“Anything you like,” he replied.
“How nice of you, George!” exclaimed Alice, ironically. She was a short, plump girl, pale, with daring, rebellious eyes. Her mother was a Wyld, a family famous either for shocking lawlessness, or for extreme uprightness. Alice, with an admirable father, and a mother who loved her husband passionately, was wild and lawless on the surface, but at heart very upright and amenable. My mother and she were fast friends, and Lettie had a good deal of sympathy with her. But Lettie generally deplored Alice’s outrageous behaviour, though she relished it—if “superior” friends were not present. Most men enjoyed Alice in company, but they fought shy of being alone with her.
“Would you say the same to me?” she asked.
“It depends what you’d answer,” he said, laughingly.
“Oh, you’re so bloomin’ cautious. I’d rather have a tack in my shoe than a cautious man, wouldn’t you Lettie?”
“Well—it depends how far I had to walk,” was Lettie’s reply—“but if I hadn’t to limp too far——”
Alice turned away from Lettie, whom she often found rather irritating.
“You do look glum, Sybil,” she said to me, “did somebody want to kiss you?”
I laughed—on the wrong side, understanding her malicious feminine reference—and answered:
“If they had, I should have looked happy.”