“Yes. And very good.”
“But she hasn’t much sense of humour?”
“She is so busy all the time,” said Alix. “When one is so very busy taking care of people, there is not much time for humour. But she can be quite playful; like a young girl.”
“I can’t see her being playful,” said Lady Mary. “Just as I can’t see her with her hair waved or her nose powdered. I don’t suppose she’s ever powdered her nose, or rouged her lips, or had her hair waved, has she?”
“It would not go with her type,” said Alix. “There is a natural ripple in her hair, and her nose is of that pale dull sort that does not need powder.”
Lady Mary was laughing again. “She’s a dear, of course. I saw that. And of course it isn’t her type. It isn’t his type either, is it; the pretty surfaces of life. Though he has humour,” said Lady Mary, clipping down a card with soft deliberation and then shifting it. “Quite grim humour, too, I felt, once or twice. And I like that.”
“I know no one who has a better sense of humour than Giles,” said Alix.
“He is modest, too,” said Lady Mary. “And most middle-class young men are so overweeningly proud of their brains. We must all be proud of something, I suppose. One rather wishes he was not going to be buried in Oxford; but one feels, too, that it is his métier. He would not care a scrap about getting on or making a name in the world, and it’s such a happy life, that of the scholar. And if they don’t intend to marry, there’s no reason why they should strive and strain like worldly people.”
“But then they do marry,” Alix observed.
“Oh. Yes; perhaps so. But it depends to whom. It would be the unfortunate wife who would strive and strain in that case, wouldn’t it? It must be a very dreary life. Marigold wouldn’t like it, would she?” laughed Lady Mary.