“I told my husband that I wished to leave a good impression on your mind!”
“Really? But why struggle for the inevitable? I am all the more flattered though, of course. It is not every day that a lady makes herself smart for my especial benefit.”
“Oh, please don’t!” said Chum, as she lifted herself easily into the saddle. “Smart is now a word sacred to the middle classes, to whom it means inferior silks and strings of imitation beads!”
“So bad as that?”
“Yes, really. And the same degree of cheapness is expressed in the word ‘clever’—its mental equivalent. Perhaps on the whole it is best summed up in the draper’s ideal of one and elevenpence halfpenny!”
“I am so glad you did not say three farthings!”
“We never have such things now,” sighed Mrs. Lewin. “There is a farthing, of course—but they are rapidly becoming relics. You get a packet of very bad pins, or a pencil that you particularly don’t want, for the odd number.”
His laugh sounded like the earlier terms of their acquaintance, and she congratulated herself on her stroke of policy in reannexing him for this occasion. Never once had her eyes met Gregory’s since that revelation during Gurney’s song, and she had not spoken to him. As they rode back through the falling dusk she fenced with Halton as of old, retreating and advancing like the figure of a mental quadrille, and was surprised to find it tedious. Had the stronger personality that was even now shadowing her made the other man seem slight, or was Halton only attractive to a certain point, after which he could only repeat himself? It seemed to her that realities had superseded the dilettantism of their brain flirtations, and made them a tiresome waste of time.
As they rode through Port Victoria, and turned off on the Government House road, she missed Ally and learned that he had ridden home with his chief, and would come on to the bungalow afterwards, doubtless.
“I saw them turn up the avenue; they were in front of us,” Halton said quietly. “Did you not see them?”