She had her shrewdness also, increased by the experience of a beauty, who has seen many aspire in golden ardour, sigh in piteous failure, and presently ride away on another chase with remarkably cheerful countenances. If this after failure, what after success? Men were tempestuous in wooing; what were they when the fight was won? She knew about her husband, of course, but she meant real men—so her thoughts perilously put a contrast.
"Have you often been in love, Sir Christopher?" she asked the old Judge one day as he sat in her little den, sipping tea and smoking cigarettes.
He was a lifelong bachelor. "Often, Bernadette."
"Now, tell me," she said, leaning towards him with a knitted brow and a mighty serious look. "Of all the women you've been in love with, is there anyone you now wish you'd married?"
"Yes, certainly. Two."
"Out of how many?"
"I don't know. A matter of double figures, I'm afraid." Smiling, he put an apologetic note into his voice. "They're not the two I was most desperate about, Bernadette."
"Of course I should very much like to know who they were."
"But since, of course, that's impossible, let us continue the discussion in the abstract."
"Why didn't you marry them—well, one of them, I mean, anyhow?"