"For what?"
"Why, for Joan, old duckie."
"Joan?" repeated the Major vaguely. He had for the moment lost interest in his daughter's affairs. The ex-widow Calloway made rather a luscious armful. He roused himself to the required attention, however. "For Joan? Why, good gad! the man's old enough to be her father! He was a friend of Mary's."
"Before she married you?"
"Oh, no, afterwards. She picked him up somewhere when Joan was a baby."
"Oho!" murmured Effie May with an indescribable expression. "I didn't know Mary was the sort to have friends after she was married!" (It is just possible that the bride was rather fed up on the virtues of her predecessor.) But a sudden stiffening of the arms that enfolded her warned her of rocks ahead, and she finished smoothly, "I thought she was too interested in you to know that any one else existed."
"By no means," smiled Richard Darcy, mollified. "On the contrary, she took an interest in many people whom I found tiresome in the extreme. Her lame ducks, I called them. Mr. Nikolai was one of those."
"Why lame?"
"Well, at the time we first knew him it seems the girl he was engaged to had just thrown him over because she found out that he was a Jew."
Effie May gave a little squeal of horror, "A Jew! Well, I don't blame her for shying at the altar! Of all the men I've known in my day, I never did go with any Jew!"