Lady of Quality by Georgette Heyer Page A

influence, she would become more sober-minded, or whether her frivolity was incurable. But after one of these soul-searchings he would see her again, fall under the spell of her beauty, and become even more determined to add this piece of perfection to his collection of artistic treasures.
    For the acquisition of pictures, and statues, and vases was his one extravagance; and since he was extremely wealthy he was able to indulge it. He employed several agents, whose business it was to inform him when and where some coveted object was coming up for sale; and frequently paid flying visits to the Continents returning usually with yet another Chinese bowl to add to his overflowing cabinets, or an Old Master to hang on his crowded walls. Miss Wychwood said that Beckenham Court was fast becoming more like a museum than a private residence; and once told her brother that she suspected his lordship of caring more for the possession of treasures which other men envied him than for the treasures themselves.
    On this occasion he had come home from an expedition to The Hague, whence he had returned with a reputed Cuyp. He said he entertained doubts of the authenticity of the picture, and hoped he could persuade Miss Wychwood to drive out to Beckenham Court to see it. He described to her in exhaustive detail not only the composition of the picture, but all the circumstances which had led him to purchase it. She listened to him with half an ear, but was more interested in the comedy being enacted by the three youngest members of the party. Mr Harry Beckenham, having seated himself beside Lucilla, was making himself extremely agreeable, and she, after some initial shyness, was enjoying what Miss Wychwood guessed to be her first encounter with a personable young man who very obviously admired her, and who knew just how to set a shy damsel at her ease. On the other side of the fireplace, Mr Elmore had evidently taken Mr Beckenham in silent dislike. This might have arisen from a feeling that he was at a disadvantage beside a man not so many years his senior but possessed of far more address, and bearing all the appearance of a Man of Fashion; but as she covertly watched the trio Miss Wychwood was assailed by the sudden suspicion that Mr Elmore's hostility sprang from seeing his childhood's friend responding with the utmost readiness to Mr Beckenham's advances. This dog-in-the-manger attitude was amusing, but might easily lead to trouble. Miss Wychwood was not sorry when Lord Beckenham's meticulous adherence to the rules governing polite society led him to break up the party immediately after tea.
    Nothing could more surely have confirmed her gathering belief that Lucilla had been kept in far too strict seclusion by Mrs Amber than her quite disproportionate pleasure in what had been, she confided to her hostess, her first grown-up party. "For I don't count being civil to Aunt Clara's fusty friends, and being sent away as soon as I've said how do you do, as though I were still in the schoolroom."
    Had she no friends of her own? No—well, none of her own choosing! Aunt did encourage her to go for walks with two girls whose parents she knew, and approved, but as they were both models of propriety, and so stupid as to be dead bores, she never would do so. And when she had been invited to a picnic party, Aunt had refused to allow her to go, because she had once contracted the measles at a juvenile party. Aunt did not like al fresco parties: she said that nothing more surely made one catch severe chills than sitting on damp ground, and that the ground always was damp, even if the picnic wasn't spoilt by a sudden shower of rain, which, in her experience, it usually was.
    Until her seventeenth birthday, a highly accomplished governess had had charge of her education, and had accompanied her wherever she went, if her aunt had succumbed (as Miss Wychwood gathered she frequently did) to one of her nervous headaches. She had been assisted by various