“You flirt? Oh, life!” and Lillian laughed scornfully, as she looked around at us all. “I was afraid I was getting a little passé, and just took you when you proposed, which you did, you remember, with much agitation and tremulous fervor.”
We all smiled, as was expected, except Mr. Marshman, who only drew his bushy brows a little nearer together.
Lillian went on (as what woman will not when she is succeeding in a tease?).
“You know, Pam, I put you off indefinitely; and, strange to tell, I received your first letter the very night Mr. Smith and I came so near loving. If he had talked differently then, perhaps the answer you received would have been different. You really owe him thanks.”
But Mr. Marshman, instead of taking the jest, grew very red in the face, and, pushing his chair back, said, angrily:
“You can make the change now, madam, if you desire it,” and left the saloon.
We looked at Mrs. Marshman, but she was not in the least disconcerted.
“Poor, dear Pam,” she said, running a spoon under the peel of an orange, “he loves me so dearly that he is morbidly jealous. I’ll have him pleasant by tea.”
Miss Finnock occupied the remainder of the hour by making original remarks and comparisons, if similes without a shadow of similarity could be called original. She said the nut crackers were like adversity, because their crushing discovered the sound fruit; that Italian cream was like a coquette’s cheek, both pink and cold; that the heart of the melon was the heart of humanity, and the black seed black thoughts; that the lemon floating in the finger bowls was like the selfishness that mingles with the purest waters of life; and much more to the same effect.