“As for that”—and she puffed smoke—“husbands are a race apart—there are men, women, and husbands, and if they pay bills, and shoot big game in Africa, it is all one ought to ask of them; to be able to see jokes is superfluous. Mine is most inconvenient, because he generally adores me, and at best only leaves me for a three weeks’ cure at Homburg, and now and then a week in Paris, but Malcolm could be sent to the Rocky Mountains, and places like that, continuously; he is quite a sportsman.”
“That is not my idea of a husband,” I said.
“Well, what is your idea, Snake-girl?”
“Why do you call me ‘Snake-girl?’” I asked. “I hate snakes.”
She took her cigarette out of her mouth, and looked at me for some seconds.
“Because you are so sinuous, there is not a stiff line about your movements—you are utterly wicked looking and attractive too, and un-English, and what in the world Aunt Katherine asked you here for, with those hideous girls, I can’t imagine. I would not have if my three angels were grown up, and like them.” Then she showed me the photographs of her three angels—they are pets.
But my looks seemed to bother her, for she went back to the subject.
“Where do you get them from? Was your mother some other nation?”
I told her how poor mamma had been rather an accident, and was nobody much. “One could not tell, you see, she might have had any quaint creature beyond the grandparents—perhaps I am mixed with Red Indian, or nigger.”