"We had some lovely days together, hadn't we? I'm not sure the first wasn't best of all. You remember?"
"Oh, yes, I remember."
"You're laughing again." But now Ora laughed a little herself. The cloud was passing away; she was regaining the serenity of which too much self-examination had threatened to rob her, and the view of herself as the passive subject of occurrences at which she, in common with the rest of the world, was at liberty to sigh or smile in a detached irresponsibility.
A man passed by and bowed, saying, "How do you do, Mrs. Hazlewood?"
"Isn't that funny?" asked Ora. "Nobody thinks of calling me Mrs. Hazlewood."
"I certainly shan't think of calling you anything of the kind," said Ashley.
She laughed, seemed to hesitate a little, but then risked her shot.
"You wouldn't have expected me to be called Mrs. Mead, would you?" she asked.
"No, I shouldn't," he answered with a smile. The whole case seemed to be stated in her question. She not only would not have been called, but she would not really have been, Mrs. Mead—not in any sense which was of true importance. Neither had she been Mrs. Fenning; neither was she Mrs. Hazlewood; she was and would remain Ora Pinsent.
"Of course I don't mind it," Ora went on, with a smile whose graciousness was for both her actual husband in the drawing-room and her hypothetical husband in the recess. "But somehow it always sounds odd." She laughed, adding, "I suppose some people would call that odd—your friend Alice Muddock, for instance."