"Madame Max Goesler, you have the most uncomfortable ideas."
"I have no doubt your Grace has tried each of them,—successfully. But perhaps, after all, a comfortable chair over a good fire, in a pretty room, beats everything."
"I think it does,—certainly," said the Duke. Then he whispered something at which Madame Max Goesler blushed and smiled, and immediately after that she followed those who had already gone in to lunch.
Mrs. Bonteen had been hovering round the spot on the terrace on which the Duke and Madame Max Goesler had been standing, looking on with envious eyes, meditating some attack, some interruption, some excuse for an interpolation, but her courage had failed her and she had not dared to approach. The Duke had known nothing of the hovering propinquity of Mrs. Bonteen, but Madame Goesler had seen and had understood it all.
"Dear Mrs. Bonteen," she said afterwards, "why did you not come and join us? The Duke was so pleasant."
"Two is company, and three is none," said Mrs. Bonteen, who in her anger was hardly able to choose her words quite as well as she might have done had she been more cool.
"Our friend Madame Max has made quite a new conquest," said Mrs. Bonteen to Lady Glencora.
"I am so pleased," said Lady Glencora, with apparently unaffected delight. "It is such a great thing to get anybody to amuse my uncle. You see everybody cannot talk to him, and he will not talk to everybody."
"He talked enough to her in all conscience," said Mrs. Bonteen, who was now more angry than ever.