But his wife laughed at Mary, or at that development of the feminist movement which had produced her and so many other more startling phenomena. The Doctor was fond of his wife, a sprightly, would-be fashionable, still very pretty woman. But her laughter, and the opinion it represented, were to him the merest crackling of thorns under a pot.
The fine afternoon had come, a few days before Christmas, and he sat, side by side with Mr. Naylor, both warmly wrapped in coats and rugs, watching the lawn tennis at Old Place. Doctor Mary and Beaumaroy were playing together, the latter accustoming himself to a finger short in gripping his racquet, against Cynthia and Captain Alec. The Captain could not yet cover the court in his old fashion, but his height and reach made him formidable at the net, and Cynthia was very active. Ten days of Inkston air had made a vast difference to Cynthia. And something else was helping. It required no common loyalty to lost causes and ruined ideals—it is surely not harsh to indicate Captain Cranster by these terms?—to resist Alec Naylor. In fact he had almost taken Cynthia’s breath away at their first meeting; she thought that she had never seen anything quite so magnificent, or—all round and from all points of view, so romantic; his stature, handsomeness, limp, renown. Who can be surprised at it? Moreover, he was modest and simple, and no fool within the bounds of his experience.
“She seems a nice little girl, that, and uncommon pretty,” Naylor remarked.
“Yes, but he’s a queer fish, I fancy,” the Doctor answered, also rather absently. Their minds were not running on parallel lines.
“My boy a queer fish?” Naylor expostulated humorously.
Irechester smiled; his lips shut close and tight, his smile was quick but narrow. “You’re matchmaking. I was diagnosing,” he said.
Naylor apologized. “I’ve a desperate instinct to fit all these young fellows up with mates as soon as possible. Isn’t it only fair?”
“And also extremely expedient. But it’s the sort of thing you can leave to them, can’t you?”
“As to Beaumaroy—I suppose you meant him, not Alec—I think you must have been talking to old Tom Punnit—or, rather, hearing him talk.”
“Punnit’s general view is sound enough, I think, as to the man’s characteristics; but he doesn’t appreciate his cunning.”