“Some tea, with pleasure”—he looked all his longing; “though when you talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day as this especially, you’d find yourselves running a continuous table d’hôte.”
“Ah, we can’t work sports in our gallery and saloon—the banging or whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for; unless, perhaps,” Lady Grace went on, “your own peculiar one, as I understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old idiotic superstitions.”
Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. “The names and stories and styles—the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious—of author or subject or school?” But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a cause sometimes lost. “Ah, that’s a game at which we all can play!”
“Though scarcely,” Lady Grace suggested, “at which we all can score.”
The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression of the place and its charm—of the number of objects, treasures of art, that pressed for appreciation of their importance. “Certainly,” he said, “no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of this order—which express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their assurance!”
“We’ve had great luck,” she granted—“as I’ve just been reminded; but ever since those terrible things you told me in town—about the tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools’ paradise in which so many of us live—I’ve gone about with my heart in my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn’t be pulling us to pieces?”
Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. “Mr. Bender?”
“The rich American who’s going round.”
It gave him a sharper shock. “The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington’s Longhi?”
Lady Grace showed surprise. “Is he a wretch?”