“No, bar all chaff—I don’t mean murder!—but if you will order me an express, I will guarantee to relieve you of every single invitation, and to rid you of ladies’ society for ever and a day; they won’t come near you!”
“You speak as if you were a species of insecticide.”
“I shall prove as efficient as the best Keating’s—and deliver you from this plague of women.”
“When?”
“Ah, that depends!—you must leave me to do it in my own good time, and my own good way—but it shall be done. I’ll never forget how Mrs. Tompkins bore down on you to-night like an old three-decker, and boarded you with grappling irons, and how the little fair girl came, and cut you out—to Badminton—from under her heavy guns; and Mrs. Briton assured me that she takes a motherly interest in you, and that her niece Julia thinks you too fascinating for words. Of course you are too civil by half.”
“No—in that lies my sole safety. I do my best to be civil to them all—I make no dangerous distinctions, but it is killing work!—like keeping half a dozen balls in the air.”
Miss Dacre, the sister of Mrs. Lawrence (wife of a Major in the Buffers), arrived at Munser early in the season. She was a graceful, dark-eyed girl, endowed with an unusual share of vivacity and charm, who gravely assured her sister that she had not travelled to the East in order to be wooed and wed, and that any attempt to find her a husband would be fruitless, if not disastrous.
“Everyone seems to think that when a girl goes to India she puts herself up in the marriage market!” she declared. “Well, my dear, there is a reserve on me!”
Ida Dacre was fully as quick as Bobby Lovett in grasping the position of the collector, and she (privately) made great fun of the little tin god and his worshippers, and held herself aloof from him, in a manner so remarkable that his interest was awakened. “Here, at least,” he said to himself, “is one girl who pointedly avoids me—snubs me—when we do meet, and plainly cannot endure the sight of me! I wonder what I have done, or left undone?”