CHAPTER XVII

Lady Turnour opened her heart and her wardrobe and gave me a blouse the first thing in the morning, which act of generosity was the more remarkable as morning is not her best time.  I have found that it is the early maid who catches the first snub, which otherwise might fall innocuously upon a husband.  The blouse was one which I had heard her ladyship say she hated; but then her idea of true charity, combined, as it should be, with economy, is always to give to the poor what you wouldn’t be found dead in yourself, because it is more blessed to give than to receive badly made things.  On the same principle I immediately passed the gift on to a chambermaid of the hotel, who perhaps in her turn dropped it a grade lower in the social scale, and so it may go on forever, blouse without end; but all that is apart from the point.  The important part of the transaction was the token that the dead past was to bury its dead; and possibly Sir Samuel timidly offered a waistcoat or a pair of boots to the chauffeur.

Instead of lying in bed, as Lady Turnour had threatened to do for a week, she was up earlier than usual, as well as ever she had been, and not more than half as disagreeable.  Although the sky looked as if it might burst into tears at any moment, and although Orange has nothing but historic remains and historic records to show, she was ready to start, almost cheerfully, at ten o’clock.

I was allowed to be of the party, laden with mackintoshes for my master and mistress; and I didn’t admire the triumphal arch at Orange nearly as much as I had admired the smaller and older one at St. Remy.  But Lady Turnour admired it far more, and was so nice to Sir Samuel that he thought it the arch of the world.  They put their heads together over the same volume of Baedeker, which was an exquisite pleasure to the poor man, and he was so pathetic I could have cried into his footsteps, as he read (pronouncing almost everything wrong) about the building of the Arch of Tiberius.  “Why, that’s just like a sweet little statuette I used to have standing on a table in my drawing-room window!” exclaimed Lady Turnour, looking up at the beautiful Winged Victory.  “You might think it was a copy!”

Although the histories say Orange wasn’t very important in Roman days, it has taken revenge by letting everything not Roman fall into decay, except, of course, its memories of the family through which William the Silent of Holland became William of Orange.  The house of the first William of Orange, the hero of song who rode back wounded from Roncesvalles to his waiting wife, is gone now, save for a wall and a buttress or two on a lonely hill of the old town; yet the arch, which was old when his chateau was begun, still towers dark yellow as tarnished Etruscan gold against the sky; and the Roman theatre is the grandest out of Italy.  Lady Turnour could not see why the Comedie