"Fancy allowing a man to have rights nowadays!" cries Mrs. Chichester, uplifting her long arms as if in amazement. "Good heavens! What a wife you would have made! Rights?" She looks up suddenly at Captain Marryatt, who is, as usual, hanging over the back of her chair. "Do you think a man has any rights?"
"If you don't, I don't," returns that warrior, with much abasement and perhaps more sense than one would have expected from him.
"Good boy," says she, patting his hand with her fan.
"I suppose husbands have some rights, at all events?" says Sir
Maurice.
He says it quite lightly—quite debonnairly, yet he hardly knows why he says it. He had been looking at Tita, and suddenly she had looked back at him. There was something in the cold expression of her face, something defiant, that had driven him to make this foolish speech.
"Husbands? Pouf! They least of all," says Mrs. Chichester, who loves to shock her audience, and now finds Miss Gower ready to her hand.
"Where is your husband now, Mrs. Chichester?" asks Colonel Neilson, quite without malice prepense.
Margaret gives him a warning glance, just a little too late. Though indeed, after all, what is there to warn about Mrs. Chichester? She is only one of a thousand flighty young women one meets every day, and though Captain Marryatt's infatuation for her is beyond dispute, still, her infatuation for him has yet to be proved. Margaret had objected to her, in her own mind, as a companion for Tita—Tita, who seems too young to judge for herself in the matter of friendships.
"I don't know, I'm sure," returns Mrs. Chichester, lifting her shoulders. "Miss Gower will tell you; she knows everything. Miss Gower," raising her voice slightly, and compelling that terrible old woman to look at her, "will you tell Colonel Neilson where my husband is now?"
Poor Colonel Neilson! who is beginning to wish that the earth would open and swallow him up.