CHAPTER XVII
"What will you all like to do to-day?" said Helen one morning after breakfast, "drive? or ride? or stay at home? or go to Langley ruins? Lady Portmore, what is your good will and pleasure?"
"I hardly know," she said, with an air of mystery.
"Let me have a little talk with you in your dressing-room; a real comfortable chat, before I decide."
"Good heavens, how inhuman!" said Ernest Beaufort, who was lolling on a sofa, supported by countless cushions, and reading the paper; "you are not going to make that guiltless Helen endure the agony of a regular talk at this early hour of this broiling day. Besides, what is there to talk about?"
"A thousand things. I have not seen Helen for ages; and we have so much to hear and to say."
"And are you. Lady Portmore," he said, giving the cushion that supported his back a languid push, "are you still going on with all that old humbug of being glad to see people, and of having something to say to them? Has not everything been said forty times over? and is not any one individual quite as good as another?"
"Now that is so like you, Ernest. How odd your theories are; and yet how true! I said myself the other day, that one never hears anything new till it is old; and Cracroft the poet, who was sitting with me, laughed very much at the originality of the idea. You and I think so exactly alike, Ernest."
"Perhaps then, Lady Portmore, you are thinking of
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