A lady on a Scotch pony--she understood that Lady Dunstable often
rode with the shooters--and a tall man walking beside her, carrying, not
a gun, but a walking stick:--that was the vision in the crystal. Arthur
was too bad a shot to be tolerated in the Dunstable circle; had indeed
wisely announced from the beginning that he was not to be included among
the guns. All the more time for conversation, the give and take of wits,
the pleasures of the intellectual tilting-ground; the whole watered by
good wine, seasoned with the best of cooking, and lapped in the general
ease of a house where nobody ever thought of such a vulgar thing as
money except to spend it.
Doris had in general a severe mind as to the rich and aristocratic
classes. Her own hard and thrifty life had disposed her to see them _en
noir_. But the sudden rush of a certain section of them to crowd
Arthur's lectures had been certainly mollifying. If it had not been for
the Vampire, Doris was well aware that her standards might have given
way.
As it was, Lady Dunstable's exacting ways, her swoop, straight and
fierce, on the social morsel she desired, like that of an eagle on the
sheepfold, had made her, in Doris's sore consciousness, the
representative of thousands more; all greedy, able, domineering,
inevitably getting what they wanted, and more than they deserved;
against whom the starved and virtuous intellectuals of the professional
classes were bound to contend to the death.
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