.”  Isabel was stricken dumb.  “I thought I had better tell you than let you hear it from some one else.  No, don’t apologize! these things will happen, and I’m not deeply hurt, for I refuse to call sibb with a Moss-Morley.  I should never foreclose on any one’s mortgage.  My mother was an Englishwoman and my father was a Levantine—­half Jew, half Greek.  Have you never heard of Andrew Hyde the big curio dealer in New Bond Street?  He was commonly known as old Hyde-and-seek.  The Hyde galleries are famous.  As I remember him he was a common-looking little old man with a passion for art.”

“Well, I’m sorry I said such a stupid thing,” said Isabel, still very red, “not because of hurting your feelings, for it isn’t likely that anything I said would do that—­but because it was stupid in itself, and narrow-minded, and snobbish.  It’ll be a lesson to me.  All the same, it’s interesting.”  She had forgotten by now that she was an innocent-young-girl and Lawrence a blase-man-of-the-world, and had slipped into a vein of intimacy which was fast charming Lawrence out of all his caution.  “I suppose you take after your father, and that’s why you’re so unlike Major Clowes.  He is a Clowes, but you’re a Hyde.”

“What does that mean?”

Isabel waited a moment to think it out.  “You’re more of a cosmopolitan; I expect you have a passion for art too, like your father.  Major Clowes hasn’t.  He doesn’t care two pins for the beauty of his old swords and daggers, he cares only for getting all the different sorts.  You, perhaps, might care almost too much.”  Lawrence dropped his eyes.  “And you vary more, you’re not always the same, you have more facets:  one can see you’ve done all sorts of things and mixed with all sorts of people.  I suppose that’s why you’re so easily bored—­I don’t mean to be rude!”