“Perhaps it won’t matter if I don’t see any one for a few days,” I said. “I will write to Paris; my old Mademoiselle is married there to a flourishing poet, I believe; perhaps she would take me as a paying guest for a little.”
“That is very visionary—a French poet! horrible, long-haired, frowsy creature. Impossible! Surely you see how necessary it is for you to marry Christopher as soon as you can, Evangeline, don’t you?” she said, and I was obliged to admit there were reasons.
“The truth is, you can’t be the least eccentric, or unconventional, if you are good-looking and unmarried,” she continued; “you may snap your fingers at Society, but if you do, you won’t have a good time, and all the men will either foolishly champion you, or be impertinent to you.”
“Oh, I realize it,” I said, and there was a lump in my throat.
“I shall write to Christopher to-morrow,” she went on, “and thank him for our outing last night, and I shall say something nice about you, and your loneliness, and that he, as a kind of relation, may go and see you on Sunday, as long as he doesn’t make love to you, and he can take you to the Zoo—don’t see him in your sitting-room. That will give him just the extra fillip, and he will go, and you will be demure, and then, by those stimulating lions’ and tigers’ cages, you can plight your troth. It will be quite respectable. Wire to me at once on Monday, to Sedgwick, and you must come back to Park Street directly I return on Thursday, if it is all settled.”
I thanked her as well as I could. She was quite ingenuous, and quite sincere. I should be a welcome guest as Christopher’s fiancée, and there was no use my feeling bitter about it—she was quite right.
As I put my hand on Malcolm’s skinny arm going down to the dining-room, the only consolation was my fate has not got to be him! I would rather be anything in the world than married to that!
I tried to be agreeable to Sir Charles. We were only a party of six. An old Miss Harpenden, who goes everywhere to play bridge, and Malcolm, and one of Lady Ver’s young men, and me. Sir Charles is absent, and brings himself back; he fiddles with the knives and forks, and sprawls on the table rather, too. He looks at Lady Ver with admiration in his eyes. It is true then, in the intervals of Paris, I suppose, she can make his heart beat.