"Coming to Blandings!"
"Freddie invited me last night. I think it was done by way of interest on the money he owed me; but he did it and I accepted."
"But, George, my dear boy, do you never read the etiquette books and the hints in the Sunday papers on how to be the perfect gentleman? Don't you know you can't be a man's guest and take advantage of his hospitality to try to steal his fiancee away from him?"
"Watch me."
A dreamy look came into Aline's eyes. "I wonder what it feels like, being a countess," she said.
"You will never know." George looked at her pityingly. "My poor girl," he said, "have you been lured into this engagement in the belief that pop-eyed Frederick, the Idiot Child, is going to be an earl some day? You have been stung! Freddie is not the heir. His older brother, Lord Bosham, is as fit as a prize-fighter and has three healthy sons. Freddie has about as much chance of getting the title as I have."
"George, your education has been sadly neglected. Don't you know that the heir to the title always goes on a yachting cruise, with his whole family, and gets drowned—and the children too? It happens in every English novel you read."
"Listen, Aline! Let us get this thing straight: I have been in love with you since I wore knickerbockers. I proposed to you at your first dance—"
"Very clumsily."
"But sincerely. Last year, when I found that you had gone to England, I came on after you as soon as the firm could spare me. And I found you engaged to this Freddie excrescence."
"I like the way you stand up for Freddie. So many men in your position might say horrid things about him."
"Oh, I've nothing against Freddie. He is practically an imbecile and I don't like his face; outside of that he's all right. But you will be glad later that you did not marry him. You are much too real a person. What a wife you will make for a hard-working man!"
"What does Freddie work hard at?"
"I am alluding at the moment not to Freddie but to myself. I shall come home tired out. Maybe things will have gone wrong downtown. I shall be fagged, disheartened. And then you will come with your cool, white hands and, placing them gently on my forehead—"
Aline shook her head. "It's no good, George. Really, you had better realize it. I'm very fond of you, but we are not suited!"
"Why not?"
"You are too overwhelming—too much like a bomb. I think you must be one of the supermen one reads about. You would want your own way and nothing but your own way. Now, Freddie will roll through hoops and sham dead, and we shall be the happiest pair in the world. I am much too placid and mild to make you happy. You want somebody who would stand up to you—somebody like Joan Valentine."
"That's the second time you have mentioned this Joan Valentine. Who is she?"
"She is a girl who was at school with me. We were the greatest chums—at least, I worshiped her and would have done anything for her; and I think she liked me. Then we lost touch with one another and didn't meet for years. I met her on the street yesterday, and she is just the same. She has been through the most awful times. Her father was quite rich; he died suddenly while he and Joan were in Paris, and she found that he hadn't left a cent. He had been living right up to his income all the time. His life wasn't even insured. She came to London; and, so far as I could make out from the short talk we had, she has done pretty nearly everything since we last met. She worked in a shop and went on the stage, and all sorts of things. Isn't it awful, George!"
"Pretty tough," said Emerson. He was but faintly interested in Miss Valentine.
"She is so plucky and full of life. She would stand up to you."
"Thanks! My idea of marriage is not a perpetual scrap. My notion of a wife is something cozy and sympathetic and soothing. That is why I love you. We shall be the happiest—"
Aline laughed.
"Dear old George! Now pay the check and get me a taxi. I've endless things to do at home. If Freddie is in town I suppose he will be calling to see me. Who is Freddie, do you ask? Freddie is my fiance, George. My betrothed. My steady. The young man I'm going to marry."
Emerson shook his head resignedly. "Curious how you cling to that Freddie idea. Never mind! I'll come down to Blandings on Friday and we shall see what happens. Bear in mind the broad fact that you and I are going to be married, and that nothing on earth is going to stop us."
It was Aline Peters who had to bear the brunt of her father's mental agony when he discovered, shortly after Lord Emsworth had left him, that the gem of his collection of scarabs had done the same. It is always the innocent bystander who suffers.
"The darned old sneak thief!" said Mr. Peters.
"Father!"
"Don't sit there saying 'Father!' What's the use of saying 'Father!'? Do you think it is going to help—your saying 'Father!'? I'd rather the old pirate had taken the house and lot than that scarab. He knows what's what! Trust him to walk off with the pick of the whole bunch! I did think I could leave the father of the man who's going to marry my daughter for a second alone with the things. There's no morality among collectors—none! I'd trust a syndicate of Jesse James, Captain Kidd and Dick Turpin sooner than I would a collector. My Cheops of the Fourth Dynasty! I wouldn't have lost it for five thousand dollars!"
"But, father, couldn't you write him a letter, asking for it back? He's such a nice old man! I'm sure he didn't mean to steal the scarab."
Mr. Peters' overwrought soul blew off steam in the shape of a passionate snort.
"Didn't mean to steal it! What do you think he meant to do—take it away and keep it safe for me for fear I should lose it? Didn't mean to steal it! Bet you he's well-known in society as a kleptomaniac. Bet you that when his name is announced his friends pick up their spoons and send in a hurry call to police headquarters for a squad to come and see that he doesn't sneak the front door. Of course he meant to steal it! He has a museum of his own down in the country. My Cheops is going to lend tone to that. I'd give five thousand dollars to get it back. If there's a man in this country with the spirit to break into that castle and steal that scarab and hand it back to me, there's five thousand waiting for him right here; and if he wants to he can knock that old safe blower on the head with a jimmy into the bargain."
"But, father, why can't you simply go to him and say it's yours and that you must have it back?"
"And have him come back at me by calling off this engagement of yours? Not if I know it! You can't go about the place charging a man with theft and ask him to go on being willing to have his son marry your daughter, can you? The slightest suggestion that I thought he had stolen this scarab and he would do the Proud Old English Aristocrat and end everything. He's in the strongest position a thief has ever been in. You can't get at him."
"I didn't think of that."
"You don't think at all. That's the trouble with you," said Mr. Peters.
Years of indigestion had made Mr. Peters' temper, even when in a normal mood, perfectly impossible; in a crisis like this it ran amuck. He vented it on Aline because he had always vented his irritabilities on Aline; because the fact of her sweet, gentle disposition, combined with the fact of their relationship, made her the ideal person to receive the overflow of his black moods. While his wife had lived he had bullied her. On her death Aline had stepped into the vacant position.
Aline did not cry, because she was not a girl who was given to tears; but, for all her placid good temper, she was wounded. She was a girl who liked everything in the world to run smoothly and easily, and these scenes with her father always depressed her. She took advantage of a lull in Mr. Peters' flow of words and slipped from the room.