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Unlike most women, Dodo much preferred to breakfast down-stairs in a large dining-room, facing the window, rather than mumble a private tray in bed. Jack, in consequence, was allowed to be as grumpy as he pleased at this meal, for Dodo’s sense of fairness told her that if she was so unfeminine as to feel cheerful and sociable at half-past nine in the morning, she must not expect her husband to be so unmasculine as to resemble her.

“Crumbs get into my bed,” she had said to Edith the evening before, when the morning venue was mentioned, “and my egg tastes of blankets. Also, I hate bed when I wake: I feel bright and brisk and fresh, which is very trying for other people. Jack breakfasts down-stairs, too, though if you asked him to breakfast in your bedroom, I daresay he would come.”

“I hate seeing anybody till eleven,” said Edith, “and many people then.”

“Very well, Jack, as usual, will be cross to me, which is an excellent plan, because I don’t mind, and he works off his morning temper. Don’t come down to protect me: it’s quite unnecessary.”

This was really equivalent to an invitation to be absent, and as it coincided with Edith’s inclination, the hour of half-past nine found Dodo reading her letters and Jack fortified against intrusive sociability by a copy of the Times, propped against the teakettle.

The room faced south, and the sun from the window struck sideways across Dodo’s face, as she exhibited a pleasant appetite for correspondence and solid food, while Jack sat more in the shadow of the Times. This oblique light made the black ink in which Dodo’s correspondents had written to her appear to be a rich crimson. She had already remarked on this interesting fact, with an allusion to the spectacles which had been finally lost three years ago, and as a test question to see how Jack was feeling, she asked him if he had seen them. As he made no answer whatever, she concluded that he was still feeling half-past-nineish.

Then she got really interested in a letter from Miss Grantham, an old friend who had somehow slipped out of her orbit. Miss Grantham was expected here this afternoon, but apparently had time to write a long letter, though she could have said it all a few hours later.

“Grantie is getting poorer and poorer,” she said. “A third aunt has died lately, and so Grantie had to pay three thousand pounds. I had no idea aunts were so expensive. Isn’t it miserable for her?”

She turned over the page.

“Oh! There are compensations,” she said, “for the third aunt left her twenty-five thousand pounds, so she’s up on balance. Three from twenty-five. . . . But she sold a picture by Franz Hals to make sure. How like Grantie: she would run no risks! She never did; she always remained single and lived in the country away from influenza and baccarat. Oh, Jack, the Franz Hals fetched eight thousand pounds, so her poverty is bearable. Wasn’t that lovely?”

“Lovely!” said Jack.

Dodo looked up from Grantie’s letter, and ran her eyes round the walls.

“But those two pictures there are by Franz Hals,” she said. “Do let us sell one, and then we shall have eight thousand pounds. You shall have the eight, darling, because the picture is yours, and I shall have the thousands because I thought of it.”

Jack gave a short grunt as he turned over his paper. He had not quite got over the attack of the morning microbe, to which males are chiefly subject.

“All right,” he said. “And what shall we buy with the eight thousand pounds? Some more boots or bacon?”

Dodo considered this oracular utterance.

“That’s a wonderfully sensible question,” she said. “I don’t really know what we should buy with it. I suppose we shouldn’t buy anything, and the picture would be gone. I would certainly rather have it than nothing! What a mine of wisdom you are, darling! I suppose it was my mercantile blood that made me think of selling a picture. Blood’s thicker than paint. It always shows through.”

A fatal brown spot had appeared in the middle of Jack’s paper just opposite the spirit-lamp of the teakettle against which it leaned. As he was considering this odd phenomenon, it spread and burst into flame.

“Fire!” cried Dodo. “Edith will be burned in her bed. Put—put a rug around it! Lie down on it, Jack! Turn the hot water onto it! Put some sand on it! Why aren’t we at the seaside?”

Jack did none of these brilliant maneuvers. In an extraordinarily prosaic manner he took the paper up, dropped it into the grate and stamped on it. But the need for prompt action had started his drowsy mechanisms.

