“Really!” Cissy echoed impressively. “But why such a man, who doesn’t care for anything but railroads, should be going to Emma, who doesn’t care for anything but marrying Julia—Of course”—her shallow eyes endeavored to plumb Mrs. Essington’s—“he’s going for something in particular.” She topped it off with her laugh, that seemed to fill her thick throat.
“Perhaps,” Florence helped her out, “he’s going for the same reason that you are?”
Cissy looked both blank and disconcerted.
“Poor man, he’s usually too anxious for pleasure!” Florence explained.
Cissy took it in seriously. “Really the fact is, a woman is never free from her cares! But a man, when he rests, rests so completely!”
She sighed, with her eyes on the door through which Fox Longacre had departed.
She added inconsequently, “You know Emma has asked my cousin Charlie Thair. Of course it’s perfectly plain why Emma asked him. The wonder is that he dares to go!” Florence could only guess at the situation, but she thought the wonder would have been if Thair had dodged it. “Though it’s perfectly indecent of him, I’m sure, with his money, not to marry,” Cissy ran on; “and of course Julia is a magnificent creature. But the idea of expecting to really ‘land’ Charlie! It’s too funny! So like dear Emma.”
Upon this point Florence was, silently, in accord with Mrs. Fitz Hugh. She could see—from Mrs. Budd’s point of view that every eligible man not only should, but sooner or later would, marry some suitable girl—how the proposition was a reasonable one. But she felt there was as slight a possibility of Charlie Thair’s being unseated from his bachelor state as from his hunting-saddle.
“Was there”—it was the following thought—“such a scant possibility of Fox Longacre?”
She turned from her vis-à-vis to the window, as the train, with a roar and a swing, rushed into the cañon, and fixed her eyes on the dizzy fascination of the whirling river below.