‘I tried once, at a militia review or something, to talk to Marjorie, just in the usual way one talks, not without success you know, to girls of her age.’
‘And the result was?’ asked Linda.
‘She looked at me coolly—grand Spanish eyes of hers those are, bar the temper in them! “You are fresh from Eton, are you not?” she observed. I confessed that Eton had known me in my youth. “Talk about Eton, then,” struck out Miss Bartrand, straight from the shoulder. “Talk about cricket, football, boating, Latin grammar, if you learnt any. I will not,” with a murderous flash from her big eyes, “listen to foolishness from any man.”’
By the time Lord Rex finished this characteristic anecdote Gaston Arbuthnot, with his usual expression of genial impenetrability, had sauntered back to the refreshment tent. Picking up Rahnee, he asked the child what ailed her? For Rahnee’s face, sickly at all times, wore a look and hue forlornly out of keeping with the bravery of her attire.
‘What in the world has befallen the infant, Mrs. Thorne? Her complexion is of the lively arsenic green the doctors forbid us to use in wall papers.’
‘Rahnee! mamma’s own darling pet, what is the matter?’ cried Linda, suddenly recalled to the fact of her darling’s existence.
‘Me eat matazoons. Bad matazoons!’ whimpered Rahnee, with the tender conscience, the quick physical repentance of her age.
‘That is a wise little Rahnee,’ said Gaston Arbuthnot, kissing her. ‘Right morality. Pitch into our pleasures the moment our pleasures begin to pitch into us.’
‘Have you seen her?’ exclaimed Lord Rex. ‘This kind of trifling, remember, may be fun to all of you. It’s stretched high above a joke to me. A tall fair girl, dressed in black——’