"I'll try," he promised, laughing. "The other day I heard of you in your glory. You sounded very splendid," he added.
Then he had to tell her all about how he had heard, about Mildred Quain, and so about the rest of the circle in Regent's Park. His shyness vanished; he gave humorous little sketches of his friends. Of course she knew Sarradet's shop, and was amused at this lifting of the veil which had hidden the Sarradet private life. But being the entirely natural creature she was, talking and thinking just as one of her class naturally would, she could not help treating the Sarradets as something out of her ordinary experience, as something rather funny perhaps also instructive to hear about, as social phenomena to be observed and studied. Without her own volition or consciousness her mind naturally assumed this attitude and expressed it in her questions and comments; neither were cruel, neither malicious, but both were absolutely from the outside comments and questions about a foreign country addressed to a traveller who happened to have paid a visit there; for plainly she assumed, again instinctively, that Arthur Lisle was no more a native of that country than herself. Or he might almost have been an author presenting to an alert and sympathetic reader a realistic and vivacious picture of the life of a social class not his own, be it what is called higher or lower, or just quite different.
Whatever the gulf, the difference, might be broad or narrow, justly felt or utterly exaggerated Arthur Lisle would have been (at twenty-four) more than human not to be pleased to find himself, for Mrs. Norton Ward, on the same side of it as Mrs. Norton Ward. She was evidently quite genuine in this, as she seemed to be in everything. She was not flattering
him or even putting him at his ease. She talked to him as "one of ourselves" simply because that seemed to her what he undoubtedly was and what his friends undoubtedly, though of course quite blamelessly, were not.
They were thus in the full swing of talk Arthur doing most of it when the Judge came across the room and joined them. Arthur at once rose, to make way, and the lady too seemed to treat his audience as finished, although most graciously. But the Judge took hold of his arm and detained him.
"Do you know, Esther," he said, "that this young man has, by right of kinship, the entrée to the Shrine? And he doesn't use it!"
"What?" she cried with an appearance of lively interest. "Oh, are you related to the Godfreys, Mr. Lisle?"
Arthur blushed, but this time less acutely; he was getting, as the Judge might have put it, much inured to this matter of the Godfrey Lisles.
"Don't ask him questions about it; for some reason or another he doesn't like that."
"I don't really think my cousin Godfrey would care about "
"Not the least the point, is it, Esther?" said the Judge with a twinkle.
"Not the least, Sir Christopher. But what's to be done if he won't go?"
"Oh, you must manage that." He squeezed Arthur's arm and then let it go.
Here, plainly, though no less graciously than from the hostess, was his dismissal. Not knowing any of the other women, he drifted back to the girl who was enthusiastic about lawn-tennis.
The Judge sat down and stretched out his shapely thin hands towards the fire; his rings gleamed, and he loved the gleam of them. To wear them had been, from his youth, one of his bits of daring; he had, as it were, backed himself to wear them and not thereby seem himself, or let them seem, vulgar. And he had succeeded; he had been called vain often, never vulgar. By now his friends, old and young, would have missed them sadly.
"What do you make of that boy, Esther?" he asked.
"I like him and I think he's being wasted," she answered promptly.
"At our honourable profession?"
"You and Frank are better judges of that."
"I don't know. Hardly tough enough, perhaps. But Huntley was just such a man, and he got pretty well to the top. Died, though, not much past fifty. The climb killed him, I think."
"Yes, Frank's told me about him. But I meant wasted in his own life, or socially, or however you like to put it. He's told me about his friends, and "
"Well, if you like him enough, you can put that right, Esther."
"I like him, but I haven't much time for young men, Sir Christopher. I've a husband, you may remember."
"Then turn him over where he belongs to Bernadette."
She raised her brows a little, as she smiled at him.
"Oh, the young fellow's got to get his baptism of fire. It'll do him good."
"How easily you Judges settle other people's fortunes!"
"In the end, his not going to his cousin's house is an absurdity."
"Well, yes, so it is, in the end, of course," she agreed. "It shall be done, Sir Christopher."
While his fortunes were thus being settled for him more or less, and as the future might reveal Arthur was walking home, well pleased with himself. The lady's friendliness delighted him; if he did not prize the old Judge's so highly, he had the sense to perceive that it was really a more valuable testimonial and brought with it more substantial encouragement. From merely being kind to him the Norton Wards had come to like him, as it seemed, and their liking was backed by Sir Christopher's endorsement. He did not regard these things from a worldly point of view; he did not think of them as stepping-stones, or at any rate only quite indirectly. They would no doubt help him to get rid of, or at least to hold in subjection, his demon of self-distrust; but still more would they comfort him and make him happy. The pleasure he derived from Mrs. Norton Ward's liking, and the Judge's approval, was in quality akin to the gratification which Marie Sarradet's bearing had given him a few nights ago in Regent's Park; just as that had roused in him a keener sense of Marie's attractiveness, so now he glowed with a warm recognition of the merits of his new friends.