Стивен Ликок
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
It was realized in a flash that Yahi-Bahi and Ram Spudd had paid the penalty of their daring with their lives. Through some fatal neglect, against which they had fairly warned the participants of the seance, the two Orientals had been carried bodily in the astral plane.
"How dreadful!" murmured Mr. Snoop. "We must have made some awful error."
"Are they deastralized?" murmured Mrs. Buncomhearst.
"Not a doubt of it," said Mr. Snoop.
And then another voice in the group was heard to say, "We must hush it up. We can't have it known!"
On which a chorus of voices joined in, everybody urging that it must be hushed up.
"Couldn't you try to reastralize them?" said somebody to Mr. Snoop.
"No, no," said Mr. Snoop, still shaking. "Better not try to. We must hush it up if we can."
And the general assent to this sentiment showed that, after all, the principles of Bahee, or Indifference to Others, had taken a real root in the society.
"Hush it up," cried everybody, and there was a general move towards the hall.
"Good Heavens!" exclaimed Mrs. Buncomhearst; "our wraps!"
"Deastralized!" said the guests.
There was a moment of further consternation as everybody gazed at the spot where the ill-fated pile of furs and wraps had lain.
"Never mind," said everybody, "let's go without them—don't stay. Just think if the police should—"
And at the word police, all of a sudden there was heard in the street the clanging of a bell and the racing gallop of the horses of the police patrol wagon.
"The police!" cried everybody. "Hush it up! Hush it up!" For of course the principles of Bahee are not known to the police.
In another moment the doorbell of the house rang with a long and violent peal, and in a second as it seemed, the whole hall was filled with bulky figures uniformed in blue.
"It's all right, Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown," cried a loud, firm voice from the sidewalk. "We have them both. Everything is here. We got them before they'd gone a block. But if you don't mind, the police must get a couple of names for witnesses in the warrant."
It was the Philippine chauffeur. But he was no longer attired as such. He wore the uniform of an inspector of police, and there was the metal badge of the Detective Department now ostentatiously outside his coat.
And beside him, one on each side of him, there stood the deastralized forms of Yahi-Bahi and Ram Spudd. They wore long overcoats, doubtless the contents of the magic parcels, and the Philippine chauffeur had a grip of iron on the neck of each as they stood. Mr. Spudd had lost his Oriental hair, and the face of Mr. Yahi-Bahi, perhaps in the struggle which had taken place, had been scraped white in patches.
They were making no attempt to break away. Indeed, Mr. Spudd, with that complete Bahee, or Submission to Fate, which is attained only by long services in state penitentiaries, was smiling and smoking a cigarette.
"We were waiting for them," explained a tall police officer to the two or three ladies who now gathered round him with a return of courage. "They had the stuff in a hand-cart and were pushing it away. The chief caught them at the corner, and rang the patrol from there. You'll find everything all right, I think, ladies," he added, as a burly assistant was seen carrying an armload of furs up the steps.
Somehow many of the ladies realized at the moment what cheery, safe, reliable people policemen in blue are, and what a friendly, familiar shelter they offer against the wiles of Oriental occultism.
"Are they old criminals?" someone asked.
"Yes, ma'am. They've worked this same thing in four cities already, and both of them have done time, and lots of it. They've only been out six months. No need to worry over them," he concluded with a shrug of the shoulders.
So the furs were restored and the gold and the jewels parcelled out among the owners, and in due course Mr. Yahi-Bahi and Mr. Ram Spudd were lifted up into the patrol wagon where they seated themselves with a composure worthy of the best traditions of Jehumbabah and Bahoolapore. In fact, Mr. Spudd was heard to address the police as "boys," and to remark that they had "got them good" that time.
So the seance ended and the guests vanished, and the Yahi-Bahi Society terminated itself without even a vote of dissolution.
And in all the later confidential discussions of the episode only one point of mysticism remained. After they had time really to reflect on it, free from all danger of arrest, the members of the society realized that on one point the police were entirely off the truth of things. For Mr. Yahi-Bahi, whether a thief or not, and whether he came from the Orient, or, as the police said, from Missouri, had actually succeeded in reastralizing Buddha.
Nor was anyone more emphatic on this point than Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown herself.
"For after all," she said, "if it was not Buddha, who was it?"
And the question was never answered.
