Lady Connie. Mrs. Humphry Ward
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and evident desire to please "affectation," or patronage, and had been vexed in her silent corner to see how little her own two girls could hold their own beside Constance.
As for Lord Risborough, he had frankly found it difficult to remember Mrs. Hooper's identity, while on the other hand he fell at once into keen discussion of some recent finds in the Greek islands with Ewen Hooper, to whom in the course of half an hour it was evident that he took a warm liking. He put up his eye-glass to look at the Hooper children; he said vaguely, "I hope that some day you and Mrs. Hooper will descend upon us in Rome;" and then he hurried his wife away with the audible remark--"We really must get to Blenheim, Ellie, in good time. You promised the Duchess--"
So ill-bred--so snobbish--to talk of your great acquaintances in public! And as for Lady Risborough's answer--"I don't care twopence about the Duchess, Hugh! and I haven't seen Ewen for six years,"--it had been merely humbug, for she had obediently followed her husband, all the same.
Recollections of this kind went trickling through Mrs. Hooper's mind, roused by Ewen's angry defence of his sister. It was all very well, but now the long-legged child had grown up, and was going to put her--Ellen Hooper's--daughters in the shade, to make them feel their inferiority, just as the mother had done with herself. Of course the money was welcome. Constance was to contribute three hundred a year, which was a substantial addition to an income which, when all supplemental earnings--exams, journalism, lectures--were counted, rarely reached seven hundred. But they would be "led into expenses"--the maid was evidently a most exacting woman; and meanwhile, Alice, who was just out, and was really quite a pretty girl, would be entirely put in the background by this young woman with her forward manner, and her title, and the way she had as though the world belonged to her. Mrs. Hooper felt no kinship with her whatever. She was Ewen's blood--not hers; and the mother's jealous nature was all up in arms for her own brood--especially for Alice. Nora could look after herself, and invariably did. Besides Nora was so tiresome! She was always ready to give the family case away--to give everything away, preposterously. And, apropos, Mrs. Hooper expressed her annoyance with some silly notions Nora had just expressed to her.
"I do hope, Ewen, you won't humour and spoil Constance too much! Nora says now she's dissatisfied with her room and wants to buy some furniture. Well, let her, I say. She has plenty of money, and we haven't. We have given her a great deal more than we give our own daughters--"
"She pays us, my dear!"
Mrs. Hooper straightened her thin shoulders.
"Well, and you give her the advantage of your name and your reputation here. It is not as though you were a young don, a nobody. You've made your position. Everybody asks us to all the official things--and Connie, of course, will be asked, too."
A smile crept round Dr. Hooper's weak and pleasant mouth.
"Don't flatter yourself, Ellen, that Connie will find Oxford society very amusing after Rome and the Riviera."
"That will be her misfortune," said Mrs. Hooper, stoutly. "Anyway, she will have all the advantages we have. We take her with us, for instance, to the Vice-Chancellor's to-night?"
"Do we?" Dr. Hooper groaned. "By the way, can't you let me off, Ellen? I've got such a heap of work to do."
"Certainly not! People who shut themselves up never get on, Ewen. I've just finished mending your gown, on purpose. How you tear it as you do, I can't think! But I was speaking of Connie. We shall take her, of course--"
"Have you asked her?"
"I told her we were all going--and to meet Lord Glaramara. She didn't say anything."
Dr. Hooper laughed.
"You'll find her, I expect, a very independent young woman--"
But at that moment his daughter Nora, after a hurried and perfunctory knock, opened the study door vehemently, and put in a flushed face.
"Father, I want to speak to you!"
"Come in, my dear child. But I can't spare more than five minutes."
And the Reader glanced despairingly at a clock, the hands of which were pointing to half past ten a.m. How it was that, after an eight o'clock breakfast, it always took so long for a man to settle himself to his work he really could not explain. Not that his conscience did not sometimes suggest the answer, pointing to a certain slackness and softness in himself--the primal shrinking from work, the primal instinct to sit and dream--that had every day to be met and conquered afresh, before the student actually found himself in his chair, or lecturing from his desk with all his brains alert. Anyway, the Reader, when there was no college or university engagement to pin him down, would stand often--"spilling the morning in recreation"; in other words, gossiping with his wife and children, or loitering over the newspapers, till the inner monitor turned upon him. Then he would work furiously for hours; and the work when done was good. For there would be in it a kind of passion, a warmth born of the very effort and friction of the will which had been necessary to get it done at all.
Nora, however, had not come in to gossip. She was in a white heat.
"Father!--we ought not to let Connie furnish her own rooms!"
"But, my dear, who thinks of her doing any such thing? What do you mean?" And Dr. Hooper took his pipe out of his mouth, and stood protesting.
"She's gone out, she and Annette. They slipped out just now when mother came in to you; and I'm certain they've gone to B's"--the excited girl named a well-known Oxford furniture shop--"to buy all sorts of things."
"Well, after all, it's my house!" said the Reader, smiling. "Connie will have to ask my leave first."
"Oh, she'll persuade you!" cried Nora, standing before her father with her hands behind her. "She'll make us all do what she wants. She'll be like a cuckoo in the nest. She'll be too strong for us."
Ewen Hooper put out a soothing hand, and patted his youngest daughter on the shoulder.
"Wait a bit, my dear. And when Connie comes back just ask her to step in here a moment. And now will you both please be gone--at once?--quick march!"
And taking his wife and daughter by the shoulders, he turned them both forcibly out, and sat down to make his final preparations for a lecture that afternoon on the "feminism" of Euripides.
Meanwhile Connie Bledlow and her maid were walking quickly down the Broad towards the busy Cornmarket with its shops. It was a brilliant morning--one of those east wind days when all clouds are swept from the air, and every colour of the spring burns and flashes in the sun. Every outline was clear; every new-leafed tree stood radiant in the bright air. The grey or black college walls had lost all the grimness of winter, they were there merely to bring out the blue of the sky, the yellow gold, the laburnum, the tossing white of the chestnuts. The figures, even, passing in the streets, seemed to glitter with the trees and the buildings. The white in the women's dresses; the short black gowns and square caps of the undergraduates; the gay colours in the children's frocks; the overhanging masses of hawthorn and lilac that here and there thrust themselves, effervescent and rebellious, through and over college walls:--everything shimmered and shone in the May sunlight. The air too was tonic and gay, a rare thing for Oxford; and Connie, refreshed by sleep, walked with such a buoyant and swinging step that her stout maid could hardly keep up with her. Many a passer-by observed her. Men on their way to lecture, with battered caps and gowns slung round their necks, threw sharp glances at the tall girl in black, with the small pale face, so delicately alive, and the dark eyes that laughed--aloof and unabashed--at all they saw.
"What boys they are!" said Constance presently, making a contemptuous lip. "They ought to be still in the nursery."
"What--the young men in the caps, my lady?"
"Those are the undergraduates, Annette--the boys who live in the colleges."
"They don't stare like the Italian young gentlemen," said Annette, shrugging her shoulders. "Many a time I wanted to box their ears for the way they looked at you in the street."
Connie laughed. "I liked it! They were