Algernon let off steam in a whistle. “Thompson, the solicitor’s daughter!” he said. “I met them the other day, somewhere about here. He introduced me to her. A pretty little baggage.
“No.” Adrian set him right. “’Tis a Miss Desborough, a Roman Catholic dairymaid. Reminds one of pastoral England in the time of the Plantagenets! He’s quite equal to introducing her as Thompson’s daughter, and himself as Beelzebub’s son. However, the wild animal is in Hymen’s chains, and the cake is cut. Will you have your morsel?”
“Oh, by all means!—not now.” Algernon had an unwonted air of reflection.—” Father know it?”
“Not yet. He will to-night by nine o’clock.”
“Then I must see him by seven. Don’t say you met me.” He nodded, and pricked his horse.
“Wants money!” said Adrian, putting the combustible he carried once more in motion.
The women were the crowning joy of his contemplative mind. He had reserved them for his final discharge. Dear demonstrative creatures! Dyspepsia would not weaken their poignant outcries, or self-interest check their fainting fits. On the generic woman one could calculate. Well might The Pilgrim’s Scrip say of her that, “She is always at Nature’s breast”; not intending it as a compliment. Each woman is Eve throughout the ages; whereas the Pilgrim would have us believe that the Adam in men has become warier, if not wiser; and weak as he is, has learnt a lesson from time. Probably the Pilgrim’s meaning may be taken to be, that Man grows, and Woman does not.
At any rate, Adrian hoped for such natural choruses as you hear in the nursery when a bauble is lost. He was awake to Mrs. Doria’s maternal predestinations, and guessed that Clare stood ready with the best form of filial obedience. They were only a poor couple to gratify his Mephistophelian humour, to be sure, but Mrs. Doria was equal to twenty, and they would proclaim the diverse ways with which maidenhood and womanhood took disappointment, while the surrounding Forey girls and other females of the family assembly were expected to develop the finer shades and tapering edges of an agitation to which no woman could be cold.
All went well. He managed cleverly to leave the cake unchallenged in a conspicuous part of the drawing-room, and stepped gaily down to dinner. Much of the conversation adverted to Richard. Mrs. Doria asked him if he had seen the youth, or heard of him.
“Seen him? no! Heard of him? yes!” said Adrian. “I have heard of him. I heard that he was sublimely happy, and had eaten such a breakfast that dinner was impossible; claret and cold chicken, cake and”—
“Cake at breakfast!” they all interjected.,
“That seems to be his fancy just now.”
“What an extraordinary taste!”
“You know, he is educated on a System.”
One fast young male Forey allied the System and the cake in a miserable pun. Adrian, a hater of puns, looked at him, and held the table silent, as if he were going to speak; but he said nothing, and the young gentleman vanished from the conversation in a blush, extinguished by his own spark.