fool.”

“General opinion!” she returned with infinite contempt. “The opinion of a lot of women who were mad to be duchesses. What is your general opinion worth to-day in this tiresome affair? As worthless and wrong as usual. No, John, you did a good thing for yourself when you married me, and you know it.”

“I know it?”

“I have made you.”

This was too much. Here was the once Miss Isabel Grendon, a nobody with a pretty face and trim figure to whom he had, after much hesitation, played Cophetua, talking of having made a Duke of eight generations. “Made me!” he cried thickly, in his ducal indignation.[41] “I had an idea that the Dukes of Lancashire were made, as you call it, some hundreds of years before your name appeared on the roll.”

[41]

“Made? Yes, I dare say; after a fashion. But you were not worth noticing, even when you had got your coronets on. Before I took you in hand you were nobodies.”

“Nobodies!” the Duke could only echo. In this rarified atmosphere of insult independent argument, and even utterance, were asphyxiated.

“Nobodies,” the Duchess maintained with exasperating insistence. “I’ve seen your mother waiting in Johnson and Maxtons to be served and none of the shop people would notice her. They knew well enough who she was, and that she had come in to spend half an hour in buying a few yards of sevenpence-halfpenny lace to furbish up an old gown which her own housekeeper wouldn’t have looked at except to sell to the dustman to dress his wife in for Hampstead Heath. J’ai changé tout cela.”

“Yes, you have,” assented the Duke, recovering his breath as his wife lost hers. “And if extravagance makes a man, you have made me.”

“One owes something to one’s position,” argued the lady.

“You owe a great deal, my dear, not to say everything,” retorted the Duke, in a happy flash.

“To be Duchess of Lancashire meant next to nothing before my day,” her Grace proceeded, ignoring the hit. “I saw the possibilities of the position.”

“No doubt,” agreed the Duke.

“And have raised it to its proper level in accordance with modern ideas. I found you thrown away in a[42] dusthole, I have polished you up and brought you into the drawing-room.”

 Prev. P 30/219 next