LITMIR.BIZ

      "

      LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

      LADY PENELOPE BRADING . . . . . . . . . Frontispiece

      Who had ideas of her own.

       CAPTAIN PLANTAGENET GOBY, V.C., LATE OF THE GUARDS

      Who was ordered to read poetry.

       LEOPOLD NORFOLK GORDON

      Some said his real name was Isaac Levi.

       AUSTIN DE VERE

      He wrote poetry, and abhorred bulldogs and motor-cars.

       THE MARQUIS DE RIVAULX

      Anti-Semite to his manicured finger-tips.

       RUFUS Q. PLANT

      Born in Virginia.

       CARTERET WILLIAMS, WAR CORRESPONDENT

      He wrote with a red picturesqueness which was horribly attractive.

       JIMMY CAREW, A.R.A.

      He was the best looking of the whole "horde"

       THE EARL OF PULBOROUGH

      Clever; but indolent.

      LADY PENELOPE

      CHAPTER I.

      All the absurd birthday celebrations were over, and Penelope was twenty-one.

      She declared that her whole life was to be devoted to reform. She meant to reform society, to make it good and useful and straightforward, and simple and utterly delightful.

      She let it be understood that men were in great need of her particular attention. They were too selfish and self-centred, too extravagant, too critical of each other, too vain. They acknowledged it humbly when she mentioned it, for Lady Penelope Brading's beauty was something to see and to talk of; major and minor poets agreed about it; artists desired to paint her and failed, as they always do when true loveliness shines on them. She had the colour of a Titian; the contours of a Correggio; the witchery of a Reynolds, and under wonderful raiment the muscles of a young Greek athlete. She wiped out any society in which she moved. When sweet Eclipse showed herself, the rest were nowhere. The other girls did not exist; she even made married beauties quake; as for the men, they endured everything she said, and worshipped her all the more. She was strange and new and a tonic. She had no sense of humour whatsoever; she could not understand a joke even if it was explained by an expert on the staff of Punch. This made her utterly delightful. Her beautiful seriousness was as refreshing as logic in a sermon. She believed in clergymen, in politicians, in the Deceased Wife's Sister, in all eminent physicians, in the London County Council, in the City of Westminster, in the British Constitution, in herself, and hygiene. She read the Times, the Athenæum, the Encyclopædia Britannica, Herbert Spencer, Mr. Kidd, and the late Mr. Drummond. She used Sandow's exercises and cold water. She was opposed to war; she admired the leader of the opposition and the lord mayor; she subscribed to a society for establishing a national theatre to play Mr. Bernard Shaw's tragedies, and to the nearest hospital. She was the most delightful person in England, and was against vaccination. She had money and lands and houses and ideas.

      "We ought all to do something; to be something," said Lady Penelope Brading.

      It was an amazing statement, a shocking statement, and clean against all class tradition when she interpreted it to the alarmed. Was it not to be something if one was rich, let us say? Was it not to do something if one spent one's money on horses and sport and dress and bridge? Heaven defend us all if anything more is asked of man or woman than killing time and killing beasts! Hands went up to heaven when Penelope preached.

      Not that she preached at length. Her sermons lasted five seconds by any clock, save at the times when she warmed her ankles by the fire with some pet friend of hers, and took into consideration how she was to use her power for the regeneration of the world which was hers. Now she was with Ethel Mytton, a remote relative of the celebrated Mytton who drank eight bottles of port a day, and was a sportsman of the character which makes all Englishmen prouder of sport than of their history. Ten thousand on a football field would put him higher than Sir Richard Grenville. Sidney was a fool to him. Her father was a cabinet minister.

      But Ethel was meek and mild, and followed Penelope at a humble distance, modelling herself on that sweet mould of revolution. So might a penny candle imitate an arc-light; so a glowworm worship the big moon.

      "But you'll get married, dear," said Ethel, "of course you'll get married."

      Penelope was pensive.

      "There are other things than marriage," said Penelope.

      "Oh, are there?" sighed Ethel. She did not think so, for she was in love. Penelope loved theories best.

      "Which of them will you marry?" asked Ethel.

      "Which what?"

      "Silly, them," said Ethel. "What the duchess calls your 'horde.'"

      "I don't know," replied Penelope. "I'm like Diogenes, and I'm looking for an honest man."

      "Oh, honesty,—yes, of course, I know what you mean. But there are plenty of them, Pen dear.

      "Boo!" said Pen; "so the other Greeks said to the man in the tub."

      Ethel sighed.

      "What Greeks and what man in what tub?" she inquired, plaintively.

      And Penelope did not enlighten her darkness, for in came the Duchess of Goring, her aunt, whose Christian name was Titania. She weighed sixteen stone in glittering bead armour, and had a voice exactly like Rose Le Clerc's in "The Duchess of Bayswater." She rarely stopped talking, and was ridiculously moral and conventional, and, except for her voice, she might have been a shopkeeper's wife in any suburb.

      "My dear Penelope," said Titania, "I'm glad to see you again. You look positively sweet, my darling, after all these parties and carryings-on, and what not, and now at last you are quite grown up and yourself and your own and twenty-one. I wish I was. I was nine stone then exactly,—not a pound more. Oh, and it's you, Ethel. I hope your dear papa is not overworking himself, now he's a cabinet minister. Cabinet ministers will overwork themselves. I've known them die of it. Tell him what I say, will you? But of course he will pay no attention, and in time will die like the rest. It's no use advising men to be sensible. I've given it up. Ah, here at last is Lord Bradstock."

      Titania flowed on wonderfully; she flowed exactly like the twisting piece of glass in a mechanical clock which mimics a jet of water. She turned round and never advanced. But Augustin, Lord Bradstock, was as calm as a mill-pond, as a mere in the mountains. He was tall and thin and ruddy and white-haired at fifty.

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