“Well, it’s morning,” he said as he returned to the table, “so let us begin. No, I think we won’t sell a Franz Hals, Dodo. And then came Grantie and her auntie, and then you with your mercantile blood. Which shall we take first?”

“Oh, blood, I think,” said Dodo, “because there’s a letter from Daddy. He would like to come down this afternoon for the Sunday, and will I telephone? He put a postal order for three-and-sixpence in his letter, to pay for a trunk call. Isn’t that rather sweet of him? Daddy is rich, but honest. That’s an epigram, or is it an inversion, but you needn’t laugh. Put up a thumb, darling, to show you recognize it. Jack, shall I say that Daddy may come, and we should love it? I like people of eighty to want things. And really, if we can give pleasure to a person of eighty, hadn’t we better? Eighty minus fifty-four: that leaves twenty-six. It would be pathetic if in twenty-six years from now you no longer cared about giving me pleasures. What has happened to the postal order for three-and-six? He did enclose it. I saw it. I believe you’ve burned it with the Times, Jack. Can we claim from the fire insurance?”

Jack formed a mental picture of old Mr. Vane, contemplated it for several seconds and dismissed it.

“Of course, he shall come if you want him to,” he said. “Send him my love.”

“That’s dear of you. I do want him to come, because he wants to, which, after all, is a very good reason. Otherwise, I think I should have liked him to come perhaps another day, when there weren’t twenty-five million other people. On the other hand, Daddy will like that; he’s getting tremendously smart, and ‘goes on’ to parties after dinner. My dear, do you think he will bring another large supply of his patent shoe-horns with him this time? I think we must examine his luggage, like a custom-house.”

This was an allusion to a genteel piece of advertising which Mr. Vane had indulged in last time he stayed with them. On that occasion Dodo had met him at the door, and without any misgivings at all had seen taken down from the motor an oblong wooden box about which he was anxious, and which, so he mysteriously informed her, contained “presents.” This she naturally interpreted to mean something nice for her. It subsequently appeared, however, that the presents were presents for everybody in the house, for Mr. Vane had instructed his valet to connive with the housemaids and arrange that on the dressing-table of every guest in the house there should be placed one of Vane’s patent shoe-horns with a small paper of instructions. This slip explained how conveniently these shoe-horns fitted the shape of the human heel, and entailed no stamping of the human foot nor straining of leather. . . .

“That’s what I mean by blood coming out,” continued Dodo, “when I want to sell a Franz Hals. I think I must be rather like Daddy over that. He doesn’t want any more money, any more than I do, but he cannot resist the opportunity of doing a little business. After all, why not? A shoe-horn doesn’t hurt anybody.”

“It did: it hurt me!” said Jack. “It bruised my heel.”

“Did it? Who would have thought Daddy was such a serpent? I didn’t use mine: my maid threw it into the fire the moment she saw it. She observed, with a sniff, that she wouldn’t have any of those nasty cheap things. I remonstrated: I told her it was a present from Daddy, and she said she thought he would have given me something handsomer than that.”

“They weren’t very handsome,” remarked Jack. “Nothing out of the way, I mean. Not raging beauties.”

“Daddy went on to Harrogate afterwards,” said Dodo. “He flooded the hotel with them. He used to sit in the velvet place which they call a lounge, and make himself agreeable to strangers, and lead the conversation round to the fact that he was my father. Then as soon as they were getting on nicely, he produced a shoe-horn. Bertie Arbuthnot told me about it. Daddy worked the shoe-horn stunt on him.”

“Priceless!” said Jack, grinning. “Go on.”

“Quite priceless: he gave them away free, gratis. Well, Daddy came in one day when Bertie was sitting in the lounge, and asked him if he knew me. So they got talking. And then Daddy looked fixedly at the heel of Bertie’s shoe which was rather shabby, as heels usually are, and out came the shoe-horn. ‘Take one of these, young man,’ said he, ‘and then you’ll make no more complaints about the bills for the cobbling of the heels of your shoes. Vane’s patent, you mark, and it’s that very Vane who’s addressing you!’ ”

Dodo burst out laughing. “I adore seeing you and Daddy together,” she said. “You find him so dreadfully trying, and I’m sure I don’t wonder, and you bear it with the fortitude of an early Christian martyr. What was the poem he made about the shoe-horn which was printed at the top of the instructions?”

