“Oh, I give up. Spare me,” cried Dick.
Mrs. Lenox rose with a little nod, and as Madeline swept past him towards the door, Dick turned for an instant and stopped her laughingly.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I did not mean it. I felt like saying something obnoxious.”
“But you always used to want to be nice, Dick,” she answered.
“Miss Elton,” Mrs. Percival spoke severely, as a matron to a heedless girl, “perhaps the gentlemen would prefer to have their smoke alone. Are you coming to the drawing-room with us?”
Later, much later, Lena, in the privacy of her own room, awaited the coming of her husband who seemed to her to prolong outrageously the game of billiards which made his excuse for sitting up a little longer than herself. She shook out her fluff of hair, and arrayed herself in a bewildering pink dressing-gown from beneath which she toasted some very pink toes before the fire. She knew what arguments told on the masculine intellect. And at last Dick came.
“Sit down over there,” she commanded. “No, you shan’t come near me, Dick, until I’ve said my say. I’m really much displeased, and you need not act as though you thought it was a trifling matter.”
Dick sat humbly in the spot appointed.
“Dick, I don’t want you to say any more horrid little things about women. You’ve done it several times lately. The other day you said something to Mr. Early about his ‘glorious freedom’; and you made a sneering remark to Mr. Preston about women’s small dishonesties.”
“Only jokes, I assure you.”