Lady Hathaway's House Party Read Online Free PDF

uncertainty as to his perfection. It was a hard thing to admit, and had taken quite a few months, but as he sat at home at Belwood looking out the window to the bleak winter countryside, he conceded that there might have been just a little something in his own conduct that put her off. He really had not treated her quite so well as he ought to have. She surely did not expect him to go on courting his wife, but the shift from premarital to postmarital behavior might have been less abrupt.
    He had been generous with his money, but of his actual time she had not had so much. Not so much as a bride might have expected possibly, a bride from the country in any case. It was possible that Belle didn’t realize married people were laughed at if they went jauntering arm-in-arm to every do together. A modern, society bride was given much freedom to go her own way; she didn’t have a husband looking over her shoulder at every turn, to see she behaved herself. Ladies like to go shopping and play loo and have a few harmless flirts on the side, to be in style. They would have been a laughingstock if he had carried on after marriage as he had before. It wasn’t done . . . yet he had wanted to do it.
    It had annoyed him no end to see her go off without him, and he often let some trace of his annoyance slip out too, some snide remark about a bonnet or a gown, when it was her going off without him that really bothered him. So he went off to Brook’s to play cards, or to the boxing parlor to take his ill humor out on Jackson, or to the House of Lords to catch up on what was going on in the world of politics, and she went off with her own friends. He had seen to it she had all kinds of friends. She never asked him to change his plans—not once. He had at least never gone off and abandoned her for any length of time. She had accompanied him to the two house parties attended that month. They had been the best part of that wretched marriage, really.
    He had thought she would hate it at Crockett Hall, but she had begun looking rather peaky that third week of their marriage, and a weekend away from the hurly-burly of London seemed advisable. There at a quiet party without a single dashing buck to amuse her, she had been happier than at any other time. Just the two of them, the only young couple there, going off together for rides and walks and sitting around in the evening playing cards, or reading by the fire while the oldsters played whist. He remembered the second evening they were there, and again as on the first the hostess had set up the card tables. He had been afraid Belle might think he was showing her a pretty flat time.
    “Perhaps we should go back to London,” he suggested.
    “Are you bored?” she asked wistfully. He had thought she must be.
    “I daresay we would be better amused than watching the old folks play cards in any case.”
    “We came here to rest,” she reminded him, and took up her book with apparent contentment. Cowper she had been reading—poems by Cowper, and he had laughed at her for liking such maudlin stuff. To show her how sophisticated he was, and how well he read French, he had picked up Voltaire’s Candide. They had passed a restful evening together by the fire, reading sometimes silently, and occasionally aloud to each other when they came across a particularly good passage. They had retired early together, an unusual event in their social lives, one of the happier recollections of that unhappy month.
    At Crockett that weekend Avondale had had some hopes that once they went to Belwood, his wife would be happier. The rural life appealed to her. She had run through the fields like a gypsy, or a colt, her dress billowing behind her, and he could hardly catch her. She had seemed like a very young girl that weekend, a happy girl. It had been a mistake not to go directly to Belwood for a honeymoon; he was convinced of it now.
    But she had gone to London for the season, her first, and he had not wished to