hint of an accusation. So much she owed to Lily
in return for all that Lily was prepared to abandon.
‘There is my note,’ she said at last,
offering it to her daughter. ’I did not
mean to see it,’ said Lily, ’and, mamma,
I will not read it now. Let it go. I know
you have been good and have not scolded him.’
’I have not scolded him, certainly,’ said
Mrs Dale. And then the letter was sent.
MRS DOBBS BROUGHTON’S DINNER-PARTY
Mr John Eames of the Income-Tax Office, had in three
days risen so high in that world that people in the
west-end of town, and very respectable people too—people
living in South Kensington, in neighbourhoods not far
from Belgravia, and in very handsome houses round Bayswater—were
glad to ask him out to dinner. Money had been
left to him by an earl, and rumour had of course magnified
that money. He was a private secretary, which
is in itself a great advance on being a mere clerk.
And he had become the particular intimate friend of
an artist who had pushed himself into high fashion
during the last year or two—one Conway
Dalrymple, whom the rich English world was beginning
to pet and pelt with gilt sugar-plums, and who seemed
to take very kindly to petting and gilt sugar-plums.
I don’t know whether the friendship of Conway
Dalrymple had not done as much to secure John Eames
his position at the Bayswater dinner-tables, as had
either the private secretaryship, or the earl’s
money; and yet, when they had first known each other,
now only two or three years ago, Conway Dalrymple
had been the poorer man of the two. Some chance
had brought them together, and they had lived in the
same room for nearly two years. This arrangement
had been broken up, and the Conway Dalrymple of these
days had a studio of his own, somewhere near Kensington
Palace, where he painted portraits of young countesses,
and in which he had even painted a young duchess.
It was the peculiar merit of his pictures—so
at least said the art-loving world—that
though the likeness was always good, the stiffness
of the modern portrait was never there. There
was also ever some story told in Dalrymple’s
pictures over and above the story of the portraiture.
This countess was drawn as a fairy with wings, that
countess as a goddess with a helmet. The thing
took for a time, and Conway Dalrymple was picking up
his gilt sugar-plums with considerable rapidity.
On a certain day he and John Eames were to dine out
together at a certain house in that Bayswater district.
It was a large mansion, if not made of stone yet looking
very stony, with thirty windows at least, all of them
with cut-stone frames, requiring, let me say, at least
four thousand a year for its maintenance. And
its owner, Dobbs Broughton, a man very well known
both in the City and over the grass in Northamptonshire,
was supposed to have a good deal more than four thousand
a year. Mrs Dobbs Broughton, a very beautiful
