In the matter of exercise, Mrs. Lambert was one of those people who want but little here below, nor want that little long. The tour of the two acres that formed the demesne of Rosemount was generally her limit, and any spare energy that remained to her after that perambulation was spent in taking weeds out of the garden path with a lady-like cane-handled spud. This implement was now in her gauntletted hand, and she waved it feebly to the riders as they passed, while Muffy stood in front of her and barked with asthmatic fury.
“Make Miss Fitzpatrick come in to tea on her way home, Roderick,” she called, looking admiringly at the girl with kind eyes that held no spark of jealousy of her beauty and youth. Mrs. Lambert was one of the women who sink prematurely and unresistingly into the sloughs of middle-age. For her there had been no intermediary period of anxious tracking of grey hairs, of fevered energy in the playing of lawn-tennis and rounders; she had seen, with a feeling too sluggish to be respected as resignation, her complexion ascend the scale of colour from possible pink to the full sunset flush that now burned in her cheeks and spanned the sharp ridge of her nose; and she still, as she had always done, bought her expensive Sunday bonnet as she would have bought a piece of furniture, because it was handsome, not because it was becoming. The garden hat which she now wore could not pretend to either of these qualifications, and, as Francie looked at her, the contrast between her and her husband was as conspicuous as even he could have wished.
Francie’s first remark, however, after they had passed by, seemed to show that her point of view was not the same as his.
“Won’t she be very lonely there all the afternoon by herself?” she asked, with a backward glance at the figure in the garden hat.
“Oh, not she!” said Lambert carelessly, “she has the dog, and she’ll potter about there as happy as possible. She’s all right.” Then after a pause in which the drift of Francie’s question probably presented itself to him for the first time, “I wish everyone was as satisfied with their life as she is.”
“How bad you are!” returned Francie, quite unmoved by the gloomy sentimental roll of Mr. Lambert’s eyes. “I never heard a man talk such nonsense in my life!”
“My dear child,” said Lambert, with paternal melancholy, “when you’re my age—”
“Which I sha’n’t be for the next fifteen years—” interrupted Francie.
Mr. Lambert checked himself abruptly, and looked cross.
“Oh, all right! If you’re going to sit on me every time I open my mouth, I’d better shut up.”