Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/21

 and lived in Upper Baker Street. His wife took my arm from a place they called a drawing-room (the Captain as he spoke was on a fourth floor), to share some unknown food which they called a dinner (the Captain at that moment would have welcomed a rasher). The woman went about blabbing--the thing got wind--for the first time my character received a soil. What is a man without character! and character once sullied, Jessie, man becomes reckless. Teach my boy to beware of the first false step--no association with parvenus. Don't cry, Jessie--I don't mean that he is to cut your--relations are quite different from other people--nothing so low as cutting relations. I continued, for instance, to visit Guy Darrell, though he lived at the back of Holborn, and I actually saw him once in brown beaver gloves. But he was a relation. I have even dined at his house, and met odd people there--people who lived also at the back of Holborn. But he did not ask me to go to their houses, and if he had, I must have cut him." By reminiscences of this kind of talk, Lionel was saved from any design of Mrs. Haughton's to attract his orbit into the circle within which she herself moved. He must come to the parties she gave--illumine or awe odd people there. That was a proper tribute to maternal pride. But had they asked him to their parties, she would have been the first to resent such a liberty.

Lionel found Mrs. Haughton in great bustle. A gardener's cart was before the street door. Men were bringing in a grove of evergreens, intended to border the staircase, and make its exiguous ascent still more difficult. The refreshments were already laid out in the dining-room. Mrs. Haughton, with scissors in hand, was cutting flowers to fill the eperyne, but darting to and fro, like a dragonfly, from the dining-room to the hall, from the flowers to the evergreens.

"Dear me, Lionel, is that you? Just tell me, you who go to all those grandees, whether the ratafia-cakes should be opposite to the sponge-cakes, or whether they would not go better--thus--at cross-corners?"

"My dear mother, I never observed--I don't know. But make haste-take off that apron-have those doors shut come upstairs. Mr. Darrell will be here very shortly. I have ridden on to prepare you."