"Eh?" says Mona, innocently, and stares at him with an expression so full of bewilderment, being puzzled by his tone more than his words, that presently Mr. Rodney becomes conscious of a feeling akin to shame. Some remembrance of a line that speaks of "a soul as white as heaven" comes to him, and he makes haste to hide the real meaning of his words.
"I mean, some of them dress uncommon badly," he says, with much mendacity and more bad grammar.
"Now, do they?" says Mona. "I thought they always wore lovely clothes. In books they always do; but I was too young when with Aunt Anastasia in Dublin to go out. Somehow, what one imagines is sure to be wrong. I remember," laughing, "when I firmly believed the queen never was seen without her crown on her head."
"Well, it always is on her head," says Mr. Rodney, at which ridiculous joke they both laugh as gayly as though it were a bon-mot of the first water. That "life is thorny, and youth is vain" has not as yet occurred to either of these two. Nay, more, were you even to name this thought to them, they would rank it as flat blasphemy, and you a false prophet—love and laughter being, up to this, the burden of their song.
Yet after a moment or two the smile fades from Mona's mobile lip that ever looks as if, in the words of the old song, "some bee had stung it newly," and a pensive expression takes its place.
"I think I'd like to see myself in a regular evening gown," she say, wistfully.
"So should I," says Rodney, eagerly, but incorrectly; "at least, not myself, but you,—in something handsome, you know, open at the neck, and with your pretty arms bare, as they were the first day I saw you."
"How you remember that, now!" says Mona, with a heavenly smile, and a faint pressure of the fingers that still rest in his. "Yes, I should like to be sure before I marry you that—that—fashionable clothes would become me. But of course," regretfully, "you will understand I haven't a gown of that sort. I once sat in Lady Crighton's room while her maid dressed her for dinner: so I know all about it."
She sighs, then looks at the sky, and—sighs again.
"And do you know," she says, with charming naivete, not looking at him, but biting a blade of grass in a distractingly pretty and somewhat pensive fashion, "do you know her neck and arms are not a patch on mine?"