"On the whole, though, I think he was right," said Mr. Beadon. "These Radicals, you know."
"Come and have lunch with us," the dowager invited.
It would be the last independent hospitality she could offer at Clare Court.
While the dowager was presiding over lunch at Clare for the last time, while her daughters were getting more and more openly excited about the arrival of their sister-in-law, and while even Mr. Beadon partook of their excitement to such an extent that he ate much less than usual, Dorothy was sitting down to lunch in the restaurant-car of the Western express. Her old life was being left behind more rapidly and with less regret than the country through which the train was traveling. Happiness always widens the waist of an hour-glass. Dorothy was so happy in being a countess that on this railway journey time and space passed with equal speed; and she looked so happy that all those who recognized her or were informed by one of the waiters who she was commented upon her radiant air. They decided with that credulous sentimentality imported into Great Britain with Hengist and Horsa that she must be very deeply in love with her husband; no one suspected that she might be more deeply in love with herself. The head waiter, anxious to pay his own humble tribute to the happy pair, removed the vase of faded flowers from the table they occupied and put in its place another vase of equally faded flowers. If he could have changed the lunch as easily, no doubt he would have done so, but train lunches are as immemorial as elms, and it would have taken more than the marriage of a Vanity girl to a Devonshire nobleman to persuade the Great Western Railway Company that sauce tartare is not the only condiment, and that there are more fish in the sea than the anemic brill.
In days now mercifully forever fled Dorothy had often admired with a touch of envy the select minority of the human race that seemed able to obtain from the staff of a great railway station all the attention it wanted. Now she had entered that select minority, and perhaps nothing brought home more sharply the fact that she was a countess than the attitude of the station-master at Exeter.
"Welcome back to the West, my lord," he said to Clarehaven, who thanked him for his good wishes with the casual rudeness that minor officials of all countries find so attractive in their acknowledged patrons.