I should never again see Richard Dawson's face, with its insolent and
coarse good looks, as long as I lived.

"Yes, you took the shine out of the fine ladies that were with me that
day," he went on, "fine a conceit as they have of themselves. They were
fine London ladies, my dear, the sort that play cards all night, and
motor all day, and have no time to be God-fearing and loving like the
women that went before them. You didn't look at them?"

The speech struck me as oddly incongruous in parts of it, yet we had
heard--about the one thing we had heard in his favour--that he was fond
of his old mother, a good-natured, homely, kindly body, people said, who
was rather unhappy among the Dawson riches, rather afraid of her
granite-faced, beetling-browed husband.

"No, I didn't look at them," I said.

"And why not, pray?"

"I took no interest in them. I did not like their way of speaking. They
seemed vulgar to me."

I hardly knew why I answered him. Perhaps he compelled me. When I had
answered he turned round and looked at me with an uproarious delight in
his face.

"If Lady Meg could only hear you! Lord! lord!" he said, with infinite
gusto. "The daughter of a hundred earls! And Miss Moxon, just as high
born and just as fast! How amazed they would be. They would box your
pretty ears, my dear; at least Lady Meg would."