Jack promptly quoted it—

“Yes, that’s it,” said Dodo. “And what a gem! He told me he lay awake three nights making it up, like Flaubert squirming about on the floor and tearing his hair in the struggle to get the right word.”

Dodo got up, looked for the Times, and remembered that it had been reduced to ashes.

“That’s a relief, anyhow,” she said. “I think it’s worth the destruction of the three-and-six-penny postal order. If it hadn’t been burned, I should have to read it to see what is going on.”

“There’s nothing.”

“But one reads it all the same. If there’s nothing in the large type, I read the paper across from column to column, and acquire snippets of information which get jumbled up together and sap the intellect. People with great minds like Edith never look at the paper at all. That’s why she argues so well: she never knows anything about the subject, and so can give full play to her imagination.”

Dodo threw up the window.

“Oh, Jack, it is silly to go to London in June,” she said. “And yet it doesn’t do to stay much in the country, unless you have a lot of people about, who make you forget you are in the country at all.”

“Who is coming to-day?” asked he.

“Well, I thought originally that we would have the sort of party we had twenty-five years ago, and see how we’ve all stood it; and so you and I and Edith and Grantie and Tommy Ledgers represent the old red sandstone. Then Nadine and Hughie and young Tommy Ledgers and two or three of their friends crept in, and then there are Prince and Princess Albert. They didn’t creep in: they shoved in.”

“My dear, what a menagerie!” said Jack.

“I know: the animals kept on coming in one by one and two by two, and we shall be about twenty-five altogether. Princess Albert is opening a bazaar, or a bank, or a barracks at Nottingham on Tuesday, that’s why she is coming.”

“Then why have you asked her to come to-day?”

“I didn’t: she thought it would be nice to come on Saturday instead of Monday, and wrote to tell me so—remind me to give Daddy the autograph—he has begun collecting autographs. However, he will look after her: he loves princesses of any age or shape. As for Albert, he shall have trays of food brought him at short and regular intervals, so he’ll bother nobody. But best of all, my beloved David is coming back to-day. He and his round of visits! I think I’ll send a paragraph to the Morning Post, to say that Lord Harchester has returned to the family seat after a round of visits. I won’t say it was the dentist and the bootmaker.”

“Oh, for goodness sake, don’t teach David to be a snob,” said Jack.

“Darling, you’re a little heavy this morning,” said Dodo. “That was a joke.”

“Not entirely,” said Jack.

Dodo capitulated without the slightest attempt at defence.

“Quite right!” she said. “But you must remember that I was born, so to speak, in a frying-pan in Glasgow, enameled by the Vane process, or at least that was my cradle, and if you asked me to swear on my bended knees that I wasn’t a snob at all, I should instantly get up and change the subject. I do still think it’s rather fun being what I have become, and having royal families staying with me—”

“And saying it’s rather a bore,” put in Jack.

“Of course. I like being bored that way, if you insist on it. I haven’t ever quite got over my rise in life. Very nearly, but not quite.”

“You really speak as if you thought it mattered,” said Jack.

“I know it doesn’t really. It’s a game, a rather good one. Kind hearts are more than coronets, but I rather like having both. Most people are snobs, Jack, though they won’t say so. It’s distinctly snobbish of me to put my parties in the paper, and, after all, you read it in the morning, which is just as bad.”

Dodo bubbled with laughter.

“Oh, my dear, how funny we all are,” she said. “Just think of our pomposity, we little funny things kicking about together in the dust! We all rather like having titles and orders; otherwise the whole thing would have stopped long ago. Here’s Edith: so it must be eleven.”

Edith had taken to smoking a pipe lately, because her doctor said it was less injurious than cigarettes, and she wanted to hurt herself as little as possible. She found it difficult to keep it alight, and half-way across the room she struck a match on the sole of her shoe, and applied it to the bowl, from which a croaking noise issued.

