Berwick had many faults, but personal vanity was not one of them. He considered Oliver Boringdon more a man to attract women than he was himself, and he had thought his friend lamentably backward in making use of his opportunities. Now, the knowledge that Boringdon was daily in Mrs. Rebell's company was distinctly disturbing. Was Barbara the type of woman--Berwick knew there were many such--who make a cult of sentimental friendships? Then he felt deeply ashamed of the thought, and in his heart he begged her forgiveness.
A Frenchman, once speaking to him of an acquaintance whose unhappy passion for a celebrated beauty was being much discussed, had observed, "Il l'a dans la peau! Dans ces cas-là il n'y a rien à faire!" He had thought the expression curiously apt, and he remembered it to-night. More than once during the last few days he had found himself planning his immediate future entirely by the light, as it were, of Chancton Priory. By every post he was refusing invitations, and avoiding coming political engagements. But there was one great exception. Even while speaking to Arabella at the ball, he had been wondering whether he could persuade her to secure Mrs. Rebell's inclusion in a very small and entirely political house-party in Scotland, the occasion of which was a series of important political meetings, and to which both brother and sister had been for some time pledged. It would be good to be away with Barbara, among strangers, far from Chancton and from Chillingworth.
Berwick hated Chillingworth. When there he felt himself to be the unwelcome guest of the man who had built the huge place, and whose personality it seemed to express and to perpetuate, as houses so often do the personality of their builders. The creator of Chillingworth had been an acute early Victorian manufacturer, a worthy man according to his lights, and a pillar of the Manchester School. He had taken fortune at the flood, and his late marriage to a woman of slightly better birth and breeding than his own had produced the sickly, refined daughter whom Berwick had married.
Chillingworth seemed plastered with money. Every room bore evidence of lavish expenditure; money spent on furniture, on pictures, on useless ornaments, during a period of our history when beauty seemed wholly in eclipse; and this was all the more pitiable because the house was gloriously placed on a spur of the down, and the views from its windows rivalled those of Chancton Priory.