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Mr Carleton put up his black brows in exaggerated surprise, and said in a bewildered voice: 'Now, what in the world can I have said to put such a notion as that into your head? It cannot have escaped your notice, my dear Beckenham, that I carefully refrained from saying "some other silly gudgeon"!'
'I shall take leave to tell you, Carleton, that I find your – your wit offensive!'
'By all means!' replied Mr Carleton. 'You have my leave to tell me anything you choose! How unjust it would be in me to refuse to grant you leave to do so when it has never occurred to me that I should ask your permission to say that I find you a dead bore, which I've been doing for years.'
'If it were not for our surroundings,' said Lord Beckenham, between his teeth, 'I should be strongly tempted to land you a facer, sir!'
'It's to be hoped you would have the strength of mind to resist temptation,' said Mr Carleton, with spurious sympathy. 'Such a very gudgeon-ish thing to do, don't you agree?'
Since Beckenham was well aware that Mr Carleton was almost as famous for his punishing skill in the boxing-ring as for his rudeness this reply infuriated him so much that, with only the briefest of bows to Miss Wychwood, he turned on his heel and walked off, his brow thunderous, and his lips tightly compressed.
'I have never been able to understand,' remarked Mr Carleton, 'why it is that so many persons find it impossible to rid themselves of such pompous bores as that fellow!'
'Perhaps,' offered Miss Wychwood, 'it is because very few persons – if any at all! – are as rude as you are!'
'Ah, no doubt that is the reason!' he nodded.
'You should be ashamed of yourself !' she told him.
'No, no, how can you say so? You don't mean to tell me you didn't wish to be rid of him!'
'Well, no,' she admitted. 'I did wish it, but that was because he vexed me to death. I was going to do the thing myself if you hadn't interrupted us! And I shouldn't have been grossly uncivil!'
'You can't be very well-acquainted with him if you imagine you would have succeeded,' he said. 'Nothing short of the grossest incivility has ever been known to pierce his armour of self-importance. He can empty a room quicker than any man I've ever known.'
She smiled, but said charitably: 'Poor man! One can't but feel sorry for him.'
'A waste of sympathy, believe me! He would be incredulous, I daresay, if it were disclosed to him that he was an object for pity. In his own eyes, his consequence is so great that when people smother yawns in the middle of one of his pretentious lectures he is sorry for them, because it is plain to him that they are persons of vastly inferior intellect, quite unworthy to receive instruction from him.'
Recalling very vividly the numerous occasions when she had been provoked almost to screaming point by his lordship's disquisitions, accompanied as they invariably were, by kindly but intolerable attempts to enlighten her ignorance, or to correct what his superior taste assured him were her false artistic judgments, she could not suppress a little chuckle, but she atoned for this by saying that even if his lordship were a trifle prosy he had many excellent qualities.
'I should hope he had. Everyone has some excellent qualities. Why, even I have! Not many, of course, but some!'
She thought it wisest to ignore this bait, and continued, as though she had not heard the interpolation, to defend Lord
Beckenham's character. 'He is a man of the first respectability,' she said, in a reproving tone. 'Always well-conducted, with propriety of taste, and – and delicacy of principle. He is an affectionate brother, too, and – and altogether a very worthy man!'
'I don't think you should encourage him to make such a dead-set at you,' he said, shaking his head. 'You will have the poor fellow making you an offer, and if you don't accept it very likely he will be so broken-hearted that if he doesn't put a period to his life he will fall into a deep melancholy.'
The picture this conjured up was too much for Miss Wychwood's gravity. She choked, and broke into laughter, informing him, however, as soon as she was able to control her voice, that it ill-became him to poke fun at his betters.
'If it comes to that it doesn't become you to laugh at him!' he retorted.
'I know it doesn't,' she acknowledged. 'But I was not laughing at him, precisely, but at you for saying anything so absurd about him. Now, if you wish to talk to Lucilla –'
'I don't. Who is the young sprig at her elbow?'
She glanced across the room, to where Lucilla was the centre of an animated group. 'Ninian Elmore – if you mean the fair boy?'
He put up his glass. 'Oh, so that's Iverley's heir, is it? Not a bad-looking halfling, but too chitty-faced. Legs like cat-sticks too.' His glass swept round the group, and his face hardened. 'I see she has Kilbride dangling after her,' he said abruptly. 'Let me make it plain to you, ma'am, that that's a connection I don't wish you to encourage!'
She was nettled by his suddenly autocratic tone, but replied with characteristic honesty: 'I shall certainly not do so, Mr Carleton, rest assured! To be frank with you, I was vexed that he should have come up to me last night, so that I was obliged to introduce him to Lucilla, for although I find him an agree able companion, I am well aware that his engaging manners, coupled as they are with considerable address and a propensity for flirting desperately with almost any pretty female, make him an undesirable friend for a green girl.'
He let his glass fall, and transferred his gaze to her face. 'You have a tendre for him, have you? I might have guessed it! Your affairs are no concern of mine, Miss Wychwood, but Lucilla's are very much my concern, and I give you fair warning that I don't mean to let her fall into the clutches of Kilbride or any other loose screw of his kidney!'
She replied, in a cold voice at startling variance with the flame of anger in her eyes: 'Pray enlighten my ignorance, sir! In what way does Mr Kilbride's character differ from your own?'
Any hope she might have cherished of putting him out of countenance died stillborn: he merely looked astonished, and ejaculated: 'Good God, do you imagine I would permit her to marry any one like myself ? What a bird-witted question to have asked me! And I had begun to think you a woman of superior sense!'
