Free Eleanor by Mary Augusta Ward Page B

time to take you about. I can guess that! How’s the book getting on?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ she said, opening her eyes wide in a smile that would not be repressed, a smile that broke like light in her grave face.
    Her companion looked at her with approval.
    ‘My word! she’s dowdy’—he thought—‘like a Sunday-school teacher. But she’s handsome.’
    The real point was, however, that Mrs. Burgoyne had told him to go out and make himself agreeable, and he was accustomed to obey orders from that quarter.
    ‘Doesn’t he read it to you all day and all night?’ he asked. ‘That’s his way.’
    ‘I have heard some of it. It’s very interesting.’
    The young man shrugged his shoulders.
    ‘It’s a queer business that book. My chief here is awfully sick about it. So are a good many other English. Why should an Englishman come out here and write a book to run down Italy?—And an Englishman that’s been in the Government, too—so of course what he says’ll have authority. Why, we’re friends with Italy—we’ve always stuck up for Italy! When I think what he’s writing—and what a row it’ll make—I declare I’m ashamed to look one’s Italian friends in the face!—And just now, too, when they’re so down on their luck.’
    For it was the year of the Abyssinian disasters; and the carnage of Adowa was not yet two months old.
    Lucy’s expression showed her sympathy.
    ‘What makes him—’
    ‘Take such a twisted sort of a line? O goodness! what makes Manisty do anything? Of course, I oughtn’t to talk. I’m just an understrapper—and he’s a man of genius,—more or less—we all know that. But what made him do what he did last year? I say it was because his chief—he was in the Education Office you know—was a Dissenter, and a jam manufacturer, and had mutton-chop whisker. Manisty just couldn’t do what he was told by a man like that. He’s as proud as Lucifer. I once heard him tell a friend of mine that he didn’t know how to obey anybody—he’d never learnt. That’s because they didn’t send him to a public school—worse luck; that was his mother’s doing, I believe. She thought him so clever—he must be treated differently to other people. Don’t you think that’s a great mistake?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Why—to prefer the cross-cuts, when you might stick to the high road?’
    The American girl considered. Then she flashed into a smile.—
    ‘I think I’m for the cross-cuts!’
    ‘Ah—that’s because you’re American. I might have known you’d say that. All your people want to go one better than anybody else. But I can tell you it doesn’t do for Englishmen. They want their noses kept to the grindstone. That’s my experience! Of course it was a great pity Manisty ever went into Parliament at all. He’d been abroad for seven or eight years, living with all the big-wigs and reactionaries everywhere. The last thing in the world he knew anything about was English politics.—But then his father had been a Liberal, and a Minister for ever so long. And when Manisty came home, and the member for his father’s division died, I don’t deny it was very natural they should put him in. And he’s such a queer mixture, I dare say he didn’t know himself where he was.—But I’ll tell you one thing—’
    He shook his head slowly,—with all the airs of the budding statesman.
    ‘When you’ve joined a party,—you must
dine
with ‘em:—It don’t sound much—but I declare it’s the root of everything. Now Manisty was always dining with the other side. All the great Tory ladies,—and the charming High Churchwomen, and the delightful High Churchmen—and they
are
nice fellows, I can tell you!—got hold of him. And then it came to some question about these beastly schools—don’t you wish they were all at the bottom of the sea?—and I suppose his chief was more annoying than usual—(oh, but he had a number of other coolnesses on his hands by that time—he wasn’t meant to