Wilbraham spoke hastily. Mrs
Maxwell leaned back in her chair, and tapped the table with her fingers.
“Well, it has its inconveniences,” she remarked drily. “Sylvia is not like that. Sylvia would never rush into extravagances without first consulting some one.”
He stood up, tall and stiff.
“They are different,” he said guardedly.
“Oh, yes—they are different.”
Mary Maxwell, who loved playing with fire so long as she did not burn her own fingers, laughed as she spoke, and afterwards enlarged on the subject to her husband.
“I,” she said, “give him a month—one month. Every one has acted idiotically in supposing that poor little Sylvia could hold an affection, and now—see!”
“No one asked him to fall in love. You make him out a wretched cur,” returned Colonel Maxwell, from behind the sheets of the Times.
“If Teresa did not ask him, she managed that it should be easy; always dressing up that poor little goose in borrowed plumes. Heavens! Imagine being tied for life to a bundle of platitudes! You can’t, you know; but then you ought not to have left me to say it,” she said, perching herself on the arm of his chair.