CHAPTER FIVE: The Love Story of Mr. Peter Spillikins
Almost any day, on Plutoria Avenue or thereabouts, you may see little Mr. Spillikins out walking with his four tall sons, who are practically as old as himself.
To be exact, Mr. Spillikins is twenty-four, and Bob, the oldest of the boys, must be at least twenty. Their exact ages are no longer known, because, by a dreadful accident, their mother forgot them. This was at a time when the boys were all at Mr. Wackem's Academy for Exceptional Youths in the foothills of Tennessee, and while their mother, Mrs. Everleigh, was spending the winter on the Riviera and felt that for their own sake she must not allow herself to have the boys with her.
But now, of course, since Mrs. Everleigh has remarried and become Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins there is no need to keep them at Mr. Wackem's any longer. Mr. Spillikins is able to look after them.
Mr. Spillikins generally wears a little top hat and an English morning coat. The boys are in Eton jackets and black trousers, which, at their mother's wish, are kept just a little too short for them. This is because Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins feels that the day will come some day—say fifteen years hence—when the boys will no longer be children, and meantime it is so nice to feel that they are still mere boys. Bob is the eldest, but Sib the youngest is the tallest, whereas Willie the third boy is the dullest, although this has often been denied by those who claim that Gib the second boy is just a trifle duller. Thus at any rate there is a certain equality and good fellowship all round.
Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is not to be seen walking with them. She is probably at the race-meet, being taken there by Captain Cormorant of the United States navy, which Mr. Spillikins considers very handsome of him. Every now and then the captain, being in the navy, is compelled to be at sea for perhaps a whole afternoon or even several days; in which case Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is very generally taken to the Hunt Club or the Country Club by Lieutenant Hawk, which Mr. Spillikins regards as awfully thoughtful of him. Or if Lieutenant Hawk is also out of town for the day, as he sometimes has to be, because he is in the United States army, Mrs. Everleigh-Spillikins is taken out by old Colonel Shake, who is in the State militia and who is at leisure all the time.
During their walks on Plutoria Avenue one may hear the four boys addressing Mr. Spillikins as "father" and "dad" in deep bull-frog voices.
"Say, dad," drawls Bob, "couldn't we all go to the ball game?"
"No. Say, dad," says Gib, "let's all go back to the house and play five-cent pool in the billiard-room."
"All right, boys," says Mr. Spillikins. And a few minutes later one may see them all hustling up the steps of the Everleigh-Spillikins's mansion, quite eager at the prospect, and all talking together.
Now the whole of this daily panorama, to the eye that can read it, represents the outcome of the tangled love story of Mr. Spillikins, which culminated during the summer houseparty at Castel Casteggio, the woodland retreat of Mr. and Mrs. Newberry.
But to understand the story one must turn back a year or so to the time when Mr. Peter Spillikins used to walk on Plutoria Avenue alone, or sit in the Mausoleum Club listening to the advice of people who told him that he really ought to get married.
In those days the first thing that one noticed about Mr. Peter Spillikins was his exalted view of the other sex. Every time he passed a beautiful woman in the street he said to himself, "I say!" Even when he met a moderately beautiful one he murmured, "By Jove!" When an Easter hat went sailing past, or a group of summer parasols stood talking on a leafy corner, Mr. Spillikins ejaculated, "My word!" At the opera and at tango teas his projecting blue eyes almost popped out of his head.
Similarly, if he happened to be with one of his friends, he would murmur, "I say, do look at that beautiful girl," or would exclaim, "I say, don't look, but isn't that an awfully pretty girl across the street?" or at the opera, "Old man, don't let her see you looking, but do you see that lovely girl in the box opposite?"
One must add to this that Mr. Spillikins, in spite of his large and bulging blue eyes, enjoyed the heavenly gift of short sight. As a consequence he lived in a world of amazingly beautiful women. And as his mind was focused in the same way as his eyes he endowed them with all the virtues and graces which ought to adhere to fifty-dollar flowered hats and cerise parasols with ivory handles.
Nor, to do him justice, did Mr. Spillikins confine his attitude to his view of women alone. He brought it to bear on everything. Every time he went to the opera he would come away enthusiastic, saying, "By Jove, isn't it simply splendid! Of course I haven't the ear to appreciate it—I'm not musical, you know—but even with the little that I know, it's great; it absolutely puts me to sleep." And of each new novel that he bought he said, "It's a perfectly wonderful book! Of course I haven't the head to understand it, so I didn't finish it, but it's simply thrilling." Similarly with painting, "It's one of the most marvellous pictures I ever saw," he would say. "Of course I've no eye for pictures, and I couldn't see anything in it, but it's wonderful!"
