"I NEVER heard anything so preposterous in all my life!" declared Madame Collier, in a muffled tone of righteous indignation.
The muffled sound was due to a physical cause, not to a mental condition. Madame Collier was putting a false hem to an old serge skirt of Jean's for lengthening purposes; and the process required a plentiful use of pins. Two or three white points protruded from each corner of her mouth. She wore her huge untrimmed garden hat, having been previously fruit-gathering; and the rusty alpaca was looped up, Dutchwoman-wise, nearly half-way to her knees, displaying ankles formed rather for strength than grace.
Marie Collier had her little vanities, like most people; as, for instance, in the matter of her name. She plumed herself on being "Madame Collier;" not plain prosaic "Mrs." In the matter of dress, she did not study the becoming. Vanity here took the opposite course, not necessarily less vain. She prided herself on a stoical indifference to appearances.
"Preposterous!" she repeated, taking a pin from her mouth, sticking it into the serge, and reaching energetically across the dining-room table for scissors. Mr. Trevelyan stood on the other side, upright and stern. "I declare the world is going crazy. General Villiers, over sixty years old—and a baby of sixteen! Preposterous!"
"Matters are bad enough without exaggeration. General Villiers is fifty-five, and Evelyn is just eighteen."
"Eighteen and fifty-five! He might be her grandfather! It is wicked! Downright wicked!" declared Madame Collier, paying off her heat of spirit into the folding and pinning. "I never heard such an idea in my life. Who told you?"
"General Villiers. I met him half-an-hour since. He seemed too much delighted to keep the thing to himself; but it is not to be known just yet."
"And Miss Devereux?"
"I gather that she is taken by surprise—"
"I should just think so!"