I. A. R. Wylie

“ You have read how the elderly Duchess of Ashminster wakes up suddenly one fine spring day to the fact that she is being bored into premature old age by her sheltered, conventional life, and seizes a Heaven-sent opportunity to slip away from it all for a little taste of freedom. One of her first encounters is with a young woman of the underworld who takes her for a fugitive from justice and advises her to dye her lovely white hair, as a means of escaping detection. ”

“ He ate next to nothing, though he was often quite vulgarly hungry, and his clothes were artistically disreputable. There was only one other cottage on the bay, a ramshackle building whose notice, “To let furnished,” had a battered, weather-beaten appearance, as if it had stood there a good many years already and expected to stand there for a good many more. Drake regarded it with gloomy satisfaction on his return from his morning's work. When it disappeared, he was thoroughly aggrieved, though also slightly excited. It is a tedious, boring business, dying of a broken heart at the twenty-three. ”

“ She wore her black hair loosely coiled like a girl, and a gay muslin dress, and carried a parasol to match over one shoulder.
Robert Drake could see that her lips moved, but the thunder of the seas drowned her voice, and he could hear nothing. He did not want to hear. He resented her presence. At the same time, it was obviously impossible to sit there in stoic indifference while a lady addressed him. To the last, one must be chivalrous even to a sex that deserves no good of anybody. ”

“ As it was, the Lady Angela kept the scandal alive by adding one of her own. In so doing, she surprised no one. Society had long since ceased to be surprised at anything the Lady Angela did, though it was unceasingly dismayed. A duchess' daughter who refuses to attend smart functions, who haunts art schools, associates with quite impossible people, and wears impossible clothes, smacks of red revolution and the guillotine. ”

“ There was a blouse which especially caught the duchess' eye. It was the most delicate muslin, sprigged with pink roses. The duchess sighed deeply.
“There were no blouses in my day,” she thought. “And now I am too old.”
Still, she went into the shop. The shopwalker who swept down upon her frightened her. He was so terribly superior. The duchess murmured something about the seaside and suitable clothes, and she was passed on to a smart young lady with a cheerful eye and a French accent. ”

“ More than one earnest attempt had been made at reform. The duchess had tried, and now that she had gone—thereby seeming to offer a silent, but vivid explanation of Angela's amazingness—Sir John O'Neill, the Lady Angela's appointed guardian, supported by a series Of baffled chaperons, had attempted the task with even less success. The Lady Angela, with the bit well between her teeth, careered wildly along her chosen course. ”

“ The Lady Angela's laugh was subdued and tremulous with a curious, suppressed excitement.
“How like him! But it's true. One day Rossetti's laurels will look faded, Robert.”
“If I had you always with me, I could write better verses and paint finer pictures than Rossetti ever dreamed of,” he answered, with youth's glorious sincerity. He covered her hand on the rail with his. “Marry me!” he said.
She looked straight at him.
“I want to,” she answered quite simply.
The Cromwellian grimaced, and a frivolous, befeathered gentleman of the Restoration Period stared. ”

“ He nodded. “How well you understand! Yes, I loved a girl like that. She belonged to that wretched, effete race of good-for-nothings which we misname the aristocracy. But I thought she was different. I loved her—Heaven knows how I loved her!—and in the end, when the choice had to be made, she chose her own kind—her doddering old ancestors, her bigoted old mother, a senile guardian—the whole caste of half-witted imbeciles wrapped in their mummy clothes of pride and prejudice——”
“Oh, Robert!”
He caught her hand and kissed it.
“Forgive me. I know I am violent—pitiless. ”

“ Yes, a young lady had been there. She had gone down to the beach to look for him. Yes, she had come back and written the note. She had been crying. And then she had taken the village fly and driven to the station.
Drake slammed the door on the phlegmatic face. He went back to the table and picked up the crumpled letter. His eyelids burned. He felt as if he were being slowly choked.
“And I shall have to marry her!” he groaned. “I shall have to marry her!”
But it was not of the Lady Angela that he was thinking. ”

“ His neckcloth had a bias toward one ear. There was dust on his clothes, He bowed formally, but his whole personality seemed ablaze—seemed to shout violence, riot, and red revolution,
“I ventured to enter unannounced, duchess,” he said breathlessly. “I have just had a somewhat painful interview with Mr. Drake. I say painful, but it offered certain compensations. I had no idea that I remembered so much from my young days. Mr. Drake is a strong and fine-spirited young man, but he has no science. I doubt whether he will be able to wish you good-by as he had no doubt intended.” ”

“ Sir John's manner grew suaver, more polished, in proportion as his opponent's became rude and heated. “But other people may not think quite as you do, Mr. Drake. They may think that Lady Angela should marry a man of her own world—of her own position.” ”