The career of Mr. Spillikins up to the point of which we are speaking had hitherto not been very satisfactory, or at least not from the point of view of Mr. Boulder, who was his uncle and trustee. Mr. Boulder's first idea had been to have Mr. Spillikins attend the university. Dr. Boomer, the president, had done his best to spread abroad the idea that a university education was perfectly suitable even for the rich; that it didn't follow that because a man was a university graduate he need either work or pursue his studies any further; that what the university aimed to do was merely to put a certain stamp upon a man. That was all. And this stamp, according to the tenor of the president's convocation addresses, was perfectly harmless. No one ought to be afraid of it. As a result, a great many of the very best young men in the City, who had no need for education at all, were beginning to attend college. "It marked," said Dr. Boomer, "a revolution."
Mr. Spillikins himself was fascinated with his studies. The professors seemed to him living wonders.
"By Jove!" he said, "the professor of mathematics is a marvel. You ought to see him explaining trigonometry on the blackboard. You can't understand a word of it." He hardly knew which of his studies he liked best. "Physics," he said, "is a wonderful study. I got five per cent in it. But, by Jove! I had to work for it. I'd go in for it altogether if they'd let me."
But that was just the trouble—they wouldn't. And so in course of time Mr. Spillikins was compelled, for academic reasons, to abandon his life work. His last words about it were, "Gad! I nearly passed in trigonometry!" and he always said afterwards that he had got a tremendous lot out of the university.
After that, as he had to leave the university, his trustee, Mr. Boulder, put Mr. Spillikins into business. It was, of course, his own business, one of the many enterprises for which Mr. Spillikins, ever since he was twenty-one, had already been signing documents and countersigning cheques. So Mr. Spillikins found himself in a mahogany office selling wholesale oil. And he liked it. He said that business sharpened one up tremendously.
"I'm afraid, Mr. Spillikins," a caller in the mahogany office would say, "that we can't meet you at five dollars. Four seventy is the best we can do on the present market."
"My dear chap," said Mr. Spillikins, "that's all right. After all, thirty cents isn't much, eh what? Dash it, old man, we won't fight about thirty cents. How much do you want?"
"Well, at four seventy we'll take twenty thousand barrels."
"By Jove!" said Mr. Spillikins; "twenty thousand barrels. Gad! you want a lot, don't you? Pretty big sale, eh, for a beginner like me? I guess uncle'll be tickled to death."
So tickled was he that after a few weeks of oil-selling Mr. Boulder urged Mr. Spillikins to retire, and wrote off many thousand dollars from the capital value of his estate.
So after this there was only one thing for Mr. Spillikins to do, and everybody told him so—namely to get married. "Spillikins," said his friends at the club after they had taken all his loose money over the card table, "you ought to get married."
"Think so?" said Mr. Spillikins.
Goodness knows he was willing enough. In fact, up to this point Mr. Spillikins's whole existence had been one long aspiring sigh directed towards the joys of matrimony.
In his brief college days his timid glances had wandered by an irresistible attraction towards the seats on the right-hand side of the class room, where the girls of the first year sat, with golden pigtails down their backs, doing trigonometry.
He would have married any of them. But when a girl can work out trigonometry at sight, what use can she possibly have for marriage? None. Mr. Spillikins knew this and it kept him silent. And even when the most beautiful girl in the class married the demonstrator and thus terminated her studies in her second year, Spillikins realized that it was only because the man was, undeniably, a demonstrator and knew things.
Later on, when Spillikins went into business and into society, the same fate pursued him. He loved, for at least six months, Georgiana McTeague, the niece of the presbyterian minister of St. Osoph's. He loved her so well that for her sake he temporarily abandoned his pew at St. Asaph's, which was episcopalian, and listened to fourteen consecutive sermons on hell. But the affair got no further than that. Once or twice, indeed, Spillikins walked home with Georgiana from church and talked about hell with her; and once her uncle asked him into the manse for cold supper after evening service, and they had a long talk about hell all through the meal and upstairs in the sitting-room afterwards. But somehow Spillikins could get no further with it. He read up all he could about hell so as to be able to talk with Georgiana, but in the end it failed: a young minister fresh from college came and preached at St. Osoph's six special sermons on the absolute certainty of eternal punishment, and he married Miss McTeague as a result of it.
