Sometimes she would give them a tip on the Stock Exchange; not that Mrs.
Small or Aunt Hester ever took it. They had indeed no money to invest;
but it seemed to bring them into such exciting touch with the realities
of life. It was an event. They would ask Timothy, they said. But they
never did, knowing in advance that it would upset him. Surreptitiously,
however, for weeks after they would look in that paper, which they took
with respect on account of its really fashionable proclivities, to see
whether 'Bright's Rubies' or 'The Woollen Mackintosh Company' were up or
down. Sometimes they could not find the name of the company at all; and
they would wait until James or Roger or even Swithin came in, and ask
them in voices trembling with curiosity how that 'Bolivia Lime and
Speltrate' was doing--they could not find it in the paper.
And Roger would answer: "What do you want to know for? Some trash!
You'll go burning your fingers--investing your money in lime, and things
you know nothing about! Who told you?" and ascertaining what they had
been told, he would go away, and, making inquiries in the City, would
perhaps invest some of his own money in the concern.
It was about the middle of dinner, just in fact as the saddle of mutton
had been brought in by Smither, that Mrs. MacAnder, looking airily
round, said: "Oh! and whom do you think I passed to-day in Richmond
Park? You'll never guess--Mrs. Soames and--Mr. Bosinney. They must have
been down to look at the house!"
Winifred Dartie coughed, and no one said a word. It was the piece of
evidence they had all unconsciously been waiting for.
To do Mrs. MacAnder justice, she had been to Switzerland and the Italian
lakes with a party of three, and had not heard of Soames' rupture with
his architect. She could not tell, therefore, the profound impression
her words would make.
Upright and a little flushed, she moved her small, shrewd eyes from face
to face, trying to gauge the effect of her words. On either side of her
a Hayman boy, his lean, taciturn, hungry face turned towards his plate,
ate his mutton steadily.
These two, Giles and Jesse, were so alike and so inseparable that
they were known as the Dromios. They never talked, and seemed always
completely occupied in doing nothing. It was popularly supposed that
they were cramming for an important examination. They walked without
hats for long hours in the Gardens attached to their house, books in
their hands, a fox-terrier at their heels, never saying a word, and
smoking all the time. Every morning, about fifty yards apart, they
trotted down Campden Hill on two lean hacks, with legs as long as their
own, and every morning about an hour later, still fifty yards apart,
they cantered up again. Every evening, wherever they had dined, they
might be observed about half-past ten, leaning over the balustrade of
the Alhambra promenade.