“I’ll do my best to fall in love with her myself,” I promised.
“It won’t make any difference what you try,” was the best I got out of her in return for my concession.
All the same, her emotional volte-face continued to surprise me. She might, perhaps, well forget that she had loved and pitied Lucinda. Was it—well, decent—so entirely to forget that she had once heartily disliked Nina, and to call me a fool on the score that my feelings were the same as hers had been not much more than two years before? Besides, I did not dislike Nina. I merely failed (as Sir Paget failed) to find in her certain characteristics which in my judgment lend charm and grace to a woman. I tried to explain this to Aunt Bertha; she sniffed and went on knitting.
The young man, Captain Frost, anyhow, I did like; I took to him at once, and he, I think, to me. He was spending a brief Christmas holiday at Briarmount, with a certain Mrs. Haynes, a friend of Nina’s, for company or chaperon to the cousins. He was a tall, straight fellow, with a bright blue eye and fair curly hair. There was an engaging candor about him; he was candid about things as to which men are often not candid with one another—about his stupendous good luck and how he meant to take advantage of it; his ambitions and how he could best go about to realize them; his extremely resolute purpose to let nothing interfere with his realizing them. He was even candid about his affairs of the heart; and this was supreme candor, because it lay in confessing to me—an elder man to whom he would wish to appear mature at least, if not rusé—that he had never had any; a thing, as every man of the world knows (God forgive them!) much harder for any young man to own to than it would be to plead guilty to—or to boast of—half a dozen.
“But why haven’t you?” I couldn’t help asking. He was himself attractive, and he was not, I fancied, insusceptible to beauty; for example, he admired his cousin—at the respectful distance which her Ladyship set between them.
“Well, up to now I couldn’t have afforded to marry,” was his reply, given in all seriousness, as though it were perfectly explanatory, perfectly adequate. But it was so highly revealing that comment on it is needless.
“Well, now you can,” I said—I am afraid a little tartly.
“Yes; but it’s a matter needing careful consideration, isn’t it? An awful thing if a man makes a mistake!” His eyes, bright and blue, fixed themselves on mine in a glance which I felt to be “meaning.” “Your cousin, for instance, Major Rillington, was very nearly let in, wasn’t he?”
“Oh, you know about that, do you? Was it Lady Dundrannan who told you?”
He laughed. “Oh, no! It was Miss Fleming. And she didn’t tell me anything about who it was—only just that he’d had a lucky escape from a girl quite unworthy of him. She said I must remember the affair—it was all over London just before the war. But as I was in the works at Dundee at the time, and never read anything in the papers except racing and football, I somehow missed it; and when I asked Nina about it, she shut me up—told me not to talk scandal.”