“ How ridiculous you are! My people are my people. I can't help having ancestors. You've got ancestors.”
“I haven't.”
“You have.”
Their eyes met in a blaze of wounded pride, of outraged and betrayed love. Very deliberately Robert Drake took the crumpled lyric and tore it across and across, scattering the pieces over the parquet flooring.
“Finished!” he said. “Finished!”
And he turned and strode headlong from the scene of disaster.
For a minute, neither the Lady Angela nor Sir John moved. ”

“ I'm Angela's guardian. It's my business——”
“Oh, if you're thinking of Angela——”
“I'm not,” he admitted sullenly.
She got up and began gathering up a few frivolous oddments from the table and hurrying them into a frivolous little wrist bag.
“Of course no one could help being very fond of him,” she said dreamily. “He's so young and handsome and ardent. I think we are very stupid about rank and position. Mr. Drake is as gallant a gentleman as——”
“Elizabeth, do you care for him?”
His voice shook. It refused to be controlled. The duchess moved with dignity toward the door. ”

“ Man, don't stand there like that! Is it nothing to you that—that a young girl's heart should be broken by a good-for-nothing puppy? Do you stand idly by while her most tender feelings—are—are outraged? ”

“ One's got a duty toward the pool devils. One can't ignore them as if they didn't exist. Supposing we started a mission to the aristocracy—kind of rescue work, you know. Try to lift them up to our level, educate them—and all that.”
The Lady Angela nodded thoughtfully.
“We might have started on mother,” she considered, “but mother seems to have ideas of her own, and besides, we don't know where she is. But there's Sir John and Colonel Magree and Mrs. Cochrane—heaps of them. As Sir John's my guardian and we want to get married, I think we'd better rescue him first. ”

“ Drake?”
“I do,” Mr. Drake returned without embellishment.
“May I ask who you are?”
“My name is already known to you.”
Sir John smiled faintly, ironically.
“I am afraid your name conveys very little to me. May I ask—what are you?”
“A man.”
“Indeed? The description is not very helpful, Mr. Drake. There are many men——”
“Not so many as you would think,” was the bitter and significant answer.
As may be seen, the situation was not improving. The Lady Angela pressed her guardian's arm and frowned restrainingly at her lover.
“Robert is a poet and a painter, guardian,” she explained. ”

“ I know women in the world”—he jerked his head as if indicating another sphere, and his tone darkened—“girls with faces like angels, whose hearts are as withered and old as a mummy's. I know what their youth is worth, and I despise them! ”

“ The male part of the population wore its hair long, and the womenfolk showed a tendency to wear it short, and they were all shabby. There was, indeed, a general suggestion that to be deliberately agreeable to the eye is an offense against art.
A young man stood at the Lady Angela's side. He did not join in the conversation nor was he apparently interested in the Dante-visaged youth. His whole attention was given to the Angela, whether she was talking or not. ”

“ And it must be admitted that the conduct of an elderly duchess of irreproachable character who suddenly breaks her moorings and sets out on a sea of adventure without allowing the world so much as an explanatory interview is sufficiently startling to give rise to a crop o£ rumors.
The behavior of the duchess' daughter, the Lady Angela, made matters considerably worse, too. If the Lady Angela had only been at all what she should have been been, it is possible that her mother's escapade might have been sprinkled with decent oblivion, at any rate until her return to the fold. ”

“ We—our whole set is being made ridiculous. Angela ought to have thought of our feelings. People in love never think of any one but themselves.”
“Disgusting! It's a disease. Thank Heaven, we grow out of it!”
The colonel coughed awkwardly, and O'Neill pulled a letter out of his pocket and read extracts from it in a tone of scathing contempt:
“Can't live without him. Wealth and position nothing. Ancestor worship idiotic and barbarian. Did you ever hear such impertinence?”
“Never,” said Colonel Magree and scowled prodigiously.
Sir John O'Neill continued to pace backward and forward. ”

“ The solemn ducal residence in Park Lane, the scene of how many great historical gatherings, became a club for impossible people who dropped in at all hours of the day and night to partake of the perpetual picnic in the Georgian dining room and to discuss pre-Raphaelite futurism, or something that sounded like that, in the Louis XV. drawing-room, to the horror of James, the footman. ”

“ So a hurried contract was drawn up, and the duchess left the office the tenant of a cottage on the Cornish coast and poorer to the amount of fifty pounds.
Mr. Mortimer was almost abject with respect.
“Money doesn't seem to worry you much, anyhow,” he declared. “Might be made of it, the way you toss it about. Well, it's the jolliest morning I've had for a long time—quite the jolliest. Never enjoyed myself so much. Call me up any time. If you want to back a winner or buy a locomotive, I'm your man, and don't you forget it! You're a sport, Mrs. ”