“On the contrary, sir! I object very much to it,” she said, sparks of wrath in her eyes. “I think it is a gross impertinence—to give you the word with no bark on it!—for what right have you to give me hints on how I should conduct myself? None that I have granted you!”

He looked to be a little confounded by this forthright speech, but embarked on a ponderous explanation of the purity of his intention, in which his regard for her, his hope that he might one day have the right to guide her judgment, his conviction that the warning he had uttered would meet with her brother’s warm approval, and his knowledge of the world, became entangled almost beyond unravelling. He seemed to be aware of this, for he brought his speech to an end by saying: “In short, dear Miss Annis, you are ignorant—as indeed one would wish you to be!—of how very undesirable an acquaintance for a delicately nurtured female Carleton is! Particularly for a lady of quality such as yourself! I am persuaded that your good brother would echo my sentiments on this occasion, and that there is no need for me to say more.”

She bestowed a glittering smile upon him, and said: “No need at all, sir! In point of fact, there was no need for you to have said as much. But since you seem to be so much concerned with my welfare let me assure you that my acquaintance with Mr Carleton is unattended by any danger either to my reputation or to my virtue! He is quite the rudest man I have ever met, and I am not so ignorant as to be unaware that he is what I believe is termed a man of the town,but I have it on the best of authority—his own!—that he never attempts to seduce ladies of quality! So you may be easy—and I beg you will say no more on this subject!”

An amused voice spoke at her elbow. “I expect he will, though, and you can see he is far from easy,” said Mr Carleton. He nodded at Beckenham, who was visibly swelling with hostility, and greeted him with a careless tolerance which still further exacerbated his lordship’s resentment. “How do you do?” he said. “They tell me it was you who bought that dubious Brueghel at Christie’s last month, but I daresay rumour lied!”

“I did buy it, and I do not consider it dubious!” responded his lordship, growing almost purple in the face from his effort to suppress his spleen. “I heard that you had a fancy for it, Carleton!”

“No, no! not when I had had the opportunity to inspect it more closely!” replied Mr Carleton soothingly. “I wasn’t the bidder who ran you up so high—in fact, I wasn’t in the bidding at all!” Observing, with satisfaction, the effect this had on the infuriated connoisseur, he added, by way of rubbing salt into the wound: “I don’t think I was told who your unsuccessful rival was: some silly gudgeon, no doubt!”

“Do I understand you to mean that I too am a gudgeon?” demanded Lord Beckenham fiercely.

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 agreeable 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!”

She found herself without a word to say, but no answer was required of her. With the briefest of bows he turned away, leaving her to regret that she had allowed her vexation to betray her into what she realized, too late, had been an impropriety. Ladies of the first consideration did not accuse even the most hardened rake-shame of being a loose screw. She told herself that the fault lay at his door: she had caught the infection of far too plain speaking from him. But it would not do; her conscience smote her; she foresaw that she would be obliged to offer him an apology; and discovered, with some surprise, that it was more mortifying to be thought by him to be bird-witted than brassily forward.