"She is going in for philanthropy, I suppose," Lady Tramley conjectured, shaking her head with a patient smile over the small, flowing handwriting--Camelia hated untidy scrawls. "Let us help her. Camelia is sure to do something interesting in the way of cottages. She'll carry them through like a London season."

Lady Tramley, as may be gathered from these remarks, was one of Camelia's admirers, though not a blind or bigoted one. She shook her head on many occasions, but Camelia's defects were not serious matters to her gay philosophy, and Camelia's qualities in this frivolous world, where nothing should be peered at too closely, were attractively sparkling. As a successful hostess Lady Tramley prized the charming Miss Paton.

"Now mind," Camelia said on arriving at her friend's house, "I am not going to be shown to any one. I am in a monastic frame of mind, and must be kept unspotted from the world. No dances or dinners, if you please,"

and she fixed her with eyes really grave.

"Very well." Lady Tramley acquiesced as to a humorous and pretty whim.

"My doors are closed while you are here--as on a retreat. But when will the season of penance be over? We are all expiating with you, remember."

"Do I imply penance? Is that the habit my retirement wears?"

"People give you credit for all sorts of niceties of feeling." Lady Tramley smiled her significant little smile, a smile not lavished on the nothings of intercourse, and Camelia, taking her by the shoulders, shook her softly.

"No; sly as you are you get nothing out of me, and give me credit for nothing, please, not even for curiosity as to what people _do_ say of me."

"You know, dear, he is to meet, I fear, a second disaster as unmerited----"

Camelia had sat down to the tea-tray brought to refresh her after her journey. She looked up from the filling of her cup to meet in a glance the delicate directness of Lady Tramley's look.

"Jack knows the ropes, of course, and I thought you ought to know too--and be sorry." In her heart Lady Tramley hoped for an expansion of sorrow that would carry Camelia past her moment of inexplicable folly.

"I am sorry. The bill, you mean." Camelia folded a slice of bread and b.u.t.ter, adding "Idiots."

"Idiots indeed. It won't be carried, I am afraid. There is a split in the Government, and Mr. Rodrigg has developed a really spiteful acrimony. I always hated that man."

"Ah! I loathe him!" said Camelia. She thought with a pang of self-reproach of an unopened letter among the rejected pile--a letter for Mr. Rodrigg. She had not cared to read his shuffling excuses. His vanity, bulwarked by the strangely apt events succeeding his discomfiture, might well renew hope. He might imagine these events the result of remorse, and that, brought to a timely realization of her folly, his fair one would consent to bury the hatchet and allow his firm hand to tame her finally. All this Camelia had conjectured very rightly on looking at the fat envelope. She had restrained the direct rebuff of returning the unopened letter, but she had neither answered nor cared to read it, and could well imagine that Mr. Rodrigg's c.u.mulative humiliation would urge him to his only possible vengeance. The "I loathe him" was spoken with a most feeling intensity of tone.

"Yes." Lady Tramley's affirmative was meaning, and Camelia looked up alertly. "Lady Henge told me."

"You know everything, I believe," cried Camelia. "Well, I am in good hands."

"I understand--your idea in it. But how unwise. How you mistook the man."

"Rather! a.s.s that I am!"

"You looked for superlative chivalry, if you come to think of it."

"No, for sincerity; common honesty. I thought I could convince him. I didn't want chivalry without conviction. What did Lady Henge say of me?"

Camelia added bluntly.

Lady Tramley replied very frankly, "She said you were a shallow jilt. I quite agreed with her inwardly--though I shamelessly defended you."

"If I say that I agree with you both it will only savor of ostentatious humility--so I refrain. But, Lady Tramley, it was not the breaking of our engagement that was shallow--that I will say. And so the bill is doomed. Can we do nothing? Shear no Samson in the lobbies? Mr. Rodrigg, of course, offers no hirsute possibilities."

"Not a hair. Your Mr. Perior will be disappointed. He came back from the Continent, you know, and put his shoulder to the wheel."

Camelia stirred her tea evenly. Her nerves, as she felt with pride, were very reliable.

"_Our_ Mr. Perior then, is he not?" she asked, while her thoughts flew past Sir Arthur to nestle pityingly to Perior. His useless valiancy embittered her against the world of unconvinced opponents. Idiots indeed! But she could not see him yet; even her nerves were not yet tempered to a meeting. She had no comfortable background against which to present herself; when she did, the background must be so unfamiliar that for neither of them could there be the confusion of a hinted memory.

"Ours, by all means," said Lady Tramley. "I only effaced myself before the paramount claim.--Not quite doomed. There is still the final fight, and it is to be heralded by a thunderous article in the _Friday_. Mr.

Perior only goes down sword in hand."

CHAPTER XXII

So he was in London. Camelia, sitting at home in the library, could think of the nearness with a new calm. She was preparing herself to meet its closer approach. She was not leaving herself defenceless. She plunged into her reading--architecture, agriculture, decoration, and sociology. The books came down from London in heavy boxes, and she sat encompa.s.sed by the encouraging perfume of freshly-cut leaves.

"Are you happy, dear?" her mother asked her. She would come in with her usual air of deprecatory gentleness, and bend over the absorbed golden head that did not turn at her entrance. On this day the absorption wore a look of eager interest that seemed to justify the question.

Camelia finished her sentence, smiling, however, as she put her hand on her mother's without looking up. Her mind, indeed, was soothed, comparatively comfortable.

"No rude questions, Mamma!"

"You understand all these solemn books?" Over her daughter's shoulder, where she leaned, Lady Paton looked respectfully at the heavy volume.

"I am beginning to understand that whatever one does in philanthropy is wrong from the point of view of some authority!" Camelia said, stretching herself on a long yawn, and then gently pinching her mother's chin, while the smile dwelt upon her appreciatively, "As usual I find that the only thing to do in this world is to do just as one likes."

"If one can," said Lady Paton, with a half sad playfulness.

"If one can;" the words woke in Camelia a painfully personal affirmative, and with the wave of self-pity that swept through her mingled a sense of her mother's unconscious pathos. Still holding her chin she looked up at her, "It has often been _can't_ with you, hasn't it?"

Lady Paton's glance fluttered to a shy alarm and surprise at this application.

"With me, dear?"

"Yes--you have had to give up lots of things, haven't you? to put up with any amount of disagreeable inevitables."

"I have had many blessings."

"Oh! of course! You would say that over your last crust! But it has been can't with you, decidedly. I wonder if it was because you weren't strong enough to have your own way!"

"That would be a bad way, surely."

"Ah!--not yours!"

"And perhaps I have no way at all," Lady Paton added, and Camelia was obliged to laugh at the subtle simplicity.

"That is being too submissive. Yet--it is comfortable, no doubt.

Absolute non-resistance isn't a bad idea. And yet, why shouldn't one make one's struggle?--survive if one is fittest? Why is not having one's own way as good as submitting to somebody else's? Oh dear!" she cried.

"What is it?"

"Nothing, nothing; I am unfittest, that is all!" Camelia stared out of the window.