



Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)











                         Studies in Wives

                      By MRS. BELLOC LOWNDES


    NEW YORK
    MITCHELL KENNERLEY
    _2 East 29th Street_

    _Copyright, 1910, by Mitchell Kennerly_




CONTENTS


                             PAGE

        I. ALTHEA'S OPPORTUNITY                            1

       II. MR. JARVICE'S WIFE                             47

      III. A VERY MODERN INSTANCE                         93

       IV. ACCORDING TO MEREDITH                         151

        V. SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR?                           205

       VI. THE DECREE MADE ABSOLUTE                      277




I

ALTHEA'S OPPORTUNITY

     "His confidence shall be rooted out of his tabernacle, and it shall
     bring him to the king of terrors."--JOB xviii. 14.


There came the sound of a discreet, embarrassed cough, and Althea Scrope
turned quickly round from the window by which she had been standing
still dressed in her outdoor things.

She had heard the door open, the unfolding of the tea-table, the setting
down of the tea-tray, but her thoughts had been far away from the old
house in Westminster which was now her home; her thoughts had been in
Newcastle, dwelling for a moment among the friends of her girlhood, for
whom she had been buying Christmas gifts that afternoon.

The footman's cough recalled her to herself, and to the present.

"Am I to say that you are at home this afternoon, ma'am?"

Althea's thoughtful, clear eyes rested full on the youth's anxious face.
He had not been long in the Scropes' service, and this was the first
time he had been left in such a position of responsibility, but Dockett,
the butler, was out, a rare event, for Dockett liked to be master in his
master's house. Before the marriage of Perceval Scrope, Dockett had been
Scrope's valet, and, as Althea was well aware, the man still regarded
her as an interloper. Althea did not like Dockett, but Perceval was very
fond of him, and generally spoke of him to his friends as "Trip." Althea
had never been able to discover the reason of the nickname, and she had
not liked to ask; her husband often spoke a language strange to her.

"I will see Mr. Bustard if he comes," she said gently.

Dockett would not have disturbed her by asking the question, for Dockett
always knew, by a sort of instinct, whom his master and mistress wished
to see or to avoid seeing.

Again she turned and stared out of the high, narrow, curtainless
windows. Perceval Scrope did not like curtains, and so of course there
were no curtains in his wife's drawing-room.

Snow powdered the ground. It blew in light eddies about the bare
branches of the trees marking the carriage road through St. James's
Park, and was caught in whirling drifts on the frozen sheet of water
which reflected the lights on the bridge spanning the little lake. Even
at this dreary time of the year it was a charming outlook, and one which
most of Althea's many acquaintances envied her.

And yet the quietude of the scene at which she was gazing so intently
oppressed her, and, suddenly, from having felt warm after her walk
across the park, Althea Scrope felt cold.

She moved towards the fireplace, and the flames threw a red glow on her
tall, rounded figure, creeping up from the strong serviceable boots to
the short brown skirt, and so to the sable cape which had been one of
her husband's wedding gifts, but which now looked a little antiquated in
cut and style.

It is a bad thing--a sign that all is not right with her--when a
beautiful young woman becomes indifferent to how she looks. This was the
case with Althea, and yet she was only twenty-two, and looked even
younger; no one meeting her by chance would have taken her to be a
married woman, still less the wife of a noted politician.

She took off her fur cape and put it on a chair. She might have sent for
her maid, but before her marriage she had always waited on herself, and
she was not very tidy--one of her few points of resemblance with her
husband, and not one which made for harmony. But Mrs. Scrope, if untidy,
was also conscientious, and as she looked at the damp fur cloak her
conscience began to trouble her.

She rang the bell. "Take my cloak and hang it up carefully in the hall,"
she said to the footman. And now the room was once more neat and tidy as
she knew her friend, Mr. Bustard, would like to see it.

It was a curious and delightful room, but it resembled and reflected the
woman who had to spend so much of her life there as little as did her
quaint and fanciful name of Althea. Her husband, in a fit of petulance
at some exceptional density of vision, had once told her that her name
should have been Jane--Jane, Maud, Amy, any of those old-fashioned,
early Victorian names would have suited Althea, and Althea's outlook on
life when she had married Perceval Scrope.

Althea's drawing-room attained beauty, not only because of its
proportions, and its delightful outlook on St. James's Park, but also
because quite a number of highly intelligent people had seen to it that
it should be beautiful.

