“It has everything to do with it,” she threw out. “If she had a snub nose and thick legs you wouldn’t care for her at all.”
“I don’t say that I do care for her,” without emotion. “The situation interests me. Here is an extraordinary little being thrown into the world. She belongs to nobody. She will have to fight for her own hand. And she will have to fight, by God! With that dewy lure in her eyes and her curved pomegranate mouth! She will not know, but she will draw disaster!”
“Then she had better not be taught anything at all,” said Feather. “It would be an amusing thing to let her grow up without learning to read or write at all. I know numbers of men who would like the novelty of it. Girls who know so much are a bore.”
“There are a few minor chances she ought to have,” said Coombe. “A governess is one. Mademoiselle Vallé will be here at eleven.”
“I can’t see that she promises to be such a beauty,” fretted Feather. “She’s the kind of good looking child who might grow up into a fat girl with staring black eyes like a barmaid.”
“Occasionally pretty women do abhor their growing up daughters,” commented Coombe letting his eyes rest on her interestedly.
“I don’t abhor her,” with pathos touched with venom. “But a big, lumping girl hanging about ogling and wanting to be ogled when she is passing through that silly age! And sometimes you speak to me as a man speaks to his wife when he is tired of her.”
“I beg your pardon,” Coombe said. “You make me feel like a person who lives over a shop at Knightsbridge, or in bijou mansion off Regent’s Park.”
But he was deeply aware that, as an outcome of the anomalous position he occupied, he not infrequently felt exactly this.
That a governess chosen by Coombe—though he would seem not to appear in the matter—would preside over the new rooms, Feather knew without a shadow of doubt.