Alice threw down her work, and hastily opened the notes. She flushed an angry pink as she read them.

"I might as well not exist!" she said shortly, as she pushed them away again.

For two of the notes requested the pleasure of Dr. and Mrs. Hooper's and Lady Constance Bledlow's company at dinner, and the third, from a very great lady, begged "dear Mrs. Hooper" to bring Lady Constance to a small party in Wolsey College Gardens, to meet the Chancellor of the University, a famous Tory peer, who was coming down to a public, meeting. In none of the three was there any mention of the elder Miss Hooper.

Mrs. Hooper looked worried. It was to her credit that her maternal feeling, which was her only pa.s.sion, was more irritated by this sudden stream of invitations than her vanity was tickled.

What was there indeed to tickle anybody's vanity in the situation? It was all Constance--Constance--Constance! Mrs. Hooper was sometimes sick of the very name "Lady Constance Bledlow," It had begun to get on her nerves. The only defence against any sort of "superiority," as some one has said, is to love it. But Mrs. Hooper did not love her husband's niece. She was often inclined to wish, as she caught sight of Alice's pinched face, that the household had never seen her. And yet without Connie's three hundred a year, where would the household be!

Mrs. Hooper was painfully, one might have said, guiltily aware of that side of the business. She was an incompetent, muddling woman, who had never learnt to practise the simple and dignified thrift so common in the academic households of the University. For nowhere, really, was plain living gayer or more attractive than in the new Oxford of this date. The young mothers who wheeled their own perambulators in the Parks, who bathed and dressed and taught their children, whose house-books showed a spirited and inventive economy of which they were inordinately proud, who made their own gowns of Liberty stuff in scorn of the fashion, were at the same time excellent hostesses, keeping open house on Sundays for their husbands' undergraduate pupils, and gallantly entertaining their own friends and equals at small flowery dinner-parties in Morris-papered rooms, where the food and wine mattered little, and good talk and happy comradeship were the real fare.

Meanwhile the same young mothers were going to lectures on the Angevins, or reading Goethe or Dante in the evenings--a few friends together, gathering at each other's houses; then were discussing politics and social reform; and generally doing their best--unconsciously--to silence the croakers and misogynists who maintained that when all the girl babies in the perambulators were grown up, and Oxford was flooded with womenkind like all other towns, Oxford would have gone to "Death and d.a.m.nation."

But Mrs. Hooper, poor lady, was not of this young and wholesome generation. She was the daughter of a small Midland manufacturer, who had rushed into sudden wealth, for a few years, had spent it all in riotous living, over a period just sufficient to spoil his children, and had then died leaving them penniless. Ewen Hooper had come across her when he was lecturing at a northern university, immediately after his own appointment at Oxford. He had pa.s.sed a hara.s.sed and penurious youth, was pining for a home. In ten days he was engaged to this girl whom he met at the house of a Manchester professor. She took but little wooing, was indeed so enchanted to be wooed that Ewen Hooper soon imagined himself in love with her; and all was done.

Nor indeed had it answered so badly for him--for a time. She had given him children, and a home, though an uncomfortable one. Greek scholarship and Greek beauty were the real idols of his heart and imagination. They did not fail him. But his wife did him one conspicuous ill turn. From the first days of their marriage, she ran her husband badly into debt; and things had got slowly worse with the years. Mrs. Hooper was the most wasteful of managers; servants came and went interminably; and while money oozed away, there was neither comfort nor luxury to show for it.

As the girls grew up, they learnt to dread the sound of the front doorbell, which so often meant an angry tradesman; and Ewen Hooper, now that he was turning grey, lived amid a perpetual series of mean annoyances with which he was never meant to cope, and which he was now beginning to hand over, helplessly, to his younger daughter Nora, the one member of the family who showed some power to deal with them.

The situation had been almost acute, when Lord Risborough died. But there was a legacy in his will for Ewen Hooper which had given a breathing s.p.a.ce; and Connie had readily consented to pay a year's maintenance in advance. Yet still the drawer of bills, on which Nora kept anxious watch, was painfully full; and of late the perennial difficulty of ready money had reappeared.

Mrs. Hooper declared she must have a new dress, if these invitations were to be accepted.

"I don't want anything extravagant," she said fretfully. "But really it's too bad of Nora to say that I could have my old blue one done up.

She never seems to care how her mother looks. If all this fuss is going to be made about Constance and I am to take her out, I must be decent!"

The small underhung mouth shut obstinately. These musts of her mother's and Alice's were Nora's terror. They always meant a new bill.

Alice said--"Of course! And especially when Constance dresses so extravagantly!" she added bitterly. "One can't look like her scullery-maid!"

Mrs. Hooper sighed. She glanced round her to see that the door was shut.

"That silly child, Nora, had quite a scene with Connie this morning, because Connie offered to give her that pretty white dress in Brandon's window. She told me Connie had insulted her. Such nonsense! Why shouldn't Connie give her a dress--and you too? She has more money than she knows how to spend."

