“Faute de mieux.”
Zoe blushed, but would not hear—“And it is so good of you to make a friend of me, and talk sense. Oh! see—a lady with two blues! Come and look at her.”
Before they had taken five steps, Zoe stopped short and said, “It is Fanny Dover, I declare. She has not seen us yet. She is short-sighted. Come here.” And the impetuous maid dragged him off behind a tuft of foliage.
When she had got him there she said hotly that it was too bad.
“Oh, is it?” said he, very calmly. “What?”
“Why, don't you see what she has done? You, so sensible, to be so slow about women's ways; and you are always pretending to know them. Why, she has gone and bought that costume with the money you gave her to play with.”
“Sensible girl!”
“Dishonest girl, I call her.”
“There you go to your big words. No, no. A little money was given her for a bad purpose. She has used it for a frivolous one. That is 'a step in the right direction'—jargon of the day.”
“But to receive money for one purpose, and apply it to another, is—what do you call it—chose?—de'tournement des fonds—what is the English word? I've been abroad till I've forgotten English. Oh, I know—embezzlement.”