RS. GEORGE RICHARDSON gave the ultimatum at five o'clock in the drawing-room. George Richardson had taken his house at Cradley because his wife had a fancy to try the country. She was thirty, pretty, slim, and extremely restless. In London she ranged through innumerable sensations, until she tired of all. That was how she came to want the country. People were talking of the simple life, and it sounded well. At any rate it sounded like a change, and a change was what Ellice Richardson wanted. George was wont indulgently to grant her most of what she wanted. He was a novelist of repute, with a standing in literary circles, and an income not capable of indefinite expansion. Cradley in its remoteness and its silence satisfied his needs. for he had enjoyed life in his forty years, and now liked to stand in the wings and look on aslant at the performance with a perfect knowledge of the conditions in which it was taking place. If he had been unable to do this, he would not have been able to write his novels, sound, broad-minded, wise, sweet-blooded, and cynical books like himself. With the relaxation of life's ardent claim on him he had also developed an interest in nature other than human. He faced the wind on the heath with rare pleasure; he was a spectator of the human show, but a partisan on the hills. The acrid smell of gorse upon a hot afternoon was as perfume to his nostrils; he was part of that now rather than of big cities and the whole complex and monotonous social system. So he found Cradley to his taste, while his wife tired of it.
Ellice, indeed, may be said to have tired of it ere she gave it a proper trial. They had fled from London in the early spring, when the country exhibited to eyes weary of the drab winter-time its most pleasing features. Daffodils nodded in the meadows, the violets bad come, and the sweet o' the year entered with the primrose. Ellice gushed over nature and formed innumerable plans for the garden, for excursions, for settling info rural life—forever.
"Isn't it far more delightful than noisy, staring, unhealthy town?" she asked her husband, in staccato adjectives, and he agreed. "The taxicabs!"—she made a sound of despairing disapproval—"the dirt! the noise!" She paused. "The taxis were useful," she added, pensively.
But this mood of satisfaction was not destined to endure. Cradley was dull beyond question, and perhaps even indefensibly dull. George Richardson never attempted to defend it against her attacks when the first rapture had disappeared. Spring passed into summer, and despite her full pageant summer proved dull. A beauty may be dull, you know, and very often is. The resplendent lanes and woods and hills were dull; and then the hot days brought the dust; and Ellice, missing the shops and the parties and the theatres and the restaurants, and the unceasing stream of people, known and unknown, declared the situation intolerable. They had agreed to forego their summer holiday, partly because of the expense incurred by their removal, and partly because the change to Cradley was to be regarded in the light of a holiday. So in the dog-days, with her heart in London, Ellice Richardson moped. The chief source of her dissatisfaction was the fact that none of the best people in the countryside had "called." Carfields, Melcombes, Beamans, Bostocks, and their congeners all abstained, quite unconscious of the intrusion of the newcomers. Society straddled between religious works and hunting. In summer there was no hunting, but there were always religious works, and plenty of old maids to be absorbed in them. For the male part of the inhabitants hunting was the prime consideration, and George did not hunt. He could not have afforded to hunt even if he had wanted to, which he certainly did not. Of course the Vicar's wife, Mrs. Mowbray, called on Ellice, but she, though young, was prim and heavy and gauche as well, and so did not count very much. The doctor's wife, on the other hand, was elderly, with rather a vulgar sense of humor, and so "second-rate" that it was of no consequence to know her. She counted even less. There remained the landed gentry, whose wives were in no hurry, it appeared, to make Ellice's acquaintance. George had proffered reasons out of his imagination, mainly for the purposes of consolation and reassurance, but somewhat in indulgence of his humor.
"It is obvious they want us to be on probation," he said. "You see, it is an important matter to be admitted into the familiarity of country society."
Didn't Ellice know it was important? That was the very reason she was indignant. What did these people mean by not rushing to make her acquaintance? They were merely rustics, clodhoppers, louts....