Alice did not reply. She, too, wanted new dresses; she could hardly endure the grace and costliness of Connie's garments, when she compared them with her own; but there was something in her sad little soul also that would not let her be beholden to Connie. Not without a struggle, anyway.

"I don't want Connie to give me things either," she said sulkily. "She's never been the least nice to me. She makes a pet of Nora, and the rest of us might be doormats for all the notice she takes of us."

"Well, I don't know--she's quite civil," said Mrs. Hooper reflectively.

She added, after a minute--"It's extraordinary how the servants will do anything for her!"

"Why, of course, she tips them!" cried Alice, indignantly. Mrs. Hooper shrugged her shoulders. It was quite indifferent to her whether Connie tipped them or not, so long as she gained by the result. And there was no denying the fact that the house had never gone so smoothly as since Connie's arrival. At the same time her conscience reminded her that there was probably something else than "tipping" in the matter. For instance--both Constance and Annette were now intimately acquainted with each of Mrs. Hooper's three maids, and all their family histories; whereas Mrs. Hooper always found it impossible to remember their surnames. A few days before this date, Susan the housemaid had received a telegram telling her of the sudden death of a brother in South Africa.

In Mrs. Hooper's view it was providential that the death had occurred in South Africa, as there could be no inconvenient question of going to the funeral. But Connie had pleaded that the girl might go home for two days to see her mother; Annette had done the housework during her absence; and both maid and mistress had since been eagerly interested in the girl's mourning, which had been largely supplied out of Connie's wardrobe. Naturally the opinion of the kitchen was that "her ladyship is sweet!"

Alice, however, had not found any sweetness in Connie. Was it because Mr. Herbert Pryce seemed to take a mysterious pleasure in pointing out her, charms to Alice? Alice supposed he meant it well. There was a didactic element in him which was always leading him to try and improve other people. But it filled her with a silent fury.

"Is everybody coming to the picnic to-morrow?" asked Mrs. Hooper presently.

"Everybody." Alice pointed indifferently to a pile of notes lying on her desk.

"You asked Connie if we should invite Mr. Falloden?"

"Of course I did, mother. He is away till next week."

"I wonder if she cares for him?" said Mrs. Hooper vaguely.

Alice laughed.

"If she does, she consoles herself pretty well, when he's not here."

"You mean with Mr. Sorell?"

Alice nodded.

"Such a ridiculous pretence, those Greek lessons!" she said, her small face flaming. "Nora says, after they have done a few lines, Constance begins to talk, and Mr. Sorell throws himself back in his chair, and they chatter about the places they've seen together, and the people they remember, till there's no more time left. Nora says it's a farce."

"I say, who's taking my name in vain?" said Nora, who had just opened the schoolroom door and overheard the last sentence.

"Come in and shut the door," said Alice, "we were talking about your Greek lessons."

"Jolly fun they are!" said Nora, balancing herself, as usual, on the window-sill. "We don't do much Greek, but that don't matter! What are these notes, mother?"

Mrs. Hooper handed them over. Alice threw a mocking look at her sister.

"Who said that Oxford didn't care about t.i.tles? When did any of those people ever take any notice of us?"

"It isn't t.i.tles--it's Connie!" said Nora stoutly. "It's because she's handsome and clever--and yet she isn't conceited; she's always interested in other people. And she's an orphan--and people were very fond of her mother. And she talks scrumptiously about Italy. And she's new--and there's a bit of romance in it--and--well, there it is!"

And Nora pulled off a twig from the banksia rose outside, and began to chew it energetically with her firm white teeth, by way of a.s.sisting her thoughts.

"Isn't conceited!" repeated Alice with contempt. "Connie is as proud as Lucifer."

"I didn't say she wasn't. But she isn't vain."

Alice laughed.

"Can't you see the difference?" said Nora impatiently. "'Proud' means 'Don't be such a fool as to imagine that I'm thinking of you!'--'Vain'

means 'I wonder dreadfully what you're thinking of me?'"

"Well then, Connie is both proud and vain," said Alice with decision.

"I don't mean she doesn't know she's rich, and good-looking and run after," said Nora, beginning to flounder. "But half the time, anyway, she forgets it."

"Except when she is talking to men," said Alice vindictively, to which Mrs. Hooper added with her little obstinate air--

"Any girl who likes admiration as much as Connie does must be vain. Of course, I don't blame her."

"Likes admiration? Hm," said Nora, still chewing at her twig. "Yes, I suppose she does. But she's good at snubbing, too." And she threw a glance at her sister. She was thinking of a small evening party the night before, at which, it seemed to her, Connie had several times snubbed Herbert Pryce rather severely. Alice said nothing. She knew what Nora meant. But that Connie should despise what she had filched away only made things worse.

Mrs. Hooper sighed again--loudly.