“You didn’t answer Jerry this morning about her looks,” Lady Mary was going on. “It’s a thin little face, I feel, don’t you? And too pink-and-white; too blue-and-gold. But perhaps that’s because I’m dark. I suppose dark people, like you and me, Alix, usually suspect the white-and-gold ones of being cats.”
“I do not like her face,” said Alix.
“Whereas Jerry admires her immensely; and he’s only a boy, only just twenty, you know, and it’s rather tiresome. You will take his mind off her.—Not that it has ever really worried me,” said Lady Mary; and Alix knew that it really had.
But Jerry and his flirtation was not Lady Mary’s object. Alix began to see that her interest in herself was more disinterested than that. She was making her way, through smoking, and riding, and Marigold, to other topics. The topic she was really coming to was Giles, and she wanted to find out just how fond Alix was of him, and just how far went her commitments to him and to his family.
Alix fancied, watching her, that she had a habit of playing patience when she wanted to say special things to you and to keep them from seeming special.
“I don’t wonder at their taking you in as you say they have,” she remarked, when Alix expressed her sense of gratitude to the Bradleys. “Their brother, you know; what you and your mother had done for him. Giles told me about that last night.—And then you are a nice young person in yourself, Alix. One might like having you about.”
“But it is not because I am nice that they have me,” Alix demurred. “And even if they did not like me so much they would take me in.”
“Because of him?”
“Yes. Because he was so fond of me. And not even quite that. It is more as if I had been a fox terrier he had left behind him. I mean it was like that at the beginning. They would have taken it in and cared for it always, even if it had not been a very nice one.”
Lady Mary laughed. “Well, you are a very nice one. I liked Giles’s mother that day in Oxford. She is very earnest, isn’t she?”