‘I should use a French phrase.’
‘Please do! I delight in your command of modern languages.’
‘I should call Dinah desœuvrée.’ Geff, you may be sure, pronounced the word atrociously. ‘But she will never find compensation by frequenting Gaston’s world. At this moment poor Dinah, I know, feels heavier in spirit than if she had stayed quietly at home with her book and her cross-stitch.
‘She is beautiful beyond praise. In these regions one gets tired of mere pink and white prettiness. It is a thing of the climate. Every girl in the Channel Islands has her day of good looks. Mrs. Arbuthnot’s is a face of which you could never grow tired.’
‘I believe I am no judge of beauty. Gaston tells me frequently to admire people who to my taste are horrible monsters—“type Rubens,” I think he calls them. It requires an education to admire the “type Rubens.” One does not like a face, or one does like it—too much, perhaps, for one’s own peace.’
Geff spoke in a tone that brought the blood into Marjorie’s cheeks. The girl had blushed with other feelings could she have guessed—she, who would accept second love from no man—that at this moment his thoughts had wandered to a remote Cambridgeshire village, and to the peace of mind he lost there!
‘Mrs. Arbuthnot seems to me so thrown away—you must let me speak, although I know it is a subject on which you can bear no contradiction—so cruelly thrown away upon a man like your cousin Gaston.’
‘No other woman would suit my cousin Gaston half as well.’
‘That is the true man’s way of putting things. “Suit Gaston.” Would not a less Frenchified, less universally popular husband, suit Dinah better?’
‘I am quite sure Dinah, who should be a competent judge, would answer “No.” Miss Bartrand,’ broke off Geoffrey, with notable directness and point, ‘I wonder why you and I are discussing other people’s happiness just at an hour when we ought to be thinking about our own?’