"I shall next ask what is the matter with you," he said. "You really do not look well, Florence!"
"Do I not?" She laid down her fan, took up a hand-glass set in silver from a table at her side, and studied her face in the mirror for a few seconds with some intentness. "You are right," she said, when she put it down; "I am growing hatefully old and haggard and ugly. What can one do? Would a winter in the South give me back my good looks, do you think? Perhaps I had better consult a doctor when I go up to town. I am not so old yet that I need lose all my 'beauty,' as people used to call it, am I?"
"Why do you care so much?" Hubert asked. He fancied that there was something deeper in her anxiety than the mere vanity of a pretty woman whose youth was fast fleeting away.
"Why does every woman care? For my husband's sake, of course," she answered, with a slight laugh, but a look of carking care and pain in her haggard eyes. "If I leave off looking pretty and bright, how am I to know that he will care for me any longer? And, if not——"
"If not! You are a mystery to me, Florence; you never professed before to trouble yourself about your husband's love."
"If I am a mystery, you are a perfect baby, my dear boy—I might almost say a perfect fool—in some respects. If he ceases to love me, he—don't you know that he may still leave me penniless? I had no settlements."
Her voice sank almost to a whisper as she said the words.
"Is that it?" said Hubert coldly. "I did not give you credit for so much worldly wisdom, Flossy. If that is your view of the case, I wonder that you do not pay a little more attention to the General's wishes sometimes. I have seen you treat him with very little consideration."
"He is so wearisome! One cannot always be on one's good behavior," Flossy murmured; "and, as long as one looks nice and gives him a word or two now and then, just to keep him in good-humor——"
"So long, you think, he will be kind to you? Florence, you do not understand the General's really noble nature. He is incapable of unkindness to any living soul—least of all capable of it to you, whom he loves so dearly. Do try to appreciate him a little more! He is devoted to you, both as his wife and as the mother of his child." He could not tell why she turned her head aside with a sharp gesture of annoyance.