“Dodo, is it true that the Prince and Princess are coming to stay here to-day?” she asked. “I saw it in the Daily Mail.”

Jack opened his mouth to speak, but Dodo clapped her hands in his face.

“Now, Jack, I didn’t put it there,” she said, “so don’t make false accusations. Of course, they did it themselves, because you and I—particularly I—are what people call smart, and they aren’t. That proves the point I was just going to make: in fact, that’s the best definition of snob. Snobs want to show other people how nicely they are getting on.”

Edith sat down in the window seat between Dodo and Jack, who shied away from the reek of her pipe, which an impartial breeze, coming in at the window, wafted this way and that.

“But who’s a-denying of it, Saireh Gamp?” she asked. “The snob’s main object is not actually having the king, or the Pope, or the Archbishop of Canterbury to dinner; what he cares about is that other people should know that he has done so. Snobbishness isn’t running after the great men of the earth, but letting the little ones know you have caught the great ones.”

“You hopeless women!” said Jack.

Dodo shook her head.

“He can’t understand,” she said, “for with all his virtues Jack isn’t a snob at all, and he misses a great deal of pleasure. We all want to associate with our superiors in any line. It is more fun having notable people about than nonentities. When it comes to friends it is a different thing, and I would throw over the whole Almanac of Gotha for the sake of a friend—”

Jack turned his eyes heavenwards.

“What an angel!” he said. “Was ever such nobility and unworldliness embodied in a human form? What have I done to deserve—”

Dodo interrupted.

“And we like other people to know it,” she said. “Poor Jack is a lusus naturae; he is swamped by the normal. You must yield, darling.”

Jack made an awful face as the smoke from Edith’s pipe blew across him, and got up.

“I yield to those deathly fumes,” he said.

Dodo’s guests arrived spasmodically during the afternoon. A couple of motors went backwards and forwards between the station and the house, meeting all probable trains, sometimes returning with one occupant, sometimes with three or four, for nobody had happened to say what time he was arriving. About five an aeroplane alighted in the park, bearing Hugh Graves as pilot, and his wife, Nadine, as passenger, and while Dodo, taking her daughter’s place, succeeded in getting Hugh to take her up for a short flight, Prince and Princess Albert arrived in a cab with Nadine’s maid, having somehow managed to miss the motor. Jack was out fishing at the time, and Prince Albert expressed over and over again his surprise at the informality of their reception. He was a slow, stout, stupid man of sixty, and in ten years’ time would no doubt be slower, stouter, stupider and seventy. He had a miraculous digestion, a huge appetite for sleep, and a moderate acquaintance with the English language. They spent four months of the year in England in order to get away from their terrible little court, and with a view to economy, passed most of those months in sponging on well-to-do acquaintances.

“Also, this is very strange,” he said slowly. “Where is Lady Chesterford? Where is Lord Chesterford? Where are our hosts? Where is tea?”

Princess Albert, brisk and buxom and pleasant and pleased, waddled through the house into the garden, where she met Nadine, leaving her husband to follow, still wondering at the strangeness of it all. She talked voluble, effective English in a guttural manner.

“So screaming!” she said. “Nobody here, neither dearest Dodo nor her husband to receive us, so when they come we will receive them. Where is she?”

Nadine pointed to an aeroplane that was flying low over the houses.

“She’s there just now,” she said.

“Flying? Albert, Dodo is flying. Is that not courageous of her?”

“But Lady Chesterford should have been here to receive us,” said he. “It is very strange, but we will have tea. And where is my evening paper? I shall have left it in the cab, and it must be fetched. You there: I wish my evening paper.”

The person he had thus addressed, who resembled an aged but extremely respectable butler, took off his hat, and Princess Albert instantly recognized him.

“But it is dear Mr. Vane,” she said. “How pleasant! Is it not screaming that we should arrive when Dodo is flying and Lord Chesterford is fishing? So awkward for them, poor things, when they find we are here!”

Prince Albert looked at him with some mistrust, which gradually cleared.

“I remember you!” he said. “You are Lady Chesterford’s father. Let us have tea and my evening paper.”

