“Some day! Oh, some day!” The Baxter girl was staring at the fire. “Shall we ever get her back?”
“In a year! Let us give her a year!” Mr. Flood looked up at the lady beside him with a thin smile. I couldn’t bear him. He sat on the floor, and he called you ‘dear lady,’ and sometimes he would take hold of your watch-chain and finger it as he talked to you. But he was awfully clever, I believe. He wrote reviews and very difficult poetry that didn’t rhyme. Anita was generally mellifluous to him and she quoted him a good deal. She turned to him with just the same smile—
“Ah, of course! You’ve met John Carey too.”
“For my sins, dear lady—for my sins.”
“Not the same sins, surely,” breathed the blonde lady.
“As the virtuous Carey’s? Don’t be rude to me! It’s a fact—the man’s a churchwarden. He carries a little tin plate on Sundays! Didn’t you tell me so, Anita? No—we give her a year. Don’t we, Anita?”
“But what did she marry him for?” wailed the Baxter girl.
They all laughed.
“Copy, dear lady, copy!” Mr. Flood was enjoying himself. “Why will you have ideals? Carey was a new type.”
“But she needn’t have married him!” insisted the Baxter girl. The argument was evidently an old one.