Page:The Smart Set (Volume 52, Number 4).djvu/16

“Don't you know their names, Horace?”

“You don’t,” he returned with assumed calm; “you can’t bluff me this time.”

“She was Lady Minster and the man was the Duke of Penderosa, captain of the Madrid Polo Club. Of course I know them.”

“This time you happen to be right,” he admitted, and marvelled at Horace Blackwell who had been seen publicly walking with a baroness and a duke.

The baroness had smiled and the duke had raised his hat. He had no desire for Bowlerville to know. They would not understand. They would raise rude voices in raucous laughter. He knew his Bowlerville. And it had all happened because he did not want to seem a fool in having set out to cross a field too late and being compelled to turn back and meet unsympathetic glances.

Standing a little apart he saw Lady Minster greet Mrs. Buxton.

"By the way,” the American woman asked, “who was that tall good looking man you were talking to just now?"

“I'm ashamed to say I've forgotten his name, and even where I met him. It was at a dance somewhere, or was it a dinner? No, I think it was at a tennis party. But I've been so splendidly entertained here and met so many charming men that I can't for the life of me remember their names.”

This conversation was sufficient to establish Blackwell’s eligibility in Mrs. Buxton’s mind. Although men in all ranks of life bend to beggar maids—and others—they do not like their women to smile at men of inferior birth. There are lamentable stories in society of valets and men of obscure walks of life who have masqueraded sufficiently well to marry women of rank. It is true they have rarely captured buds; but full-blown flowers have occasionally yielded themselves to such suitors and so confounded high families and scandalized relatives and set lawyers to the making of new wills.

Duff McGregor presently found that Mrs. Hamilton Buxton was taking absolutely no notice of his remarks. He was not sufficiently conceited to find anything strange in this, but he thought she need not have turned the battery of those wonderful eyes on a man whom neither he nor she, nor anyone else, apparently, knew. After a time he became oppressed by the sense of his relative unimportance. He could not accuse the lady he admired of flirting like a shopgirl on a holiday at a cheap beach. She had glanced only a couple of times at the stranger and there was nothing in her gaze that might offend propriety. At least so he thought; and sighed a moment later when it occurred to him that his lack of success might be that he could not properly interpret the signs.

Presently someone told him that his mother sought him and he excused himself and walked away. Colman took his place by the lady’s side and was too much interested in the fast and exciting play to talk. Until today the invaders had been matched with comparatively slow teams and their own pace was not called upon. But today they were showing speed and teamwork that made him wonder what would be the issue when they met his country-men, whom he did not consider to be in equal physical condition.

In all his six and twenty years of life HoracE Blackwell had never seen a woman who fascinated him so wholly as this magnificent brunette. She was assuredly one of those princesses of whom he had dreamed. And he cursed fate sullenly that he was placed in an environment where such women did not come. Those rooms of his on the Avenue and his discreet Togo seemed miserably lacking in space and importance when he considered how these people about him dwelt. The great mansion standing a half mile distant from the polo ground had, so Effie informed him, sixty rooms in it, and it was but one of several which the millionaire Phillips owned.

He dared not attempt with Mrs. Hamiiton Buxton another such man-

maneuvre