And, meantime, Mr. Spillikins had got engaged, or practically so, to Adelina Lightleigh; not that he had spoken to her, but he considered himself bound to her. For her sake he had given up hell altogether, and was dancing till two in the morning and studying action bridge out of a book. For a time he felt so sure that she meant to have him that he began bringing his greatest friend, Edward Ruff of the college football team, of whom Spillikins was very proud, up to the Lightleighs' residence. He specially wanted Adelina and Edward to be great friends, so that Adelina and he might ask Edward up to the house after he was married. And they got to be such great friends, and so quickly, that they were married in New York that autumn. After which Spillikins used to be invited up to the house by Edward and Adelina. They both used to tell him how much they owed him; and they, too, used to join in the chorus and say, "You know, Peter, you're awfully silly not to get married."
Now all this had happened and finished at about the time when the Yahi-Bahi Society ran its course. At its first meeting Mr. Spillikins had met Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown. At the very sight of her he began reading up the life of Buddha and a translation of the Upanishads so as to fit himself to aspire to live with her. Even when the society ended in disaster Mr. Spillikins's love only burned the stronger. Consequently, as soon as he knew that Mr. and Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown were going away for the summer, and that Dulphemia was to go to stay with the Newberrys at Castel Casteggio, this latter place, the summer retreat of the Newberrys, became the one spot on earth for Mr. Peter Spillikins.
Naturally, therefore, Mr. Spillikins was presently transported to the seventh heaven when in due course of time he received a note which said, "We shall be so pleased if you can come out and spend a week or two with us here. We will send the car down to the Thursday train to meet you. We live here in the simplest fashion possible; in fact, as Mr. Newberry says, we are just roughing it, but I am sure you don't mind for a change. Dulphemia is with us, but we are quite a small party."
The note was signed "Margaret Newberry" and was written on heavy cream paper with a silver monogram such as people use when roughing it.
The Newberrys, like everybody else, went away from town in the summertime. Mr. Newberry being still in business, after a fashion, it would not have looked well for him to remain in town throughout the year. It would have created a bad impression on the market as to how much he was making.
In fact, in the early summer everybody went out of town. The few who ever revisited the place in August reported that they hadn't seen a soul on the street.
It was a sort of longing for the simple life, for nature, that came over everybody. Some people sought it at the seaside, where nature had thrown out her broad plank walks and her long piers and her vaudeville shows. Others sought it in the heart of the country, where nature had spread her oiled motor roads and her wayside inns. Others, like the Newberrys, preferred to "rough it" in country residences of their own.
Some of the people, as already said, went for business reasons, to avoid the suspicion of having to work all the year round. Others went to Europe to avoid the reproach of living always in America. Others, perhaps most people, went for medical reasons, being sent away by their doctors. Not that they were ill; but the doctors of Plutoria Avenue, such as Doctor Slyder, always preferred to send all their patients out of town during the summer months. No well-to-do doctor cares to be bothered with them. And of course patients, even when they are anxious to go anywhere on their own account, much prefer to be sent there by their doctor.
"My dear madam," Dr. Slyder would say to a lady who, as he knew, was most anxious to go to Virginia, "there's really nothing I can do for you." Here he spoke the truth. "It's not a case of treatment. It's simply a matter of dropping everything and going away. Now why don't you go for a month or two to some quiet place, where you will simply do nothing?" (She never, as he knew, did anything, anyway.) "What do you say to Hot Springs, Virginia?—absolute quiet, good golf, not a soul there, plenty of tennis." Or else he would say, "My dear madam, you're simply worn out. Why don't you just drop everything and go to Canada?—perfectly quiet, not a soul there, and, I believe, nowadays quite fashionable."
Thus, after all the patients had been sent away, Dr. Slyder and his colleagues of Plutoria Avenue managed to slip away themselves for a month or two, heading straight for Paris and Vienna. There they were able, so they said, to keep in touch with what continental doctors were doing. They probably were.
Now it so happened that both the parents of Miss Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown had been sent out of town in this fashion. Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's distressing experience with Yahi-Bahi had left her in a condition in which she was utterly fit for nothing, except to go on a Mediterranean cruise, with about eighty other people also fit for nothing.