Once at the tea table, there was no more anxiety about Prince Albert.

“There are sandwiches,” he said. “There is toast. There is jam. Also these are caviare and these are bacon. And there is iced coffee. I will stay here. But it is very strange that Lady Chesterford is not here. Eating those sandwiches, Sophy? And there are cakes. Why is not Lady Chesterford—”

“She is flying, dearest,” said she. “Dodo cannot give us tea while she is flying. Ah, and here is dearest Edith.”

The news of the august arrivals had spread through the house, and such guests as were in it came out on to the terrace. Dodo’s father took up an advantageous position between the Prince and the Princess, and was with difficulty persuaded to put on his hat again. He spoke with a slight Scotch accent that formed a pleasant contrast to the guttural inflection.

“My daughter will be much distressed, your Highness,” he said, “that she has not been here to have the honor to receive you. And so, your Highness, the privilege falls on me, and honored I am—”

“So kind of you, Mr. Vane,” said that genial woman. “And your children, Nadine? They are well? And, dearest Edith, you have been in the East, I hear. How was my cousin Charlie?”

Mr. Vane gave a little gasp: he prevented himself with difficulty from taking off his hat again.

“The king came to my concert there, ma’am,” said Edith.

“He would be sure to. He is so musical: such an artist. His hymn of Aegin. You have heard his hymn? What do you think of it?”

Edith’s honesty about music was quite incorruptible.

“I don’t think anything at all about it,” she said. “There’s nothing to think about.”

Princess Albert choked with laughter.

“I shall tell him what you say,” she said. “So good for him. Albert dearest, Mrs. Arbuthnot says that ‘Aegin’ is nothing at all. Remind me to tell our dear cousin that, when I write.”

“But I will not any such thing remind you,” said her husband. “It is not good to anger him. Also, it is not good to speak like that of the king. No? I will have no more iced coffee. I will have iced champagne at dinner.”

Mr. Vane already had his hand on the jug.

“Not just a wee thimbleful, sir?” he asked.

“And what is a thimbleful? I do not know a thimbleful. And I will remind you, Sophy, not to tell the king what that lady said of his music. Instead, I will remind you to say that she was gratified and flattified—is it not? Also I hear a flying-machine, so perhaps now we shall learn why Lady Chesterford was not here—”

“Dearest, you have said that ten times,” said his wife, “and there is no good to repeat. There! The machine is coming down. We will go and meet dearest Dodo.”

The Prince considered this proposition on its merits.

“No: I will sit,” he said. “I will eat a cake. And I will see what is a thimbleful. Show me a thimbleful. A pretty lady could put that in her thimble, and I will put it now in my thimble inside me.”

Fresh hedonistic places outlined themselves.

“And when I have sat, I will have my dinner,” he said. “And then I will play bridge, and then I will go to bed, and then I will snore.”

Dodo had frankly confessed that she was a snob; otherwise her native honesty might have necessitated that confession when she found herself playing bridge in partnership with Nadine against her princely guests. She knew well that she would never have consented to let the Prince stay with her, if he had not been what he was, nor that she would have spent a couple of hours at the card-table when there were so many friends about. But she consoled herself with desultory conversation and with taking a turn or two in the next room where there was intermittent dancing going on. Just now the Prince was dealing with extreme deliberation, and talking quite as deliberately.

“Also, that was a very clever thing you said, Lady Chesterford, when you came in from your flying,” he said. “I shall tell the Princess Sophy. Lady Chesterford said to me what was very amusing. ‘I flew to meet you,’ she said, and that is very clever. She had been flying, and also to fly to meet someone means to go in a hurry. It was a pun.”

“Yes, dearest, get on with your dealing. You have told me twice already.”

“And now I tell you three times, and so you will remember. Always, when I play bridge, Lady Chesterford, I play with the Princess for my partner, for if I play against her, what she wins I lose and also what I win she loses, and so it is nothing at all. And now, with all your talking, I have turned up a card unto myself, and it is an ace, and I will keep it. I will not deal again when it is so nearly done.”

