"Well," she continued, "this dear boy is a half-breed; his wife is of our best and purest blood. Yet, with all his peculiarities, Hal is adorable, and Edith—well, if she's a type of superiority, God help the British Empire."
"Edith isn't representative; oh, no; oh, my, no!" Sir Gordon's enthusiasm in rejecting Edith on behalf of the British Empire almost upset the coffee urn.
"Oh, my, no!" he kept repeating with comic insistence.
"Isn't she?" objected Lady Winifred coming forward to take the cup offered by her husband. "Isn't she? Is the smoking, drinking, gambling woman with a moral code of her own an exception, or is she getting to be the London type?"
"By the way, where is Edith?"
"Dining with Lord Yester at the Carlton."
"Dining at the Carlton the first night her husband is at home?"
"My dear Gordon, you are hopelessly old-fashioned. Husbands are like the vermiform appendix. They must have served some useful purpose once, but no one knows now what it was. A busy woman has no time for such trifles. Edith is just back from a house party at Groton Court, she had to devote some time in the forenoon to her modiste; she went to the races in the afternoon, had tea at the Austrian Embassy, played a little bridge, and naturally she had to dress for dinner. If Hal is patient they may eventually meet here or at some mutual friend's."
Gordon never tried to follow the intricacies of his wife's raillery.
"Well, I must be hopelessly old-fashioned," he said in the most matter-of-fact way. "Modern matrimony is quite beyond me." Sir Gordon was old-fashioned. He belonged to an epoch when men, by an unwritten law, left the gossip to the women.