“Oh, Peggy, what a good inquisitor you would have made!” she said. “No, I wasn’t, and I shan’t be when I get down there again. But you know we have been living at rather high-pressure up here as well, and I will allow that that may have had something to do with it. It is rather exciting to see your husband go up like a rocket in the way Hugh has done.”
Peggy did not want to insist on this too much, or call Edith’s attention to the fact that she was concerning herself about her sister’s fatigue, for she meant secretly to speak to Hugh about it; a thing which Edith would certainly have forbidden her to do if she guessed that such a plan was in her mind. So she slid quietly off the topic, seeming to yield.
“After all, I think that it is a sort of disgrace not to get rather tired every day,” she said. “One hasn’t done as much as one should in a day if one is not more than ready to go to sleep at the end of it. But it’s a bad plan to have a deposit of tiredness on board, to which one adds every day.”
It required no great exertion of diplomacy on Peggy’s part to secure a quiet stroll with Hugh after tea, and hardly more to introduce the subject of their move to Mannington.
“You will be leaving London at once, I suppose,” she said. “I remember you meant to go down as soon as your engagement was over.”
“Why, I believe we did!” said Hugh; “but I suppose we both forgot. I don’t think the thought of Mannington ever occurred to either of us. London is such fun, isn’t it? And, do you know, we are such swells. People are asked to meet us! And if Edith got proud she made it a rule to go to the opera and hear me sing, and if I got proud I went to ‘Gambits.’ Wasn’t it a good plan?”
“But she can’t go and hear you now,” remarked Peggy.
“No but I can go to ‘Gambits.’ Peggy, I believe that play will be crammed night after night until the Day of Judgment. And even then the audience won’t know, and Gabriel will have to come on to the stage and say: ‘I beg your pardon, ladies and gentlemen, but the last trump sounded ten minutes ago.’ I wish I had written ‘Lohengrin.’”
“Yes—you weren’t born soon enough. But if you are going to stop on in London, you will come to my big dance, won’t you, the week after next?”