“But you must deal again,” cried his partner. “It is the rule, Albert. You must keep the rule.”

He laid down the few cards that remained to be dealt, and opened his hands over the table, so that she could not gather up those already distributed.

“But I shall not deal again,” he said, “the deal is so near complete. And there is no rule, and my cigar is finished.”

Dodo gave a little suppressed squeal of laughter.

“No, go on, sir,” she said. “We don’t mind.”

He raised his hands.

“So there you are, Sophy!” he said. “You were wrong, and there is no rule. Do not touch the cards, while I get me a fresh cigar. They are very good: I will take one to bed.”

He slowly got up.

“But finish your deal first,” she said. “You keep us all waiting.”

He slowly sat down.

“Ladies must have their own way,” he said. “But men also, and now I shall have to get up once more for my cigar.”

“Daddy, fetch the Prince a cigar,” said Dodo.

He looked at her, considering this.

“But, no; I will choose my own,” he said. “I will smell each, and I will take the best.”

During this hand an unfortunate incident occurred. The Princess, seeing an ace on the table, thought it came from an opponent, and trumped it.

“But what are you about?” he asked. “Also, it was my ace.”

She gathered up the trick.

“My fault, dearest,” she said. “Quite my fault. Now what shall I do?”

He laid down his hand.

“But you have played a trump when I had played the ace,” he said.

“Dearest, I have said it was a mistake,” said she.

“But it is to take five shillings from my pocket, that you should trump my ace. It is ridiculous that you should do that. If you do that, you show you cannot play cards at all. It was my ace.”

The rubber came to an end over this hand, and Dodo swiftly added up the scores.

“Put it down, Nadine,” she said. “We shall play to-morrow. We each of us owe eighty-two shillings.”

The Prince adopted the more cumbrous system of adding up on his fingers, half aloud, but he agreed with the total.

“But I will be paid to-night,” he said. “When I lose I pay, when I am loser I am paid. And it should have been more. The Princess trumped my ace.”

The entrance of a tray of refreshments luckily distracted his mind from this tragedy, and he rose.

Dodo took the Princess up to her room, followed by her maid, who carried a tray with some cold soup and strawberries on it.

“Such a pleasant evening, dear,” she said. “Ah, there is some cold soup: so good, so nourishing. What do you say, Marie? A little box? How did the little box come here? What does it say? Vane’s patent soap box.”

Dodo burst out with pent-up laughter.

“Oh, that’s my father,” she said. “Really, I’m ashamed of him. His manufacture, you know. I expect he has put one in each of our rooms.”

“But how kind! A present for me! Soap! So convenient. So screaming! I must thank him in the morning.”

Then came a tap from the Prince’s room next door, and he entered.

“Also, I have found a little box,” he said. “Why is there a little iron box? I do not want a little iron box.”

“Dearest, a present from Mr. Vane,” said his wife. “So kind! So convenient for your soap.”

“Then I will take my soap also away inside the box. I will have eighty-two shillings and my soap in a box. That is good for one evening. Also, I wish it was a gold box.”

Dodo went down-stairs again, and found her father in a stupor of satisfaction.

“A marvelous brain,” he said. “I consider that the Prince has a marvelous brain. Such tenacity! Such firmness of grasp! Eh, when he gets hold of an idea, he isn’t one of your flyaways that let it go again. He nabs it.”

His emotion gained on him, and he dropped into a broader pronunciation.

“And the Princess!” he said. “She was speaking of Charlie, just like that. ‘Charlie,’ as I might say ‘Dodo.’ Now that gives a man to think. Charlie! And him, his Majesty the King!”

Dodo kissed him.

“Daddy, dear,” she said, “I am glad you’ve had a nice evening. But you put us all out of the running, you know. Oh, and those soap boxes, you wicked old man! But they’re delighted with them. She is going to thank you to-morrow.”

“An’ there’s condescension!” said he reverently.

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

Illustrations by Katharine Sturges Dodge (1890-1979) can not be included as they are not in the public domain.

A cover was created for this eBook and is placed in the public domain.

[The end of Highness, by Edward F. Benson.]