"I suppose I am old-fashioned" — there was a murmur of polite dissent from all the ladies present, except the one addressed — "Oh, I take it as a compliment nowadays, I assure you; but when I was a girl a young lady would have no more thought of flying than of" — she paused almost on a note of pained surprise at finding the familiar comparison of a lifetime cut off — "well, of standing on her head."
"No," replied the young lady in point, with the unfeeling candour that marked the youthful spirit of the age, "because it wasn't invented. But you went bicycling, and your mothers were very shocked at first."
"I hardly think that you can say that, Miss Lisle," remarked another of the matrons, "because I can remember that more than twenty years ago one used to see quite elderly ladies bicycling."
"After the others had lived all the ridicule down," retorted Miss Lisle scornfully. "Oh yes; I quite expect that in a few more years you will see quite elderly ladies flying."
The little party of matrons seated on the Hastings promenade regarded each other surreptitiously, and one or two smiled slightly, while one or two shuddered slightly. "Flying is very different, dear," said Mrs Lisle reprovingly. "I often think of what your dear grandfather used to say. He said" — impressively — "that if the Almighty had intended that we should fly, He would have sent us into the world with wings upon our backs."
There was a murmur of approval from all — all except Miss Lisle, that is.
"But do you ever think of what Geoffrey replied to dear grandpapa when he heard him say that once, mother?" said the unimpressed daughter. "He said: 'And don't you think, sir, that if the Almighty had intended us to use railways, He would have sent us into the world with wheels upon our feet?'"
"I do not see any connection at all between the two things," replied her mother distantly. "And such a remark seems to me to be simply irreverent. Birds are born with wings, and insects, and so on, but nothing, as far as I am aware, is born with wheels. Your grandfather used to travel by the South Eastern regularly every day, or how could he have reached his office? and he never saw anything wrong in using trains, I am sure. In fact, when you think of it you will see that what Geoffrey said, instead of being any argument, was supremely silly."
"Perhaps he intended it to be," replied Miss Lisle with suspicious meekness. "You never know, mother."
Such a remark merited no serious attention. Why should any one, least of all a really clever young man like Geoffrey, deliberately intend to be silly? There was too often, her mother had observed, an utter lack of relevance in Irene's remarks.
"I think that it is a great mistake to have white flying costumes as so many do," observed another lady. "They look — but perhaps they wish to."
"Certainly when they use lace as well it really seems as though they do. Oh!"
There was a passing shadow across the group and a slight rustle in the air. Scarcely a dozen yards above the promenade a young lady was flying strongly down the wind with the languid motion of the "swan stroke." She wore white — and lace trimming. Mrs Lisle gazed fixedly out to sea. Even Irene felt that the vision was inopportune.
"There are always some who overdo a thing," she remarked. "There always have been. That was only Velma St Saint of the New Gaiety; she flies about the front every day for the advertisement of the thing: I wonder that she doesn't drop handbills as she goes. There's plenty of room up on the Castle Hill — in fact, you aren't supposed to fly west of the Breakwater — but there will always be some —— " A vague resentment closed the period.
"Are you staying at the Palatial this time?" asked the lady who had mentioned lace, feeling it tactful to change the subject. "I think that you used to."
"Oh, haven't you seen?" was the reply. "The Palatial has been closed for the last six months."
"Yes, it's a great pity," remarked another. "It looks so depressing too, right on the front. But they simply could not go on. I suppose that the rates here are something frightful now."
"Oh, enormous, my dear; but it was not that alone. The Palatial has always aimed at being a 'popular' hotel, and so few of the upper middle class can afford hotels now. Then the new tax on every servant above one — calculated as fifty per cent of their wages, I think, but there are so many new taxes to remember — proved the last straw."
"Yes, it is fifty per cent I remember because I had to give up my between-maid to pay the cook's tax. But I thought that hotels were to be exempt?"
