Her husband was kindling a cigarette, and the match lit up the grin with which he answered: “But, my dear, have I ever shown the slightest symptom—?”
“Oh, rubbish! When a woman says: ‘No clothes,’ she means: ‘Not the right clothes.’”
He took a meditative puff. “Ah, you’ve been going over Ellie’s finery with her.”
“Yes: all those trunks and trunks full. And she finds she’s got nothing for St. Moritz!”
“Of course,” he murmured, drowsy with content, and manifesting but a languid interest in the subject of Mrs. Vanderlyn’s wardrobe.
“Only fancy—she very nearly decided to stop over for Nelson’s arrival next week, so that he might bring her two or three more trunkfuls from Paris. But mercifully I’ve managed to persuade her that it would be foolish to wait.”
Susy felt a hardly perceptible shifting of her husband’s lounging body, and was aware, through all her watchful tentacles, of a widening of his half-closed lids.
“You ‘managed’—?” She fancied he paused on the word ironically. “But why?”
“Why—what?”
“Why on earth should you try to prevent Ellie’s waiting for Nelson, if for once in her life she wants to?”