"Now, don't tell me you are my cousin," says Molly, "because I wouldn't like it."
"I am not proud; if you will let me be your husband, I won't ask anything more. Oh, Molly, how I wish this year was at an end!"
"Do you? I don't. I am absolutely dying to go to Herst." Then, turning eyes that are rather wistful upon him, she says, earnestly, "Do they—the women, I mean—wear very lovely clothes? To be like them must I—be very well dressed?"
"You always are very well dressed, are you not?" asks her lover, in return, casting a loving, satisfied glance over the fresh, inexpensive Holland gown she wears, with a charming but strictly masculine disregard of the fact that muslin is not silk, nor cotton cashmere.
"Am I? You stupid boy!" says Molly; but she laughs in a little pleased way and pats his hand. Next to being praised herself, the sweetest thing to a woman is to have her dress praised. "Not I. Well, no matter; they may crush me if they please with their designs by Worth, but I defy them to have a prettier ring than mine," smiling at her new toy as it still lies in the middle of her hand. "Is Herst very large, Teddy? How shall I remember my own room? It will be so awkward to be forever running into somebody else's, won't it?"
"Your maid will manage all that for you."
"My maid?" coloring slowly, but still with her eyes on his. "And—supposing I have no maid?"
"Well, then," says Tedcastle, who has been bred in the belief that a woman without her maid is as lost as a babe without its mother, "why, then, I suppose, you would borrow one from your nearest neighbor. Cecil Stafford would lend you hers. I know my sisters were only allowed one maid between each two; and when they spent the autumn in different houses they used to toss up which should have her."
"What does a maid do for one, I wonder?" muses independent Molly.
"I should fancy you could better answer that than I."