he said apologetically. "We've talked of a variety of subjects--to little purpose, I suppose. But it's entertaining to survey the field of humanity. Your views were briefly expressed, Hayes."

"Everybody else was talking such a lot, sir," said Andy.

Belfield's humorous laugh was entangled in a cough. "You'll never get that obstacle out of the way of your oratory," he managed to stutter out. "They always are! Talk rules the world--eh, Wellgood?" He was maliciously provocative.

"We wait till they've finished talking. Then we do what we want," said Wellgood. "Force rules in the end--the readiness to kill and be killed.

That's the _ultima ratio_, the final argument."

"The women say that's out of date."

"The women!" exclaimed Wellgood contemptuously.

"They'll be in the garden," Harry opined. "Shall we move, pater?"

"We might as well," said Belfield. "Are you ready, Wellgood?"

Wellgood was ready--in spite of his contempt.

Chapter VI.

THE WORLDS OF MERITON.

The garden at Halton was a pleasant place on a fine evening, with a moon waxing, yet not obtrusively full, with billowing shrubberies, clear-cut walks, lawns spreading in a gentle drabness that would be bright green in to-morrow's sun--a place pleasant in its calm, its s.p.a.ciousness and isolation. They all sat together in a ring for a while; smoke curled up; a servant brought gla.s.ses that clinked as they were set down with a cheery, yet not urgent, suggestion.

"I suppose you're right to go in for it," said Wellgood to Harry. "It's your obvious line." (He was referring to a public career.) "But, after all, it's casting pearls before swine."

"Swine!" The note of exclamation was large. "Our masters, Mr. Wellgood!"

"A decent allowance of bran, and a ring through their noses--that's the thing for them!"

"Has anybody got a copy--well, another copy of 'Coriola.n.u.s'?" Harry inquired in an affectation of eagerness.

"Casting pearls before swine is bad business, of course," said Belfield in his husky voice--he was really unwise to be out of doors at all; "but there are degrees of badness. If your pearls are indifferent as pearls, and your swine admirable as swine? And that's often the truth of it."

"My husband is sometimes perverse in his talk, my dear," said Mrs.

Belfield, aside to Vivien, to whom she was being very kind. "You needn't notice what he says."

"He's rather amusing," Vivien ventured, not quite sure whether the adjective were respectful enough.

"Andy, p.r.o.nounce!" cried Harry Belfield; for his friend sat in his usual meditative absorbing silence.

"If I had to, I'd like to say a word from the point of view of the--swine." Had the moon been stronger, he might have been seen to blush. "I don't want to be--oh, well, serious. That's rot, I know--after dinner. But--well, you're all in it--insiders--I'm an outsider. And I say that what the swine want is--pearls!"

"If we've got them?" The question, or insinuation, was Belfield's. He was looking at Andy with a real, if an only half-serious, interest.

"Swine are swine," remarked Wellgood. "They mustn't forget it. Neither must we."

"But pearls by no means always pearls?" Belfield suggested. "Though they may look the real thing if a pretty woman hangs them round her neck."

Their talk went only for an embellishment of their general state--so comfortable, so serene, so exceptionally fortunate. Were not they pearls? Andy had seen something of the swine, had perhaps even been one of them. A vague protest stirred in him; were they not too serene, too comfortable, too fortunate? Yet he loved it all; it was beautiful. How many uglies go to make one beautiful? It is a bit of social arithmetic.

When you have got the result, the deduction may well seem difficult.

"It doesn't much matter whether they're real or not, if a really pretty woman hangs them round her neck," Harry laughed. "The neck carries the pearls!"

"But we'd all rather they were real," said Isobel Vintry suddenly, the first of the women to intervene. "Other women guess, you see."

"Does it hurt so much if they do?" Belfield asked.

"The only thing that really does hurt," Isobel a.s.sured him, smiling.

"Oh, my dear, how disproportionate!" sighed Mrs. Belfield.

"I'd never have anything false about me--pearls, or lace, or hair, or--or anything about me," exclaimed Vivien. "I should hate it!" Feeling carried her into sudden unexpected speech.

Very gradually, very tentatively, Andy was finding himself able to speak in this sort of company, to speak as an equal to equals, not socially only, but in an intellectual regard.

"Riches seem to me all wrong, but what they produce, leaving out the wasters, all right." He let it out, apprehensive of a censuring silence.

Belfield relieved him in a minute.

"I'm with you. I always admire most the things to which I'm on principle opposed--a melancholy state of one's mental interior! Kings, lords, and bishops--crowns, coronets, and ap.r.o.ns--all very attractive and picturesque!"

"We all know that the governor's a crypto-Radical," said Harry.

"I thought Carlyle, among others, had taught that we were all Radicals when in our pyjamas--or less," said Belfield. "But that's not the point.

The excellence of things that are wrong, the narrowness of the moral view!"

"My dear! Oh, well, my dear!" murmured Mrs. Belfield.

"I've got a touch of asthma--I must say what I like." Belfield humorously traded on his infirmity. "A dishonest fellow who won't pay his tradesmen, a flirtatious minx who will make mischief, a spoilt urchin who insists on doing what he shouldn't--all rather attractive, aren't they? If everybody behaved properly we should have no 'situations.' What would become of literature and the drama?"

"And if n.o.body had any spare cash, what would become of them, either?"

asked Harry.

"Well, we could do with a good deal less of them. I'll go so far as to admit that," said Wellgood.

Belfield laughed. "Even from Wellgood we've extracted one plea for the redistribution of wealth. A dialectical triumph! Let's leave it at that."

Mrs. Belfield carried her husband off indoors; Wellgood went with them, challenging his host to a game of bezique; Harry invited Vivien to a stroll; Isobel Vintry and Andy were left together. She asked him a sudden question:

"Do you think Harry Belfield a selfish man?"

"Selfish! Harry? Heavens, no! He'd do anything for his friends."

"I don't mean quite in that way. I daresay he would--and, of course, he's too well-mannered to be selfish about trifles. But I suppose even to ask questions about him is treason to you?"