Page:The time spirit; a romantic tale (IA timespiritromant00snaiiala).pdf/254

 odd friendships, she had joined queer movements, and from time to time she regaled very remarkable people with tea and cake at Bridport House.

To all this there could only be one end. First she consulted her oculist and changed her glasses, and then she fell in love. She was the first of the Bridport ladies to enter that state; thus she was less a portent than a phenomenon. Sarah, Blanche, and Marjorie gave her the cold shoulder, and Aunt Charlotte frowned, but there was no getting over the sinister fact that Breadth had at last undone her. Sir Dugald had recently been seen for the first time in one of the smaller and less uncomfortable drawing-rooms of Bridport House. The Dinneford ladies seldom read the newspapers, at least the political part of them, being beyond all things "healthy-*minded" women; therefore they knew little of the facts of his career. Moreover, they were in happy ignorance of the attack he had launched three years ago upon their sire. But it cannot be said of Muriel that she was equally innocent. Evil communications corrupt good manners; Breadth had made a recourse to politics inevitable. And the slight importance she attached to a certain incident was, to say the least, unfilial.

In the cool, appraising eyes of Sarah, Blanche, and Marjorie, the bold Sir Dugald was set down already as a freak of nature. They were not used to that sort of person at Bridport House. Unfortunately such an attitude forbade any just perception of the man himself. His career was still in the making, and in the view of keen but unsympathetic observers who had followed it from the start, the hapless Muriel had been marked down in order that she might advance him in it. Moreover, up