England -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction; Families -- Fiction; Journalists -- Fiction
He was at Sherards for that week-end because Lord Pinkerton was just
making him editor of the _Daily Haste_. Before that, he had been on the
staff, a departmental editor, and a leader-writer. ('Mr. Hobart will go
far,' said Lady Pinkerton sometimes, when she read the leaders. 'I
hope, on the contrary,' said Lord Pinkerton, 'that he will stay where
he is. It is precisely the right spot. That was the trouble with
Carruthers; he went too far. So he had to go altogether.' He gave his
thin little snigger).
Anyhow, here was Hobart, this Saturday afternoon, having tea in the
garden. Jane saw him through the mellow golden sweetness of shadow
and light.
'Here is Jane,' said Lady Pinkerton.
Jane's dark hair fell in damp waves over her hot, square, white forehead;
her blue cotton dress was crumpled and limp. How neat, how cool, was this
Hobart! Could a man have a Gibson face like that, like a young man on the
cover of an illustrated magazine, and not be a ninny? Did he take the
Pinkerton press seriously, or did he laugh? Both, probably, like most
journalists. He wouldn't laugh to Lord Pinkerton, or to Lady Pinkerton,
or to Clare. But he might laugh to Jane, when she showed him he might.
Jane, eating jam sandwiches, looking like a chubby school child, with her
round face and wide eyes and bobbed hair and cotton frock, watched the
beautiful young man with her solemn unwinking stare that disconcerted
self-conscious people, while Lady Pinkerton talked to him about some
recent fiction.
On Sunday, people came over to lunch, and they played tennis. Clare and
Hobart played together. 'Oh, well up, partner,' Jane could hear him say,
all the time. Or else it was 'Well tried. Too bad.' Clare's happy eyes
shone, brown and clear in her flushed face, like agates. Rather a pretty
thing, Clare, if dull.
The Franks were there, too.
'Old Clare having a good time,' said Mrs. Frank to Jane, during a set
they weren't playing in. Her merry dark eyes snapped. Instinctively, she
usually said something to disparage the good time of other girls. This
time it was, 'That Hobart thinks he's doing himself a good turn with
pater, making up to Clare like that. Oh, he's a cunning fellow. Isn't he
handsome, Jane? I hate these handsome fellows, they always know it so
well. Nothing in his face really, if you come to look, is there? I'd
rather have old Frank's, even if he does look like a half-starved bird.'
2
Jane was calmly rude to Hobart, showing him she despised his paper, and
him for editing it. She let him see it all, and he was imperturbably,
courteously amused, and, in turn, showed that he despised her for
belonging to the 1917 Club.
'_You_ don't,' he said, turning to Clare.
'Gracious, no. I don't belong to a club at all. I go with mother to the
Writers' sometimes, though; that's not bad fun. Mother often speaks
there, you know, and I go and hear. Jolly good she is, too. She read a
ripping paper last week on the "Modern Heroine."'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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