Mr. Rasselyer-Brown himself, though never exactly an invalid, had confessed that after all the fuss of the Yahi-Bahi business he needed bracing up, needed putting into shape, and had put himself into Dr. Slyder's hands. The doctor had examined him, questioned him searchingly as to what he drank, and ended by prescribing port wine to be taken firmly and unflinchingly during the evening, and for the daytime, at any moment of exhaustion, a light cordial such as rye whiskey, or rum and Vichy water. In addition to which Dr. Slyder had recommended Mr. Rasselyer-Brown to leave town.
"Why don't you go down to Nagahakett on the Atlantic?" he said.
"Is that in Maine?" said Mr. Rasselyer-Brown in horror.
"Oh, dear me, no!" answered the doctor reassuringly. "It's in New Brunswick, Canada; excellent place, most liberal licence laws; first class cuisine and a bar in the hotel. No tourists, no golf, too cold to swim—just the place to enjoy oneself."
So Mr. Rasselyer-Brown had gone away also, and as a result Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown, at the particular moment of which we speak, was declared by the Boudoir and Society column of the Plutorian Daily Dollar to be staying with Mr. and Mrs. Newberry at their charming retreat, Castel Casteggio.
The Newberrys belonged to the class of people whose one aim in the summer is to lead the simple life. Mr. Newberry himself said that his one idea of a vacation was to get right out into the bush, and put on old clothes, and just eat when he felt like it.
This was why he had built Castel Casteggio. It stood about forty miles from the city, out among the wooded hills on the shore of a little lake. Except for the fifteen or twenty residences like it that dotted the sides of the lake it was entirely isolated. The only way to reach it was by the motor road that wound its way among leafy hills from the railway station fifteen miles away. Every foot of the road was private property, as all nature ought to be. The whole country about Castel Casteggio was absolutely primeval, or at any rate as primeval as Scotch gardeners and French landscape artists could make it. The lake itself lay like a sparkling gem from nature's workshop—except that they had raised the level of it ten feet, stone-banked the sides, cleared out the brush, and put a motor road round it. Beyond that it was pure nature.
Castel Casteggio itself, a beautiful house of white brick with sweeping piazzas and glittering conservatories, standing among great trees with rolling lawns broken with flower-beds as the ground sloped to the lake, was perhaps the most beautiful house of all; at any rate, it was an ideal spot to wear old clothes in, to dine early (at 7.30) and, except for tennis parties, motor-boat parties, lawn teas, and golf, to live absolutely to oneself.
It should be explained that the house was not called Castel Casteggio because the Newberrys were Italian: they were not; nor because they owned estates in Italy: they didn't nor had travelled there: they hadn't. Indeed, for a time they had thought of giving it a Welsh name, or a Scotch. But the beautiful country residence of the Asterisk-Thomsons had stood close by in the same primeval country was already called Penny-gw-rydd, and the woodland retreat of the Hyphen-Joneses just across the little lake was called Strathythan-na-Clee, and the charming chalet of the Wilson-Smiths was called Yodel-Dudel; so it seemed fairer to select an Italian name.
"By Jove! Miss Furlong, how awfully good of you to come down!"
The little suburban train—two cars only, both first class, for the train went nowhere except out into the primeval wilderness—had drawn up at the diminutive roadside station. Mr. Spillikins had alighted, and there was Miss Philippa Furlong sitting behind the chauffeur in the Newberrys' motor. She was looking as beautiful as only the younger sister of a High Church episcopalian rector can look, dressed in white, the colour of saintliness, on a beautiful morning in July.
There was no doubt about Philippa Furlong. Her beauty was of that peculiar and almost sacred kind found only in the immediate neighbourhood of the High Church clergy. It was admitted by all who envied or admired her that she could enter a church more gracefully, move more swimmingly up the aisle, and pray better than any girl on Plutoria Avenue.
Mr. Spillikins, as he gazed at her in her white summer dress and wide picture hat, with her parasol nodding above her head, realized that after all, religion, as embodied in the younger sisters of the High Church clergy, fills a great place in the world.
"By Jove!" he repeated, "how awfully good of you!"
"Not a bit," said Philippa. "Hop in. Dulphemia was coming, but she couldn't. Is that all you have with you?"
