'Good gracious! what a waste of time! Why in the world don't they marry?' cried Julia energetically.
'Well, you see, they only want just to be friends,' answered Mrs. Claude, with unconscious irony; 'and they had all sorts of things to talk about, only they were always very serious. But Stella and the Doctor have great fun very often.'
'Why, do they chaff each other much? Because, you know, that's a great sign sometimes. That's the way Dan Wylie and Milly Waring used to go on.'
'Mercy on us! do you suppose that Stella and Dr. Langdale go in for that sort of horse-play?' said Mrs. Claude, with a comic look of horror.
'Well, I wish to goodness you would give me some idea of what they do go in for. I might then get an opinion of my own. You mustn't think it's just idle curiosity,' said Julia, with a solemn expression. 'Any time I overhear them they laugh and smile at things that don't seem to me in the least funny. And Hector, too, who is the slowest coach I ever saw in my life, he seems quite lively and talkative with these two.'
'Well, you know, Hector and Dr. Langdale were great friends before ever Stella came.'
'What was that talk going on about novel-writing on Thursday evening?'
'Oh, there is a theory that each is writing a novel. Stella declares the Doctor is bent on making his book so agreeable that there are crowds of obliging fairies in attendance on his characters, picking crumpled rose-leaves out of their way, and so on. And he imagines that her people in the end resolve to sit still all their lives, as the only way in which they can avoid doing evil; and then when things go wrong they call Nature, and Life, and Providence to the bar of judgment, and decree that they ought to be hanged, so as to give the world a fresh start. The Doctor declares that reaping as we sow makes up two-thirds of the misfortunes of life. Then Stella asserts that life is so arranged that you sow tares when you mean to sow wheat, and that when you do sow honest grain an enemy comes in the night, who spoils the harvest.'
'Well, it's rather silly, don't you think, to go on so about far-off things? And then they seem to turn even people's misfortunes into a joke. They were actually smiling over Mr. Dene's compound fracture.
'Oh, Julia, how can you take up things in such a crooked way!' said Mrs. Claude warmly. 'They did nothing of the sort. Hector had been to see Mr. Dene, and said he was getting low-spirited through being confined to the house so long. And then Stella said, quite gravely at first—she often makes one believe she is in earnest when she is not—"I suppose in writing a novel fit to be read when one smoked a pipe after the labours of the day are over, an accident of this kind should be termed one of the agreeable amusements of old age—or would you ignore a compound fracture altogether?"'