But the eventual analysis of the whole episode, made by Lydia with characteristic detachment, brought home to her various certainties.
Margoliouth’s defection had hurt her vanity slightly—her heart not at all.
She could calmly look back upon her brief relations with him as experience, and therefore to be valued.
But perhaps the conviction that penetrated her mind most strongly, was that one which she faced with her most unflinching cynicism, although it would have vexed her to put it into words for any other human being. No grief or bereavement that her youth was yet able to conceive of could hurt her sufficiently to discount the lasting and fundamental satisfaction of the beau rôle that it would bestow upon her in the view of the onlookers.
XIII
“Broken heart? Nonsense. People with broken hearts don’t eat chestnut-pudding like that,” quoth Grandpapa.
Lydia would have preferred to make her own explanations at Regency Terrace, but Miss Nettleship had already written a long letter to Aunt Beryl, as Lydia discovered when she reached home on Christmas Eve.
Aunt Beryl took the affair very seriously, and made Lydia feel slightly ridiculous.
“Trifling like that with a young girl, and him a married man the whole of the time!” said Aunt Beryl indignantly.
“It’s all right, auntie,” Lydia made rather impatient answer. “I didn’t take it seriously, you know.”