Although Scrope, who thought he knew his young wife so well, would have
been surprised and perhaps a little piqued if he had been told it,
Althea preferred the house as it had been before her marriage, in the
days when it was scarcely furnished, when this room, for instance, had
been the library-smoking-room of its owner, an owner too poor to offer
himself any of the luxurious fitments which had been added to make it
suitable for his rich bride.

As soon as Scrope's engagement to the provincial heiress Althea then was
had been announced, his friends--and he was a man of many friends--had
delighted to render him the service of making the pleasant old house in
Delahay Street look as it perchance had looked eighty or a hundred years
ago. The illusion was almost perfect, so cleverly had the flotsam of
Perceval Scrope's ancestral possessions been wedded to the jetsam
gathered in curiosity shops and at country auctions--for the devotion of
Scrope's friends had gone even to that length.

This being so, it really seemed a pity that these same kind folk had not
been able to--oh! no, not _buy_, that is an ugly word, and besides it
had been Perceval who had been bought, not Althea--to acquire for Scrope
a wife who would have suited the house as well as the house suited
Scrope.

But that had not been possible.

Even as it was, the matter of marrying their friend had not been easy.
Scrope was so wilful--that was why they loved him! He had
barred--absolutely barred--Americans, and that although everybody knows
how useful an American heiress can be, not only with her money, but with
her brightness and her wits, to an English politician. He had also
stipulated for a country girl, and he would have preferred one straight
out of the school-room.

Almost all his conditions had been fulfilled. Althea was nineteen at the
time of her marriage, and, if not exactly country-bred--she was the only
child of a Newcastle magnate--she had seen nothing of the world to which
Scrope and Scrope's Egeria, the woman who had actually picked out Althea
to be Scrope's wife, had introduced her.

Scrope's Egeria? At the time my little story opens, Althea had long
given up being jealous--jealous, that is, in the intolerant, passionate
sense of the word; in fact, she was ashamed that she had ever been so,
for she now felt sure that Perceval would not have liked her, Althea,
any better, even if there had not been another woman to whom he turned
for flattery and sympathy.

The old ambiguous term was, in this case, no pseudonym for another and
more natural, if uglier, relationship on the part of a married man, and
of a man whom the careless public believed to be on exceptionally good
terms with his young wife.

Scrope's Egeria was twenty-four years older than Althea, and nine years
older than Scrope himself. Unfortunately she had a husband who, unlike
Althea, had the bad taste, the foolishness, to be jealous of her close
friendship with Perceval Scrope. And yet, while admitting to herself the
man's folly, Althea had a curious liking for Egeria's husband. There
was, in fact, more between them than their common interest in the other
couple; for he, like Althea, provided what old-fashioned people used to
call the wherewithal; he, like Althea, had been married because of the
gifts he had brought in his hands, the gifts not only of that material
comfort which counts for so much nowadays, but those which, to Scrope's
Egeria, counted far more than luxury, that is, beauty of surroundings
and refinement of living.

Mr. and Mrs. Panfillen--to give Egeria and her husband their proper
names--lived quite close to Althea and Perceval Scrope, for they dwelt
in Old Queen Street, within little more than a stone's throw of Delahay
Street.

Joan Panfillen, unlike Althea Scrope, was exquisitely suited to her
curious, old-world dwelling. She had about her small, graceful person,
her picturesque and dateless dress, even in her low melodious voice,
that harmony which is, to the man capable of appreciating it, the most
desirable and perhaps the rarest of feminine attributes.

There was one thing which Althea greatly envied Mrs. Panfillen, and that
was nothing personal to herself; it was simply the tiny formal garden
which divided the house in Old Queen Street from Birdcage Walk. This
garden looked fresher and greener than its fellows because, by Mrs.
Panfillen's care, the miniature parterres were constantly tended and
watered, while the shrubs both summer and winter were washed and
cleansed as carefully as was everything else likely to be brought in
contact with their owner's wife.

In spite of the fact that they lived so very near to one another, the
two women were not much together, and as a rule they only met, but that
was, of course, very often, when out in the political and social worlds
to which they both belonged.

Althea had a curious shrinking from the Panfillens' charming house. It
was there, within a very few weeks of her father's death, that she had
first met Perceval Scrope--and there that he had conducted his careless
wooing. It was in Mrs. Panfillen's boudoir, an octagon-shaped room on
the park side of the house, that he had actually