“I thought of a ride with Mr. Merriman and Sir Harry. Do you care to come?”
“No, no, I have too much of Sir Harry and Mr. Merriman as it is.”
“It is dull down here, Frances. Perhaps you had best be off to Homburg. I am bent on recuperative vegetating, you know.”
“Whom are you waiting for?” Mrs. Fox-Darriel asked, coming to the point with a circumspection rendered rather ridiculous by the frank promptness of Miss Paton’s answer.
“I’m waiting for Mr. Perior, Frances,” and she laughed a little, glancing at her friend with a rapid touch of ridicule, “and he is half-an-hour late; and I want to see him very badly.”
“Mr. Perior?” Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s vagueness was not affected. “One of the vegetables, my dear? Has not the curiosity of the neighborhood exhausted itself?”
“Ah—this vegetable isn’t curious, I fear, not a shoot shows at least. If he is curious he will pretend not to be, and pretend very successfully.”
“That is subtle for a vegetable. Perior, the name is familiar. Who is this evasive person?”
Miss Paton’s serene eyes looked over her friend’s head at the strip of blue and green outside framed by the long window. She was asking herself with an inward smile for her own perversity, whether she had not come down into the country for the purpose of seeing the “evasive person.” She would not mind owning to it in the least. Pickles after sweets; she anticipated the tart taste of disapproval pleasantly.
“Who is he?” Mrs. Fox-Darriel repeated.