“Presents,” I said, feeling really indignant with him for being so obtuse, “are very different. For one thing, I should not have to keep them always. They would go back to you at the end of the year, as soon as that paper I signed for you is torn up. But—girls don’t take clothes as presents, ever!”
“I don’t see why not,” he said obstinately. “Besides—don’t they! A cousin of my own, a girl” (fancy his having a girl-cousin!) “who was staying with us last winter used to wear a magnificent stole and a muff of leopard-skin—the leopards had been shot by her fiancé.”
“Those were furs,” I explained. “Furs are different.”
“A great many things would seem to be ‘different’ from what I imagined,” he said, in a tone of voice that was almost petulant. I felt inclined to say, “Yes! You imagined that because you’re as infallible as a tape-machine in business-hours, you can’t make mistakes outside the office!”
Whereas Sydney Vandeleur, who has no “business” outside his amateur art criticism, with an occasional design for hand-wrought jewellery, would never have made the faux pas this man had done. It was so absurdly ignorant and gauche of him not to see it. And even now he seemed inclined to dispute the point.
“Feathers, now,” he said a little satirically. “Might not a girl wear a couple of really good, expensive ostrich plumes, or whatever you call them—the things that hang down the back like a sort of Niagara of fluff—if they were sent to her by a man with facilities for buying direct from South Africa?”
“Oh, yes,” I said readily, feeling as if I were an editress answering “Queries on Etiquette.” “Feathers are quite as permissible as furs.”
“Even supposing them to be very costly? Worth as much, say, as five times the amount of the rest of the lady’s wardrobe?”
“It’s nothing to do with the cost,” I explained patiently. “A twenty-guinea fox stole a girl might accept from a man. A four-pound frock she couldn’t.”
“I confess I don’t understand these nuances,” said Mr. Waters, almost absent-mindedly.