It was at breakfast time that this letter arrived, and the bacon was undeniably less good than it would have been two days previously. Evelyn sniffed at it, and decided against it. But his sensitiveness to slightly passée bacon was sensitive to her feelings also.
“One doesn’t want meat food in the summer,” he said. “Tea and marmalade—how delicious!”
“You dear,” she said. “It is high, and it’s my fault; I thought it would be good just for to-day. But it isn’t. Oh, Evelyn, it was nice of you to pretend you didn’t want any. But you can’t act before me. I always know you. So give it up.”
Evelyn gave a great shout of laughter.
“Madge and marmalade,” he said. “That’s good enough for me. In fact, I would leave out the marmalade if required. Oh, Madge, why can’t you be serious and talk about this. By the way, I’ll paint another sketch of you called ‘Bad bacon’; the yearning face of the young wife. You are young, you know, and you are my wife. Don’t chatter so, it confuses me. Now Lady Dover, if you will be silent one moment, lives at Golspie.”
“That’s where you are wrong,” said Madge. “You have to go to Golspie before you begin.”
“I don’t want to begin. I want to get there. Don’t you?”
Madge put on the woeful face that always introduced Ellesdee.
“I don’t like the ticket man at King’s Cross,” she said. “I don’t think he is what he seems.”