Page:The time spirit; a romantic tale (IA timespiritromant00snaiiala).pdf/119

 a distant kinsman that he had never taken the ducal connection seriously.

The family's reception of the Tenderfoot—his own humorous name for himself—amused him considerably, yet at the same time it filled him with a subtle annoyance. Five fruitful years out West had made him an iconoclast. He saw with awakened eyes the arid and sterile pomposities which were doing their best to put the old land out of the race. Bridport House was going to spell boredom and worse for Jack Dinneford.

Still the Duke, as became a man of the world, soon got to the root of the trouble, and having the welfare of a time-honored institution at heart, was at pains to deal with the novice tactfully. All the same, he was far from being pleased by the tricks of Providence. But he made the young man an allowance of two thousand a year, and exhorted him not to get into mischief; and the Dinneford ladies, who were prepared to be kind to the Tenderfoot and to be more amused by his "originality" than they confessed to each other, chose some rooms for him in Arlington Street, looked after his general welfare, and began to make plans for the future of Bridport House. Aunt Charlotte took him at once under an ungracious wing, and found him a bear-leader in the person of her nephew Wrexham, a subaltern of the Pinks, a picturesque young man, reputed a paragon of all the Christian virtues, and a martyr to a sense of duty.

From this model of discretion the tiro soon received a hint. Cousin Sarah owned to thirty-eight in the glare of Debrett, Cousin Muriel had other views apparently, but there remained Cousin Blanche and Cousin Marjorie