"Not in the end. It was argued that hotels existed for the convenience of the monied classes, and that they ought to pay for it. So a large number of hotels are closed altogether; others work with a reduced staff, and a great many servants have been thrown out of employment."
Miss Lisle laughed unpleasantly. "A good thing, too," she remarked. "I hate hotel servants. So does everybody. It is the only good thing I have heard of the Labour Government doing."
"I am sure I don't hate them," said Mrs Lisle, looking round with pathetic resignation, "although they certainly had become rather grasping and over-bearing of late. But it was quite an unforeseen development of the scheme that so many should lose their places. Indeed the special object of the tax was to create a fund — 'earmarked' I think they call it — out of which to meet the growing pension claim, now that so few of the servant class think it worth while to save."
Miss Lisle laughed again, this time with a note of genuine amusement.
("A most unpleasant girl, I fear," murmured the lady who had raised the white costume question, to her neighbour in a whisper: "so odd.")
"It made a great difference at the registry offices. There are a dozen maids to be had any day where there were really none before. Only one cannot afford to keep them now."
There was a word, a sigh, and an "Ah!" to mark this point of agreement among the four ladies.
"I am afraid that the Government confiscation of all dividends above five per cent bears very heavily on some," remarked one after a pause. "I know a poor soul of over sixty-five, nearly blind too, whose husband had invested all his savings in the company he had worked for because he knew that it was safe, and, having a good reserve, intended to pay ten per cent for a long time. When he died it brought her in fifty pounds a year. Now — "
There were little signs of sympathy and commiseration from the group. The sex was beginning to take an unwonted interest in terms financial — per centage, surrender value, trustee stock, unearned increment, and so on. They had reason to do so, for revolutionary finance was very much in the air, or, rather, had come tangibly down to earth at length: not the placid city echoes that were wont to ripple gently across the breakfast-table a few years earlier without leaving any one much better or much worse off, but the galvanic adjustment that by a stroke made the rich well-to-do, the well-to-do just so-so, the struggling poor, and left the poor where they were before. The frenzied effort that in a session strove to tear up the trees of the forest and leave the plants beneath untouched; to pull to pieces the intertwined fabric of a thousand years' growth and to create from it a bundle of straight and equal twigs; in a word, to administer justice on the principle of knocking out one eye in all the sound because a number of people were unfortunately born or fallen blind.
"Five and twenty," mused Mrs Lisle. "I suppose it is just possible."
"It is really less than that," explained the other. "You may have noticed that as it is now no good making more than five per cent, most companies pay even less. There is no incentive to do well."
"One hears of even worse cases on every hand," said another of the ladies. "I am trying to interest people in a poor deformed creature whose father left her an annuity derived from ground rents in the City... As it has been worked out I think that she owes the Incomes Adjustment Department lawyers something a year now. But private charity seems almost to have ceased altogether. Have you heard that 'Jim's' is closed?"
It was true. St James's Hospital, whose unvarnished record was, "Three hundred of the very poor treated freely each day," was a thing of the past, and across its portal, where ten years before a couple of stalwart gentlemen wearing red ties had rested for a moment, while they lit their pipes, a banner with the strange device, "Curse your Charity!" now ran the legend, "Closed for want of Funds."
"I wonder sometimes," mused the last speaker, "why some one doesn't do something."
"But," objected another, "what is there to do? What is there?"
They all agreed that there was nothing — absolutely nothing. Every one else was tacitly making the same admission; that was the fatal symptom.
Miss Lisle jumped up and began to move away unceremoniously.
"Where are you going, dear?" asked her mother in mild reproof.
"Oh, anywhere," replied Irene restlessly.
"But what for?" persisted Mrs Lisle.
"Oh, anything."
"That is 'nothing,' Miss Lisle," smiled the tactful lady of the party, anxious to smooth over the awkwardness of the moment.
"No, it is at least something," flung back the girl brusquely; and with swinging strides she set off at a furious pace towards the open country.
"Irene is a little impulsive at times," apologized her mother, sitting back with placidly folded hands.