"Ah, Jack," she said, "this is delightful; I am tremendously glad to see you! Let's see, whom do you know? May I introduce you to Miss Grantham? Mr. Broxton. I think you know everybody else. Chesterford, come here and sit by me at once. You've been an age away. I expect you've been getting into mischief." She wheeled a chair up for him, and planted him down in it. He looked radiantly happy.
"Now, Jack," she went on, "tell us what you've been doing all these months. It's years since we saw you. I think you look all right. No signs of breaking down yet. I hoped you would have gone into a rapid consumption, because I was married, but it doesn't seem to have made any difference to anybody except Chesterford and me. Jack, don't you think I shall make an excellent matron? I shall get Maud to teach me some of her crochet-stitches. Have you ever been here before? Chesterford, you shut it up, didn't you, for several years, until you thought of bringing me here? Sugar, Jack? Two lumps? Chesterford, you mustn't eat sugar, you're getting quite fat already. You must obey me, you know. You promised to love, honour and obey. Oh, no; I did that. However, sugar is bad for you."
"Dodo keeps a tight hand on me, you see," said Chesterford, from the depths of his chair. "Dodo, give me the sugar, or we shall quarrel."
Dodo laughed charmingly.
"He would quarrel with his own wife for a lump of sugar," said Dodo dramatically; "but she won't quarrel with him. Take it then."
She glanced at Jack for a moment as she said this, but Jack was talking to Miss Grantham, and either did not see, or did not seem to. Jack had a pleasant impression of light hair, dark grey eyes, and a very fair complexion. But somehow it produced no more effect on him than do those classical profiles which are commoner on the lids of chocolate boxes than elsewhere. Her "discoverer" was sitting in a chair next her, talking to her with something of the air of a showman exhibiting the tricks of his performing bear. His manner seemed to say, "See what an intelligent animal." The full sublimity of Lord Ledgers' remark had not struck him till that moment.
Miss Grantham was delivering herself of a variety of opinions in a high, penetrating voice.
"Oh, did you never hear him sing last year?" she was saying to Lord Ledgers. "Mr. Broxton, you must have heard him. He has the most lovely voice. He simply sings into your inside. You feel as if someone had got hold of your heart, and was stroking it. Don't you know how some sounds produce that effect? I went with Dodo once. She simply wept floods, but I was too far gone for that. He had put a little stopper on my tear bottle, and though I was dying to cry, I couldn't."
"I always wonder how sorry we are when we cry," said Lord Ledgers in a smooth, low voice. "It always strikes me that people who don't cry probably feel most."
"Oh, you are a horrid, unfeeling monster," remarked Miss Grantham; "that's what comes of being a man. Just because you are not in the habit of crying yourself, you think that you have all the emotions, but stoically repress them. Now I cultivate emotions. I would walk ten miles any day in order to have an emotion. Wouldn't you, Mr. Broxton?"