CHAPTER IV.
BRIDPORT HOUSE
I
In the meantime Cousin Marjorie and Cousin Blanche enjoyed their ride very much. It was the one thing they really did enjoy in London.
They were two ordinary young women, yet even so late in the Old World's history as the year 1913, their own private cosmos could not quite make up its mind to regard them in that light. Cousin Marjorie and Cousin Blanche had surprisingly little to say for themselves. They were modest, unassuming girls, without views or ideas, very proper, very dull, absurdly conventional; in the eyes of some people as plain as the proverbial pikestaff, passably good-looking in the sight of others; in fact, a more commonplace pair of young women would have been hard to find anywhere, yet deep in the hearts of the Ladies Dinneford was the sure faith that the world at large did not subscribe to any such opinion.
It was not merely that they rode rather well. They passed other members of their sex in the Row that morning who rode quite as well as themselves. No, proficiency in the saddle, the one accomplishment they could boast, of which they were unaffectedly modest, was far from explaining the particular angle at which the
