“Necessarily,” she replied, “if one is so happily disposed as never to become tired of one’s self.”
“It would be rank heresy to suppose,” said Anstruthers, “that any of Miss Crespigny’s friends would allow it possible that any one could become tired of Miss Crespigny—even Miss Crespigny herself.”
“This is the third figure, I believe,” was Lisbeth’s sole reply, and the music striking up again, they went on with their dancing.
“He supposes,” said the young lady, scornfully, to herself, “that he can play the grand seigneur with me as he does with other women. I dare say he is congratulating himself on the prospect of making me feel sorry some day—me! Are men always simpletons? It really seems so. And it is the women whom we may blame for it. Bah! he was a great deal more worthy of respect when he was nothing but a tiresome, amiable young bore. I hate these simpletons who think they have seen the world, and used up their experience.”
She was very hard upon him, as she was rather apt to be hard upon every one but Lisbeth Crespigny. And it is not improbable that she was all the more severe, because he reminded her unpleasantly of things she would have been by no means unwilling to forget. Was she so heartless as not to have a secret remembrance of the flush of his first young passion, of his innocent belief in her girlish goodness, of his generous eagerness to ignore all her selfish caprices, of his tender readiness to bear all her cruelty—for she had been cruel, and wantonly cruel, enough, God knows. Was she so utterly heartless as to have no memory of his suffering and struggles with his boyish pain, of his passionate, frantic appeal, when she had reached the climax of her selfishness and indifference to the wrong she might do? Surely, no woman could be so hard, and I will not say that she was, and that she was not inwardly stung this night by the thought that, if he had hardened and grown careless and unbelieving, the chances were that it was she herself who had helped to bring about the change for the worse.
The two young men, Lyon and his friend, spending that night together, had a little conversation on the subject of their entertainment, and it came to pass in this wise.
Accompanying Anstruthers to his chambers, Lyon, though by no means a sentimental individual, carried Miss Crespigny’s gold and purple pansy in his button-hole, and finding it there when he changed his dress coat for one of his friend’s dressing gowns, he took it out, and put it in a small slender vase upon the table.
Anstruthers had flung himself into an easy-chair, with his chibouque, and through the wreaths of smoke, ascending from the fragrant weed, he saw what the young man was doing.
“Where did you get that?” he demanded, abruptly.
“It is one of those things Miss Crespigny wore,” was the modestly triumphant reply. “You saw them on her dress, and in her hair, and on her fan. This is a real one, though, out of her bouquet. I believe they call them heart’s-ease.”