The Pollingtons, the Wilders, the Wardens, the Baerens, the Goslings, and others of his acquaintance, talked of Lady Camper and General Ople rather maliciously.  They were all City people, and they admired the General, but mourned that he should so abjectly have fallen at the feet of a lady as red with rouge as a railway bill.  His not seeing it showed the state he was in.  The sister of Mrs. Pollington, an amiable widow, relict of a large City warehouse, named Barcop, was chilled by a falling off in his attentions.  His apology for not appearing at garden parties was, that he was engaged to wait on Lady Camper.

And at one time, her not condescending to exchange visits with the obsequious General was a topic fertile in irony.  But she did condescend.  Lady Camper came to his gate unexpectedly, rang the bell, and was let in like an ordinary visitor.  It happened that the General was gardening—­not the pretty occupation of pruning—­he was digging—­and of necessity his coat was off, and he was hot, dusty, unpresentable.  From adoring earth as the mother of roses, you may pass into a lady’s presence without purification; you cannot (or so the General thought) when you are caught in the act of adoring the mother of cabbages.  And though he himself loved the cabbage equally with the rose, in his heart respected the vegetable yet more than he esteemed the flower, for he gloried in his kitchen garden, this was not a secret for the world to know, and he almost heeled over on his beam ends when word was brought of the extreme honour Lady Camper had done him.  He worked his arms hurriedly into his fatigue jacket, trusting to get away to the house and spend a couple of minutes on his adornment; and with any other visitor it might have been accomplished, but Lady Camper disliked sitting alone in a room.  She was on the square of lawn as the General stole along the walk.  Had she kept her back to him, he might have rounded her like the shadow of a dial, undetected.  She was frightfully acute of hearing.  She turned while he was in the agony of hesitation, in a queer attitude, one leg on the march, projected by a frenzied tip-toe of the hinder leg, the very fatallest moment she could possibly have selected for unveiling him.

Of course there was no choice but to surrender on the spot.

He began to squander his dizzy wits in profuse apologies.  Lady Camper simply spoke of the nice little nest of a garden, smelt the flowers, accepted a Niel rose and a Rohan, a Cline, a Falcot, and La France.

‘A beautiful rose indeed,’ she said of the latter, ’only it smells of macassar oil.’

‘Really, it never struck me, I say it never struck me before,’ rejoined the General, smelling it as at a pinch of snuff.  ’I was saying, I always . . . .’  And he tacitly, with the absurdest of smiles, begged permission to leave unterminated a sentence not in itself particularly difficult

‘I have a nose,’ observed Lady Camper.