‘I believe you are half right, my dear girl,’ he observed, in his sunniest voice, and picking up his wife’s hat from the spot where it had fallen at her feet. ‘But people of the world are not as transparently truthful as you, my Dinah. You shoot at the bull’s eye when you do discharge an arrow, and seldom miss the mark. Now, let me tie your hat strings! Lift your chin—so! Let us wander off to the sea and forget all the insincerities, all the Linda Thornes in existence.’
The speech must have been uttered with some of the airy mental reservation that Gaston Arbuthnot’s habit of ‘poker talk’ made easy to him. He did not for one instant forget that he was engaged to dine that evening at The Bungalow; engaged, although there was no moon, to enjoy pure air and watch the light upon the Caskets from the jetty yonder.
CHAPTER III HAS HE A WIFE?
‘The battle is to the strong, Marjorie Bartrand; the race to the swift. Women have been fatally handicapped since the world began. And Nature understands her own intentions, depend upon it, better than we do.’
‘Does Nature intend one half of the human race to be ciphers?’
‘Nature intends men to have wives. There is no escaping that fact. When I was a girl we got quite as much education as society required of us.’
‘Society!’
‘We learned modern languages, French and Italian, for of course German was not in vogue, and I must say I think Italian much the more feminine accomplishment.’