The last remark was ironical. It referred to the two quite large steamer trunks of Mr. Spillikins that were being loaded, together with his suit-case, tennis racket, and golf kit, on to the fore part of the motor. Mr. Spillikins, as a young man of social experience, had roughed it before. He knew what a lot of clothes one needs for it.
So the motor sped away, and went bowling noiselessly over the oiled road, and turning corners where the green boughs of the great trees almost swished in their faces, and rounding and twisting among curves of the hills as it carried Spillikins and Philippa away from the lower domain or ordinary fields and farms up into the enchanted country of private property and the magic castles of Casteggio and Penny-gw-rydd.
Mr. Spillikins must have assured Philippa at least a dozen times in starting off how awfully good it was of her to come down in the motor; and he was so pleased at her coming to meet him that Philippa never even hinted that the truth was that she had expected somebody else on the same train. For to a girl brought up in the principles of the High Church the truth is a very sacred thing. She keeps it to herself.
And naturally, with such a sympathetic listener, it was not long before Mr. Spillikins had begun to talk of Dulphemia and his hopes.
"I don't know whether she really cares for me or not," said Mr. Spillikins, "but I have pretty good hope. The other day, or at least about two months ago, at one of the Yahi-Bahi meetings—you were not in that, were you?" he said breaking off.
"Only just at the beginning," said Philippa; "we went to Bermuda."
"Oh yes, I remember. Do you know, I thought it pretty rough at the end, especially on Ram Spudd. I liked him. I sent him two pounds of tobacco to the penitentiary last week; you can get it in to them, you know, if you know how."
"But what were you going to say?" asked Philippa.
"Oh yes," said Mr. Spillikins. And he realized that he had actually drifted off the topic of Dulphemia, a thing that had never happened to him before. "I was going to say that at one of the meetings, you know, I asked her if I might call her Dulphemia."
"And what did she say to that?" asked Philippa.
"She said she didn't care what I called her. So I think that looks pretty good, don't you?"
"Awfully good," said Philippa.
"And a little after that I took her slippers home from the Charity Ball at the Grand Palaver. Archie Jones took her home herself in his car, but I took her slippers. She'd forgotten them. I thought that a pretty good sign, wasn't it? You wouldn't let a chap carry round your slippers unless you knew him pretty well, would you, Miss Philippa?"
"Oh no, nobody would," said Philippa. This of course, was a standing principle of the Anglican Church.
"And a little after that Dulphemia and Charlie Mostyn and I were walking to Mrs. Buncomhearst's musical, and we'd only just started along the street, when she stopped and sent me back for her music—me, mind you, not Charlie. That seems to me awfully significant."
"It seems to speak volumes," said Philippa.
"Doesn't it?" said Mr. Spillikins. "You don't mind my telling you all about this Miss Philippa?" he added.
Incidentally Mr. Spillikins felt that it was all right to call her Miss Philippa, because she had a sister who was really Miss Furlong, so it would have been quite wrong, as Mr. Spillikins realized, to have called Miss Philippa by her surname. In any case, the beauty of the morning was against it.
"I don't mind a bit," said Philippa. "I think it's awfully nice of you to tell me about it."
She didn't add that she knew all about it already.
"You see," said Mr. Spillikins, "you're so awfully sympathetic. It makes it so easy to talk to you. With other girls, especially with clever ones, even with Dulphemia. I often feel a perfect jackass beside them. But I don t feel that way with you at all."
"Don't you really?" said Philippa, but the honest admiration in Mr. Spillikin's protruding blue eyes forbade a sarcastic answer.
"By Jove!" said Mr. Spillikins presently, with complete irrelevance, "I hope you don't mind my saying it, but you look awfully well in white—stunning." He felt that a man who was affianced, or practically so, was allowed the smaller liberty of paying honest compliments.
"Oh, this old thing," laughed Philippa, with a contemptuous shake of her dress. "But up here, you know, we just wear anything." She didn't say that this old thing was only two weeks old and had cost eighty dollars, or the equivalent of one person's pew rent at St. Asaph's for six months.
And after that they had only time, so it seemed to Mr. Spillikins, for two or three remarks, and he had scarcely had leisure to reflect what a charming girl Philippa had grown to be since she went to Bermuda—the effect, no doubt, of the climate of those fortunate islands—when quite suddenly they rounded a curve into an avenue of nodding trees, and there were the great lawn and wide piazzas and the conservatories of Castel Casteggio right in front of them.
