Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/226

 lost to the playwrights. I felt sorry for them. I even felt sorry for Flora Furness. As for the Centerbrookers, the joke was on them both ways. The daughter of the stuffed-heart aristocracy and poor Con Gorman, the ne'er-do-well, had both arrived at their distinguished goals by following the impractical bypaths which Centerbrook—in the person of the coal-yard proprietor—had so despised. Life has a way of playing such little jokes upon the wisdom of the too practical.

It has also a way of playing similar jokes upon the wisdom of the too unromantic.

I supposed, as I say, that their story was complete. They were separated by all the waters of the Atlantic, to say nothing of the even greater distances of social differences between them. When we heard that Howard Hartley, being invalided home from France, had married an English heiress the news made no point with me. It did not occur to me that the Furness family no longer depended on Flora to maintain their position in the world. I was equally blind when her husband's name was given among those who died aboard the Queen Mary in the Jutland battle. I still thought of Lady Flora Williamson as irrevocably committed to the aristocratic life and the war work of the Woman's Auxiliary Corps, of which she was an active patroness.